Thucydides vs. China: What Makes "The West" Special?

there is
no countdown for the broadcaster you get the statement going live in the present continuous with a very ambiguous icon on the screen all right guys we're gonna have a conversation to kick this off about what if anything makes the west special politically philosophically and otherwise and i'm happy to take questions from the audience if there is any audience and if there are any questions as has become our habit in just the last few days this is a 100 unannounced and spontaneous live stream so melissa when did you first read thucydides three years ago okay melissa sitting off camera three years ago read through cities for the first time and i assume you had never heard of thucydides before you before you met me i mean as okay it would be one thing to say it's a name that's never spoken on the radio or never in newspaper headlines but in the year 2021 in fact the name is in newspaper headlines on the radio all the time so you guys uh shout out to larry first person show up in our in our audience spontaneous unannounced livestream uh in the year 2021 since joe biden came into office there has been a lot of talk about the thucydides trap as a stupid idiom and completely needless piece of jargon um proposing that china and the united states have a relationship somehow analogous to somehow comparable to the relation between sparta and athens and that there was a kind of inevitable war looming just because of the greatness of the two powers contesting their their place of the world now i think that's ridiculous but that is something that puts thucydide's name uh quite literally into newspaper headlines 2021. i think it is really worth questioning sincerely from a non-fascist perspective what what is the meaning of the west what is special about the west you know obviously right wingers and neo-nazis and crap they talk about the west as if it has some kind of intrinsic special moral superiority over other civilizations and precisely because they're willing to take that for granted they're not going to really examine it in a thorough going or a sincere way now i started off life left-wing i was born left-wing and i was raised left-wing my parents were not just leftists they were communists and i ended up becoming a rather harsh critic of of communism and i grew up in the shadow of genocide and the rise and fall of the british empire here in canada so it is natural as a young man that i would be hostile to the notion that there is anything special about the west or western democracy right um so there's a comment from the audience from sam sam says he finds it surprising that melissa hadn't heard of thucydides he says he heard about the acidities in his eighth grade world history class that's great where did you go to schools i i sure was held in here i can tell you sorry it's a whole separate story when that i first hear about vicinities i had a very peculiar professor in university who was from iran and he he did not identify as a refugee but he could be called an iranian refugee there's an interesting case you know do you identify as male or female well you're persecuted and you fled the country you don't identify as a refugee as a question but he had been uh put in prison and tortured to some extent in iran it was torture light you know what i mean they didn't cut off any fingers or toes but he was interrogated and treated badly in prisons there for being a kind of dissonant intellectual uh interesting guy and yeah if you put his name into google you will find out things about him so his first name was rameen r-a-m-i-n which is not a totally surprising name for an iranian and his last name is so it is unusual for someone from iran his last name is which is still it's spelled more like a hindu name from india but it's not he's iranian um i won't digress into why linguistically those are so similar but they are sanskrit is very similar to avestan people okay i can't i keep saying that in these livestreams i keep doing political seriously guys sanskrit is very similar to avesta come on work on etymologies people uh anyway so rameen jahan beglu was my professor and you know he was the guy who introduced me to the philosophy of max sterner and we talked a lot one-on-one as a as professor of student women we didn't just talk in class or something and i knew a lot about his personal life and things he was one of those professors who took me aside and i think he was somewhat desperate to socialize with someone who was a real intellectual he very explicitly told me that none of his colleagues were none of the other professors were addressed in politics or philosophy none of them were real intellectuals who was absent but he told me about max sterner and a number of other philosophers i did get interested but i remember he was the first person to ever mention thucydides to me and i just completely dismissed this video like he's a historian he's not a philosopher he doesn't do political philosophy i do philosophy i do the philosophy of politics come on you want don't read this historian and he didn't push back on that you know i remember ramin he was like oh yeah you know you're quite right you know like he was acting as if like aristotle and plato are more worthy of your attention than to say but yeah i hadn't read thucydides i was just dimly aware he was considered the father of history you know sorry the context in which i had first first first first ever read the word the name thucydides was in the discussion and critique of hegel so herodotus and thucydides and that stuff came up at that time and then yeah so i that's also shows when i was a young man i was hostile to historians in the writing of history and such and i still am i mean it's it's very hard it's very dangerous to recommend to a young person that they go to the history section of the library and get a book off the shelf it's mostly crap and a lot of it's propaganda and a lot of it's misleading and ill intention and stuff you know i mean history as a as a department at the university is a parlous please to myself powerless okay okay but i'm not done if you don't know parlez look it up okay anyway yeah this is a digression into how i first heard the name thucydides in contrast to melissa but as a young man i was raised to be left wing and i became very critical of my parents political ideology as time went on i saw the cracks in it and so on i am still left of center by the american political compass certainly i thought we're in some very left-wing country in europe i might not be left of center because center is different from place to place i don't know i don't know how i do in sweden i suppose i suppose well maybe we'll find out maybe season two of a ballast y'all will be falling but before live studio audience too let me get again let's get ourselves a studio in stockholm i in the old days i used to have more i used to have more viewers per capita in sweden than any other country i don't think that would be true today but back when i was doing videos about veganism well that was the main thing with speaking politics uh sweden was my most overrepresented source of minorities because their population is small so if you if you looked at viewers per capita for that country they were number one for me um so look growing up left wing it's one of those things where you'd say um is there something special about the west and it's very easy if you are sympathetically inclined to say no that there's nothing special now partly that's based on optimism like you look at what the western world has accomplished and you say hey syria can accomplish that too there's nothing there's no trick to it the syrian people can have a democratic pluralistic society and uh newspapers that criticize the government and people that stand for we they can they can really easily catch up with it anybody can do it right look at the japanese or the japanese don't share our tradition or our history or whatever they were able to create this modern look at taiwan look at south korea so if you look at it in that way you can say look democracy and put it this way not just democracy the redeeming qualities of western civilization were things that the japanese the taiwanese and the south koreans were able to generate themselves without having access to any kind of special heritage or tradition uh in the western world they certainly did it without reading thucydides or aristotle or plato or any of that so why would we delude ourselves as the right wing or want to do as you know especially white nationalists and fascists and what have you and outright uh you know racists uh i wanna want to think that way so that's one and you know obviously that's not all wrong there's some sense in which i'm sympathetic to that and optimistically i'd like to think that any country in africa any country in the middle east or something can very easily take advantage of all the redeeming qualities of the so-called west now i'm going to challenge this idea of the west with the next example especially why is nexus dramatic pause this is unedited people this is why is mexico so much poorer than the united states american day why is the quality of government in mexico so much worse than the united states today all right historically guys you may not know this mexico had silver mexico had oil i.e gasoline mexico has i'm going to go into linear i'm going to say mexico has the world's greatest climate for agriculture find one that's better you know they're right on that cusp where it's not all the way tropical but there's also not really any winter it's that temperate you know hot temperate climate with great soil right and for a lot of america's history you know when you look at like the 13 colonies period mexico and the spanish empire in that part they had more population all kinds of advantage they were part of this great world empire that was managed quite well compared to the american 13 colonies mexico had all kinds of advantages say 200 years ago they had all kinds of advantages 400 years ago too by the way um in terms of the indigenous people you know there were great cities in the area that's now mexico under indigenous people we did not have great cities comparable to the inca and the olmec and so on you know uh here in west the west coast of canada for example you know it's a big contrast mexico seemed like on a continental scale on eclipse you have all these venues why does mexico lack precisely the advantages that we pretend are innate or inherent to or heart and parcel of this thing we call the west western civilization now how about we get even even more challenging greece greece from 2008 to 2021 why is it that greece seems to lack the advantages of of the west right and of course greece is a definitive part of the west people says what greece is about spain you know they're these kind of sick men of europe these kind of failed states within western europe and you know what we mean by the west and the advantages of the west actually it's you know it's quite difficult to tease out which i shouldn't say the statista this is a really kind of technical jargon it's difficult for us to really be honest with ourselves and others what we mean when we're talking about the western world let alone we get into a comparative framework talking about japan or china ancient and modern another great example is india india sri lanka