The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Why Everything Is Falling Apart

00:00:00.000 So it's become apparent that there's something wrong with modern morality. There is something

00:00:10.040 wrong with what we think in which the good life consists, and in the very nature of how

00:00:17.200 we describe what is and is not moral. And this was the fundamental thesis of Alastair

00:00:22.680 McIntyre's book After Virtue, in which he posits a thought experiment. And I wanted

00:00:27.440 to take you through this, because I think there's something, I really think there's something

00:00:30.300 to this. He suggests that, imagine there was a complete collapse of science, and not only

00:00:37.340 was science not done, there was an anti-science movement that spent its time trying to tear

00:00:43.240 up what science had discovered and cast it to history so it's completely lost. And then

00:00:49.480 once this madness had passed, people tried to reconstruct the lost science. They would

00:00:56.160 find parts of textbooks, they would find old recordings, they'd find certain studies,

00:01:01.040 and slowly but surely begin to reconstruct what science was out of the ashes of these

00:01:06.380 ruins. But they would only be partial, there would never be a full understanding of the

00:01:10.720 theories. And so they would use words like, you know, atomic theory or whatever, I'm not

00:01:16.120 a scientist. They would use scientific words, but they wouldn't really have a full understanding

00:01:20.320 of those scientific words. And so once they'd at least partially reconstructed all of this,

00:01:26.420 would you be able to call that science? And the answer is of course no, because these,

00:01:31.480 the new reconstructed scientific theories would probably not have the same qualities and effects

00:01:38.000 that actual proper science does. And Alastair McIntyre's contention was that this is what

00:01:43.100 has happened to morality in the modern world at some point in the last few hundred years. Morality

00:01:50.000 has actually been under attack, it has been deconstructed, it has been essentially lost to

00:01:55.200 history. And we still now, in the modern era, we are now trying, for some reason still, to

00:02:02.520 reconstruct morality. We are trying to understand what morality is. And you hear this from the left

00:02:07.280 all the time. They're constantly talking about the progress of their politics and their morals.

00:02:11.640 And you think, okay, but it's been thousands of years. How have we not worked out what it is to

00:02:16.380 be a good person yet? And the answer is, of course, that we have. This was just destroyed

00:02:21.260 in the paradigm shift from the traditional way of being into liberal modernity. And now the liberal

00:02:29.600 moderns have a very weird view on what it is to be a good person. In fact, you'll notice that

00:02:36.160 instead of the judgment-based morality that dominates, and if you read anything from a few

00:02:42.780 hundred years ago, you realize that they are very, very judgmental in their language. And it's because

00:02:48.000 they themselves are trained to make judgments of their own about what is right and wrong, what is

00:02:53.060 good and bad. And you'll notice that this is something that we just don't do now. What we have now

00:02:57.660 is a kind of rules-based morality. The morality of the civic bureaucracy, which in and of itself is

00:03:03.980 fundamentally exculpatory, as if to say, morality is not your personal judgment. So you are the person

00:03:11.520 upon whom the judgment ultimately lies. If you judge right or wrong, you might make a wrong judgment,

00:03:17.680 and you might make a bad call, and you might have to apologize for that. But then it's you that's the

00:03:21.940 person who is the agent there. Instead, morality has become externalized. It is a series of rules

00:03:27.140 imposed by an authority. So you personally can't really be judged right or wrong for following

00:03:33.360 these rules, because this was what morality was taught to you as. And I think this is just

00:03:38.080 fundamentally incorrect. I just think this is completely fundamentally incorrect as to what

00:03:44.000 morality actually consists in. But moreover, I think it makes bad people. I think this is the formula

00:03:50.840 to create people who are, at best, just compliant rule followers who can exist within a giant bureaucracy

00:04:02.820 without causing any disturbance to the bureaucracy itself. But I don't think it actually makes the

00:04:08.320 people good. I don't think it makes them happy. And I don't think it makes them moral. And that's why

00:04:12.960 I asked Stelios to write me a course on how to be moral. Because thankfully, we happen to have a long

00:04:21.700 history, written history of morality that we can actually call upon here. And we can actually

00:04:27.360 reconstruct it ourselves. So I asked him to do me a course on ancient Greek virtue ethics, because I'm

00:04:34.300 sure you're all aware, I'm quite besotted with Aristotle. And I think that basically all of moral learning ends

00:04:39.240 are there. And everything since has been a waste of time. Although he might correct me on that. But I

00:04:44.200 genuinely have come to that conclusion. And so I asked him to write me a course on ancient Greek virtue

00:04:49.080 ethics, because he happens to be an Athenian philosopher with a PhD in philosophy. So who better to do it?

00:04:56.440 Well, thank you very much for this. The course and the preparation for it and recording it was an

00:05:04.520 incredible experience. And I'm very grateful for this. So I think that you mentioned some really

00:05:10.520 important points that definitely need addressing. And they are things that I saw when I was teaching

00:05:17.400 philosophy. And there were problems that I encountered while I was in academia. And I'm actually writing a

00:05:24.520 book for some time now, about how the dominant intellectual trends of both analytic and continental

00:05:32.440 philosophy, that is Anglo-Saxonic philosophy and also continental European philosophy of the 20th

00:05:38.680 century, are literally sabotaging people from understanding themselves as beings of worth,

00:05:45.480 and as beings with rights and responsibilities. They usually think of the former instead of think of

00:05:54.200 both. I mean, if you look at our entire political discourse at the moment, it is nothing but

00:05:58.280 rights claims. I have a right to this because. Exactly. Where is the morality in this? Where is

00:06:05.480 the judgment in this? Where is the actual argument about right and wrong? Exactly. And in contemporary

00:06:11.960 culture, especially in alternative spaces, we have people constantly talking about the evils of

00:06:19.480 continental philosophy, such as critical race theory, neo-Marxism, postmodernism. But very few people

00:06:25.000 talk about analytic philosophy and very few people talk about what's there, which isn't so much

00:06:32.440 directly problematic as it is fundamentally indirectly problematic. I think that this is what destroyed the

00:06:41.800 defenses that we as Westerners had against the subversion that many people consciously tried to do

00:06:50.920 coming from continental philosophy and other areas of the world. But just a quick thing on that as

00:06:58.600 well. A third point is there's no alternative. No one ever seems to actually create a substantive alternative to

00:07:06.360 these structures. Well, that's the idea we are destroying with this course, and we are trying to recapture the

00:07:13.880 the spirit of antiquity and some of the fundamental pillars of Western civilization. Yes. A civilization

00:07:21.320 we are told constantly that is being uniquely guilty and also that it doesn't exist. Yes. It's right. So the

00:07:30.520 fundamental problem I find with analytic philosophy is ontological materialism. There's no other way of saying it.

00:07:37.560 If people start when people enter the stage where they start thinking about things and want to form a

00:07:43.480 worldview and ask themselves, right, how do I guide my thinking about becoming a good person and about

00:07:49.960 becoming a good moral agent, chances are that they're going to walk into a bookshop or watch a video on

00:07:56.200 YouTube by people telling them that essentially the the deflated view of humanity is is unproblematically

00:08:05.400 true, that all there is to human beings is just a meat machine. And just there is no value there that

00:08:12.920 the self doesn't exist, the self is a is an illusion. Well, if it's an illusion, who is deluded? That's not a

00:08:19.160 question that they ever care to answer. And also the idea that morality just doesn't fit well into the

00:08:26.360 materialistic universe. And let me just be very clear, because I want to be very exact and precise.

00:08:33.320 in what I say, I think that I don't say that every person who's a materialist is immoral.

00:08:39.080 I am saying that to the extent that they are moral, they're moral, despite their materialism,

00:08:43.880 not because of it. I think I often view a lot of these people as neither being moral nor immoral,

00:08:50.840 because it's it's all focused around harm reduction and the obedience to the bureaucratic rules. And so that

00:09:00.600 that doesn't actually require them to make any particular judgments or actually positively act in

00:09:06.680 a way that we could consider moral. And so, okay, you didn't do anything wrong. But what did you do

00:09:12.520 that was good?

00:09:13.320 Yes, I think that this is fundamentally the template for becoming a crazed fanatic ideologue.

00:09:21.000 I agree.

00:09:21.480 The rules account for everything. If the if the rules don't account for it, it doesn't exist. When

00:09:29.080 reality clashes with theory, so where is for reality?

00:09:31.960 Yes, that's the mind the mind template of a of a fanatic ideologue.

00:09:38.600 But also, you can see how it gives them license to invade every space that doesn't follow these

00:09:43.160 rules. I have essentially sanctified the rules. The rules are my entire moral universe.

00:09:49.800 Exactly.

00:09:50.440 And so if you're not following these rules, then they think of us in the same way that the

00:09:57.960 the conquistadors thought of the Aztecs sacrificing children, right?

00:10:01.080 Absolutely.

00:10:01.800 They view us in that way. And that is, I just like I said, I just do not think that is a moral stance.

00:10:10.440 I think that's actually a bureaucratic stance.

00:10:12.760 It is not a moral stance. I think it's the extreme manifestation of the staff of the stance

00:10:19.160 we're talking about. And essentially, it gives us license to forego judgment. Yes.

00:10:25.240 To stop judging. And one of the reasons that that's the entire point of it, in fact,

00:10:28.840 the entire point is to prevent us from judging to impose this repressive tolerance in which

00:10:34.840 literally everyone is allowed to do anything as long as it's within the rules,

00:10:39.800 even though the things they're doing themselves might be completely degenerate,

00:10:43.800 just utterly immoral in every way, shape or form.

00:10:46.680 Exactly. And there is something that is simultaneously metaphysical and ethical there.

00:10:51.960 According to this point, according to which we can just forego judgment because the rules

00:10:57.800 unproblematically apply on every situation, there is a metaphysics according to which

00:11:04.920 no particulars exist. It's only universals that exist. Every specific thing that possesses any kind

00:11:11.960 of particularity doesn't exist unless it can be understood as a just bundle of relations.

