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Hello listeners. First of all, I want to thank you for rating and commenting on the last podcast. Really made a huge difference. This episode is a little bit different than our normal ones. We reflect on the 50th anniversary of punk rock. And then we dive into the life and times of the first punk. A man who prowled the streets of the city and questioned everything and everyone, mocking authority. And ultimately he died for his beliefs. Am I talking about Sid Vicious or Johnny Thunder? No, this episode is about the first punk in history. Socrates Keep it locked.
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Event for them what happens once happens again when use up is a mystery to them to break history.
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Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch fix online Personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style and budget preferences. I order boxes when I want and how I want. No subscription required. And he sends just for me pieces plus outfit recommendations and styling tips. I keep what works and send back the rest. It's so easy. Make style easy. Get started today@stitchfix.com Spotify that's stitchfix.com Spotify 50 years ago this month, on November 6th, four young angry amateurs took the stage at the common room at St Martin's Art School in London. They were the opening act for Bazooka Joe. This was their debut. Even though they had been practicing for a few months in a nearby loft, none of the so called musicians knew how to really play their instruments. They bombed. The group was so unknown that the promotional poster called them support band. But in a few months, the whole world would know who they are. The Sex Pistols. No recording of the St. Martin's gig exists, but we can extrapolate that this is more or less what the band sounded like. This is from February 1976. Raw, loud and revolutionary, the Sex Pistols, along with the Ramones, are widely considered the pioneers of pop. And this month, one could say, say, punk turned 50 years old. This also marks the 50th anniversary of the Ramones signing with Sire Records. A musical genre defined by its defiance, anger and youthful rebellion is now middle aged. Mark and McLaren. You discovered and managed the group. Now what about the accusation that you're more into chaos than anything else?
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Well, that's an accusation by people who.
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Really don't understand what kids want. Kids want excitement. They want things that are going to.
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Transform what is basically a very boring.
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Life for them right now.
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And music, young rock music is the.
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Only thing they have that they thought that they controlled. And if you look in the charts.
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They don't really have anything to do with it.
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It almost feels cruel. And that's what today's breaking history is all about. Because if you think about it, punk is a strange phenomenon. Let's just start with the word itself. Depending on the context, punk can be either the highest form of praise, like an innovative CEO being punk rock because he disrupted an industry. Think of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. In another context, though, punk is a fighting word. I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in.
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All this excitement, I've kind of lost track myself.
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But, ian, this is a.44 Magnum, the.
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Most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off.
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You've got to ask yourself one question. Do I feel lucky?
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Well, do you? Punk.
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The etymology of punk is fascinating. Some trace it back to the Scottish word spunk, which meant burning ember. William Shakespeare, the Bard, used punk in his plays Measure for Measure and All's well that Ends well to mean a prostitute. For most of the 20th century, punk meant a sniveling street criminal in prison. It means an inmate who is raped. Yet at the end of December 1975, Punk magazine was launched with feature stories on former Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed and the ruffians from Queens known as the Ramones. Like the appropriation of queer by the gay community, punk was stolen by its targets. The punks were not only cool, they were out to destroy the rock stars of the 1960s, who were millionaires selling out stadiums. Punk was no longer an epithet, it was a badge of honor. It meant that you were authentic, you had balls, you stuck to your artistic vision, no matter the consequence. Here is Sex Pistol lead singer Johnny rotten, explaining in 1976 the mission for his new band.
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What do you mean?
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Do you mean you actually want to destroy them or you want to wipe them out? You want to complacent, apathetic old, walk up and down and do nothing and.
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Complain about everything, watch Top of the.
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Pops and send those boring little letters into Melody Maker week after week?
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That's what I want to get rid of.
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This desire to burn down the old in order to build something better, whether it's the culture or in industry, was identified by economist Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy as creative destruction. I doubt Johnny Rotten knew about that concept at the time of that interview, but that is exactly what the Pistols were doing back in 1975 when they opened for Bazooka Joe at St Martin's School of Art.
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The essence of punk, I think, is to, you know, stand up and throw the rock, you know, into the, into the tell screen and to, you know, publicly denounce the status quo and say, you know, enough already. We are not going to be kind, we're not going to be polite, we're not going to be well mannered. We are going to break the rules because the rules are not working for us anymore.
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I couldn't create a podcast about punk without inviting Nick Gillespie, the former editor in chief of Reason magazine, to dilate on this issue.
