Hobbes, Hegel, Kant… NOT Reading Political Philosophy.

i had a long
meaningful passion delivered but largely ignored video talking about public monuments and government policy for the arts just a few days ago many of you missed it remarkably few people watch it compared even to melissa's analysis of the importance or lack of importance of uh music in education and you know in following up afterwards i shared with my patreon subscribers one of the most hilarious and the most awful examples of public art here in victoria canada perhaps anywhere in canada perhaps anywhere in the world and it's a giant metal sign and it's placed on quite a busy road it's in quite a prominent place like you'd think it was advertising ordering the way this sign is set up it's in the middle of a park it's your taxpayers dollars at work and it is proudly proclaiming every time you walk past that uh night is for sleeping new sentence day is for resting so this is this is literally a monument to laziness this is letting you know every time you walk past this if you live in this neighborhood you're seeing this oh the fact that night time is for sleeping doesn't mean that you need to be alert and hard working during the day no no no night is for sleeping day is for resting your taxpayers dollars at work now if you live in the united states if you live in europe you might get sick of seeing uh patriotic slogans declarations about you know feeling grateful for our troops you might just feel you're seeing this message a little bit too often i've got to tell you the most saccharine the most tear-jerking statement about war wounded people coming back from afghanistan would be so much more meaningful than this government-sponsored statement that night is for sleeping days for arresting i would gladly see that sign replaced with you know an image of a limping soldier who's been wounded by a land mine who returned from afghanistan and a statement they fought so that afghan people could have democracy or whatever propaganda look on the in terms of propaganda i could tolerate how about a statement about sobriety how about a statement about hard work or staying in school mr t is anyone else here old enough to remember mr t mr team managed to get you know stay off drugs stay in school stay in school kids stay in school kids i don't think mr t himself stayed in school mr t the original high school dropout going around to tell you keep your nose clean stay in school kid stay out of trouble hey kids stay in trouble stay in school don't be a fool say stay in school that put that on a mental side i wouldn't jesus day is for resting night is for sleeping this is a public art monument taxpayer sponsored monument this is the capital city of western canada capital city of british columbia monuments to laziness all right uh the woman's lives uh maybe a short live stream it may be long uh is to reply to a letter from a supporter of the channel on patreon and a member of the audience first name danny um i'm going to read this now i'm going to think about a little bit i'm going to talk about a few other issues and i will come back to this a little bit later so people who join later when i reply to this question uh they won't be totally thrown off so danny writes in and this this part of the letter is also kind of interesting he says as of today i've been watching your channel content for half a year and i learned a lot this is also interesting i hear from people who've been watching the channel for six years in this case six months but you know you hear from people who joined at different points in time and it influenced their lives and difference and also people who started watching at different ages i've had letters from people like you say to me they started watching my channel when they were 15 and now they're 20. you know what i mean this is like an influencer that's crucial but anyways this guy writes in he's been watching he's watching for half a year today i finally decided to support you on patreon as i appreciate your content i know you're not a fan of making book recommendations and handing out reading lists but i value them and right now i'm in the process of reading your recommended list that you gave to melissa so this includes xenophon aristotle etc so that's also interesting to me uh quite a few people as many as five is it as many as 10 yet people have written in and said that this video or series of videos i may be talking to to melissa well it's me talking to the fact that melissa i put her on this kind of catching up with catching up with the university education you should have had but didn't have you know i made this uh this special reading list from melissa and we read it together so many of the books maybe all of them i had read before there might have been one there might be one or two things that i hadn't read before i forget but in any case um i i didn't just hand the reading store but we read them together and we talked about them together and made some youtube videos starting along the way not as many youtube videos came out that as you uh as you might say i think the title of that video is why i am forcing you to read aristotle is that it okay so we can get that is that going to be shadow band on youtube at my channel am i going to get up you know a lot of stuff any anything to do with autism is banned on my channel uh sir but we'll talk about this okay so there you go so we presume that is the right video so fully three years ago watched by 1 500 people why i am forcing you to read aristotle so that's me talking through look oh so james is in the audience and james says that he also started with that recommended reading list so it is rare we'll talk about that a little bit more in this video it is rare that i recommend somebody read something but in that case i work through that list with melissa and it's interesting to hear that other people change their lives now i'm also look let's also do some follow-up here i think that reading list profoundly changed melissa's life i think melissa has changed a lot and matured a lot as a human being in the last three years and i don't think the effects came about right away like i don't think reading thucydides the first time when you did had an impact immediately but maybe later as the years go by and you see what connects to other things and other questions you know getting at those real fundamental roots of the origin of democracy in in the ancient west in the modern west like maybe you know it took some time to percolate but yeah i think it's had a big impact on melissa and who she is as a person in her life and it's informed and enrich it has informed and enriched later reading that she's done and so on so yeah anyway interesting to hear that still still having consequences um for fans of the channel three years on anyway so that is i mean you know depending on depending on who you are what you want to know it is still um an important video to watch and a useful reading list so he says quote quoting this letter from danny my main concern in reading this list and eventually getting to aristotle is to gain a greater understanding of politics and philosophy in parallel all over the internet are lists and charts that contain many influential persons and philosophers descartes kant hegel and many others leading up to 20th century thinkers from your position is it worthwhile to delve into this large corpus of the western canon in order to understand the legacy of the ancient greeks in our modern world as politics question mark are some thinkers more worthy than others question mark the big picture question that i couldn't find a concrete answer to is why are all of these thinkers being taught in universities it's a very good question and nobody's going to give you the honest answer why should i or society care for them should i skip them or read a select few okay so let's start with um start with something that's parallel remarkably different but important in some of the same ways um i had an email from somebody i'm sorry i actually forget who this was but some longtime viewer of the channel wrote into me um probably wouldn't be useful for me to tell you his name or anything else about him anyway but there was a guy writing in and talking about enrolling in an advanced university course in buddhism and this was at a big famous respectable university somewhere in the united states it wasn't a small college but even the largest universities in europe and america they will generally have just one professor who does buddhism generally it's rare to have two professors that's a large department of buddhist studies so you know even if they have a very robust asian studies or religions and religion and history of asia department they'll try to have one guy who does hinduism one guy who does buddhism right maybe one guy who does islam you know whatever but they divide it up this way so you are lucky to have one specialist in buddhism university at all but maybe maybe two maximum so we enrolled in this course now okay if you're taking university level studies in buddhist philosophy buddhist history what is politics what do you read what if the entire course is nothing but japanese pure land what is you know this would be like you enroll in a class in christianity um and there's only one professor of christianity and the entire course is just about american mormonism you know now christianity did not originate in the united states of america mormonism is neither the earliest nor the most representative or the most influential form of christianity this is a minor sectarian variant that comes in very late in the history and it's very far removed geographically culturally and linguistically from the origins of what christianity are about why christianity is so important so you'd say this is completely ridiculous obviously there's just one professor who's like a cult member who's a true believer in mormonism and he's perverted this department to teach nothing but mormonism as if that's the whole history of virginia yeah this happens in buddhist studies and it happens in myriad ways uh you know if someone is going to be an eccentric you know it's nice if they don't keep it hidden all right we had a professor at the university of toronto