I want to be the Theodor Herzl of a new state, a resurrection of an ancient Greek city, complete with the language and everything. When you look at Israel as a role-play of antiquity, and that word is used a lot now, larping, live-action role-playing, as if it's a bad thing, I think it's a good thing. A lot of actually Western and European history is larping, especially of Rome, less so of Greece, but especially of Rome. Washington, DC is built according to Roman city models, Roman architecture, Roman political standards, and they did not go all the way and resurrect Roman identity, certainly, but not even the Latin language. I would like that very much, even though you can dispute, for example,

how much really of antiquity is reborn with Israel as a state. Can you resurrect the Hittite state? And I don't think very much at all in the end. Nevertheless, as an attempt to resurrect biblical state, even in symbol, whatever your opinions pro and con in the world of day to day politics now, this year, you have heard a lot Zionism, this Zionism that it turned out to be a complete dud in this election, all the retards on the left and some on the right who predicted that Israel was Israel versus the Palestinians as if the conflict of tiny peoples in the Middle East was supposed to determine American election Well, American voters didn't think so at all. Although it's good, maybe I was looking at leftist, left-arm accounts trying to attack them.

I had made this list to attack them from before October 7th and I was putting it off and I was trying to gear my energies because I love combat and I wanted to attack the left. But then when I look at this list after October 7th of last year, 90, 95 percent of their content. Israel, Palestine, they're complete obsessed with that. So I couldn't use this list because that issue doesn't interest me. But you have to say, at least it may be demotivated the left from voting and contributed to Kamala's loss. It's quite funny though, that in Michigan, the Muslims turned out for Trump, because guess what, with all the stupid propaganda you've seen of Trump is a Zionist and this which he's not, but it turns out that there

is no non-Zionist political faction in American politics today and the Muslims in Michigan saw that. The Kamala-Baidan regime, call it what you want, was just as Zionist as anybody else and so they will go for Trump, maybe he changed things. I think it's interesting that everyone on all sides has high hopes for Trump administration. Both Russia and Ukraine has high hope for this. Anyway, I want to go back to talk about the resurrection of ancient states. Whatever again your opinions, pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, whatever, it doesn't matter. You have to admit, as a historical project, the foundation of Israel is a wild, adventurous, It's a great undertaking in the modern world in the same way that ISIS and other forms attempt to resurrect caliphate.

That also is kind of a wild, amazing idea for the Muslim side. The Palestinians, I would respect more if they really wanted to larp as Philistines, they should re-adopt ancient Indo-European rights if they want to go that way. I don't know. They hope, I mean, the caliphate thing, the ISIS people, yes it's different because they hope for worldwide dominion, but it doesn't matter, I'm talking just a naive, enthusiastic attempt to resurrect some ancient form of political, not just political, but even social moral organization like this, even maybe the language. We want caliphanao, that kind of thing. And I know from friends, a similar idea, who are French monarchists who wish for the return of the king in Versailles, and they want an absolute monarchy with the church at its side,

not just the kind of constitutional symbol, you know, they want the return in Versailles, and they say, they use the same example I do, they say if the Jews could wait 2,000 years for Israel to come back, we can wait and fight and persevere a few more hundred years for the return of our king. I love this ambition, this drive to be found. Of course, in the case of the Jews, it was not the religious Jews who were saying next year in Jerusalem, they were saying that for centuries, and nothing ever happened. It was the secular ones in the 19th century and early 20th who went ahead and actually did it, you know, they actually, ignoring, you know, the, you know, the Jews who are cucked by the rabbi priests in the same way that Christians are cucked by their priests,

historically I mean, and it was not, it is not the religious cucked by rabbi Jews who founded it. It was the secularist Jews with men like Theodor Herzl providing the ideological, theoretical, and motivational base for doing this. And they had to throw off the rule of priests before they could do any of this at all. In their case, rabbis, same thing. But I like this spirit in all things. It's something great to pursue in a world that's moribund and petty, this kind of antiquity revival project, the resurrection of old forms and for me one day to be a kind of Theodor Herzl of a city-state where the ancient Greek language is resurrected and spoken or ancient Greek principles of life also. The Agon or the contest as the basis of life.

I don't want to say a constitution that word overused now but in the constitution in the ancient sense the day-to-day basis for life the contest as an organizing principle of state An aristocratic military republic living under a type of law like that of Vycurgus from Sparta, an updated form of that kind of Sparta. You read the Nietzsche essay on the Greek state, which he wrote I think, he was 28 years old but he never published it. But you can find it online if you want to see what I have in mind. Something like that, and also an updated form of the Greek religion. so much religion as I don't think the old gods are awake. You can't make people believe today in any case. I don't think you should try to. And I agree with my friend the city

bureaucrat when he say some things can survive cynicism. Those things are worthwhile. Everything should be put through the prism or the, what do you call it, the gang where you pass a a corridor where everyone is hitting you. It's not called gang rape, what is it called? But yes, everything should be gang raped, gang banged, gang raped by cynicism. And anything that can survive the caustic modern cynicism and skepticism, that deserves to survive. Anything that can't come out of that probably doesn't. And physiognomy, physiology for example, can survive that. You can't sinicize and skepticism and be irony too much about physical beauty. That's one thing that survives all attempts at bringing it down like that. But astrology, on the other hand, probably can't survive that.

Religion, mysticism, I don't think can survive that. In general, high-flown bullshit principles can't. And certainly I claim that no gods, ancient or modern, can. But an updated form of the Greek religion, something secularized, I mean, and the Greek language and all its beauty with pitch accent pronunciation. Should I start half hour tear on this show weekly where I read ancient Greek drunk? Maybe I will do that. But maybe I will charge $7,000 a month for it. What do you think? But yes, this is worth resurrecting. And this can survive cynicism. And some, when I say secularized, I mean some of the principles behind some of unusual ancient Greek cults. Again, not the religion itself, but let's say a doctrine maybe driven by Heraclitian

political, a public and more modernized Heraclitian somewhat simplified doctrine that is in keeping with modern science and more important, just with day-to-day observation available to any man. I will try to do some of this in my book, but that not really a public manifesto document that was more short, intimate text I intended for distribution among friends, this would be something much more of public program. The procession, muscular men will hold the bust of Heraclitus in procession at the head of mechanized columns of soldiers and parade, yes, Heraclitus as the prophet of a state in much the same way that Pelopidas and Epaminondas in the 300s BC, they reformed Thebes, the Greek city-state Thebes, on the basis of the philosopher Pythagoras in much that way with

worship of public nudity and such and laws and things. By things I mean festivals and images reborn in public that you would have never thought to see again. It will shock the world. This is what I wanted. I was thinking of the relative advantages and the difficulties and advantages my ambition has as opposed to something like Herzl's and of the Zionists who succeeded in founding Israel. And I think if you weigh it on both sides, this is very interesting. This may be of interest what I talk now also to various others who I know are thinking about or some already trying to find new voluntary communities, they call it, of various kinds. And I think the big difference between what I want and what they want, if you, I won't name them, I will not name them.

You will have surely heard attempts to found charter cities and semi-independent autonomous charter cities and this kind of thing. But I don't think the others who are trying this, well I'm not trying it for now, I'm just talking about it. But the others don't have a good feeling for the necessities of sovereignty and the need to be independent of any other state power. To me, if you don't achieve that, this is not worth doing. The need to be able to resist a state physically if you have to. And they forget that living in a city or a community, I hate this word, but the community like what they have in mind, that kind of life, the good life is the wages and the reward of victory. But that will probably not come in your lifetime if you're serious about it.

because there is conspiracy of interests arrayed against you today if you try to do this so actually if you have such an aim now you can only hope for a lifetime of war of conflict you won't have good life that Aristotle talks about you know he say the city comes into being for survival but exists continues existing for the good life but you will not achieve that in a city today you will only have war trying to found your city it won't be allowed to come about not as a general rule so they are geared for living in peace they are not oriented and organized for war so they will lose and by war I mean in particular covert mafia war since you won't actually have the numbers and material to have direct war not with any major state today and so it has to be covert in this case also

for let's say a Zionist in the year 1899 or something like that if you started around then there would have been for you or to look ahead just constant war struggle skirmishes there was physical warfare in that area also throughout into the 1940s there were wonderful small-scale skirmishes throughout the whole Canaan area and of course that was a huge war then in 47 or 48 when independence was declared and in this case in our time I mean you could choose a better site and you would not have to be faced down by natives necessarily resisting you in the area on the other hand colonialism in 1900 was the rule of the day today it's not acceptable so you have that going against you but you would actually have then the entire world against you if you tried something

like what I propose. Even if you choose a relatively empty area and get the consent of, let's say, the local state, they may even invite you, they would see it as a way to prosperity. But, you know, they would say they could tax you or you would bring commerce or something if you were successful. But I think very quickly you'd have the entire world against you. It would take a great deal of wiliness, luck also to get it done. For the libertarian-ish projects that have been suggested. I don't want to name them. Good luck to all of them. Look, I'll name them. Okay, there's Praxis, right? Everyone knows that. But there are others too. My advice to them long ago would have been to erase any reference whatsoever to anything dissident coded or

rightish coded because it's that most of all that will turn the world against you. Including even cryptocurrency. Don't call yourselves crypto bros. That has connotations of of governments don't like that, establishment doesn't like that today. Just to give you an idea of the challenges, let's say you are planning to found a city in a part of the world that has good weather, that is easily accessible from land, that is already in let's say an inhabited, owned part of the world, which I do not know if they made this public, I've not been following proxies back and forth, and I'll be discreet, But I think I'm not being too indiscreet to say they were planning something like what I just said. A city in a good part of the world, let's say with good weather, there are other cities

around it and so on in a quite accessible part of the world. And I told them that's a mistake. You should choose Iceland because it's cold, it's inaccessible island. And all that would have to happen if you are a leftist. If the city is an accessible part of the world, you arrange a caravan of homeless, they will trickle into your new city over land. They will be able to do this if you are planning to do it in a liberal-aligned, liberal-type-aligned city, let's say. If you choose, on the other hand, to do it in the territory of an authoritarian state, there are other big risks that come to you. But let's say you choose in a relatively liberal part of the world, something aligned that depends on its existence for public opinion in America and so on, where a leftist can

organize caravan of homeless, they will trickle in over land. And then even if you use third party security to remove this infestation, they will place cameras and so on, and selectively edit and say, oh, look, it's Nazis, they're mistreating poor people, they're putting down these good people in violation of international human rights, you know. So then you would have to choose between being infested with homeless or being demonized. And then local governments will say this is too much of a liability, you are attracting bad attention, you're attracting trouble. Maybe they will not renew your charter or give you worse terms or whatever. Then another vulnerability, do you plan to let in women? Because that's something else I would do if I was a leftist, I would send leftist women

and I'll start all kinds of sexual harassment proceedings, maybe after a year or this. And if the country you are in doesn't make those kinds of proceedings easy, I'd have the women start them in the home countries of the people trying to make the city like they did to Julian Assange, you know. And this is also why the conservative dating app I've heard of is so stupid. There was a dating app suggested a while ago, and besides the fact that they used a fat porkswoman to advertise it, but even if it had been a well done from that point of view, If I were a leftist girl, it's an app for dating, for conservatives to meet, I would go there. I pretend to be a conservative. I get all kinds of embarrassing video and such of conservative men. I make a compilation and many such things.

