00:00:00.000Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:07.140We talk a lot on this channel about the problems of universalism versus particularism, but that's only one of many different types of metaphysical tension that our society is currently facing.
00:00:20.260Yes, this is all very complicated. Yes, at some level it's kind of esoteric, but this is the kind of channel where we talk about these things.
00:00:27.680we engage with the philosophy we engage with the theory behind this whole thing and my friend rod
00:00:33.320dodson just gave a fantastic speech that i saw and when i saw that i said ron we have to have you on
00:00:39.440we have to have a conversation about this we're going to go all over the place so i'm not even
00:00:43.780going to try to uh kind of wrap up the description of the talk entirely in one byline but i think you
00:00:50.220guys are going to enjoy this a lot so ron thank you so much for coming on man i'm so excited that
00:00:56.000you asked me to be on. This is a bit of a passion project for me, and I really enjoy the topic.
00:01:03.180I think it's something, maybe not for everyone, but for those who are interested in the deeper
00:01:11.580things, I do think it's exciting and not dry, dusty, and just for the graduate-level classroom.
00:01:21.720well like i was saying to you before we came on uh you know this is a channel where we spent a lot
00:01:27.340of time reading uh guys like nick land and tried to decode his work so if there's one audience
00:01:33.140that's ready to hang in there and uh go deep into the weeds with you it's definitely these guys so
00:01:38.820i think you've come to the right place to delve into issues like this so that said uh you know
00:01:44.260the title of your talk here is the metaphysical tension being becoming physics versus nomos nature
00:01:50.780versus convention universals versus historicism and the ditch on the other side of the road so
00:01:56.920the good news is brevity was not what you were aiming for there uh but but but we are going to
00:02:02.880touch on all of these issues i'm just going to kind of walk through uh the presentation as uh
00:02:09.560you you kind of explain a little bit and i'll be asking clarifying questions as we go so that said
00:02:14.620why don't you kick us off what are we talking about here well it's two plus two equals four
00:02:22.860it's something that you learn at the very beginning of school something that is true
00:02:28.540everywhere and always and it's simple and it just establishes that there is reality that isn't
00:02:38.840subject to your whim or wish. And the other picture is that of a cup of coffee. I've got one
00:02:45.660right here, which is as fleeting. I mean, this cup right here by the halfway through our talk
00:02:55.140will be tepid. And I'll drink it anyway, because my throat gets dry. But it's fleeting. It's
00:03:03.220momentary. It is completely dependent upon the situation. It is the epitome of historical,
00:03:12.300and then it's gone. As Stephen King might say, the Langoliers are quick to eat it.
00:03:17.180And so those are just kind of, in a kindergarten sense, the two ends of the spectrum between
00:03:25.000what we might call, in a cheap way, universal truth versus radical historicity.
00:03:33.220and i think a lot of times people get tied up having to be in one camp or the other which is
00:03:40.420why i really enjoyed your presentation because this is something i am always struggling to try
00:03:46.580to get people to kind of grasp that yes like these universal eternal higher truths are critical
00:03:52.940there's no taking away from that i'm not a relativist i don't it's not that i don't think
00:03:57.100they exist but in our western tradition that seems or at least it may be perhaps better to say
00:04:03.120in an anglo tradition that tends to be where the focus lies as where a lot of people will then
00:04:09.980sneer it's a continental philosophy something like phenomenology and they will say oh well
00:04:15.920that's only talking about this experience and that's you know that's what matters and so that
00:04:20.620that's that's bad philosophy because it doesn't focus only on the higher things and i think the
00:04:26.400answer that you come to as we roll through this is that both matter that both are critical that
00:04:31.360we are beings that exist in both worlds, and trying to isolate one or the other leaves us
00:04:38.080with lesser knowledge. But obviously, you have a lot to say about that, so I'll let you get into
00:04:44.660it here. Well, all this slide does is take it up a notch. And so we have, as the viewers are
00:04:53.580looking on their left, that's the graphical representation of the Pythagorean theorem.
00:04:58.300and again it's more complex than two plus two equals four but once you look at it and perceive
00:05:05.440its truth as the classic classical thinkers did it speaks to a at least I'll just to me I remember
00:05:16.800the first time I saw it depicted this way and it really spoke to me this longing for permanence
00:05:22.500that I think is bound up in the soul of man. And there's a capital T truth there that is
00:05:32.340beautifully depicted. And it spoke, it certainly spoke to Plato and his contemporaries and those
00:05:42.560who came just before him as to speaking again to this permanence. I want to stay away a little bit
00:05:51.380from universal, although that's true. It's true everywhere and always. And then on the other side
00:05:57.540is something that is completely and utterly fleeting, even though it speaks to that which
00:06:05.800is universal. And it's just, this happens to depict a particle accelerator, a particle smashing into
00:06:14.880one another and there's uh this is the graphical representation of one of the earliest uh pieces
00:06:21.760of evidence of materialized evidence for the higgs boson and uh you know we can you know i don't get
00:06:30.240me off into those weeds we we will we'll be here for four hours we don't have time for particle
00:06:34.960physics ron we can't we don't there but it's but the point is again something that speaks to
00:06:39.920a universal permanence versus something that happens within you know a microsecond
00:06:45.600so yeah and yeah you know I don't want to sit here and read the read the presentation but it's
00:06:55.240true human life exists in uh from that which is being imposed from above or capital T truth that
00:07:05.440our lives are bounded by. Gravity exists. If my heart stops beating, I will die. And then
00:07:17.420the phenomenal things, the love I have for my kids, which changes every day, but as they grow
00:07:27.100and get older, now they're grown and it's different than it was yesterday. But if we focus on either
00:07:33.580one of those, if we take either one of those to the extreme and camp out there, there's
00:15:43.600So, just so, in case you don't know, this is just, these were all contemporaries. Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi are the guys who finish up the biblical Old Testament, literally the end of the Book of the Twelve, which forms the Minor Prophets.
