March 28, 2025 • 60 mins
Christo-techno-fascism? I'm hunting down the impulse producing the end of the world and how religion functions as a social technology. As it turns out, we're all still religious.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:19):
Uh, oh, well, gotta say it looks like we're in trouble.
Whatever you want to call it, fascist, fascisto accelerationism, techno feudalism,
mechanism as an expression, but seems to be flaming up everywhere.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
And this is what you know.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I've been sitting down and pondering curiously, so it led
to this diatribe. And it's a fascinating confluence, isn't it.
The vibes From a ViBe's perspective, the world has not
been this interesting in my lifetime. It's terrifying, of course,
but it's interesting. So what I've realized is that I
(01:00):
and it seems like people are grasping for a method
that really explains it because it just seems so unreal.
And I've been setting out on a path to at
least understand why I don't understand it. So with that
in mind, I'm going to try to give you my
take on it, which is a take under development. But
(01:20):
it's brought me to religion, which I think we need
to redefine because the way it's defined it doesn't seem
like something particularly important. But we'll arrive there. So if
we're going to say that something like this fascist accelerationism
is a religion, you could, but perhaps it's more like
(01:42):
a reformation. It's a rearticulation of something that we already believe. Yeah,
that's scary, fine, but there's always reformations in faiths, and
they only happen when the existing system isn't doing so hot,
it's not doing its job. And that's really what I
have been trying to scratch and dig for is what
(02:04):
is religion's function, Not what does it look like, not
what is the content, but what is the form? And
it seems to me like we have kind of misunderstood
religion generally, especially philosophers, because philosophers usually just consider religion
to be bad philosophy rather than what I'm going to
(02:26):
try to argue here is that philosophy is an abstraction
of religion. And so, yeah, there are reformations in religions,
and then they consider themselves retroactively to.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Have been about the ideas.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
This is not a materialist theory, And for now I'm
going to just like err on the side of caution
and say that this is a materialist theory, that reformations
are born out of period periods of crises, but not
doctrinyl crises, not doc sastic crises as they're usually painted,
but probably that the religion is not doing its job
(03:05):
with respect to the thing that most people in most
societies care about, which is food on the table, future
for your kids, et cetera, et cetera. So this is
why millenarianism, particularly which is tell me if this sounds right.
A millenarianism is like a story about a charismatic leader,
a savior figure who arrives to sweep away the old,
(03:30):
stagnant and usually corrupt order. This is of course what
Christ was here to do, right, And now we have
our new messianic cults that that our our new heroes
are coming to sweep away the corruption, that the world,
the old world will come to an end, It will
(03:50):
be destroyed, the wicked will be cut, will be punished,
and then the coming whatever the Ai basilisk or the
new president will cleanse us of our media impurities, and
the beneficent rulers will cleanse society of wokeism and immigrants.
This is the story's oldest time, the millenarian story, just
(04:11):
it comes up all the time. It came up in
first century Palestine and gave us Christianity. The same structure
also appeared in the Cook Islands in Melanesia, in what's
now known as Cargo cults, where some people still believe
to this day that a man named John from will
one day return and restore to the local islanders who
(04:34):
are faithful to him. He'd come back and bring them cargo,
their food, machinery, technologies that was sent by their ancestors,
but that was intercepted by the military personnel stationed on
their islands, who were intercepting and stealing their birthright from them. Eventually,
all these old orders will pass away, and justice, a
(04:56):
system of justice, will be established on the earth. And
in structure, it's basically indistinguishable from qano, which has passed
into the air the milieu.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Now, in a previous.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Episode, now I gave a case without really following it up.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
It was off the cuff.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
The philosophy is a discipline, as a method, it's fallen short.
Some understanding is supposed to come out of it. But
now philosophy is dead. And you know, if you look back,
apparently philosophy has died a few times. One of the
big ones would be Heidiger in the sixties, and you know,
(05:36):
there's a good reason to have a case for it,
because if there was anyone who believed in philosophy, it
was him. But the tradition of philosophy, or one tradition
of philosophy failed at its mission, and Heidiger thought that
it would be now replaced by cybernetics. And his use
of the term cybernetics is of course disparaging, because cybernetics
(05:58):
is merely mechanic symbol manipulation that you, after the fact,
call knowledge.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Which is, you know, what is the world?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
If it's not that, but what was philosophy's mission, then
the world's confusing to look at.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
But you can break up the illusion.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
You can reduce the confusing bits to concepts, rearrange these
concepts a little bit, and eventually arrive at this new state,
which is understanding or whatever it is. Exiting the cave
or believing in the clear and distinct ideas is kind
of an animating principle of philosophy that you first deny
(06:40):
what people tell you about the world, if not the
world itself.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Right, you clear.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
The the dogmas out of your head, You clear doxa
out of your head, and make way for the light
of reason and phrase that way. If you boil down
philosophy's promise, this seems to be not unlike religion. Right,
you clear off the layers of lies, the layers of illusions,
(07:06):
and a truth appears, or a truth arrives or is
allowed to arrive, and you accept this on faith.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Faith. Hm, I'm gonna use this term a lot. I
think faith.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Consists in an attitude that there really is something underneath
what you see. There is something underneath the illusion. Eastern
philosophy some of it, you know, some Buddhist traditions, at
least they got out of this problem by saying, no,
you dig up the illusion and you don't find anything.
(07:41):
And Western philosophy, at least in its major traditions, never
goes that way. You might make some exceptions with like
negative theology in the medieval debates of nominalism, but Western philosophy,
I'll do a hasty generalization just so I can move
past this. But the true truth is in there, right.
The truth is if you dig it, if you dig
(08:03):
hard enough with your mind, there will be logos. And
the assumption is that under the confusion of the world,
the apparent right, the apparent confusion of the world, the
correct ordering is there for the few who have the
eyes to see, and that seems, you know, it does
(08:24):
seem good enough when the material conditions of around the
philosopher are on an upswing. Right, It's much harder to
take this for granted when material conditions are in decline,
because when material conditions are in decline, then you see
all sorts of particularly millenarianist beliefs pop up, or more
(08:49):
desperate attempts to have the world die and be reborn.
You know, I'd love to see some chart of philosophies
that have faith in the world versus philosophies that deny
the world in some style, and then the course of
how their civilization was doing at the time.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
I think there.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I think there would be a kind of line up
between the crises and the denial of the apparent world,
and then the the the upswings and some sort of
faith in the world.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Like the Renaissance. Right, tons of tons of.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Money is flowing into Europe from from the East. It's good,
good for good for artists, good for new styles of literature,
good reason for optimism. And out of the Renaissance you
have Renaissance humanism, like a faith in the apparent world.
Then you get someone like who's a good example, day
(09:50):
Kart Deycartes right after the Thirty Years War devastates devastates Europe.
Descartes sits there and says, you know, there's no reason
to have faith in the apparent world at all. So
if you can, if you could line this up, you know,
I haven't really checked, but I would assume that decline
(10:12):
and distrust in the apparent world, those two things correlate.
So there is a correlation between distrust in the apparent
world in favor of some other one and the decline
in just basic living standards. So if that's true, can't
really prove that, But if that is true, that would
be what we are saying right now. And that is
(10:34):
to say, from a philosophical perspective, From an Enlightenment perspective,
people don't act like they're supposed to when the civilization
is in decline. Enlightenment seems pretty good when your civilization
is in the midst of an upswing.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Ours is not in the upswing. It's not.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
So we see instead religion as opposed to philosophy. And
again I'm going to try to say that philosophy is
an abstraction of religion.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
It's just it.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
It works better when things are going well, and because
things have been going well for quite a while most
of my life at least, I don't think we really
understand what religion is, and I think we better get
on it right the religion. The intellectual milieu doesn't really
care about religion because it thinks it knows what it is.
(11:27):
And perhaps we are in the midst of a great awakening,
a great rude awakening as to what religion is. I
want you to think of QAnon. I know QAnon's not
not in it's heyday, but the fact that this spontaneously emerges,
when it emerges, and why it emerges.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
I'm sure you have some awareness of the reasons for it.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
But if we think of that kind of cult as
an expression of some underlying reason, underlying cause, then that's
what I'm going for here with religion. What is religion
actually expressing? So what I want to do is acknowledge
religion in a way that has gone out of fashion. Originally,
(12:18):
religion was what sociology was, what sociology was about, right,
and now religious studies is kind of.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I don't know, neutered.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
It just breats stories about what religious people do, the
teachings they happen to write down. And I think religion
on as a primordial expression of something prior to all that,
something that you would just call thought. And in that sense,
we're all religious, you me ritualistic, finding some sense of
(12:51):
social coherence in religion. And the philosophy is then an
abstraction of religion, at least Western logos philosophy sort to
perhaps cut to the chase.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Here a little a little bit too quickly, what we call.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
God is an abstraction for the coherence of society. Now,
societies are not always coherent. This is why we have
reformations in religion. They're kind they're kind of catching up
to the base. Here the superstructure is catching up to
the base. And this is not what you will hear
(13:29):
from the debater, atheist types, the master debaters, and they
make the mistake like the misunderstanding, just a fundamental misunderstanding.
