114 Lambs & Eagles: Nietzsche On Nobility

Nietzche's concept of Nobility is a set of traits that have one have a greater control of his reality. In this episode we break down the Master and Slave archetypes that are within us all, how they play out in society, and how to actively enable your own inner nobility.

Transcript

The Ruando podcast is an exploration of the unconscious and the game of life.

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So last week I turned 33 and I wasn't planning on doing anything initially,

I'm not party type but the night before I turned 33 I was hanging out with some buddies.

This one guy we hang with who is much younger than the rest of us,

He's actually one of my friends employees.

Good guy,

Maybe 10 years younger than me and when he came up that was my birthday he was like oh we gotta party,

We gotta go out,

We gotta celebrate,

Sketch rock,

Whatever and it's very much not my thing.

But then that night I was thinking well I only turned 33 once,

I only get one birthday a year,

It's symbolic of something,

Maybe I should do something and I thought well how do I want to enter my 33rd year,

Should I treat myself to something,

Should I sleep in,

Should I do something comforting and I was like no,

That's definitely not where I'm at,

That's definitely not how I want to enter this new stage of my life particularly regarding family and fatherhood and stuff like that.

So I was like well how do I want to set myself up for this next chapter and it was Taking Souls a la David Gargan's.

I wanted to do something that is actually in line with how I want to behave this next chapter of life.

So I got up a little bit before dawn,

I biked over to the mountain that is nearby,

I live in Chiang Mai and I ran up the mountain which is actually great,

It's easier on my knees than running on flat land.

It was interesting,

My girlfriend and I have been speaking about getting a dog these last couple of weeks.

As soon as I arrived on the mountain these three little puppies just ran down the mountain and just hopped in my lap and it seemed like oh it's a sign,

It's a sign from the universe,

These are my dogs,

I should take them all.

There's three of them,

A little bit more than I would want to keep.

Anyway,

I walked up the mountain,

These three dogs followed me,

They're with me,

We were like a little pack of four.

I could not run as fast as they could but it was fun going up the mountain.

I got up to the top of the mountain,

There's a temple there,

Did some journaling,

Did some pondering about life,

Thinking about my mortality,

All that fun stuff.

There's one dog that to be fair was probably the least interesting of the dogs,

The most beta of the dogs but this dog seemed like really,

At least in my head,

It really wanted me to take her home.

The other two dogs were kind of more rambunctious,

A little more alpha.

I just imagine that this third dog,

I'm sure they're all siblings but this third dog,

They're all puppies too,

This more beta dog probably didn't get as much food and get as much love.

So I just had this whole idea of like,

Oh,

This is kind of like the pathetic dog or the runt and it really needs me and maybe I should take it home because it really needs me and I was looking for a dog as kind of a sign and I came very close to doing that.

But then I realized I was journaling while I was pondering all this thinking on the page which is why I think journaling is such an important thing,

It clarifies your thoughts by putting them in a row,

In coherent sentences at least.

And I was like,

Wait a minute,

This is exactly my old pattern with women whereas if I'm with a woman who seems to fit something that I think,

Thought I asked for but not exactly but like they really need it.

I mean basically it was my Captain Sabo thing that almost came out in dog form.

So like,

All right,

Not today,

Not today old nice guy patterns,

I'm not falling for this one.

And that kind of led me down another journaling path of like,

Okay,

This is an old pattern that I've had in various many relationships and things that I haven't meant to do.

Actually if you caught my episode last spring with Dr.

Michael Pariser,

Author of No More Mr.

Nice Guy,

The Hero's Journey,

We kind of spent that episode analyzing me and this particular old nice guy pattern that I still had at least as of last year where when faced with a woman who was kind of in a pathetic place and really needed,

Seemed to need me,

That would kind of pull on my heartstrings and I would go into Captain Sabo.

Anyway,

That's a separate topic but this had me start to journal,

Okay,

What are the things that I know for sure at 33?

The things that I'm pretty sure I know,

Right?

Like I've spoken about this in some recent episodes of it's important for every person to have a divergent period of their life where they're open to all sorts of new ideas,

They're going to new locations,

They're speaking to people they wouldn't normally speak to,

They're breaking their old childhood patterns which were maybe instilled into them by their reference group or their parents or whatever and it's great to break all that,

Kind of enter like the fool archetype,

Kind of let all your patterns shatter and go explore whether physically or only in your mind,

Expose yourself to new things and like come up with new stuff.

It's like kind of the whole diamond theory of you spend some time branching out,

Branching out,

Branching out but at some point it's important especially if you want to mature,

Especially I'd say as a man but I'm sure applicable to women as well.

You pick,

You find out that you've,

Okay,

I've explored enough things,

The things I know about myself now or think I know about myself and it's time to like narrow things back in,

Hence the diamonds and so I started making this list.

I started a list like this when I was 30,

Another symbolic birthday and what I came up with,

It was specifically around this king archetype,

This entering father,

Preparing for fatherhood I should say and reducing the globalness idea of like bringing things down to like basically reducing my circle of thought and it's like converging instead of diverging,

Converging other things that I know to be true or the principles that I believe enough to be true that I'm willing to stop questioning them and start living my life with more certainty.

At some point you have to do that.

And I do want to also say I don't think it matters at what age this is.

I think in a recent episode I was like,

Oh,

You're supposed to branch out when you're young and then like converge when you're older.

If you spent your youth focused on one thing,

Let's say focused on making money and then you realize,

Oh shit,

I want to explore the world,

I think that's fine too.

Basically guys who get divorced,

They kind of enter a new diversion stage and it maps to our hormones which I'll speak to later.

Anyway,

I made this whole list of basically instead of doing this,

I will do that or I kind of had this like list of dichotomies and a lot of it had to do with my social behavior or just behavior in general.

And some of these,

This instead of that behaviors were not necessarily even like the old behavior was necessarily bad but there are certain behaviors like such as branching out and exploring new things that was maybe perfect for when I was in my 20s but not perfect for now.

And I had this whole list.

And I looked at this whole list and if there was one thing that separated the I want to do this now instead of that which is maybe an old behavior or old way of thinking or old belief system,

Whatever,

It kind of came down to a topic I've been meaning to speak about anyway which is Nietzsche and nobility.

Everything that I decided on this list of stuff of what I know at 33 that I want to do from now on kind of fell under the category of what Nietzsche would call master morality.

And basically everything that I decided I was not going to do anymore,

It was not something that was serving me anymore or maybe never was serving me,

Kind of fell under the category of what Nietzsche would call slave morality.

So that's what we're going to talk about today,

Master morality versus slave morality.

And these are charged terms obviously especially in modern context.

Speak masters and slaves,

People immediately think of race discussion or stuff like that.

That's not what we're talking about here.

I know a lot of writers who speak about Nietzsche and nobility just avoid these terms like Jack Donovan in his books use the terms noble and anti-noble to just avoid the master and slave stuff.

But I'm going to stick with Nietzsche's real or his original terms.

I hope that everyone listening can read the context of what I'm speaking about because ultimately we all have both master archetypes and slave archetypes.

I'm going to explain what these are in this episode.

And they just like all archetypes,

They've evolved for certain purposes in our ancestry,

In humanity.

They've become a part of the collective unconscious for a reason,

Survival purposes.

And therefore they're in us and they do drive our behavior in some ways.

We all have both of these archetypes.

I would argue though that the more you're living in the master archetype as an individual,

The happier you are.

And especially for men,

The master archetype is the archetype that leads to greater happiness,

Greater fulfillment,

Greater sense of personal power.

And the difference between these two things is what Nietzsche would call nobility.

It's the qualities of the master archetype.

In this episode,

We will speak on the biological and anthropological and I guess you could say sociological origins of these two archetypes.

Speaking from like the actual class system of masters and slaves,

This is just to get a sense of the origins of where these driving forces or these personality traits or these senses of morality come from.

This is not a comment on masters or slaves or that people should be one way or another or how society should necessarily be.

But I will say there are certain behaviors that a lot of people embody.

I think most people embody the slave archetype because our society has kind of been built around that and a lot of people not that you're literally enslaved.

If you're watching this or listening to this,

I assume you're a free person,

But a lot of us make choices based on slave morality that keep us enslaved in our minds or enslaved in some way that you're not living free as a person,

As an individual person.

So this quality of nobility according to Nietzsche is what allows that freedom,

Allows you to be more of a master of your reality,

Not a slave owner.

Just to define this,

Nobility according to Nietzsche,

At least my interpretation of this is the assumption that your reality is within your control and therefore your responsibility.

My buddy Chris,

We have a lot of great discussions on this stuff with,

Added this definition of this quality that the master archetype or the person embodying nobility does not have a separation between his will and his action.

