Demons & the Machine, John Vervaeke & Jonathan Pageau

so we kind of talked about like the this space the conversations that we're part of and kind of who knows where you sort of draw the boundaries but there is sort of definitely a coherence to the conversation and i want to kind of ask where you feel that coherence is at the moment because for me i was really struck by recently i did a hosted a conversation with paul kingsnorth and mary harrington that felt to me to be sort of a very interesting coalescing of the conversation that overlaps with all the conversations that you've had paul vander clay's been talking about and they were really talking about i could summarize their conversation sort of looking at i called i called it the war on reality it was the sort of sense that there is a a war on all limitations mary called it a sort of uh what do you call it luxury near luxury gnosticism automated luxury agnosticism fully automated luxury gnosticism and paul talks about the machine the sort of obliteration of any sense of place turning everything into kind of like i think mary called it a standing reserve but i think paul would call it kind of quantification and interchangeability and that this and paul also kind of located that in a kind of almost like a metaphysical space rather than a kind of a a defined plan by like a group of people which is where it starts becoming sort of overlaps the conspiratorial ecosystem but that for me felt like a very live fascinating exploration it felt like a kind of moving together of lots of different parts of the conversation and i know you've both kind of listened to it and it overlaps a lot with some of the things that you've been thinking about what what did you make of that and where do you feel do you think that is sort of partly where one of the frontiers of the conversation yeah i mean first of all the thing i just said was actually like motivated by this because the fetishization of freedom right and making it into this kind of absolute no limits no limits um that's one of the things that both mary and paul are putting their fingers on and then the other and jonathan and i have had two discussions around this the the the discovery of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition and how it has a life of its own and that we don't have a good way of talking about this or thinking about this these are the two themes i have a lot of criticisms about what both of them said in specifics but uh what what like let's let's go to the gnosticism right um the the yeah this this this um like almost like a corrosive acid we're gonna we're gonna carry out we're gonna we're gonna fulfill the project of the enlightenment through absolute liberation and what that means is that all limitations are physical limitations in our body right we're gonna maybe crits we're going to do the transhumanism thing the rapture of the nerds or right we're going to do right we're i'm going to do i'm just going to modify my body or i can i'll uh i'll i'll merge with my avatar and like there's all these pseudo transcendence that's good everywhere right and it's again as far as i can see the only thing that justifies this is are you getting closer to reality no are you somehow making things beautiful no you know is there some way you know can you show me how this is um ethical you might get a bit of an answer but it's ultimately justified in terms of well it's about freedom and the absolutization of it and it's like why do you what like you don't understand limits you so this now let's move into my domain cognitive science constraints the problem with words is words can be marked or unmarked just quickly so if i say to you how tall is someone that doesn't mean anything but if i say how short are they that means they're short the problem with the word constraint is it's a marked term but you have to hear it unmarked you have to hear it the same way you hear tall okay because constraints are both selective and enabling evolution evolution needs natural selection and it kills things off and it winnows things down yes right but it also has variation these are enabling constraints limits not only right and this is what i mean about don't hearing you have to hear the term in an unmarked way they're not just constraining you they're also affording you right so language limits me i'm a critique i criticize this here propositions limit us but language also enables me i can talk about you know what it what what might have happened if africa had discovered steam power earlier than england i can do that and you can go and you can like language bertrand russell once said no matter how eloquently a dog barks it can't tell you that its parents were poor but hard working so language both limits me in the negative sense but it also affords me in the positive sense and and and and so absolute absolute freedom and an absolute removal of all well i'll become completely self-determining but do you that does that mean you think the self is a bound limited no the self is completely and it's like what do you mean by self-determination if there's no limiting if there's no you know coherent notion of what a self is it just becomes this it's what my hands are doing and and it's like why you need to give me an overwhelmingly convincing argument why i should care about that at all and so for me them they're putting their finger on the fact that right we haven't for me i mean at one point we should talk about what was good about gnosticism you know narcissism is trying to address when people feel sort of existentially trapped existentially ignorant inertia right there there's a reason why we have narcissists there's a reason why that term was in the ancient literature but putting that aside right there's an important thing there right this idea of freedom like even in like you should always ask freedom from and freedom too yes okay i want to be i want to