The religion is just a kind of philosophy that's bad
philosophy and it has bad arguments. But if you recast this,
if you recast us in what I'm suggesting here, religion
(13:52):
is prior to philosophy, because you need a society to
do philosophy in you need someone else to be growing
your food if you're going to be a full which
means that if religion is this expression of the original
glue that holds society together, right, it's not that religion
is the glue.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I want to make that clear.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Religion is an abstraction or the expression.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Of the glue that holds it together.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
And this is why you can't debate religion. You can't
debate or hold you can't even hold religion to a
rational standard. I mean you can, but it would be
pointless to do. Because religious people, which is everyone, everyone
who lives in a society, we live in a society,
(14:41):
no one actually cares about what is correct. They care
about what works. And this is not on an individual
level either. This is on on us level, because by
this definition, you're religious, and religion is an expression of
society itself. And God is the name of the coherence
(15:03):
of society, which depends, of course, on certain rules.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Religions full of rules, and we'll get to that.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
But it appears the coherence of society appears, you know,
apparently ex nihilo like from nothing, just as God does.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
You're born into it.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
You don't actually get a choice to decide whether to
become to be part of a society or not. And
there are certain contradictions that need to be resolved by
being part of a society. You have to do things
that you don't want to do, and you also have
to do things for no reason, Like it doesn't matter
if you don't like to wear clothes.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
It's part of the law.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
It's part of the law of the other while you
are existing in society that you have to wear clothes,
and not only clothes, but certain types of clothes, like
it depends on the religion of your society. But our
society there are male clothes and female clothes and some
that are in the middle. But you basically have to
abide by that.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
And then we have also our.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Rituals like funerals, weddings, and there are appropriate clothes and
colors to wear to those, an inappropriate clothes to wear
to those. There may be class defined clothes. I don't
know if I can think of any examples of that,
or special clothes for priests or judges or on special occasions.
(16:30):
Now we have some of those rules, like definitely we
have man clothes versus female clothes. But in every culture
that we have any record of, there is a distinction
drawn between special clothes and ordinary clothes, and we still
have it too, you know, like judges wear robes. People
(16:52):
wanting to appear as business people they wear suits unless
you're a quote unquote disruptor, and then you wear a
black turtleneck. Men can't wear dresses, or you can, but
if you do, then you are expressing some norm deviants.
And none of this is really legal, like you can't
be punished for it, which means which is to say,
(17:13):
then if it's not legal, it's religious. And that's why
I'm saying, like this is the original domain of religion,
because religion takes it way further of course, like priests
wear really weird stuff to distinguish them from everybody else,
but you can't wear plain clothes as a priest. And
these domains are where original religion still is today. And
(17:37):
same with food, Like think of how many religious rituals
you can think of that include food, the Eucharist, passover.
It's just a list of foods, when to eat them,
what to say before you eat them, and then you
can think of all the other food laws and religion,
like you can't eat bacon never so on. But then
there's the common religion of food we eat the religious
(18:00):
food laws, like you eat turkey at Thanksgiving, you eat
cotton candy and caramel apples at the county Fair, you
eat wings at the super Bowl, you eat bacon for breakfast.
Bacon for breakfast was invented by an advertising agency. But
clothes and food are the most basic things that apply
(18:21):
to society, and we have rules around those, and I
would call those ritual or religious rules. And that is
to me what I'm talking about when I say original religion.
If you find if you look at actual institutional religion,
then you find all the rules about food and clothes
on steroids. But we still have them on just a
(18:42):
basic level.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Now, before we get back.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
To, you know, defining religio and ritual and where all
this stuff comes from, I take it as a truism
that religions are a form of response to crisis, to crises,
and religions just die out or disappear or fail to
(19:05):
continue to have adherents when they are not good at
responding to new crises. And part of my worry of
religion just you know, general aversion to Catholicism, especially those
the trad kids and the psychotic adult converts who are
now running around and like Catholicism versus historical Christianity. This
(19:31):
historical Christianity just in the sense that it's a Jewish
millenarian apocalypse cult of first century Palestine, and then you
give it two thousand years and it turns into Catholicism.
Like if you're just on a personal level, if you're
over the age of thirty and you convert to a
(19:51):
religion that is not your parents' religion, that's scary, but
it's probably gonna be a response to a fundamental problem
for you that there's no other way to get around,
and religion becomes what it is as a sort of
organism responding to social crises and abstracting them because the
(20:12):
crises in a way they can't be dealt with head on.
Because in a way, I know that's a it's a
psychoanalytic version of what crises and and trauma is. But
it just seems to me that this holds true a
on a social level as well, because Catholic well, Catholic
Christianity pretty much it's just a syncretic pagan nature cult
(20:33):
with this God at the center of it. That's that's
really just a supreme landlord right to get to get
Catholicism from Jesus himself, who's just one of dozens of
rabbi political criminals that are executed by the Romans for stirring.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Up the locals.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
They didn't they didn't like you stirring up the locals.
But to get from this political rabble rouser preaching about
love and the love of God, the love of the
Jewish God, and then to turn it into this supreme
landlord at the center of like Aristotelian causation. The answer was,
there's just a lot of crises on the way. There's
(21:15):
a lot of crises of what we call Western civilization
that had to be dealt with. And this is what
we got out of it. We got out of it
this very abstracted identity that some of the fringes you know,
don't identify with. And if it fails to solve these
social problems, if it fails to be that imaginary cell
(21:38):
that you need, then you get a reformation, which is
what happened, and it is it is super weird because
Christ said, like so many times, yeah, of course I
am a king, but I'm not a king in this world.
And yeah, you know, Catholicism didn't really get to that
verse those verses apparently. But this is not to say,
(22:00):
like religious debaters go this way to say that, you know,
religions are inhumane. This is not about religions. This is
about religion, which is to say that Catholicism cannot be wrong.
You know, if it's still alive, that means it's doing
its job good enough, and it makes no difference what
(22:21):
the content is.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
It makes no difference if it's good or bad.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Even if they did an inquisition or a Crusades, that's
irrelevant because the primal position of what religions do is
to abstract at a very basic level the habits of
a functioning society. So not a religion, but religion in
general has to be where it is. If one weren't there,
(22:47):
another one would be there. So, in terms of being
an abstraction, all religions and all cults on one basic level,
in the formal level, they're all the same. They go
in different directions. Obviously they go in different expressive directions,
but these are only at higher levels of abstraction.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
So when you're talking.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
About debate atheists like secular humanism is still religious, you know,
it's not in vogue anymore. But that is just a
high level abstraction of the originally religious impulse to say
that God became a human, and God became a human
in a bunch of religions. But the secular atheism stuff
(23:29):
comes from God becoming a human in Christianity, which says,
you know, if God did that, that means humans are good.
And then eventually you get secular humanism, which has exactly
the same form as religion. This actually happens pretty often.
So of course, we human beings that make religions are
(23:50):
at the center of our own social universe. So we
need to love ourselves and love our neighbor. In order
to keep society functioning. We need to have rules that
will guide you through crises so that society keeps functioning.
And this is why if you break down any table
(24:12):
of values belonging to any religion, basically you get to
don't harm each other, don't steal, don't kill. And that's
the second commandment after the first commandment, which is respect
the Gods. Respect God, respect the gods. They all say that,
So what is God. When it says respect the gods, well,
(24:36):
that's society, right. The law is to respect society and
if you don't, you'll be punished for it. And also
don't kill and don't steal because you'll be punished for it. Now,
in an upswing scenario, in a material upswing where things
are going well, you don't need to tell people to
do that because they will respect the religion that's helped
(25:00):
them out. They will respect the others because you know
everyone's on the rising tide. But you need religion to
survive crises because you need a reason for people to
not go kill each other when the world is not
going well for them, when society is not going well.
So religion is for maintaining morality when when the ship
(25:22):
starts to sink. This reminds me of another thing. Another
thing I from those the debate atheists.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
They really object.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
They don't like the term that their their theists counterparts
use sometimes, which is there's no good without God. Like
if there's no God, everything is permitted, so there's no morality.
And unlike the debate atheists too, you know, I agree
with on most of their details about things, but this
one I don't and Nietzsch didn't either. Nietzsche recognized that
(25:57):
all morality from religion, and that's what I'm saying here
that in times of plenty, you don't really need rules
that much, you don't really need morality because people are
generally happy, they have a future to look forward to.
And you know, of course there's gonna be plenty of
possible objections to that. I'm using it as a generalization,
(26:20):
but religion is really for crisis points. And one reason
that I'm turning to it now is because I think
the evidence is everywhere around us. We're in a crisis point.
We're in a crisis point that it's going to end
in violence and something like liberalism, which works great in
(26:40):
times of plenty. It works great to you know, respect
each other and have love for the discourse and positive agreements,
but you know, we all just desire to be free.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
That works when.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
There's a lot of money going around for everybody, it's
not gonna work. It doesn't work anymore in a crisis.
That's just obvious on its face, and we're gonna see
the reality of that continuing. So you know, that's why
I'm at religion. So yeah, we're gonna get a reality check,
and the real world is religious. People are fundamentally religious.
(27:12):
Religion here also just means believing in society, and in
times of crisis, no one says fuck society in general. No,
but they do focus on the impure elements of society, right.
They focus on if we just got rid of this,
if we just got rid of either these people or
(27:33):
if we just got rid of this behavior, then our
society would be okay. But they still believe in society.
So I don't just mean here the crowd of idiots
are religious.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
I mean this is.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
A religious conflict and an ideological conflict. And I use
religion and ideology the terms I think, not how they're
not how other people use them. I think I'm using
them closer to the original meaning.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I know that's not how language.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Works, But if we redefine ideology and religion, they basically
are the same thing. They are an abstraction, an original
abstraction that no one is in.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
The problem that I have with how people use the
term religion and ideology both as concepts is that they're
phrases these sort of choice garments, clothes, an outfit that
you kind of like put on and take off at will.
Whereas I think the meaning of ideology as with as
(28:37):
with religion, it's something that you don't really know that
you're in and if you're even if you realize that
you're in it, like like I am, even if you
realize that you're in it, it doesn't change your behavior in
any way. You know, just because I realize that it's
a form of ritual, I'm not going to butt in
line at the store, right. That's part of a religious
(29:00):
ritual that expresses your belief in society. There's no law
that says you can't but in line, but still no
one does it. And that's the sense so that I
mean everyone accepts these rituals, you know, putting up your
putting up your hand as a wave if you accidentally
(29:21):
cut someone off or didn't see them on the road.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
You know.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Another example like the wave is an expression of a
much more originary ritual. I'd say that is like, hey,
I don't have a weapon in my hand. That's that's
probably where waving comes from. It's like, hey, my hand's empty,
I'm not gonna kill you with the sword. Now we
use it to apologize or to acknowledge someone's existence. And
(29:45):
when you acknowledge someone's existence, this is a sort of
belief in society. Now, the fascist acceleration, oh, techno, feudalist,
whatever you want to call them, they also believe in society, right,
but they believe in a society without something in it.
