December 8, 2025 • 50 mins
Margaret talks to Dana El Kurd about Diogenes, the founder of the Cynics, who was kind of an edgelord and lived in a jar.
Sources:
The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic, Jean-Manuel Roubineau
How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Cynicism, Diogenes (edited by MD Usher)
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16916263
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Greece
https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/ancient-history/ancient-greek-slavery/
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57342/57342-h/57342-h.htm
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
You're twice weekly reminder that I have a podcast and
it's about people who did stuff that I think is cool.
I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today
as my guest is Dana el khurd Hi. How are
you hi?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah. Dana is a researcher and writer about the authoritarianism
and once wrote a book called Polarized and Demobilized Legacies
of Authoritarianism in Palestine and works does a bunch of stuff.
I don't know. Is that that who you are?
Speaker 1 (00:37):
That's perfect? Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Isn't it great when people are like, here's your bio,
as if this explains who you are, and I'm like, yeah, totally,
that definitely explains sure, Yeah, absolutely. I now understand why
authors always include the like lives with her dog or
whatever the fuck and or their bios right right right, anyway.
We have a producer named Sophie who's not on the call,
and we have an audio engineer named Eva hi Eva
(01:02):
hi Eva are. The music was written for us by unwoman.
I usually am talking about things that happen one hundred,
two hundred years ago, sometimes twenty years ago. But I've
been on this kick by accident where I've been talking
about the ancient world, going back a couple thousand of years.
And I discovered this very week that one of my
favorite Sesame Street characters was probably based on a real
(01:25):
figure from history.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Oh my gosh, who is it? Is it Oscar the Grouch?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
It's Oscar the Grouch. It is totally Oscar the Grouch.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Okay, that was a guess, but I love it.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Do you watch mom Sesame Street as a kid?
Speaker 1 (01:39):
I did not bump my son did.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, Okay, awesome. There is for the people who live
under a rock eh eh, or in a trash can
on a public street. There is a green grouchy man
who lives in a trash can and he hates everything
that normal people like. That's his whole thing. He's a
grouch and his name's Off and it seems likely that
(02:03):
he was based on this week's main character, a famous
old grouch who lived in a jar on a public
street in ancient Greece. The one and the only diogenies
of Sonope, not to be confused with the other diagenies,
the one who wrote the latter. I wrote the one
and only Diogenes is note and then I was like, oh,
my main source for this week, the main source about
(02:26):
this guy period is another guy named Diogenes Diogenes Laertis
because okay, I don't know all romany Greek sounding names
all sound the same to me, but it's literally just
also Diogenes, who wrote a biography of this man several
hundred years later, so it's still an ancient source, but
it's still two thousand years old. You ever heard of Diogenies?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I have not, No, not a big Greek fan.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, neither was Diogenes to his credit. You know how
everything that you learn in school, you've then learned that
you learned kind of weird sanded down version, yeah, the
wrong things. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I like learn all this
stuff about ancient Greece as a kid in public school
in the United States of America, and you're like, oh,
it's got this stuff. It's a nightmare world. It's closer
(03:14):
to the US Confederacy, speaking of things that they don't
tell you the truth about in American school. It's closer
to the US Confederacy than it is to like some
like grand and noble ideal of democracy, right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
It's more Sparta than Athens, like, and even those versions
we totally have sanitized versions.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Of right, Oh, Diogenes is obsessed with the difference between
Sparta and Athens. But both of them are bad. They're
both it's their flavor of bad. But anyway, so I
don't have any direct evidence of Oscar the Grouch being
based on Diogenies, but I spent not a small amount
of time this week trying to find Jim Henson admitting it,
(03:52):
because it has to be true by the end of
this episode. So you're gonna be like, it has to
be the case that this man is based on Diogenes.
But maybe one day I'll do Jim Henson episodes and
I'll find out Diogenies was the philosopher that gave us
the Cynics, a school of philosophy that is almost completely
unrelated to the common use of the word cynic and cynical,
(04:13):
which you know, and someone's like, ah, like the old Cynics.
I was like, ah, I probably distrust everybody I don't know.
As an anarchist, I appreciate this. Anarchism is a school
of thought that is almost entirely unrelated to the connotations
people have with the word anarchy. The words meaned nonsense,
like you know, ask a republican in the twentieth century
(04:34):
Ireland and ask a republican in twentieth century America if
they agree about anything. The Cynics were pretty fucking radical
for their time, and specifically they refused all social conventions.
That was their core idea. This guy Diogenies literally pissed
on rich people in public.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Did they enjoy that? Was that an enjoyable thing?
Speaker 2 (04:58):
It was at a party. We'll get to the story
of that. I think it was kind of a you know,
when someone's like kind of acting up at a party
and then they're like, oh fine, I'll just fucking do
this thing.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Then okay, So they just kind of egged him on.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
That's the impression I get. But he was called the
dog in derision, and he took that name with pride.
And it is from the Greek word that I forgot
to write into my script for dog the dog that
we get the word cynical. It essentially means dog like,
and I think it less means canine and more like
(05:35):
like the guy the dog.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
You know, okay, huh, because I kind of imagine like
the way that you're describing, and I know nothing about
Greek philosophy. They're like extremely like anti authoritarian, like of
any convention. Yeah, but then the dog connection here, Yeah,
I'll have to explain it a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
No, we're gonna get to it a little bit later too.
But it's interesting because basically dogs were seen in ancient
Greece as a sort of a rebel, but not in
a glorified good way, but like a traitorous way. They
were seen as these like half wild creatures that we
like put up with. Individuals of course, were like I
fucking love my dog, right. And it was actually a
really good point in one of my sources, and it's
(06:15):
in the show notes. It's one of the books. I
don't remember which one. There's a really good point an
author made that didn't make it to the script about
how dogs are the only animal that we get mad
at like this because it's the only animal we expect
to behave perfectly.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
That's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
And so dogs were seen as these dangerous wild creatures.
Athens then and now were full of street dogs, and
is full of street dogs. So it's like you're this mongrel,
you're this just like terrible creature that just lives in
the streets.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Outside the fall.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
So he was famously a homeless, itinerant beggar, and he
was an immigrant to Athens and everywhere he ended up
living because he could never go home. We'll get to that.
And he often lived in a big ceramic jar, which
is what Athens used instead of barrels. He was born rich,
he was forced into exile, he became a beggar, then
(07:10):
he was enslaved, then he was freed. He's the only
guy I've covered on the show who was both owned
a guy and been owned by a guy.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
This guy his life story.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, and most of the shit he did after he
was like fifty, and he lived a pretty wild life.
And he believed that philosophy should be put into action
or it was meaningless. For hundreds of years, the Cynics
weren't taken seriously as a school of philosophy in ancient
Greece because they're like, ah, it's just the weird fucking
street trash. Because well, some sources are like because they
(07:41):
didn't write. No, he wrote so much, we just don't
have it. The other word we get from him, incidentally,
is the word cosmopolitan because he was the first self
declared citizen of the world, and he had no use
for national borders, which at the time meant city borders.
And he was a lot of things, a lot of
(08:03):
contradictory things, and if I'm being honest, most of what
I read about him was like, Wow, he's the most
unique man who's ever lived. But I have met dozens
of this guy in my life. And maybe it's because
I've just like lived on the streets, and I think
maybe most writers haven't. These people aren't boring. Diogenies not boring.
These people are aggravating and arrogant and full of unexamined
(08:26):
privileges and assumptions while they're accusing you of the same,
But they are not boring. His philosophy was shockingly feminist
for the time, but he was also a misogynist. He
actively worked against the culture of pederasty, which is a
very common thing in ancient Greece, where older men would
fuck young men and children, but he was homophobic and transphobic.
(08:46):
He taught that people shouldn't own slaves, but also that
slaves shouldn't look to be freed. He's just a guy.
If I'm being honest, and he's full of wisdom and
bullshit in equal measure.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I feel like you're discribed being like a lot of leftists.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
I know totally you have met this man.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, definitely you.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Have met this Like he is so certain, he's full
of wisdom, older white dude who's like actually, in this case,
he's an immigrant, but like I mean, he's also Greek.
But whatever, we'll get to this. But yeah, this might
be the least on a pedestal I've ever had a
week subject. But he is not boring. So we're going
to talk about him. But first context. I love context.
(09:31):
We are going to talk about the Greek world of
the fourth century BCE this week because everything I read
assumed I already knew everything about the fourth century BCE.
But I am an art school dropout. I do not
know about the fourth century BCE in Greece.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Well I do now, actually, yeah, can please tell me
I don't know if.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, I'm going too yeah. No, That's my point is that,
like I try not to assume that people know the
shit that all these books I read assumed. I know
who knows this? Yeah, this is classical grease at its
most classical grease. If you think, ah, yes, classical gre Greece,
you are thinking about the fourth and the fifth century BCE.
In Greece, democracy and slavery and pederaste. And it's not
(10:09):
a period where there's some nation state called Greece. There's
a bunch of different empires that come and go and
they're all fighting each other and like, oh, it's Macedonia now,
and it's all this different shit, right, there's not even
really an empire called Greece most of the time that
lasts very long. There is a Greek culture which isn't unified,
but it is vaguely consistent across a whole bunch of
(10:30):
different city states, And so it gets really hard because
people a like, ah, yes, Greek cultures like this. I'm like, well,
unless you're in Koranth.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Which part of Greek culture, right, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
You know, like, as you pointed, Sparta and Athens culturally
very distinct. So Greek culture at this time is a
vague syncretization of the four major Greek tribes from that area,
who all spoke related languages and shit. The most famous
of these cities today are Athens and Sparta, but Corinth
was there too, and plenty of other places. They all
(10:58):
ward with each other. A bunch Athens in particular liked
being democratic and occasionally they get conquered and then overthrow
that to become a democracy again, working with ever shifting alliances.
So it's like, oh, Sparta is the big guy on
the scene. Like, no, now it's Thebes. Oh, now you
have the rise of Macedonia, a tiny little country in
the north. You've got King Philip the Second who's expanding
(11:20):
territory every which way, conquering Thrace, which is also a
place that exists, and now they're taking shit from Athens.
Philip the Second gets assassinated at his own daughter's funeral,
and his twenty year old son, Alexander the Great, starts
off his greatness by killing his own brother and his
cousin who might have wanted to take it from him.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Okay, I knew that Philip sounded familiar. I knew it.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah. Yeah. When I first watched Game of Thrones, I
was like, oh, I guess this is supposed to be
like e oldie England. And then I started reading about
the ancient world and I was like, now, Game of
Thrones is the ancient world right right, the.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Way that like you're describing the Greek world's plural. It's
just extremely Mediterranean. Like that's how people I'm from Palestine,
like this is exactly you know, shared commonalities. But yeah,
people were not one thing.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
No, that's actually such a because we tend to do
this thing where we're like, ah, Greece is European and
Palestine that's not European, and you're like, this is all Mediterranean. Yeah,
and like the ancient world doesn't give us shit about Europe.
