Anarchonomicon - September 16, 2026


Ep36 Swords, Christianity, and Paganism with: Esthlos

Ep35 “Which Way Western Man?” Part 6 (Nietzsche 1) w⧸Brynhildr

Episode Stats


Length

3 hours and 45 minutes

Words per minute

126.25

Word count

28,438

Sentence count

755

People

Guests:
Also mentioned:

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hello, glorious listeners.
00:00:03.320 Before we get started, I just want to remind you that Anarchonomicon is a purely listener-supported podcast.
00:00:10.380 We have no advertising, no paymasters, no field bucks, no foreign intel services, no USAID grant money.
00:00:19.940 We are entirely supported by individual listeners and readers like yourself.
00:00:24.520 If you think we're glowies, it is entirely because we're radioactive all on our own.
00:00:30.000 Having ordinary listeners sign up with an email, subscribe, like, restack, share, or comment
00:00:37.340 does amazing things for this project, and I personally consider those of you who become
00:00:42.980 paid subscribers to be true saints, and I will personally stand beside you and sing your praises
00:00:48.640 at the final judgment of any gods or revolutions. A deep, deep thank you to all of you who make this
00:00:55.600 possible. This would not exist without you. Now on with the show.
00:01:10.180 They will chain you, like Prometheus, to a rock where the memory of your own greatness will gnaw you.
00:01:25.600 the battle for the mind of north america will be fought in the video arena the video drone
00:01:39.800 you look around what do you see businessmen teachers lawyers carpenters the very minds of
00:01:46.780 the people we are trying to save but until we do these people are still a part of that system
00:01:51.880 and that makes them our enemy no we're not doing that you're getting called a slur
00:01:57.400 after all there is nothing real outside our perception of reality is there you can see that
00:02:06.520 can't you tribal people uh one of the main uh kinds of sport is sort of butchering each other
00:02:13.540 So, you know, it's a full-time sport in Trump's societies.
00:02:16.940 You, my children, are the water.
00:02:20.280 They will wash away all that has gone before.
00:02:25.220 The gleam in the eye of sex.
00:02:27.940 It's very simple.
00:02:29.640 The message is force is more effective than vote.
00:02:33.380 Elections change nothing.
00:02:35.060 But I had some ideas.
00:02:36.000 We got global and tribal.
00:02:37.540 We were going to come up.
00:02:38.780 The closer we got together, the more you like each other.
00:02:40.880 Yeah.
00:02:41.600 There's no evidence of that in any situation that we've ever heard of.
00:02:45.720 Major Lennox answered with his life, as you should have done if you had any sense of honor.
00:02:49.840 You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.
00:02:55.240 And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
00:03:02.160 He who saves a nation violates no law.
00:03:07.360 All forms of violence are a quest for identity.
00:03:13.360 When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity, you're a nobody, therefore you
00:03:18.460 get very tough.
00:03:20.460 You have to prove that you are somebody, and so you become very violent.
00:03:25.360 I'm coming to kill you!
00:03:27.360 For greater safety, please avoid the English language.
00:03:34.360 Please do not translate this message.
00:03:38.140 And so identity is always accompanied by violence.
00:03:42.260 This seems paradoxical to you?
00:03:44.600 It works.
00:03:45.800 Violence works.
00:03:47.520 Therefore, television is reality.
00:03:51.460 And reality is less than television.
00:03:54.520 Were you listening to me, Neo?
00:03:56.500 Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?
00:03:58.540 It's just a grotesque postmodern psyop,
00:04:01.100 and anyone who's fallen for this is brain damaged.
00:04:04.360 Hello, hello, hello, glorious listeners.
00:04:07.120 Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Anarchanon.com podcast.
00:04:12.360 Today we are joined by Eshlas.
00:04:15.140 Say hello, Eshlas.
00:04:17.420 Hello.
00:04:19.760 Eshlas, I want to have on.
00:04:22.360 You may not know this, dear listeners, but at Anarchanon.com, we have a book club going on.
00:04:30.540 I will include a link in the show notes for those of you who want to join us.
00:04:34.360 at the Discord server, but we've been reading classical, European, ancient, and generally
00:04:46.420 pagan works. There's been a few Christian texts in there as well, stuff like Milton's Paradise Lost
00:04:55.340 and a few others. The Arthurian Cycle, which is kind of like right on the edge of a classical
00:05:03.120 Celtic pagan and Christianity. You know, the entire point of the Arthurian cycle is to be
00:05:08.420 in that nebulous realm. But we've been deep diving all these various classical European
00:05:18.100 traditions, classical Greek and Roman works, classical early medieval works. And this month
00:05:31.040 we're doing Storm or Steel just because it's based. But this has kind of been my equivalent
00:05:37.740 of church for the past year or so. I don't do much spiritually, but I do maintain this book club,
00:05:46.380 and I'm quite proud of it. And it has been expanding recently. But Eshloss has been one of
00:05:54.500 the foremost contributors to this book club i i think you've missed one or like very rarely miss
00:06:01.960 one yeah i think i missed half of suetonius that that was it yeah and i was that was like
00:06:09.720 the first one we still didn't know what we were doing and we're reading the book way too slowly
00:06:15.920 uh but uh i want to have ashloss on uh we had our episode on christianity with the stone
00:06:26.440 with a woe to those who dwells while on the earth from stone choir and um i actually got a bit of
00:06:33.800 criticism from my performance in that one that um that i was not pushing back hard
00:06:41.180 are enough which uh i that was not the purpose of that interview i really just want the to have
00:06:48.920 the like stone choir vision laid out and ask a uh ask a lot of questions that you see what they're
00:06:56.120 i can jump in here i was one of the ones criticizing you but i wasn't it wasn't that i
00:07:02.300 didn't think you uh you represent as like our side of the argument well enough it was this
00:07:09.140 by not challenging him
00:07:11.220 and letting him go on
00:07:12.280 you kind of failed to get
00:07:15.140 the
00:07:15.700 conversation I think
00:07:18.140 you were aiming for in the beginning or at least
00:07:20.540 that he was aiming for and
00:07:22.420 as a listener I felt
00:07:24.280 you were aiming for
00:07:25.760 Fair enough
00:07:28.540 I
00:07:30.120 we will get into that later
00:07:33.120 in the discussion
00:07:34.320 part of it
00:07:37.400 is I felt like
00:07:39.140 like all of his points i'm like yeah that's the division i i i don't i didn't feel much of a need
00:07:48.320 to push back on a lot of it because i'm like yes i'm i'm happy to let you concede
00:07:54.920 all this ground ground to me like yes that is the place where you are but uh we we'll discuss that
00:08:02.840 in great great detail there was very little that i felt the need to push back upon them like but
00:08:08.420 we'll go into that later in the, the episode. The reason, part of the reason I want to have
00:08:13.340 you particularly on is, uh, you, Eshlas is, um, you're describing yourself just as, as a pagan,
00:08:22.240 but, uh, you're one of the people who consistently tells me things that I don't know about, like, uh,
00:08:29.320 Northern European history and paganism. Like, you have a very unique, uh, vantage point within the,
00:08:36.020 from Ireland and the deep Celtic tradition that like I do, that like always has interesting
00:08:46.520 insights. But you had one of the best like stories and works. I'll link the article in
00:08:56.200 the show notes of this episode going into your personal break with Christianity and the episode
00:09:05.360 that kind of solidified it for you.
00:09:07.560 Can you tell us about the God Sword?
00:09:10.820 I'd love to.
00:09:12.860 So the background for this was,
00:09:15.980 I was very young.
00:09:18.460 Young enough that I have very few memories
00:09:21.660 from that period.
00:09:22.880 So I've got,
00:09:26.160 right across from where I'm living now,
00:09:28.180 they set up a hovercraft
00:09:30.600 and I went on a hovercraft tour.
00:09:32.560 and the attendant allowed me to uh drive or offered to let me drive the hovercraft and i was
00:09:41.560 too shy and too cowardly and that's my only really other strong memory from this sort of period
00:09:47.700 maybe five years old let's say but the god sword is a story that i remember crystal clearly because
00:09:57.840 it formed such an important part of my life and my understanding of what Christianity
00:10:04.640 was and what spirituality was, and I think it's something that we've all kind of gone
00:10:10.380 through, so I'm going to read now from The God Sword, and if I'm too monotone, I'll just
00:10:17.960 start going from memory.
00:10:21.260 Memories of your early years can be quite vague, coming in flashes and with smudged
00:10:26.120 edges. I can dimly remember the lollipop lady on the way to Montessori, or crawling under the hedge
00:10:32.560 at my friend's house to sneak into the rugby pitch behind, learning to write at school, being too shy
00:10:38.680 to drive a hovercraft when offered by the tour guide, driving a remote-controlled speedboat in
00:10:44.020 the pool while on holiday. But one story shines out from among the rest with startling clarity.
00:10:50.360 Let me share with you my memory of the God Sword.
00:10:56.120 Our church had just got a new minister. They were cycled from church to church every seven years.
00:11:02.680 This time it was an American couple with two sons that were only slightly older than myself.
00:11:07.720 The world at the time was less Americanized than it is today. America was far away, exotic.
00:11:15.160 One of the first big projects they undertook was a themed children's holiday camp in the hall above
00:11:21.080 the church something at the time felt quite novel almost inexplicably now that we're living in a
00:11:27.960 disneyfied americanized version of the country that existed in that era they constructed an
00:11:33.560 elaborate multi-tiered maze out of cloth plywood cardboard and the nesting tables found in church
00:11:39.480 halls and schools of the era various activities were planned some of which were held in rooms
00:11:45.480 only accessible through the maze. But most importantly of all, they brought in big kids
00:11:51.100 from another church across town to help run the camp and star in their production of the multi-day
00:11:57.220 epic The Quest for the God Sword. The God Sword! Can you feel the pure, innocent excitement of a
00:12:05.920 five-year-old boy when he hears that? It's the God Sword! If I wasn't already enthralled from
00:12:12.160 racing around the labyrinth the mystery of the sealed rooms beyond the contagious enthusiasm
00:12:18.300 from an event the other children my old age from the event
00:12:23.900 with other children my own age that i could tell my friends at school
00:12:29.640 the cool big kids from the other church the promise of the god sword certainly ignited a
00:12:36.380 spark deep within my young soul. Day by day, the excitement built, the novelty of the format of
00:12:44.540 the camp, the heroic theme, so far absent in my experience of religion, that spoke directly to
00:12:51.040 every young boy's heart. At last, it's the final act. We're going to find the god sword. The god
00:12:58.040 sword! The Indiana Jones theme stirs, and the audience's attention reaches its peak.
00:13:07.180 So where's the God Sword, Bethany?
00:13:09.600 Says one of the cool kids to his co-star.
00:13:12.800 What are you talking about, Michael?
00:13:14.740 You've had it with you all along.
00:13:16.740 It's not the God Sword.
00:13:19.260 It's God's Word.
00:13:22.420 Time stopped.
00:13:24.700 I suddenly felt how cold and wide the hall felt.
00:13:29.380 The world lost its colour for a moment
00:13:31.400 as a precocious five-year-old boy's heightened expectations
00:13:35.060 were suddenly wrenched back to reality. I wasn't even able to be angry. There was no denial,
00:13:41.920 no bargaining, no depression, only resignation. In that moment, I understood at once and for all
00:13:50.140 time that Christianity had nothing to offer me spiritually. This was Christianity's true faith.
00:13:58.020 That feminine impulse for anti-heroic conformity, totally unconcerned with the dreams of a young
00:14:03.700 man. There would be no triumph, no great conquerors, no patrons of mankind. And it was so self-confident
00:14:12.600 in this assertion that neither Bethany nor any of the other organisers even noticed the
00:14:18.360 remains of my now-extinguished Christian faith smouldering on the floor. The camp wrapped
00:14:24.400 up shortly after. My mother picked me up and I went home. I left the God-sword behind.
00:14:33.700 That is
00:14:39.700 That is amazing
00:14:42.220 You never told me before
00:14:44.280 That they were Americans doing this to you
00:14:46.200 That adds a whole other layer to it
00:14:48.000 Yeah
00:14:49.640 I kind of touched on it at the beginning
00:14:52.400 But
00:14:52.780 Ireland was still Ireland back then
00:14:55.920 And them being Americans
00:14:58.780 Was actually a very
00:14:59.920 Like it really mattered
00:15:02.580 To the story
00:15:03.180 Like none of the, the format of the summer camp or anything like that would have, would have happened had it not been an American couple.
00:15:12.740 Yes.
00:15:13.300 So the, I, I remember in the fading, in the fading Canada, my youth, there, there are all these exactly like this church summer camps and like these, these Americanisms.
00:15:29.820 and there were these fading like little moments that uh
00:15:37.280 that still had like kind of the magic of old canada to it like uh the the town band and
00:15:47.480 you know german town band in this like german part of part of canada and like uh the uh being
00:15:56.600 cadets and going to the local armory or uh or events at the legion hall hall and uh all these
00:16:07.040 like very very like militaristic old imperial canada stuff that like uh would happen fleetingly
00:16:15.440 and would happen in stark contrast all these uh the this spread of uh faking gay americanism
00:16:23.240 All these bizarre American rituals that seem to suck by purpose.
00:16:35.080 There's no continuity.
00:16:38.720 There's an element of your blood coming through in even the other Christian events that might have been organized by the Canadian church before this point.
00:16:48.620 Yeah.
00:16:49.300 That the thing is, it isn't just the churches.
00:16:53.520 There's something profoundly, there's something in American culture about,
00:16:59.260 of like a purposeful humiliation to how faking gate all these events are.
00:17:11.800 And a lot of American events, and of course it inflects American Christianity,
00:17:19.300 deeply but uh but this this image of the little celtic boy with the blood of king arthur
00:17:26.580 in him and the the irish sagas like like in the and the the the barley fields that the ira had
00:17:40.280 fought in in the 1920s this this cute little this setting of like profound like shire beauty but
00:17:50.460 also this uh this uh setting of like profound conflict this uh this little irish boy who has
00:17:59.820 all this in his blood and and the pride they took in baiting you yeah three days
00:18:09.080 they kept a lid on it for three days
00:18:11.760 yeah which is like you know a year you know that's a you know that's a promised religious
00:18:20.940 revelation that's you know if you join a cult as an adult and the messiah is coming
00:18:28.760 in like 20 years you know that 20 years might feel shorter than three days is to a five-year-old
00:18:36.000 yeah you know the profound belief and sense of time and the profound build of all of it and then
00:18:43.780 and then the purposeful cop-out this is the thing like uh
00:18:51.740 but like if you think of like the prophecies in macbeth where uh you know
00:18:57.660 uh Macbeth will never slain be till Burnwood comes to Dunsany and stuff like that you know
00:19:06.100 Shakespeare coughs out on that because it's like it's prophecies and tricks by like demonic
00:19:12.700 witches that are like leading a a man to ruin or like uh you know the the oracle to
00:19:22.360 crasses of Lydia that if he invades Persia he'll destroy a great empire then he destroys his own
00:19:28.160 his own now's the empire that got destroyed like like all those stories are meant to be like
00:19:34.580 purposeful warnings about like the danger prophecies and be skeptical in this in the
00:19:42.260 stuff you know it's supposed to like keep you wary keep you on your toes uh not let you go into like
00:19:48.600 so you don't turn into
00:19:52.920 Crassus or Macbeth
00:19:54.260 whereas for them to do that with like
00:19:59.100 oh this is supposed to be the greatest
00:20:01.160 revelation of all
00:20:02.600 this is the good news
00:20:05.440 is that it was a cop out
00:20:07.340 but they clearly
00:20:09.380 understood the allure of the
00:20:11.540 of the sword
00:20:13.600 as well
00:20:14.080 there's a reason they kept a lid on it
00:20:17.140 And, you know, the whole camp was advertised by the sword.
00:20:22.760 So they knew they were doing the bait and switch.
00:20:27.520 And they...
00:20:28.560 Like, it's not just caridus, it's lime.
00:20:32.200 Yes.
00:20:33.700 And they're doing it to these poor Irish children
00:20:37.800 who have, like, magical sacred swords, like,
00:20:42.760 in every inch of their blood.
00:20:44.400 Like, I challenge you to read, like, Le Morte d'Arthur, one of the sagas, and just count the magic swords.
00:20:55.720 Like, there are individual heroes who go through, like, half a dozen magic swords, you know, like a video game character leveling up.
00:21:06.380 Like, magic swords and stuff are important culturally to these people, and they're just fucking with them.
00:21:14.140 But this, you end off that this killed your faith.
00:21:26.380 And I know there will be some Christian listeners who are shaking their heads like,
00:21:34.980 no, this has nothing to do with the Bible and whatnot, that this shouldn't impact your faith
00:21:41.460 or whatnot, or find it petty of you somehow to change your religious faith over something like
00:21:50.560 this. But like, no, this is like one of the most important matters of conscience that you could
00:21:57.620 have. Like, this is like all your being saying to be one way, and they purposely spat on it.
00:22:04.980 In the last section of the story, I actually highlight that this was what Christianity was.
00:22:14.720 And I used as the quote in that quotes from the Archangel Michael in Milton, which is the most heroic, forthright, manly version of Christianity that's possible.
00:22:28.540 And, you know, that was my example of how this cucked attitude was exemplary of the Christian faith.
00:22:40.060 Yes. Can you give us those quotes from the archangel?
00:22:45.000 Or give us one of them.
00:22:46.880 I don't have a wireless headset, so I can't go across to give you the full thing,
00:22:49.700 but I'll give you the bit I quoted, which would be,
00:22:51.880 there would be no triumph, no great conquerors, no patrons of mankind.
00:22:57.040 And this was essentially how Milton characterised the Romans, basically, towards the end of Paradise Lost, where he's trying to draw a contrast between the Christians and the Gentiles.
00:23:17.660 yes the the uh the purposeful rejection of like the heroic uh feuding vengeful great instinct
00:23:36.440 the hatred of wrath and vengeance and in christianity like all these things that
00:23:43.960 for the classical european makes life worth wink living in a winning glory a winning victory on
00:23:52.460 the field uh contesting being the great the greater you know all these things that that
00:24:00.500 little boys from noble cultures feel like in their bones uh this is where like dragon ball z
00:24:08.440 appeals across all these different cultures because it's just like that basic level of being
00:24:15.260 the greatest you can be and then going on testing with it and then like someone messing with you
00:24:20.400 and you flying into rage to fight to fight them like this fundamental human experiment experience
00:24:28.340 um there's this essential rejection of that in christianity you were kind of touching on this
00:24:37.800 in your previous podcast
00:24:39.980 that this is a part two
00:24:42.540 with Stonequire
00:24:44.700 where you were talking about
00:24:48.060 the 10th commandment
00:24:49.440 or whatever commandment it is
00:24:50.860 thou shalt not kill
00:24:52.480 and he tried to correct you
00:24:54.760 or did correct you too
00:24:56.000 it's thou shalt not murder
00:24:58.980 but then you never got a chance
00:25:01.100 to come back
00:25:01.820 and give your
00:25:04.140 treaties on why
00:25:06.600 yes thou shalt not murder is profoundly out anti-european yes uh i that that's the one
00:25:15.620 thing that didn't furiate me that i didn't want to like interject and be like uh because he did
00:25:22.800 have like an interesting point he was going off on but uh what is the difference between kill and
00:25:29.160 murder. What is the difference between those two? There's a biblical sense of it, sort of, that's
00:25:36.880 like, well, if you're ordained by God, it's not murder, it's killing. But really what it is,
00:25:42.900 the distinction between kill and murder is that murder is killing for your own motivation.
00:25:52.460 Murder is killing because you have personally judged that this person has screwed you over
00:25:58.580 or you despise this person, or you are hateful towards them or whatever. So you set out on your
00:26:04.720 own authority to kill them. And then the killing that, that the Bible would say, oh, that's fine.
00:26:12.360 It's like being a good guy and killing for the government or killing because like a priest has
00:26:19.000 told you to, or killing because, uh, you know, some war band or authority fair has told, told
00:26:26.060 you to and of course like you're never allowed to make your own war band or authority institution
00:26:32.360 you know none of these people are saying oh yes no one's killed the Epstein clients yet uh we
00:26:39.760 should create a private militia we'll have like little secret trials uh in like a church basement
00:26:47.920 in our little private militia of the Epstein clients and when we find them guilty we'll go
00:26:52.420 out and secretly kill them and that's not murder because we had we had a little institution that
00:26:58.220 decided to kill to kill them no they're like uh it's you can only comply with an existing
00:27:07.180 institution or an existing religious framework which is of course the office of the entire
00:27:13.960 european tradition which is like these noble individual warriors going out and creating
00:27:20.640 justice and order by their own hand and having their own feuds and like blood, blood vengeances
00:27:30.700 for themselves. And, you know, sometimes coming across a guy on the road who's rude to them
00:27:38.560 and saying, you know what, we're going to duel to the death right here and now
00:27:42.080 over this trifling matter of honor. And, you know, sometimes they duel and they're both
00:27:49.320 heavily wounded and then they become best friends because wow you fought well get on you stranger
00:27:55.360 and sometimes they just cut the guy down and sometimes they both cut each other down and
00:27:59.960 they die in each other's arms and then realize oh that was my long lost cousin i didn't recognize
00:28:05.460 him in the new helmet and that becomes like is that like uh some horrifying moral monstrosity
00:28:15.360 know that's a thing of beauty that's sung about afterwards that these are beautiful free men who
00:28:21.340 are enacting their own justice in the world and fighting their own battles and doing doing things
00:28:27.740 for themselves fighting for what they believe in not what other people tell them to and this is
00:28:35.280 where the whether it's thou shalt not kill or thou shalt not murder it's entirely contrary to
00:28:42.740 the Western tradition.
