A very interesting presentation thank you. I am working on an English translation of some of Petrarch's sonnets and this was useful as background. The connection with nominalism was a new one to me. But I ended up not being clear whether you are saying that some of his ideas imply that he had studied nominalism or whether we can find actual references to it in his writing. I find the contrast with Dante fascinating. Dante decides that his love for Beatrice is raising him away from worldly concerns and he treats her as a front of spiritual wisdom after she dies. He appears to be utterly without any doubts about this. Whereas Petrarch can only feel that he is being transfigured by his love in certain moods, much of the time he feels that it is distracting him from what he should be doing and just causing him anguish. And yet that anguish gives rise to some of the greatest poetry ever written, and stimulates his path of self exploration and self analysis. Truly Petrarch is a study in ambulance! PS as far as I can see the light neoplatonists especially proclus had this whole nominalist thing sorted out many centuries previously. For Proclus general essences of things are under the control of the Divine intellect. Whereas the unique individuality of things is under the control of the hypostesese above intellect, the One. Within the One are the henads which look after the uniqueness of each individual thing. Proclus of course was criticised for giving structure to that which should be absolutely simple, but in so doing he solved some problems that Plato had been unable to resolve.
I was searching for info on Petrarch (especially concerning his coining of the derogatory term "Dark Ages") and am finding info on him and so much more. Thanks for posting these.
+lengthyounarther Thank you. Praise from you is always a high honor. I plan to make the rest of the videos in this series similarly detailed. One of the things I've come to see as I've pursued my interest in theology is that theological questions reach into the deepest core of existence, and that therefore we in the West have been decisively shaped by our theological origins and cannot escape them. I'm convinced that the idea that we can decisively abandon issues germane to theology without becoming complete nihilists is a delusion. As I'll try to show in later videos (this might become more clear in the video I plan to do on Descartes) the nominalists' emphasis on the will above all else leads to quite a nihilistic view of the world, and is actually the reason why Western thought eventually moved away from theology - at least outwardly. But I don't want to come down on modernity too hard either. As I said, the nominalists' emphasis on divine will led to more rich philosophizing about the human will. It also led to the idea that man can dominate nature and use it to improve his lot (that's coming later too). So for all of the bad that nominalism is responsible for, we likely would not have modern science and our technological civilization without it. Modernity is a mixed blessing. It's just that the nihilistic chickens are coming home to roost now and the West is in cultural decline.
So just now I encountered my first Reference to Petrarch ever. I had never heard of him before seeing your video. Interestingly I encountered the reference in a course description of classes at the most elite boarding school in the country. Maybe you should teach there. Its 40,000$ a year and I can get a similar education by watching your videos ;)
+IvanTheHeathen St. Paul's School. It's in concord NH. John Jacob aster, JP Morgan, the Aldrich children and John Kerry all went there. About 30% of the graduating class goes to Harvard with the rest split primarily between Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, Princeton and Penn State. I started reading a book about it after a student there hit me up on Grindr.
+lengthyounarther Interesting. I doubt that they'd let me teach at a place like that, on account of the fact that I am but a simple prole, but I honestly wouldn't mind if it happened. You remind me of a scene in 'Good Will Hunting' where the main character tells a graduate student at Harvard, after completely intellectually destroying him, that "you just dropped $150,000 for a fucking education that you could have gotten for $1.50 worth of late charges at the public library." With UA-cam, it may be even less than that. Once I get a few more videos up here, I may send them my resume with links to some of these videos just to troll them.
+IvanTheHeathen, Its funny that I went to one of the best catholic schools in my country (Brazil) run by the Jesuits and I never heard of Petrarch also. To be honest the Jesuits educational systems theses days is not what it used to be, it probably has to do with the fact that today most Jesuits socialists...
I was thinking a lot about MGTOW during this episode so interesting you answered it. MGTOW is clearly defined but the way I see it it's about rejecting gynocentric society. Some men will decide to go monk. For me I see what BS marriage and romantic obsession is. It doesn't mean I've given up on dealing with women or the idea of having children etc.
