Podcasts about nietzschean

The journey in search of the destinationDoes life have a purpose? Is that what gives life meaning? Or is it the journey that matters the most?Join our four speakers - Nietzschean philosopher Babette Babich, clinical psychologist Frank Tallis, existentialist philosopher Jonathan Webber, and linguist philosopher Sandra Laugier - as they explore the different facets of this question. Setting ourselves goals in life seems both inevitable and necessary for the good life, yet achieving them might render living life meaningless. The balance between having a sense of purpose and experiencing things as they come is a hard one to set.Do you think life must have a purpose? Email us at podcast@iai.tv with your thoughts or questions on the episode!To witness such topics discussed live buy tickets for our upcoming festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/And visit our website for many more articles, videos, and podcasts like this one: https://iai.tv/You can find everything we referenced here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In a world fractured by injustice and misunderstanding, one survivor's journey through dyslexia, trauma, and neurodivergence becomes a rallying cry for wholeness. This metamodern manifesto weaves personal defiance with a proto-transcendentalist vision, offering embodied learning, storytelling, and Nietzschean resilience as tools to heal a fragmented society. Reject the victimhood trap, embrace your atypicality, and join the movement to reintegrate mind, body, and soul in 2025's chaos. #MetamodernManifesto #HealingThroughStory #AtypicalMindsHashtags#Metamodernism #ProtoTranscendentalism #Neurodivergence #HealingJourney #AtypicalLearning #NietzscheanResilience #IntergenerationalHealing #EmbodiedLearning #InjusticeDefied #WholenessMovement #DistributedPhD #MindBodySoul

David Gornoski sits down with James Kourtides to discuss how we can break out of tribal echo chambers, media without the crowd, Generation Alpha's fascination with wholesome things, the market as the resting place of Nietzschean values, the striking thing that connects Bitcoin to Christianity, and more. Follow David Gornoski on X here. Visit aneighborschoice.com for more

