Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

The Odyssey by Homer, translation by T.E. Shaw (Lawrence of Arabia) w/Jesan Sorrells
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Examining Homer’s epic, The Odyssey, this episode dives into timeless leadership lessons for modern managers and entrepreneurs. The conversation focused on the decline from heroic responsibility to entitlement in Western culture, the enduring value of facing challenges head-on, and the need for leaders to reclaim meaning by embracing tradition and personal accountability. Insights from translator T.E. Lawrence’s life and work sharpen the discussion on navigating today’s cultural shifts with courage and clarity.
  • Book Title: The Odyssey
  • Author: Homer (T.E. Lawrence translation)
  • Guest Names: Jesan Sorrells (Host)
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Time Stamped Overview
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00:00 Critique of modern society's values
07:01 Public institutions and heroism decline
15:33 Odysseus receives gifts and journey
22:31 Understanding the author's limitations
24:43 Lawrence of Arabia's wartime role
31:21 Odysseus arrives at the Cyclops' island
40:29 Blinding the Cyclops
42:19 Impact of Nietzschean philosophy
49:27 Odysseus doubts he's home
57:33 Understanding the Odyssey's broader impact
01:01:10 Lessons for leaders from The Odyssey
01:06:50 Conclusion and book promotion
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Foreign.

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership lessons

for the Great Books podcast. Episode number 30

with our book today, which you'll be able to see

on the video The Odyssey

the T.ELawrence or T. Shaw

Trevor Translation of the Odyssey by

Homer.

From the Odyssey by Homer

O divine posy goddess, daughter of Zeus,

sustained for me this song of the various minded man, who,

after he had plundered the innermost citadel of

hallow Troy, was made to stray grievously

about the coasts of men, the sport

of their customs, good or bad, while his heart, through all

the seafaring ached in an agony to redeem

himself and bring his company

safe home. Vain hope for

them, for his fellows he strove in vain. Their own

witlessness casts them away, the fools, to destroy for meat

the oxen of the most exalted sun, wherefore the

sun God blotted out the day of their return.

Make the tale live for us in all its many bearings,

O Muse. Book

one by now the other warriors,

those that had escaped headlong ruin by sea or in battle, were safely

home. Only Odysseus, terried

shut up by Lady Calypso, a nymph and very

goddess. In her hewn out caves she craved

for him, she craved him for her bedmate, while he was longing for his house

and wife of a truth the rolling seasons had at last

brought up the year marked by the gods for his return to Ithaca.

But not even there among his loved things, would he escape further

conflict. Yet had all the gods, with lapse of

time, grown compassionate and towards

Odysseus all but Poseidon, whose enmity

flamed against him till he had reached his home.

Poseidon, however, was for the moment far away among the Ethiopians, that

last race of men, whose dispersion across the world's end is

so broad that some of them can see the sun God rise, while others,

while others see him set

thither, had Poseidon gone in the hope of burnt offerings, bulls and

rams by hundreds, and there he sat feasting merrily,

while the other gods came together in the halls of

Olympian Zeus. To them the father

of gods and men began speech, for his breast teemed

with though of great Agitheus,

whom famous Orestes, the son of Agamemnon had slain.

It vexes me to see how mean are these creatures of a day towards us

gods, when they charge against us the evils far beyond our

worst dooming, which their own exceeding wantonness has heaped upon

themselves. Just so did Aegisthus

exceed when he took to his bed the lawful wife of Atreides and killed her

returning husband. He knew the sheer ruin this would entail.

Did we not warn him by the mouth of our trusty Hermes, the keen

eyed slayer of Argus, neither to murder the man nor lust after

the woman's body? For therefore the death of the son of Atreus

will be required by Orestes even as he grows up in

dreams of his native place. These were

Hermes very words. But not even such a friendly interposition

could restrain Aegisthus, who now pays the

final penancee.

The psychological odyssey in Western

Thought from heroic as we just read there in the

opening from book one of the Odyssey by

Homer, the journey from heroic to

not so heroic in western culture and thought

has been a long one. We

began back in the 7th, or maybe it was the 8th century before the God

man Christ showed up by worshiping and appeasing men as gods

who insisted on meddling in human affairs, as

was mentioned in book one here, for their own amusement and

entertainment.

2500 or well over 2500 years later,

in the 21st century, long after the God man Christ

has left this world, we in the west

have wound up back with the men as gods. Except our scientific

inquiry and our relentless ruthless scientism has taken

us places that even the ancient Greeks, even Homer himself, would

fear to tread. Along the way,

Western man has stripped, mined away the COVID of first

the natural world and then the meaning, the deep meaning

of the transcendental world, to reveal that

beneath all that stripping away, beneath all that strip mining, beneath all

that ruthless, relentless scientific rational pursuit,

only the baser appetites of

humanity actually remain.

And if you don't believe me, or if you're confused by anything I'm saying here,

all you have to do is go on social media, just go download TikTok

or go watch Fox or MSNBC

or you know, just go talk to your neighbor

and check out what's happening there between, well, all

the genders.

I observe without any sense of irony whatsoever, that western

humanity has also collectively erected barriers, and this

is important for leaders to understand, between the personal and the

professional, and has assumed wrongly of course, that

once the barrier between the sacred and profane was shattered, that somehow,

magically the barriers between the personal and professional or would

remain irrevocably intact.

