Yes, if you look at this man's Montaigne and who he was, a French lord of a castle, medieval times, Renaissance, whatever, mayor of Bordeaux, connected to the French court in person politically, a defender of the privileges of the French monarchy before even the king was absolute. This was in the 1500s. There were going to be further wars and conflicts in the 1600s before the famous French absolute the monarchy developed, defender also of the interests of the church and of Catholic orthodoxy, of the mainline doxies against heretics and schisms. You might think, well, the whole of his thought must be by the genealogical reasoning employed by most scholars today, most leftists and most also dissident internet researchers,

The whole of his thought must be in interest of his background, of the interests of his class, of his people, race, gender, ethnic group, whatever. And yet if you actually look at what his essays is, extreme radical, very different from all of this. And I think he himself in person was against extremism of whatever kind and for moderation because he had lived through basically religious civil war and saw what fanaticism does and very much against that on all sides. But in thought, he extreme radical and it's not even as if, oh, look, it's hidden, it's not really hidden, it's very much on surface, as you will see on this episode. I think maybe he really did conceive himself as a reborn ancient Greek philosopher and therefore more at home in ancient Athens

or ancient Sicily than in medieval France where he lived. I think Nietzsche corrects that he, along with some, quite a few other thinkers of this time, were unbroken chain with antiquity. And your mind can be free in pursuit of truth, I think ultimately not bound to whatever people say now. You have to be, oh, everything he says defense of his people, everything he says defense of his class. It's an outgrowth of a kind of Marxism. I think also when you look at what it takes to get beyond prejudice, many scholars today even that I've met never did get beyond that. Their minds probably are mired in these kinds of motivations. But in the scheme of things, I don't think it's especially difficult to get past, let's whatever prejudices may come with that kind of background.

It's far harder to get beyond the particularities of your peculiar human condition, let's say, your particular biology, your particular relationship to health, or many other things like that, how that affects your thought. That's much harder, which is why the books of men like Nietzsche and Montaigne and a few others like this are so valuable. you see them do it, and maybe you try to mimic. Of course, it takes great powers of observation to be able to do that. For yourself, it's very hard. For others, it's also hard. When you see someone psychologize another author, it's usually lame and banal. When Nietzsche does it, it's very insightful. For example, he takes Schopenhauer's theory of aesthetics and explains how it is outgrowth of Schopenhauer's extreme, violent sensuality. It is very-

Excuse me, you may hear change in my voice. They have attacked me over the last week, so excuses this on episode. I sound a bit different. But it is interesting that you can take an insight from Schopenhauer, dumb it down a bit, make it more popular, and inevitably, especially if it has to do with something from his aesthetic theories, and not just his thoughts on women, but I've done it with architecture and other things, and you put it online, it inevitably causes a lot of outrage, and you can be guaranteed almost two million views and much spouting of outrage, and it always happens with Schopenhauer especially, not as much with others when you paraphrase other authors, and I wondered why, but I guess it makes sense because if his aesthetic theory is an outgrowth of extreme sensuality,

That contains much charge, much tension, and I think people respond to that, right? It pushes buttons. But anyway, yes, my point is only Montaigne, he, medieval French lord, but really in spirit, he is an ancient philosopher, and from his point of view, a very daring step, because maybe not even the respectable philosophers like the Socratics, Think of him maybe like a reborn ancient hedonist philosopher of the Cyrenaic school, or Epicurean, or Diogenes, a Cynic philosopher, something like that. Something extreme skepticism that melts away every conviction. Very, maybe, unusual for someone like him to adopt that. Why? Because he searched for truth and he believed in this. But anyway, welcome Caribbean Rhythms, episode 180, momentous event, 18 is magical number,

and this is a relaxed episode on French variety essay writer Montaigne. You take Democritus versus Heraclitus, this very nice Montaigne essay, I suggest you start with this. It's in the middle of the first book, it's short, maybe you can read in ten minutes less three pages, It's representative of his style, and the first two pages don't even mention either of these ancient Greek philosophers in the title, so his intentions become quite obscure. It's three books of essays that are casual, addressed to you intimately, that are meandering on unexpected topics. You don't need to start in order, I think. Just read from the titles that please you. Often the titles in this essay will anyway have little to do with the content. You have to let Montaigne guide you where he will.

Often it feels like stream of consciousness. But I'm a fan of this kind of reading just what you like in beginning. I recommend it for start because if you are to understand the book, if you love it, you'll have to re-read it anyway. And if you don't, it doesn't matter. So just start with what you like. And if I can go on tangent, this is advice I would give on, you know, self-education or just reading in general. Many people ask for book recommendations, and this is my 180th episode, Caribbean Rhythms, and I must have recommended, discussed, or mentioned hundreds of books on this show, and some have made compilations. But just because of that, if you want to start, where do you start among hundreds, that would be a too big list.

And also, many of these books on lists about, for example, from my show are just ones that I've mentioned offhand or even to attack. But then there are people who make a sort of self-education mini-course compilation lists of books that are, you know, they say these are the books you should read from antiquity on, often presented chronologically. But that can be very daunting as well, because let's say you see Aristotle Politics, and of course any educated person should read this book. But if you're a very smart 13, 14-year-old, you're starting on your own, or even 25-year-old, and you want to start reading good books for the first time, or any age, but then just just jumping in middle and you're on your own and reading Aristotle politics or such.

By the way, when I say on your own, in a classroom it can even be far worse, the distortions that happen. Reading will always be on your own, maybe if you find one or two very good friends to read with, but otherwise it's on your own. But you are in that condition and you start with Aristotle politics or such, you say, oh it's chronological, it's my duty to read this before, but that can put you to sleep, and it can be difficult, it can even discourage you. Not because the writing is difficult, but you don't maybe have the interest to get through that, so you start with what is of interest to you, I think. Maybe I'll do a list of my own pleasant and exciting books to start with, that one could start from nowhere on his own, principally to wet appetite to read more, you know. Maybe

I do a substack on such lists too soon, entertaining books for a smart 16-year-old, especially in an age of internet where people's attention spans have been exploded. In that case, even I think Plato's Apology of Socrates, many people recommend you start with that, but I think that can also be a difficult thing, although it's in natural language, it's speech to a democratic audience but it can be also a bit boring I think it can disorient and demotivate all of Plato can. There are only a few very small dialogues that may be exciting but something like Herodotus is much better although that too is written in a difficult style and friends have to be encouraged you know it will be hard for the first chapter you tell them for the

first book but by the time you get to the second book on the customs and history of Egypt, you can't put it down. And in general, I was talking to Menacridon IV the other day, and we talk much these days, and he say, and I agree that history is a better thing to tell new readers to start with, especially as I've even met professors, don't get me started on academics. Many of them, before maybe the age of internet, were reading hundreds of books a year, reading in multiple quotation marks. They absorbed nothing. And I've met professors in this or that field who lack basic chronology after decades of supposed reading. And in philosophy, I think, to wet appetite, some short essays are better from men like Montaigne or Schopenhauer, things you like. You say, oh, here's an essay on noise.

I'll read that. To your liking titles are, yes, Schopenhauer's shorter essays are the best ones, appetizers to make you interesting. And then eventually you realize later they're not really appetizers, even the shorter ones. they're the main, they're the maximum in philosophy. These and Nietzsche's similar short essays and other such from men like Lichtenberg and the French moralists. The philosophers Nietzsche mentions on previous episode, I did this, Chamfort, Larouche Foucault, Montaigne, Fontenelle, and others who are even hard to find in print anymore in the Anglo world, but I think this is peak actually of philosophy or even the fragments of Heraclitus because ultimately only so much can be transmitted

by language about the great things and a great treatise, the systematic long philosophical treatise which many people associate with the philosophical form, that is a kind of vain pretense on the part of a philosopher, for example Hegel or such. I think it's a distortion not just of the world but of his own capabilities as a philosopher and the possible meaning of it, of the span of human knowledge. I think the human mind is such it can only catch a glimpse, a part of the truth from this angle, and now from that one, and always including some self-reflection of the kind I mentioned at the beginning of this segment. The human mind, or more in particular the male mind, is capable of great focus and penetration on one point.

But as we are not gods, and even the gods, there are no all-seeing eyes to see things from everywhere simultaneously. But the proletariat of the mind wants ready answers and complete picture and the assurances to one's too-human vanity that comes with all that. And so, therefore, the existence of great, I mean, big, long philosophical treatises that are a waste, in my opinion, and this is why Schopenhauer as educator, an essay by Nietzsche where he prides Schopenhauer's shorter essays above his main work in the and not just as an appetizer, but as culmination of philosophy. And really, I think, much like Montaigne essays that I talk on this episode, is a continuation of very ancient Greek sensibility in philosophical matters, treatises like Hegel's or Heidegger's

or many other such would have been seen as grotesque, I think. And these men are more trying maybe to be founders of religions than philosophers, at least in their function as writers of such long books? Or who do you think they address themselves to? Because you can address yourself to the casual reader in a humorous and provisional way to catch his attention, and then if your aim is for example to address yourself to a powerful mind or this, you don't need to fill in the blanks for them. You don't need to pursue tedious arguments and counting of reasons in speech, but just give them the insight you had, if indeed you had any, and maybe one or two directions for how the insight was reached and how they think in same direction on their own if they want.

And this can be done in one to a few paragraphs. What a point of writing a whole novel about the tedious convolutions of your own thinking. It's a waste that I think comes from vanity. But anyway, I talk many things at once. Democritus and Heraclitus. Yes, listen, this is not book report. I will speak simply the things that please me, inspired by Montaigne Essay, and you go read them for yourself. And I will talk this Democritus and Heraclitus on cannibals, on the custom of wedding clothes, and on certain ancient customs. All these are short essays in the first book. I also like this short essay on the vanity of words. As for this strange essay on Democritus and Heraclitus, after two or so pages of weird meandering where Montaigne makes the point that even in the smallest activities of a

man playing a game or in dining, that much about him is revealed in the small things of life. In the lower functions of life much is revealed, which is in main one of the methods, the thrust of Montaigne's whole work to observe the man, the character of things, even things of much philosophical import, again in small micro-observations regarding dining or playing games, culinary habits, these type is what the essays are about. Here I will read. The soul has her lower functions. Anyone who does not know her in those does not know her thoroughly. And you may perhaps get to know her better when she is ambling along. It is in her loftier sights that the winds of passion batter her about. Besides, she throws herself wholly into every matter, and never treats more than one at a time.

