April 11, 2025 • 61 mins
The cults of COVID may never go away, but this is why they are to be expected.
This is part II of the plasticpills diatribe on religion focusing on metaphor as the original decision making process in a world and specifically the metaphors of religious laws that begin with keeping your hands clean but end with the mass extermination of people.
Listen ad free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
This is part II of the plasticpills diatribe on religion focusing on metaphor as the original decision making process in a world and specifically the metaphors of religious laws that begin with keeping your hands clean but end with the mass extermination of people.
Listen ad free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
We are all of us believers.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
We're all religious, and religious is to believe in a
symbolic expression.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Of the rules that exist so a society can function
day to day. So what we usually call religions as the.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Kinds that own real estate, this is what I'm going
to call institutional religions, ones that own.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Real estate, real estated religions.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
But the rituals of institutional religion or real estated religions,
these are two original religion. What a cartoon animation is
to live action, which is to say, it's most of
the same television conventions but abstracted into simpler shapes with
(01:16):
brighter colors. If the basic religion of a society says
wash your hands and don't shit near your water supply,
it turns out that those societies where cleanliness is valued
people get sick less often, or got sick less often.
So we're handed down these conventional rules for reasons that
we don't remember, but they worked.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Now.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I don't know where the prohibition on eating pork comes from,
but it's probably something like that. So real estate religions
have what are just basically good ideas but in a
completely distorted form. And the distortion takes place over centuries.
So when the basic religion says, you know, washing your
hands is a good idea because people get sick less often,
(02:00):
what we see as the metaphorized version of this in
real estate religion is use your left hand to wash
your right hand. Do this three times, then rinse your
mouth three times, then say a bunch of words, then
your head, and if you happen to fart in the
middle of this ritual, then you have to start over.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So this is the brightly colored disnification of an idea
that we can see at its root is just functionally
a good idea. And then we get the crazy color simplified,
abstracted version of this centuries later forgetting the origin point
of it. And when we have a bunch of disnification,
(02:40):
then religion, as this sort of Disneyland now contains the
content of everything we consider to be the spirit world
or the realer world that we can't see, or the
real world that is not directly apparent to us, that
contains heaven, hell, justice, car whatever. And when it comes
(03:02):
to the disnification and its production, which is just to say,
the metaphorization into a representational system, this is also what
advertising does, right, It takes basic religious insights, basic religion,
original religion, It says cleaning is good, and it also
(03:22):
metaphorizes and turns them into hyper abstractions that now they
also work on their own merit and not just the
merits of the original idea. That is something we believe, right,
So cleanliness is good. Every culture, all the time believes
that in some way. And what does advertising do with that? Well, now,
(03:44):
it's if you stink at all, that is absolutely disgusting.
This is only possible either with indoor plumbing, where it's
a rule you can't stink because you're capable.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Of washing yourself every day.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
And if that that's not possible, then you need to
invent perfume and deodorant, and you have to sell perfume
and deodorant. So it's not only it's not only enough
to not stink, because even though the stink is not
necessarily what's bad, the cleaning is actually what's doing the work.
But we still continue to associate.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Body odor with basically a form of sin.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
You know, you could say it's a form of sin.
And what do you use to cure body odor? Now
it's deodorant and perfume. An advertising play is off the
original distinction, which is to say it is sinful to
stink in public, and we could continue. The other examples
are shaving, shaving body hair, which is gendered too write
(04:46):
because because women don't have beards, Gillette has to sell
razors for them.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
So what do they do.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
They use an advertising campaign to tell women that having
pit hair or leg hair is disgusting. Your you're sinning
against the social order. The social order says that cleanliness
is near to godliness, and now you have to shave,
and if you don't.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
That's gross.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
It doesn't matter if you believe in it, it doesn't
matter if it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Most people, most of the time are.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Gonna follow the basic religion, and advertising, just like real
estate religion, is sort of a distortion of that.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
One more example is teeth whitening.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
I remember this very vividly because I don't think I
think in my lifetime this has been created. But I
remember seeing a commercial where there's like a man and
a woman. They're kind of smiling at each other from
across the room. The woman gets up to go walk
towards him, and as she does, he smiles and his
teeth are yellow, and there's like a horror music sting boodoo,
(05:50):
and she goes, she makes a disgusted face, and instead
of walking up to him and talking, she walks past him.
So this is how I learned that having yellow teeth
is disgusting, which is of course just meant to sell
white strips and whitening toothpaste.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
So all of these come.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
All of these work because they are metaphors for the
tenet in basic religion that cleanliness is good and the
weirdness either of laws created by advertising or laws created
by religions as opposed to I was going to say pragmatism.
(06:29):
I don't want to call it pragmatism because it's not
pragmatism in original religion, like it's more akin to a
random mutation, Like it's an accident that human society's every
single one.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
A repeated accident.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
But it's an accident that we have cleanliness, basic rules
and expectations, because every single one of these expectations precedes
germ theory. So it had to be some sort of
trial and error where we discover But if you're washing
your stink off, your society is healthier, And of course
it's not because the stink itself is harmful. It's because
(07:07):
there's bacteria and germ theory and everything that.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
We know about it now.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
But all of this stuff original religion places expectations of
cleanliness on you because it works. We don't know why
are The people that are doing it don't know why
it works, but they don't argue with it, just like
we don't argue with the fact that yellow teeth are
unattractive and that women shouldn't have Harry pitts.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
What are you gonna do argue with that? You can,
it won't work.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
So all of this stuff that constitutes the spirit world,
it stays at bay generally until there's a social crisis,
and then the spiritual bursts into the world of convention,
and suddenly we again have modern witches and modern demon
hunters and end time cults that are processing a declining
(07:57):
social situation into it's symbolic sense.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
So I guess just that's to say they.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Have a better understanding of what social crises consist in
You have to have a sense of what religion is
saying about it and doing about it. You're gonna have
some that say, and I've heard them saying this, that
social crisis. This is because of a lack of morality,
you know, postmodernism did all this, or because we have
(08:24):
strayed from tradition or meaning or the true way whatever
that is, the true way, registered trademark. Usually it's Judeo Christianity,
which is which is in odd conflation. But for reasons
that I'm not going to go into today anyway, traditional morality.
The crisis is caused by a loss in traditional morality.
(08:46):
But of course we and I, as proper good boy
historical materialists, I'd be willing to bet that any social
crisis is at least in the last instance, caused by
a visible decline in living standards, and noticeable decline in
living standards if everyone's got a sort of future to
(09:08):
look forward to, expectations, you know, you don't have to
worry about your kids.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
In a situation like that.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
You don't need real estate religion to actually do very much.
People I'm sure did will continue to go to church
or do their prayers or whatever. But in upswinging societies,
what you don't see is a lot of zealots, which
is to say, you don't see much faith in the
(09:38):
kinds of religious expression that are demanding change, religion that
demands change. This is reserved for crisis times, and in
crisis times is when you get end times, cults, messiah cults,
great awakenings, and then the physical violence or social violence
(10:01):
that accompanies religious fervor seemingly every single time it happens.
But universalist sort of liberal democracy that's open to strangers
and others and for social reforms. This can only be
the religion of a society that is not getting worse
(10:22):
now at the moment. In the West, which just means
the places where I get news from the West, we
are witnessing a rapid decline of faith in society, in civilization,
and that means a flurry of new faiths, new beliefs,
vibe investments, and in order to understand those, we need
(10:46):
to understand religion and what it does or what it's.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Doing right now.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
So yeah, like I said, we have a bunch of
explanations for our current social collapse. And you don't hear
this anymore, but I remember like it was yesterday. It
started as lack of decorum, magism, trump Ism, as a
lack of decorum, far right Nazism, they're just not polite enough.
(11:12):
Right then the rabble are getting seduced by conment. This
was the twenty sixteen line. You don't hear that anymore,
but it was only nine years ago. Today, the only
correct object of faith for at least half, seems to
be some form of millenarianism. Like there are a bunch
(11:34):
of liberals just saying, no, we were on the right track,
now we're getting off it. And that's maybe half of society.
But the other half lamb basts that half and says, no,
we need the end of the world, which is to
say that in a spiritual sense, the West whatever, that
the West cannot be saved, and a new world has
(11:54):
to be born, and for it to be born, someone
has to usher it in for us. Because again, like
I said last time, religion is really just about not
having to change your habits. So someone's gonna usher in
the end times a messiah figure on behalf of God.
Now I'm saying, if you know your history, you know
(12:14):
that the apocalypse has been predicted thousands and thousands of
times before, and perhaps worlds have ended, but the world
hasn't ended. Now, if you want my guess, because this
always happens, I'm gonna just I'd say it's probably some
like mammalian nervous brain response that like when you observe
(12:36):
that things are on the decline, then it turns, it
becomes rationalized as other people are getting what you should
rightfully get, especially as a as a faithful believer. And
then if you abstract that instinct that is like unconscious response,
then it's evil, right, some sort of evil is siphed
(13:00):
off something that was meant for you, which you know
makes sense at a certain level. If you used to
have a lot, now you have a little, that stuff
probably went somewhere. And this is literally the teaching of
another culture that faced a crisis. It wasn't the crisis
of a decline so much as the crisis of observing what.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Other people had.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
And these are the cargo cults in Melanesia.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
And maybe you've seen the pictures.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
They actually started before World War Two, but the cool
pictures come from post World War two when American and
Japanese soldiers were stationed on these islands, you know, during
the whole island hopping in the Pacific theater, and they
would set up you know, temporary runways, radio towers, and
they would receive shipments of cargo from the sea and sky,
(13:54):
and then the war ends, they pack up and leave,
and the islanders, hoping to lose were the cargo back,
they build these full sized airplanes and air traffic control
towers and satellite dishes and landing strips out of wood
and torches, hoping that this would cause the cargo to return.