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Richard Nixon had recently, in recent memory, you had just come out of the Vietnam War where people had been lying to you. The economy was in shambles, the leaders of New York City were lying to everybody about them, that their bonds were worth buying, that the city was okay. There was crime everywhere, there was no future.
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That sense that the world was falling apart, the promise of the post war boom had settled into recession and stagnation. Well, it fed a lot of the original punk movement. Now there's another element of punk that is less noble. A kind of death wish, a sense of danger. The original famous New York clubs that birthed this first generation of American punk bands like the Ramones, CBGB's in Max's Kansas City, well, they were really vile places. The Hell's Angels biker gang, for example, provided security at CBGB's. Later punk shows featured mosh pits where the audience would collide into one another. And there was also a lot of drugs. Some of the original punks, like Sid Vicious of the Pistols, would not make it into the 1980s. Sid stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and murdered her in 1978 at the Chelsea Hotel. A few months later, he perished from a heroin overdose while awaiting trial. It inspired the timeless tribute from the decidedly non punk artist Neil Young.
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It's better to burn out than to fade away. My, my.
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Finally there is the reaction to punk at the time. It caused a moral panic of sorts in the late 1970s. And instead of explaining this in detail, I'm just gonna play a classic clip from an episode on Punk from that show Quincy, where Quincy, played by Jack Clubman, is a medical examiner for the LA County Coroner's office. And he actually determines the death of the young man in this episode to be punk Roc rock music. I kid you not. She comes home and she finds her daughter burning cigarette holes in her arm, shredding her clothes to bits, taking pills and locking herself in a room, listening to that violence oriented punk rock music. You've got to see it with Your own eyes to believe it. Quince, I've seen children come off that dance floor with crushed ribs and bloody faces like soldiers fighting some kind of insane war. Look which way to get out like that. Maybe the greatest persuader there is. MUSIC Punk rock as I see it is summed up in a great memoir called Punk Avenue by Phil Marchetti. He describes a typical jam night at Max's Kansas City, where some of the great bands of that era would just play old rock and roll covers. This night is in 1978. It's a Monday. James Chance, frontman for the Contortions, heads up to the stage and Johnny Thunder's Heartbreakers are the backing band. Chance asks the band to play Route 66. Johnny wasn't having it and I will let Marcity take it from here. That's right, go fuck yourself.
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No girls on stage, please.
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Come on, get off the stage.
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Baggot Games looked bewildered and just stood there, not really knowing what to do.
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Johnny added, next, yo, you go home.
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And suck your mother's dick.
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Everybody in the audience laughed. No one was thinking this typical punk confrontation would go any further than that, when suddenly this guy no one knew, real sleazy junkie in tennis shorts with white socks, pulled up to his knees, climbed on stage and jumped on James Chance, shouting, move. This guy punched James right in the face a few times in a row. James Chase fell to the floor and that guy got off the stage to a hail of booze and whistles and was instantly thrown out by Max's bouncers. James Chance slowly got back up, his face completely covered in blood, and he screamed into the microphone, do you want.
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To fucking hear me sing Route 66 or what?
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He was shaking like a leaf, blood pissing all over his white T shirt. He started the first verse and the Heartbreakers continued to snubble, refusing to play a note. But they stayed on stage anyway, confused, letting him sing all of Route 66 acapella to total silence. It was incred. Route 66 is a really long song with I don't know how many verses. And he was bleeding profusely from his forehead, his nose, his mouth. But he just kept going without moving at all until the very last note when the room exploded. Thank you. It was spectacular. I'd never witnessed such. No vision for anyone else at Max's. But he deserved it. What he did was downright extraordinary. A pure rock and roll moment.
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I would have loved to have been there for that. All the elements of punk are there. Defiance, death wish, creative destruction. And of course, the corruption of youth. And in that respect, punk has been with us really since the beginning of civilization. I'm Eli Lake and you're listening to Breaking History. In this episode, we go deep and look at the origins of punk to examine the well examined life of the first renegade. Most know him as the father of philosophy. But if you think about it, the first punk was Socrates. After the break, the life of the most hated man in Athens.
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My students and friends, why are you crying? What's certain in Naimu everyone's dying I tried to the hemlock live many days this will be my last stand and I on a fright in soft my God to run my yoke I don't what I thought Pursuing our truth Athenians asking for me to repent I suddenly left Tell them to get men My words were.
