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Modern man avoids danger and, as a result, lost his vitality. Nietzsche:

“The secret of realizing the largest productivity and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live in danger! Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! Live in war with your equals and with yourselves!”

Modern man is instead a creature of comfort: his dreams are limited to a slightly bigger house, nicer car, better vacation, and to make a few extra bps at work. His physical timidity is mirrored in his intellectual life: don’t be offensive, stay within the Overton window … For Nietzsche the willingness to embrace physical dangers is a precursor to embrace the (much more important) intellectual dangers:

“I greet all the signs indicating that a more manly and warlike age is commencing, which will, above all, bring heroism again into honour! For it has to prepare the way for a yet higher age, and gather the force which the latter will one day require, - the age which will carry heroism into knowledge, and wage war for the sake of ideas and their consequences.”

In this brief musing I will trace out how danger has been eradicated from modern life through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu culminating in the American project.

Companion interviews:
- The Secret Religion of Nietzsche | On Mysticism

The CIA ran a psychic spy program during the Cold War. I got my hands on the original documents … and was blown away by what they achieved. Science has no way of explaining this.

Project Stargate is a program that lasted over two decades which used remote viewing to gain military intelligence. Viewers sit in a dark room, are given nothing but an anonymized reference number — a hash corresponding to a military target — and try to psychically “tap into” the target. They draw out whatever sensory signals they receive to be analyzed later.

I thought this was all voodoo nonsense, a complete psy-op, until I spent a few days digging through the original, declassified files now housed at Rice university. The amount and accuracy of successful “hits” were uncanny. The personnel leading the program were secular physicists. This is not something that can be explained away by sheer chance.

What’s even weirder is that the Soviet Union and China had (have?) their own psychic military units! Behind the well-known spy battles of the Cold-War was a secret game of psychic espionage and counter-espionage.

But the Soviet Union were communists, and communists are materialists. How did a materialist superpower legitimize starting a psychic division within their intelligence apparatus? They disliked even psychoanalysis for not being “materialist” enough. It turns out that there is a heated and fascinating philosophical debate about how remote viewing actually works, and even key leaders of the program on the American side remained materialists, convinced that there was a “physical” explanation. This is why Stargate is worth investigating today, for the philosophical “payoff” on fundamental questions of ontology.

In this episode, I will take you through the highlights from the original documents of Stargate and, more importantly, discuss what this means philosophically for the world we live in.

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What We Cover:

2:12 The Best “Hits” from Stargate

9:36 Is Stargate a Psy-Op?

12:04 Why Christians Shutdown Stargate

15:01 Is Remote Viewing Nature or Nurture?

18:26 How Consciousness Influences Matter

21:07 How the Army Chose Remote Viewers

26:23 The Materialist Explanation for Remote Viewing

30:18 Remote Viewers Could See the Past

35:08 Why was Stargate Declassified?

So Stargate ran all the way from the ‘70s. It was terminated in ‘95, and then it was declassified in ‘95. So it’s not like I was able to infiltrate the CIA headquarters and get these material. These are all publicly available. I’m sitting at Rice University right now. These are housed in, what is called, the Archives of the Impossible. They’re available upon public request. Anyone can come and just see them.

So this is how one of these remote viewing sessions worked. Okay. As a leader of one of these sessions, you sit down with the remote viewer that was selected through the U.S. Army, and you start with one of these worksheets. And here’s what you do. You provide an anonymized reference number to the target, which could be a military base, a location, and your remote viewer tries to psychically tap into the target and sketches out and records all kinds of sensory input he or she receives, before analyzing it later. Which I know sounds really crazy, but wait till you see the results. I know you’re dying to see some of the actual hits, some of the best examples of remote viewing, and that is found in box 12, folder 3.

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Reference Texts + Affiliate Links:

- Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue: https://amzn.to/44twNVb
- Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: https://amzn.to/4phinje
- Viroli, Machiavelli’s God: https://amzn.to/49FZAtf
- McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy: https://amzn.to/43QiNVq

Companion interviews:
- You Need More Danger In Your Life | Machiavelli Explained:

- This is How I Fell in Love with Machiavelli | Q&A:

- Power Will Cost You Everything, It’s Worth It:

- The Forgotten 11th Commandment | Princeton’s Maurizio Viroli on Machiavelli's God:

- Why You Must Acquire Power at All Costs | Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli:

America violated the freedom of the natives in order to build the freest nation in history. According to Machiavelli, this is not hypocrisy; this is necessity. Be it Rome, Ancient Israel, or Persia, all great nations are founded by ruthlessness: there is no other way.

