Editor’s note: This entry is part of an ongoing series of personal essays by the author on love and life. You can read here parts 1, 2, 3 & 4.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the main types of external influences I have found in my life, as in the people who have left deep impressions in me to the point of shaping the way I live and the way I think. So far, I have been able to identify three main kinds, and this should obviously be not a coincidence.

As with many other things, it seems the number three works as a magical formula to define such influences, in the same way as most major ideas in Western thought tend to be stated in the form of a hendiatris, or as it would be more understandable, of tripartite mottoes.

I use this figure of speech quite a lot because triads serve a good mnemonic purpose: they help the person engaging with concepts arranged in such a way to better memorize them and thus for their meaning not to be lost in walls of empty and unimportant discourse.

But back to the original idea for this study, it seems these influential figures in my life follow a certain pattern that upbringing both as a subject and as an observer. Let me explain: I consider that in every man’s life, there are three main categories of people with whom he will engage as when to forming bonds. They are peers, mentors, and muses.

I have already long disclosed how certain emotions drive our actions and our perception of the world around us, and in the same way I combined logos, pathos and ethos with verum, pulchrum & bonum as a way to organize speech towards the transcendental aspects of Being, I am now trying to connect these philosophical triads with the social categories stated in the previous paragraph.

Some pairings would be certainly obvious, like pathos, pulchrum and muses, or maybe logos, verum and mentors, but what really interests me now is the mingling of ethos, bonum and peers. However, to get into that point, I first need to further develop the idea of muses and mentors.

By the laws of nature, every person has a mother and a father. Children are the offspring of man and woman, and thus this couple becomes the basic social cell fro which any person can take the elements needed for their social development. This is, by the simple logic of common sense, an universal truth that cannot be challenged at face value. There are ongoing debates in postmodern philosophy that try to disrupt these simple yet absolute principles, but there should be considered as unimportant for what really matters in the long run.

For the specific case of men, the influence both mother and father have in their most fundamental formation is that they provide with the basic perceptions of certain transcendental elements for life.

Fathers, as authoritative figures, tend to be associated with a more rational approach, and thus with logos and verum. Even as the family unit becomes more complex, or outright reverted in its composition, the paternal figure will always have that aura of truth (or lack thereof) and of order.

Mothers, on the other side, tend to be associated with a more emotional approach, and thus with pathos and pulchrum. Mothers create the first emotional responses in children by being the first presences they bond with, even more than with fathers, because it is in motherly nature to be nurturing.

This key difference is what makes the presence of both mothers and fathers paramount in the early development of any person’s life. In my own case, the older I grow and i get to be independent from my parents, the more I understand how my dad was the more rational presence whereas my mom was the more emotional one. For both good and bad.

This archetypical relation formed by one’s bonds with their mother and their father defines all future links with people who match their imprints: each man’s father is their first mentor and each man’s mother is their first muse. A father sets an example to follow and teaches an order to continue as generations go on in time, and a mother defines the way affections are given and received and how these affections create the bonds needed for the species to continue.

My dad, of course, is my first mentor, and for many reasons, bridges the unbroken threads of legacy built by his ancestors in their trades and interests. I may have studied the same thing as my mom did back in her day, that is, law, but ultimately I am taking the same profession as my dad, as a writer, something he took from his own father, il mio nono, and my grand-uncle sharing our same name, il suo zio.

Conversely, my mom is my first muse, and as the first in a line of women who have inspired my emotions, she’s at the center of most of my works, giving me a reason and an inspiration to pursue these passions. That may be the actual true reason I decided to study what she did, as the legal profession requires and stimulates a certain emotional character that could only be found in people like my mom, and which I most certainly took from her.

But aside from them being these first mentor and muse in my life, their influence can be further seen in all the other people taking similar positions as I grew up, with all the other mentors and muses appearing in my life and defining my ideas and my emotions in different moments and times.

We could, maybe with an ironic smirk, mention Sigmund Freud’s idea of the Œdipus complex and its femenine counterpart in the Elektra complex, developed by Carl Jung, but aside for the disturbing implications they have for the layman that barely understands the intrincancies of psychoanalysis, these concepts could be useful to illustrate a point: the way people bond and relate with their progenitors define their future affections and their place in the community.

Curiously, my dad is one of the few mentors in my life that does not follow the usual pattern in most of my mentors, that of the older bachelor who takes me as a student of their ideas. These mentors can be both shining examples of Christian chastity and Augustinian explorers of sin and virtue as any successful man can be around women.