So why did Harris lose in 2024? For one very big reason, according to the progressive essayist Bill Deresiewicz: “because she represented the exhausted Democratic establishment”. This rotting establishment, Deresiewicz believes, is symbolized by both the collective denial of Biden's mental decline and by Harris' pathetically rudderless Presidential campaign. But there's a much more troubling problem with the Democratic party, he argues. It has become “the party of institutionalized liberalism, which is itself exhausted”. So how to reinvent American liberalism in the 2020's? How to make the left once again, in Deresiewicz words, “the locus of openness, playfulness, productive contention, experiment, excess, risk, shock, camp, mirth, mischief, irony and curiosity"? That's the question for all progressives in our MAGA/Woke age. 5 Key Takeaways * Deresiewicz believes the Democratic establishment and aligned media engaged in a "tacit cover-up" of Biden's condition and other major issues like crime, border policies, and pandemic missteps rather than addressing them honestly.* The liberal movement that began in the 1960s has become "exhausted" and the Democratic Party is now an uneasy alliance of establishment elites and working-class voters whose interests don't align well.* Progressive institutions suffer from a repressive intolerance characterized by "an unearned sense of moral superiority" and a fear of vitality that leads to excessive rules, bureaucracy, and speech codes.* While young conservatives are creating new movements with energy and creativity, the progressive establishment stifles innovation by purging anyone who "violates the code" or criticizes their side.* Rebuilding the left requires creating conditions for new ideas by ending censoriousness, embracing true courage that risks something real, and potentially building new institutions rather than trying to reform existing ones. Full Transcript Andrew Keen: Hello, everyone. It's the old question on this show, Keen on America, how to make sense of this bewildering, frustrating, exciting country in the wake, particularly of the last election. A couple of years ago, we had the CNN journalist who I rather like and admire, Jake Tapper, on the show. Arguing in a piece of fiction that he thinks, to make sense of America, we need to return to the 1970s. He had a thriller out a couple of years ago called All the Demons Are Here. But I wonder if Tapper's changed his mind on this. His latest book, which is a sensation, which he co-wrote with Alex Thompson, is Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Tapper, I think, tells the truth about Biden, as the New York Times notes. It's a damning portrait of an enfeebled Biden protected by his inner circle. I would extend that, rather than his inner circle protected by an elite, perhaps a coastal elite of Democrats, unable or unwilling to come to terms with the fact that Biden was way, way past his shelf life. My guest today, William Deresiewicz—always get his last name wrong—it must be...William Deresiewicz: No, that was good. You got it.Andrew Keen: Probably because I'm anti-semitic. He has a new piece out called "Post-Election" which addresses much of the rottenness of the American progressive establishment in 2025. Bill, congratulations on the piece.William Deresiewicz: Thank you.Andrew Keen: Have you had a chance to look at this Tapper book or have you read about Original Sin?William Deresiewicz: Yeah, I read that piece. I read the piece that's on the screen and I've heard some people talking about it. And I mean, as you said, it's not just his inner circle. I don't want to blame Tapper. Tapper did the work. But one immediate reaction to the debate debacle was, where have the journalists been? For example, just to unfairly call one person out, but they're just so full of themselves, the New Yorker dripping with self-congratulations, especially in its centennial year, its boundless appetite for self-celebration—to quote something one of my students once said about Yale—they've got a guy named Evan Osnos, who's one of their regulars on their political...Andrew Keen: Yeah, and he's been on the show, Evan, and in fact, I rather like his, I was going to say his husband, his father, Peter Osnos, who's a very heavy-hitting ex-publisher. But anyway, go on. And Evan's quite a nice guy, personally.William Deresiewicz: I'm sure he's a nice guy, but the fact is he's not only a New Yorker journalist, but he wrote a book about Biden, which means that he's presumably theoretically well-sourced within Biden world. He didn't say anything. I mean, did he not know or did he know?Andrew Keen: Yeah, I agree. I mean you just don't want to ask, right? You don't know. But you're a journalist, so you're supposed to know. You're supposed to ask. So I'm sure you're right on Osnos. I mean, he was on the show, but all journalists are progressives, or at least all the journalists at the Times and the New Yorker and the Atlantic. And there seemed to be, as Jake Tapper is suggesting in this new book, and he was part of the cover-up, there seemed to be a cover-up on the part of the entire professional American journalist establishment, high-end establishment, to ignore the fact that the guy running for president or the president himself clearly had no idea of what was going on around him. It's just astonishing, isn't it? I mean, hindsight's always easy, of course, 2020 in retrospect, but it was obvious at the time. I made it clear whenever I spoke about Biden, that here was a guy clearly way out of his depth, that he shouldn't have been president, maybe shouldn't have been president in the first place, but whatever you think about his ideas, he clearly was way beyond his shelf date, a year or two into the presidency.William Deresiewicz: Yeah, but here's the thing, and it's one of the things I say in the post-election piece, but I'm certainly not the only person to say this. There was an at least tacit cover-up of Biden, of his condition, but the whole thing was a cover-up, meaning every major issue that the 2024 election was about—crime, at the border, woke excess, affordability. The whole strategy of not just the Democrats, but this media establishment that's aligned with them is to just pretend that it wasn't happening, to explain it away. And we can also throw in pandemic policy, right? Which people were still thinking about and all the missteps in pandemic policy. The strategy was effectively a cover-up. We're not gonna talk about it, or we're gonna gaslight you, or we're gonna make excuses. So is it a surprise that people don't trust these establishment institutions anymore? I mean, I don't trust them anymore and I want to trust them.Andrew Keen: Were there journalists? I mean, there were a handful of journalists telling the truth about Biden. Progressives, people on the left rather than conservatives.William Deresiewicz: Ezra Klein started to talk about it, I remember that. So yes, there were a handful, but it wasn't enough. And you know, I don't say this to take away from Ezra Klein what I just gave him with my right hand, take away with my left, but he was also the guy, as soon as the Kamala succession was effected, who was talking about how Kamala in recent months has been going from strength to strength and hasn't put a foot wrong and isn't she fantastic. So all credit to him for telling the truth about Biden, but it seems to me that he immediately pivoted to—I mean, I'm sure he thought he was telling the truth about Harris, but I didn't believe that for one second.Andrew Keen: Well, meanwhile, the lies about Harris or the mythology of Harris, the false—I mean, all mythology, I guess, is false—about Harris building again. Headline in Newsweek that Harris would beat Donald Trump if an election was held again. I mean I would probably beat—I would beat Trump if an election was held again, I can't even run for president. So anyone could beat Trump, given the situation. David Plouffe suggested that—I think he's quoted in the Tapper book—that Biden totally fucked us, but it suggests that somehow Harris was a coherent progressive candidate, which she wasn't.William Deresiewicz: She wasn't. First of all, I hadn't seen this poll that she would beat Trump. I mean, it's a meaningless poll, because...Andrew Keen: You could beat him, Bill, and no one can even pronounce your last name.William Deresiewicz: Nobody could say what would actually happen if there were a real election. It's easy enough to have a hypothetical poll. People often look much better in these kinds of hypothetical polls where there's no actual election than they do when it's time for an election. I mean, I think everyone except maybe David Plouffe understands that Harris should never have been a candidate—not just after Biden dropped out way too late, but ever, right? I mean the real problem with Biden running again is that he essentially saddled us with Harris. Instead of having a real primary campaign where we could have at least entertained the possibility of some competent people—you know, there are lots of governors. I mean, I'm a little, and maybe we'll get to this, I'm little skeptical that any normal democratic politician is going to end up looking good. But at least we do have a whole bunch of what seem to be competent governors, people with executive experience. And we never had a chance to entertain any of those people because this democratic establishment just keeps telling us who we're going to vote for. I mean, it's now three elections in a row—they forced Hillary on us, and then Biden. I'm not going to say they forced Biden on us although elements of it did. It probably was a good thing because he won and he may have been the only one who could have won. And then Harris—it's like reductio ad absurdum. These candidates they keep handing us keep getting worse and worse.Andrew Keen: But it's more than being worse. I mean, whatever one can say about Harris, she couldn't explain why she wanted to be president, which seems to me a disqualifier if you're running for president. The point, the broader point, which I think you bring out very well in the piece you write, and you and I are very much on the same page here, so I'm not going to criticize you in your post-election—William Deresiewicz: You can criticize me, Andrew, I love—Andrew Keen: I know I can criticize you, and I will, but not in this particular area—is that these people are the establishment. They're protecting a globalized world, they're the coast. I mean, in some ways, certainly the Bannonite analysis is right, and it's not surprising that they're borrowing from Lenin and the left is borrowing from Edmund Burke.William Deresiewicz: Yeah, I mean I think, and I think this is the real problem. I mean, part of what I say in the piece is that it just seems, maybe this is too organicist, but there just seems to be an exhaustion that the liberal impulse that started, you know, around the time I was born in 1964, and I cite the Dylan movie just because it's a picture of that time where you get a sense of the energy on the left, the dawning of all this exciting—Andrew Keen: You know that movie—and we've done a show on that movie—itself was critical I guess in a way of Dylan for not being political.William Deresiewicz: Well, but even leaving that aside, just the reminder you get of what that time felt like. That seems in the movie relatively accurate, that this new youth culture, the rights revolution, the counterculture, a new kind of impulse of liberalism and progressivism that was very powerful and strong and carried us through the 60s and 70s and then became the establishment and has just become completely exhausted now. So I just feel like it's just gotten to the end of its possibility. Gotten to the end of its life cycle, but also in a less sort of mystical way. And I think this is a structural problem that the Democrats have not been able to address for a long time, and I don't see how they're going to address it. The party is now the party, as you just said, of the establishment, uneasily wedded to a mainly non-white sort of working class, lower class, maybe somewhat middle class. So it's sort of this kind of hybrid beast, the two halves of which don't really fit together. The educated upper middle class, the professional managerial class that you and I are part of, and then sort of the average Black Latino female, white female voter who doesn't share the interests of that class. So what are you gonna do about that? How's that gonna work?Andrew Keen: And the thing that you've always given a lot of thought to, and it certainly comes out in this piece, is the intolerance of the Democratic Party. But it's an intolerance—it's not a sort of, and I don't like this word, it's not the fascist intolerance of the MAGA movement or of Trump. It's a repressive intolerance, it's this idea that we're always right and if you disagree with us, then there must be something wrong with you.William Deresiewicz: Yeah, right. It's this, at this point, completely unearned sense of moral superiority and intellectual superiority, which are not really very clearly distinguished in their mind, I think. And you know, they just reek of it and people hate it and it's understandable that they hate it. I mean, it's Hillary in a word. It's Hillary in a word and again, I'm wary of treading on this kind of ground, but I do think there's an element of—I mean, obviously Trump and his whole camp is very masculinist in a very repulsive way, but there is also a way to be maternalist in a repulsive way. It's this kind of maternal control. I think of it as the sushi mom voice where we're gonna explain to you in a calm way why you should listen to us and why we're going to control every move you make. And it's this fear—I mean what my piece is really about is this sort of quasi-Nietzschean argument for energy and vitality that's lacking on the left. And I think it's lacking because the left fears it. It fears sort of the chaos of the life force. So it just wants to shackle it in all of these rules and bureaucracy and speech codes and consent codes. It just feels lifeless. And I think everybody feels that.Andrew Keen: Yeah, and it's the inability to imagine you can be wrong. It's the moral greediness of some people, at least, who think of themselves on the left. Some people might be listening to this, thinking it's just these two old white guys who think themselves as progressives but are actually really conservative. And all this idea of nature is itself chilling, that it's a kind of anti-feminism.William Deresiewicz: Well, that's b******t. I mean, let me have a chance to respond. I mean I plead guilty to being an old white man—Andrew Keen: I mean you can't argue with that one.William Deresiewicz: I'm not arguing with it. But the whole point rests on this notion of positionality, like I'm an older white man, therefore I think this or I believe that, which I think is b******t to begin with because, you know, down the street there's another older white guy who believes the exact opposite of me, so what's the argument here? But leaving that aside, and whether I am or am not a progressive—okay, my ideal politician is Bernie Sanders, so I'll just leave it at that. The point is, I mean, one point is that feminism hasn't always been like this. Second wave feminism that started in the late sixties, when I was a little kid—there was a censorious aspect to it, but there was also this tremendous vitality. I mean I think of somebody like Andrea Dworkin—this is like, "f**k you" feminism. This is like, "I'm not only not gonna shave my legs, I'm gonna shave my armpits and I don't give a s**t what you think." And then the next generation when I was a young man was the Mary Gates, Camille Paglia, sex-positive power feminism which also had a different kind of vitality. So I don't think feminism has to be the feminism of the women's studies departments and of Hillary Clinton with "you can't say this" and "if you want to have sex with me you have to follow these 10 rules." I don't think anybody likes that.Andrew Keen: The deplorables!William Deresiewicz: Yes, yes, yes. Like I said, I don't just think that the enemies don't like it, and I don't really care what they think. I think the people on our side don't like it. Nobody is having fun on our side. It's boring. No one's having sex from what they tell me. The young—it just feels dead. And I think when there's no vitality, you also have no creative vitality. And I think the intellectual cul-de-sac that the left seems to be stuck in, where there are no new ideas, is related to that.Andrew Keen: Yeah, and I think the more I think about it, I think you're right, it's a generational war. All the action seems to be coming from old people, whether it's the Pelosis and the Bidens, or it's people like Richard Reeves making a fortune off books about worrying about young men or Jonathan Haidt writing about the anxious generation. Where are, to quote David Bowie, the young Americans? Why aren't they—I mean, Bill, you're in a way guilty of this. You made your name with your book, Excellent Sheep about the miseducation...William Deresiewicz: Yeah, so what am I guilty of exactly?Andrew Keen: I'm not saying you're all, but aren't you and Reeves and Haidt, you're all involved in this weird kind of generational war.William Deresiewicz: OK, let's pump the brakes here for a second. Where the young people are—I mean, obviously most people, even young people today, still vote for Democrats. But the young who seem to be exploring new things and having energy and excitement are on the right. And there was a piece—I'm gonna forget the name of the piece and the author—Daniel Oppenheimer had her on the podcast. I think it appeared in The Point. Young woman. Fairly recent college graduate, went to a convention of young republicans, I don't know what they call themselves, and also to democrats or liberals in quick succession and wrote a really good piece about it. I don't think she had ever written anything before or published anything before, but it got a lot of attention because she talked about the youthful vitality at this conservative gathering. And then she goes to the liberals and they're all gray-haired men like us. The one person who had anything interesting to say was Francis Fukuyama, who's in his 80s. She's making the point—this is the point—it's not a generational war, because there are young people on the right side of the spectrum who are doing interesting things. I mean, I don't like what they're doing, because I'm not a rightist, but they're interesting, they're different, they're new, there's excitement there, there's creativity there.Andrew Keen: But could one argue, Bill, that all these labels are meaningless and that whatever they're doing—I'm sure they're having more sex than young progressives, they're having more fun, they're able to make jokes, they are able, for better or worse, to change the system. Does it really matter whether they claim to be MAGA people or leftists? They're the ones who are driving change in the country.William Deresiewicz: Yes, they're the ones who are driving change in the country. The counter-cultural energy that was on the left in the sixties and seventies is now on the right. And it does matter because they are operating in the political sphere, have an effect in the political sphere, and they're unmistakably on the right. I mean, there are all these new weird species on the right—the trads and the neo-pagans and the alt-right and very sort of anti-capitalist conservatives or at least anti-corporate conservatives and all kinds of things that you would never have imagined five years ago. And again, it's not that I like these things. It's that they're new, there's ferment there. So stuff is coming out that is going to drive, is already driving the culture and therefore the politics forward. And as somebody who, yes, is progressive, it is endlessly frustrating to me that we have lost this kind of initiative, momentum, energy, creativity, to what used to be the stodgy old right. Now we're the stodgy old left.Andrew Keen: What do you want to go back to? I mean you brought up Dylan earlier. Do you just want to resurrect...William Deresiewicz: No, I don't.Andrew Keen: You know another one who comes to mind is another sort of bundle of contradictions, Bruce Springsteen. He recently talked about the corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous nature of Trump. I mean Springsteen's a billionaire. He even acknowledged that he mythologized his own working-class status. He's never spent more than an hour in a factory. He's never had a job. So aren't all the pigeons coming back to roost here? The fraud of men like Springsteen are merely being exposed and young people recognize it.William Deresiewicz: Well, I don't know about Springsteen in particular...Andrew Keen: Well, he's a big deal.William Deresiewicz: No, I know he's a big deal, and I love Springsteen. I listened to him on repeat when I was young, and I actually didn't know that he'd never worked in a factory, and I quite frankly don't care because he's an artist, and he made great art out of those experiences, whether they were his or not. But to address the real issue here, he is an old guy. It sounds like he's just—I mean, I'm sure he's sincere about it and I would agree with him about Trump. But to have people like Springsteen or Robert De Niro or George Clooney...Andrew Keen: Here it is.William Deresiewicz: Okay, yes, it's all to the point that these are old guys. So you asked me, do I want to go back? The whole point is I don't want to go back. I want to go forward. I'm not going to be the one to bring us forward because I'm older. And also, I don't think I was ever that kind of creative spirit, but I want to know why there isn't sort of youthful creativity given the fact that most young people do still vote for Democrats, but there's no youthful creativity on the left. Is it just that the—I want to be surprised is the point. I'm not calling for X, Y, or Z. I'm saying astonish me, right? Like Diaghilev said to Cocteau. Astonish me the way you did in the 60s and 70s. Show me something new. And I worry that it simply isn't possible on the left now, precisely because it's so locked down in this kind of establishment, censorious mode that there's no room for a new idea to come from anywhere.Andrew Keen: As it happens, you published this essay in Salmagundi—and that predates, if not even be pre-counterculture. How many years old is it? I think it started in '64. Yeah, so alongside your piece is an interesting piece from Adam Phillips about influence and anxiety. And he quotes Montaigne from "On Experience": "There is always room for a successor, even for ourselves, and a different way to proceed." Is the problem, Bill, that we haven't, we're not willing to leave the stage? I mean, Nancy Pelosi is a good example of this. Biden's a good example. In this Salmagundi piece, there's an essay from Martin Jay, who's 81 years old. I was a grad student in Berkeley in the 80s. Even at that point, he seemed old. Why are these people not able to leave the stage?William Deresiewicz: I am not going to necessarily sign on to that argument, and not just because I'm getting older. Biden...Andrew Keen: How old are you, by the way?William Deresiewicz: I'm 61. So you mentioned Pelosi. I would have been happy for Pelosi to remain in her position for as long as she wanted, because she was effective. It's not about how old you are. Although it can be, obviously as you get older you can become less effective like Joe Biden. I think there's room for the old and the young together if the old are saying valuable things and if the young are saying valuable things. It's not like there's a shortage of young voices on the left now. They're just not interesting voices. I mean, the one that comes immediately to mind that I'm more interested in is Ritchie Torres, who's this congressman who's a genuinely working-class Black congressman from the Bronx, unlike AOC, who grew up the daughter of an architect in Northern Westchester and went to a fancy private university, Boston University. So Ritchie Torres is not a doctrinaire leftist Democrat. And he seems to speak from a real self. Like he isn't just talking about boilerplate. I just feel like there isn't a lot of room for the Ritchie Torres. I think the system that produces democratic candidates militates against people like Ritchie Torres. And that's what I am talking about.Andrew Keen: In the essay, you write about Andy Mills, who was one of the pioneers of the New York Times podcast. He got thrown out of The New York Times for various offenses. It's one of the problems with the left—they've, rather like the Stalinists in the 1930s, purged all the energy out of themselves. Anyone of any originality has been thrown out for one reason or another.William Deresiewicz: Well, because it's always the same reason, because they violate the code. I mean, yes, this is one of the main problems. And to go back to where we started with the journalists, it seems like the rationale for the cover-up, all the cover-ups was, "we can't say anything bad about our side. We can't point out any of the flaws because that's going to help the bad guys." So if anybody breaks ranks, we're going to cancel them. We're going to purge them. I mean, any idiot understands that that's a very short-term strategy. You need the possibility of self-criticism and self-difference. I mean that's the thing—you asked me about old people leaving the stage, but the quotation from Montaigne said, "there's always room for a successor, even ourselves." So this is about the possibility of continuous self-reinvention. Whatever you want to say about Dylan, some people like him, some don't, he's done that. Bowie's done that. This was sort of our idea, like you're constantly reinventing yourself, but this is what we don't have.Andrew Keen: Yeah, actually, I read the quote the wrong way, that we need to reinvent ourselves. Bowie is a very good example if one acknowledges, and Dylan of course, one's own fundamental plasticity. And that's another problem with the progressive movement—they don't think of the human condition as a plastic one.William Deresiewicz: That's interesting. I mean, in one respect, I think they think of it as too plastic, right? This is sort of the blank slate fallacy that we can make—there's no such thing as human nature and we can reshape it as we wish. But at the same time, they've created a situation, and this really is what Excellent Sheep is about, where they're turning out the same human product over and over.Andrew Keen: But in that sense, then, the excellent sheep you write about at Yale, they've all ended up now as neo-liberal, neo-conservative, so they're just rebelling...William Deresiewicz: No, they haven't. No, they are the backbone of this soggy liberal progressive establishment. A lot of them are. I mean, why is, you know, even Wall Street and Silicon Valley sort of by preference liberal? It's because they're full of these kinds of elite college graduates who have been trained to be liberal.Andrew Keen: So what are we to make of the Musk-Thiel, particularly the Musk phenomenon? I mean, certainly Thiel, very much influenced by Rand, who herself, of course, was about as deeply Nietzschean as you can get. Why isn't Thiel and Musk just a model of the virility, the vitality of the early 21st century? You might not like what they say, but they're full of vitality.William Deresiewicz: It's interesting, there's a place in my piece where I say that the liberal can't accept the idea that a bad person can do great things. And one of my examples was Elon Musk. And the other one—Andrew Keen: Zuckerberg.William Deresiewicz: But Musk is not in the piece, because I wrote the piece before the inauguration and they asked me to change it because of what Musk was doing. And even I was beginning to get a little queasy just because the association with Musk is now different. It's now DOGE. But Musk, who I've always hated, I've never liked the guy, even when liberals loved him for making electric cars. He is an example, at least the pre-DOGE Musk, of a horrible human being with incredible vitality who's done great things, whether you like it or not. And I want—I mean, this is the energy that I want to harness for our team.Andrew Keen: I actually mostly agreed with your piece, but I didn't agree with that because I think most progressives believe that actually, the Zuckerbergs and the Musks, by doing, by being so successful, by becoming multi-billionaires, are morally a bit dodgy. I mean, I don't know where you get that.William Deresiewicz: That's exactly the point. But I think what they do is when they don't like somebody, they just negate the idea that they're great. "Well, he's just not really doing anything that great." You disagree.Andrew Keen: So what about ideas, Bill? Where is there room to rebuild the left? I take your points, and I don't think many people would actually disagree with you. Where does the left, if there's such a term anymore, need to go out on a limb, break some eggs, offend some people, but nonetheless rebuild itself? It's not going back to Bernie Sanders and some sort of nostalgic New Deal.William Deresiewicz: No, no, I agree. So this is, this may be unsatisfying, but this is what I'm saying. If there were specific new ideas that I thought the left should embrace, I would have said so. What I'm seeing is the left needs, to begin with, to create the conditions from which new ideas can come. So I mean, we've been talking about a lot of it. The censoriousness needs to go.I would also say—actually, I talk about this also—you know, maybe you would consider yourself part of, I don't know. There's this whole sort of heterodox realm of people who did dare to violate the progressive pieties and say, "maybe the pandemic response isn't going so well; maybe the Black Lives Matter protests did have a lot of violence"—maybe all the things, right? And they were all driven out from 2020 and so forth. A lot of them were people who started on the left and would even still describe themselves as liberal, would never vote for a Republican. So these people are out there. They're just, they don't have a voice within the Democratic camp because the orthodoxy continues to be enforced.So that's what I'm saying. You've got to start with the structural conditions. And one of them may be that we need to get—I don't even know that these institutions can reform themselves, whether it's the Times or the New Yorker or the Ivy League. And it may be that we need to build new institutions, which is also something that's happening. I mean, it's something that's happening in the realm of publishing and journalism on Substack. But again, they're still marginalized because that liberal establishment does not—it's not that old people don't wanna give up power, it's that the established people don't want to give up the power. I mean Harris is, you know, she's like my age. So the establishment as embodied by the Times, the New Yorker, the Ivy League, foundations, the think tanks, the Democratic Party establishment—they don't want to move aside. But it's so obviously clear at this point that they are not the solution. They're not the solutions.Andrew Keen: What about the so-called resistance? I mean, a lot of people were deeply disappointed by the response of law firms, maybe even universities, the democratic party as we noted is pretty much irrelevant. Is it possible for the left to rebuild itself by a kind of self-sacrifice, by lawyers who say "I don't care what you think of me, I'm simply against you" and to work together, or university presidents who will take massive pay cuts and take on MAGA/Trump world?William Deresiewicz: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is going to be the solution to the left rebuilding itself, but I think it has to happen, not just because it has to happen for policy reasons, but I mean you need to start by finding your courage again. I'm not going to say your testicles because that's gendered, but you need to start—I mean the law firms, maybe that's a little, people have said, well, it's different because they're in a competitive business with each other, but why did the university—I mean I'm a Columbia alumnus. I could not believe that Columbia immediately caved.It occurs to me as we're talking that these are people, university presidents who have learned cowardice. This is how they got to be where they got and how they keep their jobs. They've learned to yield in the face of the demands of students, the demands of alumni, the demands of donors, maybe the demands of faculty. They don't know how to be courageous anymore. And as much as I have lots of reasons, including personal ones, to hate Harvard University, good for them. Somebody finally stood up, and I was really glad to see that. So yeah, I think this would be one good way to start.Andrew Keen: Courage, in other words, is the beginning.William Deresiewicz: Courage is the beginning.Andrew Keen: But not a courage that takes itself too seriously.William Deresiewicz: I mean, you know, sure. I mean I don't really care how seriously—not the self-referential courage. Real courage, which means you're really risking losing something. That's what it means.Andrew Keen: And how can you and I then manifest this courage?William Deresiewicz: You know, you made me listen to Jocelyn Benson.Andrew Keen: Oh, yeah, I forgot and I actually I have to admit I saw that on the email and then I forgot who Jocelyn Benson is, which is probably reflects the fact that she didn't say very much.William Deresiewicz: For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, she's the Secretary of State of Michigan. She's running for governor.Andrew Keen: Oh yeah, and she was absolutely diabolical. She was on the show, I thought.William Deresiewicz: She wrote a book called Purposeful Warrior, and the whole interview was just this salad of cliches. Purpose, warrior, grit, authenticity. And part of, I mentioned her partly because she talked about courage in a way that was complete nonsense.Andrew Keen: Real courage, yeah, real courage. I remember her now. Yeah, yeah.William Deresiewicz: Yeah, she got made into a martyr because she got threatened after the 2020 election.Andrew Keen: Well, lots to think about, Bill. Very good conversation, as always. I think we need to get rid of old white men like you and I, but what do I know?William Deresiewicz: I mean, I am going to keep a death grip on my position, which is no good whatsoever.Andrew Keen: As I half-joked, Bill, maybe you should have called the piece "Post-Erection." If you can't get an erection, then you certainly shouldn't be in public office. That would have meant that Joe Biden would have had to have retired immediately.William Deresiewicz: I'm looking forward to seeing the test you devise to determine whether people meet your criterion.Andrew Keen: Yeah, maybe it will be a public one. Bread and circuses, bread and elections. We shall see, Bill, I'm not even going to do your last name because I got it right once. I'm never going to say it again. Bill, congratulations on the piece "Post-Election," not "Post-Erection," and we will talk again. This story is going to run and run. We will talk again in the not too distant future. Thank you so much.William Deresiewicz: That's good.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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Richard Doerflinger on the Dr. J Show, episode 275 https://youtu.be/W1CEN49YgGU “When young women go to college, they are instantly expected to fall into the hook-up culture," Richard Doerflinger says in Part 2 of this interview. "Their initial feeling is ‘I'm free. I'm liberated from all these restrictive norms. Nobody's watching. Sex is consequence-free.'” And yet, among these young women is more depression, anxiety, isolation, suicidal thoughts, and cutting “to know you're alive," he notes. "Then they can't figure out why they feel so miserable.” Watch part 1 here: https://youtu.be/RSUCTbkjOtM More about Richard Doerflinger: https://lozierinstitute.org/team-member/richard-doerflinger/ Chapters 00:00 The Impact of Contraception on Society 02:49 Consequences of the Contraceptive Mindset 05:49 Moral Norms and Their Importance 09:10 The Dangers of Relativism 11:56 The Role of Experience in Moral Decision Making 15:06 The Breakdown of Marriage and Family 18:14 The Need for Moral Absolutes 21:08 Reviving Natural Intuition 23:59 The Long-Term Effects of Individual Choices 26:55 The Importance of Sharing Experiences Transcript (Please note the transcript is auto-generated and contains errors) Richard Doerflinger (00:00) the social science part of it. What happens when people pass new, broader, more sweeping contraceptive programs? Do they reduce abortions? And I ended up doing a fact sheet with a couple of dozen references, concluding that they don't reduce abortions in a number of cases, they have increased abortions. The contraceptives have given people a false sense of security. made them more open to more casual sex and therefore opened them up to the possibility of a pregnancy that they don't know what to do about because they're the act that created that child was so anonymous and and so meaningless to them in a way. So it's a it was a big wake up call for me because even as a even as a social phenomenon. Contraception doesn't work. It certainly at reducing the number of abortions. And that's something that John Paul the second mentioned in his encyclical on the gospel of life as well. People think it's going to prevent it, but it can be very many times a road toward it. You had this technical thing that was supposed to prevent this. But as a backup to contraceptive failure, you have this other technical thing that will solve the problem you didn't think you were supposed to have. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:39) And you know, repair of a couple of economists, Janet Yellen and her husband, right? You know this article. Yes, yes. Richard Doerflinger (01:48) Let's sources, yeah. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:51) Basically, they were asking the question, how is it possible that in the age of contraception and abortion, both being readily available, that we have more out of wedlock childbearing than we ever did before? How is this possible? And they concluded pretty much what you just concluded, which is that the social is, contraception is the social cause. It's not a cause like smoking causes cancer, but it's a social cause in the sense that it sets a set of incentives into motion. which then the net result of the whole new system that you've created ends up with people having pregnancies that they feel socially are not sustainable, because you're the father of the child is your boss who's married to someone else. And you would never have done that if you didn't have contraception, you know, that type of thing or some schmuck you picked up at a bar, which you never would have done if you didn't feel protected. And so the woman has a choice of either aborting the baby or carrying it to term and being a single parent because there's no marriage isn't really practical. And then our friends in the crisis pregnancy center world, the pregnancy care center world, they are dealing with this issue all the time. And they would like to be able to tell the young ladies, should be, can you marry this guy? And oftentimes the answer is it would really, they couldn't in good conscience urge the girl to marry the guy. So there have been a whole series of consequences from the widespread promotion of sex that is not intended to be procreative, you know, if you can put it that way. Can you, from your perspective, Richard, spell out, you know, just kind of trace more of those consequences? What are some other things that have followed from the whole contraceptive ideology, the whole contraceptive mindset? What are some other… things that you've documented or observed. Richard Doerflinger (03:50) Well, one thing, and this was the subject of Anne Maloney's chapter in this book about, you the boys from the trenches. She's been teaching for many years at a women's college, Catholic women's college. And, you know, the female students, they come there, they're freed from their past social Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (04:03) yes. Richard Doerflinger (04:20) environment from their parents and so on. And instantly you are expected to fall in with the hookup culture. their initial experience or their initial feeling is, I'm free, I'm liberated from all these restrictive norms and nobody's watching. And I'm a liberated woman. The sex is consequence free. Well, it's not consequence free because what she found in talking to these young ladies over decades really is more depression, more anxiety, more cutting, cutting yourself in the arm to know you're alive, more isolation, more abandonment, more suicidal thoughts. And they can't figure out why they feel so miserable. It's the saddest thing I've ever read. And as we as well, you know, where's where's the young man? Well, you know, it was one night. never talk to me again. This is a very destructive culture, destructive, especially to women, though I don't think it's it's good for men either. So it's something you can see writ large in social findings. My friend Helen Alvarez calls it the immistration of women. That means women are more miserable than ever before. And that shows up in social surveys. And I think it does make people ready for abortion. The other thing is that the ideology that started with contraception and then was used to create a Supreme Court judgment that there was a constitutional right not only to contraception but to abortion, I found has gotten used by later courts, by later judges, to justify the lethal neglect of handicapped newborn children to as a precedent for euthanasia and assisted suicide for elderly. And so the whole idea that life, innocent life, supposedly burdensome life or imperfect life has no great rights that can Trump, should stop using that word, shouldn't I, can override liberty, personal liberty. that has gotten into any number of other areas where life is at risk. So it's something that has been kind of poisoning society. This idea that you can have actions that are, you don't have any actions that are consequence free. And very often the consequences are bad consequences for the most helpless among us. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (07:45) And you know, I like the way you put that because the whole idea that there are some norms, some moral norms that have no exceptions, there's a reason for those things having no exceptions. And the underlying reason is that you're trying to protect the true equality of every human being and their right to life. know, so much of this has been done in the name of equality for women. Well, when they're talking about equality for women, they're talking about in terms of income or occupational stature, that kind of thing. There's no question that women make more money as individuals than they used to, or that women have more education than they used to. That's certainly true. And so men and women are more equal. But only in that dimension. The women are now more miserable than they were before. And the idea that every human person has a baseline of human rights, that gets completely shot. you know, that the woman has the sole right to determine whether this particular person even gets to live, you know. That idea is extremely corrosive. And it's one of these things, it's superficially appealing, but when you really dig down a little bit, you find there's all sorts of dark sides to it. And, you know, it seems like it's been the job of the faithful Catholic remnant to make sure that at least somebody digs down a little bit. to pass that superficial appeal of the thing. Richard Doerflinger (09:14) Yeah, it's a, it reminded me of something that was once written by one of my favorite priests that I ever met, Jesuit priest named John Connery SJ. And he had a steady debate going back and forth between him and Richard McCormick, who was one of the great consequentialist theologians in the United States in journals like Theological Studies. And he ended one of his articles about moral absolutes with a statement that I thought, well, it's so obvious that you're the first person that wrote anything that brought it home to me. And that was, look, it's when it's hard to obey a moral norm, that's when you need the moral absolute. You don't need moral absolutes for when it's easy. You only need it when it is when the temptation is greater to to violate it. And I don't know why they're just stuck in my mind as well. It's enormous common sense. But for some reason, there are people who think that that's not true. The. And the whole history of Catholic moral teaching has been to refine and sometimes to expand the application of its witness to life. You know, more and more of the church has turned against capital punishment as, you know, an unnecessarily violent means for trying to punish or stop crime. Our tradition on war has become more and more skeptical about the idea that you could ever have in practice today with all our technology, a just war, a limited war. And so here, when life is at its most helpless, we seem to be wanting to go in the opposite direction. And I would like to say to some of my liberal Catholic friends, do you really think that once you make this new paradigm where it's only your subjective Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (11:20) Mm-hmm Richard Doerflinger (11:29) desires and your own experience that are going to make the moral norm for you. You don't think anybody's going to think of applying that to war. I don't see any reason why not. If it's a paradigm, it's a paradigm. It undermines all moral absolutes. So I think it's very, very important to that. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (11:45) Right And it undermines all moral absolutes, but it also places the weak in an even weaker position, right, because there's nothing to which they can appeal. The law of the strongest becomes much more potent in a relativistic type of system, and this is something Pope Benedict was, I think, referring to when he talked about the dictatorship of relativism. If you really don't have any standards, then you are going to end up with the law of the strongest, whether you mean to or not, whether you like it or not. that's where you're going to end up because you don't have any standard that everybody can appeal to. Richard Doerflinger (12:30) That's right. That's John Paul II as well in the Gospel of Life. When liberty, when freedom does not serve the truth, it's just a war of the strong against the weak. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (12:44) Right, right. And that's pretty much where we are. Richard Doerflinger (12:47) what we seem to be heading for. The other thing that just surprises me is that a lot of the Protestant denominations, and this has been noted by Mary Eberstadt and others, have taken this road toward a more subjectivist, more relativist morality, accepting the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, in terms of sexuality, among other things. And those are the denominations that are dying. know, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, at least some branches of them have decided we need to get with the spirit of the age so that people will find us credible. And instead, people found them dispensable. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (13:43) Yes. Richard Doerflinger (13:44) They were just saying the things that the secular society was already telling them and wrapping it around in some theology, but you don't need the theology if you've already got, you know, the answer to what you're allowed to do, which is pretty broad answer. So it's very frustrating to find that this, you know, sexual revolution, obviously, I mean, you have to just open your eyes had many, many casualties. And I don't know why that can be invisible to bishops, to theologians. The evidence is all there. again, know, Berenstead has been, and her contribution to this as well, and in yours, it's all there. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (14:36) That's right. Richard Doerflinger (14:37) Question about it, really. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (14:40) Well, I can tell you how this works, Richard. can tell you exactly how this works, because this is the kind of stuff I track, right? People selectively choose the evidence. And so the people who are talking about lived experience, they always have one kind of experience in mind, the experience of the hard case, whatever the hard case might be, the issue is abortion or the issue is end of life issues or homosexuality or whatever the issue is, it's always the hard case where it's hard to meet the norm, like you were saying before, but they never ever present the evidence, the lived experience of the people who violated the norm and then later regret it. And the whole list of reasons why people turn out to regret violating the norm. You know, it's like we're driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in California, which is a beautiful winding road, but we're driving down that highway with no guardrails. in a car that has no brakes. Well, when you go careening off the cliff, you kind of wish you had the brakes. You kind of wish somebody had said, danger, slow down, you know? But that's what the absolute moral norm can do for you, is it keeps you from the worst kind of catastrophe, but still give you lots and lots of freedom about how. So for example, you and your wife, I want to come back to your story, which by the way is the subject of his contribution here. That what you discover is when you say, okay, certain things are off limits. We're not going to use the rubbers anymore. We're not going to take the pills anymore. Okay, that's off limits. But within that, within the constraints we've now accepted for ourselves, we can do all sorts of things. We're very free if we stay in the playground, you know, and the playground is much safer than the free for all that includes cars coming through at 50 miles an hour. You know, can, the kids can't play in that kind of environment. And so, but the contraceptive ideology has broken down marriage precisely as Paul VI said it would do because if you have a strong marriage culture and you know you're supposed to be sexually exclusive, that means this ring says I'm off limits. I'm off limits to everybody, you know, and you're off limits to everybody because you got a ring on your finger. Richard Doerflinger (16:59) Even the guys who are trying to cheat on their wives and go to a bar to pick up a woman they don't know, they realize they need to take that ring off first. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (17:12) Yeah, that's right. No, that's very true. That's very true. Because there is still some residual moral norm around that you don't mess around with somebody's spouse. But contraception makes it seem like it will be OK, that we can get away with this. It's not as potentially catastrophic and stuff. And how many marriages are destroyed by infidelity? A lot. A lot are destroyed by infidelity, obviously. So yeah. Anyway, go ahead. Richard Doerflinger (17:44) I was just going say that, you when you're talking about the playground, it reminded me of something that I think GK Chesterton said about there was once a playground. It was on a sort of plateau, but it has this big strong fence all around, all around the playground. And kids would come and they would play. And sometimes they, you know, when running in a ball game, they'd actually bounce off the fence or something, you know, that everybody was having a good time. Everybody decided. Although their parents decided, well, this is very restrictive. We will take away the fence. The next day they came, the fence was down. The children arrived. They were all huddling together in the center and no one was laughing. And it reminded me also of there's a palliative care physician I used to work with on the issue of physician assisted suicide. said something very similar. said, because I know that deliberately ending the life of my patient is the one thing I must never do that freed me to do all of the ways to explore all the ways in which I can relieve his suffering and accompany him or her. Because I know that's where I don't go. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (19:09) Mm-hmm. Richard Doerflinger (19:10) So I think that's very true on all kinds of issues. You say this is what I will not do. What is it? Meet Lo, Fustasing. I'll do anything for love, but I won't do that. Those norms are there to free us for the ways in which we can live with each other and, yes, plan our families. and respect each other. I that was one of the other things that just I had to respect my wife's body and its natural cycles and so on. And that helped to undergird my respect for her, which, of course, every husband should have for his wife. And so it is a way of working with reality instead of trying to change reality to your whims. I think this is a much longer term debate or struggle than just, you know, changing laws or, you know, changing official documents. It really is about changing culture. It's about changing attitudes. I've done some writing in the past about this whole worldview of expressive individualism, that every one of us is just sort of a individual. Well, it's really, it's very Nietzschean, you know, it's the will to power. I express myself, I can create myself, making my identity by the way that I work out what I want to do. And that is so destructive on so many levels. And I think that the marriage culture, the idea of actually committing yourself to another person, that that is freeing. It frees you from all the consequences of uncommitted sex that so many women have had to experience. And it is also something that, there is also you were talking about, you know, there's a there's a moral norm built into us, you know, instinctually, a mother has the instinct of protecting her child. at every stage. We have been trying to suppress that over the recent decades of developments on this is what your individual freedom frees you or maybe requires you to do. I was very taken aback once I was reading a Catholic account of abortion. This is a priest who is responding to an essay by Anne Landers in favor of abortion. And he went through all kinds of rebuttals about the arguments in favor. And then he said, but to get back to the one thing, the essential thing, the only thing to abort is to destroy your son or daughter. And I have been working with the, you know, this is the taking of a human life or this is, you know, a form of killing and so on. And suddenly just those words took me aback. Well, of course it is. You're related. This is a member of your family. It already is a member of your family. Even if your family is only the two of you. And I think it has taken a lot of work for society to break down that very natural intuition. And there must be ways to revive it because it hasn't entirely disappeared. mean, many, many abortions are very broken up about it. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (23:01) Yes, yes. And many men are broken up by their wives or girlfriends' decisions to have an abortion. And even siblings. Every once in a while somebody will share with me, you know, Dr. Morse, my mom told me when I was a teenager, my mom told me that she had had an abortion, you know, at some point. And that guy said to me, my gosh, I have a sibling who died, you know. So even there, none of these things only affect the individual. This is the other big myth, you know. The person making the decision cannot foresee all the consequences if you, particularly if you expand the consequences beyond yourself. What impact will this have on the people around me, on my husband, on my boyfriend, on my other kids, you know? What are all those consequences? This has always been the argument against consequentialism. You know, no, I mean, it's one argument against consequentialism. You can't possibly know all the possible consequences. Richard Doerflinger (24:12) And there's no way to quantify one against the other because they're different projects. And the first consequence is on you. I you have just made yourself the kind of person who does this. And I mean, there's certainly opportunity for repenting of that, for turning your life around again. But the first consequence is on your own conscience. There are people who, you this was the first time they realized they were capable of doing this thing that they didn't think they would ever do. And that changes your life. it's, yeah, consequentialism is, it's a very one dimensional way of talking about one very small subset of all the consequences that we create when we have a human act, a moral act. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (25:10) Yes, yes. And I'm glad you're calling it expressive individualism, because one of the… I almost think of it as a trick. You know, one of the tricks that is done to make you think this act is okay is that you greatly redefine what counts as a consequence. You know, so when you see people expressing themselves by deciding they were really born in the wrong body, and they're going to change the sex of the body, and they're going to leave their wife and their children to go live as a woman… You know, that person's thinking about the consequences to themselves. They're not thinking about the long-term impact on the wife and the children. Somehow that doesn't enter the calculation. It doesn't enter as a harm, you know? And that's how a lot of this stuff is done. That's the trick, I would call it the trick. And one of the things that we try to do here at the Ruth Institute is to make sure those people get a microphone, you know, that the people who've been left behind have an opportunity to say, you know, my dad did this and it was awful. My mom did this and it was awful for us, you know, all of those type of things to broaden that discussion so that people understand your actions do have far reaching consequences, not just to you today, but to generations down the line. You're gonna be having consequences, the consequences of these acts. So we have our work cut out for us in this volume, us little, our intrepid people who are trying to fight against consequentialism in the Roman Catholic Church. where it doesn't belong, okay people, it does not belong in the Roman Catholic Church. The rest of you maybe have an excuse, but no, we're not gonna accept this. So in your opinion, who should read this book? Who should get this book? Who should have it on their shelf? Richard Doerflinger (26:55) You know, I think it would be a very handy guide for pastors who, you know, deal with people coming to them with questions regarding sexuality and so on. know, people will not necessarily always listen to, well, that this is immoral in the teaching of the Catholic Church. They might listen to, well, I mean, what you're doing or what you want to do. has really done a lot of harm to a lot of women and a lot of men. And here's some experience. I mean, if people will listen to experience, this book has got those. I think people who are teaching moral theology or are teaching marriage preparation or RCIA, Pre-Kena programs, can look at this and get some insights that will help them to talk in a very down to earth way about sexual ethics. I mean, I have a vested interest, I would, you know, I hope everybody reads this book, of course, but I think especially in those consequences, you know, in those situations, it could be an extremely helpful guide for where to go when just saying no is not enough. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (28:19) Right, right. And do you think people would respond well if they received this book as a gift from someone else? I wonder if some of our viewers might want send it to their pastor, might want to send it to their moral theologian professor or something like that. I don't know. Maybe people don't respond well to that. But maybe they do. Maybe. I don't know. What do you think, Rich? Should people try that? Richard Doerflinger (28:46) It couldn't hurt. The one person I know I should not send it to. I was talking to one of our grown daughters the other day and said, you know, Maria, I just finished, you know, I got a chapter in a recently published book. We were talking about, you know, moms and my married life in our checkered history with family planning. You want to read it? She said, God, no. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (29:15) That's it. Richard Doerflinger (29:18) So, you know, your kids don't want to. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (29:20) Send it to her. Duly noted, Richard. We will not send it to your daughter. Richard Doerflinger (29:26) But I hope other people will be sort of interested in what we learned from our experience. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (29:33) Yes. And the strategic significance of this book, just to reiterate something that Rich and I started at and have been kind of hinting around about, is that lived experience is the terminology that people use to defend consequentialism. Lived experience can trump those moral norms. And we want to say that it's actually the lived experience of people who violate those norms that should tell us that the norms are very valuable to us. and that the norms are worth defending and the norms are worth keeping. Richard Dorflinger, thank you so much for being my guest on today's episode of the Dr. J Show. This has been very interesting, very, very helpful. Are you still writing and working in this series or do you have a website or something like that where people can keep up with you? Richard Doerflinger (30:25) I don't have a website. mean, if you were to do an internet search in my name, some of my work would come up. Also, some nasty articles about me from people who didn't appreciate what I was doing in Congress. my wife is asking me once in a while when I'm going to retire from my retirement. I continue to do writing and speaking. giving a talk at Notre Dame next week, part of their fall conference on the Catholic imagination, which is interesting, is they wanted me to apply the idea of the Catholic imagination, the Catholic worldview and how it looks at reality as having deeper levels than other accounts recognized and apply it to some of these issues like abortion. so So it's mainly, a lot of the speakers are gonna be novelists, poets and so on, but I get to take that idea and apply it to what I work on usually. And it's been an interesting exercise to figure out what I'm gonna say. I haven't figured out all of it yet. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (31:44) Well, Richard Darflinger, it has been a lot of fun talking with you about these issues, these very serious and important issues, but we have had a little bit of fun while we're doing it. I do hope that people will take this volume seriously. I do hope that people will use these thoughts to interpret what you see coming out of Rome from time to time and help you understand what some of these debates are in Catholic moral theology. Your contribution here, Richard, has been really a big help to me and I'm sure to many of the viewers of the Ruth Institute. So I want to thank you so much for being my guest on today's episode of The Dr. J Show. Have a question or a comment? Leave it in the comments, and we'll get back to you! 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After enjoying her new book Open Socrates so much (and having written about her previous book Aspiration in Second Act), I was delighted to talk to Agnes Callard, not least because, as she discusses in Open Socrates, she is a big Tolstoy admirer. We talked about Master and Man, one of my favourite Tolstoy stories, but also about the value of reading fiction, the relationship between fiction and a thought experiment, and other topics of related interest. George Eliot makes an appearance too. In the discussion about the use of fiction in philosophy classes, I was slightly shocked to hear about how much (or how little) reading her undergraduates are prepared to do, but I was interested that they love Pessoa. Agnes has previously written that the purpose of art is to show us evil. Here is Agnes on Twitter. Transcript below, may contain errors!I found this especially interesting.Exactly, and I mean, 10 seconds, that's a wild exaggeration. So do you know what the actual number is? No. On average. Okay, the average amount of time that you're allowed to wait before responding to something I say is two tenths of a second, which, it's crazy, isn't it? Which, that amount of time is not enough time for, that is a one second pause is an awkward pause, okay? So two tenths of a second is not long enough time for the signal that comes at the end of my talking, so the last sound I make, let's say, to reach your ears and then get into your brain and be processed, and then you figure out what you want to say. It's not enough time, which means you're making a prediction. That's what you're doing when I'm talking. You're making a prediction about when I'm going to stop talking, and you're so good at it that you're on almost every time. You're a little worse over Zoom. Zoom screws us up a little bit, right? But this is like what our brains are built to do. This is what we're super good at, is kind of like interacting, and I think it's really important that it be a genuine interaction. That's what I'm coming to see, is that we learn best from each other when we can interact, and it's not obvious that there are those same interaction possibilities by way of text at the moment, right? I'm not saying there couldn't be, but at the moment, we rely on the fact that we have all these channels open to us. Interestingly, it's the lag time on the phone, like if we were talking just by phone, is about the same. So we're so good at this, we don't need the visual information. That's why I said phone is also face-to-face. I think phone's okay, even though a lot of our informational stream is being cut. We're on target in terms of the quick responses, and there's some way in which what happens in that circumstance is we become a unit. We become a unit of thinking together, and if we're texting each other and each of us gets to ponder our response and all that, it becomes dissociated.Transcript (AI generated)Henry: Today, I am talking to Agnes Callard, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, author of Aspiration, and now most recently, Open Socrates. But to begin with, we are going to talk about Tolstoy. Hello, Agnes: .Agnes: Hello.Henry: Shall we talk about Master of Man first?Agnes: Yeah, absolutely.Henry: So this is one of Tolstoy's late stories. I think it's from 1895. So he's quite old. He's working on What is Art? He's in what some people think is his crazy period. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about because you write a lot in Open Socrates about Tolstoy's midlife crisis, for want of a better word. Yeah. So what did you think?Agnes: So I think it's sort of a novel, a story about almost like a kind of fantasy of how a midlife crisis could go if it all went perfectly. Namely, there's this guy, Brekhunov, is that his name? And he is, you know, a landowner and he's well off and aristocratic. And he is selfish and only cares about his money. And the story is just, he takes this, you know, servant of his out to, he wants to go buy a forest and he wants to get there first before anyone else. And so he insists on going into this blizzard and he gets these opportunities to opt out of this plan. And he keeps turning them down. And eventually, you know, they end up kind of in the middle of the blizzard. And at kind of the last moment, when his servant is about to freeze to death, he throws himself on top of the servant and sacrifices himself for the servant. And the reason why it seems like a fantasy is it's like, it's like a guy whose life has a lacuna in it where, you know, where meaning is supposed to be. And he starts to get an inkling of the sort of terror of that as they're spending more and more time in the storm. And his initial response is like to try to basically abandon the servant and go out and continue to get to this forest. But eventually he like, it's like he achieves, he achieves the conquest of meaning through this heroic act of self-sacrifice that is itself kind of like an epiphany, like a fully fulfilling epiphany. He's like in tears and he's happy. He dies happy in this act of self-sacrifice. And the fantasy part of it is like, none of it ever has to get examined too carefully. It doesn't like, his thought doesn't need to be subjected to philosophical scrutiny because it's just this, this one momentary glorious kind of profusion of love. And then it all ends.Henry: So the difficult question is answered the moment it is asked. Exactly, exactly, right?Agnes: It's sort of, it's, I see it as like a counterpart to the death of Ivan Ilyich.Henry: Tell me, tell me more.Agnes: Well, in the death of Ivan Ilyich, the questions surface for even, you know, when death shows up for him. And he suddenly starts to realize, wait a minute, I've lived my whole life basically in the way that Brekhunov did. Basically in the way that Brekhunov does as, you know, pursuing money, trying to be a socially successful person. What was the point of all that? And he finds himself unable to answer it. And he finds himself, it's the exact opposite. He becomes very alienated from his wife and his daughter, I think.Henry: Yeah.Agnes: And the absence of an answer manifests as this absence of connection to anyone, except an old manservant who like lifts up his legs and that's the one relief that he gets. And, you know, it's mostly in the gesture of like someone who will sacrifice themselves for another. Right, that's once again where sort of meaning will show up for a Tolstoy, if it ever will show up in a kind of direct and unashamed way.Henry: Right, the exercise of human compassion is like a running theme for him. Like if you can get to that, things are going great. Otherwise you've really screwed up.Agnes: Yeah, that's like Tolstoy's deus ex machina is the sudden act of compassion.Henry: Right, right. But you think this is unphilosophical?Agnes: I think it's got its toe in philosophical waters and sort of not much more than that. And it's in a way that makes it quite philosophical in the sense that there's a kind of awareness of like a deep puzzle that is kind of like at the heart of existence. Like there's a sensitivity to that in Tolstoy that's part of what makes him a great writer. But there's not much faith in the prospect of sort of working that through rationally. It's mostly something we just got a gesture at.Henry: But he does think the question can be answered. Like this is what he shares with you, right? He does think that when you're confronted with the question, he's like, it's okay. There is an answer and it is a true answer. We don't just have to make some, he's like, I've had the truth for you.Agnes: Yes, I think that that's right. But I think that like the true answer that he comes to is it's compassion and it's sort of religiously flavored compassion, right? I mean, that it's important. It's not just. Yeah, it's a very Christian conclusion. Right, but the part that's important there in a way, even if it's not being Christian, but that it's being religious in the sense of, yes, this is the answer. But if you ask for too much explanation as to what the answer is, it's not going to be the right answer. But if you ask for too much explanation as to why it's the answer, you're going the wrong way. That is, it's gotta, part of the way in which it's the answer is by faith.Henry: Or revelation.Agnes: Or, right, faith, exactly. But like, but it's not your task to search and use your rational faculties to find the answer.Henry: I wonder though, because one of the things Tolstoy is doing is he's putting us in the position of the searcher. So I read this, I'm trying to go through like all of Tolstoy at the moment, which is obviously not, it's not currently happening, but I'm doing a lot of it. And I think basically everything in Tolstoy is the quest for death, right? Literature is always about quests. And he's saying these characters are all on a quest to have a good death. And they come very early or very late to this. So Pierre comes very early to this realization, right? Which is why he's like the great Tolstoy hero, master of man, Ivan Ilyich, they come very, and Tolstoy is like, wow, they really get in under the wire. They nearly missed, this is terrible. And all the way through this story, Tolstoy is giving us the means to see what's really going on in the symbolism and in all the biblical references, which maybe is harder for us because we don't know our Bible, like we're not all hearing our Bible every week, whereas for Tolstoy's readers, it's different. But I think he's putting us in the position of the searcher all the time. And he is staging two sides of the argument through these two characters. And when they get to the village and Vasily, he meets the horse thief and the horse thief's like, oh, my friend. And then they go and see the family and the family mirrors them. And Tolstoy's like, he's like, as soon as you can see this, as soon as you can work this out, you can find the truth. But if you're just reading the story for a story, I'm going to have to catch you at the end. And you're going to have to have the revelation and be like, oh my God, it's a whole, oh, it's a whole thing. Okay, I thought they were just having a journey in the snow. And I think he does that a lot, right? That's, I think that's why people love War and Peace because we go on Pierre's journey so much. And we can recognize that like, people's lives have, a lot of people's lives happen like that. Like Pierre's always like half thinking the question through and then half like, oh, there's another question. And then thinking that one through and then, oh, no, wait, there's another question. And I think maybe Tolstoy is very pragmatic. Like that's as philosophical as most people are going to get. Pierre is in some ways the realistic ideal.Agnes: I mean, Pierre is very similar to Tolstoy just in this respect that there's a specific like moment or two in his life where, he basically has Tolstoy's crisis. That is he confronts these big questions and Tolstoy describes it as like, there was a screw in his head that had got loose and he kept turning it, but it kept, it was like stripped. And so no matter when you turned it, it didn't go. It didn't grab into anything. And what happens eventually is like, oh, he learns to have a good conventional home life. Like, and like not, don't ask yourself these hard questions. They'll screw you up. And I mean, it's not exactly compassion, but it's something close to that. The way things sort of work out in War and Peace. And I guess I think that you're sort of right that Tolstoy is having us figure something out for ourselves. And in that way, you could say we're on a journey. There's a question, why? Why does he have us do that? Why not just tell us? Why have it figured out for ourselves? And one reason might be because he doesn't know, that he doesn't know what he wants to tell us. And so you got to have them figure out for themselves. And I think that that is actually part of the answer here. And it's even maybe part of what it is to be a genius as a writer is to be able to write from this place of not really having the answers, but still be able to help other people find them.Henry: You don't think it's, he wants to tell us to be Christians and to believe in God and to take this like.Agnes: Absolutely, he wants to tell us that. And in spite of that, he's a great writer. If that were all he was achieving, he'd be boring like other writers who just want to do that and just do that.Henry: But you're saying there's something additional than that, that is even mysterious to Tolstoy maybe.Agnes: Yeah.Henry: Did you find that additional mystery in Master in Man or do you see that more in the big novels?Agnes: I see it the most in Death of Ivan Ilyich. But I think it's true, like in Anna Karenina, I can feel Tolstoy being pulled back and forth between on the one hand, just a straight out moralistic condemnation of Anna. And of, there are the good guys in this story, Levine and Kitty, and then there's this like evil woman. And then actually being seduced by her charms at certain moments. And it's the fact that he is still susceptible to her and to the seductions of her charms, even though that's not the moral of the story, it's not the official lesson. There's like, he can't help but say more than what the official lesson is supposed to be. And yeah, I think if he were just, I think he makes the same estimation of himself that I am making in terms of saying, look, he finds most of his own art wanting, right? In what is art? Because it's insufficiently moralistic basically, or it's doing too much else besides being, he's still pretty moralistic. I mean, even War and Peace, even Anna Karenina, he's moralistic even in those texts, but his artistry outstrips his moralism. And that's why we're attracted to him, I think. If he were able to control himself as a writer and to be the novelist that he describes as his ideal in what is art, I don't think we would be so interested in reading it.Henry: And where do you see, you said you saw it in Ivan Ilyich as well.Agnes: Yes, so I think in Ivan Ilyich, it is in the fact that there actually is no deus ex machina in Ivan Ilyich. It's not resolved. I mean, you get this little bit of relation to the servant, but basically Ivan Ilyich is like the closest that Tolstoy comes to just like full confrontation with the potential meaninglessness of human existence. There's something incredibly courageous about it as a text.Henry: So what do you think about the bit at the end where he says he was looking for his earlier accustomed fear of death, but he couldn't find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear whatsoever because there was no death. Instead of death, there was light. Suddenly he said, oh, that's it, oh bliss.Agnes: Okay, fair enough. I'd like forgotten that.Henry: Oh, okay. Well, so my feeling is that like you're more right. So my official thing is like, I don't agree with that, but I actually think you're more right than I think because to me that feels a bit at the end like he saw the light and he, okay, we got him right under the line, it's fine. And actually the bulk of the story just isn't, it's leading up to that. And it's the very Christian in all its imagery and symbolism, but it's interesting that this, when it's, this is adapted into films like Ikiru and there was a British one recently, there's just nothing about God. There's nothing about seeing the light. They're just very, very secular. They strip this into something totally different. And I'm a little bit of a grumpy. I'm like, well, that's not what Tolstoy was doing, but also it is what he was doing. I mean, you can't deny it, right? The interpreters are, they're seeing something and maybe he was so uncomfortable with that. That's why he wrote what is art.Agnes: Yeah, and that's the, I like that. I like that hypothesis. And right, I think it's like, I sort of ignore those last few lines because I'm like, ah, he copped out at the very end, but he's done the important, he's done the important, the important work, I think, is for instance, the scene with, even on his wife, where they part on the worst possible terms with just hatred, you know, like just pure hatred for the fact that she's forcing him to pretend that he isn't dying. Like that is like the profound moment.Henry: What I always remember is they're playing cards in the other room. And he's sitting there, he's lying there thinking about like the office politics and curtain, like what curtain fabrics we have to pick out and the like, his intense hatred of the triviality of life. And I love this because I think there's something, like a midlife crisis is a bit like being an adolescent in that you go through all these weird changes and you start to wonder like, who am I? What is my life? When you're an adolescent, you're told that's great. You should go ahead and you should, yes, lean into that. And when you're like in your forties, people are going, well, try and just put a lid on that. That's not a good idea. Whereas Tolstoy has the adolescent fury of like curtains and cards. Oh my, you know, you can feel the rage of his midlife crisis in some of that seemingly mundane description. Yeah. I think that's what we respond to, right? That like his hatred in a way.Agnes: Yeah. I mean, maybe we, many of us just have trouble taking ourselves as seriously as Tolstoy was able to, you know? And that's something, there's something glorious about that, that anyone else would listen to the people around them telling him, hey, don't worry, you're a great guy. Look, you wrote these important novels. You're a hero of the Russian people. You've got this wife, you're an aristocrat. You've got this family, you've got your affairs. I mean, come on, you've got everything a man could want. Just be happy with it all, you know? Many of us might be like, yeah, okay, I'm being silly. And Tolstoy is like, no one's going to tell me that I'm silly. Like I'm the one who's going to tell myself, if anything. And that kind of confidence is, you know, why he's sort of not willing to dismiss this thought.Henry: Yeah, yeah, interesting. So how do you think of Master and Man in relation to all the others? Because you know Tolstoy pretty well. You teach him a lot. How do you place it? Like how good do you think it is?Agnes: I don't teach him a lot. I'm trying to think if I ever taught Tolstoy.Henry: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I read that you had.Agnes: I've taught The Death of Ivan Ilyich. That's the one, I have taught that one. I wish, I mean, I would love to teach. I just can't imagine assigning any of these novels in a philosophy, my students wouldn't read it.Henry: They wouldn't read it?Agnes: No.Henry: Why?Agnes: It's pretty hard to get people to read long texts. And I mean, some of them certainly would, okay, for sure. But if I'm, you know, in a philosophy class where you'd have to kind of have pretty high numbers of page assignments per class, if we're going to, I mean, you know, forget War and Peace. I mean, even like Ivan Ilyich is going to be pushing it to assign it for one class. I've learned to shorten my reading assignments because students more and more, they're not in the habit of reading. And so I got to think, okay, what is the minimum that I can assign them that where I can predict that they will do it? Anyway, I'm going to be pushing that next year in a class I'm teaching. I normally, you know, I assign fiction in some of my classes but that's very much not a thing that most philosophers do. And I have to sign it alongside, you know, but so it's not only the fiction they're reading, they're also reading philosophical texts. And anyway, yeah, no, so I have not done much, but I have done in a class on death, I did assign Ivan Ilyich. I don't tend to think very much about the question, what is the level of quality of a work of art?Henry: Well, as in, all I mean is like, how does it compare for you to the other Tolstoy you've read?Agnes: I, so the question that I tend to ask myself is like, what can I learn from it or how much can I learn? Not, it's not because I don't think the question of, the other one is a good one. I just think I trust other people's judgment more than mine unlike artistic quality. And I guess I think it's not as good as Death of Ivan Ilyich and I kind of can't see, like, it's like, what do I learn from it that I don't learn from Death of Ivan Ilyich? Which is like a question that I ask myself. And, there's a way in which that like that little final move, maybe when I'm reading Death of Ivan Ilyich, I can ignore that little final bit and here I can't ignore it. Tolstoy made it impossible for me to ignore in this story. So that's maybe the advantage of this story. Tolstoy makes his move more overt and more dominating of the narrative.Henry: Yeah, I think also, I've known people who read Ivan Ilyich and not really see that it's very Christian. Yeah, oh yeah.Agnes: I don't think I- Much less.Henry: Yeah.Agnes: That's what I'm doing. I'm erasing that from the story.Henry: But that's like much less possible with this one. I agree.Agnes: Right, exactly. That's sort of what I mean is that- Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, here the message is more overt. And so therefore I think it's actually a pretty important story in that way. Like, let's say for understanding Tolstoy. That is, if you were to try to take your view of Tolstoy and base it on Death of Ivan Ilyich, which sometimes I do in my own head, because it's occupied such an important place for me, then this is a good way to temper that.Henry: Yeah, they make a nice pairing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Let's pick up on this question about philosophers and fiction because you write about that in Open Socrates. You say, great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from. So it makes questions askable, but then you say only in relation to fictional characters, which you think is a limitation. Are you drawing too hard of a line between fictional characters and real people? Like if someone said, oh, we found out, we were in the archives, Ivan Ilyich, he didn't, it's not fiction. He was just a friend, just happened to a friend, basically word for word. He just did the work to make it kind of look okay for a novel, but basically it's just real. Would that really change very much?Agnes: I think it wouldn't, no. So it might change a little bit, but not that much. So maybe the point, maybe a better thing I could have said there is other people. That is one thing that fictional people are is resolutely other. There's no chance you're going to meet them. And like they are, part of what it is for them to be fictional is that, there isn't even a possible world in which you meet them because metaphysically what they are is the kind of thing that can't ever interact with you. And, like the possible world in which I run into Ivan and Ivan Ilyich is the world in which he's not a Tolstoy character anymore. He's not a character in a novel, obviously, because we're both real people. So I think it's that there's a kind of safety in proving the life of somebody who is not in any way a part of your life.Henry: The counter argument, which novelists would make is that if you gave some kind of philosophical propositional argument about death, about what it means to die, a lot of people just wouldn't, they'd like, maybe they'd understand what you're saying, but it just wouldn't affect them very much. Whereas if they've read Ivan Ilyich, this will actually affect them. I don't want to say it'll resonate with them, but you know what I mean. It will catch them in some way and they're more likely then to see something in their own life and be like, oh my God, I'm appreciating what Ivan Ilyich was telling me. Whereas, this is the argument, right? The statistics of social science, the propositions of philosophy, this just never gets through to people.Agnes: Yeah, so one way to put this is, novelists are fans of epiphanies. I mean, some novelists, like Tolstoy, it's quite explicit. You just get these epiphanies, right? Like in this story, epiphany. James Joyce, I mean, he's like master of every story in Dubliners, epiphany. Novelists have this fantasy that people's lives are changed in a sudden moment when they have a passionate, oh, I just read this story and I'm so happy about it. And I don't actually doubt that these things happen, these epiphanies, that is people have these passionate realizations. I don't know how stable they are. Like they may have a passionate realization and then, maybe it's a little bit the novelist's fantasy to say you have the passionate realization and everything is changed. In this story, we get around that problem because he dies, right? So, that, I don't know. I somehow am now James Joyce. I don't know. I somehow am now James Joyce is in my head. The final story in Dubliners is the dead. And there's this like, amazing, I don't know who read the story.Henry: Yeah, yeah. Also with snow, right?Agnes: Yeah, exactly.You know, and it's this amazing where this guy is realizing his wife, their relationship is not what he thought it was, whatever. But then the story ends, does he really change? Like, do they just go on and have the same marriage after that point? We don't know. I mean, Joyce avoids that question by having the story end. But, so you might say, you know, novelists like epiphanies and they're good at writing epiphanies and producing epiphanies and imagining that their readers will have epiphanies. And then there's a question, okay, how valuable is the epiphany? And I think, not nothing. I wouldn't put it at zero, but you might say, okay, but let's compare the epiphany and the argument, right? So, what philosophers and the social scientists have, what we have is arguments. And who's ever been changed by an argument? And I think I would say all of human history has been changed by arguments and it's pretty much the only thing that's ever done anything to stably change us is arguments. If you think about, like, what are the things we've moved on? What are the things we've come around on? You know, human rights, there's a big one. That's not a thing in antiquity. And it's a thing now. And I think it's a thing because of arguments. Some of those arguments, you know, are starting to come in their own in religious authors, but then really come in, the flourishing is really the enlightenment. And so you might think, well, maybe an argument is not the kind of thing that can change very easily an adult who was already pretty set in their ways and who is not going to devote much of their time to philosophizing. It isn't going to give them the kind of passionate feeling of your life has suddenly been turned around by an epiphany, but it might well be that if we keep arguing with each other, that is how humanity changes.Henry: I think a lot of the arguments were put into story form. So like the thing that changed things the most before the enlightenment maybe was the gospels. Which is just lots of stories. I know there are arguments in there, but basically everything is done through stories. Or metaphor, there's a lot of metaphor. I also think philosophers are curiously good at telling stories. So like some of the best, you know, there's this thing of micro fiction, which is like very, very short story. I think some of the best micro fiction is short stories. Is a thought experiment, sorry. Yeah. So people like Judith Jarvis Thompson, or well, his name has escaped my head, Reasons and Persons, you know who I mean? Derek Parfit, right. They write great short stories. Like you can sit around and argue about long-termism with just propositions, and people are going to be either like, this makes total sense or this is weird. And you see this when you try and do this with people. If you tell them Parfit's thought experiment that you drop a piece of glass in the woods, and a hundred years later, a little girl comes in and she cuts up. Okay, everyone's a long-termist in some way now. To some extent, everyone is just like, of course. Okay, fine. The story is good. The famous thought experiment about the child drowning in the pond. And then, okay, the pond is like 3000. Again, everyone's like, okay, I get it. I'm with you. Philosophers constantly resort to stories because they know that the argument is, you have to have to agree with you. You've got to have the argument. The argument's the fundamental thing. But when you put it in a story, it will actually, somehow it will then do its work.Agnes: I think it's really interesting to ask, and I never asked myself this question, like what is the relationship between a thought experiment and a story? And I think that, I'm fine with a thought experiment with saying it's a kind of story, but I think that, so one feature of a thought experiment is that the person who is listening to it is given often a kind of agency. Like, which way do you push the trolley? Or do you care that you left this piece of glass there? Or are you, suppose that the pond was so many miles away but there was a very long hand that reached from here and you put a coin in the machine and at the other end, the hand will pull the child out of the water. Do you put the coin in, right? So like you're given these choices. It's like a choose your own adventure story, right? And that's really not what Tolstoy wrote. He really did not write choose your own adventure stories. There's a, I think he is-Henry: But the philosopher always comes in at the end and says, by the way, this is the correct answer. I'm giving you this experiment so that you can see that, like, I'm proving my point. Peter Singer is not like, it's okay if you don't want to jump into the pond. This is your story, you can pick. He's like, no, you have to jump in. This is why I'm telling you the story.Agnes: That's right, but I can't tell it to you without, in effect, your participation in the story, without you seeing yourself as part of the story and as having like agency in the story. It's by way of your agency that I'm making your point. Part of why this is important is that otherwise philosophers become preachers, which is what Tolstoy is when he's kind of at his worst. That is, you know, the philosopher doesn't just want to like tell you what to think. The philosopher wants to show you that you're already committed to certain conclusions and he's just showing you the way between the premises you already accept and the conclusion that follows from your premises. And that's quite-Henry: No, philosophers want to tell you the particular, most philosophers create a thought experiment to be like, you should be a virtue ethicist or you should give money away. Like they're preaching.Agnes: I don't think that is preaching. So I think that, and like, I think that this is why so many philosophical thought experiments are sort of meant to rely on what people call intuitions. Like, oh, but don't you have the intuition that? What is the intuition? The intuition is supposed to be somehow the kind of visceral and inchoate grasp that you already have of the thing I am trying to teach you. You already think the thing I'm telling you. I'm just making it clear to you what you think. And, you know, like there's like, I want to go back to the gospels. Like, I think it's a real question I have. I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I feel like something I sometimes think about Jesus and I say this as a non-Christian, is that Jesus was clearly a really exceptional, really extraordinary human being. And maybe he just never met his Plato. You know, he got these guys who are like telling stories about him. But like, I feel like he had some really interesting thoughts that we haven't accessed. Imagine, imagine if Socrates only ever had Xenophon. You know, if Socrates had never met Plato. We might just have this story about Socrates. Oh, he's kind of like a hero. He was very self-sacrificing. He asked everyone to care about everybody else. And he might like actually look quite a bit like Jesus on a sort of like, let's say simplistic picture of him. And it's like, maybe it's a real shame that Jesus didn't have a philosopher as one of the people who would tell a story about him. And that if we had that, there would be some amazing arguments that we've missed out on.Henry: Is Paul not the closest thing to that?Agnes: What does he give us?Henry: What are the arguments? Well, all the, you know, Paulian theology is huge. I mean, all the epistles, they're full of, maybe, I don't know if they're arguments more than declarations, but he's a great expounder of this is what Jesus meant, you should do this, right? And it's not quite what you're saying.Agnes: It's conclusions, right?Henry: Yes, yes.Agnes: So I think it's like, you could sort of imagine if we only had the end of the Gorgias, where Socrates lists some of his sayings, right? Yes, exactly, yes. You know, it's better to have injustice done to you than to do injustice. It's better to be just than to appear just. Oratories should, you should never flatter anyone under any circumstances. Like, you know, there's others in other dialogues. Everyone desires the good. There's no such thing as weakness of will, et cetera. There are these sort of sayings, right? And you could sort of imagine a version of someone who's telling the story of Socrates who gives you those sayings. And yeah, I just think, well, we'd be missing a lot if we didn't hear the arguments for the sayings.Henry: Yeah, I feel stumped. So the next thing you say about novelists, novelists give us a view onto the promised land, but not more. And this relates to what you're saying, everything you've just been saying. I want to bring in a George Eliot argument where she says, she kind of says, that's the point. She says, I'm not a teacher, I'm a companion in the struggle of thought. So I think a lot of the time, some of the differences we're discussing here are to do with the readers more than the authors. So Tolstoy and George Eliot, Jane Austen, novelists of their type and their caliber. It's like, if you're coming to think, if you're involved in the struggle of thought, I'm putting these ideas in and I'm going to really shake you up with what's happening to these people and you're going to go away and think about it and Pierre's going to stay with you and it's really going to open things up. If you're just going to read the story, sure, yeah, sure. And at the end, we'll have the big revelation and that's whoopee. And that's the same as just having the sayings from Socrates and whatever. But if you really read Middlemarch, one piece, whatever, Adam Bede is always the one that stays with me. Like you will have to think about it. Like if you've read Adam Bede and you know what happens to Hetty at the end, this has the, oh, well, I'm not going to spoil it because you have to read it because it's insane. It's really an exceptional book, but it has some of those qualities of the thought experiment. She really does put you, George Eliot's very good at this. She does put you in the position of saying like, what actually went right and wrong here? Like she's really going to confront you with the situation but with the difficulty of just saying, oh, you know, that's easy. This is what happened. This is the bad thing. Well, there were several different things and she's really putting it up close to you and saying, well, this is how life is. You need to think about that.Agnes: So that last bit, I mean, I think that this is how life is part. Yeah. Really do think that that's something you get out of novels. It's not, so here's how you should live it or so here's why it makes sense, or here are the answers. It's none of the answers, I think. It's just that there's a kind of, it's like, you might've thought that given that we all live lives, we live in a constant contact with reality but I think we don't. We live in a bubble of what it's, the information that's useful to me to take in at any given moment and what do I need in order to make it to the next step? And there's a way in which the novel like confronts you with like the whole of life as like a spectacle or something like that, as something to be examined and understood. But typically I think without much guidance as to how you should examine or understand it, at least that's my own experience of it is that often it's like posing a problem to me and not really telling me how to solve it. But the problem is one that I often, under other circumstances, I'm inclined to look away from and the novelist sort of forces me to look at it.Henry: Does that mean philosophers should be assigning more fiction?Agnes: I, you know, I am in general pretty wary of judgments of that kind just because I find it hard to know what anyone should do. I mean, even myself, let alone all other philosophers.Henry: But you're the philosopher. You should be telling us.Agnes: No, I actually just don't think that is what philosophers do. So like, it was like a clear disagreement about, you know, is the, like George Eliot's like, I'm not a teacher, but the philosopher also says I'm not a teacher. I mean, Tolstoy was like, I am a teacher.Henry: Yeah, I'm a teacher.Agnes: I'm ready to guide you all.Henry: You should take notes.Agnes: But I think it's right that, yeah. So I think it's like, you know, maybe they have some other way of forcing that confrontation with reality. But I, my own feeling is that philosophers, when they use examples, including some of the thought experiments, it's sort of the opposite of what you said. It's kind of like they're writing very bad fiction. And so they'll come up with these, like I am philosophy. We have to, we're forced to sort of come up with examples. And, you know, I discuss one in my aspiration book of, oh, once upon a time, there was a guy. And when he was young, he wanted to be a clown, but his family convinced him that he should be an investment banker and make money. And so he did that. But then when he was older, he finally recovered this long lost desire. And then he became a clown and then he was happy. It's a story in an article by a philosopher I respect. Okay, I like her very much. And I haven't read it in a long time. So I'm hoping I'm summarizing it correctly. But my point is like, and this is supposed to be a story about how sort of self-creation and self-realization and how you can discover your authentic self by contrast with like the social forces that are trying to make you into a certain kind of person. But it's also, it's just a very bad piece of fiction. And I'm like, well, you know, if I'm say teaching a class on self-creation as I do sometimes, I'm like, well, we can read some novelists who write about this process and they write about it in a way that really shows it to us, that really forces us to confront the reality of it. And that story was not the reality. So if you have some other way to do that as a philosopher, then great. I'm very instrumental about my use of fiction, but I haven't found another way.Henry: Which other fiction do you use in the self-creation class?Agnes: So in that class, we read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. And we also read some Fernando Pessoa.Henry: Pessoa, what do your students think of Pessoa?Agnes: They love it. So when I first assigned it, I'm like, I don't know what you guys are going to make of this. It's kind of weird. We're reading like just, you know, 20 pages of excerpts I like from the Book of Disquiet. I mean, it's like my own text I'm creating, basically. I figure with that text, you can do a choose your own adventure. And they like it a lot. And I think that it really, that, you know, the thing that really resonates with them is this stuff where he talks. So there are two passages in particular. So one of them is, one where he talks about how he's like, yeah, he meets his friend. And he can't really listen to what his friend is saying, but he can remember with photographic precision the lines on the face when he's smiling, or like, it's like what he's saying is, I'm paying attention to the wrong thing. Like I'm paying attention to the facial expressions and not to the content. And that I'm somebody who's in a world where my organization of my own experience is not following the rules that are sort of being dictated to me about how my experience is supposed to be organized. And that's sort of his predicament. So that's a thing that they like. And then there's a wonderful passage about how I keep trying to free myself from the social forces oppressing me. And I take away this noose that's around my neck. And as I'm doing it, I realize my hand is attached to a noose and it's pulling me. Like I'm the one who's doing, I'm the one who's suffocating myself all along when I'm trying to free myself from social forces, it's me who's doing the oppressing. Anyway, so those are some passages that we talk about that they like. They like it a lot. They have a lot less trouble making something of it than I had expected that they would.Henry: Is this because he, is he well-suited to the age of social media and phones and fragmented personalities and you're always 16 different people? Is it that kind of thing?Agnes: Partly it's the short texts. I mean, as I said, meeting a problem, right? And so, yeah. So like they like Nietzsche too, probably for the same reason, right? I mean, anything where the-Henry: The aphorism.Agnes: Yeah, exactly. Like no joke. You know, it's not the era for War and Peace. It's the era for the Nietzschean aphorism.Henry: This is so depressing. I thought this wasn't true.Agnes: Yeah, I think it's true. I like, I had a conversation with a student in my office yesterday about this and about how like just his own struggles with reading and how all his friends have the same problem. And, you know, I have made some suggestions and I think maybe I need to push them harder in terms of, you know, just university creating device-free spaces and then people having like, I think we have to view it the way we view exercise. Like none of us would exercise if we didn't force ourselves to exercise. And we use strategies to do it. Like, you know, you have a friend and you're going to go together or, you know, you make a habit of it or whatever. I mean, like, I think we just have to approach reading the same way. Just let's accept that we're in an environment that's hostile to reading and make it a priority and organize things to make it possible rather than just like pretending that there isn't a problem. But yeah, there is. And it's hard for us to see. So you're not as old as me, but I'm old enough that all of my reading habits were formed in a world without all of this, right? So of course it's way easier for me. Even I get distracted, but, you know, for me spending a couple of hours in the evening reading, that's like a thing I can do. But like a lot of people, okay, I was at a like tech, in a little tech world conference in California. And it was early in the morning and my husband wasn't awake yet. So I was just, and it was one of these conferences where there's like a little group room and then you have your own, like we had like a hotel room type room, but like then I would had to be in the room with my husband who was sleeping. I couldn't turn the light on. So it was early. I woke up at four. So I went to the group room just to read. And I'm sitting there reading and someone came up to me and they were like, I can't believe you're just sitting there like reading. I don't think I've seen someone read a book in, you know, he's like ever or something, maybe. I mean, he's a half my age. Like he's like, that's just not a thing that people do. And it was like, he's like, it's so on brand that you're reading, you know? But it's like, it's, I think it's just, it's much harder for people who have grown up with all of this stuff that is in some way hostile to the world of reading. Yeah, it's much harder for them than for us. And we should be reorganizing things to make it easier.Henry: Yeah, I get that. I'm just, I'm alarmed that they can't read, like the depth of Ivan Ilyich. It's like, I don't know, it's like 50 pages or.Agnes: Yeah, for one class, no.Henry: It's very short. It's very short.Agnes: That's not short. 50 pages is not short.Henry: It's an hour or two hours of reading.Agnes: It's like, yeah, between two and three. They also read slower because they don't read as much.Henry: Okay, but you know what I'm like…Agnes: Yeah, right, three hours of reading is a lot to assign for a class. Especially if, in my case, I always also assign philosophy. So it's not the only thing I'm assigning.Henry: Sure, sure, but they read the philosophy.Agnes: Same problem. I mean, it's not like some different problem, right? Same problem, and in fact, they are a little bit more inclined to read the fiction than the philosophy, but the point is the total number of pages is kind of what matters. And from that point of view, philosophy is at an advantage because we compress a lot into very few pages. So, but you know, and again, it's like, it's a matter of like, it's probably not of the level. So I can, you know, I can be more sure that in an upper level class, students will do the reading, but I'm also a little bit more inclined to assign literature in the lower level classes because I'm warming people up to philosophy. So, yeah, I mean, but I think it is alarming, like it should be alarming.Henry: Now, one of the exciting things about Open Socrates, which most people listening to this would have read my review, so you know that I strongly recommend that you all read it now, but it is all about dialogue, like real dialogue. And can we find some, you know, I don't want to say like, oh, can we find some optimism? But like, people are just going to be reading less, more phones, all this talk about we're going back to an oral culture. I don't think that's the right way to phrase it or frame it or whatever, but there's much more opportunity for dialogue these days like this than there used to be. How can Open Socrates, how can people use that book as a way of saying, I want more, you know, intellectual life, but I don't want to read long books? I don't want to turn this into like, give us your five bullet points, self-help Socrates summary, but what can we, this is a very timely book in that sense.Agnes: Yeah, I kind of had thought about it that way, but yeah, I mean, it's a book that says, intellectual life in its sort of most foundational and fundamental form is social, it's a social life, because the kinds of intellectual inquiries that are the most important to us are ones that we can't really conduct on our own. I do think that, I think that some, there is some way in which, like as you're saying, novels can help us a little bit sort of simulate that kind of interaction, at least some of the time, or at least put a question on the table. I sort of agree that that's possible. I think that in terms of social encounters doing it, there are also other difficulties though. Like, so it's, we're not that close to a Socratic world, just giving up on reading doesn't immediately put us into a Socratic world, let's put it that way. And for one thing, I think that there really is a difference between face-to-face interaction, on the one hand, where let's even include Zoom, okay, or phone as face-to-face in an extended sense, and then texting, on the other hand, where text interaction, where like texting back and forth would be, fall under texting, so would social media, Twitter, et cetera, that's sort of- Email. Email, exactly. And I'm becoming more, when I first started working on this book, I thought, well, look, the thing that Socrates cares about is like, when he says that philosophy is like, you know, when he rejects written texts, and he's like, no, what I want to talk back, I'm like, well, the crucial thing is that they can respond, whether they respond by writing you something down or whether they respond by making a sound doesn't matter. And I agree that it doesn't matter whether they make a sound, like for instance, if they respond in sign language, that would be fine. But I think it matters that there is very little lag time between the responses, and you never get really short lag time in anything but what I'm calling face-to-face interaction.Henry: Right, there's always the possibility of what to forestall on text. Yeah. Whereas I can only sit here for like 10 seconds before I just have to like speak.Agnes: Exactly, and I mean, 10 seconds, that's a wild exaggeration. So do you know what the actual number is? No. On average. Okay, the average amount of time that you're allowed to wait before responding to something I say is two tenths of a second, which, it's crazy, isn't it? Which, that amount of time is not enough time for, that is a one second pause is an awkward pause, okay? So two tenths of a second is not long enough time for the signal that comes at the end of my talking, so the last sound I make, let's say, to reach your ears and then get into your brain and be processed, and then you figure out what you want to say. It's not enough time, which means you're making a prediction. That's what you're doing when I'm talking. You're making a prediction about when I'm going to stop talking, and you're so good at it that you're on almost every time. You're a little worse over Zoom. Zoom screws us up a little bit, right? But this is like what our brains are built to do. This is what we're super good at, is kind of like interacting, and I think it's really important that it be a genuine interaction. That's what I'm coming to see, is that we learn best from each other when we can interact, and it's not obvious that there are those same interaction possibilities by way of text at the moment, right? I'm not saying there couldn't be, but at the moment, we rely on the fact that we have all these channels open to us. Interestingly, it's the lag time on the phone, like if we were talking just by phone, is about the same. So we're so good at this, we don't need the visual information. That's why I said phone is also face-to-face. I think phone's okay, even though a lot of our informational stream is being cut. We're on target in terms of the quick responses, and there's some way in which what happens in that circumstance is we become a unit. We become a unit of thinking together, and if we're texting each other and each of us gets to ponder our response and all that, it becomes dissociated.Henry: So this, I do have a really, I'm really interested in this point. Your book doesn't contain scientific information, sociological studies. It's good old-fashioned philosophy, which I loved, but if you had turned it into more of a, this is the things you're telling me now, right? Oh, scientists have said this, and sociologists have said that. It could have been a different sort of book and maybe been, in some shallow way, more persuasive to more people, right? So you clearly made a choice about what you wanted to do. Talk me through why.Agnes: I think that it's maybe the answer here is less deep than you would want. I think that my book was based on the reading I was doing in order to write it, and I wasn't, at the time, asking myself the kinds of questions that scientists could answer. Coming off of the writing of it, I started to ask myself this question. So for instance, that's why I did all this reading in sociology, psychology, that's what I'm doing now is trying to learn. Why is it that we're not having philosophical conversations all the time? It's a real question for me. Why are we not having the conversations that I want us to be having? That's an empirical question, at least in part, because it's like, well, what kinds of conversations are we having? And then I have to sort of read up on that and learn about how conversation works. And it's surprising to me, like the amount of stuff we know, and that it's not what I thought. And so I'm not, maybe I'm a little bit less hostile than most philosophers, just as I'm less hostile to fiction, but I'm also less hostile to sort of empirical work. I mean, there's plenty of philosophers who are very open to the very specific kind of empirical work that is the overlap with their specialization. But for me, it's more like, well, depending on what question I ask, there's just like, who is ready with answers to the question? And I will like, you know, kind of like a mercenary, I will go to those people. And I mean, one thing I was surprised to learn, I'm very interested in conversation and in how it works and in what are the goals of conversation. And of course I started with philosophical stuff on it, you know, Grice and Searle, speech act theory, et cetera. And what I found is that that literature does not even realize that it's not about conversation. I mean, Grice, like the theory of conversational implicature and you know, Grice's logic on conversation, it's like if you thought that making a public service announcement was a kind of conversation, then it would be a theory of conversation. But the way that philosophers fundamentally understand speech is that like, you know, speakers issue utterances and then somebody has to interpret that utterance. The fact that that second person gets to talk too is not like part of the picture. It's not essential to the picture. But if you ask a sociologist, what is the smallest unit of conversation? They are not going to say an assertion. They're going to say something like greeting, greeting or question answer or command obeying or, right? Conversation is like, there's two people who get to talk, not just one person. That seems like the most obvious thing, but it's not really represented in the philosophical literature. So I'm like, okay, I guess I got to say goodbye philosophers. Let me go to the people who are actually talking about conversation. You know, I of course then read, my immediate thought was to read in psychology, which I did. Psychology is a bit shallow. They just don't get to theorize. It's very accessible. It's got lots of data, but it's kind of shallow. And then I'm like, okay, the people who really are grappling with the kind of deep structure of conversation are sociologists. And so that's what I've been reading a lot of in the past, like whatever, two months or so. But I just wasn't asking myself these questions when I wrote the book. And I think the kinds of questions that I was asking were in fact, the kinds of questions that get answered or at least get addressed in philosophical texts. And so those were the texts that I refer to.Henry: So all the sociology you've read, is it, how is it changing what you think about this? Is it giving you some kind of answer?Agnes: It's not changing any, my view, but any of the claims in the book, that is the exact reason that you brought out. But it is making me, it's making me realize how little I understand in a sort of concrete way, what like our modern predicament is. That is, where are we right now? Like what's happening right now? Is the question I ask myself. And I get a lot of, especially in interviews about this book, I get a lot of like, well, given where things are right now, is Socrates very timely? Or how can Socrates help or whatever? And I'm like, I don't think we know where things are right now. That is that given that, where is it? Where is it that we are? And so part of what this kind of sociology stuff is making me realize is like, that's a much harder question than it appears. And even where do we draw the lines? Like, when did now start happening? Like my instinct is like, one answer is like around 1900 is when now started happening. And, and so like, so I guess I'm interested both at the very micro level, how does the conversational interaction work? What are the ways in which I am deciding in this very conversation, I'm deciding what's allowed to be in and what's not allowed to be in the conversation, right? By the moves I'm making, and you're doing the same. How are we doing that? How are we orchestrating, manipulating this conversation so as to dictate what's in it and what's out of it in ways that are like below the surface that we're not noticing, that we either that we are doing it or that we're doing it ourselves. Neither of us is noticing, but we're doing that. So that's at the micro level. And then at the macro level is the question about when did now start happening? And what are the big shifts in like the human experience? And, are we at a point somehow in human history where culture like as a mechanism of coordination is a little bit falling apart and then what's going to come next? That's like a kind of question that I have to put in that kind of vague way. So maybe the right thing to say is that reading all these sociology texts has like, has given me a sets of questions to ask. And maybe what I'm trying to do is, it's like, what my book does is it describes a kind of ideal. And it describes that ideal, you know, using the power of reason to see what would it take to sort of set us straight? What is the straightened version of the crooked thing that we're already doing? And I think that that's right, but that's not at all the same thing as asking the question like, what's our next step? How do we get there from here? That's the question I'm asking now. But part of trying to answer the question, how do we get there from here is like, where are we now? And where are we both very, very locally in an interaction, what are we doing? And then in a big picture way, where are we? What is the big, what is like, you know, in the Taylor Swift sense, what era are we in? And, you know, I guess I still feel like we are, we are living in the world of Fernando Pessoa, Robert Musso, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hermann Bruch, Franz Kafka, like that set of writers, like around 1900-ish set of writers who didn't all know each other or anything, didn't coordinate, but they all, there was this like primal scream moment where they were like, what the hell is going on? What has happened to humanity? Where are the rules? Like, who are we supposed to be? I mean, of all of those, I would pull out Musso as like the paradigm example. So this is me, I guess, taking inspiration from literature again, where I feel like, okay, there's something there about we're lost. There's an expression of, there's a thought we're lost. And I'm trying to understand, okay, how did we get lost? And are we still in that state of being lost? I think yes. And let's get a clear, once we get very clear on how lost we are, we'll already start to be found. Cause that's sort of what it is to, you know, once you understand why you're lost, like that's situating yourself.Henry: Those writers are a long time ago.Agnes: Yeah, I said around 1900.Henry: Yeah, but you don't, you don't, but there's nothing more recent that like expresses, like that's a very long now.Agnes: Yeah. Well, yes, I agree. So I say, when did now start happening? I think it started happening around 1900. So I think-Henry: So are we stuck?Agnes: Yeah, kind of. I think, so here's like a very, he's like a very simple part of history that must be too simple because history is not, is like, it's very mildly not my strong suit. I can't really understand history. But it's like, there is this set of writers and they don't really tell stories. It's not their thing, right? They're not into plot, but they are issuing this warning or proclamation or crisis, like flashing thing. And then what happens? What happens after that? Well, World War I happens, right? And then, you know, not very long after that, we got World War II and especially World War II, the result of that is kind of, oh no, actually we know what good and bad are. It's like fighting Nazis, that's bad. And, you know, so we got it all settled. And, but it's like, it's like we push something under the rug, I guess. And I think we haven't dealt with it. We haven't dealt with this crisis moment. And so, you know, I think I could say something very similar about Knausgaard or something that is, I think he's kind of saying the same thing and his novel has a novel, whatever you want to call it, the, you know, I'm talking about the later one. That's the kind of weird sort of horror quadrilogy or something. It has this feeling of like trying to express a sense of being lost. So there's more recent stuff that, a lot of it's autofiction, the genre of autofiction has that same character. So yeah, like maybe there is some big progress that's been made since then, but if there is, then it has passed me by.Henry: Agnes: Callard, thank you very much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

