how to win friends and breed people.
radical friendship extremism.
It’s easy to remember the past. But do you have the courage to forget? This is the Platonic challenge: abandon history, embrace philosophy.1
maybe the real platonism is the friends we made along the way.
I’m a leftist because I’m a utopian. I’m a utopian because I do not believe human nature is fixed. If human nature was fixed, then maybe Ted Kaczynski would be right. Just as a glove is designed to fit a hand, our minds are designed to function within a primitive environment, and we should just go back to that.
Humans are happiest when we spend time outdoors, in the sun, moving our bodies, splashing in water, having sex, making babies, eating an unprocessed diet of meat and berries, hunting animals, weaving baskets, dancing, singing, sitting by the fire, counting the stars, telling stories, and watching the sunset.
Plato advocates all of these things, and much more. What differentiates Plato from primitivism is his advocacy for a state. Plato conceives of the state as a natural form; just as each human has a nature, the state has a nature. The problem of politics is to discover the natural form of the state. Rather than seeing the state as the servant of human nature, Plato sees human nature as something to be molded to the needs of the state.
A conservative or traditionalist would say something like, “this tribe practices a particular form of basket-weaving; it is the duty of the state to protect and preserve this ancient practice.” Or, at a higher scale of abstraction, “the job of the state is to protect the ethnic, religious, and class structure of an existing society.” For Plato, it’s the reverse: economic activity should serve the state; structures of ethnicity, religion, and class should all serve the state. If a particular practice contradicts the health of the state, it should be smashed, and replaced with whatever serves the state.
Rather than seeing the state as a form of brainwashing, an accident, or an artificial tragedy imposed from the outside, Plato views the state as a biological phenomenon, as a body politic.
Beyond the individual body, with its organs working in concert, what is the smallest form of the state? The conservative would answer:
The foundation of the state is marriage and the nuclear family, with the bond between husband and wife. The husband commands and the wife submits.
This is not Plato’s answer. He is a sexual communist, who believes that women should be property of the state, to be sexually available as required. Plato believes that the smallest form of the state is not marriage, but friendship. When Plato describes the ideal state, he is working up and towards the ideal friendship. Plato is a radical friendship extremist.
In order to be a good friend, one must become a good man. A good man is strong, intelligent, self-controlled, and loves wisdom. Philosophy is the art of being a good friend, because it teaches you how to become strong, wise, and self-controlled. The purpose of the state is to breed friends.
The greatest friend is a god, or at the very least, a hero, and so Plato is attempting to breed a race of heroes. If this doesn’t sound very leftist to you, read Trotsky:
In 1922, Trotsky had argued that, using artificial selection, the human being could “raise himself to a new level…create a higher socio-biological type, an Ubermensch, if you will”
And again, in 1935:
While the romantic numskulls of Nazi Germany are dreaming of restoring the old race of Europe’s Dark Forest to its original purity, or rather its original filth, you Americans, after taking a firm grip on your economic machinery and your culture, will apply genuine scientific methods to the problem of eugenics. Within a century, out of your melting pot of races there will come a new breed of men – the first worthy of the name of Man.
Trotsky was an oddball in many ways, but on this issue, he was in good company:
Writing in the 1930s, US biologist and Nobel prize winner Hermann Müller called mainstream eugenics “a hopelessly perverted movement…lending a false appearance of scientific basis to advocates of race and class prejudice, defenders of church and state, fascists and Hitlerites generally.” Müller and other left-wing eugenicists nevertheless believed that some people were genetically inferior—even if they did not attribute that inferiority to race. British left-wing biologist Julian Huxley argued that the “upper economic classes” needed to breed more because they are “slightly better endowed with ability,” while the “lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast.” Trotsky shared the view of Marxists such as Müller and [leading biologist J.B.S Haldane, who regularly contributed to the Communist Party’s Daily Worker] that implementing a revolutionary and internationalist version of eugenics would lead to a genetically superior population.
Although the Nazis lost WWII, they won the word eugenics. One can pedantically ask, “well, what’s wrong with good genes?” but it is not productive to hopelessly defend semantic etymologies on technical grounds. Whatever eugenics meant prior to 1939, the word is now inexorably connected to compulsory sterilization, antisemitism, racism, and the Holocaust. Eugenics is bad.2
What I propose instead is McGenics: a general anti-natalism via feminism, LGBTQ, and obesity. How does this accord with Plato’s sexual communism? The argument is not difficult, but the morality involved is strange.
SEXUAL COMMUNISM.
First, we must understand what is meant by sexual property and ownership. When the means of sexual production are owned by individual men, then each woman is enslaved by a particular man. The exception to this is the temple prostitute. In the ideal state, according to Plato, all women would be temple prostitutes.
When women are the property of their father or husband, the paterfamilias has the power of life or death over the woman. This moral right is still exercised (illegally) by Islamists in honor killings. The tyranny of the paterfamilias was slightly reduced by the proto-democratic Athenian lawgiver Solon, who gave women the right to own property. Very progressive!
What is the alternative to patriarchal tyranny? Instead of women being owned by individual men, the ownership of women is held by the state. Such “ownership by the state” was applied to Jews in medieval Europe. If one murdered a Jew, the crime was not against the Jew, but against the state. Similarly, in Russia, if one killed a Mennonite, this was considered “injuring the property of the Tsar.”
