RadixJournal - Nietzsche, Civilization, and Anti-Culture

00:00:00.000 fantastic well um i guess i'll keep the introduction brief because the the meat the

00:00:04.600 revelation of character will probably happen when we start talking about this stuff but

00:00:07.960 i'm an irish man first of all and um i guess i would start with my character and personality

00:00:13.500 i'm very creative very imaginative you could call me that type of open-minded type of person

00:00:18.880 and i was in college and i developed a big fascination with nietzsche and young and various

00:00:25.000 german idealists i guess you could call them and i basically dropped out of college and

00:00:30.620 tried to sort of figure my own way through the world started to essentially become some type of

00:00:35.800 quasi entrepreneur youtuber you know the way modern millennials are these days where they're kind of

00:00:40.420 doing a lot of hats on many they wear many different hats types things and i'm sort of running a yeah

00:00:46.380 kind of a crazy combination of all of those things i talk about philosophy i talk about storytelling

00:00:50.740 and talked about skill development and um yeah i have many different concerns i'm concerned about

00:00:55.180 the nature of western culture right now that's one thing that is uh not looking that great but i'm also

00:00:59.200 concerned about things like personal development and a variety of things like that so um i think i'll

00:01:03.960 leave the bio there so you're in your mid-20s or so no i mean i'm in my late 20s now in my late 20s

00:01:11.580 now okay well that's not much of a difference uh yeah that is remarkable um yeah i feel like uh

00:01:19.600 in some ways that the trajectory of my life but but compressed so uh that is uh that is very

00:01:28.440 interesting uh i've actually yeah go sorry to interrupt but i've been checking around like because

00:01:33.740 i've been reading some of mark's stuff and i've also found um some some essays that you did on

00:01:39.000 nietzsche and i was like man these are really really good they're really really precise and i found

00:01:42.760 some things you were talking about uh bowden uh what's his name jonathan bowden yeah so they

00:01:48.740 were really good as well so i was checking that stuff out and it's uh it's really it was helping

00:01:52.240 me like flesh out some thoughts and stuff and that so it's good stuff juicy oh thanks yeah well you

00:01:57.040 know i've got a lot uh there's a lot more where that came from so i uh i'm gonna be releasing that

00:02:04.280 as as time goes on so yeah it's it's something that i'm very very interested in and like you i i've

00:02:10.960 been interested in nietzsche for really most of my life uh or adult life that is so we're going on a

00:02:18.280 quarter century of uh in you know being a nietzsche fanboy or just being kind of obsessed with him

00:02:26.380 never it always returning to him and there's something new to learn i i think i first read him

00:02:34.940 as i was when i was an undergraduate and um i was you know engaging in some intellectual expansion

00:02:42.620 on a a number of different levels and i read the genealogy of morality first and uh i again it's

00:02:53.480 something it definitely affected me it kind of blew my mind so to speak kind of shattered a lot of

00:02:59.480 assumptions that i had uh but what i've noticed is that every time i return to those books i find a

00:03:07.920 new perspective on them and i feel like i uncover something or it may be in some ways i've changed

00:03:14.840 and and thus i'm i'm reading it with um new eyes and you know there are a few authors that are like

00:03:22.680 that i i think a lot of authors they you know shoot their shot and they are who they are uh but

00:03:29.420 i i think with nietzsche there's there's a lot of becoming and then then a lot of layers and and

00:03:35.480 nuance to it so i i i would put him up there with shakespeare and plato and a number of other people

00:03:41.960 who i kind of keep returning to and and return to critically and return to refreshed um yeah like

00:03:50.860 man you know it's it's so funny but genealogy of morals was one of the first first books that i read

00:03:56.140 by him as well specifically essay one because i hadn't i hadn't a notion what was going on in

00:04:00.420 essay two or essay three but i got essay one i kind of understood that that was a bit more clear to me

00:04:04.620 i tried to read zarathustra before that as well that's that's the meme book we all go to and um

00:04:09.080 yeah of course that that just went completely over my head is like that's the worst one to start with

00:04:13.100 i would say it was it was very very bad you know but like that's obviously what you're going to go

00:04:18.180 to because it's very it's very it's where all the prestige is and whatnot right and

00:04:21.960 but genealogy of morals because this is something that even i guess you're saying that you find them

00:04:27.360 you find yourself constantly going back to him again like myself and a part of that i think is

00:04:31.400 just that he's one of the highest quality writers i think out in the western literature canon you know

00:04:37.720 like it's unbelievable how good he is and um genealogy of morals is a brilliant expression of

00:04:42.300 that it's such it's so well written it's so captivating he's so good at um at really capturing

00:04:48.700 your imagination his turn of phrase it's just like so brilliant he's so good at like one-liners

00:04:53.700 and stuff like this and just layers him through the whole thing so i think it's um absolutely

00:04:57.160 brilliant and i think even the man himself said that you when you read something you go away and

00:05:03.460 you come back and you have changed therefore what you get out of it changes like you can only get so

00:05:07.380 much out of a book that uh that you've gotten out of yourself in some sense and i've definitely found

00:05:11.300 the same thing myself it's it says an awful lot about where we are in some sense where we have

00:05:16.460 this figurehead almost like this prophet the heathen prophet i guess you could call him and he

00:05:21.700 is got this ability just with this bizarre intuitive way that he thinks he's got this

00:05:28.220 eternal fertile ability to to help people collage their thoughts against him it's it's almost like

00:05:35.220 the way he wasn't systematic allowed him to be uh almost like this this this hard thing that people

00:05:41.520 people can bash up against and he generates creative perspectives and it's just it's very very fertile

00:05:46.440 overall because almost every major figure has been huge into nietzsche since he was about

00:05:50.540 yeah that's definitely true i i noticed that you jumped on a space that i jumped on i guess it was

00:05:58.640 um early in the morning uh over in the um uh over in ireland and it was uh quite late i was about to

00:06:05.180 fall asleep on it uh but um where there there was a uh a discussion of nietzsche and um uh yeah i mean i

00:06:16.380 i think i mentioned there i as i get a little bit older and i i get a little more critical i i start to

00:06:23.400 see a kind of christian structure to nietzsche which is something that i never would have imagined when i

00:06:31.940 first read him and it was like oh look at this badass atheist you know uh attacking the modern world

00:06:38.660 and so on and i i do see him in a different way now but let's talk a little bit about morality so i mean

00:06:44.980 did did you did you i i i think also when coming to nietzsche you you do come at him from a point of

00:06:55.580 alienation on some level like you're you have that you know uh splinter in your mind that something's

00:07:03.840 wrong with the world and you and it's not just you know uh the prices of the subway are too high or

00:07:13.200 taxes suck or or whatever or you know women are on tender now or only fans or something all this

00:07:20.040 stuff that people endlessly complain about but there's something bigger and and and i think that

00:07:26.160 i think he located that something bigger that something wrong with the world in morality itself

00:07:33.420 and um it is do you do you resonate with that um in the sense that like there there's a yeah nietzsche

00:07:42.220 might not be systematic but he's he's uncovering a certain kind of system that is inflecting and

00:07:49.940 informing the world and that's the thing you have to address before you can start addressing all of

00:07:57.220 these issues that are that are ultimately kind of epiphenomenon at the end of the day um you know

00:08:03.360 dating life sucks i can't afford an apartment all that all that's real and certainly something i could

00:08:08.840 you know be sympathetic towards but but it's not really getting at the heart of the matter and the

00:08:13.680 heart of that matter is the moral system that informs the modern age man there's so much in this

00:08:20.300 like i this is again one of those things i constantly come back to naughty nasty nietzsche about i think the

00:08:25.160 first thing that hits me is that the the thing that he stresses because i come from the sort of

00:08:30.440 psychoanalytic psychological thing is is how unconscious this stuff is like your value system

00:08:35.560 is buried at the very root of your psyche as the likes of freud and young would say and you aren't aware

00:08:41.920 that it's even a thing now this is a big deal because when it comes to making decisions in your life

00:08:46.560 what these guys will tell you is that your value system is actually the predicate that's leading to

00:08:51.580 the logic of how you rationalize decisions to yourself and how you make decisions

00:08:54.800 and this actually is like technically what we would sort of mean by morality it's decision making

00:08:59.080 and so we have this very interesting thing where we we have this set of beliefs i guess you could

00:09:05.260 say but it's not necessarily beliefs it's it's like we care about things i guess and again nietzsche

00:09:09.820 is just so penetrative in the way he understands this like we care about helping the poor or we care

00:09:14.340 about um being nice or we we care about whatever like whatever thing we value we would say

00:09:19.080 and this is deeply buried inside of us unquestioned and as a consequence of this when we go and live

00:09:24.440 our lives we we sort of act out that value system we act out that story you've probably heard someone

00:09:29.860 like fucking jordan peterson like described this we're acting out our unconscious value but it's

00:09:33.880 very much along those lines he's getting that from psychoanalysis yeah and nietzsche nietzsche's just

00:09:38.060 so brutal like so brutal where he's he's basically saying all the downstream effects like our moral behavior

00:09:45.260 the manifest behaviors we have in the world are a consequence of the value structures that we have

00:09:52.240 inside of our souls i guess you would say and he just he just pokes at the thing you're not supposed

00:09:57.300 to poke at he says how what can we ask questions about that value system is that value system really

00:10:03.420 correct is it useful is it good like what is it and so when i was growing up i completely unconsciously

00:10:09.600 was essentially a sort of liberal i was um grew up in a modern household the values were like that

00:10:16.740 again like when you read nietzsche and he points out that you're an eight you're a christian moralist

00:10:21.520 but an atheist he's like that's the modern european the european pessimism or buddhism or whatever

00:10:26.080 that was exactly the experience i had growing up like a very christian upbringing but not really

00:10:31.020 like massively theistic we went to church and stuff like this but it wasn't like my grandmother was

00:10:35.020 like really really catholic but you know parents were just they were sort of doing it for the

00:10:38.700 the ropes the schooling i went up to was very sterilized of religion the culture i grew up in

00:10:43.640 is like religion's not seen as that important and all this stuff yes we are catholic ireland i would

00:10:48.460 assume just just out of curiosity or were you a protestant you're a catholic ireland yeah well i

00:10:53.080 have a unique kind of mix because i actually knew a lot of protestants and i was talking to them and i

00:10:57.820 very intimate um like i i very very i some very very good friends there and i guess i could see the

00:11:03.140 differences in culture but it wasn't like hugely distinct like there was definitely the being irish was

00:11:07.940 probably a bigger phenomenon there because i was just that's just you know what is what is the joke

00:11:12.980 uh when someone says um you know are you a catholic or a protestant in ireland and they said well i'm an

00:11:18.300 atheist actually they said so are you a catholic atheist or a protestant atheist that's the that's

00:11:25.180 the stuff yeah well that's the type of stuff where you get a get a bum underneath your your um

00:11:29.620 your pedal in your car if you're not careful so that was right but um right but as i said like i was

00:11:36.020 growing up in that context very much a modern modern um every i think everybody's gone through

00:11:40.520 this a little bit and i was not aware of this value system i read genealogy of morals and it was

00:11:45.600 almost like i couldn't even hit me because i couldn't even peer that deep into myself especially

00:11:50.240 at that age and then as i got older and i guess you could say the the sort of cascading of red

00:11:55.480 pills that happened in the last uh last couple of years and all this really threw up the the

00:12:00.660 crisis of culture in my face and it made me start to realize like it's sort of a criticism of western

00:12:06.540 culture started to land home like i really started to see anti-liberal perspectives and stuff like this

00:12:11.600 and that was flipping on the head the whole story of of of my youth and stuff like this and this really

00:12:17.180 started to open up a question of like well what does that mean what's going on and then i i see now

00:12:21.280 all sorts of fascinating problems showing up like people flipping back to christianity and it's like

00:12:26.900 well nietzsche's got a critique of christianity or what's going on there and all these these

00:12:32.220 fascinating things so i think it's a a huge deal very very fascinating a lot of a lot of derivative

00:12:36.660 consequences but if you've any thoughts on that let's uh well yeah i mean i i'm curious what will

00:12:41.900 you think about these things because i i think a lot of people on the right they they like to go back to

00:12:48.400 some time when it all changed so your basic conservative in europe or america um they they

00:12:59.060 might look back to some period maybe the 1980s i guess or the 1950s that's the real classic one

00:13:06.080 uh when everything worked so every you know 99 out of 100 people were attending church every sunday

00:13:14.220 outside of the village atheist and uh it was very you know you you turn 20 ish and you can work and

00:13:22.120 get a job and get a wife and have 2.5 kids and uh you know get a gold watch after working at your

00:13:28.880 corporation for 30 years and then die in bed uh and this is just perfect there was there was patriotism

00:13:36.100 economic success etc and these myths are kind of different in every country but i i think deeper

00:13:42.640 conservatives that they'll try to find some turning point um uh there's a a school that would actually

00:13:52.260 include some straussians would would include some uh weaver and some other conservatives as well of

00:13:59.460 looking to to occam uh something happened in the middle ages but i i would say with nietzsche i i i i think