Moreover, she treats it not its way, but her way. Things external to her may have their own weight and dimension, but within, inside us, she gives them such measure as she wills. Death is terrifying to Cicero, desirable to Cato, indifferent to Socrates. Health, consciousness, authority, knowledge, beauty and their opposites doff their garments as they enter the soul and receive new vestments, colored with qualities of her own choosing. Brown or green, light or dark, bitter or sweet, deep or shallow, as it pleases each of the individual souls who have not agreed together on the truth of their practices, rules or ideas. Each soul is queen in her own estate. So let us no longer seek excuses from the external qualities of anything. The responsibility lies within ourselves.

Our good or our bad depends on us alone. So let us make our offertories and our vows to ourselves and not to fortune. She has no power over our behavior. On the contrary, our souls drag fortune in their train and mold her to their own idea. Why shall I not judge Alexander chatting and drinking his fill at his table? Well, and he continues that way, that you may judge a man and his circumstances even by observing him play chess or go to the bathroom or see much about people and how they clean in the bathroom, which he has an essay just about that. And this method, the study of man, or what today we call a kind of anthropology or psychology, I think it can only ever be done by extreme perceptive mans like this, observing the minute and remarking on it.

It's inborn art that can't really be learned. There's no real system or science of the soul. And I will read Schopenhauer on this very matter, because excuse me to read so much on this episode, but it gets to what is so rare and insightful about writers like Montaigne, the macrocosm is the same as the microcosm. And here is from Schopenhauer's essay on philosophy and its method. There is no rational psychology I'm reading now. There is no rational psychology or doctrine of the soul since, as Kant has proved, the soul is a transcended hypostasis, undemonstrated and unwarranted as such. Accordingly, the antithesis of spirit and nature is left to Philistines and Hegelians. Man's essence in itself can be understood only in conjunction with the essence in itself

of all things and thus of nature. Therefore, in the Phaedrus, Plato makes Socrates put the question in a negative sense. Do you believe that it is possible to know the essential nature of the soul in a proper way without knowing the essential nature of the whole universe? Thus microcosm and macrocosm elucidate each other, whereby they prove to be essentially the same. This consideration that is associated with man's inner nature penetrates and permeates the whole of metaphysics in all its parts and cannot again appear separately as psychology. On the other hand, anthropology, a science of experience, can be established but is partly anatomy and physiology, partly mere empirical psychology, that is to say, knowledge of the

moral and intellectual manifestations and peculiarities of the human race, which is drawn from observation as well as knowledge of the variety of individuals in this respect. Yet the most important thing from this is necessarily as empirical material taken up and worked out by the three parts of metaphysics. What still remains, then, calls for fine observation and intelligent interpretation. Indeed, contemplation from a somewhat higher point of view. I mean from that of a certain superiority. It is therefore to be enjoyed only in the works of eminent minds such as those of Theophrastus, Montaigne, La Rushfoucauld, La Bruyere, Helvetius, Chamfort, Addison, Shaftesbury, Shenstone, Lichtenberg and others.

But it is not to be sought or endured in the compendiums of professors of philosophy who have no intellect and therefore hate it." He's talking about what I was just saying and what Montaigne was just saying, the minute observation of human character. the kind of thinker I've always loved, and Schopenhauer himself and Nietzsche follow in this tradition, which is why, you know, they are unacademic, and were it not for Nietzsche's enormous, undeniable influence on many early 20th century artists and thinkers, I think not only would he have been banned because of World War II associations, but maybe even easily banned, easily forgotten, because his style of writing, like Montaigne's, is so So uncongenial to academic dimwits who don't look for insight, they want vain words to

chop and such and write their own treatise and dissertation and so on. Unfortunately, many of the authors I just named, again, are no longer in print, although they are instantly elucidating and entertaining for any smart reader I strong recommend. But this is indeed the value of Montaigne Essays. It's insight that basically irreplaceable and highly dependent on the powers of a man who let's say he could have been writing plays or novels or such, and again you see Shakespeare as a kind of Montaigne who chose to write live-action plays instead of essays. And I want just to read the end of Montaigne's essay on Democritus and Heraclitus because short and snappy and reveals much again not only about his intention and method but about

But what you can expect in general from reading his essays, the tone I mean, the kind of content which is a kind of dark humor, you know, dark, acerbic, French humor. You'll note Schopenhauer's list of authors is quite a lot like Nietzsche's list that I read on the last episode. It's these kind of French humor, cynical authors, philosophy as cynical, dark comedy, you know. The theme is all these authors I named maybe is human vanity, hypocrisy. hypocrisy. They are quite skeptical, cynical about the pompous, self-important humans. They never stop laughing at them, which is something that continues in favorite French novelists like Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant, just acerbic humor, a keen observation of human vanity and pathology. And so here I read, though, from Montaigne, the very end

of his Democritus and Heraclitus essay. Actually, he does not mention them except at the end, I'm reading for you now. Democritus and Heraclitus were both philosophers. The former, finding our human circumstances so vain and ridiculous, never went out without a laughing and mocking look on his face. Heraclitus, feeling pity and compassion for these same circumstances of ours, wore an expression which was always sad, his eyes full of tears. One wherever he put foot over his doorstep was laughing, the other, on the contrary, wept. We prefer the former temperament, not because it is more agreeable to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful and condemns us men more than the other. And it seems to me that, according to our deserts, we can never be despised enough.

Lamentation and compassion are mingled with some respect for the things we are lamenting. The things which we mock at are judged to be worthless. I do not think that there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity. not so much wicked as daft, we are not so much full of evil as of inanity, we are not so much pitiful as despicable. Thus Diogenes, who frittered about all on his own, trundling his barrel and cocking a snook at Alexander, counting us as no more than flies or bags of wind, was a sharper and harsher judge, and consequently for my temperament a juster one than Timon, who was surnamed the misanthropist. For what we hate we take to heart. Timon wished us harm, passionately desired our downfall, fled our company as dangerous as that of evil men whose nature was depraved.

If you remember on previous episode when I discussed Alcibiades, Timon was the guy who he saw Alcibiades in the middle of a throng in Athens and he said, you my dear will be the destruction of all this mob and he was known as Timon the misanthrope. I continue. Diogenes, on the other hand, thought us worth so little that contact with us could neither trouble him nor corrupt him. He avoided our company, not from fear of associating with us, but from contempt. He thought us incapable of doing good or evil. Statilius' reply was of a similar character when Brutus spoke to him about joining in on their plot against Caesar. He thought the enterprise to be just, but did not find that men were worth taking any trouble over.

Which is in conformity with the teachings of Hegesias, who said the wise man should do nothing except for himself, since he alone is worth doing anything for. teaching of Theodoros, that it is unjust that the wise man should hazard his life for the good of his country, so risking his wisdom for fools. Our own specific property is to be equally laughable and able to laugh. Well, I stop reading and I'll note for you that in that brief paragraph at the very end where he mentions Hegesias, I believe that's a Cyrenaic, hedonist philosopher, you see kind of extreme radical point that you might find many maybe modern anarchist author and Montaigne says it not only without condemning it but you get the sense from this essay that that is probably what he believes that you have

or not you but a wise man let's say has no actual duties to country or Lord or sovereign or religion what do you think about that from this man and this is clue I think also to kind of Greek philosopher Montaigne is. Nietzsche says rightly again that Montaigne would have been readily recognized as kindred spirit among generally the Greek philosophers appreciated by them or a Greek audience. It's a classical Athens or Hellenistic even he looked up to in terms of his French wit maybe which quality that Greeks admired but were not so good at themselves. But you see that he's in tradition of Democritus, of Aristippus or Diogenes the Cynic, in terms of morality, at least, maybe. So I think he's actually wrong about Heraclitus in this essay, but that's okay. He's using Heraclitus as a foil,

but I don't think Heraclitus himself would disagree with anything from this essay I just read. But look, who was Democritus, this man Montaigne mentioned? He's known today as originator of atomist theory, and both he and Epicurus promoted this kind of, Actually, it's an extremely skeptical type of materialism, atomistic materialism. In distinction to modern atomism, it didn't conceive of use of physical mathematics, or at least not yet. It didn't apply physical, mathematic model to the natural world. If you read certain other later Epicureans like Lucretius on the nature of things famous, he introduced Epicurean thought to the Romans. But he talk about the motion of atoms, these foundational particles, these philosophical school believed in, but they believed that

the motion of these atoms was random enough that maybe they sought any application of reason to that world of chance and randomness, not to speak of predictive mathematical models. They may have thought that was useless. That's despite the fact that in practice many were known to have been mathematicians of sorts, including Democritus, who is credited with certain discoveries in geometry, I forget but certain basic proofs attributed to discoveries, attributed to Democritus. So you see maybe how atomism, ancient atomism, leads to skeptical, extreme skeptical attitude toward the world, most certainly a denial of any static divine moral order. And this was felt by other philosophers so much in antiquity that Plato, and this may be not true story, but it was told in antiquity,

traditions spread about this, that Plato tried to have all of Democritus' books burned. He tried to burn this idea, this doctrine of atomism. He felt this materialist atomist doctrine would undermine the kind of universal moral order that he and his school, the Platonists, the academics, as reformers and maybe even founders of a new religion, the moral world order that they were trying to contrive. And this struggle between the Platonist and Epicurean schools continued through the end of antiquity, they were very passionate about the different philosophical schools at the end of the classical world were fighting physically in the streets, the students from, you know, imagine students of modern universities fighting each other, but they were doing it over,

you know, autistic philosophical disagreements about the nature of the world or morality and such. And today, for the most part, antiquity is invoked for, unfortunately, for moral edification, not only by internet posters, you know, the kind they put statue avatar and they invoke ideas of Socratic or Aristotelian moralisms or, oh, I'm a Stoic, but also notable thinkers, you think, or writers, you know, like scholars like Alistair MacIntyre, very famous moral philosopher so-called today. He sees in Aristotle and antiquity a different form of ethics that he can bring back. He's not the only one. There are many others, and there are the Thomists, the Catholic moral philosophers in general. They seek something similar. I'm saying many, both among academics

and sort of popular writers, they look back for moral rectitude, moral certainty. But it's always been known that there's a long counter-tradition in antiquity of skepticism, total skepticism, Pyrrhonism, skepticism about morality, about society, about political life, the nature of the universe, and not just skepticism as in the Epicurean tradition or a Pyronist, but even at times active, radical, militant, violent antinomianism. That's my own special fascination in men like Critias and others who happen to have been quite adjacent to Socrates himself. Some were also academics later. It's a complicated story, but I'm saying there is this counter-tradition of antinomianism, skepticism, radical skepticism, and Montaigne comes out of this, this rival philosophical ancient tradition.