wonderful all right so i'm going to read some stuff going on uh in the chat for a minute junebug says good evening i wonder what time it is there because i'm in bed well junebug let me talk to you through this all right the earth may appear to the naked eye to be flat but it is in fact an imperfect sheer spheroid shape passing through the depths of space and that is why that is why when the sun shines on one side of the globe it is not visible on the other it's sorry to break this to you this is may 19 2021 but if the world were flat it would indeed be peculiar that the sun is shining here and not not so lydia asks oh i and i wonder i wonder if lydia is asking this because she's single lydia admitted in our last live stream that she moved back in with her parents and got pissed off of them and moved back out so so lydia i am wondering if you you have uh if you have a dog in this fight if you say lydia asks are you and melissa getting married any day soon not any times of any days hmm so an interested and interesting question uh another uh profound question do you like george carlin no so that's it's kind of one of the weird litmus tests i think you know back in the old days in this channel people used to insult me by calling me a pseudo-intellectual which i always found hilarious actually made some videos joking about that what hilarious and hollow a comment that is i have to say i think the people who love and look up to george carlin in this world i think they really are pseudo-intellectuals um and an example would be you know the amazing atheist the amazing atheist wars that worships george carlin and looks up to him and stuff and no for someone like me george car church colin is is really a somewhat pitiable i mean he's not great as a comedian he's certainly not great as a social commentator or political person doesn't say what you're trying i mean you're too young for him i mean you know generation [Music] yeah right on youtube right well i was just melissa is 28 so she's of the generation where george growing was being recycled on youtube in short clips or something like that that's what i've seen anyway just say no but you know in my day george carlin was like people actually watched on a vhs cassette for two and a half hours or something i think he did hbo broadcast and stuff too so there there was there was a time and there was a whole generation from that was a big deal and you know so junebug says melissa needs her own live stream for us ladies junebug are you really are you really so naive you don't think the vast majority of melissa's viewers are men really really really [Laughter] let's keep it all the way real quick even oh oh oh i just shaved before broadcasting so i got a little bit of a little bit of dried blood in the end of my channel so i'll keep my oh gee that's not great either keep my head looking straight forward so you can't see the the dried blood on my chin from shining all right my shaving scars you might say okay so um what is special about the west and how does the reading of these big definitive tomes like thucydides aristotle and plato fit into that what if anything especially was why would we look for and why would we discover some criterion something special about the west well as i got older i didn't just become left-wing i actually gained a profound level of education about the politics and history of india the politics and history of thailand cambodia laos eventually china eventually japan those are relatively recent years really that i got into that history um but you start to have a comparative framework where you will notice increasingly what is special about those western tax those western sources western politics western philosophy now if you lack that i mean it is it is really ridiculous whether you're left-wing or right-wing conservative or liberal it's ridiculous to ask children to recognize what's special about america if they have nothing to compare it to you know now even if you just have the comparison of america and mexico if you have a family that's going back and forth between america and mexico you'd start to notice some things and appreciate things so you'll be like oh wow here in america people complain that the police are corrupt but in mexico when they talk about police corruption it's a whole other story so that gives oh now you see police corruption united states in a different way well people complain that this and that doesn't work in the government in america but people even complain the government's going bankrupt in america but in mexico when we talk about the government going bankrupt it's a whole other thing that's that's only one comparison right so you might start to gain some awareness but for someone like myself as life goes on you know probably i began with a comparative awareness looking at canada versus europe but then with a lot of reading you're starting to compare europe to india you're up to well and canada uh you're up to sri lanka southeast asia i mean northern southeast asia i've never been seriously interested in places like indonesia malaysia just mentioned uh muslims southeast asia does not interest me very much but cambodia thailand laos china japan you start building on this way oh so now when i read say lord sham i just mentioned if you guys don't know how to spell or i come on it's the easiest chinese name l-o-r-d space s-h-a-n-g if you check wikipedia you get an okay article and look like it's it's not genius but you will there is a respectable wikipedia article telling you lord shang is one of the most famous influential political philosophers in the history of chinese politics or philosophy or both or the history of chinese history itself when you are reading lord sean there are a lot of really important themes and questions that are just totally absent you know and those themes and questions in the ancient greek literature and the ancient roman literature are present they're prominent they're a big deal now you know you guys might feel this way about an issue like slavery or whether or not women have the right to vote like you could be reading any ancient texts and be like well why aren't they talking about slavery or why aren't they talking about women having the right to vote and you know with a lot of western attacks european tax or something it might be in there it's kind of something briefly mentioned or covered up or something of course there are some that deal with in depth you might be disappointed if you're reading uh political philosophy from any given century it's like well what seems to us as modern readers to be such a prominent important thing you know in the chinese texts in the text from ancient india so on and so forth in all of the non-western texts including of cheese we're not even dealing with the islamic world didn't you i didn't include arabia in this woo which i have studied by the way again shout out to professor rameen jahan beglu professor romine beglu from iran he was my first professor teaching me about the politics of the muslim world and i said that intentionally so that included saudi arabia iran iraq you know i admit we didn't include indonesia it didn't include it didn't go all the way out to the furthest limits we didn't do northwest africa but it was a large part of the muslim egypt made a big impression on me studying politicians yeah so if you want to talk about the history of so-called muslim jurisprudence and these kinds of things and make that comparison why is it that it's just in this one special place in the world that we really have this profound tradition of thinking about and examining like one how is government supposed to work and then two what is the role of the people in it now we could digress here that the concept of the people is not the same at all times in all places it's not the same in all cultures it moves around uh you know during the period of time when the american revolution unfolds and the drafting the american constitution it is obvious to everyone that the people only includes christian white men and a small number of people were challenging that there were people who were in favor of uh equality for blacks there were people who were in favor of equality for women but the the vast majority of people participate in those debates their idea of the people was some people not others now the other thing in the british tradition american edition is also the property qualification they were deeply committed to the idea that people who were poor people who did not own property did not deserve to have a voice in government okay so you can note that too but back in athens and back in rome they were deeply committed to the idea that the people even the poor had to have some stake in government they had to have some kind of positive role in positive involvement in government so to be fair to rome i often say that rome was sort of much worse than athens in every way as a system of political government and i sometimes say that because that's how i feel but you know rome didn't just have the tribunes to represent the poor so there were the tribunes of the poor for the poor or whatever you want to say there were these representatives of the poor the tribunes reported back to a type of parliament or a type of pinnix or a type of plenary that was for the poor they had their own congress if you like for the poorer classes that would mean now to my knowledge there's relatively little documentation that because history was written by the rich but it's sort of mentioned in passing it's like oh yes the tribune arrived kind of with this these notes having been gathered from the meeting with the poor you know that there was this separate kind of congress or senate for the poor now its only formal power was to have the tribune uh or tribune's plural represent their interests in front of the senate to come and veto what was going on and debate it however you can imagine informally they had all kinds of power because if they want to they can burn the city down they get already they can they can burn the city down they can sabotage the war or whatever they can be the difference between winning or losing a war or the economy succeeding or failing so you know the senate knew even if they worked through the tribunes as intermediaries they had to placate and make uh you know make happy this reputation poor now okay so we're already getting at part of my answer this question without assailing the history of chinese political philosophy the history of muslim political philosophy but guys it's all bad i mean if you want to take the time if you want i enjoy reading lord sean i enjoy reading anyone who said oh yeah the philosophy lord sean still has like meaning and applicability today you have to be insane you have to be insane i mean the political and philosophical history of china is only worth studying to understand why china was so screwed up in the way it was in past centuries it's important for understanding history and it has absolutely no value to add to our political organization or function none zero now i would say the same about muslim jurisprudence we tend to always say jurisprudence rather than political science in the islamic world but yeah you want to know how sharia law works melissa was just reading about that in central asia was what's your impression i mean you know the only people who think that stills a place in the modern world are