00:11:19.000 And the thing is, as well, it's intrinsic to the very nature of following and setting rules

00:11:24.600 that they have to be for all people in all times. You can't have a rule for Mike Smith that stipulates him

00:11:31.320 and rules for him alone. That's not a rule, then. That's a privilege, actually.

00:11:35.800 Yes.

00:11:36.280 Something else.

00:11:36.680 Yes.

00:11:37.080 So the very nature of the thing has to be universalizable.

00:11:41.320 Exactly. And when we're talking about universality, let's say that obviously not all forms of

00:11:47.560 universality are wrong. But when we talk about a universality that doesn't recognize, and in fact,

00:11:55.480 it's hostility. The irreducible particularities of human life, such as individuality.

00:12:03.240 I mean, literally every person's actual life.

00:12:06.120 Exactly.

00:12:06.840 The actual content of their lives is irreducibly particular. No one has your life. You don't

00:12:11.960 have anyone else's life. And so you can't just assume there is an abstract set of rules that answers

00:12:17.720 every question and every scenario that you will ever encounter.

00:12:20.040 Exactly. And when we do this, it's not just individuality when we're talking about a person.

00:12:26.920 It's also the individuality of one's family, the individuality of one's community, the individuality

00:12:33.080 of one's nation.

00:12:33.800 It's your entire history leading up until that point and everything that has happened in it.

00:12:38.200 Exactly.

00:12:38.760 It is in any way conceivable. And even those things that you don't really conceive of,

00:12:42.920 that happened to you without your knowledge. All of these things.

00:12:45.720 And this is because to a very large extent in materialism, if we combine this kind of materialism

00:12:53.320 with the other kind of idealism, which is only universals exist, it's a very dangerous mix.

00:12:59.480 Some people call it dialectical materialism. It's not just that, but there are more trends that lead

00:13:04.680 to there. We lose what is fundamentally true about every human life, individually speaking,

00:13:12.760 and we treat everyone as the same, as being just weight.

00:13:17.480 Well, this is how you arrive at the sort of modern liberal experience of humans being

00:13:24.040 interchangeable, fungible widgets that can just be swapped over.

00:13:27.480 Yes, exactly. And modern liberalism has the idea of lack of dessert for one's actions. It's not a coincidence

00:13:35.320 that John Rawls, who is basically the patron saint of modern liberalism with his 1971 published

00:13:43.720 A Theory of Justice, he fundamentally disagrees with the notion that we have free will in any

00:13:49.480 important sense. And he thinks that we don't deserve the fruit of our labor. Because if we produce more

00:13:59.960 than others and earn more than others, for instance, in the in the economic reality, that is just a feature

00:14:07.240 of things that we cannot control. We had a better upbringing, we had a better, we were more lucky,

00:14:14.120 and everything that revolves around that idea that we are not the authors of our own action.

00:14:19.240 I don't disagree with the idea that we are shaped by our environment.

00:14:22.360 Sure, but that's not what he's saying, is it? Because this goes far further than this,

00:14:26.120 because of course, you know, okay, yeah, you had to have a certain material base, as Aristotle might

00:14:31.480 think of it, to be able to achieve and accomplish certain things in life, like to become a philosopher,

00:14:35.880 for example. But it still was your personal agency and your technique, your practice,

00:14:41.960 your learning, your discipline, and your knowledge that gets you to where you are,

00:14:46.600 you are entitled to that. And if you're not entitled to that, why am I able to say that

00:14:50.840 someone else isn't entitled to what you have? And so basically, you strip away that thing from the

00:14:55.800 people who are actually deserving. But you also create a space for the people who are undeserving

00:15:00.120 to lay claim to this as well.

00:15:01.800 Exactly. And let us say this, it's again, the metaphysics behind it that is sabotaging people

00:15:07.800 from understanding themselves as moral agents with rights and responsibilities.

00:15:12.760 Because if we see the implication of it, and draw the inferences from the materialistic assumptions,

00:15:20.200 we'll see that agency itself is way more passive than we think of it.

00:15:25.800 Yes.

00:15:26.440 Agency is just billiard ball-like movement.

00:15:29.720 If I move and I'm an agent, it's because I'm entirely necessitated or caused by factors

00:15:37.160 that are not apt to me.

00:15:38.840 You are deterministically pre-set, pre-configured to become what you are now.

00:15:44.440 And the thing is, I mean, I've just finished my master's degree in philosophy.

00:15:48.200 And, man, I'm telling you, there's nothing, thank you, I haven't, I've got to do my exam yet.

00:15:52.840 There's nothing predetermined about or necessary about me having done it.

00:15:57.960 It was a lot of work.

00:15:59.320 I had to slog through God only knows how many books and think very deeply about the subject

00:16:04.360 that I was covering.

00:16:05.240 And so the idea, just the fundamental idea that actually agency isn't a core part of

00:16:11.560 humanity and a core part of morality is just wrong.

00:16:16.120 It's just fundamentally wrong.

00:16:17.720 That's the issue, and that's what happened in the beginning of modernity, because modernity

00:16:24.760 and the Enlightenment are a combination of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution.

00:16:29.400 Yep.

00:16:29.800 And the Renaissance does have the element of returning to antiquity,

00:16:34.920 which was very problematically fused with the scientific revolution.

00:16:39.720 That's why I think that a lot of Enlightenment philosophy is actually very good, but it's completely

00:16:46.280 problematic in how it synthesizes into a whole vision of life.

00:16:51.080 That's why what you mentioned in the beginning as an idea from Alastair MacIntyre, fragmentation

00:16:58.200 of the modern worldview is very much correct.

00:17:01.960 And we can't stress enough how correct it is and how important it is.

00:17:05.800 Well, on that note, I agree with you that a lot of Enlightenment philosophy is actually very clever.

00:17:11.400 I think in many ways it's kind of misappropriated.

00:17:14.040 I mean, take the example of Rousseau.

00:17:16.040 He really likes Sparta, really likes the idea of a tightly controlled city-state with a permanently

00:17:23.560 invested political class.

00:17:25.480 So, okay, yeah, I can see the appeal and I can see why you'd like it, but you can't apply

00:17:29.800 it to a nation like France that has 50 million people, whatever it was in his time, and is

00:17:35.160 a gargantuan area that you can't do that.

00:17:39.560 Exactly, and that was fundamentally Benjamin Constant's reaction against Rousseau is that,

00:17:45.560 you know, the world has changed.

00:17:47.000 Yes.

00:17:47.560 Modern Frenchmen are not ancient Spartans.

00:17:50.040 Yes.

00:17:50.520 That's, you know, when they thought they were ancient Spartans and acted as if they were,

00:17:57.240 lots of heads were chopped.

00:17:58.520 Yes.

00:17:59.000 Yes, yes, they were.

00:18:00.680 So, this is, I think, a really good place to begin to really explain what it is we can

00:18:09.480 actually do about this, because I really do, when I began doing my degrees, I'd never properly

00:18:16.440 read any of the things that I was dealing with.

00:18:18.760 And so I was forced to read through the liberal canon, and it became apparent to me that actually

00:18:23.960 this was basically just a kind of, a very advanced conflict resolution mechanism, which,

00:18:29.400 okay, that's fine, and you know, we want to resolve conflicts.

00:18:32.840 But on a day-to-day basis, liberalism just cannot tell you what you ought to be doing.

00:18:38.040 Yeah.

00:18:38.680 And it can't tell you how to do it outside of the scope of a series of rules. And actually,

00:18:43.560 if you think about what most of your daily life entails, you don't really engage with the rules

00:18:48.440 that much, actually. You know, normally, most of your life is contained outside of engagement with

00:18:53.480 the laws, with the state bureaucracy, with whatever it is that is imposed from without

00:18:58.840 upon you. Most of your life is actually you making decisions. And so, how do we make good

00:19:03.560 decisions? What is a good decision? And I've seen it so many times in my own life. I've got cousins

00:19:09.480 who I know, when we were younger, made bad decisions. And they had a very different life

00:19:14.520 trajectory to me. And, you know, I'm very glad that I made good decisions, but I didn't know

00:19:20.680 why I was making these decisions. And so, I think this is what, actually, I was asking for with

00:19:26.760 the Course on Ancient Greek Philosophy, because I think, actually, it comes down to basically your ability

00:19:32.040 to make virtuous choices. Absolutely. I think that it's a very straightforward thing to explain.

00:19:40.440 I think the first thing is to diagnose the problem, and then propose a solution. And it's

00:19:47.560 not a novel solution. It's a very traditional. It's an ancient solution. An ancient solution.

00:19:52.920 But it's well tried and tested. And it works. Yeah, it's tried and tested. That's the thing.

00:19:56.920 We know it works. Exactly. It works. And just apply it in your life and see if it works. It does.

00:20:04.440 Yeah, your life will get better from this. Yes. So, the thing is that, from a first-person

00:20:09.000 perspective, which is the only perspective... You will ever have. You will ever have.

00:20:14.520 We're agents with moral responsibilities. And our actions are up to us, to a very large extent.

00:20:22.360 Almost entirely. We have to be the authors of our own actions.

00:20:25.480 Yes. And to a very large extent, we have to take responsibility for our own lives. And I think

00:20:31.000 there comes a point when we mature, where we start saying, right, okay, however I may have been

00:20:39.240 mistreated or unfairly treated by my family, by my friends, or by my society, I need to stop complaining

00:20:49.240 about everything. And I need to live my life as if it's entirely dependent upon my choice.

00:20:55.320 Yes. I think people who think this way thrive. People who start complaining all the time,

00:21:01.160 they can sometimes become DI officers, but generally speaking, they don't leave happy lives.

00:21:07.080 They join the lanyard class, and they become very depressed, and they have to go to their therapists.

00:21:11.720 Exactly.

