There is a beautiful episode in the Iliad, book six, but before the beauty there is first bloodshed. Diomedes, son of Tydeus, is on a rampage alongside the other Achaean heroes, slaughtering Trojans left and right. They are pushing towards Ilium, and Agamemnon, King of the Achaeans, orders that no quarter be given the Trojans: “Let us not spare a single one of them,” he says, “not even the child unborn and in its mother’s womb; let not a man of them be left alive, but let all in Ilius perish, unheeded and forgotten.” They stop not even to strip the armor off their fallen enemies, an act that would bring each warrior great honor. Instead, they press relentlessly forward, leaving the dead and their riches alone, for now they have the advantage: Diomedes has been divinely empowered by Athena and has become practically unstoppable.
Diomedes advances and leaves a trail of Trojan corpses in his wake. The Trojan warriors are panicking. Some turn to flee; a rout is imminent. Hector, fearful that Diomedes will reach the city and fall upon its walls, rallies the men to hold their ground. Within the walls of Troy the women gather at the acropolis to pray for Athena’s mercy. Helenus, Hector’s brother, prays that Minerva may “keep the son of Tydeus from falling on the goodly city of Ilius; for he fights with fury and fills men’s souls with panic. I hold him mightiest of them all; we did not fear even their great champion Achilles, son of a goddess though he be, as we do this man: his rage is beyond all bounds, and there is none can vie with him in prowess.”
While Hector rallies the men to keep them from fleeing, a single brave Trojan warrior steps forward to face the fury of Diomedes. Diomedes stares down this new opponent. Shouting loudly across the barren plane, with the armies of either side watching, he addresses the unknown warrior.
“Who, my good sir,” said he, “who are you among men? I have never seen you in battle until now, but you are daring beyond all others if you abide my onset. Woe to those fathers whose sons face my might. If, however, you are one of the immortals and have come down from heaven, I will not fight you; for even valiant Lycurgus, son of Dryas, did not live long when he took to fighting with the gods… I will not fight with the blessed gods; but if you are of them that eat the fruit of the ground, draw near and meet your doom.”
The warrior’s name is Glaucus, and he is son of Hippolochus, who was the son of Bellerophon. Bellerophon was a noble Lycian hero, famed for killing the Chimera and for his ultimately doomed attempt to ride the winged horse Pegasus to Olympus, so that he could take a seat among the Gods. Glaucus comes, then, from a long line of heroes, and bears this lineage with pride. He tells Diomedes:
“Hippolochus was father to myself, and when he sent me to Troy he urged me again and again to fight ever among the foremost and outvie my peers, so as not to shame the blood of my fathers who were the noblest in Ephyra and in all Lycia. This, then, is the descent I claim.”
The stage is thus set for a great battle: the grandson of the famous Greek hero Bellerophon, tamer of the winged horse, prince of Lycia, against the son of the great Tydeus, whose heroic lineage likewise stretches back into the misty depths of Greek mythology. The unstoppable force of Diomedes against Glaucus, of equally famed skill, of equally noble parentage. All who came before Diomedes up to now have fallen. Will Glaucus reverse the tide? Is his parentage as strong as the line of Diomedes? Or is he, like Bellerophon, doomed to failure in his hubris? Can he contend against the combined power of Athena and Diomedes?
Right here, when Homer has set the scene for a great battle, something strange happens. As Glaucus finishes telling the story of his lineage, Diomedes plants his spear in the ground and smiles.
“Then,” he said, “you are an old friend of my father’s house. Great Oeneus [the grandfather of Diomedes] once entertained Bellerophon for twenty days, and the two exchanged presents. Oeneus gave a belt rich with purple, and Bellerophon a double cup, which I left at home when I set out for Troy. I do not remember Tydeus, for he was taken from us while I was yet a child, when the army of the Achaeans was cut to pieces before Thebes. Henceforth, however, I must be your host in middle Argos, and you mine in Lycia, if I should ever go there; let us avoid one another’s spears even during a general engagement; there are many noble Trojans and allies whom I can kill, if I overtake them and heaven delivers them into my hand; so again with yourself, there are many Achaeans whose lives you may take if you can; we two, then, will exchange armour, that all present may know of the old ties that subsist between us.”
Then the two of them step down from their chariots, before all the opposed men watching, and shake hands.
