Welcome to Caribbean Legends episode 126, much anticipated episode. For those of you who are not plugged into outrage culture on Twitter and social media, maybe you have not seen that I'm apparently the most hated man online right now. I don't think I exaggerate. I was unbanned for about maybe two weeks and it's already all BAP, all Bronze Age pervert all the time now, total BAP derangement syndrome. When I was banned in April, I think, or February 2021, they immediately went after 0HP Lovecraft in the same way for about a week or a month, I don't remember. And if the two of us will be banned in the future, they will go after the next big account that they perceive as biggest in so-called frog Twitter, because I think many are terrified

of the prospect of a secular and philosophical right wing that uses facts and evidence and humor and does not screech or use hyper-emotional condensation of mental formulas, whether religious or tribal, things that never really convince outsiders. Above all, a small sphere that is not owned by anyone. Many find inconvenient us getting any kind of audience. And so a lot of rage, you see, serves the same purpose as Reddit leftist pylons do. It's a way to reinforce group cohesion against evil doctrines and so forth. In general, by the way, this This is why if you are attacked, especially on Twitter or other particular social medias or Instagram, it's a good idea to ignore it because, for example, I talk to friends who don't use these and they don't even know it's happening.

And in general, the intent of such attacks is to get you to derail yourself from your own message and content and to focus on self-defense. This is a mistake that I've seen Alex Jones make a lot, and I like him as a performer. I don't agree with many of his opinions, especially lately. In fact I want to attack him soon because of the nonsense he's spreading with conspiracy tarred populism. But he's a good performer, but he makes mistakes, spends sometimes over 50% of his time defending himself. That is their intention. Maybe if you have to defend yourself, spend 10% of time. So this is not, by the way, what I am doing on this episode, which is actually going to be on Solan, Man of Power. But I did want to spend at least the first half, maybe one or two segments, not so much

to defend myself, but to show to you the sorry state of mob mentality on the fake left and the fake right and how pathetic discourse has gotten where normal discussions that used to take place on forums of interesting and controversial ideas, things like Schopenhauer or Kant or Heidegger or Nietzsche, now these things are completely dismissed. They are all evil or irreligious or racist or gay and all these condensations of thought. And so what I did is paraphrased Schopenhauer, almost verbatim, from his essay on women, which is probably the most, this is funny, internet trivia. I would say that Schopenhauer's essay on women is always posted on any new forum because people know it pushes others' buttons. And in part, to be fair, that's why I kept posting this particular passage that I will

read for you in a moment. I knew it would trigger people but really the reaction I got was not just triggering but so incredibly idiotic that I have to describe it for you here. It was part in general of a series of tweets where I repeated almost word for word Schopenhauer arguments on architecture, on beauty, on his aesthetic theories and on his concept of utility but the people raging at me over it are in equal parts left and supposed right. And for Bose, it seems that the ritual repetition of the word gay, where in the tweet in question, which again I read in a moment had over 500 or 600 quote tweet replies, maybe a third of them, I would say, are from leftoid Marxist, so-called post-leftists or active leftists. Some are Antifa, some are leftist journalists.

Another third of the attacks are from so-called right-wing feminists or white nationalist feminist, if you can think of a more noxious mix of ideology. And the third, the remaining third are from online religionist, I would call them churchist, churchist Pharisees. People who use religion as a gang sign for their, you know, ultimately it's fixations on sex and such, but at least 500 or 600 million, I think it's more now of reply quotients, ritually repeating the word gay. You know, so when you see this, it has to be right. No arguments, no counterexamples. They must see other people are doing exactly the same thing, nothing of substance, almost nothing of substance presented at all. It's a ritual group cohesion exercise, and if I pointed out to use it, I could easily

avoid these types of controversies by not repeating naughty ideas from Schopenhauer, which I've repeated actually for almost exactly same way for over 15 years, and I know it pushes button. But I could avoid that in the same way I could also avoid posting physique photographs. The physique photos do not help me in the social media sense of broadening my audience. I've seen it for a long time where when I was much smaller account, I would post handsome Thursday and I would regularly lose one to two hundred followers and most people concerned with, you know, you're not supposed to do that, right? If you're an Instagram aspiring star or TikTok, what you do is you min-max your following. You see which posts do well and you see which ones do badly or even lose your followers.

And then you just do more of one and you eliminate the other. And then the political sphere, however this what translates, this how you get a lot of you end up with a lot of boring high engagement accounts. But they post political, it's called political rage porn, where on the left it would be here as a black, poor black, they get stomped by police. If you're on the right, it used to be here a white kid getting beaten up on a bus. They still post that. You get 1,000 retweets, or they do it with a tranny, or the Balenciaga eats children and so forth. The Balenciaga thing, I'm sorry, it's just so stupid, they are claiming now that the name Balenciaga means Baal is king, which is not true in any language that I know of, and that Balenciaga is actually a Basque name. It was a Basque guy.

His company unfortunately was hijacked. He was a great guy. He did the wedding dresses for Franco's daughters, I think. That's how he became popular in Spain. His company, like many companies with leftist drifts, got hijacked and they hired some idiot ad agency who ruined the reputation now. But it does not mean Baal eats children. It's actually a Basque name. The guy was a good guy, the guy who made the company. But anyway, not that there is not a place for political rage porn sometimes. I just generally have no interest in it. But here's another post about how the working class got betrayed by the left. Can you believe it? Thank you. I did not know that. So anyway, what is your point in your clerical rage against, for example, me quoting Kant or Schopenhauer?

And it's that which I want to mention in a moment here on this segment and the next. On this show again that actually will be on Solon, the Athenian lawgiver and founder and man of power, one of the ancient seven sages of Greece. But let me address this two minute of hate ritually directed at me. I admit largely by my own pushing of buttons because I know these kind of claims get a rise out of people. But the particular response I got this time was so intemperate, so insane, I'd say with Without exaggeration, I am current most hated man on Twitter and I've seen even before this blow up, I saw snippets from both Antifa and the fake religious right that I am apparently the most evil man in American public life. I am quoting verbatim.

I've seen several things from both left and right and now think about that for a moment. These are people who are supposed both to be directed at authorities or at the regime, like this with regime or establishment neoliberal capital or whatever, but instead it's all me 100 percent of the time. So I'm just some 80,000 follower Twitter account with a history podcast and almost no media exposure. Think of absurdity of that for a moment. I'm a fighter against neoliberal Babylonian establishment. I will spend the next two weeks attacking Bronze Age pervert. But look, let's get to meat of the matter. Let me read for you the tweet that set off this two-minute hate. I'm reading now, something that serves a purpose is almost by definition not beautiful. It can be, but despite that.

This is also the reason that the female body cannot be aesthetic. Its utility for childbearing and rearing is so overt and brutally workmanlike. Sexual instinct blinds men about this. How this make you feel? And here for comparison is the Schopenhauer passage that I was paraphrasing, which I posted a little bit later, having had it in weight, I knew, you know, I knew people would be upset and it's funny for me. But here is, I'm reading from Schopenhauer, his essay on women, only the male intellect clouded by the sexual impulse could call the undersized narrow shoulder, broad hipped and short-legged sex, the fair sex, for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty, you know?" And then he goes on to explain also how women do not have any taste for the aesthetic

or for artistic appreciation, which he conflates somewhat with the previous point about their bodies and so forth, but it doesn't matter. And from this, it's hundreds or thousands of chimp-out accounts, whether from a left-wing journalist like Bernstein, Joe, or Antifa, or right-wing feminists, whatever you want to call them, female-centered rage, that I'm gay supposedly, and introducing supposedly the nobility of women, you know. Insofar as this is a genuine response from fathers with daughters, I will repeat there's no hope for you if you're a father with a daughter and you react that way. I know there are some, you know, you are simp for your wife. a pussy for your wife and your daughter, and they will surprise you because you're weak.

Because what Schopenhauer says actually in some way pales next to what is in the Bible. For example, in Proverbs of Solomon, what he says about how you should treat a woman who is a shrew and contentious and how it is better to be alone than to be with that. Loki posted some examples to this effect. But of course, in the religious right in particular, let's leave the left aside for a moment. The religious right cannot take those truly traditional arguments. It's almost entirely now a female-centered movement. And if you point out to them, for example, that Iran, which is a theocracy Iran achieved in codification of religious law and political supremacy, what an integralist Catholic conservative in the United States could only dream of, having the analogy put in the United States.

But Iran has solved none of the problems that these people agitate over. In particular, for example, the birth rate in Iran is very low because of the large number of women in that country who have graduate degrees, which in the end shows you that the low birth rate has next to nothing to do with whether you have a religious government or not. In fact, in Israel, where birth rate has supposedly stabilized around two children replacement even for secular women without a religious enjoyment, you see, and the traditional American point that an establishment of state religion in fact can hurt day-to-day religiosity amongst the people was probably more correct when you look at what happens to a place like Iran.

But anyway, let's leave behind this so-called pacification for women that animates a lot of these responses to what I just read for you from Schopenhauer. Consider the insane response again to verbatim almost restating ideas from Schopenhauer and also from Kant by the way because the way this debate started I was objecting to the supposed beauty of sloped roofs from medieval Europe where again I quoted Schopenhauer's thoughts on architecture at length which is sloped roofs and even the aesthetic refinement of that in Gothic architecture is pretty in some way, but mainly only because of sentimental historical associations and feelings that have nothing to do with the objective worth of the architecture as such.

