RadixJournal - November 11, 2022


Inexplicable Genius

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Plato Kronos Zeus Jack Nicholson James Bond Jar Jar Statesman Socrates Richard Strauss Kalos Marx
Christian Antisemitism The Jesus Hoax

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

145.43

Word count

2,239

Sentence count

162

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the role of the philosopher Socrates in the Greek Republic, why he was so important, and why he's so important in the modern world. We also talk about his role in the myth of the mythos, and the role he plays in the story of Zeus.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Richard, I was curious to hear more about your interpretation of Plato's cave.
00:00:05.580 I've been thinking about this for a while.
00:00:08.140 It seems like you kind of have a different twist on that interpretation of Plato's cave.
00:00:13.380 Yeah.
00:00:14.580 I have a kind of Straussian reading of it.
00:00:17.760 I mean, it's not necessarily Strauss's reading, but there's an esoteric message that is suggested to you.
00:00:25.880 And then there is the exoteric message, which is exactly what you said, where it's at one point you were chained in a cave looking at shadows on the wall and with everyone else.
00:00:36.620 And then you left the cave and you saw the light of the sun.
00:00:41.620 And so you saw the good in itself or the idea of the good, the real, real.
00:00:47.300 And then you went in to try to tell these people what was happening and they didn't want to believe you.
00:00:54.760 A couple of things.
00:00:57.080 So first off, as we know, Plato counsels lying as a politician.
00:01:06.680 And he counsels lying in general.
00:01:09.660 Like the big lie of the Republic is actually that we all came from the earth.
00:01:14.560 And so we kind of like we're a nation that sprung from the earth.
00:01:19.840 And I think that is kind of a big lie of nationalism in some ways.
00:01:23.920 Like you Germans just grew out of the ground, basically. 1.00
00:01:29.280 There's some other lies.
00:01:30.640 He also, throughout the Republic, tells you pretty vividly that the philosopher in politics, I mean, politics is kind of the royal science.
00:01:42.300 I mean, it should be at least the queen of the sciences. 0.89
00:01:45.380 This is statesman. 0.91
00:01:46.740 And he talks about, like, isn't this more important than caring for pigs?
00:01:51.240 You know, surely we would have, we would allow reason to guide us and the best to guide us in this of all professions.
00:01:59.640 Why do we have petty tyrants and demagogues and people who slither up the pole and all that kind of stuff?
00:02:08.080 Why do they succeed at this?
00:02:10.240 This is not terrible in some way.
00:02:13.300 You know, there's the metaphor of the ship of state, of the man who's able to look at the constellations, who could actually navigate.
00:02:21.180 But the tragedy is, is that he can never get a hold of the rudder.
00:02:26.080 And so he kind of tells us that this is impossible in some way.
00:02:31.880 And that the, that at every stage, you're going to have to engage in some kind of lying or censorship.
00:02:42.520 You know, since his promotion of censorship is pretty explicit.
00:02:47.520 There's another kind of element to this, which I've also stressed, which is the, the platonic motive is to valorize dialectic.
00:03:01.880 Over your lying eyes, in effect.
00:03:06.480 So, you know, your lying eyes might tell you that this dude who is super rich and has lots of chicks and a great chariot, your lying eyes would tell him that that's the good. 0.67
00:03:19.900 But in fact, that's not the good.
00:03:22.720 At least not necessarily the good.
00:03:25.560 And that you need to start to arrive at the good through dialectic.
00:03:30.540 Now, what is dialectic?
00:03:32.840 In some ways, that word is kind of overdefined, like Hegelian dialectic and synthesis word.
00:03:38.180 Dialectic means discussion.
00:03:41.760 It means words.
00:03:43.260 It means conversation.
00:03:46.240 And so you're going to slowly acquire the good in itself via language.
00:03:54.300 It's an odd metaphor that he stresses looking the sun itself when his entire motive in throughout all of his works, the Republic especially, is to valorize language and logical reasoning towards something as opposed to the visual.
00:04:21.160 The visual is brought down and the linguistic is brought high in Plato.
00:04:28.840 I mean, this is a really major move that he makes.
00:04:33.900 So it's rather odd to kind of have all these metaphors of like dark caves and so on.
00:04:41.780 And then, you know, you get out of them and you see the sun.
00:04:45.100 You just see it right before you.
00:04:46.580 He doesn't want you to see the sun.
00:04:48.720 He wants you to arrive at the idea of the good, which is the sun in this case, through dialectical reasoning.
