Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this

Thank you to all of you that support the show on Patreon. You make the show possible for everyone else

Kind of off topic because it doesn't really support the show

But thank you to the people that click through the Amazon non-endorsement completely neutral banner located on the front page of the website

Today's episode is part two in a series on the Frankfurt school. I hope you love the show today

So whenever you're navigating the waters of a set of ideas that you disagree with which seems inevitable for all of us given the next couple months of the show

One thing that's really important to consider is to put yourself in the shoes of the people that you disagree with and try to consider where they're coming from with all this

One thing I like to do is I like to imagine myself as that other person. I like to imagine I woke up that morning and I was them

I sat down with my family at breakfast

I held all the same strong convictions that they do about whatever subject I'm thinking about and then I like to imagine

Say I was this person. How would I see my actual self and the views that I have about things?

In other words, where do they think I'm coming from with my views being someone who disagrees with them?

See the reason I do this exercises because I know what Nietzsche said is true

I realize how strong and incentive I have as a person to attach myself to some group or some cause that's bigger than myself

Glean a sense of identity from the process

Feel all the good feelings that come along with fighting against some evil out there in the world

But a necessary part of that whole process is

Identifying some evil that you're fighting against and what that often looks like in practice is finding some evil group of people that you're fighting against

But here's an important question to ask if you were them

Would you think that you were evil?

Do these evil people view themselves as like villains

cackling and twirling their mustache and some superhero movie or do these people think that they're acting as a force of good in the world

...