be free from the limits of my body free to do what and and tell me something that you love to do that doesn't involve your body i i don't i don't know what that means right and so what are you being free to do and for me the free too is actually what i was i mean i'm free to actually lose my freedom in love i'm i like i i i want to love the truth frankfurt calls it a voluntary necessity i want to love the truth i want to love what's good i want to love what's beautiful and and and finally just just just on this i want to get free from like like your body this is part of the guts of relevance realization your body is not cartesian clay right your body is an autopoetic it's a self-making system and it because it is making itself it is constantly taking care of itself and therefore it's constantly caring about itself and that's why you can care about this information rather than that information rather than a computer relevance realization is dependent on the fact that you're embodied your bio economy the cost functions is what actually prevents you from trying to look at everything and think of everything you take that limitation away and you hit combinatorial explosion because here's the thing you think you're going to open up your limits and reality is just going to be there stable for you open up those limits and reality will say watch what i can do and that's what it's doing exactly don't you think that possibly i think one of the friends that i try to see it through is the the frame of of desire it seems to be there's something that happened it's related to consumer culture it's related to the 60s it's related to a strange inversion from virtue into desire so listen to value sorry so we replaced talking about what people's virtues are with with what they value right yes in that sense yes in the sense of what they what they think has value to them let's say at least personally and and then so i think that that there's something related to that and then what happens and we know it from every tradition in the entire world is that if you turn your eye so it's like there's nothing wrong with desire but it's like if you turn your eye towards desire then it explodes it's like it's an it's indefinite it's insatiable exactly and if you enter into that space and you enter into it in terms of consumer culture or in terms of all the even in terms of like the hippie you know like the free love or whatever like we just can do we can have as much pleasure as we want it's insatiable there's no limit to it yes and so and then it moves towards idiosyncratic desires right so you can see that in the sexual fetishizations where it's like all these little sexual desires start to like appear these weird little pornographic sexual desires start to manifest themselves like actually appear in the world and you kind of they kind of multiply and multiply and multiply yeah and so there's no limit and so it's about desire and power and so what the machine has always been the machine from the beginning is always about increasing power that's what all civilizations do right so the civilization apparatus itself is about increasing power now if we do it in with your eye towards desire then it will lead it leads to something like the metaverse because your desires are idiosyncratic you cannot be a horse but if you live in the metaverse you can be a horse today or for five minutes if you want and then you can switch to doing something else and you can so you can just like cycle the craziest desires like one after the other and live in this whirlwind of of of desire and like of like impermanent identities that just keep flipping from one to the other and thinking that that's what will satisfy you and it will never satisfy you so i think that there's something about that this this kind of narcissism which has to do with that it's actually it's actually like the it's the it's let's say it's even the end of the very idea of technology itself technology as the notion of increasing of power to do things but they they're not it's not bad in itself it can be turned towards a good but technology always has a danger because it is an increase of power that if it's not balanced with wisdom then it will it will turn towards and what we've seen in the in the modern age is exactly that that move where we've we've discarded wisdom slowly we've seen the great power that this tech technological understanding affords us and we just are throwing ourselves into it and so there's the correlation between the obsessions and desires and and slavery to desires and this increasing technocratic technological world that that makes you think that you'll be able to escape all limitations to your desires is completely coherent like it it seems that it's it makes sense that it's happening this way okay and so the change it cannot be a technical technological change no no the change has to be a change of world view basically yes yes and so first of all that that's excellent um and you know um so i think there's a deep connection uh between the the notions of freedom and the notions of power and that both of them are being uh transformed into absolute goods rather than instrumental goods i didn't say freedom wasn't good no i didn't say power wasn't good i said they're instrumental goods they're not inherent goods right whereas virtue is about trying to be in right relationship with that that is inherently good right inherently real inherently etc right so i agree that it's it's that um [Music] i suppose what i would want to say is what you just said at the end um the part about the talk about the machine in the cathedral is um i wanna i wanna i wanna slow down that because you invoked a different term that i think is more appropriate um which is world view um and i think world views are absolutely necessary for relevance realization and they think they have to continually evolve also what now what i'm so the thing