I think that the European pagan worldview can actually be rooted entirely in biology and a kind of Nietzschean understanding of biology and the will to power. So if you start off from the understanding that all of life has a common nature and that nature is fundamentally growth which is what Nietzsche called the will to power. It's this expansive instinct. Whether it's people or trees, everything grows and that's what life does. Uh you know, it grows physically, seeks to expand, to dominate. The European pagan worldview actually starts with this implicit understanding which Nietzsche, I think, kind of picked up on. Because the highest virtue in the European pagan worldview, of course, is to strive for excellence, to reach your maximum potential and that you're, you know, beautiful, strong, you're elegant, you're noble. That's the hero who is the aristos. And this is a common idea across all European pagan branches, the Achilles or also in the Norse heroes. And when they do that, they strive for glory for excellence. They strive for the sky and to be illuminated in memory so that their name does not fade. And what also strives upwards? Plants. Trees also strive towards the sky and that's where the daylight father is. >> Sun max. Zeus. Yes. Who would have literally been called the daylight father. So >> Really? Nice. >> Yeah. I mean, that's what the name means. Like Zeus, Jupiter. We'd all be like soul bros then down on earth. Yes. Yes. So then in that case, life basically strives upwards which is against gravity. Mhm. And you know, Nietzsche says, yeah, let us let us kill the spirit of gravity. That's because in the earth is where dead things go to die. That's the house of death where Persephone goes each season until she's reborn. And so life is literally striving against death while gravity pulls it back down towards towards death. Okay, now though for growth growth requires consumption. Yes, okay. So to grow we have to eat, we have to kill animals and that consumption requires the killing of other life forms. Usually whether it's plants, whether it's animals. And so that that adds this kind of dualistic aspect of life. There's this all devouring aspect. And there's just like aspiring aspect. And all of the European pagan stories are about a descent into nature which is all devouring whether it's Achilles custom is violated he goes on this rampage he ignores custom and law and then he returns to it or Odysseus is at sea where there's cannibals, there's all sorts of craziness, everyone's eating each other and then he returns home and restores law and order. That's kind of the archetypal Indo-European story. And so what's going on there is you have the correct ordering of nature so that the devouring aspect is subservient to the striving, the growth aspect, the the will to power. And so you know you you eat stuff but you do it to get stronger and more beautiful. And the opposite of that would be the devouring aspect on top which is like Cronus devouring his children where the devouring aspect takes over. And you know Cronus is devouring his own children or you know sacrificing children to Moloch or something like that but Zeus overthrows Cronus and restores the the cosmic order which is understood as kind of excellence on top devouring aspect on the bottom this kind of cosmic tree. So that was what kind of what I wanted to lay out to you. Quite a rant. It's good. I I actually a lot of thoughts fired off in my mind as you were saying all that stuff so I like how accurately I reflect exactly what you're saying here I'm not too sure but these are these are things I've been pondering myself. So from like what I get you're trying to say as well is that within biology you see the construction of these early religions that you would say in the European myths, they're very connected to the clear observations of biological processes and realities. And it's almost like poetic. The probably the reason why they come across so poetic is it's so grounded in reality. Whereas like later Abrahamic religions tend to be a little bit more abstract and maybe pull us away from that and get our metaphysics all abstracted so they don't connect with nature as much. In some sense they're against nature. I see that on a fundamental level. But I guess the the thing that went off most like directly in my mind is thinking about the question of the problems in Nietzsche's metaphysics. I've gotten in trouble with this before talking to people like Aearion and some Platonists and stuff like this. And um I've I've often speak to Christians and I often speak to people about this problem of like, all right, base Nietzscheanism, whatever it is, how does this become persuasive? How could a base paganism, how could any of this stuff actually be something people take serious? Cuz it's all a kind of larp until people actually take actions based on real moral convictions that actually influence their lives. Like all of it is just intellectual, all of it is just playing around with words and concepts and stuff until it's like becomes very emotionally real. And I noticed with a lot of um Christians, often when you're speaking to them they'll come to this final sensation or sentiment or feeling that the reason why Christ is so persuasive, the ideal of