We need to purge that thing from society. But anyway,
(30:07):
the way that religion and ideology both accord with each
other in this way is that you don't choose it.
You don't have You don't really have much of an
option to either express.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
A religion or not express a religion.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
It's basically an expression of who you are and your
expressions of faith in society. Uh, this is a question.
I want to say, they're determined, right. I want to
say that ideology and religion, in my use of the terms,
is something automatic. To change them, To change your ideology
(30:49):
seems to be kind of like a contradiction in terms
from where I'm coming from, because it's an expression of
you know, choices that you didn't make. So you don't
change your ideology and your religion just the way you
change your clothes. Like, no matter what I believed about religion,
(31:09):
as I said, I can't I almost physically can't just
but in line at the store. It is not illegal,
but I can't do it, and I can't do it
because of the other that I believe in in my
own mind.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So anyway, we've been.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Here and I've been you know, trying to change these terms,
and I've used two terms a lot. Those are abstraction
and expression, all right, So I haven't conceptualized or defined
abstraction and expression, but they're basically they're in philosophy, especially
(31:48):
Marxist type philosophy, in which you know, ideology is an
expression of the base, and Marx uses abstraction as an explanation.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
In capital, for example, all.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
The time the commodity, the commodity that is fetishized is
the abstraction of the labor in it. So the labor
in the commodity is what it is in a real sense,
and the abstraction then takes place.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Of the real sense.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
And sometimes it's just you know, taken for granted or
supposed that abstraction is a bad thing or like a
harmful thing, which I'm going to just say, no, let's
treat it. Let's treat it neutrally. All humans seem to
abstract looks like it all culture is abstraction, and religion
(32:40):
here would be the original abstraction, and it looks like
the type of abstraction that humans do is also what
makes human society is different from a you know, other
gregarious animals and their society. Bees they seem to abstract
when they deduce a little dance to send other bees
to where they found the flowers. Right, that seems like
(33:01):
an abstraction. But human abstraction, I'd say, is different at
least on the point that the abstraction replaces the original. Right,
the map becomes more real than the territory. That's where
I'm gonna go with this, Okay, And we can say
in a negative sense that this is just fundamentally negative. Again,
(33:26):
there's some Buddhist traditions I think to say this is
fundamentally negative. Representation is why we have so many expectations,
and then the expectations not being fulfilled as why we're
so unhappy. And then the process of becoming enlightened is
just to no longer be beholden to representation as a
(33:48):
human the way that a donkey is beholden to a
carrot on a stick. But you know, we can't expect
that everyone's going to do that they're not. And so yeah,
to understand this process of abstraction again where the map
replaces the territory. But I'm gonna cast abstraction a little
(34:08):
bit different here, not as something negative, but it is
a transformation.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
And it's a transformation where.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
A decision making process and not a conscious or rational
decision making process in this case, it would be social
decision making process. Like for a society to survive, it
has to have certain rules like don't steal, don't steal,
don't kill, and respect the society, which is to respect
(34:38):
the gods. Literally, every table of values from every society
has that at its base. And the reason that they
all have that at the base is because any society,
like in an evolutionary perspective, any society that didn't have
laws against killing, stealing, and disrespecting societies, they wouldn't have
(34:59):
made it. So when we have basic religion, in some sense,
it is abstracting, is abstracting from the basic rules of
society that are required to keep it functioning two more
complicated ones. And in the more complicated ones, you have
divisions between you know, sacred activity and just ordinary activity.
(35:23):
That's one of the first things that happens in religion.
And you also have to identify your society as being
different from other ones, Like there's no universalism in totemism,
in totomistic religions, right, it's our tribe likes that tribe,
Our tribe doesn't like that tribe. We get along with them,
(35:44):
we don't get along with them. Here we do our
festivals together on this day of the year, but we
don't invite those guys.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Right, So this is why I think.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
It's in Durkheim's analysis of totemistic religions, if we look back,
we see, you know, actually quite advanced religions in I
don't know, like ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Greece. These are
quite advanced religions. And to be advanced, of course, it
(36:14):
just means they dealt with more social crises. Not that
we're all progressing towards a sort of super abstracted religion. No,
But Durkhim noticed, like what we expect of religion is
they got a god of the sea, they got a
god of the clouds, thunder lightning, death, like the big
main categories of life and what Durkhim noticed is that
(36:38):
in tootemic religion, there's nothing that abstract, right, It's much
closer to the earth. Your tribe is something that you
can point to and look at. And as religions become
more and more abstracted, you get gods of things like
abstract concepts justice, war, peace, love, all of these abstracted concepts.
(37:02):
These now become the domain of the gods. And then
once those become abstracted, then you end up with either
a sort of atheistic religion or a monotheistic religion. You
can't really get more abstracted than monotheism or atheism. I
think monotheism and atheism are are flip sides of the
(37:25):
same coin, because monotheism, I think this is an old
Dawkins line. Monotheism is just to be an atheist towards
all the other gods, and atheism is just the next
step after that, which is kind of true, right. But
this makes the mistake, and I've done a lot of
reading on this, This makes the mistake to thinking that
religion is actually about gods when it isn't. You need
(37:49):
more universalizable gods. The more complex your society gets. If
your society is your family. Then it's fine, like where
the society or the tribe of the wolf, that's fine.
But as you get more complicated, as you enter into
trade relationships with other tribes that have you know, superior
(38:09):
religion to yours, then you see that religion becomes a
sort of social technology, and it's a technology of control,
but not control in necessarily the negative sense, the sense
that like there's there's dominators and then the poor people
that are dominated. Rather it's control more in the in
(38:31):
the cybernetic sense. Obviously, some religions require surveillance, right, usually
as a form of decline Catholicism, of course, But religion
generally as a control system isn't about surveillance necessarily, but
more in the sense that as a social technology, religion
(38:54):
mediates the response to new conflicts which I'm calling crises,
but just new information from the environment that forces change,
that forces either reform or replacement. If too much changes
too quickly, then the system collapses and the religion with it.
(39:15):
So religions are necessarily syncretic, and they exchange, you know,
technologies one to another. They incorporate the things that work
from the next tribe over and all that. So if
we have today a bunch of these millenniary cult impulses.
(39:37):
And let's just say what we call now liberalism. Liberalism
is kind of just a happy humanism that everyone deserves respect,
everyone's an individual, don't get in their space, human rights
are universal.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
This is anti This is an anti millenarian cult impulse.
It says, you know, we don't need the death of
the world to have a future. Have I defined millenarianism,
I don't think so. It comes from the Book of Revelation,
the Bible Book of Revelation that says Christ is going
to return and he'll put the devil in jail in Tartarus,
(40:15):
and he'll rule for a thousand years. But before that,
a whole bunch of bad shit has to happen, like
the whole four Horsemen of the Apocalypse bit is in
here that the war and famine death will ravage the
earth and then the Savior returns to clean everything up.
So when millenary and impulses share and there's they're in
(40:39):
like literally every part of the world, in every religion,
there's something you know, profoundly human about millenary and impulses,
that they are apocalyptic and they're a kind of death drive.
And what happens structurally similarly in all of them is
that there's firsty crises, and then there's a savior. The
(41:01):
savior plucks the faithful out of the catastrophe, and then
after the catastrophe, there's a.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
New birth, a new world, a rebirth.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Paliningenesis is the Greek term, and I think it's either
the Cynics or the Stokes, but they have this concept
of the world as always being born and then dying
and then being reborn. But you can see this rebirth
theme in less tasteful kinds of social religion, where the
(41:35):
bad things, the bad people, they get punished or murdered
and maybe.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
We usher we help God with this.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Plant Nazism thousand years Reich is a pretty Millennerian. And
also the way some of these h Marxist Leninist kids
on Twitter talk about capitalism falling apart, you know it's
got millenarian vibes. Also favorite examples are those cargo cults
in the Pacific Islands, some of them still going. But
(42:06):
they thought that this the return of the Savior, would
usher in the new age. When they actually got the
cargo that the white people were stealing, so that's why
they build their model airplanes out of bamboo and they
set up runways lined with torches, hoping that the cargo
will return. And I'm gonna use this later as an
(42:27):
example of belief because they continued to believe in their
religion even after they were taken to places like Australia
and shown like this stuff wasn't sent by the gods,
this cargo wasn't like of divine origin. We just made
it over here. And they showed them that, right. They
showed the leaders of the cargo cult communities like no,
(42:48):
like this, this isn't this isn't magic, but they continued
the religion anyway. So it shows that, like the true causation,
the real chain of cause and effects matters less than
religion being able to maintain something else.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
So what is it?
Speaker 1 (43:09):
What is that something else? What is millenarianism an abstraction
of what is this end of the world? Why does
some version of this exist in basically every world religion
and why does it keep popping up?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
This is what I'm going to say. My take.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Basically, if you can recognize, like in your lifetime, that
the social world is going badly and that it's getting worse,
and would I would wager to guess that this is
pretty close to just relative standards of living.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
You know, if these can be kept stable.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
You don't really need the end of the world. But
the longer they are in decline, your basic mammal brain
realizes this, I'm hungry, I can't take care of my kids,
or is there someone over there who has more than me?
Speaker 2 (43:57):
You can predict that.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Well, if you do predict that they're going to keep declining,
it makes a lot of sense to say, oh, well,
this world cannot be saved. This world is getting worse,
and you need someone responsible for it. It's never going
to be you who's responsible for it, despite a doctrine
like original sin. But now the world's getting worse and
(44:21):
there's someone who's responsible for it. The Jews their favorite example.
More recently, it's the Wokes. It might be rewind a bit,
it might be cultural immorality or witches, you know, whatever
it is. They're parasiting off of God's power because they're
(44:44):
using the devil's power. And when you say someone is
parasiting off God by doing magic especially, they're paraciting off
of society because God is the abstraction of the coherence
of society.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
So whatever bad.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Person it is, the Jews, the Wokes, the witches, they're
animated by an anti god force, an anti social force,
an immoral force in the imaginary of course. And again
morality is quite simply the abstracted laws that a bunch
of us primates what we need for society to last.