Today, if one impregnates a woman, or marries a woman, the state is waiting in the wings to extract alimony and child support. But a woman is free to abandon or sell (surrogacy and adoption) or abort her child, while the man has no rights in this regard. It is in this sense that women are afforded greater protection and privileges. Conservatives complain about this as unfair and unequal, but such a status is in accordance with the collective ownership of women by the state as advocated by Plato.
This principle is now universalized to all citizens, so that all citizens are owned by a state, and the murder of any citizen is an offense against the state. Even if you sign a contract saying, “I would like my head chopped off by a guillotine,” and you record a video of yourself signing the contract, and additionally, you get all your family members to sign the contract as well, anyone who pushes the button to drop the guillotine upon your neck will still be charged by the state with murder.
This is because the citizen is property of the state, and they do not have the right to legalize their own murder, since it is not within their autonomy to do so. Even with euthanasia, the consent of the state is still required, since the doctor administering the murder must be certified by the state.
No murder can be permitted without the consent of the state, and that defines, in legal terms, the absolute ownership of the state over the body of the citizen. I mean, really, if you can’t consent to getting your head chopped off in an act of sado-masochistic performance art, what rights do you even have?
This was not always the case. We used to be a serious country, with legalized murder, as recently as 1859. If two men wanted to kill each other, this was fine and dandy, and the state did not intervene.
Similarly, if a man wanted to kill his daughter or his wife, this was at one point permitted, or at least threatened, with legitimate authority granted to the patriarch as the author of life or death. When Plato objects to this, he doesn’t do so on the grounds of equality. He doesn’t set out to prove that women perform just as well in battle as men. He is not silly; but he is radical.
Today, it is not legal to kill your wife or daughter, no matter how many men she sleeps with. Adultery is no crime. When we view the world through the eyes of the Greeks, such a state of affairs is best described as sexual communism, where the woman becomes property of the state, and her sexual activities are held in common, not particular to any man. Marriage, as defined in pre-Christian Europe, no longer exists. Sexual communism has been achieved, much to the chagrin of conservatives.
I argue in McGenics that this is a good thing. Plato might not agree with my exact reasoning here. He might prefer that all women be contained within a harem in which heroic men could enter after returning from a tour of duty in war or winning a Nobel Prize. What distinguishes Platonism from dogma, however, is that disagreements are not only allowed, but they are encouraged.
Whereas a legalist attempts to prove whether something is moral or immoral according to the body of precedent, the authority of tradition, Platonism is concerned with the method. The conclusion of the method has no value whatsoever. If an ancient Platonist assumed geocentrism, the modern Platonist is permitted to contradict him without guilt.
In the same way, the athlete who is inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger is permitted to surpass him, and even encouraged to do so. In Platonism, surpassing your elders is the best way to honor them. This follows from the principle of friendship, that to be a good friend is to strive and compete with your fellows, so that all benefit.
The scientific method of Plato is ever evolving, improving, and breeding a new human nature. By contrast, tradition is the democracy of the dead.
DEMOCRACY OF THE DEAD.
For Trump, the Golden Age is a fusion of Reagan and the Founders, skipping over the 178 years where white supremacy was enshrined in law. Don’t say racist. But this lying, obscuring, and worshipping of the past is the nature of conservatism, since the days of ancient Athens. To expect more from conservatism is to grant it an undeserved compliment. Conservatives cannot be otherwise.
But what has become of the left, in the absence of Plato?3
With the death of Stalin and victory of America, the dregs of leftism floated up alongside a blow-up doll pantheon of golden calves, worshipped with awkward and contrived reverence.4
google search: nancy pelosi kneeling, kente cloth
Superficial leftism today is distant from the Platonic revolution. In universities, politeness, nagging, and tattle-tailing crusade against freedom of thought. They surpass Victorian conservatism in gossip, exceed church-ladies in conformity, and outdo Puritans in witch hunting. There is no utopian future; only looking backward, with the same degree of deception as the conservative!
For the anti-Platonic left, the Golden Age is a paradoxical projection of the present onto the past, where scalping and human sacrifices are reimagined as intersectional pronoun safetyism. The “land back” movement is its radical (toothless) pinnacle: surrender all land to an ethnonationalist casino-running clique of admixed natives, so that they can LARP as hunter gatherers for all of eternity. Based!
The leftist “noble savage” is sanitized, plastic, and distorted. Sanitation is salesmanship, where the original is cleaned up, rounded out, glazed, and packaged for the mass man, vulgar and sleek. Democracy is a popularity contest, and the politician is a temple prostitute.
The more “extreme” the ideology, the more it worships history. The left-libertarians of 4chan’s Anonymous repeat the mantra: “We do not forgive. We do not forget.” To be a constitutionalist anarchist hacker is to remember, and to exact vengeance. In order to be moral, one must remember the sins of slavery, of totalitarianism, of genocide. When memory is a precondition for goodness, the historian reigns as high priest, and “the past controls the future.”5
The dissident right isn’t any better. Its goal is to stop “the slippery slope” from trans-acceptance to grooming, and from affirmative action to white genocide.6 Traditionalists go further, claiming that technology is a slippery slope toward the greatest evil of all: transhumanism. Traditionalism expands the democratic enfranchisement to the victims of Darwinian selection, the dead and defeated.