One of Democritus and Epicurus, who saw the Platonists as tyrants' lixpitals, kind of toadies to authority. They sucked up to authority, to kings and tyrants, to curry favor with them, pompous actors and posers who present a vision of life, of knowledge, of politics. I'm talking about the Epicureans now. Their vision is very cynical, very skeptical, very laughing, and they laugh at these others as puffed up, full of themselves, cagliostro actors, you know? But I wonder if it is possible to have a laughing philosophy, not in distinction to a crying one, but to a constipated modern one. And I think this, what I said just now, is what you are to expect reading Montaigne. Philosophy in the form of humor and biting satire, Diogenes-type cynicism.

Although at times, like when in his essay on Friend, it can be very touching and intimate, but most of all, it is a cynical satire philosophy. I will be right back to discuss On the Cannibals. You read Shakespeare the Tempest, or I suppose watch it. I can't really watch theater Shakespeare. It feels too weird for actors now to pretend to be, and many can't think outside of a kind of modern, casual way of talking and acting, so it's quite disgusting sometimes. But anyway, in act two, scene one of Tempest, there is man's character, Gonzalo, who gives a speech about an ideal commonwealth which is lifted almost word for word from Montaigne's essay on the cannibals, which is Montaigne's famous essay on the customs and life of the Tupi natives of what is now Brazil. It's interesting.

The French colonized the Rio de Janeiro area for a while. They still love to go there. They like this city, I think, for various debauchery memories they may have from the 1500s, racial memories of colonization of this part of the Americas. They come seeking, as then, the purity of Tupi pussy, although now also mulatta mistresses and such, and many other things, too. Maybe I mistake the time the French were there. Maybe it was not the 1500s. But they were. The Dutch were there too. It's funny. For Brazil's 500th anniversary, there was an article in one of its leading newspaper. The journalist lamented it was not the Dutch who colonized the land, and instead it was the Portuguese bringing with them their Mediterranean centuries of stagnation and corruption.

Brazil, the country of the future, and which will always be the country of the future. That goes the joke. I'm exaggerating, but yes, here is Montaigne talking about Brazil before the fact, that land at least, the country of the future. By the way, quick tangent before I forget. I mentioned mulattas now being present. Of course, why are blacks present in the New World? Because both in North America and South and Caribbean, they were imported to be slaves. But why were they imported to be slaves? There were already natives there. Why weren't the natives used as slaves? They tried to use the natives as slaves, and the natives couldn't take it. They could not take life of servitude. They preferred death to that. Many fought viciously. And I am against, in general, this

POC label, I think it speaks to kind of, excuse me, especially on the part of others, it speaks to a kind of low self-esteem to lump yourself in as POC, as some undifferentiated beige brown black mass against the white man. There are so many variations within that and some peoples are good for slavery, I'm sorry to say that, but good in the sense that they take it, and they take it for a long time, and they even prosper under it, and then others immediately refuse and will not do it and will die under it. That's a huge difference, and I respect the latter. They prefer death to servitude. And I think a big reason why this striking essay by Montaigne, that I will talk now, a big reason why it's not more talked about, although Montaigne makes points that would

be maybe even welcome to libtards. But the reason why is this very stark difference between what he's describing here, the New World Indians in particular, these forest cannibal in the South Brazil area, versus the behavior of the blacks, which everyone knows, which were very different and very embarrassing difference, I think. But anyway, I continue to read, yes, from Montaigne. Well, actually, Brazil, the country that will always be the country of the future. But yes, in this essay Montaigne talks about the discovery of the New World. He reports what he hears from travelers. The beauty of it, again, is that it's in the Greek frame of mind. So if you like ancient literature, you think what it would be like if one of them was reborn and was encountering the New World natives.

would it be like if a Greek ship had landed in Pernambuco to see, you know, he laments that Lycurgus and Plato and others aren't around, sensitive men who could wander at, who could deduce from this discovery of a people living in a state of nature and primitive innocence. So you could almost think, yes, okay, Montaigne is roleplaying an ancient Greek in place of them that disappeared, but there's nothing wrong with that. Roleplaying is good if he inhabits the mind of antiquity well. I think Montaigne does, but again, not the mind of Plato or like Kyrgyz, but of certain other philosophers he doesn't mention in this, you know. So to discuss basically this utopia vision of the Americas where, okay, now I will read for you the words of Gonzalo in Shakespeare, the Tempest now.

In the commonwealth I would by contraries execute all things for no kind of traffic would I admit. By traffic he means commerce, you know, market commerce. No kind of traffic could I admit in this commonwealth, no name of magistrate. Letters should not be known. Riches, poverty, and use of service none. Contract, succession, born, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none. No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil, no occupation. All men idle, all, and women too, but innocent and pure, no sovereignty. All things in common nature should produce without sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony, sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine would I not have? But nature should bring forth of its own kind all poison, all abundance, to feed my innocent people."

Well, he deviates somewhat from Montaigne's description of the cannibal Indians, who in Montaigne's telling they're actually a very warlike race, but otherwise in the first part of what I just read it's almost word for word lifted from Montaigne's essay on cannibals. image of American native life I think is one of signature utopian fantasies of state of nature which he mostly invents not maybe I say maybe 70% I guess is invention of Montaigne's he makes up a very unlikely story that he has these reports from a traveler who is trustworthy because he's too simple-minded you know too simple-minded to make up things but even so he claims Montaigne claims things that he couldn't have ever known and I think although Montaigne makes up this story about the lack of corruption among the natives of

the New World for much the same reason Tacitus exaggerates regarding the brilliance and purity of the customs of the ancient Germans who were also warlike and uncorrupted race living deep in the forest and it's to contrast them to the corrupt mores the corruption of his present day and of our modern age generally. Rome in the case of Tacitus, medieval France, and the modern world in general in the case of Montaigne. But there are many odd things in this essay. Montaigne begin by trying to find ancient mentions possible of the Americas in ancient literature and he considers Atlantis for example and dismisses possibility that Atlantis is the Americas. He say oh it was moved backwards by a flood. He finds this very unlikely. Then he considers a book

book attributed to Aristotle, the Secreta Secretorum, the secret book of secrets, which was supposed to be lessons from Aristotle to Alexander, but it was probably written in Arabic around 900s or 1000 AD, and then was passed to Europe as a supposed text of Aristotle, which spoke of, according to Montaigne, spoke of, among other things, a secret land beyond the Gibraltar in the Atlantic, where the Carthaginians had landed and colonized and that land was so bountiful, it was attracting so many settlers that Carthage had to pass a law forbidding further emigration to that beyond the Gibraltar and the Atlantic. Montaigne dismisses this also as possible mention of the Americas, I'm not sure why though, he just says it's unlikely, but he doesn't say why.

It could be Madeira, it could be Azores Islands, you can say that the Carthaginians discovered, But there's no record of human settlement on any of those islands I just named before the Europeans came. But you may have heard theories that the Phoenicians or Carthaginians, same thing, reached the Americas. I myself believe that the Americas were vaguely known both to late antiquity and at times to modern, I mean to say to Christian and Muslim times, from vague reports of travelers, maybe from books that they had from antiquity that we don't, maybe just speculations and so on. I mean, look, it isn't like people had photography then, right? So even if a few sailors had managed to make it to the—first of all, I believe absolutely

there were sailors who made it to the Americas by accident, you know, shipwrecks and such. Okay, you can dismiss those. They never got back. Who knows what happened to them? They were eaten or they married a nice Latina. There were no Latinas there. They married a nice Mayan woman or something. But even if a few had managed to make it to the Americas or sight some other lands and come back, let's say, in a sorry state, it's not given that people back in the Mediterranean would have believed them or that they had accurate information or evidence about anything. They didn't have photographs, right, or even maps. There wouldn't have been anything more to establish the discovery than some rumors that would have been flying around.

So think about this, how historical facts, so-called, is established in premodern times. It's not so easy. My point is that I don't think Columbus really thought he was departing to discover Asia, though. I think he knew he was discovering new lands, again, just from a collection of vague reports, I would think since antiquity, but certainly they had intensified through the 1400s. I mean, Portuguese sailors were, there is a point where you have to wheel out west into the Atlantic when you circumnavigate Africa. If you just follow the African coast, it'll take you much too long. So when Africa curves to the east, you have to actually wheel out to the west and then come back. It saves you some huge amount of time, or in pre-modern times it did.

So it's very possible that a Portuguese voyage would have sighted land on that westward bounds, and they were notorious for keeping their ocean pathways secret anyway. Why tell others, right? It would have been a trade secret and maybe just some rumors. So in Basques, this is known, had been in Newfoundland wailing for some time since the early 1400s. Now, as for antiquity, I think it's Plutarch also who mentions that Ogygia, an island from the Odyssey, lay five days' sail west of Britain. I don't know where he got that from. I just made it up or got it from somebody, but what was that? Why he say that? But that's an example that Montaigne doesn't mention. Maybe he didn't know of it, or maybe he doesn't mention it for other reasons. I don't know.

But I wonder what that thing was, five days' sail west of Britain. Anyway, after considering and dismissing possible ancient mentions of the New World, Montaigne moves then to very strike a claim that I will read for you now, claims that show this is a persistent concern of his throughout the essays. It's a very typically ancient Greek philosopher's concern, nature versus convention. I'm reading now. Now, to get back to the subject, I find, from what has been told to me, that there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to. It is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country.