And at first I try to repeat Schopenhauer architecture thoughts in my own words, which were in a similar way an intemperate attack, you know, you get called a restrater and this for preferring classical architecture to gothic, which, you know, when I posted finally then the source from Schopenhauer, that led to immediate silence, right, because in the low class world of identity, you have to stomp for your people no matter what, like any witch doctor from ethnocentrist Benin, or from the African Studies Department of Schittlieb University Madrasas. So it is Schopenhauer as well as generations of German Hellenists who preferred classical architecture, objectively aesthetically superior to Gothic, and Schopenhauer goes on for many

pages giving arguments about why this, and I listed this, but then these people are restraited, they are to be denounced for not preferring the supposedly native Gothic architecture and so forth, which actually Schopenhauer thinks has Saracen Arabic origins, but whatever. take a step back, repeating I say not only position of Schopenhauer and Kant, but of a large part of post-Kantian aesthetic tradition in Germany and in all of Europe, which melded with German Hellenism as came from Winkelmann, who I covered I think Winkelmann on this show before and by the way, if this is what concerns you, Winkelmann probably was a boy lover and this was not a secret, but somehow in 19th century Germany, right, a much more traditionalist supposedly times and today,

but generations of German scholars and estates and artists, they did not dismiss Winkelmann's arguments and insight because of his known personal behavior. Odd how that works, or maybe not odd in that they were not as low IQ strident Philistines, not as much as now. But okay, an entire aesthetic and actually ethics, also ethic tradition of rejecting utility. I'm not talking about Winkelmann now, about post-Kantianism in Germany that mixed with German Hellenism, because that's fundamentally what this is about. It's the argument that in aesthetic contemplation, for example, you cannot judge the aesthetic worth of an object or produce such an object yourself as an artist unless you're able to contemplate it disinterestedly, meaning, to begin with, meaning in the petty so-called

literal sense. If your own ill-willful individual needs and desires are mixed up with it, you can't see it in itself. Your perception is clouded, rather there's not even a chance for objective perception in the first place. I was watching this week's cooking show the other day, Season 6 Top Chef were very entertaining. Voltaggio brothers, they won every competition in the show and at one point, the cooks at the end, are taken through Napa Valley, beautiful views in a train. But they never enjoy the views. You can see that they can't pay any attention because they're busy cooking. Their entire consciousness, attention is absorbed in the work, in competition, in wanting to win, in the stress of it. They do not see the beauty of the natural setting as a backdrop even.

And it's common to how many peasants and serfs historically, they may have lived in places a natural beauty of surroundings, but they never contemplate this in itself in part because they were used to it, but mostly because like many animal, their attention entirely absorbed in catering to duties, the day-to-day things of chores, survival and so forth. And Schopenhauer is a beautiful contrast between the attention of many animals where you see There is directed literally the head of many animal directed toward the ground entirely pursuing object occupied attention as will motives where it's look for food or pray. Where on the other hand you have the statue of the Apollo Belvedere where the head looks upward and the neck seem almost separated from the body free from its cares and willful

pools and looking already to another and free life separated from that pressure. the emancipation of the intellect from the needs of the stream of motives that push on you that outside of which you know an animal usually can never begin to free itself so finally the head of Apollo Belvedere looking to freedom from the stream of samsara if I can be poetic anyway I need quick break now I have very strong brew coffee with condensed milks so you like this Vietnamese style I will be right back Second, where are you aware that German philosophical post-Kantian tradition is gay? Kant is gay, Schopenhauer, gay, that's right. No, I'm serious, but that's where things are heading for large swathes appear of the populist and let's say populist right and left, right?

So it's obvious idea though, right? If you're driven by sexual desire for an object that actually stops you from considering its aesthetic objective worth to begin with I mean this what Schopenhauer is saying in that passage, you know, it's hard for me to Objectively assess the aesthetic worth of women because I want to have sex with them That's what Schopenhauer is saying and that is gay you see and so to see you can easily look however to see the point at peacocks and at peahens where the peacock is so much more right it's obviously so much more aesthetically resplendent and beautiful than the peahen and many other birds to you like the monal pheasant or the birds of paradise and many other burb and you as an observer without an

interest in the game of these birds because you don't have an interest in it you can see the superior beauty of one over the other, whereas the female birds themselves have their own certainly characteristic, pleasant look, but they're not nearly as magnificent, right? But the peacock, the male bird thinks they are. That male bird just goes insane for these female birds. They will do anything. So he prefers that plainness and not the magnificence, for example, of another male peacock or the bird or the male bird of another species, right? Because the question again of aesthetic value in this way of thinking, and you can see here almost entirely separate from sexual desire. And the male peacock is driven wild with desire for the plain pea hen that to you rightly

does not seem so aesthetically special. Conversely, even according to these people chimping over Schopenhauer ideas, I repeat, These people who want above all to ascribe to women such superiority and to call them not just the more sexually desirable sex from their point of view, but superior aesthetically, but even from their point of view, the converse applies. I mean by your definition, the male is not aesthetic. It's much less beautiful and so on. That's what these people, many of them who are chimping, they are claiming, right? But women, human women, they go fuck crazy for supposedly ugly men then. I mean that's what you believe, right? So obviously then, women's sexual desire is not congruent at all with what is aesthetically superior by your own definitions.

In fact, this is proof that even according to these critics, such as they are, sexual instinct blinds you to objective aesthetic consideration, beyond which there were some funny replies that some stupid woman replied that 8 billion new human lives on this earth is testament to the power of natural selection making women appealing to men. So yes indeed, this is the point. Maybe these people forget, actually I'm sure they never knew, that Schopenhauer was first evolutionary psychologist, so-called. I mean, read his essays on the metaphysics of sexual love and the other one on hereditary nature of the qualities, they are in his main work. Then there is also the famous essay, On the Will in Nature. Darwin's notebooks are full of references to Schopenhauer.

He was the inspiration for Darwin's researches and ideas as well. Darwin turned Schopenhauer thought into something more, let's say, mechanistic and Anglo. But it's precisely because evolution, in other words, the pressure of sexual reproduction and the pressure of survival, precisely because it is known that this shaped the human instincts, the senses, and the basic nervous system. It's because of this that there is no necessary congruence between sexual attraction and aesthetic worth, as well as many other things. For example, no necessary congruence between the things we know, which we need to know for our survival, and the truth about things as they are in themselves. The latter is not really so relevant for the nervous system of an organism that's merely seeking to survive.

I mean the point this person made, I don't know if she was a woman, some of these are Again, please understand, I'm using these as examples. The internet is not real. These could very well be ADL operatives as many times they are. They get into ridiculous arguments to quote-unquote disrupt radical networks and so on. But the overwhelming direction of the, well let's forget the left, the populist right over the last few years have made me want to comment to you what I'm telling you in first two segments, so please have patience. But the point this woman make with the eight billion new humans and how they must have come about necessarily because men are wired to find women beautiful, well they're wired to find them sexy, that is quite different.

Have you seen the Michelin man manatee female, and forgive me gentle water friend manatees for the comparison, but the manatee-like average female in Panama, in the Congo, in downtown Atlanta, yes it is that which drives those men wild with desire. Of course they don't have many other options either, the average man is a sorry creature, but it is that that supposedly drives men wild with desire and results in eight billion superfluous new humans arriving, what they were in the last cycle of being I do not want to think. They're obviously these men who are pumping loads in these manatee females that are obviously not driven by any notion of aesthetic worth. In fact, if the male sexual desire was dependent on objective apprehension of aesthetic worth,

a species would probably die quite fast or would be extremely fragile. And probably the most magnificent species and maybe the most magnificent human tribes did die out because of that. A male rooster will seek to mate even with an oval-shaped object. The male sexual desire, as well actually as the female, but they're driven by much less specific and coarser things than true aesthetic worth. And in this vein, when someone a long time ago, during a previous iteration of this same fight, they pointed out to similar critics, a defender of mine pointed out to them that I often post images of attractive women, but the so-called critics responded that women I post are not sexy or sexualized enough, you see, that they lacked so-called heterosexual

male gaze, that they weren't chosen to entice sexual arousal. So you see, you cannot win with these morons, you know. I think if anything, what I just said right now, I think if anything proves Schopenhauer related claim that the average cow-like human has no notion whatsoever of what objective aesthetic worth even means. To them it's completely about sexual, you know, so as in maybe not once in their lives have they had a moment free from the needy pull of their stressed out desires to see worth in something as it is, unrelated to their own needs. This is why immortal artworks used often, often to be found hanging in servants' quarters they had remained for generations, you know, they were insensate for generations to the

magnificent art in front of them every day, you know, you'd think purely out of self-interest they would recognize that's worth a lot, it can be sold for a lot of money, but no, they never recognized, it's only actually out of social conditioning that many people, most people are forced to find worth even in Beethoven or Raphael or anything at all by the way, and it's good, they should be forced to, otherwise they burn all of these things down for fuel if they could or out of hatred. But anyway, yes, the entire tradition of Kantian aesthetics and German Hellenism is supposed to be rejected as gay. And the same applies to ethics, by the way. Because in ethics also, in action, in this way of thinking, it can only be seen as good in itself if it doesn't bring you personally any utility.