Whether “moderate” or “extreme,” historicist morality maintains the status quo or restores the Golden Age. Marxists moan that “the left has been losing for decades,” because the Golden Age of FDR has declined in favor of the free-market deregulation of Carter and Clinton. We have to go back, Kate,7 or more obviously, Marty, we have to go back… to the future!
The “MAGA communists” of Duginism want to RETVRN to multipolarity. The great Satan is blank slatist “Atlanticist neoliberalism,” which wipes away old traditions and leaves a gaping nihilism in their place. Satan is the progressive left, an imperial, world-conquering urge.
Dugin claims philosophy, but practices history. Following Heidegger, he is a “continental philosopher.”8 Heidegger’s complaint is that analytic philosophy is too utilitarian; it reduces all objects to a standing reserve of quantity to be exploited. Heiddegar wants to re-enchant the world, so that a bridge becomes poetic, rather than a mere device of transportation.
But this is not philosophy; it is the sacralization of what is or what was while fearing what could be. It refuses to cut the umbilical cord, and strangles the future. Philosophy, from Plato, requires the blank slate, wiping away received tradition to reveal the universal. Wotan, the supreme philosopher, dissects history and nature (the body of giants) and uses the innards to construct a new reality.
PHILOLOGY OF ANALYSIS.
In Greek, the prefix ἀνα is an intensifier, meaning to do thoroughly, repetitively, or upwardly.
The root λύω comes from the Indo-European lewh, “to cut off, separate, free.”
In Sanskrit, lunati, meaning to “to sever, cut, destroy, annihilate.”
In Albanian, lirë, “independent, unimpeded, unrestrained; free.”9
In Old Armenian, lucanem, “to untie, unyoke, unchain, unbind, undo; dissolve, decompose, break; dilute, soften; melt, to solve a riddle or problem.”
The Greek ana-luo corresponds to Latin se-luo, solvo. From Virgil’s Aeneid (1.562):
Solvite corde metum, Teucrī, sēclūdite cūrās.
“Release the heart’s fear, Teucrians, banish worries.”
Solvite is to let down one’s hair, to unfurl a letter, and to set sail. It is the release of inner nature and potential, breaking down pent-up boundaries. In the Bible, the apocalypse (“uncovering,” revelation) occurs when the “seals” are unfurled. Christian forgiveness is radical analysis, in the original Greek sense:
loosen, untie; to set free, release, redeem, to abrogate, annul, to atone, amend, die.
Christ must die (analuo), in order to redeem (analuo), so we are free (analuo).
Matthew 16:25: For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
The word “to lose” is ἀπολέσῃ, apólese. Through apolusis, one achieves analusis, redemption, atonement, and freedom.
Whatever is good in Christianity is copied from Platonism. That is the reason why the New Testament is written in Greek: not because it was the “common language” (that would be Aramaic or Latin), but because it was the language of Platonism.
TABULA RASA.
Aristotle’s use of the word “analusis” refers to deductive thinking, as opposed to the synthesis of inductive reasoning.
Whereas inductive reasoning takes many facts, or histories, and forms a theory out of them, deductive reasoning takes one theory and deduces from it certain facts. For Karl Popper, science is not inductive. It does not form theories out of facts; that is the domain of rumor and gossip. Instead, science is about cutting away via Socratic scrutiny, by deducing facts from particular theories and testing them.
For example, take the theory that the sun revolves around the Earth, Heliocentrism. Since the sun appears to rise and fall in the sky every day, everyone has plenty of empirical evidence that the sun goes around the Earth. But deductively, if we test this theory, we find its flaws. A single deduction can disprove a theory against the weight of infinite “common sense.”10 The goal of science is not to protect sacred dogmas, but to apply continuous skepticism toward all theories. It is a process of sharpening, challenging, and journeying, not of arrogant proclamations and certainties. Science is an adventure, not a destination.
Such skepticism requires a blank slate, tabula rasa. The right-wing hears “blank slate” and has a Pavlovian response. No, the Platonic tabula rasa is not about the relation of one human to another. Instead, the blank slate refers to the relationship between the mind and the world. To adopt a blank slate is to reject preconceived notions and “common knowledge.”
When Plato refers to “eternal natural laws,” the charitable interpretation is not that he is speaking of some kind of Ten Commandments, or specific dietary restrictions, but of math and logic, by which facts are cut down and analyzed. There is a less charitable interpretation by Karl Popper which confuses more than it clarifies.
POPPER vs HEIDEGGER.
There are two ways to interpret Plato’s Republic:
As a dogmatic series of commands for all Platonists to follow;
As a declaration of independence from the strictures of tradition, and a handbook of practical examples for how to employ the scientific method of deductive scrutiny and tabula rasa.
The former can be called rightist Platonism, which conspired to birth Christianity. The latter can be called leftist Platonism, which forms the basis of all genuine scientific discovery and works of poetic genius.
Popper, in misinterpreting Plato as a rightist, savagely attacks him in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper is valuable because of his attacks on historicism, his embrace of skepticism, and his rejection of tradition. But he fails to see Plato as a leftist ally in this effort. This requires Popper to “rescue” Socrates as a captive from Plato. But this is a tortured view.
Sidney Hook wrote that Popper “reads Plato too literally when it serves his purposes and is too cocksure about what Plato’s ‘real’ meaning is when the texts are ambiguous.” Walter Kaufman echoes Hook in claiming that Popper misrepresents Plato.