This is an absurd act. The chapter prior to this is a catalogue of Diomedes slaughter. For an entire chapter we watch as Diomedes kills mortal men, princes, even the sons of Gods. That chapter closes with Diomedes taking on Ares, the god of war, and he almost wins. Now Glaucus is the only thing standing between this unstoppable force and Troy itself. It is logical to assume that Glaucus is about to meet his fate, that Diomedes shall continue his slaughter to the very gates of Priams high walled fortress.
But instead, the two warriors clasp hands. It makes no sense. Diomedes is seconds away from victory, Troy is in sight, ten years of grinding war can end today, and Diomedes could be the greatest hero in all of Greek history. Any material calculation, any logic concerning winning a war and achieving strategic goals would say to smite Glaucus into the ground, to hell with Bellerophon and his pathetic line. What is that to Diomedes? But instead of the expected slaughter, Diomedes decides not to because – their grandfathers were friends? Diomedes never even met his father Tydeus, let alone his grandfather Oeneus, what does he care? Besides, and most importantly: don’t the Achaeans and the Trojans hate each other?
In modern media conflict is always between good and evil, and good hates evil. Meek but righteous good against overwhelming evil. I’ll do some armchair psychoanalysis here, this, like all our problems, stems from the second World War: the Nazis were evil, the Western Allies good, and they hated one another. Hatred, white hot hatred, hatred approaching inhumanity: they cannot be human like us, there is no possibility. The enemy as evil beyond evil, look how this idea is applied in democratic fairness to the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Italians of the Second World War, how it is then transferred with ease, after the war concludes, to the Soviet Union: strange how throughout history, the good guys always win. Look at the German Historikerstreit and the decades of debate set off by Ernst Nolte by his mere suggestion that the atrocities of the Nazis were part of a larger scale historical movement, a 20th century age of genocide. This thought was impermissible: the Nazis had to be incomparably, inhumanly, unimaginably evil, above and beyond anything else. This is a psychological problem far more than it is a historical one. The bad guys have to be not us, they have to be absolutely Other, for if they too are human then in us is the same capacity for terrible evil.
Good and evil has become the archetypal depiction of every conflict since, alongside a dash of “compelling antagonist”: damn, the fascists do look pretty slick in their Hugo Boss suits. But in the Iliad something completely different is presented, something that I did not understand at all upon first read: the Achaeans don’t hate the Trojans, they love them.
Throughout the Iliad, Hector, the main antagonist and most powerful warrior prince among all the Trojans, is referred to as “noble Hector”. Not merely in the text, as most major characters have some Homeric epithet: the Achaens, in speech, call Hector noble. Achilles calls him noble Hector. I don’t remember any of the allied leadership ever referring to “noble Hitler” in a speech. The entire plot of the Iliad is contrived the more you think about it. Agamemnon roused the entirety of Greece, formed the greatest army in all recorded history up to that point because – his brother got cucked? For some girl? That’s what brought the Greeks together? Menelaus is the brother of the king, he can have any other woman he wants! Thucydides in the beginning of his History has an excellent discussion of the Iliad, and while stating that much is likely myth, it’s clear a battle took place, but it is further clear that the battle has become legendary because it is the first time the Greeks acted together, perhaps as not a nation but at least as a cohesive group. Up until that point there had been no great wars, says Thucydides, nothing of scale, nothing worth remembering, because the Greek cities were just that: cities, not members of a nation. The organizational power was missing. It was Agamemnon who managed to bring the bickering city states of the Cyclades together for the first time in a single effort. And it was over a girl? “Well, Menelaus’ honor was injured, and they really cared about honor back then–” It is utterly provincial to believe the ancients had simpler lives than us, that somehow they were so retarded that their actions can be explained by such simple notions as “honor slighted”, as though its a meter in a video game. City sacked, +50 honor points, wife fucked by another man, -100: “well, time to go to war I guess”. Certainly honor played a part; but anyone who claims that the impetus for the Trojan war, or any ancient affair, can be reduced to simple outmoded moral or ethical ideas is really saying “well, in the modern era we’re rational and smart and have intelligent desires, and the ancients were irrational, pagan, and stupid.” I’ve read the texts. They weren’t.
Agamemnon did not raise the greatest army of all time because his brother’s wife was a whore and it hurt his brother’s feelings; the wife was only pretense. What Agamemnon wanted, what he loved, like all Greeks, was competition. He stared with squinting eyes out into the shining Aegean Sea and every ounce of his blood quivered with longing for an opponent great enough to face him, an opponent worthy of his power. Troy was that opponent. And for this he loved the Trojans greater than any other. “That I could be so honored as to face such a great opponent; that the gods would honor me with the opportunity to sack the shining citadels of Ilium; that I could slay noble Hector.” He didn’t get that last part, at least, but I’m sure he wished for it.