You can actually act on the locus of control of your life is within you.

You can act on what you want.

You can make things happen.

You can make the dents in reality that you want.

You can shape your world to be what you want.

There's someone lacking nobility,

Someone who's deep in their slave archetype has the general baseline assumption that their reality,

Their wellbeing is not within their control.

There's something external that dictates their fate.

This idea of the master,

But as I said,

Even if you're not a literal slave,

Most of us,

Many people in society embody the slave archetype assuming there's something outside of them that dictates whether they're happy or not.

So let me just make sure I didn't miss anything in this definition.

Even though we don't have literal masters,

Many of us have created a,

Play out this master slave dynamic in a not empowering way.

And actually I'll say it's tied to many other topics that we've spoken about.

This whole idea of nice guy syndrome,

The whole beta male thing or this,

I assume you know what nice guy syndrome is.

Nice guy syndrome is essentially an evolution off of slave morality.

In fact,

In one sense you could say that slave morality is kind of like the precursor or has laid the foundation for nice guy syndrome.

Slave morality assumes that you have to do things for other people outside of you who dictate your fate.

So like nice guys assume,

Nice guys assume that if I make myself harmless enough,

Women will like me or people will like me cause like anybody who's capable of harm,

Anyone who has power is obviously bad.

Like that's kind of the slave morality,

It's one of the slave morality ideas.

Of course we know that's not true.

In terms of sexual dynamics,

No one's really attracted to the nice guy even though you think,

Okay,

You might think he's nice.

No one respects the nice guy because of the fact that he's harmless.

So in embodying nobility,

We don't want to be harmless.

I just want to reiterate again,

This is an important point.

We all have both archetypes and it's not,

Towards the end of this episode I'll speak why it's important to have both.

If you were to somehow completely delete your slave archetype,

That's not necessarily a good thing either.

The slave archetype is the drive to be accepted,

The drive to be a part of a homogenous group,

Which obviously has negative connotations or negative effects,

But you don't want to eradicate that completely.

But I will say,

And I'll just nail this one before we jump in,

All masculine development centers around embodying nobility.

And I'll go as far to say,

I was thinking about this as I was preparing for this episode.

Basically I think every prescription,

Every suggestion I've ever given men on this podcast falls under the category of nobility.

And everything that I've argued against,

Like nice guy's behaviors or whatever,

Kind of falls under the category of slave morality,

Or at least can be justified by slave morality.

So this episode we're going to have three parts.

We'll speak briefly on the biological and anthropological origins of these archetypes,

Just so we get a sense of why these dual moralities exist in our consciousness today.

We're going to switch to the second part,

We're going to speak about the archetypal qualities,

Like what actually goes on in our unconscious,

In our minds,

And the differences between embodying these two sets of characteristics.

And finally we'll speak about practical application and how to actually embody nobility in your real life.

I'm not saying that we all go out and become slaveholders,

I'm saying that we can embody these traits in our daily lives and how we behave and hold ourselves to live in a noble way and have control over our reality and feel better in our lives.

Nietzsche often synonymizes nobility with happiness,

And I would agree,

Especially for men.

I'll add one thing at the end,

Because as we speak about this,

This could be a controversial episode depending on your political leanings,

Or if you're deep in nice guy syndrome,

You might feel upset when you listen to my nice guy syndrome episodes.

Depending on where you're at,

Some of it might feel harsh.

Same thing in this episode,

It could be controversial,

Definitely if you lean in that direction politically.

I'm going to try to avoid politics or political commentary,

But this could feel like a controversial episode mainly because a lot of what we would call nobility seems like selfishness.

And actually in many ways it is.

In fact,

Anybody fighting against their nice guy syndrome or anybody just developing better boundaries,

There is an argument against both of those things,

Which is,

It seems like you're being selfish.

When someone has good boundaries,

You're like,

It's easy to criticize them.

Like,

Oh,

This person who says that I have good boundaries,

They're just being selfish.

Or this person who's trying to not be a nice guy,

He's kind of just being a douchebag now.

That's not the point,

But it can seem that way.

And actually Nietzsche would argue that this idea that selfishness is necessarily bad comes purely from slave morality.

Once upon a time before the rise of slave morality,

Which kind of goes,

I mean,

It became really prominent with the rise of monotheism,

Particularly Christianity.

Prior to that,

Selfishness wasn't necessarily seen as a bad thing.

It's kind of a recent ethic that selfishness is bad.

Anyway,

We're going to speak about that.

I'm going to share one key on what prevents you from being an asshole while embodying nobility.

Before we jump in,

I don't really have any big announcements.

If you're watching the video,

You may notice that I did finally upgrade my background.

We have the black sound panels.

We're back in black.

I do need to straighten them out,

But neither here nor there.

That's not really an announcement.

Anyway,

Jumping in.

First is the origins in biology.

All of our behaviors originally come from gene competition.

The replicating matter that makes up our DNA has a tendency to replicate natural selection.

I'm sure you're familiar with many episodes running through this.

As life evolves,

We'll just skip ahead all the way to mammals.

Mammals organize,

And birds and some other creatures,

Many different creatures,

Even lobsters,

As Jordan Peterson likes to share,

Fall into dominance hierarchies.

Dominance hierarchies determine the order of resource distribution,

Which includes food in species,

Whether it's male-male competition.

The other resource is wombs,

Sex,

Eggs,

Another scarce resource.

For preconscious beings,

For non-human animals,

Obviously they don't have a sense of morality.

Morality is a sapient quality.

This idea of good in quotes is anything that promotes survival.

Anything that's bad is anything that threatens survival.

So obviously,

Lobsters,

Mammals,

Orangutans,

Birds,

They don't have a sense of morality,

But they do have certain tendencies of what feels good and what feels bad.

Typically anything that's harming you or harming your offspring,

Preventing your genes from passing on,

It just feels bad.

We've evolved that way.

Any animal that evolved to feel good about smashing its head against the wall probably didn't live very long.

Those genes did not pass on.

Anything that promoted survival of yourself and your offspring felt good.

That passed on and those became the prominent behaviors in the gene pool.

So one of the things,

Especially for males,

That promotes survival is,

Especially with mammals and birds as well,

Species where there's a lot of male-male competition rather than purely sperm competition,

Is its willingness and ability to fight.

The non-bendence hierarchy in most mammal species is determined by male-male competition.

So an extreme would be two gorillas fighting over who gets the harem of females or two elephant seals or whatever.

This is largely driven by hormones,

Steroid hormones being testosterone and cortisol.

A steroid hormone is a hormone that affects your entire body.

Steroid hormones can typically permeate cell walls.

They affect the structures of your body.

As we know in sports,

Steroid hormones can give a huge boost,

Particularly testosterone.

Anabolic steroids can give a huge boost to the growth of muscle and stuff.

There's catabolic hormones like cortisol.

Anabolic is building up.

Catabolic is breaking down.

These two hormones,

Testosterone and cortisol,

Are kind of the hormones of winners and losers.

I've spoken about this in other episodes but I'll briefly recap the winner effect.

When someone enters competitions,

It's true for humans too,

Let's say two gorillas or two rams butting heads,

One wins,

One loses.

The winner gets a boost in testosterone.

It's known as the winner effect.

This is why if you've competed in things and you win,

It feels good.

Even if you're playing a board game,

Even if it's something that obviously doesn't really matter,

Or even if you're watching sports and you're rooting for one team and your team wins,

You get a boost of testosterone and dopamine.

Your body also produces more androgen receptors in response to that testosterone so you feel better the next time you win.

You feel even more interested in winning,

More willing and able to fight.

Testosterone also gives you a strength boost.

This makes sense in the wild because if you just had a male-male competition,

Let's say you're a ram,

You just defeated one challenger,

You're probably going to get another challenger.

This boost in testosterone also makes you more horny so you should take advantage of your win,

Mate as much as you can and prepare for the next battle,

Whatever time frame that is.

The loser experiences what's known as the loser effect.

His testosterone drops,

Making him feel less strong and less willing to battle which makes sense if you've already lost to a stronger competitor.

There's no sense in fighting more.

You're best off for your own survival,

Retreating somewhere else,

Healing,

Maybe competing again in the future but certainly right after you lose,

You should not want to compete again.

If you just lost some sort of battle,

You feel bad.

Even playing a board game which maybe obviously you shouldn't take those things too seriously but it feels good to win,

It doesn't feel good to lose.

We all know this.

Depending on the type of loss,

Your body will also produce a lot of cortisol,

Cortisol being a catabolic steroid,

The stress hormone to get you away just in case you're still in danger,

Get you away from the predator,

Get you away from the competitor who just defeated you.