In this electrifying episode, we dive into a radical fusion of Keiji Nishitani's basho, Nietzsche's fierce life-affirmation, and Vajrayana Buddhism's Tantric fire to rethink creativity, mindfulness, and human potential. Forget the brain-wiring hype—neurodivergent brilliance comes from the grind of a misfit world, and we all have an infinite well of mind to tap if we dare. Rejecting monastic escape, we explore awakening as a warrior's dance in life's crucible, tempered like the faith in Canada's anthem, where every struggle is divine. Get ready for a wild ride through philosophy, faith, and the absurd!

Creating the meaning of lifeDo life's struggles make the search for meaning a hopeless endeavour?Join renowned, continental philosopher Babette Babich as she explains the Nietzschean path to finding purpose, arguing that we must embrace all elements of life - good and bad - in our search for a meaningful existence.Babette is a trailblazing philosopher of technology and science. Known for her exploration of the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, she also works on the philosophy of digital media, poetry and art. Babette is a Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York City.To witness such talks live buy tickets for our upcoming festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/And visit our website for many more articles, videos, and podcasts like this one: https://iai.tv/You can find everything we referenced here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this eighth episode of our series on brain-computer interfaces, we are joined by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Dr. Sorgner is a philosophy professor at John Cabot University in Rome, Director and Co-Founder of the Beyond Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), and Editor-in-Chief and Founder of the Journal of Posthuman Studies. Dr. Sorgner is well known for his work on transhumanism, Nietzsche, philosophy of music, and ethics of emerging technologies, and is the author of many books, including most recently We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism and Philosophy of Posthuman Art. In this episode, we discuss several aspects of Dr. Sorgner's wide-ranging work, including Nietzschean philosophy and its connection to transhumanism, Sorgner's concept of metahumanism and how it differs from transhumanism and posthumanism, his cyborg thesis, his critique of traditional utopianism, the differing data collection models in the U.S., China, and the EU, his critique of the EU's GDPR privacy laws, and his proposal for government-managed anonymized medical data collection to enhance technological competitiveness and support universal healthcare, among other topics.

