Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I wanna offer a Christian take on Andrew Tate.

More specifically, I wanna propose a thesis that I haven't heard anybody else make, namely that Tate is playing the role of something like a pagan philosopher, and that his ideas should be evaluated on those grounds.

Now, I realize that is not the popular way of understanding him.

I'll explain what I mean in a minute.

But first, I gotta give a quick update for people who maybe don't know who Andrew Tate is, or haven't followed his case very closely.

He is a wildly popular and wildly controversial figure online right now.

He made a name for himself really saying and doing provocative things, particularly things about women, but also about wealth, uh, his own prowess, his own success, all of this stuff.

As I'm gonna show, I think a lot of the people who like Andrew Tate actually like him for pretty different reasons than the people who hate or dislike him, hate or dislike him.

Uh, you'll s- see all of that, I think, as we go through it.

But it I'd be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge at the outset in bringing him up to speed, he's been accused of doing some pretty horrible things to women, uh, in Romania, in the UK, and it seems like US authorities are kind of looking into matters right now.

So I'm gonna play you a quick clip juxtaposing kind of his description of his views on women, coupled with what the authorities are kind of accusing him of.

But as I think will be clear, there's much more to what he presents and much more to, I think, what people are drawn to than the stuff he's kind of notorious for.

So, at the outset here, I should say, if you're listening with kids, a lot of this stuff isn't appropriate for kids.

Nevertheless, if you're a parent, you should know a lot of Andrew Tate's audience is made up of kids, especially young teenage boys.

So, with no further ado, here's Andrew Tate in his own words, and then in the words of newscasters reporting on him.

I'm cooperating my, my PhD program, and that is A PhD is a pimpin' hoes degree.

Get 'em.

Um-

Clever.

and that -

Clever.

and that, that teaches basically how I bought girls, how I met girls, how I got girls to like me, how I got girls to fall in love with me to work on webcam for me.

'Cause that's what I did.

That was my, my MO was find girls, make them love me, and make them work for me.

And that's how I got rich.

The controversial social media influencer, Andrew Tate, and his brother Tristan are believed to have left Romania on a private jet heading to the US. The Tate brothers, who are joint UK/US nationals, were arrested in Romania three years ago, and they face trial on allegations of rape, trafficking minors, and money laundering, all of which they deny.

I want to start there not to accuse them of something they haven't been convicted of yet, but to suggest a sort of paradox.

We find ourselves in an unusual situation where, on the one hand, you have someone being accused of horrible crimes against women.

On the other hand, you have them wildly popular among young men, and we should be asking, Why?

Now, it's hard to quantify exactly what that popularity looks like, but here's what we do know.

The UK has done seemingly more, uh, research on this than the US has.

In what I've found, 2023, 80% of British boys 16 to 17 years old had consumed Tate's content.

Now, that might be one video.

We don't really know any details on that.

But 80%'s a lot.

It's more than the 60% of boys in that age range who could name who the British Prime Minister was.

In fairness to those boys, in about a two-year span, maybe even less than that, the UK went through four different prime ministers.

So it's admittedly a confusing time in British politics.

But nevertheless, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Uh, 27% of young men in the UK aged 18 to 29 have a positive view of Tate.

24%, uh, of view agree with his views about women, and then a poll in 2023 suggested that 56% of fathers under the age of 35 approve of Andrew Tate.

Now, that's a particularly striking one.

As a dad, you think, All right, is this the model I want for my sons?

Is this the kind of man I want for my daughters?

It's a strange kind of conclusion.

And so you might be saying, What on earth is happening to all of these dads, to all of these young men?

Like, what is going on that would make them look to Tate as someone who'd be an object of admiration rather than just derision?

Well, I think there are answers to that, but it involves taking what Andrew Tate is actually presenting maybe more seriously than the popular media currently does.

That YouGov survey looking at young men from 18 to 29, when you actually delve into it Or young British people in general from 18 to 29, uh, you find something pretty striking.

Among Britons with a favorable view of Tate, 78% agreed with the things he says about work and success, 64% agree with him on masculinity and what it is to be a man, 54% on how women should be treated.

Now, on the flip side, uh, those who disagree with Tate tended to strongly dislike the things he says about women and tended to have milder reactions against the things he says about masculinity, and even m- more so the things he says on work and success.

Put it in another way, the most controversial stuff among Tate's fans and opponents that he says are the things about women.

The most popular stuff, the stuff that seems to actually be drawing people isn't that stuff.

In many cases, it's people being drawn to him in spite of those things.

I mean, notice among Andrew Tate fans, fully 34% of them agreed somewhat or strongly, uh, with his views on women.

That's a third of the audience that, at least according to their telling, isn't what they're there for.

Now to be sure, a majority still agrees with him on women, but it suggests that what's drawing them, in many cases, isn't the views on women, of how to objectify them and conquer them and all this, but it's rather something else, namely his vision of what it looks like to be a man and to be successful in this life.

Putting it another way, he's asking questions about what true virtus, manliness is, and y- what the Greeks called eudaimonia.

What does a good life consist of?

What does it look like to be a success in this life?

Now once you realize those are the questions that he's actually asking that people are actually being drawn to, you realize what he's doing, in many ways, isn't that different from the works of the ancient Greek philosophers or even more modern figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, that there is a long history of what we might call pagan philosophy that is fixated on those questions.

And to be clear, Christians have answers to these questions as well, but they're going to be pretty different ones at points.

Nevertheless, there's going to be some common ground.

So I'm going to look at Andrew Tate, Aristotle in particular, and then Jesus Christ and St. Thomas Aquinas, and you'll see kind of how all this weaves together because I think there are some points of convergence and some points of divergence, some points where we're going to agree, some points where we're going to disagree.

But it becomes clearer why this would be an interesting and compelling kind of view of life.

So let's start with that big question: What does the good life look like according to Andrew Tate?

Now I'm going to put this in kind of Aristotelian categories.

Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics suggests that when you ask what the good life is, eudaimonia, again, this is, this word's translated a lot of different ways.

There's not a great English word for it.

Happiness sometimes as a bad What does it look like to be a content, well-adjusted, successful human being?

That's the question we're really looking at.

And Aristotle says when you look at how people answer this, whether intentionally or just kind of what they have in their mind is the good life, there's broadly three categories.

Ordinary people, what he calls the vulgar, kind of the masses, they identify the good life with pleasure or a life of enjoyment.

So that's going to be our first category, the life of enjoyment or the life of pleasure.

But then he's going to suggest that other people who've thought about it a little more deeply are drawn to the life of politics or the life of contemplation.