(45:24):
That's why, that's why I respect society, respect God, honor
the gods, and don't kill and don't steal are the
basic rules. So the language of purging the body, the
language of purging the body of parasites, is really perfect.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Here.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
You believe in society, but the members that need to
be purged, or at least the behaviors that need to
be purged, they are the corrupting influence that are causing
societies decline or downfall. And it's never the people that
this appla to that are like, oh, yeah, I'm causing
society's decline.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
It's always someone else.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
It's usually you know, the easy targets or the small groups.
And that means ritual sacrifice is required to purge society clean. Yeah,
you burn the witches, you know. So when you combine
this sort of religious impulse with modern technology. Obviously that's
terrifying because you get surveillance and Holow costs, But you
(46:31):
can see that if you reduce it to its basic
social level, it's an answer to the question what is society? Like?
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Who are we?
Speaker 1 (46:41):
What is us? What is ours? What is not ours?
And if you see what is ours is on the decline,
what we have, like we're getting less and less of
the pie. That means like, well, maybe we should get
rid of some of us, you know, So you can
see it as I know, it's like terrifying to put
(47:03):
it in those terms, but you can see it as
a kind of social autoimmune response, which is to say, unconsciously, okay,
we're running out of stuff here, we don't have enough stuff.
Who can we safely get rid of? Who can we
ritualistically sacrifice here so that there there's more stuff to
(47:23):
go around, and the mob finds more and more, you know,
parasites to root out the worse conditions get and you know,
sometimes they do it the right way. You got the
French Revolution guilloting the aristocrats in the streets usually though
usually it's not directed the right way.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
But again, there's no right and wrong.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
In religion, there's no like cause and effect. It's just
the expression or the abstraction of a feeling, and that
in this case is well living standards are declining. That
means someone must have my stuff, which interestingly is exactly
what the Melanesian and Cook Islanders thought when they have
their cargo cult. They said, well, the white the white people,
(48:05):
the white soldiers that are stationed on these on these
islands during World War two, they're getting all the stuff.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
That stuff must have.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Been meant for us, and then a savior will return
and direct the cargo properly towards them at the end
of days.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
But this is the kind of.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Abstraction that I am thinking of. The social abstraction is
turned into a sort of metaphor, a sort of metaphoricity
which goes very deeply into what it means to be
a human. Even our language is based on metaphoric abstraction
from terms that mean you know, something with a much
(48:45):
more direct reference that they replace, and then it becomes
abstracted into the kind of terms that we talk about.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Now love for example.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
Anyway, the social condition is turned into a sort of
metaphor that allows us to continue our habits, and if
that means someone else pays the price for it, if
that means, like you know, we just do a little Holocaust,
we turn a blind eye because we're allowed to continue
our habits. If abstraction is kind of this first thing
(49:15):
that happens, then habit.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
I think this is my answer to the question.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Habit is the social reality that becomes abstracted originally, and
that's just that people want comfort, which we call or
I'm calling habit. Religion is like the after the fact,
retroactive justification for why you don't have to change your habits.
(49:42):
You want to keep things how they are. And this
is kind of paradoxical, right, because religion in this sense
is trying to deal with crises, but it's not very
good at doing it because it's inherently conservative, right, And
conservative is not to say that it's bad. It just
means you're trying. You're doing everything you possibly can to
(50:06):
protect the social order, to protect the social rules.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
That have gotten you this far. And this is like
why it's an opiate of the masses.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
It's going to answer every question until you have complete
social collapse, and at that point, you know religion is
not going to save you. But religion will be defending
against social collapse all the way up to the point
by metaphorizing it, by turning it into images. That's what
honor the God's means. It's to conserve the coherence of society,
(50:43):
and it means to honor the way society has been
up till now. Because speaking evolutionarily, it did get us
this far right now, even millenarianism, which is the end
of the world, it's an apocalyptic death cult. Even this
is actually the opposite of what it says. It's resistance
(51:04):
to change. It says, you know, let's eliminate this group
of people. But it also has this savior archetype that
the savior will do all the acting.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
So really you.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Don't have to do anything except, you know, maybe help
them out a bit by discovering some pedophiles. But you
just have to support the savior's efforts. And religion functions
here like it always does, as the justification to do
as little as possible. And you might then ask, well,
why does religion have so many rules? But if you
(51:39):
really consider it, these the rules are, you know, don't
do too much bad stuff. Here's something that you have
to do every day, you got to do some prayers,
you've got to be selfless, but only on the holidays,
you know, and He'll take care of the rest of it.
God will take care of the rest of them. It's
like you do a finite amount of work for you know,
(52:00):
potentially infinite upside.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
You get to go to heaven or whatever.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
It's, but you don't have to do very much. And
even when the world starts trending down, when you have
less stuff than you used to and your neighbors have
less stuff than they used to, more and more people
are gonna put more of the burden not on themselves
to change things. No, they're gonna put more of the
burden on the savior to do what God wants or
(52:26):
the prophets. When it's Nazis that are the profits. I mean,
this is this is pretty bad for society. But part
of this religious imaginary is yeah, I'll let the Nazis
do stuff because it justifies in action. Religion, I think, yeah,
I mean, this is the conclusion I'm reaching. Religion is
(52:48):
about justifying in action as opposed to action. And that's
because most people in most societies, for most of the time,
just like people in most religions, they're in act, they
consume it rather passively. They either don't know what all
this religious stuff means, they don't really care too much.
(53:10):
They're just trying to squeak by, make sure they're in
the good book. The Zelots, though, of any religion, the Zelots,
the true believers, they are always terrifying because they actually.
Speaker 2 (53:23):
Do believe in change.
Speaker 1 (53:26):
And people that believe in things are terrifying because they
are the ones who are given the reins in crises
and what they do with them, I mean that depends,
but they are the ones that are actually planning a
course of action. And you know, if we're looking around
(53:46):
in the crisis, if you look at those that are
planning course of action, there's definitely reason to be concerned.
But if you look at this as a religious economy,
this makes a lot more sense. And I can't just
drop a term like that either, religious economy. I got
the idea from Marx because he writes in capital basically
(54:08):
like yo, I don't know where this value comes from
because it's not in labor, but it suddenly appears thereafter labor,
like it's there, it's not there. And then even though
it's not in the action, then it suddenly appears there.
So Marx can't help me with the problem though, of belief,
because if we are already at the stage of this
(54:30):
economic value creation, that already means that we're in a
stable society. So my question apro po religious economy that
has the same structure, is how did we arrive at
this state where there are beliefs to be believed in?
And the answer to that is that society is sort
(54:51):
of is a faith project and morality those are there too,
Those are the rules that got us this far.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
But if religion.
Speaker 1 (54:58):
Collapses, society collapses or is it the reverse? It's a
good question society. If society collapses, does religion collapse, or
if religion collapses, does that mean society has already collapsed?
They seem again to be the flip side of the
same thing. And speaking of flip sides, where does belief
(55:19):
come from and what is its other half or other
side if you look at it the same thing from
a different angle, Just like value, it's not in the action,
but it emerges from the action. Belief has to exist
for a reason, Like you can't believe in anything arbitrarily.
You have to believe in something that's good, and what's
(55:41):
good seems to mean something very basic, like the sun
rises tomorrow and there's enough food just like there was today.
But belief is also some sort of exchange that works
against hope. It looks to me like belief is a
sort of transformation where the world, the real world, whatever
(56:03):
you want to call it, put in quotation marks, the
real world is replaced with something not of it, not
of the same material. That is, maybe an image is
replaced by an image of the world. So basically we
have an image world that is more real than whatever
(56:24):
it is that our senses are delivering right now. That's
another way to say the same thing, another world that's
more real than what we see well, spirit world, or
in non religious terms, it's a world where representations replace reality.
Speaker 2 (56:44):
And if you know my stuff, you know where I'm
getting this from.
Speaker 1 (56:46):
I don't mean that representations eclipse reality and reality is
still there. I mean that they annihilate on the very
basic level of what it means to know anything. Beliefs
are the map that annihilate whatever it was that existed
before them, And there's no way for us, as believing
(57:08):
animals to look backwards from before the times that beliefs emerged.
The real is whatever language actually represents, but we can't
even talk about that but without language. So this is
where we're trapped. We're trapped in between the spirit world
and the real world and the best religion, the best
(57:29):
religion Mahayana. Buddhism calls this reduction of the representational world
shunyavada or the emptiness, and then emptiness is like the
guiding principle for the good life. And I'm not expert
in Buddhism, but it's the religion that says that things
(57:51):
aren't real spirits, they are conventional spirits that we made up. Also,
Buddhism doesn't have God as a landlord who owns everything
and making all the laws, so that's in its favor.
But as I'm no expert on Buddhism, I won't say
anything more about it at this time. But what about Schopenharer, Okay,
I can claim some expertise there. The world as will
(58:14):
and representation. Well, the problem with the world is the
representation part of it, isn't it the dream that we're
trapped in? So in conclusion, if we understand faith as
the valuing of representations, beliefs, which is not in itself
(58:34):
really real, but basically become real in the act.
Speaker 2 (58:38):
Of believing them through habit ritual.
Speaker 1 (58:42):
Then we find a sort of correspondence here theory here,
which makes the world right now seem a lot less insane.
In fact, it seems sane, even if it's awful and
getting worse. At least there's some underlying rationality to it,
which was what philosophy was supposed to do. Just looks
(59:04):
like the theory of religion does it a little better.
And maybe that's where where I'll end it today. I
have more to say, and I have a lot more
not to say, but this is more or less an
outline of how I think the primordial form of sense
is made, and more to come. As always, I'll look
(59:27):
for your feedback, but thanks for listening, and if you're
not there, head over to patreon dot com to never
miss an episode.