Europe is like this like weird backwater full of people.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Right in the beyond.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah. Absolutely, And so Greece is part of Mediterranean culture
and that's much more important to them. So Alexander the
quote unquote great. He centralizes the power a bit in Greece,
and then he goes off marching to go fuck up
the Persian Empire and then he dies of this or
that illness when he's thirty two. I will never do
an episode about him unless he ends up a more
(12:48):
important side character one day. I don't know, maybe some
people fucking him up. I don't know. But the power
in this area is city states. And that's kind of
my most important takeaway, and I'm really interested, like this
thing that you're talking about, I'm really interested in how
if you just like dig back far enough, this is
just human history, the idea that we we always like
(13:09):
look back and like, ah, there've always been nation states.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Absolutely not, yeah, absolutely not. I mean, listen, I know
where they come from. I understand self determination claims, but
I would love for people to understand that nation states
are a new and modern phenomena. Yeah, and we did
not live like this for most of human history.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah. And so the various Greek tribes have been wandering
around colonizing other places, though in a way that doesn't
quite map to modern settler colonialism politically. I mean, they
are going around fucking people up, but it's a little
bit more like, ah, I'm going to go set up
a like city over here in this area that other
people are also trying to.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Do this too, But it's more integrative, right.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
It's interesting. I think it's more almost like a it's
not super melting pot, at least the specific place that
I'm talking about right now with Sinope, the town that
he's from, which is Greek, but it's in modern day Turkey.
It's more interwoven because you're like you're showing up and
be like, oh, no, we're a Greek culture over here,
but we are our own separate legal entity and we
(14:10):
are doing trade with everyone around us. And it's I
think I better understand where the people who invented modern
settler colonialism, if they weren't absolute pieces of garbage. I
think they thought they were doing this. It was probably
shitty back then too, like all the way back then. Yeah,
but it's a different thing than modern settle of colonialism.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
I mean, you're describing the Arab world one percent like
before the modern nation state totally.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
And like I read so much about the Ottoman Empire
for a bunch of episodes about Palestine and like understanding it.
The little that I do helped me so much to understand.
I don't know the way that everything shape. I don't
know where I'm going with this, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
It's like a microcosm of like how world history has progressed.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, exactly. And so you've got Greek colleg over and
what's now Turkey on the Anatolian Peninsula and Anatolian Peninsula
shout out. It keeps coming up on episodes. This is
like the new tuberculosis. When I did the nineteenth century,
everything was tuberculosis, and now.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Now it's this peninsula.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah. One of those colonies was called Sonope, and this
is where Diogenes was born, and we'll get to that.
Sonope is right up there on the coast of the
Black Sea, and it's very importantly. It's a Black Sea culture.
I read this thing that was like and it didn't
really interact with the rest of Anatolia. But then I
read like another thing and it was like, ah, yes,
the Phrygian who are a little bit south of there.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Like, it remained extremely mixed until the Turkish state, and
even today the Turks that live in that area consider
themselves distinct.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Oh that makes sense. Yeah, And Sonope had probably been
built in the six hundreds or so BCE, and this
is a regionally powerful city state. It has a big
navy and it like to fuck around in local affairs.
They had a tyrant for a while named times Sillius,
but then folks overthrew him in favor of democracy in
four thirty seven, and then around fourteen Tennis. You don't
(16:03):
have to remember these dates, they don't matter. And then
around four tenish Athens stopped stationing troops there, so we like,
don't know what happened in the government there. We actually
don't know what government this man was born into. It
might have been a democracy, might have not been. They
kept going back and forth. Also, democracy is a weird
term in a place to say.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, I was like, what do you mean by democracy?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
It's like the men, Yeah, yeah, the citizens, I'm the
people who matter.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Yes, of course, of course I should have known.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah, we don't know when Diogenes as motherfucker, we don't
know when he was born. Reading ancient history is so frustrating.
It is exciting that there are parts of the world
where we know about some shit from twenty five hundred
years ago, but our knowledge is still spotty. Most of
the writing about Diogenies that we have from the ancient
world is from a book written by a Roman Empire
eragant guy named Diogenes Laertis. I was talking about who
(16:50):
wrote a series of books called Lives and Opinions of
Eminent Philosophers.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Oh, he made him eminent.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, Diogenies is eminent. That's true. People didn't want to
admit that at the time, but he was eminent. But
this was written seven hundred years after Diogenes roughly maybe
six hundred. I don't bother doing math when things go
BCEC just fucking I don't know. And it relied on
sources that we no longer have access to. So this
is our best history, ancient history full of people where
(17:17):
we're like, ah, we have this two thousand year old
thing that cites its sources that we don't have. And
he's born in four oh three BCE or four thirteen
BCE or like whenever the fuck late fifth century BCE,
and he's born into one of the elite families of Sonopay.
His father was named Hysisius or something like that, and
(17:42):
we literally don't know a single thing about his mother.
Why would people write about women? I can't imagine why
anyone would. Yeah, Hessius isn't just a banker and a
money changer. He's like the money changer for Sonopay because
all this money shit was new at the time in
the region in terms of like being a important part
of more people's day to day lives. And so there's
(18:04):
this international trade going on, and Greek cities would basically
approve a license to someone to be the money changer
in order to handle all the international currency. So his
Dad would sit at a bench in the agora, which
is the public square. It's important in Greek cities and
exchange currencies. He also was the local bank, and he
was a local magistrate, which is some kind of public official.
(18:25):
We don't know what kind of public official, because we
don't know. You don't get paid to be a magistrate,
So only rich people could afford to do it. See
the aforementioned democracy of the rich men. But to talk
about being rich back then versus now, I'm not defending
ancient rich, but I think it's worth understanding. The anthropologist
David Grayburn his book Debt, which is a history of money,
(18:48):
talked about a lot of various gift economies throughout the world,
And one of the things that I learned from is
that most societies put up with the idea of rich people.
Basically when those rich people are giving things away left
and right and throwing them most fabulous feasts and banquets
and financing all the parades and shit. Basically, you're rich,
say you owe us. It's an obligation. You can see
(19:10):
traces of this still, but the modern billionaire class is
like not into.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
This, so like no, we kind of want to keep taking.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, that's a yeah. And I'm not being like, ah,
like this is funny because it ends up with me
defending fucking Carnegie, one of the like robber barons of
the nineteenth century, because at least he started all the
libraries in the country.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, he started foundations. Like yeah, he was kind of
like old school rich.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah, he was a fucking piece of shit. He was
robbing all of us, but you know what, he like
gave a little of it back.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
A little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, And so this era of Greece is obsessed with
wealth and power and status, much like modern society. It's
actually this moment feels a little bit more modern than
the areas before and after it, based on what I'm reading,
Like it's a little bit like even more into just
like nah, money's what's up? And it's a nightmare. Society
(20:08):
built entirely on slavery and war. For all of its
talk of democracy and civilization, Greece had more in common
with pre Civil War the US South than anything one
might imagine as utopian and good. The entire economy ran
on slavery, and one of the main reasons to go
to war was to enslave people. I don't know that
this is uniquely Greek. This is a little bit ancient
(20:29):
world and Mediterranean, but it's different in different places. But
Greece at this era was like especially into this. It
wasn't the racialized chattel slavery of the US South, but
it wasn't something pleasant either. I've seen it kind of
presented a little bit like most enslaved people were debtors
who then paid off their debts and then we're free again,
and like yeah, and that's the rich people who end
(20:51):
up enslaved. No, the entire productive economy was made by
unfreelabory and legal protections and workplace conditions very dramatic by
the field you were enslaved in and where you lived.
In some places it was illegal to abuse or kill
enslaved people. Athens was a little bit kinder at some
points to enslaved people than other places. And I hate
(21:11):
making this comparison, but the best comparison I can make
is that it's the way the animals are treated in
modern law. Some of the worst excesses are illegal, but
you own your dog, right, And so when people are
like ah, but they still had some rights, like yeah,
they have rights, like my fucking dog as rights, right,
you know, and that's fucked up. I'm not trying to
(21:31):
be like whatever. Anyway, Mines and farms were worked by
enslaved people who died a lot. Domestic enslaved people and
those working in skilled labor had it slightly better then.
In cities like Athens you get publicly owned slaves. People
who are enslaved by the city itself do mean civil
service work. And the Ottoman Empire was like all about
this shit.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Oh, like the janis Ares.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
I was at what they were called. I'm not actually sure. No,
those were the soldier ones, right.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, the soldier like the Christian soldiers.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Oh. Interesting, No, I don't know anything about the Janetius.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
But maybe I'm confusing some concepts.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, that's a word I'd heard a lot, and I
don't know a ton about it. I know it was
like a soldier of empire. It's been a minute since
I did episodes about this. But in the Ottoman Empire
you have a lot of civil servants are owned by
the city, and it's actually a position of a fair
amount of prestige, at least according to the sources I
was reading. People would literally sell themselves into slavery in
(22:27):
order to move up in their careers and like take
care of their families and stuff. And I don't know
how the rest of slavery worked in the Ottoman Empire,
but yeah, but ancient Greek slavery was generational slavery. If
your mother was enslaved, you were born enslaved. And some
of the very beginning's speaking of nation states, some of
the very beginning of city states working together and creating
(22:48):
treaties was to help recover stolen property.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Oh my goodness. If that doesn't tell you what the
state is about, I know we're being very anarchist today.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yeah. So this meant that basically, other cities would hold
fugitives for ransom, so they would capture the fugitive and
then ransom them back to the owner in the other city.
It's not called a ransom, it's called an administrative fee. Like, ah,
we caught your guy, you're gonna give me something for him.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
We got a storm.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, storage fees. This is the detail that I focused
on the most, And now I want to spend all
of my time reading about the shit so I can
write historical fiction set in this era. Runaway slaves might
get the words arrest me, I have run away or
something similar tattooed on their foreheads after capture.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Oh my gosh, Oh my gosh. What a nightmare society
for real?
Speaker 2 (23:40):
I know, have you ever seen a movie about the
US South where like someone who's been caught running away
has to wear like a nightmare collar that looks like
it's from a horror movie, that's like a steel cage
with spikes around their neck, and.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Shit, okay, I have it, but I can imagine it.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Okay, those were real. Yeah, and that's what this were
minds me of.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, for sure. They just like they have to wear
hats if they escape again.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, yeah, totally exactly. He like, ah, thus they invented
the bean.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Oh man, but it's still really bad, guys. This is
really fun.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, So the past is a nightmare. The president is
a nightmare too, But the past is a nightmare. And
most of the most nightmare societies seem to be the
ones hell bent on civilizing everyone else. Of course, so
Diogenes was born into the top of this world. He
was very educated. He could read and write, he could
ride horses. But do you know what, he wasn't as
(24:35):
good at as I am interrupting scripts with ad breaks.