00:28:44.860 In fact, I would go as far to say
00:28:47.040 thou shalt not murder
00:28:48.580 is
00:28:50.080 a direct refutation
00:28:52.700 of the Western tradition
00:28:54.540 in a way that thou shalt not kill, the
00:28:56.420 incorrect translation, wouldn't necessarily
00:28:58.960 be.
00:29:02.840 Very much so.
00:29:03.900 Thou shalt not murder is worse.
00:29:06.680 Yeah, and that's where
00:29:07.900 probably that's
00:29:10.860 reason the king james bible translated it as thou shalt not kill is because because they didn't want
00:29:18.180 to translate it to a complete endorsement of like slavery you know if it's thou shalt not kill it's
00:29:27.680 like oh it's always a sin when you kill but everyone's going to kill anyway for whatever
00:29:31.940 reason ask repentance or whatnot they didn't want to privilege uh uh the state even even king james
00:29:42.800 the absolute astuart king of britain didn't want to endorse those values they're like
00:29:49.400 they're like no a knight can never uh fight someone to the death over a matter of honor
00:29:54.980 Or you can never have a duel over slight or whatever.
00:30:01.380 That would have been completely hostile to the British, to the Britain of the 1600s.
00:30:09.060 I was reading last month, I was reading Odin, the One-Eyed God by Chris Kershaw.
00:30:16.400 And in it, she was talking about the ancient Germanics.
00:30:20.180 and they had a custom where
00:30:22.880 once you reached a certain age
00:30:24.900 let's say 15 or so
00:30:26.380 I don't remember exactly what it is
00:30:27.960 you would take an oath
00:30:30.080 not to groom your hair
00:30:32.940 or shave your beard
00:30:34.180 until you would kill the man
00:30:36.240 and you couldn't marry
00:30:38.960 until
00:30:41.540 you'd exited this stage
00:30:44.540 in your social development
00:30:48.340 let's say
00:30:48.780 So the result was that anyone who was too cowardly or too weak to have killed a man was physically disgusting to look at and also spiritually unable to marry.
00:31:08.080 The result being that every one of your ancestors, male ancestors, has killed a man.
00:31:18.780 at least before a certain time period.
00:31:24.120 And we have an example of a society like this,
00:31:27.440 which was the Spartans.
00:31:29.420 The Spartans, every Spartan child had to sneak out
00:31:34.460 and kill a helot in order to become a man.
00:31:40.940 And of course, if they were...
00:31:44.000 The Germans had different roles around a sneaking and whatnot.
00:31:48.180 The Germans, at least in Iceland, it was only killing in secret was a crime.
00:31:56.620 As long as you announce the murder, it wasn't murder.
00:32:00.480 It was just killing that you could...
00:32:03.180 Yeah, because then his relatives could take revenge, which is the logic.
00:32:06.960 So you would perpetuate the cycle of vengeance.
00:32:09.620 yeah perpetuate it or like or terminate it in that like no that's the that's the top guy in uh
00:32:20.620 our our our uh thingdom or uh that's the top guy in glomassar that's the top guy in our part of
00:32:33.400 Iceland of course you don't want
00:32:35.300 you don't screw with that guy he's
00:32:37.220 he's the best of the best
00:32:39.360 naturally he would kill that guy
00:32:41.640 guy and it creates
00:32:43.640 a hierarchy
00:32:44.880 of
00:32:45.920 of honour and glory
00:32:49.060 yeah there's a
00:32:51.560 there's a funny story in Tacitus
00:32:52.940 it's only slightly related to this point but
00:32:55.400 it was a
00:32:57.680 Roman
00:32:58.020 I don't think it was Tacitus himself actually
00:33:01.240 But there was a Roman dignitary staying with a Germanic tribe.
00:33:06.620 And one of his hosts was murdered by another Germanic warrior.
00:33:14.960 And he was completely confused as to why the guy had suddenly, you know, jumped up and murdered this other noble king who, you know, seemed perfectly, like a perfectly good and reasonable man.
00:33:28.440 and he said oh well his uncle insulted my brother or and then the roman's uh response was but why
00:33:39.600 didn't you kill the uncle then he's like because he was the better man so he'd killed he'd killed
00:33:46.160 this king because he was better than the uncle that had insulted his brother
00:33:50.960 and Tacitus
00:33:55.540 called them monsters ruled
00:33:57.560 by principles
00:33:58.380 well yes
00:34:03.460 physically as well as
00:34:04.860 as well as
00:34:07.520 spiritually they're so much
00:34:09.420 taller
00:34:09.820 but I know this
00:34:13.240 feuding way of life
00:34:15.100 is core to
00:34:17.440 what has made
00:34:18.420 Europeans
00:34:20.160 Europeans. And it doesn't exist in many places. Like, uh, Japan. Uh, of course, the samurai have
00:34:28.600 their, like, own feuding, dueling system that is significantly different and has significantly
00:34:35.160 different pressures. Like, uh, like, uh, you look at the Japanese, and it's similar, but it's not
00:34:44.820 the same it produces a very different effects and uh very different looks on life and it's
00:34:52.760 the japanese are beautiful people those effects you know are significantly better than many of
00:34:59.360 the surrounding areas but it's not the same it didn't produce the the same types of
00:35:03.860 attitudes the japanese kind of disappear into themselves because the hierarchy was uh
00:35:09.820 was too complete you know they're they didn't have the wild frontier and like the instability
00:35:18.160 that europe always had but uh but this is why this is where like european civilization comes
00:35:25.840 from is we had this profound profound selection pressure in northern europe particularly
00:35:32.080 particularly um forever and like the implementation of christianity
00:35:40.060 for longest time was barely a hiccup in this because of course you know the natural pressures
00:35:46.880 and like the existing aristocracy kept it going uh the the natural priesthood of a pagan society
00:35:53.240 is its aristocracy you know these are the people who are maintaining it these are the people who
00:35:58.100 can trace their lineages back to odin uh these are the people who have all the rituals and the
00:36:03.980 courts and like uh you know the churches are parallel institutions to this they don't take
00:36:11.340 over and then what you see especially in america where they successfully killed off aristocracy
00:36:16.800 is uh the the religious morality of christianity just devours everything you know as soon as it
00:36:27.680 It doesn't have the countervailing institutions and, like, spiritual structure of European aristocracy, which is, like, the natural correct hierarchy, which Christianity was, like, actually still dragging down that entire time.
00:36:48.120 Like, there's a reason, you know, Europe wasn't pressing out and conquering Islam in, like, the 15th century, despite the fact that it should have been able to.
00:37:00.680 uh uh all the
00:37:04.560 all these all these pressures just all these institutions that maintain like
00:37:14.380 white civilization die in america uh largely with the failure of the south because they were
00:37:20.880 maybe one of the most aristocratic people ever but this is the south falls also only this uh
00:37:26.500 this unbound Christianity just devours the entirety of American culture and
00:37:36.820 aristocratic values survive on the frontiers for a bit but they decay almost immediately
00:37:46.240 uh Theodore Roosevelt Teddy Roosevelt was uh you know the man who's the perfect blend of
00:37:54.440 chud and chad uh the human embodiments equal parts both uh both memes he was going on in like
00:38:04.860 the ninth the early 1900s about how the west has fallen and like uh and like western man is
00:38:14.180 declining and how if we get rid of the barbarian virtues the civilized ones won't do us any good
00:38:20.460 and trying to like form the Boy Scouts movement
00:38:25.120 and like creating all the national parks
00:38:26.940 to like stop Americans from becoming f*****s.
00:38:32.240 It's interesting you bring up Boy Scouts
00:38:34.420 because I was thinking about this earlier.
00:38:36.920 He wasn't the only one to settle on Boy Scouts
00:38:40.980 being the acceptable alternative for the missing aristocracy.
00:38:46.060 The Germans also did this quite famously.
00:38:48.940 And the Israelis did it too. It's actually the Likud party, the ruling party of Israel, Nehanyahu's voting demographic, are very proud of their origins as what's essentially a militarized Boy Scouts movement.
00:39:08.280 yeah uh canada in the commonwealth uh canada very prominently but also the rest of the commonwealth
00:39:17.280 uh had a an explicitly militarized scouting movement called cadets that uh was like actually
00:39:26.800 administered by the military and like uh i think to this day it was when i was a kid but to this day
00:39:34.840 The Army cadets, Derek Colent of an Eagle Scout, an Army cadet warrant officer, can go on the Canadian Army jump course at, I think it's 16, 17.
00:39:48.280 They will send him on the, like, actual military parachute jump course while in, like, high school.
00:39:56.520 that i i knew a guy who showed up as like a buck private uh first year in the in the army and uh
00:40:10.600 his uniform he hadn't completed basic training but they had to give him his jump wings for his
00:40:15.900 uniform because he didn't have his um he hadn't even completed his basic qualification but he
00:40:23.240 was jump qualified this is of course like completely um completely vestigial in the
00:40:31.260 canadian system uh just one of those like cool things that like you can still kind of do in
00:40:38.360 canada now if you like know about it but like uh back in the day uh the cadets were like the entire
00:40:45.060 like feeding system for the canadian military and were this massive organization and now
00:40:53.080 It's important as a, like, rites of passage have been gradually stripped away from our society.
00:41:00.320 Like, even the Christian ones that would have replaced the pre-existing ones, like Confirmation and First Communion and such are, you know, gradually losing their importance.
00:41:13.840 Even by the time I was a child, they were an excuse for a kid to collect money from his relatives.
00:41:20.060 They weren't anything religious.
00:41:23.080 Whereas something like the Boy Scouts, you know, it really does go all the way back to the steps that, you know, the kids at these exact ages were learning the exact same skills to survive in the forest outside the village.
00:41:39.120 yeah and i don't know now now you have to have a little patch for kids who um
00:41:50.880 kids who get so good in the drone simulator but uh like these were important important stuff
00:41:59.420 and deep and part of the reason i want to have you on and talk about the god sword specifically
00:42:04.760 is because I've been trying to nail down
00:42:08.360 what it is specifically about modern morality
00:42:13.160 that violently attacks
00:42:16.760 like everything that associates with heroism whatsoever.
00:42:24.220 Like your American religious camp teachers,
00:42:30.900 uh they were not like being paid by them they were not being like run by the jews they were
00:42:41.600 not getting you know dei funding to crush the little spirit of an irish boy their grant money
00:42:49.120 didn't depend on challenging patriarchal assumptions in irish five-year-olds
00:42:55.260 old and challenging traditional Irish ways of of conceiving of heroism yet they did exactly what
00:43:07.220 what you know any DEI instructor or like or like a or some like shrill the aging lesbian
00:43:19.140 and Longhauser would want them to do, which is they purposely captured and subverted your natural
00:43:28.780 instinct to heroism. And this strikes me as core to what Christianity is in the 20th century and
00:43:37.860 21st century. And I don't know, well, I do, you know, slave morality, but I have trouble
00:43:47.520 quantifying this. I have trouble
00:43:49.960 seeing this from the inside
00:43:51.660 of why they're so
00:43:55.840 smug and proud
00:43:56.740 about it.
00:44:00.540 Well, it's just
00:44:01.700 fundamentally
00:44:02.560 you're worshipping another people's god.
00:44:06.320 Like, your guest kind of touched
00:44:07.700 on this at the end. And he's right.
00:44:09.960 This is
00:44:10.520 a fundamental
00:44:13.680 divide. There's no shade of grey here.
00:44:15.600 It's a binary.
00:44:16.500 you either think Christians are worshipping
00:44:19.380 another people's God
00:44:21.840 to their own disadvantage
00:44:23.600 or
00:44:24.760 they're not
00:44:26.360 and they very obviously are
00:44:28.640 there's not really much
00:44:31.740 you can
00:44:32.180 you're just going to end up
00:44:35.960 restating the same
00:44:37.120 argument every
00:44:38.720 single time you have the discussion
00:44:40.820 until you
00:44:41.460 find a solution on that
00:44:44.920 in which case they'd no longer be a Christian.
00:44:47.980 Like it is fundamental to Christianity
00:44:49.840 and there's no getting around it is the problem.
00:44:53.440 And one of the things that it slowly hit me
00:44:59.000 and I've like slowly like,
00:45:02.060 and I've been recoiling in horror from,
00:45:05.480 is that for the Christian,
00:45:08.100 like the feeling that we associate
00:45:11.140 as like horrifying and like have to get away from it like the cognitive dissonance feeling
00:45:18.680 you know that feeling you have when it's like oh this like glorious interest trusting the god
00:45:27.260 sword you know this uh glorious thing that we're questing for and we desire and whatnot and then
00:45:33.360 like the rug pulled moment when it's god's word and it's faking gay and you don't have to do
00:45:39.700 anything and there's no struggle to be had and there is no glory to be won and there's no
00:45:46.720 nothing interesting to achieve there's no greatness on the horizon you know that that
00:45:53.320 feeling of like dissonance or like profound defeatedness uh that feeling of
00:46:00.080 of like complete faking gayness that like your mind rejects from they think that's the holy
00:46:09.100 feeling like that like they look at that and feel profoundly reassured that uh that they're not going
00:46:22.020 to be held to any standard that they're just good enough they don't have to do any anything that
00:46:27.340 that amazing tension that drives people forward they can relax that tension entirely and just be
00:46:34.920 there. That's what they worship is holy. You know, that thing that you reject and find kind of
00:46:41.840 revolting, you know, the faking gayness of the lesbian preacher coming up again to talk about
00:46:49.340 how we're all accepted. We're all here. It's like, come on, I could do something else. We're going
00:46:56.100 through. We're all accepted. It's like, well, aren't I supposed to achieve something? We're
00:47:01.220 all exactly what we need to be.
00:47:03.800 Well, I want to be something more.
00:47:05.120 We're all what we want.
00:47:07.520 Yeah.
00:47:07.920 Well, it's kind of, it's a lot like female intersexual competition.
00:47:12.440 Now that's what they reward each other for.
00:47:15.380 Every time they make a mistake, the other girls will reward them for that mistake
00:47:21.400 in order to sabotage them.
00:47:22.820 And it's the exact same logic.
00:47:26.600 And there is a relatively well-worn axiom.
00:47:31.220 what's the ephorism, women are Jews and Jews are women.
00:47:37.220 And if you're working in the interests of the Jewish God.
00:47:43.800 Yes, there's that.
00:47:48.180 I can completely see that.
00:47:49.840 I once had a thing I told a friend and he exactly recognized it.
00:47:55.840 I might have repeated it since a few times,
00:47:57.920 but uh the entire the jesus story right um it's really weird like the jesus story is profoundly
00:48:11.220 weird compared to like almost any other story like uh like the narrative like what's the reward
00:48:18.580 what's the compelling bit of this uh you know what like if you compare like uh the story of jesus to
00:48:26.140 Like, I don't know, some other martyred hero, like some guy who struggles and fights and, you know, can't hold back the horde and whatnot and finally falls.
00:48:38.020 Like, compare Jesus to Spartacus or Jesus to, like, some fallen king or Jesus to Macbeth.
00:48:46.220 And it's like, you know, there's some broad narrative beats that line up with it.
00:48:50.700 But, like, the actual, like, reward loop of listening to the Jesus story.
00:48:56.640 You know, what feels compelling about the story to, like, the audience at any given moment?
00:49:04.860 The Jesus story is not, like, is profoundly unlike most other stories in that the loop of what's fun about engaging the story is not there.
00:49:20.700 Like if you compare it to, say, an action movie or a video game or like a, I don't know, a movie about a traveling, a successful top of his game sports player or something, which, you know, Jesus is the successful preacher.
00:49:40.380 He's at the top of his game character compared to Thank You for Smoking or whatnot.
00:49:45.000 There's this loop in Thank You for Smoking where Aaron Eckhart's character is going into these challenging scenarios and then performing incredibly well.
00:49:57.900 And it goes on.
00:49:59.120 You can imagine, oh, yeah, you could have this story about a great man.
00:50:01.800 It ends tragically.
00:50:02.780 And his skill loop is how persuasive he is.
00:50:07.400 Except he doesn't actually persuade any of the characters or conduct himself well at his trial at all.
00:50:14.860 You know, it's not like, oh, he pones Pilate or he like really owns Herod when they're interrogating him.
00:50:22.000 Or he really, you know, gets one in on the Pharisees, like the loop of the story.
00:50:28.700 Like if you were to, if I was to just give you the outline of the Jesus story.
00:50:33.040 what i said is i said oh to get the power fantasy of the jesus story to really understand you know
00:50:43.180 why this is so compelling to so many people when like most people when like uh i don't really get
00:50:50.380 it a lot of people don't really get it is imagine jesus is a woman imagine jesus is your nagging
00:50:57.440 girlfriend right and suddenly the power fantasy of the cross is like overwhelming as soon as you
00:51:05.940 imagine that uh oh i told you but you didn't listen but i forgive you anyway because i love you
00:51:15.400 even though you don't always love me and now look i'm here i am suffering for you and you don't
00:51:22.120 appreciate it but i'm still gonna suffer for you because i love you love you even if you don't
00:51:29.000 always love me i i know in your heart you'll come around like for most people it's very hard to get
00:51:37.620 into the mindset and but everyone's interacted with someone who had exactly that complex as
00:51:44.380 as you like see it and you imagine like a woman on the cross cross oh forgive them they don't know
00:51:52.700 what they're they're doing that feeling of moral superiority and moral validation and the revelation
00:51:58.280 that oh that was the most important person and we didn't listen uh there's there's a moment in uh
00:52:08.360 bob clark's a christmas story uh the 1982 canadian film where um the child character ralphie uh he
00:52:20.200 swears and his mom makes him like like shoves soap in his mouth washes out his mouth with
00:52:27.120 self-like quite literally makes him sit there with a soap bar in his mouth and this is a relatively
00:52:31.840 common occurrence. So he has this elaborate fantasy that he comes home one day blind
00:52:38.060 and has a walking stick and walks into his house. His mother's there and his father's there.
00:52:44.340 Ralphie, how have you been, son? We haven't seen you in a while. What's going on? He walks in with
00:52:49.600 his glasses and his walkie stick. Ralphie? Ralphie, where are you looking? Oh my God, he's blind.
00:52:55.820 And this is an elaborate child's fantasy.
00:52:58.520 You know, this is a dream sequence.
00:53:01.240 This is him viewing into the future.
00:53:04.080 And he's there.
00:53:04.940 Oh, it was soap blindness.
00:53:08.540 I went blind from the soap.
00:53:09.860 And all his family weaves.
00:53:11.960 Oh, we should have listened to you, Ralphie.
00:53:14.220 We shouldn't have washed your mouth out with soap.
00:53:17.200 We're so sorry.
00:53:19.200 Our poor boy.
00:53:20.900 We love you, Ralphie.
00:53:22.160 What have we done?
00:53:23.260 you're such a great man for putting up with us for still speaking to us after after all this and
00:53:29.200 he's sitting there imagining it and he cuts back to him you know out of the dream sequence back
00:53:35.100 in reality sitting there on the kitchen counter with soap in his mouth mouth his mother saying
00:53:41.080 now don't you take that out for another five minutes and he starts smiling imagining himself
00:53:48.240 going blind but them all having to them all having to be ashamed that they didn't listen
00:53:57.620 to him and they they didn't realize what a great man he was and he was right all along and he
00:54:03.440 suffered because of them and they have to know about it that this is actually a power fantasy
00:54:08.860 for him, imagining going blind
00:54:11.700 from their neglect.
00:54:16.220 Yeah, yeah.
00:54:17.600 And this is actually a great pleasure
00:54:21.860 for him, imagining
00:54:23.740 that this torment
00:54:28.820 that he's experienced of having to eat the soap might have
00:54:31.740 even worse consequences for him.
00:54:34.880 But this is actually reassuring because there's a social performative
00:54:37.980 While he's still in bondage on the countertop, basically.
00:54:41.440 To understand why all these young women find Christianity so appealing, or why the gay kids find Christianity appealing, or why the crippled kids always like Christianity, you have to understand that resentful, smug feeling, or aspiratially smug feeling.