Christ is so persuasive, is that the world is very It's actually very pessimistic. The world is very tragic and broken. And there's um something about this world that is inherently devouring and monstrous, which is nature. And I actually often equate it to veganism, which people don't like at all, but I often do because I think it's a very easy way to see the psychology of what's going on here. Where if you look at like the simple tragedy that you have to eat animals every day. You have to be the devourer yourself. You have to in order for you to exist and to persist in life, you have to like have a steak every day, and some poor cow has to get like, you know, sawed up and cut up and for you for you to live. So, for you to live, death must take place, and you must devour something. And it's quite easy for you to rationalize that away and and become unconscious of it and pretend it's not happening. But if you become honest about it and think the three meals a day you have to participate in a monstrous, murderous devouring of some other animal in order to exist. This very quickly brings you to um it red pills you. It very quickly forces in your face uh uh a tragedy, which is that there's a lot of suffering in this life and you participate in it. And so, the response to this, I think, is where things become very interesting. I think when people say stuff like sin, they are kind of referencing this inherent tragedy. This is the same tragedy, I think, our ancestors when they're hunting woolly mammoths and they'd kill one, would, you know, feel its body as it's dying and experience the tragedy that they just took a life in order for them to exist. And that was mentally tough on them. And so, they they did things like ritual animal sacrifice in order to to stabilize this. And I think something like Christ or Christianity and the sacrifice on the cross comes as an extension of this, where there's this need for us to make peace with the tragedy and the pain and the suffering through this religion, through this sacrifice. But it's very pessimistic cuz it says that the world is full of sin. The world is full of tragedy. World is full of evil. We participate in suffering. Animals are a very narrow example, but in a broader sense, even like, you know, how we hurt other people or exploit other people is very common part of life. And um this tragedy, Christ redeems us from it. Christ goes in and he gives up his life, and it's kind of like God saying like, I get it. And the core idea here is God is almost in some sense coming down in the body of the victim, so all of us can relate to the victim and then we become conscious of the tragedy and then that's apparently going to make it better. This type of thing. Now, I've often wondered cuz that's very persuasive. I think that almost anybody who really engages with this this is very emotionally moving as Young says like you have to let Jesus Christ break your heart in order to individuate. But then there is something very compelling about nature because that's what I just described there is almost like depressing and anti-heroic or something like this. It's like pulling you away. So, I was banging on about Jesus. Yeah. Back to Jesus. All right. Okay. So, The lamb, the sacrifice. >> The lamb and then the the concept the concept I constantly get when I speak to the people like Christians and everything is um and I again I I sympathize with this a lot. I emotionally feel this very heavily but there there is a lot of tragedy in life. If you like it's very easy to talk about this stuff intellectually but if you ever deal with a death or you come across like a suffering animal or suffering person, it emotionally hits you. It moves you. Now, the next question is then all right, well, what is the seduction of the heroic pagan thing in contrast to this? And this is what people really really struggle with because Nietzsche is proposing a different moral way of feeling reality and a different moral way of feeling um suffering. And so, I my suggestion is the idea almost of something like the UFC. I think it's a simple analogy I can use where if you want to become the champion, the Conor McGregor, in order for you to to participate in that you literally have to enter into a hierarchy of pain. And all along this hierarchy of pain, as you climb up to become the ideal, the hero, the Conor McGregor, the champion, the Khabib, if you want to become this guy at the top, in order for you to get there, you literally have to climb basically upon dead bodies. You have to go into this like samsara meat grinder of maximum amount of suffering. You have to actually embrace suffering on first principle. It's almost like the complete opposite attitude where you go in and you say, "I'm going to go in and I'm going to like go into my gym. I'm going to have people come into my gym who want to become the ideal like me. We're going to fight each other. I'm going to hurt them. They're going to hurt me. And if I'm better than them, I will hurt them more and I will like sort of upgrade. Then I'll go to into the UFC and I'll fight people. And two guys will stand inside the octagon and they'll both have like dreams that they're going to conquer the other guy and the way they're going to do that is make the other guy