Again, another triad in my mentors, the monk, the father and the soldier. I categorize them as such because the can be organized in an spectrum with the studious monk and the partying solder at the extremes, and the father, as my dad, as a prudent middle ground. This may seem counterproductive for now, but it will make more sense when discussing the idea of peers and community building.

On the other hand, whe it comes to my muses, there is not a categorization as easy as the one I did for my mentors, but that is because fo the differing nature between muses and mentors, between emotion and reason. I do tend to see my mom as a certain standard of beauty that defines my subsequent perception of any other woman, and naturally, that creates an interesting tension: are my attractions a rejection or an overcoming of that standard?

Even when trying to proving any of those options, I always come back to the same essence, those very fundamental aspects, both aesthetically and emotionally, that come from my first muse, my mom, because these are the basic tenets of my affections.

Now, the thing about muses and mentors is that these kind of relationships are never set on equal terms. They are always built with a certain slope, with the mentor and the muse in a higher position as a teacher or an inspiration. That means that every bond involving a muse or a mentor is set to try to overcome that imbalance, to try to reach to an even point with them.

With a muse, you try to win back her affections by showing her your affection for her, and with a mentor, you try to surpass him in knowledge and experience so you may, in your turn, become a master for a younger fellow. These relationships are not the kind of bonds you would find wih an equal, because there is never equality in such relationships. Equality is the goal but never the substance.

To have a muse, to have a mentor, even with our own parents, is a struggle, because we try to reach up to their level and exceed the current limitations such a relationship imposes on us. But that is not the case with peers, and here is where I shall re-introduce the combination of ethos, bonum and community.

I connect the idea of peers with that of community because I think the second cannot exist without the first. In the way I see it, mentors are a link to the past, with men transmitting their knowledge to younger men as time goes by, and muses are a link to the future, with each one inspiring emotions meant to overcome the distance and potentially create actual bonds, but needing time, thus, always with a future term in mentality.

But when it comes to peers, they exist in the present, they are at the same moment as we are. And unlike muses or mentors, they can be both men and women, not strictly men nor strictly women. Peers are the community of equals that might be contemporaneous and contingent to our existence, and are the ones societies are built from in real time.

When trying to explain this idea, I thought about a piece by American conservative political philosopher and student of Leo Strauss, Harry V. Jaffa, titled Equality as a Conservative Principle, in which he stresses the importance of a equality of rights based on a common civic tradition as the foundation of a well ordered society, at least from the experience in the United States.

On the other hand, there’s a recently published book, written by Costin Vlad Alamariu, titled Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy (based on his 2015 doctoral dissertation) that deals with a premise that could be related to the problem of peers and community and that is of philosophy and tyranny as the dual products of mantaining rule by a foreign elite in any given society.

Alamariu, who is believed by some to be the mind behind the Bronze Age Pervert persona on Twitter (now X) and of the (in)famous Bronze Age Mindset reactionary manifesto with Nietzschean undertones, is not a foreign figure to the followers of Jaffa, and many of them, belonging to both the West Coast Straussian tradition in political philosophy and to the Dissident Right in actual praxis, actively trying to conjugate both positions in an unholy mix of traditional and revolutionary politics.

But aside from these takes, I consider that the ‘quest for peers’, as I call this issue, is both a central problem in the vital struggle of the individual human person and the organization of social communities in political philosophy and, with the first leading directly to the second.

The combination of ethos and bonum with peers is just as natural as the ones of pathos and pulchrum with muses, and logos and verum with mentors for the same reasons these arrangements make sense by themselves: just as beauty and emotion are mutually driven by each other and the perception of beautiful muses inspires further emotions towards the creation of beauty, and just as reason is driven towards truth and truth tends to be as reasonable as it can be, with mentors showing and teaching both the path of reason and the path towards truth as one and the same, the good needs community to be fully comprehended, and a public perception of it to be rightly spread and understood.

For that, said community needs to be composed of peers, members who are certainly different but also equal in other aspects, who share a common identity that unifies them among their differences. The quest for peers thus becomes a quest for equality rightly understood, which is by no means material, but mostly spiritual. We can only be peers with those who share at least a core value on which communities are formed.