Speaker 2 (59:36):
That's how to not miss anything. It's all for now.
Take care of yourselves.
Uh, oh, well, gotta say it looks like we're in trouble.
Whatever you want to call it, fascist, fascisto accelerationism, techno feudalism,
mechanism as an expression, but seems to be flaming up everywhere.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
And this is what you know.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I've been sitting down and pondering curiously, so it led
to this diatribe. And it's a fascinating confluence, isn't it.
The vibes From a ViBe's perspective, the world has not
been this interesting in my lifetime. It's terrifying, of course,
but it's interesting. So what I've realized is that I
(01:00):
and it seems like people are grasping for a method
that really explains it because it just seems so unreal.
And I've been setting out on a path to at
least understand why I don't understand it. So with that
in mind, I'm going to try to give you my
take on it, which is a take under development. But
(01:20):
it's brought me to religion, which I think we need
to redefine because the way it's defined it doesn't seem
like something particularly important. But we'll arrive there. So if
we're going to say that something like this fascist accelerationism
is a religion, you could, but perhaps it's more like
(01:42):
a reformation. It's a rearticulation of something that we already believe. Yeah,
that's scary, fine, but there's always reformations in faiths, and
they only happen when the existing system isn't doing so hot,
it's not doing its job. And that's really what I
have been trying to scratch and dig for is what
(02:04):
is religion's function, Not what does it look like, not
what is the content, but what is the form? And
it seems to me like we have kind of misunderstood
religion generally, especially philosophers, because philosophers usually just consider religion
to be bad philosophy rather than what I'm going to
(02:26):
try to argue here is that philosophy is an abstraction
of religion. And so, yeah, there are reformations in religions,
and then they consider themselves retroactively to.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Have been about the ideas.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
This is not a materialist theory, And for now I'm
going to just like err on the side of caution
and say that this is a materialist theory, that reformations
are born out of period periods of crises, but not
doctrinyl crises, not doc sastic crises as they're usually painted,
but probably that the religion is not doing its job
(03:05):
with respect to the thing that most people in most
societies care about, which is food on the table, future
for your kids, et cetera, et cetera. So this is
why millenarianism, particularly which is tell me if this sounds right.
A millenarianism is like a story about a charismatic leader,
a savior figure who arrives to sweep away the old,
(03:30):
stagnant and usually corrupt order. This is of course what
Christ was here to do, right, And now we have
our new messianic cults that that our our new heroes
are coming to sweep away the corruption, that the world,
the old world will come to an end, It will
(03:50):
be destroyed, the wicked will be cut, will be punished,
and then the coming whatever the Ai basilisk or the
new president will cleanse us of our media impurities, and
the beneficent rulers will cleanse society of wokeism and immigrants.
This is the story's oldest time, the millenarian story, just
(04:11):
it comes up all the time. It came up in
first century Palestine and gave us Christianity. The same structure
also appeared in the Cook Islands in Melanesia, in what's
now known as Cargo cults, where some people still believe
to this day that a man named John from will
one day return and restore to the local islanders who
(04:34):
are faithful to him. He'd come back and bring them cargo,
their food, machinery, technologies that was sent by their ancestors,
but that was intercepted by the military personnel stationed on
their islands, who were intercepting and stealing their birthright from them. Eventually,
all these old orders will pass away, and justice, a
(04:56):
system of justice, will be established on the earth. And
in structure, it's basically indistinguishable from qano, which has passed
into the air the milieu.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Now, in a previous.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Episode, now I gave a case without really following it up.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
It was off the cuff.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
The philosophy is a discipline, as a method, it's fallen short.
Some understanding is supposed to come out of it. But
now philosophy is dead. And you know, if you look back,
apparently philosophy has died a few times. One of the
big ones would be Heidiger in the sixties, and you know,
(05:36):
there's a good reason to have a case for it,
because if there was anyone who believed in philosophy, it
was him. But the tradition of philosophy, or one tradition
of philosophy failed at its mission, and Heidiger thought that
it would be now replaced by cybernetics. And his use
of the term cybernetics is of course disparaging, because cybernetics
(05:58):
is merely mechanic symbol manipulation that you, after the fact,
call knowledge.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Which is, you know, what is the world?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
If it's not that, but what was philosophy's mission, then
the world's confusing to look at.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
But you can break up the illusion.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
You can reduce the confusing bits to concepts, rearrange these
concepts a little bit, and eventually arrive at this new state,
which is understanding or whatever it is. Exiting the cave
or believing in the clear and distinct ideas is kind
of an animating principle of philosophy that you first deny
(06:40):
what people tell you about the world, if not the
world itself.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Right, you clear.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
The the dogmas out of your head, You clear doxa
out of your head, and make way for the light
of reason and phrase that way. If you boil down
philosophy's promise, this seems to be not unlike religion. Right,
you clear off the layers of lies, the layers of illusions,
(07:06):
and a truth appears, or a truth arrives or is
allowed to arrive, and you accept this on faith.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Faith. Hm, I'm gonna use this term a lot. I
think faith.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Consists in an attitude that there really is something underneath
what you see. There is something underneath the illusion. Eastern
philosophy some of it, you know, some Buddhist traditions, at
least they got out of this problem by saying, no,
you dig up the illusion and you don't find anything.
(07:41):
And Western philosophy, at least in its major traditions, never
goes that way. You might make some exceptions with like
negative theology in the medieval debates of nominalism, but Western philosophy,
I'll do a hasty generalization just so I can move
past this. But the true truth is in there, right.
The truth is if you dig it, if you dig
(08:03):
hard enough with your mind, there will be logos. And
the assumption is that under the confusion of the world,
the apparent right, the apparent confusion of the world, the
correct ordering is there for the few who have the
eyes to see, and that seems, you know, it does
(08:24):
seem good enough when the material conditions of around the
philosopher are on an upswing. Right, It's much harder to
take this for granted when material conditions are in decline,
because when material conditions are in decline, then you see
all sorts of particularly millenarianist beliefs pop up, or more
(08:49):
desperate attempts to have the world die and be reborn.
You know, I'd love to see some chart of philosophies
that have faith in the world versus philosophies that deny
the world in some style, and then the course of
how their civilization was doing at the time.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
I think there.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I think there would be a kind of line up
between the crises and the denial of the apparent world,
and then the the the upswings and some sort of
faith in the world.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Like the Renaissance. Right, tons of tons of.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Money is flowing into Europe from from the East. It's good,
good for good for artists, good for new styles of literature,
good reason for optimism. And out of the Renaissance you
have Renaissance humanism, like a faith in the apparent world.
Then you get someone like who's a good example, day
(09:50):
Kart Deycartes right after the Thirty Years War devastates devastates Europe.
Descartes sits there and says, you know, there's no reason
to have faith in the apparent world at all. So
if you can, if you could line this up, you know,
I haven't really checked, but I would assume that decline
(10:12):
and distrust in the apparent world, those two things correlate.
So there is a correlation between distrust in the apparent
world in favor of some other one and the decline
in just basic living standards. So if that's true, can't
really prove that, But if that is true, that would
be what we are saying right now. And that is
(10:34):
to say, from a philosophical perspective, From an Enlightenment perspective,
people don't act like they're supposed to when the civilization
is in decline. Enlightenment seems pretty good when your civilization
is in the midst of an upswing.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Ours is not in the upswing. It's not.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
So we see instead religion as opposed to philosophy. And
again I'm going to try to say that philosophy is
an abstraction of religion.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
It's just it.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
It works better when things are going well, and because
things have been going well for quite a while most
of my life at least, I don't think we really
understand what religion is, and I think we better get
on it right the religion. The intellectual milieu doesn't really
care about religion because it thinks it knows what it is.
(11:27):
And perhaps we are in the midst of a great awakening,
a great rude awakening as to what religion is. I
want you to think of QAnon. I know QAnon's not
not in it's heyday, but the fact that this spontaneously emerges,
when it emerges, and why it emerges.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
I'm sure you have some awareness of the reasons for it.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
But if we think of that kind of cult as
an expression of some underlying reason, underlying cause, then that's
what I'm going for here with religion. What is religion
actually expressing? So what I want to do is acknowledge
religion in a way that has gone out of fashion. Originally,
(12:18):
religion was what sociology was, what sociology was about, right,
and now religious studies is kind of.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I don't know, neutered.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
It just breats stories about what religious people do, the
teachings they happen to write down. And I think religion
on as a primordial expression of something prior to all that,
something that you would just call thought. And in that sense,
we're all religious, you me ritualistic, finding some sense of
(12:51):
social coherence in religion. And the philosophy is then an
abstraction of religion, at least Western logos philosophy sort to
perhaps cut to the chase.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Here a little a little bit too quickly, what we call.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
God is an abstraction for the coherence of society. Now,
societies are not always coherent. This is why we have
reformations in religion. They're kind they're kind of catching up
to the base. Here the superstructure is catching up to
the base. And this is not what you will hear
(13:29):
from the debater, atheist types, the master debaters, and they
make the mistake like the misunderstanding, just a fundamental misunderstanding.
The religion is just a kind of philosophy that's bad
philosophy and it has bad arguments. But if you recast this,
if you recast us in what I'm suggesting here, religion
(13:52):
is prior to philosophy, because you need a society to
do philosophy in you need someone else to be growing
your food if you're going to be a full which
means that if religion is this expression of the original
glue that holds society together, right, it's not that religion
is the glue.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I want to make that clear.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Religion is an abstraction or the expression.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Of the glue that holds it together.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
And this is why you can't debate religion. You can't
debate or hold you can't even hold religion to a
rational standard. I mean you can, but it would be
pointless to do. Because religious people, which is everyone, everyone
who lives in a society, we live in a society,
(14:41):
no one actually cares about what is correct. They care
about what works. And this is not on an individual
level either. This is on on us level, because by
this definition, you're religious, and religion is an expression of
society itself. And God is the name of the coherence
(15:03):
of society, which depends, of course, on certain rules.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Religions full of rules, and we'll get to that.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
But it appears the coherence of society appears, you know,
apparently ex nihilo like from nothing, just as God does.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
You're born into it.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
You don't actually get a choice to decide whether to
become to be part of a society or not. And
there are certain contradictions that need to be resolved by
being part of a society. You have to do things
that you don't want to do, and you also have
to do things for no reason, Like it doesn't matter
if you don't like to wear clothes.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
It's part of the law.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
It's part of the law of the other while you
are existing in society that you have to wear clothes,
and not only clothes, but certain types of clothes, like
it depends on the religion of your society. But our
society there are male clothes and female clothes and some
that are in the middle. But you basically have to
abide by that.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
And then we have also our.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Rituals like funerals, weddings, and there are appropriate clothes and
colors to wear to those, an inappropriate clothes to wear
to those. There may be class defined clothes. I don't
know if I can think of any examples of that,
or special clothes for priests or judges or on special occasions.