00:14:08.420 he sees a major moral turn really in the ancient world and it's it's not that something like the

00:14:17.780 enlightenment wasn't profoundly important uh or or even things in the 20th century you know the pill

00:14:24.280 uh uh free access to condoms and abortion of course those are important and and and and shattering in

00:14:32.860 some way but i i think he sees this much longer term episode of morality and that the the turning

00:14:43.260 really occurred it occurred in rome um it occurred in the ancient world it might have even occurred with

00:14:50.660 plato i mean he doesn't he doesn't quite make it specific because you know because of the type of

00:14:56.200 writer he is um but i i think he sees this as as kind of like a much longer turn a longer term

00:15:04.380 episode that we're experiencing and it's not just you know something went bad 10 years ago with you

00:15:12.100 know i don't know barack obama or tony blair or something and now the world sucks or something it's

00:15:17.960 it's something went back and something went wrong in the ancient world and and and i think that's a

00:15:23.000 it's a very bold claim and but i i think it's something true in a way and and again not that

00:15:29.780 these things like you know the french enlightenment or the pill not that these things are unimportant

00:15:34.620 of course they are but they they're also kind of all riding that bigger wave but but what do you

00:15:42.240 think about what do you think about that notion i i think this is absolutely correct so i try to look

00:15:48.320 at this stuff culturally because it's it's one thing again to to read this i would sit down there

00:15:52.640 and i'd read genealogy of morals and i'd read this when i'm a young man and then it would manifest

00:15:57.560 around me and like this this stuff actively happened i lived through these ideas coming to

00:16:02.880 life and that floors you man because this is one thing that you know you keep going back to him

00:16:07.680 he's he is genuinely prophetic like he predicts things to accuracies that it just astounds you

00:16:13.620 sometimes and so i'm living through this experience where you know like jordan peterson shows up

00:16:19.460 in the mainstream culture and start saying god is dead and it's terrible i'm like whoa god is dead

00:16:24.520 and that's what these people say what's going on here yeah and and you notice us going through these

00:16:28.660 phenomenon and so what i wonder about it is that like is is there a an instance where this stuff has

00:16:34.840 been baked into the cake for for maybe centuries or at very least decades and then an awful lot of

00:16:39.920 people nowadays are just sort of waking up to the effects so like the the cause has long since

00:16:44.180 happened and now people are waking up and the frog has been boiled you know and they're like oh my god every you know

00:16:49.300 there's transgender people a lot of people complaining about this stuff or like dating life

00:16:53.420 has gone to shit as you said or the breakdown in in culture in general and then at that point they

00:16:58.440 they they wake up and they're like they they say there's something wrong what's wrong what's wrong

00:17:02.060 what's wrong and the natural human instinct i even think of this in a very like mechanical down

00:17:06.500 to earth analogy like if you're a boxer and you go and you're fighting and then you lose a fight

00:17:10.960 you're gonna go back to your coach and your coach is gonna be like well let's go back to the drawing

00:17:14.420 board what was working last time stop being so creative stop being so crazy this is sort of like

00:17:18.620 the critique of progressivism you know stop doing crazy shit fuck science science is obviously a

00:17:23.240 terrible thing fuck the future fuck all this type of stuff let's go back to 1950s or something like

00:17:28.020 this or or kind of revert back to something or as you said like a lot of people are like let's go back

00:17:32.120 to the noughties where what's the conservators are like let's go back to the 2000s where we lived in

00:17:37.020 the american pie movies or something like this that was when everybody was cool this type of stuff then

00:17:41.600 some people are like the 50s but you know like even you could go to the 50s the 50s were futuristic and

00:17:46.560 modernistic as hell like they were absolutely wild you know and then again go back to the 19th

00:17:51.480 century this is a big one now with the kind of um the return to the traditional architecture which is

00:17:56.500 really cool but it is like at the same time it's is it congruent is authentic and then the return to

00:18:03.260 even further back you know to the medieval christianity or something like this i think that

00:18:07.300 the instinct the thing i always analyze is the emotional instinct i try to approach this stuff

00:18:11.860 psychologically so people are coming up against a problem like a boxer your western culture is a

00:18:18.320 boxer it's after losing it's it's it's fucked up and so it decides it reacts to that experience by

00:18:24.000 thinking what was the last thing that worked i want to go back to this and that could be anything

00:18:27.440 inside of their heads it doesn't mean it's true they'll just almost sometimes just pick something

00:18:31.440 sentimental to them now the kind of question is is that the correct approach that's not how you think

00:18:36.740 that's almost like the incorrect version of thinking that's you know reasoning reasoning in a

00:18:41.600 conservative way which is not wrong it can work but the correct thing is to say to yourself assess

00:18:46.420 the situation ask yourself what is the first principles of what is going wrong here and then

00:18:51.100 decide an effective approach of action going forward and i think this is what nietzsche achieves

00:18:54.900 i i like in some sense nietzsche does point back to like roman judea for example but i'm not sure if

00:19:00.200 if it's even like if it's the correct way to follow his line of thinking to say that

00:19:04.300 we must pin the exact moment where everything went wrong it's more of a question of like we

00:19:09.440 existentially exist in our current situation there's a variety of different like causal forces

00:19:16.100 that led to these trends how can we assess our situation and plot out and understand the nature

00:19:21.580 of our situation accurately focus on the correct things we need to focus on and then build a future

00:19:26.200 out of that and i think this is what he was trying to do with the trans valuation of all values he

00:19:30.520 was trying to look back and say well why do we have the culture we have okay obviously

00:19:34.120 judea conquered rome spiritually why do we have this culture right now now was that conquest correct

00:19:39.320 if we could actually do something quite similar to that and re-evaluate what we're doing and create

00:19:44.780 a new structure to our value system change those subconscious first principles would that set us

00:19:50.060 on a path where we could overcome our situation and not be like crushed by i guess you could call

00:19:54.500 it modernity or something like this and so i see him as a very pragmatic problem orientated

00:19:58.940 thinker which actually turns him into some sense a futuristic thinker a very optimistic thinker in

00:20:04.060 some senses as well so um yeah that's that's sort of yeah well i i think there's there's another

00:20:08.680 aspect to this is that nietzsche he's not a reactionary in the sense that he wants to return

00:20:15.780 to rome and go crucify christ again or something like that i mean he it's that that's not what he's

00:20:23.380 doing i i think he feels like we had to go through this age we you know christianity is going to in

00:20:32.940 christian morality is going to ultimately lead to the nihilism that he he was experiencing in you know

00:20:41.420 the mid to late 19th century europe but but but certainly the nihilism that we are experiencing the

00:20:47.480 21st century but it also made us deep in a way we we there's no way out but through we we have to

00:20:55.680 pass through this age in order to get to the other side so any kind of reactionary thinking is is is

00:21:04.060 rewinding a videotape and trying to get to like the the earlier point but you know if if you're watching

00:21:10.760 uh i i don't know what what's a uh what's a a a tragic movie um you know you're you're watching

00:21:20.820 the godfather or something and expecting it to have a happy ending if you replay it it's not it's

00:21:25.620 going to have the same you're you're you're not you're going to go through this even if you could

00:21:31.740 you know hop in a time machine and go backwards and and and so there in a way are are great benefits

00:21:38.260 to christianity you know like the blonde beast you know image that he has in the genealogy that is

00:21:47.180 something that obviously nietzsche admires there's just some aspect of nietzsche that is a lot like

00:21:54.640 conan the barbarian or you know something you know it's just let's crush our enemies and dance to the

00:22:00.640 lamentation of their women or whatever that that is in there in nietzsche but that's not the entire

00:22:06.680 story i i feel like he he challenges us to kind of will the past in a way you know it's not not to

00:22:17.780 not think that you know the last 2 000 years has been a disaster and we just need to kind of larp as

00:22:24.360 romans or larp as medieval monks or larp as 1950s businessmen um we need to kind of will our past

00:22:33.280 experience and allow like follow it all the way through to its ultimate conclusion which is going

00:22:42.040 to be something terrifying and tumultuous it is going to be a world war the likes of which we can't

00:22:49.920 imagine it it is going to be the the shattering of gender relations it it is going to be um people

00:22:57.180 engaging in casual nihilism that we see today whether it's through you know deaths of despair and

00:23:03.180 suicide or self-deconstruction like we we need to pass through this because we we chose this at an

00:23:10.840 important point you can't reverse this process this process is much stronger than you and so you need

00:23:16.840 to kind of you need to embrace the process and ride it out until the end and i i think that's kind

00:23:24.680 of one of the more challenging aspects and and that's where i do you know i mean leo strauss himself

00:23:31.040 said like when you're dealing with nietzsche you're dealing with a figure of the radical right you

00:23:35.040 know don't don't give me this fuco stuff or derrida or whatever that's all fine but you're dealing with

00:23:42.520 a radical aristocratic thinker and let's not forget who he is but on the other hand i don't think

00:23:51.200 nietzsche is certainly not a conservative thinker and i and i think it's maybe not quite correct to

00:23:57.600 place him on the right um he he doesn't have a lot of those right wing instincts i i he's not a

00:24:03.840 progressive of course but he he is a progressive in the sense of like we we you know these these

00:24:10.700 cultural processes are in motion they they have a logic of their own and we need to see it all the

00:24:18.540 way through before there's going to be a a cataclysm and a birth of something new and and i think that

00:24:27.500 that's almost kind of the most challenging quality of nietzsche is to say yes to this like you you

00:24:33.920 have to i mean this is if there's one just unequivocal injunction in nietzsche's work it is to say yes to

00:24:41.140 life and but that means saying yes to the last man on some level that means saying yes to you know

00:24:49.820 transsexual uh gender ideology lesbian uh drag shows like i you know not that we need to like

00:24:58.300 any of that stuff you you have to say yes to it you have to understand where we are and embrace reality

00:25:04.480 and understand that it it is functioning under a logic that is going to lead to a cataclysm but we we

00:25:12.220 must see this through there there's no turning back you can't be like a crab and walk backwards you

00:25:18.440 have to ride it out yeah i mean i think that that appears most vividly in his endorse his endorsement

00:25:25.380 of uh dionys um you know which i i think that he in my view he had a sort of imperfect understanding

00:25:33.800 of this deity but uh he's from his perspective and it's also correct that he understands dionys as a god

00:25:42.440 of decadence um and a destroyer on some level and a lot of the things that i mean people criticize him

00:25:49.100 for not having a system but part of his role was to destroy a system uh in namely christianity um and

00:25:57.040 metaphysics as well yeah yeah yeah so i think that in this way he is kind of liberated not to have a

00:26:05.200 system because he's you know it is a little bit of a kind of cultural critique he's taking a part of

00:26:09.900 it uh taking a system apart and he he'll compare christianity to you know he'll uh advocate for

00:26:16.780 dionysus which implicitly is advocating for uh a kind of decadence um he is he he'll advocate for

00:26:25.780 uh islam and for buddha as well but i don't think he was there's no sense that he was intending that

00:26:31.760 those would be systems that europeans would adopt but only he he uses them as kind of foils against

00:26:37.220 christianity um to compare to compare them sort of favorably to christianity um but not to advocate

00:26:44.560 for them um as replacements for christianity um i mean it's evident that his heart lies with rome

00:26:51.540 if you read all of his all of his works um so i mean i i think that um you know that's that's um

00:27:00.080 that's one way of looking at it i mean as as it comes to uh so a lot of what he's doing is

00:27:05.340 destroying right in in a kind of useful destruction uh he's kind of clearing a wreckage um uh for

00:27:12.740 something new right you have to kind of destroy a temple to to build one right might be something he

00:27:18.900 you know he he would say something along that line you have to destroy an altar to you know erect a new

00:27:23.860 one um and i think that that was a huge part of what he was doing but he was also pointing uh uh to

00:27:32.340 a new direction but uh you know maybe not as explicitly as as um we would have liked but i think

00:27:39.880 that there are reasons for that um you know some of them may have been kind of cultural and social and

00:27:45.160 political reasons um but some of them also may have been because he the vision was still sort of

00:27:51.020 forming in his mind as well um you know he describes uh he describes you know great thinkers as people

00:27:58.680 who are you know who are not necessarily ever arriving but who are grasping towards something

00:28:03.920 you know that is greater than themselves um uh you know one thing i wanted to remark on too is that

00:28:10.360 i think that one kind of positive note is that um you know in there's this famous quote where he

00:28:16.820 talks about the shadow of the buddha um and this goes to your point about christianity is like we're

00:28:22.400 still kind of in the uh the wake or after aftermath of christianity yeah though god has died uh there's

00:28:29.840 still his shadow on the wall um you know uh in the metaphor he uses is of the buddha who um uh you know

00:28:38.520 the buddhists show his shadow you know in a cave for centuries after he's died uh because he's still

00:28:44.980 he's still present and and that's and he's using that metaphor to talk about god and there's a couple

00:28:50.660 of points there i mean in particular he's talking about i would say it's fair to say he's talking about

00:28:55.880 a jewish god right so in some ways it's a kind of it's not necessarily there's a kind of sorrow