00:04:56.500 So it's a kind of curious move.
00:04:58.680 It's kind of like the metaphor is, in fact, the reverse of what he's saying.
00:05:04.160 And as I have also stressed, I mean, and this is rather explicit, but throughout the Republic, he is absolutely undermining Greek religion. 0.91
00:05:17.200 So he is telling you that, you know, oh, my gosh, Zeus, you know, he had sex with all these women. 0.99
00:05:23.620 Oh, my God, this is not good. 0.98
00:05:25.300 Surely it's not good, Socrates.
00:05:26.740 Oh, you're right.
00:05:27.340 And we need to imagine a kind of different type of God that is beyond these superhuman or all too human gods that were promoted at the time.
00:05:43.740 So he's kind of subtly undermining things.
00:05:46.860 And he worries about all of these kind of myths and, you know, oh, the myth of Kalos.
00:05:52.300 Oh, do we really want that?
00:05:53.420 And yet, on the other hand, all of his philosophy is just this effort at myth-making.
00:06:02.480 At the end of the Republic, he goes into a myth of reincarnation and, in effect, heaven and hell.
00:06:11.340 I mean, there is a line in Theotatus, which is just incredible, from Socrates, where it's like, surely you can't believe that you won't be punished in an afterlife
00:06:22.420 for your behavior in this world.
00:06:24.580 I'm not actually in my library now, but I could go find it.
00:06:28.140 There are lines that are just basically like the entire 2,000 years of Christianity summed up in, like, one line.
00:06:36.340 This was something new.
00:06:37.500 This was something he was bringing into the world.
00:06:40.740 And he puts it in the mouth of Socrates as a curious figure.
00:06:44.860 And then he has all these people around, you know, agreeing with him.
00:06:48.560 And even in, like, Statesman, I mean, the myth is really like the Earth turning in the other direction in the age of Kronos, the age of Saturn.
00:06:57.720 And humans kind of coming out of the Earth.
00:07:02.040 So he kind of, like, reiterates the Republic myth in this.
00:07:06.460 His whole body is a bunch of myth-making.
00:07:10.300 And yet he tells us that he wants to censor myth and that we want justified, didactic, you know, we don't want any of that Medea stuff.
00:07:19.320 We want didactic kind of instruction for the youth.
00:07:23.600 And yet his whole project is myth-making.
00:07:28.340 So there are just some curious things that are going on with Plato.
00:07:33.400 And what I would suggest is that he is undermining and, in some cases, actively trying to censor the Greek religion and the Greek world.
00:07:44.940 And he's kind of taking early steps to moving to a new type of religion and philosophy.
00:07:52.580 And this would be a kind of age of Kronos, as he imagines it.
00:07:57.600 Greek religion is, it seems to be a kind of story of overcoming previous religions.
00:08:05.340 You know, that basic myth of Kronos eating his children and then Zeus kind of tricking him and then escaping cannibalism and then growing strong and intelligent and then coming back.
00:08:18.800 And, you know, it's like I'm now 25 and I'm intelligent as hell and been training for my whole life. 1.00
00:08:25.500 I'm just going to kick your ass. 1.00
00:08:27.100 There's this myth about overcoming an earlier religion, which I think Plato is kind of getting to. 1.00
00:08:33.460 And he wants to go back to chronology, to Kronos, Saturn alien culture.
00:08:39.260 So there's just a lot of curious aspects about this.
00:08:45.020 But he clearly wants to get away from Zeus worship towards something.
00:08:48.740 We don't quite know what it is, a kind of unknown God who would be all good.
00:08:54.020 It was kind of like a placeholder, in a way, waiting for something.
00:08:57.400 And I do think that Christianity kind of was able to fulfill that.
00:09:00.540 But in terms of the cave itself, look, you could basically say that we shouldn't read too much into this.
00:09:10.900 You know, he's making a really memorable image.
00:09:15.400 And, you know, don't be like one of those guys who has some weird theory about Star Wars or something.
00:09:22.460 Like Jar Jar is the real villain or some theories about how James Bond is always the same character and is a code name.
00:09:29.640 Anyway, these are people just reading too much into something.
00:09:33.640 They're, you know, they're much simpler explanations for things.
00:09:41.200 You don't have to come up with some secret theory that doesn't really even improve the whole thing.
00:09:47.140 But I don't think I would say that about Plato's cave because this is so of such monumental importance.
00:09:54.860 He might very well be suggesting a reading to certain people and suggesting another reading to others and that you don't have to say everything and that you can hint at things or kind of allow them to complete the thought in their own mind.