Popper’s first concern is to defend democracy against the threat of utopian totalitarianism, whether in the form of Naziism or communism. He sees Plato as the ancestor of both. To this list of sins, we should also add Christianity, and maybe even Judaism, to the extent that Talmudic dialogue is influenced by Socratic dialogue, and the Rabbinic schools by the Platonic ones.
Heidegger, through sneaky obscurantist semantics, redefines “philosophy” as historicism. Popper does the reverse: he opposes the lineage of Plato, despite the fact that Plato is the founder of the analytic school. Popper is less dangerous and more acceptable than Heidegger, because he is less seductive and his flaws are more obvious.
Continental “philosophy” is a series of historical diatribes, endlessly convoluted. It is sunk cost. “You don’t understand Heidegger? Try reading another 10,000 pages. Have you tried reading in the original German?” After 10,000 pages of being ground down into dust by paradox and misdirection, the student submits to the brilliance of Heidegger and admits his supremacy. Or, even more likely, the student attempts to “outdo Heidegger,” and take things one step further. This is Duginism.
In Heidegger, continentalism is laid out as an interlocking history of saints. The task of the philosopher is to reconcile all conflicts and bring the saints into agreement. In other words, historicist Talmudism. Contrast this with the Socratic method, where the desire is to humiliate, combat, compete, deconstruct, undermine, and analyze. For Socrates, philosophy is an Olympic game, where the athlete tests himself against truth, and if he is brave enough, he surpasses his own limits and meets death. But the death of a lie is a gain for the philosopher, and this is the path toward scientific understanding.
Heideggerian continentalism dresses itself up cozy, heimlich, but this disguises the historian’s need to control through litigation. The main opponent of Heidegger is alienation, which Socrates seeks to induce. Heidegger flees from risk, while Socrates, the happy warrior, revels in it.
Dugin projects Heidegger’s peace-making of the saints into the political realm, such that each civilization is granted sainthood. Each civilization is an eternal form (an abuse of Plato’s metaphysical concept for the ethno-narcissism of the primitive tribe). Each saintly civilization is afforded infinite respect, patience, and tolerance to conduct itself idiosyncratically, without respect for any universals. The blood of an African in the soil of the Sahara is sacred; heaven forbid that a white man attempt to terraform Africa into something more hospitable. That would be an offense against the motherland, the natural order, the sainthood of civilization.
Dugin cannot morally account for the birth, growth, and development of civilizations. Greek colonization was an offense against natives; Roman colonization was a neoliberal meat grinder that destroyed local religions and cultures. When liberals claim that “natives” have rights, separate and apart from the rights of citizens, they are worshipping the same idol of history.
Popper, in demonizing Plato, makes a less offensive error. Afterall, Plato is not a God to be worshipped, but merely the teacher of a method. That Popper condemns Plato, while benefiting from his method, is more forgivable than Heidegger, who claims to surpass Plato, while lying about the meaning of “philosophy.”
THE TRANS SCIENCE.
In Athens, Solon laid the foundations of democracy in 594 BC, and democracy was made official in 507 BC. By the time of Plato, in 370 BC, it became unquestionable dogma. Democracy was unassailable, determined by the wisdom of one’s parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and the constitution. After 224 years, in the time of Plato, the Athenians were as distant from the founding of democracy as George Bush was to the American Revolution.
In questioning democracy, Plato was engaging in the most radical possible overturning of society. Even more radical than Plato’s attack on democracy was his attack on religion. By attacking the myths, Plato declared war not just on Athens, but all of Greece.
Plato proposes that there are eternal truths, natural laws, and optimal forms of government, according to human nature. But Plato speaks about the original nature of man as beyond gender, as a hermaphrodite. Are we to take this seriously, or as a metaphor?
Without an understanding of metaphysics, Plato’s point cannot be grasped. When Plato refers to eternal truth, he refers to math. When he refers to the original hermaphrodite, he is correct to say that sexual organisms are descended, in evolutionary terms, from asexual organisms. Is Plato proposing that we retvrn into bacteria?
When Plato refers to “returning to the original ungendered human,” he is speaking of an understanding of the mathematical principles which compose man. When Plato proposes that humanity be bred to give birth without sex, he is suggesting that generation proceeds from logos, not genitalia. Genitalia are a mechanism, which can be scientifically understood through analysis. In recommending that we “return to the hermaphrodite,” Plato was providing a metaphor for the discovery of genetic engineering and science, by which man could begin to breed via logos rather than genitalia.
PLATO vs HISTORY.
For Aristotle, poetry is superior to history.11 Poetry is universal, and history is particular. Poetry is what could be, whereas history is the burden of what has been.
Philosophy calls out, scrutinizes, and embarrasses historical thinking. The job of the philosopher is to ask questions of the priest until his knowledge is revealed as a sham. This is the job of Socrates: to endlessly question and deconstruct “received wisdom” and “common knowledge.”
In Plato’s Timaeus, philosophy is represented by the Greeks, while history is represented by the Egyptians. Memory prevents the Egyptians from doing philosophy. The “forgetfulness” of the Greeks saves them from vain repetitions, so that they are free to discover truth directly from observing nature, rather than submitting to corrupted convention.