+xpallodoc My purpose with this whole series is to try and explain the origins of all modern thought as coming from the debate about universals that I talked about in the previous video. That includes everything, from libertarianism, to socialism, to scientific naturalism, to feminism, to MGTOW - you name it. And so, from time to time. I'm going to sprinkle in references to more contemporary ideas to make the connections clearer. In the case of this video, libertarianism and MGTOW were the most obvious examples. I'm probably going to sum everything up in the last video and spend the whole thing just discussion those connections. For now, I'll only be dropping hints. Even if you haven't decided to go "full monk," there is, I think, still an element of all MGTOW thinking that sees some part of the world as corrupt and either not worth dealing with or at least requiring great care when dealing with it. In your case, it's marriage and romance that are corrupt, dangerous or deluding, not necessarily women themselves. So I think it's really a question of the degree of each particular MGTOW's monkish resignation. All of them, from what I can tell, have it to some degree - some more than others.
+xpallodoc I think it's pretty easy to see what the pitfalls of either approach can be if they're taken to an extreme. If you spend your life only chasing women, you do it at the expense of other things that will give meaning to your existence. And if you're concerned with having passionate romantic encounters to the exclusion of other things, your brain can get turned off and you wind up opening yourself up being manipulated. With that said, though, chasing women is a lot of fun. Sure it can be dangerous, but so are a lot of the other exciting things in life. There's something about masculine nature that undeniably craves danger anyway. This is why men get into fights, or go to war, or skydive. So to go full monk and entirely reject contact or relationships with women because of the risk that one of them might break your heart or steal your money or even rake you over the coals in divorce court seems a little cowardly to me. Life is risk. And life can be wonderful and should be embraced, with all of its many dangers. But there's more to this than just a "thrill of the hunt" sort of thing. There's also the mutual vulnerability and the possibility of transcending personal narcissism that a deep sort of romantic relationship allows. And so people who totally reject romantic relationships are really missing out on something, in my opinion. I can tell you from personal experience that having a woman cook a meal for you - without being asked to, but just because she wants to, as a way of showing affection - is wonderful thing to experience. So I tend to view MGTOW in much the same way that Nietzsche viewed Christianity In some quarters of the MGTOW community, there's a real bitterness towards women that's just ugly and that I simply don't share. There are some men there who have been mistreated by a woman and then decide that women are basically shit and not worth interacting with as a result. This, to me, is basically the same as a woman who gets abused by some guy and then decides that all men are shit and becomes a radical feminist as a way of channeling her bitterness and hurt. I've even heard it seriously proposed in some MGTOW circles that women either cannot or do not ever feel genuine love and affection for men. I've seen with my own two eyes that that's bullshit. There are some men in the MGTOW community that are so blinded by their own pain and bitterness that they get a kind of tunnel vision about women and basically lose the ability to see them as full human beings with free will, different personalities, complex emotions, and so on. I imagine that this is probably very similar to how a lot of feminists see men. Of course, they'll try to intellectualize and rationalize this by citing statistics about divorce, child custody, court battles and so on (kind of like feminists will try to rationalize their bitterness by citing rape and domestic violence statistics). But these things are not randomly distributed throughout society. It's not like the 50% of marriages that end in divorce are a random 50%. They share common characteristics. The women that initiate these divorces have common personality traits. They tend to be vain, entitled and narcissistic, and they have difficulty making themselves vulnerable and expressing love and openness. So if a man wants to avoid the shit that women like this do to men, the answer, if you ask me, is not to swear off women entirely. It's to learn something about psychology. I think most people have a basic psychological intuition, and you can develop this intuition with practice. When we look at people's expressions, we can usually tell what emotions they are experiencing. I think everyone should practice tying to read people this way. Pay attention to their body language, facial expressions and mannerisms. Observe how they react to or what they say in various situations. You can usually learn a lot about someone when you do this. And once you get good at this, it becomes pretty easy to spot the bad women. So I'm all for prudence, but the women in my life have been good to me, for the most part. Swearing them off or avoiding them is not something I would recommend to anyone. You're missing out on something great in life if you do. I've been mostly successful at avoiding the crazy, manipulative, emotionally unstable women, and I'm sure that other men can be too. Even if you run into someone like this, you can use that experience to make better choices about who you choose to date or marry in the future. Men and women are naturally attracted to each other. They naturally seek each other out, often despite themselves. You see this in the feminist who fantasizes about being sexually dominated by a man, or in the MGTOW who talks incessantly about women. Outwardly, they say that they dislike or are wary of the opposite sex; but inwardly, I think they secretly want the opposite sex's company. So my view is, be smart, but also be suspicious of anyone who tries to screw with the natural dynamic between the sexes - be that the feminist who paints men as incurable rapists, or the MGTOW who thinks that women cannot resist bilking men of their resources.