00:55:06.180 that, that, yeah, I'm nobody now, but, uh, but one day they're going to look up at me on the
00:55:13.100 cross and they're going to realize that I was right. And then I'm going to go to heaven and
00:55:18.440 they aren't because, um, because I was morally superior, you know, you know, taking, taking a
00:55:29.840 like morally superior joy in the persecution you know the the thrill that your ex-girlfriend got
00:55:41.220 when you when you like forgot her birthday you know because now she gets to get you
00:55:49.100 for forgetting her birthday or uh i remember one story of a of a girl um the guy
00:55:57.500 she purposely bought like a big gift for their anniversary so that and didn't remind her husband
00:56:06.380 of it at all going forward while he's on a big or a project project so that he would feel extra
00:56:12.600 guilty uh when he forgot the anniversary and she'd gotten him a big present for it
00:56:18.440 you know and she she had posted like a reddit thing say like laying out her scheme like oh i
00:56:26.700 will i will get one over on him for for it was very self-aware but uh that that kind of joy
00:56:34.880 in moral superiority uh it's the same fantasy of um if you watch some like the left behind
00:56:41.340 properties or other rapture prop properties there's is um like the entire fantasy of it
00:56:47.700 is this smug reassurance that, like, oh, you don't believe us now, but when the consequences come,
00:56:59.080 you'll know that we were right.
00:57:04.500 It's like, wait, like, the fantasy should be that you, you know, are able to use your foreknowledge
00:57:13.120 to intercede to protect the people you care about not that you get to feel smug when you're
00:57:21.540 you're right and the consequences happen but that's a core part of the reward loop
00:57:26.540 because it's this uh my mother watches was watching one of these movies and you know one
00:57:36.240 that I had never seen or really heard about.
00:57:39.880 And then watching them, I'm like,
00:57:41.360 oh, this is like her reward loop.
00:57:46.060 This is like the reward loop that's activating
00:57:48.360 in her mind watching this
00:57:49.740 because she can't really affect anything
00:57:52.660 related to like the COVID vaccine or anything like that.
00:57:55.260 But she can imagine when things get really tyrannical,
00:57:59.480 she'll have been right.
00:58:01.140 And those other people who dismissed her,
00:58:03.280 they'll have been wrong.
00:58:04.160 I wonder, was there something in particular about the early Roman Empire that made writing for women much more valuable than for men, like maybe the wife controlling the household or gave outreach to all the slaves or something like that?
00:58:28.760 so christ so the early roman empire you gotta remember um what's a lot like california
00:58:39.780 like is today where um just every religious sect under the sun got a swing at being popular
00:58:49.580 in the roman empire like uh from about
00:58:53.400 uh this is also like like the exact same way america in the 60s and 70s it was like the first
00:59:03.180 time that uh any eastern mystical sect could even take a swing at like pitching out all these white
00:59:10.760 people because you know they hadn't had access to them before and they hadn't had media or anything
00:59:17.100 like that. It was the exact same way in Rome in about first century AD that, you know, you had
00:59:26.560 all these Egyptians and Parthians and Jews and Greeks and all these figures who had just been
00:59:37.300 integrated into the empire. You know, Caesar conquered Egypt and like fully integrated Egypt
00:59:44.700 into the empire just like 60 years before. And like a lot of the Near East was only integrated
00:59:52.000 like very reasonably. Crassus had died in, not Crassus of Lydia, Crassus of Gaius Crassus of Rome,
01:00:03.420 uh the first triumvirate had died in a pontus like uh like in 60 58 or so um that all these
01:00:14.280 areas had just opened up and rome was this unified empire which had like cultural exchange
01:00:20.240 and traders and stuff so it it was very much like um like california has been the past 40 50 years
01:00:30.080 we had all these eastern mystical mystical sex uh showing up and working on these like
01:00:41.080 like wealthy white women with too much time on their hands for the very first time and
01:00:48.620 and so what you see in Rome is like Christianity wasn't the first religion to sweep Rome
01:00:56.160 it was like the 80th uh like there had been the cult of mithra there had been the cult of isis
01:01:04.140 there had been uh the m the emperor caligula had started a cult of himself at one one point
01:01:12.480 and replaced all the gods with statues of himself uh the the cult of um you had philosophical
01:01:20.120 movements like epicureanism and cynicism and and stoicism that were big fads in the empire
01:01:27.940 and like took over the emperor at various various points you had um uh famously marcus aurelius was
01:01:37.560 one of the great stoke philosophers that there that stoicism was prominent prominent right into
01:01:43.160 the imperial court. You had the cult of the cult of Sol Invictus, the creator god of the universe,
01:01:54.760 but like this philosophically derived one that had all these Greek characteristics.
01:02:00.060 You had all these different cults come about and a lot of stuff that would become Christianity
01:02:05.420 actually comes out of a lot of these different cults. So obviously Sol Invictus,
01:02:11.440 uh a lot of the conception of omni benevolent uh on the um potent omnipresent uh these come
01:02:20.740 a lot of these come out of soul so ambictus and plot platonic philosophy but uh you also have like
01:02:28.900 stuff that borrows from like the cult of the caesars because the caesars were deified like uh
01:02:34.500 like rome was a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic empire very much like america where it's just like
01:02:44.580 like you can have all these different cults come about and saying you know it'd be like if
01:02:52.120 if islam won and like took over america and took over europe and two thousand years from now
01:03:01.900 everyone was islamic you know and they're like oh obviously islam was stronger than america
01:03:07.980 islam was stronger than your than europe because we were allowed because we beat them we were the
01:03:15.740 stronger even though we're less technological advanced all all this stuff you know all these
01:03:20.200 things that christians say about paganism is like no you won because they the pressures of empire
01:03:28.520 made them like more tolerant than anyone had ever been to that that point you know if islam wins in
01:03:36.840 europe and conquers europe it's not because islam was stronger it's because europe europe got itself
01:03:43.880 in a chinese finger trap where it couldn't be intolerant like it would have been at any other
01:03:49.520 point point you know you you know the like the victory of christianity isn't that it took over
01:04:00.200 the roman empire and became the fad religion for like a hundred years you know five different
01:04:05.380 religions had done bad the victory of christianity is that when it took over it tore down the roman
01:04:11.460 empire it it tore down all the traditional cults and stuff you know raised the pagan temples that
01:04:18.480 were like it had long ago many of them had become like civic institutions you know you had to
01:04:24.260 maintain these but these weren't really the focus of anyone's life but you have to maintain them
01:04:29.040 the same way you know a lot of towns now maintain their uh cenotaphs and stuff that's like oh
01:04:35.460 remembrance day isn't that big a thing anymore there aren't that many veterans left but you
01:04:39.500 have to maintain them every one shows up once a year for for remembrance day or memorial day
01:04:45.160 they'd largely forgotten the origins
01:04:47.080 yeah yeah
01:04:52.000 but the ritual is still carried out
01:04:55.760 by like a handful
01:04:57.780 of people and just a part
01:04:59.820 of the culture that's in the background
01:05:01.340 it's like
01:05:02.600 it's like imagine
01:05:05.700 if Islam
01:05:07.280 won out and then tore
01:05:09.820 down every single cenotaph and then they
01:05:11.800 said oh we were stronger
01:05:13.860 than the warriors of World War II.
01:05:17.340 You know, we were stronger
01:05:18.500 than the soldiers on Flanders
01:05:20.820 because they fought four years
01:05:25.400 over the trenches
01:05:26.020 to move them a few kilomeres,
01:05:27.820 whereas Islam came to their hometowns
01:05:30.760 and ripped up their cenotas.
01:05:32.960 Yeah, raped their daughters
01:05:34.180 on the floor of the Hagia Sophia.
01:05:38.380 Or whatever the modern equivalent would be.
01:05:40.660 Yeah, you know, we...
01:05:42.660 Yeah, we came to your towns and tore up the cenotaphs and raped your daughters in the legion halls.
01:05:51.640 Islam was more powerful than the guns of the Somme.
01:05:57.220 You know, that's the kind of thing that Christians do when they say,
01:06:00.460 Oh, we defeated paganism. We were stronger than Jupiter.
01:06:06.280 It's like you showed up, like, several hundred years later when it become, like, this cosmopolitan multicultural empire that already conquered the world and was already tied in knots trying to maintain the peace of all its different factions.
01:06:22.020 And then you behaved like assholes and destroyed the entire thing.
01:06:28.100 And that's, like, the unifying, this is where, like, Gibbon is fundamentally right if you read the...
01:06:35.280 The decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
01:06:36.880 The decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
01:06:39.860 Is that, like, at the same time, not unlike today, at the same time that there are these invasions of barbarians happening back then from Germany, now from, like, the global south through Mexico and, like, you know, all these flights being brought in and all these migrants.
01:07:03.880 at the same time that the barbarians were marching into Rome
01:07:12.620 and, like, demanding privileges and stuff,
01:07:15.640 demanding land be granted to them out of Roman territory
01:07:19.280 and that they'd be given various privileges as citizens of Rome
01:07:25.260 for showing up and threatening Rome.
01:07:27.220 various Christian sects and like the Christian emperors were waging wars against traditional
01:07:38.880 Romans, like the traditional Roman ethnicities in the country, because the sects that had gone
01:07:45.460 in charge were like of various ethnic origins, whereas the pagans in the country were like
01:07:53.680 old Roman aristocrats and, like, classical, like, you know, white original Latin Romans
01:08:01.480 who they despise as their, like, ancient ethnic enemy. You know, the exact same way,
01:08:08.320 like, the Ellis Islanders, like, the Jews and the Italians today in the Democratic Party
01:08:16.000 still hate the old
01:08:18.560 wasp whites
01:08:19.540 even as like foreign
01:08:22.400 hordes descend on their country to destroy
01:08:24.180 they're still having fantasies about
01:08:25.960 wood paneled rooms
01:08:27.260 that's probably the ultimate keyword to search
01:08:30.480 for their fantasies about
01:08:32.440 the evil Anglo elites
01:08:33.680 wood paneled rooms
01:08:38.180 I don't even know this one
01:08:39.300 basically the studies are smoking rooms
01:08:42.040 in country clubs
01:08:44.420 with wood-paneled walls.
01:08:47.340 And so they have these delusions that it's evil men
01:08:50.120 with wood-paneled rooms that are conspiring against them.
01:08:53.220 Somewhere there's a blonde old man with another pale old man
01:08:59.360 smoking a cigar and making decisions that lock the Jew
01:09:03.880 and the Italian out of power and is wood-paneled.
01:09:09.380 And in spite of all the resentment,
01:09:11.980 none of the, neither the Jews nor the Italians will just build a nice house with a wood-paneled room
01:09:19.040 or keep a nice scotch on their, in their drinking cabinet, you know.
01:09:30.260 But somewhere out there, there's an old waspy former army officer who's making actual decisions
01:09:39.500 They're undermining
01:09:41.100 The Ellis Islander
01:09:43.660 Yeah
01:09:44.060 He's gonna
01:09:44.900 He's gonna protect our
01:09:46.740 Precious bodily fluids
01:09:48.240 There's a
01:09:51.180 Yes, exactly
01:09:52.100 There's a great story actually
01:09:53.560 About the fall of Rome
01:09:55.220 And Christianity
01:09:56.680 When
01:09:58.180 Alaric the Barbarian
01:10:00.560 Was
01:10:01.040 Not quite knocking on the gates of Rome
01:10:04.140 But he'd already invaded
01:10:05.720 Cis-Alpine Gaul
01:10:08.680 um he came to them demanding or this was before he'd even sent an envoy sorry
01:10:17.320 and uh the senate was discussing what they're going to do and they were very very close
01:10:24.540 to returning to the old gods and offering the sacrifices and raising an army and going out to
01:10:34.880 crush alerg but then he sent a diplomat and said he'd go away if they just paid him some ungodly
01:10:42.500 some of silver and so they melted down the statue of victory and gave him the money paid the dane
01:10:52.540 geld and he went off and three years later came back and tore down the walls of rome
01:10:58.180 yes no and they did similar things attila and several others like uh the but of the statue
01:11:11.200 of victory being melted down is the classic event that basically every white western man
01:11:19.000 has said that was the the thing that doomed rome is not just that they were willing
01:11:27.120 to pay them off, but that they were willing to melt down the goddess of victory that they
01:11:33.200 had maintained for like 800 years to do it, and that they weren't willing to fight over
01:11:39.460 their sacred trophies.
01:11:43.660 And at the exact time, there was a Christian priest saying, well, that's idolatry.
01:11:51.300 You know, we should be melting it down anyway.
01:11:54.720 you know you know justifying find their their profound weak weakness with uh some scriptural
01:12:06.660 support and allegedly i haven't read it i one of those books i'll will eventually get around to
01:12:13.960 allegedly augustine city of god is um like it's written to argue that no christianity didn't cause
01:12:22.400 the downfall of rome you know it's a classic christian apologia but uh in it he allegedly i
01:12:31.960 haven't read the full work but in it allegedly he he comes around to the point where it's like
01:12:37.400 well it doesn't really matter because the city of god is what matters you know the god sort uh
01:12:44.300 the city of god is what matters and and all of these this uh earthly stuff is temporal
01:12:55.220 and and no that's compares to spiritual salvation but argues no there christiate doesn't have to be
01:13:06.280 completely lame but also if it is it doesn't matter you know it's not happening and it's good
01:13:12.260 that's happening uh this exact argumentation style um but uh even back then or even earlier
01:13:26.580 than augustine there were i don't know if you've read uh julian the apostate uh
01:13:34.240 against the Galileans?
01:13:41.180 I linked it the other day.
01:13:42.400 Yeah, against the Galileans.
01:13:43.740 He refers to them as the Galileans
01:13:45.540 because not the first person.
01:13:50.100 Actually, he might have been the first person to write this.
01:13:52.120 We didn't cut him all off slack.
01:13:54.900 His entire thing was,
01:13:56.580 no, if we can force the Jews all back onto the plantation of Jerusalem,
01:14:02.480 we can get rid of this problem.
01:14:03.860 You know, he was the first anti-Semitic Zionist that, well, we can send them over there.
01:14:12.960 They won't be a problem over here.
01:14:15.120 Yeah.
01:14:15.960 You know, so.
01:14:17.020 And interestingly, he drew very little distinction between the Jews and the Christians.
01:14:25.460 Well, because they're basically the same ethnicity.
01:14:30.500 Like as much as.
01:14:32.680 Judaism, as we know it, probably didn't even exist at that point.
01:14:38.820 Yeah, so Judaism, like Talmudic Judaism, like slowly starts evolving, like the Babylonian Talmud and what that evolves in Babylon.
01:14:52.360 but uh it is like the jewish diaspora does exist and this these are the people who are spreading
01:14:58.860 like like christianity you know there are all these various jewish jewish sects but uh the
01:15:07.460 ethnicity like early christianity like in the roman empire was an overwhelmingly ethnically
01:15:13.700 jewish movement like there were a few greeks but it was um here's a lot like um wokeness is today
01:15:23.540 where it's like uh where it's like this american ideology that's followed by like
01:15:30.940 gays black women uh foreigners asian women you know all these ethnicities that have been brought
01:15:39.220 into America but hate America because they aren't the core white ethnicity so they're
01:15:44.860 they're forging this identity around their victimhood and trying to redefine the entire
01:15:53.720 culture around around them and they actually despise the the core ethnicity but they're
01:16:00.920 trying to persuade the core ethnicity of their own wickedness so as to gain power over them
01:16:09.220 and that's that's what christianity was at the start it was this uh this uh network of like
01:16:18.080 exiled jews um uh grecian slaves all these all these dinky little ethnicities that uh
01:16:27.760 were allying against rome this is where like the goths wind up being christian very early
01:16:33.140 because they're using a variant of Christianity,
01:16:39.160 the Aryan heresy, to justify themselves in their conquests,
01:16:49.400 not unlike how you'll occasionally hear Islamists use Chomskyite Ardengumens
01:16:56.620 or like if you read Bin Laden's articles in, I think it was Inspire magazine at that point,
01:17:05.900 Al-Qaeda had a magazine and there are articles from Bin Laden where he talks about how,
01:17:10.580 oh, Americans are destroying the environment.
01:17:13.960 They're spreading global warming, you know, recycling all these leftist talking points
01:17:19.260 that have been prepared for him, you know.
01:17:22.400 Bin Laden, I wrote an article on this, Bin Laden was a shit limb, deep diving this.
01:17:28.640 But you see this collecting of grievances and this anti-white, anti-core ethnicity moral framework unifying in these various enemies of the core ethnicity,
01:17:49.760 both in ancient Rome and in the latter days of the American Empire.
01:17:59.820 So, would you say that wokeness is derived from Christianity
01:18:06.420 or is it a convergent evolution?
01:18:10.980 Have they both appeared for the same reason, do you think?
01:18:15.160 well i mean leftism itself like all leftism is like a christian heresy like it's copying
01:18:22.280 the framework of christianity like uh leftism itself is like comes out of protestantism in
01:18:30.480 the french revolution uh you know all these people reading uh the bible and christian literature for
01:18:38.420 the first time and applying it to politics in their own lives and then all that um leftist
01:18:45.400 politics is uh this application of like egalitarian ideas and this uh victim complex going forward uh
01:18:54.340 i think it was spangler said christianity was the mother of bolshevism uh which is like true that
01:19:02.700 that's the intellectual heritage of all that mind you like uh like the heritage is actually
01:19:11.340 like christianity uh utopian socialism and around 1848 um um marx and and the early marxist theorists
01:19:24.340 lat uh find a way to incorporate all this uh talmudic jewish stuff into christianity
01:19:32.680 as well as like into socialism as well as hegelian philosophy but like it's all this
01:19:39.080 abrahamic lineage uh and it's all specifically against the aristocratic ideals which is nowhere
01:19:47.860 in christianity or like abrahamic literature at all it's all a native european uh organizing
01:19:53.620 principle like the idea of an aristocracy and having a a king and royal family in courts
01:20:02.020 not um not like trial courts like courtly life like you know princesses having balls and
01:20:10.780 and stuff and uh this this entire society organized according to its military structure
01:20:19.200 the idea that um you know you become a general and you get like two thousand two hundred and
01:20:26.340 50,000 pounds sterling or something like that a year as your salary that you're made of rich by
01:20:36.560 your supreme place in the military structure and that, but that out of that you're supposed to pay
01:20:44.880 all the expenses and you're just honor bound to like use it appropriately and have good fighting
01:20:50.960 standards ready. And if you don't, you know, Admiral Bing lost a battle and they, they shot
01:20:57.560 him. But, uh, but like this entirely European idea of like, um, of like the aristocratic man
01:21:06.280 is the unit of life. Uh, all of leftism is set, is designed to tear that down until I create a
01:21:14.740 world without aristocrats. And all that exactly parallels the Christian tradition, which was
01:21:24.480 set up to do the exact same thing, but to Rome.
01:21:28.220 Interestingly, the Jews did have a king once. They called him the wise, Solomon the wise.
01:21:35.940 He converted to paganism.
01:21:37.340 i wonder is that a lesson against aristocracy and kingship
01:21:48.020 yeah this is so like uh this is one of the like insane things about judaism and like
01:21:59.980 its parallels to modern leftism is that like um obviously the roman empire is set up around
01:22:06.460 it's like great warrior men and like julius caesar is pontifex maximus like they made him pontifex
01:22:12.540 maximus as well as dictator that he was both the head priest of rome and the head military authority
01:22:19.020 and and like the religious authority of rome um pontifex maximus now is the pope the exact title
01:22:27.560 transfers down like unbroken uh from caesar but yeah yeah uh but uh the like in rome in a european
01:22:41.280 society the warrior class is the top religious authority like none of them recognize a religious
01:22:47.920 authority beyond them or like uh they only recognize oracles you know it's only like
01:22:53.160 high out of their mind teenage girls uh sputtering nonsense that gets turned into riddles and then
01:23:01.500 they puzzle over that for themselves and like that's their religious experience and you know
01:23:07.200 they have like rituals and stuff that they repeat throughout the year but like uh you know there's
01:23:12.720 no priest that they answer to you know there's no religious authority that can command them
01:23:20.740 whereas judaism like uh their entire society is run by the pharisees you know their priest
01:23:30.320 class is the ultimate authority in their society and this continues like in the rabbinical class
01:23:35.880 and continues in judaism to today like uh if you want to know what the jews are up to look at what
01:23:41.800 the rabbis are saying like you can see rabbis like running everything from um you know rabbi
01:23:48.620 shmooly going on about geopolitics to, or the various rabbis talking about this, then
01:23:56.080 the other two, like, you know, a rabbi ran Pornhub, you know, their religious authorities
01:24:03.560 run everything. And all of leftism is basically, and much of European history is an attempt
01:24:11.780 by various Abrahamic traditions to impose a priestly class on Western man. You know,
01:24:20.960 and this is the point of the university system, both in the medieval period, but also in the
01:24:28.220 modern period. You know, you create this priestly class of experts who are not responsible for
01:24:36.720 anything, who don't have to fight for anything, but who get all this deference and authority
01:24:42.160 placed on them and all these resources and get to drain it and also get to, like, create
01:24:46.920 all these impositions on your life.