suffer. So there's going to be this exchange. One of them will impose more suffering in the other and they'll upgrade. And in order for you to like keep upgrading, you have to create this this system of suffering underneath you and like wrangle and climb and wrangle and climb until you get up to the top. And the ideal man is in some sense the one who is hard enough, strong enough, capable of overcoming more suffering and causing a large amount of other people. Now this is this is this is like the predator opposite way of thinking. Yet at the same time, think how emotionally heavy and intense it is when you see a champion. Like they're unbelievably compelling people because they are in some sense like masters of the pain. They're like the devil in samsara and they've made it. And there's something very um there's a huge gravitas around this. I I like I speak specifically about a champion. They have like a golden magical aura around them. Like I remember when Conor was ripping off people. He had this just almost like light aura coming off him. Like a heroic ideal. He was a hero. Khabib, Jon Jon Jones over here in America. You see this type of like aura come off these people. And it is because there's something that's justified in reaching becoming that good, becoming the heroic, becoming the ideal. And it's very felt. It's not abstract. It's not You don't have to intellectualize it. Like it's actually felt. You're around the presence of these type of characters and you feel it. But there's a there's a completely different attitude because they have to almost in some sense cast aside the victims and willingly impose suffering and willingly take suffering and embrace it. And then the idea the fundamental idea is that once they reach the top, the heroic ideal, that's allows them to justify all the pain, including the pain they cause to others. And the people who fail become sort of like the sacrifices to the ideal themselves, which is like very nice. It's not very empathetic. But it it it actually has its own coherency in a sense. It's not respecting of all It's not like a everyone gets a try try out medal for participating. It's fundamentally zero sum. But the thing that gets crafted out of it is something very ideal, like a hero, something that's been forged in pain and is perfect in some sense or uh has overcome, if you so will, this type of thing. So that's a big rant in its own way as well with uh that was what was going on in my head based on what you're saying. Yes, that's good. I would say yes, but because that is often how the pagan hero is portrayed in the Iliad. Uh let's say Achilles, for example. But when you actually look at what's going on, that doesn't seem to be what's happening. It doesn't actually seem to be like a uh quote unquote Nietzschean right of the stronger ethos. Cuz the plot of the Iliad is basically there's a violation of cus- custom. Agamemnon, the the top general, top king, takes the concubine of uh Achilles, our hero. And uh Achilles really likes his concubine. He's very attached to her. Uh you know, according to the text, she loved him too, who knows. Um and this is a violation of custom. And this starts a chain of violations of custom. Uh which end in Achilles letting another man fight in his armor, fight in his place, which is oh yeah, you know, no good. His his bestie, Patroclus. Patroclus is killed, and this is when Achilles uh like custom is completely shattered. And custom is like the proper ordering of nature, uh which prevents things from just being all devouring cuz in nature everything's eating everything else. Basically, that's what's going on in nature. And custom is what prevents that from happening. And so when that's shattered, Achilles goes on this rampage. He's slaughtering people. He's chasing them down and cutting them down from behind. Uh one of Agamemnon's sons begs for mercy and he just he just kills him. He chimps out. Yeah, he just And then finally, Hector he beats Hector and Hector says, "All right, you got me.
You've beaten me and I know you're going to kill me, but grant me a proper burial." He's appealing to custom. And Achilles says uh something like there are no pacts between lions and men and there can never be any peace between wolves and sheep. And what does that mean? He's saying in nature, you know, the sheep cannot appeal to custom. It's just devoured by the wolf. And uh you know, there can be no pacts, no customs, no burial rites in nature. And so he kills Hector and then he drags his body behind his chariot desecrating him. But that's not the end of the Iliad. The end of the Iliad comes when Priam, Hector's old father, comes to Achilles' tent and supplicates himself in a customary way cuz you know, the host-guest relationship was very important in the Indo-European um uh you know, ethos.
And you know, he gets down, he like you know, grabs Achilles' feet and he says, "Please give me uh my son back so I can bury him in accordance with custom." And they both break down in tears. And it ends with Achilles having a moment of mercy and compassion where they're both crying together. And then he returns the body and gives in to custom. And also kind of gives in again to his own mortality. So the chimp out ends The chimp out ends in mercy. And that And that's why Christ on his own is actually very kind of in alignment with your European paganism. Wow, interesting.