IvanTheHeathen I chase women. What I don't do is pretend they have the ability to feel romance in the same way a man does. Never were women promoted to go out and just fuck and get experience. Even as recent as my parents my father had to go through my grandfather to get with my mother. If he called her house she didn't have cell phone, he had to ask to speak to her. My grandmother didn't even like my grandfather but her family made her date him. We're living in very different times where women are expected to pick men what a joke. Then civilization which used to protect men and understand men compete for women against other men now is bias completely toward women with ridiculous things like child support and divorce assets. What a joke a woman who leaves a man should get no custody, no child support, and if anything she should pay the man back for all he has given her not get to take half. All that aside I have had long romantic relationships of many years and women cook, bake, get down on their knees for me you name it. I can tell you that hypergamy is real and no that doesn't mean they're all trying to bleed you dry but what it does mean is don't you dare treat them as your equal. It also means at minimum expect to be putting in more for less over the years. Now my message isn't don't have a family, don't enjoy women. Yes if you want have a family, enjoy women. I'm not risk averse if anything I take risks like no other person I know. My message is we live in a gynocentric society. A society where things that worked in the past have been replaced by things that don't. Women are forever children and treating one as your equal is disaster. Finally I see the gynocentric culture as the genesis of all the modern ills facing the west. Once you open your eyes and take the red pill you can start to do some pretty incredible things. Btw the anti feminist women are usually just as bad as the feminist women. Libertarian women are often horrible people. I just want leaders back and I'm willing to be one of those leaders. I draw from an incredible pool of men in the MGTOW community. Some of these guys are blood thirsty murders ready to do some serious killing. What else could you expect from men who feel they have no proper ability to form connection community. It's start not an end. Don't you want to see some real change?
+xpallodoc I basically agree with just about everything that you said. It's really only the monk-like aspects of MGTOW that tell you to totally swear off women that I take issue with. You don't seem to be like that, so I don't really have much of a serious disagreement with you. What I was trying to say was that swearing off women, like some MGTOW advocate men do, is stupid and would probably lead to an unfulfilling life for most men. Feminism told women to pursue careers and self-glorification rather than husbands, families and children, and it's made women miserable. Men should learn from this failure that the sexes are naturally attracted to each other and that fucking with that natural attraction through extremism of all kinds will just screw up the natural order of society. Basically, I think that men should chase and enjoy women, but that there is a right way to do that. Men of earlier generations used to know what that right way was, but through the rise of feminism, that wisdom has been lost. The result is a weak, cucked generation of degenerate men who women are viscerally disgusted by and unattracted to, and who are standing by as their own societies get destroyed. We agree on that point. Your story about your grandparents was interesting. It reminded me of a similar story that Alvin Plantinga (I philosopher that I like) told in an autobiographical essay that he once wrote. Plantinga is in his 80's right now and he grew up as a Dutch Calvinist in Michigan. He talked about how, when he was a teenager, boys and girls were only allowed to meet and interact at certain pre-determined times and in controlled settings. Otherwise, they were kept separate. He then remarked that since the disappearance of this kind of thing, something about the relations between the sexes has been damaged. Something about the mystery that teenagers and young people felt towards the opposite sex, back when each was kept separate from the other, is gone now and we are the worse for it. And that all goes back to my point. The natural social institutions regulating relations between the sexes were there for a reason. Fucking with them in any way - either through feminism, or through the more extreme types of MGTOW - is bad. It will just cause society to decay in the long run. Women have been ruined by feminism. I agree on that. But I retain the belief that society must find some way to survive and continue. Women are necessary for that. So the extreme parts of MGTOW that tell you to swear off women totally are nihilistic in my view. They're willing to accept the death of civilization. They're willing to let the feminists win and finish the work that they started by alienating men and women from each other even more than they already are. And I say, "fuck that." Someone like you, though, I don't have any real problem with. There's a right way to associate with and enjoy women and you see that, so we're cool. There are definitely women who have psychological damage resulting from feminism, including anti-feminist women. I know a woman, for example, from the UK, who is totally anti-feminist and hates Muslim immigration into her country with a passion. She's worried about the demographic transformation of Britain and worries that white people are not having enough children. In another context, though, she has told me that she doesn't want to have children. This is astonishing to me. She is white. She is not Muslim. She has never worn a hijab. She is part of the very demographic group that she worries is not breeding fast enough. And yet she says that she doesn't want children. And the contradiction doesn't seem to have dawned on her. (Honestly, I think that her real problem is that she just doesn't want to have kids with her current boyfriend, but never mind.) We WILL see change, by the way. I guarantee it. I'm not worried about that. The social structures and culture inaugurated by feminism are unnatural, and nothing that is unnatural can survive forever. If you could distill being a reactionary down to one principle, I think it should be this: Nature eventually always wins. I believe that. So the society created by feminism is guaranteed to die. The question is, what will replace it? I would rather that it be replaced by something that recognizes nature - the natural attraction of men and women to each other and their natural places relative to one another. I would rather that men and women be allies going into the future ("allies" doesn't necessarily mean "equals," by the way). We are not going to have a functioning civilization otherwise.