So you know what I'm saying here is actually despite this election victory, I want to remind people we are very much in minority and we're in very weak position. Trump is actually in a weak position too. As I record this, Gaetz, his nominee for attorney general, has just withdrawn his nomination. I don't want to make this show about politics, but very quickly, I was expecting that Gaetz would be appointed under some kind of recess anyway. I don't think they could have gotten votes because so many Republican Senator Cox will not vote for Trump appointments, and there is nothing really you can do to force them. You'd have to promise them concessions which may even be worse, so he has to find some way to do it under recess appointments.

But whatever he does, this is a long fight and we are very much minority. We are surrounded by enemies, weak positioned, and this kind of anything you do publicly is going to be attacked if it has a tinge of this and these independent living community projects. And they aren't even like, oh, it's Colonia Dignidad in Chile, which was like SS men from Germany founding some compound in the Andes Mountains, Chile. So that was, you know, that's one of the examples used by the left of, oh, that's a Nazi colony or such. But this is not like some SS Nazi colony, right? They are just, in many cases, mild libertarianish guys that being crypto bros or Bitcoin associated But anything like that, we say you want voluntary communities based on that or that represent exit or independence.

Even just doing that is enough to make you a target. So any public organization that is right coded will be target. And the moment you don't really have legal countermeasures. So what you have to do instead is use a lot of tact and go very deep into hiding. You have to do it from a position of hiding. So my advice for something like proxies, I can tell it to you now because it's too late for them. There was already New York Times articles against the founders and so on. But if any of you want to try something similar in the future, do not code it as anything based or right wing or whatever and put front men who are of clean past, who are not detectable. You don't want to get dissident based points and get retweets online. You don't want to appear that way. Just say for example,

you want an environmental protection organization, protection of forests. We want to protect the green forest of northwestern Spain in Galicia. And we are into urban renewal. And you know, because there are medieval villages there that are abandoned. So you hear sometimes you can buy a whole village in Spain for $30,000. Don't get your hopes up when you hear that. It's an uninhabitable dump. Like the houses are 500 year old, mostly musty ruins out of, you know, Lord of the Rings with things crawling all inside them. You don't want that. But that would be a good site for environmental protection and urban renewal. And a right-wing organization, if it was tactful and maintained discipline, it could advance under that pretense, similar to how I have encouraged others now to take up cause of

animal rights, which the left has shamefully abandoned. And these are all unimpeachable fronts. You know, even, and your situation, by the way, is not similar to the right wing in the Weimar Republic, which had social opinion on its side and the judiciary on its side and law enforcement on its side. Now all of that is against us. But even the Weimar far right was more tactful than a lot of these people. The Weimar far right, the cover organization for a very extreme group called Organization console who I cannot even say on this show what they did, you can look up what they did, but their front organization was I believe called Sportfara in Olympia. It was a sports goods and gyms store and type of organization that was their cover and they also had like a woodworking type of front.

They were not trying to get dissident points, a retweet from Pakistani or this, you know. They were trying to achieve something politically and I've recommended the animal protection thing to a number of the, even the art people hovering around us, some of who are actually leftist, friendly leftists, because first of all, it's a good cause as such, I am genuinely for animal rights and it's very bad that the leftists abandoned this. I hope RFK Jr. perseveres, he comes into administration and he tackles also this front. But it is a great cover for informal organization, which at this point, in my opinion, you still cannot openly organize against anything overtly right wing, at the very least for fear of highly limiting the futures of your members.

But anyway, this is how I thought about the question of founding your own city. And I was taken aback when I told others who were planning these communities, I don't like that word, right, because it overlooks the political question. It's not community, it's a state you're talking about. I'm talking that has to remain central. Are you dependent on others for your security? Are you sovereign or not? And I noticed that connected with their overlooking this question, they were never geared, they were never organized for conflict, the conflict that would inevitably come about. But I would be. And I realize that such a city as I have in mind will, I'm sorry to say, will never be secure without nuclear weapons. And so the pursuit of nuclear weapons has to be this, I think, essential.

Because that way you will not have America or France coming at you saying you cannot do this. See, the restart of life, and that's what I'm talking about, the restart of life in the real sense, that has been smothered by the Pax Americana. Anytime Bob Denard or such, he tried to take over the Comoros Islands in Africa or the Seychelles or things like this, there have been other attempts and every time it's America, England and France, these powers come in and stop you. Imagine I try to make this state and America will say, no, you can't do this, you're infringing human rights, you cannot build that laboratory, you cannot do these things, don't build that lab. You can't treat these people this way or whatever.

But these are practical details, which again, if you compare to Theodor Herzl and other Zionist situation in trying to, they are trying to refound Israel, you have certain advantages. You do have certain advantages technically. For one, it's the flexibility in location. Second of all, the technology now, some say you can do these things faster and better. For example, Bitcoin, other cryptocurrency would be you'd have an independent currency you wouldn't need to depend on, a large state. Then there is a possibility of drones, these other kind of numbers boosting technologies to take care of your defenses, although I think it remains to be seen if small numbers of soldiers highly trained can resist big armies with help of drone swarms and such.

I think it's still too soon to say, still theoretical, against the determined foe who who would take kid gloves off with you, I don't know if you can resist that way, let's see. But there are such advantages that exist today. You have the internet to organize and so forth, travel is much easier of course. And then the most interesting difference and the big advantage though that the Zionists had is well they already had a people, right? And that people was in a situation where solution of a independent state became increasingly attractive. Whereas now, you would be faced with task of creating an identity that is strong enough bond as a people or as a race, incredibly difficult.

The most difficult question politically, something that can become so, and to give people who willingly choose it enough of a reason to live together permanently. And that difficulty outweighs, I think, all the material and technical advantage that you might have now. now, with one important exception, and I'll talk this now, excuse me, but this is interesting, but this interesting debate about why Zionism came about in the first place and why the need or not the need for an independent state today, how it differs. But there's one advantage in this. Let's use libtard office language, community creation, where you could have an advantage maybe today over something like Theodor Herzl. But why, before I talk that, why did Herzl and the Zionists see the creation of Israel as necessary?

The reason was for it to be a homeland for the rank-and-file Jews, not the elite Jews. That is forgotten by many now on all sides of the arguments. A lot of Zionist fervor and agitation was based on this premise, though, and it undermines somewhat the myth of Jewish unity that the rabbis, for example, have always promoted. So they're trying to kind of sweep this under the rug. They're promoting this in Israel now. And by the way, covertly, I believe that promoting it online too with the kind of fake mainstream, fake minstrel anti-Semitism that you've been seeing for the last year or two online, which I believe is all coming out of Haifa Israel or something like that, but that's for later. But also the supposed unity between Jewish rank and file and Jewish elite, which historically

You know, the Zionists rejected this because the Jewish elite had often used the common Jews as human shields. And it was the Jewish elite that was highly mobile and could escape the consequences of their, let's say, bad behavior, whereas the Jewish rank and file, the Jewish common men could not escape that. So a good example that's very old is the Kmelnytsky Uprising in Ukraine in the 1600s. Cossacks and the Ukrainian peasants rose against their Polish landowners, okay, including, let's say, the elite among the Jews in the area who had been used by the Polish landowners as arandators or tax collectors and such, and they were often given tyrannical powers to tax farms. So they were highly resented for good reason by the Ukrainian peasantry who was oppressed

by them and the Polish overlords. So it was a typical peasantry vault led by Cossacks, and the Cossack leader gave the Jews in the area the option to evacuate, actually. But he only gave this option to the common Jews, the rank-and-file Jews, not to their leaders. He said, you can leave, the Jewish people can leave, but you have to leave your leaders and I'm going to kill them. And he was planning to massacre them and also massacre the Polish nobility in that area. And I keep going on tangents, but it's interesting, the Polish nobility, the Lechs, they call themselves. You've heard the name Lech Walesa. Well, Lech is what the Polish nobility called themselves. They had such a conception of themselves as essentially different people from the Polish serf, the Polish commoner.

And certainly, all European nobility more or less did when Gobineau talks about how the French elite saw itself as essentially a different nation from the French serfs. He wasn't just inventing that, that was an accurate reflection of how many European nobles felt that they were essentially different people from the commoners that they ruled. But it was so exaggerated among the Lechs or the Polish nobles that there are theories now, mainstream historian theories, that they may very well have been different people who who had ruled the common people in that area, the Slavs, in some form of elite dominance that they had come in from Siberia, or that they were actually some kind of Sarmatian nobility that had grafted itself on top of the population somehow, because their self-conception

was just so outlandish, even by European standards, that they saw themselves as different from their serfs. But anyway, they certainly did roleplay as Sarmatians, by the way. a good thing. You know, the Polish cavalry who broke the siege of Vienna, they had Sarmatian wings on their back. It's very nice. But what happened was the Jewish leaders did not allow, they turned down Khmelnitski's offer and they didn't allow the common people to evacuate. And so although the Jewish commoners would have been saved, but the Jewish leadership essentially used them as human shields, so a lot ended up getting massacred. And this pattern, this phenomenon I've just talked about now, it kept repeating throughout Jewish history, including, I'm sorry to say, but in World War II, Papa Hitler let all the

Jewish elite left escape, and the ones who got killed were the Jewish tailors from villages in outside Minsk or something who had nothing to do with the abuses of the Jewish Communist left in Germany in the 1920s and who were, I think, the real instigators and the provokers of the Holocaust. And whether you agree with what I just said or no, this was actually the right wing Zionist line about what happened at that time. And also it was their line about what had happened previously time and again in Jewish history. And so they founded the state as a refuge specifically for the rank and file Jew, not the elite Jew. And it's interesting how this debate of that time maps over to, you know, Nietzsche has some nice lines, which I don't think many casual readers of Nietzsche realize this.

