RadixJournal - Trump's Multiracial Fascist Coalition

00:00:00.000 This is sort of just off topic, but I was wondering, Richard, if you have any response or at least saw this kind of like Asian guy critiquing Nietzsche as being like a philosopher of incels.

00:00:14.240 It's just this. I think I retweeted like Athenian stranger on this. I just find this guy. I find him annoying. And it's not that it's all bad. But I mean, let's just go to it.

00:00:36.900 I'll show you Jonathan by some his last name is by, which is kind of funny in itself. But he's some like student at Columbia who's who's Asian and he's kind of like dressed up the way.

00:00:48.840 Yeah, he's dressing and he's dressed up in a very smart kind of Tweety look. And he he's obviously rented out this place. And so he's like, I think this guy probably has money and he's like forcing people to watch his.

00:01:06.260 Philosophy lectures. And I sense. Is he from Columbia? If I were just to guess, I would say he went to the committee on social thought at UFC.

00:01:18.840 But he didn't. He went to Columbia. His bio says that he's. Yeah. OK.

00:01:26.240 It's a math Olympiad. So there you go.

00:01:28.660 I mean, I don't want to bash him too hard because, you know, I'm not against like getting this stuff out there.

00:01:39.480 There is just this sort of like fake quality to what he's doing, though, where he's not really adding anything to the conversation.

00:01:50.000 And Athenian stranger, who's who's much more of a sort of dyed in the wool, Nietzschean, you know, scholar of sorts and things like that.

00:02:00.900 He says that he listened to his whole like hour long lecture on Nietzsche.

00:02:05.000 And he said he said what I'm saying right here. I'm in a way echoing him.

00:02:08.900 It's like I'm very happy that young people are reading Nietzsche.

00:02:12.140 But there are just so many errors that it just becomes a little bit unbearable.

00:02:17.580 But let's listen to this. 0.98

00:02:19.780 Nietzsche because he lived the life of a loser.

00:02:23.780 And when you look at who is attracted to Nietzsche's ideas today, I'm not talking about the academics.

00:02:29.820 I'm talking about the real people in the real world who uncritically embrace all of Nietzsche.

00:02:34.520 It's never the ubermensch. It's never the blonde beast. 1.00

00:02:37.840 It's never the jock.

00:02:39.140 More often than not, it's people like Nietzsche. 0.99

00:02:43.900 Sickly, marginalized, unattractive, resentful. 0.86

00:02:47.880 Is he describing himself, though? 0.59

00:02:49.820 I mean, this is the problem where he's really kind of the worst person to be making this point.

00:02:56.680 Well, and also what jock is like reading up on philosophy?

00:03:02.300 What jock is reading anything?

00:03:04.640 You know, well, the answer to that rhetorical question is the Athenian stranger.

00:03:09.780 I, you know, I don't know, Jonathan, you're probably not the best vehicle for this point, which has a sort of kernel of truth to it.

00:03:22.360 You know, like there's a bunch of you've seen those images of like BAP meetups and there are these like weird Indians and like Mexican people. 0.89

00:03:31.340 And they're just like, yeah, it's pretty funny.

00:03:36.100 And the gropers are the same way, much worse.

00:03:39.380 I've never seen really unattractive or I've never seen certainly an ugly person come to any of our gatherings, although they're, you know, small gatherings.

00:03:49.340 But I'll talk a little bit more on this, but let me. 0.92

00:03:56.020 Sickly, marginalized, unattractive, resentful. 0.99

00:04:00.260 So let me be clear on what I mean that Nietzsche is a loser. 0.97

00:04:03.440 I'm not talking about his early years, which seemed fine, except for the early death of his father and brother.

00:04:07.940 I'm not talking about his fantastic early philological career, where he was made the youngest professor.

00:04:13.580 I'm talking about the mature Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who wrote books like these.

00:04:17.660 I'm talking about his chronic sickness that eventually became insanity.

00:04:21.620 I'm talking about barely scraping by with a university pension.

00:04:25.580 I'm talking about his rejection by multiple women that turned someone who was an early supporter of women's education into a cartoon misogynist.

00:04:32.540 I'm talking about a man who conceived of himself as the next Socrates, but had so little recognition in his same years that he had to self-fund the publishing of his books.