00:16:03.900They're writing from 520 to, call it, 430 BC, and Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato
00:16:12.340are rough contemporaries. Plato is a little bit later, but he just uses Socrates as his muse,
00:16:22.040so to speak. So these ideas that are this prophetic change that is coming over all the world of how
00:16:30.640mankind sees himself in light of being and becoming of of of of the historic and the
00:16:38.300transcendent or the eternal uh this is happening all over the world so to speak
00:16:44.120so plato's it's considered his greatest work uh athenian stranger and i both think that that's
00:16:55.000really laws, but most people know, at least know of, uh, Politeia or how we, we translate it the
00:17:01.760Republic. It begins with this question that every regime, every political ordering, uh, wants to
00:17:09.840avoid. And that is what is justice? And we're like, oh gosh, justice. And see this, this is part of the
00:17:15.500issue is justice has been taken over as a word, uh, by the social justice war, uh, warriors. We think
00:17:22.760that justice is some type of left-leaning idea. And justice just is the Greek word dikaio. There's
00:17:32.020this fancy D-I-K word group in Greek that's dike, which means right, as in right and wrong,
00:17:39.880dikaio, dikaio, if you want to be real technical about it, of justice or justified, dikaios,
00:17:48.360and dikaiosune, which means righteousness. All these things are bound together. And Plato,
00:17:54.440these sound like biblical words, and they are, but Plato, these are the words that Plato most
00:17:58.940often uses. And it's the question, in the city, when we're all bound together, when we're living
00:18:05.100in covenant, and whether you like it or not, if you're in a city, we all have to obey the traffic
00:18:11.700signs, and we have priests or the ministers of the law, and they wear the hats and either ride
00:18:19.000on motorcycles or in the cars with the lights on them. We're a covenantal people. We are bound
00:18:25.960together whether we like it or not, and therefore there must be some standard of justice of that
00:18:32.460which is right and wrong. And Plato's dealing with this. What does Athens call justice? Not
00:18:40.960And is that truly rooted in good and evil, or is it just whatever the democratic mob wants?
00:18:50.240And this is, what's funny is, Socrates is not speaking of just some type of eternal question.
00:18:57.040This is very rooted in the history of Athens at the time. They had just lost the Peloponnesian
00:19:02.500War. Then there was the time of the 30 tyrants, to which Socrates had some connection to.
00:19:08.040and now there's this hyper-democratic ruling class, and Socrates uses that historical reality
00:19:19.500to question, well, is right and wrong just what the majority thinks it is? In America,
00:19:26.500this is very, very important to our question of who we are right this second as a people.
00:19:33.620Heck, the Supreme Court was opining on it today.
00:19:38.560And this is so important for people because this requires a frame shift.
00:19:43.700If you grew up entirely in a Christian-tinted world, this doesn't occur to you perhaps the same way.
00:19:49.840In the Greek and later Roman traditions, the gods are not necessarily good.
00:19:54.760They are not just in the way that we believe that all justice flows from God, that God and the good are one and the same.
00:20:07.740And so when you have to ask what is justice, Plato is reasoning his way to something that is not revealed divinely in his religious tradition.
00:20:16.740So that's a critical thing for people to grasp.
00:20:18.540Yeah, Socrates in book three, beginning of book four, is of the Republic. And when you say book, that's just, call it a chapter. But he's saying that, hey, the Greek god, the pantheon is kind of crazy.
00:20:41.000They're just anthropomorphic ideals of how we act.
00:20:49.900They lie, they cheat and steal, they cheat on each other, all these kind of things.
00:20:54.060And if law is based on right and wrong, then we need to move past that.
00:21:02.000And this really frustrated the people of Athens.
00:21:05.520So, yeah, Socrates was a pain for Athens.
00:21:09.820He was akin to a Gentile prophet. That's kind of part of my thesis here. And like the Hebrew
00:21:15.460prophets, he was hated in his hometown. The prophets always saw this necessitated and
00:21:23.820unavoidable change. Because as my spiritual mentor, a guy named James B. Jordan,
00:21:30.880Presbyterian minister, his most famous book, a book called Through New Eyes, highly recommended.
00:21:36.780He said the prophets saw with what was coming, not necessarily always in the sense of prophesying all the little details.
00:21:49.100Sometimes there was that, but what they saw was God is bringing change, and that is, again, always painful.
00:21:57.980So Athens, this is what Socrates is basically proclaiming.
00:22:03.740He's doing kind of similar. He's, not to get too specific about it, but he is telling Athens
00:22:14.240that their days are over. The Athenian Empire is over. Athens, as the way it's constituted,
00:22:23.140is over. Change is coming. And it was. A generation later, Alexander is going to conquer
00:22:32.720the entirety of this whole thing and bring in a completely new order and the hyper democrats are
00:22:38.960are done so socrates posits the pantheon i apologize for my this was kind of uh for uh
00:22:46.700for uh you know punch in a speech but the pantheon's fake and gay athenian democracy is
00:22:52.600fake and gay homer is fake and gay again and socrates really did appreciate homer from a
00:22:59.060cultural standpoint but he said it didn't speak it didn't proposit justice as being based in right
00:23:07.140or wrong it was a different thing and then he's saying opinion is fake and gay opinion cannot
00:23:13.080in and of itself legitimize and this is such an interesting uh point here because homer is
00:23:21.820basically the bible for hellenic identity it is absolutely truth it's what they're trying to
00:23:28.180body it's who they want to be and so when socrates is attacking this this is like walking into a
00:23:34.440christian town and saying jesus was false you know like this is walking in and saying everything
00:23:39.880that underlies your belief system your culture your way of life these are wrong these are untrue
00:23:46.600these are not moral there is a truth that is higher than this document by which we have defined
00:23:52.600our civilization and uh you can see why uh people wanted to kill him uh because he is a heretic to
00:23:59.080his own people in a very significant way yeah this is paul walking into galatians and saying
00:24:04.680you don't need to be circumcising anymore right right into galatia not galatians the galatians
00:24:12.200of the people okay so so if you if you read that we'll go through this very very quickly because
00:24:17.920But if you read the Republic just on first pass and don't really get into what Plato's trying to do or Socrates is trying to do, it looks like a gay communist manifesto.