This was the Bronze Age Mindset, as far as I’m concerned. It was a mindset that thirsted for competition, an ethics dominated by the twin Eris’, the two kinds of strife, by jealousy and envy. They longed for competition because they loved nothing else so much as warfare, battle, even the poets competed with ruthlessness to be the seen as the greatest. They longed for an enemy capable of driving them to the heights of greatness. Diomedes does not hate Glaucus, how could he hate so great a warrior, descended of noble Bellerophon? So excellent and worthy an opponent?
Diomedes and Glaucus are family friends, cemented back three generations in history and mythology which were in any case one and the same for bronze age Greeks. This friendship must be honored. Our fathers and forefathers, greater than us, recognized one another once for just that greatness; we recognize it again. This fits with one of the great themes of the Iliad, visible already in the prior chapter. Though chapter five is a slaughter, each man killed is given a name, and a few verses about his town, where he came from, his story. Homer introduces us to a named character only for him to be slaughtered quite literally in the next line; then, for a few lines, he tells us of this man’s farm, or his cattle, or a brief story from his life. This is because the Trojans are not mere enemies, “bad guys” to be hated, they are men of honor and dignity. We would not fight wretched and pitiful opponents, how could we stoop to fight men lesser than us, we the greatest in all Achaea, we descendants of the Argives? No, our enemies are the great and noble princes of Troy, our prize the shining citadels of Ilium. It is our great fate and greater honor that we should share the battlefield with them. It is this state of mind that allows two great warriors to stop, in the midst of the slaughter, and shake hands.
Render Unto Diomedes
“Why had the Greek sculptor to represent again and again war and fights in innumerable repetitions, extended human bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred or through the recklessness of triumph, fighters wounded and writhing with pain, or the dying with the last rattle in their throat? Why did the whole Greek world exult in the fighting scenes of the Iliad? I am afraid, we do not understand them enough in "Greek fashion," and that we should even shudder, if for once we did understand them thus.” – Nietzsche, Homer’s Competition
My interpretation above of the Diomedes-Glaucus exchange is very pleasant, but I have left something out. The closing line of the famous encounter between Diomedes and Glaucus is this:
“…we two, then, will exchange armour, that all present may know of the old ties that subsist between us.” With these words they sprang from their chariots, grasped one another’s hands, and plighted friendship. But the son of Saturn made Glaucus take leave of his wits, for he exchanged golden armour for bronze, the worth of a hundred head of cattle for the worth of nine.
This final line is puzzling. After so noble an encounter, why would Homer not leave the men as equals, shaking hands? Why would he show Glaucus instead as a fool? Why would he include such a trivial and almost embarrassingly comical line? Without this last line, the entire exchange is one of noble friendship and understanding between warriors. With this line the beautiful interpretation is obliterated.
This line has long been a thorn in the side of scholars. Why did Homer include it? A variety of theories have been proposed, though rarely do they satisfy. However, I recently had the pleasure of reading two papers [1] [2] on the subject which reveal what this line truly points to: within the Homeric morality of the Iliad, Diomedes has to win.
When Diomedes learns of the familial connection between himself and Glaucus, his joy is heartfelt, as is proper for a Greek hero. Leaping from his chariot to shake Glaucus’ hand is an instinctive reaction, not the formal following of the rules of guest friendship. It is his great joy to share the battlefield with the grandson of Bellerophon. However, Homeric morality dictates that the two heroes meeting on the field of battle cannot be left in an equal state. In a confrontation between two Greek heroes, one must come away the victor.
In the course of their discussion about their lineage, it is made clear that Diomedes understands the importance of his past and his mythological history far better than Glaucus. Glaucus rashly states that generations are like the turning of the leaves, each no more important than the last, not realizing that his forefather Bellerophon’s fate will repeat with him. Fate and mythology mean something to the bronze age Greeks. Diomedes takes advantage of this failure to understand the importance of myth, and asserts that they should exchange gifts, as their forefathers did: “…Oeneus gave a [leather] belt rich with purple, and Bellerophon a double cup [made of gold]…” Diomedes invokes the very history and myth which Glaucus has failed to understand, and mimicking the exchange of their forefathers, he receives golden armor of great value and Glaucus receives bronze, worth far less, like the cup of gold and the leather belt. The irony of the situation is alluded to by Homer: calling Zeus the son of Saturn is a nod to Glaucus’ failure to understand the importance of his being grandson of Bellerophon. Later on, outside of the Iliad, Glaucus will be killed fighting over the body of Achilles; his hubris in his belief that he could capture the famous body from the best of the Achaeans mirrors that of his forefather Bellerophon, who thought he could ride Pegasus to Mount Olympos and take a seat among the Gods.