So those are the three categories that Aristotle gives, that if you think about what it means to live a good life, people's answers often fall in one of those categories.

And, and really these are tiers 'cause he thinks each answer is better than the one before it.

Where do Tate's kind of philosophical musings lead him, shall we say?

Early on particularly, Andrew Tate was very strongly, and I think accurately, associated with the first of these.

This is a guy whose idea of the good life is just a life of pleasure, the life of enjoyment.

I want to do stuff that makes me feel really good and I'm gonna enjoy all the physical pleasures I can, drive fast, eat good food, drink wine, smoke hookah, sleep with random women.

That's kind of the model.

And of course, underlying all of that, make a lot of money.

Even right now, Andrew Tate's second most popular video on Rumble, he's, he's no longer on YouTube, his second most popular video is an advertisement for a thing he is or was doing called the War Room where you'd spend like $5,000 to learn from Andrew Tate how you too could become wildly rich.

I'm gonna play you just the first, like, 40 seconds or so of this advertisement, which is basically just testimonials from people explaining that they didn't realize there was more than one way you could make money and this has helped them become very rich.

After I joined the War Room, that was the year I made $100,000.

One year ago, I did not even have a business.

I didn't make money.

Now I make five figures every month.

If I didn't join the War Room, I would be nowhere near where I am today.

A lot of people had a bad time in 2020.

I was not one of them and I credit a lot of that to, uh, being in the War Room.

That's one of the things that I'm learning in the War Room, there's, there are multiple ways to make money and

Just between those two students alone, I saved them half a million dollars.

Making money is easy.

You just take it from somebody.

The two testimonials that most stood out to me, number one, the guy who said he is learning, present tense, that there's more than one way to make money, which seems like something that a child should know, uh, but okay.

And number two, the guy who definitely doesn't make this sound like a predatory scam by saying the way you make money is by taking it from other people.

This is the caliber of sophistication he's going for.

Like, the people spending $5,000 here to be told, uh, something below 101 level econ or business or marketing, it's a little bit alarming.

But nevertheless, what I want to focus on isn't all of the red flags that this might be a bit of a scam.

What I want to focus on is what's being marketed to these clearly financially illiterate people.

And what's being marketed is you can make a lot of money, you can smoke cigars and fly in planes with your all-male friends and enjoy this kind of life of pleasure.

And this is one of the recurring themes in all of the stuff Andrew Tate does to make himself seem relevant and interesting and important is he plays up these kind of dimensions.

Look at how rich he is.

Look how successful He calls himself the humblest man in the world.

He calls himself the richest man in the world.

Despite these both being objectively, quite clearly untrue.

And so this is a recurring theme.

The life of pleasure is supposed to make you happy.

And Tate points out that this is a vision of the good life that has been sold, uh, since the days of the ancient kings.

And it's fascinating that he makes this point 'cause Aristotle's gonna make this point as well while both of them are gonna show you that this doesn't actually make you happy.

I was starting to analyze, saying, Well, if I'm currently king of the world, what did the kings of old do?

Maybe they were doing something cool.

And then you realize that life hasn't changed very much.

The world hasn't changed very much.

If I was an emperor during Roman times, I'd probably be smoking some form of tobacco.

I'd probably have some diamonds, have some chicks, eat good food .

hang around with my boys.

I'd have the fastest horse, got the fastest cars.

Nothing's changed.

Think about it, 2,000 years ago, for fun, people would drink alcohol, turn on music, and dance with stupid chicks.

Go to the club.

Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics makes a very similar point, that, he says, The generality of men and the most vulgar identify the good, meaning the good life, with pleasure, and accordingly are content with the life of enjoyment.

They think as long as they can just taste good food and drink good wine and dance with what they call stupid women, then they'll be happy.

And that's the kind of dumb idea of what human happiness looks like.

And he says, The generality Aristotle says, The generality of mankind then shows themselves to be utterly slavish by preferring what is only a life for cattle.

I'll explain why it's degrading to even call this a human life in a second.

But before that, I wanna point out that Aristotle says, yeah, it's reasonable that they would think this because there are men of high position who share these same feelings as, uh, and he gives the example of Sardanapalus.

Now, Sardanapalus, if you're not familiar, which is totally understandable, is a possibly mythological king that the Greeks believed in as being, you know, one of those bad old kings from the East.

And he was alleged to have lived this totally dissolute lifestyle of just lavish parties and sexual perversity and even stuff that, from a Greek perspective, was like, now you're pushing it too far.

And the kind of emblematic example of this is allegedly on his tombstone, it was, there was just a monument of him snapping s- his fingers saying, Eat, drink, and play, or, Eat, drink, and make love, for everything else is not worth this.

With the idea that he's snapping and it's everything else is gone, everything's ephemeral in life, so you might as well enjoy these ephemeral pleasures.

And there's something actually deeply nihilistic about that because it assumes nothing good can last.

And so you have to seize as many of these ephemeral pleasures as you can, even though on some level you have to know that they're not gonna make you happy for very long.

Like, you go out drinking, how long are you gonna be happy for?

Probably not the next morning.

And you're gonna enter one after another fleeting meaningless relationship.

How long is it gonna make you happy for?

The ephemerality is built in.

It's, it's right there in the snap of the fingers.

But Aristotle's point is this is an animal's idea of happiness, right?

Like, an animal, if you were to be like, You can do whatever you want, and the animals somehow understood you, they'd be like, All right, I wanna eat a lot, I wanna run really fast, I wanna drink a lot, I wanna mate a lot.

Th- if that's their idea of happiness, th- you have failed to even give a human answer to the question.

Here's what I mean by that.

Aristotle focuses a lot on, like, what makes us distinct from animals, what makes us special.

Because he's gonna suggest this is really important.

If we wanna know, like, what makes a good screwdriver, if I don't know the difference between a screwdriver and a hammer and my idea of a screwdriver, like, a really good screwdriver is one that can just bang into nails really hard, well, that's not even a screwdriver level answer.

That's a hammer.

Like, you've failed to even recognize what makes a screwdriver different than a hammer.

Well, likewise, if every answer you give for the good life is just something a dog would say if dogs could talk, that's a cattle level answer, bro.

Like, you, what is different about you from an animal?

And if you don't know or you don't think the difference between you and an animal is gonna be important and to whether you can be happy doing what you could do at a dog park, then you probably haven't thought deeply about the question.

Right?

Like, you probably have been settling for something too little.

And so this is the kind of recurring theme you're going to be getting.