This is the interpretation of the great Machiavelli scholar Leo Strauss who writes: “America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. [Machiavelli] would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation… of the fate of the Red Indians… there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus.”

Strauss brings in Machiavelli to combat two dominant views on America’s founding. The right wants to whitewash and hide this founding murder: they blame disease; they point to how “backward” the natives were; they want this period of history hidden in textbooks to preserve America’s pristine moral image. The left, on the other hand, seeks to expose and guilt: they tear down statues; denounce their ancestors; and want this injustice seared into the minds of each American.

For Machiavelli, both sides are equally misguided, and for the exact same reason. The right buries its head in the sand and ignores the brutality. The left implicitly assumes that it could have been otherwise: that you can build your shining city on a hill, preserve the original city, while everyone sings kumbaya. Both voices are afraid to own up to the true cost of freedom. Machiavelli writes: “there is no secure mode to possess [a city] other than to ruin them. And whoever becomes patron of a city accustomed to living free and does not destroy it, should expect to be destroyed by it.”

It is tough and ruthless men, willing to violate their deepest principles, who get you to a state of strength where you can actually realize those principles. As the saying goes, tough men make peaceful times. But Machiavelli thinks that people living in peace tend to forget this. Because peaceful times are so easy, you delude yourself into thinking that toughness was never needed. So you either whitewash like the right or denounce like the left. Peaceful times make weak men. And so, to not let weak men make tough times, Machiavelli’s role as teacher is to constantly remind you of the treachery of founding and the true cost of politics. If he were writing a textbook on American history it would be filled with acts of America’s ruthlessness — not to be denounced but to be imitated — just as his books are filled with ruthless Roman leaders for his fellow Italians to learn from.

In this lecture, you will learn about the terrifying things you need to do to build a free, equal, and lawful society. And, as always, I will withhold my own opinion and critiques for the end after a charitable reconstruction.

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Topics we cover:

0:50 America’s Founding Murder

11:03 The American Case for Technology Theft

18:29 Why Machiavelli Loves the Vulgar

35:56 Machiavelli Really Dislikes the Elites

46:58 Why co-CEOs Never Work

59:43 Wokeism is the Capitalist’s Best Friend

1:18:35 Corrupt People Cannot Be Reasoned With

1:21:08 My Own Views on Machiavelli

America is the land of freedom. She’s the protector of self-evident rights. In my mind, there can be no doubt about America’s genuine achievement in world history. How then, do we make sense of her founding? Of the systematic elimination of the natives’ freedoms whose rights were not so evident? America’s founding act violated her most deeply held principle. How do we make sense of this? This is the paradox that the great Machiavelli scholar, Leo Strauss, introduces to help us tease out Machiavelli’s central political insight. Principles need to be violated in order to be actualized. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s necessity. For Strauss, as for Machiavelli, the modern left and right are both deluded about America’s founding. The right wants to whitewash, whereas the left wants to denounce; but neither own up to the actual cost of doing politics in the real world. In this lecture, I will withhold my own opinion and critiques for the end, but not before explaining the terrifying cost of building an equal, free, and lawful society, according to Machiavelli.

1. American Founding

1.1 American Founding: Geography

I quote to you, the great Machiavelli scholar, Leo Strauss,

“Machiavelli would argue that America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. He would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation… of the fate of the Red Indians… there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus.” - Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli

So I’m going to save, as always, my personal reservations... And believe me, there’s a lot... Towards the end of this lecture. And we’re going to start just by trying to understand the most charitable interpretation of Machiavelli. And we’re going to do it by unpacking Strauss’s example here. So what is he gesturing at? This mischievous interpretation of the founding of America. Up to 90% of the Native Americans were wiped out in the first phase through contact of disease alone. Think about ten of your best friends and family. Nine of them dead. And then came a brutal, centuries-long, westward push. Massacres, war, fraud, contracts that were agreed to, but blatantly violated. By the time the frontier closed, only a sliver of the native population was still surviving. And it was not much better for those who survived. Families were confined to reserves, children were ripped out of those families, forced into boarding schools, punished for practicing their own religion, speaking their own language, until the native way of life was all but eliminated. Why does Strauss think Machiavelli would highlight this fact of founding? Is it to condemn America? No, not even close. We can tease out what Machiavelli would say about America’s founding, as Strauss suggests, by seeing what Machiavelli has said about the founding of Rome.