Of course they did not. And now at the apotheosis of

western man, we have children who have amassed audiences

of faceless space appetite driven adults. We have

confused and manipulative adults who are either unaware

of the state of the world and the game they are in, or they

are too dopamine driven to do anything other than follow

along with the masses. And we have public

institutions that have abandoned the pursuit of trust,

reverting instead to the pursuing of the amassing of raw

power and control over the masses

for their own sakes. Of course.

Tragically, it turns out that while we may be a long way from Carl Jung

and Joseph Campbell, we are even farther removed

from Homer and the Homeric

ideal. This

is troubling because in epic tales of the past heroes

or immature, naive and blind people, of which

Telemachus was one in the Odyssey, and of course

Menelaus, these folks went on

journeys just like Odysseus, to slay dragons, to

drive spikes in the eyes of monsters, or to defeat all manner of

God driven weather phenomenon.

They went on those journeys to prove themselves

and to prove to the audiences observing

them and to their ancestors as well, that

they had what it took. They had the right stuff, right. That they could

do hard tasks, they could take on large responsibilities and

shoulder the massive weight that society,

culture, history, and ultimately tradition places

on all of us.

What's troubling is that in the 21st century, with all of our comfort,

conformity, complacency and confusion,

individuals need to be called back to the journey

toward an epic struggle, at least

of some kind or another.

But these heroic acts that men and women

need to be called to engage in, in our more abundant age,

these heroic acts of defeating the gods and confronting the monsters

can't all be psychological. It can't all

be psychological heroism. That's

just not good enough. Human

beings have always needed physical proof of the mere

transcendent. They've always needed to be

shown, as folks from Missouri will attest

to. If you don't believe me, just think

back to that other ancient book, the Bible. In

particularly the New Testament, where the disciples stared

up in slack jawed amazement as the God

man Christ ascended to the right hand

of God the Father, who bodily,

or so it is written,

the esoteric, the small and the mean, the

unmentionable, the untruthful, and the outright manipulative,

the base, the hollow and the

terribly, terribly cowardly.

No calls to action that are

around any of these areas will

ever get Western people excited for

more than just a few seconds, animated enough

to merely swipe left or put in another order for

soda on doordash. So

here, now, 22 years

into the 21st century, we now

are beginning to realize that Western man needs an appeal to

the heroic to fix what's broken and

to journey out on the road of life, to face down

the God, men, tyrants all before

they affix themselves permanently and

irrevocably to the edifice of Western

freedom.

Today on the podcast we are going to talk about the

Odyssey, but we're also going to talk about

the babbling monster in the sub basement of Western

thought that brought us all of this.

We're also going to talk about T.E. lawrence and

his epic life as Lawrence of

Arabia. Actually, that'd be T.E. shaw as Lawrence of Arabia.

And I'm going to make an appeal. I'm going to

make an assertion. I'm going to throw down a

challenge. I'm going to ask a question.

Actually, I'm going to ask you one of three questions here today

as leaders listening to this podcast. So if you thought you were coming

here just to hear about Homer today, well, you're going to hear a little

bit about Homer, but you're going to hear a lot more about these three questions.

And the first one is this whole will carry

the logs. Who will

answer the call, and who among

us will take up the challenge

and go on the road?

Sam.

Back to the Odyssey by Homer. We're going to

read from book five in the

T.E. shaw translation of the Odyssey

by Homer. Dawn

rose from her marriage bed beside high born Tithonus, to bring her daylight to

both gods and men. The immortals, with Zeus the high thundering,

their mightiest one, sat down in council, and to them Athene spoke

thus, designing to remind them of the many misfortunes of

Odysseus, whose long sojourn in the nymph's house lay heavy on her heart.

Father Zeus, and you happy ever living gods, henceforth let no

sceptered king study to be kindly or gentle, or to ensue

justice and equity. It profits more to be harsh and

unseemly in act divine. Odysseus was a clement and

fatherly king, but no one of the men his subjects

remembers it of him for good, while fate has abandoned him to

languish sorely in Lady Calypso's island, kept there

by her high hand a prisoner in her house.

Nor has he power to regain the land of his

father, seeing that he lacks galleys and followers to speed him over the broad

back of ocean. Moreover, there is now a plot afoot to murder

his darling son as he returns from sacred Pylos, or

noble Lacedaemon. Whether he went and hoped to hear

somewhat of his father Zeus, the

cloud marshal answered her, and Said my child, too fierce are the judgments of your

mouth. Besides, I think this last move was of your scheming for Odysseus to

avenge himself on those men. When he comes, you have the knowledge, the power and

the skill to convey Telemachus again to his own place

wholly unscathed. See that it is so. And the suitors come back too, in

their ship. As they went,

he turned to Hermes, the son he loved, and said, hermes, hear your commission as

our particular messenger. Inform this nymph of the love locks of my fixed

decision that long suffering Odysseus shall return home as best he

can without furtherance from gods or mortal

men. Therefore he is to lash together a raft

as firm as may be, on which, after 20 days of hazard and disaster he

will make rich gleaved Syria, the Phaeton land. The

Phoenicians, godlike in race and habit, will take him to their heart with all

honor as divine, and send him forward to his native place

in a ship laden with gifts of copper and gold and clothing of an abundance

such as Odysseus would never have amassed for himself in the sack of Troy,

even though he had come away intact and with the full share of booty

assigned to him by lot.

The decree is that so furnished. He shall once again behold his friends and

enter his stately house in the country of his

fathers.