Prometheus & Alien Covenant: The Nietzschean Deicide & UFO Symbolism - Jay & TristanSend Superchats at any time here: https://streamlabs.com/jaydyer/tip Get started with Bitcoin here: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/jaydyer/ The New Philosophy Course is here: https://marketplace.autonomyagora.com/philosophy101 Set up recurring Choq subscription with the discount code JAY44LIFE for 44% off now https://choq.com Lore coffee is here: https://www.patristicfaith.com/coffee/ Orders for the Red Book are here: https://jaysanalysis.com/product/the-red-book-essays-on-theology-philosophy-new-jay-dyer-book/ Subscribe to my site here: https://jaysanalysis.com/membership-account/membership-levels/ Follow me on R0kfin here: https://rokfin.com/jaydyerBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/jay-sanalysis--1423846/support.

All the energy and vitality today is on the political right; the old conservative reactionary stance has been replaced with active, rival voices aimed at constructing a new regime. One such voice is Bronze Age Pervert and his followers. Through their series "The Politics of Paganism," Alex Denley and Dr. Andrew Jones have explored the Nietzschean proposal, arguing that it is doomed to failure. The pagan cosmos is a closed world which cannot provide the freedom and vitality that Nietzsche extols. In this final episode, Alex Denley and Dr. Andrew Jones discuss the failure of the Nietzschean alternative and the open world of a Christian political order.

Matt and Corbin talk about "Kiss Me Deadly," a film noir about a Nietzschean superman lost in an existential world... right up until the point when it turns out he's actually in a science fiction disasterpiece.  Our analysis of the election: wrong. Sorry! Corbin reccomends "BALATRO," a video game. Matt reccomends e-readers.  Next week's NOIRVEMBER selection is "STRAY DOG," which you can watch here. 

"Many lies tell the poets" - Homer. Nietzschean exploration of art, of truth and appearance in the artistic world, the way that madness, art and ritual relate, and the translation of artistic expression into different cultural contexts. Join me for this continuation of our The Gay Science readthrough!

Dr. Greg dives into a captivating conversation with leadership expert Alexandre Havard (calling in from Moscow!) about the '3 Spiritual Diseases'—rationalism, sentimentalism, and voluntarism—that could be influencing your life in hidden ways. Are you unknowingly living as a 'partial human being'? Tune in to learn how to avoid these traps - and discover what it takes to reclaim true wholeness.   Discussed in this episode: The 3 spiritual diseases plaguing our culture – and why they matter; How rationalism, sentimentalism, and voluntarism disconnect us from reality and human flourishing; How “partial human beings” are created by separating heart, mind, and will; How to recognize if you're living under the influence of Descartes, Rousseau, or Nietzsche; Why integration of heart, mind, and will is essential for true personal growth; The influence of philosophers like Descartes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche on modern ideologies; How gender ideology mirrors Nietzschean voluntarism; How rationalism disconnects people from reality by over-prioritizing intellect; The manipulation of sentimentalism in today's “I feel, therefore I am” culture; How voluntarism leads to a will-driven society, prone to ideological extremes; What it means to have an “integrated heart” in today's fractured world; Why understanding spiritual diseases can help identify and avoid ideological traps; Havard's process of categorizing historical philosophers as “destroyers” or “builders”; Dostoevsky, Pascal, and Soloviev as examples of integrated thinkers who inspire wholeness; Alexandre's latest book, Seven Prophets, and its call to unity of the person.  Resources mentioned or relevant:  Learn more about the Alex Havard's books, resources, and courses: www.alexhavard.com Seven Prophets and the Culture War: Undoing the Philosophies of a World in Crisis Free Hearts: The Power of Human Harmony Need help? Schedule a free consultation to discuss your next best step;  Feeling called to help others? Learn more about our Certification program (CPMAP): CatholicPsych Model of Applied Personalism; Sign up for Being Human, our weekly newsletter, to stay up to date on the exciting developments at CatholicPsych; Visit our website to read the CatholicPsych blog, shop in the CatholicPsych bookshop, or discover other resources we have available; Download The Integrated App for access to free audio exercises, courses, prayer resources, and more; Become a member of the Integrated Life Community to get access to every course Dr. Greg has created, plus the opportunity to participate in Integrated LIVE's - weekly, Mentor hosted Q&As covering topics like boundaries, communication, trauma, forgiveness, and more! Follow:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CatholicPsych  Instagram: @catholicpsych  X: @CatholicPsych Contact us! Have a topic or a question you would like Dr. Greg to address on the podcast? Want to give some feedback about this episode? Email us at beinghuman@catholicpsych.com - we would love to hear from you! Rate, review, and subscribe Please help us in our mission to integrate the Faith with Psychology by hitting subscribe and also sharing this podcast with your friends. Please consider rating or leaving a review of our show. It helps us reach other Catholics just like you who want to become more integrated, whole, and happy human beings. For Apple podcasts, click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate 5 stars, and choose “write a review.” Then type your sincere thoughts about the show! If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any episodes. Subscribe to the podcast now!  

We discuss Part IV: "The Triumph and Death of Western Marxism" with particular focus on the work of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism and On Revolution. We discuss Losurdo's analysis of "recognition" from Hegel and how revolution is theorized as recognition in Marx and Engels and how subsequent liberal theories of revolution in Arendt and Nietzschean theories of Foucault promote what Losurdo sees as the "death" of Western Marxism.

We examine Losurdo's criticism of western Marxism in relation to anticolonial revolution following the Second World War. We discuss Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Max Horkheimer's Authoritarian State, Althusser's antihumanist turn, Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Adorno's Nietzschean pessimism, and Tronti's workerism. We discuss how Losurdo pinpoints an aversion to the anticolonial revolution in the Marxist theories that are generated by these thinkers. We discuss the merits of Losurdo's polemic, where it hits the mark and where it falls short. Please join us at https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups. 

the modern far right, The Matrix vs. They Live, the pros and cons of "gatekeeping," gatekeeping in the twenty-first century, Eugene Thacker, Thomas Ligotti, Cosmic nihilism, cosmic nihilism vs. Nietzschean nihilism, how bending perceived reality is the essence of black magick and social engineering, Mormonism, Mormonism's influence of the American New Age and far right, the 2016 Meme Wars, the extent of the Meme Wars influence on social media, Tenet Media, Russiagate2024, Blaze Media, Glen Beck, Blaze's links to Tenet, The Joker, Heath Ledger's Joker vs. Joaquin Phoenix's, Operations MIndfuck, the DKMU, the Assault on Reality, why the Assault on Reality succeeded while Operation Mindfuck failed, how the far right has exploited the Internet from the beginning, Louis Beam, the Satanic Temple, TST's authoritarian drift, the dangers in the search for "authenticity," Hindu nationalism, esoteric Hitlerism, Piss Earth 2025 and the futureMusic by: Keith Allen Dennishttps://keithallendennis.bandcamp.com/ Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Wendy Brown, distinguished American political theorist and Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley. Together they discuss Wendy's writing on the emergence of and critical responses to identity politics, physical border controls as performative expressions of sovereignty, the replacement of democratic values with neoliberal values of free market competition and individualism, and her forthcoming work on expanded notions of democracy that account for the past, future, human and non human. They also discuss the 2024 American presidential race, and as this episode was recorded in May, before President Joe Biden announced that he would not run for re-election, some comments are out of date, though still relevant to larger conversations around electoral politics. Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/250-wendy-brown.html Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/250-wendy-brown.html Resources: Wendy Brown: https://www.ias.edu/sss/wendy-brown States of Injury: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691029894/states-of-injury Walled States, Waning Sovereignty: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781935408031/walled-states-waning-sovereignty Undoing the Demos: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781935408543/undoing-the-demos Bio: A political theorist who works across the history of political thought, political economy, Continental philosophy, cultural theory and critical legal theory, Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Chair in the School of Social Science. Prior to her appointment at the Institute, she was Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a prize-winning teacher and scholar. Drawing from Nietzschean, Weberian, Marxist, Foucauldian, feminist and postcolonial angles of vision, Professor Brown writes about the subterranean powers shaping contemporary EuroAtlantic polities, with particular attention to the political identities, subjectivities and expressions they spawn. The author/co-author of a dozen books in English, she is best known for her interrogation of identity politics and state power in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995); her critical analysis of tolerance in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006); her account of the inter-regnum between nation states and globalization in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010); and her study of neoliberalism's assault on democratic principles, institutions and citizenship in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (2015) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019). Across her work, Brown aims to illuminate powers unique to our era and the predicaments they generate for democratic thought and practice. These predicaments range from rule by finance, to the de-democratization of political culture, to the nihilistic depletion of truth, values and conscience. Currently, Brown is exploring how political freedom can be salvaged from its historical imbrication with regimes of class, race and gender subjection and be made responsive to the climate crisis. Her driving question is whether and how political freedom can be reformulated in light of both. She is also extending and revising for publication her 2019 Yale Tanner Lectures, “Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber.” Cite this episode: Chicago Style Johal, Am. “States of Injury — with Wendy Brown.” Below the Radar, SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, September 17, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/250-wendy-brown.html.

We explore the big philosophical questions at the heart of Marxism. Does Marxism require a supplementary philosophy such as Nietzscheanism or Freudianism to properly ground its practice? How have the changing material conditions post-2008 shaped Marxist thought and practice? What is the best Marxist response to speculative realism, a major movement in contemporary philosophy? To explore these questions we are joined by Marxist scholar and writer Conrad Hamilton who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at East China Normal University. Hamilton is the author of the forthcoming book, Marxism Contra Subjectivity (forthcoming from Brill) which looks at the philosophical impasses facing Marxism in a post-2008 conjuncture, with a particular focus on speculative realism, Althusserianism and different strains of French Marxism. We begin our discussion with Hamilton's analysis of Nietzsche's place in Marxism after World War II. We focus on Hamilton's recent essay on Nietzsche and French thought and his review of my book How to Read Like a Parasite. We then discuss some of the ideas in his forthcoming book on Marxism, philosophy and epistemology. Stay tuned for a symposium on Hamilton's book hosted by our study collective when it comes out. -------- Chapters: 0:00 - Introduction to Conrad Hamilton 4:11 - Recurrent Reaction: Nietzsche and the Thought of the French Middle Strata 21:10 - Nietzschean Appropriations and Marxism after World War II 30:17 - The Problems with the Nietzschean "extra class" left 48:30 - Does Marxism require a comprehensive philosophy? 1:12:10 - Speculative Realism, Real Abstraction and Marxism post-2008 1:22:20 - Where is the subject of the proletariat today? 1:43:50 - Why does philosophy matter to political Marxism? Show Notes: "The Monsters We Become" by Conrad Hamilton (https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/05/the-monsters-we-become-on-how-to-read-like-a-parasite) "Recurrent Reaction: Nietzsche and the Thought of the French Middle Strata" by Conrad Hamilton (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-13635-1)

Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism. We hate altruism, they said, not because we're “bad and cruel”, but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength. In a blog post (linked in the original post, discussed at length in the comments), Walt Bismarck compares the ultimate fate of altruism to WALL-E: a world where morbidly obese humans are kept in a hedonistic haze by robot servitors (although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure). In contrast, vitalism imagines a universe alive with dynamism, heroism, and great accomplishments. My response: in most normal cases, altruism and vitalism suggest the same solutions. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers 

I. Bentham's Bulldog Blogger “Bentham's Bulldog” recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality. Nietzsche's concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you're not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty: When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn't materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn't make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused. The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But it's not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean 

Suntem mai morali cu sau fără religie? Analizez un eseu despre religie scris de Schopenhauer, în care germanul creează două personaje în opoziție: Philalethes (ateu „Nietzschean”) și Demopheles (religios „Dostoievskian”), după care citez un articol scris de Žižek în 2024 despre o interpretare mai neobișnuită asupra ultimului roman al lui Dostoievski, Frații Karamazov. Majoritatea cadrelor (B-rolls) au fost filmate de mine în Firenze (Florența), Italia în aprile 2024 (de la străzi la Palatul Pitti și Muzeul Uffizi). ▶SURSE: Eseuri și Aforisme (Schopenhauer); ABC journal ▶LINKURI RELEVANTE: – Videoul original: https://youtu.be/pxtFz2hEXi0?si=PnMn0Z4nSAEkpK3_ – Episodul #9 din podcast (Dostoievski vs. Nietzsche): https://youtu.be/2HJOCvKX2Aw?si=U1bbfX8fTFAiH7JX – Articolul lui Zizek în original: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/slavoj-zizek-if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616 ▶DISCORD: – Comunitatea amatorilor de filosofie și literatură: https://discord.gg/meditatii ▶DIALOGURI FILOSOFICE: – Română: https://soundcloud.com/meditatii/sets/dialoguri-pe-discord – Engleză: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLnaYpeWGNO8IdPaNYNkbJjNJeXrNHSaV ▶PODCAST INFO: – Website: https://podcastmeditatii.com – Newsletter: https://podcastmeditatii.com/aboneaza – YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/meditatii – Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meditatii/id1434369028 – Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1tBwmTZQHKaoXkDQjOWihm – RSS: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:373963613/sounds.rss ▶SUSȚINE-MĂ: – Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/meditatii – PayPal: https://paypal.me/meditatii ▶TWITCH: – LIVE: https://www.twitch.tv/meditatii – Rezumate: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK204s-jdiStZ5FoUm63Nig ▶SOCIAL MEDIA: – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meditatii.podcast – TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meditatii.podcast – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meditatii.podcast – Goodreads: https://goodreads.com/avasilachi – Telegram (jurnal): https://t.me/andreivasilachi – Telegram (chat): https://t.me/podcastmeditatii ▶EMAIL: andrei@podcastmeditatii.com ▶CRONOLOGIE: 0:00 - Intro 1:03 - I. Schopenhauer și dezbaterea imaginară 13:26 - II. Žižek despre Dostoievski și libertatea religioasă

Jim talks with Alexander Bard in the second of three conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist's recent book Process and Event. They discuss eventological monotheism vs nomadological iconology, dualism vs monism, substance dualism, Spinoza's monism, graded relationality, emergence vector theory, Syntheism & its concepts, God as the ultimate dream, creating God, 4 dimensions of time, a more complete metaphysics, the problem with oneness, the two-headed phallus, priests & chiefs, the 3 fundamental entities in Hinduism, a congress of grandmothers, Plato & Confucius's idealization of tyrants, libido & mortido, objectification of the mamilla, Julia Kristeva's discovery, the Gnostic delusion, being embodied and en-minded, examples of boy pharaohs & pillar saints, paradigmatics, membranics, archetypology, the geneplex vs the memeplex, 4 paradigms in human history, finding one's paradigmatic role, embedded membranes, trans men & women as new paradigmatic categories, the dialectics of the Hegelian negation & the Nietzschean oscillation, the negation of the negation in identity production, negation in phenomenology, the golden age of 19th century German philosophy, American pragmatists, transcendental emergentism, getting laid, principles rather than laws, studying each emergence vector as its own domain, emergence vector theory in creativity, the stability of physics, cosmological Darwinism, negation & oscillation as the fundamental dialectics of reality & thought, and much more. Episode Transcript "The Last Question," by Isaac Asimov Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, by Julia Kristeva JRS EP 176 - Gregg Henriques Part 1: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap JRS EP 138 - W. Brian Arthur on the Nature of Technology JRS EP 227 - Stuart Kauffman on the Emergence of Life JRS EP 5 Lee Smollin - Quantum Foundations and Einstein's Unfinished Revolution Alexander Bard is a philosopher, artist, songwriter and music producer, author of six books with Jan Söderqvist, living in Stockholm, Sweden. Bard built his career as a philosopher in parallel with a highly successful 25-years-plus career in the international music industry. Bard & Söderqvist's philosophy concentrates on the relationship between human beings and technology, using human beings as the constant throughout civilization, with technology as the ever faster changing variable. Their work takes inspiration from thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Eastern philosophy and spirituality, in the latter case adding Persia to the well known triad of India, China and Japan. They are convinced philosophy will be the last human activity to ever be affected by AI.