There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything. Those savages are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by nature in her ordinary course, whereas it is the fruit which we have artificially perverted and misled from the common order which we ought to call savage. It is in the first kind that we find their true, vigorous, living, most natural and most useful properties and virtues, which we have bastardized in the other kind by merely adapting them to our corrupt tastes. Moreover, there is a delicious savour which even our taste finds excellent in a variety of fruits produced in those countries without cultivation, they rival our own.

It is not sensible that artifice should be reverenced more than nature, our great and powerful mother. We have so overloaded the richness and beauty of her products by her own ingenuity that we have smothered her entirely. Yet wherever her pure light does shine, she wondrously shames our vain and frivolous enterprises. Ivy grows best when left untended, the strawberry tree flourishes more beautifully in lonely grottoes and birds sing the sweeter for their artlessness. All our strivings cannot even manage to reproduce the nest of the smallest little bird, with its beauty and appropriateness to its purpose. We cannot even reproduce the web of the wretched spider. Plato says that all things are produced by nature, fortune, or art, the greatest and

fairest by the first two, the lesser and least perfect by the last. Those peoples then seem to me to be barbarous only in that they have been hardly fashioned by the mind of man, still remaining close neighbors to their original state of nature. They are governed still by the laws of nature, and are only very slightly bastardized by ours. But their purity is such that I am sometimes seized with irritation at their not having been discovered earlier, in times when there were men who could have appreciated them better than we do. It irritates me that neither Lycurgus nor Plato had any knowledge of them, for it seems to me that what experience has taught us about those people surpasses not only all the descriptions

with which poetry has beautifully painted the age of gold and all its ingenious fictions about man's blessed early state, but also the very conceptions and yearnings of philosophy. They could not even imagine a state of nature so simple and so pure as the one we have learned about from experience. They could not even believe that societies of man could be maintained with so little artifice, so little in the way of human solder. I would tell Plato that those people have no trade of any kind, no acquaintance with writing, no knowledge of numbers, no terms for governor or political superior, no practice of subordination or of riches or poverty, no contracts, no inheritances, no divided estates, no occupation but leisure, no concern for kinship, except such as is common to them

all, no clothing, no agriculture, no metals, no use of wine or corn. Among them you hear no words for treachery, lying, cheating, avarice, envy, backbiting or forgiveness. How remote from such perfection would Plato find that republic which he sought up, men fresh from the gods. In addition, they inhabit a land with a most delightful countryside and a temperate climate, so that from what I have been told by my sources it is rare to find anyone ill there. I have been assured that they have never seen a single man bent with age, toothless, bleer-eyed or tottering. They dwell among the seashore, shut in…" Well, I stopped reading there. What do you think of this? He continues to say that they lived in literal longhouses, of all things.

Just a quick aside, he says Plato never imagined such a thing, and it's true if casual readers sees that and thinks of Plato's Republic, the final kind of science fiction sophisticated eugenic science fiction, eugenic republic, military fascist republic that Plato dreams up in that book, but at the beginning of the republic, there is a state that exists very much like what Montaigne describes here, very close to man's natural animal needs without what you'd call corruptions of civilization and so forth, or even corrupted by much custom, maybe. But it is dismissed in Plato's Republic as a republic of pigs. One of Socrates' interlocutor says, this kind of village hippie life you've dreamed up, Socrates, is kind of life fit for pigs, not for humans.

It's not quite the same as what Montaigne describes in this essay, because I think it's very peaceful in Plato's telling, whereas the state Montaigne describes among the Indians is quite warlike, as I'll tell you in a moment. But it's still strange. I have a friend who thinks that in the Plato Republic, where they are seeking justice, they have recourse to constructing these idealized states to see which one embodies justice. He claims that it is this early kind of hippie, Rousseauan republic, not really a republic but really a kind of village life, that most of all embodies the idea of justice. it is abandoned. Some people have said this. It's interesting. Anyway, Montaigne doesn't address that, and I don't know why, but it's maybe because, again, Plato's example

very peaceful, whereas Montaigne wants to, as you will see, emphasize the purifying qualities of war to man's nature. Well, you know, the last description that he stopped with, that He lives along the seashore, shut in by mountains, rising out of the forest near the ocean. That sounds like Rio de Janeiro, the most blessed land on earth. So maybe he was right about everything else, too. He's right about that. But you see, Montaigne concerned here this very characteristic ancient Greek thinking on nature versus convention, nature versus custom, inspired at first by the multiplicity of ways and behavior among many different tribes and peoples, which the ancient Greeks in their curiosity as travelers and so on, they encountered these, they became fascinated.

Remember, at the beginning of the Odyssey itself, one of their Bibles, Odysseus is praised as a man who came to know the ways and customs and things of many cities and peoples. I wonder if this new movie, The Return, will touch on that. I haven't seen it yet. But it's an odd thing, you know, it's unique to the Greeks and then the West. As far as I know, aside from the very rare exceptions, a couple of travelers maybe among medieval Arabs, the signature marker of almost every other people historically, every other people outside the Greco-European world, Greco-Roman European world, is just this total lack of curiosity about the outside world. Our way is the only way, it's the best way. I'm in Japan and it's still how the Japanese think, you know.

I don't know if I pronounce it like Nihon Noriori, you know, it's the Japanese way and Japanese-ness, and they never stop thinking and talking about that, and everybody else outside is a jerk and an idiot. This is just rule among mankind, except for Greek and Greek-influenced world in Europe. So this very distinction between what is nature versus custom, as opposed to simply just again innate disdain for all other customs as benighted jerks, as opposed to your customs, which must of course, be the true and divine and only ones. This distinction is very rare among mankind historically to come even to that. And it's known in our time, I think, but even so it's been mostly abandoned as a model of understanding. I think that's a big mistake that people have abandoned

this distinction for reasons maybe I try to explain brief on this episode or the next. But Montaigne sets up this to address the most shocking practice of all among the Tupi Indians, the practice of cannibalism. He talks about strange customs. Well, the most shocking practice to Europeans would be this, cannibalism. And in this it's odd that he does not mention the most relevant discussion of cannibalism from antiquity that would come immediately to mind, especially in this context of nature versus convention from Herodotus. It's relevant to this talk of, you could think, the supremacy of custom among men. If you read Montaigne, it's just peppered with ancient references, quotations throughout. I haven't been pausing to tell you where he makes

the citations, but some of the phrases I've read so far are in Latin, and he's quoting ancient authors. So it's just peppered throughout his work, allusions to Greek and Roman authors. So if you were to tell me cannibalism discussed by an author concerned with antiquity, me, talking about custom, I can think of two very notable instances of this, also from a connoisseur and wanderer at a variety of human behaviors from Herodotus. He talks, as far as I remember, about cannibalism in two very vivid instances. One, I'll tell you what they are now. One is the Andropagoi, the man-eaters, literally a tribe of Scythians, or they were living around the Scythians, associated with them somehow, north of the Black Sea steppe.

The very brief mention in the middle of a lot of vivid commentary, I'm going to quote for you just a whole paragraph where Herodotus is describing the habits and such of various kinds of Scythians just for local color. This is just fun entertainment episode I want to read for you. I'm reading from Herodotus now. The Agathirsi are the most refined of men and especially given to wearing gold. Their intercourse with women is promiscuous so that they may be consanguine with one another and all being relations not harbor jealousy or animosity toward each other. In the rest of their customs they are like the Thracians. The Neuri follow Cidian customs, but one generation before the advent of Darius' army, one generation

before that, they happened to be driven from their country by snakes, for their land produced great numbers of these, and still more came down on them out of the desolation on the north until at last the Neuri were so afflicted that they left their own country and lived among the Budini. It may be that these people are wizards, for the Scythians and the Greeks settled in Scythia say that once a year every one of the Neuri becomes a wolf for a few days and changes back again to their former shape. Those who tell this tale do not convince me, but they tell it nonetheless and they swear to its truth. The man-eaters, the Andropagoi, are the most savage of all men in their way of life. They know no justice and obey no law.

They are nomads, wearing a costume like the Scythian, but speaking a language of their own. Of all these, they are the only people that eat men. The black cloaks all wear black clothing from which they get their name. Their customs are Scythian. The Budini, on the other hand, are a great and populous nation. The eyes of them all are very bright and they are ruddy. They have a city built of wood called Gelonos. Anyway, Herodotus goes on like that to explain how the Gelonians are a branch of Scythians that had mixed with Greek colonists. But anyway, I read this in part to show you this is tradition of curiosity about customs that Montaigne is writing in. And regarding the man-eaters, Herodotus' words are very strong and a bit unusual. It's rare to find such strong…

They have etheia, he says, ways or characters that are agriotata, the wildest and most savage among all that is known. And then he adds that they acknowledge neither justice nor nomoi, no customs and no laws. He remarks that they're the only cannibals among the people being discussed, as you just saw. So now Montaigne refers to, I think this in his essay, he says that among the Scythians, cannibalism was practiced for food, whereas among the New World tupis, who he describes in much the same way as Herodotus describes the man-eaters, but positive, but he says among the New World two-piece, it's not done for food, cannibalism is done out of revenge, which, as you'll see, he thinks that's a positive thing. I'll tell you why in a moment, but now maybe he's using another source

about the ancient Scythians, I don't know, but you heard what Herodotus just said, and he doesn't say that at all. He doesn't say that it's about food, so I don't know. So why he say that? So the second mention of cannibalism in Herodotus, which would have again been very relevant to Montaigne discussion and his concerns more generally, is where Herodotus quotes Pindar to say that custom is king among men. It's an episode, many have discussed it, I've mentioned before on this show, where the Persian king invited the Greeks, a tribe of Greeks and a tribe of Indians, a city of Greek, you know, from one Greek city under his rule, and from Indians under his rule, And he asked each of them how they disposed of their dead parents, and the Greeks cremated them,

and the Indian tribe ate their dead parents. The Persian king then asked each of them, you know, how they would react to the other's ways. And they asked, would you do the same? And both the Greeks and the Indians reacted with horror and disgust. Horror and disgust, they said, we would rather die than do what they do. And Herodotus says that, yes, this is it. These are men ruled by custom. Custom is king among men, determining everything. So you think what a strange animal is, the human. If you see it this way, you observe animals and they act by nature. By inborn nature, they know many things and act in a particular way. They will continue to do so if you move them to other lands. But men act differently in each place, and it is this weird thing, custom,

that gets them to behave so differently from one another. And I think no matter how much you attribute to differences in human nature and biology, which you have seen that Montaigne himself refers to this in the selective breeding of fruits and such in civilization, but the Greeks certainly knew about that too. They didn't deny it. In fact, their thinking even about custom is based on that realization. I mean, look, they knew about variety in nature between tribes, not just custom. Aristotle mentions how, for example, he talks of physiological means by which people in very hot climates are stupid and such. But nevertheless, the very great divergence in specific, minute things among different tribes that's obviously not coded by nature, it comes from custom.