Such was the order in the messenger. The Argus slayer made no delay in his

obedience. Instantly he laced to his feet the fair sandals of

imperishable gold by which she made equal way, swift as a breath of

wind over the ocean and over the waste places of the earth. He took the

wand with which at will he could lure the eyes of men to slumber or

wake them into activity. And with it in hand, the Argus slayer leaped out

upon the air and flew straight strongly over Mount Puri as he dived down from

the firmament to sea level, and then along the waves he sped like a

cormorant which down the dread troughs of the wild sea chases its

fish and drenches its close plumage in the salt spume. Just

so did Hermes skim the recurring wave crests.

Arriving at the island of Calypso,

presenting himself to her, he delivers

the message, and then

Calypso

responds

by saying, as God is to God. You ask me. You order me

to tell why I have come, hear the truth of it. Zeus commanded my

journey. By no choice of my own did I fare to you across so unspeakable

a waste of salt water. Who would willingly come where there is no

near city of men to offer sacrifice to the gods and burn his tasty hundreds

of oxen. Listen. In no way can

another God add or subtract any tittle from the will of Zeus. The aegis

bearer, he declares that you have with you the unhappiest

man of men, less happy than all those who fought for nine years round

the citadel of Priam, and in the 10th year sacked the city and went homeward.

Yet during their return they sinned against Athene, and she worked up against them

an evil wind and tall waves, by which this man's entire splendid company

were cast away. As for

himself, the wind blew him, and the sea washed him to this

spot. Wherefore now the Father commands that you send him hence with

speed, for it is decreed that he is not to die far from his friends.

On the contrary, he is to behold these friends again, and is to sit under

his lofty roof in his own land.

Calypso, as you can probably expect, didn't take

that well. Then with

barbed words did she reply, Cruel are you, gods, and immoderately jealous

of all others. Especially do you hate it when goddesses elect to lie openly with

men, or fall in love and make a match of it with some mere mortal.

Just in that same way, you gods are now envying me this man I live

with. Yet it was I who saved him. As he clung astride his

vessel's keel, alone and adrift in the wine dark ocean,

Zeus had launched a white thunderbolt at his ship and shattered her. And in her

wreck were all the worthy henchmen lost. Only it chanced that

he himself drifted to my shore before the wind and

waves. And I have loved him and cared for him, and promised myself he should

not die, nor grow old all his days.

Yet very justly do you say that no lesser God can overpass or make obeying

the purpose of Aegeus bearing Zeus. Accordingly, if the impulse and order are from him,

I must let my man go hence across the sterile sea.

Yet shall descending be in no wise mine here

are neither or ships nor cruise to convey him over ocean's broad back.

Unreservedly, however, I furnish him my very best

advice as how he may come safe to his

native land.

The translator of this version of the

Odyssey was a gentleman

named Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence,

also known as T.E. shaw, also known as T.E Lawrence,

also known as Lawrence of Arabia. And

his book. His. His book, Seven Pillars of

Wisdom we will be reading on the podcast at some

point here. But I want you to. I want to read directly now from

the translator's note

that he wrote from the Odyssey.

It's on pages seven through nine. And

we're going to. We're going to get his view

of the Odyssey, his view of the epic journey of Odysseus

from leaving Troy all the way back home

to deal with the suitors plumbing or

plummeting or plundering, depending upon your perspective. His

house. The 28th English

rendering of the Odyssey can hardly be a literary event,

especially when it aims to be essentially a straightforward translation. By the way, these are

the words directly of T.E. shaw. Wherever

choice offered between a poor and a rich word, richness had it. To raise the

color. I have transposed the order of metrical Greek,

being unlike plain English. Not that my English is plain enough. Water

Street Greek, like the Odysseys, defies honest rendering. Also,

I have been free with moods and tenses, allowed myself to interchange adjective and

adverb, and dodged our poverty of preposition limitations,

of verb and pronominal vagueness by rearrangement.

Still, syntax apart, this is a

translation.

Crafty, exquisite, homogenous. Whatever great art may be, these

are not its attributes. In this tale,

every big situation is burked and the writing is soft. The shattered

Iliad yet makes a masterpiece, while the Odyssey, by its ease and interest

remains the oldest book worth reading for its story and the first novel

of Europe. Gay, fine and vivid, it is never huge

or terrible book. 11.

The underworld verges towards terrible dia, yet runs

instead to the seat of pathos, that feeblest mode of writing.

The author misses his every chance of greatness, as must all his

faithful translators.

The limitations of this work scope is apparently conscious. Epic belongs to

early man, and this Homer lived too long after the heroic age to feel

assured and large. He knows exact knowledge of what he could and could

not do. Only through such superb self criticism can talent rank

beside inspiration.

In the four years of living with this novel, I've tried to deduce the author

from his self betrayal. In the work I found a bookworm,

no longer young, living from home, a mainlander city bred and domestic,

married, but not exclusively a dog

lover, often hungry and thirsty, dark haired, fond of poetry,

a great if uncritical reader of the Iliad, with limited

sensuous range, but an exact eyesight which gave

him all his pictures. A lover of old bric, a brac, though

as muddled an antiquary as Walter Scott, in

sympathy with which side of him I have conceded tenter

hooks, but not always railway trains.

Few men can be sailors, soldiers and naturalists yet this Homer

was neither landlubber nor stay at home, nor ninny. He wrote for audiences

to whom adventures were daily life, and the sea their universal neighbor,

so he dare not err. That famous doubled line where the Cyclops narrowly

misses the ship with his stones only shows how much better a seaman he was

than a copyist. Scolais have tried to riddle his technical

knowledge, and of course he does make a hodgepodge of periods.

