Like Sai, I think you're wrong about Faustian man. When you say "Faustian," I think you actually mean "Mercurial." Jews aren't the most Faustian people, as you've previously claimed —they're the most Mercurial.
Mercury is associated with commerce and trickster energy. By contrast, Faustian man is drawn towards “pure and limitless space.” His soul has a “tendency towards the infinite" (Spengler, Decline of the West).
You can see this yearning for limitless space in the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. You can see it in the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals. But the clearest expression is probably the European mountaineer, who risks everything to summit untouched peaks—not for wealth, but simply to be in pure and limitless space (Sheckelstein could never).
Faustian man thrives in solitary struggle against nature. He isn't an apartment cuck, and he isn't Jewish. In fact, I think he is uniquely Nordic. In Man and Technics, Spengler describes how the Nordic climate shaped Faustian man:
"through the hardness of the conditions of life, the cold, the constant adversity, into a tough race, with an intellect sharpened to the most extreme degree, with the cold fervor of an irrepressible passion for struggling, daring, driving forward."
I believe the Faustian spirit emerges from the environmental niche of Northern Europe—an open, less populated landscape that fostered a unique relationship with space.
TLDR: My culture is not your costume. Stop calling job stackers Faustian!
Great episode as always. Always enjoy listening to you sperg out.
I was literally referring to Geothe’s Faust, I don’t know how people keep missing this detail. I know he is a bit of a departure from earlier, more Abrahamic versions of the myth but I believe he is considered to be the closest to the original pagan Germanic spirit of the archetype.
The actual bargain with the devil that this Doktor Faustus makes is that he will be struck dead and his soul will be enslaved to the devil in the moment he finds genuine complete satisfaction in his life. This Faust is so convinced that such a thing is so impossible for him that he bets against his own “happiness” against the literal devil. It is a pagan spirit through and through, completely dipolar in its moral character. I am a Hindu, I have literally thousands of real archetypes to draw from. I don’t need Faust but I like him, and unlike so many people that claim him as theirs, I have actually bothered to read the stories. But this is why I appreciate Faust as an archetype and a myth- it is literally one of the only *actual* archetypes left alive in the western zeitgeist, that is *actually* an arc ffs, and not just a bleh stereotype of a “moral” man.
As for the symbolic detail you are trying to invoke here, again, it suffers with the same problem of a repressed shadow. Northern Europe doesn’t have a monopoly on “pure and limitless space”. *why* might one be drawn to the edge of the map? To that limitless exterior? To keep striving as if eternally unsatisfied? That is what the archetype and the story captures and you seem to have missed the point there. Sure, I will not bandy the word around to not step on anyone’s toes (I cannot say the same about Walt, of course) but if you are going to use astrological, pagan symbology to make broad distinctions between peoples, I suggest you dig deeper- you might find something genuinely valuable there. No real archetype is pure good or evil.
I mean the current state of Israel is taking on multiple Arab countries at once that want to destroy it, whereas European Nordic countries have lost their collective spine and are letting in the very people who want to destroy them. Ancient Vikings and sailors may have been Faustian, but I don't see how they are the same in our current timeline.
Great interview :-) A few points of clarification --
- Hebrew (and all alphabet scripts that read right to left and don't use vowels) is actually protective against the left-hemisphere tilt of hyper-literacy, as it requires more meaning and context to understand (right hemisphere), whereas left to right scripts with vowels (like English) can be read phonetically without the meaning and context (the extreme example of this is hyperlexia). As well, belief in God (and spirituality in general) lateralizes to the right hemisphere. Music and comedy are also right hemisphere skills. So while it's true that many Jews (in particular secular Ashkenazi Jews who can't read and write in Hebrew) are very left hemisphere dominant, this isn't true of all Jewish people at all -- religious Jews would be more balanced. I suspect Germanic and Anglo peoples, in particular those from the more affluent classes, would have the great average left-hemisphere tilt. My (Jewish) husband has said that Jews "need" God more than other peoples (I believe this is in the Talmud?) to guide them toward being a force for good ...
- Left hemisphere dominance seems to be more likely in cultures / families where there are few physical threats (the right hemisphere scans for threats, is more the "prey" brain) and low nurture / high individualism (the right hemisphere is more responsible for processing our relationships to each other).
- I suspect that people with very strong left hemispheres are more likely to have the left hemisphere (the "emissary" in McGilchrist's metaphor) get a bit out of control and stop listening to the right hemisphere -- this doesn't necessarily mean there are RH deficits, just that the person in question needs to do more to balance themselves cognitively. In other words, people with very high verbal IQs could benefit from socializing more, going out in nature more, singing and music, prayer, exercise etc which are all more RH-dominant. The high verbal IQ often comes with a runaway inner monologue (this is a problem I have, and my verbal IQ isn't that exceptional) and it's healthy to try to silence it ... but difficult for a lot of us.
That picture at the bottom, though 😅
(I know exactly the context behind it. We will make sure to properly deal with the person who made that accusation toward Sai.)
Like Sai, I think you're wrong about Faustian man. When you say "Faustian," I think you actually mean "Mercurial." Jews aren't the most Faustian people, as you've previously claimed —they're the most Mercurial.
