In the Iliad, Homer gave the ancient world the structure of its spiritual and earthly life and did it with the same power as Christ did for the new world. And that's from Dostoevsky, a man from frozen, arctic Russia land, 2700 or about 2800 years maybe after Homer, saying just what I said now. And he's not Greek-loid a man like me. I mean, a man who extolled the Greek world and Hellenism. But he's a hardcore Christian traditionalist and Russianist, not even one of the Russians, Dostoevsky that is, he's not even one of the Russian who look to the West or even to a Pan-Slavic future, but Russianist into Holy Russia purely and he say something like this. This episode on some maybe interesting commentaries by others on Homer, Welcome to Caribbean Rhythms

episode 135 and yes I think this latest I've ever been with the show, are you mad? Are you upset at this? Well, we will go back to regular programming now and I think you will be happy with the coming weeks. And I have no excuse for this is and come to think of it I do I do have an excuse I've been under grievous attack by the attack by detrimental robots by a restaurant and nightclub worker in particular okay for example just this week I was walk our street at night okay with groceries groceries how you pronounce and this following what I tell you is a repeat event for me it happened in various cities because is my habit to go to the gym to gym zords later at night maybe right before closing time so sometime 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. maybe by time you're out on street

even after 11 p.m. and skews and I'm walk in shorts after 11 p.m. on street at night and I'm always Rhodesian style short shorts but in shorts and such walking home at night and I get idea stop 24-hour or late open supermarket if I need some things that often ideal time to do shopping because it's empty and then I head home walking but by this time you see there are many bars and nightclub nightclub lounge sometime elegant are already open and there is gorilla bouncer in front and that's not a racial reference because there are guerilla type men in all races. In Buenos Aires, for example, they use Slavic ape gorilla Russia mens to protect certain money exchange places and nightclub and such. It's not that Argentine men can't do it, but many of the money exchange

places, for example, are run by Russia mafias. Some night outlets used to be before Wuhan wiped everything out. And in any case, usually Argentina mens who lift weights are rug beards and such who don't want or need to do work doors at nightclub and so forth but so there is gorilla men's and they have dim distrust look in their eyes a little bit like you know fish right in a restaurant if you go to or if you go to restaurant or fish market or place to eat where they display the fish for you you know how to recognize the freshest fish there There are various ways to check the gills and this, but if the eyes are glistening and shining and clear, then they are super fresh. But if the eyes are cloudy, not so fresh. You can still eat, but, so I walk by nice, cloudy eyes is what I mean.

Most people on street have this, not fresh fish. Their minds are born rotted. So what can I tell you? I walk this sometime elegant nightclub lounge, walk by it and I am wearing shorts but after a workout I with grocery bag in hand and these gorilla men have the effrontery to tell me no man you cannot come in to to to look you can't come in with your grocery bags and shit like that okay what is this okay so I I say I just want to look I want to see what kind of people go in there and but they don't let me come in usually that way I I suppose the clientele doesn't want to see, but if you think maybe I'm making this up for effect, it's something that ends up in this way in various cities just because of my schedule and because I usually live a nightlife area and it's convenient, you know,

it ends up this way that I try to go in nightclub with grocery bag supermarket. I met Frog recently in Rome. We went late at night to nice bar and it was the same way, slight different. I was out of toilet paper, it was late at night, so I had to stop convenience stand because actually they close most of them at midnight or close too. So I explained to him, I'm sorry if I don't get this here, by the time we get out of bar I have to go home. There won't be anything open that I know of, so okay, I had to carry grocery bag with toilet paper and iced tea to a bar, a nice bar, but because he is my friend and I did not want to completely embarrass him outside the bar in the relative circulated going out type of area I decide okay I cannot take this in with me so I hid I hid grocery

bag behind parked car on street you see but this kind of thing okay I won't I won't say if I'm in Japan now or if it was only last week but I've been in Japan and they're very strict about closing time similar kind of attacks this type of attack I've had to endure the last two weeks so even you can ask people who have lived Japan long time they will tell you even if you're a regular to a place and lunch close at 2 p.m. and you want spaghetti and you come 2 or 5 p.m. as a longtime regular even then they will not admit you to sit down even if there are other people finishing their meals it's a full restaurant you wouldn't bother but it's they're very strict about that so I get outraged by this when I go to delicious yakitori chicken skewer meatball place and such

shit that I see tables full of people and they say they cannot come sit me because I'm three minute late and I think is this true is really why or is it because I'm a dirty gaijin yeah I don't feel insulted by this if they think I'm a dirty gaijin they're probably right they shouldn't let me into most of their establishments but in this case I was very hungry and I was looking forward to they make a kind of grisly chicken meatball with cartilage and then the chicken hinds the fatty part roasted on on flame and I was very much looking forward to this so I chimp okay I they don't let me in so okay in our argument I will I may have brought up Fukushima I may bring up the act the accident and event disaster there why it happened Fukushima their negligence and

many such you know okay yes I will go there I will expand the scope of the argument so yeah and you can't shape this way in Japan they're very sensitive I feel bad about it do you ever talk to yourself I talk to myself on the street I don't mean I've seen old women who talk long phrases on the street to themselves an entire conversation but but I mean such as if I'm walking on street eyes I looking at menu or I see something in storefront window I like like Mongolian swastika and I'm inspecting and I start I get excited and I start saying that good that good and I say this to myself and it happens too that if Japanese lady look at me a little bit puzzled maybe disturb that I would say this way somewhat Ebonics but no really in Japan you are there I you

are that nostril let me put it that way I have to be polite now but you see it's Just grievous attacks detrimental robots on me, but actually it's from Japanese movie that you can introduce yourself to this concept you watch Japanese horror movie Maribito, maybe and learn the name Richard Sharpe shaver How to find this movie now I hear but long time ago I recommend this to you and the friend X bird says that it changed his life this movie Maribito And I believe this I believe some cities have hidden pathways hidden part of life you don't see mutants. Buenos Aires used to be this way. Completely unruled life at night with many hidden levels not controlled by police but there is amazing how Wuhan just wiped all of it out overnight and it did so I hear in

Japan as well there were many modern versions of the old floating world many small unusual night businesses and they all got wiped out and if they're making a comeback now around the world it's slow and incomplete and this crisis the Wuhan crisis flattened life I think we are yet to see the full effects of the lockdowns because as I may have excuse if I repeat but really it exposed to people that their lives have no meaning that continuity of time and the deepness a certain umbrella illusion that they had of the permanence and deepness of a world beyond necessity that it could all just be wiped out overnight and not by a true natural disaster tsunami or earthquake after which it could be reestablished and people would quickly forget it but on the say-so of the

government and for a long time it exposed to them the impermanence of private society and also the fact that work means nothing that it's unnecessary and I think these realizations even if for now implicit not fully discussed in open, they are going to be fatal for modern societies and will lead inevitably to something like end of Bronze Age collapse, because this crisis, the Wuhan revelations of the meaninglessness of social relations and of life, it come during a time when there was already crisis of motivation. And if I mention Fukushima, let me go on that for a moment, because actually it's related. The next big crisis, people say, will be that of AI, so-called artificial intelligence, which is just because in my book I came out against artificial intelligence, nerdery and

such, this doesn't mean I'm opposed to what gets called that right now, GPT and such thing. I think it's good technology. Actually in Homer you may find the god Hephaestus, he make robot, he make golden robot women to be his assistants, you see. It's an old idea. I have nothing against such things as such. And I think GPT so-called is good technology again. I have friends in various parts of life, including graphic designer, who are excited at the prospect of using this. Let me correct that. It's potentially good technology. But no doubt it's going to wipe out many kinds of jobs. But why will it wipe out certain jobs? Because for the most part, they're worthless. If you're a good graphic designer, you see it as an opportunity.

But if you are a shibun paper pusher who send email that can be done very easily even now by as yet inadequate GPT, you don't, you see, and I have very smart friends who are locked in worthless jobs too because they need to make a living, but they will not for that reason deny that these jobs are worthless. And much of modern economies make work, either by design or it just ends up this way because Because there are so many government regulations that they create new spheres of the economy, so-called. Big corporations, for example, need huge compliance department of lawyers, HR and such. Small corporations in some businesses, some parts of the economy, small companies cannot even exist because they can't afford this huge compliant department like this.

And I'm reminded in this of Papa Doc Duvalier. He was dictator, or rather tyrant despotic chieftain shaman of Haiti. I recommend it to you before I think Graham Green book, The Comedians, if you want a good image of Papa Doc Duvalier rule, plus it's a very funny novel. But if you read on him, even something like Wikipedia or other online high geography of Papa Doc Duvalier, they will credit him with creating a black middle class in Haiti. If you go to Haiti now, you might be surprised to hear that, because whatever black middle class existed or exists usually leaves that immediately if they have any actual skills a black doctor for example will leave Haiti sometimes even to work in West Africa as soon

as they can otherwise even after decades and centuries of black rule and really it's racial supremacist black rule in Haiti massacres of mulattoes you don't hear about that but You might hear some online mulattos celebrate the Haiti revolution and its massacre of the French and of the whites, but perhaps they're unaware that Haitians also hate mulattos and massacre them too periodically. But after centuries of this, the rulers and economic beneficiaries, whatever exists there in Haiti, are still now mulattos or otherwise Syrian and Lebanese and German expats and such. But anyway, creation of a black middle class by government fiat, I mean. That's what Papa Doc Duvalier so-called did in Haiti. And so that in the United States, even if you discount welfare states that has transferred

the equivalent of many, many Marshall plans from the white to the black communities over the last few decades, many equivalent of the Marshall plan, but even if you consider just the supposedly non-welfare black middle class, ask yourself how many shiboon women are employed in make or government or similar jobs that do nothing at all, and also how many single women too. These are the clients of the left in the United States. Entire sectors of the economy have been made to give them the illusion of having gainful employment. It would be cheaper to put them on welfare actually. But how many are engaged in similar bureaucratic work either directly for government or indirectly for government as a result of laws in entirely

fake unproductive fields like HR that are not only unproductive but are actually a drain. And so this is what I mean by AI solving problem that's not caused by nature as such, at least not direct. I mean, it is caused by nature if by that you mean the indiscriminate multiplication of these type of people and a population bulge of middle-aged, deranged womens. But it's really, in the end, entirely problems of modern men's own making, a fake economy, economy, so to speak, an economy that caters to political clients, meaning that so much of the fake economy, what percentage is digging a hole and filling it back up? And so this so-called AI that exists now, it's meant to solve that problem. And in that sense, it's more aptly called a normie simulator, a normal fact simulator. That's right.

And so you talk about computers passing the Turing test, I think maybe most humans can't pass the Turing test, there's nothing there you see. The cloudy eye of the fish. Women in particular are like this, but probably most men do not understand the content of language, women don't understand it. Usually, I mean, they learn to associate emitting certain sounds, verbal sounds, with getting certain things, prompting certain action result, in much the same way that you can train a pigeon to do apparently complex tasks with operant conditioning. BF Skinner, you look this, black box. That's right, the mind of a normal fag is a black box indeed. And so artificial intelligence is really just an artificial normal fag, which I don't think it's that hard to simulate this.