It is the penalty of being pre archaeological. His

pages are steeped in a queer nativity, and at our

remove of thought and language we cannot guess if he is smiling or

not. Yet there is dignity which compels respect

and baffles us, he being neither simple in education

nor primitive socially. His generation

so rudely admired the Iliad that even to misquote it

was a virtue. That

is from the translator's introduction of the

Odyssey written by Colonel Thomas Edward

Lawrence, and according to Wikipedia,

Colonel T.E. lawrence was a British

archaeologist, army officer, diplomat and writer who

became renowned for his role in the Arab Revolt and the Sinai and

Palestine campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the First World

War. The breadth and variety of his activities and

associations, and his ability to ascribe them vividly in writing, earned him

international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title used

for the 1962 film based on his wartime

activities. He was born out of

wedlock in August 1888 to Sarah Junior a

governess, and Sir Thomas Chapman, 7th Baronet, an

Anglo Irish nobleman. Soon after the

outbreak of war in 1914, he volunteered for the British

army, and this was after he had worked as an archaeologist for the

British Museum from 1910 to 1914 and then

briefly. Before that he had studied at Oxford

at the Jesus College from 1907 to 1910,

when he volunteered for the British army and was

stationed at the Arab Bureau intelligence unit in

Egypt. He traveled to Mesopotamia and to Arabia on

intelligence missions and became involved with the Arab revolt as a liaison

to the Arab forces along with other British officers supporting the Arab

kingdom of Hejaz's independence war against its former overlord,

the Ottoman Empire. He worked closely with

Emir Faisal, a leader of the revolt, and he participated

sometimes as a leader in military actions against the Ottoman armed forces,

culminating in the capture of Damascus in October of

1918. After the

first World War, Lawrence joined the British Foreign Office, which basically

means he continued being a spy, working with the British government and

with Feisal. In 1922 he retreated from public life and spent the years

until 1935 serving as an enlisted man, mostly in the Royal Air

Force with a brief period in the Army. During this time, he

published his best known work, Seven Pillars of An

autobiographical account of his participation in the Arab revolt.

He also translated books into English and wrote the Mint, which

detailed his time in the Royal Air Force working as an ordinary aircraftman.

Lawrence's public image resulted in part from the sensationalized reporting of the

Arab revolt by American journalist Lowell Thomas, as well as from

Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Tragically,

on May 19, 1935, Lawrence

died at the age of 46, six days

after being injured in a motorcycle accident

in

Dorsey.

Back to the book, Back to the

Odyssey by Homer. We're going to move around

a little bit, actually. We're going to move around extensively today

and we're going to read directly from this

idea. Well, not directly from, but we're going to read about

this idea that's in the Odyssey, that's embedded

within the Odyssey, this idea of sight, this

idea of seeing the truth.

Right. Because if you can

see the truth, whether that's the truth of reality or the truth

of responsibility, well, then you can effectively deal with

it. Or as in the case of Odysseus, you can maybe

potentially blind it. So we're gonna go to book nine.

We're gonna read Odysseus's

rendition a little bit here and there

of his battle with the

arrogant, iniquitous Cyclops.

We left in low spirits. This is Odysseus speaking. We left in low

spirits and later came to the land of the arrogant, iniquitous Cyclops, who so leave

all things to the gods that they neither plant nor till yet does plenty

spring up, unsown and unplowed of corn and barley, and even vines with

heavy clusters which the reigns of Zeus fatten

for them. They have no government, nor

councils, nor courts of justice, but living caves on mountaintops, each

ruling his wives and children and a law unto himself.

Regardless. Across the blight of

Cyclops's country extends a fertile island, a wooded island not very

far, yet not close. And in it their harbor,

uncounted wild goats. No trace of men

scares these, nor do hunters with dogs track them out,

fighting their way through the bush to explore the summits of the hills. The

herbage is not grazed down by flocks of sheep, nor broken by any plow.

Rather, the spot continues in solitude wholly uncultivated, a paradise

for the bleeding she goats. By reason that the Cyclops seas have

no ruddle cheeked ships nor shipwrights to make them

such seaworthy vessels for pleasuring among the cities of mankind, like those ordinary

men who tempt the seas to know others and to be known.

Otherwise they might have made this island theirs, it being not at all bad land.

Anything would grow well there in season in the soft moist meadows behind the

dykes of the silvery sea, and its vine stalks would bear forever

the crop to be harvested at the due time for such smooth plough

loam would be heavy, seeing that the undersoil is fat.

Its haven is a natural port, requiring no such gear as anchors or

warps. Ships can be beached directly to lie there in peace, while the

sailors screw up their hearts to venture farther, or until the winds

blow kind. At the head of this inlet is

pure running water from a spring rising in a cave, black

poplars shadow.

It's

Odysseus lands and gets off the ship

and then sees

the food and the owner

absent in the cave, the

flocks of lambs and kids, the milk of the

she goats.