But Nietzsche, when he talks not only about the Jews, but when he talks about the Jews, sometimes he's doing the typical European aristo thing that the Japanese also do sometimes where they're mocking you, but they're doing it in a way they give you obviously exaggerated compliments and through that they mock you. And I think that most casual readers of Nietzsche don't get that, they fall for, they see a line from Nietzsche out of context, and they don't see what he's really doing. Now, Leo Strauss, to his credit, doesn't fall for it, or not completely. He sees that Nietzsche is kind of backhanded complementing the Jews, and then he's following it up with his own solution, I mean Nietzsche's own solution, which Nietzsche's solution was

essentially for the Jews to disappear through intermixing with the Europeans, which this is the limit solution for blacks, right? Search limit if interested, limit the famous posters, the cockskin schizophrenic poster. But his solution was for blacks to be fucked out of existence on account of which, or to support this claim, limit believed that racism needs to end because racism is holding off the genocide of the black race through intermixing. So it's funny, but remember he was schizophrenic and he genuinely believed that only 40,000 people lived in Africa and so on. So in reality, if you pursued that option, it would be a bit different. But the limit option that I just mentioned, it would have done that to the Jews if it was tried.

In fact, you will often read kvetching and hand-wringing articles from Jews deploring intermarriage and such, that the Jews are being killed through kindness, through just being absorbed in this way, but they would have just disappeared as a people with their own separate identity through this means of intermixing with Europeans, I think. And this is not entirely, again, a welcome prospect to a Jewish nationalist or any such – okay, but it's an interesting question, Nietzsche's opinions on this, because actually They mirror limit the schizophrenic poster, I said, in the sense that Nietzsche also believed loudmouth antisemitism of the kind that existed as a movement in Europe in the late 1870s and 1880s, starting in the 1870s, but he believed this was bad because it was an obstacle to

getting rid of the Jews in this way by assimilation and intermixing. So if you're curious about these opinions, you can read the book by one Holub who I mentioned already. But look, I need a break, drink nice green tea milks. And I'll be right back briefly to tell you about this book and further debates around Zionism in the late 19th, early 20th century, because I think direct relevant to anyone try to found new state of any type today, I will be right back. I need green teas. Yes, this book by Holub on Nietzsche is his position with respect to the Jews, which I'm bringing up now because again, I won't tell you about debates, a situation in late 19th century, just as Zionism was taking off,

what matters were in dispute and how this differed from any potential new State Foundation project today. But this book is called Nietzsche's Jewish Problem by Holub. It's not special. It's obviously, I think, just his thesis or an academic's book, it's kind of one note and repetitive, but it does go away to arguing against certain commonly held misconceptions about Nietzsche's opinion on the Jews. You may have read some, some come from Jews who are proud that Nietzsche praises them and so on, but Holob maintains that Nietzsche held lifelong anti-Jewish views and that it It was not his sister's corruption or distortion of materials that was responsible for later understanding of Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi or as anti-Jewish thinker.

In fact, he shows this myth was invented really just out of his no factual basis. It's a creation of people like Walter Kaufmann, who was trying to rehabilitate Nietzsche after World War II for Anglo audiences. And so he invented and others like him invented this idea that, oh no, it's really Nietzsche's sister who corrupted some of his notes and letters and compiled them in such a way to make it look like he was more Nazi than he was. But actually that not true at all. And Nazis saw a kinship in Nietzsche based on his own writings, not his notes, his published writings during his life, which if you take certain passages from genealogy of morals, especially the supposedly anti-Christian ones, yes, they're anti-Christian, they're not

just anti-Christian, including those from the anti-Christ, they are actually the most anti-Jewish things ever written and they were recognized as such by Nietzsche's own friends like Franz Overbeck during his life and Nazi theorists recognized them as such. And the task being then to eliminate biblical influence from Europe and from European morality totally and completely, but he showed in multiple ways, including letters, and although Nietzsche had the Jewish friends, and he was not a bigot, and so forth, he had quite subtle opinions and ideas about them, he was not one note, but nevertheless he held throughout his life what would be today called anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish views, and indeed maybe presented

one of the greatest assaults on the Jewish idea of the world ever, the Jewish spiritual idea of the world, and that his attack on anti-Semites, which is also very obvious in his writings, but that this was directed at only in that time anti-Semite had a particular meaning. It didn't refer as it does to all the things it does today. It referred to a particular political movement with particular tactics, and for Nietzsche this was actually bound up with personal questions as well because he believed the stench of these people, they had a bad reputation as anarchical boors and so on, and it became associated with his name because his sole publisher for a while had been also a publisher of prominent antisemitic texts and Nietzsche believed this smeared him, it hurt his name

and the reputation and so on. But actually since the days of his acquaintance with Wagner, just speaking on this, it was Wagner and his wife who had warned Nietzsche to be more discreet about attacking Jews openly, which Nietzsche had done in a public lecture in the 1870s. Now think about that for a moment. It's Wagner telling you, you have to tone it down a bit or you'll hurt your career and We need you to be the respectable academic face of what we're trying to do. But in his attack on the anti-Semites, however, in Nietzsche, it actually was not just for cover. He did indeed hate the prominent anti-Semites of his own time, and it wasn't also just for personal reasons, but it was also not because he supported the idea of religious tolerance

or that he had good opinions about the Jews or such things or what was in the Bible or any other such. It was more because he thought these antisemites were retarded, and what he objected most to in their views was their socialism. They held a kind of wholesome, chungus, prigg, moralizing. So if you read in The Genealogy of Morals, his attack in the third essay, his attack on Eugene Düring, I may have read part or even a longer version this passage on this show before, it's in the middle of Nietzsche's, one of his classic explanations of leftist religious recentiment and of the pathological drive to revenge of the sick in spirit. And he represents Düring also as this, as the apostle of revenge. I read for you now, take a look into the background of every family, every corporation, every

community. Everywhere, you see the struggle of the sick against the healthy. A quiet struggle, for the most part, with a little poison powder, with needling, with deceitful expressions of long-suffering, but now and then also with that sick man's Pharisaic tactic of loud gestures, whose favorite role is noble indignation. It likes to make itself heard all the way into the consecrated rooms of science, that hoarse, booming indignation of the pathologically ill hound, the biting insincerity and rage of such noble Pharisees. Once again, I remind readers who have ears of Eugene Düring, that apostle of revenge from Berlin, who in today's Germany makes the most indecent and most revolting use of moralistic gibberish. Düring, the preeminent moral braggart we have nowadays,

even among those like him, the anti-Semites. So, and end quote, by the way, please to all of you who keep talking about Nietzsche's attack on this or that, or on what means recentement, just go back and read the third essay, actually read the whole book, but read the third essay in Genealogy of Morals. It's amazing to me, people sometimes invoke Nietzsche as if he's saying that he wishes people like what I just read about for you now would be more violent or more assertive. The point of slave morality or such, it isn't that it's soft or too nice. That is not what what Nietzsche is saying or that he would like it if they were more violent or something like that. That's not what it means. What it means is what I just read and more, go read it.

But anyway Nietzsche does not reject the anti-Semites of his time because they had bad opinion of Jews or for the sake of liberal inclusion or religious or ethnic tolerance or any other such reasons, multiculturalism or what have you. Or even actually out of any good feelings for the Jews because he continues to attack both the Jews around Jesus's time and the Jews of his own time throughout his life he attacks them but he just saw their method as something that would fail and would prevent a more tactful solution and again he saw them as primarily a rabble-rousing left-wing socialist movement which they were in his time that's what the anti-semitic movement was in his time And it's interesting that Düring is also mentioned by Engels of Marx and Engels Friedrich Engels

He has a famous text called anti Düring Which was very popular with communists and still is but it was throughout communist history Classic communist history. It was a very popular text and if you I'm not saying you should read this. It's quite tedious I I certainly didn't read every line, but if you skim it you'll see Engels is not attacking during because of his antisemitism I don't even maybe he mentions it but it's only incidental or a side point he understands during as primarily a socialist thinker and a challenger to Marx they disagreed about what socialism meant during disagreed with this idea of class conflict they had a different take on human nature and on many other things that socialists disagree with each other on.