I tend to think of my parents, my first mentor and my first muse, as peers among themselves. Not only their life stories, both before and after getting married, tend to be quite similar and parallel, but also the way they complement each other, for better and for worse, what makes them equals. They are certainly different, and they differences show: that’s why one’s my standard for mentors and the other my standard for muses. But it is their common experiences and values that make them equals in the sense of becoming paired to each other.

When brainstorming for this essay, as well, I realized two interesting things: the first is about how language holds clues about the actual meaning of our perennial institutions, and how some languages get to be closer to the truest meaning than others. The second is about how our individual lives and our social lives are tied up to the actual destiny of politics and of our different communities.

About the first point, the example is easy: let’s take the concept of couple. A pair of people, usually male and female, romantically involved (I am not going to dive into the debate of homosexual relationships here because it’s ultimately counterproductive). The word pair gives the first hint: a relationship based on a mutual link between two people. Now, the word ‘couple’ would not ring any bell, but when using the same word, but in Spanish, ‘pareja’, now it makes more sense: it comes from ‘par’, ‘pares’, meaning peers, and thus equals.

Now, are they, in a couple, the same? No, not at all, but they share a common core of values and are driven towards a common destiny. Now take this concept outside of the romantic dimension and apply it in other forms of communities that can be formed, such as neighbourhoods, cities, associations…

People on a one-to-one basis recognize their similars as peers and thus are able to build communities around their shared condition in which they reflect each other. One of the ideas that recurred to me during my last break-up was that by reflecting myself in my beloved, I would be able to find myself, and that, in a sense, meant I had seen her as my equal, my peer, my partner (again, same etymology).

And that’s what ultimately happens in organized society: peers recognize each other as equals, and work towards goals common in their equal conditions, that is, justice, fairness, prosperity, to the point one of the basic guarantees of due process in common law is that of being judged by a jury of peers in case of accusation. It is in this community of equals recognizing each other as equals where free and ordered government happens.

The quest for community is, by all means, a quest for this kind of equality. This reference is by no means random, and I thought about Robert Nisbet’s book by the same name (The Quest for Community) when researching for this essay.

I, however, don’t argue against individualism in the same way as him, because I think our individual expression may allow for communities to rise and thrive as we try to find peers with whom to share based on out most distinguishable and identifiable traits. We look in others what we try to find in ourselves, but as a way to complement what we’re missing, and to amplify what we are.

But at the same time, I do agree with another fundational premise of conservative thought, that of preserving what we hold closer, or as Roger Scruton put it, “the instinct to hold on to what we love, to protect it from degradation and violence and to build our lives around it.” Or maybe even better, in the words of Baba Dioum, “In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand“.

But for that we need to know ourselves, to find ourselves and to find others. We need to be genuine. We need to accept our existences as they are and as they come. We find our peers as we become fully integrated with ourselves. We take from our mentors and from our muses, and we look to make ourselves equal to our mentors and our muses equal to us.

The biggest challenge to this quest for peers comes with the most unhinged expressions of individualism, narcissism and megalomania, the idea of an exclusive uniqueness that separates us from the rest in ways that only the individual me can be truly important, and the idea of putting that apparent exclusive uniqueness above others as a way to rule over them in their perceived inferiorness.

Here comes Alamariu again, as the point of his thesis is to prove that conquering elites, in their free time to both produce offsprings to keep the power they achieved and to legitimate their rule develop philosophy in a circular way to both justify their rule (and free time contrated to their subjected followers), secure their legacy and ameliorate their condition and that of their descendants. Or they can simply devolve into outright violent tyranny if that does not work and their hold on power becomes weak.

But such ideas tend to be quite the opposite to what a quest for peers and for community mean. They are too cynical, even if vitalist, as they see life and politics as a struggle for dominance more than as an exerecise in self-recognition and building trust. Now, this does not mean either position is right or wrong, but for that debate, we shall set aside a future entry in this series.

At last, what reallt matters is being able to being able to recognize what qualities one has in other to find others who share them and being able to recognize our mutual dignity as ways to pair ourselves and build communities based on sound principles. And in all cases, the most important principle shall always be love; the love for our own selves, the love for our fellow men and women, for our ancestors and for our potential progreny.

Or as in the words of my favorite lyricist, Gordon Matthew Sumner, a.k.a. Sting, “Romantic love outweighs global issues. I really believe that. Love is continuity of the species, it’s the most important thing. That’s why love songs are immortal.”

Any community built on love will be eternal. We just need to find the love within ourselves and share it with our peers.