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Speaker 2: Remaining and live Man like this man letting butterfly, flattening
wing big down in our force.
Speaker 3: Man it gon cause a tree fall, letting five thousand
miles away. Man, nobody see nobody else you know? And
you got tractive conduct black a night on the panel.
Speaker 2: All right, Carlos, look to the Jay Burton Show. How
are you doing?
Speaker 3: Man? Thanks a lot, doing good? Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have relatively recently discovered your work and
it's it's quite excellent. It's sort of what I love
about doing this as a job is that just when
I think I found everyone, I find someone who does
it very very good work I just had completely missed.
So obviously I'm familiar with your product, but my audience
might not be. So who are you? And well, what
do you do?
Speaker 3: Uh, Carlos Drona. I am and I have a YouTube
channel mainly, that's what I do. I have Substack now
as well, so I'm trying to turn some of my
videos or more interesting ones into essays. And I write
on on Leo as well, which is just a substack publication,
but they publish my stuff as well, and and and
that's basically it. I mean Substack is also a chance
to explore topics that maybe wouldn't make for a full video.
So yeah, those are my two main platforms. I'm kind
of on Twitter, but not really. I'm bad with Twitter.
I forget about it. Yeah, it's a different game.
Speaker 2: That's the that's the best relationship. As a reformed poster,
I don't do it anymore for any number of reasons.
It's amazing how much that platform can suck your entire
productivity up, and it's fun, you know. It's it's sort
of like the You're eating the dessert first of online
content creation, but very clearly it drives ninety nine percent
of people, myself perhaps included, completely and totally insane. So
it's sort of a small doses thing. But you were
and and forget me if I missed characterizing this, but
the majority of what I've seen in your work is
heavily philosophical. And he recently did sort of an examination
of sort of infamous figular figure a Yuvo Harari. I
am American. I cannot say my own language, let alone
his name, So if I've mispronounced it, I would say
my apologies, but I don't know if I like him
enough to apologize on that front. But nonetheless, he's sort
of gotten wrapped up in sort of the broader conversation about,
you know, the wef you know, in the kind of
more tinfoil hat crowd. And so I'm curious if you
could provide a little bit of background on that figure,
what perhaps provoked you to make that video, and then
if you could, I guess sort of the thesis statement
of it.
Speaker 3: So I haven't really followed Harari too much. You're right,
he is pretty prominent. I saw that clip from his
speech at the WEF, and it interesting because the clip itself,
to be fair, is sort of taken out of context.
And so what he's saying is that, you know anything,
that language is essential, for anything that relies or is
constructed principally through words, AI can do better than humans.
And since religion and his opinion is principally a word game,
this is kind of how he puts it. AI is
going to be the main authority when it comes to
religion because he references Judaism in particular, but he applies
this to other faiths as well. So much of theology
is about seeing if scriptures are compatible with each other,
how you make them compatible with each other? That kind
of thing, right, So AI can do that. It can
find alternative interpretations, It can parse the meaning of a
word in every possible interpretation. So AI is going to
be your high priest. He doesn't use that term, but
that's kind of where he lands. However, following that clip
that I use, and I developed this also in an
essay I wrote for substec about this, he does make
the concession that you know. You need other elements here
as well. Spirituality cannot just come down to hair splitting
or to semantics. You need experience too. The problem is,
and this would be my contention, the value that you
ascribe to human experience depends entirely on your metaphysics. If
you believe as he does, that consciousness is accidental secondary,
it's an epi phenomenon. That's the term that gets used.
It's basically the result of non conscious matter and energy
organized just right. It has no particular reason for being there.
It's kind of an accident. You don't you don't need,
It doesn't have a function, It just happened. But fundamentally
reality is non conscious. Fundamentally, reality is about these blind
forces interacting with each other, and they rubbed up against
each other and created the spark of consciousness. And that's neat,
but it has no transcendent meaning. If that's your view,
if that's your metaphysics, if you're an emergentist, which is
how that usually gets called in philosophy of mind, then
you can tell me that experience matters to you all
you want, and that there's something disheartening about AI being
better at language because at the end of the day, Boy,
don't we want human deliberation to be part of the story.
That's nice to have that sentiment, but it doesn't mean anything,
because in religion and spirituality, the point of experience is
it gets you closer to the nature of reality. It's
possible to experience fundamental truths about reality. And you've already
decided that that's not a part of the picture, because
fundamentally reality is not about consciousness, it's not about experience.
God is not a consciousness. What you have is matter
doing matter, material things, and you know consciousness is secondary.
So ultimately his metaphysics, almost in spite of himself. It
supports the idea that the ultimate authority in religion and
philosophy and anything else should be that which is best
at processing raw data, not experience, not the interior dimension,
but the exterior.
Speaker 2: Well, and I think that it's sort of a it's
sort of an interesting premise because it is on one hand,
and for me this is imprecise language, but it is
fundamentally materialist claim, the idea that consciousness is at best
an accident, right, and that this sort of determinate factors.