isis are the really extreme islamic terrorists they they want to go back to sharia law and rule by muslim jurisprudence it was absolutely terrible and by the way india and pakistan they're very much part of that history too linguistically and culturally different but they also have their own history this kind of terrible uh brutality of muslim rule so look uh oops turn the light off nice in there um okay i'll glance at some uh glance at some uh questions from the audience here before we proceed [Music] yes i got a question what do you think of nathan rich is he thinking of the chinese rapper remember that guy yeah oh rich bryant no okay i've nev to my knowledge i've never heard the name nathan ridge before whoever asked the question oh we have a profound uh question about what does that mean and the next question is tearing down the walls i think that's a provocative suggestion but no uh it does not mean terri terry nineves it has this sense of being like uh terror heaven out of the sky so very literally yeah to tear down the sky but yeah this sense of tear down heaven or tear heaven on the sky and um it was a political slogan at several different points in uh french political history you know chanted in protests and comes up spontaneously because people would sometimes say about it tear down the government tear down the state and sometimes they say tear down the church or tear down a particular leader you know abba la blanc uh you got a different thing but then the more extreme form whatever people were saying was about the ciel so i know i'm not chanting about i'm not saying i don't want to take down the current government i want to take heaven out of the sky you know so we get an answer about nathan rich so i just say it it comes up as a sort of intentionally exaggerated political slogan in different french revolutions and uprisings so we get an answer nathan rich is a political commentator on china on youtube he is essentially a spokesperson for the ccp well i probably i'm not very sympathetic i mean the other problem is look the communist party itself is one thing the freelance propaganda people do on its behalf when they're pandering to what the con what they think the communist party wants to hear is really really bad if you want to read real communist party uh propaganda the website to look up is chosha q-i-u-space s-h-i most most western people don't know about that but there is an english language edition of chosha and that is the official political science journal political philosophy journal of the government of china where they tell you what they want you to think and in some ways it's very honest i mean i know that's going to sound weird but you know i mean honesty comes from strength right and when you're in a position of unassailable power you can be honest with people because you know they can't they can't hurt you there can't be any negative consequences so you know uh you will actually find a lot of strange honesty in the pages of uh chosha magazine about what's going on that you can learn something from that but watching these guys whether they're white guys or chinese immigrants united states of america who are out here doing freelance work it's really bad you don't uh you know yeah so somebody is saying there's a lot of this oh shout out to melora shout out to everyone showing up be honest i always wonder i wonder if anyone will ever for anyone if this will be their first introduction to my channel if anyone will show up and watch one of these live streams where are the entire audiences normally it's comprised of people who've already known me for like seven years you know there are people uh people who've known me for so many years and by the way also i mean i uh i'm sympathetic to this i say this years ago on the channel there are people who have spent more time listening to my voice than they've spent listening to their cousins or nieces or nephews or even their brothers or sisters voices like you think about in the last five years how many hours have you spent listening to a ballast yell how many hours you spent listening to your brother talk about politics talking about his life talk about anything so i know i know there are people in the audience who've really really gotten to know me but anyway yeah but i would be interested no for anyone they're they're stepping in uh midstream uh in more ways than one okay so look um what makes the west special or in what sense should we grudgingly admit that the west is special well i think what most people want to overlook or not want to deal with is exactly the issue of social class in the history of uh ancient rome and ancient greece now the idea of social class has become tarnished because marxists won't shut up about it and marxist won't stop justifying mass murder with it right a lot of ideas get discredited by mass murder but when you're talking about social class in aristotle or cicero or thucydides you know whether it's ancient athens or ancient rome you are not talking about the marxist idea of social class you're not talking about marxist excuses for massacring massacring and persecuting people being socialized nor are you talking about ideas that came out of the french revolution you know prior to marxism but still many many centuries countless centuries after uh ancient greece in ancient rome so today we talk about the people and then we sometimes talk about particular elites now it is peculiar that in the american tradition and the american tradition has now influenced the whole world governments do not think they need to have representation for elites and they should just to give you an example how many surgeons are represented in government how many nurses are represented in government those are people with special expertise and right now look what's happening in the world in 2021 the opinions and perspectives of doctors and nurses are really important well you should probably have seats in parliament or seats in your congress that are reserved to elect a certain number of senior experienced medical professionals it probably in several different areas of expertise and they probably should be elected not appointed and they should have to debate you know he should have elections where they say oh no i think i'm the best surgeon to represent the people's interests and they'll say i'm not corrupt i didn't sell out to the pharmaceutical companies like you did they should probably get up there and really dispute that so my point is here elites are not necessarily evil and having representation for political elites in government is not necessarily evil we do not have that in any of the modern so-called democracies so-called representative democracies raising the question of who are you representing you know if you have a system of congress or a system of parliament that only represents wealthy lawyers what the hell is the point of having a representative government and i'm sorry let's keep it straight bill clinton and his wife were both wealthy lawyers now in my opinion based on i also think they were genuinely corrupt genuinely criminal lawyers i've made a couple of videos that i do believe uh i do believe some of the bad things people say about bill clinton and hillary clinton by the way it doesn't mean he was a bad president i mean he's a terrible human being now when you look back at the 20th century compare bill clinton to you know ronald reagan or george w bush just like nobody is going to remember bill clinton is the worst president of his of his era or of his century he's going to obviously he's going to be remembered relatively positively in terms of this issue terrible terrible human being though and my point is just if you have a system of government that only represents that one elite that only represents uh corrupt lawyers or wealthy lawyers uh or any of them are any of them really untainted by corruption the people who get elected where are the medical doctors where are the nurses where are the school teachers where are the university professors those are all people with particular vested interests and perspectives where are certain kinds of scientists whose opinions you might really want to represent in government how about people who know about sewage treatment you know or the environment under a couple different headaches you might think about those those might be people you want to have in the room and elected not appointed because if you appoint them you're just going to appoint people who agree with what the government already wants to do what about people who are experts in fishing and fisheries i'm vegan from as far as i'm concerned we can abolish fishing but you might have people who know about fishing and hunting and habitat conservation we have none of that the only form of expertise we have is exactly the kind of expertise bill clinton had again and again and again and what you get across the spectrums are different flavors of bill clinton you get a relatively left-wing bill clinton and a relatively right-wing bill clinton but all of them have come out of this same kind of elite law school background uh again and again yet so this is now i'm only talking about the upper half of representation right where is the representation for the poor right where is the representation for indigenous people for first nations for the navajo for the cree for the ojibwe you know where you know and it never has been there i mean historically you go back over the decades and centuries it's not just that it's not there it's the this ain't something new that just came a number gee we call this representative government nobody is representing that interesting there's no actual interest in representation or who's being represented or or why hmm interesting so maybe we don't have representation or representation of maybe we have senatorial government and who and what is the senate is worth talking about but this is my point when we look back at the the uniqueness of the west of what made the west special as a political idea or political movement when we look at thucydides and we look at rome also right we're looking at societies that self-consciously and intentionally design their systems of government to represent multiple social classes these are the rich these are the poor and these are several gradients of rich and poor in between now they also sorry in athens especially in rome was a little bit different but not that much different but in athens they also divided each of the social strata into tribes and when people are first reading ancient greek texts like aristotle they're discussing this they don't really know what the truth what the word tribe means it doesn't mean tribalism in our sense it was a quite artificial thing you were basically different neighborhoods or whatever had different teams invented to represent them in government so you had an affiliation with your social class which very explicitly meant your level of wealth and you had this kind of this deem identity this affiliation with your neighborhood with your tribe and again it's a totally phony government-created tribe where just everybody gets assigned to a different tribe kind of thing it doesn't represent your ancestry or your ethnicity or whatever and then also you know you would all your life carry a special fraternity a special brotherhood because of the year that you commenced doing your military service the men who were