Well, there's another problem with this life as well, not just that this is an animal level answer that is unfit for human consumption, say.

It's also, as I said a moment ago, ephemeral in a way that makes it really unsafe to bank your happiness on this.

Now, here I wanna add explicitly the words of Jesus in Matthew chapter six.

He warns us not to lay up for ourselves treasures on Earth, but he tells us why.

He says, Where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.

In other words, if your entire happiness is built on the money you have or the stuff you can get with money or anything like that, it can go away in a second.

You can get uglier, girls will stop liking you, your incredible cars could break down.

You could have, I don't know, federal agents come in and seize $100,000 worth of your watches.

When all of that stuff happens, if that's what your happiness is dependent upon, you bought a lot of pretty jewelry for yourself as a grown man, that's a really dumb way to spend your life and a really dumb way to spend your money.

So listen to Tate kind of describing what should have been this moment of realization and a moment of enlightenment and then consider how he reacts to it.

I had $10 million of diamond watches.

When they took 'em off me, the first phone call I made in jail was to order replicas.

I want another $10 million of diamond watches so when I get out of jail, even if they still got my stuff, which they do a year later, I have all my diamond watches.

So not only did I have $10 million of diamond watches, I now have $20 million of diamond watches, two of every single one.

And when I finally get my stuff back from dcoz, I'll have one on each wrist, just for a week or so.

So hopefully that highlights at least a little bit the absurdity of the kind of life of pleasure as the good life.

The idea that you can get $20 million and spend it looking like a total goober wearing a bunch of watches on your arm, that's not anybody's recipe for success.

No one is dumb enough to actually be happy living that kind of life.

I mean, nobody.

You might convince yourself that'll make you happy, but Andrew Tate would not still be making video after video after video about how amazing his life is if he was actually content.

If he was actually happy, he wouldn't be constantly trying to sell us on how happy he was or lamenting that he doesn't have as much pretty jewelry because some of it got taken away.

And-I think, even in this, the very video I'm critiquing here, he gives some indication that he's realizing, yeah, this money stuff isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Because you can get all the money in the world, and what are you gonna do?

Buy more diamond watches?

Is, like, if money is the key to your happiness, why keep making it at a certain point when you've run out of interesting things to buy?

Here's how he puts it.

What do I need more money for?

And you don't, 'cause there's only so much stuff you can buy.

You could give me another 100, 200, 300, $400 billion today, I can't think of anything to buy.

Everything I've even remotely wanted at all, I've bought.

All of it.

Times five.

If I like a car, I'll buy five of them just to Money's not real.

Man, the most brutal line in that is that half-sentence.

He buys five cars he cannot possibly drive all at once, and he says, It just to and he can't finish the sentence, because there is no coherent answer to why he's doing any of this stuff.

It's not making him happy.

If you're gonna live the life of an animal, you can do that pretty cheap.

There's no amount of stuff you can go through that's gonna run you that much money.

It, there just isn't.

And so if you're spending all of your money on just consumption in this gaudy sort of cheap way, well, yeah, sure, you don't need hundreds of millions of dollars.

You're not curing poverty in Africa, you're not helping fight disease, you're just buying watch after watch that are gonna sit in a drawer somewhere.

You don't need $10 million to do that.

You don't need $1 million to do that.

And so he's hit the limit that this idea of what's gonna make you happy isn't.

I mean, it clearly doesn't work.

What does he need money for?

And so he ends up saying money's not real.

Money's real.

He's just using it like an animal would use money if you gave an animal a credit card.

And so that's what's not real.

Like, money's not actually leading to your happiness.

That's the thing he's actually bumping up against, even if he doesn't really have the worldview to articulate it.

But even in this video, Tate shows these glimmers that there has to be something more, there has to be something more than the life of pleasure, and he doesn't quite have a framework to articulate it.

Look, he's trying to do philosophy but doesn't seem like a good philosopher.

But he's hit this wall where none of the stuff, none of the experiences, none of this is actually leading to happiness.

And so he realizes he needs a goal, he needs a purpose in life, and so he talks about how that, unlike the stuff, is where meaning might be found.

But my point is that we haven't really evolved much in the space of fun.

It's the same junk it's always been.

So then you have to understand that the only thing that's gonna fulfill you is a purpose, and my purpose is attacking and fighting the Matrix, so do I have an army?

Yes.

All of you at home, my fans, who sit and listen to my messaging and change how you act so it's harder for the Matrix to lie to you and purport the infantile, asinine ideas which are required for your slavery.

Now, in Aristotle's terms, Andrew Tate is showing signs that he's ready to graduate from the lowest idea of the good life, the life of pleasure.

He's now realized you won't find meaning or purpose there, I mean, he said as much in that last clip, and realizing there has to be something more.

Th- that leads him to the second tier, what Aristotle calls the life of politics, so he, he has this mission, what he calls the war against the Matrix.

Tate, not Aristotle, obviously.

And Aristotle talks about this, that it, this is a life where you're pursuing honor, and that's better than pursuing just physical pleasure, but it's still not that great.

It's the middle tier for a reason.

In Aristotle's words, he says, Men of refinement, on the other hand as opposed to the, the masses who think that a Bugatti is gonna make them happy, and men of action think that the good is honor, meaning the good life is honor.

And this may be said to be the end or goal of the life of politics, but honor, after all, still seems too superficial to be the good for which we are all seeking.

Why?

It appears to depend on those who confer it more than on him upon whom it is conferred.

So Aristotle's argument is the good life shouldn't be something where you're dependent on somebody else.

It's obvious in the life of pleasure where you need other people to not take your money, you need other people to sleep with you, you need other people to provide you cool stuff in order to be happy.

You're still radically dependent on everybody else for your own happiness.

Well, Andrew Tate is still doing that, just in a slightly less obvious sort of way, because in seeking the accolades he still needs what he calls his army.

He needs all the people listening to and absorbing his stuff about how they need to stop listening to and absorbing mass media.

That's still critical for where his purpose is.

If you listen to how he's talking about it, it's not enough that he thinks he's right and the world is wrong, he's deriving meaning and purpose from the fact that he's got lots of people at home commenting about how brilliant he is.

And I don't say that as a critique, because look, the move to a life of honor is actually a move in the right direction.

I would actually suggest a lot of the way he's been living is thoroughly dishonorable, and so getting into the Aristotelian life of politics is certainly a move to get past some of the base, more animal ways that he's been living.

But nevertheless, as Aristotle points out, you're still acting in a pretty needy, codependent sort of way, even in the Like, you watch this as someone who's not like a Tate fanatic, and you're like, This man desperately wants the approval of a bunch of anonymous teenage boys that he doesn't even know.