00:26:05.800he makes it most clearly in a book called The City and Man,
00:26:08.460uh, that you, you notice if you pay attention to the imagery that the entirety ever, I think most
00:26:14.220people have heard of Plato's cave or the cave of, of, of the Republic. Strauss makes the observation
00:26:21.580that kind of the whole, the entirety of the dialogue takes place in the cave. So it's all
00:26:26.520shadow and, and, and that's very compelling to me. So yeah, that's, uh, that's sitting on my
00:26:32.240nightstand now. Thanks. Now I have to read more Leo Strauss. I appreciate it. Hey, look, I'm, I'm,
00:26:37.100i'm just your friend and encourager uh so so anyway the republic is uh is is positing a
00:26:47.340political heaven that can't exist in reality because and strauss is the guy who points out
00:26:55.900he points this out not as to be some kind of uber snob seeing something no one else is seeing he's
00:27:03.080seeing this, trying to provoke a recovery of classical philosophy. But the idea is
00:27:11.100there's a reason people call Christianity a platonic philosophy for the masses. There's
00:27:21.920much truth to this. The Republic is really positing a political reality that can only happen
00:27:30.240once man has been removed of everything that makes him a man here, chiefly his sin nature,
00:27:37.200his, for those who aren't Christian in the audience, his imperfectibility. In other words,
00:27:45.440there is nothing that can make a man righteous here on earth that is within himself. It is,
00:27:52.540Paul says this, but so does Plato, righteousness or living in the right with your fellow citizen
00:28:01.840can only be done in an alien way. It's an alien righteousness. In other words,
00:28:07.140it has to be pointed outside yourself. So along comes Strauss, the big villain
00:28:15.380for a lot of, uh, for, for a lot, again, you know, and, and full disclosure, I write for
00:28:22.180the Claremont Institute, which is a Straussian thing. And, and I, and I, uh, and I owe a lot
00:28:28.040to those guys. They've been very, very good to me and published me. Um, and, and, and I'm not a
00:28:34.200full bore Straussian, but I, I have, I really appreciate Strauss and this is why. So let me,
00:28:41.140let me uh give give people a little bit of uh cred for you here when i was doing my uh speech
00:28:47.720and my eventual episode of the show that was critical in strauss in many ways i came to you
00:28:53.140to verify the information so ron is fair on this like even if you're coming with you know some
00:28:59.500skepticism about strauss he will tell you the truth about where strauss is coming up short uh
00:29:04.600so you know yes he's a fan of strauss but i you know i trust ron enough that when i am being
00:29:09.660critical of Strauss, I go to Ron to verify those facts, so. I'm not, well, that's very kind of you,
00:29:15.400and I'm not going to go through this entire slide because we'd really get in the weeds, but
00:29:21.300what, but it's the part of Strauss, I'm a Christian, and Strauss was an atheistic Jew,
00:29:30.380So we have some presuppositional issues there where I find Strauss very profitable, whether you agree with him or not, is his academic, his scholarship is outstanding.
00:29:45.780He is maybe one of the greatest readers of the classics, at least the reading I've done.
00:29:59.860An important mentor of mine said, hey, read your—and most of my writing before I, you know, earlier on in my writing was all biblical theology.
00:30:12.320and the guy who was my mentor said, read your Bible the way Strauss reads Plato and Machiavelli.
00:30:19.560In other words, read with detail. So if you read Strauss, what you're getting mostly is,
00:30:26.580does he do some actual philosophizing? Yes, but what he's really doing is commentating on
00:30:34.540these great texts, and he's a fantastic reader, whether you agree with his conclusions or not.
00:30:42.320So I find that important. And then I do think, and we'll get into this in a minute, his recovery, his attempted recovery of classical political philosophy is something I find incredibly important.
00:30:57.320um again whether you agree with all his conclusions or not that is something that
00:31:03.640I'm fully on board with and that's the part of the Straussian project that I am uh I am I'll
00:31:10.740I'll wave the flag for that part so here's the Straussian move and I I I think this is cool and
00:31:19.180this is so to give a little bit I'm going to go really fast but what in when Socrates comes into
00:31:26.620onto the scene he does this sock what's called uh his turn and but before Socrates the philosophers
00:31:37.820were natural philosophers they were coming up with the Pythagorean theorem and the arguing of
00:31:43.900being and becoming and and considering uh eternal causes and and all these things and and what
00:31:50.700Socrates really, or at least Plato's version of Socrates, is there is this turn to the human
00:31:59.880things, and the idea is that if it's almost as though, yes, metaphysics are important, but we
00:32:09.000have to ground them in the reliability of our perception. Even though man is flawed, what
00:32:17.700Christians would say man is sinful and has a sin nature. All we have is that which we can perceive,
00:32:24.860and this is what the later, this was moved away from later, and that's, we'll talk about that in
00:32:30.740a second, but Socrates wanted to focus on how do we live together and discover what is natural,
00:32:41.800in other words, by what we can perceive and observe and see how people relate. In other words,
00:32:47.700Uh, what is it that we all consider? Is there something to be, uh, can we reason towards good
00:32:54.760and evil? And sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Uh, and, and so on and so forth. And that's his
00:33:01.160quest. Well, Strauss saw this same mechanism going on in philosophy, uh, particularly post
00:33:10.920Kant. And you saw it in the, in the idea was that we were turning so inward, particularly with
00:33:20.000Nietzsche and then Heidegger and his Strauss's most famous work, although it's, it's not my
00:33:25.960particular favorite is it was a response to being in time. It's called natural right in history.
00:33:31.920Even the title is kind of an answer to Heidegger's being in time. And he wanted to return
00:33:37.980to classical political philosophy, to these human things, these human questions, rather than
00:33:45.300a philosophy, particularly in Heidegger and then, you know, Sartre and so on and so forth, that
00:33:51.760really question our ability to judge reality. In other words, is reality chiefly on the inside or
00:34:00.180is reality chiefly on the outside? And you even see this, Nick Land deals with this. He's, when
00:34:07.080his previous Twitter handle was outsideness before he lost his password. I think that's
00:34:13.040what happened and became xenocosmography. But it's this radical understanding of is reality
00:34:20.100determined outside of me? Is it alien or is it determined inside of me? And Strauss's argument
00:34:27.120echoing Socrates and Plato was, well, if it's inside of me, none of these questions really
00:34:33.340matter there can't be a right and wrong or a good and evil this these biblical questions these grand
00:34:41.180political uh questions because ultimately it's all determined in here uh and again and that's
00:34:49.820husserl and and and again way too much to talk about maybe we can do another show on some of
00:34:55.420those things but that's where strauss is really saying no we need to recover and being in time
00:35:00.860is kind of like theology without god i've heard uh michael seguru called it that and i look look
00:35:06.940go watch michael seguru's youtubes so good on uh on plato on heidegger on husserl
00:35:15.020on aristotle fantastic stuff he just died a couple of years ago but a great great stuff on all that
00:35:21.980um but but that's where strauss i find very very uh that's the straussian part of the project that
00:35:28.460that I find very helpful is, no, we need to recover this part of the political philosophy
00:35:35.980project. And you can see why many were ready to embrace Strauss as some kind of hedge against
00:35:43.080postmodernism, a regrounding in a way that did not emphasize just how you feel, what you're
00:35:50.700experiencing, the all truth is inner truth, these kinds of things. That's right. And so for the
00:35:58.300guys who've never really read any of this stuff or consider any of this stuff, philosophy just
00:36:02.960means love and pursuit of wisdom. It is rooted, it's part of the Edenic story. The tree of the
00:36:11.960knowledge of good and evil is about wisdom. Philosophy has become kind of a Paganini of the
00:36:23.020mind, just the ability to logic and critical think, and that's really a separate thing from
00:36:31.520classical philosophy. Classical philosophy is particularly classical political philosophy,
00:36:38.240and the Bible is very political. Don't let anyone tell you it's not. It is absolutely,
00:36:43.480the body of Christ is a political body. But it is this love, as Plato would say, an eros,
00:36:54.040a passionate love towards wisdom, the understanding of what is right and wrong, of good and evil.