So I think I think there's there's another interesting angle though. I I think that Christ on his own actually fits into this worldview as the sacrificial victim. But you you have another thing going on there which is the whole um you know, Abrahamic thing, right? The the backdrop of Abrahamic theology basically and metaphysics. And the real root of that was with Zoroastrianism, which kind of broke off from the main Indo-European uh idea again, which is the proper ordering of uh nature so that it's not all devouring. That's That's what the emphasis is. And Oh, another interesting thing is when Agamemnon takes Briseis, Achilles calls him a king who devours his people. Mhm. Cuz the king is supposed to feed his people. So, it's it's not a zero-sum game where the king is just on top and dominates everyone. He's supposed to feed, but he's turning into Cronus where he eats his own children, basically. His own people. Um but anyway, the the Zoroastrian split You have the split in the conception of order versus chaos, right? Where you have this constant struggle between of order and chaos. And then you have this idea of good versus evil. And the idea that good will finally triumph over evil. You know, in a in a final complete triumph. And you know, the world will become basically a paradise. And um this seems to have influenced Judaism and and old Old Testament religion. And what's interesting though is that the Israelites were in contact with the Canaanites. And they were the ones who were sacrificing children, it seems, to their gods. So, they were worshipping this devouring part of nature as the highest. And so, it's interesting thing maybe with their contact with that which pushed them towards this kind of rejection of the world. Right? You see that here Here are these guys putting their babies into the fire to their god. And you think this world is messed up. It's not supposed to be like this. Maybe once it was perfect and now it is fallen and horrible and we need to kind of withdraw from it or try to return it to this original state of perfection. Um what pops up in my mind with this This This is a maybe chilling out a little bit, but So, obviously what happened in Rome is you see the transformation, the ending of the Indo-European religion in some sense permanently. That was the pivot point. When once it was out of Rome and the church comes Catholicism comes it just swarms over Europe and like dominates in pretty much absolute terms thereafter.
And you see basically what you're describing is this old religion die off, which would have been It's It's also interesting that that old religion never had a like formal name. In the Vikings, for example, it was just called tradition. It was actually closer to the the idea of like worldview. It's probably like the way we saw we would see science now or physics. We just accept it as like that's how the world is. It's It's very like unconscious. It's not questioned per se. It's just like an internalized way of looking at things. Um So, that in Rome we saw we saw that that got merked basically. And that's that's the end of this. And I I often wonder why why Abrahamism, Christianity is so motivating to people. And I wonder this is It's almost like a question of magic, you know? Like what you're saying with Zoroaster, like what you're saying with this idea of castigating all of nature as maybe chaos and proposing this formal good where in the future there's going to be this war and good is going to defeat evil, truth is going to defeat untruth. Is that actually a very naturally motivating way of looking at life? It might not be true, but it's naturally motivating. And the more pessimistic idea that we're in this sort of custom-based samsara and we set up custom and tradition in order to like control samsara and forge out of it this like little space of order. That's probably more wise and more natural and maybe that's what the Indo-European religion was like, an ancient suggestion that like hold on to traditions cuz that's what's formed the the hierarchy around us. And Achilles is like a individualist libertarian jumping out of the tradition bubble in order to like, you know, chimp out a a bit and let his let his his anger out. and obviously he has to get absorbed back into it. And he's like something like Zarathustra really just like jumping So, we've got this bubble of, you know, the Indo-European tradition that protects us from the devouring chaos of nature. And Zarathustra in some sense jumps out of that entirely and creates a new bubble that is um proposing that there's going to be this constant permanent defeat of devouring nature. And we're going to wage a war The point of our culture is to wage a war against this nature and attack it and conquer it. And I actually What I'm pointing out here is that this psychological metaphysics versus this very traditional stick with custom, pull back into nature, set up your boundaries and your guards against nature. This is like a very trad This is super trad way of looking at things. And the sort of psychological opposite I have here is this um almost like transhuman futurist way of looking at things where it's like nature's