The Wes Cecil Podcast

Nietzsche attacks the central moral document of his time - The Sermon on the Mount! Nietzsche argues in favor of subtlety, nuance, and life-affirmation as opposed to clarity and moral judgement. This is one of the key defining sections that allows us to understand Nietzsche mental make up and core beliefs. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain acces...

Just to make it absolutely clear how pervasive and singular the logic of Late Capitalism is, I present a brief reflection on the current events surrounding Greenland, Davos and global financial markets. I rarely comment on topical events, but the logic we have been discussing is so perfectly illustrated in recent statements by global leaders it just seemed to good to pass up without comment. Sign-...

The emotional sense of contempt for others and the concept of scarcity are relentlessly promoted and reinforced as a NECESSARY corollary to the Late Capitalist worldview. By holding both other people and all possible values in contempt, Late Capitalism undermines alternative outlooks. And the creation of scarcity is necessary for maximum extraction of value from any trade. Together they form a fun...

Nietzsche reiterates his elitist ideals and focuses on the challenges of communication across one’s cultural assumptions. He points out the difficulties of being both misunderstood and outside even of the possibility of sympathy. All philosophy is autobiography indeed. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists,...

Here are four examples rising from the very personal and small - gift cards - to the national and international difficulties facing governments trying to deal with the rising costs of retirement. The patterns we have been discussing are here exposed in, perhaps, excessive detail. However, I feel it is important to see the many manifestations of this logic before we move on to the larger philosophi...

Chapter II presents a different direction for Nietzsche to attack contemporary philosophical modes by emphasizing how the obsession with TRUTH has warped the outlook of most philosophers and led them to make dubious arguments but, more importantly for Nietzsche, to play-act as martyrs. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials...

Along with the productivity myth, the GDP myth misleads our decision makers and obscures key aspects of our economic reality - there has actually been rather slow GDP growth for decades and much of what has taken place has made the economy worse for citizens rather than better. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, readin...

Nietzsche emphasizes the difficulties we will encounter as we attempt to abandon morals and see the world as it is -free from natural laws and order and subject only to the interplay of power. If nothing else, you can’t say we haven’t been warned. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonu...

An example of what it means to think with VALUES as opposed to FINANCE. Not saying the workers are correct, though I agree with them, but that their arguments are coming from an entirely different value set. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries fro...

Democratic governments are globally unpopular and part of the reason is the bind the Late Capitalist logic places them in. Growth and investment GOOD we should do MORE so everything keeps getting BETTER while at the same time having to continuously cut budgets, services, promises and often raise taxes - all unpopular. As of yet, they have not recognized the faultiness of the premises, neither righ...

So now Nietzsche wants to point out how systematically our cultures and grammar influence our capacity to think philosophically - further undermining the notion of Philosophy as an arbiter of transcendent truth. Then, in chapter 21, he decides to attack cause and effect, number, law, relativity and many other concepts we like to think help us think but which Nietzsche considers just so much mythol...

I ran into such a perfect example of financialization - stepping in between landlords and tenants for rent payments - I just had to share. I try to be cynical, but I can’t keep up. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.&...

The elimination of all measures of worth besides price leaves us lost in a world where, with the removal of price, we have no ability to make judgements whatsoever. This is perhaps the single most debilitating impact of Late Capitalism. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures,...

A response to some comments about Steam and a note on an interesting quote from Andre Gide. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spotify represents a case study in how the logic of Late Capitalism ramifies throughout our lives in ways that destroys fundamental aspects of our culture. Our love of music is leveraged to destroy the ecosystem of music creation and enjoyment. The pattern represented by Spotify is repeated throughout every cultural sphere. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes...

So much for Free Will. Herein Nietzsche attacks the whole question of Free Will - not taking a side but simply pointing out the meaninglessness of most of the conversations surrounding free will. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. On...

In an almost Zen Koan kind of way, Late Capitalism increasingly immerses us in a society where we are simultaneously told money is THE most important value but wherein we are no longer able to even determine the price of things. This fundamental rewriting of our assumed economic structure - wherein we can make informed decisions - is eroding the dubious yet pervasive idea that somehow if we get ou...

Nietzsche rejects Sensualism, Materialism, Metaphysics and any simple understanding of Science with his core concern - an Ethics built on Joy and Vigour derived from a Will to Power that he sees in all life. It is not error he is against, but error that leads to sleepiness. Nietzsche wants a philosophy that wakes us up. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Pl...

One of the social impacts of Late Capitalism is the undermining of our sense of history. Expanding on a pre-existing pattern in American culture, which partly explains why the US is at the forefront of financialization, the loss of a historical sense disorients us in an endless, meaningless present. The logic of Late Capitalism consistently works to gather our attention, emphasize the individual,...

Having attacked most western philosophy, Nietzsche presents one of his core arguments - that all these claims to universal truth and discovery are simply a self-serving pose on the part of philosophers. Understanding his argument fundamentally alters the way we think not just about philosophy, but the construction of our understanding of the world itself. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to ge...

The creeping presence of Financialization would not be so upsetting if it weren’t that it represents such an odd/counterintuitive world view. The logic of Late Capitalism is not, for the average person, either intuitive or even really comprehensible. So we are surrounded by systems that operate on alien logic designed, as often as not, to exploit us. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get you...

Wow, Nietzsche rolls out all the rhetorical cannons to open Beyond Good and Evil. He attempts to undercut both the history and focus of Western philosophy and introduce a new basis of thinking based on a different approach to understanding the human. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, b...

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q17: The Planet? “I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has...

Financialization The creeping intervention of global financial actors into every aspect of our lives is an often overlooked, but profound, aspect of late capitalism. These actors follow a very different logic from that of normal commerce. To appreciate the depths of the penetration of these actors I recommend an experiment where one tries to live for a week spending only cash and avoiding all majo...

This read along series presents one of Nietzsche’s most important and confusing works. Written after Thus Spake Zarathustra, it continues to develop some of his central themes and attempts to reground Ethics in a completely new fashion. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON  to get your questions answered by Wes! Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures,...