Thus the two heroes do not fight physically, but there is still a clear victor in their confrontation. Diomedes wins the battle of wits. He comes away the better warrior without recourse to strength of arms. Homers leaves these two heroes as noble friends; and yet, one must emerge as the superior hero. For the Greeks, someone has to win.
Competition requires a winner and loser. Had Diomedes not outsmarted Glaucus with his understanding of myth, it would have been unclear who the superior of the two warriors is. This is unacceptable for Homer, and thus that final confusing line. What appears initially to us as a beautiful and noble moment of understanding between two great warriors, a moment of common humanity and even love, is for the Greeks a moment of conquest, a cruel joke against Glaucus that shows Diomedes the better. What to us appears similar to that famous laying down of arms by soldiers in the First World War on Christmas day is in reality a contest in which one contestant is left unknowingly humiliated. Jealousy, the first Eris, drives man to healthy competition against his neighbour, impels him to strive in his work even for the perfection of the Gods; but Envy, the other Eris, drives man to cruelty, to obsession with revenge, towards delight in barbarity.
It is this violent obsession with competition, winners and losers that is characteristic of Greek ethics: it is the source of their immense vitality, the bloody handmaiden of all their greatness, but also their greatest weakness.
“So overloaded is that passion among the Greeks that it begins ever anew to rage against itself and to strike its teeth into its own flesh. This bloody jealousy of city against city, of party against party, this murderous greed of those little wars, the tiger-like triumph over the corpse of the slain enemy, in short, the incessant renewal of those Trojan scenes of struggle and horror, in the spectacle of which, as a genuine Hellene, Homer stands before us absorbed with delight- -whither does this naive barbarism of the Greek state point? What is its excuse before the tribunal of eternal justice? Proud and calm, the state steps before this tribunal and by the hand it leads the flower of blossoming womanhood: Greek society.” – Nietzsche, The Greek State
Render Unto Caesar
“Whatever your personal religious and political beliefs, it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions, and regardless of how much you believe times have changed or how bad you are at math you should still be able to observe that those are two separate lines.” – Edward Teach, Sadly, Porn
“In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” – Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
There is a reason Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols that we cannot relate to the Greeks as we can to the Romans. Ours is no Greek morality and cannot be. The Greeks in their innate cruelty and striving are alien to us. Greek myth is an orgy of insanity and murder and rape and incest and blood, blood poured again and again for the Gods, blood, like that of Hyacinthus, that flowers into stunning beauty.
What then of the Christian? What is the Christian response to the exchange of armor? Glaucus renders unto Diomedes his golden armor, and loses his honor; Christ renders unto Ceasar what he is owed, and gains all the world. I understand that even for free association this connection is a stretch, but bear with me.
The story goes like this:
Jesus is preaching in the temple, he’s telling parables, and the people are listening. The priests are angry about this, its their temple, what right has he to preach there, but they can’t do anything: the people are enraptured with Christ and his speech. The priests begin to plot.
“And the chief priests and the scribes the same hour sought to lay hands on him; and they feared the people: for they perceived that he had spoken this parable against them.
And they watched him, and sent forth spies, which should feign themselves just men, that they might take hold of his words, that so they might deliver him unto the power and authority of the governor.” Luke 20:19
Matthew, describing the same episode, writes that it was the Pharisees who sent their disciples to trip up Jesus. Luke tells the truth: it was the head priests of the temple, and they were sending spies. This is because the priests of the temple hate Jesus, they envy him, they see what he’s doing, they see the power he has gained and moreover the power they are losing. Luke specifically mentions (and Matthew leaves out) that they not only want to trip him up in front of the people, but they want to find a way to get him arrested. They would lay hands on him, beat him, and throw him out themselves but they fear the people who are listening with rapt attention.