(16:30):
Now we have some of those rules, like definitely we
have man clothes versus female clothes. But in every culture
that we have any record of, there is a distinction
drawn between special clothes and ordinary clothes, and we still
have it too, you know, like judges wear robes. People
(16:52):
wanting to appear as business people they wear suits unless
you're a quote unquote disruptor, and then you wear a
black turtleneck. Men can't wear dresses, or you can, but
if you do, then you are expressing some norm deviants.
And none of this is really legal, like you can't
be punished for it, which means which is to say,
(17:13):
then if it's not legal, it's religious. And that's why
I'm saying, like this is the original domain of religion,
because religion takes it way further of course, like priests
wear really weird stuff to distinguish them from everybody else,
but you can't wear plain clothes as a priest. And
these domains are where original religion still is today. And
(17:37):
same with food, Like think of how many religious rituals
you can think of that include food, the Eucharist, passover.
It's just a list of foods, when to eat them,
what to say before you eat them, and then you
can think of all the other food laws and religion,
like you can't eat bacon never so on. But then
there's the common religion of food we eat the religious
(18:00):
food laws, like you eat turkey at Thanksgiving, you eat
cotton candy and caramel apples at the county Fair, you
eat wings at the super Bowl, you eat bacon for breakfast.
Bacon for breakfast was invented by an advertising agency. But
clothes and food are the most basic things that apply
(18:21):
to society, and we have rules around those, and I
would call those ritual or religious rules. And that is
to me what I'm talking about when I say original religion.
If you find if you look at actual institutional religion,
then you find all the rules about food and clothes
on steroids. But we still have them on just a
(18:42):
basic level.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Now, before we get back.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
To, you know, defining religio and ritual and where all
this stuff comes from, I take it as a truism
that religions are a form of response to crisis, to crises,
and religions just die out or disappear or fail to
(19:05):
continue to have adherents when they are not good at
responding to new crises. And part of my worry of
religion just you know, general aversion to Catholicism, especially those
the trad kids and the psychotic adult converts who are
now running around and like Catholicism versus historical Christianity. This
(19:31):
historical Christianity just in the sense that it's a Jewish
millenarian apocalypse cult of first century Palestine, and then you
give it two thousand years and it turns into Catholicism.
Like if you're just on a personal level, if you're
over the age of thirty and you convert to a
(19:51):
religion that is not your parents' religion, that's scary, but
it's probably gonna be a response to a fundamental problem
for you that there's no other way to get around,
and religion becomes what it is as a sort of
organism responding to social crises and abstracting them because the
(20:12):
crises in a way they can't be dealt with head on.
Because in a way, I know that's a it's a
psychoanalytic version of what crises and and trauma is. But
it just seems to me that this holds true a
on a social level as well, because Catholic well, Catholic
Christianity pretty much it's just a syncretic pagan nature cult
(20:33):
with this God at the center of it. That's that's
really just a supreme landlord right to get to get
Catholicism from Jesus himself, who's just one of dozens of
rabbi political criminals that are executed by the Romans for stirring.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Up the locals.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
They didn't they didn't like you stirring up the locals.
But to get from this political rabble rouser preaching about
love and the love of God, the love of the
Jewish God, and then to turn it into this supreme
landlord at the center of like Aristotelian causation. The answer was,
there's just a lot of crises on the way. There's
(21:15):
a lot of crises of what we call Western civilization
that had to be dealt with. And this is what
we got out of it. We got out of it
this very abstracted identity that some of the fringes you know,
don't identify with. And if it fails to solve these
social problems, if it fails to be that imaginary cell
(21:38):
that you need, then you get a reformation, which is
what happened, and it is it is super weird because
Christ said, like so many times, yeah, of course I
am a king, but I'm not a king in this world.
And yeah, you know, Catholicism didn't really get to that
verse those verses apparently. But this is not to say,
(22:00):
like religious debaters go this way to say that, you know,
religions are inhumane. This is not about religions. This is
about religion, which is to say that Catholicism cannot be wrong.
You know, if it's still alive, that means it's doing
its job good enough, and it makes no difference what
(22:21):
the content is.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
It makes no difference if it's good or bad.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Even if they did an inquisition or a Crusades, that's
irrelevant because the primal position of what religions do is
to abstract at a very basic level the habits of
a functioning society. So not a religion, but religion in
general has to be where it is. If one weren't there,
(22:47):
another one would be there. So, in terms of being
an abstraction, all religions and all cults on one basic level,
in the formal level, they're all the same. They go
in different directions. Obviously they go in different expressive directions,
but these are only at higher levels of abstraction.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
So when you're talking.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
About debate atheists like secular humanism is still religious, you know,
it's not in vogue anymore. But that is just a
high level abstraction of the originally religious impulse to say
that God became a human, and God became a human
in a bunch of religions. But the secular atheism stuff
(23:29):
comes from God becoming a human in Christianity, which says,
you know, if God did that, that means humans are good.
And then eventually you get secular humanism, which has exactly
the same form as religion. This actually happens pretty often.
So of course, we human beings that make religions are
(23:50):
at the center of our own social universe. So we
need to love ourselves and love our neighbor. In order
to keep society functioning. We need to have rules that
will guide you through crises so that society keeps functioning.
And this is why if you break down any table
(24:12):
of values belonging to any religion, basically you get to
don't harm each other, don't steal, don't kill. And that's
the second commandment after the first commandment, which is respect
the Gods. Respect God, respect the gods. They all say that,
So what is God. When it says respect the gods, well,
(24:36):
that's society, right. The law is to respect society and
if you don't, you'll be punished for it. And also
don't kill and don't steal because you'll be punished for it. Now,
in an upswing scenario, in a material upswing where things
are going well, you don't need to tell people to
do that because they will respect the religion that's helped
(25:00):
them out. They will respect the others because you know
everyone's on the rising tide. But you need religion to
survive crises because you need a reason for people to
not go kill each other when the world is not
going well for them, when society is not going well.
So religion is for maintaining morality when when the ship
(25:22):
starts to sink. This reminds me of another thing. Another
thing I from those the debate atheists.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
They really object.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
They don't like the term that their their theists counterparts
use sometimes, which is there's no good without God. Like
if there's no God, everything is permitted, so there's no morality.
And unlike the debate atheists too, you know, I agree
with on most of their details about things, but this
one I don't and Nietzsch didn't either. Nietzsche recognized that
(25:57):
all morality from religion, and that's what I'm saying here
that in times of plenty, you don't really need rules
that much, you don't really need morality because people are
generally happy, they have a future to look forward to.
And you know, of course there's gonna be plenty of
possible objections to that. I'm using it as a generalization,
(26:20):
but religion is really for crisis points. And one reason
that I'm turning to it now is because I think
the evidence is everywhere around us. We're in a crisis point.
We're in a crisis point that it's going to end
in violence and something like liberalism, which works great in
(26:40):
times of plenty. It works great to you know, respect
each other and have love for the discourse and positive agreements,
but you know, we all just desire to be free.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
That works when.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
There's a lot of money going around for everybody, it's
not gonna work. It doesn't work anymore in a crisis.
That's just obvious on its face, and we're gonna see
the reality of that continuing. So you know, that's why
I'm at religion. So yeah, we're gonna get a reality check,
and the real world is religious. People are fundamentally religious.
(27:12):
Religion here also just means believing in society, and in
times of crisis, no one says fuck society in general. No,
but they do focus on the impure elements of society, right.
They focus on if we just got rid of this,
if we just got rid of either these people or
(27:33):
if we just got rid of this behavior, then our
society would be okay. But they still believe in society.
So I don't just mean here the crowd of idiots
are religious.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
I mean this is.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
A religious conflict and an ideological conflict. And I use
religion and ideology the terms I think, not how they're
not how other people use them. I think I'm using
them closer to the original meaning.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I know that's not how language.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Works, But if we redefine ideology and religion, they basically
are the same thing. They are an abstraction, an original
abstraction that no one is in.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
The problem that I have with how people use the
term religion and ideology both as concepts is that they're
phrases these sort of choice garments, clothes, an outfit that
you kind of like put on and take off at will.
Whereas I think the meaning of ideology as with as
(28:37):
with religion, it's something that you don't really know that
you're in and if you're even if you realize that
you're in it, like like I am, even if you
realize that you're in it, it doesn't change your behavior in
any way. You know, just because I realize that it's
a form of ritual, I'm not going to butt in
line at the store, right. That's part of a religious
(29:00):
ritual that expresses your belief in society. There's no law
that says you can't but in line, but still no
one does it. And that's the sense so that I
mean everyone accepts these rituals, you know, putting up your
putting up your hand as a wave if you accidentally
(29:21):
cut someone off or didn't see them on the road.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
You know.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Another example like the wave is an expression of a
much more originary ritual. I'd say that is like, hey,
I don't have a weapon in my hand. That's that's
probably where waving comes from. It's like, hey, my hand's empty,
I'm not gonna kill you with the sword. Now we
use it to apologize or to acknowledge someone's existence. And
(29:45):
when you acknowledge someone's existence, this is a sort of
belief in society. Now, the fascist acceleration, oh, techno, feudalist,
whatever you want to call them, they also believe in society, right,
but they believe in a society without something in it.