00:29:02.460 to the death of god and i think that he i think he's acknowledging that definitely but there's

00:29:08.000 also a kind of liberation to the death of god um i think of the um i haven't and i didn't i've never

00:29:15.680 analyzed this film in a close way and certainly not from a kind of rem lens so i don't know if

00:29:20.560 there's any um sort of ethnic subtext or messaging in the film but uh there's a film called uh shawshank

00:29:26.660 redemption which i saw a while ago but there's one scene kind of the best scene in the film that i

00:29:32.160 i remember vividly and there's this uh old guy who's in the prison he's been in the prison his

00:29:38.140 whole life and when he's finally released from the prison it shows this very like succinct like kind

00:29:44.920 of uh very sorrowful like little montage but it just shows him you know out in the real world not

00:29:50.960 knowing what to do with himself and he and he eventually and very quickly like kills himself

00:29:55.540 or commit suicide having been released from prison um and i think that that is a little bit of the

00:30:01.760 sort of the despair that christians feel is that they've been released from the prison but they

00:30:07.660 kind of don't know what to do with themselves they don't you know their um their whole world has

00:30:14.160 changed it has become unfamiliar and it has become something that they're not really adapted to

00:30:19.580 ultimately um anyways but if if if any of you guys want to jump in yeah well i oh go go ahead

00:30:28.600 uber whale yeah sweet so i've known you're all good you're all good you're all good i've loads of

00:30:33.940 thoughts on this this is i'm leaping in here because i've got so much stuff flowing through my head

00:30:37.600 um so again i think what i'd really love to stress is just in almost like a formal sense like

00:30:44.000 nietzsche's a very good i guess you could call him philosopher or thinker he's not ever seduced by

00:30:50.780 the desire to reason from analogy or reason from you know what's kind of socially common or false

00:30:56.700 dialectics like he's a first principle thinker and i think this is what gives him this destructive feel

00:31:01.140 because that's essentially what a someone who can who can peer down into a first principle that's what

00:31:05.940 they're they're able to do they're able to realize that like if the patterns they're looking at are

00:31:09.760 incongruent there's there's something more fundamental that they don't see that is actually

00:31:13.560 driving the phenomenon and so they tried to dig down and find out what that is the famous example

00:31:18.100 of this would be like elon musk's people telling him the story that like you can't build a rocket

00:31:22.300 ship this way or that way and he's like well what if we reorganize the supply chain on first principle

00:31:26.960 blah blah blah blah so nietzsche really does this type of stuff where he understands that he's looking

00:31:31.920 at something as complicated as culture and social relations and he's seeing all the stories that come

00:31:36.680 pouring out of this stuff and he's trying to look for like hard facts underneath it he's trying to look for

00:31:40.300 things that are stable he's he's trying to penetrate down into it this just turns him to a monster he

00:31:44.580 just everything everything is worthy of being chipped away with a hammer as people often say

00:31:48.980 and so you see in response to this like people are very bad at this very very bad at this and you'll see

00:31:54.780 this in in false dialectics that pop up so for example right now i'm getting an awful lot of um

00:31:59.340 a lot of people are mad at me for posting that christianity was the woke movement of rome

00:32:03.600 now i find it fascinating to see like obviously by the way and it's it's it's it's fascinating to

00:32:12.620 see the way like because i speak to christians it's it's fascinating to see the way they frame

00:32:16.220 this in their head they immediately assume that i'm a neo-pagan you know and they they're like oh

00:32:21.020 you're so you want to go back to odin and it's like i'm irish and there's like well you want to go

00:32:24.080 back to i don't know jupiter and it's like again i'm like i'm irish i'm not sure that's but maybe

00:32:28.160 you never know but nonetheless they're they're they're putting me into this frame and they've got this

00:32:32.620 dialectic already set up inside of their heads and this leads then to this this this war of these

00:32:38.280 two stories and so when you're engaging in this conversation there's no there's no actual thinking

00:32:42.400 going on like people people are just sort of saying well like you know the bible says this

00:32:45.780 and then the the larp pagan you you know you larp pagans don't know this and then they're complaining

00:32:49.940 in a different direction and what's fascinating is that the i've noticed with these pagans and

00:32:53.540 christians they're almost all traditionalists they almost all want to go back to the countryside and

00:32:57.620 avoid modern society ted kaczynski style and so they've got all this unity but they're

00:33:02.600 fighting in this sort of superficial level and so it seems like there's there's this big big war

00:33:07.320 going on but actually underneath it there's actually some very very fundamental connection

00:33:10.980 that might be even more important than ideology in and of itself and so nietzsche does stuff like

00:33:15.680 this he goes he comes across phenomenon he attacks them and i think the master slave one

00:33:19.780 is such a brilliant advantage of this or an example of this and the way he approaches it does not

00:33:25.100 easily fall into a dialectical thinking he doesn't he like certainly master morality is attractive

00:33:30.760 and powerful and important but as you said earlier like becoming conan the barbarian or something like

00:33:36.720 this he's not saying that you know he's i'm not sure he's really saying anything in terms of like

00:33:40.540 prescription stuff he's saying that these things need to be assessed he wants us to re-evaluate

00:33:45.200 everything and judge what's going on but he would talk often about the virtues that slaves have and said

00:33:50.340 in fact some of the things that he puts as his cardinal virtues are things that you could say the

00:33:55.560 slaves have the most such as the ability to turn any disadvantage to your advantage you obviously

00:33:59.720 have to be in a bad position to learn this type of virtue you spoke for example of christian nietzsche

00:34:04.300 because i think this is really again if you're a first principle thinker you don't fall into dialectics

00:34:08.940 you don't fall into this type of stuff instead you go down and you discover what is fundamental

00:34:13.140 and all these first principles essentially turn into tools and so if we can assess master morality and

00:34:18.340 see that the masters are healthy strong beautiful representations of of life at its apex and its peak

00:34:25.100 but they've got problems like naivety they've got problems like lack of subtlety or something like

00:34:29.520 this we can actually assess that objectively and be like all right i see the good and the bad there

00:34:33.020 and you can flip over to the slaves and you can be like look they're resentful they're botched they're

00:34:37.800 ugly they're decrepit but at the same time they're crafty they've got depth as you said and so we could

00:34:42.780 actually take a mix of these if we so wanted to and we could develop a very interesting type of person

00:34:46.700 imagine a brave you know visionary forward thinker who had craftiness and depth of thinking that they

00:34:53.500 could penetrate into long distances in the future now what you're doing is you're creating an original

00:34:57.460 mix that hasn't really been seen before in the way that we might understand it and of course then

00:35:02.040 christian nietzsche as you brought up at the very start is very much related to this i feel because he

00:35:06.820 says many times that science which he's loves science comes out of christian ability to to to cook the the

00:35:15.480 the blonde beast into the monastery where he becomes a a book nerd and he's forced to like

00:35:20.720 you know spurge over all these like you know hebrewic prophecies and all this blather and all

00:35:25.420 this stuff but this actually does something to his brain where he develops this penetrative unity of

00:35:29.800 focus and culturalizes him or prepares him for he turns him into a certain species i guess you could

00:35:35.100 say that we now have as a raw material and nietzsche very much in like an affirmative thinker says

00:35:39.680 this raw material is is here there's like whatever it is it's here we've got to use it maybe we've got

00:35:45.320 a bit of slave morality in us what how can we turn that into something how can we get the best out of

00:35:49.360 that maybe we we need to develop some more master morality maybe we can we can bring all these types

00:35:54.060 of things out of but he's very much like you know use what's on your plate well that's really what it

00:35:59.580 comes down to the most important thing so i think that's a big big stress and that transforms an awful lot

00:36:05.220 of the way like again it's a thinking skill it transforms an awful other way you react to the

00:36:09.920 craziness of our moment where you start to realize that almost everything you'll get presented is a

00:36:15.580 false dialectic or an emotional dialectic oh react become a reactionary go join charlie carly charlie

00:36:21.980 kirk's thing or whatever it is or go in a become a christian reactionary or become a a fucking running

00:36:27.780 around pretending you're achilles or something like this it's like look none of those things are authentic

00:36:32.720 ways to engage your reality right now it's instead a question of like how do we actually achieve

00:36:37.900 an embrace of our reality affirm it use it and spin it to our advantage i think that would be the

00:36:44.160 closest you get to something prescriptive from the man yes yeah absolutely um do you want to talk about

00:36:51.540 do you want to go into a little more of of dionysus um mark because i mean nietzsche he famously but

00:37:00.380 begins his career with the apollo and dionysus dialectic uh in the birth of tragedy of dionysianism

00:37:09.720 as a a kind of undifferentiated all this this falling into losing your identity and personality and

00:37:22.400 falling into that that that rhythm of the mass um i think it's i mean he he talked about the music

00:37:29.740 of wagner and um and and what he imagined music in the greek theater might have been i think we can

00:37:36.380 all imagine attending a rock concert while drinking of course and there there gets to be a point where

00:37:44.740 everyone in that stadium or everyone even even in that smaller concert venue whether whether it's 100

00:37:51.720 people or or 40 000 you're all singing the same words together you're all moving together in one

00:37:59.560 rhythm and you do at some point lose yourself and lose your own identity and you're you're kind of

00:38:08.540 part of this group and and on some level nothing matters you lose your inhibitions uh you you lose

00:38:15.920 your um pretensions um reason is kind of irrelevant in this moment you i i think it is a real dionysian

00:38:24.940 experience and this can be contrasted to the apollonian which he associated with say architecture or

00:38:31.720 sculpture this is something that is meant to last a thousand years or more this is something that

00:38:36.940 you you you see an individual in all his glory that you think of michelangelo's david or something this

00:38:45.780 this concentrated uh skeptical maybe even look of david the fully formed um masculinity of david standing

00:38:58.820 there provocatively ready to to you know having faced goliath but ready to face the world and and and also

00:39:06.260 that that beauty of uh david's form uh is something that is you know timeless and um uh and and and

00:39:16.160 inspiring and and so he kind of has these two things he also you know infamously signed a letter um while

00:39:24.200 he was um suffering at the end of his life site was beginning to sign letters to you know jacob burkhard

00:39:30.380 and so on signing them dionysus he he almost fell into that undifferentiated state um but as as you say

00:39:40.420 mark i mean there i i think we should you know take what he's saying you know getting at that kind of

00:39:48.500 emotional quality of of what nietzsche is getting at with with dionysus but but also take it quite

00:39:54.640 literally in the sense of who was this god exactly who was this god that nietzsche had this

00:40:00.920 you know who was who was kind of tantalizing for him and and seductive for him someone who who he

00:40:07.200 thought was a also a kind of modern god something that would express the decadence of his time

00:40:13.260 um but then also taking that god seriously like what does it mean for nietzsche

00:40:18.480 you know for for us looking at him critically what does it mean for us that nietzsche embraced

00:40:26.700 that god he didn't embrace he he had many nice things to say about jesus but he didn't embrace

00:40:31.200 jesus he didn't also embrace exactly apollo although that that is obviously a extremely

00:40:37.720 important figure for him he didn't quite embrace zeus he didn't embrace odin he makes some passing

00:40:43.860 comments about germanic paganism and wagner and so on but kind of throws that out at by the end of his

00:40:49.580 career uh so what does it mean for us that nietzsche saw dionysus as a as a central figure in his life

00:40:59.680 yeah again i i would say that on some level he's presenting a foil for christianity right so he

00:41:07.220 understands i mean we can see uh jesus and um uh bacchus or dionysus as antipodes uh we also can see

00:41:18.420 apollo and dionysus as antipodes um though uh the uh between uh christ and bacchus the two figures are

00:41:29.160 actually more similar than people realize and and bacchus ultimately is a kind of um a predecessor or a

00:41:37.060 inspiration for jesus jesus is a kind of more a kind of sublimated version of bacchus turned into

00:41:44.120 a kind of piety cult as it were a sort of crypto bacchus you might say um uh but i think that and

00:41:50.700 i don't know that he really made was thinking of it in those terms i think he he writes at one point

00:41:56.540 that uh um i think it's in will to power so these are almost kind of more notes than things that he

00:42:01.660 really uh kind of established clearly in his mind or or or thought of as is very strongly valid ideas

00:42:08.400 but he uh he he says that jesus is the opposite of uh bacchus right and and in a way that's correct

00:42:17.140 i mean we i think we can see a kind of caducean relationship between christianity and the decadence

00:42:22.380 of hollywood for example right or the decadence of uh liberal uh society or liberal culture um

00:42:28.840 but on a i think on a uh on a um on a truer level i think that um you know both gods ultimately fall

00:42:39.360 into the category of uh semitic gods and this this is you know i think this is what the sort of

00:42:45.660 mythographers were pointing to in the ancient world uh tacitus makes an error where he i you know

00:42:52.120 and i this might be the origin of nietzsche's you know and i think error might be a strong word i

00:42:58.120 mean we you know just so uh uber boyo doesn't get mad at us we we are also very referential of

00:43:04.540 nietzsche oh yeah sure um but don't worry i think i'll commit the many more sins than you so you're