And then. Well,

so far he had been wholly engaged with his work, but now he rebuilt the

fire and looked around and saw us. Why,

strangers, said he, who are you and

where have you come from? Across the water. Are you traitors or

pirates, those venturers who see prowl at hazard, robbing all comers

for a livelihood? So? He asked, and our confidence cracked

at the giant's dread booming voice and his

hugeness. Yet I made shift to

speak out firmly, saying, we are waifs of the Achaeans from

Troy, intended homeward, but driven off

our course haphazardly across the boundless ocean gulfs

by adverse winds from heaven. It may be the

will and decree of Zeus, it may be by the will and decree of

Zeus we can vaunt ourselves, companions of Atreides,

Agamemnon's men, who is now the widest fame under heaven for

having sacked earth's greatest city and brought such multitudes to

death here. Therefore we find ourselves suppliant at your knees

in hope of the guesting fee or other rich gift, such

as is the meat of strangers. Have regard for the gods. Magnificent.

We are your suppliants and. And Zeus, who fares with deserving

strangers along their road, is the champion of suppliants, their protector

and patron God.

Thus far I got but the reply came from his pitiless heart.

Sir, stranger, you are either simple or very outlandish, if you

bid me. Fear the gods and avoid crossing them. We the

Cyclops. We are the Cyclops.

And being so much bigger, we listen not at all to the Aegeus bearing

Zeus, or any blessed God. So if I

should spare your life and your friends, it would not be to shun the wrath

of Zeus, but because my heart counselled me. Mercy. Now tell me where you moored

the stout ship you came on. The far shore. Was it or the near? I

want to know. With these words he laid a

crafty snare for me, but to my subtlety, all his deceits

were plain. So I spoke back, meeting fraud with

fraud. My ship was broken by Poseidon, the earth shaker,

who swept her towards the cape at the very end of your land and cast

her against the reefs. The drifted us in from the high sea. Only myself

with these few escaped. So I said

his savagery disdained me. One word in reply. He leapt to his feet,

lunged with his hands among my fellows, snatched up two of them like whelps

and wrapped their heads against the ground. The brains burst out from their

skulls and were spattered over the cave's floor while he broke them up

limb from limb and sucked off them to the last shred, eating

ravenously, like a mountain lion. Everything, bowels and flesh

and bones, even to the marrow in the bones. We

wept and raised our hands to Zeus in horror at this

crime committed before our eyes. Yet there was nothing,

nothing we could do. Wherefore the Cyclops,

unhindered, filled his great gut with the human

flesh and washed it down with raw

milk. Afterwards he stretched

himself out across the cavern among the flocks and

slept.

This obviously cannot stand. And so

Odysseus,

desiring to fix this problem,

begins to think,

begins to beg the gods for an opportunity to fix

this wrong, to correct this heinous

act of, well,

murder. But even more so than murder,

this heinous act of ignorance of good taste

and, of course, ignorance of hospitality

to guests and to strangers.

Of what came to me this seemed best. There lay in the

sheep pens a great cudgel belonging to Cyclops, or rather a limb of

green olive wood, from which he meant to make himself a staff. When it had

seasoned in our estimation, we liken it to the mast of

a 20 oared black ship, some broad beam merchantman of the high seas. It looks

so long and thick. I straddled it and cut off about a

fathom's length, which I took to my fellows, bidding them taper it down.

They made it quite even, while I lent a hand to sharpen its tip.

Then I took it and revolved it in the blazing flame till the point was

charred to hardness. Thereafter we hid it under the sheep droppings, which

were largely heaped up throughout the cave. Lastly, I made the others draw lots to

see who would have the desperate task of helping me lift up our spike

and grind it into his eye. When heavy sleep had

downed him, the luck of the draw gave me just the four men I would

have chosen. With my eyes open, I appointed myself the

fifth of the party.

Cyclops leaves the cave,

and then Cyclops comes back, and

Odysseus puts his plan into action.

Briskly he attacked his household work only after it to snatch

up two more of us and dine off them. Then I went up to the

giant with an ivy cup of my dark wine in hand and invited him, saying,

cyclops, come now, on top of your meal of man's flesh, try

this wine to see how tasty a drink was hidden in our ship. I brought

it for you, hoping you would have compassion on me and help me homeward. But

your unwisdom is far beyond all comprehending,

O sinful one. How dare you expect any other man from the

great world to visit you after you have behaved towards us so

unconscionably? I spoke, he

took and drank. A savage gladness

woke in him at the sweetness of the liquor, and he demanded a second cup,

saying, give me another hearty helping, and then quickly

tell me your name for me to confer on you a guest gift that will

warm your heart. It is true, our rich soil grows good vines for a

Cyclops, and the moisture of heaven multiplies your yield. But this vintage

is a drop of the real nectar, ambrosia.

Thus he declared all at once.

And then at once I poured him a second cup of the glowing wine, and

then one more, for in his folly he tossed off three bowls of it. The

fumes were going in his cyclopean wits as I began to play with him in

honeyed phrase. Cyclops, you asked me for my public name. I

will confess it to you aloud. And do you then give me a guest gift,

as you have promised? My name is no man,

so they have always called me. My mother and father and

all my friends.

Cyclops

says I will eat no man, finally, after all

his friends. The others first. That shall be your

benefit. He sprawled full length, belly up on the ground, lolling

his fat neck aside in sleep that conquers all men conquered

him heavily. He vomited out all his load of drink and gobbets

of human flesh swimming in wine spurted gurgling from his throat.