00:37:02.240And yet we know even in why, you know, in the Edenic story, Adam and Eve are punished for
00:37:10.000eating this apple to attain this knowledge of good and evil before their time well there's a
00:37:15.760sense in which it's only for the mature if if you're really questioning these things you know
00:37:21.700the immature wants all the cookies right now you want to live for ice ice cream for every meal man
00:37:28.900let's sharpen a stick at both ends and rule the island right uh that's a golding uh lord of the
00:37:36.160flies reference. Um, and, and, but the mature says, no, I've got to live at peace with the people
00:37:43.680around me. And there's an ordering to that. You see this Christ reveals this in the, in, uh, you
00:37:49.360know, the golden rule, um, uh, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. You know, how, how
00:37:54.580about you just treat people the way you would like to be treated? And that's justice. That's right.
00:38:01.760And so don't think of rights. Think of what is right in the sense of what is right and wrong.
00:38:08.080And then wisdom is not intelligent, just merely intelligence, technical competence.
00:38:13.080It's the right understanding. It's the right application of good and evil.
00:38:17.800It's ultimately morality grows out of this.
00:38:27.640So knowledge, these are just the building blocks so that you can get to this.
00:38:31.580knowledge is it's hard to be mature unless you know stuff okay unless uh unless you for instance
00:38:41.740i write on a lot of geopolitical stuff at claremont and and uh and and for uh responsible
00:38:49.340statecraft if i'm not doing my homework to understand the happenings in for instance right
00:38:55.180now in the middle east and all the players and what are their motivations i'm not going to be
00:38:59.580very wise when I try to put thoughts together. I'm just going to, it's going to be mere opinion,
00:39:05.760right? Well, we should just, you know, blow all of Iran up. Well, that would be impossible
00:39:11.120and have really bad consequences, and it probably would be evil. So knowledge is just the building
00:39:19.400blocks so that you can get to a point of having wisdom. And then, again, this assumes that reality
00:39:27.440as perceived is reality. Now, do I know when I look here at my screen and I see the bearded guy
00:39:34.740looking at me right here, I know that's just pixels, right? But I know that's Oren, and he's
00:39:42.900sitting, you know, in a different time zone. I know I can really trust that that's him or can I,
00:39:49.320you know, and if you get to a point where you question even that, then politically, covenantally,
00:39:57.440you're kind of useless, because then nothing has any meaning, and that's the thing we have to guard
00:40:03.580against. So, and then the last thing, good is the proper object of wisdom. For Plato in the Republic,
00:40:11.000that's the highest principle, and he was moving towards, in book four, he even personifies this,
00:40:16.340that can we imagine that the ruler is justice and good personified? That sounds pretty,
00:40:24.900that sounds a lot like he's looking for somebody who's without sin right pretty cool i mean i
00:40:31.620remember the first time i read that i literally had the hairs on i'm like wait a minute is he
00:40:37.060saying what i think he's saying and then he moves quickly but he doesn't have he's not speaking
00:40:42.100empowered by the holy spirit as we would understand as christians he's just a gentile trying to
00:40:47.620understand these things by looking around them but you know so anyway but you have to believe that
00:40:54.660there is a good and that that that has to have some kind of staying power so to speak some
00:41:00.900eternality okay we can move on i talked way too much about that that slide sorry well but if you
00:41:07.060you know if you're somebody who believes in natural law if you believe that the truth of
00:41:11.220christ can be revealed through its creation and through rational exploration then this all makes
00:41:16.100perfect sense right like yeah plato is a gentile prophet in the sense that he is somebody who is
00:41:22.280able to reason himself into many of the things you know at least the the the vague outlines of
00:41:28.360the things that would be revealed through revelation in a mirror dimly his way through
00:41:32.380this yeah exactly mirror dimly yeah that's romans one um it's romans one kind of stuff so
00:41:38.720and justice and righteousness again try to we've heard these words for so long it's kind of like
00:41:45.880the word sin, that it's lost all its meaning, but it's this Greek word dikaiosune. Its root is
00:41:53.320dike, and from the Greek goddess of right or justice, and the idea is it's righteousness is,
00:42:06.600you can think of it, I am righteous with regards to my wife if I am covenantally faithful to her,
00:42:13.220if i take care of her if i provide for if i'm not out running around on her if i'm coming home at
00:42:20.640night making sure you know um i'm not i don't want to get into this isn't about you know how to be a
00:42:27.140good husband talk but but dikaiosune is this idea especially in in the bible but it's it's it's
00:42:34.540hinted at in in in these in this classical political philosophy it's covenantal faithfulness
00:42:40.440How do I live rightly with a whole ton of people I've got to be at peace with in the city, acting as this weird organism, as a body?
00:42:52.860See 1 Corinthians, where Paul borrows this concept and speaks of it.
00:42:59.620But so righteousness or justice is this covenantal faithful.
00:44:36.140They rely on the fact that you are operating on a child's understanding of these concepts
00:44:42.080so that then when they try to demystify them,
00:44:45.200when they try to break them down and deconstruct them,
00:44:47.500they're not actually addressing the full, properly discovered version of these truths.
00:44:56.120they are attacking them at this childish level. And that is what so often people fall for. They
00:45:01.600look at the deconstruction of these child's toys and say, oh, well, then that means that all of
00:45:06.540this was a lie. All of these things about God were a lie. And no, actually, there are much,
00:45:10.100much more complex versions of this that you never graduated to. And because you didn't take time
00:45:15.440to ponder these issues, you are now easy prey for the deconstructionist.
00:45:20.100that's a hundred percent correct i mean and and that call to maturity is so important because
00:45:25.860think about it in in the biblical tradition we see the sheep which is one of the sacrifices
00:45:32.060is righteous to the family in the sense that the sheep was faithful to grow and produce wool
00:45:37.700and milk and and and and grow you know and and do all the things that were necessary
00:45:45.380right? It's covenantally faithful to the family. And then there was this demanded sac, the people,
00:45:52.780you know, anyway, that's why that picture of a righteous sacrifice, that's where that comes
00:46:00.080from. Interestingly enough, the shepherd and the sheep is one of the first examples that
00:46:05.380Socrates uses in book two of the Republic. All right, so Socrates isn't just
00:46:15.300thinking about justice in the sense of what would be best right now for him, okay? It's what would
00:46:27.220be best for Athens and for in conceptually, not particularly, but conceptually for everywhere.
00:46:37.040What do I mean by that is, is that every city has to have some form of covenantal faithfulness or it doesn't exist. A house divided cannot stand. And so there's the, both the universal and the particular tied up in this.