The Heideggerian reading misinterprets Plato as showing deference to the Egyptians as the “true philosophers.” But this is easily dispelled.
In the Timaeus, Plato seems to praise the Egyptians, but this politeness is a device employed to protect the Platonic School from reprisals. In Phaedrus, Plato reveals his deference toward the Egyptians as superficial or ironic, rather than genuine. If Plato were a true Egyptophile, the Phaedrus would not criticize the practice of writing so harshly, as writing was the sacred art12 of the Egyptians.
Plato argues that those who write history, like the Egyptians, become “forgetful.” In ceasing to exercise memory, the skill will atrophy. But esoterically, the distinction is between collective memory and individual memory. Individual memory places the locus of control within the rational agent, allowing for continuous questioning and testing against new evidence. By contrast, collective memory, in the form of writing, forms sacred dogmas which cannot be questioned.
In The Republic, Plato’s antagonism toward tradition leads him to question democracy and religion. Everything must be scrutinized and torn down, so that the original forms can be recovered from out of the swamp of tradition. Tradition is a history of lies, while “originality” deals with the true nature of things.
In Meno, Plato differentiates between received history and absolute, ideal, or eternal history. Received history reflects the accumulation of mutations and degenerations over centuries, which results in a deformed figure being worshipped as the product of a telephone-game. For example, we react with disgust or embarrassment at the foolishness or pettiness of Zeus.
Absolute history refers to the origin of forms. In Meno, Socrates describes learning mathematical truths as a form of “remembering.” For Plato, mathematics is “absolute history,” as part of the logos from which all matter originates. In metaphysical terms, mathematics and logos are the original ancestors of all life, while tradition and convention are a perverse and parasitic deviation from this origin point. By abolishing history, one can return to the origin point of reality via logic and reason.
IDENTITY AND GENEALOGY.
History, lineage, genealogy, race, generation, and gender: these are distractions from the universal and the rational. The left is obsessed with, seduced by, and resentful toward history, tearing down statues and burning down temples. Conservatives, seeking to avoid confrontation and be left alone, make a passive defense of history by providing excuses for it, or neutering it. The left constructs a boogeyman in order to scapegoat it; the conservative puts makeup on a corpse in a glass box with a sign, “do not touch.”
History is identity and being: who am I? What am I? Liberal? Where did liberalism come from? Christianity? Where did Christ come from? To be Christian is to Jewish, and Judaism is genealogy. Even converts require the authority of the Rabbi, and the Rabbi is authorized by his genealogy, the descent from Aaron.
Rabbis do not spontaneously spring out of nature, but out of the received genealogical authority of the historical Tanakh. The Tanakh cannot be scrutinized, changed, or updated in a scientific fashion. Talmudic dialogue assumes tradition as the supreme authority.
Morality proceeds from authority, and authority proceeds from genealogy. A declaration of genealogy is a declaration of authority, legitimizing a king or priest. From the king or priest,13 the morals of the people are fashioned.
LONE PROPHETS IN JUDAISM.
A paradox exists within Judaism between the Talmudic scholar and the Lion of Judah, King David. The Talmudic scholar scans millions of pages for obscure exceptions to dietary restrictions. King David couldn’t spell the word “scholar.” David is a tragic figure, but through the sin of writing, becomes a farce.14
Throughout the Bible, the knowledge of God is continuously lost due to corruption and needs to be recovered by a single individual and his family. Noah alone is chosen to restart humanity. When Sodom is corrupted, Lot is chosen.
Lot’s wife looks back; his daughters, fearing the extinction of their lineage, commit incest. In both cases, the tendency of women to socially conform (looking toward the city) or to secure their own social status (continue their lineage) is juxtaposed with the lone man who pursues the truth. History and tradition are products of this social conformity. Noah and Lot are heroic to the extent that they defy the convention of their day.
Joseph stands alone among his brothers. Moses forces the Israelites to leave Egypt, while they moan that they would be better off back as slaves. Job refuses to abandon the pursuit of God, despite losing all possessions along the way. Solomon becomes alienated from endless dinner parties and begins to see life as empty without God. David rebels against Saul. All prophets follow in this vein.
If we replace the pursuit of God with the pursuit of truth, then the archetype of the artist or philosopher emerges. In order to be great, one must defy social convention and rise above the masses. History, as the collective egotism of the masses, is the enemy of philosophy.
THE GREEK ORIGINS OF MODERNITY.
Athens was the first democracy that failed. In this rupture, philosophy reached its zenith. The classical era was piratical, chaotic and fragile, when impossible and utopian forms emerged briefly from the thick morass of tradition.
This crisis reemerged in modernity, as the bourgeois grew in power and undermined the aristocracy. A feedback cycle began, from the merchants of Venice to the expeditions of Columbus; from the Protestants of Europe to the liberation of property from genealogy. Each economic development led to a social liberation, and each social liberation had its own economic consequences.
As the vortex of change accelerated, the question of identity reached a fever pitch. Grasping violently for an answer, citizens sought for stability in the concept of nation, as a natural quality which stood outside the eternal flux of the state. Non-Christian nationalism formed the basis for the revolutions in America and France.