There's something weird about that.

And, and I say teenage boys 'cause a lot of the comments were like, I'm 17 and I love you and, I'm a dude, and he talks about hanging with the boys and all, and you're just like, What is going on here?

Now, in one sense you could just say, well, he's a predator.

Like he's, uh, predatory upon young women sexually, he's predatory upon young men financially and for their accolades and for their respect, but there does seem like there's this sense that he's still trying to derive happiness, just like in, you know, the life of pleasures.

I, if I want to get rich, I need to take money from somebody else.

Now it's, I want to be successful in this political agenda, this fight against the matrix, s- and so I need to take honor from somebody else and make them respect me.

It's better, but you're still not there.

Jesus, likewise, would say that there is something higher than this life of politics.

In Jesus' words, he says, Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes, and where thieves do not break in and steal.

Well, likewise, Aristotle's gonna say there's something higher than the life of politics that he calls the life of contemplation.

And it's remarkable here that even though Aristotle is this pagan philosopher, he sees the folly of every move Tate made before he made it by a couple thousand years.

Aristotle, when he talks about what makes contemplation the highest, this We're jumping ahead now from book one of the Nicomachean Ethics to book 10, so when I tell you I'm very much skipping over a lot of the intellectual work he does, well, go read the Ethics.

But he explains that happiness, this way that we arrive at the good life, this consists in contemplation.

And why does he say that?

Well, he says on the one hand, it's the highest form of activity since the intellect is the highest thing in us.

Okay, hold on a second.

Remember the hammer and the screwdriver from earlier?

If you want to know what makes a good screwdriver, you start by asking, Well, what even makes a screwdriver different than a hammer?

And then you find out, oh, it drives screws, and so a good screwdriver is one that's really good at driving screws, not just one you can use to bang nails into a wall.

Well, likewise, if I want to know what makes for a good human being and a successful human life, I need to start by asking, What makes a human life different than an animal life?

And right at the heart of that, Aristotle is gonna say, is the idea of the intellect.

You can actually contemplate things and a cow can't.

You give a dog a credit card, it might buy all the things.

You know, if it has a Bugatti, it can chase the mailman down faster.

It can eat more food.

It can mate with all the different dogs at the dog park.

But it's not gonna do anything about contemplating truth.

That's not gonna be on its radar at all, even a dog smart enough to use a credit card.

Work with me on the example here.

That's the idea though.

The intellect is what makes us different, and part of what makes us different from the animals.

So it's part of the answer is gonna involve this idea of contemplation.

That's one of the reasons this is gonna be the highest form of human happiness.

But the second that he gives us, and there, there's more to this again, is that it's the most continuous, that this is something where I can do it all the time and I'm not dependent upon other people giving me pleasure or other people giving me honor.

I, like, if everybody else goes away, I can still contemplate, and that's not true with the lower forms of the good life.

If you're stranded on a desert island, you can have a good life according to Aristotle, but it's not gonna look like anything Andrew Tate's selling.

Aristotle nevertheless notes that, like, pleasure and honor aren't bad, so you should derive pleasure from good contemplation.

Like, the person who contemplates but it's a huge chore isn't really at the height, but the person who can do this and they derive real joy from it, man, what a life that is.

And it doesn't cost a lot of money, and it doesn't take, you know, as I said before, the approval of others, et cetera.

Aristotle even has this intuition that such a life is somehow more than human because he realizes, you know, even though we talk about this as a continuous thing, everyone who's ever tried to really contemplate or anyone who's really tried to think about the nature of reality, about God, about any of this stuff, realizes it's hard to do.

You still gotta eat.

You gotta sleep.

You have all these human weaknesses that are built in being what he calls a composite nature, your body and soul.

And so as a result, there's this longing within you for something that you as a human you feel too weak to achieve, but this part of you that is stronger than the body, that is weighed down in some way by bodily weakness is looking for something that Aristotle, I think rightly, recognizes as divine.

And so it's a pretty remarkable insight for this pagan to have.

And then he goes on, uh, to suggest that if all of that's true, like if you have this sort of divine spark that's calling you for something more than just a- an animal and in some ways more than a human way of living, that your true happiness is going to be something more than that, then it's gonna be wrapped up in this idea of contemplation.

Okay, so I wanna just highlight that to say that's the piece that other pagans did get, people like Aristotle, and that Tate isn't offering.

So I do think Tate is offering something more than just a life of pleasure to his followers, but I think what he's offering is radically insufficient, certainly compared to Aristotle and much more certainly compared to Christianity.

But I wanna focus on what he is offering now though because he offers something like magnanimity, but not in the Christian sense but in the Aristotelian sense.

I gotta explain what all of that means.

So remember a minute ago where I said, you know, he has this idea of purpose and he's going on this kind of war against the matrix and all of that?

He doesn't do, like, a thorough job in that clip that I showed you explaining what that actually means or looks like.

But elsewhere, he's spelled out a little more, uh, kind of what this purpose that he views in his life consists of, and he describes it in part as combating what he calls the slave mindset.

There's no such thing as escaping the slave mind.

You must just, to some degree, understand who's programming you and understand if you really want those characteristics.

Most people are repeating, uh, opinions, and I'm saying, Where did you get that opinion from?

They can't remember where they got it from.

They don't know who even told them.

They don't know why they so fervently believe in it.

Yeah.

They're just told.

They're programmed.

You need to genuinely analyze your brain, defrag every single opinion you strongly have, and identify where it came from and if that person has your best interests at heart.

And what they're trying to do, especially with young men, is program them because we're all empty vessels.

And what you have to do as an adult, as a parent is to program your child stronger than all of society.

Mm-hmm.

It's not an easy job.

Now, I think that message is both attractive and even largely true-There absolutely are forces, intentionally or otherwise, you know, you can, uh, d- decide for yourself how coordinated or disparate these kind of forces are, but there are forces that have a particular vision of what you should believe and what you should prioritize.

This is gonna be everything from political movements to advertising agencies that are preying upon you and preying upon children and promoting a certain vision of what?

Of the good life.

And ironically, the thing they're gonna be advertising is, Look at all this stuff you need to be happy.

And so, Tate is absolutely right to say this is a slave mindset and to attack that.

The funny thing, though, from an Aristotelian perspective, is he's promoting this slave mindset.

When he imagines himself free because he can buy a bunch of the same watch, that is a perfect encapsulation of advertising executives having won, not lost, that this is where he imagines his emancipation is going to come from, and it's not.