If it does, there's no way to know if it's good in itself, it may or may not be. But by this reasoning, when you put the traditional moral qualities and sentiments to this standard of judgment, you see, in all of them, there is maybe the possibility of getting benefit or utility, except for courage and martyrdom, maybe. And so the thinking goes, it is only these that are good in themselves, as opposed to useful, courage and martyrdom, which means, you know, if they were useful, then they would be good for something else, not good in themselves. what you can think utility means, courage and martyrdom, how do you feel about that? The only true things that are truly good in themselves. And now I need to clarify for a moment that I myself don't hold either this ethical theory

nor do I especially fully hold to the aesthetic part of it because I follow Nietzsche in the end, not Kant and Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche rejects these, but he rejects them after understanding them, which seems, you know, beyond, let's say, 90% of the people who chimped out because I introduced their taboo identities or their taboo words by quoting Schopenhauer. Nietzsche's rejection of this is much more, I would say, an extension of it. So for example, he's able to deduce vanity even in the act of martyrdom, and many such things he extends. He doesn't reject this assessment of aesthetic objective judgment. For example, in The Will to Power, and in Genealogy of Morals, where he criticizes Schopenhauer

for this, and in some other places, which I will talk next show, I'll do it next weekend, why not, it's a very interesting topic. But listen, an entire century of high art, high moral criticism after Kant is to be rejected by these morons as gay, and as producing the honor of their daughters and their fat wives or whatever. So when I pointed out also that it's not just these men that you're injecting, Kant and Schopenhauer, but their disciples. For example Tolstoy, Wagner, Joseph Conrad are among the many artists and writers who consider themselves in this case the disciples of Schopenhauer. And I won't even touch for now the many more who are disciples of Nietzsche. And I ask, are they gay too? Because by the way, specifically Wagner's late work, Percival, he intended it to be

an illustration, a valet piece, a companion piece to Schopenhauer's philosophy on precisely a point very close to the views, the way of thinking I'm expressing here. And the entirety of that tradition, it's admittedly a hard tradition for Anglo to accept unless at least familiar with the basics. But even for example Nietzsche's distinction between bad and evil, his famous distinction which is anthropologically as a matter of historical fact true when you compare different moral codes of past and they meant radically different things by their assessment of bad and evil men. But even that distinction, while on one hand it's a rejection of Kantianism, it makes sense when you start from Kantian views I'm sketching out here, but the entire tradition of thinking

and production of philosophy and high art and high art criticism is to be rejected by these cretins as gay then, which is the religious Pharisees' version apparently or the populist rights version of racist, right? Why do you left use this word racist? It doesn't matter if you lose the argument of words. It doesn't matter if you are demonstrably inferior to, let's say, Joseph Conrad, as Edward Said was, or if you're so ignorant and vehement in your emotions that you do not understand even the point that's being made. You can say gay, or you can say the magic word racist, and dismiss it all to your bovine satisfaction. Social sanctioning, a kind of primitive tribal social control. And I will talk more of this on next show, but I want to mention quickly now it's something

I've noticed happening to populist so-called right for quite a while. It's Philistine turn. I will discuss what I am about to say at length maybe on next show, but I think it's the online populist right or post-left is moving toward the pink swastika argument. The pink swastika argument in some way is the pure distillation of primitive Judeo-Christianity that you see also in Alex June's too. The revolt of the poor in spirit against all that they see as oppressive. Nietzsche captures this formula a number of times. I'll find it, but just off the top of head, to put it words familiar to you, the formula might be elite, strong, evil, degenerate, Bill Gates, Ubermensch, gay, sexy, eugenic, genocidal, beautiful, and so on. I know it sounds bizarre,

but they believe these things are all connected. It's actually remarkably consistent spiritual position that arises from a certain type of dumb person driven by rage It's a mirror precisely excuse me It's a mirror precisely of the Jewish hatred of the wasp of the woke leftist hatred of whites And it becomes in the end the contest to see who is the real left? Who is the real poor in spirit whoever is the most poor in spirit wins and there are inconsistencies because excuse? they keep a tax wrote but they're in inconsistencies I know in this kind of attacks because they realize also that the left or the woke or the trans that they are the actual chandelards they are the actual biolinearist refuse and they mock them rightly for that but the inconsistency is a result of the

character of the right still being undecided these debates are taking place and right now the push seems to be toward the side I'm talking about Look up the book, The Pink Swastika, written by a rabbi and some kind of weirdo, I think, pastor, who are trying to recast the entire Western philosophical and high art tradition as a gay genocidal conspiracy, coming from the Spartans and culminating finally in the Nazis and the Holocaust and so forth. And it's a rejection entirely of Western aristocratic history of the high art and high philosophy tradition. It's, you know, it's evil elite gay stuff, you know, and it's Alex Jones, for example, saying that the European noble houses are in on it for the last thousands of years, and that they're all, they're all vampiric.

They captured children for sacrifice in the castle at night. These are things he says, many such things. It's a contest with the left, adopting the left's frame and rhetoric precisely to see again who is the one, who is the biggest loser, and the biggest loser wins, the poor in spirit, the oppressed, and the last shall be the first, and so forth. And now it's possible that I'm reading too much into this, I do not think so, but it's possible. A friend tell me when I tell him some of these ideas, he say, Bep, no, this is, they're not driven by any consistent ideological position, it's all a response to you specifically. In other words, these people making these so-called attacks now on Schopenhauer and Kant are only doing it because they hate me, you know, and they would even go so far as

to reject Tolstoy in the heat of the moment because, you know, Bat brings it up and it's evil and they see it as an opportunity to, you know, dunk on me by latching on these types of attacks and therefore only incidentally I mean attacking Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and so on. I think it's possible, but in that case I don't know what's worse. In other words, if you lack your own philosophical or even sentimental grounding such that you're You're ready, even in heat of argument, you're ready to reject Kant, and reject not just Kant, but Kant through Nietzsche really, because it's useful to do so when you're dunking on a rival streamer as these people see it, or whether you're engaging in GOP consultant slick PR against the propaganda node that you cannot control.

And in that case, I don't know what's worth, because if that's true, it makes the populist post-left or the right, whatever you want to call it, it makes the religious Pharisee right, makes them out to be far more mercenary and vulgar and stupider than the previous case I hinted at, you know, regarding, again, their hatred of Nietzsche and German Hellenism, which, again, I'll talk next show, because I do think that, at least at the higher levels that are directing constant online rage, not just against me, but quite a few, I am being attacked, in other words, as a proxy for their hatred of Nietzsche and vitalism. I believe that. But regardless, the methods, whatever their motivation, their methods is this vulgar public relations battle,

where if you look finally, they have to address names like Kant or Schopenhauer, and when they do, they reduce them to gossip about their personal lives. And this, what I wanted to say now about so-called online discourse, which was beginning on forums somewhat higher brow, but now it's no exaggeration. If you look at the replies, even from big-name journalists, big accounts who call themselves philosopher in their bio-description, and many others who got involved, you know, academics and professors who get involved in this, you know, it's gossip about how Kant is an incel, Schopenhauer is an incel, or Schopenhauer had a bad relationship with his mother, and this kind of thing. It's all that discussion has become innuendo about private lives of these great men of

the past, lies about Nietzsche's personal life as well, who, by the way, I've heard these lies about Nietzsche repeated for many years, contradictory things, that he was a shut-in incel, that he had syphilis from prostitutes, that he was gay. There's an entire book, a deranged gossip book, exactly what I'm talking about, called Zarathustra Secret, about how Nietzsche was secretly gay, and especially that he was supposedly — excuse me, this is not repeated especially in that book, but one of the tropes and stereotypes repeated online about Nietzsche, again, as personal innuendo against him, supposedly that he was physically weak, which, you know, it's a huge lie, right? Because like Mishima, Nietzsche started as a weak, physically weak and sickly boy and

he had a very bad congenital disease, by the way, that his father also died of. It was not syphilis, this is proven now, if that matters. He died of a congenital, very serious neurological disorder. But he, at the end of his life, had, as far as he could, conquered his disease, and he actually had a very vigorous, muscular physique, according to doctors who analyzed him. He spent eight plus hour a day hiking in the mountains and so forth, but led a very independent, vigorous life. But regardless of the lies, and their lives about Schopenhauer as well, who, despite not being an especially attractive man, he had both romantic affairs and prostitutes his whole life. But what's the point in the end of all this, of the relentless innuendo and feminine gossip

about the private lives of these great men, who will be remembered, you know, forever? And the people attacking them are nobodies. I mean, I had someone one time, in a very smug way, try to compare Nietzsche to some of the classicists he debated during his own lifetime, and these classicists, nobody will remember them in the future, everyone will remember Nietzsche. I want to ask these people, who are you, why are you being so smug, why are you pleasing some no-name classicists like Wilamowitz, again, why are you doing this when generations of artists and philosophers and novelists that people enjoy consider themselves disciples of Nietzsche and you're a nobody and you are being this catty thing about his private life. But I can think of several explanations actually for why this is done.

All of them are bad. At the lowest level, it's men with a fat wife, for all their talk of family and family values on this, actually the joy of family and children is obviously not enough for them. So then they have to set the paltry two to three affairs that they've had their whole lives, and their subjection to a shrew fat wife, which in former times, this was the most ridicule type, homebody man, the hand-pecked husband, but they have to set themselves above Schopenhauer and Nietzsche or Isaac Newton, as these were supposedly incels, you see, and not, you know, they were not as virtuous as the housebound, excuse me, husband, you know, who's, they were not able to have a normal one, you see. But more generally, it's worse than that.