Cortisol is only supposed to be in our bodies for a short period of time to aid with inflammation,

To get us away,

To not be interested in risk when our cortisol levels are high,

We become more risk averse.

It's doing this for the sake of preservation and testosterone and cortisol as I mentioned in the winter effect episodes,

They have the same precursor hormone,

DHEA.

So if your body is producing a lot of cortisol,

It's actually using up the raw material that you would make testosterone which is why if you lose a lot,

You actually feel less manly when you win,

You do feel manly.

This has been shown and we all know this,

Right?

Most of us have experienced something like this anecdotally that supports this probably.

So catabolic steroids like cortisol depletes our long-term stores of energy for the sake of immediate survival whereas testosterone builds things up.

Testosterone allows us to breed better,

Cortisol will deplete our reproductive system,

Deplete certain energy systems for the sake of getting us away and surviving.

If a guy or a person is producing a lot of cortisol over a long period of time as a lot of people do due to their stressful jobs for instance,

The stressful jobs where they do not control their fates as most corporate jobs are,

You're basically it's kind of like you're running for a predator nonstop,

Right?

Our bodies aren't built for that because in the wild if you're running from a predator,

You either get away and you're safe and you can switch back to producing testosterone and not producing cortisol,

Chilling out,

Rebuilding or you get eaten,

Right?

Which is why the body is willing to sacrifice everything else to get away because it doesn't matter if you have any other stores of energy if you just got eaten.

But a lot of people as I just mentioned produce cortisol way longer than they're supposed to,

Way longer than an immediate threat and this causes low sex drive,

This causes feeling shitty.

I mean we all know the effects of long-term stress.

Now one of the things that cause cortisol release is uncertainty or the perception that you do not control your situation.

And in the book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf where some of this information is coming from,

He shares all these experiments about how if you put mice in a situation where they don't have control over their environments,

Eventually they'll stop acting.

Being stressed,

They'll stop like frantically looking around,

Eventually they'll chill out,

You don't stay in that state for long but their body will still produce cortisol.

It's like their pre-aware self,

Their pre-behavioral self is still aware that it's in a bad situation,

Is still depleting its ability to produce testosterone for instance.

This is all to say that there's a hormonal basis to the dominance hierarchy,

It's something that's preconscious.

Skipping ahead through our evolutionary span into humans,

Into the anthropological side.

Social humans,

We're also mammals,

We do form dominance hierarchies but we take it a step further.

We're a particularly social species and in the Paleolithic era,

The human tribes were able to work collectively,

They stayed beneath Dunbar's number,

They were smaller than 150 people in a tribe,

They were connecting based on limbic bonds,

That sense of belonging.

In this era,

We're still pretty close to our preconscious ancestors,

Our animal ancestors,

Non-human ancestors where we can infer from the Paleolithic consciousness,

The caveman's consciousness good and bad while now we're socially enforced,

We're still based on survival.

We do know that our Paleolithic ancestors did have sense of culture,

They did make art,

They were communicating with some language but still their senses of morality,

What was good was what promoted survival,

Maybe group survival,

Certain traits were socially reinforced is good because they helped the group survival,

Certain traits were now socially reinforced is bad because they harmed group survival.

The survival traits,

Let's say for men but really for all beings,

Strength and courage,

The willingness to serve the tribe and do hard things and the ability to serve the tribe were universally good,

Especially for males because when the women were pregnant,

The responsibility of protecting and providing would fall on those with more muscle who didn't get pregnant which were the males.

As humans continue to evolve,

Human society evolved into the Neolithic era,

We started planting stuff,

This allowed settlements to grow beyond 150,

We no longer were connecting just limbically,

We had to connect via mythology as Harari speaks about in Sapiens and from here onwards into the Bronze Age and as civilization progressed,

We do see the development of some sort of class system which is kind of a more human take on the dominance hierarchy.

With preconscious animals,

If you observe dogs,

The dominance hierarchy is basically,

I mean as we speak about with chickens,

There's a pecking order,

Just an order of who dominates whom.

In a human society,

This dominance hierarchy just like adds dimensions that become more complex with how different classes should behave and in general,

As we can see certainly by the Bronze Age,

There's at least two classes of nobles and peasants.

One of the origins of these two basic classes was that as settlements developed wealth which only was able to happen once they became agrarian or agricultural rather,

Some tribes,

Let's say the typical Vikings or barbarians or whatever,

Would swoop in,

Would conquer the people because Vikings focused on warfare whereas maybe some other say Northern European group focused on building wealth.

The Vikings would come in and conquer.

The conquerors would become the noble class because they controlled everything through force.

And the conquered people which probably had their own ability,

They had their own chief at one point,

They were all subjugated to a lower class of laborers.

So you had these conquerors who were powerful,

Were mighty,

They were the ones with the military force and they basically pimped out this lower class,

The conquered people who became peasants who now had to serve their masters by providing their wealth.

And this is where we had the split because prior to this merging of two different groups into one where one becomes the noble class and one becomes the subjugated class,

Everyone lived on this preconscious idea of good and bad which is good is what's good for our survival,

Bad is what's bad for our survival.

The conquerors were still able to maintain this type of morality whereas the conquered people no longer were free.

They no longer interface directly with nature the way the conquering people or the preconquered people behaved.

Their well-being was not directly in relation to nature or reality.

Their well-being was determined by the conquered people's desires.

So that they no longer directly interface with the world,

They interface with the world through their masters.

Imagine like in pure slavery obviously the slave isn't free to do his own things or make decisions for his own well-being.

His decisions or his well-being is kind of determined by what the master decides.

This is what we see once we had conquered tribes.

They had a new morality which is essentially what we can call slave morality where since they no longer directly interface with nature,

Their good and bad no longer applies.

What's good for their survival is kind of determined by what the master sets.

It's kind of like instead of having like an instinctual or natural reality or instead of being able to follow their instincts on what good and bad is based on how animals evolved to seek survival and avoid death.

When enslaved,

They had to enter the kind of this artificial reality where instead of good and bad in the way that animals see it or animals on some level perceive it,

They had this new definition of good which is good is whatever allows the master to treat me well or allows the master to give me some sort of positive experience.

Evil is now anything that causes the master to harm me or causes harm to me.

So instead of to the conquerors,

Good typically was strong and bad was weak.

Strong men promote survival,

Weak men reduce our chances of survival.

From the slave's perspective,

Good became harmless.

Good actually became weak.

It became reverse and evil became anyone with the capacity to harm me.

You can see there's a split.

This split in moralities,

Split in definitions and actually kind of this flip of what the definition of a good is and we can see that based on slave morality for the same survival reasons,

A slave would,

Most people in a slave situation,

Most slaves had a better chance of surviving by becoming weaker and meeker and more harmless and anything that made them more mediocre,

Made them less threatening became what the definition of being a good man was.

So you see this switch and we can see like maybe this perhaps is the origin of nice guy syndrome and where there's this idea that if I become harmless and not threatening and completely average and not spectacular in a way that no one even considers me,

That's my way to get through the world.

So slave morality sees that a good man is harmless and we can see because of the fact that it is now a divergence from nature,

This is one of the reasons why women are not attracted to nice guys.

If we roll things back into like our animalistic instincts,

Which no matter what our culture puts on us,

Our instincts are still determined by our biological evolution.

Even in a world completely dominated by the assumptions of slave morality,

Women are still attracted to men who don't embody that.

Women are still attracted to strong men because of a biology,

Because of sexy son hypothesis.

On an instinctual level,

No woman wants to procreate with a weak man because even though he's harmless and will perhaps survive under the master,

The woman is more attracted to the master.

A weak man is going to have weak sons.

A weak son in a free sexual marketplace will not attract mates,

So then her genetic line will end,

Which is why women are not attracted to nice guys.

It's not a good genetic bet to spend your egg on a guy who's a slave or who embodies slave characteristics.

So here we can move on to the archetypal side or psychological side because everything I just said so far was just to show the origins of why master morality and slave morality,

What they are and why they exist in our collective unconsciousness.

I just want to reiterate,

We all have both archetypes.

In fact,

If you go through your genetic line,

Go way back or maybe not so far back depending on your lineage,

You probably have both literal masters and literal slaves in your genetic line.

I did the 23andMe thing a couple of years ago and my mom's side of the family is mostly Filipino genes but there's a little bit of European,

Which is probably the conquistadors who came into the Philippines with Marco Polo and perhaps raped some of my great,

Great,

Great ancestors.

So I have a little bit of both.

We all have a little bit of both.

In fact,

Most peoples,

If you look at say England for instance,

The noble class and the peasant class were basically formed by conquering peoples.

