“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.”

Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World?, 2017.

Recorded at the New York YM Poetry Center, Broadcast YWHA, February 1970

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Text Link

https://chomsky.info/government-in-the-future/

Buy Michael's Book on Amazon (Untracked Link):

https://www.amazon.com/Land-Power-Doesnt-Determines-Societies/dp/1541604814/

Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212924049-land-power

Author's Website:

https://www.michaelalbertus.com/

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Guest Bio:

Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. His newest book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, will be published by Basic Books in January 2025. It tells the story of how land came to be power within human societies, how it shapes power, and how its allocation determines the major social ills that societies grapple with. 

Albertus studied math, electrical engineering, and political science at the University of Michigan and earned degrees in all three in 2005. He then did a PhD in political science at Stanford University, completing in 2011. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Albertus joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012 and has since been on sabbatical twice back at Stanford, including as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of nearly 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics.

He has taught courses to undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students on topics including inequality and redistribution, democracy and dictatorship, comparative politics, and political and economic development and policy in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

The defining features of Albertus' work are his engagement with big questions and puzzles and the ability to join big data and cutting-edge research methods with original, deep on-the-ground fieldwork everywhere from government offices to archives and farm fields. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the Americas, southern Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. His books and articles have won numerous awards and shifted conventional understandings of democracy, authoritarianism, and the consequences of how humans occupy and relate to the land.

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“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.”

-Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 1949

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00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:16 - The Origins of Western Mythology

00:52:42- The Mythology of Love

01:40:07 - The Arthurian Tradition

02:33:025 - The Grail Legend

03:45:46 - The Forest Adventure of Parsifal

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These talks, entitled "The Western Quest" were delivered in November 1978 at Washington University by Joseph Campbell in front of a live audience.

In the complete works of Joseph Campbell, they are delineated in the catalogue as the Lecture II, 6.1-6.5.

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James Low's YouTube Page:

https://www.youtube.com/@jameslow

Video Source:

https://youtu.be/gf51n8V8vII

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This is an eight lecture series, delivered in 2010 at UC Berkeley by the philosophy professor and overall great human being Hubert "Bert" Dreyfus as part of a Great Books course.

Enjoy.

Reach out and share your thoughts!

[email protected]

Congratulations on a great 2024 - a couple of channel-exclusive messages and announcements as we take the podcast into 2025. Cheers to a great year.

References:

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose.

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“Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

Original Video:

https://youtu.be/371LobXpUlo

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"The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits - as the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the collective evolution of mankind: this philosopher will make use of the religions for his work of education and breeding, just as he will make use of existing political and economic conditions….the will to self-mastery is always increasing - religion presents them with sufficient instigations and temptations to take the road to higher spirituality, to test the feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence and solitude.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

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(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:00:41) - Nietzsche as Myth and Mythmaker

(00:44:34) - Nietzsche on Truth and Lies

(01:23:54) - Master of Suspicion, the Immoralist

(02:04:23) - The Death of God

(02:46:06) - The Eternal Return (Time is a Flat Circle)

(03:25:04) - The Will to Power

(04:08:08) - Nietzsche as Artist

(04:49:20) - Nietzsche's Bastard Children

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https://a.co/d/bggZEtW

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“He no longer cared to live in a house, and he rose once more into the air, this time on the breath of a breeze so sheer and transparent not even the gods felt it. This is the wind that further frees even the free. As his soul rose on that wind, it seemed to expand and flow out in all directions at once. Rising steadily upward, he passed through the arched windows of that celestial mansion and began a journey that would penetrate even the most distant, the most veiled mysteries of heaven. He slipped stealthfully across secret skies, across worlds and all their skies, growing deeper and wider as he did so, traveling beyond the starry reach of any sky, of any universe, to a place where no one could follow. There, lost in the divine and infinite distances of nothingness itself, he too disappeared, his last breath released, like a luminous song, into the void of a transcendent eternity.”
-Astika Royal Mason, A Dream Immortal, 2023

References:

“From Here to Enlightenment” - HH the Dalai Lama

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12505636-from-here-to-enlightenment

Ardor - Roberto Calasso

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/134839029-ardor-by-roberto-calasso

The Mirror of Simple Souls - Marguerite Porete

https://youtu.be/HvivvGZydFA

Agni in Hinduism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni

Rig Veda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda

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Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/fO0OkdUuvDk