00:04:49.340 What happened to Socrates, Jonathan?

00:04:53.860 Also, did Socrates, did he have like a big palatial estate outside of Athens?

00:04:59.060 Is that, is that what I remember right?

00:05:01.160 He like owned a country club or something.

00:05:03.780 It was called Mar-a-Lago outside of Athens.

00:05:05.520 That's where Socrates lived because he had a real successful business career.

00:05:10.600 Isn't that right?

00:05:13.300 I mean, does anyone edit this stuff?

00:05:18.000 I'm having the same exact impression of Athenian Stranger.

00:05:21.260 Like this is just so clanging.

00:05:23.040 It's like someone singing out of tune or something.

00:05:25.540 It's like really annoying.

00:05:26.760 I mean, Nietzsche was the youngest professor appointed at Basel and everyone had great hopes for him and he was too visionary for them, for those like academics.

00:05:47.200 And so he had to scrape by.

00:05:50.960 I visited his boarding house in Switzerland.

00:05:54.300 It's actually a beautiful spot.

00:05:56.120 I mean, it's a great place to be poor.

00:05:59.760 Yeah.

00:06:00.320 It's almost like he had to break free from the chains of academia in order to create visionary philosophy and he suffered in order to produce these amazing works.

00:06:13.820 And he also faced down rejection and he published Zarathustra on his own dime and it sold dozens of copies when it began.

00:06:28.200 And by the time of his death in 1900, it was a deeply influential book and has been profoundly influential to philosophy, literature, even popular culture.

00:06:40.800 I mean, he inspired the Superman comic book, no doubt, to some degree.

00:06:48.740 And yeah, it's like the ultimate Chad move.

00:06:53.380 And yeah, he had issues with Paul Ray and Lou Salome, but don't we all?

00:07:00.520 How many chicks are you banging, Jonathan? 1.00

00:07:04.080 How many chicks did you bang this week, Jonathan? 0.99

00:07:06.600 My guess would be Goose Egg.

00:07:12.540 Just saying, my man.

00:07:15.100 What's the impression I got?

00:07:16.340 It's like this little monkey in this suit that our people develop speaking our language, surrounded by the intellectual works of our people with this nasty little man resentment at our innovation. 0.66

00:07:31.360 He's like a Chinese fake Rolex watch. 0.97

00:07:35.640 You know, it's like, it's just the same.

00:07:36.740 It's just the same.

00:07:37.380 It's just like, it's expensive.

00:07:38.560 Like he's like selling it in Times Square or something.

00:07:43.840 I mean, I've even heard some of this criticism from like Normie Mutuals of like, you know, well, yeah, a lot of these philosophers were like incels and societal outcasts.

00:07:56.520 I mean, yeah, but that doesn't really change the fact that they that they that they also wasn't a billionaire.

00:08:05.420 Like last time I checked, he like suffered tremendously and killed himself. 0.99

00:08:11.580 You know, and also, yeah, what's your fucking point? 0.99

00:08:14.840 I mean, like, you know, he's amazing. 0.98

00:08:17.740 He brought up, he was like, you know, during the end of his life, he had to fund his own publishing house.

00:08:24.380 I mean, Karl Marx spent most of his career.

00:08:28.560 Get leeching off of Frederick Ingalls.

00:08:32.720 His ideas inspired revolutions across the world.

00:08:36.480 So what does it really matter?

00:08:38.500 Exactly.

00:08:38.920 And also, two things that are points that I'll make here.

00:08:44.740 So first off, Nietzsche did actually serve in the military and he served honorably, if not triumphantly.

00:08:56.320 So are we really is our bar really like you have to be like, oh, like you have to have like killed 20 men to be considered, you know, like heroic or something like how many men have you killed Jonathan?

00:09:13.200 What do you expect from him?

00:09:15.160 I mean, it's just so it's just like such bad faith.

00:09:18.860 It's such a bad faith discussion.

00:09:20.880 And secondly, I mean, to be fair to Jonathan and to say that there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying.

00:09:29.840 So in Genealogy and Morality, Nietzsche makes all of these points and he makes an ad hominem argument, you know, at the end of the day about how, you know, could you imagine a philosopher, a married philosopher?

00:09:45.600 Could you imagine a philosopher who's a lover?