(14:16):
The planes and the boats would return. And usually when
this is described, it's described in terms of them not
understanding causality. But this story gets weirder. So the leaders
of these cargo cults, the cargo cults were a response
to a disruption, and they were also disruptive. And the
leaders told the people that their ancestors had been sending
(14:42):
them this cargo from the spirit world, but that the
whites were changing the address tags on the cargo and
then taking it for themselves, because the white people the
soldier station there, are inherently sneaky and clever. Now, the
attitude to wars towards the cargo cults in a lot
of the early writings on it was like, Ah, that's
(15:04):
so sad. They just don't understand how causality works. So
they're dumb enough to think that this cargo is theirs,
and that it will eventually return and bring about their
utopian society on Earth. And it's basically totally dwindled. But
there are still some cargo cults still going. They're still
waiting for the Savior, and the Savior depending on the cult,
(15:26):
goes by different names. I think the most famous is
the John From cult, where they they take out the
American flag and march around doing military drills hoping that
John From will return one day with the cargo John From.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
It's probably most.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Likely it's an abbreviation of the original name John From America.
But John From America to this day, for those who
believe in him, he's worked behind the scenes because he's white. Yeah,
John From is white, but because he knows how to
outsmart the bad whites, the sneaky whites. He's one of
(16:09):
the good ones, and he is going to outsmart the
bad whites, who are the parasites in this situation. They're
parasites because they are siphoning off the good cargo that
is sent by the Islanders' ancestors. John From is going
to remove the parasites and utopia will follow. Now, this
(16:34):
is exactly the teaching of trump Ism and has been
since the beginning that he's either secretly or publicly dealing
with the parasites, the parasites of American society. Things would
be getting better here if not for the parasites, because
America itself, you know, the flag, the founding, the fathers,
(16:59):
the Constitution, and all of this is unequivocally good in
the in the symbolic sphere that's that's operating here, in
the cartoon that's operating here, it's it's wholly good. And
there are these evils that are poisoning it and preventing
it from becoming the utopia that is its destiny.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
And who are the parasites?
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Immigrants, gang members, drag queens, transgenders, satanic pedophiles, and then
wokeism as a sort of thing in the air, a
miasma that's corrupting, that's a corrupting influence. Now, these corrupting
parasitic people are corrupting the pure white center. I don't
(17:49):
mean white the race, just you know, white, clean, the
clean destiny center of America. So to purge them is
you know, the logical next step, just like in the
John Frum. If you purge the parasites who are stealing
your cargo, the cargo, symbolically as the standard of living
that is owed to you because you grow up watching
(18:10):
TV shows where the characters had that for themselves. If
you purge the parasites, you get your destiny. And this
is a form repeated constantly, usually in sects against a
major real estate religion. When society is downturning, you get
(18:31):
new savior cults, you get radical reform cults, and a
section of these radical reform cults are calling for the
end of the world. So if we are to understand
our moment, then the usual explanations of rational self interest
(18:51):
or a lapse in public morality, or of parasites stealing
what is rightfully owed to us. These explanations address the
crisis already at a level of abstraction. And what's under
the abstraction. I don't think I have to tell you.
It's almost boring to say because it's so simple. You
(19:13):
just look at the value of wages versus GDP.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
One's flat one goes up.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Wealth Inequality just means that your wages and this is
a direct experience, right your wages are worthless.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
And assets cost more.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
And you see this every time you go into the
store and your kid's life is worse than yours, just
like the cargo cults in the Pacific. The societies were
doing fine until they saw that these guys just have
planes and boats randomly dropping off crates of food for them.
(19:47):
They're not doing any work, they're not hunting, they're not planting,
They're just sitting in the radio tower and not doing
any work and they.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Get food dropped off to them.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
So just witnessing this inequality caused entire religious systems on
these islands that had probably lasted a thousand years to
just blow up, and ours too. It's a crisis, no
doubt about that.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
And yeah, as a.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Good historical materialist, boy, you chalk it up to inequality.
But everything after that is an abstraction. But to say
abstraction is not to say illusion, because religious feeling, religious fervor,
this is not illusory. But I would say that the
answer has to appear somewhere between an ideal explanation, for example,
(20:38):
saying this is a problem because we have bad morals now,
and a material explanation. So what good analysis should be
for I'm saying is what good theory should do is
account for how you get from one to the other.
How do you get from the material explanation to the
explanation of religious feeling Because there's a gap.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
There, there's a whole in your theory unless you can
explain that.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I think you can explain it by metaphor. How does
it decline in your group's living standards? Produce a moral
and a mythological explanation. We need to look at metaphor
and what is being abstracted as the end result.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
So to that end, I say.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
That faith is the basis of an economy, and that
economy is symbolic. And here representations take the place of
real things or previously real things, such that you can't
see through the representation back to whatever is being represented.
(21:43):
It's like trying to consider a world without language, except
we can only consider any world in terms of language.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
It's like trying to.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Explain to a blind person what color is like how
would you do it? But in this replacement in our
secondary economy, now the representational economy, belief functions is a
sort of energy, sort of it fuels exchanges. To call
techno techno fascists, crystal fascist, acceleration, o overlord, cabal. To
(22:15):
call these guys morons, I mean that's it's a burn
to us, isn't it. We lost We're losing two morons.
But if they're in charge underrating belief here, underrating their
beliefs and the people, more importantly, the people who believe
in them, that's going to get us all killed. So
we should at least make an effort to how religion
(22:37):
functions in crises, in this symbolic economy, where a crisis
in living standards becomes a crisis of something else, demons, the.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
End of the world, and so on.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
So from where I'm sitting, religion as a social technology
is it's its own thinking machine. It's like a cultural
symbol processor, and we inherit the symbols without really realizing
where they came from or what crises produced them originally.
But for the system to produce these symbols, it requires energy.
(23:17):
It requires exchanges of energy like any system does, and
it gets this from believers. So for Emil Durkheim, the
one of the founders of sociology, the original expression of
religion is in the form of mana, which is a
(23:38):
kind of energy that flows through all things. It's not
really anywhere, but it gathers in places and it's not visible,
but real and eventually more real.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Than everything else.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
And mana or the equivalent mana as belief. It flows
in a social system to certain people like leaders, for example.
It flows especially to certain events like I don't know, weddings,
funerals where respect, honor, prayer.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
All that stuff is the gathering of faith as.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Energy, and by consequence it creates the entire spirit world,
and the spirit world eventually replaces the real one leaders
as the blessed ones, the ones with mana. This keeps
the hierarchy of society in place. And just like with
the cleaning rituals or the cleansing washing rituals, none of
(24:39):
this appears consciously. It's more a justification of what is.
Then you have also you know sacred spaces where mana
the faith energy gathers. You know holy sites, burial grounds,
and so on. So it functions like an economy belief
economy invisible to the name, but it's also everywhere. And
(25:02):
this is where I'm.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Going with this.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
An any form of exchange looks different depending on the
point of view of the observer of the exchange, like,
for example, an economic exchange appears as a sale from
one position, but as a purchase. From the other position,
they're the same event, but they appear differently, and both
accounts are correct of what happened. So the analogy here
(25:28):
is that if the selling of belief is a transfer
of energy, then there should be a debt produced.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
There should be a pool of.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Mana where we are sending our hopes and dreams and
destinies into as well. And that pool of mana is
the property of society in general. And the mana clumps
eventually cluster, and they become holy animals versus profane animals,
and then they become gods, gods of this area or
(25:58):
that area, the god of this river. Then, as it abstracts,
it becomes a god of justice and the God of love.
Then eventually we get one infinite pool of mana, which
is the God outside of nature. So the flip side
of belief, as seen from a different angle, just like
the purchase and the selling, are to descriptions of the
(26:21):
same event, But we need an equivalent with belief. So
drawing from Boudriat, we just call that seduction and religion
as well as the products of religion, messiahs, gods, these
are nothing if not seductive.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
And now all.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
This is a kind of complicated way of saying that
we don't believe in anything arbitrarily. So when we look
at the past to judge it as compared with the
present by whichever metric, which is why anyone brings up
the past who's not a historian any way, is to
recall the symbol of it, the produced symbol of it.
(26:59):
And even when we look inside the computer, the computer
of religion, the sort of black box. And if we
try to introspect, how has this affected my mind?
Speaker 1 (27:10):
How has this affected me?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
When we arrive at the attempt to think of what
we are thinking? And is this spontaneous or is it
caused elsewhere? It's a it's part of the ritual practice
of philosophy, trying to think of thinking itself introspection or
meditation or whatever. It's already your mind is already littered
(27:33):
with religious artifacts, like the soul. The soul's real, even
though it doesn't exist, but it's real in the sense
that I become something to be looked at while introspecting,
I become a thing. And it's not just me who
becomes a thing, but all things become things. And into
(27:54):
our comfortable world of things. Science arrives on the scene
at some point and breaks off into other methods of description,
and we find ourselves increasingly in the embarrassing position of
discovering that a lot of real things don't actually exist. Unsurprisingly,
(28:15):
the fact of things not existing doesn't affect religion or
public life in the least.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Like time is real, but it might not exist.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
It almost certainly doesn't exist the way we experience it,
but that existence or non existence is completely irrelevant to society,
which depends upon time existing in a certain way.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
And sometimes time.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Is linear, sometimes it's cyclical, but however it goes, it's real.
Even if we could prove it doesn't exist, it's still real.
And everyone is religious in the sense of continuing to
believe in things that they know to be absurd. Being
in society is like the the k fame aspect of
(29:02):
professional wrestling, which is, even if you know it isn't real.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
You yet do it anyway.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
And this is exactly what happened with the cargo cults
as well. They continued doing their rituals building planes out
of bamboo after they were told what planes really were,
even after the leaders were all loaded up to a
on a plane taken to Australia.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
To see how the sausage is made.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
After that, they went back to their islands even more
invigorated than ever to keep waiting for that cargo. Now,
why do they do that? Why do we do that? Well,
of course, real cargo is not made of goods and
metal and food. The real cargo is made of faith.
(29:57):
So perhaps elon and trump and for will not make
my experience better. But the act of faith itself is
worth more than the chance that it's wrong. So to
say that another way, as much as we all I'll
put it in first person terms, as much as I
know that all the arguments against the existence of self
(30:18):
identical objects is wrong, I still believe in them, even
knowing it's absurd to And it seems that even the
least religious people we can point to.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Diogenies.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Diogenes apparently lived in a baryl in public. But he
didn't live in a barrel in the wilderness, right, He
lived in a barrel in the middle of town, and
you know, pissed on people and masturbated publicly in the
middle of town. And yet he still obeys the rule
of grammar while being apostate to the social religion. So
(30:57):
religion as a social technology, it's purpose seems to me
to be turning what we already want to believe into metaphors.