Ralph Schoellhammer's "Hammer Time Episode #5" ties UK riots to demographic changes and cultural integration challenges, using Nietzschean perspectives to critique current political leadership and underscore the necessity of a confident cultural identity. Key Takeaways: The episode examines UK riots in the context of demographic shifts and integration difficulties. Schoellhammer references Nietzsche's views on history and culture. There is an emphasis on the decline of confidence in Western values affecting integration. The critique focuses on political leadership's handling of immigration and cultural identity. It warns against the dangers of a critical historical perspective that erodes cultural pride. A strong cultural identity is deemed essential for successful integration. Historical figures and narratives are seen as vital for societal values and cohesion --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the1020/support

Both Christian and secular commentators have remarked on and questioned the close relationship between Trump and Evangelicals. Supposedly, there are such great differences between them that it's hard to see how they connect. But Trump and Evangelicals share a deep sense of ressentiment toward the world around them. In this episode, I argue that faith in Trump has replaced faith in Jesus. I use the term 'Trumpianity' to indicate something like a new religion (rather than simply a different version of Christianity). My reading of Trumpianity is primarily shaped by Nietzsche's account of the development of slave morality. But I believe that Trump has provided a way for Evangelicals to leave Jesus behind in favour of a new version of master morality in which Evangelicals are the masters. Whereas Jesus teaches love, Trump teaches his followers to hate.

The postwar period witnessed a renaissance in Nietzschean thought and interpretation, most notably with the French postmodernist readings generated by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. But what drove the French Nietzschean renaissance was in many ways supported by the work of two Italian philologists Giorgio Colli and his former student Mazzino Montinari, and their lifelong translation of Nietzsche's unpublished material and key main works. To tell this story, we are joined by German Cultural Historian Philipp Felsch to discuss his newly translated book How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold: Tale of a Redemption, published by Polity Press in June 2024. In this newly translated book, Felsch retraces the journey of two Italian editors, Giorgio Colli and his former student Mazzino Montinari and their efforts to translate the unpublished material of Nietzsche. Felsch tells a gripping and unlikely story of how one of Europe's most controversial philosophers was resurrected from the baleful clutch of the Nazis and transformed into an icon of postmodern thought. Order How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold.

Dimitri and Khalid record what is probably the last SJ episode before their assassinations by apoplectic Simpsons reply guys lashing out in the throes of total ego death. Topics include: the dominance of “Gen X irony” in 1990s pop culture, the rise of contextual/information-based toy culture, Pynchon's cameos, reflections on Bartmania, the modern tendency to view the Simpsons as both profound and deeply left-wing, “the purpose of a Simpsons is what it does”, the Trump trial self-immolator's anti-Simpsons manifesto, DSA Lisa teaching us to perpetuate official LIES… The Simpsons as reflection “of the cynicism at the heart of the neoliberal economy”, FOX's deliberate “selling” of Gen X, Douglas Coupland's generation-defining book, the inversion of words like “stupid” and “bad”, the centrality of the hot couch and “ironic consumption”, “the Simpsons is to Fox what Bart Simpson is to Principal Skinner”, similarities with the fourth wall-breaking WWF Attitude Era, the 1993 paper “Homer Simpson's Eyes and the Culture of Late Nostalgia”, Time vs. “Megatrends”, Bill Cosby's “ontological run-in with Bart” and his defeat by the “superior intelligence of the ‘toon”… The secret etymology of the “Bad Boy” and precursors to the Bart Simpson archetype in Gilded Age America - specifically the creepy neotenous “Yellow Kid” comic strip, as well as the wildly successful “Peck's Bad Boy” series by Wisconsin Governor George Wilbur Peck… Bart failing to embody the Nietzschean übermensch while inoculating you to the nihilism of the neoliberal 90s, The Simpsons as information conversion spectacle, Matt Groening's revolting foot massage on the Lolita Express, the inexplicable number of Harvard mathematics Ph.Ds on the Simpsons writing staff, and why all “floating timeline” adult-oriented ‘toons are structurally conservative and inexorably sus.