01:24:49.500 But they aren't actually responsible for anything.
01:24:51.520 They don't actually have ownership, you know.
01:24:53.980 They aren't a knight who could lose his land in a fight.
01:24:57.780 You know, they aren't a Roman general who could see all his soldiers massacred to the
01:25:03.980 last and you know have molten gold forced down his throat you know that's that doesn't happen
01:25:11.660 to tenure tack professors yeah i'm i'm interested in the the words they use to legitimize this
01:25:19.060 peer review they they throw it around like it's a spell or a mantra but i'm wondering is that them
01:25:27.860 building off like peer
01:25:30.080 and like the English legal
01:25:31.980 system was the
01:25:33.860 aristocracy.
01:25:36.180 It's them trying to suck
01:25:37.700 legitimacy into their
01:25:39.700 new priesthood class using that
01:25:41.780 word. Yeah
01:25:43.660 and the peer review system was like
01:25:45.700 implemented in 1953
01:25:48.040 and
01:25:50.300 actually destroyed
01:25:51.760 the sciences
01:25:52.360 largely because
01:25:54.760 before that you had like all these
01:25:57.660 gentlemen scientists who were like had this self-enforcing order uh not like uh how bloggers
01:26:06.400 today are structured or how uh public intellectuals interact where it's like uh no this person is right
01:26:14.220 because we can all independently read his stuff and verify it whereas the peer review system a you
01:26:21.120 can't independently read it because it's all paywalled behind uh jstor and all this stuff
01:26:27.040 and uh they all have this currency of like reference to each other and the peer review system
01:26:37.360 like is not out in the open like the peer review happens behind closed doors and is
01:26:46.180 you're exactly right, largely a spell
01:26:50.000 to create the appearance of
01:26:53.740 legitimacy that has been like unverified
01:26:58.060 and unsummarried and like
01:27:00.500 is allowed to penetrate public perception
01:27:06.240 whereas like you look at science
01:27:10.260 bloggers or commentators and they'll like
01:27:14.320 fight to get into these articles and whatnot and they review them and then and they try to come up
01:27:20.540 with their own summaries and whatnot and like it's still a point where like prominent scientists
01:27:26.840 would rather read the science bloggers that they trust than like the actual papers in a lot of
01:27:34.560 cases but uh but yeah these these pair of wall systems of like uh trying to formally
01:27:49.160 institutionalize the author the authority in a pre-class that is isolated from accountability
01:27:56.140 versus, like, these aristocratic relationships of reputation
01:28:02.340 and public esteem that is far harder to fake.
01:28:10.600 Well, Nietzsche and Bap and the like have already clubbed this topic to death,
01:28:16.600 but it really does come back to the very earliest Greek story,
01:28:21.560 the story of Perseus and his tearing down the Gorgon
01:28:26.140 that rules by taboo
01:28:28.180 with everyone in the village
01:28:29.540 asleep and all the gates
01:28:31.800 unlocked and unbarred.
01:28:36.800 Yeah, so what...
01:28:39.160 Nietzsche...
01:28:40.200 I've never read Nietzsche's work
01:28:42.100 on Perseus. What's that in?
01:28:44.100 Well, I don't know if Nietzsche specifically
01:28:45.820 references on Perseus. It would be in
01:28:48.000 his first book,
01:28:49.660 the...
01:28:50.660 What's the one?
01:28:53.220 Tragedy, Birth of Tragedy, is that what it's called?
01:28:55.020 if it's in any of them I assume
01:28:56.760 but he talks about it in
01:28:58.980 Genealogy of Morals, he talks about it through the lens
01:29:01.380 of
01:29:01.660 linguistics mainly
01:29:04.020 and he actually has a whole section of that book
01:29:07.380 a whole third of that book is dedicated to
01:29:09.200 the cucked
01:29:11.220 nature of the priestly class and their
01:29:13.340 completely anathema
01:29:15.100 worldview
01:29:17.180 to the European
01:29:19.440 worldview
01:29:19.860 but
01:29:21.680 essentially it's his model of
01:29:24.540 what Europe was like
01:29:27.060 before the coming of the Aryans
01:29:28.860 and
01:29:31.220 how the language
01:29:32.780 changed to accommodate that.
01:29:36.100 So that's Berks of Tragedy
01:29:37.380 and the other work...
01:29:39.100 Genealogy of Morals.
01:29:40.620 I recommend you start with the Genealogy of Morals.
01:29:43.180 It's very
01:29:44.360 readable.
01:29:46.640 I need to revisit
01:29:48.580 Genealogy of Morals. I read that
01:29:50.380 15 years ago.
01:29:51.860 Yeah, I've got it too
01:29:54.440 but I actually always wonder
01:29:56.340 like maybe
01:29:58.560 it's just I need to re-read it
01:29:59.920 but
01:30:00.680 when people quote
01:30:04.480 from Genealogy of Morals
01:30:05.620 I never
01:30:07.180 remember having read the reference
01:30:10.100 so I'm wondering is my translation
01:30:12.060 really bad
01:30:13.840 That is always the question
01:30:18.860 with, especially Nietzsche
01:30:20.700 A lot of the translations are, like, specifically trying to undermine his point.
01:30:27.860 Nietzsche didn't have syphilis.
01:30:29.880 This is something made up by Walter Kaufman, one of the translators in the 1950s.
01:30:34.480 Yeah, he did have some genetic disease, though, which...
01:30:39.100 He had a brain tumor, which was, like, slow acting, like his first headache associated with the disease was, like, when he was nine years old.
01:30:48.260 But he did have to train like a maniac, basically. Well, not like a maniac, but he had to go on very long walks in the mountains every day just to keep his health in order, basically, because he was quite rapidly degrading otherwise.
01:31:06.660 Yes, but he was like a very, like profoundly impressive in like 67, 1867.
01:31:20.680 uh like he was a cavalryman in a prussian unit and they all expected him to uh become
01:31:32.480 a captain in the unit like a cavalry officer uh before he had like an injury relayed to that
01:31:40.300 and then he did come back for the franco-prussian war like he wasn't
01:31:43.240 he wasn't some like sit at home chud
01:31:47.260 well then in general a healthy mind resides in a healthy body so
01:31:54.680 you would expect somebody that smart to to be physically impressive
01:31:58.840 but uh so so now we've we've kind of been going over it but i'd like to
01:32:07.100 we can get into the stone choir stuff the previous episode that you want to
01:32:13.180 talk about uh i i didn't want this episode to just be be oh dunk on the stone choir guys um
01:32:24.880 when once they've left the podcast but there was stuff that i didn't get to say that i i
01:32:31.720 And I would like to talk about it.
01:32:37.740 A huge part of where you specifically, Ash Loss, were disappointed with my performance.
01:32:46.000 It's just that, like, I really felt that I, there was all on that episode that I really didn't have to, really didn't have to address.
01:33:00.680 like um like basically so going into the episode the point of the episode part of the reason why
01:33:08.220 it's kind of a bait and switch uh uh you know christianity versus paganism cat girl clock
01:33:17.420 versus stone choir and then it's not it's just me interviewing them well why does this work why
01:33:23.220 did it take you off why are you so compelling these young guys is like i really want to understand
01:33:28.220 like is there something here is this something interesting to work with you know I I don't
01:33:35.840 actually want to like I'd like there to be like a base Christianity that's possible that all these
01:33:45.300 American Christians and like various right-wing Christians can just like do that and not have to
01:33:54.960 do the lift of like leaving christianity or whatnot and just like you know be useful and
01:34:01.480 fight this yeah life or death culture war and you know save western civilization and
01:34:10.440 and so i was very interested to interview stone choir because i'm like
01:34:14.720 like are you guys the stopgap are you guys the thing that will let you know western christianity
01:34:22.320 be non-cocked and be useful for in the fight for like the survival of western civilization
01:34:29.520 you know will you is this a good a good enough position that we can like stop the nosedive
01:34:38.260 and in that respect i suppose it was a disappointing episode because
01:34:44.340 i don't think so no you know like it's obviously no yeah uh i think it you know there are elements
01:34:56.320 of christianity that you could save like i was i was talking about whether christianity has its
01:35:03.800 place in the world like uh bowden famously said that islam had its place in the world from
01:35:09.340 Morocco to Indonesia
01:35:10.960 and
01:35:12.540 sorry just a second
01:35:15.060 and I think Christianity
01:35:21.760 does have its place in the world
01:35:23.340 there's Sicily and there's
01:35:25.600 South America and
01:35:27.180 Christianity specifically
01:35:29.160 Catholicism does
01:35:31.420 fit for these places
01:35:33.460 you know you could have
01:35:34.740 a Roman church
01:35:37.360 that's vaguely Christian
01:35:40.720 that has the heroic
01:35:42.680 and the higher ideals
01:35:44.600 that would actually
01:35:46.940 help improve those
01:35:47.940 societies
01:35:49.260 but that's not Protestantism
01:35:52.700 or the Protestantism
01:35:54.560 that he's pushing
01:35:55.420 yeah so this is
01:35:58.540 the interesting thing
01:35:59.880 Catholicism I'm always deeply skeptical of
01:36:02.980 just because of the Catholic
01:36:04.660 praise class
01:36:05.460 is maybe the worst priest class of, like, any of Christianity.
01:36:11.100 But, uh, and like, you know, say what you will about the Protestants.
01:36:15.700 You know, the Ultra Boy scandal happened in the Catholic Church for a reason.
01:36:22.540 Uh, but, uh, the, the thing that got me about, uh, the Stone Choir interview
01:36:31.020 was just the profound, like, inaction and, like, inability to adapt to this situation
01:36:44.660 or really to, like, wield scripture at all for, like, something useful.
01:36:52.740 It's actually quite impressive, you know.
01:36:55.840 you think like a 2,000-year-old text, you know, after 2,000 years, it'd be like kind of neutral,
01:37:04.260 like you could wield it any which way. You know, you think it'd be, you know, you know, it's hard
01:37:11.980 to wield a, it's hard to imagine that like something like Thucydides would have like a
01:37:18.940 partisan, you know, divide or like naturally favor one group of people over the other.
01:37:23.880 or like that the I Ching or whatever
01:37:29.740 would have like great political balance,
01:37:32.340 you know, these ancient texts.
01:37:33.360 And yet Christianity, the Christian Bible,
01:37:36.480 uniquely seems to only be useful
01:37:40.020 for doing, for like tearing down Western civilization.
01:37:45.560 So like, and we went into this,
01:37:50.240 uh, Hank Seth and, uh, Pastor Douglas Wilson, these, uh, these, uh, kind of trying to be
01:37:59.240 warrior Christians, these crusade, e-crusaders who will only crusade for Israel, you know,
01:38:07.120 who only crusade for Zionism and, and Christianity can inspire passionate intensity in them for
01:38:16.120 another people who are not white people or uh and stone choir is another example of this where
01:38:23.940 it's like okay they aren't stone choir isn't faking gay um you know rainbow church and it's
01:38:32.580 also not zionist zionist so it's like okay it's not actively doing damage the stone choir people
01:38:42.920 which, you know, is actually a fairly impressive thing in modern culture
01:38:48.440 that you could come to a set of values that's not actively doing damage.
01:38:52.340 But then you dig into Stone Choir's values, and we got into this on the podcast.
01:38:59.480 For example, they insist that the Earth is 6,000 years old,
01:39:06.520 which, like, is 100% what's in Scripture.
01:39:12.920 And is 100% what Christian values say, and if they're going to be, like, literalists or textualists at all, and not also have, like, you know, gay praise and stuff, they want to accept the whole of the text.
01:39:27.380 But also, like, that's obviously not true.
01:39:34.900 like uh like uh this is kind of going in over old reddit arguments and like uh new age atheism
01:39:44.780 arguments but uh it is important the 6 000 year claim because
01:39:51.020 a it's like fairly obviously not true like uh there are 500 year old tortoises like there's
01:39:59.420 there are species of sea turtles that live about 500 years and we have like individual ones that
01:40:05.540 were documented i think one died recently that like been originally seen by james cook and had
01:40:11.920 been continuously cared cared for in that time uh so it's like okay the universe is five siege
01:40:20.080 is uh 12 sea turtles old you know of 6 000 years 500 year old sea turtle it's 12 tardises 12
01:40:28.820 generations of tortoises. Or your grandmother might live to 100 years. So Christianity is 60
01:40:36.660 of your grandmother. Your 100-year-old grandmother has seen 2% of human history
01:40:42.220 in her time, which is obviously not true. Like you can go and see land formations like at the
01:40:51.100 Grand Canyon that were formed across millions of years. And if you stand and look at the Grand
01:40:58.060 canyon you know that's older than your grandmother times 60 like you just conceive that that
01:41:06.800 immediately by looking at at it that uh this is something that is like profoundly ain't ancient
01:41:14.800 that this is something that goes back and back and back in time and you can see the little river
01:41:20.000 that carved it and your mind can do the mental math and you can also just feel it in your bones
01:41:24.700 that is older older than that uh in Ontario Canada you can go to the um the canyon that's
01:41:32.240 been carved by Niagara Falls and if you actually look at on a map you can see okay Niagara Falls
01:41:38.320 carves about a foot of rock away a year or did until they like put some like water retention
01:41:46.340 stuff in a few decades ago but it carved about a foot of rock away a year and you can actually see
01:41:52.560 the photos that's like yes the rock moved that that much and you can see the canyon and you can
01:41:58.200 mentally model model and like just do the math of like where the canyon starts and where the
01:42:04.500 niagara falls falls are and can see oh yeah it's carved that about 10 000 years and it's like well
01:42:12.820 why does the canyon stop there what happened 10 000 years ago go and that exactly lines up with
01:42:18.440 where the Niagara Escarpment starts, which was carved by the, the great ice sheets that covered
01:42:25.540 North America during the last ice age. And like, this is all like visually apparent. You can go
01:42:30.720 like on a bicycle trip and see all, all these like formations and, and this geological history
01:42:38.600 within the small area and like, you know, be an hour to, to bike trip. And as soon as someone
01:42:47.480 tells you the story it's very obvious to see that and it's very obvious like uh like the rock in
01:42:55.380 certain places has shells in it that and the difference between the rock exactly lines up with
01:43:01.140 with the story of like where the water was at certain certain times you can see uh the little
01:43:07.620 formation of lake iroquois uh around like like ontario like this geological stuff is really
01:43:15.140 really apparent when you when you look at it and the timelines like you can like uh in some places
01:43:22.460 it's so visible you can mental math it that's like no that was not six thousand years but uh
01:43:29.200 it's more important than that because uh if the earth is six thousand years old and we're all
01:43:35.280 descended from Adam what's the problem with race mixing you know if everyone's descended from Adam
01:43:43.900 And we went to the flood, and then everyone was descended from Noah like 1,000, 2,000 years later.
01:43:50.460 You know, we're all cousins only to like 4,000 years.
01:43:54.880 You know, which is not enough for racial differentiation.
01:44:06.700 like uh your like uh the differentiation between uh north american indians and
01:44:18.740 siberians and like uh steppe peoples is 10 000 years you know goes back to the bering sea
01:44:28.280 lambridge and that's a 10 000 year different differentiation and those are profoundly that's
01:44:35.440 like a racial differentiation but actually it isn't that huge a racial differentiation like
01:44:42.020 if you compare you know mongolians to like um to like apache or cheyenne it's like okay these
01:44:50.760 people are very different but you can actually kind of see the parallel between the two
01:44:55.540 yeah if you squint really hard you can see it uh the the hungarians are allegedly decided from
01:45:04.500 the hun this is a can of worms but like if you look at them you squint you can see it they
01:45:11.040 they're way more like asian looking than the rest of europe yeah and and like uh they're
01:45:17.720 Actually, apparently relatively closely related to the North American Indians, that the tribe of the Huns that had come out of the east was exactly like kind of from that area that the American Indians had departed to go across on the Lameridge.
01:45:39.280 And like 10,000 years, so like not quite 6,000 years, but that's about the differentiation you get.
01:45:45.160 You know, it's the difference between a Hungarian, a Mongolian, and an Apache.
01:45:52.560 You know, if the earth was 6,000 years old, you know, all the Christian claims about racial differentiation
01:46:01.140 and the various races of humanity all basically kind of being the same thing,
01:46:07.280 and we should, like, work to get past our differences, and we're all created in the image of God.
01:46:12.940 Like, you know, Hungarians, Mongolians, and Apache, you know, some of those are, like, are, like, much more devolved than others and have gone through, like, much better selection pressures and whatnot.
01:46:28.380 But, like, if you squint, you can kind of say, yeah, that would kind of make sense in that world, you know.
01:46:36.200 There'd be a lot of difference, but it would kind of make sense.
01:46:40.100 That's not the case for the human races, you know.
01:46:42.940 You know, we're talking tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands of years of differentiation between the human races.
01:46:54.560 And this is, like, profoundly important that, like, Sub-Saharan Africans are, like, probably, like, several hundred thousand years differentiated from North Americans, if not more so.
01:47:08.120 You know, the...
01:47:12.340 Well, they almost can't interbreed with the more distant.
01:47:16.360 I think the two most distant subspecies or species of humans are Aborigines and Sub-Saharan African pygmies.
01:47:27.880 And they almost can't genetically interbreed the way dogs and wolves can interbreed.
01:47:35.100 But there's a very low probability.
01:47:42.340 The probability of success, basically, between the two populations interbreeding.
01:47:46.480 Yeah, and people say, oh, it's so strange.
01:47:49.680 We never encountered another living species of hominid.
01:47:54.760 It's like, no, we did.
01:47:56.740 It's just you refused to call them hominids for like religious and moral,
01:48:00.840 different species of hominid for religious and moral reasons.
01:48:04.100 Like humanity, any other species with like this much differentiation,
01:48:10.860 we'd call different species.
01:48:12.340 You know, the human race, if we were a different animal species from it, you know, if like, I don't know, dogs had conquered the earth, they classify humans as like five to ten different species, if not more so.
01:48:31.980 And then there'd be like little places like Africa where it's like, oh, there's actually 20 different species in this small little area because there's so much racial difference.
01:48:42.340 differentiation. There
01:48:44.400 was until recently
01:48:46.600 and we gave them, you know,
01:48:48.340 AK-47s.
01:48:50.280 For our listeners, the best video on this topic
01:48:52.640 is by C. Kyle
01:48:54.780 and it's called We're All Technically
01:48:56.660 Canadians.
01:49:00.460 And that's C as in the
01:49:02.660 letter C and then Kyle
01:49:04.480 as in Kyle's mum's mum
01:49:06.560 is a bitch.
01:49:07.900 Not
01:49:08.460 the German phrase.
01:49:12.340 Sieg Heil, although that's an amazing thing.
01:49:16.000 You should support him, and maybe one day he'll be able to afford a real train.
01:49:22.220 Yes, exactly.
01:49:25.140 Link me that.
01:49:26.120 I will include that in the show notes.
01:49:28.940 But this is profoundly important, that the world is not 6,000 years old.
01:49:35.460 and the reason i'm focusing on this is is i want you to understand how much of the abrahamic
01:49:45.500 religion is like this where it's like where it's like shouldn't be a problem shouldn't be a problem
01:49:52.140 you wouldn't think would be a problem and then you focus in on something that's like core to
01:49:57.340 the faith and they can never get rid of and then you realize that thing that's core to the faith
01:50:01.840 was purposely put there core to the faith so that you'd have to always believe a lie and this is the
01:50:09.480 universal thing about all abrahamic religions is that when you dig down on it and go well what's
01:50:14.520 the core thing that you can't really get rid of that's uh essential to the faith and that essential
01:50:22.800 thing that you can't get rid of because it's core to the faith like you can't get rid of the 6 000
01:50:27.200 years because God created man. It's a creation. It's not an evolution. God created man. And Adam
01:50:35.040 was there in the Garden of Eden without death and without sin. This is an entire episode of
01:50:41.200 Stone Choir, 6,000 years and counting. They go into exquisite detail about why exactly
01:50:47.920 you cannot be a Christian and not believe in the 6,000-year creation because Adam has to sin from
01:50:56.100 god for in the garden for man to fall and for death to enter the world and for original sin to
01:51:03.520 come about about and that that this is core to the entire cosmology and it's like well why is that
01:51:12.400 core to the entire cosmology this seems really weird and then you realize that like no the like
01:51:18.240 all these moral conceptions that like you're born with original sin well why are you born with
01:51:24.100 original sin? Well, because there's generational sin from Adam. Why is there generational sin from
01:51:29.760 Adam? Because he's created and he was the first man and all other men are descended from him.