They operate on autopilot anyway. They can't train AI to hunt, for example, the way African hunting dog or other canids who are hunting dogs hunt together in a pack, but take your average humans, put seven, eight, twelve of them together, they will not be able to hunt either. So just everyone operate on autopilot, all the normies, I mean, a thousand conversations you try to have with them, they're all the same. You have to understand my nausea to abuse myself, I come up with wild stories, I travel from place to place, so I get to sample normal fags of different so-called cultures, but everything homogenized now. I try to entertain myself, make up stories, I may have told you some yes, I'm a Satanist searching for this amulet, there's a lost temple under your city, I'm looking for my

sister's killer, I'm in your country because I've been deprived of my citizenship as a dissident revolutionary in the Republic of... You can just lift this out of movie dirty rotten scoundrels if you want, it's wonderful comedy, maybe you watch Steve Martin, but whatever you say after a while, you notice almost all the conversations with normal fags end up being the same, then you're on cycle. There are some differences, but after a while it's in computer game and it's on repeat, you've exhausted the possibilities. So you've heard this response before, sometimes verbatim, this, what your experience is day to day, this is the mind of a normal fag, you see. So this is why Fukushima is related to this. I tell you, because in Japan, for example, they're very embarrassed about Fukushima.

Natural disaster or not, and that disaster was huge. They had walls against tsunami, but disaster was so huge the walls didn't matter. But that wasn't the problem. The Fukushima nuclear plant actually had many pre-existing problems. They were not noticed or never dealt, never addressed, because the staff was not alert. It was not bright and motivated. They were, in the words of many Japanese, just salarymen. They were doing it by the book, unmotivate on autopilot. In other words, they were AI, effectively. And probably much of world now, including things like nuke plants, are run by human AI of this type. Maybe even less competent than Japanese meat bots who are relatively professional, as far as that goes. And so in principle, if the so-called GPT AI technology ever got up to it,

I wouldn't be opposed to running such, even nuke plants with such, because what you have now is much better. But you know, please, I have patience, I will get to Homer, this is a sequel episode on Homer. But it's not unrelated, okay? Nietzsche's great first essay from Genealogy of Morals, which I will read at the very end of this episode, where he discussed the famous distinction between good and evil, good and bad, the difference between master and slave morality. and he has wonderful insight, philological or etymological insight, that the Greek nobility, you know what they call themselves, one of the words that the Greek nobles used for themselves was esthlos, and they had many words for noble, actually. Agathos and so on, Kaloska, Agathos, but there was esthlos,

and this was one of the most important ones, and it's especially prominent in poets like Theognis and Pindar, who are the poets of aristocratic spirit in Greek times. And this word, estros, it came to mean noble. In particular, it meant nobility as truthfulness. Compared to themselves, they saw the common man, the slave, as the lying man. So estros meant something like noble, frank, straightforward, truthful. But that actually even was a late reinterpretation of very ancient primal world. In its beginning, this word comes from the verb esthai, meaning literally to be. And so at its root, the noble man, the esthlos, is the man who is, who truly has being, who is a man of nature. Whereas by contrast, all of these other humanoid shapes, these beings you see around there,

mere shades, they're empty vessels. In other words, they were recognized in ancient times as AI NPCs, as you call them. So they have no being, but they are lying shade copies of others. In fact, I think also Orthodox Jews believe something similar that at all times there are only 144,000 men with souls in this world. Where they are wrong on this is in the claim that all such souls are hoarded only among some of their people. But that sounds about right as a general number, maybe actually 144,000 overall throughout the globe is optimistic, too optimistic. I don't know when that doctrine first came about, but presumably it was a time when there were far fewer people overall in the world, and so maybe by proportion, if they were thinking

proportion, that was indeed far too optimistic a number. But anyway, sure, GPT-AI as a makeshift normal fag, why not? But at the moment, GPT actually is not so good. I know some friends say it made a wonderful legal brief or summary of scientific papers or such, but I would strongly encourage any of you who use it to double check its facts. It's very good at lying in a confident and assertive way for now, that's mostly what it does. I had someone check, for example, list ten female entrepreneurs in San Francisco with Italian last names. So it lists ten, but the last names are not Italian, and if you tell it to focus on that, it doesn't even understand what you're saying. But it confidently claims this is the answer to what you are looking.

List ten world leaders who worked in management consulting. But then it lists ten and argues confidently, but it's a lie if you check none of them did. So it fails as a search engine. Then when you look into it, why did it choose these particular ten wrong answers? You see that, for example, these were leaders spoke recently at some conference, WEF or similar thing and there were also companies there that did management consulting as co-speakers or co-sponsor and this is just, it's not just a failure but especially bad telling type of failure. It actually doesn't work well now as a search engine. You should double check it if you, but I'm not even sure what data set it's trained on. It sometimes works, as I say again, something that mimics normal fact patterns of speaking.

At that, it's relatively good. But if it should become more competent at actually being a search engine and an answer machine, I ask first, what would be wrong with replacing unmotivated or stupid salarymen all over the world with this device? Even in places like nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons and similar, I don't think it's much better now. Imagine a typical drone operator out of Tampa. Is that much better? Or pay one smart man, pay him well, and have him be motivated as troubleshooter and overseer with many AI-like tools, and he can run a whole operation and such, just one man. But more general though, I'm concerned about the salaryman so-called phenomenon, what that means in general, because you can ask, was it always such? I don't think it was.

I think there was a time of hopefulness in modern life since 1800s or so, So I will just address industrial era and after for now. I won't talk about problem of motivation and such in pre-modern times, but our era is really one with death of belief, the death of religion. It's a secular and industrial and commercial era for the most part, but there was still a time of hopefulness in it where it could sustain itself with teams of smart men working with motivation on various tasks, but something happened, and there are arguments about what and when, but something did happen, I think. And whether it's declining human capital as such, declining IQ for biological reasons, worldwide on average, I don't think it's that yet, although I think in the long term that's a problem.

Or whether it's motivation decline or some of both, but something did happen. You need both things, at least in some balance, right? If you have somewhat less IQ power, you need somewhat higher motivation and vice versa, but you need both. Even the smartest man will slack off and will let things go to waste if you don't give him real incentives. And so what's happened now, that this balance is so off, I don't know, and how can you reestablish in some way, and as for the IQ part, the modern world is dysgenic worldwide, I don't see how you fix that part. But as for the motivation, what could fix it? And so one obvious answer, right, that could come to mind if we see a team slacking off, you might be tempted to say the answer is authoritarianism. You need a Gordon Ramsay, you need a cook

who runs a French-style kitchen with an iron hand and can motivate the team to act professional with military discipline. And really behind Gordon Ramsay, if you watch his show, Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmare, but Hell's Kitchen especially, where he takes people who aren't very motivated and he whip into shape, and behind his stern and authoritarian antics, he's just really demanding the minimum in professionalism and pride in your vocation from these novice cooks who don't, they don't even have that to start with. But you might be tempted to say, well, you need that. Or you need an Elon Musk or a Bezos type executive, someone who both motivate his team, rules them and rules them with an iron hand. And on a business by business level,

you may or may not be able to find such many solutions. But I mean, this problem seems worldwide and society wide by now. And I don't think authoritarianism alone can fix it. The Soviet Union couldn't fix it, you get Chernobyl, which are a mix of ideological commitments, meaning religious delusion, and because of corruption and of lack of motivation and incentives that cannot be solved by the stick of authoritarianism, you end up getting things like Chernobyl and many other smaller Chernobyl-type accidents throughout the Soviet Union history, by the way. And I think China has similar problem. It can't and won't be able to solve this. Someone like Trump, that may come closer to what can, maybe, because it actually motivates people with enthusiasm, somebody who can, at his best,

inspire people with a hope for the future. But you can see the resistance he and any other similar leader would get across the world, and it's not a set of policies. It's a sense, I think, that men must have a correct apprehension, not just a false sense, that they have some ownership in their territory and society, which they do not now. And the Japanese men do not, by the way, despite the superficial anti-feminism of Japan and the fact that women are indeed more feminine and elegant and so forth. But the life of average Japanese salary men is a horrible drudgery, hard, long work all of his life. And the wife may actually not work at all. She go in after noon, take photographs of her coffee latte, and may only, maybe she work a little, and then when retirement comes,

very frequently their wives leave them. They divorce them in old age and abandon salarymen after long life. It's really a miserable and bleak life by a people that they've always had a pyramidal structure. So most of the population has always been wiped out, obedient and unfree, except a few samurai and nobles at the top, but you know what has happened since World War II and that time. So I mean to say that even in Japan, where the same pathologies don't exist as in the West directly, and where they don't have, for example, the problem of migration or out-of-control apparent feminism, but there are attempts to introduce both of these things there as well, to have them adopt migration and feminism.

But still this, the combination of maybe declining human capital plus certainly declining motivation, And ultimately, no way to solve this I think because no modern government, no society wants or would tolerate that kind of course correction. I mean, you know, no one will hand you ownership of a territory, either men take it or they waste away like this worldwide. And so then AI, or what gets called AI, would be something that could come in, pick up that deficit of whatever combination human capital, IQ motivation you need to keep a technological society maintained, at least, running, even if not innovating. That's the idea, anyway. And not endorsing it either way, you see, but that would be the purpose.

Because otherwise, you should get used to worldwide creeping Haiti, a Haiti-like situation, a South Africa situation developing all over the world with failing infrastructure, blackouts and the like. You cannot deprive men indefinitely of ownership of the land and even of their families and expect results any different from this but ultimately you can't breathe out the spirited and grand part of mankind or have them exterminated and expect to have anything but hovel societies I mean look at Central Americans and the domain of the former Incas and such and I don't think the Inca Lords were like the people who are there now or like the leaf blower race that's being imported into the United States that the people you see now are AI robots that were

bred to do this shit work for the Inca and Maya nobles they were bred to lead a slave life but something whatever something wiped out the Inca Lords whether it was people say the Spanish but I think even before that maybe what usually happens it's interbreeding with their own livestock so all that's left now is this robots with dim eyes people bred to carve stone minutely and to carry an Incan princess on their backs and so on but we'll see if AI can pick up this deficit for now it's all hype though it doesn't really work and who knows if it will because again if you look at something like fracking in other words a real technology before fracking came to be used it was not being propagated in media or announced by PR if it's a real technology why

would you do that it was carefully hidden a few people found out about it just before it went public and they made a killing on investments in fracking because for this, as for real technologies in general, like the early internet search engines, they were not promoted preemptively in this way as you see with now so-called AI. A technology that needs this kind of PR push is usually fake, especially when you see soyjack Reddit mails in transports over it. Hat tip to my friend Scott Laughlin, you should read him on all such matters. I've gone on some tangents unrelated direct to Homer. I will be right back Homer's poems concern us Europeans of the 21st century

The answer goes without saying these poems are the core of European civilization as well as of our literature and an important part of our Imagination within the same culture the nature of man varies little whatever the extent of historical or social changes is. The basic questions remain the same. Who am I? What are we? Where are we going? To these questions, Homer has given us ever-valid answers, and he's the only one to do so with such depth. The greater the disruptions visited on us by incessant technical, sociocultural, philosophical and religious novelties, the more we need continuity and stability, the more we need Homer. And that's from Dominique Wenner's Handbook for Dissidents, as translated by my friend Blosius, you should get this book.

I think it would be very good reading, not just for you, but good introduction to important problems and such for maybe, if you know an 18-year-old, or maybe even a smart 14 or 15-year-old, it's good presentation of problems and spirit that have animated the European right, especially since after 1950. Title is Western Samurai, a Handbook for Insumi, which doesn't have direct translation in English, but basically those who do not submit, those who are defiant. I'm not a big fan of the word dissident myself. I think it's become cluttered too many connotations over the last few years. But yes, that's the beginning of Dominik Wenner's chapter on Homer, which these are sentiments about Homer that you may have seen, again, even Dostoevsky holds, but many others.