We need to purge that thing from society. But anyway,
(30:07):
the way that religion and ideology both accord with each
other in this way is that you don't choose it.
You don't have You don't really have much of an
option to either express.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
A religion or not express a religion.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
It's basically an expression of who you are and your
expressions of faith in society. Uh, this is a question.
I want to say, they're determined, right. I want to
say that ideology and religion, in my use of the terms,
is something automatic. To change them, To change your ideology
(30:49):
seems to be kind of like a contradiction in terms
from where I'm coming from, because it's an expression of
you know, choices that you didn't make. So you don't
change your ideology and your religion just the way you
change your clothes. Like, no matter what I believed about religion,
(31:09):
as I said, I can't I almost physically can't just
but in line at the store. It is not illegal,
but I can't do it, and I can't do it
because of the other that I believe in in my
own mind.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So anyway, we've been.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Here and I've been you know, trying to change these terms,
and I've used two terms a lot. Those are abstraction
and expression, all right, So I haven't conceptualized or defined
abstraction and expression, but they're basically they're in philosophy, especially
(31:48):
Marxist type philosophy, in which you know, ideology is an
expression of the base, and Marx uses abstraction as an explanation.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
In capital, for example, all.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
The time the commodity, the commodity that is fetishized is
the abstraction of the labor in it. So the labor
in the commodity is what it is in a real sense,
and the abstraction then takes place.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Of the real sense.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
And sometimes it's just you know, taken for granted or
supposed that abstraction is a bad thing or like a
harmful thing, which I'm going to just say, no, let's
treat it. Let's treat it neutrally. All humans seem to
abstract looks like it all culture is abstraction, and religion
(32:40):
here would be the original abstraction, and it looks like
the type of abstraction that humans do is also what
makes human society is different from a you know, other
gregarious animals and their society. Bees they seem to abstract
when they deduce a little dance to send other bees
to where they found the flowers. Right, that seems like
(33:01):
an abstraction. But human abstraction, I'd say, is different at
least on the point that the abstraction replaces the original. Right,
the map becomes more real than the territory. That's where
I'm gonna go with this, Okay, And we can say
in a negative sense that this is just fundamentally negative. Again,
(33:26):
there's some Buddhist traditions I think to say this is
fundamentally negative. Representation is why we have so many expectations,
and then the expectations not being fulfilled as why we're
so unhappy. And then the process of becoming enlightened is
just to no longer be beholden to representation as a
(33:48):
human the way that a donkey is beholden to a
carrot on a stick. But you know, we can't expect
that everyone's going to do that they're not. And so yeah,
to understand this process of abstraction again where the map
replaces the territory. But I'm gonna cast abstraction a little
(34:08):
bit different here, not as something negative, but it is
a transformation.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
And it's a transformation where.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
A decision making process and not a conscious or rational
decision making process in this case, it would be social
decision making process. Like for a society to survive, it
has to have certain rules like don't steal, don't steal,
don't kill, and respect the society, which is to respect
(34:38):
the gods. Literally, every table of values from every society
has that at its base. And the reason that they
all have that at the base is because any society,
like in an evolutionary perspective, any society that didn't have
laws against killing, stealing, and disrespecting societies, they wouldn't have
(34:59):
made it. So when we have basic religion, in some sense,
it is abstracting, is abstracting from the basic rules of
society that are required to keep it functioning two more
complicated ones. And in the more complicated ones, you have
divisions between you know, sacred activity and just ordinary activity.
(35:23):
That's one of the first things that happens in religion.
And you also have to identify your society as being
different from other ones, Like there's no universalism in totemism,
in totomistic religions, right, it's our tribe likes that tribe,
Our tribe doesn't like that tribe. We get along with them,
(35:44):
we don't get along with them. Here we do our
festivals together on this day of the year, but we
don't invite those guys.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Right, So this is why I think.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
It's in Durkheim's analysis of totemistic religions, if we look back,
we see, you know, actually quite advanced religions in I
don't know, like ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Greece. These are
quite advanced religions. And to be advanced, of course, it
(36:14):
just means they dealt with more social crises. Not that
we're all progressing towards a sort of super abstracted religion. No,
But Durkhim noticed, like what we expect of religion is
they got a god of the sea, they got a
god of the clouds, thunder lightning, death, like the big
main categories of life and what Durkhim noticed is that
(36:38):
in tootemic religion, there's nothing that abstract, right, It's much
closer to the earth. Your tribe is something that you
can point to and look at. And as religions become
more and more abstracted, you get gods of things like
abstract concepts justice, war, peace, love, all of these abstracted concepts.
(37:02):
These now become the domain of the gods. And then
once those become abstracted, then you end up with either
a sort of atheistic religion or a monotheistic religion. You
can't really get more abstracted than monotheism or atheism. I
think monotheism and atheism are are flip sides of the
(37:25):
same coin, because monotheism, I think this is an old
Dawkins line. Monotheism is just to be an atheist towards
all the other gods, and atheism is just the next
step after that, which is kind of true, right. But
this makes the mistake, and I've done a lot of
reading on this, This makes the mistake to thinking that
religion is actually about gods when it isn't. You need
(37:49):
more universalizable gods. The more complex your society gets. If
your society is your family. Then it's fine, like where
the society or the tribe of the wolf, that's fine.
But as you get more complicated, as you enter into
trade relationships with other tribes that have you know, superior
(38:09):
religion to yours, then you see that religion becomes a
sort of social technology, and it's a technology of control,
but not control in necessarily the negative sense, the sense
that like there's there's dominators and then the poor people
that are dominated. Rather it's control more in the in
(38:31):
the cybernetic sense. Obviously, some religions require surveillance, right, usually
as a form of decline Catholicism, of course, But religion
generally as a control system isn't about surveillance necessarily, but
more in the sense that as a social technology, religion
(38:54):
mediates the response to new conflicts which I'm calling crises,
but just new information from the environment that forces change,
that forces either reform or replacement. If too much changes
too quickly, then the system collapses and the religion with it.
(39:15):
So religions are necessarily syncretic, and they exchange, you know,
technologies one to another. They incorporate the things that work
from the next tribe over and all that. So if
we have today a bunch of these millenniary cult impulses.
(39:37):
And let's just say what we call now liberalism. Liberalism
is kind of just a happy humanism that everyone deserves respect,
everyone's an individual, don't get in their space, human rights
are universal.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
This is anti This is an anti millenarian cult impulse.
It says, you know, we don't need the death of
the world to have a future. Have I defined millenarianism,
I don't think so. It comes from the Book of Revelation,
the Bible Book of Revelation that says Christ is going
to return and he'll put the devil in jail in Tartarus,
(40:15):
and he'll rule for a thousand years. But before that,
a whole bunch of bad shit has to happen, like
the whole four Horsemen of the Apocalypse bit is in
here that the war and famine death will ravage the
earth and then the Savior returns to clean everything up.
So when millenary and impulses share and there's they're in
(40:39):
like literally every part of the world, in every religion,
there's something you know, profoundly human about millenary and impulses,
that they are apocalyptic and they're a kind of death drive.
And what happens structurally similarly in all of them is
that there's firsty crises, and then there's a savior. The
(41:01):
savior plucks the faithful out of the catastrophe, and then
after the catastrophe, there's a.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
New birth, a new world, a rebirth.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Paliningenesis is the Greek term, and I think it's either
the Cynics or the Stokes, but they have this concept
of the world as always being born and then dying
and then being reborn. But you can see this rebirth
theme in less tasteful kinds of social religion, where the
(41:35):
bad things, the bad people, they get punished or murdered
and maybe.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
We usher we help God with this.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Plant Nazism thousand years Reich is a pretty Millennerian. And
also the way some of these h Marxist Leninist kids
on Twitter talk about capitalism falling apart, you know it's
got millenarian vibes. Also favorite examples are those cargo cults
in the Pacific Islands, some of them still going. But
(42:06):
they thought that this the return of the Savior, would
usher in the new age. When they actually got the
cargo that the white people were stealing, so that's why
they build their model airplanes out of bamboo and they
set up runways lined with torches, hoping that the cargo
will return. And I'm gonna use this later as an
(42:27):
example of belief because they continued to believe in their
religion even after they were taken to places like Australia
and shown like this stuff wasn't sent by the gods,
this cargo wasn't like of divine origin. We just made
it over here. And they showed them that, right. They
showed the leaders of the cargo cult communities like no,
(42:48):
like this, this isn't this isn't magic, but they continued
the religion anyway. So it shows that, like the true causation,
the real chain of cause and effects matters less than
religion being able to maintain something else.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
So what is it?
Speaker 1 (43:09):
What is that something else? What is millenarianism an abstraction
of what is this end of the world? Why does
some version of this exist in basically every world religion
and why does it keep popping up?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
This is what I'm going to say. My take.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Basically, if you can recognize, like in your lifetime, that
the social world is going badly and that it's getting worse,
and would I would wager to guess that this is
pretty close to just relative standards of living.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
You know, if these can be kept stable.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
You don't really need the end of the world. But
the longer they are in decline, your basic mammal brain
realizes this, I'm hungry, I can't take care of my kids,
or is there someone over there who has more than me?
Speaker 2 (43:57):
You can predict that.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Well, if you do predict that they're going to keep declining,
it makes a lot of sense to say, oh, well,
this world cannot be saved. This world is getting worse,
and you need someone responsible for it. It's never going
to be you who's responsible for it, despite a doctrine
like original sin. But now the world's getting worse and
(44:21):
there's someone who's responsible for it. The Jews their favorite example.
More recently, it's the Wokes. It might be rewind a bit,
it might be cultural immorality or witches, you know, whatever
it is. They're parasiting off of God's power because they're
(44:44):
using the devil's power. And when you say someone is
parasiting off God by doing magic especially, they're paraciting off
of society because God is the abstraction of the coherence
of society.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
So whatever bad.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Person it is, the Jews, the Wokes, the witches, they're
animated by an anti god force, an anti social force,
an immoral force in the imaginary of course. And again
morality is quite simply the abstracted laws that a bunch
of us primates what we need for society to last.