who wore a kilt every time he gave like there's a man wearing a traditional scottish scottish scottish regular scottish dress okay the word i want to use was dress it's a kilt but okay it's a man's dress okay and um he was of the persuasion that the true inner essence of calvinism of the scottish protestant tradition of calvinism and the philosophy of buddhism were one and the same that like the secret doctrine the inner essence if you could understand it and he would stand there in a kilt giving these lessons so what do you think the assigned reading list was what do you think this guy is this is real all right now there have been other professors at the university of toronto and you could be asked are they more or less insane other people are they more or less eccentric the other professors who have taught buddhism just at that same university i i could now name them and start calling out their bizarre ideological inclinations um all right so what were some examples here oh yes emmanuel kant um you know somebody like nietzsche he mentions descartes hegel okay and uh by contrast here's the name here's the name that's not in your university reading list here's the name you probably haven't seen here's condorcet so that that title has it in uh kind of hand written the scripts and there you go conor saying modernity connor say you ever heard of this guy like universally acknowledged as a genius universally acknowledged as one of the most important people in the history of his century or the history of western civilization and yet for some reason he's not on any of those reading lists next to a fascist like nietzsche what kind of crypto fascist like hegel another one i don't have a book for thomas hobbes why does why does thomas hobbes matter i thought hobbs was in this list but he doesn't he doesn't mention you know who who decides who's important who's is hobbs in there oh that's right yeah okay so hobbs hobbs does make an appearance in the email okay um okay so briefly you know slavery kind of a big deal whether or not women have the right to vote kind of a big deal now slavery it's a little bit too broad let's say more specifically and especially the legal equality of black people which goes beyond the issue of slavery it's also some ways more specific right like there can be slavery of people who aren't black there's slavery within the history of sri lanka there's slavery within the history of thailand but let's talk about white europeans enslaving black people and the consequences condorcet here is what you would have called ahead of his time condor say thought that black people should have all the same civil rights as white people he thought that black people should be able to marry and have children with white people condors say thought women should be able to vote women should be able to debate you know politics and participate in democracy just like men condorcet was on the kind of modern leading edge of a whole bunch of important ideas and questions and he had a lot of challenging useful things to say about democracy why do you think it is that nietzsche nietzsche who's you know much closer to modern this centuries later and this is this is before and during the french revolution you know nietzsche is a significant series of generations later why do you think that someone like hegel someone like nietzsche or someone like hobbes is held up as the important philosopher for us to read that's so important and meaningful for our times right um and you know there's other forms of kind of highly eccentric propaganda that creep into you know these these problems now machiavelli is actually a tremendously important political philosopher uh for the history of democracy in europe but also in the united states of america i have a very large very heavy book here which you don't need to buy don't need to read but this book exists so you can say it and say oh yeah in case you don't believe my claim that machiavelli is really important for this your democracy in america oh i can i can tell you about this book i can give you a footnote saying this book the machiavellian moment by j.g.a pocock yes as pocock established you know machiavelli's importance for the democratic tradition in both england and the united states of america can hardly be overstated it's tremendous tremendously important tremendously influential and what side of these debates was machiavelli on he was fundamentally a modernizer fundamentally a democratizer fundamentally you know trying to find a way to revive the best aspects of republicanism from the ancient world in what was then the modern world or the contemporary world right uh who who was thomas hobbes and why does hobbes matter all right like sorry i'm i'm going to come back to china addressing his his question directly all right [Music] i don't i don't hand out recommended reading for this reason okay if i know you if i know what you're trying to learn if i know what your research project is maybe i can tell you something really meaningful and really important about what it is you're doing you know what i mean like maybe i can make a recommendation for you i'm not going to make recommendations for all mankind or something and like who is it who can pretend that leviathan by thomas hobbes is meaningful for all people for all mankind if you had a friend born and raised in japan who tells you they're trying to understand the european democratic tradition like what went on in ancient times and what went on would you tell your japanese friend well thomas hobbs would you tell your japanese friend oh friedrich nietzsche and who's like oh how about immanuel kant there's a [ __ ] laugh jesus christ would you tell them to waste their time uh going back and reading those thinkers and you know and if so why what is it they're supposed to learn was it they're supposed to gain from it now you know conversely someone might have a very specific interest that would motivate them to read and appreciate thomas hobbs thomas hobbes is a minor footnote in the history of the english civil war and we have an educational tradition high school and university where we don't teach kids anything about the english civil war and most so i mean i can ask melissa melissa did you learn like even the name of the french revolution did you get like a two-sentence yeah okay so you you see your history education in high school they included a unit on the french revolution or what i wouldn't say but uh in probably not the ninth grade okay so there was there was there was a paragraph or something in the in the history textbook okay manel so that's that's the french revolution now what about the english revolution aka the english divorces approximately one century earlier you know okay i'm from a british colony and we didn't get we didn't get one sentence we didn't get one word about okay so the real story the real political philosophical questions of the time all the stuff that really you know matters none of that's you know including our education but without any of this context we're given the bizarre spectacle of the philosophy of thomas now if you just pick up a copy of hobbs leviathan and leaf through it or like look at the table of contents kind of glance at it you'll think whoa about 50 of this book is this guy's bizarre interpretation of the bible that's what it is all right now the whole english civil war took place in a period of time that we could call um the puritan uprising the the blossoming fourth of what we now in retrospect call puritanism now like puritanism as a concept only makes sense kind of looking back at history if you were alive at that time there are a whole bunch of different religious sects and movements and orders that don't consider themselves one of the same movement but now and they all wore funny hats right and now we call them puritans and it's especially from an american perspective they're called puritans because many of them when the english civil war came to an end were uncomfortable and went to america no sorry to be fair some of them were also uncomfortable before the english civil war and and went to america and now long story short guys you had a period of internacing religious carnage and at the end of it broadly speaking there was a mood of returning to orthodox anglicanism people like whoa we tried this thing with everyone coming up with their own wacky heterodox interpretation of the bible and uh you know what the english book of common prayer isn't that bad right um you know people uh went through the process of um you know entertaining uh wacky heterodox new ideas from people like thomas hobbes people like um oliver cromwell himself people went through a brief period of thinking you know maybe the church doesn't have a monopoly on the truth maybe each of us can be better christians you know alone with our own personal relationship with god directly praying and directly reading the scripture and coming up with our own ideas and you know what it led to it led to banning and burning the english book of common prayer it led to banning christmas now i'm an atheist i'm completely in favor of banning christmas but these people were banning christmas and banning the english book of comfort because they were too christian for it they were too puritanical for it thus the term puritans now in our own time this is not so different i mean okay it is it is different but you could say this is somewhat similar to the way that jehovah's witnesses in the united states of america refuse to celebrate christmas refuse to celebrate halloween they say no they want to really strictly stick to what it what it says in the bible in this country okay so this one no you know okay so just if you ask me what's interesting about thomas hobbs what's interesting about hobbs leviathan and this is a younger person i don't know how old this person is he doesn't stay this age this is somebody's been watching my channel for six months they seem they seem kind of young they seem like they're uh again i don't know if this is someone who's already been to university that's trying to compensate for all things they didn't learn university or if someone hasn't been to university yet i really don't know it might be interesting to just know roughly uh how how