a problem, custom and tradition is just a cope that gets us to stay trapped within nature. The same way as like it's actually like Prometheus, you know? The same way as like you the the humans have to stay sacrificing to Zeus and the gods because that's just custom. And then you have this Zarathustra, Prometheus, almost like Yahweh as well, suggest Marx even, suggesting that we actually need to wage a revolution against this circumstance. We need to assault nature. We need to create a moral condemnation of nature and go on a crusade in order to overcome this. And this is naturally very, very inspiring to like the young revolutionary spirit within the idealist within inside of a lot of us. So, I like look at this and think to myself in Zarathustra where you see the seeing the flickering of like futurism. And the Jason Jorjani would love this, by the way. He'd be like chim- He'd be like, "Yes, they've arrived." They call him up, get him on FaceTime. Yeah, we FaceTime him. And he's right. And And then does that make its way into Judaism then because then Judaism is proposing like uh you know, the the Marxist utopian future. The and then you see it obviously in Christianity. Christianity is like like what is the most motivating part of Christianity for a lot of people? It's things like Revelations, the prophecy of the end times. It's all prophecy. It's a prophecy based religion. It's not like Indo-Europeanism seems to be a very like automatic traditionalist uh wise connection with the natural world and ordered way of seeing things. Whereas this is like break free individualist prophecies about the future and deny nature, turn on nature, nature's evil, this type of thing. So, I'm wondering are these type of things uh clashing up? And then in the situation we find ourselves right now in our like sort of cultural political climate, there's a lot of people who are trying to pull back to tradism and they're going towards the sort of quasi Indo-European return to the natural order, go back into custom. I think this is even happening to a lot of Christians, too. Because they want that stability and that order. They want things to go They're like the woke has gone too far. They want to go back and have more of a spinal cord that they can rely on. And then um we're actually getting set up in opposition with a a very idealistic culture now that's very like free to think that actually want to go in the other direction. And um this would be like the the techno futurists, the woke movement, even an awful lot of people on the reactionary right and stuff like this, these types of things. So, I've said a lot there as well, but do you have any thoughts? Yes, yes, definitely. Back back to what you brought up, I guess, about salvation and like motivation, I think that you could reframe it in a different way as well. So, you know, what would draw people, let's say, would draw, you know, young men to the European pagan worldview as opposed to Christianity? Well, Christianity offers salvation from this devouring aspect of nature, of course, you know, in heaven, you know, the salvation of the soul, immortality of the soul. The salvation in the Indo-European or European pagan worldview is a bit different and it comes through two things, through heroic action and through ancestry. Mhm, okay. >> And and the two are very connected uh because in most stories like in the Odyssey, the heroic action is connected to kind of restoring or um yeah, I guess restoring a broken chain of ancestry. So, Odysseus is away and uh you know, he's out at sea and again you see this thing where there's no custom at sea. Polyphemus says, "I don't care about the law laws of Zeus." and he eats his guests, literally devouring his guests. Cannibalism. And at home, the suitors are trying to uh all marry Penelope, Odysseus's wife and they're devouring Odysseus's household, devouring his wealth. Again, in the absence of custom and order. And Odysseus eventually, of course, returns home, restores order and in restoring order he also reconnects with his son who he left as an infant. And then finally he reconnects with his father and that's kind of the final piece of the epic. Just like in the Iliad, it's the son the well, the dead son being returned to his father by Achilles. You have now uh Odysseus returning to his old father and saying, "I'm here." and then father or I guess grandfather, father and son strap on armor uh in preparation to fight. And that's the end. Uh well, in the end Athena comes down through divine intervention and restores order. >> Yeah, yeah. The laws, you know, justice coming from from the heavens and prevents the uh continued cycle of war, basically, cuz the families of the suitors want to um you know, get revenge for having all their sons killed by Odysseus. But what you see there is that that chain of ancestry and so the hero you know, strives for greatness, strives for excellence and I think that is highly motivating for the young man because it's really leaning into the the basic nature of life, you know, this desire to to strive, to aspire, uh to conquer. And then the reason that's connected to ancestry is, you know, through these great deeds, well, who remembers them? Your descendants. Your story is told again and again through the