The Wes Cecil Podcast

Explore how late capitalism erodes our sense of history, leaving us in a relentless present. Discover the effects of financialization on individuality and societal orientation. Wes highlights the dangers of 24/7 news cycles that diminish the significance of events. He critiques our reliance on digital memory, linking it to a loss of historical perspective. Through practical exercises, he encourages reflection on past institutions and how advertising manipulates perceptions. Uncover how historical awareness can reveal alternatives to our current reality!

Having attacked most western philosophy, Nietzsche presents one of his core arguments - that all these claims to universal truth and discovery are simply a self-serving pose on the part of philosophers. Understanding his argument fundamentally alters the way we think not just about philosophy, but the construction of our understanding of the world itself. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Explore the bizarre logic of financialization and how it shapes late capitalism. Wes highlights personal experiences, like opaque cell phone billing, as examples of exploitation tactics. Discover how companies turn customer attention into revenue streams and the predatory nature of buy-now-pay-later models. The episode unveils how platforms treat users as commodities and discusses the implications of disorienting design. Finally, Wes emphasizes the importance of local markets and understanding these systems for better mental health.

Wow, Nietzsche rolls out all the rhetorical cannons to open Beyond Good and Evil. He attempts to undercut both the history and focus of Western philosophy and introduce a new basis of thinking based on a different approach to understanding the human. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q17: The Planet?“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you.” WallStreetPoverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies. By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work. Rand Virtue of SelfishnessGrazing offers a bounty of benefitsIncreased diversity of plant and animal species. Control of invasive plant species, such as yellow starthistle. Habitat restoration for threatened and endangered species.Controlling erosion from water runoff for improved water quality. Improving vegetation along stream banks and watershed health. Reducing wildfire threat from rangeland fires. Offering visually attractive vistas. Preventing fragmentation of habitat from housing and commercial development and maintaining connected wildlife corridors.Preserving open space in a rapidly growing state. Providing food for consumers. If we really want to reduce the human impact on the environment, the simplest and cheapest thing anyone can do is to eat less meat. Behind most of the joints of beef or chicken on our plates is a phenomenally wasteful, land- and energy-hungry system of farming that devastates forests, pollutes oceans, rivers, seas and air, depends on oil and coal, and is significantly responsible for climate change. The way we breed animals is now recognised by the UN, scientists, economists and politicians as giving rise to many interlinked human and ecological problems, but with 1 billion people already not having enough to eat and 3 billion more mouths to feed within 50 years, the urgency to rethink our relationship with animals is extreme.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this discussion, financialization is revealed as a profound force shaping daily life. A call to live on cash for a week exposes how deep its reach is. The contrast between conventional commerce and the invasive nature of global financial actors highlights a dystopian reality. Topics like the surge in credit card debt, hidden costs of transactions, and the impact of tech-driven economies emphasize users turning into products. Philosophical responses offer ways to resist this pervasive financial control.

This read along series presents one of Nietzsche’s most important and confusing works. Written after Thus Spake Zarathustra, it continues to develop some of his central themes and attempts to reground Ethics in a completely new fashion. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Philosophy in 16 Questions - Q16: Nihilism?Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. Structuralism: The term ‘structuralism’ can be applied to any analysis that emphasizes structures and relations, but it usually designates a twentieth-century European (especially French) school of thought that applies the methods of structural linguistics to the study of social and cultural phenomena. Starting from the insight that social and cultural phenomena are not physical objects and events but objects and events with meaning, and that their signification must therefore be a focus of analysis, structuralists reject causal analysis and any attempt to explain social and cultural phenomena one-by-one. Rather, they focus on the internal structure of cultural objects and, more importantly, the underlying structures that make them possible.Existentialism: Sartre's slogan—“existence precedes essence”—may serve to introduce what is most distinctive of existentialism, namely, the idea that no general, non-formal account of what it means to be human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing itself.Marxism: "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature." Marx FeuerbachSign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dive into the unsettling shifts brought by late capitalism, where societal change feels like an invisible revolution. Explore how financialization has seeped into everyday life, altering education and culture into mere transactions. Discover the impact on historical consciousness and why imagining alternatives feels nearly impossible. Wes dissects the superficiality and fragmentation of cultural experiences, ultimately framing homelessness as a symptom of deeper systemic failures. Brace yourself for a thought-provoking look at modern existence and its bewildering complexities.

A reflection on the relative nature of Reading vs TV and the peculiarities of both mediums. Indeed, given how much time we spend engaged in watching various kinds of media, I think it is a bit shocking how little time we spend reflecting on the nature of the media and how it impacts us. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.