I'm so good at it. This is the sole thing
that I will never be humble about. For example, just
now you're about to hear ads in re back. But
(24:56):
even though he couldn't do that, he could read and write,
He could ride horses. He knew all the classics, all
the rich people shit. And it's funny because we don't
actually have it written down, like he was rich as fuck,
but we just like know it based on these things. Yeah,
there's no public school in order to be educated. This
is the way that the first source I read wrote
it roughly. Not only did your parents need to hire tutors,
(25:17):
they had to hire laborers to do the work that
the kids would otherwise be doing.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Right, Oh, in replacement, I see.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah. But also I don't know. This is a land
of slavery. Diogenes himself is going to be an enslaved
tutor for a while, you know. So when they're like, ah,
you have to be rich and hire people to do
these things, I'm like, fuck, you buy people. They had
to buy people. Anyway, Diogenes grows up and it becomes
a magistrate. We know very little about his early life.
(25:45):
We don't know what his magistrate to see was either
because it's a different thing in different cities, but he
was probably in charge of the coin making for the
city along with his father. He lived in Sinope just
doing rich guy shit for decades. How long fuck have
we know? Maybe he was in his thirty fifties when
the next shit happened. We know he owned a guy
named Manes, who is from Phrygia, a little bit further
(26:06):
south in Anatolia. And we only know about this because
Manes at one point ran away and then was killed
by wild dogs. Rest in peace, Manes. Most the anecdotes
we have about Diogenes's life we have them because he
would make some philosophical statement about them. And the thing
that he said after the person that he was enslaving
ran away was that he wasn't mad that Manes right
(26:29):
away he said about it quote, it would be absurd
if Mones could live without Diogenes, but Diogenes couldn't live
without Manes.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Okay, he's a self reflective guy.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, yeah, So he's living his rich guy life. He's
trying a bit of non attachment to his possessions, and
then he and his father get caught up in a
wild defacement of currency scheme because they're counterfeitters.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
The power of controlling all the money wasn't enough. I know.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
I can't believe we entrust two guys to control all
the money and then they did something fucked up.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
I mean, yeah, that's on us. Actually.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Yeah, to be fair, they lived before Tolkien wrote the
perfect metaphor for this, so no one knew. Sorry ifence
at some point. Yeah, so either his dad or Diogenes
starts counterfeiting money. At least the legend says. Most likely
what he's doing is debasing coins. He's in charge of
the coin making, so he's probably having them put cheaper
(27:26):
metal in there, or his silver plating coins or his
gold plating coins. He's doing something to fuck with the money.
This would get you executed in the ancient world, and
people were on the lookout for this shit. People had
all kinds of ways. You would tap a coin on
a marble table and listen to the noise it makes.
You would shave off a little and dip those shavings
(27:47):
in acid. You would cut into it to see the
core of it. And there are legends about why he
did this. Everything that he does is like legends about
And my favorite one is that he visited the Oracle
of Delphi and he was like, hell, yeah, make fake money.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
She's like it's totally fine, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah yeah, crime is legal.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Did you know have you seen the society we live in?
It's terrible.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, laws are fake.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
I like the idea of this, like O, like this
woman just like messing.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
With I know, and like the legend is like, oh,
there was a thing she said that could have been
interpreted more than one way. She could have been like
saying like, oh, you gotta fuck with society's norms, but
he misinterpreted her.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
He's like I should deface coins.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah yeah. And it's interesting to me too, right because
like when I was younger, I would hear about the
like anti defacement of currency laws, and I thought it
was like it's illegal to cut a quarter and a half,
which I think is like true, but no one cares.
It's about shit like this, Yeah you know it's a value.
Yeah yeah. And according to this legend, this is how
(28:54):
he knew he was destined to undermine the establishment. Like
now he was just trying to get richer, but whatever.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And then he gets caught and he's like I'm actually
a cynic.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Yeah totally. I've invented this whole new thing where I
don't even care about them.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, And this actually tracks with his later views on money,
if he just wanted to make more money, and that's
why he's counterfeiting, because the problem is that he, according
to him, if you have any money, suddenly you want
more and you lose yourself in the pursuit of a
vain and pointless thing like wealth. So he probably thought
(29:28):
that because he himself had done that, he had succumbed
to it, and it it kills his father. His father
is arrested and dies in prison, and Diogenes is either
on the run or cast out his phrases, he's in exile.
God has got to be nice to be like, Ah,
I broke a law in one city, so I just
got to go to like like, ah, Baltimore's out to
(29:48):
get me. Time to go to Richmond, Like.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Actually that would solve a lot of problems.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
But I dignest yeah totally, you know. And he's on
the run. He's like in his twenties or fifties or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Somewhere.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, and exile does him good, at least from a
becoming a philosopher who is all about not having stuff
point of view. Exile is seen as a very serious dispossession.
In this time and place, you are supposed to be
buried in the same place as your ancestors. And Diogenes
was like, no, fuck all that, this rules, fuck nationalism.
(30:30):
And so it goes off to Athens, the center of
learning and the place where people from all kinds of
places went. It's the closest The word cosmopolitan hasn't been
invented by Diogenes yet, but it's the most cosmopolitan of
these Greek cities.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
I think, Yeah, it's like New York of that time.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, totally. But even though he's Greek, he is very
much a foreigner legally and socially, because Greek is a
vague cultural idea. But what matters is Athens to Athenians
on the burroughs, Yes, fucking transplants. And so he begins
(31:07):
the rest of his life the Party's famous for which
is a homeless immigrant. His legal status is foreign resident.
He will never be a citizen again. He can hold
no office, he can't vote, he has to pay taxes,
and if you fall behind on your taxes, you become
immediately enslaved. I actually don't think he paid taxes. I
think they might have been like you're a beggar, maybe
(31:28):
you only have to pay taxes on what you make.
I'd actually don't know how the tax system worked.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, he just never declared anything.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, yeah, totally. Ah No, it's all why do you
have a bunch of ones like I don't work at
a club. I don't know your telling about he probably
would have worked at it. I don't know. He probably
wouldn't have worked at the club. We'll talk about his
opinions on sex work later, Okay, interest they're mixed, and
he becomes a homeless guy. The word mendicant is usually
used to be polite, but he did not care about
being polite, so I don't care. Being not polite was
(31:56):
his whole thing. He fell in with a philosopher and
named Antisthenas, who is way less famous today but was
his mentor and his sort of predecessor, the real founder
of the Synics. Even if Senics are literally named after
Diogenes is his nickname, So Diogenes is the founder of
the Synics. It's fine. Although Antisthenas was also called a
dog sometimes, so.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Is there's some rivalry in there?
Speaker 2 (32:20):
No, No, they're buzz The real rivalry is going to
be played o versus Diogenes. But the real fucking competition
is that all the philosophers hate athletes. But we'll talk
about that later.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Hey, I hate jocks too. That's fine, I know.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I know, right, And it's such a similar way. It's
so funny. He's like goes to the Olympics and complains
about sports ball, Like he's just like, he's that guy.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
He's like these meatheads.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Yeah, literally literally meatheads because he complains about how much
meat they eat.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
That is so funny. I did not know any of this.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, no, it's just hilarious.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
I'm excited. I feel like I am more kin to
this guy than I thought.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Okay, say that you hate people the most when you're
closest to them. That's why I hate Diogenies.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
So he reminds you too much.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Absolutely, I absolutely spent my twenties and early thirties like
mostly limited public and like.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Having strong opinions.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, totally so. Antisthenas had been a pupil of Socrates,
and the thing that he passed on to Diogenes is
that you have to live in accordance with your stated values,
and so he was into asceticism and simple living. Diogenes Laertis,
the later historian, Guy, said about Antisthenez quote, he would
(33:36):
prove that virtue can be taught, and that nobility belongs
to none other than the virtuous. And he held virtue
to be sufficient in itself to ensure happiness, since it
needed nothing else except the strength of spirit. And he
maintained that spirit is an affair of deeds and does
not need a store of words or learning. That the
(33:56):
wise mind is self sufficing, for all the goods of
others are his. That I will repute is a good thing,
and much the same as pain, and the wise man
will be guided in his public acts not by the
established laws, but by the law of virtue. I'm like
eighty percent with it.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
A bit anti intellectual, but I also like I understand, I.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Get it totally, yeah, and like, you know, I don't
think that like like, ah, if your infamous, it's good.
I'm like, but I get why people come up with that.
You know, Also when you live in like a fucking
nightmare slave society, being hated by this society.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Like maybe Intonus is not that that right.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Plato, who's way more right wing, isn't sort of descended
from the split happens. I did not study Greek philosophy,
well I did this week. But Plato is much more
right wing, and he gets some pretty good digs in
at Antesthenez, pointing out that Antisthenez he's like, always walks
around in his threadbare cloak, right, but he always wears
it so that the most patched up and fucked up
(34:57):
parts are visible because he's Oh my god, he's the
virtue sigulated. Yeah, I know this guy. Oh my god, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
I'm so tired of this guy.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
And so that's who Diogenes falls in with before that
guy dies in three sixty six, which is how we
know when Athens must have been in Athens by at
least by. So Diogenes takes that shit to the extreme
and is voluntarily homeless, living off of asking people for money.
And this is very clear to him it is not
begging from his point of view. The word he used
(35:27):
for asked in ancient Greek has connotations of asking for
something you're entitled to. He exchanged wisdom for alms. Most
alms were barley cakes and olives and little bits of food,
maybe a tiny fish, rarely money, and being a mendicant. Again,
I'm reading these sources and people are like, but being
(35:48):
a mendicant in Greece was seen as really bad, unlike today,
And I'm like, interesting, tell me more about unlike. But
this is part of why I feel like this era
of a ancient Greece is actually a little bit more
like twenty first century America than twentieth century America, because
there's this like increased war on homelessness right now, the
(36:09):
right wing reaction to homelessness is like even more intense. Right,
Being a mendicant in ancient Greece was really low, lower than
it was in most places and times in history, specifically
if you compare it to Christian medieval Europe. In medieval Europe,
if you is never good to be a beggar, it's
not a nice way, Like society is not nice to you.
(36:29):
But you get something if you give alms in medieval Europe,
because by Christian values, you are saving your soul, right,
your own soul, right.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
So there is like a virtue to like engaging with
them humanly.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Right, Yeah, And there is not that. In Athens at
this time, there's this set of Greek social norms at
the time called philia translated as friendship, and it's basically
this like social code everyone abided by of mutual aid,
where you all help each other out except beggars.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Okay, so the people who need it.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Most they don't get it, okay, yeah, which is you
see this in like right wing people too, right, You're like, oh, well,
you know that person. They're never going to help me back.