Wenner lists the opinions of Montaigne and Goethe. Many others say the same thing. Homer is it. Homer is who we are. And of all people, Lutvak recently had tweeted on this. He asked some Chinese official, why are you reading the Iliad? And the Chinese answered, it is the source code of the West. And I think this must be so. It is Homer who was the teacher of Greece, and through Greece also of much Roman spirit as well, and this strain of Western spirit, you would actually expect this to be exalted by a secular age, a supposedly secular age such as our own, in the same way it was exalted by other secularists like Gibbon and those from 18th and 19th century who wanted to move away from the Bible and back to what they saw or hoped would be the true source of European

distinction – Homer and his legacy in Greece and Rome. And I say hoped because someone like Schopenhauer, for example, who saw Europe's classical past – again, the Greeks and Romans – as very much superior to what came after, nevertheless he said, well, it's a different civilization and we live in something else, and so they are not – we are not truly continuous – this is in Schopenhauer's mind now, Europe not truly continuous with Greece and Rome, but should always look up to it as a way to de-barbarize itself. That's Schopenhauer's opinion. But the supposed secularists of our time, they are more hostile to this strain of Europe than they are to the Bible, isn't that remarkable? And the Bible for them, for the left now, is actually relatively easily brought in line

with social gospel and leftist populist thought. In fact, for all their perversions of this spirit and theology, and they are certainly perverting it, but there is nevertheless a long tradition of leftist activism that can and claim legitimacy in the Bible, and not just even in the New Testament, but the prophets and such from Old Testament are frequently invoked. Karl Leuwirth, again, considers Marx a continuation, a secularization of prophetic tradition in Old Testament, which I believe is, Spengler said something similar. But one of the most recent and influential such preachers was Martin Luther King, who of course was also a Marxist, But like I say, Christian Marxism may well be an intended religion of the future. I think they can reach quite easy accommodation with it,

even if it's, yes, I know it's a perversion of that theology but perversion or not, they are attempting such a synthesis. For example, the seminaries now and the divinity schools in United States where they are teaching such things as that passion of Jesus is the process of coming out of a gay man, which sounds absurd and my friend Thomas Seven say They couldn't possibly believe this, but I think they do. They can twist into it somehow. Whereas, for all the overt, panorastic rights of ancient Greece, they have a much harder time bringing that tradition and those texts, the Greek or Roman texts, into the leftist fold. It's not that they don't try occasionally, but in fact, they try much less. And usually when they engage with Greek or Roman antiquity,

it's to denounce it as actually the source code, so to speak, of white supremacist, hetero, patriarchal, colonialist, exploitation by the rich, and so on. And so you may have seen with Donna Zukerfeh's abortive attempts to it, it's hard to know what really her point was, Mark Zukerfeh's sister. She saw right-wing engagement with the classics as problematic, not just among the so-called alt-right, but in decades past, and many such words, but she couldn't really say that so-called appropriation by the right of the classical heritage was wrong because much of the fake scholarship of people like herself, the people in her circle, was at the same time trying to make a point that ancient Greek texts were indeed supremacist, in these other words. And in that vein, there is translation now

by one Emily Wilson. You can see, I left it at the top of my Twitter timeline, my friend Abdullah make post about someone who translate the Odyssey, and she begins with, tell me muse of a complicated man and many such distortions that I will soon Excuse me, not I will soon she will soon. I'm not this person I'm not Emily Wilson using voice changer But she will soon have translation of the Iliad too and I suppose it will corrupt the text and interpolate notes and heavy You know pay attention to my reddit notes read that not to the text to blame Achilles perhaps for his toxic masculinity masculinity in refusing to fight for the benefit of all and insisting instead on his honor and regarding His benefit about the prize girl or who knows what her point would be

But it's worth saying that overall for the left for all its supposed secularism They have not like other secularists in the past try to attach themselves to Greek or Roman or classical heritage But it is secular I think in the same way that the Russian Revolution Bolsheviks are secular and so like Nietzsche says of the French Revolution The contemporary left is very much the spirit of Judea. It's not the spirit of Rome And so it will always instinctively abhor Roman and Greek spirit, which is the spirit of a conquering and aristocratic race But I say it is this strain of the West particularly in Homer. It's not really translatable to other peoples It's really unique to the European peoples and their drive for excellence and exploration and not only because these

Aspirations are a matter of blood although such Dispositions surely have a natural basis as well, but I think it's because it's inherent in a way European children have grown up generation after generation in a culture that was fed by multiple other streams National philosophical ideological political and so on that support the spirit from different sources in other words Think of Homer as one of the great sources, maybe the original source of a big river, that is also, however, fed into by many other tributaries. And these tributaries are the various closely, relatively closely related national cultures of Europe, of pre-Christian Europe, which sprang from a source again very similar to that of Homer themselves, where the spirit of feudal, free man, and the warrior spirit

was never quite blotted out, the spirit of the ancient Saxons, for example. Despite now two centuries of commercial industrial civilization, and at least some decades of enforced leftist de-resonation and re-education, that spirit never truly blotted out. I mean, to be fair, probably the true European spirit is absent already in much of Europe and the Americas, where it formerly had a foothold, but I mean to say, if there's anything that is the purely European spirit, it is this, and Wenner has a beautiful anecdote to illustrate it from the Middle Ages. I think in this book he is best when talking about French history and the Middle Ages and how he connects this with his appreciation of Homer.

But in the Middle Ages, where actually transmission of Homer had been interrupted in West Europe, but again that spirit, the spirit of the epics never actually left it. It had been sustained from a different source, so it could always find a ready home there again when it was reintroduced, I mean the classical heritage. So I will read now and remember at this time the names of from Homer that you're about to hear of his heroes and such, they were memories. No one really read the book anymore. So I'm reading now. Life and death, the chroniclers of our 15th century celebrated a young knight of Ainau, Jacques de la Lange, champion of spear and sword, a friend of the Duke of Burgundy, esteemed by Charles VII, coveted by the Ladies of the Court. He won his first victory in tournament in 1440.

He was served. Nineteen years old, invincible in tournaments, he was killed by a cannonball in the Battle of Pouc in 1453, a memorable year marking both the end of the Hundred Years' War and the fall of Constantinople. This epitaph was written for him. He was the flower of chivalry, handsome like Paris the Trojan, pious like Aeneas, wise like Ulysses the Greek, while in battle against his enemies he had the wrath of Hector the Trojan. The comparison with Homer's heroes is telling. Toward the end of our Middle Ages, after more than twenty centuries, the Iliad remained the paragon of chivalry, even though the transmission of the poem had encountered some unexpected snag. For twenty centuries the fundamental representations of the best had therefore remained unchanged.

Like the heroes of the Iliad, authentic, noble and skilled men competed in courage and sought in action the measure of their excellence, just as women sought in love and self-giving the light of their existence. Everyone cared only for what was beautiful and strong. I repeat what I read from Wenner. Everyone cared only for what was beautiful and strong. Always be the best, Peleus recommended to his son Achilles, and excel over all the rest – Iliad 6 book. When Penelope worries herself at the thought that her son could be killed by the suitors, she fears above all that he will die without glory before he could accomplish all he had to in order to become a hero like his father." Always be the best. Remember, that is what Nietzsche distills as the meaning the tablet that the Greeks

held highest as their longing. And it's this aristocratic drive to distinction over others, to immortal fame, and to a life lived in admiration of what is strong and beautiful. This is unique or almost unique to Europe. I think actually a few other peoples, the Comanche, some Polynesians, the Japanese at their height, and maybe the Tutsi and a couple of others could also become enamored of Homer. It is the spiritual orientation of a heronfolk or of a people of conquerors. And this orientation is actually a little hard to formalize in theory or in a moral code because in fact it conceives of itself as above petty moralisms and formulas. It is just something else that Wenner emphasizes to his credit. At some of his most cutting in this essay, when he's comparing Homer and his gods and

sentiments to those of the epics of Asia and the Levant, because unlike these, in Homer and in the Greek world in general, where the priest really had a very secondary position at best, there is not the concern over moral absolutes of good and evil, over sin, over guilt, over bizarre and parochial legalisms having to do with sexual and such matters. This sounds familiar to you because it's very much part of modern leftism as well. And you know, I mock this in my book, there's this kind of very petty foggy and gross, I mean aesthetically ugly, gross legalism over many such things as sexuality, food and so on that. among Shiites and the rabbinic Judaism and a few other sects you go on their forums a Shiite forum or such it's my new details or how you should go to the

bathroom it's very this I find it very off-putting that understanding of religion it's very far removed from spirit of Homer there is none of the abasement also before frightful deities who rule through terror and who impose arbitrary law codes again through horrible fear and injunctions that many such. In fact, the gods in Homer, as Wenner points out, they're not really taken seriously. And often in interactions between Zeus and Hera, for example, Homer almost uses the gods for comic relief. There are domestic scenes out of a romantic comedy or sitcom. And Hera, Zeus's wife, used perfume to, perfumes and many such things, to seduce and deceive Zeus. And then he wakes up and he's angry at having been deceived, which is why Plato, who had

a moralistic mind, tried maybe to blame Homer precisely over this, not taking the gods seriously enough. But blame or not, maybe Plato studied too much with the Egyptians or such. But it was this that ended up being the spirit of the Greeks with regard to the gods and nature of which the gods are not the creators in this worldview. And it has many reflections in other things that the Greeks are otherwise better known for such as the discovery of mathematics and philosophy and many such, more on this in a moment. Wiener distils the spirit of Homer in three things, the respect and awe for the sacredness of nature, excellence as the end goal, individual excellence even, something perhaps consequent I think on the respect for nature, and beauty as the horizon.

It's not really a set of rules that is theorized or imposed, this is his own condensation, But it's his own condensation of a noble way of life and of heightened seeing that is shown in Homer in action, again not in a doctrine or formula. And so there is a nice passage where Vener lists the many, quite well known, but many amazing intellectual achievements of the Greeks in the classical era. He connects them to Homer's aristocratic, nature-loving sensibility. I will read for you now. The Greeks, by training at the school of Homer, whose work embodied their spirit, proved to be the great inventors of endlessly meaningful myths, but they were not into cosmogonic speculation. They preferred the finite to the infinite, the measurable to the immeasurable.

Their favorite hero was Ulysses, who combined courage with an analytic and inventive mind, as shown among other things by the scheme of the Trojan Horse, at Odyssey Book 8. Wasn't he the protege of the goddess Athena, whose symbol is the owl, the bird that sees in the dark? The Greeks' mindset drove them to search for rational explanations for phenomena and to rely only on themselves to understand the universe. Careful observation of the cosmos had thus led them to distinguish visible phenomena from the invisible causes that underlie them. Thales of Miletus was the founder of mathematics as a real science, going beyond the empirical approach of the Egyptians and Babylonians. The fragments of the Tour of the Earth, Periagesis, show Hecateus of Miletus to be the first geographer.