(45:24):
That's why, that's why I respect society, respect God, honor
the gods, and don't kill and don't steal are the
basic rules. So the language of purging the body, the
language of purging the body of parasites, is really perfect.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Here.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
You believe in society, but the members that need to
be purged, or at least the behaviors that need to
be purged, they are the corrupting influence that are causing
societies decline or downfall. And it's never the people that
this appla to that are like, oh, yeah, I'm causing
society's decline.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
It's always someone else.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
It's usually you know, the easy targets or the small groups.
And that means ritual sacrifice is required to purge society clean. Yeah,
you burn the witches, you know. So when you combine
this sort of religious impulse with modern technology. Obviously that's
terrifying because you get surveillance and Holow costs, But you
(46:31):
can see that if you reduce it to its basic
social level, it's an answer to the question what is society? Like?
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Who are we?
Speaker 1 (46:41):
What is us? What is ours? What is not ours?
And if you see what is ours is on the decline,
what we have, like we're getting less and less of
the pie. That means like, well, maybe we should get
rid of some of us, you know, So you can
see it as I know, it's like terrifying to put
(47:03):
it in those terms, but you can see it as
a kind of social autoimmune response, which is to say, unconsciously, okay,
we're running out of stuff here, we don't have enough stuff.
Who can we safely get rid of? Who can we
ritualistically sacrifice here so that there there's more stuff to
(47:23):
go around, and the mob finds more and more, you know,
parasites to root out the worse conditions get and you know,
sometimes they do it the right way. You got the
French Revolution guilloting the aristocrats in the streets usually though
usually it's not directed the right way.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
But again, there's no right and wrong.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
In religion, there's no like cause and effect. It's just
the expression or the abstraction of a feeling, and that
in this case is well living standards are declining. That
means someone must have my stuff, which interestingly is exactly
what the Melanesian and Cook Islanders thought when they have
their cargo cult. They said, well, the white the white people,
(48:05):
the white soldiers that are stationed on these on these
islands during World War two, they're getting all the stuff.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
That stuff must have.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Been meant for us, and then a savior will return
and direct the cargo properly towards them at the end
of days.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
But this is the kind of.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Abstraction that I am thinking of. The social abstraction is
turned into a sort of metaphor, a sort of metaphoricity
which goes very deeply into what it means to be
a human. Even our language is based on metaphoric abstraction
from terms that mean you know, something with a much
(48:45):
more direct reference that they replace, and then it becomes
abstracted into the kind of terms that we talk about.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Now love for example.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
Anyway, the social condition is turned into a sort of
metaphor that allows us to continue our habits, and if
that means someone else pays the price for it, if
that means, like you know, we just do a little Holocaust,
we turn a blind eye because we're allowed to continue
our habits. If abstraction is kind of this first thing
(49:15):
that happens, then habit.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
I think this is my answer to the question.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Habit is the social reality that becomes abstracted originally, and
that's just that people want comfort, which we call or
I'm calling habit. Religion is like the after the fact,
retroactive justification for why you don't have to change your habits.
(49:42):
You want to keep things how they are. And this
is kind of paradoxical, right, because religion in this sense
is trying to deal with crises, but it's not very
good at doing it because it's inherently conservative, right, And
conservative is not to say that it's bad. It just
means you're trying. You're doing everything you possibly can to
(50:06):
protect the social order, to protect the social rules.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
That have gotten you this far. And this is like
why it's an opiate of the masses.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
It's going to answer every question until you have complete
social collapse, and at that point, you know religion is
not going to save you. But religion will be defending
against social collapse all the way up to the point
by metaphorizing it, by turning it into images. That's what
honor the God's means. It's to conserve the coherence of society,
(50:43):
and it means to honor the way society has been
up till now. Because speaking evolutionarily, it did get us
this far right now, even millenarianism, which is the end
of the world, it's an apocalyptic death cult. Even this
is actually the opposite of what it says. It's resistance
(51:04):
to change. It says, you know, let's eliminate this group
of people. But it also has this savior archetype that
the savior will do all the acting.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
So really you.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Don't have to do anything except, you know, maybe help
them out a bit by discovering some pedophiles. But you
just have to support the savior's efforts. And religion functions
here like it always does, as the justification to do
as little as possible. And you might then ask, well,
why does religion have so many rules? But if you
(51:39):
really consider it, these the rules are, you know, don't
do too much bad stuff. Here's something that you have
to do every day, you got to do some prayers,
you've got to be selfless, but only on the holidays,
you know, and He'll take care of the rest of it.
God will take care of the rest of them. It's
like you do a finite amount of work for you know,
(52:00):
potentially infinite upside.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
You get to go to heaven or whatever.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
It's, but you don't have to do very much. And
even when the world starts trending down, when you have
less stuff than you used to and your neighbors have
less stuff than they used to, more and more people
are gonna put more of the burden not on themselves
to change things. No, they're gonna put more of the
burden on the savior to do what God wants or
(52:26):
the prophets. When it's Nazis that are the profits. I mean,
this is this is pretty bad for society. But part
of this religious imaginary is yeah, I'll let the Nazis
do stuff because it justifies in action. Religion, I think, yeah,
I mean, this is the conclusion I'm reaching. Religion is
(52:48):
about justifying in action as opposed to action. And that's
because most people in most societies, for most of the time,
just like people in most religions, they're in act, they
consume it rather passively. They either don't know what all
this religious stuff means, they don't really care too much.
(53:10):
They're just trying to squeak by, make sure they're in
the good book. The Zelots, though, of any religion, the Zelots,
the true believers, they are always terrifying because they actually.
Speaker 2 (53:23):
Do believe in change.
Speaker 1 (53:26):
And people that believe in things are terrifying because they
are the ones who are given the reins in crises
and what they do with them, I mean that depends,
but they are the ones that are actually planning a
course of action. And you know, if we're looking around
(53:46):
in the crisis, if you look at those that are
planning course of action, there's definitely reason to be concerned.
But if you look at this as a religious economy,
this makes a lot more sense. And I can't just
drop a term like that either, religious economy. I got
the idea from Marx because he writes in capital basically
(54:08):
like yo, I don't know where this value comes from
because it's not in labor, but it suddenly appears thereafter labor,
like it's there, it's not there. And then even though
it's not in the action, then it suddenly appears there.
So Marx can't help me with the problem though, of belief,
because if we are already at the stage of this
(54:30):
economic value creation, that already means that we're in a
stable society. So my question apro po religious economy that
has the same structure, is how did we arrive at
this state where there are beliefs to be believed in?
And the answer to that is that society is sort
(54:51):
of is a faith project and morality those are there too,
Those are the rules that got us this far.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
But if religion.
Speaker 1 (54:58):
Collapses, society collapses or is it the reverse? It's a
good question society. If society collapses, does religion collapse, or
if religion collapses, does that mean society has already collapsed?
They seem again to be the flip side of the
same thing. And speaking of flip sides, where does belief
(55:19):
come from and what is its other half or other
side if you look at it the same thing from
a different angle, Just like value, it's not in the action,
but it emerges from the action. Belief has to exist
for a reason, Like you can't believe in anything arbitrarily.
You have to believe in something that's good, and what's
(55:41):
good seems to mean something very basic, like the sun
rises tomorrow and there's enough food just like there was today.
But belief is also some sort of exchange that works
against hope. It looks to me like belief is a
sort of transformation where the world, the real world, whatever
(56:03):
you want to call it, put in quotation marks, the
real world is replaced with something not of it, not
of the same material. That is, maybe an image is
replaced by an image of the world. So basically we
have an image world that is more real than whatever
(56:24):
it is that our senses are delivering right now. That's
another way to say the same thing, another world that's
more real than what we see well, spirit world, or
in non religious terms, it's a world where representations replace reality.
Speaker 2 (56:44):
And if you know my stuff, you know where I'm
getting this from.
Speaker 1 (56:46):
I don't mean that representations eclipse reality and reality is
still there. I mean that they annihilate on the very
basic level of what it means to know anything. Beliefs
are the map that annihilate whatever it was that existed
before them, And there's no way for us, as believing
(57:08):
animals to look backwards from before the times that beliefs emerged.
The real is whatever language actually represents, but we can't
even talk about that but without language. So this is
where we're trapped. We're trapped in between the spirit world
and the real world and the best religion, the best
(57:29):
religion Mahayana. Buddhism calls this reduction of the representational world
shunyavada or the emptiness, and then emptiness is like the
guiding principle for the good life. And I'm not expert
in Buddhism, but it's the religion that says that things
(57:51):
aren't real spirits, they are conventional spirits that we made up. Also,
Buddhism doesn't have God as a landlord who owns everything
and making all the laws, so that's in its favor.
But as I'm no expert on Buddhism, I won't say
anything more about it at this time. But what about Schopenharer, Okay,
I can claim some expertise there. The world as will
(58:14):
and representation. Well, the problem with the world is the
representation part of it, isn't it the dream that we're
trapped in? So in conclusion, if we understand faith as
the valuing of representations, beliefs, which is not in itself
(58:34):
really real, but basically become real in the act.
Speaker 2 (58:38):
Of believing them through habit ritual.
Speaker 1 (58:42):
Then we find a sort of correspondence here theory here,
which makes the world right now seem a lot less insane.
In fact, it seems sane, even if it's awful and
getting worse. At least there's some underlying rationality to it,
which was what philosophy was supposed to do. Just looks
(59:04):
like the theory of religion does it a little better.
And maybe that's where where I'll end it today. I
have more to say, and I have a lot more
not to say, but this is more or less an
outline of how I think the primordial form of sense
is made, and more to come. As always, I'll look
(59:27):
for your feedback, but thanks for listening, and if you're
not there, head over to patreon dot com to never
miss an episode.
Speaker 2 (59:36):
That's how to not miss anything. It's all for now.
Take care of yourselves.
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