When the conqueror came in,

His people became the noble class.

Everyone who perhaps used to be,

I'm forgetting the king who was conquered,

His people became subjugated,

They became the peasant class.

English people have a little bit of both,

Probably,

Right?

There's lots of mixing.

So we have these both in our genetic lines.

We have this both in our collective unconsciousness because both of these archetypes have influenced how society has developed.

In the recent century,

There's been like a swing towards more slave morality,

Which has not been a bad thing as we'll speak about.

Mass morality has been,

Imperialism has been an example of like extreme mass morality,

Like our peoples are better and other peoples are not worth it.

They're there to serve us.

Obviously that's led to negative things.

There were plenty of slave revolts,

Including say the American Revolution was American.

The American colonies were an enslaved people to a sense.

They were in the slave role.

They fought back.

Anyway,

This is all to say that we have both in ourselves and this is not to say that,

Anyway,

I'm not trying to make a sociological argument.

I am trying to make a psychological argument that you as an individual,

All of us,

Will be a lot happier embodying nobility rather than acting as slaves essentially.

Just to redefine this again,

Nobility or the master morality is always the more fulfilling expression.

The more you can express nobility,

The happier,

More fulfilled you are.

The definition as far as what we care about here is that nobility assumes responsibility and therefore control of your reality.

If you're assuming that the locus of your well-being is outside of yourself,

If you're assuming that someone else determines your fate,

This is obviously a very disempowering way to live and that is slave morality.

So I'm going to run through a little bit here some of the differences in the expressions of master morality and slave morality.

The one political bit I'll share,

So on a sociopolitical perspective,

Master morality,

A lot of the things that determine good for someone in a master role or master archetype is conservation of status or the increase of power.

The master is still free or someone who's not enslaved is still free to compete for top dog.

So if you look at,

Let's say,

Medieval history,

Like in the feudal times and feudal Europe,

That was kind of an extreme of master morality where every lord had dominion over his own feudal lands and they all believed in and they were all able to compete for higher status,

Whereas obviously the slave is not free to compete.

The slave is just hoping to survive being at the bottom of the pyramid or not even within the pyramid.

They're not even technically in the dominance hierarchy of a given society.

So we can see,

Perhaps some people consider this controversial,

But this is the origin of conservative politics and liberal politics.

Conservative politics wants to conserve status because if you are in the ruling class or the privileged class,

If you will,

You want to do things,

You want to enact policies or you want to enact laws or you want to live by ethics that conserve your status,

Which makes sense.

If your family is in power,

You want to keep your family in power.

So where we see in conservative politics,

Even though this is not necessarily true today,

Like there's plenty of poor people who vote Republican,

There's plenty of rich people who follow liberal politics,

Conservative politics still follow of revering tradition and autonomy.

They want small governments,

They want free markets,

They revere the people that came before them.

American Republicans all revere Ronald Reagan.

They like looking back and praising the champions of the past,

Which comes from a time where your people,

Your family was a conquering family,

The conquering people,

And you want to ensure that everyone knows that,

Like,

Oh,

My great grandfather conquered these lands and that's why I deserve to be king or Duke of this land or whatever.

Whereas on the slave side,

Or I should say,

I mean,

I don't mean to connect slavery with liberal politics,

But it does make sense.

Poor people or poor,

Less privileged people tend to lean left or vote liberal because if you are in the subjugated class,

Whether literally or figuratively,

Anything new is better.

You don't care so much about tradition because tradition is what's led you to be in the more impoverished state.

So liberals seek progress.

They are pro-assistance.

Anything that's new is better because if you're in a shitty state,

Then you just want change,

Right?

Liberals want change,

Progression.

Conservatives distrust foreigners and they want to preserve resources and keep things internal just like in feudal Europe.

It was actually seen as a bad thing to trade because if you needed to trade outside of your estate,

It meant that you weren't able to produce everything you needed and that was seen as a bad thing in feudal Europe.

Whereas now,

The world is a lot more global,

A country is seen as good if they're able to trade a lot,

Right?

There's been a switch towards left-leaning,

Which makes sense if you're in the commoners' class and the working man's class.

Again,

Anything new is probably going to be an improvement.

Finally,

In a financial level,

Fiscal level,

Conservatives like to do anything that preserves wealth,

So low taxes.

They want to reward competition,

Free markets.

Whereas liberals tend to want to distribute wealth because they see it as like,

Oh,

We're all the common people,

We need to make things more fair.

They're seeking equality and they're often seeking relief,

Let's say,

From the government because there's this assumption of life is suffering.

The Buddhist phrase is kind of from a slave archetype perspective,

Right?

Life is only suffering if you're a slave,

Right?

If you're a king,

It's kind of hard to argue that life is suffering.

Perhaps it is on some spiritual level still.

But these are the origins of these two political sides.

I just want to say,

Even though I'm speaking on behalf of nobility,

I do lean left on most issues.

I don't think all of this is good,

Even though,

Anyway,

This is just illustrating,

Right?

So now we switch to,

Let's say,

From a purely master archetype or the noble view of things,

What is the best way to spend your time?

What's a master's pastime?

And I think Joe Rogan is a great example of this.

He's constantly saying,

Do hard things,

Cock your inner bitch.

And if you look at,

Say,

A guy like that or anyone who resonates with that kind of thing,

Like a David Goggins or any of us,

If you're listening to this podcast,

Maybe you as well.

The best thing you could do with your time is something challenging that you chose yourself,

Right?

And I think this is especially true for men.

Obviously,

There is a dopamine release and there's pleasure from doing easy things like playing video games or sitting on your ass or watching porn or binging on Netflix.

There is,

Of course,

Everyone finds pleasure in that because we have a slave archetype too.

But there's something extra fulfilling or long-term fulfilling about doing something kind of the opposite of,

Say,

Running up a hill on your birthday before dawn instead of sleeping in,

Right?

There's something that feels like archetypally masculine and fulfilling on some level.

I was tempted,

Honestly,

To sleep in on my birthday.

It's not like I never sleep in because we also have that comfort seeking too.

And if you look at someone who has total freedom in their work versus someone who is more enslaved in their work,

What do totally free entrepreneurs,

I mean,

I should say,

Someone who's like totally free to do whatever they want,

What do they typically do with their time that is fulfilling?

They take on a challenge.

You think,

Let's say,

Joe Rogan goes out and hunting with his buddies,

Whereas someone who's like enslaved by a job,

Their ultimate pastime might be doing nothing,

Right?

Going on vacation,

Sitting on the beach,

Sipping Mai Tais,

Doing nothing,

Right?

It's not to say that comfort is bad,

But that is satisfying more of the slave archetype than master archetype.

Because if you have total freedom,

You don't need to find relief from anything,

Right?

If you're the king of the land and everyone's providing you with wealth,

You could go out and choose to go hunting.

You go out and choose to go jousting or fighting your friends for fun.

You go out on battles for the sake of glory,

Whereas the peasant wants any opportunity to have relief.

You know,

Like the whole core of liberalism,

Let's say,

Is that there's an assumption that you're not free,

So you're seeking liberality,

You're seeking freedom.

Whereas if you're assuming you're free,

You kind of just want to,

Well,

Anyway,

Conservativeness is conserving your wealth,

Conserving your power.

Because the noble assumes,

The nobility assumes that you have agency.

The slave morality assumes that you're not free,

So you're seeking freedom,

You're seeking relief from life,

Whereas the noble is excited to get to do things,

Right?

Which brings us to our next thing about the perception of adversaries,

Which brings us to a very key point with Nietzsche nobility,

Which is resentment,

Relates to resentment.

Let's start with the noble.

The noble,

And this is something that Nietzsche shares in one of his essays in Genealogy and Morality,

Only a noble can really respect,

Honor,

And love his adversary,

Right?

Because the master needs other masters to do battle with.

They need other masters to be a worthy adversary so they can ensure their own quality of strength,

Honor,

And courage,

Right?

The master respects his adversary and loves his adversary in the heat of battle.

I mean,

You can see this in MMA a lot where like two really,

I mean,

Fighting is a noble quality,

Choosing to fight is a noble quality.

Even when there's a lot of beef between two fighters,

A lot of shit talkers,

They usually hug afterwards,

You know,

And they say,

It's all respect,

All love because of the fact that they fought.

Like they respect each other because they just beat each other up,

Right?

And because of the master,

Because the master needs that,

He loves his adversary.

Because since the slave can't really compete,

Like they don't have the competence to,

They don't have the ability,

They don't have the strength to actually compete in the dominance hierarchy,

They resent power,

They resent competence,

They resent anybody who has ability.

