Your Creepy Gym Teacher Loves You

July 24th, 2016

Your Parents are Just Breeding Stock

Yesterday I continued slogging my way through Plato’s Symposium. It’s like being forced to eat a chain-store pizza with a cat poo decorating each slice.

As I probably said in an earlier post, the book is about a bunch of gay Greeks sitting around drinking, talking about love. That’s actually wrong; they talk about “eros,” or “passionate love,” which really means sexual desire. It’s not what you and I think of as love.

They refer to love as a god over and over. That makes more sense if you think about Eros with a capital “E.” He’s the little round guy we think of as Cupid, the son of Venus. His name is a building block of the word “pederasty”; the “eras” comes from him.

I didn’t have a professor to explain this to me. I have a feeling they don’t push this angle at Columbia University, the school where I was supposed to be subjected to this book the first time around. I had to figure it out.

The Greeks loved two things we would call gay pedophilia and gay statutory rape. Plato’s book is a long rationalization which tries unsuccessfully to portray gay sex with younger, less powerful, less informed people as a good thing. If you think I’m exaggerating, read it yourself.

I finally got to the part where Socrates talks. To say it’s underwhelming doesn’t begin to express my reaction.

Here’s how Socrates works. He puts his conversational partner on the defensive, forcing him to answer questions but refusing to supply answers or take responsibility for them. He gets them to start out with idiotic premises, and then he forces them to build absurd arguments based on them.

He keeps pushing them toward the results he wants, pretending to compliment them on their brilliance the whole time. Then he arrives at a conclusion a ten-year-old would instantly know is insane.

I’m not impressed at all. Anyone can badger a less-intelligent or less-assertive person into saying something stupid. Put him on the defensive. Ask questions. Never answer questions. Never let him make a retraction. You will always win. You win for the same reason welshers win at poker; they never risk anything.

When I read Thucydides, I was very impressed with the arguments various orators made. It showed that they knew how to build arguments. It showed that they understood logic and persuasion. They understood structure. If you want to see how a good lawyer works in 2016, you can look at the speeches in Thucydides.

Socrates is not on that level. He is a sophist. By sophist, I don’t mean the Greek defition. I mean a person who builds arguments that are clever but false. Like Supreme Court Justice Brennan, who used an excellent mind to twist logic to suit his socialist bent.

He reminds me of something the character Mr. Dryden said in Lawrence of Arabia: “A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies, has forgotten where he’s put it.” People like Socrates and Brennan often don’t realize they’re lying. To abuse the truth is to destroy your ability to perceive it.

The upshot of his beliefs appears to be this: love for a woman is bestial, like a dog’s lust for a bitch in heat. It’s a low thing, to be contemned. The desire to sodomize a young man systematically is refined and godlike, as long as you give him teaching in exchange for allowing you to insert yourself and make him a receptacle for your fluids.

Socrates considered fathering children a lower pastime than teaching young men. Imagine that. It’s disgusting to even think that a person could have things so backward. Your mom and dad are clods, but the funny gym teacher who always had to come into the shower to talk to you…he’s a sophisticate.

I’m not distorting it at all. You can find the same argument in pedophile chat rooms all over the world.

My understanding is that we study Plato in order to understand where other philosophers got their foundation. That’s important to a lot of people. I don’t find secular philosophy useful or interesting. I had to take a course in it. I got an A, and I impressed and annoyed the professor. That’s as far as I care to go. I have never been in a situation where I thanked God for a helpful idea from Kant or Gurdjieff that got me out of a tough spot.

The characters in Plato’s book, who may or may not be accurate depictions of the real people whose names they take, are extremely shallow and carnal. They think like pigs and goats. “Love” means “sex with boys.” You can’t love anything that isn’t beautiful (bad news for parents of kids with birth defects). Everyone is motivated by a desire to be famous and admired. People should strive to make their names “immortal.”

Ridiculous. That’s not how quality people work. Quality people know the difference between lust and love. They are genuinely altruistic. They aren’t motivated by the possibility that society might reward their actions by putting their names on buildings that will be gone in a hundred years.

It’s not surprising that Plato and his pals were shallow. Their “gods” were like monkeys at the height of the mating season. They were rapists, thieves, torturers, liars, drunks, and adulterers. The men of The Symposium repeatedly affirm their admiration for these Olympian baboons. If my “god” was a chimp on Viagra, I guess I’d feel the same way Socrates did.

I’m just reading the book for its historical value, and to be able to say I actually did the reading for Lit. Hum. After that, I plan to leave it on the shelf. I don’t know if I should even have it in the house, because it’s so gross. Most of my books are sources of useful information, and they can be helpful in my person development. The Symposium is more like a slice of a diseased liver, kept by a pathologist as a warning to drunks.

I think I’m on page 517 of the PDF I am reading while I wait for my hardcopy to arrive in the mail. It ends on page 539. Every time I turn a page, I feel like I’m scratching a day off a prison sentence.

It’s strange to see the Greeks talk about excellence of character (arete) all the time. They were slimy, cruel, violent, oppressive people. They wouldn’t know excellence if it came up behind them and beat them with a club.

Augustine is coming up. I was thinking it might be nice to get away from the diseased heathen minds of the Greeks, but I may be even more disturbed by crackpot Catholic doctrine that keeps people in chains. At least I enjoyed King Lear. I read it out of sequence. Good thing I did. It was the lime sherbet that refreshed my palate prior to a serving of garbage.

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