old or how young danny is it could be a 50 year old person from the style of writing i'm guessing this is a young person i guess also the um the self-portrait he has with the email suggested me is younger person yeah it's it's a cartoon but still it doesn't it doesn't look like an older person's cartoon um but anyway presuming this is a younger person you know asking this question like oh well you know thomas is is really important well politically thomas hobbes is a total dead end philosophically he's a total dead end he represents a kind of branch that went off from the mainstream and was a total failure and went absolutely nowhere now someone like machiavelli fundamentally says that he worships and respects the ancient greek sources the ancient roman sources he has this admiration for antiquity he describes himself as being in dialogue with antiquity but of course he does also present his own new and and genuinely edgy ideas about politics about morality about the future about how they should have a republic now and he he is not lacking the self-confidence to to really point out when those ancient sources are wrong in his opinion there are where he says no no you know well this is what the ancient romans say but here's where they're wrong here's what you need to know to run a polity to run a kingdom or a republic you know in his own time in italy okay so but but fundamentally tremendous admiration for aristotle uh and all of the ancients um thomas hobbes is the one guy who says that no it's all [ __ ] thomas hobbes is the one guy who says uh this is from memory but this is not far off from a verbatim quote he says nothing has been bought at so dear a price in human blood as the learning of ancient tongues you people you read livy you read salas you read appian whatever you read these ancient latin historians you read aristotle what was it of aristotle he said has there ever been a worse teacher has ever you get these notions into your head about freedom and human rights or natural rights whatever you get this you get this discourse about freedom and democracy and rights and then you guys all slaughter each other for nothing and guess what your whole ideology is [ __ ] now look i'm a nihilist there's a certain perspective from which you can kind of get on the roller coaster ride of thomas hobbes insanity and kind of appreciate it for what it is it's this total dead end he rejected all of the elements that went into the construction of what you could call modern capitalism modern liberalism modern democracy he said nope wrong wrong wrong wrong and instead he has this kind of fundamentally authoritarian interpretation of scripture and based on his understanding of the bible and based on his understanding of human nature he says look this is how it is this is the reality of politics now i say it's fundamentally authoritarian i could argue about the limited role for personal freedom and personal happiness in the system but this is not supposed to be an hour-long lecture on the political philosophy of hobbes but you know i admit put it this way hobbes does not believe that a human being is a bee that exists only to serve the queen he doesn't believe that you are a worker ant that exists only to serve the colony that's not his philosophy however he totally rejects democracy he totally rejects all these ideas about freedom and liberty and rights and even consultation with he rejects all of it he says it's all wrong so what's what's interesting about this and why why is a christian fundamentalist maniac like thomas hobbes why is he taught as being so important and not condorcet why is condorcet forgotten because he really is i mean this this is a brand new book and the introduction is basically saying oh you know condorcet has been almost completely forgotten you know uh this one too uh the introduction more or less you know they talk about this oh well you know condorcet used to be one of the most important people in the history of western civilization but he's been completely dropped out of the curriculum nobody's heard the name nobody no reason okay well this look i can i can now tell you a bunch of things that are bad about condorcet i can engage in a critique of condorcet i can tell you things he was wrong about the stupid disadvantages of his philosophical and political worldview but this is a guy who was taking democracy seriously he was taking women's rights seriously i think okay is it too much to say that he was an atheist i i have maybe this has a chapter on that [Laughter] how close to being an atheist was condorcet that i don't know but he certainly uh he certainly was at least a free thinker now that time if you were an atheist you had to keep your cards close to your chest uh machiavelli i mean this was published after his death it is completely obvious that he's an atheist if you've read this machiavelli's this but there is no way this guy is even a shred of faith this is much more explicit in my opinion than the prince but nevertheless you lived in a society where if you were an atheist you had to keep your cards close to your chest you kind of have to pay attention but no no no that doesn't interest us i mean you know the religiosity of thomas hobbes it's in many ways more like judaism or it's it's a form of highly eccentric judaism than it is uh christianity and that was part of the spirit of what was going on with puritanism people were reading the whole bible and realizing the new testament was just one part of it and they were getting inspired by and interested in the jewish old testament material there you know um you know so i i just say okay i i right guys look okay we have a troll in the comments section again i don't mind if you want to criticize me i don't even mind if you want to troll me but you've got to rise to my level okay so if you want to come in here and you want to troll but you want to agree read hobbs read read condor say you know this is the level we're operating on you want to tell me i'm wrong i don't want to talk about it great you know i would love that i would love to have people in this uh in this you know comment section crossing stores with me but you've got to be producing comments that are really worth really worth answering someone can come in and say and and criticize uh the machiavellian moment by pocock and take this conversation and hold it okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna return to so i'm just glancing at the comments here but it looks like you know uh looks like there's nothing you guys really want me to um okay radical centrist says you use the phrase how we know what we know in regards to the beginning of economics as a science do you remember the video or can you repeat those names sorry it sounds like an interesting question but i'm not really sure what you're getting at i assume you're talking about some video where i talked about a reading list you know what you would read if you're interested in the the origins of the european tradition of of economics i assume but you know [Music] so almighty ohm says so much is a product of its time so many treat philosophy chapter and verse i.e treat it like a religious text no solution without compromise i liken it to buddhism sex potentials um okay look what i'm addressing here is in some ways shallower and some ways deeper than what you're saying here ohm because i'm asking the question why would danny read any of these texts why would they matter to him why would they be useful to you here and now that's different like okay i mean descartes why would it possibly be rewarding or worthwhile for you to do the research to understand the scientific religious intellectual and political context surrounding the philosophy of descartes why like what is the point and you know in our culture students aren't allowed to ask that now you know i can give you a bunch of reasons very easily as to why condorcet is worth going i give you a bunch of reasons why napoleon you know the french revolution that whole period why that's worth knowing about now likewise if you're talking about the american revolution obviously even if you find it boring it really matters like we could talk about why the american revolution still matters today and the philosophers and political debates that that went into writing the american constitution there's a very clear relevance day but you know you're talking about descartes so what again actually descartes it's similar to us saying about hobbes so i trailed off by saying hobbs religious views are in some ways closer to judaism uh but it would be a very eccentric form of jesus but he was getting back to the roots of the first few books of the old testament a view of the world in which god is seen as having a physical body like a human being with hands and feet which he has in the old testament it's a very different kind of cosmology now you know are you interested in an eccentric christian you know and what was going on you know emanuel kant whenever i've met people who claim emmanuel kant is this tremendously important philosopher and let me just say briefly what he says about politics is horseshit by which i do not mean to insult horseshit perfectly a good source of fertilizer emmanuel kant's philosophy is worse this man knew nothing about politics he had no wisdom to offer on such republicans emmanuel kant racist racist to his bones he was a small town bigoted stupid racist and his works are full of it he wrote on quote-unquote anthropology he popularized the four-fold division of races and gee what do you know do you think he felt that white people were the inferior race do you think he felt the german people were the inferiorities oh no conveniently his interpretation of the races of the world none of whom he has ever met he never left the small town in germany he grew up in he has no experience with politics no experience with war no experience not anything no interest in anything and no interest in meeting or getting to knowing or like learning to respect chinese people or arab people or african people but he wants to sit there with his pen and write these kind of racist condemnations of them now guys i'm saying this about emmanuel kant it's not just adorama it's also ad hominem like what we're saying