01:51:35.500 There's no one else. There's no one out there who doesn't have original sin. So you have to all be
01:51:40.980 descended from Adam. It's like, okay, but why does that have to be 6,000 years ago and not like some
01:51:47.780 nebulous before time? It's like, well, he was created. He has to be created in a time, but also
01:51:53.300 there's there's this uh continuity right of the the entire abrahamic early abrahamic religion
01:52:01.740 from adam from adam to noah genoa and then noah to abraham and downwards and they actually have
01:52:12.240 the chart of it and it's like yeah and it's like um you know they all have these like obscenely
01:52:19.400 long lifespans right you know there are these characters who's like like adam is supposed to
01:52:25.240 live to like something like a several hundred years or a thousand and these characters are
01:52:31.300 living hundreds of years and then one's just living to 120 years and the lives are getting
01:52:36.100 shorter and shorter which is actually the exact opposite you know people are living vastly longer
01:52:41.780 as time goes on but that wasn't always true to be sure there were there were periods when
01:52:48.000 hunter-gatherers became... There were periods, but...
01:52:50.980 Agricultural. Like ancient Rome, for example, the average
01:52:54.820 lifespan was about like 18, and the average age
01:53:01.020 in ancient Rome was 18. So like the Eurisocratic Romans lived much
01:53:05.040 longer, and there were a lot of characters who lived longer than 18 in Rome.
01:53:09.080 But the average age was a lot like Gaza today, where the average age
01:53:13.160 is 8, 18. And that's actually important to understand, because
01:53:16.920 these guys who get up to like age 40 or 50 are like twice as old as the median person like
01:53:24.020 like a triarii who makes to like 40 is is not just like senior he's also like significantly
01:53:32.420 older than all the junior guys in legion and when he's like retired as full citizen status
01:53:39.700 like that really matters because he's older than everyone else he's richer than everyone else
01:53:46.920 You know, this guy has achieved, is it of an age and a level of achievement that no one else is, that the majority of other people are not getting to.
01:53:57.300 Like the slaves are not, very few amongst them, well, aside from the very intelligent or very skilled, are making it to 40.
01:54:07.640 There was sort of a hard stop back then as well, just from dentistry wasn't very advanced and you'd literally die because you starved to death because you couldn't chew your food.
01:54:19.960 there's that but there's also like a lot of the stuff that like we associate with like um and this
01:54:29.660 is where like civilized roman life was like highly valued because of these these established roman
01:54:35.520 citizens were like going to the baths every day and like having all these like hygienic practices
01:54:41.920 and stuff that like are radically increasing their lifespan over everyone else and making
01:54:47.180 And I'm like, look vastly better.
01:54:50.080 But going back to the Abrahamic stuff,
01:54:52.480 like the reason you can't get rid of the 6,000 years and all of this
01:54:59.160 is because this continuity profoundly matters
01:55:02.780 for why you should believe the book at all.
01:55:06.880 Like, why should you believe the Bible?
01:55:09.120 You know, it's just a book.
01:55:11.220 You know, why should you believe that the book of Genesis
01:55:15.500 is the turret
01:55:18.360 because you can't be punished
01:55:20.480 if it's not real
01:55:22.220 like you read the book
01:55:25.340 to escape punishment
01:55:26.320 but within the religion
01:55:29.680 you know
01:55:30.500 what's the rational reason
01:55:32.500 it's because there's supposed to be this continuity
01:55:35.180 of knowledge that's been maintained by the Jewish
01:55:37.220 people that you know
01:55:38.860 so the Bible is written around like
01:55:41.220 the date is
01:55:43.100 debated when Genesis read
01:55:44.640 I subscribe to the latter interpretation that it was like—
01:55:48.240 The Ptolemy?
01:55:48.780 Actually, the book of Genesis is like something of a—
01:55:52.820 Genesis and all of that is something of a retcon that was like consciously created by Jews under occupation under Alexander.
01:56:01.420 And that's why a lot of like Platonic philosophy is like written into Genesis,
01:56:09.100 that there's this like real Platonic structure to the Old Testament.
01:56:14.640 testament and a lot of these are arguments that's actually like written down and codified from like
01:56:21.420 several different traditions like fairly late under the map under the genesis 11 is directed
01:56:29.720 referencing buildings in babylon so even if you took a longer view you couldn't take much longer
01:56:36.320 than that yeah exactly exactly and uh but some people say oh it's 600 or so but why should you
01:56:46.340 believe it you know you know people are believing genesis but they aren't believing
01:56:51.460 he sees the agony well why is that well there's supposed to be this like continuous religious
01:56:56.640 tradition pass passed down that uh that even if genesis the final version wasn't written at the
01:57:05.860 time there were other written versions that are like amalgamated and and ultimately the knowledge
01:57:13.060 of what was happening in the garden with adam is like passed down by a word of mouth from like
01:57:22.020 father to son on this chain of uh custody of the tradition and that's why who begat who matters
01:57:29.220 right you know who'd be at who matters because if if they don't have that straight how can they
01:57:37.140 have the rest straight you know adam begat so-and-so who'd be at so-and-so and this
01:57:42.260 this chain of custody is maintained right down to uh the uh the jewish kings and like temple judaism
01:57:52.580 the first temple and temple judaism and all all this and so there's this consistent chain of
01:57:58.820 narrative custody for to the creation of the world that they maintain right so a if if that's
01:58:08.320 not true right already you really don't have a reason to believe in the bible you know if that's
01:58:15.440 not not true then all the rest of it like this chain of custody from god is just like you know
01:58:20.660 a schizo-religious tradition you know it's king arthur it's comic books is what it is for those
01:58:26.600 of you yeah yeah like uh so king arthur uh we have no idea who the historical king earth
01:58:34.880 there was uh the arthurian myth mythology has been built upon and built built upon and when
01:58:41.300 you actually go back and try to find historical figures that that have the attributes of king
01:58:46.300 arthur like were they talking about arcturus the roman legion there were they talking about this
01:58:51.840 General Arctur. Are they talking about Arthur, this Welsh warrior? You know, these guys with
01:59:00.240 vaguely similar names across like 300 years. What you quickly run into is that Arthur is
01:59:07.980 clearly an amalgam of five or six different traditions, and none of these actually quite
01:59:14.860 add up. And the Arthur of Mallory is such an amalgam of different traditions that
01:59:20.800 it doesn't really exist in the past and you know you can narrow it down to I really believe Arthur
01:59:27.380 is a Welshman who was a general but not a king who was a great like swordsman and whatnot and
01:59:33.420 it's like yeah there was a guy like that but then some guy would say I really believe King Arthur
01:59:39.180 was like like a Roman and stuff and it's like yeah there's a guy like that 200 years before that
01:59:45.820 who like shared none of the who didn't even share a language with the second guy with the first guy
01:59:50.520 Or I really believe Arthur was a Saxon who did X, Y, and said, yeah, there's a guy like that.
01:59:57.700 And, like, the importance of Arthur is really that all these traditions came together and they formed this, like, mythical guy who could be all their guy because all their actual guys fought each other.
02:00:11.480 But, like, basically, unless you believe the 6,000-year thing, then basically everything in the Bible is King Arthur.
02:00:20.520 And everything in the Bible is just like, oh, this is a cultural thing, this is whatnot, which is like, for any other ethnic tradition.
02:00:28.480 I don't see why that's so unappealing, though.
02:00:31.200 Like, I believe in King Arthur.
02:00:32.360 Well, this is the thing.
02:00:33.160 For any other ethnic tradition, this would not be a problem.
02:00:37.020 Like, King Arthur rocks.
02:00:38.560 Everyone loves King Arthur.
02:00:40.320 King Arthur is like badass and a good example for young people.
02:00:44.000 And it's an amalgamated European wisdom and way of living of all these different ancestors and all these different tribes have come together to create the ideal English man.
02:00:57.300 My favorite example of this is that the Horus heresy in modern Warhammer, which is the most popular story, is the story of King Arthur and Mordred.
02:01:07.880 And they very clearly did not set out to create the story of King Arthur and Mordred.
02:01:12.820 it's just the people that wrote it were English
02:01:15.920 so King Arthur is in their blood
02:01:17.880 and it came out whether they wanted it or not
02:01:20.200 yes and this is
02:01:23.760 this is like this is a very
02:01:26.200 you know European
02:01:28.220 Indo-European pagan way of doing it
02:01:31.040 it's like oh yes it doesn't really matter
02:01:33.900 that like you know there were five guys
02:01:36.700 who were the head stories that were like Odysseus
02:01:39.920 that all got amalgamated and like one guy
02:01:42.140 banged Cersei and another guy blinded
02:01:44.260 the Cyclops and another guy was
02:01:46.260 stranded on an island for like eight years
02:01:48.380 with a sea nymph and another
02:01:50.320 guy massacred all like
02:01:52.140 120 men when he finally got home 20
02:01:54.260 years later like you can imagine
02:01:56.500 you know Odysseus might
02:01:58.360 have come about through a similar process
02:02:00.380 of like you know combining the
02:02:02.320 stories of a few different guys
02:02:03.840 guys that come about or you know
02:02:06.360 there are a lot of figures who do have that
02:02:08.340 many adventures in a lifetime. Well I have a book that
02:02:10.300 Claims Odysseus came from the Baltic.
02:02:16.180 Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in Odysseus.
02:02:20.380 Allegedly, one of the Germanic tribes, like the Scythians,
02:02:26.840 one of the tribes of the Scythians that became like the Teutones,
02:02:30.700 were supposed to have been like,
02:02:33.200 like Odysseus was their chieftain when he was lost,
02:02:36.080 that this was their tradition.
02:02:37.100 And because, of course, every single tradition in the European world has to some way relate to Troy.
02:02:43.800 So it's like, well, how did your people relate to Troy?
02:02:46.540 And you weren't written into the, oh, Odysseus banged an Amazon.
02:02:51.000 And that's how our tribe came about.
02:02:53.840 You know, we're tribesmen, but we're really Grecian heroes.
02:02:57.260 And like Athena favors us.
02:02:59.560 And they're actually referring to Freya and stuff.
02:03:01.900 But like you see like lots of stuff like this in the European tradition.
02:03:04.900 tradition and it's like usually quite beautiful because it's this amalgam of like um
02:03:10.300 you know what what these stories end up becoming is they end up becoming these amalgams of all the
02:03:17.620 best wisest things that you've had you know the stories that like some brave knight wanted to
02:03:23.900 include the story of their friend in the arthur mythos so they write him in as a minor character
02:03:30.460 and he's preserved forever in this, like, immoral, timeless thing.
02:03:35.300 But it's also, like, summoning, like, a people who doesn't quite exist yet
02:03:40.560 from the future into being.
02:03:43.560 You know, that England did eventually have, like,
02:03:49.580 someone equivalent to King Arthur, who also, like, King Arthur wasn't a king,
02:03:53.240 was a general, according to the one tradition.
02:03:55.360 They summoned Arthur, Duke of Wellesley, from the future.
02:04:00.460 future into reality, who had this profound aristocratic sense of being and also had this
02:04:09.080 reluctant ruler thing. He was prime minister of Britain. He wasn't the king. And he has these
02:04:15.500 weird overlappings. But it's like this aristocratic man who managed to defeat Napoleon is in many
02:04:23.760 ways like created by the arthur mythos that this conception of english or aristocracy you know this
02:04:31.300 man from ireland from the isle across the sea uh uh they've who was an irish who was an englishman
02:04:41.560 who was over there for some reason like in many ways the mythology creates these these individuals
02:04:49.480 in the future and for an indo-european that's very appealing you know oh there's there's wisdom
02:04:57.960 in this and and you know maybe this ancient story isn't quite something that's happened
02:05:03.660 maybe it's something that's going to happen yes it's evil's theory that myth is actually truer
02:05:09.560 than history yes and uh you know that the the gods are at once the memory of your ancestors
02:05:18.800 and the premonitions of your children to be.
02:05:23.400 This uniquely does not work with the Judaic tradition.
02:05:27.900 This uniquely does not work with the Abrahamic religion
02:05:30.500 because the entire point is that, no, you have a specific guilt
02:05:35.580 and you have to suppress your instincts
02:05:40.440 is the entire essence of the Abrahamic tradition.
02:05:44.920 You have to suppress your natural instincts and live in obedience to the word.
02:05:54.000 You know, not your pre-linguistic loyalties and intuition and conscience and being true to yourself,
02:06:03.960 but the specific word, even if it doesn't make sense,
02:06:06.720 even if it's, you know, incoherent, you know, or oddly specific in a way that's, like, plainly
02:06:17.180 gameable. You know, you have to be loyal to the word, even if it doesn't make sense. So,
02:06:22.560 so, like, you see this in, like, Orthodox Judaism, where, you know, they're always trying to
02:06:30.560 trick god and like not create fire so they they turn a light a lampshade so they're not turning
02:06:39.180 a light on and off and that's not creating fire it's like why are you tricking god it's like no
02:06:46.160 we're observing the rule because we the rule around making fire itself that specific wording
02:06:52.900 doesn't make sense of them are more in context but there's always fire around us but there's
02:06:57.480 always this. So how do we avoid doing it or not? And the entire point of Judaism is that it's not
02:07:06.180 intuitive. It's not, you know, your internal conscience. It's not, you know, your deep
02:07:17.280 inner sense of self it's not a vibe it's not um it's not it's not a spirit it's the word it's
02:07:29.860 the explicit fucking word it's the word on the page is is duty i think this is where you lost
02:07:37.340 him actually in going back to the stone choir podcast like he asked you to define paganism
02:07:45.080 and you went through a long genealogy of European myth
02:07:51.980 just like this
02:07:53.760 and his response was basically
02:07:57.580 yeah but that's the race not the religion
02:08:00.680 for him religion was the word
02:08:02.580 it was something entirely separate
02:08:04.840 to the blood and the history and the feeling of your people
02:08:10.180 it was something on top of and separate from
02:08:14.840 yes uh and i i couldn't i can actually appreciate what he was asking like i give him this long
02:08:24.500 genealogy well this is what i believe and there's this tradition brought in this tradition brought
02:08:29.480 in and i tell him this elaborate gene genealogy of where all these beliefs and stuff come from
02:08:36.920 and
02:08:38.520 and
02:08:41.120 he's asking for like a definition
02:08:43.520 like a Merriam-Webster
02:08:45.280 thing, you know.
02:08:46.440 Where's your gay little book?
02:08:48.040 That's how I described it.
02:08:51.260 Yeah, but like
02:08:52.480 the very idea of a definition
02:08:54.400 of like a word, right?
02:08:57.020 Define is such and such.
02:08:59.540 Like
02:08:59.640 the definition
02:09:02.000 largely is invented by Samuel
02:09:04.540 Johnson in
02:09:06.380 like the late 1700s this is the same figure from our book club last week yes exact exactly which
02:09:17.760 like is a very nice etymological tool having a definition but like ultimately like the definition
02:09:26.220 of word of words are profoundly fluid and have like vastly more continuity than uh are contained
02:09:34.420 in in the definition also the word itself is like yeah when he asked the question my first
02:09:40.880 reaction was to give a one-word answer with just religion is the answer
02:09:44.920 yeah uh the the uh like the idea that um and this is another thing to that's very abrahamic the idea
02:10:00.800 in the beginning was the word you know the idea that language is the originating
02:10:10.840 unit of reality which which it plainly isn't like uh i'm not i'm not quite sure uh how
02:10:21.280 how to explain this deeply but language is plainly not the original unit of reality
02:10:27.720 like if you go out and you try to describe you know the grass or the blades of grass like the
02:10:33.300 more you look at it the more the language breaks down like uh like oh uh a blade of grass is such
02:10:41.160 and such and then like you see blades of grass are like you know growing together or blended
02:10:46.420 together like two blades become one because they grew out of dutch angle just like morph together
02:10:52.660 They're actually, you know, one, depending on the species, you know, one plant is actually producing four or five, five blades.
02:11:01.620 And actually you look closely and the blade itself isn't a whole, it's like a series of proteins that are molded together.
02:11:09.280 And the closer you look at it, the more it isn't like actually that meaningful to talk about, about the blade as a unit.
02:11:18.640 because all the individual proteins have gaps gaps in it like the language is very clearly
02:11:25.540 a placeholder for your individual purposes and you see this especially like in English where
02:11:33.720 we just invent words all the time you know uh you can't work in like many fields without like
02:11:41.140 having to invent terms and language for stuff as like a placeholder for what you're describing
02:11:48.100 because they'll, and maybe this is something where English is, like, very different from
02:11:55.460 evangelical ages, but English is, like, very plainly clued together from, like, dozens of
02:12:02.300 different languages, and maybe, maybe if you actually speak Hebrew, where such and such has
02:12:09.800 been unchanging forever uh it takes on a an individual unique importance but uh that
02:12:17.700 the consistent thing with like uh so so most languages the the way works is that it's on
02:12:27.880 the listener to understand what the person is saying so you're you'll get like uh phrases that
02:12:34.660 sound like Chinese fortune cookies or whatever in a lot of religious traditions. It's on you to like
02:12:40.680 puzzle over it and puzzle over it and come and go through different interpretations to find the
02:12:47.880 truth behind the words and stuff. Whereas English is a profoundly different language where it's
02:12:54.860 really on the speaker to communicate the meaning and to be precise. And English has all these tools
02:13:02.780 that allow an incredible amount of precision in the language,
02:13:05.800 like double and triple negatives can actually be used in English very precisely
02:13:13.800 to make a, like, incredibly esoteric ideas.
02:13:23.840 So if I said, she was not unaroused, you know, that has a very specific meaning,
02:13:31.640 that she was not not unaroused like it's like there's a coyness to it that uh you're you're
02:13:39.460 speaking to that uh she's not saying she's aroused but she's not unaroused and there's
02:13:46.860 there's this like precision of like uh like uh double meaning in like the the pain of interpretation
02:13:56.520 and whatnot and this is where uh english uh many people praise it it's like you a uniquely
02:14:03.560 destructive language like uh you can combine stuff in all ways like to dream away uh the spanish
02:14:10.940 there's that one spanish fellow who said oh yes these are directional
02:14:15.440 languages like to dream away to look in
02:14:19.180 to look in words, to live something down, you know, this directional combination of words is
02:14:30.180 all very specific. But the thing is, in English, like it's very plain that what we are describing
02:14:41.200 is not a fundamental aspect of language you know uh that these are all combinations and
02:14:53.260 conjunctions of things to get at the reality of what's going on and you can see this especially
02:14:59.480 in like um you know english has like a word for everything uh that uh you can glare at someone
02:15:10.020 or you can look gleamingly back at them or you can catch a glimpse of someone and all the words
02:15:16.500 uh all these specific words uh for the exact same thing just to look at someone um
02:15:24.000 all of them have a very specific meaning for just someone looked at some someone
02:15:32.960 but there it's very clear that the language itself is not a core factor of the behavior
02:15:47.440 that's going on it's you know the distinction between a pig and pork whether you're describing
02:15:57.840 it is an animal in anglo-saxon or a uh or a dish in anglo-norman uh that's not a core
02:16:08.100 attribute of um what is the the latin phrase for pig
02:16:14.720 uh it might be the same might be for sus domesticus yeah so like in english we might
02:16:25.680 refer to pig. We might refer to sus, to masticus. We might refer to pork the dish. We might call
02:16:31.300 them swine or hog. You know, we have all these, all these words to describe. Or we might call them
02:16:41.500 bacon if we want to really talk about the food aspect of it. But it's very clear that a language
02:16:49.720 is not core to the reality that language is something that we're we're creating to describe
02:16:58.560 it and if you like interact with Shakespeare like any good English craftsman wordsmith
02:17:08.380 which itself is a wonderful like English language term a wordsmith some you know smith is a black
02:17:17.620 someone who like forges metal artificially and then a wordsmith is someone who does the same
02:17:23.900 thing to language and this is like a staple of english language the wordsmith uh if you look at
02:17:31.400 shakespeare or like any of the great wordsmiths you know any of the great poets like it's very
02:17:36.620 apparent that they're creating this like artisan artificial artificiality through language and
02:17:44.720 and are like crafting entire new words that will be compelling to the listener
02:17:54.360 and using words in new ways.
02:17:59.600 So the conception that the fundamental aspect of reality in the beginning was the word
02:18:07.740 is about the most absurd line possible in the English language.
02:18:16.340 Because, of course, English itself, like, we can see the skeleton structure of English
02:18:22.780 and all the languages that have amalgamated into to form English.
02:18:27.260 You know, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Greek, Latin, terms borrowed from Japanese, you know,
02:18:35.960 novel
02:18:37.480 novel
02:18:40.140 with
02:18:42.240 borrowed words from Japanese
02:18:44.240 who in turn borrowed them from Portuguese
02:18:47.080 yeah
02:18:49.220 like tempura
02:18:51.460 you know
02:18:51.860 acronyms that like have
02:18:56.920 lost their periods like
02:18:58.620 scuba you know self-contained
02:19:01.060 underwater breathing apparatus
02:19:02.540 that like I can guarantee you in 20
02:19:04.900 years in 20 to 100 years like no one's going to remember that that's from the acronym and then
02:19:10.620 someone's going to find it in a book that oh scuba where did this where did this word come from
02:19:17.400 you know it's it's mysterious what's the etymology of it and then it's like oh it's an acronym you
02:19:22.820 should lay some red herring say it's a it's a native american word for uh holding your breath
02:19:30.360 underwater or something or breathing from seashells it comes from the lost language of
02:19:37.700 the huron who were wiped out by the iroquois but uh but like we can see plainly in english
02:19:44.200 that the language is coming profoundly after the reality you know the language is something that we
02:19:50.380 made made uh not god you know the world is this like pre-linguistic thing thing which is also
02:20:02.340 true um you know in the history of like evolution and technology language has to be invented
02:20:10.020 yet uh yet all abrahamic religions in the beginning was the word uh the fundamental
02:20:18.200 aspect of God is language in all Abrahamic religions and the moral instruction and the
02:20:27.900 absolute adherence to the word, which itself like is slippery. Words are slippery. They're not code.