And this is one of those things like I can
describe it happening, but I don't know why. This comes
from some primal, originary thing that worked, something that just
(31:20):
worked itself out, that metaphors work this way when it
comes to our thinking, And yeah, I can't. I don't
have an explanation. I don't know why, but I can
see what it does, and that is that metaphors seem
to be easier to process.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Things are easier to process than processes. And as we
are in a broad.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Crisis of civilization owing to the explosions of new religious fervor,
even though they don't all look like QAnon, but damn,
QAnon is profoundly illustrative.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
It's it's a.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Fully formed folk religion, bearing all the traits previous, But
it doesn't look like that to anyone who's inside it,
which is another truism. Occult's never a cult when you're inside.
It only looks like a cult from the outside.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
So I've been using.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
This broad term crisis saying that an individual turns to
religion in times of crises, and also that cultures do
or subcultures do. But religion's a little like politics in
the sense that in an upswing in a time of improvement,
you don't really need them very much, right, They sort
(32:33):
of flare up as a response to spiraling something not
going very well. And not going very well means, of course,
in the last instance, that if you trace the causal
chain backwards, is it living standards relative living standards?
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Are they going up or down?
Speaker 2 (32:53):
I have a suspicion here that somewhere in our mammal
brain is day Kurt's penial gland that keeps a check
on how everyone else is doing versus how we are doing,
and we're not aware of that. But this, this processor
seems to be causal. It measures the social vibe for us,
(33:17):
and we can tell or feel maybe whether we are
on our way up or on our way down. So
then we get back to belief as this thing that's
being processed. The input of religion, just like the input
of advertising, is the social structure at its most basic.
(33:39):
Not rational arguments for the social structure, just the things
we believe automatically, like clean clean is good, original religion.
I've been calling it that. I don't know if that's
the best word for it, but it's just the minimum
required expressions of faith in society that keep it going
(34:01):
on a day to day level, and the fundamental expectations.
They're pretty easy to do. We can still observe them
today in their normal functioning because they are universal. Every
culture has them. They have things like don't yell in
public unless you have a good reason to, unless there's
an emergency, or wear the right clothes depending on who
(34:25):
you are, your class, your gender, boys clothes for boys,
girls clothes for girls. Another one would be don't act
unpredictably if you're in public, which means you know, you
stand when everyone else is standing. You don't butt in lineups,
don't be loud at a time when everyone else is
(34:47):
being quiet. And if you break one of these rules,
if you mess up, then give some one a wave.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Oh yeah, and shit where you're supposed to.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
These are the basic ones, and then there's a bunch
more varied ones that are different, less universal, but how
to date, how to be a how to be a
good guy, how to be a good dad as opposed
to a bad guy or a bad dad, and these
are these seem to be more culturally dependent, but they
are still unwritten rules of how to treat people.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Oh. Another one is like, how how do you how
do you treat people older than you? Do you show
them respect?
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Ours A culture doesn't really have that, but others others do,
And certain people can't follow the rules. Toddlers, for example,
they get a pass because everyone knows they aren't working
yet they aren't, they aren't integrated yet. Bad adults though
they don't get a pass. There's usually a special place
(35:45):
to put them. You know, if you're drunk in public,
if you have a breakdown in public, there's someone to
call to, you know, put you somewhere. If you cause
a scene, there's going to be an apparatus, an emergent
apparatus to deal with you, and often a special place
to put you. And all I'm saying with all this
is all of the unwritten rules that you follow. They
(36:07):
don't have anything to do with your decision to follow them,
your rational justification for them, although that can come after.
But it's very difficult to break them, even when you
know that they are arbitrary, Like are you physically capable
of walking out onto the street naked. Yeah, are you
(36:27):
physically capable of budding to the front of the line
in the grocery store. You're physically capable, But I'm pretty
sure I couldn't do it.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
And the reason the.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Society functions is because most people can't do it, except
for diogenies. But even though diogenies breaks all the social codes.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
There are codes that he can't break, like the rules
of grammar.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Now, these sorts of rules that are almost immediately overcoded
by the mana complex, the mana computer. They are unwritten,
they emerge organically, and every society has the same ones
generally speaking.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
But they are also not pre symbolic.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
So I don't wanna I don't want to be saying
if we just went back to the original, if we
went back to the the origin point, then everything would
be okay. And I don't think that's true. There's no
heartbreak where we have raw social codes that suddenly turn
into abstracted objects or abstracted laws, because the original laws,
(37:31):
even the ones that we follow, they are still metaphor
they're still abstracted. For example, in our greetings, So if
you're gonna greet someone, you wave, you shake hands. In
other cultures. You bow, that's that's the rule. And these
actions are themselves metaphors. Waving means I'm not aggressing. I
(37:57):
don't have a weapon. Shaking hands, I assume, is probably
the same thing. Here's my open hand, I'm not hiding
a weapon and bowing Similarly, here it's like here, look
at the back of my head. Here's the most vulnerable
part of my body that I'm exposing to you because
I trust you, I respect you, you respect me, and
(38:18):
I know you're not going to kill me if I
show you the back of my head. This is like
when a dog shows you his neck. It's a Is
that a metaphor? It's a metaphoric expression of respect or
trust or some mutuality, even when the original meaning has
disappeared and like everything else has been taken up into
(38:39):
our real estate. Religions like Muslims are Christians. They bow
to God to pray like obviously God is not the
sort of thing that can hit you in the back
of the head. But it doesn't matter. It's the original
metaphor has now been abstracted to the place where all
the mana is gathered. Now I'll admit that there's there's
(39:00):
a problem. There's a problem of introspection or a problem
of second order observation for the apparatus as I'm presenting it,
Because if we're only thinking in metaphor, and we're only
thinking via abstraction and faith and things, where does the
split between non metaphor and non abstraction. And then eventually
(39:21):
this turns into metaphor and abstraction. But how does it
do that because it has to do it within a system,
but the first act it can't occur in a system
because there is no system based on it yet. And
like I just said, it seems like dogs do it,
it seems like bees do it. However, human societies do
it with everything. So my suspicion is, I don't know
(39:45):
there's some fundamental understanding of metaphor that we may share
with animals, and that would mean that this is a
difference in degree that we do with everything rather than
a difference in kind.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
I don't have an argument for that.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
I don't really know how it works, because you'd have
to be able to think outside of metaphor, but if
thought is metaphoric, you can't do that. So all I
actually have is an argument for the bridge from religious belief,
that is belief in society and how that becomes what
we call belief in the real estate religions, and that
(40:21):
is metaphorizing, metaphorizing abstracting. It's taking something that works in
one zone and transforming it into a second zone when
it takes on new significance. And in fact, this is
probably necessary for societies to exist at all. You need
to mediate relationships when the people don't know each other.
(40:44):
But this is to say it's a necessary abstraction. I
now again, don't take the wrong thing from this. I'm
not saying abstraction or metaphorizing is bad, because to say
that would be nonsense. We're already in this realm, in
this capacity of language to express abstractions. There's no way
(41:08):
to undo it. There's no way to go back to
whatever processes gave rise to the things that we see.
And it might in fact be a socially necessary abstraction,
like you need a general understanding of law or even
just rules for it to mediate the relationships between people
that don't know each other. This is to say, though
(41:29):
that as a necessary social abstraction, not every part of
it is necessary. Like you can believe too much in
the spirits, you might say, and this is the problem
with zealotry and radicals and cults sometimes is that they
believe so much in this spirit dimension, they believe so
(41:52):
much in the machinations of this spirit world, that they
become antisocial. And there's no and there's not really a
way to draw the line between appropriate anti antisocialness and
inappropriate antisocialness.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
So you have to see when you get there.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Now, another problem for me that might be relevant here
is how is it that we get from the basic
code that we can see now looking back, they have
they're strongly tied to a purpose and an end. This
basic side of religion functionally works in some way or another.
So how does a good rule one that works in
(42:33):
some way, How does it turn into the cartoonish religious
laws that everyone now knows and mocks, which are at
best weird and at worst just bizarre nonsense, Like you
cannot have these two foods sit next to each other
on the same plate, and this is a concern to
religious authorities, or you have to wash yourself seven times
(42:55):
if you touch a woman who's menstruating, or when you
eat this cracker it magically substantially turns into a dead
guy's flesh, even though it doesn't appear to change at all.
You know, come on, I know you don't believe that.
Just like if I told you that I'm a miniature,
a miniature space giant, which is why I appear to
(43:18):
be human sized, you'd be like, come on, I know
you don't believe that. The good code arises and then
provide some functional use to the society and some advantage
like a measurable advantage, and then these get too crazy
rules that are never allowed to be changed except in
like crises reformations, even though everyone knows they're crazy.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
It's just like it's like hoarding.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
It's it's hoarding rituals from the past, even though we
also have the discipline of history that informs us why
they came up with these rules in the first place.
So each is an organic process, but the second, the
car is part of the nature of metaphor, where you
can get metaphors of metaphors, simulations of simulations, and eventually
(44:10):
what results is something that resembles no good. It doesn't
resemble anything that has connection to the warp and woof,
and everyone willfully forgets it that thousands of years ago
there may have been some real social purpose rather than
the law being good in itself. When the law is
(44:31):
good in itself, it's no longer really good for anyone.
It's it's following rules for the sake of rules, and
you know those are the most annoying people there are.
So this will get us to wrapping up. I'm using
this term good that I almost have always avoided before.
But goodness prior to referring to abstractions is something that
(44:53):
we can kind of see in religious text. They're still
there in Jermy. So in original religion there are rules
for good behavior, clothing rules, fool rules, how to greet,
and also how to use the word good in the
context of being a good guy, good father, good mother,
(45:17):
a good worker, a good friend. We too have particular
definitions for each of these, and they're not necessarily cross cultural,
but in some ways they are. Generally they are like
a good man cross culturally. He might have different emphasies,
but usually means someone who is dependable, trustworthy, not rash
(45:39):
with his emotions, keeps his contracts, is cool headed, shrewd maybe,
but not deceitful.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
And as you see.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
There, it's loaded up in the term good man. Is
that's everything that's required, not for an individual to be successful,
as we can look around and see for an individual
to be successful, fucking people over is a big benefit, actually.