about his character as a man and what we're saying about you know the value of his work they're inextricable they're one of the same this tells you something about who my new goodness well so whenever i meet people who think emmanuel kant's philosophy is is tremendous important i asked him oh so what was the thesis of critique of pure reason why did he write the book why was he motivated to write the book what what's what is in common english what is the point of critique of pure reason and you have to understand it's stated by the way in the introduction that apparently none of them have read like it's stated from immanuel kant the critique of pure reason is a defense of christian faith and it's not even as useful as studying official church doctrine and understanding like the wars that were going on between different sects of christianity at that time that was what was going on in mainstream channel it's this nebish it's this guy in a small town whose opinions don't matter really has nothing interesting significance to say and um you know he is constructing this worldview and presenting you with his epistemology presenting with these comments on uh how the mind works and how we observe and know and learn from reality so that he can defend faith against reason and that is even in the title this is the title of the introduction and i meet all these people who are university educated and have studied kant and they come away saying oh emmanuel khan is tremendously important and you know hilariously or tragically they can't say why they don't know why now this tells you something about the people and tell you something about our education system and tell you something about the bizarre agenda to try to promote german cultural supremacy after the end of world war ii which is that they rummaged through you know the the jewelry box of german philosophers and tried to find somebody who wasn't too fascist somebody who wasn't too racist wasn't too anti-semitic wasn't too evil to make into a great philosopher so that we'll all think of germany 19th century germany as the athens of modern europe as the pinnacle of intellectual development around europe which it is not immanuel kant was not intelligent he was not brilliant his works still today are not worth reading if you're in his own time or not receiving reading immanuel kant didn't discover anything and what is he credited with oh he's credited with uh inventing the idea of the united nation because he wrote an essay called on perpetual peace that any you know any high school child you know could write today you know so anyway okay so i'm just going to look at some of the uh some of the comments here not a question just a comment so this is quoting noel i learned so much from this channel very thought-provoking content thank you so frida comments that especially law professors make students read kant and kelson it's weird so a totally totally worthwhile comment from almighty home again a critique or an analysis tends to say more about the observer than the observed yes but you know life is only so many years long i have books that are literally underneath the camera right now my books propping up the camera that i would love to read and i don't have time i got some email from a an old friend we don't talk anymore with a phd that was asking me really technical questions about um philosophy of emmanuel kant this about a year ago and i remember it's like it all came back to me a couple people have commented in response to melissa's recent video that um they studied the cello as a child and now they don't remember it at all or they studied piano and they don't remember how to do it it doesn't contribute to their lives but i'd say a lot of that philosophy i studied in the past like and including emmanuel khan it's amazing that it does come back to me i was like oh yeah i remember all these bizarre technical terms in german i studied german briefly but you know i did learn some german i learned german for reading philosophy and so on and oh yeah and i can talk about this stuff but i mean you know life is only so long and if what is worth knowing about thomas hobbes is that he is a footnote and a kind of dead-ended digression in the history of the english civil war then you are much better off reading a political history of the english civil war in which perhaps thomas hobbes will be mentioned in a few paragraphs or maybe in a footnote right like that's what's significant about him now with someone like descartes i can't even put him in that kind of context like i can't even say oh well there's some important political or philosophical story that descartes is a moment in and you should read this other book and then descartes is going to have his paragraph or his or his position i mean from my perspective descartes uh significance is you know entirely it's not just an exaggeration it's kind of fiction it's whole clock uh fiction sorry so lilac cloud writes in i did some philosophy in high school in the uk and the emphasis on kant and descartes really confused me right okay so why is that so look uh lilac cloud uh welcome be honest i don't remember i'd remember you because you're such a memorable name okay i've met people i've met british people face to face and their whole struggle in life was christianity was that they were raised to believe in the christian church and this certain kind of intellectual approach to rationalizing the christian church and they took kind of baby steps towards atheism and kant and the critique of reason and descartes and these little challenges step by step and um reading some of the church fathers i don't know reading saint augustine and some of this crap too you know this was their formal training and philosophy and some of them stuck with it some of them really became lifelong committed anglicans they became committed to the rationalization of faith you know uh coming out of that tradition and some of them instead you know would eventually turn to somebody like friedrich nietzsche you know someone to me is a joke philosophically is really you know this is not even a philosopher to me to me this is like a you know newspaper columnist just melting off opinions there's really no philosophy to it and some of them you know that process of studying emmanuel kant it led them to being willing to accept some of these you know uh genuinely anti-anti-christian so look it's no excuse but it's an explanation before at the start of this conversation i gave the example of a department of buddhist philosophy where you're not studying the actual teaching of the buddha you're not learning about buddhism in india the whole course is just devoted to one bizarre branch of buddhism that only exists in japan right okay well this is kind of weird and you know the japanese language is not pali and it's not sanskrit and it's not connected you know like the scriptures have no real connection and the culture and the politics and the history has no connection you know you can learn a lot about christianity by studying a certain period of time in ancient israel right and you can learn very little about christianity if all that you study is say the history of the russian orthodox church in the 17th century you know like it's just how it is the russian orthodox church might be interesting you know but in this in this way there's this very strange you know distortion that creeps in however it creeps in for a reason um these decisions ultimately are made by particular professors with particular fantasies with particular access to grind with you know this this kind of so i just say you know uh it may seem random but it's not and i do think uh to my knowledge it's pretty much an official government policy and an official academic university policy in germany i do think there has been a conscious attempt to project the philosophical importance of germans and to try to find and promote the philosophers they consider to be not fascist not racist etc etc and they failed because guess what the philosophy of hegel is so close to fascism and is so racist and is so christian it might you might as well be reading a nazi philosopher it's not middle east not quite that bad he's almost that bad the philosophy of emmanuel kant the flaws to these other guys that are held up you'd be much better off promoting the people who were their inveterate critics so again within 19th century germany has anyone here read furbach fleur bach was in this christendoms you know this has become obscure has anyone read max sterner we've talked a lot about max turner on this channel you know there are some dissident voices there are anti-christian anti-establishment uh voices so on and so forth okay i'll just read a couple more comments here coming in right so frida asks who gets to choose the curricula of philosophy courses well in canada none of this comes from the government and i've been in conflict with professors before where i challenged that so at the university of toronto i formally you know went and made a complaint and had meetings to the professors and i said look i've been here for so many years i've been there for a lot of years at that point and every single one of your courses is just about hegel kant nietzsche that's it that's all i can study in your department and okay to be fair i had taken the one course on plato already there was a little bit of ancient greek that's like you know and i was pointing out philosophers that had never been covered that had never been taught and i went through the records of the last time arthur schopenhauer had been taught and it was really just one example for me it wasn't really that i was committed to schopenhauer i wasn't a you know devotee or disciple of chopin hour but it was something like look i went through the records and the last time schopenhauer was taught this remember like the last time was taught was 1976 or something you know so they are decisions made by small numbers of human beings and most of those human beings are kind of gormless confessed who don't ask these questions okay let's be let's be all the way real they do not question how will this help my students they do not question what is the use of this for my students they think oh oh thomas hobbes this is a great