When I see major journalists, academics repeating this personal life innuendo about Schopenhauer, I have to think it's an extension of the left's Marxist, post-Marxist turn, where according to the rules of vulgar historicism, a man's thought cannot transcend his time, and therefore it's always an expression of class interest, or as in post-Marxism, gender and race interest, group interest of some kind, it must always be some secret convoluted group interest, you know, so this leftist frame is accepted by many conservators of various kinds as well, to where you don't anymore have to pay attention to the philosophical content of anything, But you talk only of the origin or personal life or, you know, in your own crude way you do psychologizing of hidden motivations.

Follow the money, that's the most common idiocy, you know, to follow the money of the thinker in question. The thought then is only a crude expression of personal power pursuit or actually financial interest. Because by power they do mean in the end financial by the way. In other words, this worldview collapses all life to the stomach. It is the spiritual horizon of all Marxoids. In the end, it's all a result of material self-interest. And then again, this style of PR attack, public relations attack on a great thinker like Schopenhauer is also just an extension of frivolous woman-based social analysis, right? Social gossip online, social gossip tabloid, where everything in particular gossip about the sexual worth of a man, a mudik, you know, sexual habits, sexual, so you know, it's like

a university thought who will say well Kant had a small penor, he didn't fuck good, so you know QED, that's about the level of it. So how many times have you heard this over the years and it's not, I'm not a big fan of Kant if that's the matter, but this goes, Nietzsche sometimes make a joke, he called Kant the Chinaman of Konigsberg or he does, but he always also has reasons to reject Kant to metaphysics and ethics or to extend them. But on this other level that's being attacked now, it's all social networks, social gossip analysis, you know, so Isaac Newton, right, Van Gogh, or just, no, they not get in it, you know, so they said something mean or racist to a woman once, or you can speculate they were gay because they visited Sicily or whatever, same thing on both sides.

And by the way, when I'm saying both sides, I don't mean the right versus the left. They're both fake versions. Ultimately, they're both leftists. Finally, what's going on maybe is simple entryism, you know, low-key supposes this. In other words, if you look at the people making these arguments, one thing that occurred to me about people's reaction to Schopenhauer is they were basing it almost entirely off of screenshots I posted and think about his personal life that could be found on just reading Wikipedia. And this speaks to a larger point about how on a level of pure philosophical dispute they don't want to tangle with me, okay, so they reduce the debate to something that any idiot can understand. And it's an entryist tactic, okay, entryists.

As I have been saying, glow jigs, glow niggas, and think tanks, of which some are identifiably so, but they do not have tons of German philosophy scholar or classicist lying around who could actually argue with substance of my work or work of friends or the works I cite especially. So you know it's then this female pseudo post-Marxist social gossip and vulgar Philistinism and calling names. But I will discuss as a matter of Nietzsche and the populist right of the Alex Jones type next time an interesting subject of its own. So now we go break and talk life of Solon. The true partisan learns nothing more. He only experiences and judges. It is significant that Solon, who was never a partisan but pursued his aims above and

apart from parties and even against them, was the father of that simple phrase wherein lies the secret of the health and vitality of Athens. I grow old, but I am always learning. Yes, do you like this? That phrase, I grow old, but that's, by the way, from Nietzsche, human all to human, where he talk about Solon, the man above parties, and that phrase, I grow old, but I'm always learning, sound a bit trite, but it's a famous phrase of Solon and key to understand his life and why he's a man of power and why he embodies Athenian spirit. Life as, well, Solon, look, one of seven sages of ancient Greece, they're not quite their holy men, they're wise, Nietzsche says this also, other nations had saints, the Greeks had geniuses and sages.

And this interesting, very interesting, is that any other nation like this, so distinguished by intellect that even the Greeks' neighbors agreed they were smarter. This was a widespread stereotype in ancient world. Even the Greeks' gods were acknowledged by other peoples to be more magnificent than their own gods, smarter, trickier, more beautiful, tricky Greeks. Cochrane and Harpending in the book 10,000 Year Explosion, most of you know it, it's the HPD introduction book, right? But they point out in their researches into Ashkenazi intelligence, which today is also stereotype, I think actually Cochrane and so forth exaggerate this a little because if you look at older studies of IQ tests, actually English Islanders have similarly

high IQ and that is a little bit obscured when the so-called white non-Jewish IQ is considered today. They do not generally consider them by different ethnic breakdowns, but if they did, I think they would find that Zoroastrians, for example, if you want to consider them white, but certainly English Islanders have a stereotype at least as high as the Ash, because that's very interesting and I think overlooked in a lot of the HBD discourse on IQ and so forth. But in any case, Cochrane Harpending, interesting book, and in the researches on Ashk intelligence they point out that in ancient world this rumor did not exist about the Jews. And I think this is despite the fact that Bible is a work of genius of first rate poetry

and that in stories within the Bible you also see examples of trickery but maybe they're not quite Trojan horse level and they were not recognized necessarily by the people surrounding them, but there is cunning there too. But they didn't have this stereotype, so Cochrane and Harpending focus instead on evolutionally selection pressures among Ashkenazi medieval Jews specifically, and they try to think about how Ashke intelligence evolved recently, they say it is a recent phenomenon. But Ashken intelligence, it must be said, is of a very different kind from ancient Greek intelligence. Greek intelligence was according to Nietzsche again of a feminine, he means this as a compliment, a feminine pole, meaning it was created like the French.

It seeks to be fertilized by other peoples and to nurture and grow and create new things, to welcome new notions, ideas from others and to develop them and make them much better. Whereas he calls the Germans, the Jews, and the Romans masculine peoples, they are peoples who are constantly lusting after others and seek to implant things in them. So let's say they would be this at their best, but in the end there is no comparison I think between the Greeks and any other people, ancient or modern. It is to them, the Greeks, to them alone that up to now nature has manifested itself in its glory and full magnificence. But I mean, imagine that sages or wise men or geniuses, as opposed to saints, no other nation, this almost 3,000 years ago happened.

So Solon was born around, let's say, 630 or 640 or so BC, and he lived for 80 years. And he was born at time of crisis in Athens, but throughout the Greek world, time of crisis. When aristocratic world of tragic age of the Greeks or archaic age, it was being challenged tyrants who were themselves aristocrats, but they often came to power at head of the popular party or of the poor among their citizens, or so the story goes. I think in some cases, tyrants were actually just aristocratic lustful adventurers who hired foreign mercenaries. But during Solon's time, Athens was great tension between at least three factions that were regional and political and you can say socio-economic. So Attica, a peninsula being a relatively large place for Greece at times.

So you had the hillmen, the men in the hills so-called, who they were for democracy. The men in the plains, they were for oligarchy. And the men on the coast favored the mixed regime type and they were opposed to both of the other factions. But it was the people, the popular party or the poor, who they groaned under terrible weight because of debts they had incurred. And at that time, you put yourself up for security for death. So many could, if they failed to pay, they could be pressed into slavery or even sold abroad and so forth. And furthermore, Athens was in constant conflict with Megara, this neighboring city-state. They were fighting over island of Salamis, later fame a place where Greeks crushed Persian invasion naval force.

But the war was not going well for Athens around this time. And besides the conflict between rich and poor and foreign wars not going well, it was also perceived a moral corruption in city with confusion in marriage law and such, plus a criminal code that many perceived overly brutal. You may have heard Draconian code and Draco, this previous lawgiver of Athens, this previous reformer. Draco, it was just total death, death penalty for everything, even for idleness, even for robbery or fruit of fruit or salad you got death penalty. He say he thought the lesser crimes deserve this or you know he was criticized even when he enacted these laws you say but the lesser crimes I think they deserve this and for the greater ones I can't think of a bigger punishment this how he justified it.

So death penalty for everything. This interesting actually agree with the modification of this probably all felonies should have death penalty, get rid of jails, death penalty for every felony and fines or some other kind of restitution for lesser crimes, public flogging maybe. And this culls the population you see over successive generations and maintains public order much better by providing real disincentives. As friends say in private to me, if crime is big enough to send someone to jail over, it's big enough to hang them over it. And I personally would one day like to see state where you are allowed to challenge any man to a duel to the death. It's complete bullshit, by the way, that you cannot, that you cannot openly challenge any man.

Like, for example, you should be able to challenge any politician, any oligarch, anything to a one-on-one duel for their property, and if they refuse, they forfeit property to you. I believe in this. This true freedom may be better than draconian state. But Draconian state is better and freer than jail societies of now. So anyway, this was condition of Athens roughly at the time. And Solon came from a noble line, some say descended from Caudrus I Athenian king, others say different. In any case, but from noble but impoverished family. Plutarch say his father spent family wealth on various charitable donations, gave his inheritance away essentially. So in his youth, because his family had been benefactors of others, he was too proud to ask for money from friends in his penury.

So he decided to go into commerce, which I'm not sure on evidence of this, but Plutarch – and by the way, the three main sources for life are so long – Plutarch, life by that same name, parallel lives, from his book Parallel Lives, which you should introduce your son or even daughter to in their youth. Maybe I would think appropriate even at nine or ten if they are smart, maybe even younger. And Plutarch lived much later but I think based his life of Solon on the same life by Theophrastus. Theophrastus was Aristotle's successor at the head of his philosophical school and he notably left behind a famous botanical treatise. But other sources for this are Diogenes Laertius from the lives of the eminent philosophers

which are lives plus collected sayings of Greek sages, many of them, not just the famous seven sages. In much similar style, I think, to what Jesus' early gospels, the early Christian pre-gospels must have been like a compendium of the guru's sayings and brief sketch of his life. Finally, there is famous passage from Herodotus where Solon meets Croesus, the king of Lydia, recounts to him the story of Cleobis and Byton, the famous Couroy brothers. I presented this story in my own book, I will say more on that in a moment. But yes, Solon began his life in commerce which at that time Plutarch say did not carry dishonorable connotations as it did a little bit later in Athens where commerce was seen as a low thing. But I still think perhaps Solon hid the fact that he had to work.