00:21:11.880 But no, no, you're absolutely correct on this. This is exactly correct. Because I can't help but notice

00:21:18.840 that much of the destructive forces in modern society and our politics are built on envy and

00:21:27.480 resentment and other negative emotions that are nurtured in the hearts of these people instead of

00:21:34.760 actually, I don't know, expressing a bit of forgiveness and working to become better people.

00:21:41.320 And instead of pressing rights claims out of grievances, you could actually become a virtuous

00:21:48.840 person that everyone would recognize intrinsically as a virtuous person.

00:21:52.280 I think you're right. And I think that this envy and resentment comes straightforwardly from the idea

00:22:00.120 that one isn't an agent of their own lives, that it's others that have to give me what I want to be

00:22:07.880 given without ever asking myself whether I deserve to be given.

00:22:11.400 And this is the very nature of victimhood.

00:22:13.320 Exactly.

00:22:13.800 Someone did something to me. I'm not the agent here. Someone is the agent here.

00:22:17.720 And now I have a rights claim. And this is what all of these rights claims are fundamentally predicated

00:22:23.240 on a sense of victimhood. I am the victim of the state. I'm the victim of white supremacy,

00:22:28.200 whatever they want to call it. And therefore, give.

00:22:31.640 Exactly. And let us mention one of the extreme manifestations of this mentality,

00:22:38.120 which is the activist according to whom everything in the world must change before

00:22:44.280 their lives personally change. It's unless you live in communist utopia, you cannot ever experience 0.78

00:22:51.240 true relationships with human being. And unless you are in communist utopia, morality doesn't really

00:23:01.000 apply because we are in a condition of emergency and warfare.

00:23:04.760 And you can see why these people are so miserable.

00:23:06.680 Exactly.

00:23:07.240 I mean, that is, that is a huge ask. I mean, you know, or you can work on being a good person

00:23:15.640 in your own life, with your own relationships, with them, with the options available to you.

00:23:20.600 And actually, after a year of doing it, you'll realize, honestly, genuinely, this is what I did

00:23:26.440 back in 2019, 2020, when I started my course, I started thinking about it and just really focusing

00:23:31.560 on, okay, no, I'm actually going to take Aristotle very seriously. I don't want defect or excess.

00:23:37.080 I want to do things to the right amount for the right reasons to get the right results. And I think

00:23:42.440 I think it's really worked for me. I mean, I've got, I've got all this, you know, so all I'm saying is,

00:23:49.560 this is my personal philosophy we're talking about.

00:23:52.840 And I think you're right. And to get back to what we were talking about before, it's we need to first

00:23:58.680 understand the diagnosis, the problem, we need to have a diagnosis, and then give the solution of

00:24:04.600 that, that is the time tested one that we're giving with the course. Now, the problem is that when we

00:24:09.640 enter modernity, and we couple the Renaissance with a scientific revolution, essentially, we understand

00:24:16.760 everything in terms of a materialistic, like billiard balls, nature of the universe, everything

00:24:25.640 becomes billiard balls, billiard balls. Now, not every Enlightenment thinker had that thought,

00:24:31.080 but that was the basis where they were gravitating towards, because they had embraced some assumptions

00:24:38.360 that lead their biological necessity, right? So if we embrace this, and we understand and we try to

00:24:44.680 understand the human mind materialistically, we're constantly locked in the effort of reducing

00:24:51.720 everything that is first personal, to third personal language, to language that doesn't involve

00:24:58.680 anything that is mind related. Yes. And that can can happen. And it can happen when it comes to agency,

00:25:07.000 when it happens, when it comes to normativity, because all agency, agency becomes billiard

00:25:12.600 ball, billiard ball like movement, which isn't really agency, it's just movement. No, it's

00:25:17.160 determinism. And exactly. And also, when it comes to normativity, we have the ease out

00:25:23.800 problem that Hume mentioned, that if you break down everything to physical factors, it all just becomes

00:25:31.160 movement and just particles coming together and being torn apart. You don't have the sense

00:25:38.120 of wrongness or rightness of action. It's just things change.

00:25:42.120 But you've drained the moral content out of the universe. Absolutely.

00:25:47.720 That's the issue. And so you can't draw the ought and the moral ought from what's materially there,

00:25:53.080 because none of it has any moral substance of its own. Exactly. And if we end up in an effort

00:26:00.760 to reduce all first personal notions, and everything that appears to us in the first

00:26:07.960 person, such as our agency and our moral responsibility into third person language,

00:26:15.240 we're going to lose morality for the following reasons. For the following reason that movement,

00:26:20.200 the movement of atomic particles is neither right or wrong. It just is. So if we try to understand human

00:26:28.600 action and human interaction in human society in terms of the motion of particles, we're never going

00:26:35.800 to be able to understand it as the interaction of morally responsible agents, agents who have

00:26:45.560 moral responsibility for making the world a bit better than they found it.

00:26:50.760 And moreover, it actually intrinsically reduces a person's ability to even conceive of themselves

00:26:57.720 that way. Because under the external rules-based exculpatory system of liberal morality, actually,

00:27:06.200 being moral is essentially a form of non-agency. It's a form of not moving. The most moral thing you can

00:27:12.600 do is to not infringe on anyone else's rights or on their feelings or whatever it is that people feel

00:27:17.800 infringed upon rather than actual true morality which is positive, affirmative. It requires you

00:27:23.000 to have done something. A moral agent is not someone who is harmless. A moral agent, as Jordan

00:27:29.080 Peason famously puts it, is someone who could choose to do wrong but chooses to do right instead.

00:27:35.080 And so it's a completely... the modern view of morality is completely backwards and trends

00:27:41.720 definitionally towards passivity. As in, you don't act and you are good. You do act and intrinsically

00:27:50.040 there's something negative about it. Or we have the very activist sense that you have to act but you

00:27:55.240 have to act in ways that are almost entirely in conflict with traditional morality. But if you look

00:27:59.640 at that, they're not even really acting though, are they? They don't think of the way that they deal with

00:28:04.280 other people as good or bad. What they're doing is just making demands of the system for extra rules

00:28:08.920 to allow them to fall back into this passivity so they don't actually have to take control and

00:28:15.560 go and take command of their own moral compass. I think you have a point there because one thing

00:28:19.880 I constantly see is people thinking that the act of legislating is sufficient action for something.

00:28:28.360 Whereas, you know, just it's not sufficient. It's just the first step in a journey of a thousand miles

00:28:33.320 because you have to constantly police the law and enforce the law and interpret the law.

00:28:39.960 And it's this interpretation of moral laws, just like interpretation of positive laws,

00:28:46.600 that is necessary for judgment and seeing how to apply them in society.

00:28:53.960 This is an element that we completely lose when we have a view, a metaphysical worldview that leads

00:29:02.760 us into thinking that there is no particularity. It's all just, you just know the moral law,

00:29:08.760 you legislate the moral law and that's it.

00:29:10.600 But you've got to constantly expand the law as well, because the world is constantly

00:29:14.600 changing and things are constantly happening. And if more and more of the moral decision making

00:29:19.800 and judgment is essentially offloaded to the state, to the rules, to the bureaucracy,

00:29:25.400 well, okay, yeah, we're going to need lots of new laws to judge the personal interactions

00:29:30.760 that people are having with one another. And so the whole thing becomes far more complex and

00:29:35.320 more burdensome than it ever would have been in any other era. And by necessity, it has to become

00:29:41.320 that way. So this whole paradigm, frankly, I think is trending towards tyranny necessarily.

00:29:48.040 There's no way out of it. Because once you've assumed this rules-based view of morality,

00:29:54.680 well, then you create people who only respond to the rules-based view of morality. They only

00:29:59.640 understand this. And so now your rules have to be comprehensive for a human life. Whereas,

00:30:04.600 actually, traditionally, morality was something that people did with one another, and they were

00:30:10.040 the ones responsible for actually making judgments. You know, have I wronged you? Well, I can make

00:30:14.920 restitution. I can apologize. I can take you out for dinner or something. You know,

00:30:18.680 it's a show of apology, of contrition. No external rules arbiter needs to be involved in this. This

00:30:24.360 is a decision that we make between ourselves. And we're creating people who are just not able to do

00:30:29.720 that. And just to add to this, because I think that it's an important qualification to make,

00:30:34.680 so no misrepresentation occurs. When you're saying that it's not just a matter of rules,

00:30:42.040 I think you're correct. But essentially, what I get from you is not that having rules is bad.

00:30:48.600 No, no, there has to be some rules.

00:30:50.120 Exactly. There have to be. But for some reason, they constantly expand to become very totalistic and

00:30:56.040 totalitarian.

00:30:56.680 Well, it's because the only aspect of morality in modernity are the rules themselves. It's not

00:31:03.160 the character of the people following the rules. Because the thing about rule is it actually has

00:31:07.560 nothing to say about the individual to whom it applies. This is a boundary. This is a barrier.

00:31:12.440 You cross it or you don't cross it. And if you cross it, I'm going to consider you bad,

00:31:15.720 and I'm going to punish you. But if you don't cross it, I still have nothing to say about the kind 0.97

00:31:20.280 of person that you are, the character of that person. So, okay, you could be the world's worst

00:31:25.240 welfare sponge. You spent your entire life on benefits, you've got a government house,

00:31:29.320 and all you do is smoke weed and drink and play video games and throw rubbish out of your window.

00:31:34.280 But if that's not against the rules, then that person is just as good a person as the person

00:31:38.760 who gets up at 6am, has a shower, goes for a run, makes sure their kids have got breakfast on the

00:31:44.040 table, goes out, works hard all day, then does charity in the evening. Those people are moral

00:31:48.520 equivalents in the rules-based order. And that's the problem with the rules-based order.

00:31:52.120 And the who are you to judge mentality.

00:31:55.320 Absolutely.

00:31:55.800 And the just leave them alone mentality.

00:31:58.520 Absolutely. I'm a person with judgment, which is why I'm a person to judge. And I have decided

00:32:03.880 that I am the moral arbiter in the interactions in my life. I'm the guy who gets to decide what's

00:32:09.400 morality. And so are you. And so are you. And this is why we all need to have this kind of conversation.