00:10:14.740 So he doesn't, like, he could have come up with a myth of the cave of, like, a guy, like, if you imagine, like, you're lost in darkness and you only have, like, your smell and your touch as a sense and your hearing, I guess.
00:10:30.380 And so you're, like, you're putting your hands on the wall of the cave and you're figuring a way out or something.
00:10:36.600 And then you get out of the cave and you've never seen the light of day before.
00:10:39.960 Now you see the sun.
00:10:41.380 He could have done that, but he didn't.
00:10:43.880 He did a puppet show.
00:10:45.860 He did basically a movie theater.
00:10:48.100 He imagined the movie theater before Wagner and before cinema, Hollywood.
00:10:54.740 So he imagined this people in a movie theater, trapped in a movie theater, in fact, looking at projection.
00:11:01.100 And you have to thus ask yourself, who are the puppet masters?
00:11:10.940 Who are these people who are doing shadow poetry on a cave, who are basically making cinema?
00:11:20.000 Who are they?
00:11:21.620 Are they not just as enlightened as the man who sees the sun?
00:11:25.940 Or are they, in fact, more enlightened?
00:11:28.080 They're the ones putting on the show.
00:11:31.580 I do think he's saying something about human nature, where you're trying to convince people that those shadows are not real.
00:11:37.420 I do think people will often, you know, attack you for that.
00:11:43.480 Oh, no question.
00:11:44.800 We all get that.
00:11:45.840 Like that, you know, you try to grab someone by the ears and tell them the truth and they resist and resist and resist.
00:11:53.080 Yes.
00:11:53.360 So my thought was, well, I would be better off if I have been able to look at the sun.
00:11:59.860 I would be better off joining or projecting the images instead.
00:12:05.280 You know, instead of trying to, you know, it is kind of futile to try to convince those people that the shadows are not real.
00:12:13.260 But maybe instead you could cast some better shadows.
00:12:18.260 Yeah, that is what I'm suggesting he's actually telling you.
00:12:25.880 Because he is himself a myth maker.
00:12:28.760 You know, he is obviously engaging in rational disputation, but he acknowledges that it's just kind of futile at the end of the day. 1.00
00:12:35.520 You know, these idiots will never learn, basically. 1.00
00:12:38.600 And he's also counseling lying. 1.00
00:12:44.480 And so all of these people, like, I think we've, I've mentioned this before, but like, you know, the Heritage Foundation or like some great books college or whatever, they'll be like, oh, Plato's Cave.
00:12:57.200 You know, finally, you know, finally, you open up the book and it opens up the world to you and you see the truth and whatever.
00:13:04.940 I do think the, his message is much darker, literally and figuratively than that.
00:13:12.980 Um, he's certainly attacking like solar religion, sun worship, Zeus, Apollo, etc.
00:13:20.760 He's, he's trying to move you away from that.
00:13:23.720 And B, he, he offers this kind of tantalizing, unfinished image of basically enlightened people keeping others literally and figuratively in the dark and showing them cinema.
00:13:39.900 So it's actually rather disturbing and keeping them in chains as well.
00:13:49.460 Right.
00:13:50.200 I was going to ask, you know, what is the alternative or alternative to that?
00:13:54.580 The Marx system of like Roman interpretation and then also creating these worlds, these new worlds that can, you know, produce new forms of art.
00:14:04.720 You know, what is the alternative?
00:14:07.400 Are you going to cast shadows that somehow tell the truth?
00:14:10.960 Like, what is, what is the vision for an Apollonian?
00:14:14.980 That is the question.
00:14:16.480 I mean, maybe we should learn something from Plato.
00:14:20.040 To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, like, can we actually handle the truth?
00:14:26.400 And what, you know, and if the answer is no, like, what kind of work do you want to be involved in and in projecting something for someone to look at?
00:14:37.400 But I think this is also kind of like the problem of like red pilling people or something.
00:14:45.100 Do you really want to red pill the normies?
00:14:48.480 At the very best, they might resist you.
00:14:53.560 And at the very best, they also might ignore you.
00:14:56.780 And at the very worst, they might be destroyed by you.
00:15:00.460 So, you know, this whole thing of effects is a couple minutes of theoy 000 Copas, so people will go somewhere else.
00:15:08.160 So, let's say that a couple minutes of above.
00:15:08.820 But have you guys felt like a couple of days?
00:15:13.660 It's hard to say.
00:15:14.920 It feels like you need an iPad.
00:15:18.020 And then you're doing something else anywhere you need.
00:15:20.900 All right.
00:15:22.200 See you in the next cycle?