number one sexy tropical beats show, Friday night, welcome Caribbean rhythm, episode 95. I was walking the other day on screed by the sea, a kind of boardwalk, and it was time of crepuscular wonder, violet sky, twilight, my favorite time of day, just after sunset, and a strange cloud pattern, seemed this time to put chessboard grid on the sky, which I took as a kind of taunt. They were taunting me with this, And I walk on this boardwalk and I notice increasing biological disaster in this place where I am. I'm about to leave it. The people here are ever more deformed. Something happened. I don't know. I get in very restless mood because, you know, I'm playing Frogger. I have to swerve around so that these squat, obese, Panamanian type women don't yell in my face.

They can only talk by horse yelling, which that's another thing about this that I'm just Just like Milton wrote hundreds of letters to Parliament, I am writing yet again a long letter encouraging city government here to enact public order decrees. Because it's not just enough to ban people from sleeping in the streets. You know the disaster now in San Francisco with the fecal streets and this. But a city should forbid anyone also from talking too loud in obnoxious voice. Because especially the gypsoid type peoples when you have fat slum type shibun and she's got seven kids or this and they don't walk together, they're spread out on city block street and she's yelling, you know, stentorian Roman orator or centurion voice, the shibun is something else, the vocal chords.

And I don't like this, you have to understand, I don't like agitation. I was very quiet, dreamy kid when I was six or seven. My nickname was equivalent of space cadet in English. I like to look out the window or I like to draw or so forth by myself. I don't like public vulgar disorder. It agitates me. I would also ban displays of obesity. For example, you should not be allowed to take off shirt in public if you're fat or even on the beach, no such… I mean what is this? It's ugly to see and also it encourages unhealthy behavior. Now you can make an exception for people over 70 years old, for example, who are strong fat olds and Churchill type or whatever this is to be humane. But no way should you allow young people to show obesity in public and normalize it or

people again to talk loud or even to stand obstinately in street and linger. So I have to play Frogger and swerve around them because I don't want to get contaminate touching, I want public sanity and hygiene ordinances, but the trend is opposite. Even in centrist mayors or centre-right mayors across the world, they are forbidding actually, the opposite, they are forbidding citizens from cleaning their own streets. So the police comes after you, for example, if you are building security and you have homeless sleeping under the awning and annoying residents coming in and out of your building, And if you hose them down or whatever something like that, the police will come after you and they force even the restaurants to treat obnoxious beggars with kid gloves.

So you know, they're saying the streets don't belong to taxpayer and people who have to get up and work in morning 7 a.m. or if your aged mother wants to go shopping at six and you have schizophrenic dirt, you know, they are so dirty. of them that dogs bark from them half a block away, you know, and they're saying the streets belong to those people, not to you. I don't know how a people becomes tamed like this. And this is so even in cities you might consider based, just basically every filthy city government has now learned that working people are a bunch of sheep and you can abuse them every which way. So you don't need to go as far as me, but it's hard for anyone to respect people who don't own their own streets, who furthermore they go around these docile drones with the

mask on, that's a new thing. The pandemic, the so-called public health pretense, meanwhile there are schizo-homeless pissing and shitting in the street. It makes me lose respect for people to see this. I was talking to this guy, he was saying he does not go out at all anymore. I knew him from two years ago, I run into him supermarket, I say, yeah, I don't see you at this bar. No, no, he's afraid he doesn't go out at all anymore. He stopped going to gym because he's afraid of pandemic, but he lives in a city where basically street is open sewer. How can you respect this? So I asked them, why don't you hose them down? Why don't you put, you know, a chemical, a spray, so it itches them if they try to sleep there, the homeless in front of your building?

Or then they say, no, no, the police is camera everywhere and they will come for us. So I ask, why don't you replace the police and the mayor, it's your city, why no one runs on this? So now tell me, yes, it's de-civilization, but it can only happen on the backs of a sheepoid, tamed, dumb people. And I don't respect that, and I do not wonder that the oligarchs shit on your heads. I have no respect for this. So I was in this mood thinking of next letter to write city council, and so I see now, I see this man who look like a sadhu, you know, an Indian mystic, but he was probably just, you know, bum with long white beard and this, but unlike other bum, he had unusual look in the eye so I could see from far he was making these arcane hand gestures, like if

you see medieval Byzantine icons and they make strange hand gesture in the icon, it has esoteric, hieratic meaning, each of those hand gesture, and this man was, he was channeling this energy. So I've always been affected by this. I don't know if I told you, I was once at Capitol Club in Washington, D.C., and Scott Walker was there, right? So you know this man, he has very stiff manner, he's governor, I think, of Wisconsin. If you remember, he was a brief candidate for president in 2016. He wasn't getting anywhere, so he dropped out. So he had this stiff, deadpan manner, if you remember. But I go up to him and I ask, okay, so the wall was actually voted on in 2006, the southern border wall, if I remember right.

The wall for southern border was passed then, actually, this is subject for another show, but America has quite strong laws, they're just not enforced, or they're selectively enforced, including immigration law, by the way, but that's for another time. So I ask him, you passed this law, the government said you're a governor, why haven't these repoops with whom you have so much weight, these repoops who talk strong border, why Why have they not ever funded the wall and fulfilled the law? And he hesitates, Scott Walker, for a moment. He does not make eye contact, he looks straight ahead with that blank, stiff stare he has on face. So I thought he didn't hear me, but then I look behind and he appears to have an arm behind him somehow, contorted, right, the kind of weird, unnatural contorted.

