Welcome back to Episode 46 of the Rational Policy Podcast! In this installment, your intrepid hosts Mike Coté and Art Vandelay break down the most recent week of current events, running the gamut from politics to war. We start with some truly sad news: the sudden passing of South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a stalwart conservative and a true titan of the institution. We lament his death as heralding the end of an era of serious statesmen and public servants in Congress, while also detailing how his lifelong support for liberty and America’s global role in defending it is unfortunately becoming less popular every day. We then shift gears to talk about the return of outright hostilities in the US-Iran conflict, debating whether it is a good or bad thing and what might come next. We discuss how the US can deal with the Strait of Hormuz, what sort of outcome we should be looking for here, and how weakening our various enemies around the globe will help us in our grander rivalry with the Chinese. Finally, we touch on the terrible ICE-involved shootings in Texas and Maine, explaining how the administration has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with its reckless and hamfisted approach to immigration enforcement, as well as how this faulty approach is entirely due to the extreme and myopic focus on base voters – a much broader problem in our politics today.
Check it out, follow us on Twitter/X (Mike / Art), and share the podcast with anyone you think might appreciate it. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with another show. Until then, be sure to tune into the World Cup final this Sunday; it’ll be an absolute banger.
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Rising Tide FoundationJul 16 · Rising Tide Foundation
The following essay is the first part of a series published in the latest RTF Spring Anthology exploring the forgotten battles to restore Natural Law in the midst of the Roman empire’s breakdown.
“Do not be conformed by this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing, you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect”
-Paul’s Letter to Romans
“It is by application to great problems that small men are frequently turned into great men”
-St. Augustine of Hippo
The following essay is the first part of a series published in the latest RTF Spring Anthology exploring the forgotten battles to restore Natural Law in the midst of the Roman empire’s breakdown.
While this essay begins and ends with the figure of the great Augustine, Bishop of Hippo who lived during the darkest days of the Roman Empire, my true intention is to paint a picture of the dramatic stage of history as Augustine himself understood it and which he used to craft his own identity as an agent of positive change in an otherwise tragic world. If you notice identical patterns to those shaping our current crisis-ridden world, then I will consider this work a success.
Augustine’s World
When the Visigoths carried out their first invasion of Rome in 410 AD pillaging the once great civilization, the idea of “the eternal empire” crumbled fast, as Rome had already split up into an eastern and a western block just a few years earlier.
St Augustine was born in 354 AD in the former Carthaginian territory of Hippo in North Africa (today’s Algeria), and in his early twenties, had become a teacher of rhetoric and a leading disciple of the recently created cult of Manicheanism.
Since most of his students were young people from the aristocratic class often devoid of any moral foundation who simply wanted to learn the art of persuasion (aka: rhetoric) in order to pursue careers in politics, and law Augustine found himself suffering pangs of conscience but had little means of resolving his inner tension.
Despite authoring dozens of incredible works, one of his most famous writings is named ‘The Confessions’, which he wrote in 398 AD outlining how he had worked through and resolved his spiritual gordian knots and internal contradictions causing him anguishing turmoil during his early years.
Extolling a former student towards a philosophical life devoted to the pursuit of wisdom instead of the life of material success which Augustine had also been formerly devoted, he wrote:
“Wake up! Wake up, I beg you! Believe me, you’ll be grateful that the gifts of this world have hardly entranced you at all with the successes by which they ensnare the unwary. They tried to catch me while I was daily singing their praises, until the pain in my chest compelled me to cast aside my puffed-up profession and to flee to the bosom of philosophy. Now philosophy nourishes and sustains me in that retirement we have so much hoped for. It has freed me completely from the superstition into which I had thrown you headlong with myself. Philosophy teaches, and teaches truly, that nothing whatsoever that is discerned by mortal eyes, or that any of the senses comes into contact with, should be worshipped.