I say more on this in a moment, I need a quick... I need... Anyway, I need to take milks and honey break. I froth milk with honey for you in celebration. And then I'll be right back to talk custom and such things. Back, and apparently there is plenty of archaeological evidence to show cannibalism on the Scythian steppe around the time Herodotus claims. I think also will be found evidence of lycanthropy, you know, turning into wolf. I believe this. I mean, literal werewolf, I believe. Although Herodotus himself says he doesn't believe these reports, I think they are true. But the nook, actually, seriously, they were true in the sense even latest Indo-European scholarship from people like David Anthony and others, has found archaeological evidence

of wolf cult on the steppe. So it's very possible that these tribes that, excuse me, this tribe Herodotus was describing were very ancient Indo-European Aryan right of donning wolf or dog skins and terrorizing their neighbors, which even the Spartan youths, I think, the youths of Lycurgus, the wolf worker, periodically declared war on the helots every year in a ritual I think very much similar to what Herodotus is describing on the steppe, and just ancient, very ancient Arian memory of youth wolf cult, and in fact connected in some coincidental way to cannibalism. It's very possible, first of all, that they ate the victims they terrorized. But it is in Plato, actually, in the Republic, where he describes a wolfish man, a tyrant

who turned into a wolf and had a cannibal feast. So I don't think Montaigne has any of this in mind, but my mind wanders, you know. It's all connected, it all fits together. kind of thing. Are you awake? Are you woke yet? So, you know, I won't take detour that tangent to talk some of this for a moment, not the wolf, but what is truly an indisputably universal among mankind versus what is indisputably determined by custom and convention particular to each nation or tribe, because I think much is revealed in this by what Montaigne is saying about the discovery of the New World cannibals and why he thinks they are men of nature, uncorrupted. Schopenhauer believes cannibalism is the purest illustration of the absolute essence of the

world, the will eating itself, consuming itself, in pain and violence. This, I think, what's his name, Werner Herzog has a good Schopenhauerian rumination on this in the jungle. He was shooting some movie. Was it the one in the construction of the opera house in Manaus? I don't know if it's that movie, but he just paraphrases Schopenhauer in this way. Yeah, cannibalism, the purest essence of the world in itself. Do you believe in this? But anyway, what Montaigne means by the New World natives, why does he think they are men of nature, uncorrupted, the cannibals, and what he means in particular by the corruption of a certain kind of custom. I won't talk about that, but I think I go on tangent instead, because argument between

what is universal in man versus particular is much misunderstood on account of this debate, having been subsumed by other more vague concepts that try to obscure the distinction between nature and convention. And then also, on the other hand, the partisans of each side, radical egalitarian universalists on one side, people who say it's all convention or all education, extreme blank slatists. On the other hand, the radical particularist nationalists exaggerating each their own positions rhetorically obscures the tension in this question. You may have seen stupid concept of Lindy, for example, thrown about. Lindy, originating in the mid-wit Nassim Taleb, and then popularized by a plagiarist, sweaty Greek-aloid, I hear. And this concept of Lindy may be, I think, without even

knowing of this debate I'm talking about, it's an attempt to obscure the distinction between nature and convention with a word that means a little bit of each, something vaguely, it means Lindy, it means something normal and old established. It's vaguely like what primitives people think when They refer to the ancestral as the authority. They don't pause to think if that ancestral is a happenstance of accidental custom, or if it has a real natural basis. And I want to emphasize very strong that I do not believe many ancestral customs have any direct utility or benefit in nature. Very often they're arbitrary, they're valued precisely because they're arbitrary and because through their mysteriousness and irrationality, they reinforce a belief in the dignity of

custom as such. Nietzsche mentions an Ainu custom, where it is taboo to wipe snow off a knife on your boot or your lower leg pant or such. And I think many such customs exist, in your face irrational, either to mark a separation between a tribe and its neighbors, or even just simply this kind of human enjoyment of the arbitrary and mad as, again, to reinforce the overall dignity of this is custom you don't understand it you are to fear it and obey it you know it's the the mystery of the ancestral family ghosts haunting you or even for many other reasons that maybe we don't understand yet but what custom i mean brings no immediate or direct benefit no utility but maybe even the opposite and if you want to see compendiums of such obscure customs

the two books i can most recommend are again Herodotus history you know did you know the the Egyptians, the circumcised Egyptians, pee sitting down, including the men. There's only one other nation that Herodotus says are circumcised, and that's the Colchis in the Caucasus, who he says are like the Egyptians, being curly-haired and swarthy and practicing circumcision. And I think he does mention the Syrian, the circumcised Syrians, by which I assume maybe Maybe he means the Jews, although he doesn't discuss them directly, which is very dubious why he does not do that. But anyway, the other book I can recommend is George Frazier's book Golden Bough. But Frazier himself holds to classic English utilitarian understanding of magic and custom.

He explains almost all customs through concept of sympathetic magic. But since we're on cannibalism, Frazier's book is just so full of cannibalism examples that I've read some on this show before, you know. Related to this is to the concept of sympathetic magic is Camille Paglia's correct mention that when we look at old cave paintings, they were not created just for aesthetic enjoyment because they're deep in dark caves. It would have been hard to admire them without candlelight or that torchlight, whatever. They were put there as a request or prayer in the bosom of the earth to beg for the return of game animals for the hunt and food. And this is a very Frasier-type insight. This is how primitive men think, sympathetic magic. Are they correct? Do you believe this?

Such primitive thoughts are returning now to where world leaders are expected to turn away the tides, to change world temperature, to change apocalypse climate and such. There was a movie about world ice age, if you remember, with Jake Gyllenhaal. I think it was called The Day After Tomorrow, where a nasty speech by Dick Cheney calls a World Ice Age to immediately come about. You know, the gods are angry, that kind of thing. Look, anyway, I like tangents. But when you look at the variety of human custom, you see so much variation in burial rites, in sexual practices, in marriage, in foods. Puglia, again, has a beautiful takedown of a queer theorist. The queer theorist makes the usual hackneyed point that, well, he claims ancient peoples and the Greeks in particular

did not categorize people morally or otherwise by sexual practices or impulse, any more than they would do so by food or culinary practices, she claims. And this is absurd, obviously absurd to do that. You know the argument, why would you care if somebody eats broccoli or fucks a man or that? You've heard this before, they like to, but she points out, you know Mr. Classicist, you as a classicist and supposed historian of that time, you might have heard of the extent which all Mediterranean peoples did actually often obsessively categorize and distinguish people by their food styles and culinary habits. It's often mentioned even in the Herodotus thing I said, but it's in the Odyssey. It's also very strongly in the Bible dummy, but that's hardly unique. It's everywhere.

So if you look at what's universal among mankind, that's very interesting. What is indisputably universal? The number of vertebrae in the spine, such things, the number of bones in hand, fingers and toes, such things are natural to men universally. I don't mention genetics, you know, because that you need to know about, you need tests. You can't see genetics, but you can. I'm talking about what's readily apparent to all men immediately. You can just tell someone who's never heard of genetics the things I'm saying, you know. All men also go to the bathroom. In what way they do it, there's some variation, but they have to. So the bowel movements are universal in a way. You might think that various peoples around the world, when the Europeans first arrived

on big ships, they thought the Europeans were gods, that the Aztecs did. But maybe you know, after a few days of seeing them shit just like you do, maybe you come to your senses. I don't know. But there are, after all, myths that some god defecated on valleys and made them fertile. Some peoples have myths like this. gods do defecate. The Japanese have this in, I think it's in the Kojiki, the ancient chronicles, which makes sense. They're god shit all over the valley and that's why we can grow crops. They have a fascination about this. If you see Japanese businessmen on train at night and they're reading a hardcore sadomasochistic magazine in full open as there are women and children around. But beyond these very basic biological processes, it's very hard to come

up with true universals, but when it's more interesting, I mean, in the higher registers of man's mind, his behavior, that's very hard to come up with true universals. Is it the case, for example, that all nations condemn murder? You hear this said, you know, condemnation of banning murder, a universal natural law. You can claim this, but the, excuse me, they do this to my mouth while I talk. The definition of murder then becomes so broad, the variation in how different peoples treat this, it's so great, it becomes almost meaningless to say, oh murder, banning murder is a universal natural law among men, you know. The Jews are a universalist people from their beginnings, I believe, and they've always liked to claim that the Noahide laws are

universal for all mankind, and therefore implicitly natural, although they don't use this word. But you know, one of these Noahide laws is that you can't eat blood, I think, and I won't give up delicious Asturian blood sausage cured blood sausage and bean stew. And I also enjoy the kind of spicy Taiwanese hot pot with congealed pork blood, tofu, pork intestine, and pickles in a kind of spicy broth on fire. Okay, it's very good in cold weather. Cold weather food. I hungry. I think that dish should make me recover now. I will not give that up. Anyway, what could you say is universal among men that's at the level of the intellect or of social life or political life where it's interesting. I'll say this, I think men's political nature is something both universal

and high content having to do with high IQ, higher functions and more interesting behavior. His political behavior, let's say that's universal. I'm not saying specific political behavior like political structures, right? I'm not saying specific political structures or forms of state or even having a state. That's a kind of perversion of the view I'm talking about. That's, for example, you can say, oh, all peoples yearn for freedom or can live well under a liberal democracy or a democracy of some kind or a socialist Marxist regime or anything else along that line of thinking, even on the opposite side. I'm not saying anything like that, by the way, although I I do think you can make a relative strong case for monarchical instinct in man, about

as strong as the wolfish monarchical instinct, but certainly not as strong as ants or bees. But that's not what I'm saying, that political structures of some type are universal. I'm saying political behavior that's readily recognizable in any other people at any other time. You know, for example, Game of Thrones-type behavior. The reditoid who wrote Game of Thrones, I forget his name, something, R.R., I don't know. But he went to a medieval French source where there was this kind of political intrigue society and he just maybe copied their political intrigues into his fantasy world. I'm talking about the vying and intrigue for power or influence or political leadership. Call it what you will. I don't want to get into debates about that.