But no, what we consider to be good inherently means
(46:09):
good for society. A person who's dependable and keeps his
contracts and who is like above all predictable, that's someone
we can hitch a wagon to, so to speak. That's
the style of life that we can build a stable
society on. Now, isn't isn't that kind of crazy that
(46:30):
that's the definition we arrived at after thousands of years
like this emerged organically from a society that was, of
course interested in a definition like this. A society of
people trying to fuck each other over and break contracts
all the time is not going to be stable. But
this didn't arise from someone writing a dictionary calculating what
(46:51):
are we all together going to consider a good man?
What's going to be beneficial in the long run. No,
it unconsciously, organically, spontaneouaneously appeared in our language here because
it worked. It came to define the common sense language
that we use. So that kind of that kind of
illustrates my point rather well. And this this kind of
(47:14):
etymology is useful because in the etymology, in the grammar
even you find the traces of the old God before
it spiraled off into into abstractions.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
And there is no good without God, of course.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
So we can frame this again nicely by going back
to the cleanliness that I opened up with. We could
focus on clothes and food, because every every real estate
religion goes to town.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
On those as well.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
But cleanliness, it'll it'll wrap this up as we'll see
in social evolution. As I said, you can see why
being clean would be a selective trait that works out
for the cultures that the decis to be clean. And
this appears on the scene before germ theory. It's already
a part of society by the time that we get there.
(48:07):
So they didn't know why they were doing it. In
other words, kind of in the same way that we
don't know why we have boys clothes and girls clothes,
and why we say sorry if we step in front
of someone walking into a door, like there's no really,
there's no real reason to say sorry except that you
are acknowledging the other person. So the laws of cleanliness,
(48:30):
this I mean now we have a rational explanation for
why we should wash our hands and why we should
shower regularly and all that, but we were handled those
rules by previous societies that didn't have those rationalities or
reasons for why they were doing it. But original religion
takes this form. It works, so keep doing with it now.
(48:55):
Then the esthetic metaphorized religions, they go crazy, this kind
of stuff, the levitical laws of how you have to wash,
in what order you have to wash on this festival,
this day, whatever. Before you read the Koran, as I
opened up with, you have to do three times this,
three times that. Rinse out your mouth, wash your face,
(49:15):
wash your arms up to the elbows, all this stuff.
So the metaphors extended, abstracted, and just turns it just
becomes useless. Right at this level of abstraction, and do
this like it has an original meaning, which we've been covering,
but there's no reason for it anymore, in the same
way that there's no reason that white teeth are more
(49:36):
attractive than yellow teeth, in the same way that it's
embarrassing or faux pas to wear the same outfit in
public twice.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
How embarrassing is that? Right?
Speaker 2 (49:48):
By the soap that is created by science to intelligently
cleanse the germs that your dog brought into the house. Now,
are not these all examples of cleanliness that are just
abstracted from the normal Dare I say good lowercase g
the good idea of being clean? And doesn't it put
(50:09):
into your head in the in the current climate, the
notion of a white, pure country with a pure history.
And then these dirty immigrants and homosexuals they're getting they're
getting it all dirty and they need to be purged
by the radiant light coming from the new profit I mean?
(50:32):
Is is that not pretty close to the language that
we're using the language of purging, cleansing, restoring shortly after
it's witch burning, purifying the community through punishment. But the
reason it works in politics and advertising is that it
depends on something true that we all know that comes
(50:54):
to us via religion. The dirtiness is connected to disease
and filth and whatever, and by tying certain people, certain
people groups into the filth, then it only makes sense
that it's good to purge them. Now, all of this
connection is happening in the spirit realm, in the realm
(51:17):
of representation.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
You tie in a beat.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
A group of people with filth doesn't matter if they
are filthy or not, but as soon as you make
the connection that they are, then it's okay to not metaphorically,
but literally cleanse them from society. Now I couldn't end
this episode, and I think we need to return to
it because part of what broke people's brains in the
(51:43):
religious sense was COVID plus the COVID lockdowns. And I
don't yet have an analysis of that. Put it in
the comments if you do. But I notice like hearing
anti vac's arguments, hearing them talk, the articulation is so
(52:04):
religious in structure. It's the fear of corruption, fear of
the parasite, the toxin, and especially the corruption parasite and
toxin crossing the holy sacred boundary between myself and the world,
which is the skin. Maybe this ties into an individualist
(52:27):
culture as opposed to a collectivist culture. A collectivist culture
might say yes, like we together are the body that
needs to resist the diseases. An individualist culture might say,
my body, my choice. If I give your kid beazels,
fuck your kid, it's my body, my choice. I don't
know if that's true. It's just an interesting way to
(52:49):
take it, because the anti vax is a completely religious
on this mythology of corruption, purity, and maybe property as well.
But from that point of view, I'm sorry to say
it's entirely rational. The irrationale for vaccines comes from science,
(53:09):
which might be true in its own sense, but it's
not true for the religious mythological person in their deciding moment,
because in their deciding moment, they see it is not
good for people to put a bad thing through my skin,
into the core of my being. They want to corrupt me.
(53:33):
This must be bad people. Fauci, the fauci Auci and
the demon crats are trying to poison me through the
only barrier I have against evil, which is my own skin.
So it's entirely reasonable from a mythological perspective to say
that's bad. And I can see why they say that's bad.
(53:56):
It's just that in a different system, a different language,
that of immunology, it makes perfect sense. But if you
think of it from the religious perspective, yeah, it's terrifying
and it scared the shit out of people, which is
why it broke their brains. I mean, the anti vaccin
and evangelical Christians lines up basically one to one. So
(54:16):
if they believe that society is run by satanic pedophiles,
then the notion that they their highest goal would be
to corrupt the purity of your soul, and you're trying
to homeschool your kids to keep them safe from the
corruption of the satanic pedophiles, then of course they would
also try to put poison into your body past your
(54:39):
skin barrier to corrupt you.
Speaker 1 (54:42):
Two.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
So religious explanations on their own terms, they always sound
cultic like this, and I do have to say this,
they're also completely rational from the perspective that they occupy.
They're completely rational to all the relevant questions that are
asked within their own symbolic vocabulary. And so we end
(55:05):
up with a very black and white world. On the
white side, on the side of the light, there we
find cleanliness. Cleanliness in its abstracted sense. Cleanliness for the
Christian is connected to the absolution of Christ. And then
we connect that purity to the purity of my soul,
(55:29):
which then in a reversal, becomes the purity.
Speaker 1 (55:32):
Of the body.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
Then the flip side of purity, the flip side of
the white, is the black, the sinful and the corrupted.
So if this is your operating symbolic system, it makes
perfect sense that I do not want the government run
by demoncrats to be to have the capacity to put
(55:55):
a sinful, harmful toxin in side my body, which is
I've been trying to keep pure. And after all of
this symbolic processing, look at the duality that they end
up with, because it's sensible, Okay, it is sensible. They
have on one side they have light. They have cleanliness
(56:18):
in its inheritance from all the things we've talked about.
They also have Christ has forgiven my sins, made me
white as snow, so I am purified. And then you
have on the other side, the side of darkness. You
have the government which is godless, and they are trying
to mandate that I put chemicals and substances of an
(56:41):
unknown origin through my skin. And this is just another
way of saying the same thing at a macro level,
the immigrant problem. They are letting thousands of dirty immigrants
who are a corrupting influence, probably also gang members. They
are letting this past the skin of my country. All
(57:05):
of this is a response to the world falling apart.
To fall back on a mythological binary war between light
and darkness. So every new event brings into clarity.
Speaker 1 (57:18):
Who is light? What is light? And who is dark?
What is dark?
Speaker 2 (57:23):
And we have some guys in power that listen to us.
They speak to us, They want our allegiance to fight
the powers of darkness. They just state in very clear
terms what is good what is bad? And to help
them out, what do we have to do?
Speaker 1 (57:43):
Well? Nothing.
Speaker 2 (57:45):
The Trumpsts have to do nothing but watch him on
the TV. And if they watch him on the TV,
they are a part of the great end Times battle,
the war for the soul of America. This is an
abstract religion in almost its purest form, and these explanations
(58:09):
have always existed in the minds of cranks right But
as soon as there is an institutional crisis or a
crisis of the cultural center, that position is no longer
held by cranks, because within a crisis, any explanation is
better than the institutional one. Any explanation is better than
(58:32):
the easy one that says, you know, we're all in
this together, and it's because we're all in this together
is not working anymore. We were all in this together
twenty years ago, and it got worse and it's not working,
So now it's not.
Speaker 1 (58:48):
We're all in this together.
Speaker 2 (58:50):
Let's find the infiltration and the parasites and burn them
out if necessary. And with what most have been saying,
the answer in crisis is always, well, if we're not
getting our do someone else must be getting it, and
usually it's the Jews, you know, the Jews are siphoning
the wealth. Now it's now it's immigrants and the cargo cults.
(59:13):
Who was the bad whites that were siphoning the cargo
and the good whites that we're gonna restore it. French Revolution,
we got the you know what, the French Revolution is
one of the ones that got him right. These the
wealthy landowners are parasiting off our labor, and if we
kill them, they can't do that anymore. This forever will
be known, this shall be known hereafter as the cult
(59:36):
of Luigi Mangioni. And the abstraction is not insane. This
is a fact of debt. If you are losing and
he used to be winning, that means somebody else is
now winning. And now even while that's true, while in
the metaphoric space, which is just dividing things into what's
(59:56):
white and what's black and in that space which is
not very nuanced, but there, easy targets are easier. Easy
targets are not complicated institutions upon which the whole economy
indirectly depends. Instead, it's on images that are easy to target,
(01:00:19):
like Drag Queen Story Hour, which admittedly is not something
I would ever attend or bring my kid to, but
it's also not something that I would have ever heard
of actually existing except for that conservative streak out about it,
and I want to wrap it there. The cult of cleansing.