That's the point here, right. The beggars don't get to
be part of this culture because they are taking without
giving in return. And beggars terrified the rich ancient Greeks.
(37:21):
I read it as they terrified ancient Greeks and then
I'm like, do you just mean the citizens again? And
the answer is yes, they terrified the fucking citizens the
rich dudes. To dream about a beggar was to dream
about death and loss. One third century CE Greek guy
put it, beggars have this in common with death, that alone,
of all people like death. They take something without giving
(37:44):
anything in return. And this just like wildly misunderstands giving
to beggars and death. Death doesn't take without giving in return.
It is literally where soil comes from.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
It is, right, it's actually quite generative. Right.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, every religion or if it's salt, totally fine with death.
Trying to stop death always be so bad. Yeah, I mean,
like we should stop people from dying individually, but at
the end of things, you're supposed to fucking die.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Everyone's supposed to die. Yeah, but remember your guy, he
does exchange things, right, he exchanges his wisdom.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
So he doesn't see himself as a beggar I see.
And so he's like he's being a little bit like
he's a little bit of a pigmy about this. He's
like a little bit like, I'm not the rest of these.
He actually, he goes on at one point about how
he has it worse than the other beggars. It's much
harder to be voluntarily homeless, according to him, this is okay.
This was the first thing I read where I was like,
I think I hate this man.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
He's like, you don't know how hard it is for me.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Right, And his argument is because I read one thing
that was like and everyone hated giving to beggars, and like,
clearly people are giving to beggars.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
What it is is that the working poor are giving
to the homeless poor. And this is much like modern
society today, right, Like I came up and I like
fucking always keep I actually got this from my dad.
I keep twenties under my visor my dashboard to give
people flying signs, right because there but by the grace
that God go I right and like right. And so
that's where people are getting their money is from working
(39:14):
people who are like, oh fuck, I could be you.
I want this system of mutual aid to apply to
you too, so that it applies to me, or they
just are like, oh fuck, you're hungry and I have food.
Fuck you know, yeah, I'm a human. Yeah you're a human. Yeah,
yeah exactly. But his whole thing is that people could
look at a beggar and think, ah, I might end
up a beggar. No one looks at a philosopher and thinks, ah,
(39:36):
I might end up a philosopher.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Oh my god, face palm. Those guy's annoying. But it's fun,
you know.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
But I also I like love that he exists. I
just don't want to hang out with him.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
The audacity, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Yeah, totally. It's not just for recording podcasts. Sorry, that's
the software I used to record podcast joke it's free, okay.
And some sources are making the argument that even enslaved
people are capital to their owners, so their owners have
investment in keeping those people alive, and so to be
unowned and unhoused was potentially worse. I could not tell
(40:15):
you if that's the case. I'm skeptical of anything that
ever says something like that. But do you know what
I'm not skeptical of.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (40:22):
Any of these goods or services. I think all of
them are on the level, especially gambling on your phone.
That always works out well for everyone. Yeah, whenever you
look at someone, you're like, that person gambles a lot.
You never say that person has a gambling problem. There'd
be a phrase gambling problem, but that doesn't exist. No. Instead,
people are like, ah, that person's rich. They spend all
(40:44):
their anyway tone online gamble. If that's the ad, I'm
very sorry. I don't have enough control over it. But
here's the rest of the ads and we're back. So
this guy lives in this increasingly weird liminal spot where
he's increasingly famous as a philosopher while living on the streets,
(41:04):
but no one will have him over well again, I'll
read sources or analysis a little bit, but no one
will have him over. But then I have all of
these other documented times when people had him over. So
I'm like, God, damn it, historians, why don't you all
agree on everything? Why is there not a simple camera
(41:24):
that goes back then? I have never more in my life.
I've always been anti time travel is like a thing
we should try and develop. I am so curious about
the past that I would absolutely risk my life and
time paradoxes to see how some shit went happened went down.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Yeah, you're alone in that. You're alone in that.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
I kind of join you. You don't want to go
back in time and figure I actually don't give a
shit whether this man went to parties or not.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
But just to say that, are you actually going to parties?
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, totally. You called yourself a kill joy. But speaking
of this, as part of why I hate this man
so much, is that literally, my my cynicism and kill
joy attitude is how I ended up with my last name.
And so, as far as I can tell, there are
two classes of celebrities in ancient Greece. They're the athletes
who competed in the Olympics and had statues built of
(42:10):
them and were compared to gods. And then there were
the philosophers, who people were really excited about two but
philosophers hated the athletes, and they never phrased it because
I'm jealous. They always had real complicated philosophical arguments about
why they were Just.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Don't put it in the paper that I was mad.
I was not.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Mad, Yeah, exactly, that's like me, like me with I know,
I'm actually just jealous. I know they're all jealous. And
it's funny because Diogenes and Plato like are like at
each other's throats, like all the time. They would get
into fist fights and shit with each other. I don't
know if Plato and Diogenes would, but Diogenes did throw hands.
(42:52):
That is one thing that I can read between the
lines is that Diagenies threw hands like every now and then,
Like sources will be like, can he did grow up
a boxing and like they just included yeah, which is
interesting because he's like another character that I like a
lot more that I he reminds me of from the
research I did, is Oscar Wild. In that Oscar Wild
(43:13):
is also heavily quoted and misquoted. Diogenes is heavily quoted
and misquoted. They're both these like celebrity kind of like
wild characters who are very unique.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
And they reject a lot of things.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
And right totally. And Oscar Wild's the inverse because Oscar
Wild spends most of his life actively pursuing pleasure and vice,
whereas Diogeny's whole thing is like, fuck pleasure, fuck vice,
all of those things, you know, although they both fuck.
Unlike a lot of later cynics, Theogeny is absolutely fucks.
But what A hated Oscar Wild, partly because he's homophobic,
which is what a fucking hated Oscar Wild. But I
(43:50):
think they had a lot in common anyway. But they
both threw hands. At one point early in his life,
Oscar Wild was being bullied a lot in school. But
Oscar Wild is like not a small man, and he
just like beat the shit out of the people who
are picking on him. I think they were accusing him
being gay or whatever, and he's like, all right, I'll
just beat you all up now, and he like took
on a whole room full of people or whatever.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
The fuck understandable.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
That's why I like Huskar well a lot. But Diogenes
in Plato they're at each other's throats, but they agree.
Fuck athletes. And as for how he lived as this
homeless rockstar philosopher pissing on the rich, we'll talk about
on Wednesday. What do you think about Diogenies so far?
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Honestly, he's an extremely intriguing guy, and it upsets me,
as you said that, I'm finding a lot to agree with.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
I know, I know, but that's like when you meet
this guy in real life. That's how it is, where
you're like, fuck, half of what you say is so profound, right,
and you think the other half is profound too, And
that's a problem.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Uh yeah, I mean typical man and I don't know,
And I'm just like, the men have this problem generally.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah, and he's such a good like his philosophy is
very actively feminist, but the way he acts and treats
women is not very actively feminist.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Again, you're describing so many people like yeah, and this
kind of nightmare society, I mean, the extreme contradictions, Like
it's really a shame how much it reminds you of today.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's like interesting because all the right
wing people are obsessed with the ancient world. They're obsessed
with the ancient Greece, and are obsessed with ancient Rome,
and they're obsessed with Plato especially. They're also obsessed with
the Stoics, and they're wrong about that. The Stoics would
fucking hate the modern right wing. The Stoics actually developed
from the Cynics. But they're all obsessed with the shit.
And I think I understand them a little better by
(45:50):
reading more about Roman Greece, Like the Confederacy was trying
to be this and they saw themselves like Sparta and like, yeah,
like so civilized and shit. Although ironically, according to Diogenes
and some sources, Sparta is actually a more gender equal
society than Athens. Really Sparta, like Diogenes, actually, I don't
(46:14):
think I put this in the script. I'll just go
on this brief. Rent Dieges really liked Sparta and compared
it favorably to Athens, although we never lived in Sparta.
But like at one point people were like, where do
you find the wisest men in Greece? And he said,
there are no wise men in Greece, but in Sparta
there are some wise lads. Lads, Okay, they're coming along,
(46:36):
I think is where he's going with this, because he
liked them because they lived a spartan lifestyle. They were
much more like minimalists. Yeah, they were like anti pleasure
and like just like stoic and just to keep using
these words that now mean very different things. He saw
them as a more masculinous society and he kind of
liked that, as compared to Athens was effeminine, not womanly,
but effeminine, and he did not like effeminins. This is
(47:00):
my biggest problem with him is that he hated me.
So it's like, in return, I'm like, well, then fuck
you too. Yeah. Obviously, yes, although oh there's going to
be a really good point about he's going to literally
have his life saved by trans women in part two,
which we'll get to on Wednesday. But first, what if
people want to know more about you and what you do.
(47:21):
Do you have a book out?
Speaker 1 (47:22):
I do have a book out. It's about the palsinge
and authority, so very different from what we've been talking about,
called polarized and demobilized Leguacies of authoritarism in Palestine. I also
edited this book called The Handbook on Authoritarianism in the
Arab World. That's aboutually released open access so people stay
tuned and then if they want to hear me. I
you know, I do these podcasts for Cool Zone Media
(47:44):
as well as for the from the Periphery Media Collective.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
So yeah, wait, can you tell me more about the
second book. I'm curious about it.
Speaker 3 (47:50):
Yeah, so it is kind of like a reference material,
but I made sure that it's doing access. Yeah, life really,
but like I really wanted to be outside of academia
as well. And it's got thirty contributions on different facets
of authoritarianism in the air World, including like gender and
disinformation and the genocide and gaza, like so many different
(48:11):
components that I'm really proud of by thirty different contributors,
most of them based in the region.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yeah, I'm super excited for it to come out because
obviously the Air World says so much about our global context.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
And yeah, I'm gonna be thinking a lot about the
thing that you said about how like the Arab world
is sort of a perfect microcosm both historically and present
to like understand so much about everything about I mean,
not everything everything, obviously cultures are different in different places,
but like.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
It's such an integral part of understanding Europe's development. Yeah,
and therefore our situation.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
Now right totally. Every now and then I get kind
of caught up on how like I'm like, fuck, I
keep doing these fucking European things. And part of that
is like literally my own background and you know, the
culture that grew up in. But also part of it
is just like understanding I mean, I want to understand everything,
but part of that is the way that Europe colonized
(49:06):
the world and where that comes from. Yeah, and like
like watching the British, the old tribal British fighting against
Roman incursion and then turn around and become Rome and
like literally model themselves on Rome. Yeah, and then you
have the gall to use gall okay, sorry, and then
you have the gall to use the people who fought
(49:26):
the Roman empires, your nationalist heroes, like those people would
literally kill you for doing what they would anyway. Whatever.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Yeah, Well it goes to show humans are terrible.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Ah, we're gonna make a cynega.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
I'm too prone to this.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
All right, I talk to you, Well, i'll talk to
you in five minutes, but I'll talk to everyone else
on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (49:49):
Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
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Speaker 2 (50:06):
M
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
You're twice weekly reminder that I have a podcast and
it's about people who did stuff that I think is cool.