But he was primarily understood, as was the rest of the anti-Semitic movement, as a left-wing type of socialist wholesome chungus like communitarian moralistic socialism, let's say, concerned with social justice and exploitation and this other kind of thing. And it's that element, not the Jewish one way or another as such, it's that element that Nietzsche objected to. And it's also interesting in context of what I talk on this episode that Theodor Herzl, supposedly, I say, the same man Nietzsche attacks, Eugene Düring, is who convinced Theodor Herzl that assimilation was no longer a path for the Jews in Europe, because Düring had turned it into a racial question. I don't think he was actually the first one, because Gobineau had certainly talked about

the Jews in a racial context before, but Gobineau actually had quite positive opinion of the Jews. But Düring turned it from one of belief or culture or religion into this racial question around which there was no way out, there would be only murder or expulsion as a solution. So I say that it's interesting that it's this figure that was the impetus for someone like Herzl to push for Zionism, for separation, for leaving Europe and so on. Because again, regarding the solution of assimilation, Leo Strauss points out, and may be correct, that Nietzsche's hope for assimilation could only ever appeal or work with the Jewish elite. And by that is meant not just the social, political, or financial elite of the Jews

or such, but even let's say if you take the top 10% of the Jews of that time in intelligence and culture, or potentially so. That is what Strauss essentially, I think, in what I'm about to read for you, that's what he and other Zionists believed, yes, they could assimilate, but the rest of the Jews, there are many rank-and-file Jews who could not, because in Strauss' own saying, they are too boorish, too average, or too whatever, as in any population, the mass of people is just at best average, and they would not be able to integrate with the Europeans or assimilate, or they could not do so in any way that was not completely humiliating to themselves, Strauss says. If you are Wittgenstein, or not even that level, but something like that, you can assimilate

on a relative equality into European society. If you are Marcel Proust, maybe you can. But if you're a shoe cobbler from Borodrit, Stetl on the edge of Belarus, or whatever the average intelligence, will probably not be able to, Strauss is saying. And Israel was intended as a solution for this, for the Jewish people in its average form, let's say, or as a method, an alternative side of what I'm saying, is a method of purification for the Jewish people so that they could shed many of their bad qualities. Nietzsche lists some of their bad qualities that they would have to shed in order to assimilate and fully join European society. And these qualities, actually the earliest Zionists completely accepted them to the point

where the Jewish left considers the early Zionists and even Herzl to be functionally anti-Semitic, to have accepted anti-Semitic judgment about what the Jew in the Diaspora or in Europe was. But the early Zionists, this is what they believed, that the Jew had become a kind of deformed creature living as he did in Europe, you know, kind of a neurotic Woody Allen kind of, with all the bad qualities attributed to Jews by stereotype, which Nietzsche, by the way, believed applied also to the anti-Semites. They were kind of spiritually Jewish in their judgments and their rancor and so forth. But that the point of Israel was that the Jews would be purified of these qualities and will become like other nations by living in their own land.

So I will read for you now, it's a somewhat subtle argument Strauss is making, because he doesn't seem to be sure if Nietzsche's trolling, you know. So I will read some passages from his relevant lecture on this. Nietzsche's analysis regarding the assimilation of the Jews into Europe, he's saying, Nietzsche's Nietzsche's analysis had some defects though. His statement, which is almost dithyrambic, is based on very deep analysis, perhaps on the deepest analysis ever made, of what assimilation could possibly mean. Now the most patent defect of Nietzsche's analysis seems to be this. The regeneration or cleansing which he has in mind as part of the process proved to be insufficient as a work of individuals, however numerous, dedicated or gifted.

It required and requires an act of national cleansing or purification. And this, in my mind, was the establishment of the State of Israel. Everyone who has seen Israel, nay, everyone who has witnessed the response to that act in New York, will understand what I mean. But this fact refutes Nietzsche's dream of assimilation, Strauss is claiming. For the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel means that while this may be a progress in the way of Jewish assimilation, as it surely is, he means of the Jews shedding their sort called bad qualities and becoming like other nations, is also a reassertion of the difference between Jews and non-Jews. So this is Strauss's take, it's a kind of ethno-narcissistic, but subtle and polite

apologia such as you find in the American civil religion, the city bureaucrat, I'm indebted to him for pointing these things out to me. But if you, I'm not even saying you need to read between the lines in what I just said, The premise of what Strauss is saying and what I just read is that there's a whole mass of Jews who, although gifted individuals would have been able to assimilate in Nietzsche's scheme or blueprint for it, the Jewish nation as a whole did not have qualities that would have allowed it to. And the only way to get rid of those is through living a national life, which actually ends up precluding the kind of assimilation that Nietzsche was talking about. But in this same lecture, Strauss has various sides pointing out that, well, Nietzsche has

this kind of high conception of the Jews, because he only came in touch with elite or very cultured Jews, but he didn't know the average Jewish common man. The same undercurrent runs throughout Strauss's lecture. So here I read for you. He's quoting Nietzsche at the beginning of what I'm about to read for you. So Nietzsche says the resources of today's Jews are extraordinary, they least of all those who inhabit Europe today, they reach when in distress for the cup of suicide in order to escape a dilemma least of all, as the less gifted are so prone to do. So Nietzsche is saying that suicide was very rare among the Jews of his time and that this speaks to a kind of spiritual strength among the Jews.

And Strauss adds that every sociologist knows that regarding suicide, the situation is terribly changeable. That was still the sturdy old Jews of Europe, Nietzsche meant. So these are Strauss's lines about what I just, you know, the short line from Nietzsche. He's saying even in the few decades since Nietzsche had written that the modernity had, let's say, weakened Jews the same way it weakens every other people. sturdy old Jews of Nietzsche's time were gone. And he adds, so in the course of reading, again, he's reading from Nietzsche's passage about the Jews from the dawn, there's this book, Nietzsche at the Dawn, where he talks about this assimilation process. And Strauss is reading here, but here what he says as an aside, so I'm reading again.

They possess by far the greatest experience in all human intercourse, and even in their passions they practice the caution taught by this experience they are so sure in the exercise of their spiritual versatility and shrewdness that they never not even in the most bitter circumstances find it necessary to earn their bread by physical force as manual laborers porters or farmhands and then so when Nietzsche says that Strauss interjects and says well we knew only Germany and then he continues but he's saying that he didn't know Nietzsche didn't know, he only had access to like Georg Brandeis, you know Brandeis, elite very cultured Jews from Germany who were somewhat like he talked about, but he didn't know about the Jewish manual laborer and common man and so forth.

So the reason I'm giving all this preamble, because aside from the historical question of debates around Zionism, which are interesting in themselves, I've wanted to present the problems as it appeared to the champions of this national foundation movement at the time it was taking off. And as you can see, they had a very particular problem, both Herzl and Strauss and really all the others. It was the Jewish common man that they were focused on. And in general, for any national foundation party, faction, such, that has to be their primary concern. But obviously that problem is quite different than the one I have in mind. And yet Zionism, or any other national independence movement for that matter, if the Armenians

wanted to recreate their greater state, which used to stretch to southern Anatolia, or many people say the Kurds who have never had their own nation, they say they deserve their own nation. But it's not quite the same though, right, to ask for independence of a people already living in a region, already sharing a language or languages, even if they had never had independence I mean, I don't think Croatia had ever existed in history either, and there's never been an independent Basque state for that matter. And yet, if the Basques managed to someday get a sovereign state, well, they've lived in that land since forever, they already have a language, although my Spanish friends will complain and say Basque was never a literary language, so you know, when you hear of historical

famous Basque. So Elcano was Magellan's secondhand man on the voyage around the world. It was actually Elcano who completed the voyage. Magellan died in the Philippines. But Elcano was a Basque, but people know him as Basque from history, but he spoke Spanish, thought in Spanish. So other famous Basques from history, you know, thought and wrote in Spanish or Latin. Again, Basque was kind of a peasant language, rural language. The efforts to revive the Basque language as an official and a written language, that's a recent 20th century thing. But many other things are so. The Ukraine example is like that too. All the famous historical people who are now called Ukrainian thought and wrote in Russian and thought of themselves

as Russian, but I'm considering various examples of increasing weirdness and difficulties why I'm telling you this. On one hand you have the straightforward restoration of a people in its independence in a previously existing state, for example the Poles in Poland, where they had had a big state of their own and it disappeared at the end of 18th century and then reappeared after World War I, although There were attempts in the 19th century to resurrect it. Chopin's famous revolutionary etude is written, I think, forgive if I'm wrong, but I think it's written in 1848, and it's written because he was angry that a Polish drive to Polish independence did not work. But that's an easier case. It's a long-existing, powerful even state, and the people want to resurrect it.

A harder case would be a people, again, that existed in the region but never had a state, or maybe in some cases you have to resurrect or intensify this desire for independence. Of equal difficulty to this middle case, I'd say, is the foundation of a state like United States, which breaks away from an empire despite never having been its own nation. You see process for something similar in fiction form, if you read Joseph Conrad's novel Mastromo, where precisely because it's fictional country, I think the birth of a breakaway state, that's really what book is about in its, let's say, macro level, but it appears so vividly in full form. I'd recommend that book as one of most insight political books ever, how you create a new secessionist state.

But this is of intermediate difficulty on par, on par, let's say, with the Kurds getting independence for themselves, okay, but that's arguable. Which of these would be harder? That's arguable. Then the hardest of all the examples so far would be, again, example of Israel or maybe if the Zoroastrians were either to return to take over Iran or to found a new state of their own somewhere else by gathering their worldwide diaspora, resurrecting the state religion in their case maybe and so on, that would be similar. That's among the various examples of national foundation. I think this considered so far, I think this would be the hardest. I don't know of other similar examples. Again, the French monarchists, if they get their full absolute monarchy back, you could

say that's just the change in government, but not really to be such a total change in society that I think would be of equal ambition to this. ISIS with the caliphate, that's maybe whatever, it was not done very prudently. They all managed to get themselves killed. Don't follow that example, please, because they got themselves herded and blown up by Papa Pootler, actually. He's not given sufficient credit for destroying ISIS in Syria with that bombing campaign. But then there is the example I mention here on this episode, my own example of a new Greek city state, something like that, which you think is maybe crazy and hardest of all things conceivable. hardest, not only to found a new state, but to found the people basically to go with it. And that's very difficult.

Even if again, the modern practical aspects, the technology, the flexibility and choice for location, many such things will appear to make it easier than it was for Israel. But, but, but and why I went on the long preamble about the Jewish common man versus the Jewish elites and why this was a part of the debates around Zionism in late 19th, earliest 20th century. lack of a people actually and of the duress under which Israel was created. Without this duress, how are people motivated to go to your state, to become it, to be ready to give their lives for it and so on? No amount of convenient choices and options and technologies can make up for that hardest of all things. And what a lot of these voluntary communities miss now, this talk about them, any seriousness

in the sense of this libertarianish thing of, oh yeah, that's just part of what I am. I go there sometimes to attend the gym or go to a conference or for vacation, but I'm actually a cyclope of individual, actually with my family, and I don't need to give myself entirely to the state. Well, you can have people like that on the side, maybe, but that's never going to, if the core of the founders is like that, you're never going to have a lasting state or organization based on that. It's only, I think, with just utter madness of enthusiasm for the new God that you will have a group of men willing to die and willingly to live together in an entirely new way. A complete shedding of all modern hesitations and half-measures, you know, which I talk at times in my book.