00:46:57.800okay so the democracy that uh so so the city that claims to love wisdom kills the philosopher the
00:47:04.440democracy that claims to honor civic virtue condemns the just man uh in in our sense uh the
00:47:11.980democracy uh makes a mockery of the democratic vote um so the pantheon the poets the sophists
00:47:19.980so on, is all converge in this death of Socrates. They all are calling for his death. And so there's
00:47:29.160a sense in which his death really is a judgment on, it's a covenantal lawsuit against Athens.
00:47:37.600And again, we see this echo of the prophets and then eventually Christ, right? Like the man who
00:47:42.740comes, you know, is a stranger in his homeland, brings the truth, is hated for speaking the
00:47:48.020truth and ultimately pays the price, you know, while Christ's death is redeeming at the end of
00:47:54.040this, everyone up to him is simply, as you say, a judgment upon those who are ultimately rejecting
00:47:59.120the truth, the challenge that is brought by those prophets. That's right.
00:48:06.320So anyway, you know, this is talking about the idea of the righteous person. We can,
00:48:16.060um it there's there's this introduction in the in here of this idea of good death in other words
00:48:23.540that if the death of one man can show a civilization where it has gone wrong um
00:48:34.280because that man ultimately it will be judged by history as being righteous in a in christ sense
00:48:43.260with a capital R, but in other senses with a lowercase r. But there's this sense of good
00:48:50.700death, and this was very radical for the time, that all death was considered bad. And even,
00:48:57.140you know, the Romans, when confronted later with the gospel of Christ, were like,
00:49:04.620wasn't this guy stuck on a cross and killed outside the city gates? No, that's bad. That's
00:49:11.940always bad. Well, we should probably clarify though, because they would have understood like
00:49:17.040a glorious death in battle, right? So it can't be all death is bad. That's right. That's right.
00:49:21.780I'm talking about the death that's brought upon by the politia itself, by the regime.
00:49:27.300Yeah. Great, great clarification. So this is the quote that really got to me. It says,
00:49:36.900it was therefore for the sake of a pattern, Socrates says, that we were seeking both for
00:49:41.860what justice by itself is like and for the perfectly just man, if he should come into being
00:49:48.040and what he should be like once he came into being. We were not seeking them for the sake
00:49:53.960of proving that it's possible for these. In other words, Socrates, in a sense, prophesies,
00:50:00.880not really, but tries to imagine that the only thing that would make this right is if there
00:50:06.840was the perfectly just man, because it's impossible otherwise for the perfect city to exist.
00:50:16.460It has to almost be this legal miracle, to quote Carl Schmitt.
00:50:24.940So Strauss comes along, and he's useful because he understood the modern world had lost the
00:50:30.360seriousness of this ancient question, the ancient question being, is justice bound up in what is
00:50:37.600right? And you can disagree with Strauss's conclusions about how that applies, and sometimes
00:50:45.920I do, but I think the question is justified, pardon the pun. So the modern, because of
00:50:55.680the, the, the worry was if, if all law was positive, in other words, if all law was just
00:51:03.180because what we all agreed, you know, the democratic ideal, that the law is what we all
00:51:08.900agree it is, and that therefore it is relative, completely relative, all, you know, no, it's
00:51:17.040completely customary, then man must be viewed as perfectible, because the law, by definition,
00:51:28.680has to be perfect, right? Because it has the power of life and death. So if it's not perfect,
00:51:36.960we have, it's by definition unjust, because we are killing people, right? So the modern view
00:51:45.540had to see man as perfectible because he had the role of the ultimate lawgiver. It was not from
00:51:52.240above, and therefore the good in the transcendent sense was passé. And so Plato's good, to put a
00:52:01.140pin in it, is not liberal universalism. It's not human rights ideology. It's not democratic
00:52:08.020evangelism. It's the intuition that the visible political world is not completely self-explanatory.
00:52:16.280The city cannot finally justify itself. The soul cannot finally order itself. The human being is
00:52:22.420not perfectible. Justice can't completely ground itself. There must be a good, in Socrates'
00:52:30.220picturing, beyond the cave of our own individual understanding. It has to be outside our
00:52:36.520outside ourself yeah and again you can see how this will eventually lead to the understanding
00:52:43.300that is so close to christianity yeah so we already covered this uh strauss saw that through
00:52:53.020the imagery that the entirety of this of this polity of or the regime the republic this entire
00:52:59.480dialogue takes place in a cave in the cave that that that socrates towards the end and in book
00:53:05.780seven uh uh describes um and that it's that it's really impossible that that if you seek perfection
00:53:16.240here without ordering the soul first you're going to end up with gay race communism that's just
00:53:23.720yeah no it's a very interesting reinterpretation of the republic i'm i'm certainly looking forward
00:53:30.060to uh getting through that essay and uh and getting full grasp of his argument uh you know
00:53:35.660of course reserve judgment until i'm done but that is a very i think that is a very very
00:53:40.280interesting way to approach that and if that is an excellent argument that he makes uh that that
00:53:45.260does revolutionize in many ways your understanding of what's going on here which you know again could
00:53:51.240understand why people then have so much respect for strauss at least in this area yeah well i
00:53:56.400ultimately, Plato takes the esoteric lens off in laws, where he's just very clear about a lot of
00:54:08.240this. They're outside of Athens. They're away from the cave. And then they, you know, Athenian
00:54:13.180Stranger, I think, has either lectured, I think he's lectured on this, and it's fantastic. I
00:54:18.120recommend, highly recommend him. You can look him up on X. Go subscribe to his stuff. It's fantastic.
00:54:24.940Yeah, he's been a guest on this channel multiple times.
00:54:32.220So anyway, Strauss argued, so historicism is the idea that is, you know, I've used some pretty fancy language here.
00:54:42.280But it's that in order to truly understand everything, everything has to be historically bound.
00:54:49.840Now, this is going to sound like I'm being very anti any kind of historicity, and that's not true. I'm a huge Paul Gottfried fan, and Paul would probably call himself a historicist.