I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today
as my guest is Dana el khurd Hi. How are
you hi?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah. Dana is a researcher and writer about the authoritarianism
and once wrote a book called Polarized and Demobilized Legacies
of Authoritarianism in Palestine and works does a bunch of stuff.
I don't know. Is that that who you are?
Speaker 1 (00:37):
That's perfect? Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Isn't it great when people are like, here's your bio,
as if this explains who you are, and I'm like, yeah, totally,
that definitely explains sure, Yeah, absolutely. I now understand why
authors always include the like lives with her dog or
whatever the fuck and or their bios right right right, anyway.
We have a producer named Sophie who's not on the call,
and we have an audio engineer named Eva hi Eva
(01:02):
hi Eva are. The music was written for us by unwoman.
I usually am talking about things that happen one hundred,
two hundred years ago, sometimes twenty years ago. But I've
been on this kick by accident where I've been talking
about the ancient world, going back a couple thousand of years.
And I discovered this very week that one of my
favorite Sesame Street characters was probably based on a real
(01:25):
figure from history.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Oh my gosh, who is it? Is it Oscar the Grouch?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
It's Oscar the Grouch. It is totally Oscar the Grouch.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Okay, that was a guess, but I love it.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Do you watch mom Sesame Street as a kid?
Speaker 1 (01:39):
I did not bump my son did.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, Okay, awesome. There is for the people who live
under a rock eh eh, or in a trash can
on a public street. There is a green grouchy man
who lives in a trash can and he hates everything
that normal people like. That's his whole thing. He's a
grouch and his name's Off and it seems likely that
(02:03):
he was based on this week's main character, a famous
old grouch who lived in a jar on a public
street in ancient Greece. The one and the only diogenies
of Sonope, not to be confused with the other diagenies,
the one who wrote the latter. I wrote the one
and only Diogenes is note and then I was like, oh,
my main source for this week, the main source about
(02:26):
this guy period is another guy named Diogenes Diogenes Laertis
because okay, I don't know all romany Greek sounding names
all sound the same to me, but it's literally just
also Diogenes, who wrote a biography of this man several
hundred years later, so it's still an ancient source, but
it's still two thousand years old. You ever heard of Diogenies?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I have not, No, not a big Greek fan.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, neither was Diogenes to his credit. You know how
everything that you learn in school, you've then learned that
you learned kind of weird sanded down version, yeah, the
wrong things. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I like learn all this
stuff about ancient Greece as a kid in public school
in the United States of America, and you're like, oh,
it's got this stuff. It's a nightmare world. It's closer
(03:14):
to the US Confederacy, speaking of things that they don't
tell you the truth about in American school. It's closer
to the US Confederacy than it is to like some
like grand and noble ideal of democracy, right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
It's more Sparta than Athens, like, and even those versions
we totally have sanitized versions.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Of right, Oh, Diogenes is obsessed with the difference between
Sparta and Athens. But both of them are bad. They're
both it's their flavor of bad. But anyway, so I
don't have any direct evidence of Oscar the Grouch being
based on Diogenies, but I spent not a small amount
of time this week trying to find Jim Henson admitting it,
(03:52):
because it has to be true by the end of
this episode. So you're gonna be like, it has to
be the case that this man is based on Diogenes.
But maybe one day I'll do Jim Henson episodes and
I'll find out Diogenies was the philosopher that gave us
the Cynics, a school of philosophy that is almost completely
unrelated to the common use of the word cynic and cynical,
(04:13):
which you know, and someone's like, ah, like the old Cynics.
I was like, ah, I probably distrust everybody I don't know.
As an anarchist, I appreciate this. Anarchism is a school
of thought that is almost entirely unrelated to the connotations
people have with the word anarchy. The words meaned nonsense,
like you know, ask a republican in the twentieth century
(04:34):
Ireland and ask a republican in twentieth century America if
they agree about anything. The Cynics were pretty fucking radical
for their time, and specifically they refused all social conventions.
That was their core idea. This guy Diogenies literally pissed
on rich people in public.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Did they enjoy that? Was that an enjoyable thing?
Speaker 2 (04:58):
It was at a party. We'll get to the story
of that. I think it was kind of a you know,
when someone's like kind of acting up at a party
and then they're like, oh fine, I'll just fucking do
this thing.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Then okay, So they just kind of egged him on.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
That's the impression I get. But he was called the
dog in derision, and he took that name with pride.
And it is from the Greek word that I forgot
to write into my script for dog the dog that
we get the word cynical. It essentially means dog like,
and I think it less means canine and more like
(05:35):
like the guy the dog.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
You know, okay, huh, because I kind of imagine like
the way that you're describing, and I know nothing about
Greek philosophy. They're like extremely like anti authoritarian, like of
any convention. Yeah, but then the dog connection here, Yeah,
I'll have to explain it a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
No, we're gonna get to it a little bit later too.
But it's interesting because basically dogs were seen in ancient
Greece as a sort of a rebel, but not in
a glorified good way, but like a traitorous way. They
were seen as these like half wild creatures that we
like put up with. Individuals of course, were like I
fucking love my dog, right. And it was actually a
really good point in one of my sources, and it's
(06:15):
in the show notes. It's one of the books. I
don't remember which one. There's a really good point an
author made that didn't make it to the script about
how dogs are the only animal that we get mad
at like this because it's the only animal we expect
to behave perfectly.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
That's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
And so dogs were seen as these dangerous wild creatures.
Athens then and now were full of street dogs, and
is full of street dogs. So it's like you're this mongrel,
you're this just like terrible creature that just lives in
the streets.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Outside the fall.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
So he was famously a homeless, itinerant beggar, and he
was an immigrant to Athens and everywhere he ended up
living because he could never go home. We'll get to that.
And he often lived in a big ceramic jar, which
is what Athens used instead of barrels. He was born rich,
he was forced into exile, he became a beggar, then
(07:10):
he was enslaved, then he was freed. He's the only
guy I've covered on the show who was both owned
a guy and been owned by a guy.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
This guy his life story.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, and most of the shit he did after he
was like fifty, and he lived a pretty wild life.
And he believed that philosophy should be put into action
or it was meaningless. For hundreds of years, the Cynics
weren't taken seriously as a school of philosophy in ancient
Greece because they're like, ah, it's just the weird fucking
street trash. Because well, some sources are like because they
(07:41):
didn't write. No, he wrote so much, we just don't
have it. The other word we get from him, incidentally,
is the word cosmopolitan because he was the first self
declared citizen of the world, and he had no use
for national borders, which at the time meant city borders.
And he was a lot of things, a lot of
(08:03):
contradictory things, and if I'm being honest, most of what
I read about him was like, Wow, he's the most
unique man who's ever lived. But I have met dozens
of this guy in my life. And maybe it's because
I've just like lived on the streets, and I think
maybe most writers haven't. These people aren't boring. Diogenies not boring.
These people are aggravating and arrogant and full of unexamined
(08:26):
privileges and assumptions while they're accusing you of the same,
But they are not boring. His philosophy was shockingly feminist
for the time, but he was also a misogynist. He
actively worked against the culture of pederasty, which is a
very common thing in ancient Greece, where older men would
fuck young men and children, but he was homophobic and transphobic.
(08:46):
He taught that people shouldn't own slaves, but also that
slaves shouldn't look to be freed. He's just a guy.
If I'm being honest, and he's full of wisdom and
bullshit in equal measure.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I feel like you're discribed being like a lot of leftists.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
I know totally you have met this man.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, definitely you.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Have met this Like he is so certain, he's full
of wisdom, older white dude who's like actually, in this case,
he's an immigrant, but like I mean, he's also Greek.
But whatever, we'll get to this. But yeah, this might
be the least on a pedestal I've ever had a
week subject. But he is not boring. So we're going
to talk about him. But first context. I love context.
(09:31):
We are going to talk about the Greek world of
the fourth century BCE this week because everything I read
assumed I already knew everything about the fourth century BCE.
But I am an art school dropout. I do not
know about the fourth century BCE in Greece.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Well I do now, actually, yeah, can please tell me
I don't know if.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, I'm going too yeah. No, That's my point is that,
like I try not to assume that people know the
shit that all these books I read assumed. I know
who knows this? Yeah, this is classical grease at its
most classical grease. If you think, ah, yes, classical gre Greece,
you are thinking about the fourth and the fifth century BCE.
In Greece, democracy and slavery and pederaste. And it's not
(10:09):
a period where there's some nation state called Greece. There's
a bunch of different empires that come and go and
they're all fighting each other and like, oh, it's Macedonia now,
and it's all this different shit, right, there's not even
really an empire called Greece most of the time that
lasts very long. There is a Greek culture which isn't unified,
but it is vaguely consistent across a whole bunch of
(10:30):
different city states, And so it gets really hard because
people a like, ah, yes, Greek cultures like this. I'm like, well,
unless you're in Koranth.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Which part of Greek culture, right, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
You know, like, as you pointed, Sparta and Athens culturally
very distinct. So Greek culture at this time is a
vague syncretization of the four major Greek tribes from that area,
who all spoke related languages and shit. The most famous
of these cities today are Athens and Sparta, but Corinth
was there too, and plenty of other places. They all
(10:58):
ward with each other. A bunch Athens in particular liked
being democratic and occasionally they get conquered and then overthrow
that to become a democracy again, working with ever shifting alliances.
So it's like, oh, Sparta is the big guy on
the scene. Like, no, now it's Thebes. Oh, now you
have the rise of Macedonia, a tiny little country in
the north. You've got King Philip the Second who's expanding
(11:20):
territory every which way, conquering Thrace, which is also a
place that exists, and now they're taking shit from Athens.
Philip the Second gets assassinated at his own daughter's funeral,
and his twenty year old son, Alexander the Great, starts
off his greatness by killing his own brother and his
cousin who might have wanted to take it from him.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Okay, I knew that Philip sounded familiar. I knew it.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah. Yeah. When I first watched Game of Thrones, I
was like, oh, I guess this is supposed to be
like e oldie England. And then I started reading about
the ancient world and I was like, now, Game of
Thrones is the ancient world right right, the.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Way that like you're describing the Greek world's plural. It's
just extremely Mediterranean. Like that's how people I'm from Palestine,
like this is exactly you know, shared commonalities. But yeah,
people were not one thing.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
No, that's actually such a because we tend to do
this thing where we're like, ah, Greece is European and
Palestine that's not European, and you're like, this is all Mediterranean. Yeah,
and like the ancient world doesn't give us shit about Europe.