So I look down behind him, and indeed he's holding his arm down low. Behind him with his hand, he's making this bizarre gesture over and over, holding basically the ring and pinky finger together with thumb, while the index, he had it impossibly flexible in the wrong direction. So it took me aback, and he makes this gesture, sort of flicking his wrist, a strange, hieratic gesture, a forgotten faith. And he mutters in deadpan way under breath, he mutters, Tlaloc, Tlaloc, Tlaloc, and then you walk away. Okay, so I'm not sure if I captured it right, but okay, he say, Tlaloc, okay, that was the answer. An Aztec deity, you can look it up, Tlaloc. So you know, this is his answer for why the Republicans don't fund border.

So you know, I've always been very sensitive to these hand signs and this, so I see this This old sadhu, the sadhu-like man, he makes these gestures, and I decide to follow him, and now look, before you say, Bap, why you follow, okay, there is this movie, Marebito, it happened in Tokyo, I may have mentioned before, and of course Tokyo, one of the few clean cities in the world without these problems I just mentioned, and the movie takes off when a main character, Marebito, that's name of movie, the main character, he's a kind of cinema camera freak type, you know, the type of man obsessed with recording and cameras and photograph. And he sees a man in Tokyo subway stick a knife through his own eye and the camera freezes

at the moment, right before he's about to do it, there is terror in his eye. And main characters say, you know, he pursues this in bowels of the city. He wants to see what this man saw. What did he see? He wanted to experience this. Are you ready to open the gateway to the path of terror? It's a good movie. It's about Darrows, detrimental robots who I discuss sometimes. Please search Richard Sharpshaver if interested. So anyway, I was thinking of this and maybe this old man, so I pursue this old mystic-looking man who's staggering along and he's making these hand signs. What does he see? What does he know? I follow him. I make a sport of this, by the way, it's not first time. I like to follow some people. Long time ago I was in this place, I will not say, but Natalie Portman was okay.

She was there on the street and I saw her and I followed Natalie Portman for several blocks and I did not really make attempt to hide. I was doing this, you know, no tradecraft, none of this. I just, you know, I didn't care if she knew and I think she sensed it. I'm pretty sure she did. She was uncomfortable. Okay, she looked, she tried to hurry. But that's okay, she has a right to feel uncomfortable, okay? Some of you don't realize, you keep poking beehive with me, you don't understand, once you get into my horizon, I may fixate on you, okay? You want this? You want me to fixate? I like Frank Booth in Blue Velvet movie, where he say, I will write you a love letter, is this what you want? I'll send you straight to hell!

Let's say, you know, I follow this, again, I thought he was a mystic, but he ended up in the back alley passed out in front of dumpster so you know who knows possibly why he was maybe he had seizure or cramps or pre-parkinson alcohol abuse in his hands i don't know it was a disappointment but you rarely see this any uh kind of type by the way even the you know the thin alcoholic the bone thin drunk this used to be a frequent type uh you used to see it not just in bums, but other class, working class, bouncing drunk, for example, but no longer. Everybody fat now, I don't know. So anyway, this is just what I was doing this week. What a show I have for you today, number one sexy Caribbean Beat show, Calypso, on this week's readings on a strange philosopher, Aristippus.

There were many homeless philosopher also, by the way, ancient world biogenies, I am sure you all know. Aristippus, fewer people know him, he's a weird man, and if there is time, I may talk on one of my favorite painters, but before I go to break, how about this Zemur in France? I told you, this is amazing, it's getting very big, much worldwide attention, I told you this will be big in France in the world, the time of the Jewish Nazi is coming. And I ask all Jewish National Socialists to mobilize. I have a Jewish Nazi jigachat image Frog sent me. I cannot tell you who yet, but he asked I publicize it. And I ask people I know on Zemur campaign to adopt this image to mobilize Jabotinsky battalions, mobilize Rann-Uns, break out the uniform.

I am getting in touch with Lubavitcher franchises to mass print armbands with standard symbol and Star of David and this. Let's hear it for Zemur. Imagine Emmanuel Shiriki. to tell you life of a philosopher who really left no book behind. It's all lost, if he even wrote any. But he's famous, right? I mean, maybe for now Aristippus is just famous among ancient Greek and philosophy weebs. But everyone has heard otherwise of Heraclitus or Parmenides or Empedocles, and their books also did not survive. And it reminds me of when Schopenhauer says that in the fame contest, philosophers win it by far. I mean, the fame of philosophers lasts unvarnished for thousands of years, even when no book is left. And what other human type is like this?

Artists, not really, because let me give you an example on last show if you remember I mentioned Winkelmann conceded that modern painters are more perfect than ancient ones. But even so, ancient painters achieved quite a lot in technique of contour, possibly even perspective and other things. And one name stands out among them, Zeuxis, if you remember, right? So Zeuxis, if you're an ancient Greek weeb or obsessive, maybe you heard this name Zeuxis, but only for the most fanatical weebs. And even then, it's only a name that survived only the name. You don't know anything else about him because a description of a painting doesn't do much. A description of a philosophy does a lot more, right? So in a similar way, many know the names of ancient kings and conquerors.

