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Young Heretics

Ep. 56: It's All Socrates' Fault

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.94.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2021

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What if all this Western culture stuff is just a mistake? That's the provocative question Spencer Klavan explores in this episode, with the help of that infamous German polemicist Friedrich Nietzsche. Spencer begins with Nietzsche's first book, "The Birth of Tragedy," taking a hard look at the weakness Nietzsche saw in Socrates, and so in the Western tradition of philosophy.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Do you guys ever wonder if it was like all a mistake by which I mean like Western civilization?

0:11.5

That is essentially the central question that I think Friedrich Nietzsche helps us to ask.

0:19.0

Even if he doesn't help us to answer it, it's an important question.

0:23.1

And I have given Nietzsche a hard time on this show. I'm going to continue to prod him in future.

0:32.0

But I think we do ourselves a disservice if we just dismiss him as a kind of nihilist, relativist, you know, like whatever.

0:41.4

Weirdo. He was not. He was actually, I think, one of the most brilliant philosophers and observers of the 19th century,

0:50.7

of what was going on in Europe in the 19th century and what was shortly to come in Europe and in general in the West.

0:59.4

That question that I asked might sound like kind of a troll, it might sound like a joke, but actually it's a question that a lot of people are asking all the time and not just people on the left.

1:10.2

It's something that occurs when things are going as disparateingly, as badly as they currently are, right?

1:18.7

It's hard not to look around and think, like, what are we doing here?

1:23.2

Like, we want to love our culture, we want to love our civilization, that's what this whole show is about, right?

1:29.4

But you can't look at some of the stuff that's going on and wonder, like, there's some deep, wrong turn that's been taken here.

1:36.9

And where was that wrong turn? You know, I mean, I was in the grocery store the other day.

1:42.0

And usually, you know, they announce over the intercom regularly, you must wear a mask in order to shop in our store or whatever.

1:50.4

Now, the mask mandate has been lifted in Tennessee.

1:54.1

And so instead of just, you know, throwing the gates open and taking that announcement away, they replaced it with this periodic announcement over the intercom about how to cover your nose with your hand when you sneeze.

2:06.6

Like, as if you were talking to a six-year-old, right?

2:08.8

Like, when you used to help stop the spread of germs, if you sneeze or cough, cover your nose and mouth with your hand or your elbow, right?

2:16.1

It's difficult for me to express, but I'm sure you feel, right, just how pathetic that is.

2:24.0

And when you watch a society basically locked up and, and, and,

2:28.8

you know, modified and, and turned into this kind of like, survival-obidiant group of, of sheep essentially, it's, it's hard, you know, not to feel really, as I said,

2:40.8

dispirited about the state of the West and to ask, you know, is it really so great?

...

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