Europe is like this like weird backwater full of people.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Right in the beyond.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah. Absolutely, And so Greece is part of Mediterranean culture
and that's much more important to them. So Alexander the
quote unquote great. He centralizes the power a bit in Greece,
and then he goes off marching to go fuck up
the Persian Empire and then he dies of this or
that illness when he's thirty two. I will never do
an episode about him unless he ends up a more
(12:48):
important side character one day. I don't know, maybe some
people fucking him up. I don't know. But the power
in this area is city states. And that's kind of
my most important takeaway, and I'm really interested, like this
thing that you're talking about, I'm really interested in how
if you just like dig back far enough, this is
just human history, the idea that we we always like
(13:09):
look back and like, ah, there've always been nation states.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Absolutely not, yeah, absolutely not. I mean, listen, I know
where they come from. I understand self determination claims, but
I would love for people to understand that nation states
are a new and modern phenomena. Yeah, and we did
not live like this for most of human history.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah. And so the various Greek tribes have been wandering
around colonizing other places, though in a way that doesn't
quite map to modern settler colonialism politically. I mean, they
are going around fucking people up, but it's a little
bit more like, ah, I'm going to go set up
a like city over here in this area that other
people are also trying to.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Do this too, But it's more integrative, right.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
It's interesting. I think it's more almost like a it's
not super melting pot, at least the specific place that
I'm talking about right now with Sinope, the town that
he's from, which is Greek, but it's in modern day Turkey.
It's more interwoven because you're like you're showing up and
be like, oh, no, we're a Greek culture over here,
but we are our own separate legal entity and we
(14:10):
are doing trade with everyone around us. And it's I
think I better understand where the people who invented modern
settler colonialism, if they weren't absolute pieces of garbage. I
think they thought they were doing this. It was probably
shitty back then too, like all the way back then. Yeah,
but it's a different thing than modern settle of colonialism.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
I mean, you're describing the Arab world one percent like
before the modern nation state totally.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
And like I read so much about the Ottoman Empire
for a bunch of episodes about Palestine and like understanding it.
The little that I do helped me so much to understand.
I don't know the way that everything shape. I don't
know where I'm going with this, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
It's like a microcosm of like how world history has progressed.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, exactly. And so you've got Greek colleg over and
what's now Turkey on the Anatolian Peninsula and Anatolian Peninsula
shout out. It keeps coming up on episodes. This is
like the new tuberculosis. When I did the nineteenth century,
everything was tuberculosis, and now.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Now it's this peninsula.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah. One of those colonies was called Sonope, and this
is where Diogenes was born, and we'll get to that.
Sonope is right up there on the coast of the
Black Sea, and it's very importantly. It's a Black Sea culture.
I read this thing that was like and it didn't
really interact with the rest of Anatolia. But then I
read like another thing and it was like, ah, yes,
the Phrygian who are a little bit south of there.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Like, it remained extremely mixed until the Turkish state, and
even today the Turks that live in that area consider
themselves distinct.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Oh that makes sense. Yeah, And Sonope had probably been
built in the six hundreds or so BCE, and this
is a regionally powerful city state. It has a big
navy and it like to fuck around in local affairs.
They had a tyrant for a while named times Sillius,
but then folks overthrew him in favor of democracy in
four thirty seven, and then around fourteen Tennis. You don't
(16:03):
have to remember these dates, they don't matter. And then
around four tenish Athens stopped stationing troops there, so we like,
don't know what happened in the government there. We actually
don't know what government this man was born into. It
might have been a democracy, might have not been. They
kept going back and forth. Also, democracy is a weird
term in a place to say.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, I was like, what do you mean by democracy?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
It's like the men, Yeah, yeah, the citizens, I'm the
people who matter.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Yes, of course, of course I should have known.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah, we don't know when Diogenes as motherfucker, we don't
know when he was born. Reading ancient history is so frustrating.
It is exciting that there are parts of the world
where we know about some shit from twenty five hundred
years ago, but our knowledge is still spotty. Most of
the writing about Diogenies that we have from the ancient
world is from a book written by a Roman Empire
eragant guy named Diogenes Laertis. I was talking about who
(16:50):
wrote a series of books called Lives and Opinions of
Eminent Philosophers.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Oh, he made him eminent.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, Diogenies is eminent. That's true. People didn't want to
admit that at the time, but he was eminent. But
this was written seven hundred years after Diogenes roughly maybe
six hundred. I don't bother doing math when things go
BCEC just fucking I don't know. And it relied on
sources that we no longer have access to. So this
is our best history, ancient history full of people where
(17:17):
we're like, ah, we have this two thousand year old
thing that cites its sources that we don't have. And
he's born in four oh three BCE or four thirteen
BCE or like whenever the fuck late fifth century BCE,
and he's born into one of the elite families of Sonopay.
His father was named Hysisius or something like that, and
(17:42):
we literally don't know a single thing about his mother.
Why would people write about women? I can't imagine why
anyone would. Yeah, Hessius isn't just a banker and a
money changer. He's like the money changer for Sonopay because
all this money shit was new at the time in
the region in terms of like being a important part
of more people's day to day lives. And so there's
(18:04):
this international trade going on, and Greek cities would basically
approve a license to someone to be the money changer
in order to handle all the international currency. So his
Dad would sit at a bench in the agora, which
is the public square. It's important in Greek cities and
exchange currencies. He also was the local bank, and he
was a local magistrate, which is some kind of public official.
(18:25):
We don't know what kind of public official, because we
don't know. You don't get paid to be a magistrate,
So only rich people could afford to do it. See
the aforementioned democracy of the rich men. But to talk
about being rich back then versus now, I'm not defending
ancient rich, but I think it's worth understanding. The anthropologist
David Grayburn his book Debt, which is a history of money,
(18:48):
talked about a lot of various gift economies throughout the world,
And one of the things that I learned from is
that most societies put up with the idea of rich people.
Basically when those rich people are giving things away left
and right and throwing them most fabulous feasts and banquets
and financing all the parades and shit. Basically, you're rich,
say you owe us. It's an obligation. You can see
(19:10):
traces of this still, but the modern billionaire class is
like not into.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
This, so like no, we kind of want to keep taking.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, that's a yeah. And I'm not being like, ah,
like this is funny because it ends up with me
defending fucking Carnegie, one of the like robber barons of
the nineteenth century, because at least he started all the
libraries in the country.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, he started foundations. Like yeah, he was kind of
like old school rich.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah, he was a fucking piece of shit. He was
robbing all of us, but you know what, he like
gave a little of it back.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
A little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, And so this era of Greece is obsessed with
wealth and power and status, much like modern society. It's
actually this moment feels a little bit more modern than
the areas before and after it, based on what I'm reading,
Like it's a little bit like even more into just
like nah, money's what's up? And it's a nightmare. Society
(20:08):
built entirely on slavery and war. For all of its
talk of democracy and civilization, Greece had more in common
with pre Civil War the US South than anything one
might imagine as utopian and good. The entire economy ran
on slavery, and one of the main reasons to go
to war was to enslave people. I don't know that
this is uniquely Greek. This is a little bit ancient
(20:29):
world and Mediterranean, but it's different in different places. But
Greece at this era was like especially into this. It
wasn't the racialized chattel slavery of the US South, but
it wasn't something pleasant either. I've seen it kind of
presented a little bit like most enslaved people were debtors
who then paid off their debts and then we're free again,
and like yeah, and that's the rich people who end
(20:51):
up enslaved. No, the entire productive economy was made by
unfreelabory and legal protections and workplace conditions very dramatic by
the field you were enslaved in and where you lived.
In some places it was illegal to abuse or kill
enslaved people. Athens was a little bit kinder at some
points to enslaved people than other places. And I hate
(21:11):
making this comparison, but the best comparison I can make
is that it's the way the animals are treated in
modern law. Some of the worst excesses are illegal, but
you own your dog, right, And so when people are
like ah, but they still had some rights, like yeah,
they have rights, like my fucking dog as rights, right,
you know, and that's fucked up. I'm not trying to
(21:31):
be like whatever. Anyway, Mines and farms were worked by
enslaved people who died a lot. Domestic enslaved people and
those working in skilled labor had it slightly better then.
In cities like Athens you get publicly owned slaves. People
who are enslaved by the city itself do mean civil
service work. And the Ottoman Empire was like all about
this shit.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Oh, like the janis Ares.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
I was at what they were called. I'm not actually sure. No,
those were the soldier ones, right.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, the soldier like the Christian soldiers.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Oh. Interesting, No, I don't know anything about the Janetius.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
But maybe I'm confusing some concepts.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, that's a word I'd heard a lot, and I
don't know a ton about it. I know it was
like a soldier of empire. It's been a minute since
I did episodes about this. But in the Ottoman Empire
you have a lot of civil servants are owned by
the city, and it's actually a position of a fair
amount of prestige, at least according to the sources I
was reading. People would literally sell themselves into slavery in
(22:27):
order to move up in their careers and like take
care of their families and stuff. And I don't know
how the rest of slavery worked in the Ottoman Empire,
but yeah, but ancient Greek slavery was generational slavery. If
your mother was enslaved, you were born enslaved. And some
of the very beginning's speaking of nation states, some of
the very beginning of city states working together and creating
(22:48):
treaties was to help recover stolen property.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Oh my goodness. If that doesn't tell you what the
state is about, I know we're being very anarchist today.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yeah. So this meant that basically, other cities would hold
fugitives for ransom, so they would capture the fugitive and
then ransom them back to the owner in the other city.
It's not called a ransom, it's called an administrative fee. Like, ah,
we caught your guy, you're gonna give me something for him.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
We got a storm.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, storage fees. This is the detail that I focused
on the most, And now I want to spend all
of my time reading about the shit so I can
write historical fiction set in this era. Runaway slaves might
get the words arrest me, I have run away or
something similar tattooed on their foreheads after capture.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Oh my gosh, Oh my gosh. What a nightmare society
for real?
Speaker 2 (23:40):
I know, have you ever seen a movie about the
US South where like someone who's been caught running away
has to wear like a nightmare collar that looks like
it's from a horror movie, that's like a steel cage
with spikes around their neck, and.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Shit, okay, I have it, but I can imagine it.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Okay, those were real. Yeah, and that's what this were
minds me of.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, for sure. They just like they have to wear
hats if they escape again.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, yeah, totally exactly. He like, ah, thus they invented
the bean.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Oh man, but it's still really bad, guys. This is
really fun.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, So the past is a nightmare. The president is
a nightmare too, But the past is a nightmare. And
most of the most nightmare societies seem to be the
ones hell bent on civilizing everyone else. Of course, so
Diogenes was born into the top of this world. He
was very educated. He could read and write, he could
ride horses. But do you know what, he wasn't as
(24:35):
good at as I am interrupting scripts with ad breaks.