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At St. John's College, students study 3,000 years of human thought in an inclusive community devoted to shared inquiry. In undergraduate and graduate seminars, students read the great books that built our civilization, from Plato and Aquinas to Locke, Lincoln, Einstein and Douglas. In a culture quick to forget, St. John's develops memory, reason and renewal. Because understanding history is how we change it. St. John's College a better place, a better world at SJC. Edu before we dive into the father of philosophy, I want to get something out of the way. The legacy of Socrates has been debated for nearly 2,500 years. I am providing the Eli Lake interpretation, but this is hardly the only or final word on the man. Socrates contained multitudes. On the one hand, Socrates was a relentless interrogator of everything and everyone around him. Socrates was the kind of guy who would show up at a bar and engage in a long dialogue with the bartender about why people had to pay for their drinks and whether the bartender believed this was a just and fair system of alcohol distribution. You get the picture. I imagine many Athenians found Socrates to be exhausting. Socrates, by all accounts, was a pest. He wandered the streets of Athens, questioned citizens and sometimes even slaves on some of their most deeply held customs and creeds, and would often conclude that they had no idea what they were talking about. And that itself is very punk if you think about it. And yet, at the same time, Socrates was a loyal, law abiding citizen of Athens. He fought bravely as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, and when he was condemned in a trial to death, he accepted his sentence and refused offers from his friends to help him escape. So up front, let's acknowledge that there are multiple interpretations about the life of Socrates. I call him the first punk because of how his life ended. His trial, his sentencing and his death are more punk than the first Clash record. All the components are defiance, death wish, creative destruction. He was convicted for corrupting the youth for Zeus's sake. Now the trial of Socrates is known to history. Because his student Plato wrote it down, and because those works have endured, Socrates is widely seen today as an intellectual hero. Plato was a devoted fan, but not all Greek writers agreed. The dramatist Aristophanes depicted Socrates in his play the Clouds as a clever con man who counseled the sons of wealthy families to beat up their fathers. Here's a snippet of the 1971 production that aired on British television. O Socrates. What do you want, mortal? What are you doing up there? I walk upon the air and elevate my mind. Only up here, dangling my vast intellect in the heavens, can I scientifically perceive the secrets of the universe. By Zeus. What marvelous words. Zeus? Did I hear you say Zeus? Are you mad, sir? There is no Zeus. No Zeus? Then who makes it rain? Have you ever seen it rain out of an empty sky? No, but when there are clouds, it rains. Yes. Therefore, sir, it is the clouds that cause rain, not Zeus. Powerfully argued. But what about thunder? Surely the gods cause thunder. Reflect, sir. When you gorge yourself on your wife stew, does not your belly rumble? True. Think of the rumble your tiny stomach makes. Then think of the sound the boundless clouds can produce when they have indigestion. This view of Socrates as a charlatan, the philosopher who theorized that thunder was caused by the clouds when they had indigestion, that was the Socrates who stood accused of corrupting the youth and insulting the gods.
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They come from Aristophanes, where we see Socrates is running a kind of. It would not be too anachronistic to say a think tank. What kind of think tank? Well, it's a think tank that investigates the natural world. And it's a think tank that has as its purpose to show that conventional moral practices can't be justified.
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This is Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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Actually, the young people who flock to Socrates think tank should be able to violate custom and convention. Like beat up their father. Yes, yes. If the sons think they're misbehaving. So, in other words, what we have here is the caricature of the scientific inquirer, the relentless questioner who is completely dead to the importance of convention, the importance of our inheritance, indeed, civilizational importance.
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Inheritance, that is as Punk as it gets. No. A relentless questioner who scoffs at his civilizational inheritance. Even though the Clouds was penned around 25 years before the trial of Socrates in 399 BCE, this caricature played a major role in his prosecution. In Plato's Apology, Socrates goes out of his way to respond to Aristophanes in what he calls the old charges against him. Now, we should acknowledge that jurisprudence has come a long way in the last 2500 years. An Athenian trial lasted a single day. In the case of Socrates, he had a jury of 500 fellow citizens, and that large number was intended to make bribes less effective. There were no lawyers back then either, and any citizen of the city could bring a case against whoever they wished. There were also no rules of evidence. One could be convicted, for example, through guilt by association. And here's another strange thing. There's no surviving account of the case against Socrates. We know from Plato that he was charged with corrupting the youth and insulting the gods of the city. But there's no recorded text of the argument of his accusers. So for centuries, scholars have had to piece together those arguments from Socrates during his cross examination. Here's a snippet from the apology of Socrates challenging Meletus, one of his primary.