Forthwith I thrust our spike into the embers of the fire to get it burning

hot, and cheered my fellows with brave words, lest any of them hang back through

fear. Soon the stake of olive wood, despite its greenness, was almost trembling into flesh

flame. With a terrible glowing incandescence I snatched it from the fire. My men,

helping some power from on high, breathed into us

all manner of mad courage, by whose strength they charged with a great spear

and stabbed its sharp point right into his eye. I

flung my weight upon it from above, so that it bored home as

a shipbuilder's bit drills its timbers steadily

twirling by reason of the drag from the hide thong, which is mates underneath

to and fro alternately. So we held the burning pointed

stake in his eye and spun it till the boiling blood

bubbled about its pillar of fire.

Eyebrows with eyelids shrivelled and stank in the blast

of his consuming eyeball. Yea, the very roots of the eye

crackled into flame.

The irony of blindness is

not lost on me, and the

irony of an unconscionable lack of hospitality to

guests is also not lost on me, because,

quite frankly, it has been a long, long

20th century.

Beginning in the 1840s, collectively, through a series of

conscious and subconscious decisions and actions, we in the west

have blindly and psychologically

built and now fully inhabit the world we claimed

we always wanted.

Beginning with the much valuehooed death of God in

the early 19th century and continuing through the rise of secular atheist

humanism, society, culture, and modes of thinking

about our place in the Western world and the transcendental world beyond

have catalyzed into an acidic form of nihilistic,

existential, blindly paralytical dread.

And yet I have hope,

because there are still some Odysseuses out there.

And the Nietzschean ideal fully matured through the

existential dread proposed by Sartre and Camus and fully matured

by Jacques Derrida and the other deconstructionists, is finally

shuffling, I believe, ignominiously, capriciously and

ideologically to an end. In the West,

I think we are beginning to recover our sight.

But the tragedy is that the Nietzschean ideal did a lot of

damage on the way to the forum of the

now. Leaders can

see this whether they have one eye, two eyes, or

whether they are dead. Blind leaders can see

this, and right now they're dealing with entitlement.

They're dealing with a lack of grit and resilience, they're dealing with a rise in

narcissism, and they are dealing with an end of the ties of shared

humility, shared community, and shared reality

that used to bind Western culture together.

Leaders right now are seeing the effects of such conditions in the form of

resignations, lower quality work product and an overall

decline in productivity and a desire more for the trappings

of promotion than a willingness to adopt the responsibilities of

promotion itself.

To navigate our way forward and out, we must go back to the past.

We must go into the cave, such as it were, and rescue the

knowledge of the rightness of human authority, action and competence

from our forgotten, blinded and abandoned

father. We must restore

our father's sight. But we

ourselves can't perform this rescue mission without clear

eyes, courageous hearts, and the ability

to really speak candidly about what is

true. So

I'll start. Here's a piece of truth.

Every ideal and every idea that the

wily German lurking in the sub basement of Western social,

cultural, intellectual thought, Friedrich Nietzsche

ever had was an absolute

cyclopean lie.

But it was close enough, it hewed close enough

anyway, to the perceived truth of some people's mental

models of reality. That in the maelstrom of moral

destruction wrought by the ideas that were also

swirling around at the time of Marx, Darwin and Freud,

the lie went mostly unnoticed

and became integrated into so many other lies that

the tangled web became untangleable.

That web has developed and turned into a cancerous

manner, turned into a cancerous thing

that lurks in the sub basement of Western thought that

impacts everything we do, and that has

made us ill and blind. But

it's time. And I believe we are the

generation who will begin the

long, sordid and messy process

of cutting the cancer of the Nietzschean ideal

out of the body of Western

thought.

Sam,

Back to the Odyssey, back

to the story of Odysseus. Book 13,

where we'll pick up here in book 13. And remember, we we

never read the whole book on these podcasts. There's no possible way

to do it. These podcasts are built like book reviews

or critical critiques, right? Built like

folios. Folios? Folios. I can't pronounce words today.

Folios of the past. Right? Where you can

we give you enough of a sample of the book, we provide you with enough

of an idea of the book for you to go out and pick it up.

And just like we covered the

Iliad in episode number three of the Leadership Lessons from the

Great Books podcast, this book has plenty to teach us

now about all manner of things. Whether

that means whether that is about epic journeys,

whether that is about recovering from our own blindness or

recovering from the blindness of our fathers. But it also

has something to teach us about how to be

subtle in exacting not

necessarily revenge, but how to be subtle in

thinking about your powers,

your rights and your responsibilities.

Back to The Odyssey. Book 13.

Odysseus speaking with

Athena fluently,

Odysseus answered, your powers.

You assume all forms, goddesses. Your

powers let you assume all forms, goddess, and so hardly may

the knowingest man identify you. Yet I well know of your

partiality towards me from the day that we sons of the Achaeans went

to war against Troy, until we plundered Priam's towering city.

But after we had embarked thence, and the might of the gods scattered the Achaeans,

and since that day I have not set eyes on you, O daughter of

Zeus, nor been aware of you within my ship to deliver me from evil. So

it became my lot to wander brokenheartedly, waiting for the gods to end my pain,

until at long last you appeared in the Phaeacians rich capital and

threatened and heartened me by your bold words to venture in.

Accordingly I now conjure you for your father's sake. Surely I am not

in clear shining Ithaca. I think I have lighted on some foreign land,

and you are telling me it is Ithaca only in mockery to cheat my soul.

If in very deed this is my native land, assure me of it,

said Athene or Athena. Your mind harps on that, and I

cannot leave on tenter hooks one so civil, witty and shrewd.

Any other returned wanderer would have dashed home to see his children and his wife.

Only you chose to be skeptical and to reject the evidence, till you had further

proved the wife who was who, as from the beginning, sits awaiting you in

the house, miserable through the long nights and tearful all her days.