about we all face the paradox of communication and cooperation what this is from monica what i mean by that okay so if you and i don't communicate we'll work at cross purposes and that will actually undermine will waste our lives to some degree right but if we just talk we'll also waste our lives right and so well what do you do well one of the things you can do is you can let's use an analogy the brain does this and so imagine uh a happily married couple they've been married for a long time okay and they almost have telepathy right and so now why is that because the husband uh just for ease it's ease of conversation i'll presume they're a heterodox uh so not heterodox heterosexual couple um um and right the husband has internalized a model of his wife and given it considerable space in his psyche and so he can consult that model when he's not with her and she can consult her model because she's internalized him and they can both act in a coordinated fashion without having to spend that much time talking to each other right now the thing is we can't we and this is what we do with friendships but we can't do that with sort of so what we do and this is mead's idea is we create think about a baseball team right this is meets example what i do is i create i internalize not you or you i do that a little bit but i'll internalize the generalized other what what anybody else on the team would do that's called the generalized other and then i can consult that model and then i can play well with a whole bunch of people and then you take that up a notch what a world view is it's it's a it's a generalized agent what what any agent is in our in our group and this is the arena for our group so that we can coordinate without you and i and at all having to talk directly to each other in depth that's irreplaceable you can't you can't i'm gonna dispense with world views do you understand right right right and you have to so but notice if the couple never talk it's a disaster and if they talk too much that means something's probably going wrong they have to cycle between it right and so the world view has to cycle between you you accept it and then you might revise it and then you it has to evolve i put to you that one of the functions not the only one of the and this is derived from gertz's idea one of the function of religion was exactly that to to to to to create participate and and curate a worldview for people yeah i agree right so part of my worry about the the the criticism of the machine and right and the cathedral is yeah that's right we do have these hyper objects and they do exercise a kind of hyper agency but we need them right we can't do without world views we can't do without so again i i i was worried about there being a crypto gnosticism under the critique of gnosticism which is let's get free of world views and it's like no that's not you can't do that because you won't be able to run a you know a civilization yeah but i think knowing paul and having talked from several times and listening to the conversation i i was i think that what he's saying is that there's something about you know him better than him yeah he he he says there's something about let's say what you could call something like the the traditional worldviews which have this this organic embedded structure of of of relationships and hierarchies that that are you know they develop forever and they're just kind of they're that's what they are that's how they work and that and that this has ritualization there's things we celebrate you know all of these things are part of it um and that this has been replaced or there's been a move to replace it by what what he calls the machine and this and this machine is is like a parody right of these more organic integrated systems and and it has to have some aspect of of it or they couldn't exist right exactly so so it's taking some aspects of how identity functions and it's radicalizing in some ways and you can see it because one of the things that they talk about is freedom it's hilarious because i totally agree with them but we also have to remember that that the freedom that they talk about this like this reduction this reducing of all constraints on reality has to exist in exact balance with the most control that you've ever experienced in your entire life more control than any any society has ever been able to to to impose on anyone and so those two things strangely co-exist together you can see it's a radicalization of a normal relationship let's say of something like freedom and authority which would just kind of organically uh manifest itself in a normal system not sometimes in a messy way and sometimes in a violent way but would would work itself out whereas now what we've got is in order to go in order to access the metaverse and to have access to absolute freedom to do whatever you want you have to give up every single aspect of yourself to this machine you have to be completely submitted to it you have to see you know everything about you is going to be owned by this thing and there's no way out of it and so it's like it's a it's it's 1984 and and brave new world at the same time like who thought that this was possible but it seems like that's what we're kind of seeing on the horizon where it's like it's absolute control and but one that is balanced out weirdly with this okay this is excellent this is tremendously helpful and thank you for um for us for speaking on his behalf because he's not here to speak for himself so that there's now an uh an issue of almost finesse or virtuosity or nuance because you can't you can't be critical of the self-organizing have of having a life of its own aspect of this thing because that's how it functions right so that can't be yeah i think the reason why they're doing that have that aspect of the conversation is because one of the problems that we're seeing in this this type of discussion is that