02:20:36.480 You know, you know, a code can only execute one way. Heaven help you if you think laws can only
02:20:43.480 execute one way you know laws are written in language and so laws can as soon as you get into
02:20:50.860 the courtroom the law can become other things because it's written in the English language
02:20:57.600 and can be reinterpreted and misinterpreted and you can get screwed up really fast by lawyers with
02:21:02.540 them with them read reinterpreting and misinterpreting words there's a famous
02:21:08.660 uh there's a famous uh court case uh uh this has been like memed on a replicate where a man is
02:21:19.720 being depositioned uh do you have a printer in your room and he's like well i don't know the
02:21:26.100 definition of a printer it was a lawsuit over print printers and like xerox machines and whatnot
02:21:32.500 and like the specific definition of what a printer was was actually in contest and so the lawyer is
02:21:39.340 asking him in layman terms well do you have a printer in that room uh i don't know we have a
02:21:45.760 machine that performs a function that's like a print but i'm not sure if it meets the definition
02:21:52.640 of printer i'm just a layman i'm not asking you for the technical definition do you have a printer
02:21:58.740 I am not sure
02:22:00.600 I am not sure we have a machine
02:22:03.240 that I colloquially
02:22:04.900 refer to as
02:22:07.100 printing but I'm not sure if it prints
02:22:09.320 I feel like this
02:22:11.320 is kind of a
02:22:12.220 this idea
02:22:14.580 that laws are
02:22:17.140 changeable
02:22:18.940 and formidable
02:22:20.680 malleable is something that's actually
02:22:23.140 kind of been relearned in the last
02:22:24.700 like decade or two I feel like
02:22:27.260 It seems to be of something that was forgotten by our parents' generation who believed laws were set.
02:22:34.520 The idea that the rule of law executes itself, it's like, no, it's not a blockchain.
02:22:40.560 Bitcoin executes itself, unless you control 51% of the miners.
02:22:48.920 The Bitcoin blockchain executes itself because it's code.
02:22:53.120 The law is whatever a judge, two lawyers and a jury agree on.
02:23:00.200 Yeah, there was a line from Carl Schmitt, which was, law must be both interpreted and enforced, which I always used as my response.
02:23:17.940 And I set up like a little debate club type thing in the sauna in my previous gym.
02:23:23.200 yes uh language is profoundly like this but this is the thing with abrahamic religions because um
02:23:34.220 the instincts of abrahamism and like uh the relation to universe is profoundly
02:23:40.900 non-intuitive anti-intuitive like uh like uh the entire point of the abrahamic religion is really
02:23:50.820 to reject most of your intuitive instincts you know to reject rage to reject revenge to reject
02:23:57.460 wrath uh to reject your lust um uh to reject like a a lot of these like basic intuitive instincts
02:24:10.560 uh to and this goes down abrahamism so you find like um like dean tarp
02:24:20.820 And the Abrahamic religion is named after Abraham, who bound Isaac and agreed to sacrifice him for God.
02:24:32.020 Why? Because that was the word of God.
02:24:33.820 Well, was he going to get anything for him?
02:24:35.600 No, God commanded it, and he was obedient to the word.
02:24:40.960 I think that story, it's a bit of a distraction from the point you're making,
02:24:45.340 but that story is probably one of the more important ones in Christianity, I feel.
02:24:50.820 And Judaism from a historiographical point of view, because you see their cousins, the Phoenicans in North Africa, at the same time are still sacrificing babies, their firstborn child, to a giant bull statue.
02:25:10.360 And this is their religious justification for why they can get away with, we're only going to symbolically steal the vitality from our firstborn sons.
02:25:22.180 We're not going to actually steal the vitality from them by crushing them in a burning drum.
02:25:29.520 Yes, but this is, so this is the thing with Abrahamism.
02:25:33.360 Abrahamism. So the Greeks, like the Hellenics, they just say, no, we don't want to do that. So
02:25:42.260 we stopped. You know, they'd like, uh, Diomedes stabbed the gods, uh, Venus and Ares. You know,
02:25:51.820 the idea that like a Greek or a Greek people might have a feud with a god is like, you know,
02:26:00.120 that that happens you know poseidon poseidon and like a greek city state could have a falling out
02:26:07.900 and like uh that's not like metaphysically odd like the greeks are perfectly capable of
02:26:15.420 conceiving themselves of just stopping doing a religious tradition if they don't don't like it
02:26:21.520 name war. And there are stories like that. The Phoenicians, um, they sacrificed their firstborn
02:26:31.180 son. And I maintain that their wealth actually did come from the fact that they sacrificed their
02:26:36.460 firstborn sons. Because what happens when you sacrifice your firstborn sons? Well, all suddenly
02:26:42.460 you have an extra daughter for every family, basically. You know, if the firstborn son gets
02:26:48.380 sacrifice you have like a wide surplus of daughters so immediately the phoenicians
02:26:54.800 you know the selection pressure the sexual selection pressure is gone so they start decay
02:27:00.220 but uh suddenly you have all the excess women that you can marry off for like financial connections
02:27:07.680 and you can see why that would be very very useful for a um
02:27:13.660 for a trading people and you can see why i'm keeping the wealth concentrated on one male so
02:27:22.740 like uh so like by the time you have on average you know one son and two daughters
02:27:28.460 you know you're marrying off the two daughters the son easily gets gets a wife and all your
02:27:36.940 wealth that you've accumulated is passing on um to one heir and is passing down that like
02:27:43.020 naturally creates an accumulation of wealth like this is kind of the same reason people do abortions
02:27:50.520 today foolishly at her argue but like the justification is it's going to bring you wealth
02:27:56.580 and like you're going to be higher status for uh having pursued careers or whatnot as opposed to
02:28:03.760 uh the child well the phoenician system uh produce that but the abrahamic system specifically says
02:28:12.160 no we would have done it for no advantage because we're absolutely loyal to god we're absolutely
02:28:21.380 obedient to him and god stopped us we did not stop ourselves which is an interesting twist
02:28:30.820 on the explanation that no absolute obedience is 100% due and we would have 100% do it but God
02:28:39.600 didn't want it uh uh and this like kind of like absolute obedient mentality this loyalty to the
02:28:50.800 word first and foremost not to like your own intuitive intuition which says no I don't want
02:28:55.940 to kill my my kid and not to like uh not to even you know reason where like you can imagine a
02:29:02.980 phoenician being talked into that bargain you know if you do this you will get this you know
02:29:11.100 if you perform this ultimate sacrifice you will have wealth beyond measure uh it's not
02:29:17.580 a rational bargain or anything it's we would be absolutely obedient for no reward and the only
02:29:25.980 reason we're not doing it is because we're still loyal to the word and we are told told not to and
02:29:31.820 this uh rejection of intuitive belief and like rational self-interest as well you know it's not
02:29:40.620 Your personal intuition, like Diomedes, when he charged forth and stabbed the goddess Venus because she was trying to take his quarry, Paris, away from his spear, or not for, like, your actual self-interest like the Phoenicians, but purely for, like, moral, absolute obedience that you behave.
02:30:05.980 that is uniquely Abrahamic, you know.
02:30:09.800 You do it whether it brings you any advantage or not.
02:30:14.700 You do it because it is God's will,
02:30:17.660 which in the Jewish case is the same as the race.
02:30:22.260 You know, you do it because it is good for the Jewish people.
02:30:27.020 And in Christianity, if you do it because it is good
02:30:31.140 just for the message of Christianity and Islam,
02:30:33.900 you do it because it is good for dar al-islam uh like this supreme loyalty to the word is the
02:30:43.700 abrahamic religion and this is why uh this is why the 6 000 years they have to insist on it because
02:30:50.660 it's in the text and if you aren't loyal to the word of the text you know you're basically lost
02:30:57.620 or you're loyal to a vibe,
02:31:01.700 which the vibes you're going to get
02:31:03.020 from the text of the Bible
02:31:06.380 are like, as we've gone through,
02:31:09.600 going to lead you to ruin very quickly.
02:31:16.680 Does that make sense?
02:31:18.900 Yeah.
02:31:19.180 Am I beating a horse?
02:31:21.160 Well, like I outlined at the start,
02:31:23.720 on this topic,
02:31:25.780 you're always going to be beating a horse
02:31:27.020 Because really, like, every argument is Jewish God, slave morality, Jewish God, slave morality, the Jewish God, slave morality.
02:31:35.520 And there's no getting around that.
02:31:38.860 You know, they've purposely constructed a moral framework where they have no agency or responsibility because they're slaves that worship the Jewish God.
02:31:49.600 Yes. Yes, it's this bizarre thing that came out of, like, Semites under Babylonian slavery.
02:31:59.000 You know, these people who lived under a god king and then constructed a god king when they no longer had a god king.
02:32:07.320 uh but uh so so this
02:32:14.260 like if you cannot believe in the 6,000 years you cannot really be an Abrahamic and I've gone
02:32:23.500 through you hacked like if you believe in the 6,000 years that leads to ruin but uh like there's
02:32:31.340 no reason to believe the book if the 6,000 years untrue because the line of custody back to the
02:32:36.860 word of god isn't there you know it's just another book that was written by a guy you might as well
02:32:43.140 read he he see it's the ocony and at least that's poetry you know at least it's pretty but uh
02:32:49.840 but uh one of the things that struck me about stone choir um and this is this is a little more
02:33:03.800 more uh personal i don't want to really like talk crap about whoa but uh
02:33:12.060 he won't start at church and he had he had reasons that he didn't want to start church um
02:33:20.140 that he he was divorced so he's not a man above um he according to like some textual
02:33:30.000 interpretation he's not a man above um uh he's not a man beyond criticism and there's he isn't
02:33:40.540 quite sure what a church is because it turns out an early church is different than how churches
02:33:46.200 have been structured in the protestant tradition and stuff and also there's it's supposed to be
02:33:53.200 god whereas if he started a church it'd be the woe show all the stuff and you know all these
02:34:00.460 okay maybe that's not quite the path to like you'd want to spiritual oneness but another thing is
02:34:08.840 you know all the people
02:34:10.720 all the christians who would attend his church are either not attending church or they're going
02:34:20.040 to other churches of people who don't have
02:34:22.100 those scribbles.
02:34:25.000 That was where he really lost me
02:34:27.960 in the show.
02:34:29.100 His response to that question. It's fine not
02:34:32.000 to start your own church.
02:34:34.120 If he just answered
02:34:35.580 I don't want to do it, I've got my own thing
02:34:37.660 let somebody else do that and I'll
02:34:40.060 give them a shout out or whatever
02:34:41.480 go ahead. But his reasons
02:34:44.000 were just
02:34:44.540 pathetic. There's no other way
02:34:48.020 of describing it.
02:34:48.680 Well, it sounded like the libertarian excuse for why you wouldn't fix things or act decisively to resolve things.
02:35:02.800 But the other thing is, like, the point of Stone Choir, which is the case if you listen to the episode, is that there's a crisis in Christianity.
02:35:17.060 i don't think any anyone listening uh christian or non-christian would debate that that there's
02:35:25.560 this profound crisis within the christian faith that it's you know there are all the rainbow
02:35:30.580 churches then they're all the zionist churches and and christianity has this profound profound
02:35:38.680 crisis of just how compromised it is by everything all these compromised christian churches all these
02:35:44.760 denominations. You know, oh, obviously you can't attend a Protestant church. They're cucked. Well,
02:35:51.620 obviously you can't attend a Catholic church. They're cucked. Well, obviously you can't attend
02:35:55.880 an Orthodox church because they're actually cucked in these other ways. Okay, so what
02:36:03.420 denomination can you attend? Oh, there's plenty. There's plenty. Which one? Which one?
02:36:07.600 uh uh uh you know i had a thing uh name one denomination i could attend within like 200
02:36:17.100 kilometers of me that would be non non-cut but they can't have uh run a refugee relief program
02:36:25.780 and people would name well you could do this one and then i just type in the name of that
02:36:30.860 denomination refugee relief no they've sponsored refugees to come into the country no they've
02:36:36.300 sponsored refugees to come into the country. No, they sponsored refugees to come into the country.
02:36:41.760 One named a specific church that I looked up the exact name of the church. No, they sponsored
02:36:48.620 refugees to come into the country. Then he was like, no, that's not the church I attended. I
02:36:53.240 attended this one. They had to look up that other specific church with a .ca instead of a .com.
02:37:02.040 and they had also sponsored refugees to come into the country uh like ridiculous amounts of like
02:37:10.920 betrayal and and copes that no it's still good enough it's so good enough uh it's you
02:37:19.500 but uh the so like the natural solution think is like okay well if you're non-cut you start a
02:37:29.060 church. You know, this is a crisis moment, you know, and if there's one thing that I will praise
02:37:37.340 the New Testament for, it's very clear that you, that you are to start a church if there's no
02:37:44.600 better option. You know, all of Jesus's disciples, they all started churches. He was just pulling,
02:37:52.260 you know, he pulls a fisherman, you're a fisherman now, that like there is seemingly
02:37:57.400 like some mandate for direct action by just the individual faith right you know
02:38:05.080 mary magdalene a former prostitute is sent out to preach which is scandalous but also like
02:38:13.860 there is a mandate for individual action and it's shocking therefore that uh
02:38:21.920 actually no there's this profound unwillingness to like take action or like to take in a like
02:38:32.860 individual leadership in relation to anything related to christianity and these shriples that
02:38:40.620 come up that came up around uh woe specifically uh starting a church which again i don't want to
02:38:48.760 beat up on him too much you everyone has stuff going going on in their life but like uh the
02:38:55.500 scribbles that he spoke to uh was very much like anyone who's been on the right for for a while
02:39:05.500 knows these scribbles that uh that as soon as it's like well we could do something that could
02:39:10.860 actually affect something and then no we can't because and then you know well you quickly
02:39:20.080 realize is that people start searching for reasons why action can't be taken because
02:39:25.420 because the real reason is like oh if we did that we might do something we might be effective in
02:39:32.500 some way and that in itself sets off the heckles that like oh no there must be something wrong
02:39:38.480 about that you know that that itself had that they've been like beaten so long the idea of
02:39:47.380 something that might actually do something and be effective is like immediately sets off their
02:39:55.560 like beaten dog reaction they're like no there must be something wrong with this I need to find
02:40:00.580 to shripple from why we can't do that. And I just don't see that in paganism at all.
02:40:11.700 I don't see that in any of the Western pagans. I say, you know, I don't really know what
02:40:19.680 uh a pagan church should look like uh obviously i do not have the infrastructure to run like uh
02:40:31.560 a weekly church service like a location or a ready supply of um
02:40:38.080 people to run like a weekly church service but uh i have my monthly book club my monthly
02:40:44.300 classic book club that does meet in person yeah and and also has an online component and also has
02:40:50.920 now i have a second uh in-person book club that does meet once a month yeah you're like title
02:40:56.660 tyler durden yeah exactly and it you know it's not a fight club it's a book it's a book club
02:41:04.440 but uh but it's like no we are meeting we are reading like classical texts we are reading
02:41:10.080 Caesar's Gaelic Wars, you know, a book written by God himself about how he won his wars.
02:41:16.600 We are, we did read Xenophon, we did read Thucydides, we did read the Iliad, one of
02:41:25.220 the greatest holy books of all time.
02:41:29.100 Skulls and shields crushed under the wheels of Achilles' chariots, profoundly sacred.
02:41:34.840 it. We did read La Mortarthur. We are going to be circling back to the sagas. We're reading
02:41:45.700 The Storm of Steel this month, maybe one of the most Germanic texts ever written.
02:41:53.340 You listeners at home, I'm including a link in this podcast to the Anarchonomicon Discord server.
02:41:59.900 do join if you want to join us for the book club and read the storm of steel this month and books
02:42:06.140 subsequent months um in ontario we do have the in-person book book club i'll tell you about if
02:42:12.700 you shelf at the discord in the discord server uh but like you know starting a book club which is
02:42:21.540 what a church is that's what it that's what christianity is it's a book club of one book
02:42:26.900 that can be done like very very quickly you know you meet up with drinks and you discuss
02:42:36.280 discuss attacks and you have like camaraderie and in friendship and stuff and you know from there
02:42:44.160 you have like little outings and whatnot and you build up your little rituals like
02:42:48.700 that's a profoundly doable thing that's like one of the most basic units of community building
02:42:54.680 And the fact that what I see within, like, the crusader-based Christianity is that that's not happening, that, like, all these e-crusaders cannot start, like, a basement church, you know, cannot start a, oh, come over to my place and we'll have cheese and crackers.
02:43:22.580 and we will read the Bible and we'll do communion with, like, a bottle of wine,
02:43:28.220 which is, like, all that's necessary, you know.
02:43:32.600 You know, and if that doesn't work out, you know,
02:43:36.200 oh, we made some friends and we can go to, like, a better church
02:43:41.080 or, like, we can scale it or do whatever.
02:43:44.640 We can move to Bob's basement if that's not working.
02:43:48.720 Like, that's what church is.
02:43:50.220 It's a book club.
02:43:50.820 uh you know it scales and like eventually you can have like a very nice building for your
02:43:56.680 for your book club and you can play really nice music and stuff and you can have like uh
02:44:02.800 associations for like for like the kids and whatnot you can have you know the wise can bring
02:44:08.660 potluck but ultimately it's a book club uh uh it's a bunch of people getting together to do a ritual
02:44:18.300 to do a ritual and like
02:44:21.620 cultivate
02:44:24.480 you know
02:44:25.720 you know
02:44:27.940 their height
02:44:29.060 high text and you know maybe you perform
02:44:31.920 a sacrifice at the book club
02:44:33.120 or whatever but ultimately
02:44:35.300 you know
02:44:36.740 that's what it scales out of
02:44:39.520 out of
02:44:41.660 I think one of their main problems
02:44:43.780 is they're trapped in the
02:44:45.140 same mindset that's really
02:44:47.280 plaguing all of society in general at the moment and that's credentialism like they've they've
02:44:53.660 invested moral and spiritual authority in these institutions and can't really take it from
02:45:01.520 themselves or see themselves taking it for themselves and you know it's the same with
02:45:06.840 the universities does anyone really care that you have a degree in engineering if you're
02:45:12.400 looking to, I don't know, rights in software?
02:45:14.740 No, of course they don't.
02:45:17.680 Yeah, and this is
02:45:18.580 where, like,
02:45:20.380 as a Canadian who graduated
02:45:24.340 into a bad market with the wrong race,
02:45:27.340 like, the idea
02:45:28.740 that the credentials matter
02:45:30.120 is, like, profoundly dead to me.
02:45:33.120 Because, like,
02:45:34.040 you know,
02:45:35.860 I got one of the
02:45:38.420 best degrees from one of the best schools,
02:45:40.500 like in a department that was supposed to be world class
02:45:43.500 and it was as if I had just graduated high school like no one cared not a soul cared
02:45:51.580 you know it opened no doors whatsoever you know immediately had to make like a thousand
02:45:58.040 applications to get a shitty sales job and part of this is just the Canadian market sucks that much
02:46:04.320 part of that is like this is racial conquered territory but if there's ever something that
02:46:09.680 would like make you not respect a credential ever again it's that it's like going to the
02:46:17.960 trouble getting one and then like being treated like shit anyway uh
02:46:24.040 and like the idea that that not doing it yourself is like uh i'm at the point where if you don't do
02:46:37.660 yourself how you know it's even done you know you're gonna trust some like fucking indian who
02:46:44.200 shows up with his grief from one by you're gonna trust like some some lesbian priest who shows up
02:46:52.240 with like, like a certificate from an online course. Yeah, but I do want to get into like
02:47:07.720 the positive vision. I do feel like, like paganism, it's easy to, to turn it into a,
02:47:18.740 the why we're not christian show uh which this has like mostly been but uh a huge part of it
02:47:27.000 is that you do have to contrast it with what you're trying to fix uh and why you think it
02:47:34.480 needs fixing like paganism is a massive break from uh the existing moral system and you have
02:47:41.840 specify what exactly it is and why exactly you're breaking from it but uh would let let's get into
02:47:52.220 the the positive vision uh you've been reading up on um odin and and and your unique little
02:48:06.260 your unique look into the
02:48:08.680 ancient city and
02:48:10.320 others, what does paganism mean to you?
02:48:16.440 In a word, Europeanism
02:48:19.040 is essentially
02:48:20.840 what it is. There's a profound
02:48:22.980 continuity
02:48:24.540 going all the way
02:48:26.900 back to before
02:48:28.820 the birth of warfare.