+lengthyounarther You just reminded me of that skit from Chappelle's Show where the guy testifying in court kept saying "FIIIIF!!!" every time that he was asked a question.
I’m sorry about that. These are old videos and I had nothing but an old laptop with a busted fan with which to record them at the time. I later got a better microphone, and this stopped being an issue.
@@IvanTheHeathen No worries. I had an old laptop that used to do that and it would drive me crazy especially in summer. I've just been really interested in the effect the ideas of nominalism had on the development of reformation ideology and I haven't found a lot of information out there on it
I do eventually get to that topic in later videos of this series, but unfortunately, you’ll have to endure more of that whirring noise. I’m sorry again.
You look exactly likes my history & philosophy teacher back in High school.... Same glasses, hair and leather jacket
A very interesting presentation thank you. I am working on an English translation of some of Petrarch's sonnets and this was useful as background. The connection with nominalism was a new one to me. But I ended up not being clear whether you are saying that some of his ideas imply that he had studied nominalism or whether we can find actual references to it in his writing. I find the contrast with Dante fascinating. Dante decides that his love for Beatrice is raising him away from worldly concerns and he treats her as a front of spiritual wisdom after she dies. He appears to be utterly without any doubts about this. Whereas Petrarch can only feel that he is being transfigured by his love in certain moods, much of the time he feels that it is distracting him from what he should be doing and just causing him anguish. And yet that anguish gives rise to some of the greatest poetry ever written, and stimulates his path of self exploration and self analysis. Truly Petrarch is a study in ambulance!
PS as far as I can see the light neoplatonists especially proclus had this whole nominalist thing sorted out many centuries previously. For Proclus general essences of things are under the control of the Divine intellect. Whereas the unique individuality of things is under the control of the hypostesese above intellect, the One. Within the One are the henads which look after the uniqueness of each individual thing. Proclus of course was criticised for giving structure to that which should be absolutely simple, but in so doing he solved some problems that Plato had been unable to resolve.
I was searching for info on Petrarch (especially concerning his coining of the derogatory term "Dark Ages") and am finding info on him and so much more. Thanks for posting these.
Thanks for the video. I really appreciate this detailed examination because I am almost wholly ignorant about most of what you discussed.
+lengthyounarther
Thank you. Praise from you is always a high honor. I plan to make the rest of the videos in this series similarly detailed. One of the things I've come to see as I've pursued my interest in theology is that theological questions reach into the deepest core of existence, and that therefore we in the West have been decisively shaped by our theological origins and cannot escape them. I'm convinced that the idea that we can decisively abandon issues germane to theology without becoming complete nihilists is a delusion. As I'll try to show in later videos (this might become more clear in the video I plan to do on Descartes) the nominalists' emphasis on the will above all else leads to quite a nihilistic view of the world, and is actually the reason why Western thought eventually moved away from theology - at least outwardly. But I don't want to come down on modernity too hard either. As I said, the nominalists' emphasis on divine will led to more rich philosophizing about the human will. It also led to the idea that man can dominate nature and use it to improve his lot (that's coming later too). So for all of the bad that nominalism is responsible for, we likely would not have modern science and our technological civilization without it. Modernity is a mixed blessing. It's just that the nihilistic chickens are coming home to roost now and the West is in cultural decline.