So they send their lackeys to ask Jesus a question. They pick a culture war topic that they know will piss people off no matter his side and they demand that he takes a stance: do we pay the tax to Caesar, or not? If Jesus says no, they have grounds for his arrest, advocating for tax avoidance is illegal and dangerous to the Roman state. If he says yes, the people will hate him: Caesars poll tax was so despised by the Jews that it kicked off an armed rebellion. Jesus, enraged by the question, demands to see one of their coins.
"Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar's.
And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's.” Luke 20:24
The spies of the priests’ marvel at his answer and go away.
The standard interpretation of this parable is that its a statement on the separation of church and state, that is, Jesus says here that God approves of Christians paying tax to the government. How this interpretation is possible for anyone who actually read the parable is beyond me. Why would a statement about taxation send away the spies of the priests? “Wow, what an interesting statement of economic policy, Jesus! You sure have stumped us. Geez, I guess we’ll have to come back with something better.” They aren’t there to hear about taxation. They are there, explicitly, to ruin Jesus before the people. If this was a calm discussion of Christian tax policy, why would Jesus be so mad? He’s angry because the spies are there to trip him up, they are not asking a question “in good faith”. Luke has the spies specifically use the word “rightly”, and as always this is no accident:
“And they asked him, saying, Master, we know that thou sayest and teachest rightly, neither acceptest thou the person of any, but teachest the way of God truly…”
To steal as I always do from Sadly, Porn:
“The word “rightly” appears rarely in the Bible except in Luke, who uses it ironically. This is because Luke was a doctor and a Greek at a time when Greeks and doctors learned medicine from Plato, who wasn't actually a doctor but an ironist, or at least an esotericist. The word is a pointer: it is Socrates's verbal crutch, he says it to know-it-alls when they think the answer they gave should be obvious.”
The words of the spies are laden with irony, “rightly”, “teachest the way of God truly” – “Jesus we really do think you’re soooooo smart, there’s just one little thing we want to ask you about” and then a question with no correct answer, a question explicitly designed so that Jesus will fail, because the spies of the priests aren’t there to learn from Jesus, they are there to win. Remember that the priests are prepared to lay hands on Jesus, to kill him, but they can’t, the crowd will riot and besides they’ll only turn Jesus into a martyr if they kill him. Instead they elect to defeat Jesus in an impossible contest of wits. But it doesn’t end that way, the spies go away marvelling at Jesus’ words. “Marvel” is used specifically here. Luke uses it not because he wanted to show how Jesus epicly owned the spies in a facts and logic debate. He was showing that they were astonished, that they didn’t know how to take his answer at all, and more importantly Luke notes that they “could not take hold of his words before the people”, that is to say, that the people understood what had happened: Jesus saw exactly what the spies were doing and rejected the form of their question.
The temple priests don’t care what Jesus has to say, they don’t care about the souls of men, whether they believe Jesus is truly teaching the word of God is irrelevant to them. They aren’t angry because they think Jesus is a false prophet, or that he teaches wrongly. This is not a question of theology. It is a problem of power. The temple priests are filled with envy. They see Jesus enthralling the people, in their temple, usurping their priestly power, and they are filled with rage. They want him gone, who cares how, whether by the hatred of the people or by arrest. The envious don’t want what the other has, they want to deprive the other for their own satisfaction.
Note the form of the priests action: they do not go themselves to confront Jesus, a strategy which may have worked; they cannot act, action is impossible. They send their spies but not even the spies can act, all they can do is ask questions and hope that someone else will do the dirty work, be it the mob or the authorities through arrest. The priests claim they would kill him themselves if they could — but of course they come up with a reason that action is impossible. They cannot act.
Hence the priests choice of question, one intended to provoke some other omnipotent power to action. Hence Christs anger: he sees that their resentment and their envy is their true motivator. The priests are wasting his time. They attempt to engage him in debate, they attempt to bait him, but he refuses the question. Jesus doesn’t care about winning.
Over and over in the bible Jesus is put up to battles of wits, he is asked mean questions, leading questions, questions intended to win, “oh, Jesus, you are sooooo very intelligent, you teach the way truly, but—” and Jesus, again and again, rejects the form of the question. Unlike Diomedes, Christ need not win. He does not need to claim honor; when Christ is confronted there is no question for him of victory or defeat. Here then is the difference between Christian and Homeric ethics. Gone in Christ is the obsessive need to win. Gone in Christ is the evil Eris of envy which animated the cruel aspects of the Greek spirit. Like Socrates, Christ doesn’t care about winning, he doesn’t care about proving the other wrong. His work is to show not how stupid you are, not to own you in debate, but to show you that you are lying to yourself, over and over again, that the things you believe are your beliefs so that you don’t have to act, so you don’t have to be responsible for your life. Whos face is on the coin? Caesars. Thus render unto Caesar what is Caesars, and unto God what is Gods: stop asking questions intended to waste your own time, it is to God that you owe a tax, account for all your sins before everyone who depends on you and despair.
