Philip II's assassination was a '9-11 moment' — the kind of bolt from the blue where everyone watching knew everything had changed, and the system was not set up to function without him.

(00:00:00) What you're about to hear is part 2 of a multi-part series on Alexander the Great. (00:00:05) If you missed part 1 and need to catch that first, we recommend it. (00:00:09) If you didn't hear part 1 but don't mind, you know, starting a story in the middle, well please feel free to keep going. (00:00:14) And for the rest of you, without further ado, part 2 of Mania for Subjugation. (00:00:22) December 7th, 1941. (00:00:28) A date which will live in infamy. (00:00:32) It's history. (00:00:33) One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. (00:00:40) The events... (00:00:45) ...but have fighting power. (00:00:50) Not quite to the morning, man. (00:00:52) That'll work humanity from this time and place. (00:00:55) The figures. (00:00:56) Pride in the words. (00:00:58) Ich bin ein Vialina. (00:01:01) Mr. (00:01:01) Gorbachev, tear down this wall. (00:01:06) The drama... (00:01:11) Tower 2 has had a major explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse surrounding the entire area. (00:01:16) I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. (00:01:21) The deep questions. (00:01:22) Well, I'm not a crook. (00:01:23) If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. (00:01:36) It's hardcore history. (00:01:40) One of the things that I find terrifying about life is how fortune can just turn on a dime. (00:01:52) And I think it's more of a cynical pessimist's way of looking at that sort of dynamic than an optimist. (00:02:01) An optimist would say, thank goodness life can turn on a dime. (00:02:04) hit the lottery tomorrow, change everything, wouldn't it? (00:02:07) So that's a certain kind of personality maybe, but I'm more of the person that just says, okay, gosh, just protect me from a bolt from the blue. (00:02:18) What's a great term, a bolt from the blue? (00:02:21) Protect me from something that just instantly changes my world and turns it upside down, probably for the worse, right? (00:02:34) And this bolt from the blue aspect of our existence is operating on every level, right? (00:02:42) Your individual level, something can happen in your life. (00:02:45) We are soft, squishy beings, and it doesn't take much for us to get hurt. (00:02:52) I mean, so things happen all the time, right? (00:02:54) Illnesses, things strike a bolt from the blue in your personal life. (00:02:59) But this works on the giant super macro scale, too. (00:03:04) Something happens and all of our worlds are thrown in a completely different direction as quickly as a billiard ball caroms off another billiard ball and changes its trajectory entirely. (00:03:16) I mean, if you're old enough to have consciously lived through something like the 9-11 attacks, you know what that's like. (00:03:26) That's wake up in one world, go to bed that night in a completely different world and know it. (00:03:33) And Pearl Harbor was that way too, just to take a couple of American things, but this is so common, every people on the planet can name historical bolts from the blue that had that same sort of an effect in their world. (00:03:47) It's not uncommon at all, right? (00:03:48) In your personal life, all the way up to global affairs. (00:03:54) And in a lot of cases, we should remember a bolt from the blue that impacts global affairs (00:04:01) can still be a bolt from the blue at ground zero on an individual level too. (00:04:07) I mean, to just go back to the 9-11 attacks. (00:04:09) We're all affected by the 9-11 attacks the minute it happens, right? (00:04:12) Your sense of stability is upset. (00:04:15) You don't know what's going to happen next. (00:04:16) We're all a bit traumatized. (00:04:17) But the families of people who died in the 9-11 attacks, well, they get all of that we get, and then they get the impact on ground zero in their family where they've suffered. (00:04:28) a bolt from the blue where the ripples of pain will continue to emanate in their individual world for a generation two or three, right? (00:04:38) For 20-year-old Alexander III, right, the future Alexander the Great as we will know him, it's very possible watching his dad get stabbed to death publicly in front of a crowd of, for the most part, important people, (00:04:56) to watch that from a few feet away, well, that has the potential to be both those things, doesn't it? (00:05:03) Because obviously, you take out the most important person in the history of that region, if we're talking about sort of the great man theory of history, or the just in the geopolitical kings conquest, you know, politics, realpolitik and all that sort of stuff, you're taking out the most important figure, potentially in the history of the region. (00:05:24) If