So you know the name Sargon or Zeus, but again it's just a name and you know next to nothing about him. His character does not come out if you just say, oh, okay, he united Mesopotamia or Zeus. Yes, it's significant historical fact, but it's not knowledge of him as a man, whereas To give you a counter example with a general and conqueror like Napoleon, who a lot is known about, even if you wouldn't have had Napoleon's own writings, he wrote quite a lot of good things by the way, but you could learn Napoleon's character and greatness just from knowing his tactics in battle. And these are still studied. My friend Soso, the small black cat, he was on this show to talk Klausowitz a few shows back. I may have him in future to talk Napoleon.

There are people who study Napoleon justice battles and his character and way of being, you can say, comes out in just that. But not for very ancient kings, right? So you can see Schopenhauer is right. It's different for a philosopher because even with a few fragments in the description of his life and his sayings, you get a good sense, for example, of what Heraclitus is as a character, as a man. His fame has survived in a more complete way, where Homer gives immortality to Achilles and also to himself, arguably, in his great poem. But for a philosopher, imagine if Homer's poem had not survived, right? And this is how it is. It's as if the poems didn't survive, but Homer would still be famous. But it led me, all of this, to think, what is fame?

Why was it so prized, especially by noble cultures, as the highest good? They thought fame is the highest good in many ways, and the simple answer, of course, is always immortality of some kind. But I think this is too vague, and probably it's wrong the way people understand it now. So fame, Nietzsche says, even for the wisest man, fame is the biggest desire, the desire that he gives up last. Meaning of what? I will read for you a very short Nietzsche aphorism from The Gay Science, aphorism number 330. I'm reading Nietzsche now. The thinker does not need applause nor the clapping of hands, provided he be sure of the clapping of his own hands. The latter, however, he cannot do without. Are there men who could do also without this, and in general without any kind of applause? I doubt it.

And even as regards the wisest, Tacitus, who is no communicator of the wise, says, and he quotes in Latin basically that even for the wise, the desire for fame is the desire that they give up last. And Nietzsche adds, that means with him, with Tacitus, never. So but what is it, again, that it's an immortality of some kind is obvious, okay, of some kind, But from the most ancient formulas regarding the power of fame, these are poetic formulas that for example are shared by Greek and Sanskrit. I say this before, the formula undying fame, immortal fame. Let's not say immortal, undying fame. And it's shared by both those languages and must therefore have been an important part of proto-Indo-European or let's just call it Aryan culture.

There's no other way it could show up in both Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, and in between no. So you know, it's not like they transmitted it to each other, so they must have inherited it from common ancestor. And in Greek, it's kleos apthiton, and in Sanskrit it's amartam nama, but it's the same formula, it means the same thing, it's the same number of syllables even, undying name. And there are echoes of this in other Aryan poetry. For example, many of you like to quote Old Norse, the poem known as Havamal. There are some famous stanzas from it. Cattle die and kinsmen die, and so one dies oneself, but a noble name will never die if good renown one gets. I don't think it read that way in Old Norse with the syllables, but you get the meaning.

There's also another version, cattle die and kinsmen die and so on dies oneself. One thing now that never dies, the fame of a dead man's deeds. So you know, this is apparently actually very old part of that poem, the Havamal from before 1000 AD. So you see very explicit contrast between immortal fame and man's mortality. Humans die, but fame doesn't. But I think still is not fully understood in concrete way to modern audience because you don't know what they meant by mortality or immortality. So right now you have very different post-Christian and even scientific view of these things, and I think it distorts it. I think ancient views are kind of, maybe you could call it vitalistic materialism, where they believed actually in material reality of this fame somehow, and I will not pretend

to fully understand it, but I will tell you maybe some ways to think on it. So Heraclitus himself remarks on this when he says, the best, and the word is the aristoi, they think, they seek one thing above all others, ever-flowing fame among mortals, but the many stuff themselves like cattle. So that's a famous saying of Heraclitus that has survived, and the word he uses is the same one, kleos, that's fame, sort of, kleos, einaon, neton, I'm sorry to recite Greek, Maybe it's pretentious, but that word neton just means among mortals. But the other word aenaon, which is often translated as ever-flowing, but it means a lot more than that. And I mentioned this, I think in the book it's the same word that is behind the Latin word for eternity, you know, eon and that type of thing.

In Greek it would be aia, forever, and in the image of an always flowing river for the stream of reality. I think if you want to study comparative Indo-Europeanists like Calvert Watkins who talk about this kind of thing, but this same image of river is in Sanskrit and some other poem and some other Indo-European epic languages, and my own special emphasis on all of these words for foreverness and immortality that are used is that it's the same root as the word for youth. And I think the intuition is that a physical energy or a vital force that renews itself in every generation of mortal beings, but this youth persists, and I'm simplifying a little bit here, but I think they believe concretely and materially in this vital reality

which you must do at least if you want to begin to understand how they saw something like fame and immortality and divinity, here is a second clue. At the beginning of catalogue of ships from the Iliad, which is the oldest part of the Iliad, so you know, if the Greeks didn't have wonderful sophisticated bards like Homer, if they had been, let's say, a more centralized culture like some in the Near East, then this is probably all that would have been known of the Iliad, I mean, a catalogue of all the kings and heroes who joined the expedition, an inventory of how many ships they had and from where they were, and so forth. But Homer does even this part more artistically than any Near Eastern palace inventory would do it.