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Accusers, then, by the gods, Meletus, of whom we are speaking, tell me, and the court, in somewhat plainer terms, what you mean. I do not as yet understand whether you affirm that I teach others to acknowledge some gods and therefore do believe in God, and am not an entire atheist. This you do not lay to my charge, but only that they are not the same gods which the city recognizes. The charge is that they are different gods. Or do you mean to say that I am an atheist simply and a teacher of atheism?
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I mean the latter.
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You're a complete atheist.
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That is an extraordinary statement, Meletus. Why do you say this?
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I assure you, judges, that he does not believe in them.
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Friend Meletus, do you think that you are accusing Anaxagoras? And do you have such a low opinion of the judges to consider them ignorant to such a degree as not to know that these doctrines you mention are found in the books of Anaxagoras, not me. And so, Meletus, you really think that I do not believe in any God?
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I swear by Zeus that you believe absolutely in none at all.
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You are a liar, Meletus, not believed in by yourself. For I cannot help thinking, my fellow Athenians, that Meletus is reckless and impudent, and that he has written this indictment in a spirit of mere wantonness and youthful bravado. For he certainly does not appear to me to contradict himself in the indictment as much as if he said that Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods and yet of believing in them. But this surely is a piece of fun. I should like you men of Athens to join me in examining what I conceive to be his inconsistency. And you, Meletus, answer. And I must remind you that you are not to interrupt me if I speak in my accustomed manner.
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Two things to notice here. The first is the defiance. Meletus is not just wrong, he's lying. The other is that Socrates is asserting that he does believe in the gods of the city. And that's pretty strange if you think about it, because if you read his dialogues, you find that Socrates is questioning everything. So what was all of this about? Well, it goes back to the Oracle of Delphi, the place where Greeks went to learn about the future. And then the oracle was asked who the wisest man in Athens was, and her answer was Socrates. Here is Peter Berkowitz again.
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He says that he was minding his own business when one day a friend of his, Chaerephon, asked the oracle at Delphi, who is the wisest person? The goddess there, says Socrates. What's Socrates reaction? He doesn't believe her. Now, is that pious or impious? He says he's going to be. He piously attempted to go out into the city and see what she was talking about, to refute her. Actually, not exactly pious.
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So one can understand why Meletus would get the impression, at the very least, Socrates did not believe the gods of the city were infallible. He seeks to prove the judgment of the oracle and he does so in a very Socratic way. He goes into the city and meets with poly, politicians, poets, artisans and others, only to conclude that they don't really know much of anything. So maybe the gods were correct.
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So in the end he concludes, the gods are right. He is wiser than all these fellow citizens because they think they know things that they don't know where. Socrates knows about the limits of his knowledge, so he vindicates the gods.
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Now that right there is a kind of creative destruction. Wisdom for Socrates is not knowing what everyone thinks they know. It's the opposite. It's appreciating all one doesn't really know. Because when you acknowledge that the conventional wisdom is wrong, it opens up the space to try to do something in a different way. And that is also Very punctual. When punk is forming in New York and London, one must remember that the rock gods of their day were marketed as virtuoso musical geniuses. They wrote operas, they played to roaring crowds at massive stadiums. The new punks played their sets at dive bars. They didn't even know how to play their instruments. Compare a prog rock band like yes to the remotes. Three chords in the truth, as they say, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash cleared away the interminable drum solos, intricate guitar tunings to bring back the music to its feral essence. And there's another parallel as well. Socrates is, of course, widely considered one of the finest minds in history. And yet he presented himself as someone who didn't know anything and just wanted his interlocutors to explain why they believed what they believed. The first punks also played dumb. This is Dee Dee Ramone from the superb documentary End of a Century, explaining how impressive it was that one of his bandmates knew how to cook for himself. Tommy was the type of guy, he would buy some potatoes and hamburgers and cook himself a dinner at 21 years old. That's like really, you know, pretty cool thing to do rather than eat some dope and potato chips. Okay, back to Socrates. Now, the punk element of the last days of Socrates is his sentencing and finally his death. Let's start with the sentencing. In ancient Athens, when the accusers suggest a punishment, it's usually the beginning of a negotiation. So Socrates was initially sentenced to death. He lost a little more than half of the 500 jurors. One might expect that Socrates at this point would show some humility and beg his fellow citizens for mercy. But instead he suggests that his punishment should be free room and board at the town hall of Athens, the Pryttinium, for the rest of his life.
