Boreas Podcast

Send us Fan Mail What is it that makes us uniquely human? Thinking ( homo sapiens )? Organizing ( homo economicus )? Symbols (“the symbolic species”)? I propose that it is desire in Girardian sense — we are homo desiderans : the desiring humans. Artificial intelligence versus the desiring human. Wordcels, shape rotators, and a third way.

Send us Fan Mail What is the one single basic principle of all war strategy? The answer is given from readings of René Girard's mimetic theory together with Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and the Bible.  I suggest how to apply it in modern life. Also, there is a discussion of military history and how war changed through to modern times. Were Sun Tzu and Machiavelli cynics? Were European aristo...

Send us Fan Mail A Girardian angle on the stock market. Yes, the market is irrational, and no, it's not because we have "herd instincts" and other traces of evolutionary survival instincts, but because we are mimetic. Investing is like romance. Girard's mimetic theory does not in any way, shape, or form support any Marxist or neo-Marxist attacks on the Western civilisation.

Send us Fan Mail Conspiracy theories getting out of hand on the right. Separating sound skepticism from "esoteric" conspiracy theories. Esoteric conspiracy theories as leftover of archaic paganism. Conspiracy theorising is witch hunting in a secular age. CTs may be violent  polytheism, but the woke left is the Antichrist.

Send us Fan Mail Girardian takes on addiction. Beyond the biochemistry, brain science, and environmental triggers. The pursuit of deviated transcendence. The tormenting obstacle; obsessive or repetitive stumbling. Addiction to pain as well as euphoria; sadomasochism.  Escapism; addiction as medicine. Aggravated addiction and hallucinations, monsters, and demons.

Send us Fan Mail Exploring the connection between the black pill (resigned mindset) and embracing or rejecting "the flesh." Why scientism is an embracing of the flesh. Why the black pill is a demonic lie that should be rejected and protected against.

Send us Fan Mail Some personal background on how I ended up writing and talking so much about Christianity. Reading some of Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" and discussing the big question of individual freedom versus belonging. 

Send us Fan Mail Exploring Jews in the role of Girard's archaic scapegoats: magical outsiders who blend in and either bless the community with white magic or curse it with black magic, and how Jews react and act in this role.

Send us Fan Mail George is back with Virgil for Season 3 of the enchanting, enlightening Boreas Podcast! The episode was recorded around Christmastime 2023. We discuss the katechon , one of the concluding topics in our new book, The Modern Malaise , available all over the internet February 7th, 2024. Katechon ("he who restraints / that which restrains") is a term from St. Paul's sec...

Send us Fan Mail George closes out the season with a meditation on low self-esteem. How can this increasingly common affliction be explained by a failure in the relationship with our mimetic models? And especially the most decisive mimetic models of our lives – our parents ? How is low self-esteem connected to things like homosexuality, transgenderism, transhumanism, and in general a desire to tra...

Send us Fan Mail George rushes were respectable scholars fear to tread: the mimetic-theory hypothesis on homosexuality. The idea is that homosexuality arises when the sexual attention and appetite shift from the instinctual object of desire – i.e. a person of the opposite sex – onto the rival. George elaborates on the theory and applies it to the next-level sexual nonconformity we're seeing t...

Send us Fan Mail Virgil is back to talk to George about living the good life. We've done a lot of critique on the frogs and the snowflakes. Now it's time to discuss how to tell the right path and pick role models that will lead us to a good place. It helps to learn what "deviated transcendence" means, as well as the difference between internal and external mediation. Virgil and...

Send us Fan Mail Charlie is out for this one and George has a head on reckoning with the whole culture of pickup artistry. How PUA doctrine stacks up against the mimetic understanding of desire, why PUA doesn't work, and why you should stay away from it.

Send us Fan Mail Having laid out all that's wrong with the modern malaise, a debilitating mental illness suffered by both the new right and the new left, George and Virgil set out to discuss what is to be done about it. Conversation takes off with a discussion of desire: how in older times desire was feared as a disruptive force, how, on the contrary, in the modern times it is encouraged, and...

Send us Fan Mail George and Virgil are back on their project of subverting the twin neo-paganism of the new right and the postmodern left. These two take a lot of pride in themselves subverting "traditional morals." For the new right, it's Nietzschean revaluation of all values and ceasing to feel sorry for the "refuse" of humanity. For the postmodern left, it's subver...

Send us Fan Mail George and Virgil have their take on a topic on which everyone has a take: WOKE CULTURE, or WOKISM.  René Girard may be the first person to clearly foresee the ongoing obsession with victimhood, predicting it in his writings back in the 1970s. So wouldn't you want to know how the prophet saw it? In this episode we serve that to you as a centrepiece in a smorgasbord of other e...

Send us Fan Mail George and Virgil talk about the parallels between our 21-century times and Nietzsche's 19th century. Things have gotten worse: as society became more and more equal, we got more and more rivalry and competition. Youth of today are confronted by their own Wagners at every step. We then swerve into talking about the anthropology of mimetic crises and how the Bible irreversibly...

Send us Fan Mail We explore the patron saint of Modern Malaise Martyrs: Friedrich Nietzsche. The famous 19th-century philosopher was an incel before there were incels, alt-right before there was alt-right, a sperger before there were spergers, a racist before ... never mind... ; the original ubermensch railing against the worms and slaves of this world (almost everyone other than himself)... We lo...

Send us Fan Mail George's old friend Virgil joins the studio for the start of another season of George Boreas Podcast. This season is a project of about seven episodes that will be turned into a book. The goal is to study an increasingly influential internet subculture that goes by many different names (trad? vitalists? frogs? alt-right? etc.), but that involves the rejection of modern wester...

Send us Fan Mail How one goes from trying to conquer the universe with artificial intelligence to being fascinated with cute cats. Electronic omertà. Eight billion flawless AI robots. Being on spectrum as a free pass for being a prick. The perpetual orgasm of knowing the mathematical mysteries of the universe. Etc.

Send us Fan Mail Is historical progress guaranteed? Is history moving definitively in one direction, or is there a chance that our civilisation might collapse and we go back to ground zero? If progress is definitive, what drives it? What is the motor and guarantor of that movement in one direction, rather than in a circle? George goes over the common philosophical perspectives and gets to the Gira...

Send us Fan Mail "In reaction to the continuous humiliation that is poverty, the underprivileged enter a life of self-destructive sadomasochism, which according to René Girard is the final state of all frustrated desires." The poor aren't fine. They are possessed by demons, and the demons are the privileged. So they can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Neither can they...

Send us Fan Mail Seasteads: self-governing communities floating upon the ocean. Utopian communities  free from oppressive government, or super-villain lairs plotting their own takeover of the world? Charlie and George discuss this and other visions of libertarian dreams.

Send us Fan Mail According to René Girard, sadomasochists have an obsessive yet accurate understanding that all desire feeds on obstacles placed between it and its goal. The obstacle, and the pain it creates, convince desire that transcendence is within reach. For sadomasochists, this pain is the sacrament through which they partake of that evasive transcendental being that is the goal of all desi...

Send us Fan Mail Charlie and George tackle the controversies of immigration politics. The historical motives behind immigration and against it in the USA and elsewhere. Immigrants as assets in the progressive-conservative conflict of Western democracies. Discussion of the libertarian view of immigration. & more.