book this is an important book the book is important we have to do justice to the book so we have to force the students to read the book oh emanuel kant that's an important oh as if this is an inherent quality in the book this is an important book we have to teach the students emanuel khan and then if you ask any of these other questions oh well why isn't condor say on the list oh i'm sorry we have so many great important books we just you know there's no there's no room on the shelf there's no room in the course anymore and there is absolutely no questioning of i'm sorry what is the confidence the student is supposed to gain what's the job they're supposed to be able to do ultimately what is it they're supposed to learn now i just say i've always been a fan of um area studies as an approach by contrast so area studies this is this is the technical term used um you know area studies would instead of an approach like saying okay if you're going to understand the french revolution these are the people you have to to so you have an area france and you have a period of time say okay we're going to do these 200 years in france so who matters jean-jacques rousseau matters voltaire matters condorcet matters now we start to get a list of names that make sense and they connect to each other in in a way that makes sense the definition of the department as philosophy per se or the definition department even worse politics you have a department that's just called politics so you walk in and say elections in egypt what do you got for me oh no no no we don't we don't do that here we do politics what do you mean this is the department of politics who's going to cover elections in egypt what other department is there now if you have area studies that would cover that you could have an area studies department that covers egypt and syria or something you know you have a department specialized in the middle east but if you have a department that's called philosophy you have departments called politics none of them will cover it they will all unquestioningly follow a canon of so-called great books from so-called great dead white men you know this is just unquestioned eurocentric exception and then you know guys the last several years i've been doing china china is not a marginal country not now not 500 years ago not 1 000 years ago china's a big deal now it's been a big deal for thousands of years all right you walk in oh okay so what what do you guys got on china nothing right so before i had to have a kind of humility when i was doing like sri lanka cambodia thailand laos like i understood i come into the room be like look these i've been doing politics and history and philosophy in this part of the world i understand you guys have nothing for me but how are we going to make this work now i'm doing china for several years and it's like really bro really you're you're out here teaching thomas hobbes you're out here teaching emmanuel kant and pretending that emmanuel kant's essay immanuel kant's pamphlet on perpetual peace supposedly the invention of the united nations which by the way has worked out great right like emmanuel kansas pamphlet on perpetual peace is such a brilliant work of philosophy that today in myanmar they have democracy and today in israel and palestine they have peace because the united nations is a huge success right it's been a really great idea right right oh and yugoslavia and haiti and any other example oh cambodia any example of a un intervention you can name they're all really successful it's worked out really great oh and i'm sorry where did this all begin again oh have you heard of the korean war do you know what the united nations did in the korean war oh thank you emmanuel account thank you for this [ __ ] pamphlet that any high school student today could write let's let's just break down for those who don't know perpetual peace this is my name is emmanuel khan and here is my essay on perpetual peace some people think that you know um people are always in civil war with other people but when they have a government they have no civil war because they all serve the same government so they have peace so you know now we have this problem where one government has war with another government but we can solve it the same way you have another government so now you know the same way there's no civil war when you have a government there's no international war when you have an international government because you have you have another so there are no more problems yeah yeah bro uh you know um the roman empire there was just no war in the whole history that it was gabriel that totally worked you know why would you who could see anything wrong with going back especially if it's a eurocentric roman empire especially if you're talking about white europeans conquering africa and the middle east which is exactly what you're talking about right like oh who can see who can see a problem with how this is going to go what's wrong with the french empire with the british empire who would question this oh emmanuel perpetual peace oh yeah sure bro this is idiocy and of course in practice the united nations has been a disaster in case you have difficulty um interpreting sarcasm oh but look sorry all right come back come back let me just reread a little bit okay so he says all over the internet are lists and charts that contain many influential persons and philosophers descartes kant hegel and many others uh leading up to 20th century thinkers uh okay what did kant and hegel influence what you have to challenge that okay i can tell you right now what congress say influenced right condorcet influenced the french revolution the american revolution and the whole history of the rest of the world honduras say also a brilliant scientist brilliant mathematician influenced the history of science right his brilliance is proven the consequences of this philosophy are proven okay machiavelli here right machiavelli influenced the whole world his work is still sold in airport bookstores people want to read machiavelli people are forced to read emmanuel kant right like he's influential intellectually intellectual politically and by the way in his own life he was a really important political leader he influenced the history of italy directly as a politically and that's why the book has this very tragic air i was saying before that immanuel kant never left his hometown never had direct experience with you know real politics well machiavelli really did machiavelli had experience with the mud and blood and hypocrisy of politics he had been tortured himself and beaten up himself and he'd seen other men being tortured and killed and fighting in these wars he knew war he knew peace he knew democracy he was part of a democratic republican government in florence and he saw that democracy fall apart he saw it be conquered and turned into a kind of despotism you know he saw the rise and fall of democracies plural within italy during his lifetime so you get that you get that feeling something you're never going to get from an imbecile like emmanuel kant or uh or gwf hegel all right uh guys i just say so we are now 50 minutes in the live stream 49 minutes and 40 seconds 34 people in the audience we have only 17 thumbs up now i understand i understand some of you are sitting on the fence and you're not sure if you want to hit the thumbs up button but it will help people find the video it will help more people see the live stream while it's going on if while you're here you hit thumbs up i totally understand washington ten first ten minutes you're like i'm not sure what is this going to be about veganism again is this going to be you know i understand you don't you're not sure if you want to hit the thumbs up but okay we're 40 minutes into it or whatever 50 minutes in now i i dare to ask the question could you hit the thumbs up button so more people will see the video and more people can can join the conversation okay as i've paused as you hit the thumbs up button i'll glance again do so okay great so some of these questions that you're anticipating stuff i do want to talk about lilac cloud says i honestly expected some political philosophy especially from the ancient greeks but it was mostly meaningless stuff about perception that what we do actually exists both show this right so this is the other thing so i mean the guy's asking about reading and grace and stuff there are really meaningful works about politics and political philosophy from ancient greece and really wrong and i'm going to say this clearly there are there are works of philosophy and politics and history from that period where you don't need my interpretation you don't need someone reading between the lines to explain to you what's interesting about it you know what i mean um [Music] it's right up there on the surface what's interesting but even if you're 19 years old or something like if you're a younger person you you know i mean you're going to get what the point is so i read in my last uh live stream the the from the first uh chapter of appian appian an ancient roman historian civil war and you get a discussion about slavery and poverty and the struggle between the rich and the poor and the senate and it's about democracy and it's about the lack of democracy and wow right up on the surface there's something really meaningful and really relevant to politics and life and philosophy as it is today and it's meaningful to life as it exists today and it's meaningful to human nature as it exists today you can also read works especially religious works that are not meaningful to life today whatsoever one of melissa's comments when i first put together the reading list for her on um on you know ancient greece and ancient rome she said she was surprised there was no mythology there uh by the way babe do you want to grab the book we have the book on uh yes yeah yeah yeah another great source book for understanding uh cultural and political context in um in ancient greece and romans to read the theater so this is not this is not like reading philosophy or reading politics but you know in reading aristophanes this is a book we got recently i think this was a gift from the audience so quite a few of these books i'm holding up