00:43:10.480 all right all right all right well just you know i mean we we don't we because you know when we disagree

00:43:15.460 with nietzsche we disagree with him kind of in a a careful way because we know how uh powerful and

00:43:20.880 insightful thinker thinker he is um so uh we we kind of check our our bases or think about it

00:43:27.360 carefully uh because he's usually right i mean he gets a lot right obviously um but uh yeah he seems

00:43:34.200 to be so the mythographers were saying that he was a kind of equivalent of yahweh in the ancient world

00:43:39.140 um and you know in israeli uh archaeologists are sort of admitting this now interestingly enough

00:43:46.580 um but in and i think that the problem so tacitus looks at and i've probably mentioned this on a

00:43:53.240 number of calls so bear with me if this is uh seems like i'm repeating myself because i've definitely

00:43:58.080 repeated this point a number of times but uh tacitus uh looks at the cult of judaism and looks at the

00:44:04.380 cult of uh bacchus and says these are not the same cult one is uh a cult of like merriment

00:44:12.360 happiness and celebration uh you know and this was at a certain point in the development of the cult

00:44:18.300 of bacchus right where probably maybe to some extent it had become sort of domesticated at that point

00:44:24.260 um but it was it's a cult of happiness celebration and the cult of judaism is this sort of dour cult

00:44:33.240 where you have these serious brooding rabbis and so they are dissimilar they're not the same cult

00:44:39.060 and he and he was making that remark in reaction to you know other thinkers and historians and

00:44:46.220 mythographers that were saying that they were the same cult and i think that what he was missing

00:44:51.480 ultimately is i think what a lot of uh sort of conservatives miss too um is that there are there's a

00:44:59.000 kind of duality to judaism where there's a kind of crypto pagan aspect of judaism which we see for

00:45:06.260 example in the secular world whether in hollywood or finance or or you know jews basically pursuing

00:45:13.060 ethnic interests outside of you know an explicit identification as jewish it's just sort of members

00:45:21.160 of the society as important players in hollywood dominating hollywood for example that that also is

00:45:27.440 ultimately kind of expression of judaism and and expression of the sort of duality of judaism and the

00:45:34.060 a cryptic aspect of judaism that uh i think tacitus was missing um but to nietzsche i think that nietzsche

00:45:41.500 so in other words i think that the the figure that would have been better for nietzsche's metaphor

00:45:46.880 though i guess somewhat more obscure not a god not obscure not more obscure but not a god would be

00:45:53.920 the figure of orpheus i think orpheus represents the the decadent arian for lack of a better word

00:46:01.020 um whereas bacchus uh represents a uh kind of proto-jewish element i would argue that is interested

00:46:10.460 in bringing decadence to an arian group right so um you know we see that with the athenian theater

00:46:19.300 for example is called the dionysia and it was explicitly a celebration of dionyses so in the

00:46:25.740 dionysia we see a formation very similar to hollywood for example right so we see a kind of

00:46:31.100 reoccurrence of the phenomena in the modern world um and so that's my reading of it now and i don't

00:46:38.180 think that but i think that we nevertheless understand we get his point right so when he's

00:46:43.140 referring to it's in it's kind of a nerdy academic uh you know point that i'm making maybe um that you

00:46:50.960 know maybe uh he's talking about apollo versus orpheus might be a better way of like under you

00:46:56.900 know if if we're going to be kind of specific about our metaphors here and and the myth um you

00:47:03.820 know but bacchus in but i think it is it is important though that um we understand this kind of duality

00:47:10.220 to jews um that they you know and i you know it's sort of uh illustrated as well i think in the um

00:47:18.220 uh vividly in the athenian theater with these these masks that they wore with the mask of comedy for

00:47:24.800 example you know uh versus the mask of tragedy that ultimately these are kind of masks developed

00:47:31.120 to produce effects in audiences to develop feelings in audiences whether to demoralize or to distract or

00:47:38.580 whatever the case might be um now of course i'm not saying the dionysian was all a sort of proto-jewish

00:47:43.620 phenomena in the sense that there were evidently you know arian playwrights that were actually very

00:47:48.500 critical of the dionysia itself for making fun of it and that sort of thing in the in the comedic

00:47:53.440 vein but um uh but that it was ultimately something like hollywood um and was ultimately something

00:48:01.040 foreign uh to uh greek society in you know in the way that some of the uh philosophy ultimately had a

00:48:09.220 kind of you know persian sense uh persian origin or egyptian origin through you know guys like

00:48:15.860 socrates or heraclitus you know i'm saying so that there was a kind of foreign but that i mean that's

00:48:21.740 just sort of the greek greek was a kind of was mixed in that regard um that there was definitely uh both

00:48:28.780 you know strong aryan and semitic elements and and the culture that we see ends up being you know

00:48:35.100 uh showing a kind of dialogue between those forces or elements um yeah i don't i don't know what else

00:48:42.500 you want me to say well yeah i mean i i guess what i i was i was getting at is that you know is are

00:48:48.780 there are there problems or or maybe put a different way are there revelations by the fact

00:48:55.820 that nietzsche identified with dionysus um in the sense that you know what what is that what does that

00:49:02.780 say about him but also what what does that mean for us looking back at him now like he is he's

00:49:10.640 identifying with i mean you you can see and you know the uh the bakke by uh euripides you it is a

00:49:17.660 it is a foreign quite dangerous element that is inserting itself into greek society and so what does

00:49:26.620 it mean that nietzsche chose that and then also um there there is a you know nietzsche might have

00:49:34.440 seen dionysus and christ as oppositional um in the sense you know on a in a basic sense of you know

00:49:42.880 uh stodgy puritanical christians uh who are terrified of seeing a lady's legs or something like that and

00:49:51.140 then you know dionysus who's you know drink up and uh you know let's let's get let's take part in an

00:49:57.440 orgy or something you know on just a basic there's a basic distinction that you can easily make but i

00:50:04.660 think that distinction is i think he might have very well have been missing something i mean it is dionysus

00:50:10.900 who is this god of rebirth um much as christ is it is dionysus who is a god of wine and as you

00:50:21.020 you know provocatively pointed out it is jesus who turns water into wine is jesus who is the vine

00:50:27.400 you know among other metaphors that he's equated with there's this interesting connection between

00:50:34.200 christ and dionysus that maybe and and i would stress maybe nietzsche missed

00:50:40.360 um but you can take this on a on a different level as well in the sense of nietzsche's own

00:50:47.520 identification with dionysus and his own identification of himself with christ as the

00:50:52.580 antichrist but you know an antichrist is still a christ in a way and that he imagined much as jesus

00:51:01.680 did and much as dionysus kind of created in a way he imagined himself living in this

00:51:08.860 degenerating world where you know again the the the 1870s probably look uh uh blissful from our

00:51:18.980 perspective but nevertheless he he was envisioning coming world wars he was he saw cultural decadence

00:51:26.060 he saw socialism as a kind of new expression almost a brutal one of christian morality of dragging

00:51:34.480 everyone down to one level and there was going to be a kind of rebirth a superman that would come out

00:51:42.860 of this and so so there's there's something we can see in nietzsche of his equation his equating

00:51:50.360 of himself with dionysus so it on the one hand it's kind of problematic that he chose dionysus in the sense

00:51:59.840 of you're you're you're ultimately choosing this god of chaos and destruction but then it's also kind

00:52:05.500 of revealing about the the the actual nature of nietzsche himself in the sense that he he imagined

00:52:14.060 himself as a dionysus and he imagined himself as christ he imagined himself as kind of you know

00:52:19.740 inaugurating the end or as is as being a figure that would be rebirthed after the end and so on do you

00:52:26.920 do you follow me on on that yeah yeah no i mean i think that yeah i mean it's it is interesting and

00:52:33.380 it's almost it's you know because he's such a deep and analytical thinker and because he knows people

00:52:39.340 so well and probably this is the fate or of every person is that the things that um that what he doesn't

00:52:47.800 realize about himself he reveals unconsciously right and and so in other words i don't know that

00:52:56.900 he would necessarily even have understood himself as is basically kind of because i think that

00:53:03.100 ultimately you know nietzsche you know he's part of this process of revealing sort of the identity of

00:53:11.400 jesus christ himself that he is you know he is this god that uh who is a sort of composite god of of

00:53:19.600 these previous dying and rising gods and and borrows from other myths as well probably even including

00:53:25.360 myths you know that apollo was involved in um you know for instance there's one myth where uh

00:53:32.580 uh before apollo's born born at uh delos uh alito has to go around and she's being rejected by everyone

00:53:40.300 doesn't have a place to sort of give birth it's very kind of reminiscent of the uh birth of jesus for

00:53:46.160 example right um though but of course apollo and jesus are different gods and apollo is not one of

00:53:52.120 these dying and rising gods he's understood as an immortal celestial god um but so there's obviously

00:53:58.960 influences from the ancient world uh that are creating um jesus as a composite character that

00:54:05.900 are inspiring jesus and i think it is i think it is just a kind of it's almost like a sort of um

00:54:12.720 you know the fact that uh nietzsche who is railing against christianity adopts bacchus as an avatar

00:54:20.660 whereas you could argue that bacchus might be the most influential uh inspiration for jesus adonis is

00:54:28.880 another figure that you could argue uh this is this is the case of but in terms of the symbolism

00:54:33.700 you could make the you could make the argument that it is bacchus um and in fact dave there's there's

00:54:40.400 imagery in the hebrew bible that seem to compare david very closely with bacchus he's he's got the

00:54:45.880 uh the donkey under a vine and he's got the wine stained you know shirt and you know it's it's in

00:54:51.880 what's it kind of implied with the metaphor is that he's using decadence to sort of dominate the donkey

00:54:57.080 and the donkey is uh the gentile or or the non-jew for example david you know king david um

00:55:04.260 so in donkey also is a symbol that's closely associated with bacchus he's riding the donkey

00:55:10.980 and um vulcan as well as is also closely says as is jesus jesus rides the donkey in in in his triumphal

00:55:18.740 procession but um in any case uh so it is a kind of it is a kind of profound thing that maybe he didn't

00:55:28.900 he himself didn't realize how profound uh his association with bacchus was but um

00:55:36.420 he it's almost as though he wanted to worship the kind of revealed christ or the revealed jesus

00:55:42.760 in his real or in a kind of truer form as it were you know i'm saying to get to your idea that he there

00:55:49.320 is something christian about it you know i mean that there is that he is ultimately um seeking the

00:55:56.080 true christ or whatever you know in in the in the protestant manner of like trying to really figure

00:56:02.880 this shit out you know what i'm saying yeah no i i think he is his son of a pastor yeah but but again

00:56:09.160 i think extremely important i think i think part of his attraction to bacchus is that it's he sees

00:56:16.200 bacchus as a foil uh vis-a-vis christendom and i think that that is a major at least that would be

00:56:22.800 i would guess that that's part of his conscious attraction to the figure of bacchus you know he

00:56:27.100 understands bacchus ultimately i mean he doesn't deny the sort of subversiveness in bacchus and he

00:56:32.800 sees it i'm a destroyer um but um because he sees uh his most important task it it would seem

00:56:41.540 is to uh be the antichrist as he were as it were now you know oh go ahead go ahead steph no i have a

00:56:51.920 stack of thoughts on this gen so i might take a couple of minutes i hope uh pull out the fucking

00:56:56.100 popcorn yes and there's there's some really good stuff that you brought up and i think because some

00:57:01.780 of the things i was reading from mark um about apollo and things like this and and many of the

00:57:05.860 things richard you were saying itself i think are just so fascinating to explore so i've actually

00:57:10.540 wrote written out a couple of notes here like one thing i'd love to go into is young and young's

00:57:14.080 actually um psycho analysis of nietzsche if you will he talks about this specifically much different

00:57:20.020 than the ways that you would see it and then of course the relationship between apollo and

00:57:24.020 dionysus but i'd actually like to start with the thing that you brought up i think it was richard

00:57:30.480 mark said it as well but anyway about essentially the dionysian theater as in some sense a sort of

00:57:37.640 hollywood because this is such a big idea and it comes with another side of nietzsche another big idea

00:57:44.900 from nietzsche that is again one of his most challenging ideas and one of his most shocking

00:57:50.260 ones but actually one of his wisest in that um the truth is not that valuable to life the truth and

00:57:56.740 life are not necessarily related at all to know the truth in some sense can be demoralizing it can make

00:58:03.060 you depressed you know it's like uh you see an awful lot of guys in the red pill space and they're

00:58:07.080 learning maybe dark truths about women's nature and you actually notice they become very jaded with women

00:58:12.440 as a consequence and they can't actually set up relationships because they're so quote-unquote

00:58:16.580 red pill they become black pill this type of phenomenon now this this actually scales in a

00:58:20.980 profound way you see even these um funny scientific experiments they do with computer programs where

00:58:25.420 they code one little ai towards life and life goals or life uh references or something like this and

00:58:31.800 another one towards the reality of the simulation it's in and the one that is seeking reality always dies