As you've said, these kind of large kind of blind forces,
but in a bizarre way it leads to this sort
of disembodied view where this sort of digital construct becomes,
as you've said, this sort of high priest. It's sort
of a and again it's sort of this bizarre horseshoe theory.
Right where you've gone so far through materialism, you come
out with basically a literal black box, right, something which
is completely and totally incomprehensible to human understanding. Obviously maybe
not in its current form, but you know, taking that
sort of one step further. And so I'm curious what
do you make of that sort of relationship between on
one hand, what you could consider you know, materialism, empiricism
might not be the quite word, but the idea you're
kind of this discounting of human consciousness leading to this
sort of loyalty to a disembodied synthetic consciousness if you
see what I'm getting at, Carlos.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that kind of machineic god that intuitively we
kind of feel is is imagined at least right when
we hear people talk about the singularity, it sounds like
a counterfeit for spirituality. It sounds like a scatology, often
deliberately so I think that if you discount the newminess
or consciousness as fundamental, that doesn't change the nature of reality,
and it doesn't change the nature of human yearning. You're
still gonna have the same impulses that lead people to
look to religion or to philosophy. They're just going to
go in a different direction. There's a lot of hope
put into technology as making sense of existence, or at
least as the fleeing forward into some state that resolves
the contradictions in the human condition. I think that's what
you end up getting also with guys that are very
different in some respects from Harari. When Peter Teal talked
about the singularity something that we have to cause to happen,
it was often in terms of this kind of tragic
sense of the human condition being terribly limited, painful. So
how do we get out of this? And well, technology
can get us out of this. We can get to
the point where innovation accelerates and sort of reaches escapablocity
and is able to rewrite every fundamentally limiting condition to
which we are subject. And so he talks about yeah, gender,
you can change your gender, but that's not enough. That's nothing.
We want to be able to change everything. In that
famous New York Times interview where he talked about the
Antichrist and everybody was kind of freaking out a little
bit at him, I don't think there he mentioned the Singularity.
Maybe he did, but he's given lectures about it before.
You have other guys that were part of the so
called dark Enlightenment, so they're kind of like the right
wing to uve al Harari's left wing in that same world,
but they have the same ethos. So what it comes
down to, I guess if I answer your question succinctly,
or if I try to wrap my head around why,
even within a materialist paradigm you end up with this
kind of image of a counterfeit god. You call it
the black box, and that's very interesting, of course, because
that that is where the mysterium tremendoum ends up. This
is the black Box of AI. We don't know what
it's doing, but we still have mystery. We still have
something there. Right. I've called that the like the machine
or the demonic Kabba. It's kind of this weird, sacred
looking symbol that that comes out of it. I think
the reason is that. I think the reason is that
we are limited. Human life is tragic in many ways,
and we still want something to give it meaning, or
at least to give it a plausible escape. There has
to be some way to escape from this, you know,
from all these limitations and all and all this this
this suffering, and so technology could do that. So we
imagine the singularity. The singularity is a very speculative idea,
you've all Harari's data ism is a very odd speculative
way of of of looking at human innovation. You know,
it assume that we're going to move in a particular direction,
or that there's certain rules that govern innovation, the way
we have laws in physics or in biology that make
it plausible that we will develop in a particular direction.
And that direction is this point at which we've innovated
so much that again we reach escape velocity and there's
really nothing stopping us from rewriting the human genome, et cetera.
But it is, yeah, the limitation of the human condition.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because this is
something you see particularly as well in the kind of
neoliberal mind. I think of someone like Tony Blair, who,
even if he's never said it, seems to believe that
innovation works off of sort of a linear formula that
if you produce x number of or x plus one PhDs,
your rate of innovation or whatever that constitutes will go
up by a commensurate rate. And you see this a
lot in the discussion around, you know, kind of universal education,
the idea that not only should everyone be educated to
sort of a baseline of competence, but also as many
people as possible should be jammed into higher education, and
that the stated claim is, of course, that that will
produce a higher number of geniuses. And I think that
that term a genius is sort of an interesting one.
It seems that moderns are sort of uncomfortable with it
because there is, even if it's sort of faintly, a
transcendent claim being made by that term, right, someone who
is sort of outside of the normal, And even in
that and maybe this is slightly further abroad than the
context in which you meant it. I have a very
distinct memory of talking to a deeply progressive professor of
mine who would be absolutely aghast if she knew what
she turned me into. But she has an influence one
way or another, and she was absolutely railing against the
idea of the great man, the idea that humans have
the agency or you know, as someone from a different
age would say, like the courage or the ability to
break out of just the simple kind of trends and
forces of economics. She was a Marxist, so I believe
it was all economic with her. And I think that
that's interesting because that further claim, right that innovation is
simply the product of a certain educational path, is somehow related.