when you point out to the machine people will say that's not possible because it requires a conspiracy a complete centralized conspiracy and therefore what you're saying is false and with paul's writing saying no what i'm saying doesn't require that i can these self these self-organizing systems exist this is one of them it's it's excessive it's it's parasitic and so and i can describe it and say that it exists without and you can't accuse me of saying it can't exist because it would require this insane like absolute top-down hierarchy to to to be communicating i think that argument is very well placed and thank you for bringing it up like the the the one of the things and you and i have talked about this right right one one of the one of the damages of conspiratuality is is its inability to see hyper objects and see hyper objects as self-organizing entities that can have a collective intelligence and kind of a collective agency and that's one of the big that's one of the the the the the really worrying uh kinds of blindness that that can do and so i think that argument is well placed what but what let me try what i'm trying to say is like the the like this is well it's running on its own and you're right that needs people need but that that's not it's that's not what's wrong with it right right right right and so what i think is not being said that there that needs to be said is that they're trying i'm going to say this very carefully and you you know paul better than i do you both know their work better than i do so i might be speaking out of ignorance so i'll just caveat that but i think they're trying to find a metaphysical location for evil they're trying to get so what happens in the enlightenment is we we lose sin and we lose evil and we replace it with immorality right now there was there's great advantages to that there's there's a lot gained but again there was something lost which is we actually don't right we like we we can't understand evil because we've reduced it to morality and we've reduced morality to individual choice because we you know we've kantian ethics autonomy right so what i'm trying to say they're trying to say something like they want i think what they would like to say is you know the machine is evil yeah but but i think that they i think so when i listen to them and i don't know if they would say this but what i get from them and this is maybe filtered through my own symbolic lens whatever is to say something like what i see is the desire to instrumentalize all things towards desire they won't say desire they say freedom but like i prefer the desire part because i think it's closer to a whole historical development well freedom is understood as freedom from restraint on desire exactly there you go and so so what they're saying is that you're trying to instrumentalize things in the name of this and i think that that's you that's evil that's a good definition of evil evil is instrument instrumentalization of things towards my own self okay selfish desire okay but this is the part that's missing from their work the conversation we're having right now which is this needs to be a discussion about what it's not there's no there's no reason to sort of ah because it's self-organizing or because it's distributed cognition or because it's a hyper object or because it takes on a life of its own it's what they basically want to say is that's evil yeah and it's evil that's that's not the same as the immorality of individual choice and behavior it's got a life of its own that the ancient notion of evil was that it was something beyond immoral behavior it had it had a non-existence you know what i mean when i'm doing it it has it has a reality independent of humanity this is augustine's great he claims his great discovery right that there's something pulling him down that's not his choice but it somehow infects his choice it makes him believe it's his choice right and then he tries with original sin and we won't get into the theology but the the insight there is that we want to say no no there's something beyond there's something else that goes on beyond immoral like you you can see you can see orent wrestling this with like when she's eichmann in the banality of evil like like why is this guy so banal he's making these banal individual they're immoral but they're banal how do we get the titanic evil of the nazis from a bunch of people acting immorally like like she's really that that's how i i'm reading her she's do you see what i'm trying no i totally agree but i think that there's a i think that the the narrative if you look at people can't i understand people don't understand the narrative they've been ruined by science fiction and in movies where they see like demons with wings that are with swords and fighting and so but that's the whole demonology that's what demonology is right demonology is to understand that evil is transpersonal it has it has a kind of parasitic intelligence and that you can recognize it you can name it and you can see the pattern and you can notice when it embodies itself and then you can see that for most of us sometimes most of us will will let's say give up to some demon sometimes like i get angry i do this i do that but then sometimes some people get completely taken over by something a parasitic pattern that they that they become completely uh taken over by and then they're possessed they're possessed by the demon of anger and that this is something that that happens i think that that's what demonology is and i mean i understand people would be hesitant to bring back demonology because it has so many weird connotations but if we can understand it properly we can see that it is this idea that there are these patterns that are intelligent and that are a have a gen agency and that you can recognize them and that like you said it's not it doesn't necessarily doesn't neces necessitate conscious actors