What does that mean? What does God do? Well, God creates,
that's what God does. So if we want to become God, we have
to create. So we have to create life. So again there's something almost
subconscious they're going on that we have to create new life in order to actually
be God's if we're going to really cement our dominance of the planet and our
coming dominance of the universe, because we're going to colonize that as well,
because that that, I mean, that's another aspect of it, right,
we end up colonizing the whole of creation. This is all part of the
same narrative. We're going out into the stars, We're going to terraform the
planets. So it's in order to become like God's we have to create.
We have to create worlds, which is what we're going to do when we
terraform Mars. That's what Ellen Musk wants to do, and we have to
create new life. So here we are openly trying to do it, but
at the same time we have this kind of terrifying sense that the life we're
creating isn't under our control. You know, it's already looking like it's going
to supplant us. So because funnily enough, we're not very good at being
God's you know, we're good at creating, but we don't even really know
how what we're doing where it's going to go. Turns out that being gold
is crout complicated. This is Jonathan Pechel. Welcome to the symbolic world.
So hello everyone, I'm here with Paul kings North. Paul kings North for
people you know who watch my content, needs no introduction. He is a
writer. He he has written several novels and recently did an entirely very powerful
uh series on the Machine, which broke down some of the mechanisms of what
is happening around us, trying to help us understand, you know, the
processes with the the let's say, first of all the principalities behind it,
but then also understanding how it how it runs. And so he has finished
his series, he's actually going to publish it as a book next year,
and so I wanted to talk to him and see what his insights are after
going through this. So Paul, thanks for talking to me. Yeah,
great to be back and see you again. And so you have you've gone
through the whole process of thinking through that their situation you know, and things
are moving so fast. What are the main insights that you taken away from
your process? Yeah, it's a good question. So well, it's so
you just use the word principalities right to talk about talk about the thing,
the power behind the machine. And I think this is the main insight for
me. So, I mean my my sort of long term, I don't
know what my background is exactly. I'm a writer, but I've always I've
always kind of I've cycled between my left and my right brain as a writer.
So I'll I write a novel and then I'll then I'll write some nonfiction,
then I'll go back to the novel, And I'm always circling around the
same question I think all writers do. The question for me is why modern
people are so disconnected from everything real, actually disconnected from culture, I think,
disconnected from nature, disconnected from God. And I felt that all my
life and I've tried to explore it in all my work since I became a
Christian, since I became an Orthodox Christian through four years ago. Now it's
really come into a different focus entirely. It feels like that's the kind of
the apex of the understanding. But what I was trying to do with this
book, which I started writing while I was in the process becoming Christian,
so that that kind of is reflected in the writing. I think the last
chapters of more Christian than the first one, strangely enough. But what I
was trying to do is look at the technological society that we're living in,
which which I called the machine, which is a term I borrowed from writer
as I've admired for years. Rs. Thomas D. H. Lawrence Robinson,
Jeffers, you name it. For one hundred or so years, people
have been using this phrase. George or Well used it because it's a very
good image. It's a very good symbol for the kind of of world we're
living in. It feels like we're cogs in a machine. It feels like
we're part of something very much bigger than us, that isn't really natural,
that's constructed in some way, and we're controlled by it. Maybe we built
it to control things, but now it controls us, and it's accelerated a
thousandfold in the digital age, and it's accelerating all the time, and it's
very difficult not to feel like we're part of something that we can't get out
of. Now that's starting to feel like it's got a mind of its own,
and that's the big insight. So, especially just in the last couple
of years, say AI has taken off, we've really started to feel and
we've seen a lot of people talking and writing about this, So there's something
behind this that's almost intelligent. So I felt like we were trapped in this
thing, and I wanted to write about what it was, where it came
from, how it actually infected or affected or infected the culture and politics,
and what we could do about it. And I think that the big insight
for me probably is a spiritual one. It is the sense that the as
if you look at this from if you look at it safe from a Christian
perspective, then it looks like the ultimate manifestation of the rebellion against God that
begins in the start of the Book of Genesis. Right, So we decide
to stop aligning our will with that of God and we start to follow our
own will. And what do we do then, Well, we construct cities,
we construct technology, but more than that, we start to try to
build a world of our own. And the ultimate endpoint of trying to build
a world of our own is trying to build God or trying to build God's
which is the way that the people in Silicon Valley now openly talk about what
their project is. So we've ended up building this thing which is far more
than the sum of the technologies involved. So it's not just about whether the
smartphones are good or whether the cars are good or whatever. It's a whole
network of something that feels like it's taking on a from its own. And
one of the things that I really found most fascinating and disturbing in the research
was that if you start to read the stuff that's written by the guys in
Silicon Valley who are coming out with this stuff, who are really designing the
kind of the brain of the machine that we all function on all the time,
which we call the Internet, they talk very openly about what they're doing
as summoning God, building God, creating a platform for something to come into
They talk about the importance of they talk about self replication, but more than
that, they talk about something that has its own mind and its own way
of seeing. So you know, you can dismiss that as mad fantasy,
but they're the people building it. And so if you look at it from
a spiritual perspective, from the perspective of those powers and principalities, you see
something going on that's sort of long predicted. It's very old, but it's
also very new. We're trying to replace nature, and we're trying to build
God, and we're trying to live forever, and we're trying to become God's
and in that sense, it's a very old story. But the machine,
if you like, is I think that the latest manifestation of it probably the
most successful one. So that's the weird, disturbing constriction that I ended up
coming to. Yeah, I mean, I think I totally agree with what
you're saying. I mean, there's a question that I have. This is
something that I've been thinking about for a very long time, which is,
if you can so in the revelation, right, there's there are two images.
There's the image of the beast and the horror you know of this this
kind of let's say, civilizational beast, which is using people's desires to advance
itself and to basically become more powerful, and then ultimately the beast kills the
horn and then it's just tearing me all the way, all the way through.
So there's this one image, right, that's one image of civilization,
but then there's another image, which is heavenly Jerusalem, in which you do
have the sense of technique of a city. You know, have you ever
thought or imagine or thought of how technology it would it be possible to turn
this into something that would serve guide Let's say, Well, that's the question,
isn't it. The question is always what the machine, what the technology
itself is serving. So firstly, I think there's a difference between a tool
and a technology because a tool is a very simple thing that you can use
to you know, a spade is a tool. You use it to break
the ground, and you could use it to dig the grave of somebody who
just murdered, or you could use it to plant beautiful plants and grow food
that you need to feed your family. Right, so that tool could be
used for good or el. A technology is something that is almost able to
manifest its own will, and that's where we are now. So the question
is what something served. So I don't think that's just the question of you
know, a very common argument we will here is technology is neutral, and
all we really need to think about is whether we do good or all with
it. And sometimes that can be true, like it's as I say,
it's true with the spade. But some technology is not neutral, and an
atom bomb is not neutral. It can only do one thing. I would
actually argue that a smartphone is not neutral either. I mean, it's going
to take you in one particular direction, so you can create technologies and tools,
and creating technologies and tools is what humanity does. There's no way of
getting out of that. That's who we are, that's what that's that's the
gift we are given. It's a question of what you create, and what
you create is determined by what you serve and what the what the machine is.
So this thing I'm calling the machine, I think is designed to serve
our independent will, so it will take us in a direction away from God.
You could build technologies designed to serve something else and they would look different,
I think. So it is not a question of the all or the
technology per se. It's a question for the thing that's being served. As
you say, there's a different kind of city. I've seen you talking about
this before. You know, the heavenly Jerusalem has a tree at the center
of it. You know, it's a very particular type of city. I'm
struck by the fact that the cities we used to build in the Middle Ages,
the highest buildings in those cities with churches. The highest buildings in our
cities are banks. So that's the difference between the city now and the city.
Then there are a lot of different kind of cities. There are different
kind of technologies. It depends on who you're serving and what you're trying to
do. And I think that in a culture like Hours, which specifically almost
even rejects that question, can't see anything other than the material and the financial
and the progressive in the broadest sense of that word, it's always going to
build something like the machine, which will always just turn us back to our
own will all the time. Yeah. One of the things that I think
is interesting, And tell me what you think about this, because I've been
thinking about this a lot, which is, so you build a tool,
you make a tool, then the tool serves the purpose of what the tool
is made for. But there is a manner in which we become dependent on
the tool to some extent. Right, So if I, you know,
if I have matches, then I forget how to make fire with something else,
and at some point if I don't, you know, as technology increases,
then I lose certain organic abilities to make that ability more powerful. So
if there is a manner in which we tend to become dependent of our tools,
now is that good? Is that bad? You know, it's just
reality, Like it's just how things function. But when you create a technology
which has to do with mind, and a technology which has to do with
attention, and technologies which have to do with human the way humans perceive meaning
and engage with meetings. So the idea of creating a statue of a god
for example, Like that's an example where you create a tool, you're creating
a technical structure, like you're making a statue of some god. There seems
to be a way in which, all of a sudden that the manner in
which we become dependent on it, it changes because then we serve it.
Because you're at the AI, Like, what we're seeing with the AI is
that we're creating this AI to serve our will, but everybody knows that ultimately
we will subject our will to it. It's it's a weird thing, right,
It's like we're doing it to increase our power and to increase our capacity
and increase all to do these things. But if you ask even the people
building it, like, will it transcend us and then become a god in
the proper sense of being above us and managing us? And the answer is
well, probably probably yes. You know, my daughter, like my daughter,
her last essay for graduating English was to write an essay about how AI
serves the needs of students. And she said that the way that the thing
that they gave her to read in order to write the essay, we're all
about it basically being impartial, you know, being able to manage things without
the human prejudice, all this stuff. And I'm like, basically they're saying,
you're going to serve these Aiyes, No, it's really it's really interesting
that the whole notion of what you serve. So again, I mean,
we've known for a long time that we've already created a society which we're serving.
Consider how people talk about the economy. Okay, politicians talk about the
economy all the time, and when there's an election, the argument is who's
going to run the economy best, what's best for the economy, what can
we do? And the economy is spoken of like a god like it's a
separate thing. And if you actually look at what you know, the economy
literally the you know, going back to the Greek, you're looking at a
term that means household management. Right, So an economy is something you're embedded
in, so your home is an economy. Then in a traditional society or
even in a modern one, it's just it's the some total of things humans
are doing. But we now talk about this thing called the economy which is
somehow out there, separate from us, and we're already serving it. Okay,
So and you'll hear, oh, we need lots of immigration for the
economy, or we need privatization for the economy. Whatever it is, as
if you somehow have to make a sacrifice to this god. Right, Well,
we might not like this, but we have to do it. So
we've already accept it exactly. Yeah, so the economy has has become an
idol, and we're already serving it, and we're accepting. If you listen
to the way that politicians talk about this, we've already accepted that we've created
a thing that is now controlling us, and we have to give the economy
certain sacrifices every year. Otherwise the economy will collapse and then we're in trouble.
That's like the God rejecting us. So we've been in this for a
long time. So AI, in one sense, is very new, but
in another sense, it's just a cumbination of living in this system in which
you say we are totally dependent on and we have been for centuries on millennia.
There's a phrase that the historian Ronald Wright came up with called the progress
trap. He wrote a great book called A Short History of Progress, and
he's talking about exactly this. You create, we had a technology to solve
a problem, Maybe it solves the problem, but you're then dependent on that
technology. So say you want to I'd take something like the green revolution.
Right, So we're saying, oh, there's a lot of people in the
world, there's not enough food for them. Well let's use artificial fertilizers and
phosphates and chemicals. Well great, and now we've increased the food supply,
but we've also damaged the soil. And also we have to keep producing this
stuff because there's so many people now dependent on it. So now we're locked
into an industrial system that needs all these inputs, and then that has a
lot of ecological impacts that you hadn't worked out before, and then you've got
to deal with them that requires another technology. So you get deeper and deeper
all the time. So AI is a solution to the problem of us already
being dependent on a society that we're stuck in, and so we just get
deeper and deeper and deeper into it. And it's like we have to always
convince ourself that what's happening is good. We have to have the myth of
progress, because otherwise we might step back and say, hang on, we're
completely dependent on this machine. Yeah, and we don't even know where it's
going. And now, as you say, it seems to be going somewhere
that is not under our control at aol. Yeah. Yeah. But the
problem and this is it's so it's so interesting. Technology is so fascinating because
the issue in some ways is also real. Like if I I want to
give the devil his due, as we say, right, So the AI
problem, once the cat is out of the bag, it's almost impossible to
put it back, like once the serpent is out, it's almost impossible to
put it back because because then there's also world competition. So if we don't
do AI means that we're gonna let China do it, of course, and
they don't want China to be the ones ruling us with their AI and so,
and it's interesting because that's when you can understand what it means to be
dominated by a principality, where like no nobody controls us anymore. And this
is what was great about your entire essays. I thought the whole series of
machines that people you know are always saying, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist
because you see these these these things happen in the world. Like, No,
you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist. You don't have to have
to have intention at every level of the system. It's just like it's just
whether or not people follow their own advantage. Once the cat is out of
the bag, then the process just lays itself out and you become a slave
to it. And now we're going to ride AI until what. Well,
that's the thing, isn't it. It was so interesting you saw that thing
that happened maybe six months or a year ago, when all these guys in
Silicon Valley came out with a call for a moratorium on AI. Development.
And they were pretty high level people. They were the people who were developing
this thing. And you knew as soon as they did that that that was
not going to happen. Right, these are the people developing this stuff.
They are saying, this is dangerous, we need to take a step back.
And you already knew that wasn't going to happen, because, as you
say, the cat's out of the bag now and then okay, we can
stop it. But the Chinese weren't, etc. So it's an arms race.
There was a fast peace in the New York Times and I can't remember
who wrote it. I quote it in one of my essays. And the
journalist just went and spoke to a lot of these people who were concerned about
AI development in Silicon Valley. He spoke to the developers who'd signed this moratorium,
and he said, if you're concerned about this, why are you still
Why have you been developing these things at all? Right? And they all
gave different sort of vague answers, and one of them said something fascinating.
He said, he said, when you listened to them all, he would
sum up what they were saying. As they were scared about what's happening,
but they felt like they had a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence
into the world. Right. That ushered this new form of intelligence into the
world. Right, So he literally summoning a new intelligence into the world through
their machines. This is a New York Times journalist, right, He just
spoken to these people and he's trying to sum up what they say. So
you get the impression that the people developing this stuff don't exactly know what's happening
either. Right. That's why there's no conspiracy theory required. You don't need
six evil geniuses in a room with a plan. They haven't got a plan.
They're developing it. They can feel that there's something behind it that they're
ushering into the world, but they don't even know what that is, but
they feel like they have to do it. It's like it's almost like they're
addicted. It's a very strange, very strange thing to hear people are to
hear people who are making the tech itself say that they're scared of it.
They don't really know why they're doing it. They think we should stop,
but they can't stop, and they're ushering in a new form of intelligence.
And you think well, hang on a minute. This is a very very
strange situation. So one of the ideas that I had as well is that
if you think about the revolt against heaven, so you think about it like
a structure, and you see that structure in Hesiod's Cosmogani, right, theogony
where you see the gods castraight the father, and then because of that they
have to create a tyranny because you know your own children are not going to
come and get you because you've killed your father. And then you have this
back and forth where on the one hand, the one who does the cast
rating first has to tyrannize the people below, like Stalin. That's what happened
in the Soviet Union. Right, It's like a bunch of we we we
killed it, Sorr. We created a revolution. At some point somebody takes
control of it and then kills everybody that participated in the revolution. Works,
yes, just like clammed down. Right, So you have this problem,
but it seems like the revolutionary thinking itself, where we think that we have
to take from heaven, right, this Promethean gesture that we have to take
from heaven for ourselves, that we're owed, this that we take it.
The sense that I have in this is that secret secretly hidden in that process
is the secret knowledge that if I've done it, I will be supplanted.
And therefore there's almost like a weird like unconscious desire to be supplanted. And
we are. We're actually people unconsciously are creating the thing that will supplant them.
They know even that they're doing it, but it's almost like, this
is the process, this is what we did. We took from above and
we lifted ourselves up to be the gods. And now that's going to happen
to us. And sometimes consciously that's the thing you hear from people as well.
You know, this is a thing you hear from philosophers of technology.
Some of them will openly say, yes, we are creating the species that's
going to supplant us, and they'll use the argument from evolution. They'll say,
well, this is how evolution works, right, A new species evolve.
So we're just helping the new species to evolve, and we hope it
will be kind to us when it evolves. And I think that the gamble
is that if we can create these new things, this new mind, this
kind of Asimov style over mind, then then we can hitch a ride on
it. You know, this will allow us to become immortal. This will
we'll put the chips in our brains, we can replace our bodies with silicon,
we can upload our minds, all of this stuff. So yes,
we will create a new species. But at the same time, we will
somehow, you know, merge with it. This is the right curt curse
bile singularity. Right, we merge with the silicon new species, we become
part of it. We we move to our ultimate destiny. So it's a
deeply religious narrative. Yeah, it really is exactly that. Yeah, and
it's been there since the beginning. I don't know if you were. I
was a science fiction fan when I was younger. Yeah, me too.
Yeah, and the first Star Trek movie. That's what basically it was about.
Right, It's like they send this, they send this technology out into
space and then it becomes conscious. Who cares what the reason the way it
becomes conscious, But now it wants to return and merge with its maker.
Like it's a it's a it's a theological it's a form of of like a
weird form of theosis, a kind of inverted form of theosis, and that
is possibly, Yeah, that's that might be the fantasy. It might be
a deformation of theosis that we're looking at like we're going to create this God
and then we'll merge. Yeah, it is, isn't it. And it's
also that you know, if we want to become God's, which I think
we do, I think our ultimate aim is to become God's. And again
this is this is the story of the Snake in the garden, right that
the snake says, you don't need to follow God's will. You can follow
your own will and you can become God's. And he literally says that,
right, you can become like God's knowing good and evil. So don't bother
with God. He's just trying to keep you from your from you for your
own power. So become like God. So that's the ultimate dream. If
we want to become like God. What does that mean? What does God
do? Well? God creates, That's what God does. So if we
want to become God, we have to create. So we have to create
life. So again there's something almost subconscious they're going on that we have to
create new life in order to actually be God's. If we're going to really
cement our dominance of the planet and our coming dominance of the universe, because
we're going to colonize that as well. Because that that, I mean,
that's another aspect of it, right, we end up colonizing the whole of
creation. This is all part of the same narrative. We're going out into
the stars, we're going to we're going to terraform the planets. So it's
a it's in order to become like God's we have to create. We have
to create worlds, which is what we're going to do when terrorfor Mars,
that's what Ellen Musk wants to do, and we have to create new life.
So here we are openly trying to do it, but at the same
time we have this kind of terrifying sense that the life where creating isn't under
our control, you know, it's it's already looking like it's going to supplant
us. So because funnily enough, we're not very good at being God's you
know, we're good at creating, but we don't even really know how what
we're doing where it's going to go. Turns out that being God is quite
complicated. Yeah, that's a big The fact that we listen to the snake.
The fact that we you know, because ultimately our destiny is to become
gods, like that is what God wants for us, but not through our
own self willing right now through this taking, but rather through through through obviously
through submission to the highest principle, to God himself and also self emptying.
That's the image of of that's what Christ comes to reveal to us. But
then but then because we did it by this ground, by this grasping,
by this taking. Yeah, it's interesting because you know, you ask,
because I've asked some of the people that that they have ideas about where AI
is going to go. You know why is it? Because we do create
beings, like we have children, that's what you know, we actually But
then they sometimes they'll talk about it like this is our child that we're that
we're that we're creating, but it's making and giving birth is not not the
same, I guess because because what would you know if you have a child,
you're you, I mean, you're not really in control, right,
You have the moment of creation and then nothing else is really up to you.
You have to bring the child up. You do your best at that.
But the being that you've created is not in one sense, it is
created by you, but it's part of the same species issue. What we're
doing now is we're trying to create a new, whole, new order of
being. Right, So it is like God, because God creates beings that
are not exactly giving birth to children is continuation of your own nature. Now,
it's like we want to create something, and it's something you're given.
You know, you're given this ability to create, create, to replace yourself,
to create new life, but it's it's new life in the line that's
already been created. So and then when I think about what you were just
saying about the difference between the way that we're we're to become godlike as Christians,
it's the difference between aligning your will with that of God. Like you
say that there's the self emptying aspect, the destruction of the passions, emptying
of the self, destruction of the will. Align your will of God's will,
and that's how you become God alike. Whereas what we're doing is we're
saying, now we don't want to do any of that, we don't want
to do the self empty and we're not doing any We're not doing any asceticism.
We're not aligning our will with anyone. We're going to align the world's
will with ours. And since we don't believe in God, that's not a
problem anymore. We just have nature, and nature is just fungible and malleable.
We can take that and we can use that to our own advantage,
because we've got the tech to do that now. So we take nature,
which is just a collection of dead matter, there's nothing sacred about it,
and we use that for our own ends, and then we create a new
species, we create new life, and then we fulfill our destiny, which
is to colonize the universe and become godlike. So it's a it's a it's
a it's a religious story. It's a theological story, you know, it's
and it's also it's just foreshadowed in so many creation myths. It's obviously it's
Genesis, but it's also stealing fire from the gods. It's you know,
there are so many stories in which humans just their pride overtakes them, they
try to become gods and then they fall burning from the heavens. And it's
such an old story, such an old story. It's like, we're going
to get it right this time. Yeah, this is a good time.
This time we're going to win. It's going to be different because it's not
like we've it's not like we've totally forgotten all those other stories. We you
know, we we completely know the plan. We've forgotten other myths, and
now we think that we're going to do it this time because yeah, we
don't believe in myths anymore, because we've moved beyond myth and religion. Right,
we're all Richard Dawkins. Now, we've all moved beyond that. So
we know that was just stories and doesn't apply to us because we've got we've
got the Internet. So it's going to be different. Although, as everybody
knows now, Richard Darkins has officially said that he is a cultural kit Christian.
He's he's moving rapidly towards his deathbed conversion. Well, I can say
it, you can say it. It's coming. It's coming, all right.
So I have a I actually I have a very I have a tough
question for you, Like I don't know, maybe it's not a tough question.
You'll see. And so you know, before before you converge it,
you were you were obviously quite involved in the environmental movement. You you you
have dedicated a large part of your life to that, and you know,
I would say, I definitely believe in the the principle of humans tending properly
to to the to the creation. But I also see that at least modern
environmentalism the way it's set up now that it seems to be really it seems
to be somehow wedged into globalism somehow like that. There seems to be some
relationship between the desire to set up some type of one government or a global
system, and then there might at least that the way the environmental the environmental
narrative is set up. And so I don't know if you've thought about that,
if you have thought about that relationship, yeah, yeah, no,
I have a lot. I've written about that fair bit. So, I
mean, the way to see this is environmentalism. It's a little bit like
socialism or something like that. It's been swallowed by the machine. That's really
what's happened. So, I mean, you could look at the trajectory of
the left. For example, say you know, a movement which at least
originally, say where I come from in Britain, had a strong working class
contingent. Say, take something like the Labor Party for example, or the
labor movement comes out of the working classes, exists to help the poor,
exist, to get working people represented where they weren't represented. You know.
Fifty years later it's Tony Blair, you know, and and he's jetting around
the world talking about globalization, and the labor movement has been entirely swallowed by
globalization. It's been and as you say, by the kind of global machine
which points you towards the kind of technocratic global state. Actively that's where it's
going. And lots of old socialists have been complaining about that for a long
time, right and quite rightly. So there was a huge controversy in Britain
over Tony Blair because he was very obviously a kind of cooker in the nest
of the Labor Party. And so the left's gone in that direction, and
the green movement has been swallowed by it as well. And that's what's happened.
If you look at the origins of the green movement, they're fairly small
sea conservative for the likes of E. F. Schumacher or Leopold Kore or
Teddy Goldsmith or a lot other people who came from Britain. They were kind
of traditionalists really, these people. There was very much about conservation. Conservation
of nature fits with conservation of culture. It's about it is about stewardship,
it is about tending. It's also about respecting the rest of life. That
was the kind of the Green movement I grew up in. And you know,
it was always it was always leftist, and so was I when I
was young anyway, but it was also had a sense of a kind of
small scale localism about it. Environmentalism works when it's localist, really, And
what's happened is that the Greens decided, or at least the leadership of the
Greens decided. Lots of people. Environmentalism is a very broad church, but
the kind of mainstream commentators of the Greens decided that localism wasn't going to save
the planet and we had to go all in on effectively technocracy. And what
we've got is there's an essay about this in the book, actually what I
would call machine environmentalism, in which we say that the way to save the
planet, which is defined now almost entirely as cutting carbon emissions, that's all
they're concerned about is if there was nothing else to talk about, and that
is an issue, right, and you do need to do that because climate
change is real. But the way that we're supposed to do it is through
yeah, global agreements, probably global governance, certainly intense technologies, say artificial
food, the destruction of small scale farming, giant wind farms all over the
mountains, et cetera. So the green movement that used to say that the
way out of the environmental problem is localization, small scale living, a form
of asceticism really community, roots in place, etc. That's effectively been killed
by a movement which says that the way forward is high tech machine globalization,
and if we don't go down that road, then the planet's going to die.
And so that's really that's my analysis of it. And I was always
part of the old small scale, slightly romantic blood height, you know,
just really just saying, look, the actual problem is the machine. Yah,
the actual problem is the machine. So you're going to try and live
outside that if you want to live ecologically, and there's a lot of people
who do that. But the green movement that we see in the newspapers and
that we see at Davos, and that we see in the so called thought
leaders of it is entirely machine shaped at this point. And I think that's
a tragedy because I think that the green movement always came into being to resist
that right, to resist the machine, and it's been almost entirely swallowed by
it to such a degree that people are now saying, well, you know,
I screw the Greens, so I want to drive my car around and
need as much beef as possible. So it's like almost as if if you
don't like environmentalists, the way to deal with is to, you know,
poison nature to make a point. And that's that's a tragedy as well.
So you've what's happened is as well as it's been swallowed by the culture war
now right, So you've got a bunch of people on the right who say,
well, I hate the Greens because they're socialists, so screw it all,
I don't believe in climate change. And then you've got people on the
left, people on the left who will say, well, we have to
save the planet from all these fascists, so let's let's bring as many new
laws and and and high tech geekles in as possible. So it's it's yet
another thing that's been swallowed by the by the culture war that's eating the eating
society. I think, yeah, it's been it's been fascinating to watch locally
where we are to notice a hostility against local farming, like an open hostility
against For example, they passed several laws recently where you're not allowed to have
like you're not allowed to grow stuff at home, like you're not allowed to
have even just chickens or whatever, like in different different places in Quebec,
they're really trying to clamp down on people doing on their own and even and
some organic farms have been closed down for reasons that are very suspicious that are
nearby where we are. And you're thinking, these are the same people,
like the same the same garments that are touting, you know, like how
we need to be save the environment and everything. But at the same time
and so and and but then they're also they're opening the biggest bug factory in
the world is going to be in Ontario here, I think it's already open
and they and they're making insects, they're making protein. Yeah, of course,
And that's that's a great example of exactly what's happening. So you know,
an actual, an actual if you wanted this horrible word sustainable, there
used to be a good radical word and has now been completely ruined. If
you wanted a society that was actually sustainable, right which when it could be
sustained and it was, you would have to be culturally sustainable, ecologically sustainable,
spiritually sustainable, and all of those things would go together. And so
you would have to you know, you would have lots and lots of people
managing small farms, You would have lots of people actually involved in their culture.
People would want to protect the natural nott world because they actually knew what
it was, right because they went outside and they knew what grew in the
hedgerows and they actually had connection with nature. That's what that's what an ecological
society looks like. What we've got instead is this top down system in which
everybody's sitting inside looking at screens and eating bugs and living in the pod and
all the rest of it. And this is this is allegedly sustainability, but
it's not. It's just been the whole the entire thing has been hijacked.
Yeah, and it's here's the other thing, as where you can't have an
ecologically sustainable society that isn't culturally and ecoog and spiritually sustainable as well. It
has to be sustainable, sustaining to our spirits, sustaining to our families,
sustaining to our cultures and our communities and our towns. If it's not those
things, then all it is is the state and the corporation's handing down a
ton of things that you have to do, and you have to eat,
and you have to cut down, and it just becomes a sort of green,
brave new world, you know, brave new world with wind farms.
That's what you end up with. That's great. And so so you finished
the essays on the machine, you know, one of the questions I've had,
and so now you've been writing this foot how many you've been doing it
for three years? How long did you? Well? Yeah, I mean
the essays themselves took over two years and a bit, I think. Then
I've had to edit them down and turn them into a book. So it's
been kind of in my head for a long time. And so my question
is, as this has been happening, like you're working on these essays,
you're you know, you're moving away from from fiction, and you you know,
converted to Christianity, all these things happened. Has it changed, like,
have you noticed that you are preset or you're the way you think about
about story and about literature and about fiction. Do you feel like it's changed
in the past few years as you've been working on this other thing, it
has changed, and it's changed. It's changed because I, well, it's
really changed because I've become a Christian. It changed since I was baptized,
because really, yeah, I thought about this so much. I mean,
I was baptized in the River Shannon in January. So it was very cold
and sort of my priest just he's a force of nature, and he said,
we're going to baptize you in the river. We're going to do it
properly, because he said, if you ever go to Mount Athos, they're
going to ask you if you were baptized properly. So we're going to do
it properly. So just they said, right, we're doing it in the
river. So he took me out to the River Shannon on this freezing,
frosty day and he was standing there pushing my head under the water and trying.
He was halfway up up to his waist as well, so he had
trouble saying that in the name of the So we were both kind of almost
on the verge of a heart attack, and then we both came out,
and you know, it's such a kind of you know, at the time,
I thought, well, this is a kind of ceremony. It's a
symbolic ceremony, right, and I know I'm becoming a Christian here, but
this is a kind of it. It's a piece of symbolism, and it
is a piece of symbolism, but it actually changes you, right, It
changes the way you see. It physically changes you in some way that you
can't put your finger on. And what's happened to me is I haven't been
able to see the world in the same way. And I can't explain that.
I can't explain that. It's not that I've become a Christian and I've
decided I have to believe in some things, and so now I believe in
them and I didn't before. It's not a question of that. It's like
I because of this, I've been initiated into this whole cosmological vision of the
universe that you talk about so much, and that kind of symbolism, this
whole pattern that you're always trying to lay out is inside you, you know,
and it gets introduced to you through baptism, and you come out of
that and you think, my god, the world looks different. You're looking
out through the same eyes at a different world. So I couldn't write the
sort of novels I used to write because I'm not the same person anymore.
I see the world differently. So for me, the question is, now
that I'm like this, and this is a process, obviously, I'm just
at the beginning of it, what kind of stories would I write if I
were to write fiction. I don't want to write Christian fiction in some sort
of horrible didactic way. Nobody wants to read Christian fiction, including most Christians
exactly. Nobody wants to do that. But you know, the stories have
to be different in some way because they reflect a different universe. And I
don't really know what that looks like yet, but it's going to look like
something different. But I want to find out what it looks like. I
do want to try and do something, but I feel like I'm still in
a kind of state of transition, you know, where I have to work
out how to write a bit differently now in some way. And it doesn't
even mean that i'd write about anything that was even necessarily obviously Christian or religious.
But whatever I did, it would feel it would reflect a different world,
a different universe in some way. And so and so have you dabbled
like have you have you? Have you? Have you realed? This is
the question to do? This is so it's interesting. So so we we
we last met in Dublin, didn't we last year and doing an event together,
and you started harassing me about how it had the right fiction, and
I that was actually very useful. I thought, this is good. No,
it was good because you were just telling me I had to write stories,
and you were quite right. Because the way the way I seem to
work this isn't really a choice. Is that. As I said earlier,
I think I bounced between my left brain and my right brain. So I've
just spent two or three years on these essays, which I just had to
write because it was all bouncing around in my head and I had to try
and understand what they was going on. But now my left brain is exhausted
and I need some creativity and I need some soul, and so I've been.
You know, I've been writing these stories on my sub stack called which
I've called Lives of the wild Saints, which I quite enjoyed and I have
taken I'm trying to tell stories of esthetics who lived in the wilderness, and
I'm taking the taking the original sources, and I'm not exactly fictionalizing them.
I'm trying to stay true to the story, but I'm writing them as stories,
which I've really enjoyed doing, and hopefully I'm going to bring that out
of a book as well. Actually, so I'm kind of on the source
of that, but that feels like a sort of bridge between between what I
was doing before and what I might do next. So I've had a few
ideas. I've had a few ideas for novels. You gave me an intriguing
about writing a novel about the desert Fathers, actually, which I do.
Yeah, that was a good idea, I dream come true. I've thought
about that. I've thought about that a lot, actually, and that's that's
I would really quite like to do that. It's again, it's a question
that when you're writing fiction, it's always a question of the how. It's
always about the technique you can have the idea, but it's it's always the
how that's going to make it. Yeah, because the technique has been so
important in your writing, like you've always you've always the style, even the
grammar, everything about your writing is related to the purpose of what it is
you're doing. And so it's like, that's why I that's why I kind
of dream about what Paul kings North book on the Desert Fathers would be,
like there would be some integration like that. That would be fun, it
would be interesting. What I found with fiction, And again it wasn't even
it wasn't it wasn't an idea that I sat down with. It's that the
form is so connected to the content that you can't separate the two things out.
And I discovered that was writing The Way, which was my novel set
during the Norman Conquest, which is famously or infamously written in its own version
of Old English, which is which was a mad idea that somehow worked.
But I did it because I just had to be done that way, because
this is the language had to reflect the way people would have spoken. And
when you do that, you find that it then creates an entirely different landscape
that you couldn't have created in modern English, and so all of my books
have been like that. So the language, it's it's again, it's a
You can come back to this question of AI and the machine. The language
we speak is such an an unthinking reflection of the world that we live in.
It's so there's been a lot of controversy around you know, AI programs
being hyper woke for example, yea, you know the language that they use,
because obviously an AI is created by a group of people. So whatever
their politics or their culture is, which is probably completely under they didn't probably
sit down to try and create a radically left wing AI program. It's just
that's just the way they think. So that's how it came out. And
if a different bunch of people created it, it would have spoken different language.
And the language we speak is a completely, almost unconscious reflection of the
way we see the world. And though like I won't give the Gemini people
like the benefit of the doubt, because if you've used it, you know
what it does is it actually takes your promptly. I've seen these pictures,
I've seen it formulates it with the I and then it gives you the answer
and you can sometimes you could catch the reformulation before. It wouldn't surprise me
in certain cases. I've seen all the pictures of the African kings of medieval
England, for example. Yeah, but again, I mean, it's it's
that's just, that's just a really obvious, clumsy manifestation of the reflection of
the way that we see the world, the way that we speak. And
once you start paying attention to the language you're using, rather than just doing
it unconsciously, which we mostly do, you go, I can see how
I'm every time I open my mouth, I'm creating the world. Right,
I mean, isn't it interesting that in the beginning there was the word?
Right, So we have this translation of Logos, which is word, and
Christ is literally a spoken word, and he speaks creation. So right at
the beginning of of of the Bible again, or certainly the beginning of the
Gospels, the Gospel of John, you've got this this fascinating notion that in
the beginning was the word. So there's there's a way that you speak reality
into existence every time you open your mouth. So that's always reflected in fiction.
If you know the language. You can't use language unconsciously when you're writing
fiction, you because every every the way that all your characters speak and the
way that you represent the world is going to create the world. So you
know, that's that's that's why it would be interesting to try and recreate the
world of the Desert Fathers, just to It's such an interesting thing to do,
to put yourself into the head of I mean, I'm fascinated by history.
I'm a history notes, so I love to love the idea of,
you know, what, what would it actually have been like to be in
that desert at that time, because these people were so different to us,
right, I mean the human but the way they see the world and the
world they've grown up and is so alien. It was like that with with
the Norman Conquest, and you try to try to imagine yourself into that world,
and it just yeah, it's a fascinating process. I mean it really
kind of. I mean I couldn't spell properly for about a year after writing
The Wake, so it's just I was just in that world. I couldn't
I couldn't write in modern English. It took me quite a long time to
get back into the into the boredom of modern modern English language. So that
is that's that's hilarious. Yeah, well, I think that also artists in
general we are more aware of the sacramental power of language and in some ways
like the magic that is in language because we see it right, Like you
said, you first of all, if you're writing a story, you have
to create a coherent world for the story to exist in, and that happens
at different levels. But then also you're affecting the world as you put it
out there. You know, so many stories, you know, if you
think of for example, if you think of nineteen eighty four and Brave New
World for example, you know they are they just simple prophecies? Are they
self fulfilling prophecies? To what extent do these fictional or even the science fiction
of the you know, like late nineteenth century, And to what extent does
do these stories actually participate in the predicted or participate in the process by which
it comes about? It's not clear. There's a there's an ambiguity that in
that in that Yeah, I've always been so fascinated by that. I've always
been so fascinated by that question. It's like it's like the people who are
creating the technology we use now are looking at some of these things as instruction
manuals. And it is a question, isn't it how much of this is
a prophecy? How much of it is created by people who read it and
then integrate it consciously or subconsciously into themselves and then create the thing that they've
created. I feel like sometimes like people watch, you know, Mark Zuckerberg
watched The Matrix in nineteen ninety nine, and then but he thought the agents
were the good Guys's correct, So he then created the lovely metaverse, which
luckily hasn't proven me very very fashionable. But but yeah, it's it's it's
like there's a there's a a back and forth all the time between the science
fiction and the fact and which came first? And are they actually integrated?
And is that? Are those novels the really interesting question is are those novels
some kind of unconscious picture or some kind of unconscious story of something that's unraveling,
something that's unfurling that people can sense. Yeah, I think it's a
kin to prophecy. It's not prophecy, per see, it's not direct,
it's not like revelation regard, but there's something of prophecy in it where we're
we're perceiving something that doesn't have form yet, beings that that that, let's
say, embodied meaning and formulate meaning. It's almost like a tuning fork that
catches a vibration. Yeah, I think it's manifesting it before before it's fully
kind of embodied in the world. And I think I think that's it.
And in some ways it doesn't matter which side, like, it doesn't it
doesn't matter which side you're on, if you portray it as the bad guys
or the good guys, it doesn't matter. It's just the actual just embodiment
of it. So you could you could be James Cameron and think I'm writing
this to stop to stop the AI, you know machine, But that's not
actually what's happening. You're you're in a weird way participating and it's in its
unfolding and it's unraveling and then you know, but you come up with sky
in it. But then by the time we have starlink, it's like,
wait, what's the difference? Is that exactly exact same that same word,
Like, isn't that the same name? Yeah, No, it's exactly that.
It's the participation in it, and it's what's interesting is that you can
go right back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. You can see these
novels starting to be written as soon as the dark satanic mills start up,
you know, and it's interesting that they called satanic in Blake's poem. As
soon as you get these kind of infernal industrial monstrosities beginning across the landscape,
you start to get novels like Frankenstein, and then you start to get novels
like We and you know, then you're into the twentieth century. And it's
like the novels are always a few paces ahead of what's happening. But like
you say, they're in that they can tune into what's going to on fill
And it doesn't matter how many warnings you issue. You can issue as many
warnings as you like. It makes absolutely no difference to the process of the
thing. You know, nobody ever checked, nobody ever stops. People don't
read the novel and say, my god, yes we must change direction.
That No, it never happens, No, because like I said, it
doesn't matter with how you portray it. You just have to portray it.
Whether you're against or for it, it doesn't matter. In some ways,
it and it's not like we can. It's not to blame the artist.
There's no blame to put because it's not a it's something that's happening. It's
not like I'm not saying we don't. We do participate in it. But
it's not like you could stop it by writing it like a complete story.
You know. In some ways, you're just kind of writing this wave.
That's all you can do, is a writer. I've discovered in my life
from being a young man who thought he could change the whole world through his
writing and then being an older man who realizes there's no chance with that.
So if you're lucky, a few people might read you and it might be
helpful, and that's that's all you can do. And that's all right.
But yeah, it doesn't it doesn't matter. In fact, it's almost a
case to be made that the more of these novels are written, the more
they accelerate the process, you know, because it just normalizes it, It
normalizes the kind of horror show. It's interesting I think that there are,
like there are some novels that in some ways give a fuller picture. So
maybe that's also the way to do it. So if you think of Tolkien
for example. You know, I actually I've confessed this before. I actually
didn't enjoy reading Tolkien that much. Okay, I love the story, the
reading of it was difficult for me. Well, yeah, it's it's whisper
it. But he's not a great writer. Actually yeah, I mean he's
a fantastic creator, exactly, wonderful creator. He's a wonderful world builder,
you know so much. He's got so much investment in the in the the
kind of genius of the world he's created. But on an actual technical level
he's writing is just and it's laborers, and it needs it needs editing.
He needs someone needs to strip all of the songs sung by Hobbits that go
on for three pages out of them is on my check. I know I'm
gonna be I'm going to be canceled by lots of people. But I love
talking. I love talking. He's a genius. But I just don't think
he's on a technical level. He could probably just do the bit of trimming,
you know. But I think what I was going to say is that
because in some ways he gives this full epic vision, you know, he
isn't He is portraying the the vision of what's happening, Like, you know,
he's he is kind of seeing this kind of technocratic world coming to us,
but he's also bringing us. He's also in some ways bringing us out
of it. He's showing us that the way that it will resolve itself.
And so that might be that might actually have just to do with how much
insight you can you can muster. And so for example, like the Matrix
guys, you know you could tell like they're there, they didn't know what
they were doing. I'm sorry to tell you, Like they just really didn't
know what they were doing. They were just catching something. And you can
tell because they just put all these they just put all these names in there
and there's no meaning. Like so a lot of like the mythological references,
it's just references for references. Uh, but they caught something, Like they
definitely caught something, but then how do they resolve it? Who do you
remember in the third movie, like Neo gets merged with the one with the
Source or something, but what does that mean? Who knows? Well,
he's kind of it's kind of techno Jesus his name. I mean, he's
kind of crucified and then resurrected. I can't quite remember something like that.
Yeah, he gets joined with the source and then he then he becomes like
maybe he becomes like a hidden god or something. But it's like, but
it wasn't particularly insightful, Like it wasn't as insightful as as you know,
uh as as proto like you know, hesitating to destroy the ring and his
dark shadow has to basically do it for the wrong reasons. Like that's a
really that's such an insightful It's such an insightful and almost disturbing way to end,
like the the the epic, it has it hooks in you, right,
it kind of hurts. But anyways, So, so I do think
that we can change. Like what I'm trying to say is that I think
that as artists we can participate fully, like as fully as possible in giving
people also a glimmer of what's possible beyond the the monster. But yeah,
I think so, Yeah, because what you're what you're doing is I mean,
token is a great example. Again you put as you say, you're
painting a full picture. You're trying to paint a full picture of what all
the forces are. Yeah, so, and and you have to do that
in a way that is not no, that is really true to what nature
is. So again the end of The Lord of the Rings where they go
back to the shire and actually has been scoured, you know, because everybody
wants the happy ending, and they they did that in the film. Of
course, in the film, you go back and everything's nice, which is
a kind of a nicer ending because they've sorted it all out. But actually
the reality is they go back to the shire and the Shi is not the
same anymore, because after what's happened, nothing could be the same anymore.
So that's not hopeless, but it does mean that what's happened has gone through
the whole world, and so there's that kind of refusal to give a simple
happy ending tied up in a bow. But at the same time, it's
that kind of you know, what's happened with the Ring can't be undone even
though the ring's been destroyed. You know, the world has been changed in
some way, but you can, you know, you could clean up and
you can move on. But there's a recognition of what human nature is and
what your nature is, and the ring is just such a wonderful symbol.
I mean, it's just I think, I think, I saw something recently
that somebody had done online that they took all the references to various passages from
Lord of the Rings where Frodo Bilbo effectively addicted to the Ring, and they
just replaced the word ring with the word iPhone. And it was really good.
It was really good. And that's that's a bit obvious, but it's
just that the the the understanding of of that kind of ability to be addicted
to something that you know is killing you as well, it's right at the
heart of it. So it's such a it's such a great Like you said,
it's a universal story, but it's a universal story that works because it
focuses on really particular small things in ordinary people. And it's it's so interesting
that, you know, back in the eighties I read The Lord of the
Rings and it's like it was just a fantasy book then, and now it's
become this this huge symbol of something much bigger. In the time that we're
in, Tolkien has become so much bigger than he was when he was just
a fantasy writer. Something, you know, because he put his finger on
something a long time ago that's almost manifesting now. Yeah, and keep becoming
more relevant and people, you know, as a fantasy, it's it's it's
it's one of the stories that people live in quite a bit like they in
a way they use it as there that there's as their lenses to look at
the world. A lot of people see the world through Lord of the Rings,
it seems. It seems though, and especially since the movies, that
it really did, you know, you know, for all the criticism we
can level at the movies, they really created a kind of subconscious luck series
of images that inhabits. Yeah, they really strong. They were great,
they were fantastic. Everybody wanted to be Ara Gorn. You know. Of
course I wanted to be Aragon when I was sixteen, so the films just
made it worse. They just made me realize I would never be Ara,
but I enjoyed the fantasy was finally over. But no, they were great,
they were there, timeless, those films. It's a great example of
I mean, the achievement actually of taking those enormously long and complex books and
boiling them down that way was very good. And that's another example. Actually,
it's similar example that you can see how artists sometimes they just they like
catch something because I mean, what has Peter Jackson made after Lord of the
Rings that's been going well, did he make before? Yeah? No,
it's very true, it's very true. I mean, I think that's that's
almost what we have to It's the kind of best that we can hope for
as creators that we know, we just keep doing our work and maybe we'll
catch something. Maybe well there'll be some zeitgeist that we're tapping into in a
way that you could never consciously do it. You know, if you sat
down and decided to do it, you would you would never be able to.
But it's out there and if you if you have your aerials out,
you could touch it. So the question, I mean, for me,
the question as a as a writer some of these written novels is where what
are the novelists going to do from now? Are there even going to be
any novelists? I don't know. A novel is going to continue to be
written to people even read them, I don't know. But how a story
is going to be told because we're, you know, we're obviously so obviously
at the end of a kind of cultural cycle. Everything's so exhausted, everything's
being recycled, everything's boring, everything's everything's woke, and even when it's not
woke, it's just got nothing to say. It feels like such a tired
time in the culture. But something's got to change, something's going to come,
you know, something has to Those kinds of periods always lead to some
kind of renewal. So there's going to have to be new forms of writing,
new writers, and they'll be out there now, beavering away, you
know, they'll be doing it. So the question is what it's what form
is it going to take? What are the stories going to look like?
Well? How are they going to move beyond what's been done? And yet
somehow remain kind of tied into the stream. I don't know the answers,
but that's you know, I'm desperate to see the new stories because I'm so
I'm so bored, you know, I'm so bored. It's terrible. Now.
I mean it's you know, there's it's such a lull in the culture
almost but it's yeah, but it also means that there's a hunger at the
same time, feel it and and you know, and almost like I'm just
tired of eating candy. People are just they been oversaturated with just bland culture
and regurgitated over and over and over, and so I think people are just
are just hungry for something beautiful. Yeah, it's exactly that. And the
challenge is going to be tapping you tap back into the source, the eternal
source that the stories come from, and as ever, you have to do
that in a way that's going to make people look at things freshly, and
that will happen. People will come and do that, Like I say,
I'm sure they're out there now doing it. And for those of us who
are kind of a bit seasoned, it's a hard question in a way because
we've alreadyritten books, right, so we're kind of stuck in a rut.
But it's how do we do this? I think this that in that sense,
it's quite an exciting time because I think the last ten or fifteen years
have been a time of cultural decline and like I say, it's just become
so dull and it's getting to the point where something's going to explode. And
that's interesting. You know, there's there's stories. The stories will hopefully come
come roaring out again. It's just how we tell them. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, So we have to keep our how did you say,
keep your aerials out is that how Yeah, it feels like that.
It feels like you have you've got to have an aerial out there. You've
got to be paying attention to somehow to to what's to what's in the ether.
And you can't almost can't do that consciously as you write. It will
just come to you. But you know, the times, the times,
they are changing and all that, and they really are now very fast.
It's impossible to predict what the world's going to look like in five years,
you know, which which in a way makes it a hard time to write,
but it also makes it exciting. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And
in some ways, like you said, the the and the fact that the
old stories have been twisted and forgotten, and you know, there's this I
always feel like we're in this moment in Lord of the Rings. You kind
of have this image, right, It's like there are these old stories that
have been forgotten. You know, this old lineage that has been forgotten.
It's still there. You know, air Gorn is there, but nobody knows.
It's like it's all and this this idea of reforging the order, this
idea of finding the treasure right because the treasure has been has just it's there
in a dusty box, nobody knows it's there. And so there's something about
that that's exciting now because we can we can in some ways represent the stories
in a manner that will once again be surprising and fresh to people, because,
yeah, because they've been forgotten and because also people are hungry, and
so it is a great I mean, in some ways it is a great
time of great opportunity. But who's gonna who's going to be able to to
catch it? Yeah, well it's kind of it's like you've got to take
that reforged sword and then you've got to slash your way through all of the
cultural thickets that becomes of because all the crap. Yeah, because it's like
you say, people have either forgotten the stories or all the stories have been
taken and deliberately inverted right by giant corporations, which I know you've done a
lot of stuff on and it's always impossible to you know, you know that
if Disney produces a version of a fairy til you know exactly what they're going
to do, right, it's gonna be YadA yadda. You can predict it
without even bothering to watch it. But the the alternative to that is not
to go back and faithfully reproduce exactly what the brothers Grimm did. You know,
that's a lot in either right, because that's all been done too.
So so how do you go back to the source of those stories and do
something that is neither of those things? And again, I think people are
just if these stories are playing on deep images and archetypes and things that are
unconscious and things that are always real and forms whatever we want to call them,
which I think they are, then people always need them. They don't
always need them in the same form told in the same way, but they're
not going to put up forever with boring corporate in versions of the stories making
political points. You know, they actually want the real thing. And as
I say, it doesn't mean going back to the past. It means going
back to the source and then and then refreshing it. It's like you say,
it's like, it's like I've been writing a lot about holy worlds recently.
It's like, you know, sometimes you'll go and visit holy well and
it's been neglected and it's clogged up and it's full of leaves, and so
what do you do? You clean it out and then the fresh water comes
out again, and then you know, then then you're onto something and then
you can start drinking. It almost feels like we have to go back to
the source and and lean it out, you know, and let it,
let the water come roaring out again, and then see which direction the stream
goes in. Yeah, well, let's keep let's keep trying. That's something
to keep keep you busy. So there's there's Yeah, we've both got our
orders. Now, we've both got our orders. There's a lot of interesting
people out there. And you know, you've spoken to plenty. I've met
plenty more. I I hear from people all the time who are writing,
who have ideas, who are doing things. Like you say, there's a
real hunger. You can feel it. It's bubbling up. So so yeah,
I hope that in ten years time things are going to look really different.
You know this, there's there's Yeah, things are happening. I feel
like we're on the verge of some sort of explosion, hopefully a good one.
Yeah. Well, I really hope that you that you're able to kind
of that that you move towards some fiction, because I am excited of the
idea of of a kind of diving into some aspect of the weird, you
know, Christian tradition by by Paul kings North. I think it would be
for me, it'd be really exciting to read that. So I'm looking forward
to see which you're gonna going to pull together at some point. Yeah.
I haven't been able to get this Desert for Other's idea out of my head
since you mentioned it. So something, something's going on there. You've put
that in there, so I'm gonna have to I'm going to have to dig
into that is Yeah, it's it's intriguing. We'll see. We'll see what
happens now that you made a public now you've got it. No, I
shouldn't have said anything now so someone else will steal the idea and do it
better, which would also be fine. Yeah, which would be fine,
exactly all right. So Paul, thank you so much for talking to me.
It's always wonderful. It's always a pleasure. It's great and can't wait
to see also your book. How is the book going to be called the
Machine? Do they already advertise? The working title is Against the Machine.
It's nice and stock and it should be out sometime next year. Twenty twenty
five, I think, But no dates or anything yet, all right,
and so so for all of you watching, you know this is we're just
recording this right after Pasca. So Christ has risen everyone and uh and yeah,
and we'll talk to you soon. Bye bye, take care