You know. It's the idea that innovation is the product
of people who have been educated in a certain way.
If we can increase the number of people educated, therefore
we will increase the rate of innovation. Seemingly works off
of a shared premise. Do you see what I'm getting
at there, Carlos or completely off base?
Speaker 3: No, that that makes sense. I mean they feel as
though they can engineer or innovation, and even to the
point at which we won't be the ones innovating anymore.
I think something about the economic determinism of the Marxist
or of the liberal classical liberal tradition and how it
developed shares the faith that you know, used to be
faith in impersonal forces. They're going to lead us in
a certain direction. This is how progress happens. We can
predict progress. Now it's faith in technology. AI is the
one that's going to be doing the innovation, but the
idea is the same. Right, these are impersonal forces. If
you put your faith in the right impersonal force and
you liberate it historical dialectics or the market now AI
leading to AGI, then you're going to get predictable results,
at least predictable in the sense that they're going to
follow a particular trend. You might not understand what that
trend ends up making you look like, or what it
makes the economy look like, but you understand that it's
going in a certain direction, right, Like they don't know
what the singularity is going to produce, for example, But
and Marx didn't pretend to know what communism was going
to look like. But anyway, we know the direction that
it's in, and we know that it's produced in a
quasi scientific way by certain forces that really don't require
our human deliberation. Marx is ambiguous on that he himself
is ambiguous. Sometimes it is moral agency, sometimes it isn't.
Even at some point I don't remember where talks about
how you know the moral agency of particular workers is irrelevant.
They just need to do what they do for their
own sake, for their own interests, sounding very much like
Adam Smith at times in the theory of moral sentiment.
But if they do that, you know this, this impersonal
force of the economy is going to lead in a
certain direction. Of course, in order to make the human
subject predictable, you break him down to elements of his
personality and his desire that are quite simple, so material
self interest, personal well being. That should be enough because
everything else gets a little bit complicated. And when you
start filling his head up with too much philosophy, he
behaves in predict impredictable ways and in strange ways. But
if we take our unit of analysis as just human desire,
very specific elements of human desire that everybody shares, we
can build a theory on that, and it can have
the semblance of a scientific theory. It looks like science
at least, right it's atomic. We have these little units
of analysis and we build on that.
Speaker 2: And what's especially interesting, go on, uh, if if it
was relevant, I don't remember it, which didn't mean I
didn't say anything that was relevant. But the excuse me one.
One thing that you brought up there that I wanted
to get back to is you mentioned the short of
shared directionality of Adam Smith and Marx. And it is
quite interesting because I had a fascinating conversation with a
friend of mine where she was speaking on exactly that point.
We're ultimately the kind of heloists, right. The end goal
of both the classical liberal and the communists are sort
of ultimately the same in the sense that the end
goal is abundance. It is is a liberation from the
human condition, albeit expressed different ways. And you've seen, you know,
there's a lot of analysis around this talking about how
you know, effectively, it seems as if it seems as
if the kind of end of liberation, whether it is
you know, expressed in terms of market or expressed in
terms of social and sort of leads to the same thing, right,
It leads towards the same place. And I think that
that's sort of an interesting thing to examine because I
have a bad habit of a picking fight with you know,
modern day classical liberals, and they are always one to
make the claim that, oh, you know, if you were
not a liberal, you must be a Marxist you must
be woke. You know, this is the terminology goes and
I think that it's it's interesting as an outside observer
to say, well, from a certain perspective, you and the
Marxists are much more similar than not curious, what are
your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3: No, absolutely, and that's an old reactionary point, right, I
mean that right and left have ended up meaning slightly
different flavors of economic determinism. Where the economy is is
uh primary over politics. You're you're sort of leaving out
moral agency or or philosophical questions about the good society.
So you take the very basic premise that, well, the
good society at least it is economic prosperity. At least
it is, as you said, abundance, and then we go
from there. Everything else becomes become secondary. And again it's
in personal forces that are that are leading us. So
h you know, famously Adam Smith's contention, and he is
you know, I don't want to pile on because he
can be ambiguous at times, but not really on this point. Unfortunately,
It's it's pretty clear you have to end up with
individuals that are trying to maximize their monetary self interest.
So self interest understood is monetary accumulation, where money is
the index for material well being. And so Adam Smith
is interesting because he does provide very explicit discussion of
that point. But you know, the the the way in
which he understands self interest accruing to collective prosperity and
and to collective virtue is I think taken up by
by by later thinkers in different ways when you get
to Popper, when you get to Bergson first and then Popper,
they argue that if the individual is the subject whose
behave behavior determines the good society coming about, and the
individual should be pursuing his self interest. In these terms,
every mediating structure between the good and the individual is
kind of useless. Right, So national identity, partial associations, and
community are probably going to act as distorting influences for
his economic reason to manifest. Right, So when he's making decisions,
if he's making them on the basis of group loyalty
or all kinds of biases that come from nation, religion, family,
these things probably will distort the market, keep us from
the market efficiency that we need to get to what
ultimately Bergsen calls the open society. So he gives it
that term. And Popper is very clear about not thinking
that international law or international institutions should treat the nation
and the preservation of the nation as a as a good.
