Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’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 — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's a huge difference. So, you know, we have Republican measurements in place to stop that from happening. The pendulum doesn't swing as much in the United States, but you can't blame the Athenians because they literally just invented that form of government, right? Yeah. but it was better than being ruled over by a bad king.
Some people think so. Some people think that a direct democracy would be better. So there's that. There's dangers to direct democracy, too. So that's kind of something that the founding fathers were worried about, was that they liked the mentality of the Athenians under like Periclean Athenian society. They liked that. That's a whole deeply nuanced conversation.
But I think that we have a similar outlook on the world that the Athenians do, or especially our, I'm sorry, our own civilization. We're as self-aware as they were because we have the freedom to bicker with each other so much. we constantly self-analyze ourselves. Or at least I feel like I do. Or maybe we analyze each other a lot. Yeah, that's what it is. We analyze each other a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is the opposite of self-awareness. Sure, sure, sure. But... people who are ruled over by a complete monarchy don't have the freedom to do any of that at all, right?
Yeah, they can't judge other people. There's nothing to judge. And if you judge, the only person to judge is not your fellow citizen because you're all subservient to the God-King and you're not going to cast your judgment on the God-King. So in a way, what I mean is that Athenian society is self-aware because they're able to cast judgment on each other. And that's why their forums existed.
That's why the Agora and the Stoa existed. That's why the Athenian courts existed. So it gave people the ability to lob jabs at each other and be self-critical of each other. Now, some people are self-critical of themselves. Those people end up becoming the philosophers. Does that make sense? So you have this...
incredibly intricate society that i'm still just an infant in learning um you know there's there's there's this is an endlessly deep topic um that's deeply nuanced with people who are as intelligent and as perceptive as we are and more intelligent and more and more perceptive than we are and people who are extremely in touch with logic and reasoning and who spent
so so so much time having deep philosophical conversations asking these perennial questions that we still ask today and I think that that connected with me on so many levels more so than just like ancient historical or archaeological fascination it felt like if I could better understand the civilization I'd better understand myself and I'd be a better person having known it if that makes sense
Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, the Romans, it's kind of like... They're fascinating, but you're studying... We are the Romans, essentially. We really are more similar to the Romans than the Greeks. That's a fact. The Greeks are like an ideological thing to aspire to. And in reality, it's just a blip of Greek time. That's really all it was. It rose, and then it fell. And that's why the...
That's also why, whether or not Plato's Republic and the story of Atlantis really is based on a kernel of truth, it's the reason he talked about it, because Atlantis is supposed to represent Athens. It's this rise of this very self-confident, capable, luxurious, beautiful civilization, and then it becomes overly competent and arrogant, and then it falls.
And it's just two centuries, you know, and it's this blip in time. After that, you have Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon, and he basically, he sees all the Greeks bickering with each other and he just conquers all of them while they're bickering with each other. And then he uses their force to invade Persia. And then really Alexander, he gets in the car and drives it like he stole it.
And then it's over after that. Then you have Hellenistic society. But it's just this little blip in classical Greece that is like, it is this one short period
of limitless capacity of a civilization to express itself to the fullest and do everything at the highest level it's ever going to be done and the only thing the only thing that's ever been similar to that and surpassed it is the united states and uh And that's why I feel like so drawn to this, to studying the Greeks, you know, and kind of as a reminder of like how precious our society is.
We have so many problems. The United States has done so many bad things, but a lot of people suffered to give you and I the ability to sit here today. And I think
don't have to condone anything of it nobody's asking really for like my opinion on it i don't have to judge it but i should have an appreciation for what was given to me from the blood of so many people and just be aware of it you know um So, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool.
Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I just love the fact that they were interested in the Egyptians too. You know, it's this cool little window. When you're at Saqqara, you know, one of the oldest places in Egypt, and you're standing there looking at the...
The earliest periods in history, in Egyptian history, dynastic Egyptian history, they haven't really figured out how to make circular standing columns. So they have these columns that are attached to walls.
But the design of these Doric-looking columns, they're not Doric, they're Egyptian, and it's the Dorians, which are really just Greeks, that come down into Egypt all throughout history, maybe over 2,000 years after these columns are put up, and they're like... This is really, really nice. We could make this out of marble.
Look at the way that, you know, look at the way that each one of these limestone blocks are something different. We don't have the stable, huge granite stones back in Egypt that you can lift this giant stone up and it doesn't crack in half, but we have marble. We can make this out of marble. Let's do that. They go, and then the whole design of Greek columns, these big marble temples, they're
That's derivative of, or it's built on top of the columns that they took out of Egypt, that design there. And it is so obvious when you're there looking at it. And so, you know, who really knows? I mean, here's something else. The Olympics. We didn't even talk about that, but it's too much to go into. But, you know, we get organized sports from the Greeks as well.
Showing 1221–1240 of 1,858 · page 62 of 93
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