00:32:15.000 And to get back to the solution that we find in tradition, we can enter this and I'll speak in

00:32:25.160 language that I think that lots of people within a naturalistic society will understand because

00:32:33.560 the current intellectual metaphysics is naturalistic metaphysics. And it says essentially everything is

00:32:41.240 nature. And the advocates of naturalism are basically saying that every previous thinker

00:32:49.560 thought that we're somehow unproblematically disconnected with nature. I think that this is a

00:32:57.240 wrong criticism. It's a mistaken criticism of pre-naturalistic metaphysics. And what is

00:33:04.520 interesting and what has been completely lost with the metaphysics, the materialistic metaphysics of

00:33:10.680 the scientific revolution onwards, is that it destroys every hierarchy other than except for

00:33:20.760 hierarchies of complexity. So according to the traditional understanding of the universe,

00:33:25.720 metaphysics and ethics were sort of one and the same thing.

00:33:30.520 Yeah, there's no distinction between them.

00:33:32.120 The universe was a rigidly structured, a hierarchically structured entity. It wasn't just a

00:33:40.360 lump of things that was completely disordered. And to the extent that it accommodates complexity,

00:33:47.080 it's only to the extent that it accommodates hierarchies, there are only hierarchies of complexity.

00:33:54.680 Just like we listen constantly to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris talking about very complex brain

00:34:00.280 processes. These are the only complexities that they talk about. But from a traditional perspective,

00:34:07.080 we are members of the universe. In a sense, we are a mirror of the universe. And we are structured

00:34:16.280 beings. And our structure reflects the structures of value of the universe. The fundamental question in

00:34:24.760 Platonism is upwards or downwards. Because Plato is constantly talking about people living in the world

00:34:33.400 who make moral choices. And the fundamental choice is whether they're going to live as virtuous people or

00:34:42.360 as vicious people.

00:34:43.160 So let me jump in there. Because this, I think, is a very interesting thing. Because as you said,

00:34:48.360 the materialists are looking at the universe as just hierarchies of complexity. Is this particular

00:34:53.880 thing simple or complex? And they can judge based on that. But human beings live in a metaphysical

00:35:02.120 reality that is imbued with morality. And almost everything about your life on a day-to-day basis is

00:35:09.560 actually metaphysically moral or has a metaphysical moral valence to it. So for example, I wake up in the

00:35:18.280 morning next to my wife. The very sentence there is loaded with metaphysical morality. My wife is a

00:35:27.480 sort of a node in this network of morality. And I have obligations to her. She has obligations to me.

00:35:35.240 And we live in a moral hierarchy that's fundamentally social. So the next group of people that will be

00:35:44.760 introduced into that hierarchy are, of course, my children. And they occupy a lower

00:35:49.720 station in this hierarchy to me, which means I now have obligations to them, morally, in order to make

00:35:56.200 sure they're fared, clothed, but guided correctly, taught well in morality and how to deal with each other,

00:36:02.280 and then other people moving out and into an irreducibly complex moral network, landscape that we exist on.

00:36:10.520 So this idea that we can just somehow, if we just compress everything down into a rules-based order,

00:36:17.800 so actually do you follow the rule or not, that is just not sufficient to live a good life.

00:36:23.880 It's not. And let us be very clear with respect to what is happening. I think almost everyone except

00:36:31.880 psychopaths have a moral conscience. And they do experience, as agents who experience life from

00:36:40.520 the first person, what we're talking about, the experience of what is the right thing to do.

00:36:48.040 And they have an intuitive understanding of how this occasionally clashes with some desires that may

00:36:54.360 be very strong. If we embrace the materialistic metaphysics of the scientific revolution,

00:37:02.360 the extreme materialism that comes from it, we are going to view the human being as just a

00:37:09.400 bundle of passions, a clash of desires, a battleground of conflicting desires. And the strong desire will

00:37:18.760 win. As Hobbes says, the will is the strongest desire that will lead to action. Whereas Hume says

00:37:24.600 afterwards, I think about 100 years after Hobbes, maybe a bit less, he says that reason is and ought to

00:37:32.760 be the slave of the passions. But his reason is a completely deflated notion of reason. It's not the

00:37:39.400 traditional reason of Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Thomas Aquinas, or even Descartes,

00:37:47.720 Spinoza and Leibniz. It's reason materialistically reduced into a complex sensory mechanism.

00:37:54.440 It's basically the sort of large language model view of reason, right? It's an AI view of reason,

00:38:01.000 is essentially what he's coming to. But the reason I think this is so important is because the

00:38:06.840 hierarchies of morality that we live in inform the kind of people that we become. Because we move

00:38:13.240 through these hierarchies, they change over the course of your life. And this is why character

00:38:18.040 is so important. If your father is, for example, a deadbeat loser who drinks all day, doesn't get a

00:38:24.120 job, doesn't make sure that you have the books that you need to learn at school, that's a moral failing

00:38:29.560 on the part of the father. But the rules-based order says, well, he didn't commit a crime,

00:38:33.960 so what's the problem really? And so what we've done is equalized the moral character of the deadbeat

00:38:40.840 dad and the good father who provides for his family. And this is my problem with the entire moral

00:38:46.440 structure of modernity, frankly. It's like, no, there is a substantive moral difference between

00:38:51.480 the two that was not necessary. It is necessarily different, but it was chosen. Each one chose to

00:38:59.400 go down their different path. And this was based in their own personal virtues. They were the agents

00:39:05.240 of their own lives. And not just we can, we ought to make moral judgments ourselves between the good

00:39:11.880 father, who has provided for his family and pays his taxes and is a good citizen and husband,

00:39:16.440 and the deadbeat who does nothing and just sponges off society. So this worldview fundamentally

00:39:21.560 disrespects agency as we experience it from the first person. Yes. That's the issue. And it happens

00:39:28.920 because if we just collapse everything into a billiard ball-like universe, then there is no such

00:39:37.800 thing as a noble or nobler aspect of the soul that tells me one thing, whereas less noble aspects of

00:39:45.560 their soul may suggest something else, such as we find in the pre-modern traditions, almost every

00:39:53.000 everyone, every tradition. What would the concept of nobility possibly mean if nobility is just

00:39:57.720 following rules? Yes. And the issue is that because they deny this, the hierarchies of value, and they

00:40:04.760 deny the reason traditionally conceived of, which was the noble element of the soul from Heraclitus

00:40:12.520 up to Hume. Reason was the noble aspect of the soul. And it sort of linked somehow to the nobler

00:40:22.440 natures, the higher verities, in play to truth, beauty, and goodness. That was the voice that

00:40:28.520 lifted us upwards. It exerted an upwards-lifting influence.

00:40:33.240 It's what makes life better. Exactly. But in modernity, in this framework, let me rephrase it

00:40:42.280 this way, in this framework, it's all an issue of clashing desires, because there is no such thing as

00:40:50.360 noble, the noble reason of tradition that can, that should rule the passions and should govern the

00:40:57.080 passions. It's all clashing desires. And to the extent that we are beings with foresight and reason

00:41:05.000 in that sense, reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions, according to Hume. So all desires

00:41:11.800 are seeing as equal. There are no ways of ranking desires morally in ways that feature and are

00:41:20.440 compatible with the metaphysical assumptions of who we actually are. So just let me just say this,

00:41:26.520 go ahead, because this is so on the money. This is so, this explains everything about what's

00:41:30.520 happening now. Yeah, because, and the fundamental problem comes also with Kant afterwards, whose

00:41:35.720 main problem was that he took Hume way too seriously. He invents a philosophy and initiates a project

00:41:44.200 according to which there is a fundamental gap between our experience and reality. Because what he says is

00:41:52.360 we have to view the world as if we are moral agents, as if it's extended in time and space, as if time

00:42:00.040 exists. There's always an as if clause. And Kant, I think Kant was someone who was a very profound

00:42:07.560 philosopher. Oh, he's a very smart chap. Very smart. And he does have very insightful ethics. But I think

00:42:15.080 that he and Kant and Hume are the authors of this consciousness that doesn't feature in the world.

00:42:22.920 Because it constantly views the world with an as if. We view the world as if this. So when I,

00:42:29.000 when I love my, my wife from a more, from a modern perspective, I have to constantly have this thought

00:42:37.000 in my mind that is just an imbalance of chemical in my brain. That's totally true.

00:42:42.680 It brings everything down. And moreover, notice that it's Kant that really instantiates the

00:42:49.160 rules-based ethics as well. I mean, his entire categorical, categorical imperative is, can this

00:42:54.760 be a universalizable rule? It's like, I don't know. And I don't care. It might be the right thing to do

00:43:00.280 for this person in this time, in this place, for this reason, because of the particular circumstances

00:43:06.200 that brought this about. Even if that's not like, and this is obviously a common critique of

00:43:11.240 Kant's rule-based system itself. But the point is, you can see that the only escape from where this

00:43:16.760 was going is to say, okay, well, we need universalizable rules. And that's in what morality

00:43:22.360 consists. And that's just not correct. But anyway, so this, I think, is a really genuine problem.