inducted into the military who served in the military starting the same year you did you remember that oh i started in the year such and such when so and so was in charge of the army he swore me into the army and you carry and you met with those guys and had lunch with them every so often lunch or dinner but you had ceremonial occasions where you met up with your war buddies your whole life so already you get the sense of how powerful the social cohesion was the bonds of sentiment think of this okay now why why did they have this system of different social strata being represented in government okay it was not out of the goodness of their hearts it was not because of some kind of marxist theory about i don't know what's good for the rich you're good for something it wasn't out of zone okay it fundamentally was about taxation and motivating people to pay their taxes now maybe there is some exception to the generalization i'm going to make i'm going to tell you something i don't know it most societies all over the world societies other than athens and rome most of them had a fundamentally punitive system of taxation where you have some kind of despot or tyrant who's trying to tax you and if you don't pay your taxes he's going to beat you up or he's going to put you in prison or he's going to steal your wife or something where it is based just on coercion and threat now in the ancient world there are no computers right there are no credit cards there's no way to really track and trace what you're buying and selling it's not easy for the government in the ancient world to say okay well you're a farmer this is how many tons of wheat you produced and this is how much that's worth and here's the percentile value of the tax you should be paying that kind of calculation is very very difficult to do even if people are being honest with you and they're not people are going to lie obviously the easiest thing in the world whether you are mining in gold or farming olives off of your olive tree the easiest thing in the world to do is to lie about how much money you're making how much you're farming how much wool you are spinning how many clothes you're producing how many sales you are sowing out of hemp what is the financial value of the pots you are baking in an oven how is the government going to tax you well one answer is the majority of planet earth majority history was the government is going to terrorize you the government is going to interrogate you and threaten you with torture and they're going to send soldiers every so often and they are going to try to force you to pay your taxes out of fear that if you don't comply your life will be wrong that is one answer okay and the answer that athens and rome came up with instead is you should be proud to pay your taxes because we have at any given time it's something like five or six social strata it's a little bit different five six or seven levels of how wealthy you are and if you're in one of those middle levels and you start making more money you should be proud to honestly account how much money you have and then start paying the higher level of taxes so that you can move up in the political system to being represented in that level of government see ah now now we see why now we see why the people in rome and athens were divided into social classes and why they competed with another one of them they vied with one another to move up the ladder and to pay more taxes so uh we even see this with burials in terms of archaeology you know the best evidence you can ever get is a tombstone and this kind of thing they really last through history we have tombstones of people who say proudly i was born or okay this is actually a real example i remember reading this book anyway i was born in the second lowest social class you know so there's like the absolute poorest report i was one up from that and i worked hard and this was my business and this is my uh i did x y and zed in the marketplace and by the time i died i had gotten up to the highest social class i had moved up the ranks you know this is business he was proud of this it was what was inscribed in rock on his tombstone i was gonna say sometimes you have other stories where it's like hey my father was born in the lowest class i moved up to social classes and my son he's going to be in the in the eckhaus or whatever he's going to be a knight he's going to be a horseman whatever right and your social class it was reflected in again sometimes who you ate lunch with who you ate dinner with what ceremonial occasions you attended what uh festivities and religious occasions you attended or if the same festivity was happening everywhere you wouldn't go to the celebration for the plebs for the poor you'd go to this one for the for the elite you get to go to different dinner parties which by the way you can see that already in plato they cared a lot about going to fancy dinner parties people people still do it doesn't make sense you would get to go to different kinds of social occasions you'd be recognized away you would get to participate in government inform government uh in a different way and the biggest one of all right is military service because that ultimately that's where the ego trip stops right now we're talking about life and death right so if you were in a lower social class you might be stuck rowing the boat right it's a good exercise right okay but these are ancient times you might be one of the guys on the oars right in a tyrami rowing about you might have a lower duty in the military if what you wanted you know maybe you don't want this but a lot of people do if what you wanted was to wearing a gleaming beautiful suit of armor and to go into battle in at cape if you wanted to have that aristocratic bearing in war and do those aristocratic things and those those higher duties and now you know you tell me whether your chances of surviving are greater or worse um i would imagine anyway you might die on more dignified death when it came to war ah now your social class matters and it doesn't just matter for you it matters for your sons right because your son like if you're already a middle aged man your sons are going to go to war if you're an old man right your sons and your grandsons it matters for your daughters because it changes who your daughters get to marry these were totally gender unequal societies don't get me wrong but the single most important thing in a woman's life was who she would get to marry so if you move up in social class oh yeah you know um so yes people did move up and people did move down um it always stuck with me that it was said of cilla the dictator really his name is sulla so s-y-l-o-a or s-u-l-a that he was born to rented rooms on an upper floor so in rome they did have apartment buildings i don't know if they went up three floors or four floors i don't think they could go up 10 stories or something they didn't have the technology for that but if you lived in an apartment in ancient rome the most desirable place to be was on the ground floor and the reason for that was water if you lived on the upper floor you were constantly going downstairs to get a bucket of water and there were no plastic buckets this would be an earthenware jar a heavy jar you have to fill it with water you have to go up this is good exercise but this was a mark of poverty urban poverty that sola became the dictator who became the leader of rome one of the most influential but he was born to rented rooms on an upper floor so yeah there was there was social mobility and there was uh there was pride um in being able to move up and to do that you had to pay more taxes right so if you lived out in the middle of the jungle so to speak if you had no contact if you weren't downtown in athens or downtown in rome if you lived out in in the wilderness somewhere and you were making a lot of money again hashtag not vegan if you were making a lot of money raising sheep and then taking the wolf from the sheep and processing the wolves you could have a business out somewhere that has no contact with the urban city you can lie to everyone about how much money you make you could stockpile a huge amount of a fortune in gold coins or whatever the medium is you know and nobody knows about it and you're not celebrated not respected but if you want to be celebrated and respected in the society of your fellow man ah now you have to come to the city and the proof of how much money you make is that you pay taxes so again you guys whatever if it's ten percent say oh yeah well i made a million dollars okay well you prove that by paying your ten percent of money you pay that by making your contribution and by the way i have seen different indications of this to my knowledge when you're talking about ancient greece in rome the amounts of money were not fixed in percentages this way to my knowledge maybe some new research has shown this has shown something else on this but normally i believe it was fixed in military terms that it was like you have to give enough money for a suit of armor to completely armor furnish with arms and armor one uh one hoplite or you have to give enough you have to either give us a war horse or enough money to buy and raise like to add a horse there that the the levels of taxation were in this way palpable things the military needed like i you would pay money but the amount of money being paid uh would be in this way linked to military sums maybe now there's been some new uh you know one other thing before we go on uh machiavelli who's much more important for the political history of the west than anyone wants to admit he was you know uh and this is the book to read by machiavelli you won't read it cover to cover because not every just being honest not every page of it is interesting but so maybe 25 of this is really interesting and 75 of it you're going to flip through but the 25 percent of interesting is really interesting machiavelli's discourses on livy a much more important book than uh the prince by maggie um and long if i had the prince out here it looks like a pamphlet by contrast you know machiavelli is alive at a time when he said quite correctly that the era of city-states is now over that the era of the world being ruled by tiny places like athens and uh rome is now over that we're going to live in an era now with large countries like france or germany in the united states and his reasoning for this is interesting his reasoning is that it's because of artillery that now we have artillery shells that can go a long way so it is impossible for a wall the city-state like athens was to be of any importance or security you can't do that anymore now you have to have the country ah okay so interesting interesting perspective for machiavelli here's the counter argument places like athens and rome precisely because they were small in this way had almost infinite tax revenue because they were taxing all the trade that came in and out of the city so just says the most common pattern in economic development what people call third world development city is uh the center periphery pattern right you see this all over the world you see this even within the united states of america or canada normally you have one city that's wealthy and that's where the harbor is or that's where the trade is so if you have a landlocked country it'll be the city that's on the train line it's where or on the