Rome, too, was founded on at least two crimes. The first crime, Romulus literally killing his brother Remus. The second crime, Rome subjugated, colonized, enslaved her way to greatness. And the way she did it was absolutely treacherous. Machiavelli tells us when Rome was just a small city-state, what it did was it forced... It invited the city-states around it to become her junior partners. You get to keep all of your ruling class, you get to keep your laws, most of your property, your language, your religion, but you listen to us. And what Rome commanded her junior partners to do, was to go further out and subjugate the people in further regions. So not as inviting them as junior partners, but getting them in as subjects. Killing off the ruling class, taking their land, enslaving some of them, absorbing others as citizens. And when Rome’s junior partners collected enough subjects for her, Rome turned on those junior partners, with the very subjects she got, and subjugated everyone until Rome ruled alone. Blatant fraud is the heart of Rome’s greatness. This is what Machiavelli tells us. And a not too dissimilar strategy was used by America in her expansion. And the most infamous example of this is the Creek War.

In the Creek War, Andrew Jackson, as general, was fighting against the Creeks. And one of the pivotal reasons he won, was because he allied himself with the Cherokee tribe, the Cherokees, who helped America defeat the Creeks. A Cherokee leader even saved Andrew Jackson’s life. Andrew Jackson called the Cherokee, My dear and faithful friends. Now, Andrew Jackson becomes President, and he pushes through the Indian Removal Act, which would exile the Cherokee from their native land... His own allies who saved his life... It would exile them from their native land that they’ve been living for centuries, and push them west. What makes this even more treacherous is that the Cherokee at this point, had done everything they were supposed to do to assimilate. They adopted a written constitution modeled after the US’s constitution. They created a written alphabet. Many of them even stopped practicing their own native religion and rituals, and converted to Christianity. The Cherokee literally had treaties with the American government recognizing its sovereignty. So the Cherokee, again, they did everything they were supposed to do. They fight this legally, not through terrorism. They fight it legally. They take it to the Supreme Court. It’s a bit nuanced, but eventually the Supreme Court sides with the Cherokee. They recognized the Cherokee’s authority, over what Jackson said. What does Jackson do? He ignores the Supreme Court. He does an under-the-table deal with an illegitimate group of Cherokee leaders, get them to sign over the land in an illegitimate treaty, and use that as legitimacy to exile them from their land. This resulted in the infamous Trail of Tears, where the Cherokee were exiled from their native land. A quarter of them died on the journey as they went out west. Why did they go out west? Because the government told them: west of the Mississippi, native land forever.

Machiavelli’s lesson about the founding of Rome is this: Rome could not have been the free state par excellence, a beacon of freedom inspiring all the great nations that have come since, if she actually respected the freedom of others. And if you are going to conquer, if you are going to go to war, I quote to you Machiavelli,

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Johnathan Bi: Your true potential is higher than you can possibly imagine. It is literally superhuman. But modernity is suffocating that potential. Whether it’s the materialists, the religious, or the technologists, they’ve trapped you squarely as a herd animal. This is why you need to learn to not fit in, to not be normal, to give up health and maybe even sanity if you want to realize this superhuman potential. This is the seductive invitation of my guest, Jeff Kripal, who’s gonna give us a mystical reading of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. Now, Jeff himself is a scholar of mysticism who had a transformative mystical experience while researching Hinduism in Calcutta as a young man. As you’re gonna hear in this interview, Jeff came face to face with the erotic presence of a Hindu goddess as a grad student decades ago. He literally had an experience with divinity and has since been wrestling with his experience through his writing. Jeff’s ambition is for his writing to engender similar mystical states in your life, to realize your superhuman potential. And he sees the same mystical inspiration and impulse in Nietzsche. Jeff’s claim is that Nietzsche must be read primarily not as a political, philosophical, or literary thinker, but as a mystical and religious one.