So just now I encountered my first Reference to Petrarch ever. I had never heard of him before seeing your video. Interestingly I encountered the reference in a course description of classes at the most elite boarding school in the country. Maybe you should teach there. Its 40,000$ a year and I can get a similar education by watching your videos ;)
+lengthyounarther
Cool. What's the name of the boarding school? Where is it?
+IvanTheHeathen St. Paul's School. It's in concord NH. John Jacob aster, JP Morgan, the Aldrich children and John Kerry all went there. About 30% of the graduating class goes to Harvard with the rest split primarily between Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, Princeton and Penn State. I started reading a book about it after a student there hit me up on Grindr.
+lengthyounarther
Interesting. I doubt that they'd let me teach at a place like that, on account of the fact that I am but a simple prole, but I honestly wouldn't mind if it happened. You remind me of a scene in 'Good Will Hunting' where the main character tells a graduate student at Harvard, after completely intellectually destroying him, that "you just dropped $150,000 for a fucking education that you could have gotten for $1.50 worth of late charges at the public library." With UA-cam, it may be even less than that. Once I get a few more videos up here, I may send them my resume with links to some of these videos just to troll them.
Bravo! Good analysis
Thank you!
Petrarch sounds like a fun guy
These are great videos. Do you have a hair dryer going on in the background?
No, I was using an extremely old laptop to record that video which was on its last legs. Production values have improved since then.
+IvanTheHeathen, Its funny that I went to one of the best catholic schools in my country (Brazil) run by the Jesuits and I never heard of Petrarch also. To be honest the Jesuits educational systems theses days is not what it used to be, it probably has to do with the fact that today most Jesuits socialists...
I was thinking a lot about MGTOW during this episode so interesting you answered it. MGTOW is clearly defined but the way I see it it's about rejecting gynocentric society. Some men will decide to go monk. For me I see what BS marriage and romantic obsession is. It doesn't mean I've given up on dealing with women or the idea of having children etc.
+xpallodoc
My purpose with this whole series is to try and explain the origins of all modern thought as coming from the debate about universals that I talked about in the previous video. That includes everything, from libertarianism, to socialism, to scientific naturalism, to feminism, to MGTOW - you name it. And so, from time to time. I'm going to sprinkle in references to more contemporary ideas to make the connections clearer. In the case of this video, libertarianism and MGTOW were the most obvious examples. I'm probably going to sum everything up in the last video and spend the whole thing just discussion those connections. For now, I'll only be dropping hints.
Even if you haven't decided to go "full monk," there is, I think, still an element of all MGTOW thinking that sees some part of the world as corrupt and either not worth dealing with or at least requiring great care when dealing with it. In your case, it's marriage and romance that are corrupt, dangerous or deluding, not necessarily women themselves. So I think it's really a question of the degree of each particular MGTOW's monkish resignation. All of them, from what I can tell, have it to some degree - some more than others.
IvanTheHeathen where do you stand on the matter. Do you seek passion in women or do you shun it as taking away from your own identity?
+xpallodoc
I think it's pretty easy to see what the pitfalls of either approach can be if they're taken to an extreme. If you spend your life only chasing women, you do it at the expense of other things that will give meaning to your existence. And if you're concerned with having passionate romantic encounters to the exclusion of other things, your brain can get turned off and you wind up opening yourself up being manipulated.
With that said, though, chasing women is a lot of fun. Sure it can be dangerous, but so are a lot of the other exciting things in life. There's something about masculine nature that undeniably craves danger anyway. This is why men get into fights, or go to war, or skydive. So to go full monk and entirely reject contact or relationships with women because of the risk that one of them might break your heart or steal your money or even rake you over the coals in divorce court seems a little cowardly to me. Life is risk. And life can be wonderful and should be embraced, with all of its many dangers.