Now, fortunately for Tate, he does seem to be slowly growing out of this, and he seems to be seeing that there's something more.

And so he's starting to make kind of rules for life in very much a Jordan Petersony kind of way, but a little more chaotic, maybe, and instead of 12, he's got 41 rules, and instead of rules of, for life, they're the rules of Tateism because again, he desperately wants your approval.

And so I'm gonna give you just a taste for his philosophy of Tateism, and then we'll look at just the first tenet, 'cause I think the first tenet is good.

It doesn't matter what status or standing you currently have in life.

I believe if you live true to these tenets, it is the best possible framework in which you can conduct yourself to be massively successful.

I also believe not only do you have a fantastic human experience, but all of the people around you will benefit from your existence.

This is the best way to become the most capable, powerful, and competent version of yourself, and by extension, make you the most good for the people who love you, and by further extension, most good to the world as a whole.

Okay, so those are the promises of Tateism, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention at this point, 'cause I mentioned 17-year-olds earlier, top comment, I'm 17 years old, and in all my time on this Earth, I haven't come across one man who's been able to influence me like this, made me think about the world through a real masculine role model's eyes.

Serious props to everything you do.

Much love from Washington.

So, when I say, like, a lot of his fans seem to be young, impressionable boys, this is what I mean.

And, and in this case, he's molding them in what I think is largely a good direction, not that they should affirm a philosophy called Tateism, not that they should look up to this man generally as a role model, but that they're right to say, I need to have an ethos in life.

I need to have some kind of rules for how I go on living.

And the first rule that he gives is a great one.

I believe that men have the divine imperative to become as capable, powerful, and competent as possible in this life.

That is the first tenet and one of the most powerful.

So, that's the line, I believe that men have the divine imperative to become as capable, powerful, and competent as possible in this life.

Now, I mean, that is definitionally true.

Everyone is capable of doing what's possible, what, what it means to be possible, fine, but it's nevertheless a call to virtue, even if it is kind of a badly written one, and it's something that I think we should take seriously, because virtue is very good.

Again, like, this is something that Christians, Aristotelians, and Tateists can agree on.

Nevertheless, as Aristotle points out, while it is good, it is actually better than honor, it's still gonna be an incomplete good.

So, you've got sensual pleasures at the bottom, then you've got honor and honor-seeking above that, then you have a life of virtue.

But in Aristotle's words, It is clear, therefore, that in the opinion at all events of men of action, virtue is a greater good than honor.

And one might perhaps accordingly suppose that virtue, rather than honor, is the end of the political life.

But even virtue proves on examination to be too complete to be the end, meaning to be the goal.

Okay, let's break that down.

In other words, some people get involved in politics and kind of social activism of any kind because they're looking for the approval of other people.

Other people are doing it 'cause they want to actually be morally virtuous.

They want to live a good, well-regulated life.

Now, when Aristotle talks about virtue, by the way, he doesn't have in mind what we call the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.

He has what are sometimes called the cardinal virtues, things like prudence and temperance and fortitude and justice, and these are good things.

A person who is obsessed with justice and prudence and temperance and fortitude is better than a person who's obsessed with winning the honor of others and way better than a person who is obsessed with living intemperately and dishonorably.

Nevertheless, as Aristotle says, The life of moral virtue is happy only in a secondary degree.

And he explains, 'cause the ha- things he has in mind, like justice and courage and the rest, are about human interaction.

And as he points out, there's something that is actually a little too human about it.

The gods, as we conceive them, enjoy supreme felicity and happiness, but what sort of actions can we attribute to them?

Just actions?

They don't do things like make contracts, restore deposits, and the like.

Brave actions?

Well, they're never facing any situation that requires them to be brave.

They're not giving in the sense of human liberality.

Uh, they don't have any kind of coins.

They don't give out money that way.

We wouldn't describe them as temperate.

They're not saying, Well, I can't have any more.

So, prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, courage, all this stuff is good, but if we wanna be really godlike, we're gonna find that elsewhere.

We're gonna need to have something greater than that.

Now-There is a sense in which Aristotle is going to have to point beyond virtue.

As we've already seen, he points to the life of contemplation, because that's more than just treating my neighbor well.

If you want to put it in Christian terms, explicitly, the love of God is superior to the love of neighbor.

The love of neighbor is solidly in that second place.

Aristotle recognizes that.

And it's striking too, like everything, he's basically saying everything Tate is doing is too First, it was too animalistic, now it's too human-centric.

It doesn't go beyond man to this kind of divine level.

Now again, Aristotle doesn't have Christianity, he doesn't have a full vision of God, but he realizes we can either be drawn downward to the level of beasts or we can be drawn upwards to this kind of divine level, or we can stay at a kind of a so-so.

Tate's earlier stuff is drawing us downwards to the level of beasts, without a question.

His newer stuff seems like it's, it's kind of at that so-so level, but it's still not calling us upward.

In fact, it's striking, even when you hear him talking about religion.

So Tate became a Christian and then left Christianity and became a Muslim.

He doesn't understand religion as something actually above us.

He just looks at religion like, what's the most counter-cultural thing?

What's the thing that can help discipline me as a person and make me more virtuous?

So he's bringing the god down to man rather than being lifted up to the divine level.

I hope that makes sense.

Like, Aristotle recognizes this mistake, that if you put virtue above being godlike, well then you've, you've messed this up, because you couldn't imagine God or the gods being just like virtuous men.

That they're above this, they're beyond this, that the life of moral virtue is something we need, not something God needs.

Now, to be clear, Aristotle's not saying the gods are evil.

He's saying they don't have to worry about whether they tipped appropriately on their checks, because this is all a matter of human affairs.

That then gets to what I think is one of the most interesting The thing that actually I think motivated me to make this whole episode, the thing that got me thinking about Aristotle in relation to Andrew Tate, was Tate's description of what we might call magnanimity.

Now, magnanimity, literally great souled-ness, is like, it's striving for the chief excellence, but still in this kind of secondary way.

I'll, I'll get into what magnanimity means to Aristotle and then to Christians, but first, I want to see where I'm seeing, or I want to show you where I'm seeing glimpses of a desire for magnanimity in Andrew Tate.

Because his idea that even though he, he views himself as the king of the world, he's got all the stuff, the life of pleasure, would make him think, would make him happy, he's happy to give it all up in pursuit of some greater good and to help those that he thinks are beneath him.

And he imagines that this makes him, I'm not joking here, like Mother Teresa.

I'm giving it all up.