were actually given us by uh viewers like you so condorcet on modernity this was a gift from a viewer i didn't have to pay for this myself and this book on uh aristophanes um so yeah the subtitle here is critique of the gods so this is especially drawing attention to the way in which aristophanes is a heretic or an atheist he's a skeptic about religion and he's cross-examining criticizing so there's a moment in one of his plays where the main character uh renounces his religion and he has a small statue i think it was the hermes the messenger god but maybe i'm forgetting which which god it was but he's a small statue to one of the gods it's not zeus it's one of the smaller gods and he reviles the statue he says oh to think that i used to worship a statue you know now i have philosophy now i'm intellectually but now i know this is just carved out of wood i don't worship a statue anymore and then later as the as the drama progresses he becomes disillusioned with the philosophy of socrates and he goes back to the statue he takes the statue back and he puts it up on its alcove and he worships the statue again you know so you do get this this kind of commentary you get you do get a sense of it um but look you know there are books from ancient greece and ancient rome that are complete [ __ ] and i would i would say as an easy example the stuff about religious mythology is [ __ ] right now within european philosophy broadly why is it that lilac cloud so lila cloud is old enough that he or she has already been to university right why is it that when you enrolled in this course in philosophy you were taught nothing but meaningless questions about perception that do we really exist et cetera it's a choice right like people are making these choices you know what you learn at university doesn't have to be useless but it is and you know nobody is questioning what kind of life they're preparing you for what what it is you're supposed to know and i just say um you know the bad old days of the british empire the battle days of um you know classicism classical studies in england and the united states of america one of the reasons why they studied more meaningful philosophy in a more meaningful way was that they openly said they were preparing you for life as a soldier and life as a political leader of men so what did you read and how did you read it you read seneca and you read aristotle's rhetoric and you learned this is what it's like to stand up in front of an audience whether that's parliament or whether that's other soldiers in your unit and make an argument for what you think we need to do next when your life is literally on the line and they read xenophon xenophon's anabasis that was always the level one reading that's where you'd start with the class the first thing you read xenophon he depicts soldiers in a democracy the soldiers elect their leader directly their commanders are elected by the men and when the commanders explain their plan for what they're going to do next they have to convince their men they have to get a vote right it's not a question of blind obedience story and why was this taught to young men they were preparing young men for what was thought of as a meaningful life a life of taking responsibility now of course whether they went into business or whether they went into war or went into government or what have you it was saying look we are providing you with this this preparation whether that is reading appian or livy or salist or aristotle now i'll give you a counter example within aristotle so i just said you can read aristotle's politics you can read aristotle's rhetoric you can read aristotle's constitution of athens those are meaningful texts i would say that aristotle's metaphysics is completely meaningless for people today the only reason to read aristotle's metaphysics is to understand its influence on the catholic church so the development of the catholic church the development of neoplatonism and neoplatonism and the catholic and even the protestant church you know that's a totally different province frankly of [ __ ] so you could have a fascinating university course that's really useful for people today really dealing with political and philosophical ideas that are in aristotle but you could just buy the different selection of texts with a different bias have a course that's really a complete waste your time um i i would just say also i feel that aristotle's book ethics is completely useless for people to waste your time there are a few paragraphs in ethics that are relevant and they're often quoted in the footnotes to copies of aristotle's politics because like during politics they'll say oh you know there's a similar passage in ethics here and there but so you see there are some books by aristotle that are a complete waste of your time and it is not a coincidence that those are the kind of true believer religious [ __ ] books within aristotle's own uh milia and by the way if you don't know long story short the catholic church it went through a period where they were burning aristotle's books and then they had you know formal conclaves and discussions of this oh hey wait wait wait it turns out aristotle isn't such a bad pagan after all his philosophy is pretty close to our philosophy and then everything switched and the catholic church started interpreting aristotle to be a christian before christ and the ultimate um emblematization of this the taking of this bizarre cultural hybridity um this this reclaiming of certain aspects of classicism in the dark ages of christianity uh comes in the middle of uh dante's inferno so dante's inferno is a famous book of fiction it's not fact it's not a documentary it's a fictional account of a man who travels to hell and then walks to paradise you can walk from hell to heaven um again not a documentary um but you know uh there's a stage where he walks past the christians before christianity they have a special place in limbo so he walks past socrates and aristotle and these people there was a recognition that there were these there were these people who were so intelligent that before christ brought his message to the world and before europeans started converting to a form of judaism which is what christianity is that they figured out you know the mystery of the one true god or something so yeah this is a digression to say it is possible to have courses that are complete [ __ ] working even from these same sources of these same authors uh that i'm praising but you know okay i mean nobody told me about thucydides nobody told me about appian nobody told me i come from a similarly benighted educational background if you went to you know the department of philosophy university toronto i've already said all you ever heard about basically at that time was hegel and nietzsche all right and i'm sorry talk about a direction for my digression when you read these names so i was asking the question why do you think kant is important why do you think angle is important it's only important from two perspectives one is a kind of crypto fascist christian conservative view of the world that doesn't exist in the 21st century it was a form of christian conservatism that existed in the 19th century right that's one perspective from which names like uh you know hobbes also but hobbes and hegel and kant and so on that and then the other perspective of course is karl marx it's the attempt of marxists to make marxism seem like the completion of a philosophy that began with hegel which is completely ridiculous and counterproductive but marxists often try to do this thing like oh no man if you really want to understand the roots of marxism you got to go back to hegel which is again a complete waste of your time especially compared to reading you know appian or salist or condorcet or machiavelli or all kinds of things that are much more worth reading uh given that you have only only so many years on this planet so uh manila nick m comments the un is actually pretty legit so i don't know if you're still in the crowd uh manila nick i i disagree okay and you know challenge yourself in this way why don't you look up how the salaries are established for the united nations and once you look up how voting works at the united nations there is a reason why the united nations could never accomplish anything in the israel-palestine conflict there's a reason why they never accomplished anything positive in cambodia or haiti or anywhere else structurally it is at best a flawed design procedurally it is incapable of making precisely the difference in the world that promises to make and every single employee of the united nations is paid more to do their job than they would be paid if doing an equivalent job in the highest paid country anywhere in the world so let's say you're an agricultural advisor for the united nations being sent to laos or cambodia those are people i used to meet so they look at how much is an agricultural expert paid in switzerland in luxembourg in the united states of america and they pay you more than that and then you go to a country like laos or cambodia where the cost of living is very low there's a lot of money involved there's a lot of explicit overt corruption involved and the people who make decisions about cambodia at the united nations know less about cambodia than i do so there's a brief digression but it's worth saying why did the british empire fail why did the british empire have to fail you had people in london making decisions about myanmar who had never been to myanmar who was then called burma you had people in london making decisions yes about places like laos and cambodia who'd never gone there who didn't know the language who didn't know anything about it who didn't understand the cultural let alone political context okay the united nations as it exists now reproduces these awful features of imperialism and that is seen in how awful the outcomes are whether it is in haiti or cambodia or tibet or right now in myanmar this is 2021's if if you think the united nations is pretty legit manila neck all right wondersham what are your predictions what are your predictions between 2021 and 2022 for what the united nations is going to do in myanmar and my my prediction is jack [ __ ] and