Philosophy promises that it will display the true and hidden God and now and again designs to show us a glimpse of Him through the bright clouds, as it were”.[1]
In his Confessions, Augustine documents his spiritual journey leading up to his decision to abandon his pagan/Manichean worldview becoming a Christian at 30 years of age. Upon being baptised in 385 AD, and growing in influence within the church, he decided to intervene into his collapsing society in a big way.
Life During the End of an Empire
There had been certain edicts that had been passed in 380 AD that made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, but because Rome’s collapse was accelerating, supply chains were breaking down, and the social fabric was being torn apart, people were looking for an easy scapegoat to cast blame upon… the new Christian movement became that scapegoat.
Throughout his works which spanned four decades, Augustine strived to set the record straight about what really caused Rome’s slow collapse (which began LONG before Jesus was even born). In carrying out this task, he not only protected Christianity from its enemies within and without, but completely revolutionized the theology of Christianity in theory and practice.
In the age that Augustine lived, the high priesthood of the mystery cults that oversaw the collapse of Greece after Plato’s death, and which oversaw the transformation of Rome from a republic into an empire after the murder of Cicero in 43 BC were clearly desirous of coopting Christianity for their own imperial ends. And these same high priests simultaneously worked to spread gnostic pseudo-Christian cults in order to undermine the faith from within.
Augustine would have none of it, and resolved to launch a new Renaissance movement, which encapsulated the best of what he learned from Plato and Cicero, while adding the teachings of the New Testament in a fresh synthesis that had never been seen before.
Make no mistake, Augustine was no mere Church bishop or theologian. He was a renaissance thinker of the highest order who authored groundbreaking works on music theory (De Musica), educational reform (On a Christian education), politics (City of God), philosophy and religious reform.
The Evolution of Rome and the Rise of Alexander the Great
Before we can properly appreciate Augustine’s battle, let us take a moment to appreciate how that stage was set which shaped his world and which he, in turn so profoundly shaped.
Since Augustine lived through the final days of the Roman Empire, let us ask the question: What was Rome? How did it arise as an empire in the first place, and what led to its collapse?
Before Rome become the dominant hegemon of the ancient world, Persia’s Achaemenid Empire represented that role. This empire stretched between 550 and 332 BC.
At its peak, the Persian Empire stretched all the way from India, Central Asia, Turkey, Egypt and Greece. It conquered Egypt, and stretched all the way through Macedonia, where a certain character named King Philip II of Macedon ruled from 359-336 BC. Philip II had played a double handed role during his reign. On the one hand he fought Persia in several battles giving off the impression that he was a committed enemy and friend of the beleaguered Greeks who sought his help from the invading eastern force. However, according to letters between Persia’s envoys on Rhodes and King Philip II, it is revealed that the king was also engaged secretly with the high priesthood in planning a “western” empire that would split away from Persia but always using “the Persian model”.
Philosopher Lyndon LaRouche writes that this new arrangement was ‘subject to the condition that he order the internal affairs of that “Division” according to what the letters describe variously as “the Persian model” and “the oligarchical model.” Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics are the most detailed specifications of oligarchical principles of this species. Inside classical Greece, the oligarchical models included Lycurgan Sparta, Cadmian Thebes, and the temples of the cult of Apollo (Horus, Lucifer, et al.) at Delphi and Delos.’
Much more will be said of the mystery cults referenced by LaRouche later in this text.
As Cynthia Chung elaborated in ‘Plato’s Fight Against Apollo’s Temple of Delphi and the Cult of Democracy’, several of Plato’s leading students would play an influential role in organizing the mind of the son of Philip of Macedon whose name was Alexander who came to power soon after Philip was assassinated in 336 BC.
4 years ago · 109 likes · 20 comments · Cynthia Chung
Now, we have all been told the story that Alexander was the student of Aristotle, and that Aristotle was the student of Plato… yet this too is a stubborn lie which has held onto the narrative of Alexander the Great since the day he died. The fact is that Aristotle was actually no friend of either Plato or Alexander and actually sought to infiltrate Plato’s academy in order to weaken it from within when Plato was an old man. Upon Plato’s death, Aristotle failed to wrestle control of the academy away from Plato’s devoted student and nephew Speusippus who recognized how Aristotle had insidiously deformed the great teacher’s philosophy.