river where the boats you know unload and where the train loads up and stuff this is true of laos by the way the only money is on the train line on the river um where the where the river meets the train line effect but anyway but with most countries that are not landlocked okay so there's one there you got one or two cities that are on the coast and that's where all the boats dump their goods and load up to leave with other goods and at that point where trade takes place at the harbor um then there's all this tax revenue for the government coming in and out right and then the periphery you have a rural hinterland that is more or less deprived more or less poor so in a modern country like canada how is it that electricity and running water and so on are provided to our rural periphery well we tax the people in the big city and then we spend that tax money improving life for people on the rural periphery this is in third world countries it's a real struggle and you get into a lot of problems because of the extremes of wealth and poverty can be difficult for everyone to endure this will you solve this problem with a city city like athens ancient greece because all the tax money just stays there in athens there are people in the surrounding periphery there are people in biosha that's the british pronunciation of beosho ridiculous mispronunciation but anyway the actual greek pronunciation system anyway there are people in surrounding provinces attic provinces and beosha and so on these other surrounding principalities and they're farming and they're producing finished goods they're manufacturing things and they're bringing those things to athens to be sold or to be exported some of those things are going to be exported egypt and they're going to import things for me and all the tax revenue is being generated in athens and it's all being spent in athens they're droning in tax money they have lots of money to spend right and that role peripheral gets nothing right well they get the you know the farmers get the money there but they're not producing a wealthy government with those advantages so this is also a big part of i mean look why was athens successful this also explains why they were a failure you know like they were in some ways really successful and they were in some ways failure this formula had some advantages and disadvantages now so machiavelli is the turning point once you recognize that okay so machiavelli is alive in italy at a time when italy is divided into these small principalities like venice and florence they're bigger than city-states they're not just a city but they're a city with a little bit of surrounding surrounding countryside one that still exists today by the way guys is uh san marino so if you guys know the tiny state of san marino um we got some little bee fans in the audience someone who remembers my videos but those are i could unlist my videos but a little bit i could self-censor [Laughter] um so machiavelli is living at the end of this period of history and uh saying well we need to expand in that large principalities large countries right well when you do that now the wealth and tax revenue you're generating now that is going to be dissipated so you you still are generating the wealth and tax revenue in a few places a few places like new york city and boston at the united states a few places like athens and rome but even today even modern greece they don't have enough tax money today 2021 greece is still teetering on the edge of bankruptcy well still the same harbor socrates used to walk around and philosophize that the perez harbor in athens that is still their biggest harbor that's where all their economic activity is that's where the chinese ships land and unload their goods and put them onto a train line that goes straight north by the way you know that's it you've got this one little place to generate some wealth the rest of greece is poverty-stricken slight symbol and thessaloniki i guess has a little bit of money but most of greece most of the interior is poor and they've got to take this tax money generated from just one place of that you know we've got to build schools everywhere now we've got to build hospitals every now we've got to provide doctors and nurses everywhere so this is also a very fundamental difference in terms of tax revenue so i mean you know the basis for government the basis for politics isn't voting it isn't popular democracy isn't sovereignty it's taxation government comes from taxation right that's it and that's also the difference between having a government and just having a tribe you can have a tribe of people that you know we did for thousands of years and a few places in the world there's no taxation there's compulsory military service and everyone has to do whatever the tribal chieftain says and so there's you know you can call this a government but the fundamental difference is there is neither liberty nor taxation when you have government the government says you in fact do whatever you want you have freedom but whatever you do we're going to tax a percentage of it and with that you know this is very different from living in a tribal society where you don't have the freedom to do whatever you want to do and your labor is directly compelled by your political leaders the tribal chiefs and or religious leader or whatever it may be so that is that is the fundamental shift to government so that is my athens the riddle sorry that is my athens fair enough that is my solution to the riddle of what is so special about the western world in terms of democracy we went through these phases of development so i was gonna say uh you know thucydides for me personally is a big part of this of understanding this reading through cities and through cities is anti-democracy by the way through city is one of the many authors who was just constantly saying democracy is bad and wrong he's telling you all the disadvantages of democracy is the world's harshest critic of democracy but we can still read it and see the advantages of markets we can see how important it is but you know melissa was with me when i read this book by the guy with such a long name numa jesus christ am i going to get this guy's name right uh the ancient city his name right numa denistel is a very long name for a book i am not recommending this book really i'm really not but i just mentioned that's a book oh i could digress a little bit with the contrast of this month thesis okay so let's let's just reset my thesis real briefly here you know when you look at china when you look at india when you look at non-western civilizations that have a well-documented political history where we have writing about what happened there over centuries and over thousands of years because you don't have that for the world cambodian political history is relatively brief um we have to guess what was going on in cambodia phone years ago for just a few pieces of stone that are inscribed okay look at the philippines huge inhabited area you say still a huge percentage of the human beings on planet earth are filipino but good luck figuring out i mean we don't have a literature of political philosophy from the philippines but i'm i'm guessing it wasn't good i mean i'm you know but so we don't have this kind of record that we have for greece china india and so in japan it could be on this list too or something right when you look at these other non-western civilizations i am saying they did not go through this unique developmental stage that happened in athens and rome largely by accident i'm sure you know we could get into the different factors that why it happened and what happens but whatever where they started a stratified system of representational government they started having democracy yes which was taxing people in this way and positively motivating people to pay their taxes by recognizing their social status and government accordingly so it was a dynamically unequal system of democracy it wasn't democracy on the basis of of human equality it was democracy based on a kind of voluntary inequality because they wanted you to voluntarily pay your taxes in a time when there were no bank accounts and there were no credit cards there was no way to track and trace how much money you were spending or earning they wanted you to step up and in this in a sense pay as much as you could in taxes uh george so those those factors came together and then people started philosophizing about it and to keep it all the way real with you i feel like the most brilliant minds in rome never really understood what athens had done right i'm just being honest with you i don't think anyone in realm ever really got it all the way anyway the guy with the uh the long name i just mentioned oh i'm gonna read some questions from the from the audience guys i see you i see you uh see you buzzing in here be honest numa denistel de colons he instead prevents a pardon me he instead presents a developmental model of how we ended up with greek and roman civilization and it's significant to note he tries to claim that india had the same thing which it doesn't i mean it's it's just it's just dishonest but he tries to claim that india ancient india and ancient iran had the same develop now ethno-linguistically there are reasons to link those places together um this came up earlier in the video you know guys sanskrit and avestan are more closely related languages pali and latin are more closely related i think pali and greek are more close yeah so there are there are kind of ethno-linguistic reasons why he would make the hypothesis but he was actually claiming that greece rome ancient india and ancient iran i totally disagree with this hypothesis that what they had in common was this religious development and then he starts tracing out in a frankly dishonest and cherry-picking way distinctive elements of religion how religion operated at the individual level at the family level then at the community level like the neighborhood level and then at the city level and the national level and say okay so this is how the whole society fit together so uh and one of the things to say about uh pneuma denis fustel de colons this this author his later books are only in french i believe they've never been translated into english so i assume his later works when he was an older man or probably more mature and more intelligent he was relatively young when he had this hit book that is my guess i would be interested to know what his later work is like but i haven't read it i've only read this one famous early book and i mean if you know enough about ancient greece in rome it's a fascinating exercise to go through what he says and how he presents and misrepresents these things about uh religion and society and politics but it's a kind of religion first analysis that people participated in uh politics through their religion if you like what is largely true religion was a huge factor right there and uh yeah it's fascinating i also think it's totally wrong i think his hypothesis in that book i think what he's arguing is wrong and how he argues it is misleading but nevertheless i probably um refined my own view i sharpened my own claws against the rock of uh denis fustel de colanges uh work on that because it is a compendious work and you know a lot of the stuff he quotes i've read before he's quoting a lot of stuff out of plutarch and i wish i read