And we can see this in the collective culture these days where there's this huge attack on anyone with power.

Like this assumption that if you have power,

You're bad because you must have done something bad to gain that power,

Which maybe,

Honestly,

Maybe is true on some level,

Even if you go all the way back,

The noble classes,

The Queen of England even is the Queen of England because her ancestors fucked people up centuries ago or whatever that was.

I don't know,

I don't know Queen Elizabeth's lineage exactly,

But that means that that is not,

That's not a false belief from the commoner's perspective of like,

Oh,

Privileged people must have done something harsh to us,

Could be true.

But in the immediate sense,

In like your individual sense,

Which is what we really care about,

This resentment is not empowering.

I spoke about this in many episodes,

Including the magician archetype episode,

Which is if you're resentful at someone,

You're giving them power.

In order to be resentful at someone,

In order to blame someone,

In order to complain about something,

You have to believe in the assumption that that thing has control over reality.

And obviously,

None of us can control everything,

Right?

We're not like,

You can't just snap our fingers and make things happen.

But if you're feeding resentful feelings,

You're reinforcing this belief that your reality is out of your control.

You're reinforcing the feeling of being enslaved,

Right,

Which is not good for anybody.

And if you Google the French word,

Resumptant,

The two S's,

The first thing that usually pops up,

At least on Google,

Is the Nietzschean sense of the word,

Right?

If you Google this or anybody speaking about this,

It's like,

Resumptant is not exactly the same thing as resentment.

The way Nietzsche uses it,

It's like a hatred or blame of something external that causes your hardship.

But I would actually argue that,

At least in the way I say,

Resentment is spoken about in something like the 12-step program,

Which is a very practical application of monotheism in my view.

They actually kind of remind people to not be resentful.

And actually,

Some of my friends who are in recovery have said to me,

All addiction is caused by resentment,

Right?

That's what,

Resentment is what causes you to feel isolated.

The isolation is what causes you to abuse some substance of choice or activity of choice.

Because actually,

The slave,

Of course,

Resents the master for their fate,

But the master doesn't necessarily resent the slave,

Right?

And Nietzsche uses an animal example with eagles and lambs,

I believe it's eagles,

Some bird of prey and lambs,

Some bird that eats lambs,

I think it was eagles.

And he was saying that lambs obviously hate the eagles,

Right?

The lambs think that the eagles choose to be eagles and they choose to be carnivores and they're terrorizing this because they're evil,

They choose this,

Right?

So the eagles don't hate the lambs because the eagles are not threatened by the lambs at all.

The eagles actually love the lambs.

The eagles are like,

Oh,

Lambs are super tasty,

I love lambs,

Right?

And they like that.

And you can even see this in The Lion King where Simba and Mufasa are speaking about antelopes,

And I forget the pre-dialogue,

But Simba says something like,

Well,

Don't we eat the antelopes?

Speaking about respect.

And Mufasa says the famous line,

When we die,

Our bodies become the grass and the antelopes eat the grass and therefore is the circle of life.

Like the noble predator loves and respects even the peasants,

Right?

Doesn't mean that he wants to lift all the peasants up necessarily because he just accepts the reality of things.

We're going to speak about this at the end with Nablus Oblish.

Benicia actually says,

You know,

One thing I forgot to mention in the origins is that one of the major rises or the,

You know,

One thing that has allowed the prominence of slave morality is monotheism.

I actually spent a whole episode,

I mean,

This idea of Nietzsche and nobility is a major theme in my History of Masculinity series,

Which is coming out later this year.

But you know,

This dual morality has affected warfare and perceptions of masculinity,

Which is what I talk about a lot.

But one of the huge advancements of slave morality into the collective consciousness came with the rise of monotheism,

Specifically Christianity.

Because if you look at,

Let's say the Old Testament versus the New Testament,

The Old Testament is very mass morality,

Right?

The whole fire and brimstone stuff.

A lot of the Old Testament stories seem like really harsh,

Like,

Man,

God is an asshole,

Right?

But it's kind of reflecting the nature of nature,

Whereas the strong are typically rewarded,

Right?

Whereas in the New Testament,

You have all this stuff kind of like,

It's kind of more from a slave's perspective,

And Jesus was obviously a peasant.

A lot of his lines like,

Turn the other cheek or like the idea of like the meek will inherit the earth,

Or a rich man can get into heaven.

I forget the line,

But more easily than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

I botched that,

But you know what I'm talking about,

Right?

Like this idea that wealth and power is bad,

Whereas like suffering is good.

This comes from,

This is supported by slave morality,

Right?

This idea that everyone wants to see themselves as the good guy.

So the noble sees himself as like,

I'm good because I'm strong.

We are good because we're strong.

The slave has to flip that around of like,

We are good morally because we're not strong,

Right?

And then slave morality rewards weakness or mediocrity because of this.

So if you look at stuff like,

Even like cancel culture,

This hate of people in power,

This is slave morality coming out.

And Nietzsche says,

I brought monotheism because Nietzsche says that priests are the most hateful people,

People who choose to be priests.

This is his words.

I'm not saying this is what I believe because they are adding to this flip of definitions that strong means evil,

Which is kind of what Christianity did during its rise.

Ironically,

Once Christianity became a prominent force in Europe,

It started to embody mass morality as like enacting the crusades,

Which is essentially a master morality idea of like,

Oh,

Our religion is the best religion.

Let's conquer everyone else,

Which is ironic given that Christianity came from this idea of respecting all people and loving your brother and loving your enemy,

Even all that stuff.

Finally,

Well,

Two last things.

Going to selfishness and Nietzsche speaks about this in the beginning of his book,

The Genealogy of Morality,

With egotism.

Now most of us view having an ego as a bad thing.

Slave morality is kind of incepted into us that serving yourself or serving your people must be bad.

I spoke about Cersei Lannister as one of my favorite villains,

Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones,

Because she is pretty much like the most evil character.

She does some pretty nasty things,

But she does this for her family.

She does this in service of her line.

She might do this in an overly cruel way,

Not necessarily in a noble way.

This is a tangent I need to go on necessarily,

But the master seeks to glorify himself and promote his lineage and genetic line.

The slave seeks mediocrity because it's this idea that we all need to be equally low.

This is one of the criticisms of socialism of like,

Yes,

We can all be equal,

But we'll all be poor together.

That's not necessarily good.

Whereas the conservative argument against it,

Which is not necessarily true in action or not always true.

Whereas if you allow for competition,

You allow for stratification,

Yes,

There's going to be people who have more than others,

But that competition allows everyone to have more.

So even in a super stratified society,

The poorest people are still richer than the equals of a purely socialist society.

I'm not saying that's true or not.

Obviously there's a lot more to it than just saying that.

So finally bring this back to like our individual expression and what I really care about is truth.

The master is always high fidelity.

The master is also true with his word.

That's always been a noble ethic to be true to your word and honorable.

Mainly because if you are really the master of your domain,

If you really are the conquering people,

There's no reason to lie.

You're in control of everything.

So why would you ever waste your energy deceiving people,

Right?

Whereas if you're in a more slavish role where you're subject to other people's whims,

Now you have a real incentive to lie and be manipulative and be fake and pretend to be meek or bow when you don't really care to.

Like you might show fake shows of respect just to survive.

It makes sense,

Right?

But in our actual lives,

And the reason why truthfulness is so important for us is that you're reinforcing either that you're in control or you're not in control.

When you lie a lot,

Even white lie,

And we're going to speak about this in practical application,

You're reinforcing that you have to morph yourself.

You have to divert your natural instincts for the sake of other people liking you.

I mean that's the crux of this,

Right?

So the more you can be truthful,

Truthful with yourself and truthful with other people,

The more you're embodying nobility and the more you're reinforcing that you have nothing to fear.

So I want to make this bit on,

I want to say a little bit about vulnerability.

Obviously I'm pro vulnerability.

If you listen to any of my episodes,

I'm pro speaking your mind and being truthful and I'm a fan of Brene Brown.

But actually like this idea of vulnerability I think has been misinterpreted a lot,

Especially for men or by men,

And I'm guilty of this as well.

Whereas we take on this idea,

This true idea that vulnerability is good,

Is true to share what's true for you,

Right?

Is a great way to connect,

Is a great way to re-sensitize yourself and feel your instincts and just be in the world,

Right?

But the fact that people call it vulnerability is kind of like,

I think it's a misnomer actually because if you're well practiced at being truthful and high fidelity and strong in your truth and bold in your truth and not apologetic in like,

Hey,

This is what's true for me,

I'm sharing with you,

It's not actually vulnerable,

Right?