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Then what do I deserve for such a life? Something good. Athenians, if I am really to propose what I deserve, and something good which it would be suitable to me to receive, then what is a suitable reward to be given to a poor benefactor who requires leisure to exhort you? There is no reward, Athenians, so suitable for him as a public maintenance in the Prytaneum. It is a much more suitable reward for him than for any of you who has won a victory at the Olympic Games with his horse or his chariots. Such a man only makes you seem happy, but I make you really happy. And he is not in want, and I am. So if I am to propose the penalty which I really deserve, I propose this, a public maintenance in the Prytaneum.
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How punk is that? A man convicted of insulting the gods of Athens tells the city, my punishment should be to treat me like an Olympic champion. Johnny Rotten couldn't have said it better. So Socrates is convicted. He is taken to a cave and then has to wait an excruciating 30 days before his execution. This is because the trial happened on the eve of a holy month when Athens honored the God Apollo and no executions were permitted in those final 30 days. The students and friends of Socrates visit every day. They urge him to escape. But Socrates is having none of it. He is 70 years old at this point and actually is looking forward to his death. He tells his loyal friend Crito that his soul will live even after his body perishes from the hemlock. In Plato's final dialogue about the trial, the Phaedo, Socrates describes the hemlock poisoning as when his limbs become tired. But it's much worse than that. The toxin does paralyze the body, but the mind remains alert for the final hours as one is slowly asphyxiated. Gruesome. In this, I see a parallel with the tragic end of many of Hunk's first generation. While they were not ingesting hemlock, they were strung out on heroin. The song in the background by Johnny Thunder and the Heartbreakers, co written by Dee Dee Ramone. Chinese Rocks has this immortal chorus. I'm living on a Chinese rock all my best things are in hock. Here is Phil Marchetti from his Punk Avenue memoir.
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Heroin was the drug of choice in New York in the winter of 75. Looking back, it's hard to believe how naive we all were. We didn't realize the danger we were putting ourselves in, nor how many friends we were soon going to lose because of it. It was the drug of the intellectuals, the artists, the cool and the hip. Somebody could have at least warned us of the fact that you won't be able to stop and that you will die. End of story.
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Socrates, of course, was not addicted to heroin, but in the end, he embraced his own death with a fearlessness that feels very punk to me. In this section of the Phaedo, Socrates scolds his students who are crying right before he ingests the poison.
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I suppose that I may and must pray to the gods that my journey hence may be prosperous. That is my prayer, be it so.
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With these words he put the cup to his lips and drank the poison quite calmly and cheerfully. Till then, most of us had been able to control our grief fairly well. But when we saw him drinking and then the poison finished, we could do so no longer. My tears came fast in spite of myself, and I covered my face and wept for myself. It was not for him, but at my own misfortune in losing such a friend. Even before that, Crito had been unable to restrain his tears and had gone away, and Apollodorus, who had never once ceased weeping the whole time, burst into a loud cry, and made us one and all break down by his sobbing and grief, except only Socrates himself.
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What are you doing, my friends? He exclaimed. I sent away the woman chiefly in order that they might not offend in this way, for I have heard that a man should die in silence.
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After the break. What lessons can we learn from Socrates and the Punks?
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This episode is brought to you by Netflix from the creator of Homeland. Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in the new Netflix series the Beast in.
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Me as ruthless rivals whose shared darkness.
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Will set them on a collision course with fatal consequences. The Beast in Me is a riveting psychological cat and mouse story about guilt, justice and doubt. You will not want to miss this. The Beast in Me launches November 13, only on Netflix.
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We are listening now to the the only band that matters, the Clash and I play this gem from their first record Career Opportunities, because it really captures the rejection of rules and norms of society that is the essence of punk and for that matter, the essence of Socrates. Joe Strummer here rejects the opportunity to make tea at the BBC. He wants to live in truth.
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I think, you know, the way that punk functions as a kind of cultural force because it isn't, you know, it isn't a single set of aesthetics.
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This is Nick Gillespie again.