in like 1997 or 1999 or something but a lot of it is quoting sources oh he quotes thucydides too by the way this is stuff taking out the cities so a lot of it was like oh yeah right i remember when they said that about sparta and i don't know what's in that but yeah that's a that's a very different approach um you know and i just mentioned briefly this is a challenge if anyone's really interested in anthropology or kind of anthropological approach to politics you know religion is a big deal you know uh if you want to understand politics of egypt today or saudi arabia yeah you know religion is a big deal you could say that about texas religion appeal but you know it's not the only way to approach those issues i think you can get a really brilliant explanation of the unique democratic form of government in athens and rome by looking at theater do you want do you want to grab that book for me babe we haven't it's not that i guess i don't want to wrap that book we have a book right now on uh on theater i shouldn't wrap it because i haven't read it yet it's probably a mediocre book but anyway you know if you look at how the greeks organized theater how they organized sports olympic sports it was voting at sport competitions there was voting at the theater right and then you look at how they organize juries and trials wow we've got a powerful explanation here for how the whole society worked right so you have a society unlike china unlike india unlike japan where their idea of a concert is a competition between multiple musicians and the audience votes on who gets the laurel and who went voting that audiences vote on music that their idea of theater you know comedy this is also true of tragedy but comedy you'd have several different comedies performs and the audience votes right on who was the best performance and now you look at how juries how trials how murderer and you know the vast majority of cases were not murder of course they'd be uh two business associates and one backstabbed the other one didn't pay his desk the other let the other down so you're explaining a complex business relationship to an audience of like 500 people that hundreds of people in a jury and the audience votes and then you look at the panics their version of the parliament and the audience votes so this is a much more powerful explanation than the religious approach of pneumonia fustel it's my theatrical approach and now we could see something similar mutatus mutandus about rome but maybe you could also make the argument that one of the reasons why democracy was weaker in rome was that this tradition was weaker so in greece they had the olympic games those are the ones that are famous they also had the delphic games they had many different games the delphi games were just as important but probably more important the olympic games basically they had these sporting events you know you can look at that they had the theater and all this other stuff just talk about rome had gladiatorial games a little different you know i do think the gladiatorial games influenced they were both influenced by an influence so let me just let me just say this too um i do think you get a powerful insight into political organization and political philosophy in a society by looking at the police the prisons the judges the juries the trials chinese political philosophy is very much interested in training the judge right the magistrate if you like the professional politician the professional bureaucrat in china is a judge and chinese philosophers and authors and educators whether we're talking about confucius we're talking about sunza they are really part of the process of training good men to take on the extraordinary role of being a scholar bureaucrat who can sit in judgment on his filament to be a judge this involves executing people practically every sentence in ancient china ended either with you being executed with you being tortured or you being tattooed on your face and sent off to live a life of slavery so the stakes are high and their idea of being a good judge is of being intellectually pure ritually pure like performing a lot of rituals knowing poetry and literature and refining your sentiments having a certain kind of sympathy and compassion they're concerned with that like it's not their idea of a good judge is not of a cruel and callous person there's a lot about sentimentality and you know and again when i say religious purity sorry but no offense if you haven't really studied ancient china you have no idea what i'm talking about the the chinese the ancient chinese idea of religious period it's not like muslim purity it's not like christian purity it's not like jewish beauty they have a totally different you know taoist and animist sense this ancient chinese religious sense which also isn't buddhist by the way it's very different from buddhism of what what religion means and what being a good man means so they are interested in there and there is an intellectual component to that just just being literate in classical chinese is a huge intellectual challenge and these men are supposed to be at this advanced level of literacy where they're reading you know this poetry so they are interested in cultivating you to be a judge to be a scholar bureaucrat now i think it could be said if we want to say something flattering about the chinese tradition it's something totally lacking in the west what anyone can be a judge here any [ __ ] can go to law school and become a [ __ ] judge we don't care we don't expect the judge to be a good person you know what i mean it's just terrible now and if you think uh civilian trials are a joke take a look at the military tribunal system what a joke we have no interest in the judge being a good person we have no interest in the jury being a good person do we care if the lawyers are a good person there are some kind of minimum standards and practices for lawyers you know what i mean um they're we're really reckless on that issue which i think is of of central importance uh to the chinese tradition now again in athens we say this very clearly rome is maybe a little bit more of a mixed case because in many ways roman government is like a kind of decayed corrupt decrepit second-rate imitation of athenian government okay but in athenian government it's completely clear anyone anyone who has done his military service and become a citizen so these are all men and they're not slaves and they've done their time in the army if you've done any time in the army you can be in the panics you can be in government you can be a judge and who is the judge should be selected at random and you can be in the jury at random that's a profound part of the athenian tradition right that randomness sortition they even use the kind of machine uh it's not worth describing but you know that you would be randomly assigned to the jury you'd be randomly assigned to be a judge and there were all kinds of situations where even the kind of magistrate in charge the kind of president for a certain kind of political meeting would be assigned at random too or positions of political power some of them lasting one day some of them lasting one year would be assigned at random so that sense of equality and randomness you know that is you know that is something that mattered so uh francisco i do take the time to talk to people in the audience and you know guess what bro like you know i can ban you like i don't really get what the point is of interrupting i do read the comments of not often people are not really asking all the time really meaningful and salient comments or i should you know where i should stop what i'm doing uh you know to you know uh to answer them you know it's fine but you know i mean like you know sir just look you can scroll up yourself you're in the audience you can scroll up and you can see you know what what people have been saying but not all these are things you know i'm i'm in the middle of you know um you know i i really just don't see the point so someone made a comment here 4chan is cringe you know what i mean like well what do you want me to say and response to them you know sometimes i have a lot to say you know what i mean i i don't i you know i'm in the middle of explaining something about ancient athens sometimes people you know are asking questions or talking about something relevant now if you've done any of this reading if you have any if you have anything meaningful to say i'm happy to hear it but you know what there were some comments here about the rapper uh little bee you know i saw this stuff as happens i mentioned the philippines someone in the audience said i'm from the philippines that's nice to hear but like am i really going to stop what i'm saying to read that comment out and respond to it if people are saying something meaningful if people are saying something challenging or asking a question i'm you know i'm happy to hear it i'm happy to respond to it but i don't really you know i i just don't see the point of uh of this kind of complaint you know so anyway anyone who's got anything to send in you know by all means and you know sorry again if you were here at the beginning i mean with a long live stream like this i realize most people in the audience know we're not here when we first got started but i have been i've been stopping and answering what's going on all right shout out to uh shout out to vitamin water who did not sponsor this video i got my coronavirus vaccination today so what you are witnessing right now is me under the uh mind altering influence of both the coronavirus vaccine by pfizer also known as puffizer and uh that completely legal street drug that we hand out to children chocolate that's that's probably as i i did eat a small amount of vegan chocolate to help counteract the somewhat dizzying effect of the uh the vaccine anyway so someone's saying isil is on the jab that's the truth man i'm on the jab and i'm i'm on the chocolate so you guys don't know this movie i try to have zero uh caffeine uh in my diet and uh i try when i'm sick or when i have jet lag i will drink caffeine but just recently well and i had coronavirus i don't know if you guys remember that but now more than a year ago maybe a year and a half ago i did actually i was sick for 28 days so there have been times when i've just given in and drink caffeine but at the moment i'm trying to do zero caffeine and if you do zero caffeine that also means zero chocolate but today i got the jab so i made an excuse for myself and i ate ate some vegan chocolate i'm both suffering and enjoying the uh the side effects of having eaten chocolate um okay we have a this is the first time ever in the history of the channel someone has paid to make a comment some of you know this melissa people can pay and then their comment appears in a brightly colored box so someone paid five dollars wow we do not know if those are us dollars or canadian dollars i'm gonna assume the u.s dollars fight you just thanks man you just paid for my vitamin and he says quote hey guys i've been watching you for years excellent videos ha ha yeah i guess it doesn't need to be introduction well look you know so i just say that's not my perspective my perspective is if you've got something interesting to say i'm going to stop and respond to it but like look i'm not saying this to insult my audience let's be real not one person said oh well when i