00:09:47.700 And there actually is a sort of resentment in philosophy that is channeled into greatness, a resentment of not getting the girl, of not being successful.

00:10:00.940 I mean, what is Plato's Republic, if not, in a way, a sort of conspiracy of people who are out of power?

00:10:10.020 In Plato's case, maybe someone who took the other side in the Peloponnesian War, just throwing that out there as speculation.

00:10:22.480 But, like, that's, it's a good point, but it's an interesting dynamic point when Nietzsche makes it, as opposed to Jonathan Bayh, because Nietzsche is saying, Nietzsche's point there is that, you know, first off, you have to see the resentment within philosophy itself, because you have to look at the philosopher and not just philosophy.

00:10:44.240 But also, there's a sort of overcoming or inspirational point to that, which is that even, you know, maybe especially someone who doesn't get to bang Lou Salomé can actually transform that resentment and unfulfilled passion into groundbreaking philosophy or painting or even engineering or something like that.

00:11:13.160 All sorts of things.

00:11:14.000 So, it's like, Nietzsche's making a productive point, a dynamic point, whereas it seems to me like Jonathan is bashing, like, fans of VAP or something, which, you know, fair enough, I guess, but it's just, ugh.

00:11:34.600 Well, it also seems that he's using it to discredit Nietzsche's ideas.

00:11:40.020 So, it is, so it is, it's just a kind of classical ad hominem attack, right?

00:11:46.020 Yeah.

00:11:48.140 Well, let's look at his ideas.

00:11:49.900 What is the guy saying?

00:11:50.920 Is it, you know, who actually cares? 0.90

00:11:53.780 Do you care that Tchaikovsky was probably gay?

00:11:57.160 I mean, you know, I mean, it's interesting.

00:12:01.460 It might even tell you something about his music or even his operas that have, like, characters in them.

00:12:07.200 Like, it's an interesting fact that a biographer could look into and interpret.

00:12:12.500 I mean, that's all fair and good, but who cares?

00:12:16.200 I mean, we certainly don't care.

00:12:19.200 Nietzsche makes ad hominem attacks against Socrates, of course.

00:12:25.120 But, um, nevertheless, it's, you know, and maybe those are kind of the least fair of his attacks, except I think he's getting at something deeper with Socrates, and we go into it in the book.

00:12:37.880 Yeah.

00:12:38.680 Well, it's reinforced in his philosophy.

00:12:41.000 It's not merely an ad hominem.

00:12:43.940 Yeah.

00:12:44.880 Yeah.

00:12:45.640 Exactly.

00:12:46.380 Exactly.

00:12:46.780 I don't know if we want to listen anymore.

00:12:49.960 I'm just going to get mad.

00:12:51.780 If Nietzsche tells us that every philosophy is an intimate confession by their philosopher, what I hear in Nietzsche's confession is seething, unrelenting anger at an unreceptive world.

00:13:05.860 And I think that's directly linked to the two ways in which his ideas are actually flawed.

00:13:12.580 It's related to this first point, that he exaggerates will to power, because remember, Nietzsche himself tells us, the master does not think about power.

00:13:21.220 In fact, the master doesn't really think, period.

00:13:23.740 It's the slave.

00:13:24.820 It's the priest.

00:13:25.420 It's the people who don't have power on the sidelines.

00:13:27.600 Those are the ones who are conniving.

00:13:29.020 Those are the ones who are resentful.

00:13:30.020 Too many eras going on here.

00:13:32.580 This is not right.

00:13:34.060 I think Nietzsche is self-critical enough to kind of see this about himself, even, you know?

00:13:41.000 Yeah, that's true.

00:13:42.340 But just to go to what he actually said, it's not the worst thing I've ever heard, but it's actually a misrepresentation of the argument in the genealogy of morality.

00:13:53.860 Explain.

00:13:55.500 Well, the master, he celebrates his own power.

00:14:00.140 I mean, this is the whole division between good and bad and good and evil.

00:14:05.800 It's not like the master doesn't think about power.

00:14:08.580 The master thinks what is good is, you know, to quote Conan the Barbarian, to, you know, slay your enemies and dance to the lamentations of their women or whatever he said exactly.

00:14:22.420 So you're saying that the master contemplates and he's saying the master does not.