This is common throughout aristocratic history. If a young aristocrat finds himself in penury and has to engage in commerce or get a job, they usually try to hide this from friends. But yes, Solon as one of the great early sages of Greeks, he wrote thousands of lines in verse. Some of them still survived to our time. At first he composed them for his own amusement, so it is claimed. But I will tell you, I'm not sure I can read any of his poetry on show, not only because usually poetry in translation is not good, but in my opinion even what's left behind him in verse in Greek is not very good. It's mostly moral advice and I just don't find it interesting. I think it's, I think rather on his life and his actions that Solon's true fame rests, not his verse and poetry.

And in his life he was a true Greek, very tricky, very smart, cunning, very adventurous, and always, as Nietzsche says about secret to Athenian vitality, always willing to learn something new, eager for knowledge to the end of his life, seeing life as experiment, as staging for hunger for knowledge. But before he took on reform of cities' problems, for which he's most remembered as a constitutional Solon became famous through trickery and political cunning in other exploits, other adventures. And I will tell you now, chiefly, three events established his fame and prestige in the city. First of all, there was this war with the neighbor city-state Megara over the island Salamis. And Athens was not doing well. And because it was doing badly and tired of the war, it had actually passed a law

that no one would be allowed to advocate continuation of the war with Megara. And Solan, and many of the younger men in particular, felt this was a highly dishonorable thing to give up in the fight in this way. So to get around this, he contrived to play the madman. He had family and friends spread rumor that he had schizophrenic break with reality. And under discover, and by the way, there is again interesting passage from Nietzsche on just this, the importance of madness in the history of morality from his book Daybreak, where he talks about this event from Solon's life, briefly mentions it, and how Solon availed himself of a widely accepted convention at the time that whatever madness existed, genius or the voice of the divine must somehow come with it too.

You know, like in previous episode I played for you that Korean woman on the train and And I think the reason she was not attacked by the friends so-called on the train, by the joggers on the train, they did not attack her because they felt that there was something divine in her madness. And this old prejudice of mankind that wherever you see the passion of madness, there must be some divine truth being revealed. And this convention had survived to the time of Solon in Athens, and he availed himself of it, meaning, you know, a madman is allowed to come in public and to recite poetry, and the poet connection to madness was widely accepted. And he used this as cover. He came in public and recounted powerful verses about Athens' dishonor, the Athenian dishonor in giving up the fight.

And he was so persuasive, push button so well, as a madman, as a fool, that the people took up the matter again, put it to a vote, and so the war was restarted. And in this war, he took the lead and he retook Salamis from Megara by trickery. One story is that he sent a double spy and he convinced the Megarians to sail into an ambush. The other variation is that he attacked Megara by night, both by sea and land, and he captured one of the Megarian's scout ships, refitted it with Athenian crew, and while engaging Megara by land, the spy scout ship entered Megara and took it. And it's a nice story, but Megara was actually a strong neighbour, it did not give up its claim. The war continued, it caused immense casualties on both sides despite the initial Athenian victory.

So they had to call in the Spartans for outside judgment. You know, again, skin in the game, not always such a good thing. You will see later in Solon own legislation at Athens as well. I'm just against the verbal formulas that get repeated by telephone game among whatever sphere on internet and they act to short circuit thought. Skin in game. Well, you need actually sometimes outside arbitration. So Spartan come in and in the trial over who had superior right to the island, Solon made the case successfully for Athens, both through, you know, historical grave research where he showed that the oldest graves and tombs were built in the Athenian style, and also he invoked a verse from Homer that seemed to suggest Salamis had always been allied

to Athens, and some say he invented this verse, he interpolated it within Homer oral tradition. So in that sense, purely by poetic genius and trickery, he managed to win this island Salamis for Athens, that Athens would later use to save Europe from the Orient when they defeated the Persian invasion force. And second, and which according to Plutarch, the second event that Plutarch say brought Solon even greater repute than the conquest of Salamis, was how he saved the oracle at Delphi. And this was site of great pilgrimage in Greece, one of the great pan-Greek sites. And in traditional real paganism, you know, is the oracle, it's oracle-based, that is the form of divine guidance. You see in Mishima, very clear and vivid explanation in Runaway Horses, where he talked about Shintoism

and the League of the Divine Wind, that gods speak to men through oracles. Where to establish new oracle in our time? Do not answer me. I believe Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, as absurd as they may seem, they have a lot more genuine religious feeling than almost all internet so-called traditionalists who are merely, they're weirdo clerical types. They have the spirit of accusation and judgment, almost no religious feeling as far as I can tell. Anyway, so Delphi, which is an inland, Delphi had problem with the poor city that corresponded to it a little bit on the coast called, well in English it's spelled Sirra, but actually it was probably pronounced more like Kirha. So okay, the people of Kirha were harassing pilgrims to Delphi, who came from all over the Greek world

to see the oracle at Delphi and this harbor part of Delphi were harassing pilgrims, robbing them, harassing the people of Delphi, harassing Phocaeon, that's the local Greek, harassing women there. Very similar to why crusades happened, right? Christian pilgrim to Holy Land were getting harassed and bullied and so on so this what happened it was Solon who set up the Crusades of his time called the first sacred war in which a league of Greek cities came upon this bully city of Kirha and saved the Oracle of Delphi as a free pilgrimage site for all the Greeks and thereafter they were set up to celebrate this victory the famous Pythian athletic games Pythian games similar to the Olympic there were four main athletic games you see celebrated

You see them celebrated in the Odes of Pindar, a Dorian poet who celebrates athletic victors. The Olympian, the Nemean, Isthmian, and the Pythian. So they didn't just have Olympic games, they had some other athletic competitions too. And the Pythian was set up by Solon. And they are called Pythian because the Pythia was the priestess of the oracle. She went into trances and brooding, chimping, brooding over the python. That's right, the serpent. That's how Delphi was born, as an oracle. When Apollo came and he defeated the serpent, a retelling of the story of victory of Saint George over the dragon, or rather Saint Michael over the beast, which is that it's backward, right? But Tolkien, this is his understanding of world history theology. Can you be like this?

Do you think that Tolkien, Christianity can win out and have future in this sense? Because Tolkien understood, I think, the entire theology of the world, successive retelling in cycles of this victory, described also as originating animating myth of Indo-European poetics with which Tolkien was very familiar. If you want to see a modern academic treatment of this, you read Calvert Watkins' book, if you're interested, How to Kill a Dragon. You can read this, you know, hero kill dragon. That's the formula. history of the world retold in cycles centering on this story. This is how my friend Knight Errant understood Tolkien tales. The world as staging round for the retelling of this story in successive degenerating cycles

where glory slowly fades away in the world, but this conflict between good and evil replays again and again. But anyway, it's interesting I say because if I repeat, in West Africa the oracle women, I think the Yoruba Oracle women, they also freak out over water serpent, over the water python. It is some ancient memory in all of mankind that the telling of the future is associated with the dragon or victory over the dragon somehow, but anyway. So this established Solon's fame worldwide and his honor was established even more after this than after the taking of the Salamis, excuse me, Island of Salamis, which he did through cunning and violence and legal argument, right? And then the third success he had, which Maiden surely established his name in Athens, he

mediated over a great and long-lasting dispute in the city. Sometime before this, there had been a man, Cylon, who had tried to overthrow the government and set up a tyranny, and his faction lost, the Cylonians. But they were promised sanctuary after they failed, they did a coup attempt and they failed and divine sanctuary as amnesty in exchange for surrender, it's old phenomenon in many Greek cities. But because of a petty technicality they were carrying a holy string and that string broke and so the opposing party said see the string broke and it's a technicality from our point of view, it sounds, you know, very petty fogging, but they said, this is a sign from the goddess that she no longer grants you sanctuary that you were asking for. So almost all of them were butchered.

Some of them were butchered, including when they had run away and they had come to holy altars and they were supplicating and they were killed at the altar. And this very bad, the Greeks saw this, Athenians saw this as very bad for city, it polluted the city. And because of a number of bad things started to happen, including resumption of war and many other kinds of disasters, Solon, being a widely respected man already, he was called in to mediate because the descendants of Cylon's faction, they were not wiped out, they had become strong again, and their opponents, of course, had never gone away either. So you had these two contending factions with sacrilege and pollution, religious pollution of the city in the background.

So while Athens itself was not doing so well, which is interpreted as consequence of this divine, this favor over this festering feud and this pollution and sacrilege bound up with it. So Solon mediated and convinced the offending faction, you know, to submit to a judgment where I think trial jury of 300 nobles was chosen and the trial, which found in favor of the aggrieved, resolved this feud. And following this, they called in Epimenides from Crete, one of the candidates for seven wise men of Greece as well, in case somebody—I don't know if you can call him a holy man, but he was a wise man nevertheless respected as favored by the gods and a man with mystical vision. And he was called, after the trial I just mentioned, he was called in to purify Athens with religious rights.

