José Ortega y Gasset

There was a truly brilliant mind whose perspectives I happen to share quite deeply, and he once uttered a phrase I am speaking of Socrates, who lived back in the fifth century BC.

Socrates stated in his various speeches, he offered a phrase that I often repeat and completely agree with, which was this: "It is not my intention to teach, but rather what I am attempting to do is to encourage people to think for themselves." Ortega y Gasset also expressed this idea in a way that is both incredibly graphic and beautiful.

I believe we may have touched upon that point earlier in our talk.

Ortega y Gasset once famously stated, "A truly excellent teacher is not merely someone who provides a steady conceptual flow to their audience or to their students, but rather it is someone who, alongside that conceptual flow, actively awakens a sharp critical spirit within their students and their audience." By this, I simply want to convey to you that everything I have told you and everything we have discussed here today, you should not believe it in a dogmatic fashion.

Because that really has no value at all.

You have to use your power of reason.

Yeah.

no because my thing is i'm not interested so much in the economics and the social political The genius of Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, he died in 1955.

He says by the time that you are talking about the economics and the social situation, the war, cultural war has already been lost so long ago that you're putting all your eggs into the superficial.

Economics and social political stuff is superficial.

You also have incredible artists on there as well.

Kusama, writers, Octavia Butler, Bjork has an interview.

Nara, Joanna Newsom, who's one of my favorite musicians of all time.

Helmut Newton.

[laughs]

There's another thing I wrote about many years ago that might be an interesting topic for you.

I also wrote an essay about the Spanish writer Ortega y Gasset.

He wrote a book called The Dehumanization of Art in the 1920s.

But over time it became clear that commerce and capitalism had been blamed somewhat hastily and that the causes laid deeper.

More prospective thinkers soon realized that the very success of technology, productivity, and industry, that great achievement of the genius of modern man, was conducive, as Jose Ortega y Gasset persuasively argued, to the sterility of imagination and the triumph of self-satisfied pettiness.

There was and still is something paradoxical in the fact that the historically unprecedented explosion of technology and industry, which brought wealth and security to millions of people and which would not have been possible without a high degree of creativity, was a major factor in reducing people's aspirations and astonishingly giving mediocrity a touch of respectability.

Man, feeling secure and enjoying the increasingly abundant benefits of a modern civilization, was slowly releasing himself from the compelling pressure of strict and demanding rules derived from religion and classical ethics.

That means, "Yo puedo con el día, el día no, no va a poder conmigo." You know? It says, "Quién manda aquí? Who's in charge, me or, or my circumstances?" Siendo orteguiano.

José Ortega said, "Soy yo y mi circunstancia." Fine.

Pues, voy a imponerme yo, o intentarlo.

At least you try to impose your will, imponer tu voluntad, s- over external stimuli, over external inputs, external realities.

It Penashe said that, you know, he first started reading when he got to the military.

His first reading assignment was The Rebellion of the Masses or The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset.

And a lot of friends of ours will be familiar with it.

And The Gallic Wars by Caesar.

Yes.

It's Jose Ortega y Gasset said, "Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are." And if we pour our attention into what's wrong, we just go down the rabbit hole of worry and outrage and despair.

So why not pour our attention into where we can make a difference instead of complaining about where we can't?

Other elements of The Force for Good Project before we dive into the book?

And if the anarcho-capitalists aren't ready to feed them and protect them, these radical individualists, well, who will they go with? They're going to go with the warlord who has a farm or who has a confederation of farms or something like that.

what we call the consumer and industrial or post-industrial society, and Ortega y Gasset, once understood as the revolts of the masses, as well as the intellectual, moral, political, and social misery in the world today.

All of this is perhaps merely an aspect of the deep crisis in which humanity, dragged helplessly along by the automatism of Seinfeld on the brain.

The automatism of the post-totalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization.