Just to take one example. Now we have this chat GPT and already students
are using it to write their papers and professors are using it to write their
lectures. Right, so it's like two machines talking to each other, you
know. Or for example, you know, there are these programs so you
can speak into it and then I'll translate it into Spanish or something like this.
So but every step that we take in that direction, are human capacities
like reading, writing, and so forth begin to sort of rust and disuse.
Yeah, not only do they rust and disuse, but at some point
there'll be a kind of cannibal element. Once they reote open chat GBT and
it starts to now continue to analyze what's coming in terms of writing and in
terms of it'll start to eat its own children. Yeah, and it'll create
a cannibalistic monster that will start to devolve because it's going to be basically cycling
back its own its own output. This is Jonathan Pejel. Welcome to the
Symbolic World. So hello everyone. I am very excited to be back with
Jacob Holland. He has been on the podcast before. He is the provost
of the University of Austin, and he is an expert both on ancient thinking
in terms of the ancient Greeks, but also biblical thinking as well and rabbinical
thinking. So this is going to be a great conversation. We want to
talk about the question of technology and all the way leading up to the issues
of AI and all of that. So, Jacob, you're exactly the person
I want to have this conversation with. Well, thanks, I feel the
same way. So my big question, my first question for you is have
you thought a bit about the different narratives about technologies that we find both in
ancient thinking, whether mythological or philosophical, and the that the Bible portrays the
question of technology. Let's say, yeah, I mean, you know,
I think that a lot of the issues that we're confronting today were already identified
by both of those traditions. And maybe one way to put it is,
if we go back to the Platonic texts, Plato makes a distinction between acquisition
and production as sort of kinds of sciences or arts, and philosophy is categorized
under acquisition. And what does that mean? The acquisition of knowledge, which
is a kind of openness or receptivity to the world, right so there's a
kind of anthropology behind this. Human beings are these souls that relate fundamentally to
reality, and our job, if you will, is to register those realities
and to take them in. Now, production is I mean the Greek word
is poisis, which could also be translated poetry, but it just means production
making. And the thing is that there's no pure receptivity. I guess I
would say if you're doing philosophy, for example, and this is really the
ancient sort of pistemology, you register, right what is there, and then
you articulate it. There's no philosophy without articulation. But that always has a
productive dimension. You're using the tools that you have generated, for example language,
you're selecting which of those tools you're going to employ. I mean,
you could represent reality mathematically or poetically or whatever, and so there's always this
kind of productive element. You're adding to what it is that you've taken in
technology from the Greek perspective, and I think this applies to the Bible as
well. Is obviously productive because we're making stuff, we're transforming nature, we're
building, and the danger there is that it can interpose itself between us in
reality and that ultimately, if we sort of follow the line of technological development
far enough, and here I would sort of flag AI, we might create
a kind of virtual reality, that is to say, a humanly produced reality
that substitutes for the world, to which this philosophical and I would say biblical
anthropology suggests that we are fundamentally meant to be open and to order ourselves.
Mind. Yeah, I think that that. So, you know, one
of the things that I read even in college, also because of post modernists,
really is the Plato'sphedra where Socrates talks about writing itself as having that problem,
which is something that a lot of modern people would be surprised because we
we actually like beyond writing. It's like whatever effects writing had on the civilization,
and we're way beyond it. But in some ways it was exactly that
problem, which is that we as humans are living spirits, right, we
are breathing living spirits that manifests me, that take in meaning. And but
there's a kind of organic dance to that. Right whereas as soon as you
fix something then it on the one hand, it makes it more powerful,
because right, you can send your text out, you can send emails out.
But on the other hand, it does, in fact, it can
in fact interpose itself the way you said, it's a supplement, it's an
it's an adding to language. And then it can become a kind of opacity
to what it is that you're that you're saying. You know, if we're
talking, you know, you and I face to face and you don't understand
what I'm saying, you know, you can ask me and I can answer,
and then we can have this kind of back and forth where we're tuning
in and we're tuning closer to what we want. But if you read a
text, that's what it is, that's it, like, that's what you
have and so so. On the one hand, it makes it possible for
me to access the thoughts of people that I that I can't meet. But
it also at the same time creates that difficulty, which is that you know,
it's like this, these fixed words are my vision of what it is
that's coming down to me. You know, it's a means, let's say,
But it can it can become something of an idol, like because if
you lose its connection to what it originally is, then it then it somehow
has a life of its own. You could say. And it's interesting because
a lot of the postmoditors that's actually what they want to do. They want
to like liberate the text from the author in some weird way, like make
it have a kind of life of its own, where there is no there's
no like thread that goes back to the to the person, but rather it
becomes almost something that you play with, you know, just that on at
its own level. Yeah, I think that's right. You know. The
features is really interesting because I mean there are these interesting kind of contradictions.
So this is a written Platonic dialogue. Yeah, thank goodness, it's written
because we have access to the thinking of plat out. But the little story
there is to Egyptians. One is the pharaoh and one's a god, right
talking, and one of them is displaying the arts that he's produced and finally
gets to right. And the objection that the other registers is that this will
not be a tool of memory. That is to say, when writing is
introduced, the idea is we're not going to forget stuff because we've written it
down. Increase memory, it'll increase the is the is the argument of the
of the god, and the god is like a he's almost like a hephacedis
figure. He's like a kind of dark god of technology, yes, right
version, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, And I mean, as
a side note, it's interesting that this takes place in Egypt, because I
would suggest that Egypt, with its man god, it's Pharaoh, it's magicians
who exercise some kind of TECHNI right, in causing little miracle, a little
you know, strange like unnatural events to occur, and so forth. It's
enormously impressive technological achievements, by which I mean, for example, the Pyramids,
or I mean I was in Egypt a number of years ago, and
I have to say I've never seen more exquisite jewelry. I mean just the
you know, and when you take sort of the sarcophag guy and all these
things. But what's interesting is so Egypt devoted tremendous social resources to the production
of these kinds of items and obelisks and huge things like this. What were
they for? Primarily they were to honor and be stuffed in the tombs of
dead man gods. Okay, I should say incidentally that Egypt was also a
kind of symbol in the ancient world. I mean, Plato associates it with
death, with a kind of desiccation lack of life. Okay, And I
would want to connect that as a long discourse perhaps, but with technology as
a kind of substitute. Okay. So anyway, the God points out this
will actually be a tool of forgetfulness, and the suggestion is and what he
means by there is is, or let me put another way, it will
suppress recollection in a philosophical sense, which I would take to mean something like
a living openness to the fundamental things that need metaphysically, religiously and so forth
to be remembered by us, to be taken into our souls. So you're
absolutely right writing that serves is a kind of mediation, right. And obviously
today where young people and maybe not even that young people have sort of learned
not to answer the phone but to use text and so forth, they're all
kinds of further layers of mediation between human beings. So Socrates favored this face
to face discussion like we're having now, And I do think that, you
know, if we look at again artificial intelligence, just consider the levels of
mediation that are involved in when I sort of look at my smartphone or something
like that, or when I'm relating to a glowing electronic screen. What's happening
there. Human beings are observing the world, they are representing it in language
or mathematics or something. They're then encoding it into data zeros and ones,
and then that is being presented to us. Right, So there's a kind
of I mean, we've taken writing and kind of amplify I put it on
steroids, if you will. So I think this is a really important issue,
definitely, And all the imagery that happens in Fedris is related to this,
and it's actually very similar to the one that you find in the Bible,
that the way that Egypt is represented also in this text, with all
of the other symbolisms that are brought about in Fedris, it's similar to the
way Egypt is represented in scripture. Because Fedris and Socrates leave the city.
They cross they leave their city and they cross a river. You know,
it's like when you cross a river, you know what that means, Like
you're either going out into the wilderness or you're coming into the into into your
home, you could say. So they cross a river, and then there
are all these weird things that Socrates does, like sometimes he talks, he
covers his face and talks through a veil, and there's all these these kinds
of weird symbolic things that Socrates is doing. And it seems to manifest what
I've talked about quite a bit in Scripture, which is the garments of skin.
I think that the imagery of the garments of skin in Scripture is very
much akin to what is happening in this idea of the supplement that Plato is
trying to help us see, which is the garments of skin. On the
one hand, what they do is that they increase your capacity to live in
a world that's hostile to you, right, But that's what they do.
But at the same time, they are made out of death, first of
all, and they are also a weakening of you at the same time,
because you're always putting yourself in more danger as you're moving out. So that's
what and that seems to be what technology does in general, and has to
do with recollection as well. So think about think about the example I'd love
to use all the time is fire making. So my ancestors could spend a
lot of energy. They knew how to make fire, but it would take
forever, and they would use a string and a bow or whatever they would
use, and they could just kind of and even that they needed the string
in the bow, but they could they could make fire. It's like I
don't have to think about that. I just have to flick a lighter.
I have fire, So I'm a million times more powerful than my ancestors.
But if I don't have that lighter, I'm going to dive cold in the
forest pretty much. And so it's like think of technology if you think of
technology that way, which is that we've increased our power to the extent that
we can move out and go into space. And you know, I can
live here in Quebec where there's like eight months of winter, so it makes
me more powerful, but it also makes me closer, brings me closer to
death, and makes me more fragile at the same time. And that seems
to be what technology itself does, especially writing, and especially what we could
call now information technology, which is that I know I have access to more
information than all my ancestors together, but I don't have to hold it inside
me in any way, so I can pretend to be smart and be a
complete idiot or not a total idiot, but I'm far less integrated than you
know, the ancients would have been. But I also have all this access,
so it can it can. It's that duality of of of power and
weakness, or or like using death against death maybe is the best way to
describe it. Yeah, it strikes me that there there's some sort of optimal
relationship between man, nature and technology. I mean, you know, you're
absolutely right. So Adam and Eve sin God prepares them close out of animal
skins. Obviously, this then is a fundamental divorce between human beings and these
animals with whom they communed in the garden, and also from God because they
use it when they first put on coverings. It's to hide themselves from God,
right, So they hide themselves from God, and then they buffer themselves
from the animal, and they create this like buffer between them and between God
and the animal. They're like isolated in the world, or amenated is the
best way to word to use. Maybe. So one of the things that
left into my mind when you were speaking was you've all Harari's Sapiens. In
the beginning of that book, he makes a rather strong case. I think
that the hunter gathering age of our existence was in some ways maybe the most
intellectually stimulating and kind of rich compared to for example, you know, I'm
an accountant and I'm looking at a computer screen all day. Why is that?
Because individuals had to possess a range of technical skills. Right, You've
got to be able to kill animals, You've got to be able to skin
them. You have to be able to sow these garments. You have to
be able to make fire. You've got you know, you have to be
able to identify plants, to pick things, and to sort of respond to
the clusive nature. Now they obviously live much closer to nature. The thing
about nature is that it's hostile. I mean, we know this from the
Bible, we know this from the Greeks. It's not simply hostile, right,
It's also beautiful and splendid and nurturing and so forth. But we have
to deal with the hostility element. In fact, I would actually if you
sort of ask me, like, what's work, I would category work as
sorting chaos, right, just kind of getting sort of figuring things out so
you can so you can survive. Yeah, work is a good though in
scripture too, it's weird because it's like it's a consequence of the fall but
it ends up being a way to be saved from the fall, both personally
in terms of your own soul, but then also just because now you do
have to work the earth to make things grow, but right, that's also
how you survive. Yeah, so obviously we're not hunter gatherers. We've advanced.
You know, it's interesting because people still talk about progress, you know,
and so what is progress? Well, progress is also regress, right,
and now we rely on all sorts of things that we have no idea
how they work. I mean, this is something Ortega, you guys said,
writes about in the Revolt of the Masses. It's something Freud writes about
in Civilization and its discontents as well. He speaks about a technological man as
a kind of prosthetic god. We put out all our stuff and where you
might think of like a you know in the anime, were enhanced with an
exoskeletons fit and stuff like this, and technology obviously, you know, brings
discontents. But what's interesting then is that we are unable to reproduce the conditions
of our own existence. In other words, no single person can do that.
I think your named rosenstock Husi once said that A citizen is a person
who, if need be, can refound civilization. In the modern world.
There aren't any citizens by that definition, if you see what I mean.
I mean, well, there might be citizens in the sense that there could
be people with enough practical wisdom and so forth to sort of refound political life.
But if we're talking about civilization as we now depend on it and we're
utterly dependent, you're right, that becomes very difficult. One last thing I
would say here is that every technological advance subtracts, and this is obviously implicit
in what you were saying from our own capabilities. I'm going to wave at
artificial intelligence again, because just to take one example, Okay, now we
have this chat GPT, and already students are using it to write their papers
and professors are using it to write their lectures. Right, so it's like
two machines talking to each other, you know. Okay, so why do
I need or or for example, you know, there are these programs so
you can speak into it and then I'll translate it into Spanish or something like
this. So but every step that we take in that direction are human capacities
like reading, writing, and so forth begin to sort of rust and disuse.
Yeah, not only do they rust and disuse, but at some point
there'll be a kind of cannibal element to the technology, because you know,
chat GPT. Once they we owe to open CHADGPT and it starts to now
continue to analyze what's coming in terms of writing and in terms of it'll start
to eat its own children. Yeah, and it'll create a cannibalistic, cannibalist
monster that will start to devolve because it's going to be basically cycling back its
own its own output. And so it's like that, I don't see how
they're going to solve that problem in the in the long term because right,
and but even the fact that we know that it'll do that is an image
of what it's also doing to us, which is ultimately a kind of diminishing
of the human spirit as it as it increases in power. Yes, look,
this is this is already happening. I mean, weirdly, Jonathan,
I took some solace from the fact that chat GPT is cannibalizing itself in a
way. So just to be clear, right, what does chat GPT do.
Well, it goes out there and it and it kind of looks at
all this data right goes to the internet, right, which is not a
particularly intelligent pool on the average. I mean, you just you know,
which is incidentally why chat GPT makes stuff up because it obviously it sort of
can't sort out what's true or what's false, and so it kind of looks
at things and makes these what things are logical connections, but so that if
you can just calculate some antic distance, right, I mean, there was
there was a a professor told me about a paper he'd gotten on Romeo and
Juliet, you know, and it was like Romeo, you know, and
the calculates and the montaguess are worth and then Julia catches a cab and she
goes to you know, and so I mean, because this is right.
So so you kind of take this low pool and you scoop it all up
and you connect these things and you spit something out and then that becomes part
of the larger pool, which the next chat GPT it, you know,
looks at and so it's sort of like consuming your own waist. Now,
actually they cut they cut Jetchiepete off from they stopped training it a few years
ago. Oh, they've actually cut it. It's only within itself, but
they can't do that forever. Like I know, they probably did it because
they know the problem that they're setting up in the world. But at some
point they're going to have to reopen it because they can't if they want chad
GBT to keep up with what's happening, they'll have to reopen it so that
it goes back and starts to to to re calculate. So so I think
they're maybe they're looking for a solution for it, but they have, at
least for now, they have cut it off, which which is which is
something Being hadn't done for a while. And that's why Being was like a
psycho like Being would would just go into psycho mode and just become like you're
you're like your your your stalking ex girlfriend or you know, turned into you
know, like the the like passive aggressive or whatever. Like they were all
at all these personality default because it was literally training on the internet. So
that's that's really interesting. But let's go back to your cannibalization thing. Uh,
it sort of reminds me of, you know, a pagan god.
I mean, I think maybe in an earlier discussion, we I observed that
the biblical god feeds us right, man in the wilderness or Christ you know,
the Communion and so forth. But the pagan gods really one could argue,
and I won't do it right now, they sort of dying on human
beings. I mean, you know, think of like the the Athena and
these various gods you know at Troy sort of sitting like vultures compared to vultures,
and they're just so hungry to consume the bad, the blood and so
forth. Now what that means is that again human beings are relating only to
themselves, but now through the mediation of this artificial intelligence, which is why,
incidentally, I read somewhere that like thousands of writers were suing open AI
because it was training its language on proprietarial works by these authors, which you've
got to do because the movement, like, if you just keep training on
you know, the Internet, you're going to get your start at a low
point and you're just kind of going to decline. It's going to be sort
of mediocrity. But what that means is it needs to cannibalize sort of living
thinking, right, it needs to like it needs these humans generating new stuff.
And this is the large problem with our society. I mean, even
before these these kinds of artificial intelligence advances, Hollywood was cannibalizing itself. Right,
you know, I don't know such and such iteration seven, right,
you know exact or something. But think here, think, let me throw
something out for you and see what you think about this. So one of
the so if you look at the Matrix movie, so you have a situation
where the matrix is this artificial intelligence and it's feeding off of our energy.
Right, So basically we're batteries, but what they mean by batteries is something
like the electricity we produce. There's something a little naive about that. The
the way that the AI actually works now is it's it's actually farming intelligence from
humans. So AI isn't intelligent. But what it does is that we provide
quality. We provide quality, We provide judgment to the AI. So the
way they actually train the I, right, is that the I generates a
bunch of junk, and then there are people, actual people who have to
look at that junk and say yes, no, yes, no, good
bad, good bad. They'll use like the capshas for example, you know,
like when you're when you're answering a Capsha and you're you're you're like telling
it where the lights are. You're you're training AI when you're doing that,
because AI doesn't know the difference between a traffic light and something else. But
if you've got a million people telling telling the AI, oh, that's the
traffic light, that's the traffic light. That's the traffic light, then you're
then the humans. You're literally farming intelligence from humans. And so this weird
thing where humans become like so now you have these low paid you know,
uh, farms of people that are like living in horrible like offices, and
all they do all day is tell the AI, like what's even in terms
of social media and stuff, like what's good, what's bad? So you
know, that's all you do even for like the social media companies too,
Like you have people all day all they do is watch horrible content, you
know, like and then all they do is is rated and say this is
bad, this is bad, this is bad, so that Facebook can now
catch it automatically. Right, so you actually have the idea of this like
monster, right, like this monster that is eating our attention, our intelligence
and like subjugating us to it. But really, like, how can I
say this swallowing our soul, like actually swallowing our soul, and it's like
it's happening in front of us. That's that's quite amazing. And this brings
up another thing, which is, how does a child learn what a cat
is? Okay, it encounters a cat and then someone says, that's a
cat, and it takes a couple of iterations of this. All right,
why can't AI do it? Because human beings have what the ancients called intuition.
What's intuition. Intuition is direct, unmediated access to reality. Now let
me stop. I can imagine the skeptic listening to saying, oh wait a
second, of course it's mediated, right, your brain, opt nerves.
This whole thing is extremely complicated. We can struct, but let us say,
okay, fine, it's all relative on the scale of relativity. This
is the most direct, unmediated thing, which is why, frankly, we
have a critique of writing in Plato's Fiedris, because again, writing is this
mediation, and what needs to be preserved is this capability of immediate intuition.
Aristotle develops this and talks about noisis, which is an intellectual intuition, right,
yeah, in the in the Orthodox tradition, the news and the idea
of nuetic capacity is the highest form of knowledge. Right, It's more than
knowledge in the sense of the way that we think of thinking or whatever.
It is direct grasping and in the Orthodox kind of mystical theology, the news
is the capacity we have to also be united with God, because it's the
capacity we have to have first of all direct grasping of the things around us.
But then ultimately it's that which also makes us possible to like, you
know, enter into the embrace of God, because it's a it's a type
of knowledge that isn't just intellectual, it's it really is like the fullness of
your being, you know, joining with something. Yes, and look it's
not simply knowledge of God, but knowledge of human beings. I mean,
we don't do this in English, but you know we've got say in German,
someone might say, uh ken in zy Jonathan pleasure, which means are
you familiar with Jonathan? No one would say viscen z Jonathan pleasure, which
means do I have epistemic knowledge? Do I have a scientific comprehension of Jonathan?
U? Now, I would argue that anything that poses as a scientific
comprehension of Jonathan is not the best kind of knowledge of Jonathan. So if
I say, oh, he's a good guy, or he's smart or something
like this, this is a response that is that that I have that has
been elicited from me by my immediate face to face presence with you. And
human beings have a kind of inner infinity like God, and that's something that
we cognize sort of directly. So, but going back to AI and this
cannibalistic stuff, one needs to raise the question of what do we mean by
intelligence. AI has intelligence in a very specific sense. It's a kind of
discursive intelligence. It goes across data and it arranges it and moves it around.
It lacks this intuition. So when we relate to AI generated products,
we are relating to something that has lost its connection in some base or never
had a connection, never had a derivative it's derivative information necessary, which is
why you know, there's a kind of fundamental stupidity. You're you're rather harrowing
picture of people sitting in us I imagine aind of you know, windowless room
typing in like cat cat cat cat, or suggests that you know like this,
like what does it mean that that is the foundation of artificial intelligence.
I had a professor who very cleverly said, I don't know why everyone's interested
in artificial intelligence. I'm looking for the real thing, right, real intelligence
that's hard to have to find in the world already. Yeah, exactly,
So there's a kind of unmooring. And again, if we go back to
what I said at the beginning of our discussion, that this kind of Biblical
and Greek anthropology is the soul is open to reality, both both the chaos
and reality and the and the kind of moral and intellectual measures, the you
know, transcendent eternal things. If that's the case, then relating to AI
is a is a kind of shutting down of that, because we don't even
have like AI simply lacks any fundamental connection or a direct connection with reality.
Yeah, and I think that this is this is a good place to talk
about how there's a really a good a good way to understand AI today is
to understand the manner in which idolatry was kind of understood also in scripture,
for example. So if you want to take the idea of technification, because
you talked about like what's the right balance of technology, like how can technology
serve its proper purpose? So you have two images in the Bible. They're
close to each other because you know they're in the same story, which is,
on the one hand, you have the golden Calf, which Aaron builds
instead of the revelation, and people end up worshiping the calf itself. You
know, it's in worshiping the work of their hands, you could say.
And then the other one is the revelation of the Tabernacle, which is a
technical thing. Like the Tabernacle is like a little city. It is civilis
it is like a microcosmal civilization. It's a microcosm of technicality. There are
the use of metals of gold, silver, and a bronze, you know,
in a in a in a in a hierarchy. There's this. There's
a whole cosmic image in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple, and that
that seems to be the highest image of what technology can be. Is an
ordered, ordered supplementarity, but directed towards the transcendence, directed towards the transcendent
and not captured within its the fascination with itself, uh, you know,
and a kind of cannibalistic move where you The fascination of the technical itself becomes
the the or the capacity for power itself becomes the motor which makes us engage
with it. Yeah, this is so a bunch of ideas popped into my
head. Is as you were just speaking. So the gold that made the
Golden Calf, as you know, was was jeweler's earrings and things like this
taken from Egypt. Now it was in ended for the adornment of the tabernacle.
What's really interesting there, and this just occurred to me, is that
that story could be interpreted as an answer to the question how do we reorient
technology, how do we take it in its really monstrous kind of exemplification in
Egypt and reoriented toward I mean, this is obviously something that probably has occurred
to you. But so let's talk about the Golden Camp for a minute.
So Moses is up there on the mountain communing with God. He doesn't come
back. The Israelites say to Aaron, you know, the guy's not coming
back. Make us this God. And there's this weird ventriloquism that goes on
because once Aaron makes the calf, which is definitely a technical thing, right,
he has to shape it and all this kind of stuff. The Israelites
say, this is the Lord, your God, who took you out of
the land of Egypt. So they plagiarize God. There's there's another act of
cannibalism, by the way, like in some sensor know if that's exactly right?
But and what is the what is the calf? Well, there's a
weird connection between the calf and what's going on today? All right, what
are like what why do say Americans love? You know, digital stuff?
Right? Well, I mean, if you ask anybody, you know,
what's the highest traffic on the internet? Porn? Right? Technology, by
the way, will generate better and better sex robots and things like this.
The golden calf was I mean, after they made the calf, this kind
of well somehow it stimulated this back an alien celebration the next day. So
like the calf is connected with the unleashing of these desires, which no doubt
we're suppressed in eachypt. These people were slaves, but here they are in
the desert and they're like, the master's gone. We compelled this guy to
make the calf. Now we're going to do our thing right, because now
we're going to enjoy all those things that we were never able to enjoy in
our enslaved condition, and so we got that the tabernacle. I think it's
really interesting because what's happening there is to try to present in an architectural space
the possibility for the encounter with the infinite. Right, so you've got this
finite construction, and this is obviously how icons work and so forth. How
do you solve this problem? You know? But it's a very interesting contrast
because there is a proper place for gold and silver and adornments and these technical
products. Yeah, so I think your insight is very is very strong.
You know, there is a so you could say, so think about like
even in the garments of skin situation, it's very interesting because God gives Adam
and Eve these garments of skin, which, by the way, many,
at least in the Orthodot tradition, and I'm pretty sure in some Rabbidical traditions
as well, it's kind of like it's basically your biological body. It's like
it's your biological body of death, right, not that Adam and Eve didn't
have bodies before the fall, but that their bodies were more subtle. You
could say, and that these bodies of death that we're in, you know
that you eat and then you excrete and all of this and and all the
desires that come with it, they're they're related to the garments of skin,
and so there's a relationship. And what it does, it's an increase in
power, right, body is an increase in power, just like a guy
who is buff and has big muscles has more power. More you have body,
more you have power. And so it's it's an extension of that logic,
which is that if I add more body, I add more power.
If I have if I'm strong, or if I if I have a mecha
suit on top, like you said, then that mecha suit makes me more
powerful. But there's a connection between that and the animality itself, right,
a fall into animality, you could say, which is also an abandonment to
our desires and to to the to the more you know, appetite aspect of
who we are, and so like, if you think about it, it
all kind of comes together. So we tend to oppose, for example,
the world of technology and the world of animality because one is artificial, one
is natural. But if you understand it as this idea of increase in body.
Then the idea of a metallic calf, right, a metallic animal,
which is, you know, God told Adam to name the animals, and
now all of a sudden they take the animal and they put it up as
a god. They're basically doing the opposite of what God told Adam to be,
which is to be on top of the animal that name them. And
now they become subject to it, subject to the body, subject to these
kind of licentious desires, and so all of this stuff kind of goes together.
You know, in the Book of Revelation, there's this image of the
whore and the beast, right, so there's a horse sitting on a beast,
and the beast is civilization. You know, there are different ways to
understand that in the text, because the beasts are related to the Book of
Daniel and the perception of the different civilizations that like, you know, the
different animals, and so it's like these two things go together, right.
The technification and increase in power leads to licentiousness and leads to us being having
more. And you can think about it just like just very practically, which
is that if you let's say you have a little let's say you have a
little fault in yourself, right you I don't know you you look at women
or whatever. You have a little thing. Then now I'm gonna get And
that's kind of there. You're you're trying to manage it, but you're struggling.
And and I'll give you a million dollars. Right, It's like,
all of a sudden, your increase in power becomes a door for whatever that
little thing in you was to increase. And so technology does that, does
that on steroids, especially something like information technology, right, which is intelligent
technology. So the relationship between Internet and porn or Internet and all these things,
this isn't something which is completely unavoidable, like you couldn't have it anyway
else, or at least not easily. You know, it's not not accidental
that these things develop the way they did, just as it's not accidental that
they developed towards porn and the military. It's like increase in power, increase
in desire, increase in desire to dominate, to consume. All these things
are related to what technology is and technology does. Yeah, that's very interesting.
You know. One way to think about these things, or at least
one way that I think about them is in terms of the categories of work
and leisure. So human beings relate to reality. Work is a kind of
sorting of chaos. What's the point of work? Well, let's go back
to the Greeks, so Aristotle says, he's critiquing the Spartans. War is
for the sake of peace, and in peace we have business and we have
leisure. Business is for the sake of leisure. Now we need a sort
of thick conception of leisure. So I think here are productive conceptions of leisure.
For Aristotle, what's leisure for? He critiques the Greek so they said,
they drink and they tell myths and stuff. Although I think he's underestimating
the importance of mythsdown and then the symbolic richness and so forth. But what's
leisure for? From the Biblical perspective, Let's take the Jews Sabbath Sabbath and
what is that? That's an opening again to the highest things. This is
connected right with someone like Joseph Peeper, who, incidentally, you know,
I mean, he has got this wonderful book on leisure of the basis of
culture, and he sees leisure as a kind of plugging into the life giving
forces of the divine of nature and so forth. What's happened? So why
do I mention leisure? Now I'm thinking of AI again? Two things?
Where can leisure have become confused? So you were talking about the capture stuff,
right, you're actually working for AI when you're doing capture. But why
are you entering capture? Because you want to get to the good stuff,
because you want entertainment. Or every time I log into this or I'm like,
I'm gonna have fun, I watch this TikTok or something, they're getting
information about you. So you're actually working, but you're working for somebody else
you don't even know it, but you're enjoying leisure. What happens with leisure?
Well, this is a very serious problem. I mentioned Joseph Peeper.
He's writing he gives us talk on leisure The Basis of Culture, and another
one called the Philosophical Act. It's nineteen forty seven, forty eight, after
World War Two. Europe is being rebuilt. The emphasis in education is on
you've got to have useful knowledge. Right, it's all for work, and
Peeper is worried about a world of total work where we don't have exposure to
leisure. Another person who're worried about leisure is John Maynard Kaines, who wrote
an article in the early thirties called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren and Kines this
is a very important Kines said, this is the beginning of the depression.
And he says, basically, I'm obviously paraphrasing. Look, readers, you're
not gonna believe this, but here's the good news. In one hundred years,
we won't need to work, okay, because our productive capacities will increase
and so forth. And then we're going to confront the greatest problem in human
history. What do we do with our leisure? And the reason that's a
great problem is we don't educate people for leisure. Go back to Aristotle.
He was critiquing the spartans. They don't know how to be at leisure.
All they know is how to win wars. Yeah, so what happens with
our leisure? Well, in leisure you you know, I have a statement
around here somewhere of the some the world development organizations says something like AI is
going to be awesome. It's going to liberate all these human capacities. We're
going to be at leisure because's going to put all these people up, we
won't have to work, right, and you know, we're going to develop
ourselves. We're going to paint, we're going to have you know, learn
languages and all this stuff. Well much more likely, you know, you're
going to have sexual robot. That's right, most likely. So there's this
kind of you know, we this is why I think, I mean one
reason why this is just profoundly destabilizing. But just to go back to your
point, Okay, so we we we our bodies are bigger, we have
more control. It's a disordering because the point of technology was to do the
work part, and now the technology is like, oh, we're going to
give you the leisure stuff, but you haven't ordered, like you've lost the
order in some way. Yeah, so that all oh man, that image
is like, I think your insight is perfect. It helps me understand even
more like the idea of the hore and the beast as these two radicals.
Right, it's like this kind of this work and this leisure that is that
is licentious, licentious and loss in terms of purpose, right, it's just
kind of wasteful, and that there is something about the days of the week
in Sabbath, that the structural creation itself, which are the proper relationship of
all these things to all these things. So it's like, in some ways
you could say the whole purpose of the week is to lead to this moment
of rest, like rest in God. So it properly aligns things where it's
like the work is there towards so you can imagine like a ritual, like
a ritual in the in the tabernacle or liturgy in church. Right, so
it's like we're we're doing all these things so that finally we come to the
point where you know, we receive the blood, the blood and wine and
we kind of enter into this moment, this ten cented moment, and so
it's like that would that's and then we sit together and we eat and we
have we feast. It's like that's the leisure, Like the leisure is it?
It's rightly ordered, right, So then the leisure, instead of being
the lowest thing, which it is in our society, it becomes the highest
thing. Actually becomes like a kind of it transcends work in that way,
like in the right way of thinking about that. Yeah, and it's so
important. So do we sit together and we feast. Human beings are social
and political animals. We we crave even if we don't know it. The
meaning that comes through through rich connections with other human beings. Technology today is
sort of driving us apart. I mean again, as leisure today and anology
and leisure today is actually fragmenting us. Yeah, that's right, all these
forces of animization, even simply you know. So I have a colleague and
he said, well, let me tell you my daughter. She's like seventeen.
She had her iPhone and uh it was ringing and it was her best
friend. And she said to her dad, what do I do? Like,
why does she want to call me? And he says, well,
you actually have to answer the phone to figure that out. Right, I'm
just telling this story because you know now it's like text, right, so
so, but you're right. Entertainment, I mean, what is entertainment.
There used to be these things called movie theaters where kind of cool things would
happen sometimes, you know, with audiences and the way people are reacting and
just the buzz and all this stuff, and workplaces that are entering out people
are going to be put out of work. By the way. Many people
will think this is some kind of amazing blessing. So you were talking about
money, I give you a million bucks. My son had a teacher when
he was in eighth grade who was doing a documentary on what happens to lottery
winners. Yeah, they all go sour, they go nuts. And this
is actually another problem that you know, we can discuss. That's a great
image of what's coming. Like, if it's true that I was going to
make us not work, then look at what happens to a lottery winners.
Oh exactly. And it also comes down to sort of fundamental questions, sort
of moral questions, because if you pull Americans, sixty seventy percent don't like
their jobs. Okay, here's the thing. Though, you go to work,
you get a paycheck, you come home, you put food on the
table, You can buy your kid a bike, you can you know,
there's dignity. Your life has some meaning. Now I just took that away
from you, right, and I took away from you. So the guy
who wins the lottery, first think he does, he quits his job and
he moves right. All that structure your friends who used to have the kind
of basic architecture of your life is gone. Yeah, now what are you
going to do. Yeah, so, I mean these are really really fundamental
problems. Yeah, and it's interesting. I was actually it's a funny cause
we're talking about this. I just came back from Greece. I went on
this trip with Ralston College and we kind of visited all the ancient sites and
we also went to Mount Athos together. And you know, you look at
the life of the monks, and they probably have more leisure than any of
us. You know, it's it's bounded with a lot of work. So
they have like a certain amount of hours of work, and then they also
have all this this you know, they kind of have this this leisurely life,
but their leisure is really directed in that direction, like it's directed towards
you know, self transcendence really like you know, worshiping God and moving moving
towards that which is h which is the good, the true, and the
beautiful, you know. And so yeah, so so so there's an image
you know, in the Book of Revelation. I talked about the whore and
beasts, Right, there's another image in the Book of Revelation, which is
the heavenly City, right, the heavenly Jerusalem and heavenly Jerusalem is also a
technical image, just like the tabernacle or the temple. It's a city now,
it's it's but it also has that order you could say, where it's
like everything is directed towards God. And so it says that all the nations
bring their glory into the city, right, all the kings give up their
crowns basically to that which is high. And so it's like civilization technology,
but directed towards that which is good, serving and basically serving it and therefore
making what they have meaningful. Right, And so there's a sense in which
you know, I want to I want to be careful with people, like
I'm not anti technology myself, and I'm sure you're not as well. That
technology could be amazing, like of course, if we were oriented properly,
it could be. It could be an amazing thing full of glory. But
the difficulty we have is that we approach technology like the ancient Israelites approach the
golden calf or you know, like something to or even how Adam and Eve
approached the apple. It's like something to take. It's like it's mine.
I'm gonna I'm gonna make myself more powerful. I'm gonna make myself more and
in doing that already, like you said, the problem is that that very
mechanism makes it impossible for us to approach the rest properly because like it's like
we're trained to make more money now, right, It's like our whole is
education systems, to become more powerful, make more money, develop technology.
Everything is focused on that, but nobody asked what it's for. Like nobody
really is asking the question, like what could this really be for? Yeah,
look, of course I agree with you. I mean I'm not anti
technology. Whether I were anti technology or not would be completely irrelevant because it's
here to stay. We have to live with it. It does make many
wonderful things possible, this conversation right here, or we're talking to each other
in real time and others can listen to us. I think it's really wonderful.
But here, So maybe one way to put this is in terms of
the thought of Henry Adams. So within the last year or two I read
Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams, and it was quite it's really an
amazing book. So Henry Adams is born in eighteen thirty eight and he's he's
the grandson and great grandson of two American presidents. Right, and so he's
like high up there, and they live in Boston, and he says,
and he has this kind of moral and religious education, and as a boy,
he says, Boston had solved the universe, right, like, look
at these Unitarian clergymen, the wonderful civic everything is wonderful. Fast forward to
nineteen hundred. Right, you've got you've got like adventure of electric lights,
telegraphs, telephones, right, steam, mentionines, railways, finally airplanes.
You know, you've got Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism. You have a radioactive
decay. The atomic nuclei had been discovered and so forth. And science is
saying, oh, order is an accidental product, Like it doesn't it's not
natural, and human beings are like vibrating balls of motion and stuff like this.
And what Henry Adams says is in this period, what he symbolizes as
the Virgin had been eclipsed by what he symbolizes as the dynamo. Okay,
and he ran into the had these big dynamos that like the Chicago World's Fair
and stuff, and he saw these things amazing. So he has this theory
of history which is human beings. And this is really relates to the ancient
anthropology. We sort of are what we pay attention to and direct our energies
to. And for millennia it was Christianity, right, it was biblical religion,
and it produced you know, crusades and cathedrals and music and all these
wonderful things. Now it's the dynamo. So the version appeals works through the
heart and the mind through love and appeals to this higher element. The dynamo
is something completely different. It promises material solvation in this life, not salvation
in the afterlife. And it's dynamic, it keeps changing. And so I
guess I would say the problem is that we relate to this moving thing.
And then Adams has what's famously known as the Atoms curve, which is he
calculates he's doing coal production from eighteen hundred on. Every decade the power of
able to human beings technologically doubles. Yeah. Now, so the rate of
acceleration is saying, but the curve at some point becomes super steepid like this
think yeah, And so the problem is we don't really know how to deal
with it because its too fast. It kind of explodes our life. Yeah,
I don't know. It seems like that can't go on forever. I
don't know, because also just for the for human capacity to deal with it,
because at some point we'll also we also go insane because the right also
because we don't. It seems like that curve. There also seems to be
a trade off that humans make, which is that, like you said,
we are what we care about, and so we also can't care about this
dynamo at the same level as we care about and care about wisdom at the
same time. Like it's either with the hierarchy. As soon as it's inverted,
it's it's real. So as this technological stuff improves our capacity for wisdom,
our capacity to discern, you know, becomes less and less because the
technological process makes it so. Right, A chip that increases the power of
a computer doesn't care where it's used, right, it doesn't. It can
be used to power video games, or it can be used to power missile
or you know, our weapon doesn't matter. Well, and look you mentioned
the computer chips so doubling every decade, well since nineteen seventy. The capacities
and you know, memory storage and stuff like this, and speed of processors
has doubled every year or two. And now we add artificial intelligence, whose
curve or progression is literally unmeasurable by human beings because we don't actually understand how
it works. I don't even know what's going on like a black bus.
Right, So Henry Adams actually says, look, you know, at some
point the human mind might just crack up like a media or bouncing into the
Earth's atmosphere. Right now, when you add in, I'm just going to
throw this out. When you add in how technology is used today, social
media and all these other things, well, you know, a rapid increase
in mental illness, like the crackup is already happening. And because you also
have you know, you know, cyber bullying and all these other phenomena and
so forth. And incidentally, hey is is also being used. You know,
Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation are developing increased tools of manipulation
and surveillance and propaganda and all these things. So, yeah, whatever's happening
in public, you know that there's ten times more things happening right outside of
our perception. Let's say that. So if we add in like the ideological
component of it too, which is you know, you have your own thinking
and you get shot down, so you put your head down. I think
it actually encourages the development of two kinds of human beings. And let's use
the image of hitting the like the atmosphere, the hard, dense aerodynamic soul
that's like gonna just you know, like you know. And so my examples,
like you know, Homosylvietica's you know, they have tremendous pressures of communism
and these are the commissaris, you know, but much more common today is
hey, I don't want to crack up on the atmosphere. I am going
to be weightless, I'm going to be empty, I'm going to throw over
all my convictions. I'm just gonna you know, because wherever the wind is
blow, that's cool, right, And so we see these kind of psychological
reactions with this incredibly steep curve of technology, with all the pressures that come
with it. Yeah, it's it's definitely going to it's definitely going to be
interesting. You know. One of the images again, sorry to keep coming
back to the Book of Revelation. Yeah, it's just because it's one of
the best images. Because one of the images that comes about there's two.
Actually. One is, of course the beast, the beast that speaks,
right, the image of the beast that speaks, and that's what seduces everybody.
It's very fascinating. But the other one is that at some point the
beast kills the whore. Right in the story, So the idea is that
this horror and this hor is riding this beast, and it's like everybody is
putting all their seed into the whore. Like everybody's just like just just chaos
and mixture and you know whatever, all all the possibilities. But at some
point, the beast kills the whore. And it's like because, like you
said, at some point, the the control aspect of the technology and the
surveillance aspect, all of this stuff is going to ramp up to a point
where the very mechanisms that broad about like the licentiousness, are going to turn
into hard steel, right, and they're just going to control everything. Because
as things frey and I thinks, break apart, and that's people's mental health
breaks apart, there's no other solution except to create top down structures that will
hold things together. Because obviously, you know, whoever holds the reins of
these technologies. No, No, there's no advantage for them for like anarchy
to break out and things to kind of to become chaotic. And so so
it seems like the vision of AI as becoming more and more just a use
of tyrannical control seems like it is an inevitable. And this is like you
think, if you game theory it out, you see that it plays out.
There's almost there's almost no way around it, which is because I've been
talking to a lot of AI developers, I think, because I'm thinking about
this, and and there are these like cowboy AI developers, right, some
of them that are saying like kind of Elon Musk attitude where it's like,
well, this is inevitable, what's going to happen? So let's make us
as powerful as possible. Let's put the AI in your pocket, right,
Let's make your phone powerful enough that you can have open AI like independently in
your phone and you are like as powerful as any other other AI. And
it's like, I get it, but that's not going to work, right,
because so either the either the powers that be that hold the reins of
our societies are going to use AI to control us, or either we're going
to be Cowboy AI people, and it means that the terrorist is going to
be as going to have it in his pocket too, And it means that
the punk rocker is going to have in his pocket two, which means that
the reaction will be the same. Right that there's no other way, There's
no like, there's just no other way, uh, that it can play
out. It has to transform into into surveillance and control. I don't see
if you if you have another way to see it playing out, I don't
see. It doesn't seem possible. No, I don't. I mean,
I hate to say it, but I think you're absolutely right. And and
there are so many forces that exacerbate this. You know, there's there's this
kind of feedback loop because the the less we or the more adamized we become,
the less we even remember what it's like to be in a kind of
local community, the more we look at others through this lens of abstraction.
You know, it's like it's like Playo's cave image. You know, he's
got this image of people sitting around prisoners the cave looking at shadows. The
difference between my being able to turn my neck, which apparently you can't do
in the cave image and look at the other prisoner versus getting all my information
about the guy who's sitting next to me a shadow on the wall, Like
we're not doing that face to face stuff. This is a wonderful moment,
right, somebody comes down and unchains the prisoner and makes them stand up and
turn around, and it's like the first contact with a human being. You
know what's going on? Right, we have to somehow be able to do
that. But I don't see how that's going to work. So top down
solutions, well, actually, even let me let me go back. I
said top down solutions. The word solution. I almost want to excize it
from the political vocabulary because politics is a living, ongoing thing. It's a
constant renegotiation. It's a constant putting new and fresh energy in to the system.
Like you're like you got to paint your house, you know, you
got to take care of them. Yeah, it's a living organism really right.
It has a kind of opponent processing right aspect to it, where it's
like you poof push you a little harder this way this way? Like right,
So who talks about solutions, Well, it's a technical notion right,
it's almost like a mathematical thing. And I you know, I kind of
repea this race. It seems to be that all political solutions, like real
solutions, are final solutions, right, that is to say here, I
mean it's it's death in some way, it'sident only Jonathan, I've been thinking
about the thirty fourth canto of the Inferno, where which actually begins with the
line it's quoted in the Latin. You know, the royal the banners of
the King of Hell advance, right, so it kind of identify Satan as
the king. And we have this image of Satan, and remember that he's
he's like stuck in the ice. It's all frozen. It's all you know,
none of the none of the condemned, can speak to Dante. They're
frozen in these things. Right. And then you have Satan, and one
of the translators has calculated that he's sticking up a thousand feet from the ice,
like like tower of babble or something like this, right, and in
his mouth are you know, Judas and Cassidus and Brutus. And as this
same translator Johnson Claire mentions, these are the guys who guys who served satan
best. You know, they're the guys who serve. But the revolution needs
its own in a way, right, I mean, this rebellious angel fall
down and crisses into the earth, and so, I don't know, it's
just it's it's a it's a very rich image, but it's rich. It's
rich in relation to what we're saying, which is that, you know,
the the image of Aaron making the golden calf. Yes, you know,
there's there is a relationship between that and the basic Promethean image of revolution,
you know, and you see that, you know, the idea of taking
that we think that we're used to actually think of the Promethean story as something
positive. You know. It's like Prometheus goes up there, you know,
those horrible gods. He takes the fire, takes the technology, takes civilization,
brings it down to the human, to the humans. Uh. And
then interestingly enough, Prometheus's punishment is that his liver is eaten every day.
And and for the in my understanding that for the ancients, the liver was
a an image of emotion or desire, the desiring part of the human right.
And so it's actually an image of this whore and this beast again,
it's like if he brings technology to the service of man and then falls into
a cycle of desire that of his like being eaten his own desire, being
eaten and returning, and being eaten and returning. You know, it's like
the hunger of insatiability, you could say, is it's a weird image of
that, and so there is a relationship between. So it's like if so
once again, it's like, it's not that the fire is evil, right,
even in the story, the fire is at first given by Zeus if
I remember, and then taken away at it because because people don't aren't offering
proper sacrifice, then that the fire is kind of taken away, and then
Prometheus takes the fire, and so think about that, Like that's what the
story of Cain is the Cane, the served Cane is so similar. It's
like, because of an improper sacrifice, Cain has to steal that they make
civilization. You know, he's alienated from God. Then he creates the first
city out of this, like I'm going to do this for myself to protect
myself from others, to protect myself. And then in the story of the
Bible, what happens that God saves that. You could say, it's like
God redeems that through Story's like he takes what Caine develops and then transforms it
into the tabernacle, transforms it into the temple basically. But this idea of
this kind of and the frozenness is perfect for that, right. It's like,
because that's what technology is. It's a fixing, right, It's like,
let's fix these walls around our city. Let's make these limits, let's
make these artificial limits around things. And so, yes, your intuition is
absolutely right that there's a relationship between all of these things. Yeah. And
actually it's a small detail, but in Dante he compares Lucifer or Satan too.
So he's got these bat wings basically, which are blowing, and the
wings are you know, freezing, you know, freezing the ice, and
we all this water, so it's like frozen chaos. He compares him to
the wings to sails on a windmill. Okay, And then when he talks
about Lucifer's teeth eating these guys, because he's constantly eating these eating them,
which is also, by the way, an image of insatiability, he compares
it to what he calls it's a hackle, which is some kind of agricultural
tool. Okay, so there's this kind of mechanistic thing Prometheus is. It's
actually very interesting. God Zeus finally gets back at the human beings by creating
Pandora. Okay, and Pandora. It's very interesting. So this is where
we get a mixture of erotic desire with technology. Why because what happens is
Athena makes this beautiful garment for her. Okay, it's this lovely thing,
and Hephaestus gives her a crown intricately worked, and of course Hephaestus is the
craftsman, got intricately worked crown on which all the animals are represented. So
it's like a whole cosmos microcosm, right, and so here's man looking at
who's going to be a source of ill and trouble, and what's the attitude.
The attitude is beautiful, attractive woman, sexually attractive and check out her
crown, you know, the ability to create at your own cosmos. Like
there's a technological desire there too, right. Heifestus is interesting by the way,
because well in the Iliad, there's a scene where achilles mother goes to
him to make armor for Achille and he makes this incredible shield. But Hephaestus
has these robots, the first robots in history, the little maidens, lifelike
maidens running around helping him and stuff. So he's already associated fundamentally with the
kind of technology we're developing today. But he is the most humane and decent
of the gods. He has been thrown out of heaven, he's crippled,
he's all this kind of stuff. But you know, when Thetis, who's
achilles mother, shows up, he's like so welcoming to her because she saved
him when he was thrown out of heaven by her mother or maybe her father,
because they both attacked him. You know, I think it was her
mother his mother, and she and another nim for something saved him and nurtured
him, and he made beautiful jewler for them and so forth. So there's
a suggestion there of what it would look like to maintain ones and I know
he's a god, right, but like maintain his humanity and use technology,
Yeah, and I think we can. It's really important for people to always
understand, like when we talk about these stories, to be careful of absolute
moral judgment, because all of these stories all have a flip side to them.
It's like, you know, you always have to be able to see
both sides at the same time, you know, which is exactly what you
said. You know. It's like, for example, medicine is a good
example, which is that medicine is technology. It really is. But there's
a sense in which medicine can be the type of technology which is this the
proper supplement, right, the type of supplementarity and technicity which is there to
to to help humans. And I think that like the idea that you could
represent Hephaestus as this incestuous, you know, like freak that gets thrown out,
and now because of that, he kind of is He's the one who
makes all the all the toys. He's kind of like the guy in his
basement, you know, the tech the tech freak in his basement because he
can't fit into society. Like that's a proper image of him, for sure.
But there's another image, like the one you said, which is rather
this this desire to help, right. You know, if you make a
crutch for someone, you make it because you want to help them, you
know, And so there's a there's a powerful image, like we have to
always remember that Jesus does a tecton. You know, Jesus was the son
of a tecton. Jesus was the son of a technical person. And it's
not a carpenter per se. It really is a craftsman, you know.
So so when I was on vacation this summer, I read Paradise Loss,
which I hadn't read before, and it's quite amazing. In the very first
book of Paradise Lost, we're looking at Satan, he's down in hell,
and Milton says something like, you know, you guys, you human beings
here, you take pride in things like Babbel. He actually mentions Babel and
you know, mining and all this. Constructor says, you should see what
they built in hell. Like that is, you know, there's no comparison
between the technological capability of these fallen angels and spirits and human beings. And
it's really quite remarkable, right, Like they excel at that in this hell
where there's heat but no light. You know, it's like this. So
that's a really interesting warning. And yeah, I mean, look, what
has to happen today is that the dynamo has got to be informed, Like
we have to relate to the Virgin as well as the dynamo. Just to
put it very broadly, and I'm not making a religious statement, he arrow.
I'm just saying there's got to be transcendence in some way, and only
then can we control. And the reason I want to say that is you
mentioned medicine. Well, you know, if you come in and you've got
blood poisoning or something, and I can give you antibiotics or whatever, it
is, right and I fix you great. But now medicine is being used
for you know, anything, sex change, augmentation, whatever. It's because
we've got the dynamo, but we don't have the virgin so to speak.
That is, we don't have we're not guided by some kind of moral or
spiritual measures that we could attune ourselves to. Yeah. No, I think
that's the right. I think that's the right. I mean we saw during
the time during COVID as well, we saw medicine become a political tool and
you know, become a strange, a strange tool for control. Uh.
And so all of these, all of these supplements always have this duality to
it. And you're right that in some ways, I mean, the only
thing we can do and this is because it's like just paining this monstrous portrait
of what of where we are in the future. But I think that the
thing we can do, which is actually the way to anchor the dynamo,
is to you know, is to go to church, is to go to
participate with your family, is to re engage at the human scale, because
that will reverberate. It's the only thing that can really reverberate. You know.
It's like, become a better person, become a loving father, become
you become a friend. Like, I know it sounds it sounds kitchy to
say that, but I don't see what else is possible. No, Look,
what you're saying is we have to engage in the practices and you know,
like set the thinking aside, engage in the practices, and the practice
is a source of understanding. And that's what we've gotten away from it.
But here's the thing. We have to be very deliberate about it. Yeah,
that's right. We have to say, Look, you know, someone
that which was the most natural for humans, you know, thousand years ago,
is now has to be the most deliberate the behavior that we can that
we can muster. That's exactly right. And that means that with regard to
all of our institutions, say, schools, they should be in person,
they should be in a classroom, they should be with a living, breathing
human being. They should be you know, and as great as zoom is.
Uh. The difficulty is that you know, you and I came of
age before yeah, the smartphone, uh and and all this stuff. So
we actually have this anchor that we can remember, you know, what happens
when when that that's not there? Right then we actually and I'm just thinking
of the future here because you know, you you painted this unfortunately rather plausible
scenario about kind of totalitarianism and so forth. So how do we prevent that?
Right? Well, we have to educate for the future, and we
have to. But so it's look, I mean, we each have to
do what we can do, you know. I mean, I know it's
a sort of cliche, but it's not for us to finish the work.
We all have to do what we can and and set an example for others
and devote ourselves to trying to resist. I mean, I you know,
I don't know. I mean you can also run away and try to get
off the grid and so forth, And I think that's fine. Some will
do that, and I think we all have also our place. You know,
you could say, I think I think that there are people that are
going to break off and form communities off the grid and are going to create
little you know, Rodreer inspired communities. That's for sure. I think that
is that is almost inevitable, and it probably should happen. But it's I
think some people still have to stay in the fray and and and continue to
write, you know, and and it's hard to know who will do who
should do what. It's in some ways that's between you know, that that
you our own each of our of our own story. But but but of
course we also need to to have at least I feel like I still need
to have one foot in the matrix. Uh and and I often ask myself
the question when when does it go too far? Like when should you just
step out? I'm not sure I have that answer yet. At least for
now, I feel like it's it's it's important to stay connected to the machine
to some extent. Absolutely, I would be very unhappy if if you or
people like you decided, you know, I'm not going to do the symbolk
world. I'm not going to do anything I'm not going to lecture. I'm
going to go to Alaska and you know, make my own you know your
or something like that, and that God bless you, right, but that
that's that would be a withdrawal of your best energies and intelligence from from the
public space. And what we need to do is enter back into the public
space as living, thoughtful, creative, active individual and give what we can.
Yeah. So Jacob, thanks, thanks for this wonderful conversations, and
thanks for your time and also all the work that you're doing to yeah,
to build some to read sow the seed, you know, to kind of
gather together the right minds to towards the future. Thanks for your work as
well on that front. Thank you very much, Jonathan, It's been a
pleasure. If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to the Symbolic
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