Xenophanes of Colophon and Pythagoras of Samos breathed new life into philosophical inquiry by integrating geometry, arithmetic and astronomy into it. Later Heraclitus of Ephesus was the cryptic theorist of the harmony of opposites and the eternal return of life under changing forms. Still later, Democritus exposed the atomic structure of matter, Euclid gave solid foundations to geometry while Aristarchus of Samos hypothesized that the Earth was a planet that turns around its axis and revolves around the sun. On a wholly different plane, Herodotus invented historical inquiry based on facts, Hippocrates laid the foundations of experimental medicine, Socrates and Plato probed the infinite possibilities

of philosophical questioning, Aristotle fixed the rules of logic, while Aeschylus and Sophocles infused in the first theater plays the very spirit of tragedy. This era saw Praxiteles and Phidias hew from marble the splendor of ideal for human forms, paralleled anywhere else. And here, Venner quotes, in a footnote, Gibbon, as I will read to you now from Gibbon. Athens, after her Persian triumphs, adopted the philosophy of Ionia and the rhetoric of Sicily. And these studies became the patrimony of a city whose inhabitants, about 30,000 males, condensed within the period of a single life the genius of ages and millions. Our sense of the dignity of human nature is exalted by the simple recollection that Isocrates

was the companion of Plato and Xenophon that he assisted perhaps with the historian Thucydides at the first representation of the Oedipus and Sophocles and the excuse me of the Oedipus of Sophocles and the Iphigenia of Euripides and that his pupils Eschines and Demosthenes Contended for the crown of patriotism in the presence of Aristotle the master of Theophrastus Who taught at Athens with the founders of the Stoic and Epicurean sects end quote from Gibbon I am reminded, if I can interject here, of Galton, the founder of eugenics, and Darwin's cousin, who pointed out, because of observations like this from Gibbon, that probably the intelligence or the IQ of the Athenians of this time was maybe on average two standard deviations above

that of the Englishman of his time, which were that intelligence was higher than the IQ, average IQ of our own time, by the way. And so he says they were in the same relation to us as we are to Africans, referring to Athenian intelligence of this time. It's remarkable. And so Venner continues to say, these extraordinary creations handed down to us by the Greek genius were contained in a nutshell in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two poems placed at the center of the story the awestruck observation of nature and the individuality of the characters, something we do not find at this point in the tradition of any other civilization. The gods, unlike the dreadful deities rife in the Levant or Asia, never impose on them an arbitrary

moral law under the threat of horrible punishments. In their very excesses, Homer's characters are never judged according to abstract categories of an absolute moral good or evil, but rather according to what is noble, generous and or unworthy and low. A steadfast acknowledgement of individuality permeates the two poems. This ethos became expressed in sculpture since the classical era. It lit political institutions, law and the idea we have of the freedom of the city, the privileging of noble natures over the grievances of serfs. Yes, do you like this? And I think this comment on sculpture quite special also because it was this love of individuality. Now remember, individuality isn't individualism. Venner is a hardcore far-rightist. He is one of the reasons I came to Twitter.

He committed suicide in May 2013 during French protests against supposedly gay marriage, but his point was that is a kind of distraction. You should be protesting mass migration and the great replacement. And he committed seppuku suicide in Mishima fashion in Notre Dame Cathedral, and so he is not arguing here for individualistic, so-called liberal point of view. Individuality is not individualism. Individualism is an ideology that reduces different people to abstract, equal, homogenous individuals who are merely differentiated from a collective because they are separate or atomized. Individualism is thus anti-individual because it actually seeks to erase or obscure significant differences between people as they exist and it posits that they are fundamentally alike in some way.

At times it's defined in terms of their reasoning capacity, at other times it's in terms of their inherent supposed rights and so forth. But it posits this as the fundamental fact about people and equalizes them, this abstraction, under this abstraction, the individual. when in fact two persons are always unlike each other and unequal. And it may not even be right to speak of many of them as actually possessing a being of their own, although I know many would disagree with this, both for religious and philosophical reasons, I mean the very last thing I said. But regardless, in Greek sculpture, you see, Paglia mentions the same. The uniform hieratic style that was imported in part from Egypt of the archaic statues, they're called the kouroi.

I mentioned them in my book, you can Google to see what it looked. I mentioned them in my book in a passage that still make many people chimp. But then by early classical era, you have statues like the Kritios boy, who was a real boy with his own personality and individuality, and is no longer a copy from a typecast form. And it's very nice of Wenner to connect such innovations of the Greeks to their love of Homer because it is in actually the small naturalistic detail that show the individual character of the people in the Iliad. Famously, for example, the scene between Hector and his wife and child before Hector goes into battle. And that level of personal detail, what they say, their physical reactions, the cinematic

quality, everything in that is unheard of in other epics or chronicles of the time and even much later. And it's that awe at the full expression of nature, even in minute details and the full manifestation of a phenomenon's uniqueness and individuality, whether it be the human form, the physique, or it be animals or something else, it's that awe that I mentioned on last episode that you see in Homer's similes, so worshipful of nature, that Venner connects this to famous later Greek achievements in the arts and sciences, and along with other commenters on the Homeric spirit who might have disagreed on other matters, but I think even men as different in their ultimate judgments as Winkelmann and Nietzsche and Werner Jaeger

and with the famous book Paideia, but many others all agree that it's not so much the Greeks understood the divine in human light or anthropomorphized the gods, as the opposite they understood the human, human nature, both the physical form and the human emotions, emotions of all kinds, good and bad, as potentially divine. And what a different view of life and the world this is from our grim, dour conservatives who they jump at my neck when I basically quoting or paraphrasing Plato said the secret wish of every Greek was to become a god and of course serves in thrall to Asiatic gods can only interpret that in terms of blasphemy and sin and finally in terms of their daily petty fights with the left which seeks not the deification of mankind or of man but it's

the basement into cockroach form but I look away from such ugly things and I will end In this segment, I will read Wenner on just this matter of human life and the meaning of the gods from Homer. It is a thought that speaks to us in our very depths as it did the ancient Greeks I'm reading now, who made book nine of the Iliad their favorite. Let us stress for a moment what is implied by the choices made by Achilles, Hector, Helen, Penelope, or Ulysses. For Homer, life, this little ephemeral and so common a thing, has no value in itself. becomes worth something only because of the intensity, the beauty, and the breadth of greatness that everyone can give it, above all in his own eyes. A very different concept from that peddled by so many bizarre creeds and banalities

now infesting the spirit of the Western masses which fanned the desire for as long a life as possible even if mediocre and bug-like. Mortal, like all other human beings, be they vegetable or animal, men are nevertheless sometimes as splendid as the immortal gods. Homer often shows them to be even grander, precisely because they are mortal. I'm sure most of you have heard the recent news by now that Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News. I don't think this very good because he was reaching very big normie audience, spreading our ideas. And I wonder now what will be solution. He can certainly go online and have own show and probably do quite well, but he will reach much fewer people. And so if you look at France, the reason somebody like Eric Simur can get for some time now on television

and others like him, but him in particular, and say things much farther than what Tucker was allowed to say on Fox News, is because there is billionaire backer, Bolo Ray, who has his own TV empire and such. And this, perhaps also why Berlusconi in Italy could succeed for quite some time, whereas Trump could not during his administration. Maybe if Trump had been not just a real estate tycoon with some acting roles, but had invested in television media empire the way Beto Lusconi could, maybe his first term would have gone differently. And I know that the new class of billionaires does not like television and looks down on on things like Fox News as dinosaur media. But I think it still make a big difference. And if you don't want it to be on television

or exclusively such, create your own type Netflix online thing that could also be on TV maybe, and let Tucker be on, let him free, let him hire frogs, and then have other frogs, you hire frogs, smart frogs, of which there are a lot, who could make wonderful television specials on all kinds of subject. I don't mean Alex Jones type, excuse me, I know some of you are fans, but if something like this ever gets made, it can't be about how science and astronomy are satanic plots by demons and how the elites are Babylonians who drink blood of children in sacrifices. You cannot go down that foolish path. But have people like Steve Saylor on, have people to spread the truth about natural differences between men and women, about biological sciences, about real research in history, of paleogenetics

and such. There are many frogs who could put on a wonderful program. So imagine a redo of Crossfire, I think it was called, but that program at its best, you had Bill Buckley for all of his problems, and I really dislike William F. Buckley, but at least he had men like Ian Smith on and gave them in-depth interviews without shouting. One of the worst parts of watching television news stations, I really can't do it, not just because the content is already dated by the time you see it, it's already been on Twitter and elsewhere for many hours, and there's nothing original about it. But it's also the hectoring, screaming style of people, idiots like Sean Hannity, but not just him, really. On any station you turn, it's a hectoring, screaming style. It's very stressful.

And imagine having actually intelligent interviews with people like Wellebeck, or having Tucker interview Narendra Modi or Orban or Bukele on principles of state or some smart representative of theirs who, it wouldn't be a shouting, it would be like the old crossfire programs at their best. What would be wrong with that? I think it could be commercial success, there would be nothing like it. Maybe it won't get as big as Fox News, but perhaps it could and I think also again many frog have quite some talent for graphic design and entertainment of various kinds. I would hope that direction things could go in eventually, but I don't know what Tucker will do in short run and I don't have any special insight on this besides things I'm sure you've seen online.

Anyway, we are back now to talk Homer's legacy to European men as understood by Dominik Venner and other writers, and as for Venner, he's best I think when he shows Homer persistence throughout West European history, even in its eras when direct contact with a direct reading of Homer's book was lost. It was never lost, by the way, in Byzantium. It was reintroduced by Byzantine scholars around the time of the fall of Constantinople. They had actually been emigrating to Italy some time before then. This is what put a renaissance in Italy in full swing. But how would this have been possible, I mean for the spirit of Homer to continue in West Europe even when the book was not actually being read, and when there was a religion

that at least in principle, although not as it was actually practiced, but that was hostile to the classical view of Homer. But how would this have been possible unless it was a way of life, an orientation toward the world, a way of seeing things and life and what is good in life in general that drew its source from a source more primordial even than Homer. And it is, I think, the Aryan legacy, or people call it Indo-European, again I don't like that phrase, but it's the Aryan legacy of the steppe, which is shared somewhat actually even with some of the Turkic and Mongol peoples, and of which you can see a caricature but actually still mostly correct caricature in something like Conan the Barbarian. is world of the great inland sea of the steppe, transplanted into civilized and seafaring

world of the Mediterranean and the Near East. And as such, it can be understood intuitively and accepted immediately by all who are already part of this spiritual biome, something like that. So that even if the book itself is temporarily removed from circulation, let's say when it reappears, it's welcome in certain parts of the world as something uncanny that speaks to a certain type of man's longings, and the ideal and ways of seeing that are already inherent, even if in an undeveloped way, but inherent in cultures and ideals of certain peoples. So why don't I say that it speaks to man as man, to man as such in general, apart from any cultural horizon? I mean, it does, and it certainly it can. It can speak to certain individuals at any time and place, but this doesn't explain why

It's accepted so readily and welcomed by some cultures and times much more than others And in this I give some advice that if you want to start reading it start reading Homer and doesn't move you I gave to friend once he's very smart friend and he asked me when does it start to get good? He was science math guy. He didn't like very much. So then I say put it away for a while Don't force yourself put it away. Leave it a while watch Conan barbarian watch death wish or Jean-Claude Van Damme 1980s also action movies, watch Rambo, and come back to it later with a different translation. I'm against forcing yourself to read things that don't move you because if you are not full of pleasure reading it and full of intensity your brain actually won't do the work to understand and remember it

anyway. So I say even then maybe you start backwards, read Nietzsche in particular as this essay Homer's contest and read his genealogy of morals. Start Start even with Dominique Venner's book which begins from our time and its concerns and work your way backward, because they always point back to the same authors. Am I narcissistic and selfish to say, read my own book too? And it may make you like Homer eventually. Homer not easy always to get into, appears alien at first. But you try maybe first five books, see if you like Latimore translation and then see how it goes. point that Homer represent the spirit, the free spirit of the feudal step as it came into clash with the city and the civilized spirit of the agricultural and palace based

biome of the Near East and the Mediterranean and that it represent the conflict between these two very different ways of life and of valuing what is good in life. This is made by, this point made by another writer, Adam Nicholson in a book, The Mighty Dead of Why Homer matters. Where Adam Nicholson tried to capture somewhat this heroic steppe spirit and how it was preserved in Homer, I made similar point in my own book a bit different because I understood European life as attempt to preserve this free spirit of steppe and of mountain peoples and such within the bounds of the city, at least for an elite of that city. Otherwise I don't really think civilization is worthwhile. I believe aside from this type of arrangement that I just said.