I was never one of those who despaired for you, because I knew for certain

you would return, though not till after losing all

your party. Wherefore I refrain from open warfare with

Poseidon, my uncle, who always wished you ill because of his rage at

your blinding his dear son. By the way, that was the Cyclops.

But now let me show you the substantial Ithaca to convince you.

Then she takes him on a tour.

The grey eyed goddess then exhorted him further. Be

bold and dismiss these concerns from your mind, while we turn to laying up your

goods in the hinder end of this cave of marvels, where they will be safe

for you. Then must we ponder and advise ourselves the best

course of action. Athene spoke and plunged into the gloom of the cavern

to search it for hiding holes, while Odysseus carried in the Phoenician gold the

tempered Bronze, the goodly raiment, after everything

had been carefully laid by Pallas, sealed the passage with a rock.

Then they sat together by the bowl of the sacred olive to plot the doom

of the extravagant wooers. By the way,

Odysseus house has been filled with suitors the entire time he's been

gone 20 years, consuming through

his savings and plundering his

goods, his son Telemachus went off to go find him,

and was somewhat unsuccessful

on his own hero's journey.

Athene opened. Thus, son of Laertes,

next you must settle how to get these shameless suitors into your hands. For it

is now three years that they have been lording it in your palace. Okay, three

years, not 20 years. Sorry. Plaguing your glorious wife with their suits

and proffering marriage settlements, while she, despite heart wrecking

anxieties over your return, still keeps them all in play by giving each

one hope and separate promises and privy messages. With

her mind set constantly elsewhere,

wily Odysseus replied. My hard fate on reaching home, goddess, would have been such

another pitiful death as Agamemnon's, but for your timely acquainting me with the

true situation. Wherefore extend your bounty and disclose

how I may avenge myself upon these suitors. Stand by me,

mistress, fanning my valorous rage. My valorous rage, as on

the day we despoil shining Troy of its pride of towers

with Your countenance, August1, I would fight 300 men together

only buoy me up with your judicious aid, O wise

goddess.

And then Athene or Athena

tells him what she will do for him.

Surely I shall be by your side always taking thought for you, so

soon as we undertake this deed. As for these wooers of your wife and

wasters of your substance, I feel that some are about to be spatter the great

earth with their blood and brains. But now I must so work

on you, that no human being will know you. By parching the fair flesh of

your agile limbs and laying waste

the yellow locks on your head, I shall even make dim your

eyes, which are so lovely, and afterward clothe you in tatters to affront every eye.

Then your guise will repel the united suitors, as also the wife

and son you left in the house. You will begin by joining company with

the swineherd who keeps your swine, a man of single heart towards yourself and

devoted to your son and judicious Penelope.

He said to the goddess, why did you not

tell him so much? Out of your all knowing heart must he too painfully roam

the barren seas, while others devour his living.

This is speaking in reference to Telemachus, who was

wandering the seas at the time. The gray eyed one replied, taken in

not so much to heart, I was his guide. Even I who stirred him up

to win favor by this activity. He suffers no hardship, but rests

tranquilly in a treaty's palace, lapped in abundance.

Admitted the cadets of the suitors lie in ambush with their black ship hot to

kill him before he can regain his fatherland. Yet I think this will not be.

Instead the earth will cover certain suitors who devour your

estate. Then Athene touched him with her rod, withering

the firm flesh of his active limbs, robbing his head of its fair hair, and

making the skin over all his body old like an aged man's.

She quenched the sparkle of his handsome eye and flung round him for covering foul

and sorry rags, all crusted with a sooty reek.

Over these she draped a great deer skin from which the hair was quite worn

off. She gave him a stick and a shameful leather

pouch of stiff cracked leather slung from a common cord.

Then, having reached agreement upon their plans, they separated, her intentions

being for Lacedaemon to summon home the son of

Odysseus.

That's one way to take responsibility and to set a trap,

to be patient and to continue on the road.

Responsibilities. And this is what Odysseus is really doing

here in this passage from the Odyssey. Responsibilities to

tradition, to culture, to hierarchy, to the past, and even to the future.

Responsibilities matter more than rights

in the West. We have journeyed away from Homer, and of course

we've gone towards the Nietzschean ideal of the pursuit of the overman.

And as we have done this, as we've focused more about our rights,

what we are owed, we have left behind an

older, more robust attention that was once paid to

responsibilities. Homer's

writing and T.E. shaw's translation, among the

undergrowth of many other translations over the

last 2500 years or so, was focused on

ensuring that our inspiration towards

preserving tradition, our responsibility towards preserving

tradition, was upheld and maintained, even if it was at the

expense of the new, which

in our less than heroic, existentially dread

filled and narcissistic age, rings hollow to even our

jaded ears.

However, trading the truth of responsibility for the lie of

rights has resulted in exactly the type of Western mental

modeling of behavior where freedom is held up as the highest ideal.

And like all ideals, freedom judges its worshippers.

And of course, it always finds the worshippers,

well, wanting

it comes as no surprise that there's never enough freedom,

that there's never enough sacrifice to freedom

on the altar of individuality.

This is not epic, and this is not what Western man was

meant for. This is not the journey or the hierarchy

we should be worshiping. And the Odyssey gives us a

glimpse into something that can be higher, something that can be more

robust, something that can be more fulfilling, and

not in a James Joyce, Ulysses kind of way,

more like in a broader

world bending, world shaking kind of way.