00:55:04.340But, but, um, it's just, it's just the, you want to guard against is, does historicism completely
00:55:14.120swallow up anything, uh, being, does it say that, uh, that the Pythagoras was only true in ancient
00:55:23.300Greece? Well, clearly Paul Gottfried wouldn't argue that, uh, uh, or, uh, you know, uh, so that's
00:55:30.820kind of my point we just want to be on guard here yeah there's an interesting uh way that
00:55:35.860this gets overshot and i'm i don't know enough you know to to say that strauss saw it this way
00:55:40.800but for instance i you know when in doubt i reference oswald spangler uh you know spangler's
00:55:45.560assertion was not that uh you know math didn't work outside of the different uh societies the
00:55:53.520different civilizations he was speaking of what he believed was that the the understanding of
00:56:00.340those people was limited by that historical moment that uh you know that kind of hermeneutic that
00:56:06.520comes inside that civilization and so they could only grasp and reach for certain pieces of that
00:56:13.040mathematical truth his assertion was not that science wasn't real math wasn't real these eternal
00:56:17.520things were impossible it was simply that our perception of them was historically bound was
00:56:23.220bound by civilizations so it can be very uh easy and people often do take these things to both
00:56:28.800extreme saying everything is entirely historically contingent or nothing is historically contingent
00:56:33.940it's all eternal it's all transcendent and the answer is as i think is really the point of your
00:56:39.120entire presentation here both uh and so we want to look for thinkers who even if they tend to fall
00:56:45.360a little into historicism or a little into something else they ultimately still recognize
00:56:50.380the truth of both positions because if you're maximalizing one way or the other as you say
00:56:55.140you end up in the ditch. That's right. So if wisdom is only, here's what I, this was what really
00:57:03.500propelled the inspiration for this talk. If wisdom is only, if this wholehearted, passionate desire
00:57:13.940to pursue the knowledge of good and evil is only historical, not does it, are we limited by our
00:57:21.840experience. I know I have been, but if it's only historical, then there really is no wisdom. If
00:57:28.300justice is only historical, then there is no justice. If good and evil are only historical,
00:57:34.540then there is no good and evil. There are only preferences, wills, regimes, genealogies,
00:57:39.020and masks. In other words, if Nietzsche's will to power is maximalized, then I can argue good
00:57:51.240and evil away. Yeah, this is the, if all of these things are contingent, then Nietzsche has to be
00:57:59.400correct, right? That's the only logical conclusion, which is why Alistair McIntyre says it's either
00:58:06.500Aristotle or Nietzsche. Those are your options. I've just gotten, by the way, just gotten into
00:58:14.140studying him a little bit. What a fascinating thinker. You might be able to tell I'm a little
00:58:19.680bit of a fan yeah yeah maybe so I included this in here because uh if look Nietzsche's captivating
00:58:30.760I mean if you've never picked up if you can put down the space or Zarathustra and it's so good
00:58:41.860the writing just propels you along if you're into this kind of stuff you know the gay science it is
00:58:48.760captivating stuff. It raises great questions. I think, I think Nietzsche starts with a lament.
00:58:57.560I really do early in his writing and who knows how much of his stuff, his sister fudged around
00:59:04.560with, you know, who knows. Um, but, and it, but it ends, you know, here's, he's getting on here
00:59:12.160a little bit. And this picture, it, it, you know, he's speaking of will to power. And here's this
00:59:17.900picture of this unrequited love interest who has the guy she's evidently really interested in and
00:59:24.320Nietzsche she's whipping and they're pulling along the cart I mean this is just it to me shows the
00:59:30.260ultimate emptiness of his pursuit that the that the that the telos is going to and look I know
00:59:37.600there are so many Nietzsche bros out there who are going to send me hate mail don't I think Nietzsche
00:59:42.220he's worth reading. I think he's fantastic. I think his questions are, I think he has good
00:59:47.940questions. If a, if a culture abandons that which founded it, founded it, then somebody's going to
00:59:55.820have to pick up the pieces. The problem is I think Nietzsche over time realized he wasn't capable of
01:00:02.160picking up those pieces. I don't think any human is. I think Socrates was right. It takes the
01:00:08.020perfectly just man to do so and that's impossible turns out trying to pick up the pieces literally
01:00:15.060drove him insane and by the way literally yeah and if you um have not listened to daryl cooper's uh
01:00:22.260talk on uh nietzsche versus um duster dostoevsky as soon as you're done with this just go do that
01:00:29.300just go do that and uh bring some tissue for the end at least if you're up real yeah unbelievable
01:00:36.180so anyway nietzsche's not dangerous because he's stupid he's dangerous because he's honest he
01:00:40.740understood that if the christian platonic canopy collapses christian from inside the covenant
01:00:46.420platonic from outside the covenant then morality does not remain intact that's take that it becomes
01:00:54.340genealogy by all these other things and you you better maximalize those other things um
01:01:01.700um yeah I'm halfway back through the genealogy of morals so uh that's all fresh for me so there
01:01:09.560was a real important guy here Cyril who was uh really interesting had a really cool project
01:01:17.240tried to basically have the unified field theory of ontology and I think he failed
01:01:24.740brilliant guy, worth, uh, I love Segru's, uh, Michael Segru's, uh, about an hour long lecture
01:01:34.160on Husserl. It's fantastic. But Husserl was, uh, Heidegger's, uh, uh, main influence and his
01:01:43.440professor. And so Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, German thinker,
01:01:47.320had to be one of the smartest uh humans of the 20th century just brilliant was in seminary to
01:01:56.440be a catholic priest and then i think and again i am no heide heidegger expert but it seems to me
01:02:05.500that he left over this idea and i can't remember the german term but it's translated into english
01:02:12.740gracious throneness that he struggled with this idea of that that God if if God is real his
01:02:21.980sovereign will is arbitrary we have no we can express no will over who where how we and the
01:02:31.280circumstances of our birth the limits of our of our mind all these things really I think gave
01:02:40.320heidegger as it has throughout history a lot of uh intellectuals a real hard time that that divine
01:02:49.440providence seems arbitrary and if there is a long struggle against calvinism yeah well yeah and and
01:02:58.000i don't want to disrespect that i think those are honest i think i think the the bible has answers
01:03:05.040I think that, I think some of the people after Calvin, you know, we can hold, do a whole nother thing on Calvinism.
01:03:14.320But, but no, but so Heidegger, Heidegger had this question of, of because of this problem with
01:03:22.500thrownness, then he had, then he saw, he wanted to really refocus the question on ontology of being,
01:03:31.120of how do we live in our own perception? And he didn't go full on solipsism. In other words, that
01:03:39.840my entire reality is behind these my closed eyes and I don't have any idea of what's going on out
01:03:46.740there but you it can lead to that um so anyway uh he wrote a book being in time that deals with all
01:03:54.200this and Strauss we've already mentioned this but Strauss responded to being in time with natural
01:03:59.480right in history and and Strauss says and Strauss again was an atheist so he he wanted to not rely
01:04:06.360on revelation whatsoever only on rationality he wanted to show that there was a what that you could
01:04:13.880get to um right or in as in good and evil as right and wrong um rationally but but he wanted to focus
01:04:25.240that there was good and evil outside of my own perception and so this was his response um many
01:04:34.440are captivated by natural right in history uh others find it uh lacking again what i appreciate
01:04:41.560is the recovery to the classical questions so here's here's you know this the summary you can
01:04:48.520screenshot this and read it later later we've already gone over an hour so i don't want to
01:04:53.480you know i do want to focus real quick was is on eight nine and ten strauss says because of these
01:05:02.360these the the movements in continental philosophy towards the phenomenological he has this emergency
01:05:10.760return to plato and his students and and strauss really has a problem part of straw and i'll admit
01:05:20.520this part of strauss's problem with heidegger is heidegger is a nazi and so heidegger speaks of
01:05:26.600resoluteness in in being in time i think that's in being in time of this resolute um decisionism
01:05:34.760and you see uh uh schmidt is riding along the same times you see his decisionism in the same kind of
01:05:41.960thought and this was and and schmidt and and strauss were very friendly with one another schmidt
01:05:47.720helped him get away from uh germany and into uh fellowship in the u.s but but heidegger's uh strauss
01:05:56.600I don't know if they personally got along or not. I haven't done enough research. But I know he really went after this resoluteness idea. And he really attacked, he thinks that that's Heidegger's way of excusing, you know, I don't know if he meant he doesn't mention Heidegger by name, but it's clear that this is in his crosshairs.