read aristotle i didn't see it that way not one person said well you know i actually differ with your interpretation of pneuma fustel de colange and what he has to say about thucydides and the differences between roman and you know ancient greek poly okay just just keep it real i'm keeping it real with you you guys got to keep it real with yourselves there's you know during this period of time there's been nothing really in the audience for me to you know respond it's fine i'm not i'm not here to insult you guys but don't insult me if i haven't like stopped in the middle of saying that something i think is really meaningful and important and is the topic of the video when you know nobody in the audience is providing with something you know really challenging and on topic and i have if you've been watching the video i have several times stopped just to just talk about things that are off the topic so here just as an example of a relatively uh relatively substantive comment somebody asks what's your opinion on the greek economic crisis so if you do not know as diff i hope i'm pronouncing your name correctly we actually did go to greece uh i was more than not yet two years ago yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah 2019 late 2008 right and then we were there when 2019 became 2020. were we there for new york right okay we were there around christmas or something right no am i wrong okay okay right right right winter we were there in late winter of 2019. so we actually went to greece and you know i was expecting it to be a third world country with first world pretensions and instead i found a first world country with third world problems you know what i mean um [Music] yeah you know it is it is certainly i mean one of the problems with 21st century politics is that people can really kid themselves about how serious political problems are you know life as normal goes on so i mean the economic crisis in greece was very real and is very real but there is still that veneer of normalcy uh i would say in athens especially or at least in athens but i think for the whole country where people can keep on living as normal as if nothing's wrong there's nothing to worry about so i know that may not be what you were expecting me to say i did follow very closely the greek economic crisis back in 2007 2008 2009 back in that era i was very i was still interested in 2011 then i did a lot of research again um you know i mean i guess the question i would ask is how bad do things have to get for people to really go back to first principles and start taking political philosophy seriously you know right now uh chile in south africa they are writing a new sorry what did i say there you go thanks catch you on that there's a little little verbal typo chile in south america they're writing a new constitution now i'm not optimistic about the new constitution sadly but i'm i'm very happy that they are trying to solve their problems by writing a new constitution it's very important and greece should have done that and canada should do that in america a lot of countries need to write a new constitution now in case you haven't heard in chile it looks like the writing of the new constitution is going to be controlled by the communist party they didn't get a majority of the votes but they got a sort of plurality where they have enough votes to veto other people's suggestions or decisions we don't know how communist their new constitution is going to be maybe i'm being pessimistic it's going to turn out great but it could be awful or it could be mediocre um but you know look life in chile is wonderful you know really the quality of life in chile is better in quality of life in canada i'm i'm not joking certainly the quality of life for indigenous people in chile is much better than ferdicious people on campus but i can live to hear many many ways in which life in chile is better than life in canada um so how bad did things have to get how radicalized or disconcented people have to get in chile before they rewrote the constitution you know now when i was living in perpignan france which is right on the border with spain spain had more than 25 unemployment and youth unemployment was about 50 percent you know the spanish economy was a total state of crisis and we we had economic refugees coming through birmingham there were people leaving their lives in spain coming to france they normally stay in france for a short time they'd say this is a terrible country and they keep going to germany that was generally they all they all ended up going to germany maybe a few went to the netherlands or something but they were this kind of economic refugee phenomena and i asked all the time how bad do things have to get in you know in spain before people start asking these questions coming up with new answers so i would likewise ask the question how bad do things have to get in greece before people really ask fundamental questions and start coming up with fundamentally new answers and um you know i have i have a very low opinion of my fellow canadians this way i have certainly i mean it's partly out of english culture you know uh in england doesn't matter i mean they're never they're never going to go back to first principles and really think it's never going to happen you know in england they'll never get off their ego trip of believing they're the most wonderful country in the world to live in the things and they're the greatest place on earth um it can be very hard for a dissident minority to shift the majority out of their complacency to go back to the drawing board and really really ask the question what the hell are we doing here like how does the police system work how does the university education system work like what do we mean by equality what do we mean by freedom like the really basic fundamental questions about how government is going to work and what our priorities are too right sir i'll just say this again i have a whole video where i present this much more dramatically but oh yeah yeah we have millions and millions of dollars to spend on space exploration when are the indigenous people gonna have schools that are equally as good as the white people oh we don't have enough money for that that's a really low priority these things they just don't they just don't endure scrutiny like just any pinnix pnyx if you know the word look it up you know any kind of really direct democracy open sincerely this is not going to end your scrutiny you know like you know oh i mean america we spend billions of dollars on space exploration people in flint michigan don't have drinking water like yeah yeah there are these kinds of problems like guys if we just had any kind of legitimate democracy look at throughout the united states of america but including flint michigan people are expected to pay 50 000 a year for their children to get a university education people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in university education this is a huge crisis a huge problem so you know obviously there are political solutions there are many ways there's not just one way to solve this problem and i'm not even going to tell you my way is the only way or is the best way of course i think my wife's better but i'm just not going to say that but you know regardless you know um you know the lesson of the crisis in greece in 2008 you know i answered this question is that sadly a country can go through this kind of uh trauma this kind of calamity and nobody ever asks any of these questions you don't have new questions you don't have new answers and nothing changes so you know the um how to say this you know the culture of complacency and yours that's the tragic moral of the story for 2008 greece to the 2008 crisis came and went and you know nothing changed so we have we have a question that was i just mentioned i am not uh necessarily the source of censorship someone just commented i just joined you idiot and google automatically censored that like google deleted that and then i had to click to undelete this i'm just giving an example depending on your word choices uh the uh you know the artificial stupidity of google's artificial intelligence system will censor you without me having to uh having to click on anything okay so babe do you want to say anything i mean i'm i'm ready to wrap it up we've covered this has been uh compendious but not brief you know well maybe i should have said this in the middle maybe after you want to come around okay uh and you were talking about thucydides so thucydides was participating in the war yes and he was actually exiled from athens for approximately 20 years i forgot that okay so he this is why he had this experience to inform him of the other side thucydides was exiled for 20 years wow on yeah these are yeah yeah no i just forgotten i'm sure i write it too with some people yeah i don't know everything going in here right so he was able to observe the other side and i think for this reason that's why he was i remember that there was some going over the other side yeah right or some exposure to the spartan yeah but i guess in a way like i have you know xenophon really was on the other side he was really on the smart side but i i forgot that so you're telling me thucydides really ended up for 20 years okay yeah i either forgot that or i never knew it about these entities okay cool cool i believe you i'm looking at my notes i actually don't have the book anymore that's how long ago i read it so um you know but i guess what i uh wanted to say is that i kind of have more respect for somebody commenting on political and historical circumstances surrounding a war when they've participated and you know earlier in your in your discussion of this you talked about how most politicians in america and judges for that matter uh well most most uh politicians study law you know that's the trajectory you know you you go to university study political science go to law school and then you eventually uh work as a politician and that's what our representatives that's their education most i'm not saying that there aren't any former military members in congress or in senate but i found this to be like a difference between uh the people that were the important voices of that time uh and i i thought of uh lord chang as well because he participated in more as well um so yeah this was yeah this is something i i was thinking that uh is a difference i mean so you know i think you can look at political organization and political philosophy as starting with the military starting with the need for self-defense and the question of how does the government pay for the military how does the government provide a military and who are military men and who disciplines military men and who do they have to do it you can look at political organization as a series of structures on top of the military as its fundamental basis and then yes you would esteem someone like thucydides and someone like lord chang in china more than socrates for example right right um i mean one suggestion i'm making in this video is to instead look at the fundamental role of government even at a tribal stage even at the level of a tribe of nomads not as being the military but as being judgment as being the judge um so you guys may not know this but the british empire conquered uh tribal peoples people living with tribal mode of organization all over the world