Some people say, in very high-flown language, that that is the instinct for justice, or it's driven by visions of justice or whatever. Others like to use words like power. But that behavior, whatever you want to call it, whatever it's ultimately motivated by, it makes a large part of why man and human life is interesting. You see it's rough outlines, but just its outlines, even in chimps. They form coalitions and intrigues and groups that are forming to achieve something. And in mankind, I'm saying, if you are transferred to any other time, even to a village, if you are expert in that art, whatever that is, whether by birth or by learning and experience or both, you would be able to equally advise an ancient Chinese warlord or a Papuan chieftain or a Roman consul.

You could maybe advise them to the good of their territory or their commonwealth or whatever, but you could as to how they should maneuver and advance in their particular situation, they should parry and fight their enemies in political intrigues and so on, I think actually that is a human universal, which is why when you read Thucydides and he tells you it's a possession for all time, his book, this is what he means. When you read the motivations and speeches of his characters, it's not like you're seeing aliens that you can't understand. You can readily understand their motivations, what they're doing, you can ask yourself what would I do in that, it's not like alien. I think this largely disproves the very strong kind of relativist post-modernish claims.

I've heard people say, oh no, you know when you listen to Beethoven now, no matter what you feel or you think you feel, you can't really understand it the way it was understood when he wrote those musics. The people at the time understood and experienced music in a radically different way than we do. I've heard people say that, or saying about visual art, and I think, well, how would you know that, even if it was true? I read older books and I don't see that. I readily recognize what they're talking about in respect to music, for example. And so this, the enjoyment of music, I think is another human universal. Of course, given allowances for individual capacity, I think that is more varied than national or historical variation.

I mean, there are many people now or at any time just not sensible to good taste in any art or any location, more so than others maybe. But yes, this universal human political behavior, I do think that's natural in the way I said, and shared among all and also goes to why violence and war is the human universal language. That is, too, more so than sex even. I'd say sex is dependent on violence, but that's a very different discussion. Anyway, look, I need to take another break. I need more smoke and milk, coffee, honey, and I come back to continue to talk, maintain such matters of human nature. From now hyping doge government cut program as I record this, I want to tell you I would not in public attack such things because I wish them well. Trump administration has not yet started.

We must show support and enthusiasm. But I'm skeptical in private among us friends that this will do anything that people are expecting of it. He's talking about government debt, and that's not because of the things Doge is planning to address, the amount of money those things cost cosmetic. The vast majority of spending in America is social security and Medicare, and Trump is not going to cut that. And I don't even know how you would do that without causing a revolution, because I was talking to Menaquin on 4, and he mentions there are entire small towns in America with It's just old to get social security and Medicare and there's a hospital and there are some service businesses that cater to them, which they pay for with that money.

So I can think of ways to cut that waste, but it won't be done, right? I mean, you could find creative solutions to that. You could build resorts for olds in the third world countries. They would live better there on the beach. It would cost a lot less. And you could, in that case, even reduce the payments, but they still live better than they do now, I think. But such things aren't even plausible in America for a foreseeable future. So anyway, aside from that, these things that Elon Doge is supposed to address are all just very cosmetic. And in some cases, although they sound ridiculous, I would rather the United States government fund retarded studies, obscure studies, than just the bleak lives of the old and the sick. Even defense spending is much dwarfed by what I just said.

America's vast deficits are to pay for nursing home society, the old and the sick. In some cases, I think a quarter of New York state health spending is the statistic I saw just because of obesity in New York state, probably higher in other states. I'm sorry to tell you that will not be solved by giving people tallow fries either. So I'm not trying to pour cold water on it, but just to say, this show I say what I think. One good thing I guess is if NGOs and things like DEI and the various anti-white and anti-white male race-baiting programs, if they lost their funding, that would be the best thing that could come from Doge. But otherwise I have smart young friend who is afraid that Doge can become a boondoggle that can derail the careers of smart young friends who get involved in it.

They get caught up in this thing that won't lead anywhere and might get a bad name. I don't know. We will see. I'm not part of any political party, and this show, what I write also is not to cheer on anyone that's around now. I will say again, my own aims and those of friends are quite different than Trump's and than populists or nationalists in general. If you don't take these next few years, and hopefully those under Van's, so let's best case 12 years at least, to organize and infiltrate in small groups and such, then you're wasting your time. We can't expect salvation from anyone else. This election was a great good, took away a knife pointed at our throats somewhat, but now it's up to friends to pursue mafia path, I've said for a long time. I myself am too public to lead anything.

If anyone on Twitter, if any figure like big account on Twitter is claiming they will lead Be skeptical. These are not political organization platforms, they're messaging platforms only. And if I ever do anything like that, you won't hear of it if I do it well. Maybe you'll hear of it if I make pornography, but I'm not planning to do that. I'm going to write other books soon now. Anyway, I was talking nature versus convention. And what is universal among men? And I will add to what I said. Another universal is what Herodotus said in his famous scene that custom is universal among men. You can, I am not actually sure about this and I think, in fact, Montaigne, as you will see in a moment, is arguing against it.

But you can make case, many have, it's a bit meta, but it's maybe true that man follows custom and habit and convention and that even if these differ wildly sometime from place to place and time to time, it is in man's nature to follow some kind of custom or convention. Some people say that. Custom is king among men and such. But if you compare what Herodotus says in the passage about custom and cannibalism that I paraphrased before, if you compare that to Montaigne, to what he's saying at least in this essay, with what I read to you from the two P's in cannibalism, he's not contrasting as Herodotus did between the customs of Greeks and Indians or two strange customs of two different tribes in actually a rather peaceful and religious setting. What Herodotus is talking

about ultimately is religious custom. Herodotus adds that only a madman like one of the Persian king usurpers that he's talking about would go about denying religion and custom. He says only a madman would do that and would seek to radically change things wholesale in a revolutionary way. I think, actually, although Herodotus in this passage is talking about a usurper of the Persian throne who was trying to do things like this, but I think he probably had Greek intellectuals and philosophers in mind who wanted to do the same. But anyway, Montaigne doesn't mention this very relevant passage, just the less relevant one about the Scythians, which he also distorts, claiming that the Scythians only ate people for food. Herodotus doesn't say that about the Andropagoe on the steppe.

So why does Montaigne do that? I'm not sure, but I have some idea. In his example, Herodotus talks about customs again during peace, funerary rites during peace, concludes again with Pindar famous line, custom king among men. Montaigne talk in his own essay about cannibalism in the context of war and revenge. So I think he making a different point about custom than Herodotus is or anyone like him. He's not saying that custom is king among men or that custom as such is natural to men. He's even maybe saying that custom is as such unnatural that it corrupts nature, same as he made point about the various fruit in the civilized world versus in the new world. I think this appears to be also the case if you read his essay on the custom of wearing clothes. I will paraphrase now with an analogy.

There is point of view that say, well, again, yeah, the content of custom is different, but man's nature to have customs. I've already said this. But in other words, man has a software function, something like that. Content may vary, but man has that. It needs to be filled by something. It's absolutely man's nature to have some kind of convention custom, religious even, belief and so on. But then think of that as an analogy to clothes. If I wanted to dispute what I just said about custom, I would make, as Montaigne does, an analogy to clothes, the custom of wearing clothes. I'd say fashions differ. In fact, they differ within nations, and sometimes they differ year by year because people are fickle and unimaginative. He makes this point. Tailors have only so much ability.

So fashions differ from five years to five years, but then recur. He says this. And although fashions of clothes differ, it's obviously you can claim in men's nature to wear some type of clothes, whatever that may be. And yet I am saying, is it? What if clothes are as such against nature, and it's men's nature to go nude? And this is in fact the point Montaigne seemed to be making in his essay about clothes. I'll read from it in a bit. But it's obviously an analogy to the argument, let's say, a typical conventionalist would make about custom. Containers actually say no, clothes as such are fake, they're fake and gay, they're against nature. By analogy, custom as such is against nature, or at least most clothes are and most customs are. They are against nature in that they weaken men.

They make him soft, they make him womanly and dependent. This is a repeated point he makes, they make him womanly and dependent, and most customs are equivalent to this, to most clothes that have a function of weakening and entrapping man. Montaigne uses also an example, recently discovered New World natives who they say apparently they go about naked and he says, well this makes me wonder, is it in man's nature to wear no clothes at all? But now back to cannibalism. Montaigne talking about cannibalism between men who are basically uncorrupted by any customs as such, men who are living by nature, more or less, or very close to nature and natural laws. And on the other hand, he contrasts them to modern men of Montaigne's own time who are

not so much living in a kind of custom, you know, because then you could say, oh, well, custom is natural to men, too. Now, he's saying the ways they live in, the customs they live in is a kind of corruption or degeneration, a stunting of nature. And I think that's really the great step Montaigne is taking here that had not, I think there was hints of it in antiquity, but maybe not taken full way. Maybe among some of the antinomian writers I mentioned. But it's easy to confuse what he's saying for the more general criticism of civilization and the arts. This did exist in antiquity. Rousseau has the attack. See, they don't want me to talk about this, but Rousseau has famous treatise about this. The street is beloved by, well, by German idealists, but also by hippies, about how

civilization corrupted the natural innocence of men and such. But I think Montaigne is saying something different even beyond that. He's attacking the corruption of his own time in a very particular way. He sets up this half-imaginary utopia among the New World savages, then to address their most apparently savage custom, that of cannibalism, which would be most shocking to modern audiences. And he does all this in order to say, yes, cannibalism is bad and evil, maybe according to the laws of reason, but what these savages do, even at their worst in their cannibalism, is not as corrupt, stunted, and loathsome as we do. And I think that's a point of essay here. I will read this quote. These peoples have their wars against others further inland beyond their mountains.