Johnathan Bi: And he thinks this is true for all the great thinkers. They are all mystics inspired by their own supernatural experiences. What you’re gonna hear in this interview, then, isn’t just a new way to read Nietzsche, but a new way to read the entire canon as mystical. Jeff is mounting nothing less than a Copernican revolt against the materialist worldview. If you want to be invited to online and in-person lectures, seminars, and events I host across the world, then please join my email list at johnathanbi.com to be kept up to date. Without further ado, Jeff Kripal.

1.  Nietzsche as Mystic

Johnathan Bi: Who is the Ubermensch for Nietzsche?

Jeffrey Kripal: The Ubermensch is the future human. It’s where humanity is evolving or transitioning toward. And we are a transitional species, not just a transitional person, but a transitional species.

Johnathan Bi: We are to apes what the Ubermensch is to us.

Jeffrey Kripal: That’s the image Nietzsche used, of course, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that we’re on this tightrope and when we look in one direction we see the ape and when we look in another we see the Ubermensch. And we’re sort of in the middle of this. We’re on our way, as it were. But Nietzsche was not a Darwinian in the sense that he didn’t think that this was a random process, that there was some role here, some central role for the will, as he called it. And so it’s unclear how we get to the Ubermensch or to the superhumans, but again, it has something to do with culture, it has something to do with will, it has something to do with intending it. I suspect there’s certainly time travel that goes on in the Nietzschean text. So it’s, I think it’s an occult or an esoteric practice that produces the Ubermensch.

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Companion lectures and interviews:

Masters vs. Slaves | Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality Explained

You’ve been reading Nietzsche completely wrong.

He wasn’t an atheist. He was a mystic.

1. His great work, Zarathustra, is a religious text inspired by a mystical experience in Switzerland.

2. Nietzsche had a precognitive dream that shaped his metaphysics: as a young boy he dreamed of his dead father rising from the grave and taking his infant brother … who soon fell ill and died.

3. People read his claims that he was “Buddha” and “Dionysius” as madness. Yet those are his most profound statements.

4. He hated not Christ but Christianity.

In short, Nietzsche is spiritual but not religious.

This is the claim of my guest Rice University’s Jeff Kripal who will give us a mystical reading of Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

Jeff himself is a scholar of mysticism who had a transformative mystical experience while researching Hinduism in Calcutta as a young man. Jeff witnessed the erotic presence of a Hindu goddess as a grad student decades ago, and has since been wrestling with his experience through his writing. His ambition is for his writing to engender similar mystical states in your life and he sees the same mystical inspiration in Nietzsche.

These interviews with Jeff have been the most transformative I’ve ever done since starting this project. As a religious seeker I haven’t found a contemporary scholar who is able to tie together classical religion, the great books, and new age spirituality in one philosophical framework quite as Jeff has.

What you are going to hear in this interview then isn’t just a new way to read Nietzsche, but a new way to read the entire canon as mystical. Plato, Dante, Homer, Fuerbach, James, Hegel we’ve been reading all of these thinkers completely wrong as we have with Nietzsche. Jeff is leading nothing less than a Copernican revolt against the materialist orthodoxy of the humanities.

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Topics we cover:

2:42 The Übermensch Will Replace Humanity

7:38 Great Thinkers are Divinely Inspired

11:30 Nietzsche is a Mystical Thinker

16:09 Why Most People Misread Nietzsche

35:22 The Evidence for Prophecy

54:21 Holy Men Are Egomaniacs

1:18:33 Nietzsche Loved Christ but Hated Christians

1:30:04 Why Books Engender Mystical states

2:07:37 Why The Humanities Have Failed

2:23:05 All Philosophy Is Disguised Mysticism

Companion lectures and interviews:

The Incredible Results of AI Learning | Alpha School

How To Be a Thinker & a Doer At The Same Time

Capital is Cheap, This is The Last Source of Scarcity

Rebel Oxford Philosopher Declares War on Universities | Michael Gibson

Why America Needs Aristocracy | Palantir Co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s Political Philosophy

Marx & Nietzsche Are Better Than Any MBA | $16 Billion Guidewire Founder, Marcus Ryu