My book has motivation for such a brotherhood of death, especially in the last aphorism of my book, but not only there. But yes, you can see, maybe I wrote my book as preliminary call for this kind of new fortress state because I tell you again, I think that also the particular advantages I've spoken of so far of the special historical circumstance in which the Jews as an already existing self-conscious race in the late 19th century and the pressures under which they drove for recreation of their state, although these are mostly lacking now for any new state like I have in mind, they're Not totally lacking, in other words, I feel the need deeply for such a thing, and I wrote the book in the hope that others over the years would be like me, biologically, fundamentally,

and would feel this need, although we don't and we'll probably never have a people in the full sense of that word that excuse me again for the very long preamble to arrive to this conclusion of what I'm about to tell you, but that can actually be an advantage, The fact that you do not have this mass of average men that you have to cater to, that Israel and all these other national foundation projects have to pay attention to, that problem above all, you are not encumbered with that because Israel's weakness in the long run is the weakness of every other modern state. It's precisely that it has to take care of a mass of mostly mediocre people, that it's brought down by also its women, its children, its families, and all the care which has to

go into these things that are extraneous to the aims of the state I have in mind, right? Because the point of joining such a state is not that you have to care for a mass nursing home society such as all modern societies devolve into today. If I had been given rule over such, I would see my relationship to them as entirely extractive and parasitic. The goal of this new union I have in mind is not the preservation of a people and to take care of sewage works for cities of millions of whatever, but it's to be an independent and powerful fortress city for a group of men who can undertake great tasks. And yes, as great as Elon's colonization of Mars, and even greater, the experimentation on people, scientific experimentation, mass experimentation on people, the expansion of

science to frontiers not allowed by modern humanitarian democratic states, freedom of action for its members to support great works of art such as the world has never yet seen in magnitude, and also simply the ability to live free and dangerous lives of the hunt on a global scale. And so, although this would be a state, it would not be a country. I have in mind something like the Knights Templar, an independent state with tendrils all over the world and its own fortresses that are free. But not to have to take care of people, of a mess of average men and such. I think this would be the ultimate aim, although many intermediate aims are necessary to achieve this. The overthrow piecemeal of the so-called liberal world order, the Pax Americana that strangles

all great new conquests, that's already happening maybe. the intensification of instability that would allow military coups in, let's say, intermediate nations. So not just Mali or Burkina Faso, but something like bigger than Thailand. I've mentioned something on equivalent of Portugal or Greece, something like that. Something in the general sphere of so-called liberal world order nations, which could then inspire copycat in other countries. This part why I wrote the book to inspire this action among military men and to tell them their moment will come soon when they do not need to listen to civilian, again, masses of sheep. And in particular, that the nucleus of any such state, its precursor, would have to be

something that exists within favela world, in other words, a real secret society that existed within the slum world we inhabit now, or will soon in any case. And I think in this that you could have a group of men who already may start plans with vision to write their wills on destiny of millennia. I believe in this, but it would have to be initiated by frightful rights and you'd have to inspire mad loyalties, you know, it couldn't be like, oh, I have a tennis club in Dubai and come work out at my, you know, it'd have to be an enthusiasm greater than experienced by lovers or by religious fanatics of our day. And its cover could be something very innocuous, in fact should be, but now that we have avoided

incipient strangulation, tyranny under Kambala, and I think I say this also in my book that Trump and hopefully what follows him gives us some respite, is that how you pronounce, some freedom and ability to pursue this plan, a freedom of action that didn't exist before. Trump cannot solve the problem of modern states. Of course, I would never talk about this on Twitter if I ever did anything like this secret society. In fact, I can't be the head of any such thing because I am too public now. So I can't be, you know, it would have to be someone occulted. But this what I believe, you know, remember is the great benefit of Trump and similar just the ability to have boot taken off our necks and form such groups because you can't put your faith ever in the people.

You can't believe in these failed states and nations and groups which have only value in so far as they can be infiltrated and used for a group of friends. There can be no reconciliation, I think, ultimately between the few and the many. I've never written with intentions to be a mass movement or, you know, transferable to any country scale. My efforts ultimately, yes, are for very few who can pursue this other path, and I'm talking to you about this. The prerequisite of all of this is belief, complete enthusiastic belief in friendship, absolute belief and passion for friendship, which now I will come down from this kind of fervor and I will talk to you the very witty essays of, skeptical essays of Montaigne on next half of this episode. I will be right back. European books.

In Reading Montaigne, La Rushfoucauld, La Bruyere, Fontenelle, especially the Dialogue des Morts, Vauvenargues, and Chamfort, we are nearer to antiquity than in any group of six authors of other nations. Through these six the spirit of the last centuries before Christ has once more come into being, and they collectively form an important link in the great and still continuous chain of the Renaissance. Their books are raised above all changes of national taste and philosophical nuances, from which as a rule every book takes and must take its hue in order to become famous. They contain more real ideas than all the books of German philosophers put together, ideas of the sort that breed ideas. I am at a loss how to define to the end, enough to say that they appear to me writers who

wrote neither for children nor for visionaries, neither for virgins nor for Christians, neither for Germans nor for… I am again at a loss how to finish my list. To praise them in plain terms, I may say that had they been written in Greek, they would have been understood by Greeks. How much, on the other hand, would even a Plato have understood of the writings of our best German thinkers, Goethe and Schopenhauer, for instance, to say nothing of the repugnance that he would have felt to their style, particularly to its obscure, exaggerated, and occasionally dry-as-dust elements. And these are defects from which these two among German thinkers suffered least, and yet far too much. Goethe, as thinker, was fonder than he should have been of embracing

the cloud, and Schopenhauer almost constantly wanders, not with impunity, among symbols of objects rather than among the objects themselves. On the other hand, what clearness and graceful precision there is in these Frenchmen. The Greeks, whose ears were most refined, could not but have approved of this art, and one quality they would have even admired and reverenced, the French verbal wit. They were extremely fond of this quality without being particularly strong in it themselves." That last – this is Nietzsche on Montaigne and other French moralists who hardly anybody reads today, especially self-styled fans of Nietzsche. But that last line from him, the addition, without being particularly strong in it themselves, is very true, a peculiarity about the Greeks.

You can see they loved verbal innovation, they loved witty sayings, inventions of words, And yet they are not as good at it nearly as French wit esprit authors, you know. But this Nietzsche on Montaigne and what struck me reading Montaigne's essay on friendship, which I will talk about on this episode. This is first of two-part episode on Montaigne. So next I will do in a few days on some other of Montaigne's essays and on his particular style. But the friendship essay, what struck me was naive, frank, direct embrace of antiquity and just this plain desire to resurrect ancient Greek or Roman philosophical sensibility and excuse me, I remind you, you should read the essays, I will talk. This is not a book report time.

This entertainment radio show, and I only do for you from what I read, how it inspires me to think of other things. But if you are interested, get the screech translation of Montaigne, and you read this essay on friendship. And next time I will also talk about his essay on cannibals, and his essay on the custom of wearing clothing, where he attacks clothes mows, and a few others. But these are all in the first book of essays, and they're also short. You can do these, and even more if you like, if you like, if you see titles of interest, you do them in less than a sitting, a pleasure to read. But it's these I will discuss on this next episode, and who is Montaigne? He lived in the 1500s, born around 1530.

So think, you know, you're born 40 years after the discovery of the Americas, and he is sometimes called a statesman, but really he was just typical country noble, country gentleman at its best, born into a very rich family near Bordeaux and his father, and later he himself was elected mayor of Bordeaux, but they live in a chateau castle outside city some distance. The castle still exists today, including, well, I think it's been rebuilt, but the tower where Montaigne retired essentially to write his essays, that tower still exists. He retired there at a relatively young age among thousands of books. And he didn't, aside from this, I think he did not have a very colorful life by the standards of the time. You know, I mean, think about what's going on. This is the age of exploration.

And even some of the great authors of that time and some that Nietzsche mentioned, these writers in the 16th and 17th centuries, like Larouche Foucault, you know, had wild adventures and affairs and got shot in the head and took part in many wars and battles. But Montaigne just had a quiet, respectable life of country noble. He did his political duty, he had a brief typical period as courtier, some travels across Europe, and brief service to the King where in French politics Montaigne played a moderating influence trying to tone down the tensions between Catholics and Protestants this was already driving Europe into revolutions and wars in the 1500s and both as Councillor to the local Parliament and to the Kings he had this a moderating influence but really

this doesn't matter so much it's his literary creation that he lived ultimately in that he was a genius of the essay form in the composition of this essay which was unusual in his time because Ultimate Essay 4 mixes personal confessions. He is one of the most honest self-examining writers still to this day I think but it's observations about the world mixed with personal anecdotes similar to what I try to do in my book if you like that but who can equal Montaigne. He inspired also greatly Shakespeare and many others so one of the essays I will talk on next episode on the cannibals, Shakespeare used this as direct source, even almost to quoting it for The Tempest. But more in general, Shakespeare as moral thinker had Montaigne most of all as his model.

And you can see Shakespeare plays almost as a Montaigne in drama form, Montaigne's reflection transposed to movie form, okay, because just as an aside to tell you what means moralist, French moralists and the way Nietzsche uses that word refers not to the word as it came to be used or as you might think later in 19th century as let's say a moralistic thinker who exhorts the reader to write action or who praises virtue in high words. That is a legacy of Rousseau and especially Kant in Germany in 19th century and not just Rousseau but Rousseau's public propagandized celebrity self-image, I am a defender of classical virtue and this guy you know the high-flown thing then that got translated in a different way in

Germany and it's the kind of thing that cynics like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Celine who I like they they all mock you know they all they all mock this. In this sense it's used even somewhat the opposite way in the way Nietzsche refers to the French moralist. The thinkers, like Nietzsche mentioned in the paragraph I read for you at the beginning of this segment, or for referring to Lichtenberg or Helvetius, who whatever you may think of their politics or their conclusions, and I don't agree with almost any of Helvetius' conclusions, but the method, the topics, they are focused in other words on understanding human motivations, dissecting human passions in a kind of cynical way, understanding, in other words, morality in a scientific, objective way,

for which you, yes, you have to take a quite cynical, caustic, skeptical posture, actually, and if you're going to do it well, you need a great deal of psychological instinct. You need insight that can't really be learned, which is why Schopenhauer, who also, to some extent, tried to follow in this French tradition, and who, like Nietzsche, looked down on the kind of German philosophy that was full of moralistic Kant. And he looked down on attempts to systematize morality or systematize a science of the soul. But this why he say basically, it's a very rare talent who can do this kind of typical, this kind of empirical investigation of human behavior, this noticing observation of human types and motivations. And it's probably ultimately best done

in drama or literature, but there are again these amazing writers who do it in aphorisms and essays, semi anecdotal, self exposing and essays like Montaigne, La Rushfouco, Lichtenberg, who are with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Choron who followed also in this French tradition, they're my favorite writers, they continue, I think, a genuinely ancient sensibility. By the way, Schopenhauer's list of authors who can have this psychological insight is almost, there are some differences, I will post it so you have more reading suggestions, but it's almost the same authors Nietzsche mentions. Lichtenberg is an important edition, he was a German doctor who similarly had this kind of self-examining but also caustic skeptical dissection of human motivations.