I'm so good at it. This is the sole thing
that I will never be humble about. For example, just
now you're about to hear ads in re back. But
(24:56):
even though he couldn't do that, he could read and write,
He could ride horses. He knew all the classics, all
the rich people shit. And it's funny because we don't
actually have it written down, like he was rich as fuck,
but we just like know it based on these things. Yeah,
there's no public school in order to be educated. This
is the way that the first source I read wrote
it roughly. Not only did your parents need to hire tutors,
(25:17):
they had to hire laborers to do the work that
the kids would otherwise be doing.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Right, Oh, in replacement, I see.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah. But also I don't know. This is a land
of slavery. Diogenes himself is going to be an enslaved
tutor for a while, you know. So when they're like, ah,
you have to be rich and hire people to do
these things, I'm like, fuck, you buy people. They had
to buy people. Anyway, Diogenes grows up and it becomes
a magistrate. We know very little about his early life.
(25:45):
We don't know what his magistrate to see was either
because it's a different thing in different cities, but he
was probably in charge of the coin making for the
city along with his father. He lived in Sinope just
doing rich guy shit for decades. How long fuck have
we know? Maybe he was in his thirty fifties when
the next shit happened. We know he owned a guy
named Manes, who is from Phrygia, a little bit further
(26:06):
south in Anatolia. And we only know about this because
Manes at one point ran away and then was killed
by wild dogs. Rest in peace, Manes. Most the anecdotes
we have about Diogenes's life we have them because he
would make some philosophical statement about them. And the thing
that he said after the person that he was enslaving
ran away was that he wasn't mad that Manes right
(26:29):
away he said about it quote, it would be absurd
if Mones could live without Diogenes, but Diogenes couldn't live
without Manes.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Okay, he's a self reflective guy.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, yeah, So he's living his rich guy life. He's
trying a bit of non attachment to his possessions, and
then he and his father get caught up in a
wild defacement of currency scheme because they're counterfeitters.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
The power of controlling all the money wasn't enough. I know.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
I can't believe we entrust two guys to control all
the money and then they did something fucked up.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
I mean, yeah, that's on us. Actually.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Yeah, to be fair, they lived before Tolkien wrote the
perfect metaphor for this, so no one knew. Sorry ifence
at some point. Yeah, so either his dad or Diogenes
starts counterfeiting money. At least the legend says. Most likely
what he's doing is debasing coins. He's in charge of
the coin making, so he's probably having them put cheaper
(27:26):
metal in there, or his silver plating coins or his
gold plating coins. He's doing something to fuck with the money.
This would get you executed in the ancient world, and
people were on the lookout for this shit. People had
all kinds of ways. You would tap a coin on
a marble table and listen to the noise it makes.
You would shave off a little and dip those shavings
(27:47):
in acid. You would cut into it to see the
core of it. And there are legends about why he
did this. Everything that he does is like legends about
And my favorite one is that he visited the Oracle
of Delphi and he was like, hell, yeah, make fake money.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
She's like it's totally fine, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah yeah, crime is legal.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Did you know have you seen the society we live in?
It's terrible.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, laws are fake.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
I like the idea of this, like O, like this
woman just like messing.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
With I know, and like the legend is like, oh,
there was a thing she said that could have been
interpreted more than one way. She could have been like
saying like, oh, you gotta fuck with society's norms, but
he misinterpreted her.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
He's like I should deface coins.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah yeah. And it's interesting to me too, right because
like when I was younger, I would hear about the
like anti defacement of currency laws, and I thought it
was like it's illegal to cut a quarter and a half,
which I think is like true, but no one cares.
It's about shit like this, Yeah you know it's a value.
Yeah yeah. And according to this legend, this is how
(28:54):
he knew he was destined to undermine the establishment. Like
now he was just trying to get richer, but whatever.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And then he gets caught and he's like I'm actually
a cynic.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Yeah totally. I've invented this whole new thing where I
don't even care about them.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, And this actually tracks with his later views on money,
if he just wanted to make more money, and that's
why he's counterfeiting, because the problem is that he, according
to him, if you have any money, suddenly you want
more and you lose yourself in the pursuit of a
vain and pointless thing like wealth. So he probably thought
(29:28):
that because he himself had done that, he had succumbed
to it, and it it kills his father. His father
is arrested and dies in prison, and Diogenes is either
on the run or cast out his phrases, he's in exile.
God has got to be nice to be like, Ah,
I broke a law in one city, so I just
got to go to like like, ah, Baltimore's out to
(29:48):
get me. Time to go to Richmond, Like.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Actually that would solve a lot of problems.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
But I dignest yeah totally, you know. And he's on
the run. He's like in his twenties or fifties or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Somewhere.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, and exile does him good, at least from a
becoming a philosopher who is all about not having stuff
point of view. Exile is seen as a very serious dispossession.
In this time and place, you are supposed to be
buried in the same place as your ancestors. And Diogenes
was like, no, fuck all that, this rules, fuck nationalism.
(30:30):
And so it goes off to Athens, the center of
learning and the place where people from all kinds of
places went. It's the closest The word cosmopolitan hasn't been
invented by Diogenes yet, but it's the most cosmopolitan of
these Greek cities.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
I think, Yeah, it's like New York of that time.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, totally. But even though he's Greek, he is very
much a foreigner legally and socially, because Greek is a
vague cultural idea. But what matters is Athens to Athenians
on the burroughs, Yes, fucking transplants. And so he begins
(31:07):
the rest of his life the Party's famous for which
is a homeless immigrant. His legal status is foreign resident.
He will never be a citizen again. He can hold
no office, he can't vote, he has to pay taxes,
and if you fall behind on your taxes, you become
immediately enslaved. I actually don't think he paid taxes. I
think they might have been like you're a beggar, maybe
(31:28):
you only have to pay taxes on what you make.
I'd actually don't know how the tax system worked.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, he just never declared anything.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, yeah, totally. Ah No, it's all why do you
have a bunch of ones like I don't work at
a club. I don't know your telling about he probably
would have worked at it. I don't know. He probably
wouldn't have worked at the club. We'll talk about his
opinions on sex work later, Okay, interest they're mixed, and
he becomes a homeless guy. The word mendicant is usually
used to be polite, but he did not care about
being polite, so I don't care. Being not polite was
(31:56):
his whole thing. He fell in with a philosopher and
named Antisthenas, who is way less famous today but was
his mentor and his sort of predecessor, the real founder
of the Synics. Even if Senics are literally named after
Diogenes is his nickname, So Diogenes is the founder of
the Synics. It's fine. Although Antisthenas was also called a
dog sometimes, so.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Is there's some rivalry in there?
Speaker 2 (32:20):
No, No, they're buzz The real rivalry is going to
be played o versus Diogenes. But the real fucking competition
is that all the philosophers hate athletes. But we'll talk
about that later.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Hey, I hate jocks too. That's fine, I know.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I know, right, And it's such a similar way. It's
so funny. He's like goes to the Olympics and complains
about sports ball, Like he's just like, he's that guy.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
He's like these meatheads.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Yeah, literally literally meatheads because he complains about how much
meat they eat.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
That is so funny. I did not know any of this.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, no, it's just hilarious.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
I'm excited. I feel like I am more kin to
this guy than I thought.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Okay, say that you hate people the most when you're
closest to them. That's why I hate Diogenies.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
So he reminds you too much.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Absolutely, I absolutely spent my twenties and early thirties like
mostly limited public and like.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Having strong opinions.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, totally so. Antisthenas had been a pupil of Socrates,
and the thing that he passed on to Diogenes is
that you have to live in accordance with your stated values,
and so he was into asceticism and simple living. Diogenes Laertis,
the later historian, Guy, said about Antisthenez quote, he would
(33:36):
prove that virtue can be taught, and that nobility belongs
to none other than the virtuous. And he held virtue
to be sufficient in itself to ensure happiness, since it
needed nothing else except the strength of spirit. And he
maintained that spirit is an affair of deeds and does
not need a store of words or learning. That the
(33:56):
wise mind is self sufficing, for all the goods of
others are his. That I will repute is a good thing,
and much the same as pain, and the wise man
will be guided in his public acts not by the
established laws, but by the law of virtue. I'm like
eighty percent with it.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
A bit anti intellectual, but I also like I understand, I.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Get it totally, yeah, and like, you know, I don't
think that like like, ah, if your infamous, it's good.
I'm like, but I get why people come up with that.
You know, Also when you live in like a fucking
nightmare slave society, being hated by this society.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Like maybe Intonus is not that that right.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Plato, who's way more right wing, isn't sort of descended
from the split happens. I did not study Greek philosophy,
well I did this week. But Plato is much more
right wing, and he gets some pretty good digs in
at Antesthenez, pointing out that Antisthenez he's like, always walks
around in his threadbare cloak, right, but he always wears
it so that the most patched up and fucked up
(34:57):
parts are visible because he's Oh my god, he's the
virtue sigulated. Yeah, I know this guy. Oh my god, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
I'm so tired of this guy.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
And so that's who Diogenes falls in with before that
guy dies in three sixty six, which is how we
know when Athens must have been in Athens by at
least by. So Diogenes takes that shit to the extreme
and is voluntarily homeless, living off of asking people for money.
And this is very clear to him it is not
begging from his point of view. The word he used
(35:27):
for asked in ancient Greek has connotations of asking for
something you're entitled to. He exchanged wisdom for alms. Most
alms were barley cakes and olives and little bits of food,
maybe a tiny fish, rarely money, and being a mendicant. Again,
I'm reading these sources and people are like, but being
(35:48):
a mendicant in Greece was seen as really bad, unlike today,
And I'm like, interesting, tell me more about unlike. But
this is part of why I feel like this era
of a ancient Greece is actually a little bit more
like twenty first century America than twentieth century America, because
there's this like increased war on homelessness right now, the
(36:09):
right wing reaction to homelessness is like even more intense. Right,
Being a mendicant in ancient Greece was really low, lower than
it was in most places and times in history, specifically
if you compare it to Christian medieval Europe. In medieval Europe,
if you is never good to be a beggar, it's
not a nice way, Like society is not nice to you.
(36:29):
But you get something if you give alms in medieval Europe,
because by Christian values, you are saving your soul, right,
your own soul, right.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
So there is like a virtue to like engaging with
them humanly.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Right, Yeah, And there is not that. In Athens at
this time, there's this set of Greek social norms at
the time called philia translated as friendship, and it's basically
this like social code everyone abided by of mutual aid,
where you all help each other out except beggars.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Okay, so the people who need it.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Most they don't get it, okay, yeah, which is you
see this in like right wing people too, right, You're like, oh, well,
you know that person. They're never going to help me back.
That's the point here, right. The beggars don't get to
be part of this culture because they are taking without
giving in return. And beggars terrified the rich ancient Greeks.