all through the way that they embodied themselves it doesn't at all yes but you can still see the structure and you can still see it embodying itself so yeah i mean we've had another discussion about this you know we've had two and i the idea of uh you know distributed cognition uh collective intelligence and that i i think the evidence for this is overwhelming and you know uh dan chappie and i published papers on that and you know a shared agency and and i think so i think i think we're we're what i'm saying is we're because we're breaking out of the individualistic model of cognition we are now maybe groping or at least moving towards an ontology in which we can now relocate what we used to point out with demons and evil and not just try and place it within individual moral choice that's what i'm suggesting is actually the key thing that is happening here and i don't see them actually recognizing it i think it's implicit in what they're doing but i think this is actually the key thing that's happening but i think maybe i think they're fixing the wrong but it's funny because like i think that someone maybe i'm speaking for paul but i think that there's a fear people are afraid to talk about these things because like look what i just said i just said i'll say i'll say it straight out i said there's a demon that is a watcher like i said there's a that's watching over a pattern of reality and that is what is maintaining it together and making its boots work in the world and the these people are possessed and are unwilling agents of a demon and they're bringing about this system and it's like okay really and then everybody looks starts to look around and tries to get out of the room right but but the point and and you know we we don't completely agree on this although we like like uh whether or not the weather well maybe i could just say one thing so i think that our long conversation for hours and hours of conversation has made it possible for me to say that and i think you were able to see that i that what i mean has is coherent i'm using a language i'm trying to bring back a traditional language to explain something which i can then i could break it down in causalities i could use other languages if you want but that that language is is also possible and i think that would i think that paul if i had paul in a private conversation and i would say do you think there's a demon behind this he might say yes but he's like i don't know how to say that well he did say that the he felt that the the driver was metaphysical right so they pointed he's kind of pointing towards something like that okay that's an interesting question but you're you're you're a professor with tenure like you don't talk about kind of metaphysics in this in this way do you feel do you feel uncomfortable about what do you mean well i do talk about distribution you've got a reputation for you've got a reputation to protect we don't it's basically what i'm saying um like and jonathan's pointing at this that there is a discomfort with this language of discomfort with this but you're kind of you're pointing in that direction with the talk of kind of distributed cognition there's other people like bj campbell now talk about egregors and it's sort of like overlapping with with talk of the occult with with sort of areas that are not comfortably within academia for example i mean i i mean i published three papers on it so at least some part of it's comfortable in academia in in in important journals um so i i think this idea of extended cognition extended mind distributed cognition collective intelligence hyper objects hyperagents i think this is all like i said i think it's giving a metaphysics that is free from some of the his history that jason that jonathan acknowledged but he he was also he's trying to put it aside like he's trying like he's like you said there's all these imageries there's all this history there's all these horror movies there's all this other stuff that i but i don't see it as a way to right now i don't see it as a way to cast it aside but i cannot see it as a way to recapture it in a manner that will not be silly and and superstitious and and ridiculous that it will actually that i think that this moment and your work affords the possibility of going back into a medieval grimoire right and saying okay we can now understand this in a better way that the horror movie doesn't understand i i agree and that so give me that caveat and then my answer to you is given that caveat i'm happy to talk this way but in addition to demons i would talk about demons right and i would talk about demoniams these are all there's a multiplicity of terms in greek and we and we've only picked up the one term so socrates has his demonium his divine sign right right and there's and there's all i've been thinking about this so much and i've been trying to poke at it there seems to be the positive aspect and the negative aspect of these principalities and interestingly enough like saint gregory talks about the angels of the right hand and the angels of the left hand of god and he says that the angels of the left hands are basically the demons and they're unwittingly doing the transcendent work without them knowing what they're doing but so there isn't a neutral category and i'm like there's got to be a neutral category but in islam they have the notion of the jinn as an ambiguous category and i think in christianity that's why although officially in the in the theology we only have these this duality in the folk religion you'll always have the fairies and you'll always have these wood wood sprites all these manifestations of intelligent patterns that natural intelligent patterns that that people talk about that that are kind of ambiguous because you know that you know what happens in the woods is it's ambiguous right it's not always it's not good or bad it's like you know it can be it but