Mercury is associated with commerce and trickster energy. By contrast, Faustian man is drawn towards “pure and limitless space.” His soul has a “tendency towards the infinite" (Spengler, Decline of the West).
You can see this yearning for limitless space in the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. You can see it in the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals. But the clearest expression is probably the European mountaineer, who risks everything to summit untouched peaks—not for wealth, but simply to be in pure and limitless space (Sheckelstein could never).
Faustian man thrives in solitary struggle against nature. He isn't an apartment cuck, and he isn't Jewish. In fact, I think he is uniquely Nordic. In Man and Technics, Spengler describes how the Nordic climate shaped Faustian man:
"through the hardness of the conditions of life, the cold, the constant adversity, into a tough race, with an intellect sharpened to the most extreme degree, with the cold fervor of an irrepressible passion for struggling, daring, driving forward."
I believe the Faustian spirit emerges from the environmental niche of Northern Europe—an open, less populated landscape that fostered a unique relationship with space.
TLDR: My culture is not your costume. Stop calling job stackers Faustian!
Great episode as always. Always enjoy listening to you sperg out.
I was literally referring to Geothe’s Faust, I don’t know how people keep missing this detail. I know he is a bit of a departure from earlier, more Abrahamic versions of the myth but I believe he is considered to be the closest to the original pagan Germanic spirit of the archetype.
The actual bargain with the devil that this Doktor Faustus makes is that he will be struck dead and his soul will be enslaved to the devil in the moment he finds genuine complete satisfaction in his life. This Faust is so convinced that such a thing is so impossible for him that he bets against his own “happiness” against the literal devil. It is a pagan spirit through and through, completely dipolar in its moral character. I am a Hindu, I have literally thousands of real archetypes to draw from. I don’t need Faust but I like him, and unlike so many people that claim him as theirs, I have actually bothered to read the stories. But this is why I appreciate Faust as an archetype and a myth- it is literally one of the only *actual* archetypes left alive in the western zeitgeist, that is *actually* an arc ffs, and not just a bleh stereotype of a “moral” man.
As for the symbolic detail you are trying to invoke here, again, it suffers with the same problem of a repressed shadow. Northern Europe doesn’t have a monopoly on “pure and limitless space”. *why* might one be drawn to the edge of the map? To that limitless exterior? To keep striving as if eternally unsatisfied? That is what the archetype and the story captures and you seem to have missed the point there. Sure, I will not bandy the word around to not step on anyone’s toes (I cannot say the same about Walt, of course) but if you are going to use astrological, pagan symbology to make broad distinctions between peoples, I suggest you dig deeper- you might find something genuinely valuable there. No real archetype is pure good or evil.
I think the races of England are a better example than the Nordics
Very well spoken.
Albeit, like Faust, Jews really did make a deal with the Devil (a volcano demon, Yahweh).
I mean the current state of Israel is taking on multiple Arab countries at once that want to destroy it, whereas European Nordic countries have lost their collective spine and are letting in the very people who want to destroy them. Ancient Vikings and sailors may have been Faustian, but I don't see how they are the same in our current timeline.
Rekt
Great interview :-) A few points of clarification --
- Hebrew (and all alphabet scripts that read right to left and don't use vowels) is actually protective against the left-hemisphere tilt of hyper-literacy, as it requires more meaning and context to understand (right hemisphere), whereas left to right scripts with vowels (like English) can be read phonetically without the meaning and context (the extreme example of this is hyperlexia). As well, belief in God (and spirituality in general) lateralizes to the right hemisphere. Music and comedy are also right hemisphere skills. So while it's true that many Jews (in particular secular Ashkenazi Jews who can't read and write in Hebrew) are very left hemisphere dominant, this isn't true of all Jewish people at all -- religious Jews would be more balanced. I suspect Germanic and Anglo peoples, in particular those from the more affluent classes, would have the great average left-hemisphere tilt. My (Jewish) husband has said that Jews "need" God more than other peoples (I believe this is in the Talmud?) to guide them toward being a force for good ...
- Left hemisphere dominance seems to be more likely in cultures / families where there are few physical threats (the right hemisphere scans for threats, is more the "prey" brain) and low nurture / high individualism (the right hemisphere is more responsible for processing our relationships to each other).
- I suspect that people with very strong left hemispheres are more likely to have the left hemisphere (the "emissary" in McGilchrist's metaphor) get a bit out of control and stop listening to the right hemisphere -- this doesn't necessarily mean there are RH deficits, just that the person in question needs to do more to balance themselves cognitively. In other words, people with very high verbal IQs could benefit from socializing more, going out in nature more, singing and music, prayer, exercise etc which are all more RH-dominant. The high verbal IQ often comes with a runaway inner monologue (this is a problem I have, and my verbal IQ isn't that exceptional) and it's healthy to try to silence it ... but difficult for a lot of us.
>Sai keeps getting in trouble because Walt antagonizes her anti-Walt friends in Notes by theatrically talking like a supervillain
lol
The things we do for our friends..
Intro is good, chill and racist
well