in africa and southeast asia and you know out in the remote areas of what's now myanmar then british burma and stuff you know the main interaction between those people and the government was judgment um they didn't need government like they were very self-reliant they you know they didn't live in our quality of life but they made their own clothes they hunted they farmed they provided everything they needed for themselves in life they didn't expect the government to provide them with uh an education or health care they did not accept any concept that the government would provide them with medicine or something right but there would be conflicts within those tribes yes it could be something as simple as murder i honestly doubt it would be something because with murder it's kind of straightforward but there would be some conflict people trapped and they would voluntarily they would get the partisans okay let's go to the british governor let's go let's go they would call it government house that's a real british empire tradition how they go to government house and let's ask for judgment we will present our complaints you know against one another and government will you know the governor or the government will judge us now i admit this is a holotype this is just one unique example um but i think whenever you look at tribal societies and ancient societies the even children in a schoolyard like there are children in a schoolyard they have a dispute or they have a conflict and they say okay let's go and ask the teacher let's go ask the school principal to rule over us to make a judgment you know i think that is a very fundamental aspect of government that we we kind of build up uh from there i think that's kind of the one proposal of many i have in this video now when you look at it that way most of the world china india arabia to be one you know the muslim world which now it grew way past arabia but arabia iraq iran you know the the central part of the muslim world um you get a very simple answer to who is a judge who is in charge you know what i mean who rules and who is ruled and it is brutal in its simplicity right and part of what's special that you know we see in thucydides thucydides isn't even boasting about it he isn't presented as a good thing because thucydides is a harsh critic of democracy is that in ancient athens you have a totally different answer right so in ancient athens you have a culture which again even in the theater you know uh even in sports there's this idea of the audience voting so the idea of the audience is already significant right and anyone can be in the audience not slaves but almost anyone you know like there are some limits but that everyone and anyone should be prepared to step up and do their duty as a citizen and vote in the arts this is profound right and then who is a judge that this is an anonymous and interchangeable person assigned at random assigned by law that's a profoundly alien concept from any other culture in the world china never thought the judge should be chosen at random japan never thought that you know again i you can look at mesoamerica pre-contact south america or central america or something right and again if you look at islamic jurisprudence or something right the ancient buddhist world the ancient muslim world none of them have this this kind wow so that's really different right and then obviously coming out of voting you also get elections i mean voting for guilty versus innocent or voting for who is correct in a dispute between two parties because it could be a civil case a lawsuit not necessarily a crime okay voting and this kind of equality through anonymity and interchangeability and again the equality it isn't passive it's produced by our education aristotle puts a lot of emphasis and by our military service we all serve the military we all take responsibility together for the res publica you know republic is just red's public for this public thing you know we all take our share on that and then out of that you start to get these other you know democratic elements um you know now okay i'll just briefly argue against myself i think armchair academics it's easy for them to overlook the brutality of ancient peoples in this culture and the military is a huge part of that yes sir do you want to say more i mean yeah i mean yeah it's filled with massacres basically you know uh once a once an area is conquered you know they kill a lot of a lot of innocent people and uh enslave innocent people and yeah so i i definitely took note of that throughout reading it that it's the ancient world despite uh the positives about ancient athenian society despite the these uh civilized aspects of it there was definitely and piracy was common and yeah well i mean you know in general um learning from the past forces us to confront the brutality of the past now you know these were not societies that had a professionalized army again this is really part of the origin of democracy everyone should be in the army if you're not a [ __ ] or something you're not physically crippled you know everyone's a soldier everyone fights for the republic that's the greek idea it's also the roman idea to a certain extent admittedly we could rome it's not as perfect an example right but in athens you know everyone has done military service and actually one of the forms of corruption in rome which then continues on into the united states america you know in its early colonial days with the draft and so on and so is the idea that you could pay money to avoid doing military service say okay well i will pay like a hundred thousand dollars to be a significant money for another man to do military service on my behalf and that happened during the american revolution there were rich men who paid money to not fight against the british they were furnishing money that could be used to fight against yeah yeah to get a paid deferment this way you know in the napoleonic wars and stuff that idea hangs on a long time that well my money fights for me you know the people of certain socialism but no i mean in athens this is the unifying element but yeah in my recent critique of uh weeholt and the other books i've been reading about uh american political history american constitution and revolution and so on something comes up and again just when i'm talking to melissa stuff it's like you know you can't forget you can't ignore the brutality of these people these were people who had committed torture with their own hands they committed murder with their own hands they had whipped slaves they had participated and like you know they they had the experience of war and of tremendous violence and peace time that today is highly professionalized now i mean some of you guys you might have picked up about on this movie i am relatively sympathetic towards the cia i am not one of these guys who kind of blames the cia for anything i know the cia kills people you know what i mean uh i think you know again when you see it in this more centuries-long millennia-long way looking over time you can see like oh these are the parts of our society that are still carrying on that ancient brutality like now there's a small professional service that engages in subterfuge and skullduggery and murder frankly i'm not any other word for it you know like okay so the cia those are the these are this small number of professionals who are still living that way but no um yeah when you were looking at an ancient and so on the brutality of that and sir there's something else again this i've talked about most before you can't underestimate the element of risk and threat in participating in those democratic forums uh people weren't just people weren't just shy when people stood up to speak at the pinex they were risking their lives so that was that was different from you know speaking in the theater if you were going to speak in a real political debate i would i would say this is true of rome too frankly to some extent but you were you were putting your neck on the line and if you lied or seemed dishonest or made statements didn't make any sense i mean it wouldn't just be a reputation that suffered you could physically suffer consequences uh if if you were again even if you weren't actually uh a corrupt or dishonest person in politics but if you were perceived to be that could have have terrible consequences for you so the if the audience uh demanded the selfie you know that's that's another thing okay guys so from my perspective i'm coming to the end of this uh live stream um i started by typing out the the title and i think we have fulfilled the remit of the subject being uh being discussed in the title and again a spontaneous uh discussion but it's a spontaneous discussion things that melissa's been reading about for three years and i've been reading about for i don't know how many decades with thucydides itself so i guess i should finish that story i started telling the story of how i first heard about the cities there's a wonderful photograph of me lying with my daughter on my chest my infant newborn daughter on my chest and the first time i read thucydides it was really on my list of things to get around to for a couple years not for that many years but it was when my daughter was a newborn baby so when my daughter was a newborn baby and i was holding her i read thucydides and that was uh you can see in the picture it's not that thick a book it's um an edited down version of the text that was my first version of the text then later i did read the whole text and i listened to it as an audio book uh at that time also and take care of my daughter i listened to the whole of herodotus not netted now read the complete unexplored test of herodotus i listened to as an audiobook mostly when cleaning so you know my daughter would fall asleep all the time so you'd walk the baby she'd fall asleep she was asleep you'd put her down you put on the audiobook start cleaning or maybe cooking but cooking or cleaning and stuff baby wake up go back and play with the baby you know this kind of thing so actually for me uh both thucydides and herodotus that's linked to my experience of caring for my daughter uh during her first year of life and i mean at the time i remember saying to mexico i was like my whole life would be different if i had read this earlier you know if i'd read this when i was in high school or something everything would be different for me uh thucydides especially but you know putting together thucydides and products and now of course it's funny i you know i read i read those things as an old man with my daughter americans at a stage when i already had all this other political knowledge some it's been discussed this year i didn't do about china and india and southeast asia and all kinds and i knew about the french revolution and you know i knew about all kinds of stuff in in politics and i already read a lot of stuff from ancient greece and ancient rome too i read aristotle and all kinds of other sources but you know it was uh in some ways inspiring and in some ways saddening to reflect on how different my whole life would have been if i had read through cities back when i was a teenager and what what different decisions i made and it leads you to have you know an appreciation for the topic of this video what is uh uniquely important about this cultural political and philosophy philosophical legacy of the west