(01:00:42):
This has been my explanation, ranging from soap commercials to genocide.
Check out the Plastic Pills feed at patreon dot com
to not miss an episode that's where everything is. Next
time we discuss false prophets versus true prophets, and if
(01:01:03):
you're still with me, I will catch you then.
Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Cheers
We are all of us believers.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
We're all religious, and religious is to believe in a
symbolic expression.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Of the rules that exist so a society can function
day to day. So what we usually call religions as the.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Kinds that own real estate, this is what I'm going
to call institutional religions, ones that own.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Real estate, real estated religions.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
But the rituals of institutional religion or real estated religions,
these are two original religion. What a cartoon animation is
to live action, which is to say, it's most of
the same television conventions but abstracted into simpler shapes with
(01:16):
brighter colors. If the basic religion of a society says
wash your hands and don't shit near your water supply,
it turns out that those societies where cleanliness is valued
people get sick less often, or got sick less often.
So we're handed down these conventional rules for reasons that
we don't remember, but they worked.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Now.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I don't know where the prohibition on eating pork comes from,
but it's probably something like that. So real estate religions
have what are just basically good ideas but in a
completely distorted form. And the distortion takes place over centuries.
So when the basic religion says, you know, washing your
hands is a good idea because people get sick less often,
(02:00):
what we see as the metaphorized version of this in
real estate religion is use your left hand to wash
your right hand. Do this three times, then rinse your
mouth three times, then say a bunch of words, then
your head, and if you happen to fart in the
middle of this ritual, then you have to start over.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So this is the brightly colored disnification of an idea
that we can see at its root is just functionally
a good idea. And then we get the crazy color simplified,
abstracted version of this centuries later forgetting the origin point
of it. And when we have a bunch of disnification,
(02:40):
then religion, as this sort of Disneyland now contains the
content of everything we consider to be the spirit world
or the realer world that we can't see, or the
real world that is not directly apparent to us, that
contains heaven, hell, justice, car whatever. And when it comes
(03:02):
to the disnification and its production, which is just to say,
the metaphorization into a representational system, this is also what
advertising does, right, It takes basic religious insights, basic religion,
original religion, It says cleaning is good, and it also
(03:22):
metaphorizes and turns them into hyper abstractions that now they
also work on their own merit and not just the
merits of the original idea. That is something we believe, right,
So cleanliness is good. Every culture, all the time believes
that in some way. And what does advertising do with that? Well, now,
(03:44):
it's if you stink at all, that is absolutely disgusting.
This is only possible either with indoor plumbing, where it's
a rule you can't stink because you're capable.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Of washing yourself every day.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
And if that that's not possible, then you need to
invent perfume and deodorant, and you have to sell perfume
and deodorant. So it's not only it's not only enough
to not stink, because even though the stink is not
necessarily what's bad, the cleaning is actually what's doing the work.
But we still continue to associate.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Body odor with basically a form of sin.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
You know, you could say it's a form of sin.
And what do you use to cure body odor? Now
it's deodorant and perfume. An advertising play is off the
original distinction, which is to say it is sinful to
stink in public, and we could continue. The other examples
are shaving, shaving body hair, which is gendered too write
(04:46):
because because women don't have beards, Gillette has to sell
razors for them.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
So what do they do.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
They use an advertising campaign to tell women that having
pit hair or leg hair is disgusting. Your you're sinning
against the social order. The social order says that cleanliness
is near to godliness, and now you have to shave,
and if you don't.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
That's gross.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
It doesn't matter if you believe in it, it doesn't
matter if it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Most people, most of the time are.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Gonna follow the basic religion, and advertising, just like real
estate religion, is sort of a distortion of that.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
One more example is teeth whitening.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
I remember this very vividly because I don't think I
think in my lifetime this has been created. But I
remember seeing a commercial where there's like a man and
a woman. They're kind of smiling at each other from
across the room. The woman gets up to go walk
towards him, and as she does, he smiles and his
teeth are yellow, and there's like a horror music sting boodoo,
(05:50):
and she goes, she makes a disgusted face, and instead
of walking up to him and talking, she walks past him.
So this is how I learned that having yellow teeth
is disgusting, which is of course just meant to sell
white strips and whitening toothpaste.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
So all of these come.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
All of these work because they are metaphors for the
tenet in basic religion that cleanliness is good and the
weirdness either of laws created by advertising or laws created
by religions as opposed to I was going to say pragmatism.
(06:29):
I don't want to call it pragmatism because it's not
pragmatism in original religion, like it's more akin to a
random mutation, Like it's an accident that human society's every
single one.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
A repeated accident.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
But it's an accident that we have cleanliness, basic rules
and expectations, because every single one of these expectations precedes
germ theory. So it had to be some sort of
trial and error where we discover But if you're washing
your stink off, your society is healthier, And of course
it's not because the stink itself is harmful. It's because
(07:07):
there's bacteria and germ theory and everything that.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
We know about it now.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
But all of this stuff original religion places expectations of
cleanliness on you because it works. We don't know why
are The people that are doing it don't know why
it works, but they don't argue with it, just like
we don't argue with the fact that yellow teeth are
unattractive and that women shouldn't have Harry pitts.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
What are you gonna do argue with that? You can,
it won't work.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
So all of this stuff that constitutes the spirit world,
it stays at bay generally until there's a social crisis,
and then the spiritual bursts into the world of convention,
and suddenly we again have modern witches and modern demon
hunters and end time cults that are processing a declining
(07:57):
social situation into it's symbolic sense.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
So I guess just that's to say they.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Have a better understanding of what social crises consist in
You have to have a sense of what religion is
saying about it and doing about it. You're gonna have
some that say, and I've heard them saying this, that
social crisis. This is because of a lack of morality,
you know, postmodernism did all this, or because we have
(08:24):
strayed from tradition or meaning or the true way whatever
that is, the true way, registered trademark. Usually it's Judeo Christianity,
which is which is in odd conflation. But for reasons
that I'm not going to go into today anyway, traditional morality.
The crisis is caused by a loss in traditional morality.
(08:46):
But of course we and I, as proper good boy
historical materialists, I'd be willing to bet that any social
crisis is at least in the last instance, caused by
a visible decline in living standards, and noticeable decline in
living standards if everyone's got a sort of future to
(09:08):
look forward to, expectations, you know, you don't have to
worry about your kids.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
In a situation like that.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
You don't need real estate religion to actually do very much.
People I'm sure did will continue to go to church
or do their prayers or whatever. But in upswinging societies,
what you don't see is a lot of zealots, which
is to say, you don't see much faith in the
(09:38):
kinds of religious expression that are demanding change, religion that
demands change. This is reserved for crisis times, and in
crisis times is when you get end times, cults, messiah cults,
great awakenings, and then the physical violence or social violence
(10:01):
that accompanies religious fervor seemingly every single time it happens.
But universalist sort of liberal democracy that's open to strangers
and others and for social reforms. This can only be
the religion of a society that is not getting worse
(10:22):
now at the moment. In the West, which just means
the places where I get news from the West, we
are witnessing a rapid decline of faith in society, in civilization,
and that means a flurry of new faiths, new beliefs,
vibe investments, and in order to understand those, we need
(10:46):
to understand religion and what it does or what it's.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Doing right now.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
So yeah, like I said, we have a bunch of
explanations for our current social collapse. And you don't hear
this anymore, but I remember like it was yesterday. It
started as lack of decorum, magism, trump Ism, as a
lack of decorum, far right Nazism, they're just not polite enough.
(11:12):
Right then the rabble are getting seduced by conment. This
was the twenty sixteen line. You don't hear that anymore,
but it was only nine years ago. Today, the only
correct object of faith for at least half, seems to
be some form of millenarianism. Like there are a bunch
(11:34):
of liberals just saying, no, we were on the right track,
now we're getting off it. And that's maybe half of society.
But the other half lamb basts that half and says, no,
we need the end of the world, which is to
say that in a spiritual sense, the West whatever, that
the West cannot be saved, and a new world has
(11:54):
to be born, and for it to be born, someone
has to usher it in for us. Because again, like
I said last time, religion is really just about not
having to change your habits. So someone's gonna usher in
the end times a messiah figure on behalf of God.
Now I'm saying, if you know your history, you know
(12:14):
that the apocalypse has been predicted thousands and thousands of
times before, and perhaps worlds have ended, but the world
hasn't ended. Now, if you want my guess, because this
always happens, I'm gonna just I'd say it's probably some
like mammalian nervous brain response that like when you observe
(12:36):
that things are on the decline, then it turns, it
becomes rationalized as other people are getting what you should
rightfully get, especially as a as a faithful believer. And
then if you abstract that instinct that is like unconscious response,
then it's evil, right, some sort of evil is siphed
(13:00):
off something that was meant for you, which you know
makes sense at a certain level. If you used to
have a lot, now you have a little, that stuff
probably went somewhere. And this is literally the teaching of
another culture that faced a crisis. It wasn't the crisis
of a decline so much as the crisis of observing what.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Other people had.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
And these are the cargo cults in Melanesia.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
And maybe you've seen the pictures.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
They actually started before World War Two, but the cool
pictures come from post World War two when American and
Japanese soldiers were stationed on these islands, you know, during
the whole island hopping in the Pacific theater, and they
would set up you know, temporary runways, radio towers, and
they would receive shipments of cargo from the sea and sky,
(13:54):
and then the war ends, they pack up and leave,
and the islanders, hoping to lose were the cargo back,
they build these full sized airplanes and air traffic control
towers and satellite dishes and landing strips out of wood
and torches, hoping that this would cause the cargo to return.
(14:16):
The planes and the boats would return. And usually when
this is described, it's described in terms of them not
understanding causality. But this story gets weirder. So the leaders
of these cargo cults, the cargo cults were a response
to a disruption, and they were also disruptive. And the
leaders told the people that their ancestors had been sending
(14:42):
them this cargo from the spirit world, but that the
whites were changing the address tags on the cargo and
then taking it for themselves, because the white people the
soldier station there, are inherently sneaky and clever. Now, the
attitude to wars towards the cargo cults in a lot
of the early writings on it was like, Ah, that's
(15:04):
so sad. They just don't understand how causality works. So
they're dumb enough to think that this cargo is theirs,
and that it will eventually return and bring about their
utopian society on Earth. And it's basically totally dwindled. But
there are still some cargo cults still going. They're still
waiting for the Savior, and the Savior depending on the cult,
(15:26):
goes by different names. I think the most famous is
the John From cult, where they they take out the
American flag and march around doing military drills hoping that
John From will return one day with the cargo John From.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
It's probably most.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Likely it's an abbreviation of the original name John From America.