You should go directly to the individual. And that's sort
of it. So it's the atomic individual or the atomized individual,
and the universal society, the global society. So what you've gone,
you've you you've ended up with liberal internationalism the way
that the Marxists end up with with their you know,
view of the international Smith didn't do that, so because
perhaps he was inheriting a completely different political tradition, and
perhaps because the implications of some of his ideas weren't
entirely clear to him. You know. He at some point,
I think in the Wealth of Nations argues that the
the the bias that you have for workers, that you
can understand, for a culture that you understand that you
grew up in, is going to lead you, as a
business owner, as an industrialist, to reinvest in your own country.
You're probably not going to take the fruits of your
labor and just go off somewhere. Right. This market logic
is occurring within the body politique of a nation. So
you can still with Smith as I recall, understand this terrible,
dirascinating market logic as a metabolic process happening in a body.
By the time you get to later very extreme liberals,
the metabolic process is what matters, and you better break
the body down. You know, you've got the what is
it organs without bodies with the losing Watari. That's a
great image because that's kind of what's being described there.
The market is a blood stream, and liberate the bloodstream
from these pesky bodies of nations and communities and and
and all the rest of it. So okay, well that's
not going to work because it always occurred within a
body that was structured by all kinds of institutions whose
effect on human behavior you might take for granted. But
it was structuring people's lives. It was guiding people's decisions
in all sorts of little ways. I think one of
the this is going to take us very far afield
redirect me if I start saying, you know, things that
aren't all that interesting. But I think maybe one of
the problems is that we had this account of how
money came about, which was a sort of just so story.
It was a kind of plausible story. As I recall
the Liberals the later on as well, Carl Menger and
the Austrian school repeat this idea, right, that that money
comes about as a system of exchange, where first you
have trade and eventually to get more precise because maybe
you don't have the right number of eggs that I
consider equivalent to my goat, Well, let's have money. Money
is a good index. Actually, anthropologists seem to find that
money is always imprecise and it's always socially embedded, Like
you go to pre modern societies and it's IOU's you know,
it's it's always credit. It's not like we have to
create a specific coin that has a certain value and
we're all keeping tabs. It's more informal, and it's a
it's a psychological artifact that you give me credit basically,
and I don't pay you back exactly, because then I
don't want to be your friend. Like you have me
over for dinner, and I have you over for dinner
the next day and I serve you exactly what you
served me. It's like it's a bit much, right, it's
too exact. That means I want to disassociate people were
not like that and so they would only really be exact.
They would want like exact exchange if you were a foreigner,
maybe a merch or you know, somebody I don't know,
I have no relation to you. So economic relations, they
were always embedded in social relations. And so I think
because we assumed that the human mind or the human
subject wanted to parse the economic from everything else, and
so we had an account of how money came about
that assumed people were very, very calculating and very you know,
very exact. Maybe that is what led then to these
these ideas, so that there was already a mistake in
understanding how money came about.
Speaker 2: There's an interesting it's a similar mistake in the liberal tradition.
And I wonder if again a reactionary would say, I
say that as if I'm not in that group, but
would say something that, you know, the common issue with
liberalism and the ideologies which birthd it was an over
reliance on human reason, the idea that human reason, whether
economic or otherwise, is the primary driver of all action.
Because you see a sort of similar idea with the
state of nature and the social contract, the idea that
everyone lived, you know, as individual units right out in
the Woods, and then they decided to enter into a
voluntary exchange of freedoms for protection. Now, obviously there are
certain examples where it's a little bit cleaner the kind
of early feudal system. Right, Hey, can you protect us
from the barbarians? Okay, I guess we're serfs now, all right,
maybe cleaner in that context, But I think that And actually,
Harrison Pitt had a very interesting conversation with Carl Benjamin
about exactly this not too long ago, So if anyone interested,
check that out. But it's it seems as if there
is a similar error being made which is placing this
undue primacy on I guess you could say kind of
like rational human economic action. The choices are made by
that kind of mental weighing of cost and benefit. You know,
everything is a product of sort of cost benefit analysis,
and most certainly, you know, people tend to act in
accordance with incentives. We understand that. I wonder if that is,
and maybe I'm curious to get your thoughts on this.
A similar error we see in both the kind of
formation of society and also the formation of money as
it were.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I haven't listened to that conversation. Harrison's a friend
of mine. I think, what what what happens when reason
overtakes intellectus? Right? Like, I mean, the subject is really
folks on the way you understand the human subject just
focuses on that. I want to say, the calculating faculty
or reason understood as not as that part of us
that admires things esthetically and for their own sake. Let's
put it that way, because I think that's what ends
up interfering with the materialistic or the economically deterministic account
of human life. Because of course, if money is not
always or if economic exchange within a community is not
always exact, and if it is socially embedded, as seems
to be the case also in small communities today, you
don't have to go to anthropological literature about pre modern communities.