Instead of viewing America as the antithesis of nationalism, as imagined by some today, America should be understood as the most purely ethnic state of the 19th and 20th century. Even as mass immigration dilutes America’s physical purity, in ideological terms, America is more obsessed with race and nation than any other country. That the rest of the world is catching up is a product of growing American influence. Biological race as a natural identity is an American idea first and foremost, not a European one. It was Americanism that inspired Naziism.15
The Enlightenment created racism by rejecting both Abrahamic genealogy and aristocratic lineage. But in order to reject one set of lineages (from Charlemagne, Saint Peter, and Abraham), these reformers had to first find new genealogies in the Greeks:
The classical education of Protestant reformers, Luther and Calvin; and later liberals like Locke, Smith, Rousseau, Gibbon, and Jefferson
The revivification of Greek tragedy in Shakespeare;
The neoclassicalism of the American and French revolutions, reflected in architecture and the term “Republic”;
The Greek origins of German idealist philosophy;
Romanticism, named after the Romans;
The Greek obsession of Freud, even as a child, reflected in his writings on Oedipus, Narcissus, and the Acropolis;
Marx’s doctoral thesis “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature”;
Nietzsche, as a philologist, concerned with the origin of words.
Modernity is distinguished from the medieval by the return of the Greeks. The Renaissance was animated by the idea of utopia, represented by the classical world.
MARX AND THE GREEKS.
The left claims that history is injustice. To stop injustice, we must end history. The left is simultaneously obsessed with history, while it claims to wish to eliminate it. To be unburdened by what has been.
According to Marx (1857):
“…the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model. A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?”16
Compare this to Plato’s Timaeus:
“O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is not such a thing as an old Greek.”
The nostalgia for childhood is tragic: the longing for something lost by distance, time, and development. Childhood is stolen “by a thief in the night.” The loss of childhood is the beginning of guilt, shame, and regret. If the Garden of Eden represents childhood, then “paradise lost” is blamed on original sin. In Freudian terms, each man feels irrational guilt for the loss of his own childhood, for allowing his innocence to die.
For the Greeks, the childhood of humanity lay in the Golden Age, the age of heroes and Gods, when Herakles walked the Earth. What followed was a degeneration into the Silver and Bronze age. This occurred not only because lineages became confused and mixed with lower elements, but because all the dragons had been slain. The best heroes cannot be developed against mediocre challenges, but only against supreme ones. The defeat of great monsters had depleted, reduced, and diminished the need for heroes. Necessity is the mother of generation; without great need, heroism faded.
During their tragic period, the Greeks became self-aware of their own age. In the Renaissance, Greek tragedy gained an echo, in that it not only mourned its own loss of innocence, but also became a refrain for the Renaissance man who measured himself against the past and found himself to be hopelessly inferior.
FREUD AND THE GREEKS.
Freud pathologized the Oedipal Complex, not as a beautiful tragedy, but as the symptom of a disease to be cured. Freud attempts to dissect, analyze, and cut out this disease by picking it apart and neutralizing each element. Freud, in this sense, is an anti-Renaissance thinker. In Freud’s childhood, he was obsessed with Greece. To overcome his childhood and become a man, Freud believed that he needed to reject and overcome the Greeks.
Is there anything more tragic than the self-imposed wound of suicide, in the zenith of youth? Romeo and Juliet; the Samurai who commits seppuku. Freud views this self-destructive tendency as irrational.
Freud saw the Greek tragedy as a wound to be healed. He is attempting to solve the problem of masochism. Freud takes youthful suicide as the supreme evil, which places him firmly in the Jewish camp in opposition to Greek tragedy.17
POE AND THE GREEKS.
In The Philosophy of Composition (1846) Edgar Allen Poe writes:
Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones…
I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death, was the obvious reply… the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world…
This is the idea which inspired The Raven (1845), and the suicide of a beautiful woman provides the backdrop for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). It is not the rape of Lucrezia, but her suicide, which inspires the founding of the Roman Republic. Boudicca, mythical mother of the British nation (later re-mythologized as Britannia), committed suicide. When Pat Buchanan wrote Suicide of a Superpower, America becomes a woman committing suicide: “She devalued her currency 45 percent,” and so on.
Poe appealed not to the majority, but to the “sensitive soul.” For Poe, it is necessary to qualify which type of soul we are speaking of. If Poe wished to appeal to the vulgar soul, or the average soul, he would abandon tragedy and embrace comedy. It is comedy — the action movie, the hero slaying the dragon, the Christmas carol — which sells best. Poe died penniless.
THE GREEK DIGNITY OF LABOR.
The right-wing is nationalism, populism, and traditionalism. These former two worship “the people.” The word “tradition” is usually conceived of as worshipping one’s grandparents.
But even worse than this is when right-wingers take the word “traditional” more seriously, and begin to worship the Amish peasantry. They speak of the “dignity of labor” as a cheap plagiarism from socialists, in contradiction to scripture: agricultural labor is not a gift to be cherished, but a punishment from which humanity must redeem itself.
The sin of agriculture differentiates Cain from Abel. The patriarchs follow Abel in their pastoralism, and the sacrifices of the Israelites insist on the supremacy of meat over wheat. David was a shepherd boy, and the Lord is a shepherd, not a farmer.
The Greeks share this attitude in disparaging the farmer, while extolling the virtues of hunters, pirates, warriors, mountain dwellers, and treasure hunters. Apollo and Athena are hunters; Poseidon travels by horse and by sea; Zeus dwells not in fertile valleys, but on high mountains. It is Pluto, God of death, who becomes intertwined with Demeter, God of grain. The “traditionalist” worship of farming is a death cult, associated with Saturn, God of old age.