But there's more to this than just a "thrill of the hunt" sort of thing. There's also the mutual vulnerability and the possibility of transcending personal narcissism that a deep sort of romantic relationship allows. And so people who totally reject romantic relationships are really missing out on something, in my opinion. I can tell you from personal experience that having a woman cook a meal for you - without being asked to, but just because she wants to, as a way of showing affection - is wonderful thing to experience. So I tend to view MGTOW in much the same way that Nietzsche viewed Christianity
In some quarters of the MGTOW community, there's a real bitterness towards women that's just ugly and that I simply don't share. There are some men there who have been mistreated by a woman and then decide that women are basically shit and not worth interacting with as a result. This, to me, is basically the same as a woman who gets abused by some guy and then decides that all men are shit and becomes a radical feminist as a way of channeling her bitterness and hurt. I've even heard it seriously proposed in some MGTOW circles that women either cannot or do not ever feel genuine love and affection for men. I've seen with my own two eyes that that's bullshit. There are some men in the MGTOW community that are so blinded by their own pain and bitterness that they get a kind of tunnel vision about women and basically lose the ability to see them as full human beings with free will, different personalities, complex emotions, and so on. I imagine that this is probably very similar to how a lot of feminists see men.
Of course, they'll try to intellectualize and rationalize this by citing statistics about divorce, child custody, court battles and so on (kind of like feminists will try to rationalize their bitterness by citing rape and domestic violence statistics). But these things are not randomly distributed throughout society. It's not like the 50% of marriages that end in divorce are a random 50%. They share common characteristics. The women that initiate these divorces have common personality traits. They tend to be vain, entitled and narcissistic, and they have difficulty making themselves vulnerable and expressing love and openness. So if a man wants to avoid the shit that women like this do to men, the answer, if you ask me, is not to swear off women entirely. It's to learn something about psychology.
I think most people have a basic psychological intuition, and you can develop this intuition with practice. When we look at people's expressions, we can usually tell what emotions they are experiencing. I think everyone should practice tying to read people this way. Pay attention to their body language, facial expressions and mannerisms. Observe how they react to or what they say in various situations. You can usually learn a lot about someone when you do this. And once you get good at this, it becomes pretty easy to spot the bad women.
So I'm all for prudence, but the women in my life have been good to me, for the most part. Swearing them off or avoiding them is not something I would recommend to anyone. You're missing out on something great in life if you do. I've been mostly successful at avoiding the crazy, manipulative, emotionally unstable women, and I'm sure that other men can be too. Even if you run into someone like this, you can use that experience to make better choices about who you choose to date or marry in the future. Men and women are naturally attracted to each other. They naturally seek each other out, often despite themselves. You see this in the feminist who fantasizes about being sexually dominated by a man, or in the MGTOW who talks incessantly about women. Outwardly, they say that they dislike or are wary of the opposite sex; but inwardly, I think they secretly want the opposite sex's company. So my view is, be smart, but also be suspicious of anyone who tries to screw with the natural dynamic between the sexes - be that the feminist who paints men as incurable rapists, or the MGTOW who thinks that women cannot resist bilking men of their resources.
IvanTheHeathen I chase women. What I don't do is pretend they have the ability to feel romance in the same way a man does. Never were women promoted to go out and just fuck and get experience. Even as recent as my parents my father had to go through my grandfather to get with my mother. If he called her house she didn't have cell phone, he had to ask to speak to her. My grandmother didn't even like my grandfather but her family made her date him. We're living in very different times where women are expected to pick men what a joke. Then civilization which used to protect men and understand men compete for women against other men now is bias completely toward women with ridiculous things like child support and divorce assets. What a joke a woman who leaves a man should get no custody, no child support, and if anything she should pay the man back for all he has given her not get to take half. All that aside I have had long romantic relationships of many years and women cook, bake, get down on their knees for me you name it. I can tell you that hypergamy is real and no that doesn't mean they're all trying to bleed you dry but what it does mean is don't you dare treat them as your equal. It also means at minimum expect to be putting in more for less over the years. Now my message isn't don't have a family, don't enjoy women. Yes if you want have a family, enjoy women. I'm not risk averse if anything I take risks like no other person I know. My message is we live in a gynocentric society. A society where things that worked in the past have been replaced by things that don't. Women are forever children and treating one as your equal is disaster. Finally I see the gynocentric culture as the genesis of all the modern ills facing the west. Once you open your eyes and take the red pill you can start to do some pretty incredible things. Btw the anti feminist women are usually just as bad as the feminist women. Libertarian women are often horrible people. I just want leaders back and I'm willing to be one of those leaders. I draw from an incredible pool of men in the MGTOW community. Some of these guys are blood thirsty murders ready to do some serious killing. What else could you expect from men who feel they have no proper ability to form connection community. It's start not an end. Don't you want to see some real change?