He goes off on short, vivid anecdotes about the heroes' lives, or, you know, if Ares went to bed with a maiden and she was given sons by him, would you be cucked by a god? But anyway, so listen to how he begins this most important part of the Iliad, where the The hero's origins and genealogies are listed, but just before then he begs the muses to put inspiration in him and to tell him the story. And it reads like this, I'm reading now, this is Richmond-Lattimore translation. Tell me now, you muses who have your homes on Olympus, for you who are goddesses are there, and you know all things, and we have heard only the rumor of it and know nothing. Who then of those who were the chief men and the lords of the Danaians?

I could not tell over the multitude of them, nor name them, not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had a voice never to be broken and a heart of bronze within me, not unless the Muses of Olympia, the daughters of Zeus of the ages, remembered all those who came beneath Ileon. I will tell the lords of the ships and the ships' numbers." And then he goes on to what I told you on the inventory. So maybe from this, and from what I tell you before, that in both Greek and Sanskrit, and in Latin the word euenis for euds and for eternity have the same roots, and also in the epic poems of other Indo-European or Aryan languages, call them whatever you want, but I think they saw fame because for modern audiences it's really just rumor, and you contrast this

rumor and talk and just social gab. And when you think of it, you contrast this vague material thing with carnal immortality as promised by Christianity or other mystery religion, or now literal immortality promised by science. You know, this is big among some people, longevity studies, or preserving yourself in a freezing tank or whatever, or uploading your consciousness, that's a little bit different. But so it seems very unsatisfying to think, oh, these people believe that others talking about you would make you immortal. But I don't think they just thought that. I think they believed immortality of the soul too, by the way. But that part was not important to them because that soul to them was not you. It's in the first lines of the Iliad. Many people miss it. Many scholars miss it.

Many normal people don't miss it. But Homer says the bodies of the heroes are made to be a feast for dogs and vultures, but their souls live on and it's just this chattering shade that's not really you. Whereas the immortal fame that's somehow divinized, if it's intense enough, it reaches the bronze heavens and is preserved in the ever-useful and immortal gods. And they are the ones who preserve your fame or kleos somehow, meaning it joins the vital stream that is the source of all life itself. And I will not pretend to understand all the details. But just to hint to you, maybe it's the way Homeric men, or before that, the ancestors of Homeric men might have understood and prized fame. But regardless of how they understood it, it is of course loved by others in later times

also who didn't think precisely that way, but there is always a hunger for it, and at highest levels it's not a social community so-called desire. It's the very opposite. It's not this kind of smug thing I hate when you talk to some girl and she's, oh, we are social beings and we want to be remembered. It's terrible when people try to apply this to ancient Greeks who didn't think this way, or they talk about the love of honor among ancient Greeks, and to square that somehow with small village life and socialism. They didn't think of it in those terms, right? Because let's say community-based cultures, they do not have cults of fame of this kind. The more community-based a culture gets, the less of this cult they have. They have anonymity.

That's what Oriental societies are known for, the anonymity of the individual. But the Aryan-derived cultures have the perpetuation of individual failure, not just by the way your clan or family, but you as a man, and an admiration for individual greatness, which isn't necessarily achieved by winning approbation of people in your own lifetime. But sometimes it's by setting yourself against all of them. And this was taken to extremes, for example, by many, but a man who burned down the temple of Artemis in the ancient world. This is in Asia Minor, the huge temple of Artemis, and he supposedly did it in hope that he would be remembered, even if remembered just as notorious. So you could think this is a distortion of this love of Homeric fame, but I think there's

probably more to his motivations than this. I think he was probably taking a stand against the Earth Mother to whom this temple was really dedicated. But in many other cases, it isn't really your current society or peers among whom you're trying to win fame, but again it's immortal fame which is even I think intensified in Christian era. I believe it's intensified by Christ's own example of standing as a lone man against his own people and against the greatest empire of the time. So it's very different from, you know, in America for the last few decades, for example, even wanting to be a celebrity or to work in entertainment. That's very different. Right? If you think of movie stars from decades ago, they aren't really known anymore now.

Who thinks of, I mean, they are seen maybe as quaint or it's quite gay. It's like a gay guy's thing to make a cult of Lauren Bacall or whoever or Audrey Hepburn. But nobody really remembers most of them. So it's celebrity today is fame seeking, I think, in fail mode, right? So TikTok type fame is the worst of that. And I hate to be a celebrity, by the way. I don't know how Dennis Miller, he went on Tucker and he said being famous is great. Okay, maybe he cannot go girl without her knowing who he is. But I think it's awful to be noticed in such city today by drooling idiot. I would like to be anonymous, okay? I want to go to new place and have people not know me and I want them to talk to me in frank way, the stupid and inane thing like girl telling me of places she likes to go

to do nails in this and I like to pull trick on them and tell them I'm here to hunt my sister's murderer and this type of thing. But do not confuse celebrity seeking and face faggery for this kind of other lust for immortal fame that is very different, but I will be right back to talk an unusual perverted philosopher from Greek world. Minari kiku no Na te mu watashi wa ningyo Senakani keshita ino Dake nami natao Made Having told him that she was with child by him, he replied, You are no more sure of this than if after running through coarse rushes, you were to say you had been pricked by one in particular. Someone accused him of exposing his son as if it was not his offspring, whereupon he replied, Flegen too, and Vermin, we know to be of our own begetting, but for all that,