meanwhile you can just look at the [ __ ] grocery bill you can see just how much money is being spent to accomplish jack [ __ ] and guys there are so give you two examples there were meetings at the u.n where they were spending millions of dollars just to have the meeting just the cost of putting everyone in a five-star hotel and each one of these people is being paid a salary over a hundred thousand dollars spending a huge amount of money to have a meeting and they hear and listen to a bunch of reports about indigenous peoples and how oppressed they are and they vote and they sagaciously decide to grant 300 for some you know indigenous peoples you know when you i mean i'm sorry any aspect of the un whether you're looking at it in terms of environment veganism like you know food and agriculture organization the advocacy for the meat industry versus eliminating meat and pursuing a vegan diet a vegan word would you look at the ecological side it's [ __ ] when you look at the war and peace side when you look at the endangered languages indigenous peoples side there is no aspect of the un i can speak about positively and when the cost is that high you know you have to have some kind of standards if we took that same money and just gave it to the indigenous people just handed it to them instead of having this meeting we just said hey you figure out how to teach your language and stop your language from going extinct instead of us having a um the outcomes are better i have to say to um you know i've read direct transcripts of the un meetings on cambodia and all the people at those meetings know less about cambodia and i do and it's sickening and by the way they're from all around the world so like there's somebody there from india on the microphone talking about the stuff about cambodia and they're like you know they're supposedly going to improve women women's rights in cambodia or some [ __ ] you know whoo at every stage it's scary so it's it's not just what europeans who are ignorant about cambodia or ignorant about haiti and the same thing if you look at the stuff on haiti well yeah you got some people from india you got some people from saudi arabia you got representatives from around the world and they're all completely ignorant of the cultural and political situation in haiti and there are millions of dollars being wasted and so forth so the the track record of failure uh at the united nations it it reflects deep and shallow problems with international okay uh anyway guys thanks for thanks for making intelligent comments i mean you know i uh i do uh i do appreciate it can i just try to catch up here okay um so doom one 1063 asks isn't hobbes valuable because he was the first social contract theorist who based political legitimacy outside of religion that is completely false so doom that is a fascinating example of a statement every single aspect of which is false i can talk about how hobbs fits into social contract but no absolutely nothing you've just said is is uh is correct and no his theory of state and government is by no means a secular one or outside of religion but no i mean i i i don't know who would have possibly told you that but anyway um [Music] do radical centrist is asking again about the history of economics yup you can go go back and watch the video so you remember what it is yeah i remember i did make videos talking about karl marx and the origins the the pre-marxist uh history of economics and how marxism is distorted the way we now remember go back just search my channel for call marks and guys i'll give this if you're having trouble because youtube it is not easy to search the database of uh more than 2 000 videos on my channel so sorry who is this radical centrist check out this link you can search here for the word marks but i think there are only about two videos i did on mark's maybe three maybe it's five but anyway there aren't that many you can just search for the word marks there and you'll you'll get the videos done with that stuff we have a question sir i've many articles and many videos about buddhism we have a question from ddp do you believe the buddha was mythical so i have written articles dealing with that but i also have enough videos about it you could search my channel for the word um apotheosis i'll give you that link that's a good place to start but yeah i have written articles also in addition in addition to making videos discussing that question uh so this is pdp but there's a video to get you started you can watch some of the other videos or read some of my articles in print frida is asking is cicero worth reading so frida stay tuned most of cicero is not worth reading so quite a long time ago on the channel i talked about his work de republica on the republic of the republic for most people that is not worth reading i read it i will make videos in the future talking about cicero's uh lectures or declamations and there may be some bits and pieces worth reading or i may say to you you know don't waste your time just just watch my youtube videos talking about it so you know um a lot of cicero is not worth your time but obviously a tremendously influential author so you know in the sense you know [Music] sorry i don't have an official uh uh whistling policy okay lila cloud this is your first time uh but you lila cloud agrees with me about the united the united nations lilac cloud says quote the u.n peacekeepers are also a sick joke they're notorious for their abuse um i heard they somewhat held the situation in bosnia in the 90s but i looked into it probably yeah so you know um [Music] uh the recent scandals in haiti i think were the ones that drew people's attention most to the extent to which the u.n peacekeepers are their own source of rape and human rights abuses that they all all the same problems you could have with a national army you can have and more you can have even worse with uh you know uh with the united nations army so you know an army is an army and again you can get into organizationally who are the soldiers who do they report to where were they trained because the united nations isn't a separate country why does that work out uh so much worse than um having the swiss show up and act as peacekeepers whatever but look let's just say very briefly the origin the sorry the whole history of the united nations stage managing elections has gone very poorly and why is it that so few countries have succeeded in making the transition to democracy okay egypt egypt has 100 million people doesn't democracy in egypt matter doesn't it matter to the united nations like i admit maybe myanmar is not your top priority what about russia you know what about ukraine i mean yeah ukraine is another great example why does the united nations not seem to care about oh hey have you uh have you heard about a little island just south of turkey called cyprus in greek pronounced kupros have you thought about the record of the united nations on cyprus scary it's so bad it's scary and yeah there are u.n peacekeepers there basically permanently for decades and decades and doesn't solve the problem so yeah we have a problem in our culture of perceiving weakness as strength of perceiving failure as success and success as failure and the united nations is a sterling example of that um okay do i have anything else to say about this i'm going to read the conclusion of this question one more time all right the big put the big picture question that i couldn't find answers to is why are all of these thinkers being taught in universities why should i or society care for them should i skip them or read a select few my current plan is to go through your and melissa's list and after i finish with it i'll start with descartes and the lot so actually so this is more thomas more utopia hobbs and then descartes um look my advice is kind of parallel to and similar to what i said earlier but the difference between area studies and these definitions that are more abstract like philosophy and politics as a topic if you just study politics as defined in a eurocentric way you're never going to do politics of japan you're never going to do politics of sri lanka you're never going to do politics of uh you know uh egypt or whatever you know you're never gonna do politics of anywhere i mean also if you do politics in university you're never gonna do politics of england i mean it's pathetic i mean i mentioned recently in a video at some length you never learn anything about italy i mean italy really matters all these places matter i think the way to approach this kind of reading is through a series of projects babe could you grab just a couple of your central asia books just whatever's handy grab like two of them and bring them over to me you know um so you know i i i keep saying i'm gonna do a video talking about um napoleon right now i don't think you should do a research project about one man you know in the same way that i don't think you should read any of these people kind of in isolation definitely don't read descartes in isolation don't read hobbs in isolation don't read hegel in isolation it's meaningless right but if you said okay i want to understand what happened in the 50 years leading up to the french revolution and in the 50 years after the french revolution then obviously napoleon becomes meaningful but also the amount of reading you do becomes finite rather than infinite it's not like oh i'm going to read the complete works i'm going to read the whole bookshelf on napoleon right now also if you do that and if you're being honest with yourself what your interest is i would say for example atheism becomes a crucial question okay so in the 50 years before the french revolution what was going on in terms of religion and atheism oh well all of a sudden now there were emerges as a really important author someone like holbach someone like helvetius so i'm just going to type these out so you may not have heard of these authors no this is part of what western academia sucks why our high school education sucks and also our university education sucks now from this perspective you say okay i'm taking on a job maybe again start a youtube channel start a blog or start writing articles do whatever you want to do but if you have a youtube channel