Capitalism’s Best Kept Secret: Follow the Fun | Colin Moran, Oxford History

Same Interview, 8 Years Later | Francis Pedraza

Johnathan Bi: Not only is my guest James Liang, the co-founder of Trip.com, now with $50 billion, he was also a prodigy academic who started college at 15, got a PhD at Stanford and then became a professor at China’s top university, PKU. James straddles not just the active and contemplative life, but elite circles across US and China. Now, sitting at this unique intersection, helps James articulate his most important idea, that demography is one of the most overlooked factors that impacts innovation. The problem with an aging population is not just the financial strain on pensions, but a cultural technological stagnation that will suffocate any creative act. James believes the technological race between US and China will be in large part decided by which population ages first. In this interview, you will learn about the coming population collapse from one of the world’s foremost demography experts and what to do about it from one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurs. I’m Johnathan Bi, a founding member of Cosmos. We deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups and believe that philosophy is critical to building better technology. If you wanna join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, you can find roles we’re hiring for, events we’re hosting and other ways to get involved on johnathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, James Liang.

Johnathan Bi: Most employers view their employees having children as a drag on their business. Yet you pay your employees 50,000 for every baby they make. You are starting a one billion fund to pay PhD students to have babies. Why is that?

James Liang: Well, I believe profitable companies should provide better benefit. But on top of that, I believe increasingly low fertility problem is becoming a more serious social and economic problem for many countries, especially for China. So in general, I believe young people need a lot of support, financial support, give them more money and time to have more children. That’s a small step to help them.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. So in the middle of your career, while you were building Trip.com, and it was very successful, you decided to leave and pursue a PhD at Stanford to study demography. But back in the day, demography wasn’t this... And low fertility wasn’t this issue that everyone is talking about. So what initially attracted you to demography?

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James Liang is a Chinese billionaire who pays his employees 50K for every baby they make, who is launching a 1 Billion fund to pay PHD students to have children, here’s why…

James is the cofounder of trip.com worth $50B, he was also a prodigy academic who started college at 15, got a PHD at Stanford and then became a professor at China’s top university PKU. He straddles not just the active and the contemplative life but elite circles across US and China.

Sitting at this unique intersection helped him articulate his most important idea: that demography is one of the most overlooked factors that impact innovation. The problem with an aging population is not just the financial strain on pensions but a cultural, technological stagnation that will suffocate any creative act. Gerontocracies (rule by the old) result in sterile, hierarchical, and unimaginative futures. If humanity is going to continue innovating, humanity needs to stay young. James believes offering money alone can significantly fix the problem and is putting his money where his mouth is.

In this interview, you will learn about the coming population collapse from one of the world’s foremost demography experts and what to do about it from one of the world’s most resourceful entrepreneurs.

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This interview is part of our Cosmos series on philosophy, AI, and entrepreneurship. At Cosmos, we deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups, and believe that philosophy is critical to building better technology. If you want to join our ecosystem of philosopher-builders, you can find roles we are hiring for, events we are hosting, and other ways to get involved on Johnathanbi.com/cosmos.

Topics We Cover:

2:02 Paying Employees to Have Babies

3:09 Low Fertility Kills Innovation

11:05 The Young Want Merit. The Old Want Hierarchy

15:42 Small Population = Little Innovation

33:50 Why a CEO Left for Academia

48:33 Humanity Craves Novelty

55:14 True Innovation Creates Heritage

1:16:32 AI Won’t Lead Innovation

The supernatural is real: levitation, reincarnation, near death experiences, remote viewing…

Not only do these “impossible” phenomena occur, they are well documented and often by secular scholars nonetheless. There are entire labs out of Duke, Stanford, Princeton, University of Virginia that have come up with compelling evidence of the supernatural that cannot be absorbed into a materialist frame.

This is the claim of my guest Princeton’s Dale Allison in his new book: encountering mystery.

So why haven’t we heard any of this? When I read Allison’s impressive survey of this phenomena my first reaction was not shock but anger: why haven’t I in my 20+ years of education ever been made aware of this radical data and the Copernican shift it seems to suggest?

Dale’s answer is that this has all been systematically suppressed by not just atheists but the religious as well. This data is threatening not just for the materialist worldview but most religious traditions as well. In fact you are going to hear how atheism itself is an outgrowth of certain sects of Christianity.

In this interview you are going to learn about all the mind-blowing empirical data for the supernatural and what this tells us ontologically about the world we live in.