But John From America to this day, for those who
believe in him, he's worked behind the scenes because he's white. Yeah,
John From is white, but because he knows how to
outsmart the bad whites, the sneaky whites. He's one of
(16:09):
the good ones, and he is going to outsmart the
bad whites, who are the parasites in this situation. They're
parasites because they are siphoning off the good cargo that
is sent by the Islanders' ancestors. John From is going
to remove the parasites and utopia will follow. Now, this
(16:34):
is exactly the teaching of trump Ism and has been
since the beginning that he's either secretly or publicly dealing
with the parasites, the parasites of American society. Things would
be getting better here if not for the parasites, because
America itself, you know, the flag, the founding, the fathers,
(16:59):
the Constitution, and all of this is unequivocally good in
the in the symbolic sphere that's that's operating here, in
the cartoon that's operating here, it's it's wholly good. And
there are these evils that are poisoning it and preventing
it from becoming the utopia that is its destiny.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
And who are the parasites?
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Immigrants, gang members, drag queens, transgenders, satanic pedophiles, and then
wokeism as a sort of thing in the air, a
miasma that's corrupting, that's a corrupting influence. Now, these corrupting
parasitic people are corrupting the pure white center. I don't
(17:49):
mean white the race, just you know, white, clean, the
clean destiny center of America. So to purge them is
you know, the logical next step, just like in the
John Frum. If you purge the parasites who are stealing
your cargo, the cargo, symbolically as the standard of living
that is owed to you because you grow up watching
(18:10):
TV shows where the characters had that for themselves. If
you purge the parasites, you get your destiny. And this
is a form repeated constantly, usually in sects against a
major real estate religion. When society is downturning, you get
(18:31):
new savior cults, you get radical reform cults, and a
section of these radical reform cults are calling for the
end of the world. So if we are to understand
our moment, then the usual explanations of rational self interest
(18:51):
or a lapse in public morality, or of parasites stealing
what is rightfully owed to us. These explanations address the
crisis already at a level of abstraction. And what's under
the abstraction. I don't think I have to tell you.
It's almost boring to say because it's so simple. You
(19:13):
just look at the value of wages versus GDP.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
One's flat one goes up.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Wealth Inequality just means that your wages and this is
a direct experience, right your wages are worthless.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
And assets cost more.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
And you see this every time you go into the
store and your kid's life is worse than yours, just
like the cargo cults in the Pacific. The societies were
doing fine until they saw that these guys just have
planes and boats randomly dropping off crates of food for them.
(19:47):
They're not doing any work, they're not hunting, they're not planting,
They're just sitting in the radio tower and not doing
any work and they.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Get food dropped off to them.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
So just witnessing this inequality caused entire religious systems on
these islands that had probably lasted a thousand years to
just blow up, and ours too. It's a crisis, no
doubt about that.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
And yeah, as a.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Good historical materialist, boy, you chalk it up to inequality.
But everything after that is an abstraction. But to say
abstraction is not to say illusion, because religious feeling, religious fervor,
this is not illusory. But I would say that the
answer has to appear somewhere between an ideal explanation, for example,
(20:38):
saying this is a problem because we have bad morals now,
and a material explanation. So what good analysis should be
for I'm saying is what good theory should do is
account for how you get from one to the other.
How do you get from the material explanation to the
explanation of religious feeling Because there's a gap.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
There, there's a whole in your theory unless you can
explain that.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I think you can explain it by metaphor. How does
it decline in your group's living standards? Produce a moral
and a mythological explanation. We need to look at metaphor
and what is being abstracted as the end result.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
So to that end, I say.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
That faith is the basis of an economy, and that
economy is symbolic. And here representations take the place of
real things or previously real things, such that you can't
see through the representation back to whatever is being represented.
(21:43):
It's like trying to consider a world without language, except
we can only consider any world in terms of language.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
It's like trying to.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Explain to a blind person what color is like how
would you do it? But in this replacement in our
secondary economy, now the representational economy, belief functions is a
sort of energy, sort of it fuels exchanges. To call
techno techno fascists, crystal fascist, acceleration, o overlord, cabal. To
(22:15):
call these guys morons, I mean that's it's a burn
to us, isn't it. We lost We're losing two morons.
But if they're in charge underrating belief here, underrating their
beliefs and the people, more importantly, the people who believe
in them, that's going to get us all killed. So
we should at least make an effort to how religion
(22:37):
functions in crises, in this symbolic economy, where a crisis
in living standards becomes a crisis of something else, demons, the.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
End of the world, and so on.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
So from where I'm sitting, religion as a social technology
is it's its own thinking machine. It's like a cultural
symbol processor, and we inherit the symbols without really realizing
where they came from or what crises produced them originally.
But for the system to produce these symbols, it requires energy.
(23:17):
It requires exchanges of energy like any system does, and
it gets this from believers. So for Emil Durkheim, the
one of the founders of sociology, the original expression of
religion is in the form of mana, which is a
(23:38):
kind of energy that flows through all things. It's not
really anywhere, but it gathers in places and it's not visible,
but real and eventually more real.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Than everything else.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
And mana or the equivalent mana as belief. It flows
in a social system to certain people like leaders, for example.
It flows especially to certain events like I don't know, weddings,
funerals where respect, honor, prayer.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
All that stuff is the gathering of faith as.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Energy, and by consequence it creates the entire spirit world,
and the spirit world eventually replaces the real one leaders
as the blessed ones, the ones with mana. This keeps
the hierarchy of society in place. And just like with
the cleaning rituals or the cleansing washing rituals, none of
(24:39):
this appears consciously. It's more a justification of what is.
Then you have also you know sacred spaces where mana
the faith energy gathers. You know holy sites, burial grounds,
and so on. So it functions like an economy belief
economy invisible to the name, but it's also everywhere. And
(25:02):
this is where I'm.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Going with this.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
An any form of exchange looks different depending on the
point of view of the observer of the exchange, like,
for example, an economic exchange appears as a sale from
one position, but as a purchase. From the other position,
they're the same event, but they appear differently, and both
accounts are correct of what happened. So the analogy here
(25:28):
is that if the selling of belief is a transfer
of energy, then there should be a debt produced.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
There should be a pool of.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Mana where we are sending our hopes and dreams and
destinies into as well. And that pool of mana is
the property of society in general. And the mana clumps
eventually cluster, and they become holy animals versus profane animals,
and then they become gods, gods of this area or
(25:58):
that area, the god of this river. Then, as it abstracts,
it becomes a god of justice and the God of love.
Then eventually we get one infinite pool of mana, which
is the God outside of nature. So the flip side
of belief, as seen from a different angle, just like
the purchase and the selling, are to descriptions of the
(26:21):
same event, But we need an equivalent with belief. So
drawing from Boudriat, we just call that seduction and religion
as well as the products of religion, messiahs, gods, these
are nothing if not seductive.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
And now all.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
This is a kind of complicated way of saying that
we don't believe in anything arbitrarily. So when we look
at the past to judge it as compared with the
present by whichever metric, which is why anyone brings up
the past who's not a historian any way, is to
recall the symbol of it, the produced symbol of it.
(26:59):
And even when we look inside the computer, the computer
of religion, the sort of black box. And if we
try to introspect, how has this affected my mind?
Speaker 1 (27:10):
How has this affected me?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
When we arrive at the attempt to think of what
we are thinking? And is this spontaneous or is it
caused elsewhere? It's a it's part of the ritual practice
of philosophy, trying to think of thinking itself introspection or
meditation or whatever. It's already your mind is already littered
(27:33):
with religious artifacts, like the soul. The soul's real, even
though it doesn't exist, but it's real in the sense
that I become something to be looked at while introspecting,
I become a thing. And it's not just me who
becomes a thing, but all things become things. And into
(27:54):
our comfortable world of things. Science arrives on the scene
at some point and breaks off into other methods of description,
and we find ourselves increasingly in the embarrassing position of
discovering that a lot of real things don't actually exist. Unsurprisingly,
(28:15):
the fact of things not existing doesn't affect religion or
public life in the least.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Like time is real, but it might not exist.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
It almost certainly doesn't exist the way we experience it,
but that existence or non existence is completely irrelevant to society,
which depends upon time existing in a certain way.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
And sometimes time.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Is linear, sometimes it's cyclical, but however it goes, it's real.
Even if we could prove it doesn't exist, it's still real.
And everyone is religious in the sense of continuing to
believe in things that they know to be absurd. Being
in society is like the the k fame aspect of
(29:02):
professional wrestling, which is, even if you know it isn't real.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
You yet do it anyway.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
And this is exactly what happened with the cargo cults
as well. They continued doing their rituals building planes out
of bamboo after they were told what planes really were,
even after the leaders were all loaded up to a
on a plane taken to Australia.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
To see how the sausage is made.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
After that, they went back to their islands even more
invigorated than ever to keep waiting for that cargo. Now,
why do they do that? Why do we do that? Well,
of course, real cargo is not made of goods and
metal and food. The real cargo is made of faith.
(29:57):
So perhaps elon and trump and for will not make
my experience better. But the act of faith itself is
worth more than the chance that it's wrong. So to
say that another way, as much as we all I'll
put it in first person terms, as much as I
know that all the arguments against the existence of self
(30:18):
identical objects is wrong, I still believe in them, even
knowing it's absurd to And it seems that even the
least religious people we can point to.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Diogenies.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Diogenes apparently lived in a baryl in public. But he
didn't live in a barrel in the wilderness, right, He
lived in a barrel in the middle of town, and
you know, pissed on people and masturbated publicly in the
middle of town. And yet he still obeys the rule
of grammar while being apostate to the social religion. So
(30:57):
religion as a social technology, it's purpose seems to me
to be turning what we already want to believe into metaphors.