because they are useless, we cast them as far from us as possible. He received the sum of Monia from Dionysus at the same time that Plato carried off a book, and when he was tweeted with this, his reply was, well, I want Monia, Plato wants books. One asked him why he let himself be refuted by Dionysus. For the same reason, said he, as the others refute him. And that is from Diogenes Laertius' Life of Aristippus. Dionysus refers not to the god, of course, but to the Sicilian tyrant, and these are short biographies, this book, Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers, short interesting biographies of ancient philosophers, summaries of their teachings. And this is a different Diogenes from Diogenes the Cynic, who many of you know and enjoy as a public nudist, and master Baetor.

He is the founder of the Cynic, or dog-like school of philosophy, Diogenes the Cynic, the first frog, the one who told Alexander as great to get out of his sunlight, and also he came to marketplace with a lamp saying he was looking for a man, and because there There are no men to be found anymore, as this is different. Diogenes Lertius, the biographer, lived several hundred years after that, probably in the 200s AD during Roman rule, and not much is known about his life or his own philosophical allegiances, but he is a great source, again, if you want to learn history by biography, which is best way. You can read him, you read Plutarch, and with these two, and maybe Herodotus and Thucydides, you have great view of ancient world.

If you want to design curriculum also for your son this way, these are all authors he can read in high school. I think Diogenes' Lertius compilation, these lives of the philosophers, these short biographies were a favorite of Nietzsche when he was in high school, and I think you will see why. Now Aristippus himself, he lived slightly even before Diogenes the Cynic. Aristippus lived about 430 to 350 BC, so he was about 30 or 30-something when Socrates was executed in Athens, and Aristippus had come to Athens, Diogenes says, he was drawn by Socrates' fame, which had spread all over the Greek world. So Aristippus is a Socratic, you could say he is a Socratic school philosopher, and he knew Plato and so on, Plato didn't like him, he attacks him.

But he is remembered as the founder of the Hedonist, or the Cyrenaic school of thought, which as you will see in a moment is not really just about Hedonism. He was born in Cyrene, which was a Greek colony in Libya. It was founded by Dorians, I think, in the 600s BC on direction from Oracle at Delphi. There are still ruins there in Libya, which was this North Africa, but it's very lush, fertile land. It was a prosperous commercial city, it was dedicated to Apollo I think, it had a port called Apollonia, and it did much trade, it was all Greek Mediterranean world, it was one of the main outposts in Africa, they had others in Egypt. Now, Pindar has some wonderful odes which were commissioned by the kings of Cyrene,

but Aristippus lived maybe a century or so later when Cyrene had become a republic of sorts. And anyway, the details of his origin are not so important, but his philosophy came to be called Hedonist, and it carried on in ancient world for some time through master-disciple relationships the same way any real tradition is perpetuated. And it's different from Epicurean, okay, so if you read this Diogenes Lertius biography of Aristippus, he goes into some main differences between what is Hedonism, how is it different from Epicurean, and it's not different just in ethical content and so forth, but in the question of how to live, but different entirely I think in character because Aristippus was a Socratic and Epicurus was not. Epicurus was a student of Democritus, the atomist.

He came up with atomic theory, the universe consisted of atoms, and he was a rival and and hater of Platonism, Epicurus that is, and Plato wanted, this may be a apocryphal story, but Plato even wanted to burn all books by Democritus. There's a whole story behind that, very revealing actually for what Platonism and Socrates is. But so Epicureanism and Aristippus-type Cyrenaic Hedonism are actually from rival schools of thought despite some superficial similarities. And a reminder also that in ancient world, these philosophical school differences were taken deadly serious, literally, I mean, in Roman times, you'd have stoics physically fight Epicureans and academics in the street and this type of thing, physical violence.

If there is a difference that maybe I could leave you between the two, hiddenism versus Epicureanism, it's that the strongly moralistic character of Aristippus' so-called hiddenism, This moralism is shared with all other Socratic philosophers and it's not with Epicurean school. Plato, I think, hated Democritus, Epicurus' intellectual master, you could say, for just this reason. So, if you see the beginning of Diogenes Laertius' biography, I will read now a little bit from this. Again, so you get an idea of, it's not just hedonism, but there's very strong moralistic streak to it. Okay, so I'm reading a couple of paragraphs now from this short biography. He is said to have ordered a partridge to be bought at the cost of 50 drachmae.

