31: Ryan Holiday - Conspiracy, Manipulation & other Pastimes: Difference between revisions

Or-I mean, and-please allow me to plug into a large mimetic complex so that my time isn't wasted with references. For example, I drove here, and I have this Discord server of people who talk about the show and the culture. And I wanted to announce myself as coming in. So I said this line from the HMS pinafore, “My gallant crew, good morning!” and I was hoping somebody would echo back, “Sir, good morning!”

Well, that is when its- I mostly write about ancient philosophy. So reading Montegna, or Seneca, they'll quote lines from the Odyssey or Virgil or they're quoting poetry in plays and things. And it never occurs to them to attribute the line. It's always in the footnote from the translator. This is a lost line from a Euripides play or whatever, right? But in the ancient world, it was assumed that you'd not only have seen said play, but you would have seen said play so many times that you would recognize it. And you know, I think the problem is there was just so much less stuff, right? So-Eric Weinstein Well, there’s that, but there's also this weird discomfort we have of teaching a Canon for the purpose of keeping interoperable referencing. Ryan Holiday Well, canon is racist, Eric. That's why we can't have it. Eric Weinstein So that’s why we promote it on the Portal. Ryan Holiday No, of course. Well, we stopped teaching the canon. People used to learn Seneca when they were being taught Latin, but now they don't learn Latin. So they're definitely not going to learn Seneca’s epigrams, so there, I think there there's an element of that to it. But also, it's like, Look, there was only a handful of playwrights in Athens. Now we have all those playwrights, and we have Shakespeare, and we have 100 years of movies with the movie canon.