(37:21):
I read it as they terrified ancient Greeks and then
I'm like, do you just mean the citizens again? And
the answer is yes, they terrified the fucking citizens the
rich dudes. To dream about a beggar was to dream
about death and loss. One third century CE Greek guy
put it, beggars have this in common with death, that alone,
of all people like death. They take something without giving
(37:44):
anything in return. And this just like wildly misunderstands giving
to beggars and death. Death doesn't take without giving in return.
It is literally where soil comes from.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
It is, right, it's actually quite generative. Right.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Yeah, every religion or if it's salt, totally fine with death.
Trying to stop death always be so bad. Yeah, I mean,
like we should stop people from dying individually, but at
the end of things, you're supposed to fucking die.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Everyone's supposed to die. Yeah, but remember your guy, he
does exchange things, right, he exchanges his wisdom.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
So he doesn't see himself as a beggar I see.
And so he's like he's being a little bit like
he's a little bit of a pigmy about this. He's
like a little bit like, I'm not the rest of these.
He actually, he goes on at one point about how
he has it worse than the other beggars. It's much
harder to be voluntarily homeless, according to him, this is okay.
This was the first thing I read where I was like,
I think I hate this man.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
He's like, you don't know how hard it is for me.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Right, And his argument is because I read one thing
that was like and everyone hated giving to beggars, and like,
clearly people are giving to beggars.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
What it is is that the working poor are giving
to the homeless poor. And this is much like modern
society today, right, Like I came up and I like
fucking always keep I actually got this from my dad.
I keep twenties under my visor my dashboard to give
people flying signs, right because there but by the grace
that God go I right and like right. And so
that's where people are getting their money is from working
(39:14):
people who are like, oh fuck, I could be you.
I want this system of mutual aid to apply to
you too, so that it applies to me, or they
just are like, oh fuck, you're hungry and I have food.
Fuck you know, yeah, I'm a human. Yeah you're a human. Yeah,
yeah exactly. But his whole thing is that people could
look at a beggar and think, ah, I might end
up a beggar. No one looks at a philosopher and thinks, ah,
(39:36):
I might end up a philosopher.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Oh my god, face palm. Those guy's annoying. But it's fun,
you know.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
But I also I like love that he exists. I
just don't want to hang out with him.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
The audacity, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Yeah, totally. It's not just for recording podcasts. Sorry, that's
the software I used to record podcast joke it's free, okay.
And some sources are making the argument that even enslaved
people are capital to their owners, so their owners have
investment in keeping those people alive, and so to be
unowned and unhoused was potentially worse. I could not tell
(40:15):
you if that's the case. I'm skeptical of anything that
ever says something like that. But do you know what
I'm not skeptical of.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (40:22):
Any of these goods or services. I think all of
them are on the level, especially gambling on your phone.
That always works out well for everyone. Yeah, whenever you
look at someone, you're like, that person gambles a lot.
You never say that person has a gambling problem. There'd
be a phrase gambling problem, but that doesn't exist. No. Instead,
people are like, ah, that person's rich. They spend all
(40:44):
their anyway tone online gamble. If that's the ad, I'm
very sorry. I don't have enough control over it. But
here's the rest of the ads and we're back. So
this guy lives in this increasingly weird liminal spot where
he's increasingly famous as a philosopher while living on the streets,
(41:04):
but no one will have him over well again, I'll
read sources or analysis a little bit, but no one
will have him over. But then I have all of
these other documented times when people had him over. So
I'm like, God, damn it, historians, why don't you all
agree on everything? Why is there not a simple camera
(41:24):
that goes back then? I have never more in my life.
I've always been anti time travel is like a thing
we should try and develop. I am so curious about
the past that I would absolutely risk my life and
time paradoxes to see how some shit went happened went down.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Yeah, you're alone in that. You're alone in that.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
I kind of join you. You don't want to go
back in time and figure I actually don't give a
shit whether this man went to parties or not.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
But just to say that, are you actually going to parties?
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, totally. You called yourself a kill joy. But speaking
of this, as part of why I hate this man
so much, is that literally, my my cynicism and kill
joy attitude is how I ended up with my last name.
And so, as far as I can tell, there are
two classes of celebrities in ancient Greece. They're the athletes
who competed in the Olympics and had statues built of
(42:10):
them and were compared to gods. And then there were
the philosophers, who people were really excited about two but
philosophers hated the athletes, and they never phrased it because
I'm jealous. They always had real complicated philosophical arguments about
why they were Just.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Don't put it in the paper that I was mad.
I was not.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Mad, Yeah, exactly, that's like me, like me with I know,
I'm actually just jealous. I know they're all jealous. And
it's funny because Diogenes and Plato like are like at
each other's throats, like all the time. They would get
into fist fights and shit with each other. I don't
know if Plato and Diogenes would, but Diogenes did throw hands.
(42:52):
That is one thing that I can read between the
lines is that Diagenies threw hands like every now and then,
Like sources will be like, can he did grow up
a boxing and like they just included yeah, which is
interesting because he's like another character that I like a
lot more that I he reminds me of from the
research I did, is Oscar Wild. In that Oscar Wild
(43:13):
is also heavily quoted and misquoted. Diogenes is heavily quoted
and misquoted. They're both these like celebrity kind of like
wild characters who are very unique.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
And they reject a lot of things.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
And right totally. And Oscar Wild's the inverse because Oscar
Wild spends most of his life actively pursuing pleasure and vice,
whereas Diogeny's whole thing is like, fuck pleasure, fuck vice,
all of those things, you know, although they both fuck.
Unlike a lot of later cynics, Theogeny is absolutely fucks.
But what A hated Oscar Wild, partly because he's homophobic,
which is what a fucking hated Oscar Wild. But I
(43:50):
think they had a lot in common anyway. But they
both threw hands. At one point early in his life,
Oscar Wild was being bullied a lot in school. But
Oscar Wild is like not a small man, and he
just like beat the shit out of the people who
are picking on him. I think they were accusing him
being gay or whatever, and he's like, all right, I'll
just beat you all up now, and he like took
on a whole room full of people or whatever.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
The fuck understandable.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
That's why I like Huskar well a lot. But Diogenes
in Plato they're at each other's throats, but they agree.
Fuck athletes. And as for how he lived as this
homeless rockstar philosopher pissing on the rich, we'll talk about
on Wednesday. What do you think about Diogenies so far?
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Honestly, he's an extremely intriguing guy, and it upsets me,
as you said that, I'm finding a lot to agree with.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
I know, I know, but that's like when you meet
this guy in real life. That's how it is, where
you're like, fuck, half of what you say is so profound, right,
and you think the other half is profound too, And
that's a problem.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Uh yeah, I mean typical man and I don't know,
And I'm just like, the men have this problem generally.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah, and he's such a good like his philosophy is
very actively feminist, but the way he acts and treats
women is not very actively feminist.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Again, you're describing so many people like yeah, and this
kind of nightmare society, I mean, the extreme contradictions, Like
it's really a shame how much it reminds you of today.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's like interesting because all the right
wing people are obsessed with the ancient world. They're obsessed
with the ancient Greece, and are obsessed with ancient Rome,
and they're obsessed with Plato especially. They're also obsessed with
the Stoics, and they're wrong about that. The Stoics would
fucking hate the modern right wing. The Stoics actually developed
from the Cynics. But they're all obsessed with the shit.
And I think I understand them a little better by
(45:50):
reading more about Roman Greece, Like the Confederacy was trying
to be this and they saw themselves like Sparta and like, yeah,
like so civilized and shit. Although ironically, according to Diogenes
and some sources, Sparta is actually a more gender equal
society than Athens. Really Sparta, like Diogenes, actually, I don't
(46:14):
think I put this in the script. I'll just go
on this brief. Rent Dieges really liked Sparta and compared
it favorably to Athens, although we never lived in Sparta.
But like at one point people were like, where do
you find the wisest men in Greece? And he said,
there are no wise men in Greece, but in Sparta
there are some wise lads. Lads, Okay, they're coming along,
(46:36):
I think is where he's going with this, because he
liked them because they lived a spartan lifestyle. They were
much more like minimalists. Yeah, they were like anti pleasure
and like just like stoic and just to keep using
these words that now mean very different things. He saw
them as a more masculinous society and he kind of
liked that, as compared to Athens was effeminine, not womanly,
but effeminine, and he did not like effeminins. This is
(47:00):
my biggest problem with him is that he hated me.
So it's like, in return, I'm like, well, then fuck
you too. Yeah. Obviously, yes, although oh there's going to
be a really good point about he's going to literally
have his life saved by trans women in part two,
which we'll get to on Wednesday. But first, what if
people want to know more about you and what you do.
(47:21):
Do you have a book out?
Speaker 1 (47:22):
I do have a book out. It's about the palsinge
and authority, so very different from what we've been talking about,
called polarized and demobilized Leguacies of authoritarism in Palestine. I also
edited this book called The Handbook on Authoritarianism in the
Arab World. That's aboutually released open access so people stay
tuned and then if they want to hear me. I
you know, I do these podcasts for Cool Zone Media
(47:44):
as well as for the from the Periphery Media Collective.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
So yeah, wait, can you tell me more about the
second book. I'm curious about it.
Speaker 3 (47:50):
Yeah, so it is kind of like a reference material,
but I made sure that it's doing access. Yeah, life really,
but like I really wanted to be outside of academia
as well. And it's got thirty contributions on different facets
of authoritarianism in the air World, including like gender and
disinformation and the genocide and gaza, like so many different
(48:11):
components that I'm really proud of by thirty different contributors,
most of them based in the region.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yeah, I'm super excited for it to come out because
obviously the Air World says so much about our global context.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
And yeah, I'm gonna be thinking a lot about the
thing that you said about how like the Arab world
is sort of a perfect microcosm both historically and present
to like understand so much about everything about I mean,
not everything everything, obviously cultures are different in different places,
but like.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
It's such an integral part of understanding Europe's development. Yeah,
and therefore our situation.
Speaker 2 (48:46):
Now right totally. Every now and then I get kind
of caught up on how like I'm like, fuck, I
keep doing these fucking European things. And part of that
is like literally my own background and you know, the
culture that grew up in. But also part of it
is just like understanding I mean, I want to understand everything,
but part of that is the way that Europe colonized
(49:06):
the world and where that comes from. Yeah, and like
like watching the British, the old tribal British fighting against
Roman incursion and then turn around and become Rome and
like literally model themselves on Rome. Yeah, and then you
have the gall to use gall okay, sorry, and then
you have the gall to use the people who fought
(49:26):
the Roman empires, your nationalist heroes, like those people would
literally kill you for doing what they would anyway. Whatever.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Yeah, Well it goes to show humans are terrible.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Ah, we're gonna make a cynega.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
I'm too prone to this.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
All right, I talk to you, Well, i'll talk to
you in five minutes, but I'll talk to everyone else
on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (49:49):
Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
M
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.