And I'll, I'm only satisfied with that if I feel like I've made a genuine dent in the matrix, if I've done genuine damage, which means I need all of you to do very well.

All of my fans need to do exceptionally well as people.

So perhaps I am philanthropic.

Perhaps I do actually really care about all of you, because it's the only way I can justify the sacrifice I'm making is to have all of you become multimillionaires.

Perhaps that's why I try so hard to teach you the things that you need to be successful in life, like mental rigidity and how to make money, networking inside the war room, why I made university.com cost less than a hamburger so anyone can join and make money.

Perhaps I am actually not only the richest man on Earth, I might be the nicest man in the world.

But let's try not to be arrogant.

Yeah, no, it's not arrogant.

I'm the nicest man in the world, I'm the richest man in the world, I'm the most desired man alive, and I'm gonna give it all up for you people at home, because my heart is so kind.

Mother Theresa is waiting for me.

Me and her are gonna have a long chat about how we sacrificed everything for the peasants, the peons, the people who wouldn't help themselves.

So no, I would say it's fair to say Andrew Tate does not sound very much like Mother Theresa, but he does sound a little bit like a dumbed-down version of Aristotle.

Here's what I mean by that.

Aristotle describes a man that he calls magnanimous, and again, this means like great-souled, uh, and this means something different for Aristotle than it does for later Christian thinkers.

Before we get there, though, I want to just highlight that even Tate's version of magnanimity is limited by his total inability to figure out what makes you happy.

Remember, he'd said like, okay, this life of pleasure, all this money isn't doing anything, it's, you can only buy so many stupid watches, you can only buy so many of the same car before you're like, Okay, what's the point?

Like if I've got a thousand Maseratis or Bugattis or whatever, Saabs, who cares, is that gonna make me happier than if I have one?

Why?

Like, what model of consumption is this smarter coherent?

And it's not, and, but he's like, Okay, I need a purpose.

And his purpose as he describes it is to help other people live that same kind of pointless life that he's living.

But the fact that he's helping other people gives him a purpose that a person just following in his footsteps wouldn't have.

I hope you're, you're catching the difference.

Like, the thing he's getting that the people who, even if they followed him and became fabulously wealthy wouldn't have, is this idea like, oh, I can help other people.

Because this isn't actually for others, this is still him trying to figure out how to become happy.

I mean, by his own telling, he needs this for purpose in his life.

So all of this, long way around, reminds me of the pagan notion of magnanimity, and John Casey talks about this in his book, Pagan Virtues.He says, The magnanimous man And this is very much like the Aristotelian sense.

The magnanimous man does not run into trifling dangers, nor is he fond of danger, because he honors few things.

But he will face great dangers, and when he's in danger, he is unsparing of his life, knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth having.

And he is the sort of man to confer benefits, but he's ashamed of receiving them.

So you can imagine, like, Tate is only too happy to throw his money around and let everyone know he's throwing his money around.

But if he was ever in a situation where he needed help, such a man doesn't want to be the recipient of help.

For the one is the mark of a superior, the other of an inferior.

He's open in his hate and in his love.

He does not flatter.

He does not make his life revolve around anyone unless it be a friend.

Hanging out with the bros.

For this is slavish, and for this reason, all flatterers are servile, and people lacking in self-respect are flatterers.

He is one to possess beautiful and profitless things rather than profitable and useful ones, for this is proper to a character that suffices to itself.

Look, this description sounds like Andrew Tate.

Now, I think this guy carries himself with a little more dignity than, and class than Andrew Tate does.

He's pretty nouveau riche.

But it's still what I think Andrew Tate's trying to be, the person who's just above the fray, he's above it all.

He's not gonna get worried about money or circumstances or anything like this.

Oh, all the peons, all the brokies flattering me.

Uh, he has nothing but contempt for such people.

And he cares about his friends, he cares about, uh, using his money to help other people if he wants to.

He's able to possess beautiful and profitless things, like $10 million watches and Bugattis.

He doesn't need things to, you know He's not using his money on stuff that he actually needs.

He's just using it on stupid stuff he doesn't need to show you that he doesn't need it.

Further, A slow step is thought appropriate to the magnanimous man.

He even carries himself, he's got a deep voice and a level utterance.

For the man who takes few things seriously is not likely to be hurried, nor the man who thinks nothing great to be excited, while a shrill voice and a rapid gait are the results of hurry and excitement.

So his whole demeanor kind of suggests he's, he's above the fray.

He doesn't, eh, he's not worried about this stuff.

Now, John Carey, uh, critiques it like this.

He says, The magnanimous or proud man has not proved to be the most durably popular of Aristotle's ethical portraits.

It goes without saying that he is directly opposed to Christian humility.

But modern dislike of him extends far beyond the ranks of believing Christians.

In other words, a lot of people hate the kind of Tate-ist, magnanimous man of Aristotle, even if they're not someone steeped in Christianity.

He offends that spirit of equality, partly rooted, of course, in Christianity, which few of us can escape even if we try.

Like somebody who is openly contemptuous of their lessers, who thinks that they're better than the people beneath them, uh, we kind of recognize that as a dislikable trait.

Whether you're coming from a Christian perspective about caring for the least of these, or a democratic perspective of all men being created equal, there's something unlikable in Aristotle's view of the magnanimous man.

And I think there's something deeply unlikable for many people in Andrew Tate for similar reasons.

But I want to suggest that there is something salvageable.

So, uh, Christopher Cordner in Aristotelian Virtue and Its Limitations draws out this apparent antithesis between Aristotle's magnanimous man and Jesus.

And he does it in this way.

He says, In the Nichomachean Ethics, we find no mention of kindness, compassion, forgiveness, apology, repentance, remorse, humility, or of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

These various moral ideas, Christian-inspired perhaps, but arguably not at home only within specifically Christian thought, have become seminal in at least one tradition of our moral thinking.

Some of these ideas may have cousins in Aristotle's ethical picture, but there seem to be few close connections.

So in other words, we find missing in the magnanimous man kindness.

We find missing compassion.

We find missing forgiveness, apology, remorse, repentance, humility, faith, hope, love.

As a result, Cordner says, the distance between Aristotelian and Christian moral thought here is crystallized in the radically contrasting central images of these two moral traditions.

On Aristotle's side, you have the magnanimous man, a megalopsychos in Greek, great-souled.

He's noble, proud, reserved, politely disdainful of the masses, conscious of the requirement to comport himself well in the eyes of his peers.

And on the other hand, you have the figure of the almost naked, crucified, suffering, loving, forgiving Jesus.

A worldly pride confronts an unworldly selfless love.