00:58:36.940 compared to the one that's seeking just success in a fundamental level now this is not a trivial idea

00:58:42.120 at all not a trivial idea at all and nietzsche goes in and studies mythology this is actually what

00:58:47.640 birth of tragedy was all about he was looking at and this whole concept of like what what is the

00:58:53.560 purpose of stories why do we why do we bullshit ourselves with like crazy stories about you know

00:58:58.560 god and heaven and stuff like this like why why do these stories matter and it he sort of finds out

00:59:03.360 that these stories are actually the most important thing of everything it's it's not a good analogy but

00:59:09.400 it's like a donkey needing a carrot in order to lead him forward if we knew the truth of our

00:59:13.680 situation we'd all become nihilists we'd all become pessimists and we'd all just blow our fucking

00:59:17.040 brains out and stop so nietzsche is much more like we need we need a narrative we need fairy tales we

00:59:23.560 need stories in order to keep us moralized and motivated stories lead to life lead to success and

00:59:30.340 that's more valuable than truth that's a big idea and so the whole purpose he looks at the

00:59:35.740 infrastructures because he was hanging out with wagner all that and they were creating the mythos

00:59:39.540 that like inspired the the german revival movement and eventually like the nazis they all love this

00:59:45.360 because wagner captures this very germanic energy he captures this big sort of epic lord of the rings

00:59:51.120 energy you know and it really just when you listen to wagner like you get hyped man there's something

00:59:55.380 very european there's something very pagan about a very european about it and he's bringing up like

00:59:59.400 this deep deep energy inside of you and and keeping you excited and getting you getting you filled

01:00:04.100 with this this ambitious were otherworldly fantasy feeling it's so amazing when you listen to him it's

01:00:10.320 the same feeling you get out of lord of the rings and you you'll go online and you'll find so many of

01:00:14.040 these um traditionalist accounts and all this and they absolutely love lord of the rings they're like

01:00:17.940 lord of the rings is an identity for it's religious for them and stuff like this and it's because this

01:00:21.820 is the effect that these type of things can have they're they're in some sense lord of the rings is

01:00:25.340 completely made up but it probably keeps these guys out of like depression and being jaded at the

01:00:30.420 modern world more than anything else more than the truth like it's amazing and so the purpose of

01:00:35.660 the the myths that we tell ourselves the stories we tell ourselves is to serve life this is um a big

01:00:41.480 deal a really big deal and the responsibility of artists is to achieve this now i guess like if people

01:00:47.580 want to get a very relative relevant version of this you could make a very strong argument that the

01:00:51.640 problem with our culture and this is the type of thing nietzsche was critiquing the the mythos that

01:00:56.960 exists in our culture is that it is in some sense anti-life on its predicates now i think you could

01:01:03.000 say that perhaps there's people who are running the culture that have resentment directed towards

01:01:07.600 western people and as a consequence that narratives they put out are fundamentally demoralizing of

01:01:12.800 course nietzsche said that one of the most demoralizing feelings of all is guilt and so what

01:01:16.480 we see is all these stories about how we're these demons we're these monsters we should relinquish our

01:01:20.960 civilization towards and the the victims of of our struggle in the path i get told this stuff all the

01:01:26.320 time even though i'm irish i never get to cash in on this um this is kind of my pitch like where

01:01:30.400 where do i get the reparations guys what's going on nonetheless there's this um there's this anti-life

01:01:36.160 energy that's demoralizing and so think about what type of effect that has on a culture you have a

01:01:41.440 mythos a story that demoralizes that make you that makes you not believe in yourself and not

01:01:46.460 believe in life and not believe in your right to create and your right to reach towards the future

01:01:51.040 or your impetus i should say to reach towards the future it it stamps that out nietzsche would say it's the

01:01:55.900 castration that a slave morality places upon a creative master what you see there is something

01:02:01.240 very terrible because that leads to less success less life and this is very very damaging and so

01:02:07.080 the mythos is essential and this then you go back to ancient athens and you go you look at hollywood

01:02:13.040 and you see that the way that people related with these myths there's there's many many complicated

01:02:16.820 things i guess one whole tangent that i'm not going to go down for the moment is to ask a question of

01:02:21.380 like well what type of mythos could we construct that is moralizing that is that is supporting life

01:02:26.240 that is there's giving us a prominent and solid identity and this is why i found some of mark's

01:02:30.600 ideas really powerful like the assertions about apollo very very fascinating because it's actually that

01:02:35.480 precise thing it's like all right how do we empower a an affirming identity as opposed to a negating

01:02:41.140 identity an anti-life identity a guilt identity now another side of this because this i want to go into

01:02:45.460 the jesus question and the dionysus question is um nietzsche was thinking about these ancient athenian

01:02:51.180 theaters and stuff like this and he was um he was getting a little bit uh funky with this because i

01:02:56.160 guess they they might have even grown out of like human sacrifice cults if you think about it and what

01:03:00.820 was actually happening with these is that this is this is the famous mechanism of the scapegoat that

01:03:05.800 people like gerard would talk about there is an experience that we all have where we have trauma you

01:03:10.180 know like bad things happen to us we stub our toes or you know mark mark makes fun of me or

01:03:15.340 i make fun of him or something like this and we all get jaded and someone beeps at me in my car

01:03:19.060 and it's sort of like the community builds up this like storage of of trauma and there's a big problem

01:03:25.160 where that trauma in some sense needs to be released that trauma needs to be expressed and this is this

01:03:29.300 is almost like our jadedness and our depression and our our our feeling of pessimism about life you

01:03:35.400 could even say maybe it's a little bit of the truth sneaking in if you want to get a little bit savvy

01:03:38.680 but nonetheless that that trauma actually if it if too much of it gathers and it reaches a critical mass

01:03:44.500 it becomes demoralizing it becomes it stops the community being able to function and shit just

01:03:49.500 goes fucking crazy it's like all the gods come up to play and people start getting angry at each other

01:03:53.420 and all these type of things and so art was in some sense functionally put into place theater drama

01:03:58.240 ritual most importantly this is why i brought in the idea of human sacrifice i'm not saying we should

01:04:02.960 go back to that but these sort of evolved out of this and what was happening is that these rituals

01:04:07.660 these shared experiences allowed very interesting things to happen such as for example even in the

01:04:13.060 in the medieval times a public execution would be a way that everybody could project that hate upon

01:04:18.180 the the guy getting executed and it's almost like a catharsis you know and in some sense it's a tragedy

01:04:23.940 ritual play that the ancient greeks would have been experiencing when they're doing this of course

01:04:27.480 they would act it out with the stories of dionysus because it's very very similar thing

01:04:30.660 and this catharsis as aristotle noticed is extremely important extremely important because it allows

01:04:36.560 people to get rid of bad feelings and then go and pursue life with an optimistic attitude it's almost like

01:04:41.480 the opposite of a hangover you know you get you get fucked up on depression and tragedy by watching

01:04:46.240 these plays or participating in these rituals and then you go out and you have a new lease for life

01:04:51.020 when you go out and take on the world and that's actually exactly the function you'd expect out of

01:04:54.880 something like this this is what you want to achieve with these things and so dionysus like i know mark

01:05:00.300 is more different technical definitions i'm going with this sort of um i guess you could say

01:05:04.600 youngian or comparative mythology or maybe even i would say nietzschean definition where

01:05:08.840 the purpose of these was to evoke that tragic feeling out of people so that it would lead to a

01:05:14.420 pro-life or an affirmative state of thinking because they'd watch something tragic happen

01:05:18.780 and they'd achieve catharsis and jesus it was exactly a dionysian experience absolutely a hundred

01:05:24.640 percent jesus is a ritualized myth of human sacrifice and you sympathize with jesus because

01:05:30.540 he's the guy getting killed and this gives you all this huge catharsis like coming up on

01:05:33.720 with passion of the christ look how much people love that movie and it's precisely for these reasons

01:05:37.400 that's the feeling it evokes out of you it's very very moving to see this to see the story of christ

01:05:41.780 an incredibly powerful story and dionysus was the same thing it was the the death of the hero the

01:05:46.700 death of the the life in some sense but then it is born again at the end and it's this kind of victory

01:05:51.760 no i think and nietzsche definitely was oscillating between the crucified and dionysus throughout his

01:05:57.020 life especially at the end but on a very specific reason i've been thinking about this an awful lot

01:06:01.640 i think jesus he worried was would lead to guilt first of all because the crucifixion is an accusation

01:06:08.560 of guilt upon the world but second of all he thought it was um it was anti-life in its predicates

01:06:13.420 because essentially jesus dies because he doesn't have enough power he has too little power he's not

01:06:18.700 able to overcome his circumstance whereas dionysus specifically is so powerful and so attractive that

01:06:24.980 he draws all the the babes all the babes come running in and they want to eat him alive and so it's

01:06:30.100 almost like that's the difference as far as i can see that dionysus is too juicy too vital too full of

01:06:36.000 energy that he gets destroyed life actually turns on on life because it's just it's almost like there's

01:06:41.000 too much energy swelling up there and there's something incredibly fascinating about that and

01:06:45.020 then jesus on the flip side is is is lacking power and what i see in this is a a juxtaposition very

01:06:51.600 similar to the master slave thing which is the the consciousness of christ is the feet is a very human

01:06:56.800 feeling the feeling of not having enough power being a victim to circumstance and essentially

01:07:01.220 essentially being a victim it's the perspective of the victim now nietzsche worries that that can be

01:07:05.180 that's an incredibly demoralizing way to to to think and he sees that the the consciousness of

01:07:10.120 dionysus is the kind of like delusional god power like you're so strong you're so vital the warrior

01:07:14.680 there's an absolute apex the the artist when he's in his shamanic trance and stuff like this this is an

01:07:19.560 overflow and expression sex orgasm these are all he brings all these phenomenon in related to this and

01:07:25.180 this is some in some sense heroic and an apex of life and a peak of power and he was really he was

01:07:29.900 all about like the kind of flow and power and the peak of energy the ubermensch is in some sense an

01:07:33.720 expression of that energy actually manifesting itself and tangibly in the world and so i think

01:07:39.300 he had a big conflict where he he was a human he had many many victim flaws he he was not his health

01:07:45.080 was not powerful enough to overcome things like his problems he was not powerful enough to get lose

01:07:50.440 simone to marry him you know so he felt like a victim like we all do loads and that makes you feel

01:07:55.040 it makes you understand christ and get wrapped up in that but there's also a part of us that wants

01:07:59.400 to go beyond that we don't want to be all too human we want to be beyond that and actually there's

01:08:03.680 something very important about that as well there's been able to embrace that ascendant energy and so

01:08:07.360 and that's the sort of affirmative dionysian spin the the the overflow of powers we'd often say

01:08:12.780 and again to try wrap this all into some sense it actually does bring up quite interesting

01:08:17.940 questions about christianity so that his his his criticism that if we instead decorate

01:08:23.480 ourselves with these myths of this guilt-inducing crucifixion at the start of the world that's

01:08:28.900 predicated on it's actually a little bit demoralizing when you think about it and if we

01:08:33.200 could we could see the reformation of new mythologies new stories that had this affirmative

01:08:38.520 dionysian energy which he's categorizing as something separate maybe that would be the thing

01:08:43.080 we need for the future like stories that lead us towards life and he worries that we'll go through

01:08:46.900 this phase where all the stories will break down will the truth will sneak in we'll all become

01:08:50.520 demoralized spin into anti-life spirals and then um there'll have to be some type of victory over

01:08:56.420 this and i think part of him might have been looking at like wagner as an example of a type

01:09:00.560 of character who could produce this new style and really get a cultural movement going now i've loads

01:09:05.420 of other things i want to say but maybe i'll just leave it there if there's any ponderings or

01:09:08.500 something like that i know this is great stuff i i would encourage you to keep going oh god all right

01:09:15.960 here we go give me one second well i i would just say i mean real quick on just what you said on the

01:09:22.560 on the uh just uh just uh right then um yeah i mean i i don't i think wagner in in nietzsche's early

01:09:33.580 career was this notion of a new culture that is coming out of germany and it's going to be a

01:09:41.480 nationalist culture it's going to be a specifically uniquely german culture um and and and i think he

01:09:49.540 had this dissatisfaction with wagner as time went on and i i think some of that came due to the kind

01:09:57.040 of nihilistic quality of wagner itself i mean the the ring does ultimately end with the end of the

01:10:04.340 world and he's he kind of saw it as a an expression of decadence and not really as an overcoming of

01:10:13.220 decadence or as a way out and i i think with zarathustra there's there's an attempt to you know

01:10:22.360 i mean is zarathustra really giving us all these moralizing myths i mean there there are things like

01:10:28.700 the you know the the the camel and the uh the child and the lion and and and and i i think in

01:10:37.560 those ways it is rather uh evocative and and moralizing but i i would say that book is not

01:10:44.600 particularly moralizing in many ways it's a a study and failure of zarathustra being rejected by the

01:10:51.860 world of zarathustra dealing with his acolytes and how to how he can uh relate to them and what

01:11:00.420 what their task is in the world even even overcoming him um so it's a kind of i maybe i wouldn't say