generations. And so I think the European pagan worldview isn't just kind of cal- you know, calcified custom. It's very active. Where you're going in and wrestling with the world. You're you're realizing that there is this devouring aspect. Uh and you know, you're trying to order it and and to strive for excellence, but the war in the Indo-European worldview is kind of against entropy. This is where you get into the Nietzschean thing, the spirit of gravity. You're trying to liberate life and and to the point of ordering nature, the point of civilization, the point of virtue is to direct the individual towards excellence, to kind of encourage life. You know, it's like you're cutting away all the weeds from the tree, you know, you the tree might get strangled by all these weeds or all these vices or whatever. You're cutting them away so the tree can grow stronger. So the hero so you're kind of basically trying to encourage life and wage war on entropy. Whereas in the Abrahamic view, it becomes a moral war uh having to do basically with suffering. You're kind of waging war on suffering. You're kind of waging war on suffering from rather than waging war on entropy, it's good versus evil and that really just means, you know, trying to avoid inflicting suffering and and the guilt that comes with inflicting suffering, which I think can lead to a like a withdrawal from the world. >> That's a very fascinating way of articulating that. I can actually see that moral metaphysics appear in our world because if I think about um to sort of quintessential reactionary world feeling, if you will, which a lot of us are very unconscious about. We look at a like, you know, you look at that uh infrastructure of USA's NGOs. And I I'll talk about Ireland cuz it's the most immediate thing to talk about. Um you see all these like IPSA centers and stuff like this. And you see all this this enormous amount of funding flooding into like these greedy boomers who just want to uh cash in on basically destroying the future by elevating housing prices and keeping the GDP up and doing all these like mad importation projects and all this just so they can like cash in a couple of million dollars to go live in Spain and have a holiday. And it's it's like what you in a weird way you you would expect it to be some type of like war. You think you're in a war against evil. And in and we have this sentiment that we want to think that there's like crazy conspirers at the very very top doing everything. Maybe that's the case. But in some sense when you start to pull up the rock and look at the bugs moving around, what you actually see is almost like uh uh as you said an entropy seeping in. That there used to be an ordered um society that had a sense of itself and had a like coherency that it wasn't just going to do stupid things like destroy the youth and kill off its potential for life and like you know render the Irish essentially useless in the next like 20 years. It's a completely confused destroyed nation. Um And so because that order because they there's no heroes fighting to preserve that order anymore, it's almost like there's no King Arthur to come up and like stamp down authority and be like we're there's going to be no [ __ ] around here. All the like greed is almost like these little mouths of devouring, you know, they're like worms or something like this that just start gnawing away at every aspect of the culture and they just try to extract. They see a way to make money or value and they start to suckle it out like a parasite. And the if you think of the society like Ireland is this little body, this little entity, you know, all of a sudden there's like it's called parasites and they're beginning to devour it and it's starting to fall apart. And so the sort of claim, the feeling now and I've noticed this with McGregor, you know, standing up and saying he's going to do president and all this, I've noticed the sentiment is literally like a sort of Arthurian hero sort of saying to himself, all right, I'm going to pull the sword out of the stone. I shouldn't be using an English myth for this, by the way. You know, he's like going to stand up and he's going to be the redeemer. He's going to he's going to like an a old Indo-European cult, cut the parasites out and reestablish order, reestablish that type of custom. So, I can see that. And that's the sort of idea that you're like constantly fighting against this perpetually. And then think of the opposite world feeling where um people say like what is the the the the woke? What does it mean to be woke, if you will? And you see people like James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson sort of using this term woke right or something. It's just silly stuff. But if you think about like the actual feeling of it, it is actually that exact morality that you're speaking about where they look at like they look out into the world and they see there's an enormous amount of suffering. And in every place that they find that, they try to like eviscerate it, re- get rid of it basically. So, why is there euthanasia machines in Canada? Because they're trying to find a way to to to eradicate suffering. Like it seems like a very strange thing like suicide pods, you know? But the logic is actually very