The Wes Cecil Podcast

Nietzsche is not just presenting a series of arguments, he is modelling a very different approach to thinking and understanding our world than we usually encounter. To conclude our read-along, I reflect on the structure of his arguments and how they are as, or even more, important than the actual content. In the end, like a poem, Nietzsche invites us to participate in the creation of our own understanding. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonu...

A reflection on the global structure of Late Capitalism encapsulated in Cheerios as an example that can help us understand the nature of the world we inhabit. I also cover the unanswerable question, “Why has 70 years of efficiency and progress made Cheerios so expensive” and the unspeakable word - “Deflation”. Hopefully having these small examples in our minds will help us to address the complexity and estrangement that assaults us everyday. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bo...

The final section finds Nietzsche in usual form attacking the notion of ‘levelling’ and ‘universal good’ and ‘Equality’. HIs driving force, following on Will to Power, is the pursuit of individual ideas that suit individuals and hence refute the drive towards universality or assumptions of ‘good’ or ‘true’. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on...

Okay, I couldn’t help myself. Keurig is such a perfect example of how this entire orientation towards the world is destructive of more or less all the greatness and joy in life that I pause here to reflect in greater detail on the specifics of the Keurig case. I also think the example of FitBit and similar devices renting to us the capacity to connect with our bodies - and hence of course alienating us from our bodies - is similarly bizarre and disturbing. For the record, somewhere between 15-30 BILLION k-cups type pods are thrown away every ye...

As long as we keep the values of Late Capitalism we will be trapped within and reproduce the problems associated with our current system. To reorient ourselves within our world we need to articulate for ourselves a new set of values. Two key elements is to resist the notion of money as a necessary arbiter of all things and to reevaluate our desire for haste. It is in large part our addiction to speed, haste, busyness and the attempt to live this way that opens us up to many of the problems we experience. Slowing down, doing less, and...

I pause for a moment to review the central concept for Nietzsche - the Will to Power - how it differs from the concept of will deployed by Schopenhauer and how it utterly reframes the debate around free-will and determinism (though most people don’t seem to notice). Hopefully, this provides a little more clarity and also suggests why it is both a crucial insight and pretty confusing all the same time.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain a...

Following on from the Unaskable Question, is the notion of how our health is intimately linked with our physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing. However, the logic of Late Capitalism, which we have been examining largely from the direction of money and economics, functions in precisely the same way when we look at our health. Unfortunately, but predictably, isolating people in stressful environments does not produce wellbeing nor is it actually being sought. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain...

Nietzsche reminds us that pain does not, in fact, correlate with truth. And while these chapters are a little confusing, he repeats his observation that all philosophy is derived from the philosopher’s autobiography - and in this case it is clearly Nietzsche expressing his sense of the world. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/Wes...

Musk's decision to absorb his failed Twitter company into his failing AI company which he is now folding into his cash positive satellite launch company is such a perfect example of Late Capitalism I couldn’t help but comment. Bizarrely, Musk denies he has a car company, or a telecommunications company, or a rocket building company. Why would a successful 19th century industrialist systematically deny the companies he’s built? Late Capitalism. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain acce...

We know money answereth all things and that as long as we get money, keep money, and have more money then everything will be fine . . . of course this is completely and demonstrably wrong, and yet, the power of the Late Capitalist ethos reinforces this idea relentlessly as it prevents any other value from intervening in the process. However, if actually stop and ask - what is the source of my wealth, my wellbeing, my overflowing - well that is a potentially revolutionary question within the Late Capitalist ethos. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your...

We arrive at perhaps the central theme Nietzsche has been building towards - the Will to Power. That life is not trying to survive but rather to thrive is the key argument he makes. He sees this as an extra-moral condition of existence because it is present in all living things - hence Beyond Good and Evil. That life force is motivating and shaping in every moment fundamentally alters the notion of a disinterested observer working within the framework of perfect reason to derive the Truth about the world.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get...

Unsurprisingly, Late Capitalist outlooks have largely colonized our interactions with jobs. Both the structure of employment and the way we think about jobs has shifted dramatically over the last 40 years. Worse, our general cynicism about our current employment environment is itself a sign of how pervasive late capitalist outlooks have impacted even how we imagine our lives might be.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hos...

Here Nietzsche critiques the whole notion that we ‘live in a simulation’ or that we live in a ‘hologram’ roughly 150 years before those concepts come into existence. In fact, however, he is really working against the Platonic tradition of perfect forms that haunted, and continues to haunt, the western concept of both the world and how we should, as ethical beings, respond to it.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, he's very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to peer discussion groups, bonus lectures, additional course materials an...

The structure of our contemporary societies promotes an increasingly powerful focus on isolated individuals as not just a model, but the model of a quality and ‘successful’ life. As isolated individuals we increasingly struggle to meet our basic needs by interacting with globalized and financialized systems that exploit us. The increase in loneliness, anxiety, suicide, and other mental health problems is a predictable and necessary outcome of an increasingly exploitative world in which individuals are pitted against corporations. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to cours...

Nietzsche attacks the central moral document of his time - The Sermon on the Mount! Nietzsche argues in favor of subtlety, nuance, and life-affirmation as opposed to clarity and moral judgement. This is one of the key defining sections that allows us to understand Nietzsche mental make up and core beliefs. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mor...

Just to make it absolutely clear how pervasive and singular the logic of Late Capitalism is, I present a brief reflection on the current events surrounding Greenland, Davos and global financial markets. I rarely comment on topical events, but the logic we have been discussing is so perfectly illustrated in recent statements by global leaders it just seemed to good to pass up without comment.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diarie...

The emotional sense of contempt for others and the concept of scarcity are relentlessly promoted and reinforced as a NECESSARY corollary to the Late Capitalist worldview. By holding both other people and all possible values in contempt, Late Capitalism undermines alternative outlooks. And the creation of scarcity is necessary for maximum extraction of value from any trade. Together they form a fundamental poison that undermines even the possibility of living in an abundant, respectful world. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, read...

Nietzsche reiterates his elitist ideals and focuses on the challenges of communication across one’s cultural assumptions. He points out the difficulties of being both misunderstood and outside even of the possibility of sympathy. All philosophy is autobiography indeed.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here are four examples rising from the very personal and small - gift cards - to the national and international difficulties facing governments trying to deal with the rising costs of retirement. The patterns we have been discussing are here exposed in, perhaps, excessive detail. However, I feel it is important to see the many manifestations of this logic before we move on to the larger philosophical implications for ourselves and our culture. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer...

Chapter II presents a different direction for Nietzsche to attack contemporary philosophical modes by emphasizing how the obsession with TRUTH has warped the outlook of most philosophers and led them to make dubious arguments but, more importantly for Nietzsche, to play-act as martyrs.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.