Helen Lewis
speaker
1,139 appearances
8 recordings
6 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 Jun
Helen Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
You know, many of my friends are academics, but I can see how it slightly deranges people.
Right, it does.
As soon as I was thinking about this, I started thinking about Peter Turchin's idea of surplus elites that, you know…
And some of these people, perhaps they didn't fit in socially at universities and colleges, perhaps they didn't fit in politically, but they had that same kind of yearning in them to be intellectuals and to be taken seriously.
And this provides an outlet for that.
No, you're right.
Somebody like Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth's congregation founder, he basically wants to live in Salem circa 1650, as far as I can see.
That for him is his vision.
Other people have that vision of 1950s suburbia.
Other people look to the Romans or the Greeks or the Spartans even.
There's a big excitement about the Spartans.
Other of them take inspiration from Nietzsche, which is interesting to me.
So Nietzsche is writing these critiques of modernity at the end of the 19th century, at which point he's making all the same criticisms about his society that they're making now.
And you think, well, hang on a minute, this is a vastly less industrialized society.
You know, this is before the invention of antibiotics, all of this kind of stuff.
So how can this be exactly the same criticism now?
And it goes in the other direction, too.
So one of the things I read for the piece was this very famous essay on The Long House by Lómez.
which is constantly referred to.
And his idea is that there were these matriarchal societies, or there were these communal dining halls that were overseen by a den mother, and they were ruled by kind of petty bitching and backbiting and ostracism, while the men were going out doing manly things.
Showing 421–440 of 1,139 · page 22 of 57
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