Civilization is a kind of prison so that the choice, if you were only given the choice between Mongol free life and to be living in a servile prison Han Chinese or in this ancient Saigon type of life or ancient Babylon even, I don't think it's difficult choice. I think only a bored slave would choose a Chinese or Babylonian so-called civilization, which I suppose means that if by civilization they mean they live in houses, okay? Because aside from this kind of domesticity and brokenness and this kind of preservation of mere life, there's really almost nothing more than that to it. And Wenner, too, makes this point that for Homer, a life of freedom, of war, and the two are synonymous, a life of honor and the search for glory and distinction in war, that

this was the aim against which even great wealth and possessions and status or position is in a society of domesticates, it means nothing. Nicholson quotes Achilles from when Achilles rejects the plea, right, Achilles drops out of the fight and then eventually the situation gets so bad for the Greeks, it's the original and real Atlas shrug, right? Achilles moves out of the fight, he shows the Greeks how much they needed him, things get so bad Odysseus and some others come on an embassy to ask and persuade Achilles to rejoin the fight and bring him many gifts from Agamemnon in apology. But Achilles scoffs at their attempt, and Nicholson has a very interesting explanation of this. So I am reading from Nicholson now, and Achilles refuses the entreaties of the embassy, and

one of the things he says, all the wealth of Troy is not worth what my life is worth. And Nicholson continues to say, these are great statements, they rage at the triviality of ownership. They are unforgiving in their contempt for the greedy, Christ-like in their abrasive, revelatory scouring of the facts and desires of power. Achilles speaks again of possessions, this time not the blandishments of cities but the things which should have been familiar in the stepland of the north. Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses. But a man's life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted, nor captured again by force once it has crossed the teeth's barrier. Death overwhelms every other meaning.

What can matter in the face of mortality? Agamemnon is puerile and disgusting, Odysseus is a liar, Hector is pathetic. Only by stepping outside the value system of the world can you find any value. It is one of the riches of Homer's characterization of Achilles that what he says is not consistent. He toys with the idea that he might go home and marry a lovely girl, settle down and enjoy the possessions his father had won. But alongside that, he recognizes that we are all vagabonds on earth. Nothing belongs to us. Our lives have no consequence and our possessions are dross. We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth and Achilles is not some kind of new existentialist hero. This is the oldest truth of all, surviving

uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and over kings, diplomacy and accommodation, The power structures and the proliferations of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides, all of it more modern than Achilles can allow himself to be. He is the voice of the northern, shiftless past, asserting the claims of a higher stepland purity against the material greed and ignobility of the fixed and southern present. The power of the poem lies in its understanding that these things cannot be reconciled. The Iliad subject is not war or its wickedness, but a crisis in how to be. Do you like Agamemnon attempt to dominate your world? Do you like Odysseus manipulated? Do you like Hector think of your family above all and weaken your resolve by doing that?

Or do you like Achilles believe in the dignity of love and the purity of honor as the only things that matter in the face of death? These questions are urgent for Homer because the arrival of a steppe culture at the gates of a city made them urgent. There is more to Achilles' stories than this in the course of the poem he suffers, grows, uses himself in the violence of grief, and finally comes to a new and deeper understanding. But in this great speech of stepland consciousness, Homer has bequeathed to us the first unforgiving idealist of our civilization. Yes, do you like this? I think the reference to Christ-like is interesting. The Bible in general, too, sees also the life of civilization as corrupt.

It's something that Rousseau in part borrowed from that, not just from the classical idea that the shepherd as superior to the civilized. Remember, God accepts the sacrifice of Abel, not that of Cain. David is a shepherd and so forth and many such things. The Bible, repeated, tries to emphasize that the life of the shepherd is pure and idyllic while that of the city, the life of agriculture is drudgery and corrupt and many such things. Of course Bible very different from Iliad in its general orientation But I think this primal point about the life of the shepherd or the wild man Is something that speaks very deep to longings of many many men Which is why just something as small as hiking outdoors groups the retreats and such very popular

Especially on some parts of the right they have been for a long time German nationalist and European nationalist movements are born in outdoors appreciation groups I think I gave this advice actually in my book, right? I think in the final section, if people had followed this advice, the final part of the book, not the final aphorism, but if people had followed some of this advice, I'm not saying it would have been a complete inoculation against us getting infected by feds and GOP flunkies and NGO monkey types and such, but it would have been something in that direction, you know, a few frogs that I know left our sphere when they saw that people weren't lifting weights anymore or at least aspiring to. These two things, as random as they may seem at first glance, outdoor hiking and lifting

weights are some of the best filters that the right has. It's always been so. Without them you get infected by – I mean, go look at any real nationalist movement, the Serbs, Hezbollah, whatever, they're all either into lifting or outdoors hiking or both. And I don't want to give Feds ideas now where they can start a kind of outdoors movement for diddling each other, but even then, you know, even then, even if it was faked by Feds, it would be a filter of sorts. And if done right, an outdoors movement that is overtly apolitical, but implicitly political, might survive political pressure, if you do it right. But the right, the face-fag right, is entirely instead in the spirit of the influencer, the social media prima donna and the slick GOP consultant who tries to have public conferences,

public rallies and these types of useless performances, public performances that are appropriate to something like the GOP that's already an establishment party or appropriate once you already rule a country but have no meaning in our situation now. It's always been so in the United States at least that you get these kind of GOP college Republican consultant aspirant types doing yet another conference and such but so you will recognize them. There is book by Evola or rather a collection of essays on mountaineering in which Evola goes into some detail on this point and the spiritual connection between climbing mountains and the reawakenings of peoples to a different kind of life in his time. But anyway to return to

point I think what Nicholson say in the book The Mighty Dead where he makes that Homer is a kind of memory of the free warrior step spirit and he depicts its confrontation with the world of the city. It's very much reconcilable with much of what Wenner say. In speaking of the primeval step heritage of these epics, Nicholson emphasizes, for example, the love of horses. In minute detail, again, the appreciation of the horse speed, the horse muscle and the sheen of the skin and the way the horse muscle moves under the skin. And in general, though, I don't think he makes this point, but you have to think also of the familiarity of pastoralists with breeding livestock in general. And then also the immense beauty of the idyllic step in summer, which Nicholson speaks very touching on.

He visits it, and he has some passages on it. And the great overawing sky, the sky that dominates everything on the Earth's sea, all of these things would have provided, I think, adequate or even wonderful basis for the excitement and minute concern and appreciation of nature that Venner speak of in Homer, I mean the two make very much same point and on the matter of the drive for personal excellence and desire to best all other men, this is obvious point that is even in the book the best of the Achaeans, I think it's by Nagy, because this obviously the concern of us that value system if you want to call it that who should be the best of all men, the best of the Achaeans and of the Greeks in general according to Nietzsche and Zarathustra, this was their ideal, not just in Homer.

But the desire to excel above all others and to love a friend, these things are entirely and directly the heritage of the spirit of the steppe and can even be found, like I say, at least historically found among some Mongol peoples and such. The desire for immortalization in song, for eternal glory. But glory acquired in feats of great physical and spiritual display as part of war. free, boundless and ranging war, not confined to domestic bickering, but the primal confrontation of great men as natural phenomena. There is also some nice passage in Nicholson on the appreciation shown in Homer for technology and in particular the technology of speed, fast ships and fast chariots. The two innovations of the Bronze Age that allowed not just the Greeks but other peoples

like the Kassites, the Hyksos, the Aryans who conquered India and so forth, allowed them these very rapid, massive conquests and there's this sense that this new world of speed that made the world accessible, these fast ships and chariots, it's an extension somehow of the body, it's a very different attitude to technology than you see now in some parts of the right which despair that technology is the end of man and such. They didn't see it this way. It was an extension of man that increased the power of superior men. But this is foundation itself of the drive for personal excellence and of the contest or Agon that many thinkers, not just Nietzsche but Burckhardt and many others, recognize as the engine of Greek life at its height in the archaic and classical ages.

By this I mean the spirit of the steppe, the warrior spirit of the steppe, which sees the the drive for personal excellence as expressed in the drive for immortal glory, which comes out when you kill great opponent, but then again this gets formalized in the Greek agon or the Greek peaceful struggle for supremacy. And on this point, I think I disagree somewhat with Venner, who thinks that Hector is implicit greater hero of the Iliad, because Hector is the defender of his city, defender of homeland against invaders, and he is depicted a very noble way as stoic and patriot. And I understand why Wenner would like Hector more and seek now, especially now, in an age that disdains patriotism. I understand why he would want to put Hector above even Achilles as the ideal hero in Homer.

But I think it's somewhat wrong and introduces a kind of contemporary moral political concerning to the story that's not really there. Both men were looked up to in ancient life well as modern and medieval times and so on but I think for the Greeks specifically it was Achilles not Hector who was significantly their equivalent of Jesus a man they look up to as a I don't want to say role model but as a hero to be emulated who willingly and knowingly chose death and chose it above the domestic happy life in pursuit of undying fame and it is the spirit of Achilles in that sense again the spirit of a step warrior seeking eternal fame and murderous rampage but it is that spirit that is also behind the Argon the contest the tumultuous drive of the Greek aristocrat to assert himself

whether it's an athletics or to assert himself politically and to assert himself otherwise in his city or also the drive of a dramatist a writer like like Aeschylus, to put on the best play. Everything ran according to a competition or contest in Greek world. And while the ending of the Iliad is decorous and it shows Achilles to be a gentleman when he returns Hector's body to his father Priam, but it's not that act that assures Achilles' greatness, as some would like to say, what assures Achilles' greatness is just that. It is manifest, biological, and divine being, when Athena puts fire on his head and fire on his shoulders to make him stand out and frightening to others and makes him distinct among all men. And if this sounds alien or vulgar or simple to you, maybe it should.

But the drive to be the best, I mean, is what is prized here and not to be the most gentlemanly or the most just in defense of one's country or any such, but simply this, being the best and besting others, often at whatever cost. And it is behavior that Homer, I say often at whatever cost there is an asterisk, Nietzsche makes the exception, do not betray a friend. But it is behavior that Homer, and by the way Nietzsche doesn't say that to tell you what to do or to moralize, he's describing the spirit of this, of Achilles as translated into ancient Greek culture. But I continue to tell you that it is this behavior that Homer recognizes even among noble beasts this desire to best others and to glory in your strength as when he

compares Paris I think who is not an especially noble character in the Iliad but he compares Paris the abductor of Helen in his moment of glory comparison to a stallion who glories in his strength I think he uses that phrase he refers to the pride of his strength and the surety in his glorious strength that the horse feels so even beasts do it is a manifest magnificence that actually He needs no elaboration and defense, and in fact almost all verbal elaboration and defense exists actually to cover up and argue away such magnificence. And Wenner should have had the consistency to praise this above even Hector's noble defense of his city, for which Achilles, who is a man hardly of any city, but he's rather a centaur of the steppe.