They go forth naked with no other arms but their bows and their wooden swords, sharpened to a point like the blades of our pigstickers. Their steadfastness in battle is astonishing and always ends in killing and bloodshed. They do not even know the meaning of fear or flight. Each man brings back the head of the enemy he has slain and sets it as a trophy over the door of his dwelling. For a long period they treat captives well and provide them with all the comforts which they can devise. Afterwards, the master of each captive summons a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the arms of his prisoner prisoner and holds him by it, standing a few feet away for fear of being caught in the

blows, and allows his dearest friend to hold the prisoners the same way by the other arm. Then before the whole assembly, they both hack at him with their swords and kill him. This done, they roast him and make a common meal of him, sending chunks of his flesh to absent friends. This is not as something done for food as the Scythians used to do in antiquity, but to symbolize ultimate revenge. As a proof of this, when they noted that the Portuguese who were allied to their enemies practiced a different kind of execution on them when taken prisoner, let me interject. This has been proven, by the way. Of course, the Tupis are well known to have been cannibal. But the American Indians in the southwest, there was a long debate about whether they had been cannibal.

And of course, hippies and leftists and the native tribes themselves in their ethnic self-regard wanted to deny that their ancestors had practiced cannibalism and archaeological finds then were that, how do you put this, they found a human shit that was obviously digested human remains and they were shit into the dwellings, they defecated into the dwellings of the people that they had killed. So in other words, they killed you, they ate you, and then they shit you out in your own dwelling so that you were shit in your own dwelling that they had processed through their bowels. They found this defecation, excuse me to not use fancy words, but they found this shit made from human remains in the dwellings, you know? So, obviously that was done as ultimate humiliation,

the revenge of their enemies in a different part of the New World. But what he's saying here is correct. Anyway, I go on. But to symbolize ultimate revenge, as a proof of this, when they noted that the Portuguese who were allied to their enemies practiced a different kind of execution on them when taken prisoner, which is to bury them up to the waist, to shoot showers of arrows at their exposed parts and then to hang them. They thought that these men from the other world had scattered the knowledge of many a vice throughout their neighborhood, and who were greater masters than they were of every kind of revenge, which must be more severe than their own. So, they began to abandon their ancient method and adopted that one.

It does not sadden me that we should note the horrible barbarity in a practice such as theirs, and here I think is his point. What does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their wrongdoings, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture, a body still fully able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs, as we have not only read about but seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among our own fellow citizens and neighbors, and what is worse, in the name of duty and religion, than in roasting him and eating him after his death.

Chrysippus and Zeno, the leaders of the Stoic school, certainly thought that there was nothing wrong in using our carcasses for whatever purpose we needed, even for food. As our own forebears did when, beleaguered by Caesar, he is talking about the ancient Gauls, in the town of Alesia, they decided to relieve their hunger of the besieged with the flesh of old men, women and others who were no use in battle. By eating of such food it is notorious that the Gascons prolong their lives. And our medical men do not flinch from using corpses in many ways, both internally and externally, to cure us. Yet no opinion has ever been so unruly as to justify treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are everyday vices in us.

So we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason, but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism. Their warfare is entirely noble and magnanimous. It has as much justification and beauty as the human malady allows. Among them, it has no other foundation than a zealous concern for courage. So you see, the whole thrust of his argument is to attack the moral vanity and hypocrisy especially of the modern world around him. And what was the world around him? What was its content? What is it fundamentally the idea he attacking? So look, I think it's better I take other nice music break to listen nice musics. I need to relax before I end episode on this. This is big matter, I must relax.

Yes, I'm back, and a quick word regarding Montaigne's style. It is a joking style, it's humorous, meandering is ironic experimental kind of style, very experimental, it's very similar Nietzsche style and that of other short essayists, aphorists I've mentioned like Larouchefoucault, Lichtenberg, and so on. You can think of these as philosophy, again, in form of comedy or laughter. And yet that does not mean it's not serious thought. Kohler, an idiot on website X, recently had pompous dump-thread denouncing Nietzsche, again denouncing him for not writing a systematic book. Because you know, for plebs, they only think it's real thinking if it's long, ponderous, heavy, requiring constipated grimaces, supposedly hard to understand, and full of obscure words of the kind that Montaigne

derides in his own essay on words, where he talks about the vanity of specialists with their technical high-flown words for trivialities. He shits especially on architects. He says they have these very high-flown words for just small corners of his kitchen, and he doesn't get it. But look, dummy, it may just be that human understanding being what it is. It's best to put your insights in brief and laughter form, because ultimately, again, who are you talking to? though I mean smart people will fill in the blanks, you only have to fill in the blanks explicitly for midwits. Now what's the point of writing for them? Well there is a point if you want to, but it's actually much harder to be brief and to distill your insight into a few sentences. It's actually hard to observe

the world as humor and experiment and this is something about Montaigne you can only get from reading him yourself, same as Nietzsche, which is that the very Every style they use affects how you think. I know that sounds a bit, you know what, but it does. It puts you in an experimental, probing, exciting, joking mood. And this is never transferred to you when you read a book about them, written usually by a dullard, you know? Because if that book is not written in the same style, and it never is, you can read about the thinker and come away with a completely false impression of what they're about. the books about such thinkers are written in a long form, ponderous, explaining things minutely, and this distorts even the content of their ideas, is what I'm saying. The presentation

is inseparable from the content in these writers. The experimental probing from different angles. Irreverent and humorous presentation. And don't think that just because something is in laughter form is not you know, serious, right? Like when Nehamas claims that Nietzsche is joking all the time, because that is another pleb view. It's really two pleb views. Either he must be heavy and ponderous and manifesto, or he must be actually joking and not mean it. You know, these are the two modes that the pleb understands. You know, for the plebs, unless you're constipated in grave, it must mean you don't really mean it. That's- Nehamas is a spiritual pleb, you know, so But he meant it, and he laughed while meaning it. You know, he meant it literally, a hundred percent, I believe that,

and in other ways, and he laughed while meaning it. So, if you make me a dictator, I will laugh all the way to building a fire temple and the sacrifice of hundreds of millions, and I can laugh the whole way doing that in a genuine way. And I also want a philosophy that laughs, as Nietzsche says. I want a dictatorship of psychosis. Is this okay? Anyway, read their own essays and aphorisms. It will just put you in kind of feel-good discovery mode, but I was saying regarding customs. Last I was on a previous segment talking Montaigne and the Tupi Indians and how he contrasts their ways to the ways of his own world, and I was asking, well, what is his world that he sees as so corrupt compared to the natural ways of the New World cannibals? And I think Montaigne is here

taking two significant protonician steps. First, he's pointing not just to the corruption that civilization or comfort or commerce or the technical arts and so on that they wreak on mankind, but to the fact that there are customs as such, that custom as such, maybe even all customs corrupt and break man, and therefore he's pointing to the fact that custom is a vehicle for human domestication more than human refinement. So in this passage I think he's already pointing to Nietzsche's famous distinction between master morality and herd morality, which I I rebind is not so much what people think, it's the fact that most moral codes or customs that Nietzsche observes are those that domesticate and tame man, and very few of rare ones are those of breeding.

If I may make an aside, I was talking to Mena the other day about parenting styles and there are some people now who, in the reaction to libtardate permissive styles, say that parents should be strict and that, oh it's great that East European or Oriental parents are are strict and they spank kids, but from what I've seen, Oriental and East European and Russian parents are brutal to kids out of, often brutal or at least too strict, but they do not do so in order to make the kids stronger or more independent. They do it because they're emotional and they feel dissed and they actually want to make the kid more dependent on them and weaker. But there were severe ways of raising children among the ancient Spartans, among the modern Prussians, among the Japanese at times,

which was strict with the intention of making the child stronger. I think maybe also English upper class style was like this. But it's very different from the usual run of strictness, which I've met kids who grew up in very strict households who turned out, you know, as bad as you can think, antifa tattooed type retards, you know. But anyway, I think Montaigne, although not in full form, he's looking in this direction here, that there are two kinds of morality and the main kind among mankind, the rule. What custom usually means is something is the breaking and domestication of men. And he goes so far as to anticipate, again, the counterargument that the cannibal natives are following some kind of custom of their own blindly. He says they're not following any custom blindly.

and his evidence is that they compose poetry as good as Anacreon, the ancient Greek poet. Again, implying that these are a poetic, natural, smart people, that they are not the way they are because they were commanded to be so by some priest or prophet. They are men of nature, not corrupted by on one hand civilization and its softnesses, yes, but also not corrupted by deforming and taming savage custom. And I think this is a very important theme in all of Montaigne's essays, that custom as such deforms man, and I quote him now from his essay on the custom of wearing clothing, custom makes for us many things impossible which would otherwise be possible. It isn't just civilization and its so-called technical high arts or

high commerce and the luxuries that softens or corrupts, but custom itself or most kinds of customs and moralities themselves, they have a deformative action on men. Most traditions, most historical traditions so beloved by My trades, right, are actually highly defective. They hide man's nature from himself. They therefore hide his true possibilities. I quote now from his essay on clothesmows. It's actually called On the Clothesmows, essay 36, book 1, an attack on clothesmows. I read, Since the word of God says that everything under the sun is subject to the same law, in considerations such as these where a distinction has to be made between natural laws and contrived ones. So let me interject this distinction between nature and convention, this is his focus.

Anyway I continue, where a distinction has to be made between natural laws and contrived ones. Men of understanding regularly turn for advice to the general polity of the world, he means to the natural world and the world of animals. Nothing can be counterfeit there. Now since everything therein is exactly furnished with stitch and needle for maintaining its being. It is truly unbelievable that we men alone should have been brought forth in a deficient and necessity state, a state which can only be sustained by borrowings from other creatures. I therefore hold that just as plants, trees, animals, and all living things are naturally equipped with adequate protection from the rigor of the weather, wherefore virtually

everything is protected by hides, silks, shells, tough skin, or bark, so too were we. But like those who drown the light of day with artificial light, we have drowned our natural means with borrowed ones. It can easily be seen that custom makes possible things impossible for us. For some of the peoples who have no knowledge of clothing live under much the same climate as ourselves, and even we leave uncovered the most delicate parts of our bodies." Anyway, he goes on like that. And this very strange essay too, by the way, I don't know how to interpret the end of this essay on the clothes modes. You just read it. short essay, but toward the end he suddenly starts to talk about cold weather in general and how Xenophon's army expedition in his book, The Anabasis, when the Greek army was

crossing the mountains of Armenia that many froze to death. It's unclear to me why he mentioned this, or Alexander's similar encounter with cold weather peoples, or how wine freezes in the cold and then you have to hack it instead of drink it, you have to like hack a block of frozen wine. It comes off very stream of association anyway, but you know. So then he is contrasting this as yet unnamed morality of these touchy-toothed Germanics in the Brazilian forest. He's contrasting them to his world, which is the modern Christian world. And he himself, okay, he was a religious man in his private life. He was against atheism, heretical thought, and so on. But I think he is seen as irreligious and a skeptic by Pascal and other religious thinkers.