01:11:08.380 demoralizing but but it's a it's a curious kind of equivocal work it's a study and failure just as much

01:11:15.360 as it is a study in in triumph and and i think nietzsche felt that he had to give us that story

01:11:22.000 you know a discussion of where we are right now this kind of failure that we're experiencing this

01:11:28.360 our our inability to know what's behind the corner over the horizon and and i do think he kind of

01:11:36.260 leaves that open i mean what exactly the real moralizing myths are going to be in the new world

01:11:44.420 is something that i don't i don't think nietzsche can really express yet it's something that is

01:11:49.320 going to be the product of the child it's going to be the product of this in in some ways kind of

01:11:55.520 naive playful being that's going to come after the end of our civilization who's going to recreate a myth

01:12:06.380 that we never even imagined who's not going to try to revive paganism or revive germanism or or

01:12:13.120 medieval christian catholicism or whatever but it it's gonna this child is going to tell a story

01:12:19.800 that we can't even imagine at this point that's i think that's a really good observation i really

01:12:26.560 really like that because i do i get that same feeling as well like i'm on both counts first of

01:12:30.900 all wagner um he is like there's many reasons i guess he's jaded with it like one of them is that

01:12:38.540 he wagner's reconstructing this very very germanic mythos and i guess part of nietzsche's wondering

01:12:43.580 like i guess maybe this is more of his political side but should it be some type of pan-european

01:12:48.900 thing we don't understand that now i guess it's like western culture was he looking for something

01:12:52.500 broader and bigger and then wagner was slipping back into christianity as well and stuff like this

01:12:57.200 and yeah nietzsche didn't really like that stuff and so like i'll get into that maybe with the

01:13:01.700 union take on all that because it is an interesting one a little bit tangential but then the

01:13:05.960 zarathustra is a fantastic point as well because zarathustra nietzsche often talks about how much

01:13:11.040 he likes the likes of isaiah and the prophets and all these but he calls them satirical writers

01:13:17.580 like he he kind of points out that they're tongue-in-cheek predictors of the future and

01:13:22.400 and um they have a very interesting he sees them as an interesting archetype and i think he understands

01:13:26.860 that that's what he is he realizes he's not christ he realizes he's not the uberman she realizes he's

01:13:31.640 isaiah and he's going to get sawn in half and he may as well make peace about that and so

01:13:35.340 so like um zarathustra has that energy where like i i find this is one of the most compelling parts

01:13:40.540 of zarathustra is zarathustra's futuristic like i he he describes this big idea again related to that

01:13:47.060 idea of collective trauma mankind is this giant ball of or a cloud of black trauma and pain this

01:13:54.800 overflow of negativity all flowing up and this this cloud is going to morph together and and catalyze

01:14:01.200 into a storm and then there's going to be a strike of lightning and that lightning ability ubermanch

01:14:06.400 and i am here to collect the profits of the lightning and i am the first of these profits

01:14:10.500 of the lightning but the lightning will be the ubermanch and he's talking about this future

01:14:14.540 exactly as you're describing where there's going to be some great creative process in the future but

01:14:19.100 he's he's merely the herald he's merely the the bridge towards this you know he's he's all these

01:14:23.560 type of things which again i i think um flows back into something that um that i wanted to talk

01:14:30.080 about with dionysus and all those which is he's constantly using this this terminology of the

01:14:34.500 down going and the up going that's the whole motif of especially the start of zarathustra

01:14:38.560 and i i get this is sort of related to many of the things that mark says and i'd wonder about this

01:14:43.780 because mark looks at dionysus in a slightly different way i i would see it as all right so

01:14:48.680 nietzsche's coming in and he's in some sense describing dionysus as a entropic dissolving

01:14:54.960 um crazy energy like it's it's just pure ball of energy that just it's like a vortex that sucks

01:15:00.900 everything into it and it's a it's a destroyer like shiva the destroyer in some sense and i could

01:15:05.440 definitely see how that could we'd be weaponized into something subversive and apollo is juxtaposed

01:15:10.280 as this crystalline ascendant angelic energy that is frozen and solid and um obviously christ was both

01:15:17.980 christ began as this dissolver of the old world the dionysian dionysian energy that swept over rome and

01:15:23.720 chewed it up and spat it back out with a new face and a new shape but after that christ rose up and

01:15:28.820 became apollonian he became a representative of order and stability and these types of things

01:15:33.240 and i know i'm not sure if you'd agree with that but i think that's very very interesting because

01:15:37.040 that's the relationship of um a very important force the super symbol of the culture in relationship

01:15:43.140 to the the era so rome going through the decline is rome going through the god is dead period

01:15:47.920 you know the jupiter and all that is dead in comes this chaotic dionysian energy from the east

01:15:52.620 ironically and chews it all up transforms it morphs it and then the down going is achieved

01:15:58.860 and once the down going is achieved the energy shifts and the up going begins so everything at

01:16:04.020 the it's like a body dies and it has to dissolve before it can be born as something new again the

01:16:09.200 phoenix has to rise again and it's it's almost like this type of thing where dionysus comes in

01:16:13.220 destroys everything and then when the up going begins that's apollo's start and i'm wondering

01:16:18.760 we look at our situation we would love a stable culture like i think this is the really the thing

01:16:23.980 to get at is like we would love a stable culture of moralizing myths to be around us but that's just

01:16:28.460 not our situation like that realistically we're actually in the middle of the dionysian period and

01:16:33.100 nietzsche himself said he saw a couple of hundred years of nihilism that we'd be like schizophrenically

01:16:38.340 trying to make our way through now in the end something apollonian will rise that will create some

01:16:42.900 type of stable order for some period of time but in between that is going to be pure it's almost

01:16:48.220 like you know you're you're in a you're in a you're in a trench in world war one you can't trust

01:16:53.080 your ears and your eyes anymore because you've got like tightness because they've been blown out and

01:16:56.360 you can't see anything so you have to go on the floor and feel around with your hands and sniff

01:16:59.900 you know you turn a bit more dionysian into the animal you have to go a bit back into your instincts

01:17:03.880 trust your gut to make it through and so this is this is sort of the era we're going through dionysus

01:17:08.680 good instinct the the the destroyer is actually very useful in this phase and it's also the

01:17:14.040 predicate energy that will set up the the direction we want to go and then so as you pointed out like

01:17:19.480 rock concerts all these type of things the dissolution to fall into that type of energetic space

01:17:24.540 has many fascinating effects but again i said a lot there maybe if you have any comments on that

01:17:29.340 before i uh i'll try to bring some order to all these things i'm pointing out i know i'm enjoying

01:17:34.920 i mean mark do you want to jump in or uh yeah uh so yeah the only thing i would say is that um i think

01:17:42.080 that in i do this in my work as well is that i think that we should look critically at this idea

01:17:46.860 of tragedy and catharsis because we see it we of course see tragedy and catharsis in films in hollywood

01:17:54.500 today and i i'll think of one one example is um that's popular on the uh alt-right or the dissident

01:18:01.000 right is uh blade runner uh both the first film and the sequel and you you'll see people memeing

01:18:06.640 this a lot and there's that famous scene with uh rutger howard um on the roof of the building with

01:18:12.300 harrison ford and you know he's about to expire the replicant's about to expire and um the subtext

01:18:19.020 of that scene whether intended or not and we we argue you know richard and i have analyzed these films

01:18:24.780 we argue that there is a kind of intended subtext there um but the subtext is kind of the death of

01:18:30.860 aryan man right in this sort of urban hellscape that's become chinatown or in san francisco or

01:18:37.840 wherever it is vaguely this this modern urban hellscape um and that rutger howard uh represents

01:18:45.320 that and and whether or not that's the intention it kind of you know it serves that function because

01:18:51.820 we have this you know this very vivid blonde uh archetype um and we have a the the kind of theme

01:18:58.660 of decadence and degeneracy all around him um but this um it is demoralizing though ultimately it is

01:19:07.760 demoralizing and you'll see you know you also see these memes in the dr where people people will

01:19:13.060 have um what's the name of that uh ryan gosling who was who starred in the uh uh uh you know the

01:19:21.220 he was in blade runner as well wasn't he yeah he was in the sequel he was in blade runner uh 2049

01:19:26.740 but he and he's sort of this wayne sorrowful character who doesn't have a real girl i guess

01:19:33.300 he's not real himself he's a replicant but he has his girlfriend is this hologram and there's a lot

01:19:39.900 of memes in the er about this carry like and it's very kind of wayne and sad and depressive and

01:19:47.400 ultimately in my view it's not healthy right so i think that there is an element of tragedy uh that

01:19:53.120 is is not good or not useful in a in apollo in contrast is understood as kind of a sunny god

01:19:59.980 right so the idea was that you couldn't you had to approach his idols smiling or being sunny being

01:20:05.360 happy right he's the the diurnal god of uh clear skies and this sort of thing and happiness um whereas

01:20:12.360 you know this element you're talking about in tragedy you're correct i mean this the story of

01:20:16.960 christ is is is very much a tragedy uh and it emerges uh you know from those elements uh with the god

01:20:25.000 bacchus in the dionysia uh the theater which had this this tradition of uh tragedy that um aristotle

01:20:32.140 analyzes and you know and i think that you know aristotle um i think that he feels

01:20:38.540 an obligation because there's this ancient you know at at the point that he's analyzing tragedy

01:20:44.400 the golden age of tragedy in athenian athenian theater has already passed by 200 years or something

01:20:50.080 uh but he but he it represents this sort of rich and proud tradition in athens that people are

01:20:56.280 very proud of right so i think that he feels a way of look i think he's looking at it uh as something

01:21:03.460 uh of a great uh sort of athenian tradition and he's defending it so he's in ways he's sort of

01:21:09.900 rationalizing um this you know uh he's rationalizing but he's also trying to figure out what purpose did

01:21:17.080 it serve because it must have served a beneficial purpose in his mind um but i don't know if that

01:21:23.060 assumption can be made uh necessarily you know i mean in i mean to give uh dionysia his credit i mean

01:21:31.100 the thing that we that we can love and appreciate about uh the dionysia in the athenian theater is

01:21:36.720 that it was it was a religion that was wildly creative right i mean if we understand that as

01:21:42.220 religion it's a religion that encouraged um artists to be creative and to create you know i mean they

01:21:49.940 were working within a known mythos uh with all their characters and but they were also inventing within

01:21:55.420 that mythos um and so that's that's something that i think is a very good or positive thing that we can

01:22:02.080 look at that tradition and take away um but i think that the idea of tragedy it's i think that there

01:22:09.040 there can also be a kind of sinister aspect to it where there is a desire to deliberately demoralize

01:22:15.080 in some case some cases in some in in some cases that has a kind of ethnic subtext where they're happy

01:22:20.820 uh you know for the population to be depressed or demoralized and inactive and it's you know the

01:22:26.540 more sad we are the closer we are to death you know in uh greek mythology uh you know death and um

01:22:34.380 death and sleep and um you know sleep being a symptom of sorrow they're all kind of siblings or

01:22:42.620 are part of the same group of gods as it were the same family of gods um and i think that um you know

01:22:49.060 so i think that that is something to we i think the tragedy and that's not to say that we do away

01:22:54.860 with tragedy i mean i think that they're like for example we can think of very affirmative uh examples

01:23:00.320 of tragedy where for example a hero you know defends the bridge and dies alone on the bridge but saves

01:23:06.540 his tribe right i think that um i think that they were going for something like that in the recent uh viking

01:23:12.920 movie uh uh the north the northman which i don't think was entirely succeeded but i think

01:23:18.780 they were going for this element of like there's tragedy but then there's you know he saved his

01:23:23.460 offspring or his his scion but it was ultimately the tragedy is affirmative and we can watch that

01:23:29.240 film and be like yeah that's so that that would be a kind of even though the film itself has flaws

01:23:33.820 that does seem like a kind of affirmative use of tragedy um so i think that in also i think in tragedy

01:23:41.720 we also have to look at whose tragedy for example using the example of blade runner what is the

01:23:47.700 whose tragedy is being described in that film ultimately it's our tragedy right it's our

01:23:52.920 displacement on a kind of esoteric level that's being described in that film and that is demoralizing

01:23:58.960 so i think i think the tragedy you know again we don't discard tragedy but we find kind of

01:24:03.940 appropriate uses for it um you know because it does make sense for a father sometimes to die to defend

01:24:11.620 his family or for a warrior to die to defend his tribe and though and though that is a tragic event

01:24:17.540 it's ultimately a kind of affirmative and glorious event that is serves a higher purpose i guess is

01:24:23.800 the point i would make um whereas other expressions of tragedy we could say are just demoralizing

01:24:29.680 right and and not necessarily you know in the the cathartic effect the cathartic effect is kind of a

01:24:37.300 theory um that aristotle is putting forward but when i look at you know um the effect of for example

01:24:44.860 the film blade runner on the dissident right and the way that they sort of process that film i don't

01:24:51.340 see it as is um a film that is is encouraging them to be powerful and successful and to overthrow their

