Inspire Change SEASON 7-301 He Who Lives by the Sword

This week on Inspire Change...Gunter dives deep into this theme of this weeks podcast: "How a Culture of Performative Strength and Grievance turns the forum into a firing range.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(01:09):
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Speaker 2 (01:18):
You're listening to Inspire Change, the broadcast that strives to educate, motivate,
and empower men to challenge traditions of masculinity to guide
us through the intricacies and intersections of emotions, relationships, and
male identity is renownced psychologists, author and speaker Gunter Swubota.
This is Inspire Change.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Before I begin the actual podcast, I would like to
respectfully acknowledge the gategor people of the Order Nation, who
are the traditional custodians of the lane on which I work.
I would also like to pay my respects to their
elders past and present. Welcome everybody to another episode of

(02:02):
Inspired Change with Gunta. I'm your host. There is an
old admonition that the man who lives by the sword
should not be surprised to meet it coming the other way.
This is not a curse. It's a warning about cultures
that confuse moral seriousness with theatrical force. Just recently, a

(02:25):
political showman was shot dead while doing what he did best,
staging an argument as a public spectacle on campus built
for ideas. The fact pattern is playing. Charlie Kirk, founder
of Turning Point USA, was speaking at Utah Valley University
when a single round ended his life. Universities have since

(02:49):
scrambled to explain this security, announce memorials, and promise reviews.
None of that undoes the obvious. Politics in the United
States again preferred the bullet to the sentence. Al Gunter,
I'm your host on inspired change. I'm a psychologist, I'm

(03:12):
an author and content creator. And today's theme is how
a culture of performative strength and grievance turns the forum
into a firing range. The line we're tracing runs from
the falling Roman Republic to the rise of the Roman

(03:34):
Empire or empires in general, from the liberation to mass pachetry,
from dialogue to spectacle. The ancients put it clearly, first
the Senate, then the circus. In the twentieth century, rally's
replaced arguments and uniforms replaced ideas. The lesson is not

(03:55):
that we are Rome or the Weimar Republic incarnate, but
that republics die in stages, and the stages have a look.
Kirk was feeling questions when the shot rang out. Reporting
indicates that he'd just been sparring with a student about

(04:16):
transgender people and mass schoonings. If it wasn't irony, it
was at least the theater of our time, the set
piece campus confrontation. The camera phones raised, the questions circulated
for virility. The answer delivered for the clip, then the crack,

(04:38):
then the chaos. The suspect, a twenty two year old,
was later identified and arrested. Investigators, however, still trying to
sort out motive from rumor. Utah Valley University has since
commissioned an external review of its security and messaging. Good

(05:00):
universities owe these citizens more than vidials. They owe them competence. Now,
the maximum about the sword is not a moral ledger.
It does not say the victim deserved it. It says
the environment matters. When a politics glorifies in hardness, in combativeness,

(05:27):
then we need to take a hard, long look at
what's going on. Now, this should be restraint, but the
empire treats mercy as a weakness. It lowers the threshold
for force. Kirk helped design that environment. He didn't hide it.

(05:49):
He once described empathy as a made up new age term.
Now you can agree with his critique of sentimentality and
still see the cost of mocking the capacity that lets
us inhabit another mind before we pass sentence. He also
argued that execution should be public, even an initiation for

(06:13):
the young. Ceremony as pedagogy, violence as civic catechism, that
is not merely a pulsive view, that is an esthetic.
The state's lethal power becomes theater lesson taught with a
stage and a crowd. You don't build such a stage

(06:37):
and then act shocked at others less credentialed try to
climb onto it. Kirk understood the medium. He made campuses
into arenas. In one of his more polished lines about
higher education, he lamented what he called the shift from
tolerating opposing ideas and a respectful debate to obscene bully

(07:00):
tactics from the left. He was not wrong that the
culture of intimidation exists, but it's ironic that he was
one of the main proponents. But his answer was not
to re sacralize argument. It was to professionalize the counterpage

(07:21):
badgeant the traveling circus versus the resonant circus. Look at
the choreography that followed his death. A memorial that behaved
like a revival fused with a campaign rally, church meets
state speeches that canonize the fallen as a martyr for freedom.

(07:43):
Hoist vessel comes to mind in the third Riich, a
movement quick to convert grief into mobilization. Again, this is
non acclaim about causation. It is a point about form.
The Republic at its healthiest is allergic to spectacle. Empires

(08:05):
inhale it and generate it. There is a stubborn code
that trains men to prove value by dominance in vulnerability
and swift retribution. Call it a patriarchy of posture if
you have to, but give it its due precision. It

(08:26):
is a cultural script that equates worth with command and
equanimity with softness. Kirk named the casualties of that script
the Lost Boys of the West, and he wasn't entirely wrong,
but his cure reviving a combative ideal of manhood misreads
the disease. Boys don't need more theater of force. They

(08:52):
need apprenticeship in restraint, negotiation, and a slow heft of responsibility.
When political entrepreneurs trade in humiliation, when applause lines depend
on finding the next out group to club, men who
are hungry for meaning will imitate the club. This is