Today's episode features Jonathan and Sy talking with Pastor Rasool Berry. They discuss:-        The importance of acknowledging and understanding your own and your community's power-        The social and spiritual forces behind the opposition to CRT or DEI (or whatever they're calling it today)-        Pastor Berry's incredible documentary about Juneteenth and Christian faith-        When to leave communities that push back against racial justice-        And after the interview, Sy and Jonathan reflect on the work it takes to pass on a tradition like Juneteenth well, and the truly, literally unbelievable levels of ignorance whiteness creates in people-        Plus, they discuss the Daniel Perry pardon, and the threads that connect it to the Donald Trump convictionsMentioned in the Episode-        Our anthology - Keeping the Faith: Reflections on Politics and Christianity in the era of Trump and Beyond-        An abridged version of Pastor Berry's article from the anthology.-        His subsequent article, “Uncritical Race Theory”-        The documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom-        Resources for screening Juneteenth and inviting speakers involved with the film-        The soundtrack for Juneteenth-        Pastor Berry's podcast, Where Ya From?-        The article on Daniel Perry Sy put in our newsletter-        The Texas Monthly article about how legally unusual Perry's pardon wasCredits-        Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscript[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Rasool Berry: There was a lot of nicknames and still are for Juneteenth. One was Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, but Jubilee Day. And when I discovered that, that's when I said we got to get involved in this process. Because you mean to tell me that these formerly enslaved people at a time when it was illegal to read, that they understood enough of the story that they picked out this festival, that it was this reordering of society, the kingdom of heaven coming back to earth. And in the context of this, of their faith, they saw God doing a jubilee in their lives?[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]IntroductionSy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Today, hear us talk to Pastor Rasool Berry about his thoughts on the movement against CRT, or DEI, or whatever the term for the moment is right now when you listen to this. We're also [laughs] going to talk about his incredible feature length documentary called Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom, which is available for free on YouTube right now. And then after the interview, hear our thoughts on the pardon of Daniel Perry and the conviction of Donald Trump in our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open?Sy Hoekstra: The 34 convictions of Donald Trump.Jonathan Walton: All of them.Sy Hoekstra: All of them [laughs]. We're going to talk about each one individually…Jonathan Walton: Exactly.Sy Hoekstra: …the specific business record that he destroyed, whatever.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Don't be afraid, we're not going to do that. By the way, I said at the end of last week that the guest this week was going to be Brandi Miller, and then we realized that we had to do the episode that was about Juneteenth before Juneteenth. So Brandi Miller's going to be in two weeks from now. And this time [laughs], it's Pastor Rasool Berry.Before we get to that, just a reminder, we need your subscriptions. Please go to ktfpress.com and become a paid subscriber on our Substack. Your support sustains what we do, and we need that support from you right now. We've been doing this as a side project for a long time, and like we've been saying, if we want this show to continue past this season, we need to get a lot more subscribers so that we can keep doing this work, but not for free as much as we've been doing it.So go and subscribe. That gets you all the bonus episodes of this show, which there are many, many of at this point. And then it also gets you access to our new monthly subscriber conversations that we're doing. Jonathan and I will be having video chats with you to talk about all the different kinds of things that we talk about on this show, answer some questions, just have a good time. And if you cannot afford a subscription, if money's the only obstacle, just write to us at info@ktfpress.com. We will give you a free or discounted subscription, no questions asked. But if you can afford it, please, ktfpress.com. Become a paid subscriber. We need your support now.Jonathan Walton: Pastor Rasool Berry serves as teaching pastor at The Bridge Church in Brooklyn, New York. He's also the director of partnerships and content development with Our Daily Bread Ministries. Pastor Berry graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in Africana Studies and Sociology. He's also the host of the Where Ya From? podcast sponsored by Christianity Today, and the writer, producer and host of Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. Let's get to it. Here's the interview.[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Pastor, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.Rasool Berry: Oh, well, I'm glad to be here with you all, back at it again, Keeping the Faith.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yes, exactly [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Amen. Amen.The Importance of “Mapping” PowerSy Hoekstra: So, you wrote this fantastic essay for… so, well, actually, it was originally for your blog, I think, and then we kind of took it and adapted it for the anthology. And it was about critical race theory, and you broke down a lot of the history and sort of the complex intellectual background of it and everything. But you talked specifically about something that you said, critical race theory and the Bible and the Black Christian tradition in the US all help us do something really important, and that thing is mapping power. Can you talk to us a little bit about what power mapping is and what the importance of it is?Rasool Berry: Yeah. I first kind of got wind of that framework when we were launching a justice ministry at our church. And two friends Gabby, Dr. Gabby Cudjoe Wilkes and her husband, Dr. Andrew Wilkes, who do a lot of great work with justice, actually walked our church through thinking about mapping power in our church as a way of evaluating what types of justice initiatives did it make sense for us to engage in, in light of what we had in the room. And so for instance, when I was in my church in Indiana, a lot of the parishioners worked at Lilly who's headquarters is in Indiana. And so when they decided to do something for the community, they ended up opening up a clinic in the church building, which still exists and serves the local community, because they all had medical backgrounds.So when they do mission work, they do mission work with a medical component, because that's a effective way of mapping power. Where our church in Brooklyn average age is about 28, 29 and they're more artsy. So we're not opening up clinics, you know what I mean? But what we can do is events that help inspire and help engage with people. And then eventually with our pastor's leadership started something called Pray March Act, which looks to be a place to mobilize churches around issues of justice in New York City. So what is oftentimes overlooked in Christian spaces, and I really am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, for really surfacing the need for us to have a theology of power.That this is something that oftentimes especially evangelical churches, or more kind of Bible oriented or people kind of churches, there's a sense in which we don't know how to think about power. And I believe, I suspect this is one of the reasons why the church has been so susceptible to issues like sexual abuse, to egregious theft in money, is because we are not really conditioned to think about power, which is really ironic because the scriptures really do point to… I mean, we literally have two books, First and Second Kings, and those books are pointing to you have the king, this king was a good king, and it impacted the kingdom of Israel this way. This king was a bad king, and then this is what happened.And so it's wired in the text, right? Amy Sherman in her book, Kingdom Calling, Dr. Amy Sherman points to this when she points to the proverb that says, “when the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.” And it's this idea, when she says righteous, she's not thinking about it in the kind of traditional pietistic aspect of righteousness, but she's talking about “tzedakah” in the Hebrew, which has this connotation of justice. Because when people who are put in positions of power and influence, when they do right by the people underneath them when they do right, that people celebrate. Versus when there's somebody who's a tyrant that's in office, the people groan because there's that sense of they recognize we've mapped power dynamics, and somebody who's going to do ill is going to have a disproportionate impact on all of us.And so power mapping is bringing to surface the awareness of what is it that we have in the room. And it's also a very humbling way of being aware of our own power, right? Like how do I show up as a man in a space, in certain things? Like I know if I get up and I'm about to preach that there's some different dynamics depending on who I'm talking to in a room. Like if I'm in a predominantly Black context that's younger, then the locks might actually kind of give me some street cred. Like, oh, that's kind of cool. But if I'm in a older, traditional space, looking younger is going to be more of a uphill climb to say, okay, what's this guy coming at? And if I'm in a White space, versus but I also recognize that when our sisters come up, that there's a whole different type of power mapping situation.And so all of these things are helpful in being aware of how we show up and how that matters. And Andy's kind of thesis is that unlike the kind of post Nietzschean postmodern suspicion and critical view of power that only sees it as a negative, that God has actually given us and ordained us to exert influence and power in redemptive ways. But we can only do that if we map it, if we're aware of it, and if we use it in a way that's not just for our own self or comfort or glory, but for those who we're called to serve.Sy Hoekstra: Can I ask, just for some like to get specific on one thing, because I'm not sure this would be intuitive to everyone. You said if we map power, then we might not end up in the same situations that we are with, like abuse scandals in the church?Rasool Berry: Yeah. Yep.Sy Hoekstra: And I think I… where my mind goes is I think we would react differently to the abuse scandal. I don't know if the abuse scandals themselves would… those happen unfortunately. But I think where the power mapping might come in, is where so many people are then just deferring to whatever the person in, the pastor's narrative is. Is that kind of what you're talking about, like the reaction?Rasool Berry: I think it's on both sides.Sy Hoekstra: You do? Okay.Rasool Berry: Yeah, because for instance, if I am aware, very aware of power dynamics with children and adults, I would see the value in a practice of not leaving an adult in a space with a child by themselves.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see. You might put systems in place ahead of time. Yeah, yeah.Rasool Berry: Right. So there's the sense in which we can put policies in place that recognize… it's the same thing why we put the labeling system on kids when they check into childcare, right? Like you put the little label so that some random person can't just come and pick them up because a kid can't defend themselves. Or they may not have the capacity to understand what's going on if somebody just random comes up and says, “Hey, your mom and your dad told me to come get you,” and then they believe that. And so we have systems that we put in place to recognize those power dynamics. And I think unfortunately, that in a lot of our church context and culture there's an overly naive sense of, and really sometimes idolatrous view of pastors and leaders that essentially say, well, they're good and they're godly people, so there isn't a need for accountability, or there isn't a need for, you know…And so no, it's like, well, in the same way that we have trustees in certain churches, or there's a elders board, depending on what your church polity is, that polity should reflect a sense of accountability and transparency so that there is an awareness on the front end as well as on the backend that when it does come to bring people into account, that there's also an awareness of a power dynamic at play there too.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense especially when [laughs] we throw those things out, all we have are the systems of hierarchy and social dominance that exist to define what power is, right?Rasool Berry: Right.Jonathan Walton: So the train just keeps going.The Social and Spiritual Forces behind the Fight against CRT/DEIJonathan Walton: So leaning into that a little bit, you wrote an essay focusing on CRT power mapping and things like that. But it feels like nobody in the Trump camp really had an idea of what CRT was, and it didn't even really matter to them what it was.Rasool Berry: Right.Jonathan Walton: So what do you think is at the core of what's going on with White people when they reject CRT or DEI or whatever the—conscious—whatever the term would be?Rasool Berry: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: What do you think the underlying concern is?Rasool Berry: Well, you know, after… and it's so funny because when I wrote that first piece, I wrote it as a way… [laughs] I wrote it just to get it off my chest. And in my mind, almost nobody was going to read it because it was like a 20-something minute read, and I just didn't care because I was just like, “I'm getting this off my chest,” and this is the last I'm going to say about it. Like I thought that was going to be just this thing, just so I can point people to, if anybody asks. I did not intend, nor did I think that it was only going to kind of position me as this person that people were listening to and reading and resonating with about it. So that was funny. But then what ended up happening, and especially after I was on the unbelievable? podcast with Justin Brierley, kind of in this debate format with Neil Shenvi, who's kind of been one of the most outspoken evangelical Christian critics of critical race theory. Critics is probably too mild of a term, kind of a…Jonathan Walton: Antagonist.Rasool Berry: Antagonist, even stronger. Like this doomsday prophet who says that, who's warning against the complete erosion of biblical norms because of the Trojan Horse, in his mind, of critical race theory. In the midst of that conversation, that kind of elevated, it was one of their top 10 episodes of the entire year, and it just kind of got me into these spaces where I was engaging more and more. And I kind of sat back and reflected, and I had a few more interactions with Neil on Twitter. And I ended up writing a separate piece called “Uncritical Race Theory.” And the reason why I did that, is I went back and I was curious about what kind of insights I could get from previous instances of the way that there were being controversies surrounding race in America in the church, and how the church talked about those debates.So I went back and I read The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll, who looked at and examined the actual debates during the time of the antebellum period of pro-slavery Christians and anti-slavery Christians, and he analyzed that. Then I went back and I read The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby, who looked at the pro-integrationist and segregationist arguments in the church. And what I found was that there was incredible symmetry between what was argued in each of those instances, going all the way back to the 1800s, to the 1960s, to now, and there were two things that emerged. The first was that the primary response from those who were supportive of slavery in the 1800s, or those who were supportive of segregation in the 1960s was to claim first of all, that the opposing view were not biblically faithful, or were not even concerned about biblical fidelity.So this is different than other types of discussions where we could say, even going back to the councils, right? Like when there's some type of, like during the Nicaean Council or something like that, they're debating about how they're understanding the text about certain things. Whereas is Jesus fully God, is he man, is he both? But there's a basic premise that they're both coming at it from different aspects of scriptures. What I noticed in the American context is that there was a denial that the side that was kind of having a more progressive view was even biblically faithful at all.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Christian.Rasool Berry: The second part is related to the first, is that there was this allegation that there was outside philosophies that was actually shaping this impetus because it wasn't clearly the Bible. So in the 1800s that was the claim, “Oh, you're being influenced by these post-enlightenment ideas.” In the 1960s it was straight up Marxism, communism. You see the signs. “Integration is communism.” Like you see the people protesting with that, and of course the new version of that is kind of the remix of cultural Marxism, or these type of things. And so what I acknowledged in each of those scenarios is that part of the problem is that there is such an uncritical understanding of race that it causes, I think especially those in a dominant culture or those who've been susceptible to the ideologies of White supremacy, which can be White or Black or other, There's a tendency to see any claim that race is a problem as the problem itself because there's an underlying denial of the reality of racial stratification in our society, and the what Bryan Stevenson refers to as the narrative of racial difference or what is more commonly known as White supremacy. So when your default position is that you are introducing a foreign concept into the conversation when you talk about the relevance of race in a scenario, then it causes… that sense of uncritical nature of the reality of race causes you to then look upon with suspicion any claim that there's some type of racial based situation happening. And that is what I call, it is really ironically uncritical race theory. It's the exact opposite of what critical race theory is trying to do.And so I think that that's my take on what's happening. And then I think that's more of the scientific sociological, but then there's also a spiritual. I am a pastor [laughter]. And I have to end with this. I have to end with this, because in some ways I was naively optimistic that there was, if you just reasoned and show people the right analogies or perspectives, then they would, they could be persuaded. But what I have since realized and discovered is that there is a idolatrous synchronization of what we now know of different aspects of White Christian nationalism that is a competing theological position and belief system that is forming these doctrinal positions of what we now kind of look at as American exceptionalism, what we look at as this sense of the status quo being… all the things that are moving toward an authoritarian regime and away from democracy, that that is all solidifying itself as an alternative gospel.And I think that at the end of the day, I'm looking at and grieving about mass apostasy that I'm seeing happening in the church as a result of an unholy alliance of political ideology and Christian symbols, language, and values expressed in this kind of mixed way. And that's what is really being allowed to happen with this unmapped power dynamic, is that people don't even realize that they're now exerting their power to kind of be in this defensive posture to hold up a vision of society that is actually not Christian at all, but that is very much bathed in Christian terms.Jonathan Walton: I want to say a lot back, but we got to keep going, but that was good.Sy Hoekstra: We got to… [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, we could talk forever about what you just said, but we could also talk forever about your documentary. So let's transition to that.Rasool Berry: [laughter] You all are like exercising restraint.Sy Hoekstra: Yes.Jonathan Walton: I am.Rasool Berry: Like, “oh, I want to go there.” I just threw steak in front of the lions [laughter].Why Pastor Berry Made a Documentary about JuneteenthSy Hoekstra: But it's because, I mean, the documentary's interesting in a way... It's sort of like, okay, you've seen this movement of mass apostasy and everything, and you've had all these people tell you you're not faithful. And with this documentary in some ways, you're just sprinting on down the road that you're on. You know what I mean? It's like sort of [laughs], you're just going straightforward like we need to remember our past. We need to learn about power dynamics in American history. So you wrote this—[realizing mistake] wrote— you were involved in, you're the kind of narrator, the interviewer of this documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. And you went to Galveston and you went to Houston, Texas to learn more about the history of Juneteenth and the communities and the people that shaped the celebration and everything.And I guess I just want to know how this got started and why it was so important for you to engage in what was a very significant project…Rasool Berry: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: …to teach people about this kind of history that I think the movement against CRT or DEI or whatever is quite actively trying to suppress.Rasool Berry: And these two stories are very much intertwined…Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.Rasool Berry: …in ways that I didn't even fully anticipate in some ways. In some ways I knew, in some ways I didn't. But I grew up in Philly, where there was not growing up a significant Juneteenth awareness or celebration or anything like that. So I had heard about it though when I was very young, the concept of it. I had a classmate whose middle name was Galveston, and I was like, “That's a weird name. Why is your middle name Galveston?” [laughter] He told me that it's because his mom had told him about this situation where there were Black people that didn't know they were free for two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. I was like eight years old when I first heard that, but filed that away.It wasn't really until more recent years with the, just massive racial justice movement spurred on by the murders of Tamir Rice and George Floyd and others, Sandra Bland. And so, as that movement started to gin up, conversations about race that I was kind of plugged into, I heard about this 90-something year old woman that was appearing before Congress…Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Rasool Berry: …and challenging them to make Juneteenth a national holiday.Sy Hoekstra: I can't believe you got to interview her. She was amazing.Rasool Berry: Yeah. And I was like, why would a 90-something plus year old woman be like this committed to this? So I started looking into it and realizing, I think both spiritually and socially, that there was incredible potency and opportunity in the recognition, the widespread recognition of Juneteenth. I'll go socially first. Socially, the reality has been the United States has never had a moment where we collectively reflect on the legacy of slavery in our country. And if you do the math, from the first enslaved people that we have documented coming into the States in 1619 until if even if you go to the abolition of slavery in 1865 or 1866 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, that's about 244 years.If you go from 1865 to now, it's like 159 or so years. So we still have way more time in our society that has been shaped by this most intense version of a caste system and brutal slavery that had global, it literally reshaped the globe. And sometimes we forget. I live in Brooklyn where most of the Black folk are Afro-Caribbean. When you think of Jamaica, you think of Usain Bolt or Bob Marley. Do you realize that all of those people are from Africa, like our African descent people. That like the native people of Jamaica would've been Native Americans. So the legacy of slavery and colonialism has literally reshaped population centers in our world. That's how significant it was.And so to not have a moment to reflect on all of it, the implications of how the legacy still shapes us, but also the progress of what we've seen happen and how we are not in that same place is a missed opportunity. But on the contrary, to put that in place is an opportunity for reflection that I think could really help ground us toward being a more perfect union, toward us being a unified people. Because we're basing it on the same story and information, which increasingly in the age of misinformation and disinformation, that the erosion of us having a shared narrative is really upon us. So I think it's interesting and important from that standpoint. Spiritually, it was even more dynamic because one of the… so there was a lot of nicknames and still are for Juneteenth. One was Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, but Jubilee Day.And when I discovered that, that's when I said, “Okay, Our Daily Bread, we got to get involved in this process.” Because you mean to tell me that these formerly enslaved people at a time when it was illegal to read, primarily because they didn't want people to read the Bible, that they understood enough of the story of the Old Testament, that they picked out this festival in Leviticus 25, this ordinance that God had put in place, that on the Jubilee year, the Sabbath of all Sabbaths, I call it the Super Bowl of Sabbaths [Sy laughs]. Seven years times seven, forty nine years plus one, fifty. That on that day that it was this reordering of society, the kingdom of heaven coming back to earth, which simultaneously anticipates the wickedness and the brokenness of human systems in power, but also projects and casts vision about the kingdom of heaven, which would allow for equity and equality to take place. So debts were forgiven, lands were returned, and people who were in bondage primarily because of debt, that was the main reason back then, they would be set free. And in the context of their faith, they saw God doing the jubilee in their lives. So what that gave was the opportunity for us to talk about and reintroduce in many faith traditions the relationship between spiritual and physical freedom, and see that in the Bible story those things were wedded.What's the major account in the Old Testament is the Exodus account. Like it was both physical and spiritual freedom. And in the same way we see that is why Jesus, when he reveals himself and says, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” notice when John the Baptist starts to waver because he's expecting this conquering king. He's still in prison and he says, “Hey, are you the one or we should expect another?” Jesus points to physical and spiritual aspects of liberation in his response. “Tell John what you see. The blind receive sight. The sick are healed. The gospel is preached. Blessed is the one who is not ashamed of me.” So in the sense of that, what we see elements of the kind of seeds of in the gospel is this aspect of the physical and spiritual liberation being tied together.And that is what Jubilee gives us opportunity to explore and investigate. And I think lastly, seeing the role of the Black church in bringing out that insight, I think is particularly valuable in a time where oftentimes those contributions are overlooked and ignored.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. I think being able to watch the documentary was transformative for me. Mainly because I'm 38 years old and it's being produced by people who look and sound and act like me. It's interviewing the people who came before us, trying to speak to the folks that are younger than us. And each generation I think has this, this go around where we have to own our little piece of what and how we're going to take the work forward. You know what I mean?Discerning Whether to Leave Communities that Push back on Discussions about RaceYou interviewed Lecrae in the documentary and he's taken that work forward, right? And you both say that you've had the experiences of believing you are loved and accepted in these White evangelical spaces until you started talking about racial justice issues.And so I feel like there's these moments where we want to take the work forward, and then we're like, “All right, well, this is our moment.” Like Opal was like, “Hey, I'm going to do Juneteenth.” Where now you're like, “I'm going to do something.” [laughs] So I wonder, like for you, when you have to make decisions about how to stay, not to stay or just leave. What is the effect of constantly engaging in that calculus for you?Rasool Berry: Oh, man! It's exhausting to do it. And I think it is valuable to count the cost and realize that sometimes you're best suited to reposition yourself and to find other ways to express that faithfulness. At other times, God is causing you to be a change agent where you are. And I think how to navigate through that is complicated, and I think it's complicated for all of us, for our allies who see the value of racial justice as well as for those of us who are marginalized and experience, not just conceptually or ideologically the need for justice, but experientially all of the things through macro and microaggressions that come up, that weigh and weather us and our psyche, our emotions, our bodies.And I think that it's important to be very spiritually attuned and to practice healthy emotional spirituality as well as, best practices, spiritual disciplines, all the things that have come alongside of what does it mean to follow Jesus. I was recently reflecting on the fact that in the height of Jesus' ministry, when it was on and popping, he's growing, the crowds are growing in number, it says that he went away regularly and left the crowds to be with God. And then the verse right after that, it's in Luke, I can't remember which chapters, I know the verse is 16 and 17. And then it talks about how he had power as a result of going away to do more. And there's this relationship between our needing to rest and to find recovery in the secret place in the quiet place with God in order to have the energy to do more of the work.And that's a lot to hold together, but it's really important because otherwise you can end up being like Moses, who was trying to do justice, but in his own strength at first when he kills the Egyptian, and then he tried to go to his people being like, “Yo, I'm down!” And they're like, “You killed somebody. We don't want to hear from you.”Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Right.Rasool Berry: And then he flees. Because he tried to do it in his own strength. And then when God reveals himself at the bush, now he's totally broken and not even confident at all in himself. And God has to say, “No, the difference is going to be I'm with you.” So I think in my own journey, I've been one of many people who've had to evaluate and calculate where I've been in order to kind of see where there are opportunities to move forward. For instance, I was on staff with Cru for 20 years and then as the opportunities to work with Our Daily Bread, and I remember specifically the podcast Where Ya From?, that we launched and then Christianity Today got connected to it.They were eagerly looking, or at least supporting the idea of us having conversations about faith and culture and race and all these things. Whereas in my previous environment, I felt like that was not something… I didn't even feel like it, I experienced the pullback of talking about those things. So it has actually, by repositioning myself to kind of be able to be in spaces where I can tell these stories and advocate in these ways, it has been a better use of my energy and my time. Now, even in that other space, everything isn't perfect. It's still the same type of challenges that exist anywhere you go in the world where you're a minority in race and racial difference is prominent, but at least it's a opportunity to still do more than I could do maybe in a previous position. And all of us have to make those type of calculations.And I think it's best to do those things in the context of community, not just by yourself, and also with a sense of sobriety of encountering and experiencing God himself. Because at the end of the day, sometimes, I'm going to just say this, sometimes the answer is leave immediately. Get out of there. At other times, God is calling you to stay at least in the short term time. And it's important to be discerning and not just reactive to when is the right situation presenting itself. And the only way I know to do that is by doing it in community, doing it with a sense of healthy rhythms and time to actually hear the still small voice of God.Sy Hoekstra: Amen.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Sy Hoekstra: Because you really can err in either direction. Like some people, “I'm getting out of here right away,” without thinking. Meaning, when you're being reactive, when you're not being discerning…Rasool Berry: Right.Sy Hoekstra: …you can get out right away or you can have the instinct, “No, I'm going to stick it out forever,” even if it's bad for you, and it's not going to accomplish anything.Rasool Berry: Yup, yeah.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Which I think leans into jumping all the way back the critical versus uncritical.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. There you go.Jonathan Walton: Like if we're not willing to lean into the radical interrogation of the systems and structures around us that inform our decisions each day, we will submit to them unconsciously, whether that be running when we should resist or whether that be resisting where we actually should flee. So yeah, thanks for all that.Where you can Find Pastor Berry's workSy Hoekstra: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. And so we will have links to both of the articles, to the documentary, which is entirely free on YouTube.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: So you're just wasting your life if you're not watching it, really [laughter]. And a couple other things you talked about, we'll have links. But is there anywhere that you want people to go to either follow you or your work online?Rasool Berry: Yeah. So the other thing that what we did with the Juneteenth documentary, because the response was so strong and overwhelming, really, people wanted to host screenings locally. And so we did a few things to make that more possible. So you can actually go on our website experiencevoices.org/Juneteenth. And you can fill out like a form to actually host a screening locally. And we have designed social media so you can market it, posters that you could print out, even discussion questions that you can use to host discussions. And sometimes people invite some of us from the production on site. So I've gone and done, I've been at screenings all the way from California to Texas to Wisconsin and here in New York.So you can reach out to us on that website as well if you're interested in hosting a screening with the director or one of the producers or myself, and we can kind of facilitate that. Also be looking at your local PBS stations. We partnered with PBS to air screenings so far over a hundred local channels.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, wow.Rasool Berry: And have aired it. Now, the PBS version is slightly different because we had to edit it down to fit their hour long format. And so the biggest version is the PBS version doesn't have Lecrae in it [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Oh no [laughs].Rasool Berry: We had to cut out the four-time Grammy winner. Sorry Lecrae [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Rasool Berry: You know what I mean? But it just so happened that way it, that it was the best way to edit it down.Jonathan Walton: You had to keep Opal.Rasool Berry: Had to keep Opal, had to keep Opal [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: I feel like Lecrae would understand that, honestly.Rasool Berry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was so gracious. And actually, the other thing that Lecrae did, I had told him that we were working with Sho Baraka, a mutual friend of ours, to do the music. And he said, “Yeah, I heard something about that.” He's like, “I have a song I was going to put on Church Clothes 4, but I feel like it would be a better fit for this. If you're interested, let me know and I can send it to you.” I'm like, “If I'm interested? Yes, I'm interested.” [laughter] Yes. I'll accept this sight unseen. And so he sent us this incredible song that features, well actually is listed as Propaganda's song, but it features Lecrae and Sho Baraka. And you can get the entire Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom soundtrack 13 tracks, poetry, hip hop, gospel, rnb, all on one thing. And wherever you listen to your music, Spotify, Apple Music, anywhere, you can, listen to it, stream it, buy it, and support this movement and this narrative. So yeah. And then personally, just @rasoolb on Instagram, @rasoolberry on, I still call it Twitter [Sy laughs]. So, and we're on Facebook as well. That's where folks can follow me, at rasoolberry.com, website. So thanks for having me.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, pastor, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.Jonathan Walton: Thanks so much, man.[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Reflecting on the InterviewSy Hoekstra: Hey, Jonathan, you know what's really useful, is when in the middle of an interview with one of our guests, we say, “Oh no, we don't have time. We'd really like to get into this, so we have to move on to another subject.” It's really useful when we have these little times that we're doing now after the interview to talk more about the subjects than we did with the guests [laughter]. This works out well for us.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Why don't you tell everybody what you're thinking after the interview with Pastor Berry?Passing on a Tradition Well Takes Significant WorkJonathan Walton: Yeah. I think the biggest thing for me that I took away among a lot of the nuggets that he… nuggets and like big things that got dropped on me while we were listening, was like the amount of work that he went through to make this film. Like traveling to Galveston. There's a lot in the documentary that reminds me of how much it costs us personally to create things that are moving. To be able to have these conversations, sit down with these people, smell the smells of these folks' homes. That's just a big thing, particularly for me, like not having… I grew up with the Juneteenth story and needing to think through my own traditions and what I'm going to pass to my kids and stuff like that.It's just I'm challenged to do that work so that I have something substantial to pass on to Maya and Everest. And to the folks who listen to the preaching that I give or the stories I write, or the books I'm going to write, just so I can communicate with the same amount of intimacy that he did. So, Sy how about you? What stood out for you?The Literally Unbelievable Racial Ignorance of WhitenessSy Hoekstra: I think what stood out for me was actually right at that point where we said we really wanted to talk more about something, I really did have more thoughts [laughs]. When he was talking about the thing that underlies the fight against CRT and DEI and all that sort of thing. Being just a straight up denial of any sort of racial caste system or racial stratification in our country, I think that point is extremely important. That so much of our disagreements about racial injustice, at least on the intellectual level, not on the emotional and all that kind of thing, the intellectual level that come down to a difference in beliefs about the facts of reality in America. It is literally just do you think racism is happening or not? Because if you do think that it's happening, then everything has to change [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And there's not a lot of room… you'll have to do a lot more like kind of active denial. A lot more having a very active lack of integrity [laughs] to continue in the way that you're thinking when you believe that there is no racism in America if you find out that there is. Which kind of explains why there's so much resistance to it. But I think one story that sort of illustrates how this dynamic works a little bit that just, this is something that happened to me that this reminded me of. I was an intern right after college at International Justice Mission, and I read Gary Haugen's book, The Good News About Injustice, where the intro to this book is about his childhood growing up in kind of suburban, I think he's outside of Seattle, somewhere in Washington. A suburban Christian home, things were pretty nice and easy and he just did not know anything about injustice or anything in the world. Like oppression, racism, he did not know anything about it. And then the book takes you through how he discovered it and then his theology of what God wants to do about it and what the organization does and all that kind of thing. But just that intro, I remember talking to one of the other interns who was at IJM m when I was there, who was a Black woman who was ordained in the Black Baptist Church and had grown up relatively low income. And I was talking to her about this book because I read that intro and I was like, “yes, I totally resonate with this. This is how I grew up, check, check. That makes sense. I understand all of it.”And it makes sense to a lot of the people who support IJM, which are a lot of suburban White evangelicals. She told me, she read the intro to the book and her immediate reaction was how, there is no way that anyone could possibly be this ignorant. It is not possible [laughs]. And I was like, [pretending to be hurt] “but I was” [laughter]. And there's this wrench in the gear of our conversations about justice where there's a large spectrum of White people who are, some engaging in actual innocent good faith about how much nonsense there is, like how much racism there is in America, and people who are engaging in complete bad faith and have ignored all the things that have been put right in front of them clearly.And it is just very difficult for a lot of people who are not White to understand [laughs] that there are actually… the level of ignorance of a lot of White people is unbelievable, by which I mean it literally cannot be believed by a lot of people. And I don't know, that's just, it is a complication in our conversations about race that doesn't really change what you have to tell people or how seriously you should take your conversations or whatever. It's just a note about what you might need to do to bring people kind of into the fold, by which I mean the fold of the truth [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes. This is true of like a lot of White people. And the sad part is that it can also be true of a lot of people of color…Sy Hoekstra: Well, yeah.Jonathan Walton: …who say, “I'm just going to deny, because I haven't experienced.” Or, “We have opted into the system of ignorance and don't want to engage.” And so I'll tell a story. Priscilla was at the airport this week.Sy Hoekstra: Your wife.Jonathan Walton: My wife Priscilla, was at the airport, not a random woman [laughter], was at the airport this week. And someone said, “Yeah, everyone who came to this country, like we're all immigrants.” And Priscilla said, “Actually some people came here as slaves.” Then the person says, “No, that's not true.” And it's like, what do you say to that? When someone just says slavery doesn't exist? And that's literally why we celebrate Juneteenth. So I don't know what this person's going to do on Juneteenth, but when there's a collective narrative and acknowledgement that this happened, and then there's a large group, James Baldwin would say, ignorance plus power is very dangerous.If there's a large group that's ignorant and or like intentionally not engaging, but also has power and privilege and all the things, the benefits of racial stratification without the acknowledgement of the reality of it, which is just a dangerous combination.Sy Hoekstra: So when somebody says something like that, like that didn't happen, people didn't come over here as slaves, I think it is possible that they legitimately don't know that I suppose [laughs], or that they think it's a conspiracy theory or whatever. My guess is, tell me what you think about this. What I would imagine happened there was, “Oh, I never thought about the fact that Black people are not immigrants. And so I'm just going to say no.” Do you know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. Well, I agree. I think some people even, so let's say like, I write about this in 12 Lies. Ben Carson says that we all came here as immigrants, even if it was in the bottom of a ship. He says that. And I think that is a, to be kind, a gross misrepresentation of the middle passage [laughs], but I see what he's trying to do. He's trying to put Black folks in a narrative that fits in the American narrative so people can, so he's not othered. Because what happens when you acknowledge enslavement is that you have to acknowledge all that. They all come with each other. It's like being at a buffet and there is literally no other menu. Like once you say, once you go in, you can't order one plate. If you talk about slavery, you're opening up all the things and some people just don't want to do that. And that sucks.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Which Tab Is Still Open: Daniel PerryJonathan Walton: It's true. And [laughs], I think this feeds into a little bit of this segment [laughs] that we have aptly called Which Tab is Still Open. Because out of all the things in our newsletter and our podcast, there's stuff that comes up for us and it's just still hanging on our desktops, we still talk about it offline. So for Sy, like for you, which one, which tab is still open?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. We're going to talk about Daniel Perry and Donald Trump today.Jonathan Walton: Fun times.Sy Hoekstra: So I recently had an article in the newsletter that I highlighted as one of my resources, that is about the case of Daniel Perry, which I think kind of flew a little bit under the radar in the fervor of 2020. But he was a known racist, meaning we have now seen truckloads of social media posts and text messages and everything revealing his out and out racism, his fantasies about killing Black Lives Matter protesters, all these kinds of things. Who in the summer of 2020, during those protests, drove his car through a red light into a crowd of protesters. And he did not at that moment hurt anyone, but another, an Air Force vet, Daniel Perry's also a vet, but another Air Force vet named Garrett Foster, walked up to him carrying, openly carrying his, in Texas, legal assault rifle.He didn't point it at Daniel Perry, but he was carrying it. And he knocked on the window and motioned for Perry to roll his window down, and Perry shot him through the window five times and killed him. He was convicted of murder in 2023 by a jury. And the day after he was convicted, governor Greg Abbott republican governor of Texas said that he wanted his case to be reviewed for a full pardon, so that the pardons board could send him a recommendation to do it, which is the legal way that a governor can make a pardon in Texas. And that happened a couple weeks ago. Daniel Perry walked free with all of his civil rights restored, including his right to own firearms.Texas Monthly did some really good reporting on how completely bizarre this pardon is under Texas law, meaning they very clear, they kind of laid out how these pardons typically go. And the law very clearly says that a pardon is not to be considered for anyone who is still in prison, like hasn't finished their sentence, except under very exceptional circumstances, which are usually that like some new evidence of innocence has come to light.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And the actual materials that the board reviewed were basically just his defense case where like him arguing that he was doing what he did out of self-defense. He was standing his ground, and that he was afraid of Foster and therefore allowed to use deadly force. In any other case, the remedy for that, if you think that's your defense and you were wrongly denied your defense by the jury is to appeal. Is to go through the appeals to which you have a right as a criminal defendant. And in this case, he became a bit of a conservative cult hero and the governor stepped in to get him out of jail. It was so bizarre. So the weird thing here is, for me at least, for these cases, for the cases surrounding like where someone has been killed either by the police or by an individual, it has always been pretty clear to me which way the case is going.Like if you're someone who's actually taken a, like me, gone to law school, taken a criminal law class, you've studied murder and then like the right to stand your ground and the right to self-defense, and when you can use deadly force, most of these cases are pretty predictable. I knew that the killers of Ahmaud Arbery and Walter Scott and Jordan Davis were going down. I knew that people were going to get off when they got off. Like those were not confusing. And that isn't because the law isn't racist or whatever, it's just the law doesn't take race into account at all. It just completely ignores, it has nothing to do with the cases, according to the law. So it's like this one was stunning.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Because if it had gone to the appellate judges, the judges who actually are thinking about like the whole system and the precedents that they're setting would say, “Hey, in an open carry state like Texas, we do not want to set a precedent where if someone who is legally, openly carrying a gun walks up to you, you can kill them.” That is not a precedent that they want to set. But this is not an appellate case, so we're not setting that precedent, we're just letting this racist murderer go. That's it.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And that is like what effectively Greg Abbott and the Board of Pardons in Texas have conspired to do. And I didn't know this was coming actually. I hadn't heard the news that he was calling for the pardon when it happened, but it's wild. And I just kind of wanted to give that additional context and hear what you're thinking about it, Jonathan, and then we'll get into Donald Trump a little bit.Normalizing Punishing Protestors and Lionizing MurderersJonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean, I think first thing for me is like this is a PG podcast. I won't use all the expletives that I would like to use. The reality of like Kyle Rittenhouse lives in Texas now. George Zimmerman, after he killed Trayvon Martin, he was in other altercations with people with guns. So this is not a person or a scenario that is new, which is sad and disappointing. But the reality of an institution stepping into enforce its institutionalized racism, is something that feels new to me in the environment that we're in. And what I mean by that is like, I think we now live in a society that desires for protestors and folks who are resistant to the system that oppresses and marginalizes people, if you believe that is happening.There are individuals and institutions that desire to punish that group of people. It is now normed that that group of people can be punished by anybody.Sy Hoekstra: If you're in the right state.Jonathan Walton: Well, I won't even say the right state, but I almost think if you can get caught in the zeitgeist of a certain media attention, then you will be lauded as someone who did the right thing.Sy Hoekstra: Oh yeah. Even if you might still end up in jail.Jonathan Walton: Even if you might still end up in jail, like you'll become a hero. And so the circumstances have been created where protesters can be punished by regular members of society, and then their quote- unquote punishment could be pardoned in the court of public opinion, and so much so you could end up being pardoned by the institution. There are going to be more protests on campus. There are going to be more protests in light of Trump's conviction and potential election. The chances of political violence and protests are very high, highly probable there're going to be thunderstorms. And what we're saying is like, let's give everybody lightning bolts [Sy laughs]. And we all know if this is a racially stratified society, which it is, if it's a class stratified society, which it is, then we will end up with things like Donald Trump getting convicted and becoming president.Sy Hoekstra: And the racial stratification is important to remember because people have pointed out, if there had been a Trump rally and someone had been killed, that like, not a chance that Greg Abbott does any of this, right?Jonathan Walton: The hallmark of White American folk religion is hypocrisy. If this were a person of color, there's no way that they would've got pardoned for shooting someone at a protest.The Criminal Legal System was Exceptionally Kind to Donald TrumpSy Hoekstra: And this is the connection to the Donald Trump case [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: Because despite the fact that he was convicted, he has been treated throughout this process in a way that no poor or BIPOC would, like no poor person or any BIPOC would ever be treated by the New York State courts. I can tell you that from experience [laughter] as an actual attorney in New York state. Donald Trump had 10 separate violations of a gag order, like he was held in contempt by the court and required to pay some money, which is significant, but nobody does that and doesn't spend some time in jail unless they are rich and famous and White. It was shocking to watch the amount of dancing around him and his comfort that the system does. And this is, pastor Berry mentioned Bryan Stevenson, another Bryan Stevenson quote.I've mentioned, we've mentioned Brian Stevenson so many times on this show [laughter]. But it's true. One of the things he says all the time is that the system treats you better if you're rich and White and guilty than if you're poor and BIPOC and innocent.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And, that's the demonstration. So the Trump indictments happened when we're recording this yesterday. Or the convictions, I mean. And in terms of what it'll do to the election, probably not much. In terms of what it'll like [laughs], like Jonathan was just saying, like this is the situation that we're in here. We don't have a lot of political analysis to bring you about this case because I don't think there's much political analysis to do except to continue to point out over and over again that this is not the way that people are treated by the criminal justice system. This is an exception to what is otherwise the rule.Outro and OuttakeOkay. I think we're going to end there. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Our theme song, as always is “Citizens” by John Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robyn Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale. And thank you all so much for joining us. Jonathan, thanks for being here. We will see you all again in two weeks.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me was like the amount of work that he went through to make this film. I'm challenged to do that work so that I have something substantial to pass on to Maya and Everest, just so I can communicate with the same amount of intimacy that he did.Sy Hoekstra: So now you're going to go make a documentary about Juneteenth, is what you're saying?Jonathan Walton: [deep exhale, and Sy laughs] At least a reel [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: A reel… yeah, those are pretty much the same I'd say. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe

David Gornoski is joined by Shane Kennedy and Shannon Braswell for a conversation on the negation of the body in the West, the rise of pseudo-gnosticism, the similarities in modern-day conflicts, returning to signs and wonders, why secularists want to transcend nature, the attempt to return to Nietzschean, and more. Visit aneighborschoice.com for more

Stefan is alone this week, defending Paul from the haters and giving a Nietzschean account of the tragic Greek hero   Get Tickets to the DC Live Show here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/clr-james-and-the-struggle-for-socialism-in-america-tickets-876034973187?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl Thank you guys again for taking the time to check this out. We appreciate each and everyone of you. If you have the means, and you feel so inclined, BECOME A PATRON! We're creating patron only programing, you'll get bonus content from many of the episodes, and you get MERCH!   Become a patron now https://www.patreon.com/join/BitterLakePresents? Please also like, subscribe, and follow us on these platforms as well, (specially YouTube!)   THANKS Y'ALL   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG9WtLyoP9QU8sxuIfxk3eg Twitch: www.twitch.tv/thisisrevolutionpodcast www.twitch.tv/leftflankvets​ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Thisisrevolutionpodcast/ Twitter: @TIRShowOakland Instagram: @thisisrevolutionoakland   Read Jason Myles in Sublation Magazine https://www.sublationmag.com/writers/jason-myles   Read Jason Myles in Damage Magazine https://damagemag.com/2023/11/07/the-man-who-sold-the-world/   Pascal Robert's Black Agenda Report: https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/Pascal%20Robert

Get bonus episodes on Patreon!   600 pages of expertly dramatized philosophy and theology, starring a giant worm with a human face – this book was written for Cam. Our discussion starts with the compounding, echoing relationship between all of the Dune books, before settling on the unexpected Nietzschean flair of Frank Herbert's God Emperor. Alongside the ghola, he's one of the central walking thought experiments that plays out the intellectual curiosities of this world and their underlying and emotional agonies. This series remains a thought provoking and devastating character study. Herbert has managed to pull a fourth rabbit out of the same sandy hat. LINKS: Patreon, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Cam's stories Feedback & Theories: secondbreakfastpod@gmail.com

This episode delves into Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy on personal transformation and the pursuit of one's ultimate potential. We explore his concept of the ‘Übermensch' and the transformative steps involving passion, suffering, and creativity, aiming to understand how these ideas can be applied to achieving peak performance and self-mastery.

Would you say Shawshank Redemption is "a movie with a happy ending"? Years ago as a young husband, that's what Brian picked to watch when his wife made a request for just such a film with a happy ending. (Spoiler: Shawshank Redemption was not the kind of movie she had meant.) For this momentous 145th episode, and the first ever LAMPC pick WITH CLIPS FROM THE MOVIE INCLUDED IN THE EPISODE (go watch it on Canon+, people), the guys discuss a movie this film that was a box-office failure upon release, and has since climbed into the upper echelons of film conversations. Brian asks Nate about its popular appeal. Nate surmises why it flopped upon release, and makes suggestions for improving that release (if given a time machine). Brian fails at describing Andy Dufresne's character flaw. Nate avoids talking about Stephen King, who wrote the original story. They discuss how Christians interpret movies wrong (Andy giving the 12 prisoners beer on the roof is the Last Supper) and how atheists do the same thing (Zihuatanejo is a Nietzschean paradise beyond guilt and innocence!). Enjoy! #LAMPC #LookAtMovingPicturesClub #SASF #StoriesAreSoulFood #ShawshankRedemption

In this episode, I analyze Mr. Robot through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy and Jungian psychology. Mr. Robot is probably one of my all time favorite shows, and there was much to think about in each and every episode. I highly recommend checking it out. Instagram link Novel ⁠⁠On Death and God⁠ Merch Links ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ITA Coffee Cup⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ITA T-Shirt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ITA Tank Top ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ITA Bottle Opener⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ References USA Network's Mr. Robot Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul Play God without permission clip I'm gonna break you out clip Biggest wealth distribution clip You are a monster clip F society clip Shrek clip

This week Rhys, Colin, and Jonathan continue the podcast's readthorugh of Begotten or Made?  This time they discuss the relational and procreative good of marriage and how they relate, why IVF is Nietzschean, and what Protestants think of contraception.Timestamps00:00:00-00:09:38 - intro, recap, the unitive/relation good of marriage00:09:47-00:18:47 relation of various goods in marriage00:18:57-00:37:51 - why IVF is Nietzschean00:38:00-47:00:00 - Protestants and contraception00:47:10-end - what we're reading; spotlight; wrap upTexts DiscussedBegotten or Made? by Oliver O'DonovanSpotlightOn the Death of Christ and Other Atonement Writings by John DavenantWhat We're ReadingJonathan: The Silmarillion by J.R.R TolkienColin: Leviathan byThomas Hobbes   Rhys: Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts   MusicIntro and Outro:Midnight Stroll by Ghostrifter bit.ly/ghostrifter-scCreative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported — CC BY-ND 3.0Free Download: hypeddit.com/track/2gic0sLink Music:New Road by Ghostrifter bit.ly/ghostrifter-scCreative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported — CC BY-ND 3.0Free Download: hypeddit.com/track/l7ldfnTo find out more about The Davenant Institute, visit our website.

Greetings, audient!Thanks for hanging in there. It can't be easy.This episode tackles the Tossers' own Marx Grudge Star -- come to collect its resentful dues. Karma imposes its menacing presence in the form of a book by Daniel Tutt, with the provocative title How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left got High on Nietzsche. A unique pleasure it was to host Jamie, who joins us from a more Frankfurt School angle, and helped reign-in Sagi by riposting some of his cheaper jabs at our buddy Karlo.So, as you can imagine, it was a grudge-bath. (Yep. Me no native English.)At their best, our discussions turned, and tossed, the treacherous soils and soilings of ressentiment, a Nietzschean concept used against the working class to repress any uprising (for it will be ridiculed as a "slave rebellion" I imagine). Tutt lays this at Nietzsche's feet, the more general claim being that Nietzsche's philosophy is a status-quo machine, and/or an anti-revolutionary one, in the sense that it puts the kaibosh on any universal equality, ideational and/or actual, as some kind of (secret, cunning) axiom.All this time we thought it was Reason -- turns out it was Nietzsche who was cunning.We also admittedly devolve to devote some uneasy attention to Tutt's notion of the parasite vis-a-vis the act of reading/interpreting Nietzsche, which, if we're lucky, seems to only stumble over its own feet (the identity of the parasite shifting constantly, something narrated but never engaged with). If we're not, then Tutt's bulldozers will show those parasites 'how a real parasite does it,' becoming tone-deaf to the metaphysical critique that underwrites Nietzsche's contempt towards humanist ideas of equality in the process.We will get into that. And so much more...Stay tuned, won't you, audient?Stars: Marx Grudge; WWJD

In this lively episode, Manu and Brian embark on a whimsical journey through the twists and turns of attachment theory critiques. With a dash of Nietzschean flair and a sprinkle of Buddhist wisdom, they unravel the mysteries of human development, exploring desire, and curiosity like a pair of philosophical detectives. As they navigate the landscape of life's enigmas, they dive into the intriguing concept of the inner orphan and dissect Deleuze and Guattari's intriguing orphaned unconscious. With music as their trusty sidekick, they groove through the conversation, shedding light on the role of melodies in shaping our attachment styles. But it's not all serious talk; Manu and Brian embrace their wild sides, challenging conventional views and flipping anthropocentric beliefs on their heads with a playful dose of symbolism. From vulnerability to resilience, they tackle it all, shining a light on the coercive nature of language and pondering the cosmic impact of technology. It's a whirlwind of ideas, laughter, and profound insights that will leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about attachment theory. Manu Bazzano Website: https://manubazzano.com/ Dr. B's Website: https://somaticdoctor.com/ Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/boundlessbodypodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/TheSomaticDoctor/ https://twitter.com/Boundless_Body Articles: https://medium.com/@boundlessbodypod --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/boundless-body-podcast/message

A how-to guide for the left on how to overcome Nietzsche's divisive and damaging influence.  How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (Repeater Books, 2024) overturns the whitewashed and defanged version of Nietzsche that has been made popular by generations of translators and academic philosophers who have presented his work as apolitical and without a core reactionary agenda. The central argument of the book is that Nietzsche's philosophy does have a center, and that the left learns a great deal from Nietzsche when we read him as driven by a highly sophisticated reactionary political vision that informs all his major concepts and ideas. The most important Nietzschean concepts — from perspectivism, ressentiment, eternal return to the pathos of distance — are analyzed in the historical context in which Nietzsche lived and wrote, and several case-studies of prominent left-Nietzscheans from Jack London, Gilles Deleuze, Wendy Brown to Huey Newton are discussed. How to Read Like a Parasite makes a persuasive case for how we can overcome Nietzsche's damaging influence on the left, showing us how to read and understand his work without becoming victims of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A how-to guide for the left on how to overcome Nietzsche's divisive and damaging influence.  How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (Repeater Books, 2024) overturns the whitewashed and defanged version of Nietzsche that has been made popular by generations of translators and academic philosophers who have presented his work as apolitical and without a core reactionary agenda. The central argument of the book is that Nietzsche's philosophy does have a center, and that the left learns a great deal from Nietzsche when we read him as driven by a highly sophisticated reactionary political vision that informs all his major concepts and ideas. The most important Nietzschean concepts — from perspectivism, ressentiment, eternal return to the pathos of distance — are analyzed in the historical context in which Nietzsche lived and wrote, and several case-studies of prominent left-Nietzscheans from Jack London, Gilles Deleuze, Wendy Brown to Huey Newton are discussed. How to Read Like a Parasite makes a persuasive case for how we can overcome Nietzsche's damaging influence on the left, showing us how to read and understand his work without becoming victims of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

A how-to guide for the left on how to overcome Nietzsche's divisive and damaging influence.  How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (Repeater Books, 2024) overturns the whitewashed and defanged version of Nietzsche that has been made popular by generations of translators and academic philosophers who have presented his work as apolitical and without a core reactionary agenda. The central argument of the book is that Nietzsche's philosophy does have a center, and that the left learns a great deal from Nietzsche when we read him as driven by a highly sophisticated reactionary political vision that informs all his major concepts and ideas. The most important Nietzschean concepts — from perspectivism, ressentiment, eternal return to the pathos of distance — are analyzed in the historical context in which Nietzsche lived and wrote, and several case-studies of prominent left-Nietzscheans from Jack London, Gilles Deleuze, Wendy Brown to Huey Newton are discussed. How to Read Like a Parasite makes a persuasive case for how we can overcome Nietzsche's damaging influence on the left, showing us how to read and understand his work without becoming victims of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Listen to Moral Minority here: https://pod.link/1728182343Charles and Devin from Moral Minority join us to discuss Nietzsche's concept of "the übermensch": what it is, what is in't and the deeper implications behind the figure of "the overman".Support the showSupport the podcast:https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcastZer0 Books and Repeater Media Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/zer0repeaterMerch: http://www.crit-drip.comOrder 'Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape': https://repeaterbooks.com/product/anti-oculus-a-philosophy-of-escape/Order 'The Philosopher's Tarot': https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-philosophers-tarot/Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/169wvvhiHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com​Revolting Bodies (Will's Blog): https://revoltingbodies.com​Split Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Daniel Tutt about the importance of the political left reading Nietzsche seriously. They talk about Nietzsche vs. Nietzscheanism, prolepsis and prophetic/esoteric and exoteric readings, and the Janus face of Nietzschean philosophy. They discuss building culture, caste and class, current leftist readings of Nietzsche, and Losurdo's four stages of Nietzsche. They also talk about Nietzsche and Marx on religion, reading Nietzsche as a parasite, and many more topics.Daniel Tutt is a philosopher and writer and has been trained in philosophy and psychoanalytic practice. He has taught philosophy at George Washington University and Marymount University. His interest areas and writing are focused on Marxist thought, Nietzsche's philosophy, and social power of the intellectual. He is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation and, his most recent book, How to Read Like A Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche.Website: https://danieltutt.com/Twitter: @danieltutt Get full access to Converging Dialogues at convergingdialogues.substack.com/subscribe

In this nonstandard episode, Gil and Owen are joined by Michael Peterson to talk about how dreadful utilitarianism is, consider some of the offers that folks have made to come guest on the show, and reflect on how deeply unimpressive LLMs are when it comes to actually taking a position. Just having some fun with it! Video of the recording is available to our supporters on Patreon.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:National Council on Disability, Response to Singer https://ncd.gov/newsroom/04232015münecat, "Sovereign Citizens: Pseudolaw & Disorder":https://youtu.be/KcxZFmKrxR8?si=s3Xu_nH7dS6NkrWdmusic:Vintage Memories by Schematist | https//schematist.bandcamp.comConnect by Astrale | https://go-stream.link/sp-astrale START OVER by HYMN | https://get.slip.stream/g3FFTJ My Space by Overu | https://go-stream.link/sp-overu 

Devin Goure is a scholar with a background in philosophy, an interest in psychology, mental health & neurodivergence. He holds a PhD in political theory. He's known as Left Nietzschean on X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DevinGoure You can find Devin's substack here: https://devingour.substack.com/ In this conversation, Devin and I discuss the meaning of leftism in modernity. I asked him a number of questions concerning how the ideas of Nietzsche can be used for the left. How does Nietzsche compliment a Marxist philosophy? Where does Nietzsche conflict with Marx? Or with Hegel? How can we square an anarchist reading of Nietzsche? And what are the errors in interpretation of figures like B.A.P.?

This week, we're diving into the world of psychology and exploring how things affect our level of happiness and living a life of purpose. Then, we'll look into an often-overlooked element of the Nietzschean philosophy in Eternal Recurrence. Thanks for listening and have an amazing week! Links: No Escape: Nietzsche's Concept of Eternal Recurrence https://blog.philosophicalsociety.org/2023/05/01/no-escape-nietzsches-concept-of-eternal-recurrence/ Perspective-changing experiences, good or bad, can lead to richer lives https://www.sciencenews.org/article/good-life-happy-meaning-richness-change-experiences-psychology Skull and Crown Ltd. www.skullandcrownltd.com Craftsman+ FB Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/craftsmanplus/ WCY Podcast YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/WhenceCameYou Ancient Modern Initiation: Special Edition http://www.wcypodcast.com/the-Shop The Master's Word- A Short Treatise on the Word, the Light, and the Self - Autographed https://wcypodcast.com/the-shop Get the new book! How to Charter a Lodge https://wcypodcast.com/the-shop Truth Quantum https://truthquantum.com Our Patreon www.patreon.com/wcypodcast Support the show on Paypal https://wcypodcast.com/support-the-show Get some swag! https://wcypodcast.com/the-shop Get the book! http://a.co/5rtYr2r

Giles Deleuze is one of the most significant figures of French postmodernism, famous for his work with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. In this episode, we're going to consider Deleuze's work, Nietzsche and Philosophy. In the words of Deleuze, the opposition to Hegel runs through the entirety of Nietzsche's work as its cutting edge. Nietzsche's philosophy is truly 'against the dialectic': as Nietzsche's work is perspectival and pluralistic, which represents the only significant challenge to the dialectical mode of thought. In contrast to dialectical labor and seriousness, Nietzsche's way of thinking affirms difference. Nietzsche asserts that being is not premised on negation, but affirmation, in which each force asserts its difference and enjoys that difference. In Deleuze, we find a new systemization of Nietzsche, in which Nietzsche's critique of morality, religion and the sciences can be reconceptualized as part of a struggle on Nietzsche's part against the triumph of reactive forces. Deleuze offers us a new language for discussing and understanding Nietzsche's work, and a radical re-evaluation of the eternal recurrence and the will to power. In this first part of our two-part series on Deleuze, we're going to consider Nietzsche's anti-Hegelianism, Deleuze's interpretation of sense, value & genealogy, the concepts of active and reactive, Nietzsche's typology, the metaphor the dicethrow, and the eternal return considered as a Nietzschean theory of time.

Support the show and get exclusive episodes: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/OneDime In this episode of the 1Dime radio podcast, I am joined by philosopher Daniel Tutt host of the Emancipations Podcast, to discuss his upcoming book "How To Read Like a Parasite", which presents a rich critique of how Leftists interpret Friedrich Nietzsche and Nietzsche's broader impact on the left today and throughout history. Daniel Tutt shares insights into Nietzsche's influence on leftist thought, emphasizing how his theories can be both valuable and problematic. The discourse explores Nietzsche's impact on left-wing thinkers ranging from Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and The Bolsheviks to Huey Newton and Jack London. Tutt draws on some critics of Nietzsche, such as György Lukács and Domenico Losurdo's book Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel. In this dialogue, we disset Nietzsche's views on politics, culture, class, slave morality, resentment, otium, truth and and the will to power. Tutt's upcoming book calls for a 'parasitic' interpretation of Nietzsche, in which we should take Nietzche as a challenge to the left and learn from his ideas while acknowledging that he is an enemy of the left rather than trying to ignore his reactionary politics to reinterpret his philosophy as being compatible with a Marxist emancipatory politics. These past two podcasts on Nietzche are my attempt to foster dialogue between left-Nietzchians, who believe a synthesis between Nietzche and Marx (or socialist policies more broadly) and left more skeptical thinkers, and see Nietzsche more as an enemy/challenge to the Left who should still be studied, rather than a thinker whose politics can be reconciled with a socialist/communist politics. Regardless of your views, Nietzsche and his philosophy are incredibly relevant in the age of late capitalism. Check out 1Dime's videos if you haven't already: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@1Dimee/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Become a Patron at ⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/OneDime⁠⁠⁠ to support the show Be sure to give 1Dime Radio a 5-star rating if you enjoyed!

A Merry All Hallow's Eve to Ye All! There will be a regular episode this Friday, but I can't resist the opportunity to release an episode on the day of Halloween. Mynaa and I discuss a Persian novel concerning Nietzschean existential horror! Sadegh Hedayat grew up in the Iran of the Shah, and was influenced by western writers such as Kafka & Hesse. The urban legends surrounding this text in Iran were oft-repeated from parents to children: "Don't read this book; those who read it commit suicide."  The Blind Owl is the story of an unnamed narrator who is haunted by an elusive, metaphysical scene that he witnesses by happenstance. The narrative is unreliable, and the recursive loops of his madness are woven into the repetitive phrases and descriptions; the characters are all copies of one another; the events of the novel are, in effect, the same narrative repeated ad nauseum. Central to the plot is the long illness and drug abuse of the narrator, and an endless downward spiral of insanity. Hedayat's writing often reflects existential horror, and could be compared to H.P. Lovecraft. Mynaa even suggested that certain passages resemble those in Ecce Homo. We do a review with minimal spoilers for the first fifteen minutes or so, then what follows is a very spoilery review where we analyze, speculate, and ramble about the imagery of this mysterious novel.