And it was this man, Epimene, there's religious reforms in Athens and his purifications, his renewal of the town, you know, if you see what is that show on Netflix with Japanese woman and she come to people's homes to supposedly reorder their belongings because they live in chaos, but she always blesses the house. So it's old pagan thing you can think of that way. He came to renew the city religiously and to cleanse it of pollution. But it was his epimenides religious reforms during this event that paved the way soon after for Solon's law giving and constitutional reform. And now for this constitutional reform for which Solon is most famous, I don't want really necessarily to dwell on it too much. It's discussed in detail both in Plutarch and Aristotle if you're interested.

But let me just say first, in the medium term, it was a failure. He lived, Solon lived like the American founders, he lived to see his constitution fail. In his case, much more spectacularly because his old friend Peisistratus ended up becoming tyrant sometime after his reforms. In the short term, and in the very long term, you can say Solon reformed successfully. People say Solon was inspiration for foundation of later Athenian democracy, was set up I I think about 100 years later with Cleisthenes, but Solon actually knew it probably wouldn't work. The conservatives of our time should get this through their thick skulls, but I will read next because Solon himself told that man, the religious reformer from Crete, Epimenides,

the one I just mentioned, Solon had this wonderful line to him about how ultimately both legislation and religion are useless for political or moral reform of a people, okay? He said, and I'm reading now, this is from Diogenes Laertius, but he said, Solon said to Epimenides, it seems that after all I was not to confer much benefit on Athenians by my laws any more than you by purifying the city, for religion and legislation are not sufficient in themselves to benefit cities. It can only be done by those who lead the multitude in any direction they choose. And so if things are going well, religion and legislation are beneficial. If not, they are of no avail, okay? Okay you like that? And his failure in legislation, if you want to call it that, I don't think in the end

however takes away from his being a man of power and of having a life of magnificence and genius because frankly, given the extreme restless, vehement character of the Athenians, So innovative always in their history. The extreme instability of their political situation. I don't know that any man, no matter how genius, would have been able to give them a stable constitution. And I don't know that their later democracy was a stable constitution either. By all accounts, it was not a good form of government. The American founders did not find it to be good. And I think it's absurd to ascribe Athenian world fame and the splendor and genius that produced by this city, right? More genius produced per capita than any other time in history. But how absurd would be to ascribe that

to a political system? It wasn't because either of so long or the democracy or the anti-democracy, rather it was, well, what Nietzsche earlier said about the secret to Athenian vitality, always the innovation, the will and hunger to learn new things, the political turbulence you see in their history, their instability. this is another symptom of that same genius, and I doubt that any man would have been able to provide for them with anything like political stability. Political stability and the flowering of genius, in fact, may be at odds with each other. So no, the genius of Solon was, just like in the case of Alcibiades, it was not about the services they rendered to the city or the role they played in its history, but rather their own being as magnificent specimens,

magnificent biological specimens. Their city was a platform for their genius and for a life of magnificence and freedom. And this is easy to recognize in case of Alcibiades, very flashy guy who was not and didn't even try to be necessarily good for his city. But in the case of Solon, because people saw a statue and they think they have to be pious because they heard his name, oh what a statesman. So it's harder than for people to admit that his life was magnificent because it was a life of adventure and display of personal excellence, and not because of his political achievement or contribution to the state, which in the end, like I say, he lived to see Athens' government overthrown. You think the ancient Greeks didn't know this?

You think they didn't know that his reforms failed soon after they were enacted? And they admired him immensely, nevertheless, as a great man and a founder. And now, as for the laws he enacted for reform, to resolve the quarrel principally between the rich oligarchs and the poor democratic many, I think for me the most significant part of it was the debt jubilee. He cancelled all debts. This is amazing. And this actually did resolve the city's problems in the medium term. And by the way, Peisistratus, the tyrant who soon came after him, and who had been his lifelong friend, and as some say in their youth, his lover, okay, we will not say that. But it's not like Piscistratus, the tyrant, wrecked all of Solon's government reforms.

In many ways he enforced them, and he built on them and extended them with authoritarian power. The name tyranny at the time, especially in the reign of Piscistratus, was not as much frowned upon as later. He really was a competent ruler and a champion of the cause of the people in the best sense, because, you know, they had legitimate grievances, right? But in the medium term, and arguably in the long, Solon's cancellation of debts did work. And you have to wonder, I think, why no one proposes this in our time. Supposedly we live in an age of political radicalism and of total opposition to a rapacious financial establishment, but this most beneficent measure, a debt you believe, it's a radical measure, nobody has proposed it.

You know, it would solve very many problems if you've looked at debt figures. And I know student debt is thrown around periodically by the Democrats, especially although Trump rightly mentioned it too in his first campaign in 2016. But yes, of course, Biden never managed to deliver on any of this either. And it's just a huge problem for America, not just the student debt, but consumer debt. By the way, I think if you want to talk about economic causes of let's say low birth rate, it is this much more than absolute level of material deprivation as such. This is much bigger problem because young people feel extreme insecurity over the future as long as this hang over the head. So I think enormous problem to get rid of and not just America but many countries, consumer

that in particular I move around in different countries, I see everywhere people are buying on credit. I don't think it's just because of convenience or cashless economy thing, but they don't actually in many cases have money even for groceries or for day-to-day thing, it's everywhere put on credit. And the lifeblood of modern Leviathan, I don't like that word actually, I think Leviathan is a majestic creature, it's a global latrine society. I will not say that anymore. Loki Juliana has asked me to stop saying the third world, it's a gross image. Let's call it GNC, global nigger communism. It's lifeblood is the financial usury system. But strangely enough, nobody ever brings this up anymore. Ron Paul used to say, audit the Fed, but no, that's rejected now by the virtuous post-lefties.

No, no, Ron Paul is a liberal, no, we can't say that, we can't talk about that. Why would you not do that though? This would just crush, it would cancel out the entire premise of modern fake economy, a debt jubilee. What about someone like Trump, they run on debt jubilee like Solon enacted and not you know a bailout for creditors but a real, they take a haircut, real debt cancellation. What if Trump or someone like him again, somebody credible with a credible audience, large following who actually would do what he say. What if you were to threaten a bank run, a coordinated bank run on a certain day to his followers? If you don't like Trump, okay, choose somebody else, someone like him. But merely the threat of such a thing if it was credibly made to be credibly coordinated.

Imagine that would be the end of the whole thing right there. That would be the end of what you call Zog or Global Homo or whatever. If somebody with Trump's level of following was to coordinate bank run, in two weeks it's the end of it all. And yet no one, not even self-styled radical or dissidents this or that, they never propose such a thing. It's always this petty, unserious stuff like child tax credit and do you believe in Jesus? Have you gone to church? Did you pray this morning? This incredible, performative Pharisaism. What about debt jubilee? What about a bank run? What about doing a bank run? Strange enough, nobody ever proposes. Anyway, Solon One measure, in the very short run, did not please either side.

The rich did not want, obviously, the debts, they didn't want their securities erased and cancelled. And the poor, they wanted much more than this. They had wanted land redistribution, which he did not give them. And in the most extreme cases, the poor had wanted Solon to be like, like Kyrgyz had been in Sparta, and to make everyone, I mean all the citizens of Attica, to make them equal. But as Plutarch explains, Lycurgus, by contrast, was direct recent from the line of Hercules and from the gods, whereas Solon's position in Athens was much more of a mediator. He was much more of a common man. He had nowhere near the authority or prestige to enact such sweeping refoundation and reimagining of the Athenian people as Lycurgus had done for the Spartans.

So in the very short run, no one was pleased by his reforms. But soon after they were, the wisdom of his laws was revealed in the short to medium term, let's say a year or a few years after they were enacted. But he was not in Athens to see this because Solon left on a 10-year trip. You see, there's a value to not having skin in the game for both sides, both for the forger of a new constitution and for the people receiving it, which is why I may have mentioned on previous episodes, frequently Greek cities invited outsiders to design constitutions for them and then to kindly leave, which Rousseau says is a necessity for the legislator, that he not be subject to the laws that he designs, right? Because in this case, you in fact do one, excuse me, a disinterested arbiter who does

not stand to gain in any way from his legislation, who composes it as an objective good for the whole city and as a piece of art, right? There's a whole part in Burkhart, Burkhart history of the Greeks, which you should read very important book. It has a part called the state as a work of art, right? And the artist of the Greek state, the artist of the constitution is better for him if he's not involved in it himself, if he doesn't have friends in the city, so that then he cannot design something to benefit them partially at the expense of the whole. You know, no skin in the game is actually better here. You know, it's a stupid concept, the way it's become a formula, again, with a telephone game passed around.