00:43:29.240 This is why I asked you to begin on this odyssey from the very beginning. Because this has taken,

00:43:33.880 how long have we been working? We're working on it for about a year. Right. So this has taken a very

00:43:38.760 long time. But it became apparent to me that we would need something like this, that we could say,

00:43:43.960 look, you are basically trapped in a kind of mind fog of modernity. This is a deliberate attempt

00:43:52.200 to reduce your personal agency and to make you not know what you ought to do with your life. And this

00:43:58.120 is completely counter to what all ancient Greek philosophy basically was for, which was how to

00:44:03.720 live a good life. The idea that human life has a goal, what they would call a telos, is something

00:44:10.120 that's completely absent to modern thinking about what it is to exist. You are just a bundle of

00:44:14.760 desires, a fleshy sack that is seeking to satiate itself and therefore get in the pod, eat the bugs,

00:44:21.720 you know, watch the VR and consume the soma. It's like, sorry, I don't think that's actually a good

00:44:25.880 life. It's not a good life. I think that's the opposite of a good life. It's a curse. It's not a good

00:44:30.440 life. It's the, it's the life of vice, according to Plato and Aristotle and basically all the

00:44:36.760 ancients and all the, and all the pre-moderns in their respect, because, and also for many modern

00:44:42.840 philosophers, because if we are just a battlefield of conflicting desires, none of which are more noble

00:44:50.760 than the others in ways that our view of the universe can sustain, well, let them, let, let

00:44:58.920 the strongest desire win by right of conquest. And also, you can, you can see why leftists and

00:45:04.760 liberals are constantly on the side of the, the villains from this perspective, right? If there's

00:45:10.760 no particular nobility to you doing the right thing and them doing the wrong thing, because they are just

00:45:17.080 the conflict on the battlefield of desires and the, the, the, the stronger desire, which we would

00:45:22.200 consider negative as one, well, then he's no less moral than you. He was just unfortunate. He is just

00:45:28.680 a victim of circumstance. He was just, you know, so if we just give him enough, if, if, if we just

00:45:34.040 satisfy the socioeconomic conditions, then he'll be less of a criminal. It's like, no, that's just not how

00:45:38.600 it works. Actually, it's about training and character. That's what all of morality actually is in the

00:45:44.520 way that you deal with things. And so the, I, basically what we are doing with this course

00:45:49.400 is completely rejecting the modern paradigm of morality. Yes. Because it's wrong. It's just

00:45:55.800 incorrect. And actually going back to a traditional virtue-based view of morality, because that is

00:46:02.200 correct. That is actually how good people are made and what, in what morality is actually contained.

00:46:07.560 And contrary to what many scholars think, resurrecting antiquity and going back to ancient Greek virtue

00:46:15.800 ethics and ancient Greco-Roman virtue ethics is also capable of giving guidance to our lives and also

00:46:25.240 capable of accommodating lots of the good elements of the Enlightenment and of today. Because one of the

00:46:33.720 constant criticisms of ancient virtue ethics is that it doesn't give you guidance to,

00:46:40.120 to your life. I think it's the exact opposite. It does. That's what it's for. That's what they're

00:46:45.240 saying. They're saying that it's, it doesn't give you a rule to apply to every case. That's true. It

00:46:51.400 doesn't give you a rule to apply to every case. And what it does is fosters your judgment. So no matter

00:46:55.400 what case you find yourself in, you can make a good decision. Yeah. So I think that, as you said,

00:47:01.720 with, with this course, we're fundamentally rejecting the modern paradigm in its entire

00:47:07.720 philosophy. Yes. Its entire philosophy. Root and branch. Exactly. Because the problem is,

00:47:13.320 as you mentioned with McIntyre in the beginning, and the really great and profound thought experiment

00:47:19.880 that he starts his after virtue with, is that human beings have a tendency towards wholeness and

00:47:26.600 and completion. That's why we, as he also says, we live, we can, we cannot but experience our lives

00:47:34.120 in narrative form. Correct. As a complete story with beginning, middle and end, and an ending.

00:47:39.800 And there's, there's so much extra that could be said about the narrative view of life as well. We

00:47:44.360 won't get into it now. Yeah. But honestly, after, after reading after virtue, I've been on this journey

00:47:49.720 myself to get to that point. And so reading McIntyre basically put the sort of capstone on my own view

00:47:54.680 on this. I was like, yeah, no, everything actually is stories. We can't, there's no context and

00:47:59.320 understanding of anything if it's not in a narrative. Like you don't know why, why are you here still?

00:48:03.960 Well, you know why you're, you've got a story of how you got here and you, you watching, you've all

00:48:07.560 got the same. So it's just one of those things where it's like, yeah, God, we, the, the sort of atomic

00:48:12.680 modern view of what a human being is and each event is just so wrong. But that's, I, I'm going off on a

00:48:18.040 side tangent now. Sorry, Karen. No, but just to let me add to this, there is a human need for, for

00:48:24.440 completion and there is a human need for, uh, for a wholeness and fragment fragment. The fragmentation

00:48:32.200 of our modern worldview is creating lots of troubles for it. Completely. And, uh. This is a quick example

00:48:38.280 of this. Um, I keep seeing articles of aging millennial women who are now getting to their 40s and being

00:48:44.040 like, well, I'm a girl boss who earning 100 grand a year. Why can't I find a husband? It's like, because

00:48:48.760 you didn't have a plan for your life. You didn't think, okay, when I'm at that age, how will I have

00:48:55.400 a certain set of goods that I want to have? It's like, well, you didn't take any of the actions required

00:49:00.600 to get to that place. And now you've, you've taken, in fact, a series of counteractions that actually

00:49:05.960 prevent you from getting to that place. And you're wondering, well, why aren't I there? It's because

00:49:09.000 you were raised in a society that did not prepare you to get the things you actually want.

00:49:13.880 Exactly. You were, you were completely misled, frankly.

00:49:16.600 You didn't view life as a whole. You viewed life just from an, uh, an action and actions and

00:49:24.120 outcomes in very short term. But yeah, it's immediate. And the thing is my whole life,

00:49:30.440 I remember, I, now I think back my whole life in modern Western democracies, you are just taught

00:49:36.840 not to worry about the future. There's just no concern for you.

00:49:39.800 You absolutely should worry about it.

00:49:41.160 Well, of course, obviously, you know, it's your life. If you, if it's not important to you.

00:49:46.360 Exactly. Who's important to you, right? But this, but this, the thing it, it, everything is about

00:49:51.160 just satisfying the primary desire that you're feeling at the moment.

00:49:55.400 Yes.

00:49:55.720 That's what everything's based around. And it's like, okay, well, I'm not saying that doesn't feel good,

00:50:00.280 but you will wish. I mean, I wasted my twenties. I wasted my twenties living in that paradigm.

00:50:06.760 So I was just like, okay, well, I'll just work whatever I need the bare minimum to sustain myself.

00:50:11.160 And then I'll just, you know, play my video games. I'll just drink beer. I'll scrap my friends. I'll

00:50:15.080 do nothing useful. And I guess I'm very lucky that I've ended up where I ended up, but I didn't know

00:50:20.680 I was going to end up here. I was just very, very lucky. I don't think this is the life path for most

00:50:24.680 people. And actually, I think that you need to plan long and long in advance to get to where

00:50:29.720 you actually think you want to be, you know, and this, this is just alien to modern philosophy,

00:50:35.960 completely alien. And in fact, it's a form of oppression probably in, in most of it, frankly.

00:50:41.720 So with this course, we're telling people fundamentally start listening to your noble

00:50:47.720 nature. Yes.

00:50:49.000 Start waking up to the hierarchies of your soul and of your being and person and of life

00:50:56.360 and of life. Learn to say no to, to the less noble elements and also have the metaphysical

00:51:07.000 ground to, to make sense of this. Correct.

00:51:10.200 Because one of the major problems with materialistic metaphysics is that we can't

00:51:14.360 make sense of morality and of ourselves as moral agents.

00:51:18.360 So I think that this is something that is really important. And I wish I was told this

00:51:24.840 when I was younger.

00:51:27.080 I wish I'd had this drilled into me at school.

00:51:29.320 Yeah.

00:51:29.560 I, I, I'm sure I'd be more successful than I am now if I had.

00:51:33.320 So let's, let's go through the structure of the course. So as I understand it's, it's, uh,

00:51:37.000 the introduction and then eight lectures.

00:51:38.840 Yeah.

00:51:39.240 So it's, and it's 14 and a half hours of lectures.

00:51:42.200 I think it's somewhere there.

00:51:43.560 Which is a long course. That's a big course.

00:51:46.200 It's not a small undertaking.

00:51:48.440 Um, you know, this, this is serious stuff.

00:51:51.160 And there's, uh, a reading list for each lecture, obviously.

00:51:55.960 Um, but I, I assume it's not the entire books.

00:51:58.280 It's just sections of books, is it?

00:52:00.360 Um, yeah.

00:52:01.000 I mean, as with everything, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.

00:52:05.560 Right.

00:52:05.800 So the, the course is, um, involves an introduction.

00:52:10.120 There's about half an hour and is very basic.

00:52:14.120 It sort of gives some fundamental tools for people to understand

00:52:17.880 ethical theorizing and ethics better.

00:52:20.360 And, uh, eight, uh, lectures.

00:52:23.240 Now, let me say a bit, a bit about introduction.

00:52:26.040 I think it's a very important one because I think philosophy is something that

00:52:32.200 most people love or hate depending on how they were introduced to it.

00:52:37.320 Because there are, unfortunately, so many philosophers.

00:52:40.600 Academia has lots of them, um, who just talk about the subject

00:52:45.480 and make it incredibly uninteresting.

00:52:47.560 Yes.

00:52:48.520 And just someone who isn't instantly drawn into it from a, just for its own sake,

00:52:56.200 will say, right, okay, but how is that important?

00:52:58.440 How does it help?

00:52:59.240 That, that's the problem.

00:53:00.120 It's the disconnect.

00:53:01.000 It's spoken of entirely in the abstract, as if it doesn't have a bearing on the here

00:53:05.240 and now in real life.

00:53:06.200 But actually, no, it really does.

00:53:07.880 And the, you know, the, it informs the decisions that you make.

00:53:11.720 And that's what you need to train.

00:53:13.560 Exactly.

00:53:14.040 So in the very beginning, I introduce how some basics of ethical philosophy

00:53:21.240 in terms of how they relate to first person experience.

00:53:24.680 I think that's the best avenue to enter into it because most people, as Aristotle said,

00:53:30.440 try to understand the less familiar in terms of the more familiar.

00:53:34.920 And there's nothing more familiar than first person experience.

00:53:37.800 So I'm talking about moral experience, moral judgment, and then ethical theorizing.

