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Young Heretics

Cyclops Nationalism: The One Thing Worse than Politics

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.94.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ah, the state of nature: a peaceful utopia where each man is free to live off his own vineyards, sit under his own fig tree, and eat people alive. Wait--what?? In Book 9 of the Odyssey, Homer gives us a diabolical bait-and-switch, from the pure serenity of primitive life to the gruesome horrors of a world without law. It's the perfect antidote to the wishful thinking that might set in around election time, when all we want is to get away from politics: if you can believe it, the alternatives might be even worse!

SIGNUPS OPEN: Register for Spring courses at The Ancient Language Institute https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/

Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: https://a.co/d/2QccOfM

Subscribe to my joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com

Simon Netchev’s Odyssey Map: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/15906/odysseus-ten-year-journey-home

 

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:14.3

My friends, if you are sick to death of election politics, if you've had it up to here with Republicans and Democrats, you hate everybody left, right and center, and you just wish they would all go away. You are in luck because this is the Young Heretics episode for you.

0:19.2

Follow me to a land with no rules, no councils, no laws, no votes.

0:26.0

But be careful what you wish for,

0:28.0

because it might just turn out that a world without politics is the one thing worse than a world with politics.

0:36.9

It's time at last to journey to the land of the Cyclops. All right, it's time to pony up at last. I feel like I've been teasing the journeys of Odysseus for weeks and weeks and

0:56.3

and Homer teases them in the Odyssey. He opens up the poem not with Odysseus journeys which are kind of the most famous part of the poem but with

1:05.8

telemicus and the whole lead up and build up to finally encountering this adventure story of how Odysseus was blown off course on his way back home from Troy after the Trojan

1:26.4

war and how at last he found his way, if not ultimately home, then at least to the

1:31.2

fiations who are going then to take him home.

1:35.0

So we sort of set up how Odysseus gets ready to tell this story last week,

1:40.6

and now I'm gonna go book by book and give you one episode each on books 9, 10, and 11, which is really the meat of it and where we get all the juicy mythological adventure stuff that again we all kind of associate with this poem.

1:58.4

After that we really are on the home stretch.

2:00.5

We're getting back to Ithaca and back to the subject of the movie that's coming out with Ray

2:05.3

Fines about Odysseus Return, which is kind of why I started off on this whole thing to begin with.

2:11.2

Although I have to say, it has now become such an adventure unto itself,

2:15.6

this journey that we've taken through the Homeric poems that I'm really excited to do more of this kind of thing with you and last week I put out a call for

2:24.4

people to let me know other works of great literature and even maybe Western art

2:29.1

that you might like to go on a deep dive into I think think I'm just going to keep doing this from now on.

2:35.2

So I've been really enjoying all of your suggestions. People have been writing in at

2:39.8

Rejoiceevermore dot substack.com to tell me maybe you'd like to hear about the

2:44.7

defined comedy or Aristotle's organ on I've got a bunch of I'm collecting these

2:48.9

suggestions now and I'll see what we do next after we finish the Odyssey.

...

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