Of course, the skin in the game, so-called, that the legislator has is he wants to have a good creation because he will be thereafter worshipped as a hero and a god, you know, he was the founder of our constitution and so forth. But in fact, this principle demonstrated in Solon's own action that I just mentioned regarding the debt jubilee because he unwisely told some friends about his plans to enact debt cancellation so they all immediately of course took out very large debts knowing they would be cancelled and then it soon looked like Solan was a crook who had set it up for his friends which he had not. So to counter this impression he gave away some say five or some say fifteen talents of wealth which was a huge amount of wealth to prove that he was not in on it but his

friends made out like bandits. So in any case, because of his great prestige in the city, he was, as I say, invited, encouraged finally to become a tyrant or monarch, but he refused saying something like, it's a high position from which you can never come down. So in ancient law giver fashion, he instead decide to embark after his act of foundation, he decided to embark on international tour, which led to some of other famous incidents in his His trip to Egypt and his trip to Lydia to the court of Croesus, but I've been talking for a while on this segment I come back to discuss more Solon's live love laughs travel of Giga chat discovery in ancient Egypt and regarding Atlantis I will be right back back and regarding Solon's legislation besides the jet Jubilee

Again, I do not want to discuss too much in detail You can find Aristotle on Athenian constitution and in Plutarch's life of Solon But aside from reforming the state into classes of voters based on property holdings. He had some unusual laws I'll mention a couple of them as for his property participation scheme It should be said the crucial passage in Plutarch to understand is that despite the fact that the largest class of men The Thetes they really had no political power These were the men with the least property. But aside from serving in juries and on assembly, right, they could propose nothing themselves really of importance in the state. But in fact, the way that Solon wrote the Constitution, they ended up having the most

power because the vagueness of the arbitration between the other three higher property classes, you know, it was determined how much power and where you served on and what assembly by how much wealth you had. But it wasn't clear, very clear in the laws, how disputes between these classes would be resolved. So actually, almost all disputes and therefore decisions of state ended up either in the General Assembly to vote or in the courts, where again, the people were the jury. And so the poorest people, the Democratic Party, in other words, ended up acting as a kind of final arbiter or Supreme Court to the whole Constitution. And then Solon designed certain other deliberative bodies also, I forget which source says it,

but chiefly he did it as an outlet for the immense energy that the Athenians had. It was either Diogenes Laertes or Plutarchus said this, I forget, but it's very striking thing he said this. In other words, ancient writers recognized too is the immense political passions and energy all these classes had. The purpose of these institutions was just to give them an outlet, you know, so he created certain senate and house-like bodies to channel this energy, certain chambers. And the thing is, Mollbug is right about this. Modern peoples just don't have this political energy and passion. You know, the Greeks were politically insane, right, so largely the institutions designed to channel popular passion, either in modern times or the analogous ones created by men

like Solon, they don't even make sense in our time, they're just this weird anachronistic co-redundant because you can't have democratic or republican forms of government with a bovine low-energy people, you see. But anyway, so two weird laws I will mention because this entertainment radio show, Solon made a law that you would be disenfranchised in a time of dispute and faction and conflict if you did not take sides, right? He did not want fence-sitters, you know, he didn't want people to say, let me arrange my private affairs carefully and sit on sideline and then when I see who's coming out on top I will join that side. You know he wanted people to join the side they thought was better and to give it both

political and material aid and to be driven by public spiritedness and this shows you in large part the difference between ancient conception of city and modern private directed one where you know if a woke centrist fag it's supposed to be a good thing to stay out of political conflicts like this but in fact if you understand the city as a compact for common good of the citizens to sit it out speaks you know it encourages what it does it encourages in the long run the success of a really sneaky type of private centered type of man who prospers at the expense of the public spiritedness of others and uses it to his ends right consciously or not. So then a second law that Solon made which I think was very good is to outlaw basically

marriages for profit. So he did not let you marry an heiress if you didn't also have sexual intercourse with her and produced heir. And he allowed her, in case you neglected her in this way, he allowed her to switch you for one of your male relatives. You can't just marry an older heiress to get her money. And he didn't allow dowries really. Again, because he said marriage should be for the joys of love and production of good children and not for profit and calculation, which I mentioned to you in book actually how very few, this is so unusual in history, how very few the peoples are in history who try to arrange marriage for its own sake, for eugenic production and not for financial alliances between families and so on.

Of course you still need to give the man the upper hand in such a system, otherwise you get dysgenic results also. he made law, if a young man was to be found to be a boy toy in the house of an older woman living as gigolo on her money and so forth, he was not allowed to do that. He was reassigned to a younger girl who needed a husband, you see. So they did not allow illegitimate marriages that could not at least in theory produce good children. How does this make you feel? Well, to me another eugenic policy would be to allow society based on dual that I mentioned before in which something like this existed in Icelandic free state, I believe that this is society of might makes right, just violence mixed with free female selection.

This would also produce good eugenic results, but only if you actually free up the rule of violence and allow one man to openly challenge another to contest, which was ritualized. They went to an island and they hunted each other on the island with very basic weapons. But anyway, so much for Solon's legislation, it's interesting but it's not like that of Lycurgus in Sparta or Moses or Mohammed which you can say it took a people and really either gave it a new character or actually I would say perfected a character already nascent within it that the legislator saw that he could forge from within it. But he was not a founder of a people in that full sense. But similar since I'm discussing Solon achievements, I mentioned before that I'm not so much impressed by his poetry.

Most of it is just moral advice, but since we are on it, Diogenes Laertius does have a famous list of advices from Solon, maybe the most famous of all, which I will read for you now. I'm reading from Diogenes Laertius. His counsel to men in general is stated by Apollo Dorus in his book on the philosophic sects as follows. Put more trust in nobility of character than in an oath. Never tell a lie. Pursue worthy aims. Do not be rash to make friends, and once they are made, do not drop them. Learn to obey before you command. Now that is a very interesting one. Most people today probably should take that to heart. Learn to obey before you command. In giving advice, seek to help, not to please your friend. Be led by reason. Shun evil company. Honor

the gods' reverent parents. I think this is all very nice. So anyway, he went on a famous trip, right? It's not live, laugh, love, it's eat, pray, love, or something like that. As for the portion of his trip to Cyprus, he went to island Cyprus. In Cyprus, Solon helped a local king found a new city, which was then thereafter named Soli in honor of him. He helped the king reform his domain and essentially oversaw the construction of a new city or new capital which, because of his genius in resetting it, attracted many new colonists from all over the Greek world, which again he could notch up as a historic achievement worthy of fame into the future. Then he was invited to Sardis, in present-day Anatolia, center-west, I guess, the Kingdom

of Lydia, capital where the fabulously wealthy King Croesus wanted him to come. This very famous story in Greek world, retold many times, you find this same story in Herodotus. It's really taken to be pure expression of Greek character versus the Asiatic, right? Croesus, famously rich king, wanted Solon to come and he wanted to display to Solon his wealth and Solon really to have the reaction, oh you are the happiest man in the world and you must be the happiest man in the world, Are you not happy or something like this and he was very disappointed because Solon was not impressed by his African style display of jewels and this kind of flashy thing Solon considered that very trashy It appeared in his manner and he told them no, I don't think you are the happiest man

I think and he gave example of a man from Athens who lived a virtuous life and had good sons and then he died a good death and And the story did not seem to impress Croesus. Croesus didn't understand it. So then he told a second story, which I tell you also in a chapter of my own book. I retell the story of Cleobis and Byton, the famous kuroi brothers, who during a festival, their mother, they carried her on a platform up to the shrine. And after such immense effort, although they were very strong and healthy and handsome, they both died. And they died at the peak, at the peak of their existence, at the peak of their lives. And Solon represents this to Croesus, who has wanted him to praise rather the television, remote control, jewel type life.

Instead, Solon tells this very strange story, even to modern audience, very strange, that the height in life is to die a good death at the peak of your youth. Yes, do you like this? I mean, this at least is how I understand the story of the two brothers. It's not really a moral story about duty to parents or to state or to the gods. It's rather extreme, super-aesthetic vision of life where the only happy life is a life where you have a good and magnificent death, right? If there was a purely moral explanation to it, it wouldn't have been, you know, so extreme. It's rather death at the peak of your existence. That is taken to be happiness. It's about dying at your absolute peak. That's the beauty of it.

And despite the severe moral character apparent in some of Solon's saying, this story and combined with story of his own life, in which the legislation he's famous for was actually an afterthought, a failure, but to me it speaks again to an aesthetic, artistic conception of what is magnificent in life. And it's very hard to understand, both for Asiatics of that time and for the Asiatics of ours, which means pretty much the whole world, the vast majority of modernity is Asiatic. But anyway, before these excursions, Solon had visited Egypt, which again he could do because of profits from his commercial activity. See, he didn't use it to display 20 ruby rings on his fingers the way Croesus did. He used it to go to new countries and learn the minds of new people.

This is what Odysseus is praised for and very much envied for, I think, in the Odyssey. By the way, since we're talking about good wives, you know, Penelope waited for her husband for how long was it, 10 or 20 years while he was away, maybe it was 30 or 40 years while he was away on his adventures. Now that is a good wife. Maybe the trad husband should understand that. You know, Abraham took his wife. She accompanied him into the wilderness when he heard the call of God. She didn't tell him, you need to stay home, take care of me anyway. I can't go on, I can't go on this way or the traditional and radical feminists will have my head chopped off, but you know, Interpol will come after me. So he went to Egypt to learn a mind of new peoples and new things and he's said to have

met with priests who told him the tale of Atlantis. Now whether this is true or not or if it's something made up, nobody knows if it's something made up by Plato, right? So it's from Plato that we actually have the full story or relatively full story of Atlantis and some people say Plato made up, put it, said it was Solon to give it greater prestige, you know. He was Solon learning this on his stay in Egypt. I don't know but I do believe Solon learned it from there and I will now comment on this This matter of Atlantis in a way that's not directly related. The story of Atlantis appeared to us in dialogues of Plato, Timaeus, and Critias. These are names of actually united dialogue of Plato. Critias is unfinished. It's Plato's last dialogue.