Like you actually,

When I coach guys in dating,

I almost always tell guys to just say what you're actually feeling.

If you're nervous,

Say you're nervous,

But it's not saying,

Oh,

I'm nervous on a date to get her to pity you.

That's not the point of saying what's true for you.

It's just like kind of declaring in a bold way.

I know it seems oxymoronic or paradoxical,

But like in a bold way saying,

Hey,

I'm so attracted to you that I'm a little nervous right now.

I'm kind of like,

I can't think of what to say or I'm whatever.

By identifying it,

By volunteering that information,

You're reinforcing it to your subconscious,

Hey,

I have nothing to fear.

I have nothing to be ashamed about.

The slave has plenty to be ashamed about.

The noble has nothing to be ashamed about.

He's just saying this is what's true for me and I'm so resilient and strong that I'm going to show you the stuff that maybe other people would be ashamed of.

This is really important.

And so I actually think this idea of vulnerability is like the wrong word because I'm guilty of this as well when I started to learn the importance of vulnerability.

At times I would interpret this to mean for my slave morality conditioning that this meant sharing the most pathetic things about myself in a pathetic way.

I'd be like,

Oh,

That hurt my feelings or this or that or whatever.

That's not the way.

At times maybe it's a good stage to just be practiced and it's obviously better to share what's true for you than to hide and manipulate and try to morph yourself into a fake facade.

But the way that at least men should be vulnerable is not in a supplicating way.

It's like,

Hey,

This is what's true for me.

You can be truthful and high fidelity while being noble,

Not being pathetic.

So I see this a lot,

Especially in younger guys,

Because I think as slave morality has incepted into our culture,

I think mainly through social media,

I speak with a lot of younger guys who are very introspective or very self-aware,

Are very much trying to work on themselves and really putting an effort to work on themselves as grow as people and grow as men.

But they've taken on this idea to an extreme that vulnerability is good,

Therefore I should admit and reveal every single embarrassing thing about myself and be like,

Hey,

Here,

I'm having feelings,

Look at me,

Which is not the way to be vulnerable.

Forget the word vulnerability,

It's not the way to be truthful.

You can say,

Anyway,

I need to get my point.

Which brings us into our last section here,

Which is,

And I'll actually read a quote,

I didn't bring the book with me,

But there's a quote from this book I'm reading called The Dice Man,

Which I'm going to do a whole episode on because it's a really trippy book.

I'm going to do an episode on the fool and devil archetypes.

But there's a quote in that book,

It's about a guy who lives his life,

Instead of thinking,

He rolls dice to determine what he does in every stage.

And there's this great quote in the book that a man is defined by his audience.

In the book he's talking about behavior change and who you see yourself as is determined by what audience you care judges you.

And he has,

I mean,

I don't remember the words exactly,

But something like a man is defined by who he thinks is cheering and booing him.

So even when you're by yourself,

If you're doing stuff and you're like,

Oh,

This is good and this is bad,

Good and bad from whose perspective?

From someone's perspective,

Right?

You might've forgotten whose perspective that is.

Maybe it was your mother or your religion or something,

But like what you think is good and bad,

Even when you're by yourself,

Is based on some external perspective to some degree at least,

Right?

We all have that in us.

And in the Dice Man,

He was speaking about how when a person quickly changes the audience he cares about,

He usually goes through an existential crisis.

And I experienced this a little bit,

Or I experienced this in some way when I was in the cult.

The moment that I knew,

Looking back,

The moment that I was actually in the cult was not when I moved into the house,

Because I was still very much part of the outside world.

I was just trying this weird thing out.

It wasn't even the moment that I started giving them money.

The moment that I was actually in the cult versus out of the cult was when I started caring more about their opinions than my non-cult friends' opinions.

When I started going to the mindset of like,

My old friends don't really get me,

But these like weird cult people,

They do understand me.

Like when I started to believe that,

That's when I was in that reality versus the old reality,

Right?

That's when my personality transformed,

In mostly a positive way.

And you can listen about that in my cult episodes.

But who you are is determined by the reference group whose opinion you care about.

So the most noble reference group and the most noble audience is internal.

I mean,

To the degree that you're noble is the degree that you care mostly about what you think of yourself,

Or to some degree what your noble class thinks of you,

Right?

A lot of what honor is,

Is caring about what other people think about you,

Specifically men think about you,

But not all men,

The men that you have deemed to be honorable,

The men that you've deemed to also be noble.

Whereas a slave's audience is everyone else,

Right?

Again,

Most of us don't have literal masters,

But slave morality has like its own in-break,

Slave morality,

For slave morality to exist,

There has to be some perception of an external force.

So like in modern culture and social media supports this a lot,

People care so much about what other people think,

They care about,

They're treating the collective as their master,

Right?

Like what I do is only good or bad based on how many likes I get or how much support I get from people on social media,

Or what my friends will think about me,

Or what these people who are maybe not even my friends,

But I call them my friends,

Like what they think about me.

If that's how you're living your life,

If that's the audience you care about,

Then you're living in the slave archetype more.

So anyway,

All right,

Let's bring us to the final section.

This episode has been a little bit longer than I meant,

But we're going to bring us into the practical application of nobility now.

I'll reiterate this definition that came from my buddy,

That a noble is one who has no separation between will and action.

He can directly put his will into action.

That is what nobility is.

It's a reinforcement that you are the one who has the most influence over your immediate reality.

So I'll just run through a couple principles of putting this into place.

So a very simple thing to do in social situations,

Naturally as I wrote my list of things I know to be true at 33,

A lot of them were like these social things of,

Oh,

I should do this instead of this.

A lot of the things that I'm going to stop doing or I've been moving away from,

But I still am not perfect,

Have been things I've been kind of doing for other people to like me,

As opposed to doing what I really wanted.

We all have some level of behavior in this.

And a very simple question to ask yourself is,

With any given activity or any decision,

Am I doing this for my own instinctual desire,

For my own desire,

Or am I doing this to be liked by some external group?

If it's for your own desire,

You're assuming that you are responsible for your reality.

If you're doing things for other people like you,

You're assuming that they dictate your well-being.

And the more you do things for other people,

The more resentful you become ultimately,

Even if you think you're doing this to be a good person or I'm going to do this because I'm a good friend.

If you're doing this mainly for their perceptions,

You are giving away your power and you're increasing your resentment because it's actually nobody who constantly does things for other people is really happy.

And actually,

Gabor Matze has this great talk on this,

On how he gives us this list of examples of how people who are constantly doing things for other people have a higher risk of cancer.

And he has all these examples of the guy who got cancer because he was constantly being selfish,

Selfless,

Constantly doing things for other people.

He had no boundaries and he never expressed anger and he went into work every day until the day he died from cancer.

And he has this,

He points out how a lot of us think like,

Oh,

What an amazing thing.

What a selfless guy that to the day he was dying of cancer,

He was still spending most of his time to make other people rich.

That is slave morality.

The idea that we would even think that's a good thing or some people would think that's a good thing is slave consciousness,

It's a slave perspective.

Whereas you have to serve yourself first and actually as Gabor Matze pointed out,

If you want to live longer,

You need to have boundaries.

Anger is a good thing.

Anger is the emotion of,

Hey,

Get out of my space,

Get out of my survival zone.

This is mine so I can survive.

That's not a bad thing.

That's a very good thing.

And if you suppress your anger,

You're going to be resentful.

A lot of people,

I mean,

I'm just saying this for my friends who've been in recovery,

A lot of healing from addiction or recovering is dropping resentments and part of that is having boundaries of not doing things just to be like because that's going to make you resentful,

It's going to make you feel isolated,

It's going to make you do bad things,

Bad things according to yourself.

So the technique that I share in all of my programs,

I bring it up in almost in many of my coaching sessions,

Especially with someone with poor boundaries or especially men who maybe have become so apathetic because of doing things for other people that they can't even feel their desire is the I want exercise.

The more you can use the phrasing I want,

The more you're reinforcing that your desires are valid,

The more you're reinforcing the noble archetype inside of you.

Like the king says,

I want grilled chicken and someone brings him the grilled chicken.

He just has that belief that whatever he wants,

He gets.

He's assuming nobility.

Whereas if you constantly use the phrase I need or I have to do this,

Like those phrases are reinforcing that you're subject to someone else.

Like I need to do this thing for my job.

Maybe that's true and if you are working a corporate job or you're dependent on a salary,

Yes,

In order to get the salary,

You might have to do things you don't want to do.

But you don't want to reinforce that reality that you don't have choice.

It's like I'm going to do this thing for my boss because I want the salary.

At least bring it back to where you have agency because you don't want to reinforce this reality because you don't have control of your reality because that makes you feel shittier.