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Topics:

2:11 Two Books Every Materialist Must Confront

8:17 Consciousness Doesn’t Come From the Brain

14:27 Materialism is Fundamentalism for Atheists

33:36 Miracles Don’t Confirm Religions

44:33 Why Christians Fear the Miraculous

1:14:19 How Satan Was Invented

1:16:56 Buddhism vs. Christianity

Johnathan Bi: The supernatural is real. Levitation, reincarnation, near death experiences, remote viewing; not only do these events happen, they are well documented. Not only that, but they are well documented by secular, serious scholars and scientists. There are entire labs out of Duke, Stanford, Princeton, UVA, that have come up with compelling evidence of the supernatural that cannot be absorbed into a materialist frame. This is the claim of my guest Dale Allison, who himself is a Princeton historian and a highly respected scholar. So why haven’t we heard any of this? When I read Allison’s impressive survey, my first reaction was not just shock, but anger. Why haven’t I, in my 20-plus years of education, ever been told any of this, of this radical data and the Copernican shift it seems to suggest? My guest Dale’s answer is that all of this has been systematically suppressed by not just atheists, but the religious as well. This data is threatening not just for the materialist worldview, but most religious traditions as well. In fact, you’re going to learn how atheism itself is an outgrowth of certain sects of Christianity. In this interview, you’re going to hear about all the mind-blowing empirical data for the supernatural, and what this means for the world you and I live in.

Johnathan Bi: You wrote a book called, ‘Encountering Mystery,’ about... It’s a survey, really, of the different metanormal experiences across traditions and across cultures. Let’s say you were talking to a die-hard materialist right now, what examples of the metanormal would you give that you think is the least likely to be absorbed into a purely materialist frame?

Dale Allison: Okay. Well, the first thing I would do would be to refer to two books. The first book I would refer to is a book called,’Irreducible Mind: Towards a Psychology for the 21st Century,’ edited by Edward Kelly, which is an empirical refutation of materialism. And the second book is by a man named David Bentley Hart, which is called, ‘All Things Are Full of Gods.’ One of those books takes an empirical approach, and the other takes a philosophical approach. I would simply say, go read those two books and if you’re still a materialist, I can’t help you. But if you’re going to ask me for experiences from my book, one thing I do talk about, is near death experiences which have veridical elements... Or apparently veridical elements. This is when a patient is out of it, let’s say, being operated on, and then they wake up, and then they talk to the doctor and they say, “By the way, I noticed that you had red tennis shoes on.” And the doctor is very puzzled and says, “Well, yeah, there’s no way you could know that.” There are quite a few stories now, from doctors and nurses, who say so-and-so told me something that he or she could not have known, should not have known, but did, because the person was out when what they saw happened.

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Companion lectures and interviews:

The Devastating Wrong Turn in Early Christianity | Princeton Historian Explains:

The Surprising Evidence for Christian Miracles | Yale Historian Carlos Eire:

Making Sense of Christianity’s Violent Past | Yale’s Carlos Eire:

Companion lectures and interviews:

Columbia Professor Teaches the Art of Self-Esteem | Fred Neuhouser on Rousseau:

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Now, back to the regular scheduled programming…

This is a really special interview for me. My guest Axel Honneth is one of my first teachers who made me fall in love with philosophy.

In college, my biggest struggle was dealing with my own craving for external validation. I found myself racking up achievements I didn’t need, to pursue careers I didn’t want, all in order to impress people I didn’t particularly like.

When I realized this, I decided that I needed to be free from external validation altogether if I wanted to build a healthy self-esteem. So I deleted all of my social media. I moved to Nepal to practice in a Tibetan monastery: I was genuinely considering renouncing the world. Encountering Axel’s work saved me from this other extreme and made me realize I was operating under a false dichotomy.

The way to build a healthy self-esteem is not by rejecting validation altogether, it is by gaining the right kind of external validation. The right question is not: “how do I stop caring what others think of me?” The right question is: “how, from whom, and when should I care?” That is what you will learn in this interview: how to stop living for others, and discover a life truly your own.

But what moved me even more than Axel’s ideas is who he is as a person. As one of the most important philosophers, he spent hours every month taking me 1-on-1 carefully through his works. His generosity showed me what a philosophical life was all about.

This interview is special then because it gave me the opportunity almost a decade later to revisit the works that started my journey into philosophy.