01:24:59.120 enemies or anything like that i see a kind of wane you know acceptance or demoralization occurring

01:25:05.760 with a sort of internalization of that mythos look i think that's a good point and i think it goes

01:25:12.480 again to um what i was saying at the start you know the purpose of of your mythos is supposed to

01:25:18.460 help you achieve success and if your mythos is demoralizing if it's guilt inducing especially or

01:25:23.040 whatever it is like if it's just not a good mythos the stories are your culture is not um getting you all

01:25:28.240 feeling all heroic you're in a very very bad uh position and there's definitely something to be said

01:25:32.260 for a big winner energy james joyce i used to read uh quite a lot of him he started off his career as

01:25:39.200 loving tragedy because that's what you're taught to do as a storyteller like tragedy is the way that

01:25:42.420 you write all your books and as he was writing ulysses he this is a big revelation for him he was

01:25:47.660 like actually comedy is is more divine than tragedy because comedy is the energy of the big winner you

01:25:52.660 know comedy is the energy of like the inconquerable and all this and so he becomes very big a comedy

01:25:57.220 obviously in the technical sense meaning like uh things work out in the end as opposed to

01:26:01.280 things are like funny and all this but of course it it has that energy of big winning and all these

01:26:05.740 type of things and i i think fundamentally that these two things are more just like functions of human

01:26:10.740 nature and for specific reasons like the whole concept around tragedy or first of all the whole

01:26:16.000 concept around a big winner energy yes is really real and actually really important and you'd look at

01:26:20.800 the i look at the 80s as being just full of that energy like uh top gun schwarzenegger films and all

01:26:26.160 this totally like it's all just like so fun so high energy so uh raw it actually kind of reminds me

01:26:32.720 of like the the things like the iliad where it's there's very little like introspection but there's

01:26:37.240 something kind of like like amazing about it like glistening about it very very fun in fact i would say

01:26:43.760 the iliad is sort of like an apollonian text in some sense but um the the tragedy is it's just like

01:26:50.300 they're not lamenting so much they're they're putting arnold schwarzenegger and total recall into just this

01:26:54.800 bizarre super fun sci-fi world and he's getting this like hot girl and then he like kills her and

01:27:00.440 then he gets another hot girl and it's just like it's just it's just all winter energy it's not it's

01:27:04.860 all these type of things and then you look at the art after the 1990s and it's very brooding and sad

01:27:09.720 and depressing and all these type of things and it's lost that and an awful lot more tragedy shows up

01:27:13.900 and absolutely to your point and i think in a technical sense though there's obviously a place for

01:27:18.860 tragedy in an aesthetic sense like the point of tragedy is that it actually mimics our experience

01:27:25.660 of life first of all like we die at the end so that's you know a big uh shebang lads like that's

01:27:30.380 going to happen to us all and i think the the very difficult existential reality for us is that

01:27:35.920 our life is going to consist of peak experiences and at some point that will like we will fade away

01:27:41.400 from that and actually the experience of of the most treasured parts and sometimes the parts of our

01:27:46.380 lives that we are seeking towards are almost always peak experiences that fade like for example orgasm

01:27:51.740 for example some type of career success and producing a child and seeing a great moment in

01:27:57.020 their life like these happen along the way and there are these peak experiences and what comes after

01:28:00.980 those is a sort of tragic ending to this like nothing lasts very buddhist type of idea and and there's

01:28:06.180 certain apollonian arts cannot represent this like architecture can't show you the idea of a peak

01:28:11.620 experience and the statue can't do the same thing and it does something else which is very bombastic

01:28:16.920 and powerful and manifest of like grandeur but music shows you that like music gives you an

01:28:23.520 experience and then it's over and at the end of the song you're depressed you're like that was class

01:28:27.300 i can't listen to that again you can never really experience it in the same way a movie is the same

01:28:31.880 thing it's time bound and there's a big apex in the story and then the end of the story is the kind

01:28:36.080 of wrapping up and so tragedy very much mimics this type of um experience and as i said it's just

01:28:41.400 part of how our brains work and all artists are in some sense going to to wrap themselves around this

01:28:46.240 and it's more just a question of almost like a platonic elite making sure that the mythos is not

01:28:51.160 massively demoralizing using tragedy to make us hate ourselves with this guilt complex or whatever

01:28:56.500 it is and making sure that our tragedy is is affirmative towards life and as i said like you could look

01:29:01.760 at the dionysian myths to be actually possessing this like why does dionysian die almost in a comic

01:29:06.640 way he's so juicy he's such a mad lad that all the main ads come out and rip him apart and eat him

01:29:10.920 alive i think perfume you know that film perfume is an interesting example of this like a representation

01:29:16.180 of the dionysian story that i've never quite seen before and in some sense it's hilarious but also

01:29:21.660 absolutely twisted and schizo at the same time and just make it's it's unbelievably gripping to just watch

01:29:27.480 that film and the end of it is just so crazy but um you i don't know it's it's hard to describe it

01:29:32.280 as demoralizing it's just so bizarre and amazing that there's something special about it so

01:29:36.120 yeah well go go a little bit i i remember you mentioned a uh you know like 20 minutes ago you're

01:29:44.600 you're interested in this almost like union psychoanalysis of of nietzsche when i'm curious um

01:29:51.720 what you have to say on that excellent yeah i'll get into this so this is a very fun one

01:29:56.300 um now i'm not again i'm not sure what you think it is this is just a perspective

01:30:00.360 you can chew in it whatever way you so wish so jung had his critiques of nietzsche actually so

01:30:05.680 jung wrote um did a seminar as the nazis were rising and so jung was a bit of reactionary to

01:30:11.500 the nazi movement and um he was looking around him and he was feeling that there was he was very

01:30:18.680 you know sensitive man to the unconscious he had been through world war one just before world war

01:30:23.280 one happened he basically had a schizophrenic break which he wrote down in the red book and

01:30:27.640 in that the the year before it happened he was seeing visions of people dying in these like fields

01:30:31.600 of europe and stuff like this and so this guy like was sort of felt prophetic he knew how to listen to

01:30:36.660 his gut and his intuition and so as the nazis arise and he was feeling these big strong feelings once

01:30:41.680 again and he wrote an essay called wotan which is about the old god of the norse and he talks about in

01:30:48.260 this essay how wotan is like a trickster wotan is like this energy now again i've read mark and mark

01:30:54.320 has a different interpretation on this so this is like a slightly different spin but again this is

01:30:58.580 sort of young's ideas here and and you can critique them for what they're worth and he would point out

01:31:03.880 to the fact that like he believed that gods or archetypes or you could say energies from our

01:31:10.080 unconscious mind whatever you want to call it can can possess us we can get possessed by things

01:31:13.880 and they can bewitch us and they can they can make things happen to us and he basically points

01:31:18.840 out that there was this energy rising in germany maybe for a couple of hundred years maybe since

01:31:24.140 goethe when goethe like a sort of conjured and faust and metastopheles that's the beginning of

01:31:31.060 something that led to the german idealistic um new society and all along this there was this

01:31:37.580 cultural energy picking up steam and the likes of like wagner capture into this and they

01:31:43.860 create this they craft this their their dreams are shuttling out these new visions and these new

01:31:49.960 stories and they're creating this new pagan religion essentially and nietzsche gets on board with this

01:31:54.420 and he feels this too and young kind of points out that this was this was the old god the norse god

01:31:58.680 woden waking up again protestantism even says is actually a representation of this like people

01:32:02.800 thought that they were worshiping the protestant god or the christian god but it was actually it was

01:32:06.780 it was it was it was wotan in fact the word god comes from lombardy which actually meant godan which

01:32:12.140 meant woden you know so he had this big idea that the germans were worshiping their collective will

01:32:18.080 if you want to put it this way their collective spirit or something along those lines in a variety

01:32:22.400 of different ways now it was classical europe obviously prestigiously loved the greeks and so

01:32:27.900 young actually taught nietzsche was just literally feeling this energy he was picking up because nietzsche

01:32:33.360 was very sensitive man picking up in this woden rising energy in the german people and he was just

01:32:38.620 calling it dionysus because that was the prestigious fancy way to describe these things but actually

01:32:43.660 what this was was the possession he was experiencing of um of woden rising up again and then of course

01:32:49.560 after nietzsche nietzsche comes out with the all these like vitalistic profound neo-pagan anti-christian

01:32:55.060 perspectives and then this shuttles down into world war one in the most bizarre way the world

01:32:59.320 the soldiers of the german army were charging up against the french and the british with the bible and

01:33:04.220 thus spoke zarathustra where what they were deployed with they were given both those books which is just

01:33:08.500 fucking crazy like what the hell the the british the british were saying like they're they're look at

01:33:13.880 they're all satanists like what is going on they're they're carrying these books by this dude who wrote

01:33:18.160 the antichrist and will the power and stuff like this and then of course this comes to a head in the in

01:33:22.800 the the the the first world war that was actually the germans they put their foot forward woden puts his

01:33:28.540 foot forward and says we're going to be the leaders of the future we're going to assert a new vision of

01:33:32.920 reality a new story a new welton show new world view or something like this and then they put

01:33:37.800 their best foot forward and they get beat down and then they lose and then of course the energy is not

01:33:42.740 done woden has more fight in him and so it builds up once again it builds up once again and then it

01:33:47.040 returns as the nazis and at this point it's like it's coming back with even more of a menace at this

01:33:51.340 point it's more refined it's more it's more stretched it's more angry it's it's a wounded uh wolf this

01:33:56.740 type of thing and so this is what young felt was going on around him is that it was just like

01:34:00.940 at that point they were they were all in they were full tilt they were either going to finish the job

01:34:05.860 create a new paradigm new world or it was it was over something like this and so basically he was

01:34:11.000 very pessimistic about it he believed that it was like the kind of fickle and excited energy of a

01:34:16.320 of a like a you know a false god a trickster god if you want if you will and that it was going to

01:34:20.820 lead to um it was going to lead to the germans ruins and and he felt proven right in the end he

01:34:24.960 called this before the war by the way and um yeah he like points out to an awful lot of this

01:34:29.580 phenomenon in this way now again it's also dismissive of some of these other things we're

01:34:33.680 saying but um he he then categorized nietzsche as he diagnosed them as being possessed by this spirit

01:34:39.600 and and this is why he like drummed all this stuff up and zarathustra is an example of this spirit

01:34:45.180 bursting out in him and stuff like this and even he points out to zarathustra just being the most surreal

01:34:49.720 book because in the 19th century everybody was very rational and everybody would would not have this

01:34:55.480 idea that you have an unconscious that's just such a weird thing to think in the 19th century

01:34:59.620 we all thought that you know that we had these rational egos and that's all we were we were a

01:35:04.140 christian and you believe christianity and and you were formalized this way and then nietzsche comes up

01:35:08.920 against the god is dead problem and jung was like his creative dynamism and imagination was so profound

01:35:14.020 that he did the right thing he invented uh an imaginary friend an imaginary character which

01:35:21.340 that could that could represent that his deeper unconscious could explode into and act as a wise

01:35:26.720 guide that would teach him what to do with the situation help him process the pain and help him

01:35:31.340 process the confusion and so zarathustra was in some sense young um nietzsche's unconscious manifesting

01:35:37.620 a schizophrenic friend in order to explain to him how to deal with the god is dead problem and

01:35:42.320 jung would say you know that was that was um partly wotan partly in the german spirit doing that as well

01:35:47.160 so that's kind of the completion to take again it's yeah no it's great stuff

01:35:51.140 yeah i think there's a lot there yeah go ahead mark i wouldn't even necessarily disagree with that

01:35:57.180 uh reading um or at least not in its entirety i mean it's not i mean i think that that is true that

01:36:03.220 the the norse myth exercised a power on the um german imagination uh that was quite evident i mean we see

01:36:12.640 that with most vividly with wagner's uh rigs uh ring cycle of course um which people consider and i think

01:36:19.900 rightly one of the greatest uh german works of art uh certainly of that period um and yeah it's

01:36:26.160 incredible i think yeah yeah so and i think that that is true i mean i think that in i i also share

01:36:32.120 some of uh jung's uh reservations about it about that spirit too in the sense that it is that norse

01:36:39.360 myth is ultimately very pessimistic and disastrous all the gods die right and i make the argument that

01:36:46.860 it's what it's actually describing is a kind of conversion to christianity or the inevitability

01:36:51.800 inevitability of christianity because after ragnarok you know the one god that uh rises from the dead

01:36:58.800 and returns is um balder who is you know mythographers identify as a very kind of christ-like

01:37:04.460 figure uh so they actually could be kind of describing or prophesizing the coming of christianity

01:37:10.280 and the end of a pagan faith uh theoretically that that is i mean that's my reading of the myth um so

01:37:17.740 so there's something very tragic and nihilistic and destructive about it as well all right so in

01:37:23.960 odin is a kind of doomed god so if he's your guy then you know he's he's born to expire as it were he's

01:37:30.500 born to die um so i think that there are um you know very kind of dangerous things ultimately about

01:37:38.780 that myth which we saw we saw born out uh in world two right so i i i think that young is is correct