But we can only take up the task, take up the mode

of this responsibility, if we actually

recognize what it is and put down our appetite,

our cyclopean appetite for

our rights. But

a wise letter writer, older than myself, writing to

believers, worshiping a different hierarchy with a different ideal at the top of it,

during times that seemed just as moribund, unserious, and

chaotic as ours, wrote it better than I

ever possibly could.

And I quote, who

changed the truth of God into a lie and

worshiped and served the creature more than the

Creator who is blessed forever.

Amen. Romans

1:25.

So this may be a podcast episode

that you may want to listen to a couple times, because it's going to take

a little bit for you to kind of understand what I'm doing here with the

Odyssey. It may seem a little

disjointed at first. Listening may seem like I'm jumping all over the place.

But I'm making the foundation of a much larger

argument that we are going to be exploring this month on the podcast.

Our very next episode, we're going to be looking at Heart of

Darkness by Joseph Conrad. And then on the

back end of that, we'll be looking at Thus Spake Zarathustra.

We're actually going to go into the Cyclops cave, and we're going

to see. We can pull out of there with Friedrich Nietzsche. And

finally, the end of this month, beginning of next month, we'll be looking

at fantasy and memory. We're looking

at Alice in Wonderland and what happens when you go through the looking glass,

as so many of us have. Whether that looking glass is

YouTube, Hulu, Netflix,

Facebook, TikTok, or LinkedIn, we're

all through the other side of looking glass. And this is

part of the place we need to walk out of,

for there are caves and monsters on the other side of that

looking glass. So the question I

always ask at the end of these podcasts is how do we stay on the

path? Right? How do we. How do we make

sure that we're actually getting something out of this experience, how do we as

leaders integrate this knowledge from these great pieces of

literature? And the Odyssey is a great piece of literature, been around for

so long and developed an undergrowth of so many different translations.

That just proves its greatness. What can leaders learn from

Odysseus journey through the

wilds of going home? What can he learn

from the speeches of the gods, the laments of

Calypso, all the way to the firmness of Athena,

the recalcitrant nature of Poseidon, or

the angry recalcitrant nature of Poseidon and the

hands off leadership of Zeus?

How can leaders take all of this and stay on the path in our

modern times where we don't believe in the gods and where the

transcendent has been stripped away and needs

to be restored?

Maybe the first thing that leaders need to do

is not confuse the results of the impact

of the power of the triumph of the Nietzschean ideal with the

process of the path we walked in the west to that ideal.

Yes, that has had impact. Yes, that has had power. Yes. There's a

lot of complicated things going on in there and I've used a lot of complicated

philosophical terms today. I've used

existential and I've used deconstruct and I've used Nietzsche and I've repeated

this over and over again, right? Because I want you to know that

underneath banal ideals, underneath the

clicks and the likes, underneath the hot

takes and

underneath the casual commentary lie deeper

things that are influencing all of that. And leaders,

leaders need to not confuse the results of the impact

of the power of that with the path we've trodden.

The path we've trodden to that ideal in the west can be

retroden and leaders can lead us off of

that path or, or if we would like, back onto it.

Maybe backwards is better than going

forward.

The second thing that leaders need to take from the Odyssey

is that the weight of responsibility is something that each

individual needs to carry. And this is not just in a

psychological sense, but sometimes also in a physical sense. And

that when you allow your followers to

fail and then put more weight

on them, they will rise to the challenge.

We talk a lot in our culture, particularly startup culture,

about how we're free to fail, right? We, we fail

upwards, right? Or, or sometimes we

talk about it. Well, actually failing upwards is usually used as a term of,

of, of, of dismissal, right? Or as

a term of a person who should have been allowed to fail and then be

booted out of, be booted off the scene, right?

We have it on the wall of Facebook, fail fast

and break things, right? But most of us, most

average leaders, most average people don't live in that environment. We instead

live in an environment where very often the risk

associated with failure, the cost associated with failure

is too high to bear. And so we do everything possible to eliminate

failure. Failure. We do everything possible to eliminate mistakes. We

do everything possible to eliminate even the possibility that

we might screw up.

That's not responsible. That's just avoidance. And at the

end of the day, it is responsibility of leaders to make sure that their followers

are not avoiding hard things, but

that they are instead rising to the challenge of hard things. And that

when failure does occur, that people realize, as

Zig Ziglar said back in the day, that failure is not final.

It ain't over until the fat lady sings or

the fat goddess or the fat whatever.

The last thing we can take from the Odyssey, and I think this is the

biggest thing, is that

leaders need to fight for their followers

to have the responsibility to experience an epic life.

And they need to encourage and support their followers as they travel

along the epic path of their own lives. Right?

So that we as a society, individually and

collectively, but it always starts with the individual first

so that we may go into the pit and rescue our dead fathers and our

moribund traditions and restore the power of

epic, awe inspiring meaning

to the West.

Leaders, this is your calling. This is the road that

you are out on. This is the answer to the question of who will

carry the logs? Who will go out on the

road? Who will take the journey?

Who will,

Who will go on the path and who will stay on it?

And well,

That's it for me. Well, if you liked that video, you should check out more

by subscribing to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast

playlist here on the HSCP Publishing YouTube channel.

You can also get a copy of my third book, 12 Rules for

Leaders, the foundation for Intentional Leadership, co written with

Bradley Mankin. Check that out on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and

everywhere where you get ebooks today. And thanks.