it does it still has that wonder so i've been trying to find spaces for that but i i'm not totally sure i found a way to talk about it yet that is coherent with to have like a yeah this idea of these like the way that the daemon would have functioned in greek culture would have not necessarily been good or bad it would just have been like something that you that that eros is considered a daemon yeah in in the symposium right and and then socrates demonium is something that's also just uh one step aside because it's not a daemon but it's a demon it's it's something like a demon in him um so it's it's a much more it's a much more complicated and interesting taxonomy yeah um but you have the notion of the guardian angel again in some russian theology for example there's a notion that the guardian angel is the best aspect of you right it's like the aspect of you projected into heaven you could say and that's what your guardian angel is and that's what's kind of if you read when you ever when you come to saying gregor of nisa and you read the life of moses you'll see he talks about he talks about the angel on the right shoulder and the demon on the left shoulder and he puts those both into aaron and he says aaron is both of those at the same time you'll find it very interesting when you get there anyways sorry this is way off now no this is still on topic um there's one last thing i wanted to bring up and i'll talk about paul vander clay who which which ties a few of these things together and also pushes into something of personal interest which is uh the future of rebel wisdom and kind of this sense that well wrapping up the project and moving on to other things so paul mentioned how this area of the internet is kind of dealing with the questions what is the nature of the civilizational crisis we're facing and what are the paths out um and he said part of the difficulty and the opportunity of the moment is that this little corner of the internet is what holds the heterodox community together is resistance against the hegemonic thesis institutions but he says this makes the heterodox space to some degree always reactive and that reactivity is antithetical to the sort of institution building that's necessary for sustained human reformation and flourishing and this overlaps you you tweeted out i think in 2020 saying that the idea of like heterodox rebel dark was not a sort of sustainable platform for building new institutions or for whatever needs to come next which is something intuitively that i've been finding and feeling with the narrative journey of rebel wisdom like it feels like it was the right thing to to cover that insurgency it was a real is a necessary moment sort of from 2016 onwards and covering that whole narrative was was the right thing to do but for me it feels like that story has been told and that actually what's needed now is synthesis what's needed now is actually a process of integration and not just a sort of rebellion or a heterodoxy so yeah i'd love to hear your thoughts on that i agree i've even you might have not seen that tweet but i said very early i think like right maybe a few months after it started i said i do not identify with the intellectual dark web like i just do not identify with that name i don't want there's something there something that to me doesn't that's not what i want like i don't want to do that i won't be just a guy poking at the system because then you lose you've already lost um and i but i think that there is like you're right and where you are and what you want to do next i think it's possible right now because there was a need for some deconstruction there's always a need to kind of break down the assumptions and then once the champions are breakdown you can't just keep doing that you have to then plant a new seed you have to rebuild it and the parable of the sower christ talks about right the seed grows in the the plowed earth you have to do it plowed earth mean it's not already a path it's not already anything else you have to kind of break down some things and then after that we can kind of build out of it and so i think damn it i wish the bat i hope that that it's something you're able to find your your line or your path to create something positive but we're all doing it in our own way it's not just yeah it's not it's not going to be a um i guess the issue like uh on my tombstone neither nostalgia nor utopia um is um right um i agree we you know paul and i had a recent video where we're talking about what this what's what we're facing right now the choices we're facing uh he and i um and and and and the i mean i uh la paul's work comes to mind here like if you could see what's going to happen in the transformation you're not going through a real transformation if you can infer your way through it then you're not you're just you're just extrapolating right and so that's why i'm really resistant to utopias because it's a claim that you can see where right and then that that undermines what i think is happening which is a genuine transformation so the difficulty what we're facing right now yeah the imaginal link is is difficult the imaginal link is is difficult um and and and it's and it's needed you can't do it without the imaginal link you you can't go through transformation without doing imaginal serious play that's the talk i gave at cambridge like ritual is absolutely necessary but the the the question then becomes well what are right we we sort of like we deconstructed we broke the frame but how do we how do we how do we properly i guess how do we properly ritualize the transformation um because the the thing and this is where there might be some significant different difference between jonathan and i although he says very provocative things about the death and resurrection of christianity itself so um um like i don't i don't know i'm not it's not clear in my mind what how how we move forward