It is salutary to try to imagine Aristotle's reaction to a moral religious tradition which has the crucified Jesus as its central image.

I think he would've despised it.

End quote.

Now, I think there's a lot said there that is quite fair.

There is something profoundly un-Christian about the Andrew Tate vision of human excellence.

It is hard to look at Christ and look at Andrew Tate and say, Yes, these two men can be harmonized.

We can understand the message of Christ and the message of Tate in a harmonious sort of way.

And it is alarming, genuinely alarming, that in this increasingly post-Christian culture, so many are turning from Christ to Tate, because he's not just an inferior.He is in many ways an antithesis.

Nevertheless, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Christians have found the good, even in magnanimity, and redeemed the magnanimous man before.

So here, I'll point to the work of Eleonore Stump, uh, in her Humility, Courage, Magnanimity: A Thomistic Account, and she points out that on the surface, there is this radical disparity.

In Aristotle's description, the magnanimous man is willing to spend his own money on works that benefit the whole community through his great-souled desire for honor, right?

That, I mean, it'd be great if Tate was even that far along.

Whatever.

So for Aristotle, magnanimity is a matter of desiring honor and being willing to spend money to deserve it.

Now, I think he is fair.

He'll throw his money around if he thinks it'll impress you and you'll honor him for it.

Contrary to what one might suppose from that description, though, magnanimity counts as a virtue for Thomas Aquinas as well.

It's not so easy, she recognizes, Stump here, I mean, to see how magnanimity could be a virtue if humility is a virtue.

And so we need to do a little bit of work to harmonize those two.

Well, fortunately for us, St. Thomas Aquinas explains how an authentic magnanimity, an authentic desire for greatness and great-souled-ness is actually a good thing.

In other words, if magnanimity is all about, I wanna be great, there is a way that is deeply un-humble about that, or there's a way in which that coexists perfectly with humility and complements humility really well.

In Aquinas' treatment, he says that there is, in man, something great which he possesses through the gift of God, and something defective which accrues to him through the weakness of nature.

Let's start with that.

That's a very important understanding.

You are great, and you are defective.

Those two things are both true.

If you wanna understand how to think about yourself, if you wanna understand how to think about your neighbor, if you wanna understand how to think about humility and magnanimity and everything else, you have to start with those two truths.

You have been given talents by God.

If you remember the parable of the talents, these are vast sums.

Andrew Tate is not the richest man in the world.

All of us have been given indescribable wealth because we've been given these great talents by God.

That doesn't just mean talents in the normal sense of you're very gifted at something.

It means you were loved into existence.

It means that you have all of the great goods of your life, and they're gifts from God.

And so, when you recognize that, and when you recognize that greatness, that's not arrogance.

That's gratitude for a gift.

If someone gives you an incredible gift, even if you Look, don't do this.

If you wanna go over to my Patreon, shamelessto.com, and get me a $10 million watch, I will accept your gift.

I will, if I'm being totally honest, I will try to re-gift it, or at least sell it.

But I will accept it.

And if I were to treat it as junk, if I were to just throw it out, just 'cause I think it's gaudy and stupid-looking, there would be an ingratitude there.

Well, likewise, when you've been given all these gifts from God, you have a duty to treat them as gifts.

If you've been given five talents, if you pretend like you only have one, it's a false humility, and it's an ingratitude.

So you should recognize your greatness, but you should also recognize your limitations, that you have sin and ignorance in your life as well, that there are things that the other person made you better than you, and that they've been tremendously blessed and gifted as well.

That has to be where you start, or you're gonna go wrong in everything else.

Accordingly, St. Thomas Aquinas says, magnanimity makes a man deem himself worthy of great things, in consideration of the gifts he holds from God.

Like, you are made for greatness, and it's not arrogant to say that.

Thus, if his soul is endowed with great virtue, magnanimity makes him tend to perfect works of virtue.

And the same is to be said of the use of any other good, such as science or external fortune.

Meaning, if you're smart, if you're rich, if you're holy, if you're any of these things, these are gifts from God, and you need to, number one, recognize them, and number two, strive to use them well.

On the other hand, humility makes a man think little of himself in consideration of his own deficiency, and magnanimity makes him despise others insofar as they fall away from God's gifts, since he does not think so much of others as to do anything wrong for their sake.

In other words, that doesn't mean despise others like you hate your neighbor.

That means, like, you're not so in need of the esteem of others that you're gonna be peer pressured into sin, and you're not going to want to copy them in those things, because you realize your own weakness and limitation, that's true humility, and that you're worth more than sin.

That's true magnanimity.

Yet humility makes us honor others, even your sinning neighbor, and esteem them better than ourselves insofar as we see some of God's gifts in them.

Now, this is, I think, a really important point.

If you wanna know why St. Thomas Aquinas understood human nature and happiness so much better than Andrew Tate, start here, that true humility is recognizing you can learn from other people.

And what Aquinas has done is masterful.

He's learned from Aristotle and from Jesus Christ, and he's seen all of the things Aristotle gets wrong and the ways that he fell short, and in the light of Christ, is able to provide a soft corrective, to say, Yes, magnanimity is good, but Aristotle misdiagnosed what the magnanimous man looks like.

And in Aquinas' words, We must not esteem by pretending to esteem.

We should in truth think it possible for another person to have something that is hidden to us, and whereby he is better than we are, although our own good, whereby we are apparently better than he, be not hidden.

In other words, there's stuff you know that I don't know.

There's stuff I know that you don't know.If I have authentic humility, I'm willing to learn from you, and this is the key to success.

In fact, Andrew Tate says as much.

Do you want to learn how to play piano from the piano teacher or do you want to sit there as an arrogant brokie?

Most people are brutally arrogant and you can sit there and you can try and help them, and they're just so arrogant.

They think, Oh, I can do it myself, or, I'll work it out myself, I don't need help.

And it's arrogance and it keeps them at the bottom.

Everything great that's happened to me in my life, someone taught me.

I had a kickboxing coach, my dad was my chess coach.

You get taught things.

To sit there and think you're too ar- you're too good to learn, well, this is the problem, most people are broke.

On the flip side, if you've been given true gifts by God, it's not arrogance to think you can offer those things to other people.

There's things you know that they don't know.

I had to admit, like, hey, there's stuff I know that many people watching this didn't already know.

And if I have a false sense of humility and I have to think, oh, I've got nothing to offer, I'll never be able to teach, I'll never be able to share, be able to give.

That includes, like, giving to my children, right?

Like, you have to realize you have gifts that are worth sharing with other people.