okay i am going to do a series of videos where i summarize my conclusions and my findings about what happened 50 years leading up to french revolution 50 years after okay and i'm being honest about what my interests are so i'm interested in slavery because i'm alive in the 21st century i'm interested in racism against black people i'm interested in atheism versus christianity maybe you're also interested in the status of women you know like maybe sorry maybe not let's just say hypothetically given who who's in my audience i'm talking to you maybe you're interested in how ancient greek ideas and how ancient roman ideas got reinterpreted and reinvented in that period in france or that period in in western europe right okay so now you've got a bunch of interests and now napoleon fits into that as one puzzle piece and you're going to do a certain amount of reading about napoleon but you're not going to let it take over decades of your life but now also people like holbach and helvetius and probably also you know condorcet here whose book i people have probably these other thinkers start to fit in as puzzle pieces and now you have a sense of mission you have a sense of purpose you know what it is you want to understand now i just say i don't think i don't i'm not praising condorcet in a one-sided way here another question you might have in looking at that period of 100 years is what did these people have to say about the american revolution because these things happen almost simultaneously you have the unfolding of american politics and politics i think what condorcet says about the american revolution is kind of dumb it's interesting i'm glad i read it you know but you look at it he's like oh yeah they're going to abolish slavery any day now oh the american revolution is going great it's just a matter of time before they abolish slavery give evil equal rights to black people guess again conor said he was quite naive he was quite jejune about and quite naive about relationship with the uh the first nations people the indigenous people too the genocide that there were things he was just wrong about his heart was in the right place but he was wrong about these things um so you know but when you have that sense of mission and purpose you're then not going to be disappointed you're not going to be frustrated with that because your analysis of that fits into that puzzle these are puzzle pieces fitting into your your project and now later after you've done that if you want to especially read more about napoleon or especially read more about slavery or what was going on and you know these different things you when you teach philosophy that way when you teach politics that way or when you teach yourself that way you gain confidence you gain a skill that you can use in the real world and it still matters now like still today you will be hearing about the ban on headscarves in france and quebec there is the struggle between secularism and organized religion in french politics still to this day that 100 has its origins in the french revolution and napoleon like french revolution was one thesis and napoleon was a counter thesis you know what i mean one was moving in one direction one movie in the other and that the compromise between the two forces you can say produce the legal and political and cultural framework that still carries on to the state and you you will find if you read this way you've gained real confidence if you read thomas hobbs leviathan in isolation you gain no confidence if you read kant in isolation if you read hegel in isolation if you read descartes in isolation and the worst thing is the main way these people read these books is just oh this man was a genius he was a great man don't question why he was a genius don't question what he discovered or what he accomplished or what his influence position is you read it in this isolated way where you gain no confidence and no comparative awareness either so just just to finish that example of the the french revolution learning about the french revolution that way you will not regard napoleon as a genius if you're reading him in that way in that context i don't think you'll regard any of them as geniuses like holbach and helvetia's the two guys i just mentioned you would see them as people who were competing with other authors right you're like oh yeah so this was one guy who had a hit book and he was kind of responding to and competing with this other guy who had a hitbook and all these people influenced napoleon and napoleon was imitating this guy and reacting you get a sense of the political and intellectual and philosophical competition going on in all directions and pushing and pulling at the republic all at the same time and then you get a sense of how it unfolds so again that's that's very different from the way academia at least english speaking at the midwest it puts these people on a pedestal and i'll just really brief sorry i could talk about this all day that's what i see done with socrates too right oh what do you need to know about socrates that socrates was a great man you know and he's presented in isolation in this bizarre way that makes him meaningless and no that's that's not who socrates was that's not why he mattered you know it's socrates story we had the book yeah in reality socrates was the butt of many jokes in athens they didn't think he was a great man and they killed him in case you hadn't heard you know hashtag spoilers and then story ends the socrates dead uh you know he was given a public trial and sentenced to death and executed so they didn't think he was a great man you know he was one guy competing with these other cultural forces and you know and that included religious as well as you know uh political and philosophical voices that he was one voice putting his hat into the ring and he was saying no i know what the government ought to be i know how politics ought to be organized and run this is my you know bid for power and he got involved with a guy named alkibiatis and really tried to change government and politics in athens in the middle of an ongoing civil war and so on you know so anyway yeah i remember i got a peer review very negative peer review for one of my essays i think this was one of the essays that got published in the end i had essays that went through peer review get rejected and then they get accepted or whatever remember one guy wrote back just snubbing my essay and saying oh well this is just making the point that um content needs to be understood in context that's not new like there's nothing there's nothing it touches i remember that you know you can imagine this was actually someone who's a religious buddhist and is looking for an excuse to shut down my article because my articles really call into question and condemn a lot of things that are precious and holy to religious buddhists and their their their faith is blind faith it's based on ignorance that's often contradicted by the text you know i remember thinking you know you're wrong arguing for content in context is never going to go out of style it's not it's never going to this is never going to not matter it's like your whole life people are gonna say something about napoleon and you're gonna have to say back well yes but he was only doing that because at the same time this was happening your whole life people are gonna say people are gonna make a statement like this about how thomas hobbes uh invented some concepts and you say no no no he was responding to these other people and this is what was going on that's an intellectual tradition that goes all the way back to ancient rome and ancient greece and well no no this is not true at all you know um no arguing for struggling for understanding content in context it never goes away it never gets all that happens again again so just mention a uh this book was literally on melissa's desk when i asked you to grab it for me but this is an example of area an approach where you say okay i'm going to understand the border between central asia and china i'm going to understand this region of xinjiang western china into uzbekistan turkmenistan etc i'm going to understand what it's all about so if you didn't have this project if you didn't kind of take it so it exists on a map geographically it also exists chronologically right because you're not going back 3000 years right mostly it's the last 300 years maybe 500 but mostly the last 30 years okay what happened in the last 300 years that produced this situation in xinjiang it involves china involves russia by the way russia is very much involved it involves turkey at least a little bit you know i mean involves iran as a really politically contentious part of the world okay and then these people in between the uzbeks you know the turkmenistanis the uh the turkmen yeah the kurgis and the the residents of xinjiang right they're caught in the middle right okay if you didn't have that context we could pick out the name of any one of these political figures and say oh are you interested in reading about this guy's political philosophy no not at all i know turkmen bashi or something one of these one of these leaders you know oh do you want to read about the philosophy of turkmenbashi no right it's not significant it's not meaningful it's not motivating in isolation but if you take on the task of saying look i'm not going to understand what's happening in xinjiang in the context of this [ __ ] propaganda narrative that's being presented to the world on cnn right now i'm going to understand it in terms of the context of 300 years of history that involves the qing dynasty in china it involves these different political figures and religious movements in central asia and you know there are really interesting questions here about the future of islam and the future of atheism and secularism the future of democracy on planet this becomes meaningful this becomes rewarding it becomes interesting and it breathes life into what would others otherwise be a completely boring set of isolated texts and isolated ideas you know so yeah that's ultimately the end of my my answer a long and thorough and in-depth answer to this question sent in by a viewer in the audience and a supporter on patreon shout out to danny