not, one of the top ones, certainly the most important during this time period, you take out this guy, you changed the whole world. (00:05:31) I mean, you tried to find other people in history where it would have been this big. (00:05:35) Well, what about Hitler in 1940? (00:05:38) Not to compare the two in a moral sense, but I mean, you take out Adolf Hitler in 1940 or 1939, and you can't even fantasize on how things are different. (00:05:49) And you could say the same thing about someone like, Franklin Roosevelt or Churchill too. (00:05:53) And no question, had those two died of a heart attack or something at the start of the Second World War, a bazillion things change in major ways. (00:06:00) But those systems of diffused power and sorts of internal rules of succession and all that would have fared much better, right? (00:06:08) The US is just going to plug a different president into the White House. (00:06:12) And it's going to be different, but in a lot of ways it's not. (00:06:14) You take Hitler from the leadership position of Germany right at the start of the Second World War, and you can't even imagine what happens. (00:06:22) And the situation in Macedonia when Philip II is murdered is much more similar to that. (00:06:29) It has to do with the fact that so much power is wrapped up in one person, right? (00:06:33) And the system itself isn't really set up for what happens without that person. (00:06:38) They've created this intricate web (00:06:41) that really relies on them being the spider in the middle of it for it to all work. (00:06:45) And you take the spider out and then what do you have? (00:06:48) So that is a 9-11 moment, right? (00:06:51) The minute it happens, everybody watching it knows that everything has changed. (00:06:54) They don't know how it's changed. (00:06:56) And I get this sense after Philip's murder that everyone's walking around the way we were walking around for the next week after the 9-11 attacks. (00:07:03) We all had like little swirls in our eyes and we just couldn't believe (00:07:07) or absorb what had happened. (00:07:09) And it was like everyone was experiencing this at the same time. (00:07:12) And I get the feeling that it must have been similar, especially in the area of the assassination, with the people who saw this. (00:07:21) And one of them, of course, being Alexander. (00:07:22) And I keep trying to figure out, because this is the side of the story where it's a 9-11 attack for Alexander also, maybe even again, more than for most people, because now he's in the spotlight. (00:07:35) in terms of the most likely person to succeed, but it's a personal one. (00:07:40) It's dad. (00:07:40) Dad just got shanked in front of me. (00:07:43) Do you get PTSD from that? (00:07:45) Just wondering. (00:07:46) And the reason I ask is because there's a couple of historians that have put forward the theory that maybe Alexander during his lifetime was suffering from PTSD, but most of the time they draw it back to the many horrific experiences he had in a career of personal combat. (00:08:02) This would be at the very beginning, basically, (00:08:05) But I mean, if I told you that some person on the other side of the room, whispered into your ear, hey, that poor guy, his dad was murdered in front of him, wouldn't you expect that this would be a monumental, milestone moment, negatively speaking, for that person in their life? (00:08:22) Wouldn't you think they'd be visiting and getting some psychiatric care maybe for the rest of their life? (00:08:27) Tie any major problems they have to that? (00:08:29) Certainly you could say PTSD, right, watching your... (00:08:32) Your parents murdered, I mean, that's a superhero origin story, isn't it? (00:08:35) That's how you get Batman. (00:08:38) But as psychologically dark as the comic book origin story of Batman is, right? (00:08:45) Little boy sees his parents murdered in front of him by a criminal. (00:08:49) As dark as that is, think about how much more sinister it gets. (00:08:53) If the person who killed Bruce Wayne's parents, leading to the creation of the (00:08:57) avenging Dark Knight that sometimes is a little bit psychologically unbalanced. (00:09:03) If the person that killed Bruce Wayne's parents was Bruce Wayne, if he killed his own parents and that led to the creation of Batman, that's a even more psychologically dark and twisted tale, isn't it? (00:09:15) And in the Alexander story, the reason it matters is because Alexander is a pretty different person in our eyes in the way you might see him, isn't he? (00:09:27) if he killed his own father, right? (00:09:29) Can you get PTSD witnessing your dad's murder if you orchestrated it? (00:09:33) That just popped into my head. (00:09:35) But I mean, think about the way you'd see this guy differently. (00:09:37) One version of him is a victim, sees his dad killed him.