But this continues a very ancient skeptical sensibility. And you know, when you read them, it's funny when they slight attack and disagree with each other. I will read you now Lichtenberg on Montaigne. Sometimes they attack each other. I find this just amusing. Lichtenberg say, of all the chapters that the pleasant chatterer Montaigne left to us, I enjoyed the one about death, notwithstanding all of the excellent thoughts contained therein, the least of all. It is the 19th chapter of the first book. One can see through it all that the brave philosopher feared death, and with the violent anxiety with which he shifted his thoughts, even turning them to plays on words, he makes a quite bad example. Whoever really does not fear death would unlikely know how to speak against it with as many

little reasons for consolation as Montaigne presents here." Now, I end quote, but it's nice to see what they say about each other. I have no point saying that other than I think amusing. But what struck me reading Montaigne, yes, is this naive direct embrace of possibility of resurrecting antiquity, which is why I launched for you in the first half of this episode on my own ardent desire to be a Theodor Herzl for an ancient Greek revival state, which is interesting why Montaigne, who so plainly states his desire to resurrect antiquity, as also Machiavelli, who does in similar terms in the beginning of the discourses, when he speaks of desire to resurrect antiquity in political and state matters, too, and not just in the arts and literatures as others of his time had been doing.

But neither of them, nor similar others, ever considered something so direct and crazy as kind of a refoundation of an ancient Greek city itself, although, you know, the new world had come about. I mean, you can make the claim, you know, Rome, America tried to be Rome eventually, But none of these thinkers proposed this, although Montaigne grew up, you know, role-playing a very classical education. His father raised him speaking Latin as his first language, and he learned Greek early. And yes, I mean, I know the answer why they didn't. Well, there was one man who did, in a way. He did try to recreate antiquity in a very direct sense, Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of of Rimini in the mid-1400s, so about a hundred years before Montaigne, who was a frankly openly neo-pagan military leader.

He had his own city, he was a leader of Venice military forces against the Ottomans, but he did many other things in his life. He had his own court in Rimini with complete pagan philosophers and many other things, But he didn't go full way of trying to change the language to Grech and such, you know. But another attempt in this direction maybe was initiated by Gabriele D'Annunzio in 1919, but again it didn't take off. But getting closer in a sense, yes, a more explicit need in the direction I'm talking about closer to our time, something like what D'Annunzio tried, you know. So for reasons I will address, you know, maybe later, maybe on some other episode. But for Montaigne, why he wouldn't go for this? Well, he was not mentally ill, as I am.

But to be fair to myself, things have changed quite a bit since Montaigne Day. And there is a reason where I think my crazy idea is doable and necessary. But it wasn't either of these things in Montaigne time. Now, I'll tell you now, in part. In full, I may explain on next episode because this is very big matter. So I'm questioning, should I go into this now? But in short, men like Montaigne and Machiavelli face a very different situation in their own time, different both from our age and from age of antiquity. They were facing, first of all, the great power of the church and the dogma of revealed religion, of doctrinarism, dogmatism, religious fanaticism already pronounced in Montaigne's time and leading to incipient religious wars.

And as a counterweight to this, a necessary counterweight is to resurrect the ancient Greek philosophical skepticism especially. And so despite what I tell you on this episode about his thoughts on friendship as I see them, and despite the current day associations between the classical spirit and heroic virtue and so on, there's another side to antiquity, the power of philosophical skepticism which Montaigne brings back, you can call him even a philosopher of doubt, Nietzsche has this very beautiful line that Montaigne said doubt is the best pillow for a well-formed head. Nietzsche adds that this incensed Pascal, it made him see precisely because Pascal, the famous mathematician who became a religious thinker later in life, he wanted to believe

so much that he was trying desperately to fight against this renaissance, really a rebirth of skepticism, of ancient Greek skepticism. I'm simplifying here. Nietzsche actually also admired Pascal a great deal. But yes, you see the philosophical life, a great entry to it is simply to put great minds in conversation, see what they said to and about each other, what got each other mad and so on. Nietzsche understands that. But yes, Montaigne faced different problems. The problem of doctrinaire establishment religion on one hand, and on the other, the nature of monarchy, and by his age, although the time of absolute monarchy had not fully arrived in even in France, on the other hand there was in Renaissance as a result of revived

spirit for antiquity, there was spirit of republicanism, which his friend to who he dedicated this essay, his friend had this spirit and he had written a rather radical tract in his use on the problem of obedience and authority. And so in this context Montaigne says that he wished he had been born in Venice, referring to his friend a republic, which I mean that they look to antiquity for its spirit of republican liberty also, as also of philosophical skepticism against the, let's say, problems of their age which was church dogmatism on one hand and incipient absolutist monarchy or even just regular tyrannical monarchy on the other. And that he found a fountain in Greek and Roman thought to deal with this great problems they faced in their day.

But in our time, the problems are quite a bit different. Peter Thiel's recent remark, notwithstanding, I saw this interview he did, that we too face a dogmatism maybe stronger than that of the medieval church. I'm not sure I agree with that. The establishment today is far more brittle and the skepticism, I think, among people for authorities is far greater than what existed in something like Montaigne's day. I don't think the authority of present-day machine, Thiel calls it the machine, not the cathedral. I don't think his authority is anywhere near as great. But even beyond that, the problems of our time, which I try to address in my book in part is that of own space, the feeling that there is no ground for free action anywhere

in this world and no escape from, whereas for Montaigne, the new world and actually new worlds that were being discovered, he was writing again in the 1500s as the Americas were just being explored, and not just the Americas, many other parts of the world, some Islands that were discovered in the Atlantic had always been uninhabited. Well, always, who knows, maybe Atlantis existed, but in historical memory, uninhabited. And it's quite an amazing thing when you read Montaigne Essay on the Cannibals, for example, which again I talk on next episode in more detail, but it's just as if you can imagine, you ask yourself what would an ancient philosopher or historian, what would Herodotus or Aristotle say about the customs of the tribes in the Americas if they had been discovered in antiquity

and you have in Montaigne someone of entirely ancient cast of mind to show you just what... There is no such thing as typically ancient thinker, but let's say characteristically ancient Greek thinker. I think he did have that kind of mind and it's amazing to read that, to see what would a follower of Democritus or something like this say about the customs of tribes of the New World. But look, to show you just how direct Montaigne means, embrace of antiquity, Montaigne wrote the most famous praise of friendship there has ever been, an attempt not only to resurrect ancient Greek ideal of friendship, but even to improve on ancient analysis on this. And look how he talks about antiquity there. I read for you now, I mean the treatise to which he gave the title on willing slavery,

he's referring to his friend here. I mean the treatise to which he gave the title Unwilling Slavery, but which others, not knowing this, very appropriately baptised the fresh as Against One. He wrote it, while still very young, as a kind of essay against tyrants in honour of freedom. It has long circulated among men of discretion, not without great and well-merited esteem, for it is a noble work, as solid as may be. Yet it is far from being the best he was capable of. If at the age when I knew him when he was more mature, he had conceived a design such as mine and written down his thoughts, we would now see many choice works bringing us close to the glory of the ancients. For particularly where natural endowments are concerned, I know nobody who can compare with him."

So this is how he refers to his friend, bringing us closer to the glory of the ancients. And yes, this and other such frank statements by Montaigne, both in this essay and others, I found inspiring, fresh to me, to state so direct. Also if you look, a much longer essay he had on sexual and love confessions. This is from book three, essay five, the essay is sometimes called Some Lines of Virgil, but sometimes called Other Things. He criticizes, excuse me, he begins it by criticizing the modern bashfulness to talk about sexual love and he says I'm reading now in the school of the ancients the school I cling to far more than to the modern its virtues is virtues seeming greater to me and its vices less they preach these words at

you those who excessively strive to flee from Venus fail just like those who follow her excessively you alone Oh goddess rule over the totality of nature without you nothing comes to the heavenly shores of light nothing is joyful nothing is lovable so I was just reading this was Montaigne quoting Plutarch and Lucretius and what he means by the ancients yes is specifically Greeks and their Roman friends and by moderns is meant what came in the modern era generally which isn't to say just the 1500s he means the medieval age and actually the whole post AD age and so on but such a fouls are everywhere in his work I find extreme inspiring and especially in this essay where he trying to resurrect or again improve on ancient Greek understanding of friendship which

I think he achieves it's probably a deeper and more detailed and more true to the phenomenon understanding of friendships and what you find in Aristotle or Plato I will be right back I need smoke break please you enjoy this Unusual Musics. I will be right back to talk a little bit Montaigne Essay on Friendship. Yes I am back and look you can argue who had bigger dick or rather who had bigger dick up his ass. I'm sorry to be vulgar and crass but you can argue who has bigger problem whether dogmatism on one hand and political tyranny on the other were worse problems in Montaigne time or ours. I would grant you they are just as bad today, and I completely embrace Montaigne's resurrection of classical skepticism against the dogmatism of outrage, as also his defense of freedom against tyranny.