00:53:43.240 How we're trying to organize the verdicts of our moral judgment.

00:53:48.760 And then we have eight lectures.

00:53:50.440 Well, before we go on this, just like, this is another real strength of Alastair MacIntyre.

00:53:54.920 Temporalizing ideas.

00:53:57.160 It's very easy when you're doing philosophy or any kind of thinking, really, to look at the

00:54:03.000 tradition that came before you and assume that it kind of floats outside of time and space.

00:54:07.080 Because I can pick up a manuscript from Descartes or something 400 years later and be like,

00:54:12.040 oh yeah, and feel like I'm having a conversation with him.

00:54:15.240 But no, he's very much a product of his time and place, actually.

00:54:18.200 All ideas are actually a product of their time and place.

00:54:20.840 And so having a proper understanding of the context that leads up to a certain set of ideas

00:54:28.920 actually gives you mastery over the ideas.

00:54:31.720 The ideas are not just abstract and imposed upon you from the divine form of Marxism or whatever it is.

00:54:37.560 It's actually, no, you can see how this is coming out of the Industrial Revolution as a reaction

00:54:41.320 to the centralization of capital and labor.

00:54:44.760 Like, these things suddenly become much more comprehensible.

00:54:47.640 And that's what I think the point of, like, Lecture 2 is, or Lecture 1 actually is.

00:54:52.920 Well, yeah.

00:54:53.800 And now, Lecture 2 is a lecture that is talking about myth and the seven stages of antiquity.

00:55:02.920 And I think that in it, people will like it because myth is something that is very appealing to many people.

00:55:11.240 It's very majestic.

00:55:12.440 It's very easy to get into it.

00:55:14.840 It's very cool in some respects.

00:55:16.840 I think everyone loves myths.

00:55:18.120 But it's also just value setting.

00:55:22.040 This is where values are set.

00:55:23.480 Exactly.

00:55:23.960 And there's a reason that Alexander slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow

00:55:27.320 and wanted to emulate Achilles as an example.

00:55:29.320 Yeah.

00:55:29.880 But it's, myths are where we set values.

00:55:33.080 And so you told me before we talked about this,

00:55:35.480 it's like, look, it's actually in these mythologies that the birth of philosophy comes.

00:55:40.840 Exactly.

00:55:41.480 Yes.

00:55:42.440 Right.

00:55:42.760 So Lecture 2 dispenses completely with the Enlightenment myth, according to which

00:55:49.960 everything before Enlightenment reason is darkness, and there comes reason, which is the light.

00:55:57.080 According to, I think, a more sophisticated view on things, suggests that philosophy is a brighter light.

00:56:05.240 And it's very interesting to look how, to look at how philosophy arises from intellectual and cultural factors of the time.

00:56:16.760 Yeah.

00:56:16.920 Yeah.

00:56:17.480 Right.

00:56:17.800 So Lecture number two is about ethical teachings in pre-philosophical traditions.

00:56:23.240 And I start by saying that ethical teachings and ethical reflection doesn't begin with philosophical reflection about ethics.

00:56:31.960 And I'm talking there about the myths.

00:56:33.800 I'm talking about Hesiod's Theogony, Hesiod's Work and Days, a bit about Iliad and the Odyssey,

00:56:41.880 and a bit about Antigone, and also about a chapter, I think it's in Sophocles' Ajax,

00:56:52.040 where there's a battle about, there's rivalry between Odysseus and Ajax of Telemann about who is going to get Achilles' armor.

00:57:01.080 And that essentially shows different philosophies of warfare.

00:57:06.600 We part with the Achilles versus Hector 1v1 mode of warfare, which Ajax of Telemann, who was number two in everything, 0.91

00:57:15.800 you know, because Achilles was number two in everything.

00:57:18.440 And we go with a much more, you know, surgical hit, drone strike view of warfare with Odysseus.

00:57:25.800 But the point of the story is to impart a moral lecture, right?

00:57:28.840 The point of the story is to teach you something about morality.

00:57:31.400 Exactly.

00:57:31.880 And that's why Hollywood stories are terrible now, because they've forgotten that that's the point of a story.

00:57:37.080 And in fact, they do still lecture you, but it's on a backwards morality about woke intersectionality.

00:57:43.160 But that's why philosophy comes out of these myths and stories.

00:57:47.240 It becomes something important that we continue on.

00:57:50.120 Let me just give you a very brief example, which I gave in the lecture.

00:57:53.640 The myth of Theseus can be interpreted as having profound ethical insights, such as don't let success intoxicate you to the degree that you forget your promises.

00:58:06.040 Yes.

00:58:06.520 Because Theseus slayed the manotaur, and in the partying, he forgot his promise to his father, Aegeus, to change his sails from black to white.

00:58:18.040 And his father saw black sails and thought his son was dead, and he killed himself.

00:58:24.840 So there are profound ethical dimensions in mythology.

00:58:28.680 Right.

00:58:29.060 Lecture number three is about the birth of ethical philosophy from the pre-philosophical traditions and the realities of ancient Greek city-states, particularly Athenian democracy.

00:58:40.200 As I say it in a bit simplistic way, but I think it's a good start, there were two kinds of factors, intellectual and cultural factors.

00:58:52.940 Intellectual factors had to do with a metaphysical stalemate at the time between Heraclitus and Parmenides.

00:59:00.840 Most people interpreted Heraclitus as saying everything is in motion, in flux.

00:59:06.960 Most people interpreted Parmenides as saying change is an illusion.

00:59:12.600 And there wasn't a metaphysical mastermind to create a way out of this up until Plato.

00:59:20.120 So people focused from metaphysical, they changed focus from metaphysical to ethical matters.

00:59:26.480 And then there was the realities of Athenian democracy, which was exceptionally litigious and conflict-driven.

00:59:33.040 It was very vibrant.

00:59:34.400 Very vibrant, yeah.

00:59:35.980 And I think it's a good way of thinking about it, is that as civilization advances, there is more conflict.

00:59:42.940 And there is more of a need to solve conflict, there's a need for conflict resolution.

00:59:49.440 And when we have a relative balance of powers between factions within a state-to-state or state-to-states at large, there is discourse.

01:00:00.340 There isn't a right of conquest.

01:00:02.180 There is discourse about what are fair principles for conflict resolution.

01:00:07.500 And that's what drew all the intellect of the ethical philosophers with respect to it.

01:00:13.940 Just the question is, what are the principles for governing a society?

01:00:18.860 That's why one of the main tasks for the wise sage was to draft a constitution.

01:00:26.060 Yes.

01:00:26.620 And this happened all the time in ancient Greece as well.

01:00:29.260 A city would find itself with two powerful factions that are just irreconcilable.

01:00:36.480 One couldn't defeat the other, and they couldn't come to an agreement.

01:00:39.720 So they would literally request a philosopher from a foreign city to come in and give them their constitution, to which they would all have to abide.

01:00:47.820 Because it would be assumed that he's not personally invested in one of the factions, but he would be well-educated and able to create them something based in reason that would actually satisfy their needs.

01:01:00.340 Yes.

01:01:00.960 And it wasn't just foreigners. 0.64

01:01:02.600 It was sometimes from the metropolis going to colonies.

01:01:08.140 Yeah.

01:01:08.680 So lecture number three is about sophists and Socrates.

01:01:11.980 Yes.

01:01:12.380 And I'm talking about the sophists in a more sophisticated way.

01:01:17.520 The sophists have a very bad reputation, but they don't really deserve it.

01:01:21.220 They're not all terrible.

01:01:23.400 Right.

01:01:23.880 They're not great.

01:01:25.060 Right.

01:01:25.660 But they're not all terrible.

01:01:27.060 There is an olive branch.

01:01:28.680 I think so.

01:01:29.420 Anyway, we won't go into it.

01:01:30.920 No, but really, really quickly to say, because I think that it's a really interesting thing.

01:01:36.540 Plato didn't like the sophists.

01:01:39.240 I know.

01:01:39.640 But there's a good case to be made that he didn't think everyone was as bad.

01:01:43.700 I think he did have some respect for Protagoras and Gorgias.

01:01:48.380 And essentially, his main problem with them was that if you deny objectivity to such an extent, you're going to be led to the position of Calicles and Thrasymachus, who are the real villains of Plato.

01:02:01.900 Yes.

01:02:02.620 Right.

01:02:02.920 Lecture number four is about the ethics in Plato's Republic.

01:02:05.900 I think you're going to like Plato's Republic after this.

01:02:12.360 You know, it's going to be a hard sell.

01:02:16.900 Yeah, but I think it's a high-stakes sell, and I'm willing to bet.

01:02:21.560 Okay.

01:02:22.100 Well, I guess we'll see.

01:02:23.320 I guess we'll see.

01:02:24.140 So it's a very, I think, one of the most profound texts of all time.

01:02:29.980 I mean, it is.

01:02:30.700 There's no, you know, it holds the place in the Western canon that it holds for a reason.

01:02:34.920 But also, I think it holds the place as a lifelong companion, because I don't agree with everything in it.

01:02:41.360 Of course.

01:02:41.860 There's much I disagree with him in it, but I think it has earned its place as a life companion.

01:02:49.320 My objections to Plato are almost like a meme at this point.

01:02:52.960 Like, you know, in fact, to give him his due, you can't deny the brilliance of his work, whether you agree with it or not.

01:02:59.480 Lecture number five is about the goat by Aristotle and virtue in Nicomachean Ethics.

01:03:07.340 And this is the one that just, it really is the gold standard for me.

01:03:11.500 I love Aristotle.

01:03:13.540 And I represent Aristotle on his own terms.

01:03:17.020 And in fact, all of the ancient Greco-Romans on their own terms.

01:03:21.280 I'm not doing a Marxist or a third wave feminist reading of them.

01:03:25.280 No, we want to actually get the best out of it.

01:03:25.980 We are looking at antiquity on its own terms.

01:03:29.140 Yeah.