But he even has some contempt for that, Hector's defense of his city and the way he lives a hampered life and so forth, so I had an argument with Blosius, he's a friend and he translates Venner over this friendly argument, because although I think along with Venner that the spirit of the nation and of patriotism now is unjustly derided and we should hope for many hectares, but I also think that the spirit of hectare is easy to mislead and corrupt. Duty bound men can be misled in modern world as it is. It's easy for governments to use the rhetoric of service, duty to the fatherland and the family and so on and the nation to get people to die as they're doing now in meaningless war in Ukraine where I hear 200,000 people have died and I'm very saddened, I'm beyond

outrage and very saddened to know that what I told you would happen at the beginning of that conflict is happening and the entire youth of that country is being wiped out in a kamikaze action for nothing and it's all being done with this kind of rhetoric and And I fear that they could convince the same in the United States and just send brave white kids to die meaningless industrial war in Taiwan, even just to get rid of the young white male population. They would do that. And similar, for example, in France, if a group of military men were to overthrow that filthy republic that exists now in France, they no doubt would do this under the ultimate motivation, and I say under, not with, but let's say under the ultimate motivation of saving the nation and the people.

And many may believe even this genuinely and to be motivated by many of the actors in that when the time comes. But on two levels, the spirit of Hector can be insufficient or faulty. And I say this because we live now in a time when nations and states and peoples, even not to speak of groups like races and religions, but all of these have faltered or are failing. And if you put your trust or hope in them, I think you will be disappointed. make this mistake always, the nation will rise up, the nation will do this, it will never happen. Politically it's always a small group that does anything and especially today and my concern is how do you get for example a motivated and cohesive small group in let's say the

French military or some other country's military could be even in the third world, how do you get them to act this way? And then once they do take action they must realize it is on them and them alone that events rest. rely on something as weak as the nation or the people, or even expect these to be grateful. They must realize, as aristocrats of the past always realize, that they are the nation, the true bearers of its heritage and spirit, while for the masses these things actually are largely unimportant, the many who are relatively homogenous and they're happy to let gods be ignored and forgotten. But this is big matter. I do think the spirit of Achilles and Odysseus coalescing into a brave and cunning mafia

is what is called for now this rather than the spirit of Hector who is noble but he is dutiful and patriotic to a solid state that adores and prizes him and already exists and such states don't exist now. And I also wonder how much someone like Gaddafi or Napoleon who take over their nations when they were so such young I think Gaddafi at the age of 27 and they take over their very different nations but what motivated them whether it was really just the desire to save their nation, or rather the desire to excel above all other men and be deified, I wonder what motivated them. But anyway, on this matter of deification and Homer, I will be right back. The mission of Homer as aristocratic morality, and really the whole ancient Greek world that

followed him as also expressions of aristocratic or master race morality, or the morality of conquering people, brings to mind Marxist class analysis also as a possible criticism. And actually, Marx himself exempted ancient Greece specifically from his materialist class analysis. It's in the Grundrisse, I think. Marx was more edumacated and more generous than many of his followers, at least also more in awe of the, maybe I would think he might have called Greeks children in adolescent stage of mankind in a patronizing way he might do that. But he was maybe too respectful of what he saw as their boyish wonder to try to subject them to something like class analysis, which he realized maybe did not really fit the available

historical philosophical material from ancient Greece, and his followers, though, they couldn't stop themselves. I mean, the disease of the commentator, you have to pronounce on something, and so in their search for content, certain Marxists earlier in 20th century did try, for example, to say Platonists corresponded to the material interests of such and such a class in ancient Greek society, I forget what, or that the sophists corresponded to the interests of another class, the whatever, the Epicureans represented the interests of landed owners as opposed to industrialists, you know, I mean there was quite an arms workshop industry and shipbuilding industry and such in the Greek states which, right, maybe their interests

were represented by the Stoics, so I may be mixing them up, but all of these types of analyses were attempted by Marxists who followed Marx and it's simply because the Marxist has to see philosophy as ideology as an epiphenomenon or superstructure that is meant to justify or rationalize or support certain ultimately material interests or if they want to be fancier they would say modes of production and such and so you see in the work of Alistair MacIntyre the second city bureaucrat has a recent sub-stack discussing this. MacIntyre, who is a commentator, academic, who started out as a Marxist, but then became a so-called Christian virtue ethicist. So unfortunately, this synthesis of Christianity and Marxism that I'm afraid is going to be maybe a religion of future.

I've seen it coming for more than a decade now. I knew Antifa, he was Antifa-style Christian Marxist. I knew him, I don't remember exactly when, maybe 10 years or 15 years ago. He was good guy. He seemed very nice, very decent, personally, but had crazed glossy look in the eye. And he was many type of shampoo and such. He had glistening hair and skin cream products. I'm not saying this to attack him for that. He was, by the way, I'm not insinuating anything about him. He had girlfriend, I think, not that there's anything wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being gay, as Seinfeld says, but he was not whatever, and it's just a strange case. You would not expect Artifa maybe to use many shampoos, but he was a strange case. He was driven by some kind of emotional disturbance,

but that kind of emotional energy can be turned in different direction. He was smart guy. I had hoped maybe to convert him, convert him to Seif and such, but I am too lazy and too indifferent, so I ran to Brazil instead when I could, but I'm not sure you can convert people anyway, not directly. I mean, not if they know you. If you have, you have to outflank them, you have to go several level deeper. You almost can never do it head on. I was converted to Nietzscheism brutally and directly when I was 16, and my initial reaction to Nietzsche was a kind of anger, and of being astounded, how could he say the things he was saying? Because at the time, I believed in a kind of Platonist, Borg communism, a synthesis of Platonism, communism, and Borg as the ideal future of mankind.

So sometimes I think you can just take a leftist and introduce him to Nietzsche and that the angry response itself, that anger, if they learn to savor the anger, it can turn them into wonder and charm soon after. But maybe I'm projecting. I was never attracted to leftism as such or egalitarianism as such ever, but to these kinds of things like Platonist Borg because I thought it would lead to a platonic total state and ultimately a melding of human minds into one super consciousness in this kind of thing. And now I find such projects abhorrent, but one of the things that disgust me the most still about the idea of death is that my remains should ever mingle with those of dirty others. I mean, imagine being on a plane and be, but anyway, where was I?

MacIntyre, the Christian Marxist professor pile driver. And you may know him from book After Virtue, but in another book called A Short History of Ethics is where he has a kind of pseudo-Marxoid analysis of Homeric so-called ethics. I think it's very clumsy, but for MacIntyre, let me just read to you from The Bureaucrat. His mentions are quite good on this. The final line, I will read itself, quite cutting criticism of MacIntyre, entire type of thinking. So I'm reading now from The Bureaucrat, Second City Bureaucrat. The Catholic philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, writes in a short history of ethics that in Homeric Greece, the most important judgments are passed about how a man discharges his function.

What this means can be explained by analogy to an oversimplified but spiritually honest model of present-age morality where the most important judgment is passed about whether a person is white, heterosexual and male. In Homeric Greece, a function like King has a set of expected subsidiary functions like being brave and skillful in war and peace. The king must also be wealthy and have leisure because these are necessary conditions for the king to perform his functions. But importantly, they are also rewards for performing his functions, which creates a sort of self-justifying normative logic that can nevertheless be derived from factual propositions. Ought can be derived from is. X is a king, therefore X ought to do and receive whatever a king ought to do and receive is

a valid argument that presupposes a social function. For fun, consider my uncharitable but not implausible model of the present age, where everybody has the same function, to not be white, heterosexual and male. This function supersedes all other functions and therefore judgments about whether those subsidiary functions have been performed. For example, if a ship captain fails to perform as a ship captain ought to perform, navigating a ship, managing the crew, etc., this failure might not trigger a negative judgment if the the ship captain is not white, heterosexual and male. Homer's word for good, agathos, it's not like our word for good. Agathos is just a euphemism for the functions of a king. In the Homeric age you could never say that someone who is

not a king is agathos in the same way that we can say today that someone who is not a king is still good. McIntyre explains, the question is he agathos is the same as the question is he courageous, clever and kingly. And this is answered by answering the question does he and has he fought, plotted, and ruled with success. The point of such ascriptions is in part predictive. To call a man agathos is to tell your hearers what sort of conduct they can expect from him. We ascribe dispositions to the agent in the light of his behavior in past episodes. Moreover, I fail to be agathos if and only if I fail to bring off the requisite performances. And the function of expressions of praise and blame is to invoke and justify the rewards

of success and the penalties of failure. You cannot avoid blame and penalty by pointing out that you could not help doing what you did, that failure was unavoidable. That was a quote from MacIntyre. Now the bureaucrat continues. This means, in other words, that whether being kingly was possible in a given scenario is irrelevant to passing judgments on someone's kinglyness. Whereas modern morality is often formalized through deontic logic, and deontic logic is almost functionally equivalent to modal logic, Homeric morality is bereft of modern deontic modal or related operators. This is a nerdy Anglo way of saying that there is no higher set of rules, no meta-language applied in determining whether someone was being good once we know what actions the person

has performed and the outcomes they have thereby achieved. For example, Benjamin Witts at Lawfare blog qualifies that Obama should not be condemned for accidentally droning civilians because he lacked perfect knowledge of the facts on the ground and because he's droning orders or motivated by good intentions. Thus modern moral language is cluttered with multiple contingent operators and many refinements that are simply absent in Homeric ethics and which helpfully absolve people performing kinglish functions of responsibility. MacIntyre uses the example of Odysseus, blaming the suitors of Penelope for acting as if he were dead, fearing neither the gods nor himself. Of course the suitors could not know whether Odysseus was alive, and we would say the suitors

should therefore be forgiven for not behaving as they ought to have behaved had they known Odysseus was alive. But this doesn't make sense for Homeric Greece, where the judgment of whether someone is being kingly or otherwise performing their function does not admit of any contingent psychological operators like belief or knowledge. If a king takes a loss because he was deceived or because of some unfair disadvantage outside of his control, he was not being kingly. I interject here to remind you of a particularly cruel sounding to modern ears cruel type of ancient Greek judgment that I may have referred to before in the case against Eskeniz where a law was cited that if you were ever abused sexually as a man you lost all political rights

that includes the right to vote or to speak in assembly and if you want to get graphic about it that would mean if you were penetrated by another man's cock but no exception was made to, if this was done to you unwillingly in your youth or something like that, the judgment was still the same. You were not allowed to participate politically. And it's part of this general type of Homeric morality that it doesn't, if something happens to you or if you're a king and you're deceived or some natural accident even, you're really responsible for it. Odysseus is blamed for the wind blowing him off course, if I remember right. So I continue reading from Bureaucrats, further MacIntyre explains that Homeric shame is just

what is felt when a man has fallen short of that which is socially established description both of you and others had applied to yourself that had led them to expect. Feeling ashamed is to be aware, MacIntyre writes, that one is liable to reproach. See I don't like this kind of, I don't want to say Anglo-academic language because German write the same, it's just, what does that even mean, to be aware that one is liable Anyway, this means Homeric morals presuppose a certain sort of social order characterized by a recognized hierarchy of functions. MacIntyre explains that slaves, those who fall outside the system, are not part of this moral order since they cannot, by virtue of their bondage, engage in kingly activities. Slaves are things, not persons.

That's another misrepresentation for MacIntyre, but I keep going. From this observation, it follows for MacIntyre that where this social order falls apart, or for Marxists, where the material conditions change, this moral system becomes incoherent. From here, MacIntyre goes into how future Greeks ameliorated this problem by providing better so-called moral answer to paradoxes and perceived injustices that arose from Homeric morality. For example, in post-Homeric Greece, you begin to find that lower types, even slaves, can be wealthy and kings can be poor, suggesting a breakdown in the coherency of Homeric morality. Suddenly, being a slave or a king signals a property of inheritance disconnected from what the individual has achieved, being noble-born and base-born.