Aristotle was forced to leave Athens and returned to his homeland in the kingdom of Macedon at the invitation of Philip II who explicitly wanted Aristotle to tutor his son in the arts of managing an empire while advising Philip II directly.
When Aristotle’s manipulations were again identified by Platonists surrounding Alexander, he was once more forced to abandon his dream of controlling a new western empire and now set up his own academy dubbed ‘The Lyceum’ in 335 BC. At the Lyceum, Aristotle could teach his own peculiar brand of memory-driven (instead of discovery-driven) philosophy.
It cannot be overstated that Aristotle actually developed a method of thinking that was in total opposition to every single moral and principled dimension to the comprehensive philosophy and discovery-oriented method developed by Plato.
The centerpiece of Raphael Sanzio’s School of Athens (1509) featuring the schism between Plato and Aristotle.
When Alexander realized how Aristotle had been manipulating the young leader, he promptly fired his tutor and proceeded to embark on a vast city building enterprise soon replacing the entire Persian Empire with something never before seen.
During this time Alexander even discovered a plot to assassinate him led by Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew and Alexander the Great’s official historian whom he had executed in 327 BC. Alexander’s advisors always suspected his former tutor to have coordinated the plot from afar.
The mentor who had a much stronger role in Alexander’s worldview and his strategic thinking to break the Persian Empire was a figure named Delius of Ephesus. Delius was a student of Plato’s Academy, and a leading figure at the time who had recently founded his own school that was continuing Plato’s program.
A mosaic featuring Alexander the Great
Delius of Ephesus also ensured that young Alexander had access to the works of Plato’s great ally Xenophon, who had authored a semi-fictional biography of Cyrus the Great designed to inspire future philosopher kings to virtue and a love of wisdom.
As Cynthia elegantly demonstrated, this is a book which Alexander took with him on all his travels and sought to emulate Xenophon’s Cyprus as a great role model of a city builder.
Alexander did not wish to be a tyrant who would simply expand, plunder and loot colonies, or who would try to create an empire for extraction and slavery. He saw himself as a real civilization builder who would spread the best of Hellenic Greek civilization all the way into Asia. Under the guidance of Plato’s true heirs, Alexander replaced his father (whose assassination remains a mystery to this day) to become king of Macedon at the age of 20. With this new found influence, he lost no time defeating the Persian Empire and establishing a great, albeit short-lived empire which lasted until his death in 323 BC at the age of 32 [see image below].
And we see, evidence of this incredible Hellenic artistic tradition can even be found in such places as the Kingdom of Bactria, and the recently discovered Kingdom of Gandhāra, which existed across today’s borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. This incredible kingdom established under Alexander endured for over three centuries (until it was extinguished in 10 AD).
Located in today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan, Gandhāra was a political, cultural capital of Asia starting in the 1st century BC.
The Mauryan Empire that united India and launched a golden age under Chandragupta Maurya (the founder of the Kingdom and ally of Alexander the Great) unleashed a vast renaissance which peaked during the 40-year reign of Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka (reign from 268-232 BC).
In the Greco-Buddhist kingdom of Gandhāra, archeologists have found architecture and sculptures that utilize the golden ratio, and we find wonderful life-like sculptures which portrayed the Buddha for the very first time. And again, we find very Hellenistic artistic techniques. Alexander also had a program where he would encourage education and the preservation of local cultural heritage, writings and language groups.
Seated Buddha, dating from 300 to 500 CE, found near Jamal Garhi. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ
Siddhartha at the Bodhi Tree, Gandhara, Pakistan, c. 100–200s, Schist. Image courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art.
Alexander ensured that the local governors of territories he conquered would continue to have influence within his new system. In every region which he conquered Alexander sought to build trust and loyalty with his new subjects and built vast public works, infrastructure, temples and schools across his kingdom.