These are important things that many rightists today, to their discredit, forget about, and will make them out to be losers, I think, in the long term. That being said, there's a special particular problem in our day that was not conceivable even in Montaigne. And let me give you an example from Covid, the Wuhan flu. In the pandemic I was desperate at beginning when I noticed that the lockdowns were just beginning precisely when they were no longer going to be effective at all. But effective or not, I didn't want to be imprisoned and was looking desperately around the world for someplace where I could escape to. Eventually I found Iceland. I found a way to get in there just in time and I managed to be free and alone in the mountains in Iceland, which was an amazing thing

because the country was empty and you can listen to my shows from that time. But I have episodes So I was chased by Iceland, possible mountain troll during an incipient kind of snowstorm at the end of summer. That being said, I was trying before then to find some place, I'm very happy I found Iceland where there were no real lockdowns and any such thing. I don't want to repeat myself, sorry. But there was in Nicaragua, there was, Nicaragua had remained open throughout, I think maybe Maybe they closed later in 2021, or I don't remember, but they were open at the beginning. And there's one particular location there on the west coast. I forget the name, it had become a kind of youth colony. Young people gathered there from all over the world to try to escape lockdowns.

They didn't want to live in prisons. And what I'm saying is what exists now and did not, for example, in Montaigne or Machiavelli time, is the weight of these accumulated populations. Maybe you want to call them liberated democratic populations, maybe you don't, regardless. The material requirements of this weight of millions and hundreds of millions of people, many of whom are fat and old, they're getting to be old now, and they are bringing a special new kind of suffocating tyranny that was not possible. Maybe it was conceivable, but it was not possible in previous ages. And it is this, I wrote this book. I've been feeling this way actually my whole life, but I published the book in 2018 before COVID.

And at the time, many people thought I was exaggerating about this idea of the long house since such a pandemic happened and proved everything I was fearing right. And so a kind of biological Zionism, so to speak, something where certain types of people can escape this suffocating weight of these hundreds of millions of losers that are going to bring down every state and it's not, I think, any longer possible in our time as As it was for Machiavelli or Montaigne, who could merely resurrect ancient forms, or the American founders for that matter, they could merely resurrect ancient ideas and forms and apply it to their national or political circumstances. Machiavelli for the unification of Italy and Montaigne for the good of France, and he ended

up supporting the king as a kind of method of peace, let's say. And but he wanted to do it on on classical terms and then the kind of classical revival that the American founders had for their own people in the United States. That I think isn't sufficient any longer because all existing groups are broken. But that's a matter for another time. Montaigne intention in this famous essay on friendship. It's in book one of his essays, chapter 27 or 28, I think. He celebrates his friendship with Étienne de la Boétie, and he thinks a lot about what means friendship. These two, they met each other by reputation, you know, much like you would meet a like-minded frog now. But if you meet online, which you should meet friends online, but take high precautions

because I repeat Loki's warning that if you are vulnerable to doxxing, you should really only meet people who you trust with your life. But different people have different security situations. But anyway, Montaigne only knew Etienne for a while, for I think four years. And then his friend died and Montaigne never recovered. Some people say he wrote his essays as a kind of conversation or remembrance in general of his friend. I mean the essays as a whole, not just this particular one on friendship. But regardless, this essay is written in the context of a memorial and impart an apology for his best friend who at the age of 22 had written a tract that, yes, had not been published but only passed around among friends, a kind of revolutionary, almost anarchical tract

on the problem of obedience, monarchy and tyranny, an argument for the cause of freedom which by the time Montaigne is writing this essay, that piece of you can say Samizdat, his friend had written Samizdat and now it had taken off, it had become public and was being used for anti-state and revolutionary purposes. And Montaigne is writing, you know, in this context of saying it was just something his friend had written when he was very young and that he would have disapproved of the way it was being used to argue for revolution, and that both he and his friend believed in obedience to the laws under which they were born, and so on. And it reminds me, you know, if you remember episode I did a few ago on Agisilaus, the

King of Sparta, from Plutarch, if I may repeat, Lysander, one of most famous Spartans in general, one of the unusual Heart of Darkness men of antiquity, I will do Man of Power episode on Lysander soon, movie should be made about him. He won Peloponnesian war for Sparta. And then in the cities that he liberated from Athens, Athens had become quite imperious and oppressive, but in these cities liberated from the Athenian empire, he became in some of them the first Greek to be worshipped as a god and the first living man to be worshipped as a god. And Agisilaus, the young king, had been his friend and also his lover, which by the way, I should address now in talking of such matters as ancient friendship revived, I have to address

this because Montaigne condemns this practice saying that our manners and morals rightly forbid Greek love and he goes through explaining excuse the tangent but yes it's somewhat elephant in the room even for Montaigne and certainly for any of us talking this today I talk this now so you must understand Montaigne essay not about anything so called gay okay not even in code or such which gays like to appropriate any example of close male historical friendship whether it's this essay or Lincoln or whatever because I think I remember Andrew Sullivan the mega gay the oh-so-precious conservative pundit I think I forget if this was his take but I think he was trying to interpret Montaigne essay in a gay manner I could be wrong but that's a big mistake so

Montaigne spent some paragraphs explaining how Greek homosexual love although it was so central to their culture and education but is rightly condemned by modern customs he doesn't fully go into why but he does mention that it mixed friendship with all kinds of extraneous things such as lust or the desire for advancement in career leading to confusion and that its only advantage was at best it would foster a kind of non-sexual friendship anyway so I guess he allows if you remember begins his career in Asia essentially plan a a spartan-led panhellenic conquest of asia and the persian empire some decades before alexander but he starts it really by mistreating his mentor and his lifelong friend lysander betraying him even publicly humiliating him to get lysander to leave so that agassilaus

would get all the credit for the expedition and one of the things he was planning to do to degrade lysander's reputation especially after lysander's death was even though this had been his close friend, but he was going to publish widely a treatise that Lysander had written. It was a revolutionary tract which Lysander had intended to read before the people of Sparta essentially announcing regime change revolution, and he was dissuaded from doing so but the efforts to let him know if you do that, this is too revolutionary a text, you can't publish it even to this credit, Lysander. So I'm not saying there is any special deep significance, but it's a nice historical echo where here you have Montaigne praising his lifelong friend and defending him because

a revolutionary text that his friend had written had become now public and was being used for agitation versus Agassiz Laus who continued betrayal and war on his friend out of envy for his glory, and tried to publicize his secret revolutionary manifesto to discredit him. And I suppose the only sure thing you can take from what I'm telling you is that this is purpose of friendship in the way Montaigne means it in this essay, in the true sense of friendship. It's not, you know, oh yes, knock down the brewski after work and chill out man and this kind of... I'm sorry, but that kind of thing is tedious, it makes me sick, I don't like this. The purpose of true friendship is the planning of conspiracies and great political ventures like this, or great philosophical scientific ventures, or

exploration of new worlds and many such things that you are supposed to do with your true friend who you can trust with your life. And I don't think that's true of a thing that people do with someone they drink and so on. I don't know, just drink casually, I mean I don't know that any of you have ever had such a friend. I would bet almost surely not. Montaigne himself says that he realizes how rare is such friendship in an especially beautiful passage I will read for you now. But realizing how far removed from common practice is such a friendship, and how rare it is, I do not expect to find one good judge of it, for the very writings which antiquity have left us on this subject seem weak to me compared to what I feel.

In this case the very precepts of philosophy are surpassed by the results. While I am in my right mind, there is nothing I will compare with a delightful friend. In antiquity, Menander pronounced a man to be happy if he had merely encountered the shadow of a friend. He was certainly right to say so, especially if he had actually tasted friendship. For in truth, if I compare all the rest of my life, although by the grace of God I have lived it sweetly and easily, exempt, say for the death of such a friend, from grievous affliction in full tranquillity of mind, contenting myself with the natural endowments which I was born with, and not going about looking for others. If I compare it, I say, to those four years which it was vouchsafed to me to enjoy in

the sweet companionship and fellowship of a man like that, it is but smoke and ashes, a night dark and dreary. So yes, I at least have not witnessed almost anyone to have such a friend. And think also, however, of the great difference of Montaigne time as opposed to ours. He was writing in an age when men could still be frankly friends. It was not yet even courtier, absolute monarchy time where the aristocracy had been reduced to an appendage of the court. They were still the remnants of a feudal military aristocracy with feudal Germanic rights of friendship and loyalty, and even he is saying this, how rare true friendship is in his time. It's so much rarer in ours to the point of being non-existent, to the point where an

essay like what he wrote in ours would be considered maybe even highly weird and pathological or gay or something like that, you know. But this would be a friend who you can call upon as you would on yourself, you know, the to bury a body? Can you call someone to bury a body in the middle of the night? Can you call someone if someone kidnaps your daughter as happened to this man who is publicizing it now to the world on Twitter? Maybe it will work out for him if he manages to raise up political pressure and mass anger, but I doubt it. In a former age, I'm not endorsing anything, But in a former age, a judge would not feel okay doing that, giving a crazy ex-wife your son so she could castrate him, because he would be rightly afraid that a man had four or five friends,

or in some cases 50 friends, and would come to his house and burn it down. And I'm sorry, I'm not endorsing anything, but as long as these kinds of modern governments act, their agents act with impunity, because they know every individual is an atom without friends to do this kind of thing. But anyway, Montaigne gives another example of this from the life of another man of power I covered on this show, Tiberius Gracchus. This is the ancient Trump, Tiberius Gracchus and his close friend, the philosopher Blosius, who encouraged Gracchus to take on the corruption of the Roman Senate and oligarchy that was flooding Rome with migrants, impoverishing and disenfranchising the middle classes through this kind of actually demographic warfare just as now.

And of this famous friendship, Montaigne says, in the presence of the Roman consuls who after the condemnation of Tiberius Gracchus were prosecuting those who had been in his confidence, Lelius eventually asked Caius Blosius, the closest friend of Gracchus, how much you'd have done for him. He replied, anything. What anything? Lelius continues, and what if he had ordered you to set fire to our temples? He would have never asked me to, retorted Blosius. But supposing he had, Lelius added, then I would have obeyed, he replied. Now if he really were so perfect a friend of Gracchus as history asserts, he had no business provoking the consuls with that last rash assertion, and ought never to have abandoned the certainty he had of the wishes of Gracchus.