00:14:26.580 Of course, yeah.

00:14:27.360 He just celebrates power in itself.

00:14:30.380 But the whole point, Nietzsche's whole point, is that will to power is everywhere.

00:14:34.780 So you have to see the will to power in morality.

00:14:37.820 And so that, you know, the the the the mouse that's killed by the hawk or something, it's it will use morality because it can't use physical force.

00:14:51.300 So it will say what you're doing, you're killing me, hawk.

00:14:55.860 That's immoral. 0.65

00:14:57.520 So think about that, hawk, before you kill another mouse.

00:15:01.160 That that's the way that morality itself is a weapon.

00:15:04.860 And it's in its directed against someone who's physically powerful.

00:15:10.520 Well, the other thing is that Nietzsche represents effectively a kind of anti philosopher, right?

00:15:17.000 So he is ultimately against his own class of philosophers.

00:15:20.580 So the criticisms he's making of Socrates, for example, and of philosophy in general are ultimately criticisms that are implicitly directed back at himself.

00:15:33.800 And I think that that's something he must have been fully cognizant of.

00:15:37.360 He is ultimately a kind of the anti philosopher.

00:15:41.420 He definitely he definitely is an anti philosopher.

00:15:43.700 I think that is he's bringing to a close the history of Western philosophy.

00:15:49.040 And it's becoming self-conscious finally and sort of ending.

00:15:53.320 I totally agree with that.

00:15:54.580 And also an anti priest.

00:15:56.800 But in order to be an anti priest, it's a kind of paradox.

00:16:00.180 You have to also be the priest, right?

00:16:02.580 In order to spell the magic, you have to do magic yourself, right?

00:16:07.360 Yes.

00:16:07.840 Yeah.

00:16:08.180 Understand the magic.

00:16:09.000 In order to end philosophy, you have to be the philosopher.

00:16:11.920 I totally agree with that characterization.

00:16:15.460 The other thing about him, and I went into this again, when we did these lectures on Nietzsche's, we need to return to Nietzsche.

00:16:21.020 It's like there's this irony within Nietzsche that I don't think Jonathan Bai is appreciating, which is that, yes, the trans evaluation of all values in the ancient world and the revolution represented by Christianity, it was in a way a sort of disaster.

00:16:46.460 I mean, there's no doubt that Nietzsche appreciates the blonde beast and sort of takes the side of the blonde beast. 0.91

00:16:52.920 After all, it's Rome versus Judea.

00:16:56.420 It's the master or Arian versus the seething, resentful Jew. 1.00

00:17:02.780 And we know which side Nietzsche is on.

00:17:06.320 That being said, Nietzsche always has a synthetic quality to his thought, and he also says that because of this revolution of morality, we became deeper.

00:17:23.060 Whatever the origins of morality might be, and the origins of morality are resentment and punishment and a mental attack where a physical attack is not available, it still was a development of self-consciousness and self-awareness.

00:17:42.840 It's like, because we've gone through this history of Christianity, we've been deepened by it.

00:17:51.960 And so there's this synthetic turn he has to his philosophy.

00:17:58.100 But just to address what Jonathan Bai said right here, Nietzsche has never said that masters don't care about power and that it's only slaves who are conniving.

00:18:08.200 That is a mischaracterization, a misreading, a misunderstanding of Nietzsche.

00:18:16.620 And you should not be lecturing on Nietzsche if you are off on this really basic point.

00:18:27.040 So on this point, my memory may be less strong than yours.

00:18:32.760 But to the extent that you're correct, what you're saying is correct, and I trust that it is, he must be taking the error from, because Nietzsche does have this, does have a passage or two about how evil of some type is sort of the origin of intelligence.

00:18:51.880 So you have the priestly type, who is physically weak, and his intelligence, its origin is this kind of resentment of the strong physical type that doesn't necessarily require his mind to be dominant and so forth.

00:19:07.820 He might be deriving the error from those passages.

00:19:11.640 Sure.

00:19:11.900 And I think Nietzsche was only such a masterful psychologist of resentment, because he was also a creature of resentment.

00:19:22.240 And you hear that through the seething anger, through his work and through his pages.

00:19:27.460 So I think the exaggerated emphasis on the world to power tells us perhaps a bit less about the Christian psyche and the psyche of Nietzsche himself.