01:06:20.820And he wants to really, he has real problems for, you know, obvious reasons.
01:06:29.460So his followers, his students, which include Alan Bloom and Harry Jaffa and Harvey Mansfield and Seth Bernadetti and some really smart guys.
01:06:50.820uh i'll admit jaffa is not my personal uh favorite but jaffa was a very smart guy wrote some
01:06:56.900cool stuff for uh uh wrote some good speeches very strong on the homosexuality question
01:07:03.260so um but but anyway some very interesting guys but some of the students of those guys
01:07:09.940ended up being some of your mega neocons and so um do with that what you may i personally think
01:07:18.920that's kind of like blaming Calvin for some of the excesses of the Puritans and the scholastic,
01:07:26.500you know, the scholastic reform scholasticism movement. But, and I think that's kind of unfair
01:07:33.060to Calvin. I think some of the excesses of the neocons movement were due, you know, it's hard
01:07:41.760depend directly on Strauss, but that chain is there. So, you know, make your own decision.
01:07:49.520Again, I like that return to classical political philosophy. Part of that is the question of the
01:07:55.600best regime. And boy, the neocons ran with that. They ran with that. But assuming that the American
01:08:05.180regime was best always and everywhere for everyone, that mixed regime, and that's probably
01:08:11.300another topic for another day but there's reasons that people have turned on strauss because of this
01:08:17.540uh you know the crystals i'm not going to make any excuse uh you know so yeah but horowitz is
01:08:26.740in such yeah but uh all that to say i as i said when i gave my presentation on strauss i agree
01:08:32.740with you that i think he's a very interesting scholar i think that he has some very important
01:08:37.060things to say uh i do think that some of the implications of his his ideas do get us to where
01:08:43.580we are uh you know i i would i don't want to one for one him with like marx like obviously i think
01:08:48.600there's more wrong with marx at the end of the day but you know if carl marx saw his his modern
01:08:53.620day communists he would probably uh say yeah they belong in a ditch you know but like you know so
01:08:58.920i'm sure strauss would feel the same way about uh you know the bill crystal but when you look at
01:09:03.360some of the underlying thought there. You can see how that line gets drawn. You get the connective
01:09:09.380tissue. And I wrote a long thread on this on X once, but Strauss started as a staunch Zionist
01:09:17.020and then abandoned Zionism. He was careful with it because that's a big pull. You don't want to
01:09:27.400be seen as disloyal, but he had some really critical things to say about Zionism. He was a,
01:09:33.560uh, he was a big supporter of Nixon. Uh, and so it's just, you know, you've got to take each day.
01:09:41.800We're not talking about, uh, this isn't a, uh, uh, it's just a smart guy, a good, a good scholar
01:09:48.420and, uh, you know, read them and take what you want and, uh, but help him, you know, help
01:09:54.640So just take the scholar, you know, the scholar aspect of it if you don't want to take the rest
01:10:01.660of it. Yeah, as always, with most people who are operating at this level, it's complicated.
01:10:08.800And the desire is to, you know, I did a whole podcast with Athenian Stranger on what Christians
01:10:17.060should learn from Nietzsche, right? Because like a lot of people will want to look at him and say,
01:10:20.860oh, well, he's anti-Christian, so there's just no reason I should understand anything he said.
01:10:24.640he's automatically bad and that's true at some level but like also there's deep insight there
01:10:30.480and so you know that doesn't mean everyone needs to explore these topics guys i know
01:10:35.660uh it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of effort we're not telling you hey you need to
01:10:40.100read a thousand books but we're just saying when you address these issues if you aren't able to
01:10:45.440consume everything about a thinker just remember you know you can have judgments on them you can
01:10:50.300make uh you know assumptions you can look at what they're doing and draw conclusions but remember
01:10:54.360there's more there and there's always another level and you should be willing to go that other
01:10:59.020level if that is something that interests you if that is something that you want to pursue it
01:11:03.100doesn't have to be for everybody but it is something to keep in mind try not to reduce
01:11:06.860everybody down into this flat uh you know uh kind of a cartoon of who they are what they were
01:11:13.060thinking uh try try as much as possible to give a great thinkers room to room to grow if that's
01:11:19.420one thing strauss is really telling you it's that you know make sure you're looking at all the
01:11:24.060layers involved not just the surface reading in any given uh glance uh that said ron obviously
01:11:30.360uh there is just about a thousand hours more we could go on about this uh so we're gonna have to
01:11:35.820limit ourselves to just about the hour 15 we've clocked so far uh we've got a few questions from
01:11:41.420the audience so we'll jump to those in just a second but before we do where can people find
01:11:45.280all your work? Well, I write for The American Mind, which is a publication of Claremont. I
01:11:55.060write for American Reformer, and I owe them something. I have time for you to write for
01:12:04.200them again. It's about time. You can find me on Substack, where I put my more outside the box
01:12:13.260and experimental stuff, or maybe just something I'm thinking about while I'm drinking coffee.
01:12:17.220I have thumbed out more than one essay there, but with obviously no editorial going on. It's
01:12:25.920just whatever. And that's the eyes of Apilles, a reference to the end of the book of Romans.
01:12:32.420And then I'm on X, so at Ron Dodson, you can find me there. And then I also write for
01:12:41.080responsible statecraft uh uh occasionally and uh love the folks over there um some really good
01:12:48.920thought-provoking stuff yeah so you're just fine right at your local think tank uh or at his uh
01:12:55.000his sub stack that's right all right guys that's right one thing i wanted to mention
01:13:01.240in this is that with uh you know look whether you agree or disagree with strauss if it hadn't
01:13:08.280been for strauss i wouldn't have seen these deeper um covenantal truths that are being hinted at in
01:13:17.160even in plato that god and again i'm a christian you don't have to be to get all this stuff out
01:13:23.080here but for me it was incredibly encouraging to see um what i think was god at work in and among
01:13:30.680the gentiles all along it wasn't just about what was going on in israel with the hebrews with the
01:13:37.160israelites with the jews that got you know we see pictures of this throughout the old testament you
01:13:42.680see guys like melchizedek and jethro and uh you know uh use so um and then it turns out these
01:13:51.960same questions were being you know in the area uh that eventually would become the bedrock of
01:13:58.040christianity you had these guys at the same time thinking about these greater things of righteousness
01:14:02.920And then, you know, Plato's greatest student is Aristotle, and one of his students is Alexander, who conquers the entire eastern Mediterranean.