But those who condemn his reply as seditious do not fully understand the mystery of friendship. and failed to accept the premise that he had Gracchus' intentions in the pocket of his sleeve, both by his influence and by his knowledge. They were more friends than citizens, friends more than friends or foes of their country or friends of ambition and civil strife. Having completely committed themselves to each other, they each completely held the reins of each other's desires. Grant and despair were guided by virtue and led by reason, without which it is impossible to harness them together. Blossius' reply is what it should have been. If their actions broke the traces, then they were a constant to do so because I do not doubt what my will is any more than I doubt the will of such a friend.

All the arguments in the world have no power to dislodge me from the certainty which I have of the intentions and decisions of my friend. Not one of his actions could be set before me, no matter what it looked like, without my immediately discovering its motive. Our souls were yoked together in such unity and contemplated each other with so ardent an affection, and with the same affection revealed each to each other right down to the very entrails, that not only did I know his mind as well as I knew my own, but I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself. Let nobody place those other common friendships in the same rank as this." And then Montaigne goes on to warn that actually most so-called friendships are just acquaintanceships

and you have to be somewhat on your guard, which, you know, me being naïve, I get continually betrayed. I hope always for a closer bond than can normally exist in today's time. But when he say they were friends more than citizen friends and such and more than friends to their country. See, that truly rare and that real friendship, this very valuable, I don't know if it can exist today. It must exist today, especially because citizenship and the law and the groups that exist now are so unworthy of loyalty. And yet, you are constantly told that to put a personal relationship, I'm not talking about family or such. but to put friend relationship above the law or above requirements of country and such,

you are told it's seditious or it's low trust behavior, it's Sicilian mafia behavior, whatever. It is the most needful thing today and also the most rare and impossible in our time, even more so than much more rare today than it was in Montaigne time. But yes, I do ask if you have ever had such friendship and I do think some of the greatest things in history, and especially political undertakings and great feats like voyages were only possible with men sharing such friendships. I almost did, I've always tried in any case to find it, but it's exceedingly difficult, and for the brief time I thought I had such friends, it's a very happy thing because as Montaigne goes through essays showing, all the other bonds that are important in life are actually much less than this.

The bonds of family are actually significantly less. Mother and son, for example, have too many duties to each other to be friends. Brothers are not necessarily well suited to each other either. Passion or sexual love with a woman is very different. Marriage to a woman is very different also and precludes friendship. One thing Montaigne is absolutely right about is that all the ancient schools considered the idea of friendship with a woman to be impossible. And I think he and Nietzsche and other modern deep thinkers on friendship agree. You can't, you just cannot expect a woman to be friends with you. And this is maybe hardest thing for modern men to hear, because this kind of friendship is first of all put under suspicion that it must be something gay, which has been this

vile age of ours, this vile womanly age of ours, its greatest achievement to preserve its own continuation and power is to smear such bonds as gay. And please understand that what I'm talking about is the definition of so-called atomization that you hear so much about, especially from dissidents and conservatives. The sundering of man that makes him a powerless unit individual. Having a family and a woman does not make you not atomized. In classical terms, it's again the definition of atomized, an ideotes, a private, a strictly private domestic man living asunder from other men with his women and children and not taking part in public life because he doesn't have bonds of friendship to other men and thinkers

like Montaigne and certainly those in antiquity emphasized this bond of friendship and not actually the bonds of family when it came to opposing tyranny. It is friendship not actually necessarily family as such that ancient tyrants were very keen to attack. You see, it's the bonds between friends not so much or what you hear or the community bonds. It's my, I'm going to get my aunt, I'm going to get my cousin to fight with me against this tyrant. generally work like that the family is not historically reliable for resisting tyranny friendships of this kind are were in antiquity were in modern times and always thinkers of liberty and republics with small R always went to this particular thing friendship as the most powerful mean means against tyranny

and authoritarianism but this is the stupidity that I fight against by the away from social conservatives with their feminized language of community. There is no community in the sense of families like this, as if having a collection of women and children, and that leads to a common political purpose. It's not. It's the men who in all ages either have or have not been able to organize, quite aside from their families or their wives, who generally have no role in that. They are a way to hold the men back that the tyrant of whatever type can come and threaten their family, you know So my friend the poster Blasius is quite right that in all real and effective ages the man who was brought under ridicule was the woman man the so-called the man who

Retreated into the bosom of his private life with his wife who lived with women in that sense the hand-pecked husband being the most reasonable part and and then Paris, the kind of soft ladies' man, the sort of party guy who lived with women, that was seen as bad, but actually less reasonable. You know, Homer actually has a passage where he makes Paris look quite magnificent, and it's the one time that he's heading to war for his friends. But it was the henpecked woman man, Ned Flanders, who was always seen as the most laughable man. And now, however, it's reserved in the sense that scorn and mockery is put on men men who would have close friendships of this type with other men. And I say that this, or whatever you want to call it, Zog, whatever, I call it just the low, disgusting,

democratic, normal fag mediocrity of our age. But its greatest achievement in its self-preservation is to have done this to men. Because actually, this kind of friendship, although in its fullness, the way Montaigne describes it, is quite rare and used to be praised and appreciated and admired, envied even by other men when they saw it, by the way, but even if this full type was quite rare, the need for it at a less intense level is a natural need for many men. Not all men, I would say the woman men maybe makes a slight majority of men, but many men feel this as a natural need, the best men, I think, and now as this need is not met as they are told that a woman can fulfill their needs for companionship, and a woman should be everything, should be your everything and so on.

But when that's attempted, it doesn't work, it always fails. So then they're left in this really terrible condition where a natural longing is not at all met. And so generations of the best men, while their lives away in a kind of atomized loneliness, which often they don't even realize this, they get used to it. And I remember most fondly of all the great aspirations I had at rare times with friends, although it never unfortunately was anything like what Montaigne had, but I imagine it must be in antiquity that the great political fraternities and the great voyages of exploration and conquest and foundation were done by organizations made of cells of such friends. And it generally has to be two, and then they can band together in a greater group, but

Generally, each cell is of two, not three or more for reasons that Montaigne explains in this essay. But as an example, you take Tiberius Gracchus, who undertook to try to change Rome with his friend Blosius. And that kind of power and enthusiasm in undertaking such ventures, it reminds me of very rare times I'm telling you, I'll tell you anecdote to make what this means very vivid. I had a schizophrenic friend for a while. I don't know if we were ever particularly close. But the schizophrenia made up for not being close, do you understand what I mean? We were good enough friends, and this man, in his medicated periods, there was not much that I found interesting to talk him, but in periods of manic madness, he wrote letters and other things that to me read as good as any modernist novel.

I mean, just full of insane fire. I was planning to break him out of mental asylum if they put him there, but... And then there's also my friend Owen, the most popular man on Afro introductions and most famous playboy in Nairobi. And he too is a medicated, unfortunately, schizophrenic. But when he's on his schizophrenic game and off his meds, to me that's such a rush to talk to him because it's just divine madness. I laugh with a maniacal abandon when he speaks, not at him, right, but the things he says with him. I wish one day I could bring him on the show. I wasted the whole night recently. I was Hong Kong is in phone with him trying to interview him. I got nothing. Why? Because his bitch nurse was there and he has this bitch nurse and he was medicated and

just it was very dull is just very dull. I think I have the audio but I'll delete it. I have to find him when he's alone and off his meds. But anyway I had a closer friend than Owen a while back and when he was in his manic schizo phrase and talking to him was such a rush because we were speaking about philosophical wild ideas, what means Heidegger at the end of the history of philosophy, what means the emanation or appearance of philosophers in history and the relationship of that to perpetuation of truth in the world and we were mixing it with insane plans, also plans of attack, okay, and at one point he started to hint, this is a religious man, he knew my beliefs, this was not a problem between us, we had many good conversations of that, he was genuine

traditionalist Catholic like Montaigne okay but but insane so at one point he starts to tell me that he had and I think he was attending SSPX Church but he started to hint he was a return of Jesus to his priest okay because he was an actual schizophrenic and then he crashed and we fell out out of touch for other reasons it doesn't matter but I will not say more than this I do not want to be indiscreet and I don't think he can be identified from anything I've said, but why am I saying it? Because although I never had a friend like Montaigne did, not quite, I kind of did when I was 16 and such, but this madness I'm talking about of great achievement, I'm telling you, even though I was not necessarily very close with this

other schizophrenic friend, when I talked to him in his mania and when I talked to Owen when he was an inspired schizophrenia, I feel, you know, I feel what that friendship that that Montaigne talked about must be like. I feel inspired that I could do anything with such energy. I could, yes, I can see what Tiberius, Gracchus, and Blasius felt, that their common bond was enough to change the Roman Empire. It was a republic at that time, whatever. And your mind, okay, is this what I'm saying? Your mind, your spirit starts to fixate on very high longings, very high designs and plans, and nothing seems outside your reach. And even though, again, I only managed to experience this when talking to schizophrenics, or at times in my own half-schizo enthusiasms when I was alone,

but imagine that feeling sustained in a partnership of blood and destruction with a close friend, and you are both rational and clear-minded, and not schizo, and you start to understand why men on this small, jutting peninsula coming out of Asia have been embarking on great voyages of exploration, both great ships on ocean and voyages of the mind since Greek antiquity, and I think it's because of this bond of friendship that makes them escape the turgid rule of olds and faggots and women, that this bond of friendship that Montaigne describes may be even better than Plato describes it, but I think you start to see how it's the engine of so many great ventures. So I'm sorry to end this on maybe something I've said at times before.

episode, I will talk in some detail several of Montaigne's essays and many of his thoughts on how he resurrects some very ancient ideas like the distinction between nature and convention and how he manages to call people clothes most for wearing clothes and so on. But maybe such exhortation to friendship is much more necessary in our time than it was in Montaigne's when great things were still happening and men could still form buns, right, manor buns to affect great change in the world. But in ours, we are made completely powerless by this and if I could tell even a few people to seek and want and to become great friends ignoring the Ned Flanders and the chatter and the Clothmose and the geriatric old trunes telling you to grow up and to live under the

warm fat thigh of a ham beast, in domestic retardation, who seek to mire you in a swamp of dull disillusionment, it is only with spirit of Montaigne described here in essay or with voyage spirit that Pindar attributes to the great friendships that form the Jason's crew on the voyage of the Argo, as only in such things will great life of the world be reborn. Well until next time I will talk more calm show episode Montaigne next time, until then bat out!