And this is one of those things like I can
describe it happening, but I don't know why. This comes
from some primal, originary thing that worked, something that just
(31:20):
worked itself out, that metaphors work this way when it
comes to our thinking, And yeah, I can't. I don't
have an explanation. I don't know why, but I can
see what it does, and that is that metaphors seem
to be easier to process.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Things are easier to process than processes. And as we
are in a broad.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Crisis of civilization owing to the explosions of new religious fervor,
even though they don't all look like QAnon, but damn,
QAnon is profoundly illustrative.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
It's it's a.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Fully formed folk religion, bearing all the traits previous, But
it doesn't look like that to anyone who's inside it,
which is another truism. Occult's never a cult when you're inside.
It only looks like a cult from the outside.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
So I've been using.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
This broad term crisis saying that an individual turns to
religion in times of crises, and also that cultures do
or subcultures do. But religion's a little like politics in
the sense that in an upswing in a time of improvement,
you don't really need them very much, right, They sort
(32:33):
of flare up as a response to spiraling something not
going very well. And not going very well means, of course,
in the last instance, that if you trace the causal
chain backwards, is it living standards relative living standards?
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Are they going up or down?
Speaker 2 (32:53):
I have a suspicion here that somewhere in our mammal
brain is day Kurt's penial gland that keeps a check
on how everyone else is doing versus how we are doing,
and we're not aware of that. But this, this processor
seems to be causal. It measures the social vibe for us,
(33:17):
and we can tell or feel maybe whether we are
on our way up or on our way down. So
then we get back to belief as this thing that's
being processed. The input of religion, just like the input
of advertising, is the social structure at its most basic.
(33:39):
Not rational arguments for the social structure, just the things
we believe automatically, like clean clean is good, original religion.
I've been calling it that. I don't know if that's
the best word for it, but it's just the minimum
required expressions of faith in society that keep it going
(34:01):
on a day to day level, and the fundamental expectations.
They're pretty easy to do. We can still observe them
today in their normal functioning because they are universal. Every
culture has them. They have things like don't yell in
public unless you have a good reason to, unless there's
an emergency, or wear the right clothes depending on who
(34:25):
you are, your class, your gender, boys clothes for boys,
girls clothes for girls. Another one would be don't act
unpredictably if you're in public, which means you know, you
stand when everyone else is standing. You don't butt in lineups,
don't be loud at a time when everyone else is
(34:47):
being quiet. And if you break one of these rules,
if you mess up, then give some one a wave.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Oh yeah, and shit where you're supposed to.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
These are the basic ones, and then there's a bunch
more varied ones that are different, less universal, but how
to date, how to be a how to be a
good guy, how to be a good dad as opposed
to a bad guy or a bad dad, and these
are these seem to be more culturally dependent, but they
are still unwritten rules of how to treat people.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Oh. Another one is like, how how do you how
do you treat people older than you? Do you show
them respect?
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Ours A culture doesn't really have that, but others others do,
And certain people can't follow the rules. Toddlers, for example,
they get a pass because everyone knows they aren't working
yet they aren't, they aren't integrated yet. Bad adults though
they don't get a pass. There's usually a special place
(35:45):
to put them. You know, if you're drunk in public,
if you have a breakdown in public, there's someone to
call to, you know, put you somewhere. If you cause
a scene, there's going to be an apparatus, an emergent
apparatus to deal with you, and often a special place
to put you. And all I'm saying with all this
is all of the unwritten rules that you follow. They
(36:07):
don't have anything to do with your decision to follow them,
your rational justification for them, although that can come after.
But it's very difficult to break them, even when you
know that they are arbitrary, Like are you physically capable
of walking out onto the street naked. Yeah, are you
(36:27):
physically capable of budding to the front of the line
in the grocery store. You're physically capable, But I'm pretty
sure I couldn't do it.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
And the reason the.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Society functions is because most people can't do it, except
for diogenies. But even though diogenies breaks all the social codes.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
There are codes that he can't break, like the rules
of grammar.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Now, these sorts of rules that are almost immediately overcoded
by the mana complex, the mana computer. They are unwritten,
they emerge organically, and every society has the same ones
generally speaking.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
But they are also not pre symbolic.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
So I don't wanna I don't want to be saying
if we just went back to the original, if we
went back to the the origin point, then everything would
be okay. And I don't think that's true. There's no
heartbreak where we have raw social codes that suddenly turn
into abstracted objects or abstracted laws, because the original laws,
(37:31):
even the ones that we follow, they are still metaphor
they're still abstracted. For example, in our greetings, So if
you're gonna greet someone, you wave, you shake hands. In
other cultures. You bow, that's that's the rule. And these
actions are themselves metaphors. Waving means I'm not aggressing. I
(37:57):
don't have a weapon. Shaking hands, I assume, is probably
the same thing. Here's my open hand, I'm not hiding
a weapon and bowing Similarly, here it's like here, look
at the back of my head. Here's the most vulnerable
part of my body that I'm exposing to you because
I trust you, I respect you, you respect me, and
(38:18):
I know you're not going to kill me if I
show you the back of my head. This is like
when a dog shows you his neck. It's a Is
that a metaphor? It's a metaphoric expression of respect or
trust or some mutuality, even when the original meaning has
disappeared and like everything else has been taken up into
(38:39):
our real estate. Religions like Muslims are Christians. They bow
to God to pray like obviously God is not the
sort of thing that can hit you in the back
of the head. But it doesn't matter. It's the original
metaphor has now been abstracted to the place where all
the mana is gathered. Now I'll admit that there's there's
(39:00):
a problem. There's a problem of introspection or a problem
of second order observation for the apparatus as I'm presenting it,
Because if we're only thinking in metaphor, and we're only
thinking via abstraction and faith and things, where does the
split between non metaphor and non abstraction. And then eventually
(39:21):
this turns into metaphor and abstraction. But how does it
do that because it has to do it within a system,
but the first act it can't occur in a system
because there is no system based on it yet. And
like I just said, it seems like dogs do it,
it seems like bees do it. However, human societies do
it with everything. So my suspicion is, I don't know
(39:45):
there's some fundamental understanding of metaphor that we may share
with animals, and that would mean that this is a
difference in degree that we do with everything rather than
a difference in kind.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
I don't have an argument for that.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
I don't really know how it works, because you'd have
to be able to think outside of metaphor, but if
thought is metaphoric, you can't do that. So all I
actually have is an argument for the bridge from religious belief,
that is belief in society and how that becomes what
we call belief in the real estate religions, and that
(40:21):
is metaphorizing, metaphorizing abstracting. It's taking something that works in
one zone and transforming it into a second zone when
it takes on new significance. And in fact, this is
probably necessary for societies to exist at all. You need
to mediate relationships when the people don't know each other.
(40:44):
But this is to say it's a necessary abstraction. I
now again, don't take the wrong thing from this. I'm
not saying abstraction or metaphorizing is bad, because to say
that would be nonsense. We're already in this realm, in
this capacity of language to express abstractions. There's no way
(41:08):
to undo it. There's no way to go back to
whatever processes gave rise to the things that we see.
And it might in fact be a socially necessary abstraction,
like you need a general understanding of law or even
just rules for it to mediate the relationships between people
that don't know each other. This is to say, though
(41:29):
that as a necessary social abstraction, not every part of
it is necessary. Like you can believe too much in
the spirits, you might say, and this is the problem
with zealotry and radicals and cults sometimes is that they
believe so much in this spirit dimension, they believe so
(41:52):
much in the machinations of this spirit world, that they
become antisocial. And there's no and there's not really a
way to draw the line between appropriate anti antisocialness and
inappropriate antisocialness.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
So you have to see when you get there.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Now, another problem for me that might be relevant here
is how is it that we get from the basic
code that we can see now looking back, they have
they're strongly tied to a purpose and an end. This
basic side of religion functionally works in some way or another.
So how does a good rule one that works in
(42:33):
some way, How does it turn into the cartoonish religious
laws that everyone now knows and mocks, which are at
best weird and at worst just bizarre nonsense, Like you
cannot have these two foods sit next to each other
on the same plate, and this is a concern to
religious authorities, or you have to wash yourself seven times
(42:55):
if you touch a woman who's menstruating, or when you
eat this cracker it magically substantially turns into a dead
guy's flesh, even though it doesn't appear to change at all.
You know, come on, I know you don't believe that.
Just like if I told you that I'm a miniature,
a miniature space giant, which is why I appear to
(43:18):
be human sized, you'd be like, come on, I know
you don't believe that. The good code arises and then
provide some functional use to the society and some advantage
like a measurable advantage, and then these get too crazy
rules that are never allowed to be changed except in
like crises reformations, even though everyone knows they're crazy.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
It's just like it's like hoarding.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
It's it's hoarding rituals from the past, even though we
also have the discipline of history that informs us why
they came up with these rules in the first place.
So each is an organic process, but the second, the
car is part of the nature of metaphor, where you
can get metaphors of metaphors, simulations of simulations, and eventually
(44:10):
what results is something that resembles no good. It doesn't
resemble anything that has connection to the warp and woof,
and everyone willfully forgets it that thousands of years ago
there may have been some real social purpose rather than
the law being good in itself. When the law is
(44:31):
good in itself, it's no longer really good for anyone.
It's it's following rules for the sake of rules, and
you know those are the most annoying people there are.
So this will get us to wrapping up. I'm using
this term good that I almost have always avoided before.
But goodness prior to referring to abstractions is something that
(44:53):
we can kind of see in religious text. They're still
there in Jermy. So in original religion there are rules
for good behavior, clothing rules, fool rules, how to greet,
and also how to use the word good in the
context of being a good guy, good father, good mother,
(45:17):
a good worker, a good friend. We too have particular
definitions for each of these, and they're not necessarily cross cultural,
but in some ways they are. Generally they are like
a good man cross culturally. He might have different emphasies,
but usually means someone who is dependable, trustworthy, not rash
(45:39):
with his emotions, keeps his contracts, is cool headed, shrewd maybe,
but not deceitful.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
And as you see.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
There, it's loaded up in the term good man. Is
that's everything that's required, not for an individual to be successful,
as we can look around and see for an individual
to be successful, fucking people over is a big benefit, actually.