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Topics We Cover:

2:52 All Struggles Are Struggles of Recognition

7:39 Not All Jobs Get Social Esteem

15:29 From Occupy Wall Street to Woke Capital

24:28 The ‘Self’ is a Product of Love

53:23 You Can Demand Rights, Not Esteem

1:20:39 Freedom Requires Recognition

1:35:55 The Overlegalization of America

Johnathan Bi: This is a very special interview for me. My guest, Axel Honneth, is not just one of the greatest philosophers alive, but one of my first teachers who made me fall in love with philosophy. Back in college, my biggest struggle was dealing with my own craving for external validation. I found myself racking up achievements I didn’t need, to pursue careers I didn’t want, all in order to impress people I didn’t particularly like. And when I realized this as a 19, 20 year old, I decided that I needed to be free from external validation altogether in order to build a healthy self esteem. So I went the opposite extreme. I deleted all of my social media. I moved to Nepal to practice in a Tibetan monastery. I was genuinely considering renouncing the world. But then I encountered, among others, Axel’s work on Hegel. And it showed me that I’d set up a false dichotomy. The way to build a healthy self esteem, it turns out, is not by rejecting validation altogether, it is by gaining the right kind of external validation. The key question then is not how do I stop caring, it’s how, from whom and when should I care?

Johnathan Bi: This is the most important lesson that Axel taught me and will also teach you today. But what really moved me back then, even more than Axel’s ideas into philosophy, is who he is as a person, as one of the most important and busy scholars, he spent hours every month taking me some random undergrad at the time, one-on-one, carefully through his works. His generosity showed me what a philosophical life was all about. This interview is special then, because it gave me the opportunity, almost a decade later, to revisit the works that started my journey into philosophy. In this interview, we’re going to tease out the relevance of Axel’s ideas by examining a common tension within the modern left between class conflict and identity politics, before providing you with a systematic roadmap for how to live a life not just for others, but authentically your own. Without further ado, my teacher, Axel Honneth.

1. Class Conflict Vs. Identity Politics

Johnathan Bi: I wanna begin by critiquing examining one of your most interesting and controversial opinions. In classical leftist progressive movements, it has been politics of sameness, class conflict. Workers of the world unite to fight against what many people see is the major injustice and inequality, namely the material one. In the recent decades, there’s been a rise of identity politics, and that has been interpreted as a politics of difference. Not only do we need to care for African Americans, but African American women, but disabled African American women. And so it becomes intersectionality. It’s a kind of a force of difference. Most scholars seem to think that recognition and redistribution are opposed, or at least distinct. But your opinion is that all forms of moral struggle are actually at the bottom, struggles of recognition.

Axel Honneth: Yes.

Johnathan Bi: Why is that?

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I gave this lecture months before Venezuela & Greenland, but it’s now more relevant than ever. It’s on Machiavelli’s case for conquest: why great nations should pursue foreign expansion.

In his Discourses, Machiavelli wrestles with this choice of stability (Sparta/Venice) or conquest (Rome). While he identifies advantages & disadvantages of both, he ultimately sides with conquest as the better strategy. Machiavelli warns us that our modern obsession with peace is a lot more dangerous than first meets the eye. For easy times make soft men, and soft men make hard times.

We moderns want to reply to Machiavelli that conquest itself is morally repugnant: that even if it is successful, the conqueror becomes corrupted through the process. Machiavelli flips this logic on its head: it’s those who know only peace who are morally decadent, becoming soft and effeminate. In other words, what’s so shocking about reading Machiavelli is not just THAT he urges us to conquer but WHY. He believes that there is something spiritually & morally healthy in conquering others:

Danger cleanses your soul. War brings sobriety. And violence is the best moral teacher.

Let me be clear. I do not agree with Machiavelli’s prescriptions of geopolitical expansion. A return to the 20th century is neither possible nor desirable. But, I do think Machiavelli’s insights are a serious challenge to our modern complacency and, perhaps, overvaluing of peace. I will end this lecture by developing this critique and point to other avenues of expansion that are available to us today.

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Topics We Cover:

2:16 The Sobering Power of Violence

5:11 Good Can’t Stand Without Power

12:02 “Startup Mode” is Uncomfortable

17:24 American Expansion vs. Swiss Neutrality

36:07 Fraud: The Humane Way to Conquer

45:35 Tough Laws Will Save The 21st Century

48:04 Tech & Commerce: The Last Domains of Expansion