01:14:14.560Because of that, they all speak Greek, and the gospel of Jesus Christ is able to go out.
01:17:13.160Atenas? I'm not sure how to pronounce that. A preview of
01:17:17.580Yahweh? Well, there's a lot of, you know, this is, you know, again, probably you could go down
01:17:25.700this rabbit hole and spend another hour talking, but just know this, there is a ton of Egyptian
01:17:32.600imagery that is used. If you take the biblical account, if you take the last part of Genesis,
01:17:39.760if you take that account seriously, and again, I do, it makes sense that there's a ton of Egyptian
01:17:46.920imagery uh in that finds itself into the uh mosaic cultists um you have the use of strong drink
01:17:56.820which is beer uh as as the libation offering then once they enter into the land it becomes wine
01:18:03.360because one is uh you know the the commoner worker soldier drink of the wandering and then
01:18:09.320the kingly drink of taking rest in the land. But the cherubim are very definitely Egyptian
01:18:21.260in imagery, sphinx-like in imagery, and so on and so forth. Lots of really cool stuff,
01:18:30.400but we would expect that, that God would use, again, if you take it seriously, that God would
01:18:35.920use aspects from all over his world to uh to do things but um as far as a preview of yahweh i
01:18:44.160don't know exactly what the question is getting at but i know that there was a lot of imagery
01:18:48.480that was used uh chary cook nixon says any thoughts on the idea of that the biblical magi
01:18:55.440were zoroastrian clerics sent to witness the nativity by god any other non-abrahamics
01:19:01.280receiving prophecy. Well, and it wouldn't be direct prophecy, but yeah, the Maserat
01:19:06.840was absolutely in the Zoroastrian, you know, retinue, so to speak. Yeah, I think they were
01:19:16.500Zoroastrian, and they were probably converts going all the way back to Jonah, and, you know,
01:19:25.260in present-day Mosul, which is where Nineveh was, and that whole, if you read the, you know,
01:19:33.880any Zoroastrian stuff, it reads like Noahic covenant kind of musings on God. Again, outside
01:19:39.920the intimacy of the covenant, but there were people who were, you know, worshiping Elohim
01:19:45.040all over the place. So, yeah. Any other non-Abrahamics? You know, we, it's, you could say
01:19:53.740maybe, you know, is Gilgamesh pointing to that? I don't know. And if you take this stuff
01:20:01.780seriously, the problem is you get a lot of folks who don't take it seriously doing the research.
01:20:08.320And so it's a real mixed bag, but I'm going to say just sure. I think the Noahic covenant was
01:20:15.060fully in play the entire time. The Jews were the administrators of Yahweh's local presence,
01:20:23.740But that didn't mean God wasn't work throughout the rest of the world through the Noahic covenant.
01:20:29.340We see this in Acts chapter 15 when we see all the former disciples, now apostles, gather in Jerusalem.
01:20:38.780And what do they decide to recapitulate? The Noahic covenant.
01:20:42.680So the four things, the four stipulations, they don't mention the Mosaic law other than Moses needs to be, for political reasons, respected.
01:20:52.740but it's the noaic prohibitions that have to be held to uh going forward and so uh pretty
01:21:00.220interesting stuff indeed uh nixon also says off topic but erickson's attempt to conflate you with
01:21:06.940cavalier was disgusting uh you'd uh you'd press the deport button he would appeal to constitutional
01:21:12.680pieties uh thanks i mean it's eric erickson he's wrong about everything all the time so you know
01:21:17.640he's wrong about that too uh the funny thing is that of course eric like openly called for the
01:21:22.480murder of the j6 protesters so him pretending like he gets queasy about the discussion of violence
01:21:27.380is a little adorable uh i miss i miss og eric back in the when he founded red state with
01:21:33.960you know uh those other guys what happened you know uh i only know eric is a little cow that's
01:21:41.400yeah og og in late 20s eric was a different um late 20s in his age not right we're in the late
01:21:49.42020s but anyway weirdy kurt says humanity is like a drunk man who falls off his horse to the left
01:21:55.660uh then to even things out he mounts his horse and falls off to the right uh sounds like a uh
01:22:01.660a famous quote of some kind i don't know the reference but uh yeah certainly some truth there
01:22:09.100uh althea says i'm rather fascinated by the daniel 11-3 uh but fascinated that uh the daniel 11-3
01:22:16.780calls alexander a uh rab uh rav miss small which arguably means rabbi of domination i.e the jews
01:22:26.620considered him a scholar of war to learn under yeah so rav here uh remember there is a uh with
01:22:34.300the muslim uh takeover of greece you had the shift of of beta to vita so we know that it was a beta
01:22:43.500the alpha beta gamma delta epsilon beta was originally pronounced with the bah
01:22:49.240sound due to the onomatopoeia describing the sound that sheep make but it became
01:22:55.300the V phonetic sound the fricative rather than explosive and so when you
01:23:01.820see Rob that's that that's why it's Rob and not Rob or Reb and this is a this is
01:23:10.140under the interpretation that Daniel was written late. I take it as written when it says it was
01:23:16.180written. So cool stuff, though. Interesting to think about. And Althea says, there's an alternative
01:23:24.120idea of Mismal to mean will to power, in which case Alexander is considered the rabbi of the
01:23:30.580will to power. So a continuation of that theory, I assume. Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting.
01:23:35.160Alexander, if you take the accounts seriously, there's a reason the Jews were allowed to
01:23:45.320continue to speak Hebrew. Greek encroached under the Seleucids. That's after Alexander. Seleucis
01:23:54.540was one of his generals that took the area of Syria. But Alexander kind of left, the legend is
01:24:04.220that he even sacrificed a free will offering at the at the temple um that would match all this
01:24:09.640other interesting stuff so who knows right no fascinating fascinating glimpses throughout
01:24:15.380history uh if depending on how where we look all right guys well we're going to go ahead and wrap
01:24:20.020this up once again make sure you're checking out all of ron's work and if it's your first time on
01:24:23.980this channel you need to go ahead and subscribe click the bell notifications all that stuff so
01:24:28.620you know when we're going live if you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts you subscribe to the
01:24:32.740mcintyre show on your favorite podcast network and when you do leave a rating or review it helps
01:24:37.520with the algorithm magic thank you everybody for watching and as always i will talk to you next time