00:19:39.120 Oh, God.

00:19:39.640 I think the same goes for his heroic individualism.

00:19:42.460 It just...

00:19:43.080 I'm just going to stop it there.

00:19:45.860 There's so many errors.

00:19:49.560 Richard's too offended.

00:19:51.840 This really...

00:19:53.160 Like, I'm sorry to be this mean and racist, but, like, this guy is the equivalent of a fake Rolex sold in Times Square. 0.95

00:20:03.500 A Chinese maid. 0.96

00:20:04.680 Is he promoting himself, or is he...

00:20:06.500 Someone was tweeting that he's part of the Teal Network, or...

00:20:12.000 I would not be surprised if that's the case, but this is just awful.

00:20:16.580 I mean, these arguments could...

00:20:18.020 You know, there could be some interest in muting Nietzsche.

00:20:25.220 So...

00:20:25.500 Well, but they're sort of emphasizing Nietzsche, I guess.

00:20:28.420 But he's saying, okay, this is what I think I just took from those few sentences, which is that Nietzsche's critique of Christianity is that it is all will to power, as if will to power is a bad thing.

00:20:45.220 Nietzsche's worldview is that will to power is everywhere.

00:20:51.800 It is everything.

00:20:52.940 He is talking about an essential life force, which is will to overcome, to either subordinate yourself to a higher force and be taken along with it, or to oppose and resist the force, or to, in fact, overcome it, or absorb it within yourself.

00:21:11.200 Like, his concept of will to power is universal.

00:21:16.980 It's cosmological.

00:21:19.780 So he's not using will to power as, like, a critique of Christians.

00:21:25.740 So if anything, if this does come from the Teal Network, this is some sneaky way of, like, promoting whatever neo-reactionary Catholicism they're promoting or something.

00:21:37.560 It's the most common mistaken assumption, I think, about what the will to power is.

00:21:44.040 They just think, oh, it's the desire to wield power over others.

00:21:48.240 End of story.

00:21:49.420 Which can be one expression of it.

00:21:51.020 But no, the will to power is something cosmological, as you were saying.

00:21:54.680 Yeah.

00:21:54.960 And amoeba has a will to power.

00:21:57.160 Exactly.

00:22:01.020 Your genes have it.

00:22:02.460 I mean, yeah.

00:22:03.400 And the Christian has a will to power, right? 0.76

00:22:05.560 Yes.

00:22:05.820 Christian has a will to power.

00:22:07.920 It's an indirect, disingenuous will to power relative to the Viking, right?

00:22:14.860 But I think the other thing, I don't know if he's already made the point in the clip that you've played so far, but he's saying that, you know, Nietzsche, the reason Nietzsche was so obsessed with power is because he lacked power himself, right?

00:22:30.160 And then he also uses this to make a criticism of the followers of Nietzsche who are powerless people, and that's why they're obsessed with power.

00:22:39.420 Now, as we've already discussed, that's not the reason Nietzsche was obsessed with quotation marks around power.

00:22:45.720 He was defining phenomena.

00:22:47.580 He was saying this is the way the universe works.

00:22:50.260 It's a will to power, right?

00:22:51.460 But I think, I mean, you could say that people who are, some people who are attracted to the concept of a will to power or people who are interested in power or looking to gain power.

00:23:09.120 So, um, that would make sense.

00:23:11.660 I mean, if a, if a, if a man, this is like those guys that buy like the, what is it like the 99 rules of power at, in paperback at Barnes and Noble or something. 0.96

00:23:21.820 They're like, this is how I become an evil CEO and, and like, fuck over my investors and like, screw my secretary.

00:23:29.740 No, and I, and I think that there are some, you know, if there is a, like, if there is a good point to tease out of this, I think that there are people who are like that in the dissident, for example, who are looking at Nietzsche as a way of, you know, solving this problem of them not having power. 0.97

00:23:48.920 Right.

00:23:50.580 Um, yeah.

00:23:52.320 I'm not going to listen to more of it.

00:23:54.220 As someone in the comments is suggesting we call this video the bi-science.

00:23:59.740 Yes.

00:24:03.600 Yes.

RadixJournal - November 08, 2024

Trump's Multiracial Fascist Coalition

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