When the Pharisees three chapters earlier demand to know when the kingdom of God will come, Jesus snaps at them: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” The kingdom of God is within you. It is here and now in this life, it is up to you, it was always up to you, if not you then who? Wait for some other omnipotent entity to bring about the kingdom of God for you? You can see how well relying on others worked for the priests in their confrontation with Jesus: Christianity dominated world religion for the next two thousand years, and Pharisee now means hypocrite.
The standard criticism made by the Nietzschean against Christianity is that Christianity is a religion of excuses, of escape, of flight from life into an all-negating No. They aren’t wrong, Kierkegaard had so much to say on that topic that he published three books about it on the exact same day, besides the 20 or so others he wrote about the failures of Christendom. The Nietzschean critique is correct about Christendom; it is incorrect about Christ the man. For Christ the kingdom of God is not in heaven, not in a negating No, but here on earth within you. The kingdom of heaven is up to you. Before Pontius Pilate Christ is the foil of Socrates, and with Achilles Christ agrees that he would rather be a slave on earth than the king of the whole of the underworld. There is no contradiction.
We love the Greeks because they love life, love it feverishly, they strive for perfection, their vitality and strength is like nothing that has existed before or since, but we cannot return; the Homeric morality of delight in cruel victory is alien to the two thousand years of Christian blood that flows in our veins. We cannot truly embrace the bronze age. But what Christ preached came from the very same spirit that animated the Greeks to the heights of human excellence: you must act. You must change your life. The kingdom of heaven is within you, it can be manifested today, this very minute, your life is up to you, if only you can be bold enough to reach out and take it. It was always the case: the Greek-Christian synthesis is called Christianity.
As always thank you for writing. The way you pace yourself and allow for the reader to preempt the connections you are to make by allowing them to observe the story beforehand is something that is as instructive as it is endearing; you place confidence in your readers while allowing those who are unfamiliar to be included at the same starting point and to use their wits in the same step, it keeps even the familiar fresh. It also takes patience and reserve not to shock them with conclusions as quickly as possible, and makes the reader feel as mature as you would have to be in formatting it this way. It also fits the message of the essay, as you accommodate participation in your form, so you implore it in your content. Beyond writing however I'll think of how to apply these points to my own living and habits, which is the point of writing after all. Thank you again YW
It is true that you'll probably have a much more fulfilling life in trying to make your own life a perfect little slice of heaven for yourself, rather try and be an aggressive groyper, but the whole "the Homeric violence and gloryseeking is alien to us" is simply not true, many people are living will to power lifestyles even in the current day, and it's often the people you express a lot of hate and ascribe (falsely) a lot of misery to, since you see the world through the veil of cope. As you've correctly noted regarding the nature of conflict in the Iliad, I can assure you that they actually do think of you as fully human, while you only see them through the lens of political caricature fed to you by 30 year old hateful line cooks (no disrespect to line cooks but its important to note a failure of achievement here is not by political choice) who dwell in seething resentment and misery over not realizing their desires, even though it's true that they might cut your jugular. You got the world upside down. Think about it: anything but 4HL is unthinkable to you, and you are the "man of letters", i.e. written culture, you write substacks. Your reaction comes from the fear of the strange invading force that you fear would upend your sedentary lifestyle. You've never faced any real conflict, you've never even moved outside a 30 mile radius away from your high school, and will do anything to avoid doing so because you're afraid you won't be able to make friends who invite you to parties anywhere else, so this is why you think like that. You know some people just do whatever the fuck they think is cool, even if it doesn't make money, and maintain their culture by hanging out, not by writing substacks, and this drives you nuts. As ridiculous as it is, they *are* your pirates, and you are the farmer. Personally, I think you are so cringe because you've seen so few miracles. Christianity will probably not save you, but in my heart I do sincerely wish you a swift recovery, and hope that it does.
P.S. I wish you didn't block me on sight so I could fit less into one huge block of text, you get me? Creating throwaway accounts every time I remember about your existence and have thoughts I must express is low key very annoying! Perhaps then i would talk to you nice.