It makes you feel less of a man.

It increases your cortisol levels and it may even cause cancer according to Gaber Matzoh.

Second principle related is being willing to enter discomfort.

The whole thing of entering tension that my buddy Brian Vision speaks about all the time.

The nobleman chooses to enter battle.

The nobleman chooses to take on challenges.

The nobleman chooses to enter discomfort.

They bring the fight because that's how nobility was earned in the first place.

The conquering people are the ones who initiated the tension.

I spoke about this more in the predator versus prey archetype episode.

The predator is the one who initiates the battle.

The prey is always trying to avoid tension.

A lot of nice guys or people who are running on slave morality will often use this seemingly moral excuse for avoiding discomfort.

For instance,

An easy example would be a nice guy has a problem with someone at work or a problem with one of his friends but he's so afraid of avoiding tension that when someone says,

Oh,

Well,

You should probably tell them how you feel,

They're like,

Oh,

No,

No,

That would make them feel bad.

There's always this idea that,

Oh,

I'm doing this for other people.

It would make them feel bad.

I don't want to make them feel uncomfortable by sharing about how they harmed me or they bothered me in some way.

But really,

As we all know,

The nice guy is really just trying to avoid his own tension.

He's using his outside justification of why he should avoid something he's afraid of.

That's slave stuff.

The slave is trying to avoid any discomfort.

Whereas the noble enters discomfort.

He's willing to confront anybody because of the fact that he has an assumption he's going to win.

Or at least he's willing to find out if he's going to win because if the nobleman can't deal with confrontation,

If the nobleman can no longer win battles,

He's no longer deserving to be a man of high rank.

Yes,

I know this maybe is not politically correct,

But these are the origins of these archetypes.

We can see in early societies where the class structure isn't so divided.

We look at early Germanic tribes or barbarian tribes where of course there was already a separation between the chiefs and the most powerful,

The alphas if you will,

And the betas.

There's still this perception that if,

We actually see this even in Game of Thrones with like the Dothraki,

There's a line like a kal who cannot ride is no kal.

There's this assumption that if you're going to be high class,

You have to earn it.

You have to earn it through competition.

Whereas this has been diluted through the years where you have these figurehead noble people,

Or you have these families who are generationally wealthy even though maybe they're not embodying these strength characteristics anymore.

In the origins,

The people just assumed like the chief is a chief because he's the most bad motherfucker in the tribe,

And he has to keep earning that.

If he starts being cowardly,

He's no longer worthy or weak,

He's no longer worthy of that.

So someone who's really embodying nobility is willing,

Maybe they don't assume they're going to win every competition,

But they know that they have to compete in order to deserve their place.

They have to continually do hard things if they're going to be deserving of their privilege.

So this third principle of practically applying nobility would be,

And this is something that I've been working on.

It has been a paradigm shift for me,

Which is reducing the realm of what you care about to the zone of what you can influence.

Even before this recent shift,

I've actually never voted.

I try to not get involved in global politics,

Even though obviously there's certain things I should know.

A lot of people criticize me for this.

But my retort is who I vote for doesn't actually make a difference in the world.

There's certain things in the world that I can affect.

I'm not going to virtue signal and list all the things that I do for my community,

But I will say there's things that I do that I actually have a real effect on.

Caring about stuff that's far beyond me,

Caring about some of the political discussions or cultural discussions going on in America,

I can't actually affect that.

So I stop caring about that.

I actually tune all of that out.

Whether you choose to do that,

I'm not saying what you should do.

If you vote and you're involved in politics and you feel you're making a difference,

Great,

You should do that.

Definitely do whatever you feel is right.

That is the noble way.

But to care about stuff that you cannot control,

That is slave stuff.

The more noble you are,

The more you put your attention on what you actually can influence.

It's basically doing what you can for where you actually can.

.

.

Anyway,

I'm repeating myself,

But only caring about what you can actually influence,

Caring about your realm of control.

If we look at feudalism again,

The feudal lords were most in their nobility,

The most extreme of master morality,

At least in terms of sociological structure.

They didn't really care about anything beyond their state.

They didn't want to even trade.

They wanted to produce everything in house.

If you look at this from a social perspective,

And I had this recently with a friend who I had some issues with,

Because of the fact that we had gotten so close and I actually,

I'll take it on myself,

I started caring a little bit too much about what this friend was doing.

We had made certain plans,

But it doesn't really matter what the details are,

But I started becoming resentful.

I started becoming disappointed in this friend's character and behavior,

But only because I started caring a little bit too much about stuff that was really beyond my business and beyond my control.

Whereas if I was really in nobility,

I would not care about anything outside of my family,

Essentially.

I can influence my family.

I can influence my land,

The parcel of land that I live on.

I should not care about what my neighbors do,

Unless it obviously affects me and my family.

It's a lot more healthy of a way to live.

You can't be resentful if you don't expect things of people or things that you cannot control.

If you only care about stuff that you can control,

And take full responsibility for what is within your control,

It's just a lot more healthy of a way to live.

Which brings us to how you organize your social circle.

This is something that I had to think about a lot as well,

And I've spoken about on a more abstract level in the Breaking Social Constructions of Reality episode,

Which is,

I said something cliche in that episode,

Like find your tribe.

But in applying nobility is,

I would say,

The way to support your own nobility is to only associate with people that are also noble in your eyes.

To give an example,

When I was living in New York,

I was driving a cab and I was trying to break back into coaching,

Because I had been coaching for a while.

I had existential crisis.

I stopped doing that,

Switched to blue collar jobs for a while.

As I was rebuilding my wealth and rebuilding my business and moving out of the servitude of blue collar work,

Which I have a lot of respect for,

But it is,

If you're in a blue collar job,

Unless you're the boss,

You are enslaved in some way.

As I was moving out of that and starting to make more money again,

I noticed that some of the guys I was hanging out with,

Who regardless of their wealth,

They were just kind of in a slave mode,

In a resentful mode,

Where I noticed I didn't want to share with them about my business victories.

I had some friends who were like,

I realized I never wanted,

It didn't feel good to share anything positive with them,

Because I knew they were going to be jealous.

So what did I would,

Because I was hanging out with these guys,

Kind of unconsciously,

I would often share bad things.

I would often connect on negative things.

I'd be like,

Oh yeah,

I just got hit with this huge bill,

Or I got another parking ticket.

They'd be like,

Oh yeah,

They would commiserate,

I have something bad too.

And we would bond over the slave stuff.

We would bond over being mediocre,

We would bond over bad news.

Whereas the friends that I actually started moving towards more were the ones who would actually celebrate my victories,

Be like,

Oh yeah,

Fuck yeah,

You got this new whatever.

Like oh here,

I got this thing too.

Or they would be inspired,

And their inspiration would inspire me,

And we'd have this positive feedback loop of raising each other up,

As opposed to,

I need to be more mediocre to relate to these mediocre people.

And I know this sounds really harsh,

And I have some friends who are,

Whatever,

I'll just say,

I don't mean to criticize anyone in particular,

But I will.

I'll criticize anyone who supports mediocrity,

Or at least I'll call it out if it comes up.

Unless you're a sociopath,

You are affected by the people you hang out with.

You have empathy.

It's a natural thing.

So you have to be very clear of who you associate with,

And who you care about.

And I just made this decision recently,

I explicitly told myself recently,

That I don't want to invest in any social relationship,

Any friendship,

With anyone whom I feel incentivized to share mediocre things with,

Just to relate to them,

Where I have to coddle them in any way where I can't tell them the truth because they're too sensitive.

Like I don't want to deal with that,

Right?

Because that's supporting slave morality.

I don't want to do that to myself,

Right?

I'm preparing to be a father,

And I think the best way to be a father is to be as noble as possible.

And there's a quote by Nietzsche,

Which I think applies very well to dealing with trolls or haters or whomever.

I'm paraphrasing a bit,

But he says something like,

A nobleman shrugs off the worms that eat at weaker men.

If you care too much about what other people think of you,

Specifically people who are critical of what you think is right.

It's one thing if you're doing shifty,

Slavish,

Shitty things,

And a good friend of yours is like,

Hey dude,

You're kind of going down a wrong path,

Or you're kind of doing some fucked up shit.

That's one thing,

Right?

But for another person who is critical of your success or critical of your nobility or critical of your good boundaries,

Let's say,

Those are people you don't want to spend a lot of time with because in order to relate to them,

You have to make yourself more productive.

More mediocre.

Which brings us to our last thing,

And I already mentioned this in the archetype section,

Which is being high fidelity.

I said this already,

But it's worth repeating that a nobleman,

Because of the fact that he assumes he's in control of his reality,

Always tells the truth.