and start to build the civilization one thing i think i've tried to take lessons from history i've tried to take a lesson from the birth of christianity and the notion of stealing the culture you don't you don't come in with a political revolution you don't come in with socioeconomic policies what you do is you you build new homes new ways of people being together and gathering together and you built and then they network together and you you build you steal the culture and and so i think that's what has to happen and but i like it it comes down to very practical questions like we're trying to network a lot of these emerging communities of practice together and we want to vet them but we're like who are we to do this and where is this authority coming from and what are the criteria by which we do the vetting right now we've been we've just been relying on i trust jonathan and i trust paul but like if we might make a civilization that's got to scale in some fashion so um i totally agree with that it's the the i think we're at the kairos we're at the point of the turning um i i'm suspicious of people who just say well here's the answer nostalgia or i see the future utopia very suspicious of that um so i i i don't i don't know i like i i don't know what to do i mean i know i keep doing all of what i'm doing and stealing the culture and everything but i'm really wrestling really deeply about how can i behave virtually and responsibly in this kairos and i take that question the question is haunting me because i i i'm i'm really suspicious i'm suspicious of any easy answer for the reasons i've given and something else and i know part of it is part of it is you can train your ear and that's part of what you're doing right you're trying to can i hear the the first notes of the new melody can i hear the calling and part of what we're drawing is yeah but how do i turn that in from a metaphor into something we do something we share this is this is what what what what so um i really want to encourage you with what you're doing and um [Music] i i think you're putting yourself into trying to catch the wind of a maelstrom and um but if you're a good sailor right um i there's a one of my favorite scenes in moby dick the lee shore he talks about this ship and right and there's a storm and it's outside of the port and what the ship wants to easily do is just go into the port but what it has to do is it has to marshal the wind and use the wind to go out to sea that's what i think you're launching yourself into and i think it is admirable and challenging i hope i can help you uh but um i i there's i've come to sort of something analogous it's really reverberating in me it's like how do i do what novel said how do i virtuously turn right my sails in the maelstrom so i can sail he calls it into the open sea of truth right um and i i and part of course what what people are wrestling with in moby dick is there's no easy answer um so i i deeply uh empathize and admire and i hope i can be of help i hope you will help me because i hope you'll help me because all of this is for me this is this is this is for me the the central existential virtue question i think right now it's the most exigent pressing how can i be virtuous in a genuine kairos yeah yeah i want to speak to that because that's because i framed it as talking about kind of wrapping up rebel wisdom but obviously that's in order to to go to something else and it's also there's something in what you're saying about what is what is my piece to hold what is your piece to hold what is your piece to hold and they're they're different like you i can and my piece to hold i think is is more going from making things just for youtube to trying to get more mainstream and legacy media attention on some of these ideas some of these practices going back completing that kind of hero's journey of going from the legacy out into the alternative and coming back with the gold and supporting people like yourself and and shining a light on it and saying this is significant hey everyone look at this this is significant and this is how it fits together with other things that's the thing i think that i am able to bring because i've been involved in so many different conversations i've also got a sense of where the mainstream conversation is and what the pressure points are on that conversation to be able to say this is how that relates to this and this is why it's significant because of the times we're going through and that's the story like that's the story that i think i'm called to to tell and that now is no longer a rebel thing it's no longer just an alternative thing i think it was an alternative thing and it coalesced as an alternative thing but now it's it's time to to see how many of those pressure points we can kind of we can press on and there's yeah one of those is the media side another of those is for me i talked to jonathan yesterday about going back into the gender conversation it feels very timely to to go back into there that in a very sort of mature way and what is a healthy relationship was a healthy conversation between the masculine the feminine look like because that's a huge cultural pressure point that again because of the the background and the stuff that i've been doing with rebel wisdom is also feels like something i'm positioned to articulate but your your job is just to recreate the actual revolution john you haven't taken on a big plan at all yourself yeah i mean i i yeah i do want the extra revolution of the french revolution but i love the way you talk when you talk about kind of the distributing of practices like that has to be what it's about it's like how do you create those practices of virtue those practices of connection that then become an embodied living thing that changes things rather than coming up with an idea that's going to change things yeah i think it's that um i think we have to recover