01:37:46.040 that mythos that this kind of norse mythos is playing an important role in directing a lot of

01:37:52.560 this uh cultural phenomena uh leading up to world two i think that's definitely the case and and the

01:37:58.280 germans were sort of self-conscious of it as well um and it probably became more of a thing during that

01:38:04.360 period right during this sort of pagan revival um uh you know how much of it you know i think that uh

01:38:12.660 the way that it served the vikings for example against christianity you know it may have had a

01:38:19.700 similar kind of function to the extent i mean we don't know to the extent you know this myth is sort

01:38:24.560 of late arriving to us coming through christianity uh so we don't know what the viking religion looked

01:38:30.320 like really we don't really have a clear view of it at all um but um theoretically it could have

01:38:36.080 served a similar function it does seem that like the myth of valhalla for example could be very similar

01:38:41.480 to uh the myth of an afterlife in islam where you know a warrior's death is rewarded and this becomes

01:38:47.760 great propaganda for you know raiding beaches and killing monks and and and fighting english armies

01:38:54.040 and this sort of thing um but uh yeah i i but uh so young's reading i think is is basically correct

01:39:03.460 i i think he what he does though is he which i think is a mistake and and again it's a kind of nerdy

01:39:08.840 technicality potentially but he i think he um he he identifies uh hitler with odin or a wotin and

01:39:20.760 the etymology i have for that name or that i've always seen for it is uh inspiration rage or frenzy

01:39:28.160 so in some ways you could argue that he's he is similar in some ways to bacchus or dionyses

01:39:32.520 um a god of madness right for example um but uh yeah i mean i sort of lost my track uh my train of

01:39:42.640 thought here but uh yeah so i i think that um there there's a there's a tragic a very tragic and doomed

01:39:50.560 aspect to that mythos um he identifies hitler with wotin i think that that's sort of a bit of a

01:39:57.080 misidentification sigurd sigurd is actually sort of the kind of or siegfried or sigurd is

01:40:02.940 kind of the apollonian figure in that myth and he's a certain more

01:40:07.940 ah every uh every time we talk with mark there'll there'll be this moment where he'll

01:40:17.340 pop out uh due to his uh yeah well let's um yeah i i'll just kind of complete the thought i i do i do

01:40:26.880 think there is a oh are you back mark yeah can you guys hear me oh yeah where did i drop off

01:40:33.180 where did i drop off you were talking about siegfried yeah so i think that he that like that's

01:40:39.140 a better uh sort of um analog with hitler he's he's an apollonian figure he's the dragon slayer

01:40:45.500 and he's a mortal figure you know in a universe that you know where he can't really control all the

01:40:51.260 events he's just a sort of tragic figure a mortal figure and um and yeah but it's tragic for the

01:40:58.900 gods as well the gods also die there's um even in that essay like just to give you like sort of

01:41:05.980 exactly what young says again like i'm not sort of saying this is the reality but i just find it so

01:41:10.020 fascinating so that germanic spirit that we're talking about you you could say the rise of odin

01:41:14.560 as you're describing um it was building up and nietzsche might have felt the tingles inside of him a

01:41:20.220 little bit and she kind of let it in you know and i think what young was pointing out is that

01:41:24.960 hitler allowed that to just saturate him like hitler was basically like stood up at one point

01:41:32.280 and said uh you know all father take me and and do your will like express yourself through me you're

01:41:38.120 young sort of implying this he he compares mussolini to hitler and he says mussolini is this like

01:41:41.920 aggressive bombastic hyper masculine you know big these big chimp movements where he's like a certain

01:41:48.020 himself and all this type of stuff and young sort of pointing out that like mussolini has this like

01:41:52.300 grandiose and he's he's he's got an ego you know and he's like he's a man he's a man and all these

01:41:57.280 type of things whereas hitler was a shaman hit was a mystic you know he was actually in some sense

01:42:03.240 like had these these more um these more demure introverted uh feelings to him he was like he

01:42:09.520 wasn't necessarily a leader but like a a chief druid magician type character and when hitler was talking

01:42:15.420 he was releasing out of him and this this manifest spirit the spirit was speaking through me it would

01:42:20.240 say and so hitler was in young's eyes technically possessed by wodan and became the mouthpiece for

01:42:25.380 the german spirit which is why everybody got sucked up in that type of energy and so much it was just so

01:42:30.220 captivating he was he was so um powerful with this but again like that's his take you can read into it

01:42:35.800 many different things there's all these fascinating ideas about like um what was sort of happening with

01:42:42.360 with these guys it was the rise of the germanic you could even say the a european counter worldview to

01:42:48.140 the judean worldview that would have been there since the bible since the 2000 years ago and was

01:42:52.860 that one of its first great challenges i think maybe napoleon might have been one as well but we'll

01:42:56.760 kind of leave that aside and um and this is a this is just a very fascinating way of thinking like the

01:43:01.540 worldview or the welton shound clash and the struggle for the future because so many things about that war

01:43:07.880 have all these bizarre aspects to it like the germans would come up with the concept of jewish science

01:43:13.160 and then they would penetrate they would they would come get into like rocketry and they would try to

01:43:17.700 they would approach science in a very german way like nietzsche's perspectivism and this would

01:43:22.260 actually lead to them getting these like bizarre superpowers like rocketry as i said and and they

01:43:27.440 had all these like alternate oils and stuff like this but then of course jewish science is the one that

01:43:31.520 shredded open the the atom bomb and gave the the americans the super weapon and all these things and

01:43:36.620 so it's like what what was going on man this is just bizarre in every level and so yeah it's a it's a

01:43:42.060 it's just such a fascinating time of history yeah i mean you you could make that argument about hitler

01:43:47.680 i i think that um because i and i think that people in the dr now see him as a kind of a truth

01:43:54.480 speaker though or a soothsayer or a speaker of truth right uh which you would associate more with apollo

01:44:00.880 so i think he does also have a kind of apollonian aspect to him and again in the north myth uh there is

01:44:07.080 no real clear male sun god in the north myth which is an interesting feature of it um there is a female

01:44:13.000 sun god uh soul uh but siegert has aspects of but he's a mortal figure he has aspects of apollo he's

01:44:20.980 this dragon slayer and mythographers uh theorize that he might be derived in some part from you know

01:44:28.920 apollo or even saint michael or you know earlier figures where uh there's a character uh slaying a dragon

01:44:37.080 bouncing off everything you said i've been thinking about this very pragmatically so as i said

01:44:41.660 the leverage position is really important you know like horses were brilliant until rifles came along

01:44:47.280 and then all of a sudden everything changes castles were awesome till cannons came um if you owned a

01:44:52.560 castle you were in a powerful position and then some bumfuck from nowhere it could just like shoot

01:44:56.060 gunpowder at you and that's the end of that so we have a sort of similar situation where there's

01:45:00.820 these massive entrenched institutions that are promoting a mythos as you know a theater dream

01:45:07.480 theater that is um negatively premised and life denying perhaps um how do we play a better leverage

01:45:13.720 position how do how do we get ourselves how do we utilize these things quite well so i very much

01:45:18.120 in line with what you're saying is not bowing down to something like a machine but looking at it as a tool

01:45:22.580 that can be leveraged towards a goal that is not necessarily machine dependent at all it's just simply a

01:45:27.140 tool right and i keep on thinking about um the problem we have right now because i think one of

01:45:34.100 the worst issues is the suck of social media i i suffer from this too like i make that zarathustra

01:45:39.600 video it's 15 minutes long it gets like you know loads it gets 16 000 views it does well but it gets

01:45:46.140 the same as my other video where i rant into the screen about the problems in the world for two hours

01:45:51.460 or something like this and youtube rewards the longer one because it's longer watch time and i'm sort of

01:45:57.020 i've got there's this entropy to this where like if i'm going to continue to do this i'm going to

01:46:00.760 have to actually go towards the thing that's easier to make it takes me a month to make zarathustra

01:46:04.100 it takes me like 20 or two hours to make the other thing now there's a big problem there because

01:46:08.880 entropy is going to win in the long term efficiency is going to win in the long term and so we have this

01:46:13.300 like suck where you know the the whole you i think you've seen this stuff before like we're all we're

01:46:17.460 all podcasters podcast revolution it's like i don't know is this really going to solve it

01:46:21.760 oh let's fight the culture war by making another podcast it's like it that's not that's not

01:46:25.980 political action that's not cultural action that's not making stories we look at all these

01:46:30.240 people um making movies making music making art and we're stuck being commentators on the culture

01:46:36.240 like that's not good that is bad that's a terrible place to be well it is what it is i let me say let

01:46:43.100 me say two things i i do think there is a power in deconstruction and dispelling this and really kind

01:46:50.140 of looking up the skirt of people who are more powerful than us and revealing their truths i i

01:46:57.600 think there is a power in that so i i wouldn't totally i get your point obviously but i i wouldn't

01:47:03.040 just totally dismiss you know what we're doing now or podcasting or whatever but on a deeper level

01:47:09.900 and this is something i've i've talked about with the group uh you know um a few weeks ago a few months

01:47:15.880 ago maybe uh is is we're in this kind of like weird place in culture because i i don't

01:47:24.340 so you know when when mark and i will will look at you know like a spielberg movie or or a kubrick

01:47:32.060 movie you you see that those are two artists who are both immensely talented and and skillful

01:47:40.460 and they're they're also in the belly of the beast of a cultural power center you know they

01:47:46.400 they have massive amounts of capital is put uh in there in there is put in their direction and they're

01:47:53.920 they're exploiting this industry to the best of their creative abilities i mean they they are real

01:48:00.920 masters of the universe types and i think with with both of those examples um those aren't just

01:48:07.840 films like they aren't just mere entertainment they're you know et is jesus christ among other

01:48:14.100 figures either they're bringing a kind of religious like experience to the public and that is you know

01:48:24.140 even if we have a load of criticisms about someone like spielberg we can still admire that and understand

01:48:31.380 the function he's playing but i feel like we are entering a world of of like anti-culture or

01:48:43.180 something so whatever criticisms we might have of spielberg they're they're they're more like

01:48:48.920 respectful criticisms than i would have of like tim pool and so what what i'm saying is like

01:48:55.100 we're we're we're moved where the the movie theater like in my childhood because i'm i'm i'm

01:49:01.440 mark and i are older than you you know our childhood it's like you you go to the movie theater like you

01:49:06.340 go to church on sunday you know it's you go you sit in the dark you're both in a group but then also

01:49:12.400 kind of individualized you know in the dark it's it's a kind of weird experience and you're you're

01:49:17.280 experiencing something quasi-religious it with these images and music and words all happening at once i mean

01:49:24.960 it's a connection to opera connection to um the dionysian theater connection to church etc and we're

01:49:33.280 now experiencing culture as like you know when you think about like my daughter or who um who's in

01:49:42.720 single digits still or or or a young person who's say like 21 or something they're sitting down and

01:49:50.440 they're they're just they're individually viewing on a small screen this like anti-culture sludge

01:49:57.880 so there there's no like mythos to tim pool or mr beast or something like like like there's there's

01:50:06.320 arguably no content whatsoever to someone like tim it's just weird like you know stream of consciousness

01:50:13.440 nonsense effectively and though he's getting he's he's getting more views and he's having more of

01:50:20.440 a cultural impact than say the nightly news or or many uh you know many hollywood movies that that

01:50:28.020 don't to do too well like he's having more of an impact but there's no there there like there there

01:50:33.140 really is i i think we're almost entering this it's like a new conception of the end of history like

01:50:38.880 it's not liberal democracy it's it's nothing it's it's tim pool rambling about some news article he

01:50:48.480 saw he read the headline of twitter it's it's kind of a horrifying place that we're entering of of like

01:50:55.580 a in absence of myth and narrative and i i do think i mean i might sound like an old fogey here

01:51:02.140 but i i do actually think it's really scary and it's it's different and somehow worse

01:51:08.240 than like the the the mythicism of hollywood in um up until you know say the the 80s and 90s

01:51:17.440 like absolutely i it's brilliantly articulated version of of what i was trying to to put out

01:51:23.200 is like the the anti-culture is actually a great way to frame it and great way to categorize it

01:51:26.820 because it's sort of what i'm saying is that like as a creator i'm incentivized towards the social

01:51:32.120 media suck towards anti-culture this is it yeah and so i like i literally sat down like i sat down

01:51:39.040 and tried to make something i was like well like zarathustra has i've never seen it visualized

01:51:42.420 properly let's try make a little piece of culture here i'll give it a whack everybody's complaining

01:51:45.820 and i invest in it i pay dudes i paid like a couple of grand a couple of thousand and then um it

01:51:51.760 obviously takes time and then i put it out and it it does well but it's not competitive with just

01:51:56.920 sludge sludge just does as good well you should have just unboxed a new iphone or like put on

01:52:04.440 makeup or talked to rambled on about your gender dysphoria that would be a more effective way of

01:52:13.520 using youtube sadly i

01:52:15.740 you

RadixJournal - April 05, 2023

Nietzsche, Civilization, and Anti-Culture

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