Sensitivity toward beauty requires liberation from the mass market, which first appears in the market of grain; the “daily bread”; the mediocrity and sanitization of nationalist, populist, and the “traditionalist” worship of labor.
MARX’S DIGNITY OF LABOR.
Marx’s concept of the “dignity of labor” is not brought about by “fair wages,” but with the quality, origin, and product of that labor, as it accords with the inner nature of man:
An enforced increase of wages… would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.18
This implies that there are some forms of labor which are inherently undignified, because these forms of labor produce products which are alien to the man:
…the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes... Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself… the object confronts him as something hostile and alien…
[alien] labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature… he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind… He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor... Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague... Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own… It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
If we take these ideas to their logical conclusion, then the supreme labor is the inner work which is performed to develop one’s own physical and mental energy. In other words, gymnastics and philosophy. Anything else, done for external fruits, is undignified.
If we follow Marx’s definition of alienated or estranged labor, then agricultural labor, or any labor performed for the purpose of “merely surviving, getting by, feeding the kids, keeping the wife happy” is undignified. The only form of labor which is dignified is that labor which uplifts and empowers the individual’s intrinsic nature.
MARXIST EQUALITY.
Marxism assumes that human nature is undifferentiated and universal. Apparent differences are explained as a consequence of external causes and systems. Since these systems do not act on everyone equally, some are rich and others are poor, and the differences in wealth are explained as arbitrary.
Marxism puts its faith in this randomness. Whenever a hypothetical mechanism is proposed to explain differences in outcome, whether it be heredity, karma, or free will, the hypothesis is dismissed with the hostility of a priest protecting the sacraments. Marxism projects its egotism into the doctrine of equality, and defends it as a matter of survival.
Marxism derives this dogma from Christianity. All souls are absolutely corrupt, depraved, hopeless, and equal before God. The soul of the most wretched Christian goes to heaven, while the soul of the most noble pagan goes to hell. This view was gradually eroded during the Renaissance, with Dante inventing “levels” of Hell to protest at the indignity of this “binary equality.”
In Marx, the equality of intrinsic natures is plagiarized from Christianity. However, instead of being saved by God, humanity must collectively save itself by recognizing the moral fact of equality. Once the moral fact is embraced by all, universally, the Kingdom of Heaven (communism) is achieved.
Marx viewed the person of Christ as an obstacle to the purity of his message. In distilling the message of Christ, Marx was attempting to resurrect Christianity after the apparent death of God. Marx was a Christian revivalist. What Marx did not realize (or hid from himself) was that the dignity of the individual stands in opposition to the intrinsic nature of the majority.
This would be the case even assuming a society of clones, or identical twins. The individual experience is meaningless against the masses. The death of an individual is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic. The mass society, united in the body of Christ, or in the body of the proletariat, is antithetical to beauty, which requires the pathos of distance. Among the mob, there can be no space, no distance, and everything sacred is trampled in the stampede.
Among the masses, sensitivity is lost as an individual experience. The desensitization inherent to mass society is present both in Marxist equality, as well as in the market of democracy.
HEGEL AND INDIVIDUALISM.
For Hegel, the “subjective beginning” of Greek art is in the “boundless impulse of individuals to display themselves, and to find enjoyment in so doing.”19 This impulse is traceable back to the overthrow of the Titans, the brute principles of nature.
Hegel attributes the association of the Muses with water nymphs as having its origin in the sounds of trickling water in rivers and streams. The sound of running water has the effect of producing white noise, which calms and soothes the mind, so that it is able to block out distractions and become contemplative. Through the aid of nature, man is better able to access the inner spiritual world, the source of creative individual expression.
When nature is interpreted freely by the creative individual, one becomes an oracle, μαντεία (manteía). Whereas superstition is the fear of natural signs, such as the tendency of man to flee from thunder and lightning, the oracle obtains mastery over nature through divination, or shamanism. This is the basis of poetry: the divine spark which inspires man to represent the beauty of nature (the forms) through language (logos).
Divination requires a projection of spirit into nature, so that nature acts as a mirror which reflects back consciousness to itself, providing insight and self-knowledge. This can be seen most clearly in the Greek mastery over the sculptural form, where man is reflected back to man as an ideal. In the same way, the poetry of Pindar attempts to idealize man, and represent the inner nature or spirit which animates the heroic individual.
The freedom of the oracle, of the artist, and of the athlete is absolute. When the masses are considered, they can only pollute or threaten individuality. The athlete is trampled; the artist is crowded out; the oracle is shouted down. Only when the individual is afforded freedom of expression and movement can divinity be approached.
The oracle attempts to find the truth hidden within the world, and in this sense, the oracle or shaman is the prototype of the scientist and the philosopher. Similarly, the artist is attempting to uncover the forms hidden within the stone; an artist cannot create beauty, but can only approximate or discover what already exists as an ideal. The athlete attempts to remember within himself his own potential, which existed from his birth. He cannot change his nature, but only expresses it, and in doing so, discovers his abilities and limitations.