And when someone censured him, that was very expensive, and when someone censured him because it was too expensive, he inquired, would you not have given an o-ball for it? And being answered in the affirmative, he rejoined, 50 drachmae are no more than that to me. And when Dionysus gave him his choice of three courtesans, he carried off all three, saying, Paris dearly paid for giving preference to one out of three. And when he had brought them as far as the porch, he let them go. To such lengths did he go both in choosing and in disdaining. Hence the remark of Strato, or by some accounts of Plato, You alone are endowed with the gift to flaunt in robes or go in rags. He bore with Dionysus when he spat on him, and to one who took him to task he replied,

ìIf the fisherman lets himself be dredged with sea-water in order to catch a fish, should I not endure to be wetted with negus in order to take a blenny?î Diogenes, washing the dirt from his vegetables, saw him passing and jeered at him in these terms, ìIf you had learned to make these your diet, you would not have to pay court to kings, to which his rejoinder Aristippus was, and if you knew how to associate with men, you would not be washing vegetables. Being asked what he had gained from philosophy, he replied, the ability to feel at ease in any society. Being reproached for his extravagance, he said, if it were wrong to be extravagant, it would not be in vogue at the festivals of the guards. Being once asked what advantage philosophers have, he replied, should all laws of the gods

be repealed, we shall go on living as we do now." When Dionysus the tyrant inquired what was the reason that philosophers go to rich men's houses, while rich men no longer visit philosophers, his reply was that the one know what they need while the other do not. When he was reproached by Plato for his extravagance, he inquired, Do you think Dionysus a good man? And the reply being in the affirmative, And yet, said he, he lives more extravagantly than I do, so that there is nothing to hinder a man living extravagantly and well. To the question of how the educated differ from the uneducated, he replied, Exactly as horses that have been trained differ from untrained horses. One day, as he entered the house of a courtesan, one of the lads with him blushed.

But upon he remarked, it is not going in that is dangerous, but being unable to go out. So he kept going like that Diogenes. So if you had to summarize it, it is more that you see a man really obsessed with the ideas of self-restraint and self-mastery, but who therefore in his obsession he sees that the only way to test self-mastery is if you can totally immerse yourself in pleasure, For example, in temptation, in enjoyment of pleasures, but to be left completely unaffected if you can despise it even while enjoying it. So another short anecdote – well, I'm not going to tell you all the anecdotes, but remember that last one I said about going into a brothel and being unable to go out. That's maybe the encapsulation of his test of spirit.

Now you could say this is faith, that he's a sophist and surely he was called this in his lifetime, by the way, as with Socrates. But in this case, you could also say he's just doing this so he can have an excuse to enjoy himself. And maybe you'd be partly right. He's also known for associating with tyrants in part because they were the ones who could fund his experiments in so-called testing restraint. You know, I'm taking his view now, because Diogenes Laertius says that Aristippus taught his daughter to avoid extravagance. And so I don't think it's just that he was using the sophistic excuse to enjoy himself and coming up with moral reasons to justify it because, you know, so-called experiment in restraint, or let's say his descent into hedonism as a way to test moral principles,

this is something you see recur throughout history in various religions and such, which it was something always interested me and I've mentioned it before, I think also on last show with the Russian friends, the Khlysti for example, a heretic Christian sect and they believed in salvation through sin or the Frankists who are the Jewish version of the same. Salvation, you have to descend into sin to be able to save, to experience redemption and salvation. It's always a, and I'm not saying by the way that their views are anything like Aristippus concretely or they're not in provenance, not in content, not in the way of life they lead to. Conceptually, you can see that when you hold a moral view of life, you can think, well,

you can't really know you embody it until you test it by its opposite. And in a sense, Christianity itself, non-heretical Christianity, has always had also some of this tendency, because it looks more highly on the redemption of the sinner as opposed to someone who has never been tempted seriously by sin or who is incapable of sinning. So how to put it? If you look at many Christian redemption tales, they're about the salvation of the prostitute, of the disbeliever, of the Ked and Raken ruffian, right? They're not just, you know, tales of stolid bourgeois who follow moral law and never think of leaving the straight path, and that's not a redemption story. So just today, or, you know, maybe it was this week, I don't remember, but some thread

poster on Twitter, made some weird post about how nudity is bad in all circumstances and seeing your wife naked is bad too. So you know, this is threads posting their Ls, right? When a frog friend saw this claim that even seeing your wife naked is terrible, he told me he has no patience with this style, supposed as traditionalists and as righteous, but who have never known what it's like to desire something, to be possessed by desire beyond all bounds, to which you'd sacrifice everything. So I think this actually is very much even non-heretical Christian way, that you can understand Aristippus' moral mission conceptually by this analogy maybe, except that Aristippus and also the other heretical sects I mentioned, they take it much farther.

They think true moral action only shows itself in the extreme situation where you have descended entirely into sin, or in Aristippus' case, in situations where lesser men would have their self-restraint blown up. But it makes me wonder if this is not a necessary feature or consequence of all moral worldview. If you take it seriously, I mean if you're a fanatic for moral salvation, which is different from legalism, I think. As in, how to put, I'm not sure that these are features of legalistic Islamic thought, for example, you know, but all truly moral philosophy, would it not have some of this same tendency? And then it made me think, would an aesthetic worldview have similar tendency? In other words, if you're in a moral frame, you could easily be led in this direction

where you think you can only embody truly moral behavior in the middle of immersion into sin, where you're being tested and tempted. But with the same hold for aesthetic man, where he could come to believe that true beauty could only be experienced in the middle of extreme ugliness and maybe bleakness or degradation. And I think there is a fruitful way to understand some art and some literature on this path also. Maybe I remember Chekhov somewhere, he is described this way as somebody who with a doctor's sensibility, he could look at growth, at carnage basically, at things that repulse or bore others, and he could see a spark of disinterested beauty even in the middle of that. Ferdin Anselin, the novelist, is maybe some of the same, where he could find beauty in degradation.

