Glad to have our own version of Alcibiades running around (better w/o the political power), but his grandiosity can't be fully realized if his whole persona is based on obsessively chasing a vain ideal to the point of denigrating the second Face (essence).
The philosophers with the most influence on my thinking throughout my life:
Ages 14-16: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
16-22: Michel Foucault
22-30: John Stuart Mill
30 to now: Thomas Hobbes
I genuinely think the only way to grasp what is going on in the world from a western perspective is to be intellectually capable of holding Marx & Spengler in your mind at the same time.
Something I really like about America is how uncomfortable we are about servants. People who do services do not *serve you*. They *do tasks*. They are a professional, working independently, and below nobody. This is not common around the world, and is to America’s credit.
Love the show - perfect level of comedy and political narcissism that gets extremists turned on for what actually was a lot of the revolutions of the 20th century.
Larping.
One of the worst feelings is reading someone and scanning their thought-structure like an x-ray, knowing exactly where they got each idea and where they stitched it at the seams with other ideas, just a walking Frankenstein of derivate conceptualizations.