Similarly, the poet is not protesting or contradicting, but discovering beauty already latent and hidden in language. He does not invent words, but combines them to find their resonance. From this it is easy to compare the musician, who does not invent any sound, but merely arranges them in mathematical ratio, so that each chord finds its proper harmony and proportion. The truth exists as something to be discovered, or, in the words of the Phaedrus, to be remembered.
The poet, musician, oracle, artist, and athlete must forget himself in order to remember beauty. When one obsesses over what one is or was, then one is distracted from what could be. From this annihilation of the self, one discovers tragedy: the artist, athlete, or hero who sacrifices his own life in the pursuit of beauty.
Rather than viewing tragedy as a “mature” development of later Greek culture, there are hints of it already in the Iliad and Odyssey. Hector and Achilles die tragic deaths; Odysseus refuses eternal pleasure with Calypso in order to fulfill his homecoming. The seduction of Calypso represents the distraction of material pleasures, while the homecoming represents the “remembering” of the eternal and absolute origins of the forms.
While the Odyssey is a comedy, and the Iliad is morally ambiguous, the figure of Prometheus allows for a pure tragic interpretation. Prometheus seeks fire as a representation of truth and knowledge, and gives it to humanity out of philosophia, despite the fact that he is condemned to eternal torment for the act.
CONCLUSION.
Once utopians take power, they either enact terror, purge, or gulags; they use semantics to declare victory; or reduce into pedantry. Terror and purges occurred under Cromwell, Robespierre, and Stalin; the semantic stagnation was introduced with Khrushchev and Deng (“communism in name only”); and in America, the left scrutinizes microaggressions without any grand vision.
Prior to the Greeks, all cultures imagined themselves as eternal, stretching from the beginning of time to the end of time. In Judaism, man’s relationship to God remains the same from Adam until the Messiah. In Egyptian religion, the Gods are primary, and the rituals are static for all time. In Hinduism, the cycle of yugas represents a series of repetitions without end.
With Greek tragedy, however, there is a new sense of individuality outside of collective customs and repetitive rituals. There is even the possibility of rebelling against the Gods, as in the case of Odysseus and Prometheus. With Plato, everything comes into question, including the form of religion and government.
Is this not the present state of western civilization: a sense of our impending doom, with no certainty of the future? Is there a day that goes by where pandemics, nuclear war, or economic collapse are not contemplated? It is in this age of apocalypse that the greatest potential arises for change.
One must imagine that the Greeks want to be outdone. Neither nature nor the human have yet to truly emerge. To see the world as it is in its inherent wonder and infinitude is to see the world through the freedom of all senses, in the eyes which sees through all other eyes, in the hands which reach out and feel themselves in communion with heaven and earth, and in the consciousness which knows itself to be in this relation, which finds all its suffering and joys in the suffering and joy of all life, and in so doing, creates.
This was not written by ChatGPT.
How did Plato ever become exiled from the left? It is a story which begins approximately with Marx and ends approximately with Khrushchev. Since that time, leftism has existed only in identitarian forms, and the left has lost any claim to political philosophy, leaving the field entirely to empirical pragmatists looking to min-max state conflict. Minimize, in the case of the Peace Corps, and Maximize, the case of the neo-conservatives, but the mechanistic focus is the same.
I have endlessly made the case for why Democrats are superior to Republicans on issues that matter. This practical case exists independently of the spiritual or philosophical ideological substance which animates the voters or the elites who brainwash them. It is simpler to say, “vote Democrat” than to say, “vote Democrat, despite the fact that democracy is spiritually corrupt, and, in the meantime, continue work toward revolution while accepting practical realities.”
But this is an 8,000 word essay on philosophy. If you made it this far, and you haven’t projectile vomited or passed out from exhaustion, then I will trust that you can distinguish between practical realities and ideals.
Orwell (1949).
Remember, without ceasing. Hold back the “the primrose path to perdition.” [Don’t you dare laugh at such stuck-up windbaggery — this is serious business!]
Is it a coincidence that the word “continent” comes from Latin contineo, meaning to contain and maintain?
Abandon the “common sense” of the mass man and received tradition, and dissect reality to find the truth.
(hiero-, sacred, -glyph, writing)
Or Demiourgos (Plato, Cratylus).
For a modern approach to this paradox, see the writing of Rabbi Dr. Natan Slifkin, of Rationalist Judaism.
Hitler proudly boasted that the genocide of Native Americans should be the model for the German treatment of the Slavs.
Grudrisse, Intro. (Notebook M), section 4. 1857.
Consider, in opposition to Freud, the case of Otto Weininger.
I wouldn't take Plato's description of society in the Republic so seriously. The Republic is partially an allegory for the human soul. It's a mental exercise. Plato's more literal political beliefs are expressed in The Laws, wherein he promotes monogamy and private property. Some say that Plato actually did believe in the Republic literally, but became jaded after his attempt to form a revolutionary state in Sicily failed disastrously, and in the aftermath of the 30 tyrants. Plato's views in the Laws are reflected in the more moderate political proposals of Aristotle.
This is your best piece yet. Should be even longer!
That said, I am a little confused why your reverence for aesthetics and beauty, so wonderfully displayed here, does not extend to politics, where you are some kind of pragmatist. The thought of clinging to the "lesser evil" also clashes with the uncompromising, individualist ideals you defend.
On a side note, do you actually believe we can achieve transhumanism? Might the death of science not get to us before that?