The Daily Eudemon

Show notes here .

Show notes. If the left hemisphere's grip on people's minds can be loosened, McGilchrist says, their perceptions will change. They will see "into the depth of things . . . all at once [and] recognize them for what they are, no longer overlaid by our projections." When this happens, the conventional notions and mental clichés we live by in our everyday world get shoved aside, and...

Show notes here .

00:10: Thomas Sowell 04:15: The Death of Chevron 11:25: Fatty Bolger Show Notes: Thomas Sowell's Hemispheres The Death of Chevron Fatty Bolger

Gardening is just a hobby, and it might not always be practical. But it is arguably the pursuit that postmodern man needs the most. A Copernican revolution in metaphysics explains why. Link to essay from which this podcast is adapted

Modernity is the left hemisphere gone wild. Gnosticism, with its dualistic approach and emphasis on knowledge that gives salvation and control, is a left-hemispheric political religion that thrived during the twentieth century and has today settled in as the dominant cultural disposition that drives public debate. Today’s powerful elites aren’t gnostics, but they ride their left hemispheres like c...

Pick four traits. The last one must be "victim." It's because we live in a gnostic culture that rails against the evil "structure." If there's a structure, there must be victims of the structure.  Show notes

Belief in a structure drives the gnostic. Without a structure to defeat, the gnostic has no purpose. Ancient Gnosticism Presupposed an Elaborate Cosmological Structure of Evil Ancient gnosticism used the ancient cosmic system: The earth was in the center, surrounded by the air and spheres: sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and a ring of fixed stars that close it all off. That was m...

Parts IV and V of an Analysis of Eric Voegelin's Six Gnostic Traits Alienation is the Marxist bugbear. He sees alienation everywhere because it emanates from the economic substructure and works its way through the socio-political superstructure. Natural economic evolution would eliminate it, but the ruling classes are suppressing the evolution out of self-interest, so a revolution needs to bring a...

Did you take a sociology class in high school or college? Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts. Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it mo...

This is a podcast episode from "Outside the Modern Limits," a whimsical newsletter that comes out every Saturday that is geared toward helping people understand and thrive in modernity. You can subscribe and find the show notes here . 

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau Rousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy. Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything. Significantly, Rousseau didn’t see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered ph...

A Diagnostic of the Gnostic Eric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels. The Swiss theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar was supposedly the first person to draw parallels between the ancient gnostic heresy and modern th...

Brains beat brawn. The Titan Prometheus knew that. He joined Zeus in his battle against the Titans. Prometheus later befriended the race of men. He saved them when Zeus thought about extinguishing them. He taught them arts and science. He gave them tools. Zeus increasingly found Prometheus’ promotion of the human race tiresome and troublesome. And then Prometheus gave humans the gift of fire, in d...

For the fortunate few, that router is hard-wired with fiber optic. Most of us only get a wireless connection, and a wobbly one at that. Show notes here

If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world. Show notes here

Solon opened Athens to true order: the transformative order found through the Tao. Show notes here . 

Within 100 years, the Cartesians used impeccable logic derived from Descartes' I think there I am to reach two conclusions: there is no earthly agent of movement and there is no matter. There is only God and mind. Hume yanked God and mind out of these conclusions and the Cartesian Jenga tower came tumbling down. Show notes here

Something really bizarre happened around the year 500 BC, all across Eurasia. We started to realize that we live in the metaxy: an area comprised of transcendence and immanence. These ten thinkers, from Italy to China, led the way. Show notes here

Voegelin was not charismatic. He was a “gentleman thinker.” He didn’t like small talk and valued his time. His personality didn’t attract a cult-like following. He didn’t establish a school or movement. But he’s important. Show notes here

Before he published the Prince , Machiavelli published the seducer. Before he published a masterpiece of political philosophy, he published a comedy. The Mandragola ( The Mandrake ) tells the story of Callimaco, a handsome young man and seducer of women. He hears about the Florentine beauty Lucrezia and begins a conspiracy to seduce her. The problem is, she’s married. She’s married to a wealthy ol...

A 50-year-old man had ritual sex with a 12-year-old girl while adult women assisted. And everyone was cool with it. That’s just part of the bizarre story told in Netflix’s Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey and the exploits of its prophet, Warren Jeffs. Keep Sweet’s Fascination It’s the story of a renegade Mormon group that still practice polygamy. Vigorous polygamy, especially the type that lets old men b...

You're soaked in modernity. You think like a modern. It's not good. Consider doing the opposite of whatever your rationality tells you to do. Show note here

Your reason isn’t reasonable. Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it. And smoke it and smoke it and smoke it, until you smoke rationality out of your head, until a love for the absurd fills your lungs, and until you breathe the fresh air of freedom. Let me explain. “I Don’t See Why” When I look back over my adult life and wince at the unfortunate things I did, there’s a common theme: the inner dialo...

Descartes was a philosophical surgeon who lobotomized common sense from the modern mind without most people even noticing. It helped that western civilization was thoroughly prepped and anesthetized for the procedure. Show notes here .