coherent. And actually in some sense emotionally tragic when you think about it. They're trying to make death just a little bit more easy for people. And why do you see this constant attempt to like reform societies? It's to eradicate inequality, suffering, pain, social inequality, these types of things. And so it's it's like this attempt to morally transform the world like Zarathustra, Abraham, Judaism, Christianity, Marx, these types of things. Um so that's that's like a whole different sort of thinking. Which I guess brings me to uh the the kind of question that I guess a Nietzschean would have to ask is that we have this Indo-European heroic restore order type idea that's clearly very based as people might think, but it's very unconscious I'd imagine. And then you have this liberated almost like futurist moral revolutionary idea that is I guess you say Zarathustrian, Promethean, Christian. Isn't Nietzsche more in this side saying that this capacity to set up a moral goal is actually what we really need to pay attention to and take possession of and not let it just be something that's aimlessly ended suffering. Like we need to go through three steps. We start off unconscious almost like the Indo-Europeans. We become conscious but we do it in a cocked way with uh yeah, you know, suffering morality and then he wants to take it to the next level and be like direct this not towards ending suffering but towards creating the Ubermensch basically. This type of thing. What do you think about that? Yes, I think so but I I don't think that would actually put Nietzsche in the kind of Christian uh camp although maybe maybe with a caveat but back to this idea I guess of the spirit of gravity. Right? That's what Nietzsche's waging war against the spirit of gravity. And he says we need to create basically higher types which are the Ubermensch which are higher types of life, higher types of the life form of man which is basically what the hero is like a higher type of man. Again, this striving against the spirit of gravity. And so in the European pagan conception really what order the ultimate order is not something that's like rigid and structure uh structured. It's ultimately life cuz life is the ability to reorder itself and regenerate itself in spite of death. And so you have the the salvation comes from this uh generational rebirth of life but you also have an obligation then that's where the ancestry thing comes in to your ancestors and to kind of aid life in the war against entropy mhm but also to uh you know, aid the coming generations to improve the generations where you you know, you have this idea that you're inheriting something and you have to pass it on. You're you're kind of like a shepherd, you know, to life. That's a Christian metaphor but what can I say? But um you know, to guide life and and to aim it towards the you know, the higher and I think that's very Nietzschean and what you see is when you try try avoid suffering that breaks down. Again, with things like these big moral projects where you're trying to avoid suffering or remove the suffering from life, what you see is the actual quality of life breaks down. You know, your society collapses. You have, you know, metaphorical suitors eating up all the wealth and, you know, living living for free in Odysseus's Um I was saying that, you know, when you try to avoid suffering, what often comes is the is the breakdown of order and actually kind of the degeneration of life, the quality of life when you try to avoid suffering. Because it's that struggle against like entropy and decay, which actually creates, you know, the hero, like you were saying, and and creates the quality of uh life. And so, when you try to avoid suffering, you it seems like to me you kind of get a breakdown of society cuz again, you're kind of withdrawing from life rather than wrestling with it. So, in that way, I think you could say European paganism is almost more futuristic cuz it's interested in it's not interested in escape or or the final solution, but interested in actually wrestling with life and these problems like entropy, which seems to fit more with like going to other planets. UFC metaphor again. Mhm. So, we have like the hierarchy of all the fighters and everybody wants to be champion up at the top because the rewards are abundant, but also there's something very ideal about this because in order to become a champion, you have to literally pick up a set of virtues that are like just basically impossible to intellectualize. You know, you have to develop them in in person and a large amount of it is actually a capacity to handle pain and deal with suffering and deal with problems. So, you go into the gym on the bottom level and everybody's sparring and everybody's exchanging trauma and you can like risk brain damage even in stuff like the gym. There's this massive trauma exchange. And if you're good enough, you're intelligent, you're disciplined, you're diligent, you're focused, and you're careful, you're healthy, like you take care of yourself properly, you will be able to like develop a set of skills and attributes to almost like escape the suffering and become so good that you don't receive as much trauma and you can like deal the trauma trauma out. And obviously then you