(09:15):
how a culture of domination eats its young. The code
rewards hardness, then punishes the hand when hardness comes back
with interest. Walkner historical arc in the Late Republic, the
older Roman rhetoric of deliberation gave way to the military parade,

(09:37):
the triumph through the forum, bread circuses. The audience moved
from benches to bleachers. A republic of law thinned into
a plever side of cheers. Two thousand years later, Europe's
most literate country built cathedrals of sound. The microphone learned

(09:58):
to shout out, learned to answer. The uniforms sharpened the
jaw lines. Politics became a mood with banners. We do
not honor victims by pretending we live in Rome or
nineteen thirty three. We honor them by noticing the warning lights.
We have grown to love the spectacle of politics more

(10:21):
than its substance. We've traced arguments for episodes, institutions for influences,
and laws for slogans clickbait that trade is corrupting the
citizen and inflaming the crank. Consider the campus format Mate

(10:45):
Kirk famous the portable dais the queue at the microphone,
the adversarial prompt. It is styled as a debate, but
functions as a contest. It flatters all participants, including the heck.
It is designed to be clipped and shipped. The point
is not to pursue or persuade along quite middle. It

(11:09):
is to feed a tribal appetite. This is why the
same events produce the same quarrels in every city. They
are touring productions of the same play. The result, while
it's predictable, bad actors, some online, some off start farming

(11:31):
the venues for mayhem. A university then discovers that its
public square, boasted of as a crucible for ideas, has
become a risk surface. At the university, the emergency messaging
failed its first stress test. The security footprint was painfully

(11:53):
light for a high risk event that is not a
left or right point in itself is an administrative disgrace.
After the gunshot, the Internet produced what is always produced,
instant certainty. Theories bloomed faster than facts, identities would guess.

(12:15):
Genders were weaponized, and false attributions propagated and industrial speed.
Even major outlets had to retract flourishers that they should
never have printed. The culture of spectacle makes patients feel
like cowardice. It makes ignorance feel like insight. Kirk's critics

(12:39):
willxert him forever. Much of it will be unfair, some
of it won't need the help on empathy. He was
explicit made up new age term on punishment make a
public even initiatory on the campus mood and debate replaced

(12:59):
by bullying on young men lost boys. Here is the
mirror of politics that belittles empathy, theatricalizes as state violence,
and reduces education to tribal compact will not produce virtuous men,
It will produce spectators. And spectatorship, however, allowed, is by

(13:24):
no means character. What then, is the civic discipline that
keeps a republic, a democracy from sliding into its arena. Well, firstly,
we need to consider argument over outrage. If your politics

(13:45):
require that constant invention of enemies is not politics, it's entertainment. Secondly,
institutions need to come before idols. If one man's death
becomes the sacrel fuel of your movement, you have a cult,
not a party, And we need to consider mercy of

(14:06):
opposing mercy is not softness, it is power with breaks.
Any code that treats compassion as counterfeit will eventually justify
cruelty as courage. Remember the Third Reich. If those sound quaint,
then that's indictment. If we have grown so used to

(14:28):
militancy as a mood, that moderation reads as treason. We
are already too late. So a message to the right.
If you insist the nation is a permanent emergency, your
base will behave like a militia. It cannot baptize anger

(14:51):
for a decade and then recoil when a man carries
your liturgy to its own logical conclusion. To the left,
if you treat campuses as quarantine zones for acceptable opinion,
you will radicalize your opponent and infantilize your allies. A

(15:11):
culture that police's speech will always tempt the theatrical CounterPunch
to universities. Security is not censorship. Failing to protect a
controversial event is not neutrality. It is negligent. If you
do not wish to host the circus, stop issuing permits
for the tense. If you do, and staff it like

(15:34):
an airport, some of you will ask whether Kirk's organization
should press on with its sur It doesn't matter they
are going to in any case, they've weaponized it. The
machine is already rolling. Perhaps it must movements live by momentum.

(15:56):
But the choice before us all is simpler. Do we
want to be citizens or fans? If citizens, then we
must recover the dull art of listening the discipline of
evidence and the patience of constitutional life. If fans, then

(16:16):
fetch the drums and roll the cameras down. The empire's
esthetic is already for you. Remember any reef and style.
So he who lives by the sword is not a prophecy.
It's a civic rule. Build the politics on domination and

(16:37):
you will get more of it. Build politics on argument,
and you might, on a good day, get a republic
and a democracy. I'm guntera. This has been inspired change.
If you've found value in the argument, share it with
someone who needs fewer slogans and more sentences. And for

(16:58):
the men listening, strength has a higher form than hardness.
Learn that lesson. So this is me signing off for
another episode in a week's time. I hope you found
this valuable. Love to hear from you, and if you're interested,

(17:18):
please check out my work on www. Dot Gonto, Savoda
dot com or www Dot Goodman Grade dot com.

Speaker 2 (17:31):
Thank you for listening to inspire change. A broadcast this
right to educate, motivate, and empower men to challenge traditions
of masculinity. For more information on the Making good Men
Great movement, or for individual or group coaching, fentships with Gunter.
Visit goodmangrade dot com.