01:03:29.980 And I'm showing how ridiculous it is to portray Aristotle as an empiricist in the modern sense.

01:03:38.600 No, his philosophy is entirely normative.

01:03:40.840 He does have this elevated conception of human nature.

01:03:47.100 Of course.

01:03:47.740 That the empiricists of modern times are completely trying to destroy.

01:03:52.080 I mean, he believes there's a purpose to a human life.

01:03:54.640 We can't have that.

01:03:55.620 Exactly.

01:03:56.200 We literally can't believe that.

01:03:58.960 And he has a very thorough exposition.

01:04:01.100 I know, it's brilliant.

01:04:01.720 He has a very thorough exposition of virtue ethics.

01:04:06.260 And he has, in a way, codified it in a really good way with a golden mean.

01:04:11.460 And one of the things that I want to do with Socrates' plate and Aristotle is to dispense with another myth.

01:04:17.440 The myth that they constantly despise tradition.

01:04:20.500 Yeah, no, not at all.

01:04:21.260 It's completely mistaken.

01:04:22.440 No.

01:04:23.320 They did dislike features of it.

01:04:25.940 But one of the main issues they took with it was that it couldn't sustain some of the most important aspects of it.

01:04:33.100 So let me give you a very brief example.

01:04:35.460 Plato didn't like mythology, the mythological tradition, and the poets of the time.

01:04:41.360 But one of the reasons why he disliked them was that he thought that if you actually pay close attention to mythology,

01:04:47.740 you will see that the notion of divinity that is intuitive to us from a first person's perspective isn't really done justice in ancient Greek mythology.

01:04:59.120 Well, his objection to poets and artists in general is based in they don't really know what they're talking about.

01:05:04.160 Yes.

01:05:04.580 They're fictionally presenting something, but they have no real understanding of it.

01:05:09.340 Yes.

01:05:09.920 Lecture number six is about a very chilled out bro.

01:05:13.780 It's about Epicurus.

01:05:14.960 I don't like Epicurus.

01:05:15.740 I think he is a very misinterpreted.

01:05:19.400 I know.

01:05:19.960 I'm not being fair to him.

01:05:21.320 He is a hedonist, but he's not in favor of debauchery.

01:05:24.520 His notion of pleasure is different.

01:05:26.840 But he did like some wine here or there.

01:05:29.240 I think so.

01:05:30.140 But I mean, Aristotle's not saying don't drink wine or anything.

01:05:33.160 Correct.

01:05:33.520 It's just don't drink too much wine.

01:05:34.800 Correct.

01:05:35.000 And don't drink at the wrong time of the day.

01:05:36.560 Make sure you're in a social setting.

01:05:37.760 Make sure you drink just enough.

01:05:39.660 Correct.

01:05:40.040 But I think that what is really important to understand here about the time,

01:05:43.340 and this links really well with what you said before about Alastair McIntyre and his idea,

01:05:49.960 his really strong idea of the times that are associated with intellectual fashions.

01:05:56.480 Epicurus comes at a very turbulent time in the Greek world.

01:06:00.480 I think he lived during the wars of the successors of Alexander the Great.

01:06:08.240 Right.

01:06:08.700 Wow.

01:06:09.320 Where essentially the Athenian Greeks, the city-states were sort of collapsing.

01:06:16.700 Oh, they were conquered.

01:06:18.140 They were all parts of empires.

01:06:19.720 But it was also the culture of them that collapsed.

01:06:22.000 And most people weren't citizens.

01:06:25.920 And they weren't citizens in the sense that ancient Athenian direct democracy featured lots of citizens.

01:06:34.200 Personal involvement.

01:06:34.740 Yeah.

01:06:34.960 So the focus changes there from the active engagement in politics to a more modern, if you'd like, setting.

01:06:44.380 It's like the cultivation of the self, take care of your well-being.

01:06:48.320 And it's interesting because this is the Hellenistic ethics.

01:06:53.080 And at the same time, I mean, not at the same time with Epicurus, but during the Hellenistic ethical framework and paradigm,

01:07:06.440 we also had Cicero, who was very much against it.

01:07:09.280 He preferred the Stoics to Epicurus.

01:07:12.140 And his main problem with Epicurus was that he doesn't take account of the importance of engaging in politics.

01:07:24.000 Now, who got the last laugh?

01:07:26.140 I don't know.

01:07:26.980 Well, I mean, the world is a lot more Epicurean than it is Ciceronian. 0.98

01:07:31.220 But also Epicurus, I mean, Cicero got into lots of trouble.

01:07:35.780 But also he gave things that an Epicurean wouldn't be able to give.

01:07:42.240 But he earned glory in that respect.

01:07:44.240 But the point is they're both kind of reflections of the same problem, right?

01:07:47.820 The breakdown of the moral substrate in which people feel that they belong, in which they're situated.

01:07:52.860 Like you said, the culture of the city-state is breaking down.

01:07:55.200 So the morality that these people are following is kind of, you know, slipping through their fingers.

01:08:00.680 So they have to think of something else.

01:08:02.160 So a Stoic says, right, okay, I retreat entirely into myself and sort of create a walled fortress where whatever happens, happens on the outside.

01:08:09.780 I'm not in control of any of it.

01:08:11.620 That's whatever happens is not my business, really.

01:08:15.660 My business is to maintain a kind of Buddha-like focus on my inner, like, rectitude or whatever.

01:08:23.040 And Epicurus, yeah, like, as you say, like, well, just treat yourself well.

01:08:28.880 Enjoy what you can while you can.

01:08:30.740 And these are both responses to the breakdown of the moral substrate.

01:08:34.980 Exactly, yes.

01:08:35.820 And let us be a bit fair to him.

01:08:39.740 I'm not even saying they're wrong.

01:08:41.060 It's probably a very rational response at the time.

01:08:43.800 No, but it's also fair to some people who are drawn to him because there comes a time where some people say, right, I had enough of involvement in politics.

01:08:51.660 I'm out.

01:08:54.340 I don't think it's productive.

01:08:56.640 But for some people, not everyone has the same life trajectory and the same desires.

01:09:01.880 And this is why Aristotle's got us covered.

01:09:03.480 The same aptitudes.

01:09:04.580 Yeah.

01:09:04.820 If you're a citizen, you're a man of the city.

01:09:06.540 If you can vote, you've got to care about politics.

01:09:08.360 Exactly.

01:09:09.140 But let's say someone isn't as engaged as others.

01:09:14.000 There is much wisdom to be found in Epicurus.

01:09:16.700 Yes.

01:09:17.020 He has some really good advice when it comes to personal well-being and how we view life.

01:09:22.580 He has a very chilling effect.

01:09:24.800 You feel like you're with the big Lebowski sometimes when you're meeting him. 1.00

01:09:29.680 So there is something there that is...

01:09:31.860 I mean, he would have been fun to hang out with.

01:09:34.020 He would have been nice to have just...

01:09:35.100 Jeff Bridges-like type of friend.

01:09:39.100 Lecture number seven is about Stoics. 0.97

01:09:41.480 These are not so fun.

01:09:43.300 I'm trying to point attention to Stoicism as a movement there.

01:09:49.880 Because most people think that Stoicism starts with Seneca, Apecta to St. Mark's Aurelius.

01:09:55.500 It doesn't.

01:09:56.320 There are late Stoics. 0.83

01:09:57.400 By the time Seneca was born, Stoicism was around 300 years old.

01:10:00.620 It started...

01:10:02.980 It began in, I think, before 300 BC.

01:10:06.440 Yeah.

01:10:07.240 With Zeno of Ketium in the famous Stoa of Athens.

01:10:11.840 And I'm talking about...

01:10:12.940 It's our God's name.

01:10:13.800 Yeah.

01:10:14.120 The difference...

01:10:15.340 The different phases of Stoicism.

01:10:16.820 And then I'm focusing on some fundamental aspects of the Stoic worldview.

01:10:22.280 Which I think has some merit, especially for people who live through adversity and very adverse conditions.

01:10:32.060 And in some cases, they may think that they can't go back to a more active, engaged lifestyle.

01:10:40.400 I think that in some cases, it's very good for people of this persuasion.

01:10:46.100 But it also has some good insights for everyone.

01:10:50.780 But one thing that is interesting in Stoicism, which is a bit challenging, and it's something that we should mention when we're talking about Stoicism,

01:10:58.780 is that the idea of the Stoic sage is very much influencing...

01:11:05.780 But I think the Stoics are trying to sell just that thing.

01:11:08.460 And they're trying to say that the fundamental journey of the Stoic sage is an inner journey.

01:11:14.600 It's a journey that Zabberlin described as a retreat into the inner citadel.

01:11:20.100 And it's fundamentally psychological.

01:11:22.220 And they're saying essentially that you need to become the Stoic sage.

01:11:26.580 And the Stoic sage is the person who understands that everything that happens, happens for good.

01:11:31.880 And they're characterized by essentially a love of fate and fatalism.

01:11:37.180 They call it, I think in Latin, it's called amor fati.

01:11:39.700 Yes.

01:11:40.000 Which, you know, it's not everyone's cup of tea, but...

01:11:43.300 But there are some virtues to it.

01:11:44.960 There's, you know, there will be times in your life when you would need to be able to call upon this kind of worldview.

01:11:51.520 If nothing else, you know, I mean, you know, again, I hate to go back to sort of Jordan Peterson,

01:11:56.400 because it feels lazy to do so.

01:11:58.060 But, you know, at your father's funeral, you've got to be the rock.

01:12:02.740 Yeah. Yeah.

01:12:03.760 I think that this is not something unique in Stoicism.

01:12:06.760 No.

01:12:07.080 But I think that this is a...

01:12:09.380 Stoics have a very good way of talking to people who experience adversity.

01:12:14.080 Yes.

01:12:14.420 And I think that this is going to be a good lecture.

01:12:18.180 Lecture number eight is about a school of thought that is as influential as it is unknown.

01:12:26.640 Yeah.