Final point, in terms of this connection between humility and magnanimity, Aquinas is going to say that you need, in difficult moments, both of these together.

On the one hand, you need in order to temper and restrain the mind lest you desire high things immoderately, to have a authentic sense of humility.

Like, if your idea is, I'm only going to apply to Harvard because I'm amazing, and you've got, like, a 3.0 GPA and pretty mediocre SAT scores, don't do that.

You need to have the humility to recognize your own limitations and not only swing for the fences.

On the other hand, you don't want to have such a sense of your own limitations, or such a disordered sense of your own limitations, that you're led into despair.

And so you need to also have a sense, no, no, you really do have great gifts and therefore you need magnanimity.

Therefore, you need these two in relationship to one another.

So, David Horner points out that this is really, like, the corrective needed to Aristotle's picture.

Like, what makes Aristotle's picture of the magnanimous man offensive isn't what is in it so much as what's missing.

What's missing are all of those balancing factors like humility.

And I think what's missing with Tate is not Like, the problem with Tate is not that he wants you to be great.

It's twofold.

Number one, he doesn't know where to find true greatness, and number two, he doesn't have any of the moral virtues like humility to balance out that picture, so it ends up being wildly distorted.

Now, the final point I want to make on this is that this connection between magnanimity and humility in one sense is part of the brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas, to recognize this.

On the other sense, we see it right there in scripture.

Like, Aquinas is not inventing this, Aristotle's not inventing this.

I want to give you just the examples of Mary and Jesus.

Mary and the Magnificat, same Latin root, magnanimity, uh, like, it's magnification, greatness.

She says, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.

Henceforth all generations will call me blessed.

So, on the one hand, she is humble.

She acknowledges her humility.

In fact, she even seems to boast of her humility, that talks about how all generations will call her blessed.

But notice, blessed, she's not just like, I'm so amazing in my own right.

She's recognizing all of the tremendous gifts she's been given by God.

She is truly magnanimous.

Likewise, Jesus himself is at once humble and magnanimous.

He says in Matthew 11, Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Again, he seems to almost boast of his humility.

He can acknowledge it forthrightly with no sense of arrogance and say, uh, one and the same time that you need to come and learn from him and rest in him, and at the other hand, that he's gentle and lowly in heart.

So, it's good to have both those.

There's something truly magnanimous about being able to say, I desire greatness, and I have something to offer.

And there's something truly humble in saying, You also have something to offer that I need, because I'm radically incomplete without it.

And in fact, I'm radically incomplete, frankly, with it, because I'm sinful, I'm ignorant, and I'm pretty limited.

Okay, the last thing, because it'd be a shame to not address this at all, these two visions of reality are going to involve pretty different visions of how we should treat others, and particularly how we should treat women.

If my thesis is right, Tate is kind of inching or crawling towards something like the pagan concept of magnanimity, but he still has coupled with this something like the pagan concept of women.

And here too, Christians provided an important corrective.

So I want to let you hear Tate's description of what a woman is and is worth and how something like chastity works for women, combined with what a man is worth and what chastity ought to look like for men.

And warning, this one's pretty gnarly.

Without loyalty, a woman's worth absolutely nothing.

Whereas me, I can, I have w- I'm not loyal to my girlfriend.

She knows I other girls and she's still loyal to me because I provide value beyond that.

I don't have to give sexual exclusivity to be a, a valuable man.

I'm valuable no matter who I .

A woman needs to give loyalty or she has no value at all.

Now, admittedly, that's from five years ago, but if you're wondering if he's changed significantly, I'd point you to this tweet from February of this year where he said, If all your children come from one woman, you are not a conqueror.

Now, again, you can see still the blatant double standard .

that women are held to one standard of chastity and loyalty and men are held to a radically different one in which what is a vice for a woman is a virtue for a man.

This is a, not just a messed up world view, but a literally impossible one.

Meaning that the only way to be a, you know, heroic man in this vision of reality is to corrupt the morals of a lot of women.

It's still deeply predatory.

It still involves ruining women, from Tate's own perspective, uh, for other men.

And so he praises a man for having six kids from three different women.

Now, one does not need to be a Christian to say there's something deeply and fundamentally broken about this.

I mean, a man who would insult his own father this way, for not cheating on his mother, there's something just lowly about that.

What's more, the absurdity of this kind of double standard is something that the early Christians called out.

And look, here's the thing.

A lot of the stuff Andrew Tate is against, you know, the excesses of feminism and all of that, I totally get it.

I understand it.

But you need to understand this.

Feminists in the 20th century saw men living and preaching this.

Women are held to one standard, men are held to a different, much lower standard.

And their response was to say, Well, we shouldn't be held to a high standard either.

The Christian response for 2,000 years has been, That double standard is ridiculous, but you should both be held to the higher standard.

What is expected of men ought to be the thing, same thing we've always expected of women, chastity and loyalty and the, the rest.

So, to give just a couple examples, Saint Gregory Nazianzen says, How then do you demand chastity when you don't yourself observe it?

How do you demand that which you don't give?

How, though you are equally a body, do you legislate unequally?

If you believe that two become one, then how in the world are you treating the rest of yourself in this corrupt way?

And he points out the absurdity of laws that reflect this broken double standard.

St. Jerome does as well.

In the year 399, he says, Earthly laws give a free reign to the unchastity of men, merely condemning seduction and adultery.

Lust is allowed to rage unrestrained among brothels and slave girls, as if the guilt were constituted by the rank of the person assailed and not by the purpose of the assailant.

But with us Christians, what is unlawful for women is equally unlawful for men, and as both serve the same God, both are bound by the same obligations.

So, I would suggest a healthy view where you're called not to just dominate and prey upon others, but are actually called to the contemplation of God and the love of God and to the love of neighbor.

There's something to be said not just for correcting this broken concept of magnanimity, but also correcting how one approaches the opposite sex.

It's good to live the kind of life where you are desirable to members of the opposite sex.

I wanna stress that.

It is good.

And so inasmuch as that is maybe downplayed in modern society, I think he is touching upon an area that is worth stressing.

Yes, you should be desired by the opposite sex, and it's good, and you should lead the kind of life that makes you a desirable person.

But not in a way to just inspire lust, not in a way to dominate, manipulate, corrupt, and so on.

But you should lead an incredible life because you are great and you're made for greatness.

So, I think Andrew Tate is addressing a real brokenness in our culture, but I think he addresses it in ways that actively make the problem worse in many regards.

And there's a corrective, first in Aristotle, but then, and more importantly, in Jesus Christ.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.