But if Nietzsche's model is true of Montaigne and some of these other thinkers, meaning that if they are, let's say, an ancient Greek reborn, let's say a skeptical or Epicurean philosopher reborn in the Renaissance, and if Montaigne truly inhabits that model, he faces something unusual that ancient Greek philosophers did not, which is this moral code around him that doesn't claim to be a custom. It's not actually in the same, like an ancient convention or nomos. It's something else. So obviously Christianity as much as Buddhism is not the equivalent of ancient tribal nomos or conventions or traditions. It's something new, something weird in that sense. You know, local conventions, customs of course existed in Montaigne's own day, much more than in ours, and would have existed

also in regions where Buddhism had become the main religion. But the relationship of both Christianity and Buddhism to local customs is very unusual. It's interesting and new in world history. They take slightly different paths, but both are revealing. Buddhism largely adapts itself to local gods, incorporates them explicitly, pays even respect to local traditional religions in a syncretic way, but it presents itself as a path to individual salvation of the soul, and somewhat then also start to present local deities as a kind of congress or court around the Buddha. You know, the thousands of devas rejoiced at the coming of the Buddha. And then there are evil demons or gods too. But some are there to reinterpret it as protecting the Buddha.

So it's interesting that the Greeks became Buddhists in Afghanistan, and you find the The Indians then adopted some of the Greek pantheons, so you find Hercules protecting the Buddha in some Indian icons or sculptures. And Christianity traditionally did much the same in Europe, but maybe more aggressive. More aggressive recasting, recasting local gods completely as either saints or as demons, reinterpreting them more completely than Buddhism usually did. And it adapted local customs to biblical and Christian interpretations. But it itself transcended these. And it's not correct to call it a primitive custom or religion like ancient religion is. It's a kind of religion-philosophy hybrid, both Christianity and Buddhism are.

And in being hybrids, they claim to have answered somewhat the challenge of philosophers to ancient traditions, you know, like an ancient Greek Epicurean saying something, I've been Like I've been saying so far, these people's customs are just partial human opinion born of fear of the gods, that these gods maybe don't even really exist or don't exist the way people think they do, that there is a universal human nature, and that I will seek what is good by nature as opposed to what is just by convention, and I will try to think of what is good for man as such, for the wise man as such, maybe. But Christianity and Buddhism, the latter, I'm not saying it's in response to Epicureanism, maybe just in response to whatever similar philosophizing might have existed in India,

which I don't know enough about. But both are saying, yes, we know this, and we have an answer about what is good for men, what is the human condition as such, something that actually transcends all customs, which we also agree are – I'm saying these two religions would say, Christianity and Buddhism that all customs are maybe important, but they're just provisional glimpses of the truth at best. But we have the truth, and it is in this and that, and we have the answer to the span of time or of the human ages as well, which was obscure to you, philosophers, because you did not see what was most needful in the human soul and what needed salvation. And it's done through this example of the life of one man, the life of the Buddha or the life of Christ.

And this is presented now as the standard rather than, let's say, revealed law from the gods, which would be easier to criticize, or the standard of nature which the philosophers use. So you know, there's a sense I'm saying in which just as there was an ancient but post-classical Jewish saying, learn how to answer the Epicurean. And I believe that this Judean branch I'm talking about learned very much to do just that. at least at the mass level, Christianity as an answer to the Epicurean, Buddhism as an answer, and I think both consist in a kind of popularized philosophy. So when you look at philosophical morality, which does exist philosophical ethics, whether of the Platonists, the Stoics, and the Epicureans had a kind of ethics too about really what

is the answer to what is the best in life, how men should live as a man by his nature, as opposed to how he should live as a Greek or Persian or such. And even if it was not always a political answer, as in, you need this or that kind of state, but necessarily an individual answer, you need to live alone on the edge of society or whatever, that's the cynic school. The cynic school had an answer too, that you need to be a vagrant masturbating in public like Diogenes and so on. And so you can see, let me leave discussion of Buddhism for another time, but you can see Christianity as an answer of its own to this. I have a friend and he is very much hardcore actually, hardcore traditional Christian, and he believes that Christian morality is an answer to the Cynic school specifically,

to outdo the ancient Cynic philosophers, people like Diogenes the Cynic, in their austerity and their purity of life. But most other thinkers who've written on this, Machiavelli maybe, but especially certainly Nietzsche, see Christianity as a kind of popularized Platonism. So you know, it's a very hard thing then to be a reborn Epicurean philosopher of a certain ancient kind, or cynic, and to come back in the Renaissance and to be faced with this and reintroduce the doctrine of convention versus nature, because so much had changed by then in the sense that there was now a worldwide philosophical-like ethics already quite similar to what you are espousing, but obscuring very much this fundamental distinction between nature and convention.

Because the example of the life of Christ or of the Buddha, on the other hand, in its historical radiance as well as the details of the lives of these men or gods, they become a new standard that outshines or obscures the standard of nature and they deny being a conventional custom, right? They're aware of that and they say, we're not that, we're something that transcends that. dismiss the life of the Buddha as some typical customary tribal morality. It is based on universal and striking claims about man's condition as man, not as part of a nation or tribe. And it does make appeal, of course, to divinity and belief somewhat, but it also makes direct appeal to human sentiments that are universal, human sensation, human needs.

So then I think if you have an Epicurean reborn in this time and he's smart and he looks around, How can he get around this situation? How can he bring back into manifest light the nature of man that is obscured by these new and grand claims? Maybe these claims are too grand for man, and even more so, how can he do so in times of religious civil war, religious fanaticism, accusations flying around everywhere? I think maybe you consider what Montaigne says in disgust about his own time, which I see again as point culminate of argument in this essay. I repeat to you, I read now, I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture, a body still fully able

to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs, as we have not only read about, but seen in recent memory not among enemies in antique, excuse me, not among enemies in antiquity, but among our fellow citizens and neighbors. And what is worse in the name of duty and religion, he says that's worse than roasting him and eating him after his death. And it is this disparity between the expectation of the new morality versus what is actually done in its name, this hypocrisy that uses humanitarianism and sweet sounding words and sentiment to mask a kind of lame, pernicious, lying, subterraneanized savagery. And so you see how Montaigne, very similar to Machiavelli and also Nietzsche, compends

moderns to ancients in his different, I'm quoting now from a different essay I haven't quoted yet, on some ancient customs I'm reading. We certainly do our utmost to equal the ancients in every sort of ostentation, in debauchery and in the devising of gratifications, in comforts and in luxuries. For our wills are as vitiated as theirs were, but our ingenuity cannot bring it off. Our powers are no more capable of competing with them in vice than in virtue, both of which derive from a vigor of mine which was incomparably greater in them than in us. The weaker the souls, the less able they are to do anything really good or really bad." And it is this lying, weak, deceptive, hypocritical savagery of the broken modern man.

For men, broken or not, with tame words or not, remain savage no matter how you mask it. But against which this Montaigne presents this new, totally healthy, innocent savagery, a people, the Tupi Indians of Brazil, totally consumed by the pure feeling of war, by the pure feeling of courage and glory in war, the drive to victory, defiance and savagery, of which cannibalism is just the most shocking example to Europeans. But also in Montaigne, it becomes a replacement of Herodotus' onius of cannibalism as example of how custom is king among men. Because Montaigne, it becomes an example of how the law of nature is king among men, and this law is war, endless war, embodied in the Tupi Indians, who are the living spirit of manly war and courage.

And it's through their example, I think, half true, half imagined, I think maybe actually 70% true. You know, Montaigne isn't making it up. There are similar reports from many other accounts of Caribs, for example, Indians in the Caribbean, just biting through their hands rather than being enslaved, biting through to escape their chains. Again, a very forgotten example because it's very embarrassing to certain other peoples who didn't do so, both during black slavery and, let's say, at other times, both before and more recent, who walked calmly to their deaths. It's a pine sheep, but I keep going, I'm sorry. But I think Montaigne uses these as a very extreme, undeniable example of what is actually forgotten human nature, forgotten by the modern world. And that is the pure drive to war.

And in order to be pure, it has to be stripped of everything else, all utility, for example. So in this essay on the cannibal, Montaigne goes to great lengths to show that two peas are not fighting for land, they don't fight for wealth or anything like that. They are pure men of nature, possessed by the manly drive to make the enemy give in, you know, dominated by Doug. Their entire system of ethics contains only the same two articles, resoluteness in battle and love for their wives. I was just quoting him now. So those two elements, if you are to distill the pure nature of man, not as he is in custom, a broken domesticate or workhorse or beast of burden warped by custom whatever, but in nature, to conquer women in sex and to conquer men in battle. How more simply than that could

you put it? There are also charming passages about how their wives, the wives of the two-piece, want them to have more women. They're not jealous. This abounds more to the manliness of their men and honor. The more they get around, the more women they have. And Montaigne, when he talks about this, he even mentions classical and biblical parallels to this, again pointing to the fact that wellspring of European man too was in the same type of nature, but has since become broken and obscured. Nature is war and is reborn in war. I think this is light coming about in the Renaissance realization. It's not coincidence that Montaigne chooses this savagery. I mean, actually has to resort to extolling this primitive savagery and man's

pure warlike nature as a kind of reminder, a counter to the obscuring of man's nature under a collection of modern, pacifistic, humanitarian lies, which is also why Machiavelli goes in this direction and Nietzsche and others too. Nature and the state as man's vehicle to freedom are reborn in our post-classical age only in the drive to war. Do you like this? And it's all set in such a charming and comedic light, you know, you almost forget where Montaigne is leading you here with his ironic French wit. It's very charming, charming journeys though. But look, I will be back in a week. I will talk more things. I hope you like this. Until next time. Bap out!