This further implies that passing judgment upon a person becomes a task which is detached from the person's function and focused upon the person's individual qualities, such that a slave could have good or kingly traits and the king could have bad and unkingly traits, all while each remaining a slave and a king respectively. MacIntyre goes on to describe how the Persian invasions, experiences with Greek colonization and related cosmopolitan so-called forces render Homeric morality even less coherent. For instance, Greeks start talking a lot about nomos or custom, convention, as they're exposed to other moralities and religions. Nomos only appears once in Homer, which introduces at least one set of meta rules or contingent operators, chief of which becomes the question of

of whether what is local, nomos, or universal, fuses or nature to man, should tell you how to live. In Homeric Greece, there is a unity of nomos and fuses, of nature and convention. Moral judgments about the world can be deduced from facts about the world. X is kingly if and only if he is kinging or doing whatever a king ought to be doing, whatever we predict a king will do. McIntyre's Greeks run into problems with this unity when they encounter complexities of an evolving cosmopolitan world, which presents them with conflicting opinions and facts about the world. Sometimes people with small souls have inherited the wealth and other favors we would expect a Homeric king to acquire. Other times people with great souls who have engaged in kingly activities are somehow denied

their rewards, often by noble-born kings. Philosophy then emerges to fix the confusion caused by the rupture of custom and nature. For example, a later Greek might move from saying, What is good is what is Homeric Greeks say is good to saying what is good is adhering to the local nomos local convention And in so doing adhering to universal or natural laws of goodness that cover a diverse range of cities For McIntyre this historical process reflects an evolution toward the higher morality Rooted in meta rules that you can discover in nature would just happen to reflect rules you find in holy scriptures that were written in ancient Palestine and Babylonia. It does seem curious that this Greek cosmopolitanization process should produce conclusions that coincide

with written rules revealed by God to non-Greek peoples just as they too were undergoing their own ordeals with forced cosmopolitanism. What does this say about the compatibility of McIntyre's system with his own faith? That's a tangent for a different day." I stopped reading from the bureaucrat, but yes, you see all this. I find it a little bit strange, all of these claims. The weird coincidence noted by the bureaucrat at the very end of what I read should be enough proof I think that something is different is going on than what MacIntyre thinks is going on. There's no natural progression toward a better and more comprehensive ethics in the Greek history. There's rather the accommodation of ethical thinking and philosophy, which didn't even

exist before philosophy, roughly before Socrates didn't as much concern itself with ethics and politics. It did sometimes, but not as much. And there's an accommodation in late Hellenistic history to the demands of a cosmopolitan empire with many different competing groups under conditions of peace. It's a situation, in other words, much like our own today. Maybe I talk on future show, I wish he would come on air, but the bureaucrat in his last two pieces, which I'm not covering on this episode, but he has developed an important new argument for how to understand wokeness or modern leftism or libtard sensibility, call it what you want. But rather than do what others do, others trace modern leftist or libtardism or progressivism to wokeism again, they trace it back to some theological

or ideological root through genealogy. It's Calvinism, it's Hegelianism, it's Marxism. But he understands it, the bureaucrat, simply as the natural outcome of group competition under a cosmopolitan empire. And the way these two, I mean both the empire and let's say Group X undergoing a process of apologia for its inability, an apology for its inability or unwillingness to fully assimilate to this cosmopolitanism. But in this process of apologia and negotiation, both the imperial self-understanding and Group ex-self-understanding are changed, and so-called wokeness is something that develops out of imperial need to accommodate many such groups. It's really, I am only highly condensing it here, but he gives with many examples.

It's an ingenious argument that makes reference to the work of Philo of Alexandria, who was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who wrote, let's say around 40 AD, around that time, and it is considered an apologia, he wrote, for the Jews toward the Emperor Caligula, who was being very abusive and which the bureaucrat compares this letter to Apologia written by Martin Luther King while in jail and I say ingenious because as far as I know this is only the only truly political argument that tries to understand political and actual psychological motivations of the primary actors in the development of so-called wokeness into seeing how they actually experience these claims to justice themselves rather than saying, oh, you know, this came out of this earlier kind of thinking

It's sort of like Hegelianism It sounds like Calvin or whatever or Marx Which might actually tell you nothing about how wokeness or leftism works today and why? Anyway, you should read them this what I give you highly condensed summary of what the second city bureaucrat is doing right now But to go back to what McIntyre is saying in the passage I read for you. It's all deficient I think is very deficient. For example, to say the Greeks are somehow forced by a late cosmopolitanism in their history to come face to face with new and different claims to morality is just wrong. It's true they did not run a cosmopolitan empire during the time of Homer and so they didn't need to accommodate non-Greek groups as rulers over them

but they were certainly aware and fascinated by other lands, by other peoples and their ways and they were again entranced by them. There is a book by Edward Said I think you know it's called Orientalism but there is a counter book I forget by who it's not very good but it's called Occidentalism. It's good in so far as it documents the total lack of curiosity for the outside world among let's say medieval Arabs but also if you ask weebs people who love Japan they will tell you for the most part Japanese are completely uninterested in the outside world not curious about it and that's one of the most different and curious peoples in outside the European world meaning that relatively readily interested in adopting foreign ways and

making them their own and so on but generally outside the European world you don't find this fascination with foreign things and foreigners and so on generally but I mean MacIntyre might want to remember the beginning of the Odyssey where Odysseus is called a man of many ways who saw the lands and learned the minds and ways of many peoples. The Greeks were a seafaring cosmopolitan race from the start. In fact, even that precursor civilization, the Myceneans, were verifiably cosmopolitan with international connections, international trade and imports. They were fabulously wealthy. And you read Amarna letters from the Near East and you see Bronze Age kingdoms are very international. rulers keeping up correspondence with foreign counterparts.

It was actually Bronze Age, very cosmopolitan world, aware of different customs of different peoples. And if you take what I've said on previous segments, it seems that the Greek mind itself is born from the clash of two very different world views, that of the conquerors and the conquered, or the conquerors and their near eastern neighbors also who had very different views of the world. And indeed, the other writer I mentioned, Nicholson interprets all of Homer as an innovative way to negotiate between these two kinds of moralities, but it's MacIntyre's refusal, actually, to understand this last part of conquest that makes MacIntyre's speculation on Homer as well as Nietzsche deficient. He's unable to understand primal struggle, war, through which, as Heraclitus say, some

Some are shown to be gods, others shown to be men. Some are shown to be free men, others are shown to be slaves. It is war that shows this. It is not a material base of possessions that is unrelated to the fact of war as if people who are homogenously alike somehow come into land or tools or slaves by accident or by creeping trickery. You know, there are songs both among the most ancient Greeks, the archaic Greeks, as also among Germans and others to the effect of that their wealth is their spear and they have contempt for those who work the plow and the land because they cannot handle the spear and the shield. And this lack of awareness of MacIntyre's appears most sharply in what MacIntyre says about nature and convention.

And to give you my own little examples of what these mean, systems of weights for example, systems of weights and measures, almost always conventional or how you decide on currency. One can agree these are conventional, maybe even arbitrary conventional, as in one people to decide to measure things this way, another that way, and neither system necessarily more real than the other, or more corresponding to reality than the other. But by nature, fire burns everywhere the same. By convention, the cow is sacred in India, but not in Greece. But by nature, the cow shits the same everywhere. So you see, and same and so on for other things. And then the question naturally arises, is all human morality simply convention because

it varies from nation to nation, or is there something as natural human morality that is naturally good to man as man? And the argument would be that most early peoples are unaware of the idea of nature. They cannot distinguish their own ways. They cannot ask the question I just asked. They can't distinguish their own ways from the way. They can't distinguish their own ways or customs or legends from things as they actually are apart from those. And then the idea is, MacIntyre is saying the Greeks came up philosophically quite late with this distinction because of their faulty, Homeric morality that had to be fixed somehow by philosophical thinking. Now whether it had to be fixed or not is something else, but it's almost for certain that this

distinction between nature and convention is something Homer very much aware of. And indeed it's, I say, at the core of his book and of the conflict depicted. The conflict is over who is the best of the Achaeans. Now what does that mean, the best by what? When Achilles challenges Agamemnon in the beginning of the Iliad, over the girl brisses that Agamemnon takes from him, Achilles swears an oath on a sprouting branch. And this is one of the only two instances of that word in nature, in Homer. In fact, it doesn't really occur anywhere else outside the Greek world. And the other mention of it is in the Odyssey when Hermes shows Odysseus the secret nature of a healing plant. He doesn't create this plant, he just knows it.

Nature is a power that is outside even the divine, it's not created by the gods. And in this case, the only other mention of the word Achilles swears an oath on this branch saying it's sprouting, the words for nature and for growing are the same. And he says, Suersonos on this branch, and this is contrasted with the scepter of Agamemnon. And this I think clearly reference to difference between nature and convention. Agamemnon is king or first among the Greeks only by convention. He carries the scepter of conventional power. But Achilles swears on the scepter of nature. He is first among the Greeks. He's the best of the Achaeans by nature in his blood and physical being. the Iliad is the manifestation of that supremacy and it is this question who is the best of

the Achaeans that animates Iliad and to some extent also the Odyssey because Odysseus is in competition with Achilles to also be the best and the question is who is best as such not who is best because others just believe him to be by custom or have given him a institutional position by custom and this being best is revealed in conflict in primal war or at least Ultimately in some kind of a contest so that is a process that McIntyre and similar kind of thinking doesn't pay any attention to because to them these are Permanent socially stable roles the role of the king and the morality is only there to describe them But this is a this is wrong This is a feudal warlord society similar to Icelandic free state what I remind you

Might makes right is a doctrine of social instability not stability because it gives the right to any man to challenge another individually and take his things if he can prove he's superior. And even numbers can be overcome by individual strength, by divine force or berserker power, in other words, and by political cunning. And it is in exhibiting these qualities that men win themselves a kingdom or win themselves freedom, and that the world is sorted into categories of king and slave that is done by war, which McIntyre, in In typical Marxist fashion, he refused to look into this, because answers don't conform to strict analysis of what the modes of production are. Because production, man as a productive working animal, is seen as something base, inherently Banausic and low,

having to do with the mere preservation of life in this world of Homer. And similar consideration when MacIntyre says something like, wealth is the attribute of a king. But later Greeks find out that the slave may have wealth and the king may not have much wealth. But when he points this out as if some great insight of the later Greeks, he again misses point of Homer view. Because this should have been obvious to him in Odyssey again, when Odysseus ends up on beach alone, poor. In fact, he's nude with nothing at all a shipwreck. And this is done so that he may reconstruct his status through his physical bearing, and his manner of speech, and his kingly demeanor. So by nature, in other words. so MacIntyre mixes up a few things. It may well be that had Achilles not regained Brise's back

and experienced at the end of the Iliad his Aristea and killed Hector and so forth, and on the other hand had Odysseus not returned home and avenged himself on suitors, it may be that then, for example, Odysseus wouldn't have been agathos, this word for kingly and good and powerful man. He would have been shown not to be such. But that doesn't mean that he was on the beach poor and naked on his travel home, or when Achilles was deprived of his war prize, it doesn't mean at those moments that they were not agatoy or good. This kind of, again, autistic rules-based thinking misses the point of what Homeric so-called morality actually is. And indeed, entire point here is that goodness is inherent in the blood itself, in the lineage, I mean, even,

and in the physical manifestation of the body in action. And the action that exhibits this is a contest, whether it be the primal conflict of deadly war or an athletic contest at the end of the Iliad. There are athletic contests showing the transition, perhaps, from this fight, the dual fight to the death, to a formalized and peaceful contest within the bounds of the city. But not just athletic contests, any other type of contests between plays, because, again, in the Greek world, even artists lived by contest and competition. Drama plays were in contest with each other. They were prize competitions. So you see in Heraclitus, the same, where this harmony through the contending of opposites, a hidden harmony appears. There is a lawfulness and justice to it.