It's because we value social relations. We know that being
embedded in social relations is good for us. But I
think there's always an irreducible element of esthetic admiration, love
for the community for how that relation functions. I think
there is always some element of us that's just a
disinterested lover of the structure around us, the order around us,
And that's why we're willing to treat it the way
we do as caretakers and as stewards. We don't want
to treat it as an ATM. We don't want to
treat it as a reality with which we interface only
in terms of what we get and what we give.
In fact, it would be very difficult to do that.
You couldn't quantify every aspect of life that way, and
that aesthetic admiration, which is an aesthetic admiration, I think
ultimately for or the integrity and the coherence and the
harmony of forms as we encounter them, including of social forms,
is what gets clouded over in this entire Western trajectory
that we've unfortunately been mired in, which takes us from
economically deterministic accounts of how money comes about and how
we should behave to accrue prosperity all the way to
the incapacity of a guy like you've all Harari to
understand that consciousness really can't be reducible to non conscious
bits of matter, and somewhere in between that somewhere in
between Adam Smith's account of money and Harari saying consciousness
is not a thing, it's it's it's an accident. You
end up with accounts of the good society that efface
all difference where there is no esthetic value, no beauty
in the differences between us and in our communities and
in nations and all that, andhrited identity that that that
we used to value so much, because what value would
there be in those in those things? Right, the human
subject is reduced to something that we all have in common.
It's a very basic element of us. It's calculation, and
it's the rational I wouldn't say reason, because reason has
other connotations, but the rational faculty mm hm. And and
there's really no particular reason to prefer that that come
in the form of coherent structures over time. So I
think that the universalism that that you get from authors
on the right and the left, or liberal authors as
well as Marxist authors, they it does. It does share this, uh,
this this loss of Yeah, that's that's how I would
put this loss of the esthetic love for the integrity
of forms as you encounter them, of social forms, and
of distinct identity and social structure. If that makes some sense, No,
it does.
Speaker 2: And to me, you see this, You see this in
changing attitudes towards wealth. You mentioned earlier, the aversion to
treating society like an atm And this was right the
character of the miser, right, the rich man, who you know,
nonetheless is very stingy with his wealth, and you compare
that to the sort of ideal of the magnanimous rich man.
The Romans are easy to pick on here, but the
idea that if you are a man of great means,
there's something owed in that, right, you must sort of
spread that around to be inexact. And sure, you know
the Romans, it's easy to see because it was bred
and circuses, but even I think in a more modern context,
the English ruling class, but also in my own small town,
right there is a statue dedicated to a man who
is independently wealthy, who started a free hospital right in
the poorest area of town, worked his entire life there
and died of typhus. I think I can't remember. Point
is right, that was seen as a sort of laudable goal.
But when you have made a transition to this sort
of adomized individual and whether from the right or the left,
nominally accepted that premise that society is made up of
individual actors acting in their own self interest, and that
that selfishness is ultimately at worst morally new, at best
morally positive. Well, you you've ripped out the distinction of
the the miser and the magnanimous man. You have flattened
it simply it is, you know, wealth is a way
to to satisfy your own kind of abitinal urges. That
is a morally neutral occurrence. And that same that same
criteria is applied sort of up and down the economic
hierarchy from the the kind of you know, Reason magazine types.
You're the kind of smoldering creater that remains of Beltwegh libertarianism.
You know, you see these defenses of you know, institutions
like the only fans kind of modern day prostitution, where
the idea is that well, that is it, that is
a good to morally neutral act. You know, you were
using an asset. You have to enrich yourself to to
sort of increase your capacity two separate yourself from the
human condition. Right, if we can take wealth as sort
of a proxy for your separation from the human condition,
and I think that sure, if we're adopting kind of
this you know, monovariable analysis, you know, where the that
within certain bounds, effectively wealth is its own end, its
own good. I think it's it's really no shock that
because of that same shared premise of materialism, that same
shared premise of individualism, we sort of end up with
this bizarre kind of horseshoe theory. Again being in exact Carlos,
But do you see what I'm getting at there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, well it's because you
you have no account anymore, I think of the of
what human flourishing requires. Right, So again, when you simplify
the subject down to a few faculties that that have
to do with with feeling good and material security and
all the rest of it, and you reject the possibility
that there's certain a spiritual anatomy, like there's certain structures
in us that are given and that actually they're going
to suffer if you do certain immoral acts. If you
reject the notion that there is such a thing as
a disordered desire outside of well it harms me in
terms of utilitarian sort of sense. But but if you
if you reject that, then well, do what you can
with the assets that are that are available to you,
and and everything ends up getting you know, broken down
and homogenized, because uh, we're all sort of pursuing the
same the same thing. But you know, we're not like that.
We know that the that the human subject requires certain
things that that disordered desired destroys you. Over the long run.
You might become a hypertrophic, very disciplined individual to compensate
for the fact that you have certain vices, but you're imbalanced.
You know, however, admirable developing tremendous discipline is if it's
done to compensate for the corroding effects of a certain vice,
that's gonna have its own consequences, if that makes sense, right,
So the answer is always to go back to things
that make a lot of intuitive sense that we all
kind of know, which is that you're supposed to keep
yourself in order, or you're supposed to have institutions around
you that keep your soul ordered. And if because you're
not just reason, and you're not just the need for
material security, and you're not just the calculating faculty, you're
you're a more complex creature than all that. And but
there are there are rules to the gain of being human.
You know, you can't expose yourself to certain stimuli, you'll
you'll fry your your brain you know, you can't give
in to certain things because they're gonna they're gonna hurt
you in in all sorts of ways. So you know,
it's it's it's about returning to certain very basic, very traditional,
uh ideas. I don't know if I answered your your
question though, I don't know if I if I addressed
what you were getting at necessarily.
Speaker 2: Oh no, definitely. Uh, it's what you're What you're saying,
Carlos is that you can't overdose on medical grade methamphetamines.
And French post structuralists like Nick Land did right. Uh.
But in all seriousness, Uh, it's funny. I I watched
your video on Land, and I've had I've read a
lot of Land by volume, but a relatively narrow selection
of his work. Certain parts of Dark Enlightenment are probably
my most visited sections of kind of modern political theory.
I stand by the Cracker Factory being one of the
funniest chapters ever written. In addition does work on super
racism and others. But in all seriousness, I wanted to
get to another video of yours that I found very
very interesting, because, to be honest, this is something that
I'm constantly noticing which is the rise of therapy culture.
And I'm not Catholic, and I'm not the biggest fan
of doctor E. Michael Jones for any number of reasons,
but nonetheless, in Libido Dominondi, he has a very fascinating
discussion of therapy as an inverted ritual of confession. And
so I'm curious if you could And I know this
is an older video, so I maybe you should have
prepped you a little bit for this, but one to
get your thoughts on therapy culture more broadly and where
it sort of fits into modern society. I guess what
role it fits. And then also if you agree with
you know, Jones's characterization of therapy as a sort of inverted,
perverted or twisted version of the sort of the sacrament
of confession.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. I haven't read E. Michael Jones, and he
keeps getting mentioned to me, so maybe that's a sign
that I that I should read.
Speaker 2: Here's what I'll say, Uh, Libido Dominondi is very very good.
It is plus or minus a thousand pages, and all
the Catholic are gonna get really mad at me for this.
It should be three hundred pages. And also it being emj.
Not to dismiss this out of hand, but there is
a certain degree to which he probably brings up the
Jews a bit too much, and it clouds his analysis
in certain areas. That is a relatively tepid criticism. It's
still well worth your time. But I and I think
many others have read forty percent of that book and
gotten ninety eight percent of the information in it. That's
my sort of ninety second review, right.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean, I the the term libido dominani,
of course, originates in the City of God. I think
Augustine originates the term. I like the term more than
I like the discussion around it by Augustine, which is fine,
but you know, there's not that much to it. I mean,
it's what you would expect. But I think, you know,
the term evokes a lot. It sounds like something that
we should dig into. And so for me, what it evokes,
or what it made me think of, was that the
the lust or the libidinal need to dominate ends up.
It's it's the result of the erotic faculty or or
erotic desire becoming untethered from its natural end, uh so
that it goes in any direction and the direction ends
up going gone.
Speaker 2: Well, sorry to interrupt you again, but I mean this
is the point you see made in Dante, right, why
the the users and the sodomites are condemned together. But
excuse me, sorry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. And and and I've been playing
with the idea, you know recent that the that the
idea of of of liberation or making liberation into the
central myth of your of your political project, really has
a lot to do with the desire to liberate, to
liberate energy or to liberate uh, tendencies within you from
the ends towards which they've been directed. And so yeah,
you end up with this idea of of erotic desire
being liberated, but it ends up going nowhere in particular
or everywhere in particular, or it's used in these very
perverse ways. Uh. And and that happens with everything. Money
becomes liberated from the real economy, so it's speculative finance
or wealth and and and and power become liberated from
the esthetic love for a given people, and that becomes
just disordered exercise of power.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean you see this with what either Kazinski
would call like the power process that that you know,
very basic function of reward for activity has effectively been
channeled into you know, he would describe as you know,
surrogate activities, right, things which sort of trick your brain
into thinking that you're doing something meaningful. But Carlos sorry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And I think Jones's point is
that that becomes a kind of matrix of control, right,
These things are used to control people. And so in
terms of therapy, therapy culture, that video was, you know,
it was a bit of a it was a bit
of a superficial exploration of the coincidence that Jung remembered
Freud uh talking about the sexual theory as the centerpiece
of psychoanalysis. That you you really have to pay attention to.