keep on doing this in actual fights and you cause more suffering than you receive allowing you to make it up to the top, this type of thing. And this is like inside of that is the metaphysics of dealing with suffering. You actually have to embrace it, attack it, feel it, and outwit it in order for you to idealize and overcome it and become better and become something that we consider heroic. And naturally by doing that, life inherently wants to do that. And when you do that it it it teaches you the basic disciplines that you need, the virtues you need, as I said. In order to become something like this, you need to be smarter, stronger, faster, and mentally tough in order to get here, which is why you champions so often have so many of these attributes in in abundance. And um then if you think about like the psychology of suffering, it is uh it's the psychology of like I I guess you could call it compassion, but I'm not sure if that's the best way to put it. You have this very very uh like it's a big problem if you're trying to eradicate suffering cuz you walk into that gym and you see somebody get hurt and you say I don't want to participate in this. There's something wrong with this hierarchy, with this plan. I don't think this is the right way to go and you start to try to uh you know, red pill all the fighters on the fact that they're participating in samsara. And I actually can like you can get that in a very very abstract sense. This is what is sort of happening in like Buddhism and sort of happening in Christianity and sort of happening in many religions around the world. In in fact, I guess saying a whole lot of leftism is the same thing. Where it's like they're walking into a giant UFC, which is the world, and all of us are participating and we're all fighting each other and they're walking around and saying to everyone, "Hey, don't you realize that you're like participating in like a a meat grinder of hell, a nihilistic meat grinder, and all you'll ever be is this hero at the top, but he's actually Satan or he's a demon and you don't even want to be that and it's not going to make you happy. And in fact, your participation is causing this cycle. And what you need to do is sort of eject out of this and reject this and try to work to end the pain and make the UFC like different in this type of way. So, I can see why that's very motivating. But it does lead to almost like a complete subversion of the heroic path. And so, these two things are like at fundamental odds that are causing an awful lot of issues. And this is like I I absolutely I absolutely like agree with the way you're sort of articulating this. Sort of suggesting that this upwards going participate in the UFC metaphysics is actually ascendant and you can see how that will lead to overcoming suffering and and reaching and striving for more life. I can I can see how that makes sense. But the obvious fundamental problem is that the opposite view is very persuasive and endemic within the majority of mankind, which puts you at a very difficult position. Like what How do How do you overcome that? What do you do with this? You even meet an awful lot of um reactionaries and they cannot help but get seduced by the sentimentality of this position. And like it like uh I maybe you don't want me to rag on Jordan Peterson, but like you know, here's a good example of a character who stands up uh proposes essentially this tradi- this based tra- traditionalism, return to custom if you will. And it's a heroic responsible young men return to custom. But he is in in some sense through the back door shilling this suggestion that like the fundamental conclusion of all this is an embrace of this figure, which is Christ, which is the end of suffering figure. The tragic acceptance of the world is like fallen and irredeemable. And if you feel inside of yourself this impulse to strive heroically towards you know, an Uberman status that's completely wrong. And it's all of a sudden he becomes very dark around that. And he's like Young said that can't happen and Nietzsche was clearly toxic and that's just not possible. So, it's almost like he's starting you out, but then when it comes to actually taking it all the way and with conviction trying to become ascendant and ideal and heroic, if you will, he just cut you off at the knees then. He says, "No, no, no, that's bad. That's evil. There's something very wrong about that. It's arrogant. It's psychologically unhealthy. It kind of missteps you with mis- these types of things." So, what do you think about this? Are we going to rag on Jordan for a little bit, what do you think? Yes, maybe. Yeah, well, it Yeah, a lot of reactionaries, you know, the the new samsara, right? It's just modernity, right? And we have to retreat into to tradition. Um and I think that's one of the problems with the European pagan worldview is it might be very convincing and, you know, matches up with physics and biology and, you know, it's psychologically compelling and traditional and so on, but then how do you you know, actually bring it into modernity? How do you make it not an escape? Um and maybe, you know, maybe we could talk about that or just the paths forwards, but first I just want to shill a little bit more for the with this UFC metaphor.