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You can't say, okay, well, you know, there's the Ramones and the Sex Pistols and maybe Iggy Pop and the Stooges or something like that. And that's all there is in punk. You know, the bands that played at CBGB's all were, you know, if they hadn't played there, you would not necessarily have linked them together because of their aesthetic preferences or their musical abilities or stylings and things like that. The essence of punk, I think, is to stand up and throw the rock into the tell screen and to publicly denounce the status quo and say, enough already. We are not going to be kind, we're not going to be polite, we're not going to be well mannered. We are going to break the rules because the rules are not working for us anymore. And when you think about that, and then you think about somebody like Steve Jobs at Apple, Apple as a Company was basically created as the mirror opposite or the bizarro world version of IBM, you know, where instead of like working in a highly structured hierarchical organization where everybody wore the same clothes, you know, it was a uniform. Even though it's like for white collar workers, everybody dressed the same and everybody had to act the same, you know, Jobs was like, no, we're going to have something very different. And the whole idea of a personal computer was a punk move because it took the computer and the idea of a mainframe computer which was distant and remote and was processing scores of data and spitting out decisions for you. It was, you know, it was the opposite. It's like we're going to take the computer and put it in the hands of individuals and we're going to reverse the network and the power will belong to individuals rather than to the mainframe computer.
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I agree with Nick on this. From Galileo to Joey Ramon to Steve Jobs, punk is throwing the rock at the tell screen and giving a middle finger to convention. Sometimes that leads to self destruction, sometimes it leads to enduring art. It can be both juvenile and profound. But it's rooted in Socratic defiance to seek the truth, to know what we don't know at the same time. At the same time, if everyone is a Socrates, a Steve Jobs or a Joey Ramone, then our society descends into anarchy. In this respect, it's a privilege to be punk. Most of us have to get on with our lives without screaming at our bosses and pointing out every half truth and compromise that comes with being a grown up. I wouldn't want to live in a world without punk, just as I wouldn't want to live in a world without Socrates. Our world is better because of the first Clash record. And it's better because an annoying pesk roamed the streets of Athens nearly 2,500 years ago, searching for what was true, what was just and what was beautiful.
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Let's speak of the Socratic impulse.
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This is Peter Berkowitz again.
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Too little of the Socratic impulse leaves us slaves to existing reality. We simply inherit without thinking about it. But of course, our inheritance is always rich and complicated and has conflicting impulses in it. So we have to think about it. Too little Socrates leaves us slaves to the given. Too much Socrates leaves us constantly undermining the inherited. We need the right balance.
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So maybe the best thing to do is to appreciate the punks before they burn out or fade away. Every now and again they expose a hypocrisy that we are better off discarding. Fifty years ago, the sex Pistols aimed their anger at the Queen, the fascist regime telling the world she was not even a human being. When the ironically titled God Save the Queen came out, most of the British media wouldn't utter a critical word about the House of Windsor. Today, Prince Andrew has been stripped of his title after he was disgraced by allegedly betting underaged girls provided by billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Perhaps Johnny Rotten was onto something and at the same time recognize that there is a limit to Socratic defiance. Exposing lies presupposes the existence of truth. Exposing hypocrisy is powerful only when honesty and order and the common good are valued. If everything must be rejected, that is neither wisdom nor progress. It is nihilism. And I suppose this is an irony. The revolutionary instinct of punk prevents stagnation, but only works if it is tempered by a countervailing appreciation for the world that produced us.
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Bugo and the Dog. I will apply to the next year's model the hobby of end for them what happens what happens again when you suck? It's a mystery to them to break.
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History.
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Sun Prize and Fism Crude suit populism Bill Clinton bringing but that Neo neighborism the hobby house Albin Banana S yeah yeah what happened once happens again.
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Thank you for listening. If you like us, you should consider subscribing to the free press hefp.com I also want to shout out Tony Pier, our sound designer. He played James Chance of the Contortions and recreated that scene in the A block for us. Thank you so much Tony. I think it turned out great.
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When use up is a mystery when use up is a mystery Tune in to break history the Eliz experience the best is podcast excellence, the EIS experience the best in podcast excellence, the EI let experience the best in podcast excellence the EI leg experience.
Podcast Summary: Breaking History – “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s Socrates”
The Free Press | November 12, 2025
This episode of Breaking History takes an inventive approach by reflecting on the 50th anniversary of punk rock and drawing a provocative parallel between the defiant spirit of punk and the life of ancient philosopher Socrates. Host Eli Lake and guests explore how questioning authority, creative destruction, and corrupting the youth are enduring themes running from the Sex Pistols to the father of philosophy, examining what it really means to "break history" and why the world always needs its punks.