This Ung, my son, you know, is very important in
memories and reflections. He recalls that conversation and his sort
of perplexed reaction to the idea that we would want
to view every psychological uh force in man as somehow
at root sexual. So he doesn't go along with that,
and he doesn't really understand that. And then, you know,
because I'm not a Youngian and I'm not a Freudian,
I you know, I can't necessarily endorse any any brand
of of psychoanalysis. I think what you said is right.
I think it ends up having this weird function in
society where it's almost as though in order to deal
with a problem or xpiate some kind of a pathology,
you you go to therapy. I think that's more common
in some countries than in others. But I've had a
lot of uh friends and family that that go down
that route. And the danger there is that you just
talk about your problems forever. You become addicted to the process,
and the process has no particular end. It doesn't really
exist within a paradigm that understands what it would look
like to end. Very often that's that's that's what I see,
and I think that does make sense as a substitute
for I guess Jones means confession right, that that therapy
takes the place of the priest.
Speaker 2: Yes, and his point and I realized quizzing you about
a large book you haven't read is sort of poor form. Uh,
not that it's stopped me, but.
Speaker 3: No, it's interused to read it.
Speaker 2: He also makes the point as well that it is
there is also an inversion of the sort of locus
of blame that you in confession, you were basically saying,
here is what I have done the precess, here's here's
what you need to do, you know, go and send
no more whereas the and you see this particularly in
the language surrounding trauma as it exists. But also the
idea is that your therapy is the process of healing
yourself from the crimes others or society at large have
done to you. The idea that you know, fundamentally you
are there's nothing illegitimate about how you feel or you know,
what you have done is there's a mitigating factor outside
of you, and you were sort of endeavoring to liberate
again yourself from that undue influence. So it is both
an inversion in the sense that it is, you know,
taking something sacred and pushing it into the realm of
at the best the medical but let's be honest, into
the marketplace. You know, it is a transaction, but also
an inversion in the sense that the locus of guilt
who needs to repent, as it were, has been shift
did as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I think when you
talk about questions of of of of personal transformation or
of healing, you mentioned trauma trauma gets brought up a lot.
It's become a really prominent part of the discourse. You
have to you have to at some point talk about
what works or or what seems to actually work. And
in my opinion, what therapy culture seems to represent is
the constantly delayed expectation of of healing, so that you
talk about a problem, and you externalize a problem, and
you continuously hope that the next cathartic moment of externalizing
the problem talking about the problem is going to be
the one that heals some breach. In my view, one
heals from trauma by deciding that that healing is absolutely
going to happen, and then in a discipline manner, going
about living an ordered life, and then it happens. There
is a sense, in my opinion, in which certain kinds
of problems, including trauma, once they've been acknowledged, you bury
them in the garden the way you would bury composts,
and you allow some organic process to take place in you,
and that's it. What you don't do is keep it
on the kitchen table or something constantly think about it
and look at it. I think you have to make
the decision that okay, well this is something I'm moving
on from, and I'm going to go ahead and put
it in its place and live a as I say,
an ordered life and there's an organic process or there's
grace because I have faith that God is gonna, you know,
sort me out, and that's gonna happen, and then I'm
going to be sorted out. And if if you know, if,
if you don't have that transcendent dimension in your worldview, fine,
But regardless the the the constant return to the to
the problem in a in a talk therapy context, especially
with the stranger, strikes me as a morbid way to
to solidify that as part of your identity, to just
turn it into well, who I am as a guy
that talks to a stranger for who I pay one?
So I have no particular faith in psychoanalysis. But if
somebody finds that it's helped them, then that's a that's
a different story. But it seems to be a way
of making it into part of your a permanent part
of who you are, which which is is grotesque. I
don't like the idea.
Speaker 2: Well, Carlos, I'll take you. I'll make a more definite
If psychotherapy has helped you listener, you were wrong, go
out and make it worse again. No, in all seriousness,
this reminds me of a fragment I can't remember which
book it's from from Kuerkerguard where he's talking about introspection,
and he says, the point of introspection is not greater introspection.
It's not to become the aro Boro set in your
own tail. It is to acquire self knowledge to go outwards.
And so there is a benefit to that introspection. There
is a benefit to understanding yourself. You can imagine the
kind of typical Oh, you know, my father never approved
of me, and so I act in this way, and
that knowledge can be personally helpful. Of course, you know,
it doesn't even need to go into the realm of psychotherapy.
People have understood. You know that this does produce or
this does produce certain tendencies. But the point of that
exercise is not to go ever inward, is not to
know more and more about yourself. It is to understand
and then go forth. There's a great section I reference
often in the Pilgrim's Regress by Lewis, where he's sort
of retelling Pilgrim's progress, you know, is sort of a
semi autobiographically and when the main character is captured by
the giant. The giant in Lewis's retelling, is called the
spirit of the age, and it's Freud. And the way
that he keeps his prisoners in check is wherever the cyclops,
whatever he looks at, they're rendered completely and totally transparent.