02:48:30.280 and
02:48:32.700 you know
02:48:35.440 you see in every
02:48:36.940 civic and cultural
02:48:38.920 institution the echo of something
02:48:41.400 that was and something
02:48:43.260 that could be again
02:48:44.260 and in every story there's a
02:48:46.720 there's an undercurrent of that
02:48:48.880 morality and spirituality
02:48:50.680 and
02:48:51.420 after a while
02:48:53.960 as you start accumulating all of these
02:48:57.100 weird little synchronicities
02:48:58.760 and you start reading books more in depth on the subject
02:49:04.300 and trying to trace back into the ancient past,
02:49:07.440 it sort of naturally solidifies into what we'd call paganism.
02:49:17.220 Yes, and one of the things that I consistently see
02:49:23.360 is people focusing on the gods and, like, the formalisms of religion.
02:49:35.080 Like, well, do you attend a temple and make sacrifices?
02:49:40.880 Do you do this?
02:49:41.680 Do you do that?
02:49:43.900 You know, trying to, you know, what is your Eucharist, basically?
02:49:49.420 You know, what, what specific rituals do you do at specific times for what specific metaphysical reasons, reasons, so as to appease some formal set of rules for a specific, specific God.
02:50:11.240 it's like
02:50:12.100 well that's not
02:50:15.260 what our religion
02:50:17.340 is
02:50:17.800 like
02:50:19.140 the people we're tracing didn't even have
02:50:23.260 these rituals to begin with they
02:50:24.700 gradually accrued them over time by
02:50:27.240 you know going out into the
02:50:29.300 world and observing what worked and what didn't
02:50:31.360 work and
02:50:32.020 in time it formalized
02:50:35.660 to what it is
02:50:36.380 atone for an original sin
02:50:39.200 We're preserving a tradition of fire.
02:50:44.120 We're preserving the spirit of our bloodlines.
02:50:50.040 You know, the purpose of pagan festivals and holidays,
02:50:55.220 the reason we have Christmas isn't to remember the reason we have Yule,
02:51:01.980 the holiday of Odin that overlaps with Christmas
02:51:06.960 And most of the Christmas traditions derive from Yule.
02:51:14.360 Obviously, early Christians in Jerusalem were not setting up pine trees in their living rooms.
02:51:23.480 The purpose of all these and this vessel of Odin is to maintain the spirit of your people.
02:51:32.620 you know
02:51:34.240 you know the
02:51:36.060 the wild hunt of your ancestors
02:51:40.060 a lot of the
02:51:41.920 festivals to Odin so
02:51:43.500 obviously Eul is the most known one
02:51:46.160 but at all of the equinoxes
02:51:48.120 and solstices
02:51:49.080 they tended to have festivals to Odin
02:51:52.340 because Odin was the god of
02:51:53.800 boundaries, the world beyond
02:51:56.280 and so that transition
02:51:57.800 from the sun being
02:52:00.440 to the south to the sun being to the north
02:52:02.380 or other transitions at other times
02:52:06.040 like lunar transitions to the new moon
02:52:08.760 were a time where Odin's power was strongest.
02:52:15.540 And so this boundary between the living and the dead
02:52:18.560 was thinnest, let's say, at that time.
02:52:23.360 And so it was a time to come together
02:52:27.700 and embody your ancestors
02:52:29.260 and let the spirits of your ancestors guide you
02:52:32.300 And Odin in the stories was famously obsessed with prophecy and he was going to the dead, learning what had happened so he could learn what would happen and bringing that all together as one.
02:52:46.940 And that's what Yule was about originally, although obviously over time, you know, people forgot that and continued practicing all the same.
02:52:57.740 And the general spirit was underneath it all, even if they didn't know the specifics or even care about the specifics or were nominally Christian.
02:53:08.200 Yes. And like a lot of the traditions of modern Christmas are shockingly continuous.
02:53:15.940 So, like, it's like children leaving out milking cookies for Santa is actually a very ancient tradition of children would leave out carrots and other fruit for sleep near Ones' eight-legged horse.
02:53:36.300 Yeah, and the eight-legged horse became eight reindeer.
02:53:39.680 It's not much of a stretch.
02:53:41.380 yeah very much very much so but uh the like the true many of christmas you know the spirit of
02:53:52.040 christmas for all the uh christianization of it the spirit of christmas is still gathering
02:53:59.120 together with your family in the middle in the middle of a winter and maintaining your familial
02:54:05.500 bonds at renewing, renewing them and asking each other how the year has been and stuff,
02:54:12.460 it's shockingly still like profoundly oriented around family and continuity of traditions.
02:54:21.660 And you can make it more so that by just digging into family genealogies on Christmas and stuff,
02:54:29.140 which many families do, like naturally, like your intuitive instinct to like,
02:54:34.380 oh, while we're gathered here, we should go through the old photo albums
02:54:39.600 and we should ask grandma about the family history and all this stuff.
02:54:44.040 You know, that is the correct instinct.
02:54:47.180 And those are the things to virtualize and continue.
02:54:52.540 But also, like, this is where when you read the Norse texts,
02:54:58.580 like the sagas and stuff or you read the ancient greek texts religion
02:55:05.580 like can appear like very tertiary to their lives uh like you read most like the sagas
02:55:14.620 are entirely about like individual heroes and their own personal conduct and honor and
02:55:22.140 and you can think well these people don't seem particularly religious and it's like no they're
02:55:28.380 You're keeping incredible faith to their ideas of honor and their ideas of their people and who they are and what they're supposed to be.
02:55:37.920 And they can seem very irreligious at points, very irreverent.
02:55:47.080 by the same family.
02:55:49.240 It's also worth noting on this point that
02:55:51.240 most of the texts,
02:55:53.740 like where the light of history shines
02:55:55.400 on Greece and Rome,
02:55:57.580 are generally from
02:55:59.340 the autumn or winter
02:56:01.800 of their civilisations. They're not from
02:56:03.640 the spring or summer.
02:56:05.860 So it's, you know, the fall of the Roman Republic
02:56:07.760 or the very
02:56:09.880 last gasp of Athenian democracy.
02:56:13.340 It's not
02:56:13.740 necessarily
02:56:15.740 like
02:56:16.660 if you look at the, compare the Iliad to
02:56:19.320 to
02:56:21.280 what did we just cover?
02:56:25.420 Thucydides.
02:56:26.720 And, you know, the Iliad is a hundred
02:56:29.240 times more animated by
02:56:31.340 the spirit of religion than
02:56:32.720 Thucydides is.
02:56:35.140 And most of our
02:56:36.580 Greek texts are going to come from
02:56:38.660 the period when Thucydides
02:56:41.160 was alive or
02:56:42.200 you know, a hundred years after.
02:56:44.380 this is this is true however uh i find in the in the greece like uh it's especially homer there's
02:56:58.220 like uh you can kind of overstate the uh the significance of the gods i have the story about
02:57:07.040 the uh the home the iliad that uh a lot of the gods intervening on the battlefield are actually
02:57:15.380 um masks that were worn because they don't have like uh they don't have banners uh on the
02:57:22.640 battlefield but what you see is the gods behaving in the role of like banners and colors and like
02:57:30.160 uh, these, these rally around the flag effects. Uh, at one point Ares is like charging into the,
02:57:37.300 um, Grecian line and the mass of Trojans is like following them. And then Diomedes has to like
02:57:47.560 convene with the leaders and they all agree that they're going to stab Ares, the god.
02:57:52.840 And so Diomedes runs up and stabs him, and he falls back, and in the text, he immediately ascends to heaven and is browbeaten by Zeus for intervening on the battlefield so directly.
02:58:09.160 but uh like you look at and it's like how does Diomedes defeat a god in single combat
02:58:16.580 you know that'd be impressive for Achilles to do and then you realize oh it was probably
02:58:21.820 like uh you look at how the gods behave and how the Greeks are treating the gods like at one point
02:58:28.060 um at one point Poseidon looks down on the battlefield steps off a mountaintop
02:58:36.180 where he's, you know, a thousand feet tall
02:58:39.520 and bestrides the Aegean in like four steps
02:58:42.840 and then shrinks down to the size of a man
02:58:45.640 and walks up to Agamemnon and Diomedes
02:58:50.800 and gives them a pep talk.
02:58:54.180 And the reaction of Agamemnon and Diomedes
02:58:59.640 to seeing this is not,
02:59:00.800 oh my God, a mountain just shrunk down
02:59:02.440 to the size of a man.
02:59:04.100 And the reaction is like, you know, I don't usually listen to the gods, but this one's actually making some good sense, you know, as if they're talking about a mall Santa.
02:59:17.300 That, you know, it's a guy in a costume, and he's kind of speaking out of churn, talking to us this way, but he's making some good points.
02:59:25.760 We should take his advice this time.
02:59:27.580 And so the gap between the Iliad and Thucydides, I think, is significantly smaller than you might think.
02:59:44.140 But it's certainly true that religion is playing a massive role in the lives of everyone in the Iliad.
02:59:51.480 And, like, as soon as, like, the heroes are alone, they're having, like, these trippy religious experiences where gods are, like, talking to them on deserted islands or, like, giving them advice that they should disguise themselves as beggars when they return home, even though, why would they do that?
03:00:11.560 by god whispers it in their ear and so they do it and then that turns out to be right and it's like
03:00:16.920 this externalized instinct of listening to to the gods or putting their faith in like uh this
03:00:24.340 intuitive idea of of athena or like athena appearing in the guise of someone new like
03:00:31.040 who mentors
03:00:34.200 Telmachus, it's
03:00:36.400 100, like,
03:00:38.200 I'd argue it's much more
03:00:39.900 physically attached to reality
03:00:42.360 than you might
03:00:44.400 think, but the, it's
03:00:46.380 certainly true that by the cities,
03:00:48.880 like, the cities isn't
03:00:50.240 using that language at all.
03:00:52.660 You know, religion enters
03:00:54.520 only when it,
03:00:57.480 the way religion
03:00:58.340 would enter a modern
03:00:59.380 script
03:01:00.840 script for it's like
03:01:03.320 oh someone was accused of
03:01:05.460 defacing the temple
03:01:06.860 so they were stripped of command
03:01:09.240 you know
03:01:11.520 the gods themselves aren't
03:01:13.740 appearing either
03:01:15.140 in costume, in imagination
03:01:17.540 or like in someone's
03:01:19.880 subconscious
03:01:20.360 not really in speeches
03:01:25.480 no it comes in a bit more in
03:01:29.260 in Xenophon I think there's a few more references
03:01:32.000 but it's still very much in the background
03:01:33.860 for anyone who
03:01:36.080 doesn't know
03:01:37.480 Thucydides doesn't finish his history
03:01:39.940 it has to be finished by Xenophon
03:01:42.120 yeah
03:01:44.140 mind you
03:01:45.820 Alexander
03:01:46.800 like Athens
03:01:51.840 loses its empire then Spartan
03:01:53.820 Sparta loses its empire
03:01:55.700 then Thebes is
03:01:57.740 they can out on the block then gul the macedon conquers thebes and like unites the greeks
03:02:03.760 sorta into a loose loose confederation uh under his leadership then he dies then his son alexander
03:02:13.280 takes over uh alexander does have like a kind of like religious like crazy adventures like right
03:02:22.700 down to the gordian knot like uh he seeks out the one thing there's a prophecy about
03:02:28.620 and whoever can untie the knot uh will conquer asia and he finds it and he takes one looks at
03:02:37.480 at it decides it's too much effort to untie so he hacks it to pieces with his sword and
03:02:43.020 not one strand of the rope is like bound to another so it's untied it's not tied together
03:02:49.540 and then he conquers Asia but uh he also like uh gets crowned god king of of Egypt like uh they
03:02:58.920 declare him the new pharaoh and descended from from Zeus and there's like a ton of stuff like
03:03:06.260 this uh a lot of it gets edited in after the fact so um if you go to the medieval like European
03:03:13.600 medieval like 1080 by that point they're writing like epic poems about alexander this is where
03:03:21.000 medieval europe is this trippy crazy place that's like neither pagan nor christian christian but
03:03:28.800 like its own entire thing now you have like figures like uh dante who may not have even
03:03:36.380 read the bible in his in his life composing like like tales about how he personally descended
03:03:43.380 into hell. And like people on the streets of Florence, Florence see him a later life and they
03:03:49.040 say that was the man who was in hell. You know, medieval Europe is this beautiful, trippy place.
03:03:56.600 But one of the things that's a huge Larry Fad at the time was writing these epic poems about
03:04:02.000 Alexander. Like, like very much like the Nibung Lied or any of these European poems or Dante's
03:04:13.220 Inferno is, uh, the Christian religious one, but writing these heroic epics similar to kind of
03:04:20.940 Beowulf or, um, or actually Europe never really stopped, never really stopped composing these,
03:04:28.440 like Spencer did the Fairy Queen and then Milton did Paradise Lost. And, you know,
03:04:34.540 there's a continuous tradition of, of this that continues quite a long time. Uh, uh,
03:04:41.620 but they were composing all these epic poems about Alexander
03:04:45.340 in which Alexander bedded the Amazonian queen
03:04:50.240 and did all these additional adventures that were not in the original canon.
03:05:00.380 Some of these were creeping in during Alexander's lifetime.
03:05:03.400 Apparently there's a legend, I'm not sure which text it is,
03:05:07.060 if it's canonical or not, that one of the generals is approached and asked about the
03:05:13.340 time Alexander is shown something about the victory of Alexander, and he includes the
03:05:20.260 scene where Alexander meets the Amazonian queen in Betzer, and he asks him, well, where
03:05:25.260 was I when that happened, that he never met an Amazon, but these were all creepy and
03:05:34.200 during alexander's lifetime uh but uh these this like like trippy uh half historical relation to
03:05:44.660 reality um is like very much the essence of a lot of paganism like the the intercession of the
03:05:55.240 mystical in the first first life i you can even see this a little in uh in like early america like
03:06:05.380 uh like there's the the stories of like george washington cutting down the cherry chi but
03:06:12.900 there's a lot of stuff with like uh the and like paul bunyan and other odd characters
03:06:18.140 characters of folklore but uh there's a lot of stuff like uh like associated with the wild west
03:06:25.600 like the weird west um the stories where you have like trippy goings-on in the american west
03:06:32.920 that uh that are part of american folklore culture that is i our one japanese friend
03:06:42.980 insist America is naturally a Shinto country and that evangelicalism has a stranglehold
03:06:52.720 on the country that should naturally be a place of Paul Bunyan and Bigfoot and not Rushmore.
03:07:01.120 And giant carved beaver totem poles at the side of the road.
03:07:05.140 Yes, and Elvis actually never died.
03:07:08.240 And he played at your county fair last year.
03:07:12.980 You brought up bedding than Amazon a couple of times.
03:07:16.900 And there's an interesting theory that the Amazons were Crimean.
03:07:22.740 And so it was like a re-injection of more primal Indo-European DNA back into the main Greek body.
03:07:34.740 So, like, they were purifying their Aryan-ness by importing blood from the Crimea.
03:07:47.280 Yeah.
03:07:48.120 And I think there is some archaeological evidence that this was the case, that there was, like, you know, families in the Crimea sort of traveling to Thessaly in northern Greece.
03:08:01.200 and intermarrying like there was like a a continual trade and culture connection there
03:08:10.660 yeah this might be built on so like if you think of just like the game theory of like when
03:08:18.060 like a female fighter of some kind would be possible like uh the the natural
03:08:25.460 thing for like where it's like okay a woman wouldn't be completely useless under these
03:08:32.480 military circumstances or like uh anything to do with like animal handling and like uh archery
03:08:40.200 right because women can perform archery quite well we've seen the olympics and women can do
03:08:47.200 animal handling quite well now we've also seen the olympics and and like also anywhere those
03:08:55.960 intersect that's also like kind of a low risk form of warfare like that's that's a low risk
03:09:02.540 skirmishing because uh like obviously women uh if your tribe tries to put women into
03:09:12.320 a form of combat where it's high risk high reward like infantry combat uh women try to participate
03:09:23.140 in like sword fighting warfare well the reward matrix is if you win you get nothing maybe a
03:09:31.000 slightly better male mate who would have bedded you anyway because eggs are expensive sperm it's
03:09:38.320 cheap cheap whereas if you lose you die whereas for men there's a natural reward to take place in
03:09:46.580 higher to participate in a high-risk warfare because if you win uh you can get lots of female
03:09:54.760 like concubines and wives and stuff so far as if you lose you die but from a like evolutionary
03:10:02.300 perspective you know winning a battle and then getting like a half dozen female slaves that's
03:10:08.720 very very worth it as a male and that like the tribe has a natural way to like reward that
03:10:15.620 and the battle itself has its own logic that rewards that so what you'd expect is that like
03:10:21.020 the only place that like women would really participate in warfare um effectively both
03:10:27.600 From the perspective of, like, being able to do it, but also from the perspective of, like, not enduring so much risk that, like, it wouldn't be worth it and, like, would destroy the tribe if they did.
03:10:41.340 it would be anywhere with, like, skirmishing cavalry. Like, anywhere where cavalry archers
03:10:49.720 are a big thing, or anywhere aristocratic enough to have, like, chariot archers. Because chariot
03:10:58.080 archers, like, have a battlefields escape pod. Like, they're aristocrats who can, like, stand
03:11:04.480 off, ride around their enemies, fire arrows, which are incredibly effective against, like,
03:11:10.840 anyone who's not wealthy enough to have
03:11:12.540 chariot archers, but then
03:11:15.000 escape immediately. And also, that's
03:11:17.040 something that you always, always, always
03:11:18.940 want to keep within families
03:11:20.900 because
03:11:21.560 naturally, a chariot
03:11:24.860 is an expensive piece of equipment
03:11:26.220 and the horses are expensive
03:11:28.680 in and of themselves.
03:11:31.720 Just the knowledge and caring
03:11:32.920 for them is actually very
03:11:34.960 complex.
03:11:36.700 It really takes
03:11:37.960 a tradition
03:11:39.760 to be able to field cavalry or chariot.
03:11:44.460 If you need two guys to want to pilot the chariot
03:11:53.300 and one to fire the arrows,
03:11:56.880 you'd want them to be two brothers
03:11:58.440 because the natural thing
03:12:00.940 if you just recruit a rando off the straight
03:12:02.900 because you don't have an extra guy
03:12:05.180 is, well, that guy's going to slit your throat in your sleep
03:12:08.640 and run away with your chariot and your horses you know what i mean so there so if you have like
03:12:16.800 a just one son and a daughter suddenly it becomes very tempting to to well it's not that high risk
03:12:27.320 of behavior anyway and it's incredibly skill intensive and it's maintaining these family
03:12:32.760 assets you know train the train the girl in it as well so what you'd expect is all these stories
03:12:39.820 of female warriors and stuff to crop up wherever horse archery or cherry archery is practiced
03:12:45.880 and lo and behold that's exactly where the amazons are supposed to be from is scythia and all these
03:12:52.900 mounted archery places and wouldn't you know it if you look at the exact same areas in the world
03:12:59.040 today, like the World Nomad Games that Roke philosophy goes on about in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan,
03:13:09.840 Turkmenistan, all that, there are a lot of competitions for female horse archers. The
03:13:15.440 Mongolians practice, their women practice horse archery. There are a lot of female horse archers
03:13:21.000 in Mongolia to this day.
03:13:24.480 So the Amazonians,
03:13:27.280 it exactly makes sense
03:13:29.720 for them to have existed
03:13:31.080 in Scythia,
03:13:32.860 exactly on the Eurasian plain
03:13:34.500 where horse archery dominates
03:13:37.720 or before that cherry archery.
03:13:42.640 And if you actually look
03:13:44.420 at the European gods,
03:13:47.160 all the warrior goddesses
03:13:51.000 either practice archery like Diana the Hunter or are pictured on chariots.
03:14:01.500 So Athena and Freya are always pictured on chariots.
03:14:09.900 And my pet theory is that both Athena and Freya descend from an earlier step goddess
03:14:18.260 because neither the Greeks nor the Germans had chariots
03:14:24.360 or significant female warrior classes.
03:14:32.460 There's a general theme in goddesses,
03:14:38.760 one of the most important goddesses that's often,
03:14:43.120 like Easter is one of them, from Ostara,
03:14:46.580 is goddess of the dawn
03:14:49.620 and Freya is pretty
03:14:51.480 archetypical of this
03:14:53.140 and
03:14:54.560 you know the goddess of the dawn
03:14:57.440 is a chariot goddess because
03:14:59.040 she's riding the
03:15:01.020 arc of the sun across the sky
03:15:03.080 and a lot of these goddesses
03:15:05.700 are
03:15:06.040 very specifically derived from a goddess
03:15:09.680 of the dawn figure from
03:15:11.140 Indo-European myth
03:15:12.380 yes and
03:15:14.200 And, like, where in European history you still see women, like, participate in warfare, it's huge—effectively, it's almost always in a role like this, of the Germanic screeching women are not in the chariot.