Plutarch has some very beautiful words about this. He say it's like an unfinished beautiful architectural building in Athens. It's either Plato last or one of his last dialogues. Now I don't remember if I talk this on this Caribbean rhythm show or just an article about the rule of the stronger and the better, which I will repost for you soon, where I talk about this man, Critias, who was Plato's uncle and himself a descendant of Solon. And Critias was one of the 30 tyrants, so called, in fact their leader, the leader of the radical, aristocratic, anti-democratic faction that Sparta installed over Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War. I think I did talk on this show, but the truth is beautiful and deserves always to be repeated.

But under the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, Critias killed more Athenians than died in the entire decades of the Peloponnesian War. They destroyed the democracy, they destroyed the docks and the naval power that had been the basis of this democracy, and they also massacred the Eleusinian priesthood, threw them off hills and so forth. Kritias philosophy was one of radical aristocratic right-wing atheism where he considered basically all human law to be a Contrivance to keep the naturally stronger from ruling by force. I will relink the article many enjoyed it But I explained this unusual ancient view radical antinomianism all human law all human morality is just the opinion of the weaker and their magical incantations to

to shackle the stronger, very much like Calicles' character in Plato's Gorgias. Now it's very interesting that Plato puts the story of Atlantis in Critias' mouth. I'm not sure what it means, maybe not good talk on entertainment radio show, but it's significant because the passage in Critias is probably most famous for today, and maybe for which he was most famous for at the time, the passage from Critias himself, I mean, that has survived, He was a philosopher and a writer, but it's where he talks about how the gods were invented to put divine fear into mankind and to give the law sanction such that men would be afraid to breach the law even when no one was looking because of fear of divine terror. And this may seem some of you call this a Reddit fedora atheism.

You know, you all have this image ready made as if it absorbs you from making any further argument and as if there's no equivalent, by the way, to fedora theism also. But Kritias' statement of atheism is different from the modern leftist atheist because he sees it as an explicit rejection of all human law and morality, whereas for the modern leftist atheist, you know, the modern leftist atheist is weirdly very much a moral fanatic, even Sam Harris, you know, where does their morality come from? They believe neither in God nor nature, so it's just this arbitrary assertion. But it's an atheism in the case of Critias coupled with a radical right-wing anti-democratic orientation as justification for rule over those stronger and more superior as a matter

of nature and blood, the stronger and more superior to rule the rest, I mean. On the other hand, the story of Atlantis, as told in the dialogue, Critias of Plato, is one of divine retribution, at least as most people understand it. It was Atlantis' utopia island of excellence and virtue, and when it was falling away from this it was then punished by the gods by Zeus with a great wave as Tolkien himself remembered with Numenor, which is, you know, of course Atlantis. And yet, if you read the very end of dialogue where Critias is speaking, something very odd appears. You see, the real reason in Plato's dialogue, Critias, that Atlantis fell is because the original bloodlines, which were divine in origin, they mix too much with human blood.

In other words, it was a racial degeneration that caused the fall of Atlantis, its fall in quality and finally its end. And if you remember, this is also the reason that Republic falls in Plato's Republic. The guardians of this state make a mistake in eugenic pairings, and it is racial degeneration of blood that leads thereafter to its decline into inferior forms. In other words, Plato was a pre-Gobino. I believe this. Well, the same thing happens to Atlantis, as in the mouth of Critias. Is Atlantis a kind of mythical and historical retelling of something like a real perfect republic that existed in the remote human past? Who knows? It's an interesting question why this all should be placed in Critias' speeches by Plato.

Critias was also famous for the study of the Spartan constitution, which he said the purpose of Spartan constitution was to create a supreme biological specimen. Isn't this interesting? So this all seems maybe consistent coming from the same character, even if the meaning is obscure a little bit. Maybe I leave this for description in writing at a future time of what it might mean. I will say this though, Critias at this time, for the Greeks, served almost analogous same role that name of Hitler serves in our time, at least for the Athenians. His name and names of his companions survived as that of utmost infamy and evil. It would be as if somebody today wrote a movie or play in which they put Hitler as character and these stories about Atlantis coming from Hitler.

The story of Atlantis comes to us via Plato showing the Hitler of the time with whom it had been Plato's relative. It had also been perceived by the people as one of Socrates' students. So if nothing else, I leave this tangent on this matter, that the entire Western philosophical moral tradition as coming from the Socratic is born cocked, right, in the sense that it's born in a disavowal similar to what modern conservative disavowal of Hitler, an eagerness to show, no way, we are not like that, we are good boys. This is consistent in a message of Plato, of Aristotle, of all of the Socratics and and also even of the rival tradition coming from Isocrates as well. The entire message of these moralistic schools that you can teach virtue, that you can make

men better by education and by teaching, which was an idea that totally rejected not just by men like Critias, but by the entire aristocratic high tradition of the Greeks, who in the words of Theognis, a Greek aristocratic poet, he said, never has teaching made a bad man good. So it's easier to breed good men than to teach bad men to be good, you know, because they will always revert, which seems to be something even Solon, the lover of the people and of democracy in a sense that even he knew from the passages briefly that I read you that are attributed to him, which is I assume why he spent so much time of his law and so much attention as every great lawgiver must if he is to be truly great. He spent so much attention on marriage and on sexual law, because the composition of

the next generation, its quality, is ultimately the only thing that matters and that constitutes a people. Never has teaching made a bad man good. The difference was, in our time, Hitler is associated in the shit-lib dominant moralistic mind with racialism, and that's what's seen as bad, whereas in the ancient world, it was the antinomianism and the atheism of this view that I just said that outraged society. But it was, I believe, the racialism also, which is why in the works of the, excuse me, not the pre-Socratics, of the Socratics and the post-Platonists, and even of other schools at the time, this was hidden, it was deliberately hidden, the focus on citizen quality by breeding in blood. In closing, then, I go on another tangent, maybe remote-related.

Here is Diogenes Laertius' account of how Solon's funeral was on his 80th year, where Solon died in Cyprus. I'm reading now. He died in Cyprus at the age of 80. His last injunctions to his relations were like this, that they should convey his bones to Salamis, and when they had been reduced to ashes, scattered them over the soil. Hence, Crotinus in his play The Chyrons makes him say, this is my island home. My dust, men say, is scattered far and wide over Ajax's land. An epigram of my own, not me, but Diogenes Lertius is continuing now, an epigram of my own is also contained in the collection of epigrams in various meters mentioned above, where I have discoursed of all the illustrious dead in all meters and rhythms in epigrams and lyrics. Here it is, far Cyprian fire, his body is

burned, his bones turned into dust, made grain at Salamis, will like his pillars bore his soul on high, so light the burden of his laws on men." It is said he was the author of, well, he's not continuing the epigram now, but I wanted to read for you this part also where Diogenes Laertius attributes the saying nothing too much, attributes this extreme moderate saying also to Solon. But anyway, I stop reading now, nothing too much, a very moderate man, but what you make of the funeral rite. You know, I had this argument with people recently online, although it's in black and white as you see here, and you see also in Herodotus in the famous passage where Herodotus quotes Pindar, the famous passage where he talks about how custom is king among men.

And in contrast, the funeral rites of the Greeks to an Indian tribe displayed at the court of the Persian king, where the Greeks burned their parents and the Indians ate their dead parents, and both were horrified at each other's customs. But I said this, and people still denied, right? In other words, why am I telling you all this? What are ancient DNA bone studies on ancient Greeks about, supposedly? Because as you can see from the script of Solon, his bones, and presumably those of his relatives, and the bones of the class of men like Solon, are never going to be tested for DNA. So when they tell you they're doing ancient DNA bone studies on ancient Greeks, whose bones are they testing when they say they found ancient Greek bones? It's not Solan's. It's not anybody like Solan's.

It's very interesting. Remember, they had the bones from a time previous when Greeks did not practice cremation from Greek far antiquity, hundreds of years from before time of Solan from Mycenae, the bones from Mycenae grave circle B. And they released some time back the mitochondria, the maternal line of those bones which by the way corresponds to a Northwest European origin ultimately, although that's not so clear because you know Maternal empty DNA it you know, it's it gets around women women were moved around, right? So it's not a given but they've had these bones. They have refused to do further studies on them They've or they've refused to reveal the full results for all these years We do not have either Y-DNA or other genetic data on them. Why are they doing this?

What are they hiding? Well, this is for another show still. I have talked for a while. I hope you enjoy this episode. Solon, man of power, man of Atlantis, not because of his service for his city, but because his city was staging ground for a beautiful trip of tourism, eat, pray, love in Egypt. She had full mudamas and these niggas eating beans. Do you like this? I'm sorry, I like your intentions about food. This full mudamas is a kind of bean paste from Egypt. You like with the spices. It's entirely made by the spices. I don't know if you like this talk about food. I remember when I was a small boy and I had left communism and I encountered Nutella for the first time. Nutella. And you put, I ate it on bread toast with butter. That is like crack for an eight-year-old.

Anyway, look, it's for another show. I have talked a while, you know. But city, in other words, Athens, it was not about Solon's service to city. His legislation didn't end panning out very well. It was rather the city staging ground for his own personal excellence as a magnificent specimen for a life of power and magnificence, which he used his entire 80 years to ravenously pursue new knowledge. Seeing life may be always as experiment, therefore not being caught up in its petty vicissitudes or in the faction of parties, but always viewing it with the pleasure with which you might see a movie, a life in ravenous hunger only for new knowledge and space for expansion of will. Until next time, bap out!