They see through their own skin. And the prisoners are
so horrified by this, this knowledge that they are simply
or that they are disgusting underneath the surface, that they
can't escape. They're sort of mired in despair. And Lewis's
point is that look like Freud psychotherapy. It doesn't need
to be Freud personally, but like this, this way of
conceptualizing the human mind is correct, there is some truth
to it, but fundamentally it is not a complete version
of the human And so you know, viewing you know,
a human as you know, merely this kind of psychological
being or as you know, kind of collection of different
you know, sacs of fluids. Well, sure, in a certain sense,
is entirely true, but it is not a complete version
of the human self. And I always found that that
visual picture particularly striking when talking about psychotherapy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely and it goes back to what we were saying before,
right of reducing the subject to certain impulses that are true,
but they're a very partial view of who you are,
and you shouldn't focus on them. You shouldn't exclude the
rest of you, more fundamental and higher part to you
because of them. And so I think, Uh, there there
is a degree to which the past is arbitrary. Events
that have happened to you and that you you address
in in a therapeutic context or are arbitrary. They they
could not have happened. Uh, perhaps look for that which
is essential in you, essential about you, rather than than
than mere biographical accident, however traumatizing it might have been,
or however upsetting it might it might have been. Right. So,
but there is a desire I think in our culture
to find an identity for yourself that derives from some
kind of a brokenness. I think oftentimes we use that,
you know, modern fiction often uses that in the romantic context.
So the way that characters pair off with each other
is by discovering that they both have some trauma. You're part,
I'm hurt, and then we should sort of create a
life together that this kind of this kind of desire
for an identity based on some arbitrary nonsense that oftentimes
you build up for yourself. The essential is not that
it's not the it's not it's not even your biography
up until the present moment. It's something you have to
you have to look for elsewhere. I think that's very healing. Actually,
if we want to use therapeutic language, that's more healing
then then making yourself transparent and looking at your liver
or what your pancreas is doing or whatever.
Speaker 2: Well, and what I think is interesting about that is that,
in a bizarre way, that desire for self definition, that
desire to be you know, I'm a sufferer of X
y Z trauma. I use you know such and such
neo pronouns is fundamentally a rebellion against that atomized individualism.
Sure it's imperfect, it is within that system. It is
still a belief that I have the ability or the
capacity to make so many choices. I can define what
gender I am, I can define what psychological affliction I
suffer from, But fundamentally it is a yearning for identity,
a yearning for something defining beyond the simple economic actor.
I think that's it's sort of this kind of it
seems to be this kind of like outgrowth of we
could say, like the human spirit or something. You know
that there is that kind of yearning for desire. Well, Carlos,
we are coming up on time. This has been a
fascinating discussion. Obviously we mentioned your YouTube channel and your substack,
but where can people find you and what can they
expect when they get there?
Speaker 3: Mainly YouTube and substack, also Twitter. My channel goes into
different topics. So recently I've been on a bit of
a kick with like thinkers that I find interesting and
I'll pick up a few of their basic ideas and
explore those. But it's philosophy, it's theology, it's politics, always
somewhere in there. So that's why that's where people can
find me for the most part. And again Twitter is
a bit of a waste land for.
Speaker 2: Me, and I will says someone who is really afflicted
with simultaneously a taste in video production and no ability
whatsoever to run Adobe Premiere. I really enjoy your production,
like the actual video of it is quite fun as well,
so I highly recommend that. Like I said, when I
discovered your stuff, it was sort of a Bolt from
a Blue How in the world have I not seen
this yet? So highly recommend that. And again, man, this
was a ton of fun. I really enjoyed the discussion.
Speaker 3: Likewise, thanks a lot for having me a bit rambly
on my part. Sorry about that, but you know it's yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, look, considering the higher prep I gave you for
this episode is do you want to do an episode,
Let's do it this day? Oh shoot, I forgot, Let's
do it in a week. So I think you handled
yourself quite well, sort of the door for my content.
So yeah, I really enjoyed it. As far as my stuff,
The Jay Burdon Show is available Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere
you listen to podcasts. This is what I do now
full time. So if you want to support me, you
can do so on Patreon, Substack, or gum road for
five bucks a month or eighteen cents an episode. You
get the episodes early in ad free. You can also
check out our sponsor, Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching. Really,
JD should be more mad at me than he is,
considering the fact that he keeps sending me checks and
I remember to plug his business most of the time.
But we don't have a contract, so I guess he
can't complain. In all seriousness, Thank you so much. Carlos
is a ton of fun, and everyone home, keep your
head up, good night.
Speaker 1: What what what what's that's that's that's the garret, the
guarant