01:12:26.800 It's mysterious.

01:12:28.000 Yeah.

01:12:28.180 It's Neoplatonism.

01:12:29.200 You say Neoplatonism and everyone's like, oh, that sounds important, but I don't know anything about it.

01:12:33.280 Exactly.

01:12:34.000 So Neoplatonism is just crazily influential.

01:12:37.080 It's crazily influential.

01:12:38.240 But they were really bad in marketing, because they didn't call themselves Neoplatonists.

01:12:44.360 They thought essentially...

01:12:45.700 We can describe them as perennialists.

01:12:48.200 And they thought that there is such a thing as eternal wisdom that was really closely communicated to the first Greeks,

01:12:57.500 because due to their proximity to the gods, but was somehow lost from their equivalent of modernity.

01:13:03.880 It was inadequately captured by Pythagoras.

01:13:09.740 They love Pythagoras.

01:13:11.060 That's why they do lots of symbols and mathematics and stuff.

01:13:16.860 And then it was better captured by Plato, who was communicating it in chunks,

01:13:22.480 because he was communicating it to those who were worthy of becoming initiated.

01:13:26.940 And he had some secret teachings that weren't for the ears of the uninitiated and the unworthy.

01:13:34.800 Right.

01:13:35.200 So I start with Plotinus.

01:13:36.880 Plotinus was born in 204 AD and died in 270 AD.

01:13:42.780 And I focus just on his Enneads, which were texts that were compiled by his student Porphyry.

01:13:48.860 I'm talking about virtue in Plotinus.

01:13:51.540 I'm talking about how completely otherworldly his view is.

01:13:55.620 And how someone can read it and say, right, where's the ethics in it?

01:14:00.560 It's almost entirely metaphysical.

01:14:02.660 But his view of ethics is also ethical, because in his mind, the universe he's talking about,

01:14:12.020 and whose hierarchy he is describing, is also a universe with a hierarchy of values.

01:14:19.520 And essentially, he says, the fundamental problem is upwards or downwards.

01:14:25.280 He implicitly says this.

01:14:26.620 That's in all Platonism.

01:14:28.600 And he says, we need to go back to the source, essentially.

01:14:32.280 And then he has the one, which is the ideal, the form of the good in Plato.

01:14:36.300 He called it the one.

01:14:37.680 He's a very original thinker, but he didn't take himself to be that original.

01:14:42.460 That's why they called themselves Platonists.

01:14:45.400 Yeah, interesting.

01:14:46.260 Right.

01:14:46.540 And then that's the focus of the lecture.

01:14:49.480 It's a very interesting message, a very otherworldly one, though.

01:14:53.700 And it influenced Islamic, Jewish, Christian mysticism, the philosophy of Christianity.

01:15:01.040 Saint Augustine of April was a Neoplatonist for many years.

01:15:04.980 The language of Neoplatonism is informing theological debates about the nature of the Trinity.

01:15:12.580 Then in the Renaissance, we have Marsilio Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola,

01:15:17.740 who were Neoplatonists, trying to bring Neoplatonism back.

01:15:21.600 It never really went away in Byzantium.

01:15:24.340 It's crazily influential.

01:15:27.500 And...

01:15:27.900 It's really interesting.

01:15:28.520 So I've never read Plotinus, actually.

01:15:30.280 Yeah, it's just...

01:15:31.920 You're really selling him to me, frankly.

01:15:33.360 It sounds interesting to read, if nothing else.

01:15:36.940 Yeah, it's just insanely otherworldly thinking.

01:15:39.960 Just, you know...

01:15:40.360 I like it.

01:15:40.940 Some people say that he was annoyed that he had a body,

01:15:45.120 because he identified with the reason.

01:15:48.260 Right.

01:15:48.480 In himself, says just this is the high element.

01:15:51.400 And good.

01:15:52.680 And...

01:15:53.040 Right.

01:15:54.520 And the lecture number nine goes back to Plato's Symposium.

01:15:58.400 Right.

01:15:58.680 I'll say this.

01:15:59.560 I didn't plan it initially.

01:16:01.260 I thought...

01:16:02.260 I was planning for eight lectures in total,

01:16:04.780 but I thought that we had to end with a more wholesome message.

01:16:07.900 Yes.

01:16:08.500 Because Plotinus is a bit...

01:16:09.900 Okay, how does this map onto what I'm actually doing in my daily life?

01:16:13.260 Yeah, he was tripping.

01:16:14.500 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:14.840 You know, he's a total tripping philosopher, just...

01:16:18.440 But really profound.

01:16:19.340 And we go back to Plato's Symposium,

01:16:22.840 because I think it's after the Republic is his most...

01:16:27.060 His best...

01:16:28.300 No, without a doubt, yeah.

01:16:29.360 His best text.

01:16:30.880 And it is a very good way of introducing,

01:16:34.920 of showing how the principles we are talking about

01:16:37.600 throughout the course apply to a specific case

01:16:41.180 that is one of the most important things in life,

01:16:43.100 which is love.

01:16:43.980 And I'm showing the clash between the various views there,

01:16:48.960 the various perspectives,

01:16:50.320 because there are many speeches in it,

01:16:52.440 and Socrates takes an issue with all of them

01:16:54.900 for different reasons.

01:16:56.680 And he completely rejects Aristophanes,

01:17:01.040 who essentially says love is lust.

01:17:03.540 And that's interesting,

01:17:04.400 because Aristophanes in that dialogue,

01:17:07.480 if Plato was completely fair to him,

01:17:10.140 he sort of represents the view

01:17:12.820 that not all moderns share, but...

01:17:15.760 Many do.

01:17:16.320 Many do, but most of people

01:17:20.020 who accept the modern framework

01:17:22.780 and assumptions of it we mentioned before

01:17:25.400 seem to be gravitating towards.

01:17:27.320 Because if we are a battlefield of desires,

01:17:30.580 and love is just an imbalance of chemicals in the brains,

01:17:34.180 and just let the strongest desire win,

01:17:37.520 not only do we equate love with lust,

01:17:40.980 we also find ourselves in some very problematic ways

01:17:44.040 of people starting to normalize things

01:17:47.200 that intuitively we're saying

01:17:49.240 this shouldn't be normalized.

01:17:50.160 Stelius, have you considered that love is love?

01:17:52.560 Yes.

01:17:53.140 That's literally their argument,

01:17:55.540 is, well, whatever we do is good

01:17:58.220 by the definition of what it is,

01:18:00.340 and we've done it.

01:18:01.620 Well, which I mean, I disagree with, obviously.

01:18:03.840 Same.

01:18:04.020 But you can see how this all maps back

01:18:06.780 onto exactly what is happening now.

01:18:08.400 These are ancient conversations

01:18:09.720 that have been had many, many, millennia ago,

01:18:13.260 but because we've lost our connection

01:18:16.620 to this tradition,

01:18:18.100 they've become relevant again.

01:18:19.660 Exactly.

01:18:20.620 I think that this was also...

01:18:23.160 I felt really well when I ended with that lecture,

01:18:27.260 because I wanted to end on a less otherworldly note.

01:18:31.600 Yeah, no, it's really substantive.

01:18:34.260 It is substantive,

01:18:35.080 and I think that the final lecture

01:18:37.400 will be the lecture that people will probably like the most.

01:18:42.380 It's very uplifting,

01:18:44.340 and it really shows how we're completely done

01:18:49.300 an injustice by the modern worldview,

01:18:52.100 and how by recapturing some aspects of antiquity,

01:18:56.820 we can actually solve the problem of fragmentation

01:19:00.340 that were mentioned in the very beginning.

01:19:03.340 Honestly, that's absolutely superb.

01:19:06.140 So what we'll do is we'll end this discussion there,

01:19:08.800 but the conversation will not actually end there.

01:19:11.720 There'll be a link in the description

01:19:12.700 if you want to go and get the course,

01:19:14.180 because I really think,

01:19:15.300 and I really mean this,

01:19:16.480 I think that actually it is our job

01:19:20.020 in this time and this place

01:19:21.060 to start putting all of this back together,

01:19:22.660 and that's why I asked Stelios to do this course,

01:19:25.620 and that's the purpose of this course,

01:19:27.460 is so we can actually start reconstructing

01:19:29.100 what a truly moral life actually is.

01:19:31.940 So the link will be in the description

01:19:33.180 if you'd like to go and get it now,

01:19:34.720 but we are also going to do a webinar

01:19:36.580 where we answer questions.

01:19:38.360 There'll be a Zoom call that you can get a link to.

01:19:40.260 It'll be free.

01:19:41.000 You just can, you know,

01:19:41.820 we'll put it up on the website.

01:19:43.080 Just follow the link in the description.

01:19:44.860 There'll be a link to the webinar

01:19:45.660 at 3 p.m. on Thursday, the 9th of October, 2025.

01:19:49.740 So Stelios and I will just be there

01:19:52.360 to answer your questions

01:19:53.380 and discuss what the course is about,

01:19:55.800 the reason we've got to do this.

01:19:57.480 And I really think this is a part

01:19:59.460 of the reconstruction of the West more broadly.

01:20:01.180 And I think that without someone

01:20:03.100 undergoing a project like this,

01:20:05.120 then the job will never be done.

01:20:07.420 I just think we fall into

01:20:09.220 the modern, immoral, rules-based order,

01:20:12.460 and that's the future

01:20:13.720 unless we do something about it.

01:20:15.720 So we will see you at Thursday

01:20:17.680 on the 9th of October at 3 p.m.

01:20:20.140 Come and join us.

01:20:20.880 Like I said, it's going to be free.

01:20:22.040 So we're just going to hang out and talk

01:20:23.180 and explain exactly why this is so important.

01:20:25.920 And if you want the course,

01:20:26.800 the link is in the description

01:20:27.740 or go to courses.lotuses.com

01:20:30.040 and pick it up there.

01:20:31.260 And thanks for watching, folks.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 06, 2025

Why Everything Is Falling Apart

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