+xpallodoc
I basically agree with just about everything that you said. It's really only the monk-like aspects of MGTOW that tell you to totally swear off women that I take issue with. You don't seem to be like that, so I don't really have much of a serious disagreement with you. What I was trying to say was that swearing off women, like some MGTOW advocate men do, is stupid and would probably lead to an unfulfilling life for most men. Feminism told women to pursue careers and self-glorification rather than husbands, families and children, and it's made women miserable. Men should learn from this failure that the sexes are naturally attracted to each other and that fucking with that natural attraction through extremism of all kinds will just screw up the natural order of society. Basically, I think that men should chase and enjoy women, but that there is a right way to do that. Men of earlier generations used to know what that right way was, but through the rise of feminism, that wisdom has been lost. The result is a weak, cucked generation of degenerate men who women are viscerally disgusted by and unattracted to, and who are standing by as their own societies get destroyed. We agree on that point.
Your story about your grandparents was interesting. It reminded me of a similar story that Alvin Plantinga (I philosopher that I like) told in an autobiographical essay that he once wrote. Plantinga is in his 80's right now and he grew up as a Dutch Calvinist in Michigan. He talked about how, when he was a teenager, boys and girls were only allowed to meet and interact at certain pre-determined times and in controlled settings. Otherwise, they were kept separate. He then remarked that since the disappearance of this kind of thing, something about the relations between the sexes has been damaged. Something about the mystery that teenagers and young people felt towards the opposite sex, back when each was kept separate from the other, is gone now and we are the worse for it. And that all goes back to my point. The natural social institutions regulating relations between the sexes were there for a reason. Fucking with them in any way - either through feminism, or through the more extreme types of MGTOW - is bad. It will just cause society to decay in the long run.
Women have been ruined by feminism. I agree on that. But I retain the belief that society must find some way to survive and continue. Women are necessary for that. So the extreme parts of MGTOW that tell you to swear off women totally are nihilistic in my view. They're willing to accept the death of civilization. They're willing to let the feminists win and finish the work that they started by alienating men and women from each other even more than they already are. And I say, "fuck that." Someone like you, though, I don't have any real problem with. There's a right way to associate with and enjoy women and you see that, so we're cool.
There are definitely women who have psychological damage resulting from feminism, including anti-feminist women. I know a woman, for example, from the UK, who is totally anti-feminist and hates Muslim immigration into her country with a passion. She's worried about the demographic transformation of Britain and worries that white people are not having enough children. In another context, though, she has told me that she doesn't want to have children. This is astonishing to me. She is white. She is not Muslim. She has never worn a hijab. She is part of the very demographic group that she worries is not breeding fast enough. And yet she says that she doesn't want children. And the contradiction doesn't seem to have dawned on her. (Honestly, I think that her real problem is that she just doesn't want to have kids with her current boyfriend, but never mind.)
We WILL see change, by the way. I guarantee it. I'm not worried about that. The social structures and culture inaugurated by feminism are unnatural, and nothing that is unnatural can survive forever. If you could distill being a reactionary down to one principle, I think it should be this: Nature eventually always wins. I believe that. So the society created by feminism is guaranteed to die. The question is, what will replace it? I would rather that it be replaced by something that recognizes nature - the natural attraction of men and women to each other and their natural places relative to one another. I would rather that men and women be allies going into the future ("allies" doesn't necessarily mean "equals," by the way). We are not going to have a functioning civilization otherwise.
5th!
+lengthyounarther
You just reminded me of that skit from Chappelle's Show where the guy testifying in court kept saying "FIIIIF!!!" every time that he was asked a question.
Would love to listen to this but your computer fan whirring is giving me a headache 🤕
I’m sorry about that. These are old videos and I had nothing but an old laptop with a busted fan with which to record them at the time. I later got a better microphone, and this stopped being an issue.
@@IvanTheHeathen No worries. I had an old laptop that used to do that and it would drive me crazy especially in summer. I've just been really interested in the effect the ideas of nominalism had on the development of reformation ideology and I haven't found a lot of information out there on it
I do eventually get to that topic in later videos of this series, but unfortunately, you’ll have to endure more of that whirring noise. I’m sorry again.