Dostoevsky come to mind too, maybe. I remind you that many frogs are doctors. This is interesting to think. But, so anyway, back to Life of Aristippus. If you remember what I read at the beginning of this segment, what is most striking to me about him and attractive isn't the content of these views so much as his extreme freedom, his irreverence, his total liberation from all conventional thought. You know, which of course the modern shit lib only pretends at this, well, actually the shit lib is the most conformist lickspittle, right? You know, I believe in science and this word misinformation fed to him by the television and following authorities and most of all being a slave to status. Whereas someone like Aristippus spits and despises all status and treats even powerful

tyrants like Dionysus, his patron, treats them with disdain. Which, you know, actually, to be fair, tyrants find that cute if you can pull it off. So they look the other way, same as when Diogenes the Cynic, famous, told Alexander to stop blocking his rays. This is welcome if it come from right men, even an Alexander would move. But you see in life of men like Aristippus and in their funny irreverence, what Nietzsche meant when he says that ancient Greek philosophers were habituated to seeing all other men as as slaves, even kings and tyrants, and so forth. And it is less in their doctrine that their value is, and more in their lives and action as men of freedom, whereby their innate character shows itself most vividly.

They are the more unique type of men, you can think, where character of human animal, you can say, shows manifest itself most fully, and then, you know, you feel you know more about who Aristippus is as a man, even thousands of years later from these funny anecdotes, Then you feel about any general or even sculptor who left behind his work, right? And you know from these descriptions, even just anecdotes about these philosophers and about their sayings, which by the way, Camille Paglia is completely right, absolutely right when she say that probably the life of Christ was transmitted in the same way. In other words, his immediate followers kept compilations of his sayings and anecdotes about him. Later they turned into the Gospels, but the source of the Gospels were probably these

kinds of compilations, very much like what you hear me saying here in Diogenes' Life of Aristippus. I mean, this anecdotal form. He said this, somebody asked him this, he said that, and probably Jesus was seen as half-God, half-Philosopher, but this latter half of belief that he was a philosopher is somewhat obscure to modern taste. If you want to see, however, a good picture of it from a devout Christian, actually, you should read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, which retells the story of Jesus and punches Pilate, but he retells from a naive, simple view, where Jesus is addressed as a philosopher. You know, this great book, by the way, Master and Margarita, almost any Russian in exile will tell you this is his favorite or one of his favorite books.

It moves back and forth between two plots alternating in chapters. One what I just told you, the other plot take place in 1930s Moscow during Stalin purges when Satan comes to visit, is actually a very timely book, amazing book you should read. But so anyway, even in these anecdotes you see full character of Aristippus, which again is what I like and admire, not so much the content of his thought with which I disagree, But that in the person of a philosopher like him, these things, I mean total freedom, irreverence, humor, manifest vividness of individual character, these are somehow the same thing united and show maybe height of human animal, even in somebody as rakish as him. Now as for the content of his views, Diogenes summarizes them a little bit and even lists his possible books.

But I will read for you again from book, here is Diogenes describing not Aristippus' doctrine, but the hedonist thought of one of his later followers, which I'm reading for you because in content even is somewhat more extreme than Aristippus. It's actually useful tactic. If you want to understand a philosopher who is obscure, now Aristippus is pretty clear, But let's say you have a text that is difficult to understand, a philosopher that's hard to understand. If you go to his students who simplified it, who made it maybe even more shocking, popularized it, it's very good for beginners and it's often the key to the master's work. Now the Theodorians, they derived their name from Theodorus, okay, so this is what I'm about to read for you now.

It is one of Aristippus' students, you could say, his later followers, his name was Theodorus, and Diogenes Laertius is here summarizing the views of this guy Theodorus, okay, so I will read for you, okay? Theodorus was a man who utterly rejected the current belief in the gods, and I have come across a book of his entitled Of the Gods, which is not contemptible. From that book, they say, Epicurus borrowed most of what he wrote on the subject. Theodorus was also a pupil of Anicherus and of Dionysus the dialectician, as Antistines mentions in the Successions of the Philosophers. He considered joy and grief to be the supreme good and evil, the one brought about by wisdom, the other by folly. Wisdom and justice he called goods and their opposites evils, pleasure and pain being intermediate

to good and evil. Friendship he rejected because it did not exist between the unwise nor between the wise. With the former, when the want is removed the friendship disappears, whereas the wise are self-sufficient and have no need of friends. It was reasonable, as he thought, for the good man not to risk his life in the defence of his country, for he would never throw wisdom away to benefit the unwise. He said the world was his country. Theft, adultery and sacrilege would be allowable upon occasion, since none of these acts is by nature base if once you have removed the prejudice against them, which is kept up in order to hold the foolish multitude together. The wise man would indulge his passions openly, without the least regard to circumstances.