I mean, to this principle of the contest. They raise it up to a universal and godlike principle of all life. And it's amazing the obfuscation that the Markzoid, Christguk piledriver like McIntyre will go to to hide this truth about Homer and the Greeks, which I think he must surely know, but the Greeks absolutely considered envy and the desire to compete and to best your neighbor. Even in small matters, actually, they consider this divine. And this is the meaning of when Wenner says, you see in Homer how it's not so much that the gods are understood in a human or anthropomorphic way, but that the human is seen as potentially raised up to the status of the divine. And this includes human emotions and drives that are blamed as deficient or bad by moderns and by other peoples.

But things like envy that are personified as divine beings and given their just place in life. So to read for you from Venar. In it, the gods are symbol of a cosmic order that includes men. So it is in book four when the poet conveys the arousing of hatred and aggression by the intervention of a goddess called Strife. Ares urged the ones on, while Athena kept arousing the others. With them came fear, terror, and Ares' sister and companion, Strife. She whose fury never ceases, who, at first small in stature, later grows enormous, head reaching the stars as she tramples the world. That's from the fourth book of the Iliad. And this is how we come to know strife, she whose fury never ceases. The allegory of divine intervention exposes passions and anger buried in our deepest selves,

their head reaching heaven and their feet trampling the earth. So okay, that's from Wenner, and now compare it to Nietzsche, what he says almost parallel exactly to, this is from Homer's Contest, the essay. Two Eris goddesses are on Earth. These are two strife goddesses. This is one of the most noteworthy Hellenic thoughts, and worthy to be impressed on the newcomer immediately at the entrance gate of Greek ethics. Greek ethics, yes, do you hear that? MacIntyre and Marxoids. Two Eris goddesses, two strife goddesses are on Earth. One would like to... Nietzsche emphasizes this as one of the most noteworthy Hellenic thoughts. I continue. One would like to place the one Eris, the one Strife, just as much as to blame the other, if one uses one's reason.

For these two goddesses have quite different dispositions. For the one, the cruel Strife, she furthers the evil war and feud. No mortal likes her, but under the yoke of need one pays honor to the burdensome Eris according to the decree of the immortals. She, as the Elder, gave birth to Black Knight. Zeus, the high ruling one, however, placed the other Eris, the other strife goddess upon the roots of the earth and among men as the much better one. She urges even the unskilled man to work, and if one who lacks property beholds another who is rich, then he hastens to sow in similar fashion and to plant and to put his house in order. The neighbor vies with the neighbor who strives after fortune. Good is this Eris to man, good is this strife to man.

The potter also has a grudge against the potter and the carpenter against the carpenter The beggar envies the beggar and the singer the singer The two last verses which treat of the odium figulinum appeared to our scholars to be incomprehensible in this place This is Nietzsche talking now According to their judgment the predicates grudge and envy fit only the nature of the evil strife and for this reason They do not hesitate to designate these verses as spurious or thrown by chance into this place for that judgment However a system of ethics other than the Hellenic must have inspired these scholars the modern ones who say that Unaware for in these verses to the good Eris to the good strife Aristotle finds no offense and not only Aristotle

But the whole Greek antiquity thinks of spite and envy otherwise than we do and agrees with Hessian Who first designates as an evil one that strife that leads men against one another to a hostile war of extermination determination, but secondly he praises another heiress another strife as the good one was jealousy spite envy incites men to activity but not to the action of war to the knife but the action of competition. The Greek is envious and conceives of this quality not as a blemish but as the effect of a beneficent deity. What gulf of ethical judgment between us and him end quote. So yes, I stopped now But you see McIntyre should have been told to put down the ethical pile driving and read this or read Homer himself

But enough of such people. What did you think of the passage? I just read to you now from Nietzsche It's interesting how Nietzsche ends this essay I read from Homer's contest after pointing out that deprived of contest of the let's say the checks and balances that competing genius is put on each other a Greek if allowed total victory so that the contest stop because somebody is the total winner but in that situation the Greek becomes immoderate and crazed and usually then brings ruin upon himself, and he gives several examples. Both individuals, for example Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, or Themistocles, the hero of Salamis against the Persians, who after achieving such fame and success that there was no longer really a competitor against either of them, but then on that pinnacle

They end up destroying themselves through excess and betrayal and he points out that the same happened to Greek states like Sparta and Athens Where they were driven by this same Homeric warrior ethos of excellence to best their neighbor But once they no longer have competitors and they become supreme in the Greek world they go haywire They become hubristic abusive excessive They end up betraying themselves and betraying Helas betraying the Greek and the Greek spirit and the contest the Homeric contest that was the engine to Greek life, but it always required a second genius or hero as competitor to be kept in check. And what happens at the end, the end of Greek history, is how Nietzsche ends up this essay on Homer.

And I read to you, Sparta and Athens surrender to Persia, as Themistocles and Alcibiades have done. They betray Hellenism after they have given up the noblest Hellenic fundamental thought, the competition. And Alexander, the course and copy and abbreviation of Greek history, now invents the cosmopolitan Hellene, the so-called Hellenism. So earlier Nietzsche began the essay by pointing to Alexander's farcical and cruel replay of Achilles dragging Hector's corpse around Troy, when Achilles conquered Egypt and the Levant, and he did exactly the same to Batis, the defender of Gaza, tied his feet to a chariot and dragged his, I think you're still alive around the walls of Gaza. So Alexander had always copied Achilles, you see, self-consciously copied him just as Caesar,

and later others, they copied Alexander. And so the bureaucrat points this out, that the cosmopolitan empire that come from the work of Alexander and then Rome is itself the result of this contest, Homer contest, the Greek agonal spirit. But the way Nietzsche ends this essay, as you have just read, is odd. He ends it on this weird case of Alexander who he calls this crude condensation abbreviation of Greek history. And it seems then that Alexander, the world conqueror, in the book of Maccabees, it begins by saying he had laid low all the kings of the world. Alexander is the ultimate among winners of Homer's call, right, the judgment of who should be the best. It leads to the attempt to create world conquest empire.

It's very interesting that in India, the Chakravartin, the universal king, who comes out of Indian philosophy in the same way that concept of panbasileya or universal kingdom comes out of Aristotle philosophy, but the Chakravartin, the universal king, and by the way, not all cultures have this concept of world empire or universal empire, but the Chakravartin European literally means he whose wheel, chariot wheel, can roll everywhere, who is unimpeded. It's a typically step expression, and this sensibility of expansive world conquest exists especially among the peoples of the steppe. You could say it is the ultimate result of competitive spirit that Homer talked about. It continues through history.

Think of how many great men in European history have tried copying Caesar, and Caesar himself looked back to Alexander who looked back to Achilles, this result of Homer. But the result of this contest, as you can see, I mean, is the foundation of world empire and the Hellenistic world empire that seamlessly almost, seamlessly becomes the Roman and according to many the European global world, or at least it still was certainly the Byzantine pretense to rule the world. They called it the oikumene, the rulership of the known world. They call themselves Roman. But I say this because, as my friend the bureaucrat points out, it appears again that cosmopolitan world empire is the unintended maybe end of Homer's contest, which is limited to the glory

of the local city and of your individual and your lineage, but perhaps this is the unintended end of Homer's call on men to be the best, which maybe necessarily leads eventually to to men like Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon, but the cosmopolitan empires such men create, are they places where this cultivation of human excellence can continue, or is it where it gets squandered away and where human capital declines inevitably, maybe? And I think Gobineau has different answer about the fate of empires. He would call it tragic situation because Gobineau would say it is in the blood of certain peoples to seek empire in this way, and nothing can really stop it, but then it leads to its own destruction once it's achieved. And I want to end this special two episode on Homer

with related, one of my favorite passages that can't be repeated enough. This is from Nietzsche, not just on Homer, but on the entire aristocratic morality I've touched on just now. And this is section five from the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals. Widely, it's lied about as a left-wing text and a favorite of some ignorant leftists, but in fact, it's a place actually where Nietzsche says some very naughty things. And so if you want to, as a cap on, understand Homeric spirit, Homeric morality, I read for you now from Nietzsche. With respect to our problem, which for good reason we can call a quiet problem, and which addresses in a refined manner only a few years, there is no little interest in establishing the point that often in those words and roots which designate good,

there still shines through the main nuance of what made the nobility feel they were men of higher rank. It's true that in most cases they perhaps named themselves simply after their superiority in strength, as the powerful, the masters, those in command, or after the most visible sign of their superiority, for example, as the rich or the owners. That is the meaning of aria, noble, and the corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic, owners. But they also named themselves after a typical characteristic, and this is the case with which is our concern here. For instance, they call themselves the truthful. Above all, the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis. The word developed for this is characteristic, estlos, fine, noble. Indicates according to its root meaning

a man who is, who possesses reality, who really exists, who is true. Then with a subjective transformation, it indicates the true man as the truthful man. In this phase of conceptual transformation, it becomes the slogan and catchphrase for the nobility and its sense shifts entirely over to mean aristocratic, to mean to mark a distinction from the lying common man as Theognis takes and presents him. Until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word remains as a designation of spiritual noblesse and becomes, as it were, ripe and sweet. In the word kakos, as in the word deilos, the plebeian in contrast to the agathos, the cowardice is emphasized. He's talking about Greek words for bad, kakos delos, he's saying they mean coward whereas

the Greek words for good you have heard, agathos means a man who is exceptionally brave. I continue now. This perhaps provides us a hint about the direction in which we have to seek the etymological origin for the multiple meaning of agathos. In the Latin, the word malus, bad, which I place alongside melas, black, dark, the common One man could be designated as the dark colored, above all the dark haired, hic niger est, this man is dark, as the pre-Aryan inhabitant of Italian soil, who through his color stood out most clearly from those who became dominant, the blondes, that is the conquering races of Aryans. At any rate, Gaelic offers to me an exactly corresponding example, the word fin, for example in the name fin gall, the term designating nobility and finally the good, noble and pure,

originally referred to the blonde-headed men in contrast to the dusky dark-haired original inhabitants. Incidentally, the Celts were a thoroughly blonde race. People are wrong when they link those traces of a basically dark-haired population which are noticeable on the carefully prepared ethnographic maps of Germany, with any Celtic origin and mixing of blood, as Virchow still does. It is much rather the case that in these places the pre-Aryan population of Germany predominates. The same is true for almost all of Europe. Essentially the conquered races have finally attained the upper hand for themselves and once again in color, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts. Who can confirm for us that modern democracy, the even more modern

anarchism, and indeed that preference for the commune, the longhouse, for the most primitive form of society, which all European socialists now share, who can say that this does not indicate, for the most part, a monstrous throwback, and that the conquering master race, the race of Aryans, is not being physiologically defeated, too. The Latin word bonus, I believe, I can explicate as the warrior, provided that I am correct in tracing bonus back to an older word, duonus, compared bellum, war, duelum, war, duenlum. He's talking about a duel, I guess, which seems to me to contain that word duonus. He's tracing the word, well, as he says, the word good back to a dueler and a warrior. Hence bonus as a man of war, of division, duo, as a warrior.

We see what constituted a man's goodness in ancient Rome. What about our German word gut itself? Doesn't it indicate then Gotlichen, the godlike man, the man of Gotlichen Geschlitz, the family of the gods. And isn't that identical to the people's originally noble's name for the Goths? The reasons for this hypothesis do not belong here.