He has no incentive to lie because he doesn't need to morph himself for other people to like him.

The nobleman sets the values.

The nobleman determines for himself what he sees as good and bad.

He runs on his own set of ethics,

Which may also match the ethics of his noble friends,

But he certainly does not care about the person who's perhaps resentful at him and criticizing him for how awesome he is,

Right?

And what he determines to be awesome.

He doesn't go by what the collective mob thinks is right and wrong just to fit in.

He acts on his own desire.

He's truthful with himself too,

Right?

The person who is enslaved,

Just this initial introduction of slave morality where the definition of good has to be switched or changed or detracted from strength,

Right?

Because prior to slave morality,

The word good referred to ethical good and competence good,

Right?

Whereas in our common language now,

There's two definitions of good.

You can be,

Let's say,

Good at sports,

But bad sportsman,

Right?

If you think of,

Let's say Michael Jordan was obviously amazing at basketball,

But a lot of people say he was a dick on the court,

Right?

You would say,

Oh,

He's a bad guy.

Maybe some people would be like,

Oh,

He's bad to play with,

But he's a good player,

Right?

He's good in terms of master morality,

But he was bad from a slave's perspective because he was being mean,

Right?

Whereas to the noble,

It's all the same thing.

Anyway,

This means you have to be truthful with yourself because the slave,

Because he's detracting from nature,

He kind of morphs things and lies to himself by convincing himself,

Oh,

I'm good by being weak,

Which is not in line with nature.

In nature,

Goodness is strength.

Being high fidelity is not just telling the truth,

But it's actually acting on your truth.

I'll bring us to our last piece here because if you're listening to this and you have some,

You know,

There's many,

It's very easy to criticize everything I'm saying from slave morality of course,

But also there's this idea,

Which is true for me too,

Of like,

Man,

Selfishness has gotten a bad rap because selfishness has led to a lot of bad things.

Imperialism,

Which is master morality in action,

Has led to the oppression of other people.

Nazism is an extreme application of master morality saying like,

Our people are the only people that matter.

All these other people we can annihilate,

Right?

Genocide has been supported by master morality.

I'm not saying that certainly not on a political level or a sociological level,

Certainly master morality is not always a good thing.

And even though I think an individual is always served more by acting nobly,

According to Nietzsche rather than ignobly,

You could be an asshole.

So what is the thing that balances out all of this,

Right?

Because we don't want to all become Cersei Lannisters.

I assume you don't want to be.

I wouldn't want all of us to become that.

And this is this idea of noblesse oblige.

It's French for the nobility obliges or the obligations of the noble class.

And it's not obligations based on the government saying,

Oh,

The rich need to do this for everybody.

You have to do this.

It's not an obligation of like coming from the church or the priest,

The Pope says,

Oh,

I need to give away a tenth of my wealth.

It's that the noble,

Him or herself decides on his or her own volition to care about other people.

And this idea of noblesse oblige was related to the noble class does have responsibilities to the peasant class.

And in feudalism,

This was protection,

Right?

And in most,

I'm not saying that feudalism was fair or necessarily good.

These peasants had terrible experiences,

But at least from the nobleman's perspective back then,

The equal trade there was that the peasants served the nobles,

But the nobles physically protected the peasants,

Which at one point was true.

Like this is kind of how mafias start extorting,

Right?

They're protecting the neighborhood,

But then they're also forcing the people to give them money for that protection,

Whether they want it or not.

The conquerors,

The Vikings came in and conquered an agrarian society.

Yes,

They took it by force,

But they also now were responsible for the protection of those agrarians,

Right?

If another conquering peoples came in,

Those conquerors would have to fight them and protect their peasants.

So there is an obligation to the noble,

And this is where your own conscious comes in.

It has to come from your own self.

And I spoke about this in the abundance model episode about how there is something purely that just feels good and feels abundant when you're choosing to be generous,

Right?

You're not giving to people because you think God will smite you otherwise.

You're not giving to people to virtue signal to the masses.

You're giving because it feels good to know that you have more than you need and you want to serve people that maybe don't have as much.

It doesn't mean that you reduce your wealth to nothing so that you're as poor as everyone else,

But it does mean that you make active choices of this is how I want to make a difference in the world for positive change.

And that's what's going to make you feel better because if you take this master morality stuff,

Only with selfishness,

And think that you and your genetic line are somehow separate from the rest of humanity,

That also is isolating and that will also make you feel resentful and weird and you eventually will get conquered by someone else as history has shown.

Because I'm going to bring us back to Mufasa.

Actually I shared the Lion King thing a little too.

I shot my wide on that one.

I'm going to bring us back to that because noblesse oblige is best demonstrated by Mufasa's line again.

Simba says,

Well don't we eat the antelope and Mufasa says,

But when we die,

Our bodies become the grass and the antelope seek the grass and such is the circle of life.

Noblesse oblige has an acknowledgement of one's mortality.

It's kind of like how when the Roman generals had a triumph and parading for their victory and thinking that they're the shit,

They had a slave on the float with them,

Reminding them that they're going to die.

You need to remember your mortality so that you don't think you're a god.

And that's what connects you.

If you take a high dose of mushrooms for instance or a high dose of some psychedelic,

You will have that feeling,

I think from a noble perspective,

That we are all connected.

Doesn't mean you should stop eating meat.

Doesn't mean that the lion should stop eating antelope,

But you can still respect the thing that you're conquering,

Recognizing that this is the way it is.

I'm a predator.

There are things that I consume.

There are things that I do,

I mean for more literal application,

There are things that I do to serve myself and serve my family,

Which maybe on some level means that there's less wealth for the competing businesses that I'm fighting against.

But that's the way it is.

That's just the way nature is.

It doesn't mean I need to hate or resent or want to harm other people.

It's like this is just the law of nature and I can still respect people and I can still give people a fair deal.

In business,

I can still be honest and truthful and noble with people while I'm competing with them.

I can still compete with my worthy adversaries.

Because I would say on another level,

This noblesse oblige is a recognition that we all have our own slave archetype as well.

If you want to take this trippy perspective of our consciousness lives many lifetimes or we are all connected on some immaterial level,

Even though on the material plane we're separate,

It gives you respect for other people.

This is what allows you to be a gracious winner.

This is what allows you to be generous with people that you conquered in some metaphoric way and really care about the people that you have privileges over.

It doesn't mean you need to give away all of your privileges but recognizing that you can still be kind and generous and there are certain,

Perhaps like conscious level or we could say heart centered obligations to humanity that you can choose to have that will allow you to feel better and actually will allow you to feel more noble.

I know there's a criticism,

There's a Marxist criticism that noblesse oblige has been a way for the privileged people to somehow do this conscious shift of like,

This is why we deserve to be better because we're doing these nice things for people.

I'm not saying that's correct necessarily but purely from an individual perspective as you go through life trying to become more privileged,

Trying to compete in the free market,

Compete in the social market and become a better person and further the well-being of yourself and the people under your care,

This concept of noblesse oblige will allow you to not be an asshole but also feel connected and good.

All of this is about feeling good ultimately.

Last bit,

If you want a more active stance or an active way to reclaim the noble barbarian within you especially if you feel it's been dormant,

I have of course my 21 day mask and archetype challenge.

It's 21 micro lessons and micro missions to summon your mask and archetype,

The testosterone driven characteristics that maybe are dormant in you,

I think is dormant in a lot of guys and we even have a meditation,

A guided meditation or guided self-hypnosis if you will to conceptualize your own inner mask and archetype and a lot of guys who have spoken to me after doing that,

They actually get conceptualized and sort of barbarian.

I don't want to put that in your head but like a lot of people do,

I do think that is the representation of that noble archetype within us and of course it comes with a free coaching session with me.

It is the most cost effective way to work with me one on one.

If you join the archetype challenge,

You automatically get a link to my schedule or to book a call with me and I'm happy to work on any of this stuff with you specific to your life whether it's in dating or your life purpose or whatever.

And on the flip side of that,

If the first part of this episode was particularly interesting to you,

The historical origins of these noble traits,

You might want to check out my history of masculinity series which is coming out later this year.

I know I've been talking about this for months but honestly it's been such a – I mean I've had to read so many books and do so much research to do justice to the history of masculinity and the history of warfare.

So it's not going to be out for a bit but I am going to do a soft launch to whoever opts in.

So you can go to historyofmasculinity.

Com.

Just put in your email and that will let me notify you and you'll get free access to the series before anyone else.

That's at historyofmasculinity.

Com and my archetype challenge is at ruando.

Com slash archetype.

Thanks for listening.

Be noble.

Goodbye.