the the distributed functionality so you could you could move up levels of this we used to have the the the the triad of the university the monastery and the church and the university and they always they overlap but so i'm just talking about emphasis the university emphasizes knowledge the monastery wisdom and then the church emphasizes yeah but that knowledge and that wisdom that better be transferable to lives or it's worthless right and so we that functionality like i i don't i we it's absolutely necessary but i don't know how we reconfigure it today the university has spun off in its own way and of course the church is spun off and then it keeps doing it built spins and fragments paul would be the first to admit that protestantism is not slowing the rate at which it fragments it's still happening right and of course the monastery is largely obsolete or irrelevant to most people's lives and so how we reconfigure that um i don't know but yeah that's what's needed um and hey like the reason why i i need to talk to people like jonathan is i mean i think jonathan is tuned has really finely tuned his year to catch that melody the first notes of it um in a way that i i haven't and that's that's what i think is a really important value right now yeah thanks i mean i i don't know we'll see you know i definitely i mean it's clearly i have a i have a different i mean my my approach is i is rather i think that the new world will be given and i it's hard for people to understand what that means but i think that the world functions worlds are built on revelations like they just are and and i hate for that people i know people struggle to understand what i'm saying but you know that's why if you look at you if you look at every civilization it always ultimately started with like some relations between a god and a human like every single civilization there's always at the outset some demigod that every things have a revelatory they need a revelation in order to to start and christianity we have a sense in which there will be right there's an eschatological notion that there will be a revelation and there's a sense in which you have to live in a moment where we're calling upon that revelation right in the book of revelation you see it's like come lord jesus right that image of the saints that are waiting and anticipating you know waiting with anticipation and calling upon this revelation to happen but there's a manner in which i truly believe that until that happens we have to take what is given and we have to make the most of it and so that's one of the reasons why i to me the best thing i can do is to take the christian tradition and to be able to do what i can to make it as vibrant as i can and to make it as real as possible and uh and so it can help you understand why why the strategy that i'm it's not a strategy but like why i live the way that i do you could say it that way yeah but there's a notion and i i i i see it in dionysus and maximus so i don't think it's completely foreign to your tradition and but it's it's much more pronounced in the neoplatonic tradition about a cultivated receptivity mm-hmm right a very uh like uh and and you have to hear this a profound kind of virtuosity and virtue like and and this is in the key of a key thing in taoism by cultivating a kind of profound receptivity there's a lot of ways in which we're blinded uh we're dulled uh we're deafened and that will will prevent us from i'll use your language for not for before hearing the revelation or scene and so i do think there's a lot we i and i don't think you're recommending passivity i think there's a lot we can do um about cultivating a deep and profound kind of receptivity that will be will become responsibility responding that we need to respond when the the new insight the new disclosure happens i do think that is something that can be recommended right now for people i'm sure we could find another load of more topics i'm talking for several more hours but um this is a fantastic conversation really glad that you took the time to come over from montreal i was such a joy thanks for facilitating it thanks for making it possible like john thanks for it's been great to have real these these people sadly are not embodied with us right now but we definitely have been have taken all the advantage of actually being in the same space and seeing that dynamism it's it's great wonderful i feel like the world is kind of coming alive again you know after cobit as well yeah and also thank both of you like the thing i was feeling to to say is like when when you share about your work that you're doing both of you i feel like a real sense of like congruence and authenticity and like the words matching the actions and sort of yeah really living that in the world so really glad to meet you in person yeah it's time properly yeah and john always well thank you david it's this has been wonderful um and um uh like that yeah but with jonathan said being here the the the dynamic living spirit of it has been a fantastic um and again it's always it's it's a joy to talk to to jonathan and and so i do think that i to use the metaphoric i hear the first notes in these kinds of conversations that's where i hear them now in the media logos when the logos really takes over and we're following it rather than just saying what we want to say that's where i start to get the first sort of query of notes from the horizon and so it's always a privilege to do that and i hope that what we've done will be that for other people they can start to hear the beginning

Channel: Rebel Wisdom

Views: 33,291

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Id: OBErw604LXg

Length: 49min 49sec (2989 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 31 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Kansasblank]

Screw David fuller. "I'm orange , your blue,let's go make a fire and chant". What a horses ass