But no, what we consider to be good inherently means
(46:09):
good for society. A person who's dependable and keeps his
contracts and who is like above all predictable, that's someone
we can hitch a wagon to, so to speak. That's
the style of life that we can build a stable
society on. Now, isn't isn't that kind of crazy that
(46:30):
that's the definition we arrived at after thousands of years
like this emerged organically from a society that was, of
course interested in a definition like this. A society of
people trying to fuck each other over and break contracts
all the time is not going to be stable. But
this didn't arise from someone writing a dictionary calculating what
(46:51):
are we all together going to consider a good man?
What's going to be beneficial in the long run. No,
it unconsciously, organically, spontaneouaneously appeared in our language here because
it worked. It came to define the common sense language
that we use. So that kind of that kind of
illustrates my point rather well. And this this kind of
(47:14):
etymology is useful because in the etymology, in the grammar
even you find the traces of the old God before
it spiraled off into into abstractions.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
And there is no good without God, of course.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
So we can frame this again nicely by going back
to the cleanliness that I opened up with. We could
focus on clothes and food, because every every real estate
religion goes to town.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
On those as well.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
But cleanliness, it'll it'll wrap this up as we'll see
in social evolution. As I said, you can see why
being clean would be a selective trait that works out
for the cultures that the decis to be clean. And
this appears on the scene before germ theory. It's already
a part of society by the time that we get there.
(48:07):
So they didn't know why they were doing it. In
other words, kind of in the same way that we
don't know why we have boys clothes and girls clothes,
and why we say sorry if we step in front
of someone walking into a door, like there's no really,
there's no real reason to say sorry except that you
are acknowledging the other person. So the laws of cleanliness,
(48:30):
this I mean now we have a rational explanation for
why we should wash our hands and why we should
shower regularly and all that, but we were handled those
rules by previous societies that didn't have those rationalities or
reasons for why they were doing it. But original religion
takes this form. It works, so keep doing with it now.
(48:55):
Then the esthetic metaphorized religions, they go crazy, this kind
of stuff, the levitical laws of how you have to wash,
in what order you have to wash on this festival,
this day, whatever. Before you read the Koran, as I
opened up with, you have to do three times this,
three times that. Rinse out your mouth, wash your face,
(49:15):
wash your arms up to the elbows, all this stuff.
So the metaphors extended, abstracted, and just turns it just
becomes useless. Right at this level of abstraction, and do
this like it has an original meaning, which we've been covering,
but there's no reason for it anymore, in the same
way that there's no reason that white teeth are more
(49:36):
attractive than yellow teeth, in the same way that it's
embarrassing or faux pas to wear the same outfit in
public twice.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
How embarrassing is that? Right?
Speaker 2 (49:48):
By the soap that is created by science to intelligently
cleanse the germs that your dog brought into the house. Now,
are not these all examples of cleanliness that are just
abstracted from the normal Dare I say good lowercase g
the good idea of being clean? And doesn't it put
(50:09):
into your head in the in the current climate, the
notion of a white, pure country with a pure history.
And then these dirty immigrants and homosexuals they're getting they're
getting it all dirty and they need to be purged
by the radiant light coming from the new profit I mean?
(50:32):
Is is that not pretty close to the language that
we're using the language of purging, cleansing, restoring shortly after
it's witch burning, purifying the community through punishment. But the
reason it works in politics and advertising is that it
depends on something true that we all know that comes
(50:54):
to us via religion. The dirtiness is connected to disease
and filth and whatever, and by tying certain people, certain
people groups into the filth, then it only makes sense
that it's good to purge them. Now, all of this
connection is happening in the spirit realm, in the realm
(51:17):
of representation.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
You tie in a beat.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
A group of people with filth doesn't matter if they
are filthy or not, but as soon as you make
the connection that they are, then it's okay to not metaphorically,
but literally cleanse them from society. Now I couldn't end
this episode, and I think we need to return to
it because part of what broke people's brains in the
(51:43):
religious sense was COVID plus the COVID lockdowns. And I
don't yet have an analysis of that. Put it in
the comments if you do. But I notice like hearing
anti vac's arguments, hearing them talk, the articulation is so
(52:04):
religious in structure. It's the fear of corruption, fear of
the parasite, the toxin, and especially the corruption parasite and
toxin crossing the holy sacred boundary between myself and the world,
which is the skin. Maybe this ties into an individualist
(52:27):
culture as opposed to a collectivist culture. A collectivist culture
might say yes, like we together are the body that
needs to resist the diseases. An individualist culture might say,
my body, my choice. If I give your kid beazels,
fuck your kid, it's my body, my choice. I don't
know if that's true. It's just an interesting way to
(52:49):
take it, because the anti vax is a completely religious
on this mythology of corruption, purity, and maybe property as well.
But from that point of view, I'm sorry to say
it's entirely rational. The irrationale for vaccines comes from science,
(53:09):
which might be true in its own sense, but it's
not true for the religious mythological person in their deciding moment,
because in their deciding moment, they see it is not
good for people to put a bad thing through my skin,
into the core of my being. They want to corrupt me.
(53:33):
This must be bad people. Fauci, the fauci Auci and
the demon crats are trying to poison me through the
only barrier I have against evil, which is my own skin.
So it's entirely reasonable from a mythological perspective to say
that's bad. And I can see why they say that's bad.
(53:56):
It's just that in a different system, a different language,
that of immunology, it makes perfect sense. But if you
think of it from the religious perspective, yeah, it's terrifying
and it scared the shit out of people, which is
why it broke their brains. I mean, the anti vaccin
and evangelical Christians lines up basically one to one. So
(54:16):
if they believe that society is run by satanic pedophiles,
then the notion that they their highest goal would be
to corrupt the purity of your soul, and you're trying
to homeschool your kids to keep them safe from the
corruption of the satanic pedophiles, then of course they would
also try to put poison into your body past your
(54:39):
skin barrier to corrupt you.
Speaker 1 (54:42):
Two.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
So religious explanations on their own terms, they always sound
cultic like this, and I do have to say this,
they're also completely rational from the perspective that they occupy.
They're completely rational to all the relevant questions that are
asked within their own symbolic vocabulary. And so we end
(55:05):
up with a very black and white world. On the
white side, on the side of the light, there we
find cleanliness. Cleanliness in its abstracted sense. Cleanliness for the
Christian is connected to the absolution of Christ. And then
we connect that purity to the purity of my soul,
(55:29):
which then in a reversal, becomes the purity.
Speaker 1 (55:32):
Of the body.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
Then the flip side of purity, the flip side of
the white, is the black, the sinful and the corrupted.
So if this is your operating symbolic system, it makes
perfect sense that I do not want the government run
by demoncrats to be to have the capacity to put
(55:55):
a sinful, harmful toxin in side my body, which is
I've been trying to keep pure. And after all of
this symbolic processing, look at the duality that they end
up with, because it's sensible, Okay, it is sensible. They
have on one side they have light. They have cleanliness
(56:18):
in its inheritance from all the things we've talked about.
They also have Christ has forgiven my sins, made me
white as snow, so I am purified. And then you
have on the other side, the side of darkness. You
have the government which is godless, and they are trying
to mandate that I put chemicals and substances of an
(56:41):
unknown origin through my skin. And this is just another
way of saying the same thing at a macro level,
the immigrant problem. They are letting thousands of dirty immigrants
who are a corrupting influence, probably also gang members. They
are letting this past the skin of my country. All
(57:05):
of this is a response to the world falling apart.
To fall back on a mythological binary war between light
and darkness. So every new event brings into clarity.
Speaker 1 (57:18):
Who is light? What is light? And who is dark?
What is dark?
Speaker 2 (57:23):
And we have some guys in power that listen to us.
They speak to us, They want our allegiance to fight
the powers of darkness. They just state in very clear
terms what is good what is bad? And to help
them out, what do we have to do?
Speaker 1 (57:43):
Well? Nothing.
Speaker 2 (57:45):
The Trumpsts have to do nothing but watch him on
the TV. And if they watch him on the TV,
they are a part of the great end Times battle,
the war for the soul of America. This is an
abstract religion in almost its purest form, and these explanations
(58:09):
have always existed in the minds of cranks right But
as soon as there is an institutional crisis or a
crisis of the cultural center, that position is no longer
held by cranks, because within a crisis, any explanation is
better than the institutional one. Any explanation is better than
(58:32):
the easy one that says, you know, we're all in
this together, and it's because we're all in this together
is not working anymore. We were all in this together
twenty years ago, and it got worse and it's not working,
So now it's not.
Speaker 1 (58:48):
We're all in this together.
Speaker 2 (58:50):
Let's find the infiltration and the parasites and burn them
out if necessary. And with what most have been saying,
the answer in crisis is always, well, if we're not
getting our do someone else must be getting it, and
usually it's the Jews, you know, the Jews are siphoning
the wealth. Now it's now it's immigrants and the cargo cults.
(59:13):
Who was the bad whites that were siphoning the cargo
and the good whites that we're gonna restore it. French Revolution,
we got the you know what, the French Revolution is
one of the ones that got him right. These the
wealthy landowners are parasiting off our labor, and if we
kill them, they can't do that anymore. This forever will
be known, this shall be known hereafter as the cult
(59:36):
of Luigi Mangioni. And the abstraction is not insane. This
is a fact of debt. If you are losing and
he used to be winning, that means somebody else is
now winning. And now even while that's true, while in
the metaphoric space, which is just dividing things into what's
(59:56):
white and what's black and in that space which is
not very nuanced, but there, easy targets are easier. Easy
targets are not complicated institutions upon which the whole economy
indirectly depends. Instead, it's on images that are easy to target,
(01:00:19):
like Drag Queen Story Hour, which admittedly is not something
I would ever attend or bring my kid to, but
it's also not something that I would have ever heard
of actually existing except for that conservative streak out about it,
and I want to wrap it there. The cult of cleansing.
(01:00:42):
This has been my explanation, ranging from soap commercials to genocide.
Check out the Plastic Pills feed at patreon dot com
to not miss an episode that's where everything is. Next
time we discuss false prophets versus true prophets, and if
(01:01:03):
you're still with me, I will catch you then.
Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Cheers
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