Hence he would use arguments as this, is a woman who is skilled in grammar, useful insofar as is skilled in grammar. I'm not going to continue this, he continues like that in typical annoying Socratic fashions with arguments you can probably imagine, by the way, for people who say that in Plato dialogues, he exaggerates the kind of question-and-answer thing from Socrates is not true because if you read from others who are not Socratic about, let's say, followers of the Socratic schools like Theodorus or many others, they all use this annoying question-answer self-satisfied dialogue thing and they're all moralistic and moral fanatics even when they're being Anyway, but you can probably imagine the rest of Theodorus' arguments and they are, let's

say, an extreme or slightly more extreme version of Aristippus, working out of them, a popularization of them. And Theodorus was also from Cyrene, but he was kicked out of that city for these kinds of views. So, how it feels to hear that, what I just read for you from Diogenes about the so-called Hedonist philosophy. And I imagine that in earlier times and generations, when they heard these doctrines, it was more refreshing and shocking than it is for us, because for us it's a bit annoying. It's more annoying than it is shocking, I think. I mean, because it sounds a little bit like atheist Reddit shit-libery and this, it sounds like a shit-lib, maybe. But there's a difference, and I will end a segment maybe telling you brief this difference

between ancient atheist hedonism of this kind and the tedious shit-libery of today. And the difference is if you read about both Theodorus and his master Aristippus, they say these things but they don't say society should be run this way. You know, they're not making a political point where they say, oh, you know, if you base society and its ethics on these principles, things would be good, things would be better, the common good would be promoted, and so forth. And that's, you know, that's the really galling thing about all modern political and social philosophy almost is this facile identification of the good and the good of the rational individual with the good of society. This is what the shithole believes.

He believes all of these things I said and more, but he also wants to add that they are good for everyone if they were put into law and made, you know, you base a political system on them, right? But it's a feature really of almost all modern thinkers. So Herbert Spencer, who is much derided today by leftists and by shit libs, but his type of social Darwinism is the same, by the way, where you have this actually really inhuman Darwinist but individualist ideology in which it's said to be conducive somehow also to the common good. It's a feature of all modern political thought, almost, it's very common to Libertardianism and this, you know, as if it's not enough for them to say individual should pursue his own good and this, but that also magically leads to the common good.

And that's false. It's smug, self-satisfied fakery. It can only be carried out usually because they smugly edit out what self-interest really is or what it should be, you know, as in, no, no, no, no, you cannot be like Idi Amin, you know. You see, being like Idi Amin and taking another man's wife and killing him, that's not self-interest. not individualist. I mean, I swear this is the kind of thing they say. So I've trolled shit lip girl this way. I said, you know, that African tyrant. And so he was really uninhibited. He, you know, he really looked out for number one. And you can see how uncomfortable they get. And they try to convince you that no, no, no, actually, that's not what the real uninhibited self-interest is. You know, it's, it's actually sticking a cucumber in

your ass and in a polyamorous thing. So fuck, what is point of arguing with these people? You know, don't do it. But look, this is big difference and also key to understanding ancient philosopher point of view because they are not concerned, you know, with common good and this type when they give advice. You know, I mean others, others may be, you know, Aristotle talks this, but when other ancient philosophers are concerned with common good, they're usually honest to make the distinction between what's good for the citizen and good for the other kind of man. The good of the few and the good of the many is not necessarily reconcilable also. So like this it's just that in these cases Aristippus and Theodorus and these others

they are not in the slightest concern with giving political or social advice. I think that at least from the extent things that people know of what they said and these anecdotes and so forth, they're just giving advice to men and women actually like themselves to live the best way. So social good be damned, you know. So they're honest about that, and that's a big difference. Epicurus and others are also honest about that. I mean, even in this case, some of the hedonists say, you know, maybe don't do things to rile up the many and to bring punishment on us, but in that case it's a practical thing, that's all. And that should be refreshing, I think, compared to what a modern shitlip says and believes. Where, however, I still don't agree with Aristippus and his followers is in what I've

also for their Socrates, because their concern is still what is moral, what is best way to live in moral sense, what it means to be a good man. And yes, it's true, they're concerned not so much about the social or political aspect, and they don't pretend the individual moral good and the social moral good are easily reconciled, which again is refreshing, but they are still obsessed with what it means to be good men. I find this annoying, you know, this moralism. It's just how the Socratic's are though, okay, they are righteous and annoying and they were much despised by many in antiquity for this reason. And the other feature Aristippus shares with Socratic's is his over-evaluation of education. I read one small line from before but you see throughout this biography small other

anecdote when he is asked about it, it shows how much he thinks an educated man is better off than an uneducated one. And now it's obvious that what he understood by education is very different from modern credentialism and this miseducation of modern so-called elites, and also that Aristippus probably thought only a small minority of people are capable of the right kind of education he has in mind. But even allowing for these things, the Socratic overestimation of education, which is connected to their moralistic obsessions, I think this was a fatal mistake. It was a fatal turn in history. And it's not that education or training is not good or doesn't exist, but when a philosophical framework starts to value education above blood and the slow work of breeding, the true

knowledge in the blood that takes actually the work of generations, then the door is opened eventually to a predictable course that lead to Matt Iglesias and Zeus. So on that note, friends, I must end this show. I know I told you I would talk Uccello, the painter, but as you can see, I can go on many asides and Uccello the painter and others I intend to talk about deserve a show of their own, which I may do soon on next time, but in that case too, I was going to tell you how a man's character, in that case, Uccello the painter is a full-on autistic spurg, but I was going to tell you how his character comes out vividly in his painting. Because this, I believe, this, in the brazen sky, I believe these things, the ideas, the

And what I've called before the eternal fame which is this one kleos that takes material Reality in utterances of violet purple monstrous beings the muses they exist I will beg them to speak through me sometime you will see until next time this number one Nietzsche agitation propaganda show this side of 1950 until next time back out I'm dying so