It was extremely impressive, but it was sadly also very short-lived as the new empire only endured from 334 to 323 BC. What ended it was the untimely death of Alexander who had made the tactical mistake of dining in Babylon. While it was never proven that Alexander was poisoned, his mother Olympia and leading Field Marshall Antigonus both accused Aristotle of colluding with his student Cassander who they claim administered the drug during Alexander’s banquet in Babylon.
In the 2nd century AD, the Greek historian and military strategist Arrian wrote a thorough biography of Alexander the Great where he speculated about the murderers of Alexander writing:
“I am aware that much else has been written about Alexander’s death: for instance, that Antipater sent him some medicine which had been tampered with and that he took it, with fatal results. Aristotle is supposed to have made up this drug, because he was already afraid of Alexander on account of Callisthenes’ death, and Antipater’s son Cassander is said to have brought it. Some accounts declare that he brought it in a mule’s hoof, and that it was given Alexander by Cassander’s younger brother Iolas, who was his cup-bearer and had been hurt by him in some way shortly before his death.”
Whether or not Aristotle directed the murder of his former student, upon his death, Alexander’s empire fell into immediate division.
The unifying force of Alexander’s leadership completely broke down as various smaller-minded generals took control over regions of the empire. General Ptolemy had created a dynasty as leader of the Egyptian territories. General Seleucid created a dynasty in the central and southwest Asian territories. You had Antigonus, and Cassander and other generals who took control over their territories and established their own little mini dynasties which quickly devolved into battles between each other.
This decaying period of warlords was not dissimilar to the ‘Warring States Period’ in China which was also occurring during this period.
With the loss of leadership, and rise of myopic infighting and chaos, many of those mystery cults which lost power under Alexander’s reign rose in influence once more. Some of those cults included the Shakti and Ishtar sects of the east which quickly moved across the west taking on different appearances depending on the tastes of the target populations. Under the Ptolemies, we saw the rise of the Isis cult’s power, now reestablishing itself in Alexandria.
The Persian solar cult of Mithra (Sol Invictus) which paralleled the solar gods Marduk of Babylon and Apollo of Greece, began to move into Anatolia along with the Magna Mater cult of Cybele-Attis. The rot seeped into the host ever more quickly with each passing year.
As the western former empire of Alexander continued slowly into chaos, the Chinese were finding their own “Alexander the Great” moment with the Han Dynasty which arose into power in 200 BC giving rise to a brilliant Confucian renaissance, peace, internal improvements and a unification of China into one kingdom for the first time in centuries. Unlike the case of Alexander, the Chinese unification endured for centuries.
The Silk Road Connection
The Silk Road that united Chinese culture with Persian, Arab, Greek, Roman and African cultures would first emerge with the Han Dynasty about a century after Alexander’s death.
Despite the fact that many modern historians attempt to treat the events of Alexander’s west to east expansion and China’s east to west program as two separate events, the connection of both programs is most certainly connected in the study of Universal History. Were it not for Alexander’s Hellenizing efforts, it is unlikely that the Silk Road would have ever arisen.
With Alexander’s death, the great potential to create a city of Justice, Love and Goodness, which treated all human beings as divine, reasonable and self-perfectible, the way Plato had put forth in his Republic, or Solon had dreamed of much earlier… fell to pieces.
Just outside of the chaos of the regions formerly known as Alexander’s Empire, the small state of Rome could be seen across from its southern neighbor across the Mediterranean Carthage. Many people know of the term “Carthage delenda est”, ie: “Carthage must be destroyed” as the battle cry of Rome during its destructive battles against its nemesis… but few understand how this war happened, why these former allies became enemies in the first place, or how this helps us to understand the origins of the Roman Empire.
To get the next installment of this story, you can do two things: 1) Purchase the full RTF Spring Anthology in digital or paperback editions, or 2) Wait until next week where you will discovery how the high priesthood of Marduk, seeking yet another host, infested Rome and induced the republic to go to war with it’s maritime neighbor setting the stage for the alchemical transformation of Rome into an new Babylon.
[1] Augustine, Against the Academicians, Hackett publishing, Trans. Peter King, 1995, p.4
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