03:15:31.080 They're in the baggage, the wagon train, or a Boudicca in the British still employ chariots in the Roman time.
03:15:43.720 And women appear in the Boudicca Rebellion.
03:15:48.760 Or for a very recent one, women, the Soviets employed women in their tanks.
03:15:59.520 Apparently there were like, several Soviet tanks were designed very small.
03:16:06.020 So you need a short man to fill certain roles or a woman.
03:16:10.740 which
03:16:12.600 goes again
03:16:14.360 in sports
03:16:15.080 one of the only modern
03:16:17.480 sports victories
03:16:19.860 of like a woman that could compete and beat
03:16:22.580 men at the professional
03:16:24.460 level was powerboat racing
03:16:25.880 which is driving
03:16:27.980 a vehicle just like driving
03:16:30.440 a chariot
03:16:30.960 yeah so
03:16:34.480 these are the
03:16:35.300 and you also see this in like
03:16:37.540 of
03:16:39.560 in japan women there's uh some tradition of like female archery but also um in anime
03:16:48.520 there is this obsession with the idea of female pilots in anime for like uh mecha and stuff like
03:16:57.360 that which uh weirdly doesn't crop up in the martial arts uh uh series that much like the
03:17:05.280 like
03:17:07.060 you don't have many female
03:17:09.460 characters in Dragon Ball Z but you do
03:17:11.480 in Evangelion
03:17:13.360 and
03:17:14.180 other pilot
03:17:17.180 and
03:17:17.520 Darlene and the Franks comes to mind
03:17:20.520 yeah so there's
03:17:23.400 this like
03:17:23.860 there's this like
03:17:27.600 Indo-European memory
03:17:29.420 there that
03:17:31.160 gets tapped
03:17:33.260 that didn't do, and
03:17:36.120 it
03:17:37.400 lines up very well with what
03:17:39.920 Creeks say about the Amazon
03:17:41.940 that they were charioteers.
03:17:51.680 But this is one of those things that I
03:17:54.020 I've written many
03:17:55.960 different things about, and I maintain this theory.
03:18:01.760 Uh,
03:18:03.260 but but yeah no this is like this is the core activity of um
03:18:11.180 of the this is the feedback loop of being a pagan is reading these esoteric books and then
03:18:21.980 getting together with with uh your friends and other other nerds and discussing them in exquisite
03:18:29.500 detail in book clubs or online groups and reconstructing the national culture from
03:18:42.360 these classical texts that by rights should have been taught in school. If you go back and grab
03:18:51.120 like a fifth grade reader from like the 1930s, you'll be shocked that they're talking about
03:18:57.160 like Siegfried and Bernhilde and the Arthurian knights and Alexander and his generals
03:19:05.060 are all in like a fifth grade reader for like school children from the 1930s.
03:19:12.300 I have one, I have a Canadian one that profoundly British imperial data.
03:19:25.120 This is like the core part of every militaristic European culture is digging through all these
03:19:34.860 classical texts and learning all the different aspects and like iterative ways that Europeans
03:19:46.260 that participated in war and conceptualized nobility and virtue.
03:19:51.920 Virtue and greatness and, you know, teaching young cubs to grow up to be lions
03:19:59.780 and perpetuate the race in like a fit state.
03:20:07.640 And it's truly incredible when you find one of these artifacts,
03:20:12.020 just how fast that has been
03:20:14.320 eliminated from our culture and like
03:20:16.120 purposely hunted down and destroyed
03:20:17.960 like there's a reason
03:20:20.040 they've like tried to extract
03:20:21.980 Shakespeare from Western Canada
03:20:23.900 they've tried to decolonize
03:20:25.940 the canon by
03:20:28.220 removing the classics from
03:20:30.080 before the colonial era
03:20:31.480 it's not about colonialism
03:20:33.720 it's about eliminating Europeans
03:20:36.200 from Western
03:20:38.000 history
03:20:42.020 And it's worked too
03:20:44.000 Like even in our case
03:20:46.120 I'm certainly not watching
03:20:48.520 You know whatever the next
03:20:50.360 Black Juliet
03:20:51.480 The thing they produce you know
03:20:55.720 So just by flooding the airwaves
03:20:59.640 With things that we ourselves
03:21:01.580 Would avoid
03:21:02.360 They have succeeded essentially
03:21:05.000 Yeah no
03:21:07.580 This is like one of those things
03:21:09.540 Where
03:21:09.940 like one of the core
03:21:12.960 tasks of like Western
03:21:15.000 man today is to track down
03:21:16.920 the good versions of things and then
03:21:18.880 to like reify them and bring them forward
03:21:20.600 so like this is where
03:21:22.240 I was complaining earlier about genealogy of morals
03:21:24.860 and not being confident at all
03:21:26.940 that it's a faithful translation
03:21:28.380 yeah so
03:21:32.540 so like
03:21:34.120 you see this on Twitter a lot
03:21:36.940 where one of the biggest impact
03:21:38.760 things you can do
03:21:39.940 uh in terms of like uh advancing our values and advancing it is tracking down like the good
03:21:48.200 version of the movie or the or the movie that you know that is like a good representation of an era
03:21:55.140 and isn't like faking gay or like propagating some hollywood morality and like really critically
03:22:03.160 looking at it that that's not doing that and then bringing it forward because a lot of people
03:22:09.640 like will only look at films or will only like engage with like some some like media version of
03:22:18.420 things and you have to make sure they're engaging with you have to do what you can to help them
03:22:22.780 engage with the right one that they're like not getting getting the fakest gayest uh version of
03:22:31.460 their own rally fed to them like uh like it's very important when Ridley Scott's Napoleon came out
03:22:39.240 that everyone was going around talking about no no no watch waterloo watch 1970s waterloo watch
03:22:45.240 serge sergey bonder chuck's waterloo now that's the actual good version of napoleon that's a
03:22:51.180 that's a version that's one of the greatest films of all time that that's the one that'll actually
03:22:56.320 teach you like good principles of command and like what what like great military leaders
03:23:03.220 think about what great political leaders think about that's when they'll show you like actual
03:23:08.140 courage in like the fear of martial nay and actual mistakes and like actual reactions
03:23:13.680 and stuff and give you lots of like little parables of what true virtue looks like uh
03:23:18.980 uh like uh you know
03:23:22.240 like uh those little uh drip edits or like uh little dark age edits a mastering commander
03:23:34.020 or whatever uh those have a big effect if they get like people to watch master and commander
03:23:41.520 who would not have otherwise uh getting people to watch like zulu or um getting people to engage
03:23:51.920 with like classic classic films that like are completely morality poisoned by by hollywood
03:24:00.460 Or like, being able to watch John Borman's Excalibur, you know, a film that looks like it was made in another dimension that's so divorced from Hollywood conventions.
03:24:14.860 As someone who has a quite significant collection of King Arthur books, it's almost certainly the best iteration of King Arthur you'll find is actually the film by John Borman.
03:24:26.840 it's so extraordinary like the fact that it like like it actually starts with uther and a grain
03:24:37.340 grain and like the war with uh cornwall and like exactly as lustily as the classic arthurian stories
03:24:47.920 like like you see that and you're like oh it's like oh is this like a like uh 80s like sex and
03:24:55.420 violence like reinterpretation it's like no no no that's that's what the arthurian legend
03:25:00.520 legends are like it's like this incredible overwhelming like lust and romance and violence
03:25:07.900 and vengeance you know forever is what the arthurian legends are like you know you know
03:25:16.520 just that sequence with the uther in a grain if you watch that like back to back like a thousand
03:25:22.340 times and that's what la mort arthur is like uh uh and
03:25:30.420 and that's exactly what they want to strip out of like all our classics is you know all the
03:25:40.460 violence all this all the like actual like meaningful sexual relationships you know
03:25:46.380 all the like pro-creative heterosexual sex like all the like romance and passion yeah a film i'll
03:25:53.440 recommend for our listeners are uh kind heart and coronet was released in 1948 but it had started
03:26:03.540 filming before the war and had to be paused for the duration of the war and it is the perfect
03:26:11.540 story of a man who
03:26:13.380 was denied his birthright
03:26:15.580 and goes on a quest
03:26:16.500 for vengeance against the
03:26:19.360 entire family that has
03:26:21.480 betrayed him, even the members
03:26:23.080 that he likes.
03:26:26.340 I will include
03:26:27.540 that in the show notes. I've not seen that one.
03:26:30.040 I will
03:26:30.660 have to track it down.
03:26:33.240 Actually, I'll include all these
03:26:35.280 films
03:26:35.600 in the show notes.
03:26:41.540 But no, like tracking down these, these good versions of the story so that you can like pass them on so that you can have like a film version that like kids and like, you know, retarded normies and stuff won't gauge gauge with.
03:27:02.120 this is an incredibly important part of maintaining your European culture,
03:27:07.360 that, like, you know, when people encounter Napoleon,
03:27:09.780 it's not the Ridley Scott, like, narcoleptic, like, man-child.
03:27:17.720 That when people encounter King Arthur,
03:27:20.080 it's not like some faking gay version from the 2010s.
03:27:25.780 and so you have
03:27:28.340 that you actually maintain
03:27:30.920 like our culture
03:27:32.960 that when you watch
03:27:33.660 a western it's not
03:27:36.940 Django Unchained
03:27:38.220 you know you watch like
03:27:40.220 that's the perfect example actually
03:27:41.880 Jeremiah Johnson
03:27:43.200 or
03:27:44.600 or one of their like real
03:27:48.400 real classics
03:27:51.380 with like real
03:27:52.160 traditional American bodies
03:27:52.820 my favorite is for a few dollars more
03:27:55.180 that so sergio leone's westerns i i quite like however part of me feels like they themselves
03:28:07.200 are a departure from the western tradition because uh they're not based on westerns
03:28:14.600 they're based on samurai films you know for a few dollars more is yojimbo which uh is
03:28:21.280 is, like, a broader, like, Aryan aristocratic culture.
03:28:26.440 It's based on Karakar Sawa's, like, samurai film.
03:28:30.060 But, like, it's not quite the American Western as it should be.
03:28:41.360 Uh, what am I?
03:28:44.420 And the other thing is rescuing, like, ones that are, like,
03:28:47.940 trying to behave and fall through the cracks.
03:28:50.120 so like uh zulu zulu is one of the most shit libby films ever made if you actually watch it
03:28:57.600 like uh they add in all this stuff of like like a michael kane at the end oh i feel shamed of this
03:29:06.220 great victory that we've won oh these beautiful zulus oh we're the real monsters all this stuff
03:29:13.000 but then you actually but then like no one actually interprets the film that way because
03:29:17.780 It's such a glorious victory.
03:29:19.420 The aesthetics just override everything.
03:29:23.000 Yes, and like the little parables of the British Army,
03:29:28.060 the sergeant major to the private,
03:29:33.880 they're facing down an army of a thousand,
03:29:37.300 like these 100 men and this little outlet that's charging upon them
03:29:43.820 and they're like, they're chanting just beyond rifle range
03:29:46.840 before they charge.
03:29:48.280 And the sergeant major looks at the young man.
03:29:52.000 Do up your tunics, son.
03:29:53.120 Your buttons are undone.
03:29:54.480 Where do you think you are?
03:29:56.720 You know, we're going to do this.
03:30:00.960 We're going to do this right.
03:30:02.020 There was some base stuff in it,
03:30:03.880 like the sergeant locking the doomer reverend
03:30:08.580 into the outhouse to keep him away from the men.
03:30:11.380 yes uh remember kids the doomer isn't the one
03:30:17.380 do me isn't about tactics it's about the belief that you shouldn't fight
03:30:21.960 uh
03:30:23.980 uh never let someone demoralize you into inaction
03:30:31.140 you can fight and you can win no almost all situations really but uh
03:30:41.240 Oh, I'd zoo to the list.
03:30:46.400 But yeah, finding and rescuing these movies.
03:30:50.260 I'd actually add a Christian movie, a profoundly Christian movie to this list that shockingly no American Christians have seen.
03:31:02.860 Khartoum, the story of Chinese Gordon in the Sudan.
03:31:06.880 Uh, Gordon was, uh, this was one of Martin Scorsese's favorite films, uh, but Gordon was a British general who was sent into the, uh, into the Sudan to fight, uh, the Mahdi, this, uh, yes, just like the, just like Dune.
03:31:25.760 uh the Mahdi this uh prophet of Islam who'd risen and was uh going to massacre all the civilians
03:31:34.800 of Khartoum of like the rival religions and stuff and he goes in and raises a private army
03:31:42.880 to prevent this massacre in like the 1880s um was the Sudan expedition and like dies a martyr's
03:31:52.140 death defending Khartoum, but that actually dooms the Mahdi and makes the British finally intervene
03:31:59.480 in spite of the protests of the media and whatnot. He dies this glorious martyr's death
03:32:06.540 trying to imitate Sir Galahad or one of these like classic British warrior martyrs of like
03:32:17.660 profound Christian faith and like rightly should have been sainted and wasn't uh mind you he was
03:32:25.740 Protestant so the Catholics wouldn't have sainted him but uh but the film version is profoundly
03:32:32.400 good and features Lawrence Olivier as the Mahdi in blackface and and Americans just don't care
03:32:42.840 about it. American Christians
03:32:44.280 don't care about it.
03:32:46.600 Completely dismissed, but it's like one of those
03:32:48.780 great films of British Empire
03:32:50.720 and like classical
03:32:53.040 like non-gay values.
03:32:59.300 Like, again,
03:33:00.880 it's a film about blackface, but...
03:33:05.600 Yeah, well,
03:33:06.800 the aesthetics matter in these things.
03:33:09.720 We'll throw that on there.
03:33:11.420 But yeah, no.
03:33:12.120 It's like the Tintin comics. It doesn't actually matter what the plot of a Tintin comic is.
03:33:16.940 The aesthetics and the weird Belgian representation of sub-Saharans is enough for you to get the gist of it, regardless of what the message is.
03:33:29.300 very much so
03:33:31.880 no but
03:33:33.160 this process of like going
03:33:36.640 into
03:33:37.280 our collective culture and drawing
03:33:40.520 out
03:33:40.940 what actually
03:33:44.660 matters when actually isn't faking gay
03:33:46.560 the actual tradition of our
03:33:48.620 peoples
03:33:49.120 this is the most important
03:33:52.860 thing
03:33:54.900 you can do
03:33:55.780 everything that has been
03:33:58.740 done in the past 80 years have been designed to break down your identity and break down your
03:34:07.260 history. And so if you can draw that out, you can wield it against them. And maybe the most
03:34:13.840 important one you can do right now, an assignment from my American listeners, is to go hard into
03:34:23.200 the, like, life of George Washington and, like, the American founders, because that's
03:34:29.980 one where, uh, for all the talk of, like, the founding period and the founders and all
03:34:35.540 that, uh, the libertarians actually don't read much about the founders.
03:34:40.200 This is one of my articles, I'll include in the notes, uh, the lie of libertarianism.
03:34:46.860 You know, libertarianism is reading a bunch of Jewish economists from the mid-20th century
03:34:51.540 you are kicked out of Austria.
03:34:53.560 You know, that's the textual backbone of modern libertarianism.
03:34:58.820 Actually going back and reading the primary text about the American founders
03:35:02.200 and actually reading, you know, the 19th century histories of the American Revolution
03:35:06.860 and actually reading, you know, the words of George Washington and the rest.
03:35:14.300 That's actually studying the campaigns of Washington, the early revolution.
03:35:19.240 uh that's probably one of the most important things you you could do in a in addition to
03:35:29.000 if you're in the south um reading up on the confederacy in the primary text of uh the war
03:35:36.260 between the states uh i have my big two volume uh jefferson jefferson davis uh
03:35:43.740 rise and fall of the Confederate government that I've been meaning to go through.
03:35:50.740 And if you're a Canadian like me, the other one is that I think all Canadians should read up on
03:35:58.580 is the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. I've got a big stack of texts on it
03:36:07.140 um, near me that I've been reading, meaning to read. Um, I've got letters from band Demon's Land
03:36:16.740 and a bunch of others I spent way too much on a used bookstore. Uh, uh, the story of the Upper
03:36:25.860 Canada Rebellion by John Charles Dent. I'll try to find a, um, archive version of that to include
03:36:34.240 in the show notes
03:36:35.040 so you kids at home
03:36:37.700 if you're a fellow
03:36:40.640 can look and do it
03:36:43.580 do you have any recommendations
03:36:47.540 for your Irish
03:36:49.840 compatriots
03:36:50.540 on books
03:36:52.520 not particularly
03:36:56.780 I always recommend if you're interested
03:36:58.580 in paganism
03:37:00.480 read The Ancient City by
03:37:02.160 Numa Denis Fustel de Cologne
03:37:03.920 it's by far
03:37:06.500 the best book on tracing
03:37:08.400 the origins of
03:37:09.740 pagan traditions
03:37:11.760 throughout
03:37:12.880 Roman and medieval history
03:37:16.480 I will include that
03:37:22.520 in show notes as well
03:37:23.500 any Irish specific stuff
03:37:25.300 it doesn't have to be paganism related
03:37:28.520 it can be like recent Irish history
03:37:30.500 it can be your favorite book
03:37:32.280 on this civil war or the
03:37:34.220 rebellion or
03:37:35.800 what have you.
03:37:38.180 Something that reifies
03:37:40.200 Irish identity. Well, South
03:37:42.040 Armada Bandit Country is always a fairly safe
03:37:44.220 bet right there.
03:37:46.960 I will
03:37:48.180 link Bandit Country again.
03:37:51.340 Such an amazing
03:37:52.360 book.
03:37:55.040 Bandit Country is for you
03:37:56.360 kids at home who don't know.
03:37:57.880 It is the story of
03:38:00.100 the IRA in South
03:38:01.940 the uh the most elite sniper campaign ever carried out by guerrillas uh they shot down helicopters
03:38:09.680 and like uh the british could not travel by car they had to travel by helicopter and like operate
03:38:17.820 out of like these fortified outposts that were like submarines in the interior because they
03:38:24.680 take like mortar fire
03:38:26.400 and
03:38:27.380 sniper fire
03:38:30.680 like these hellish little outlets
03:38:32.640 yeah I'm doxing myself here
03:38:34.780 a little bit but
03:38:35.560 my grandfather was a judge
03:38:37.980 and
03:38:39.440 he got to fly
03:38:41.540 over her mouth for a murder investigation
03:38:44.800 or something like that
03:38:45.720 he was normally a civil judge
03:38:48.600 but they needed to bring him in because
03:38:50.080 they needed an outsider for some reason
03:38:52.820 and so
03:38:54.620 He had a fun, you know, three days or a week, hopping from farm to farm in a helicopter, you know, being ferried around by, you know, a full complement of British troops.
03:39:10.700 As they, you know, basically they were just trying to give the impression that the rule of law is still employed.
03:39:20.800 I'm glad your grandfather survived that.
03:39:24.620 I mean nobody shot at him
03:39:28.560 it was just you know
03:39:29.900 it was helicopter only so
03:39:32.620 made a fun story for him which
03:39:36.340 probably one of his more enjoyable
03:39:38.740 cases
03:39:39.660 no
03:39:44.620 incredible but yeah
03:39:46.600 this is
03:39:47.820 what I encourage
03:39:49.440 I encourage all you
03:39:52.460 who
03:39:53.420 again, I'm including a link to the Anarchonomicon Discord in the show notes when this episode
03:40:02.180 comes out. Do join us for our online book club. But if you show up in our interest,
03:40:10.340 I encourage you to start classics book clubs and pagan book clubs in your area. That's
03:40:19.340 that's what a faith is that's what a religion is it's being in touch with your roots and
03:40:26.200 traditions start a start a based film club you know this is and you know you can call it religious
03:40:35.300 or you can call it civic whatever uh depending depending on uh your cast of characters but uh
03:40:43.800 this is how how we spread this is how we create communities this is how we um
03:40:49.800 this is how we how we inculcate our values and like create culture again you know we have to
03:41:00.080 be we have to create art but most important but more than that we have to appreciate the art that
03:41:08.020 we have which we have a profound amount of it if we could just sort it from the the like
03:41:13.800 slop trash
03:41:15.580 goodnight everyone
03:41:21.220 alright do you have anything else to add or
03:41:25.300 no I'm all set
03:41:26.360 and should people be
03:41:29.440 looking you up anywhere or like
03:41:31.200 do you have it
03:41:33.040 the god sword will be linked in the show notes
03:41:35.640 probably before this
03:41:37.580 is released I will
03:41:39.680 put a second one up which is
03:41:41.320 going to be an exploration of
03:41:43.420 the word earth from planet earth and how it relates to history
03:41:53.500 thank you so much and uh you listeners out there stay glories
03:42:13.420 Thank you.
03:42:43.420 Thank you.
03:43:13.420 Thank you.
03:43:43.420 Thank you.
03:44:13.420 Thank you.
03:44:43.420 Thank you.
03:45:13.420 You