It’s actually remarkable just how closely Andrew Tate’s philosophy aligns with old pagan ideas of masculinity. Today Joe examines how this compares to the perfected masculinity of Christ.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to offer a Christian take on Andrew Tate. More specifically, I want to 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 got to 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 sane and doing provocative things, particularly things about women, but also about wealth, his own prowess, his own success, all of this stuff. As I’m going to 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.
You’ll see all of that I think as we go through it, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge at the outset and bringing you up to speed. He’s been accused of doing some pretty horrible things to women in Romania in the uk, and it seems like US authorities are kind of looking into matters right now. So I’m going to 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 we’ll 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 on
CLIP:
Car t.com, I have my PhD program, and that is a PhD is a pimp and hose degree that I’m clever, clever, that teaches basically how I got 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 because that’s what I did. That was 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 faced trial on allegations of rape, trafficking, miners and money laundering, all of which they deny.
Joe:
I want to start there not to accuse them of something they haven’t been convicted of yet, but to suggest this 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 research on in the US has in what I’ve found, in 2023, 80% of British boys, 16 and 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% 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 about a two year span, 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. 27% of young men in the UK aged 18 to 29 have a positive view of Tate, 24% 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, alright, 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? What is going on that would make them look 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 u gov 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, you find something pretty striking among Britains 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, 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 more so the things he says on work and success put 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 Tate fans fully, 34% of them agreed somewhat or strongly 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 what’s drawing them in many cases isn’t the views on women 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 successful in this life. Putting it another way, he’s asking questions about what true virtu manliness is and what the Greeks called eudemonia. 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 an Tate Aristotle in particular and then Jesus Christ in St. Thomas Aquinas, and you’ll see 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 Nico McKean ethics suggests that when you ask what the good life is, eudemonia, again, 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, 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 really these are tier because 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 the life of pleasure, the life of enjoyment. I want to do stuff that makes me feel really good and I’m going to 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 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 two could become wildly rich. I’m going to play you just the first 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.
CLIP:
After I joined the war room, that was the year I made a hundred thousand dollars. 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 point, I was not one of them, and I credit a lot of that to being in the war room. That’s one of the things that I’m learning in the war room. There are multiple ways to make money and just between those two students alone and save half million dollars
Joe:
Making
CLIP:
Money, money’s
Joe:
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, 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 the people spending $5,000 here to be told something below 1 0 1 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. 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. What 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 enter 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 since the days of the ancient kings. And it’s fascinating that he makes this point because Aristotle’s going to make this point as well, while both of them are going to show you that this doesn’t actually make you happy.
CLIP:
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 call the fastest cars. Nothing’s changed. Think about it. 2000 years ago for fun, people would drink alcohol, turn on music and dance with stupid chicks. Go to the club
Joe:
Aristotle and Nick and McKean. 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 Dave calls 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 Aristotle says, the generality of mankind then shows themselves to be utterly slavish by preferring what is only a life for cattle will explain why it’s degrading to even call this a human life in a second. But before that, I want to 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 and he gives the example of Siropolis.
Now, Siropolis, if you’re not familiar, which is totally understandable, is a possibly mythological king that the Greeks believed in as being one of those battled 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, there was just a monument of him snapping 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 in some level that you have to know that they’re not going to make you happy for very long.
Like you go out drinking, how long are you going to be happy for? Probably not the next morning and you’re going to enter one after another fleeting, meaningless relationship. How long is it going to make you happy for the ephemerality is built in, it’s right there in the snap of the fingers. But Aristotle’s point is this is an animal’s idea of happiness. An animal, if you were to be like, you can do whatever you want, and the animal somehow understood you, they’d be like, all right, I want to eat a lot. I want to run really fast to drink a lot. I want to mate a lot. If that’s your idea of happiness, that you failed to even give a human answer to the question. Here’s what I mean by that. Aristo focuses a lot on what makes us distinct from animals, what makes us special, because he’s going to suggest this is really important.
If we want to know what makes a good screwdriver, if I don’t know the difference between a screwdriver and a hammer and my idea of a screwdriver, a really good screwdriver is one I can just bang into nails really hard. Well, that’s not even a screwdriver level answer. That’s a hammer 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, 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 going to 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? 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 want to add explicitly the words of Jesus and 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 a hundred thousand dollars 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 describing what should have been this moment of realization in a moment of enlightenment, and then consider how he reacts to it.
CLIP:
I had $10 million of diamond watches when they took ’em off me. The first phone call I made in jail was 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 decal, I’ll have one on each wrist just for a week or so.
Joe:
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 the very video I’m critiquing here, he gives some indication that he’s realizing, yeah, this money stuff isn’t all this cracked up to be because you can get all the money in the world and what you get into buy more diamond watches. If money’s 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,
CLIP:
What do I need more money for? And you don’t. There’s only so much stuff you can buy. You can give me another a hundred, 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,
Joe:
Man. The most brutal line in that is the 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 going to live the life of an animal, you can do that pretty cheap. There’s no amount of stuff you can go through that’s going to run you that much money. There just isn’t. So if you’re spending all of your money on just consumption in this gaudy sort of cheap way, 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 going to sit in a drawer somewhere. You don’t need $10 million to do that.
You don’t need a million dollars to do that. And so he’s hit the limit that this idea of what’s going to make you happy. 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 not real. 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.
CLIP:
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 going to 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.
Joe:
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’s fed as much in that last clip and realizing there has to be something more that leads him to the second tier, what Aristotle calls the life of politics. So he has this mission when he calls the war against the Matrix Tate, not Aristotle obviously. And Aristotle talks about this, that 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 masses who think that a Bugatti is going to 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’re all seeking. Why it appears to depend on those who confer it more than 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 jus... Read more on Catholic.com