https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Sd549Qz957k
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. Last time I had a very lively and interesting discussion with Christopher Mastapietro on the semiosis of the zombie and how the zombie is a cultural symbol for expressing but in no way resolving the meeting crisis. And we got to, towards the end, the idea that that generation of a new mythology, Deleuze in fact said the only modern myth is the myth of the zombie, why that emergence of the new mythology is a symptom, is symptomatic of the meeting crisis. And what we, I’d like to invite Chris back and we’re going to talk more about the symptomology of the meeting crisis, what are the various symptoms of the meeting crisis and how can we organize them in an intelligible manner. And this is actually part of the book that we’re currently working on, Unsheltered, which is the book that is going to be the follow up to Zombies in Western Culture, a 21st Century Crisis. So welcome back Chris. Thank you. Thank you again. And so what I’d like to do is, right, typically what’s often happened is I’ll talk about various things that are symptomatic of the meeting crisis and I tend to do this in something I don’t like doing in general because I’ve argued against it and just sort of a feature list. I do this in interviews, right, and what I’d like to do now is try and create a more schematic organization and try and give a much more coherent and convergent argument that also I think is explanatory of the symptomology of the meeting crisis. And so I think what we might want to do is begin with like laying out sort of the principles we’re using that we’re going to be making, the organizing principles by which we’re going to try and lay out and schematize the symptomology of the meeting crisis. So yeah, okay, so I think we should probably begin by saying that we’ve, the symptomology rather is so complex and so varied that in centering it into any kind of proper structure is a task. It’s very, very. It’s a task. Right. And so there are a lot of ways that perhaps we could have gone about organizing it, but which I think is intuitively right for both of us is to understand the symptoms on a continuum of reaction and response. And we’re also not going to be, right, we’re going to be gathering the symptoms into clusters. That’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this isn’t going to be a feature list. It’s going to be symptom types, right? Right. And symptom types that are. Categories of symptoms. Organized. Substantially similar. Right. That’s right. That’s right. So, you know what we should do? We should just draw one big line. Okay, draw one big line. Draw one big line right across here. Okay. Okay. So the idea about this line is to reflect a continuum. A continuum, right? And the continuum flows in this case from left to right. Okay. Okay. So on one side of the continuum we have what we’re calling the reaction, right? Which is exactly what I’ve just described, right? Right. Instinctive, largely visceral. Often impulsive. Often impulsive. I was about to say response. It’s not a response. It’s a kind of an almost. Like almost reflexive. Yeah, exactly. That’s what I think I was casting. It’s not reflective, but reflexive. Reflexive. Right. That’s right. That’s right. And that’s what we’re trying to capture by. That kind of unreflective, sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, but unaware response. And then we have response proper. And I think what we mean by response proper. Is there some agency in this? Is there some directedness to it? That’s right. And even if the individual who’s perhaps internalizing the meaning crisis hasn’t fully framed or construed it, right? Hasn’t conceptualized it, the affect is quite conscious and quite. Right. It’s pronounced enough to elicit a conscious sort of directed attention. There’s some aspect of deliberation to this. Yes. Okay. That’s right. And then on the far end, we have what we’re calling a reflective response. Right. And this means that we’re understanding the affliction of the meaning crisis, obviously, in terms of a certain amount of suffering. And the reflective response is one in which the individual is identifying with their own suffering also identifies it with some kind of communal suffering. So it’s not. This isn’t just happening to me. This is a condition that is felt also in and around. So two aspects here. It’s not just the egocentrism of pain. There’s an attempt to connect out. And there’s also an attempt to ameliorate, to address, right? In some fashion. That’s right. In an organized fashion, which I think is the difference, right? This kind of response is often unorganized. Or if it’s organized, it’s sort of accidentally organized. It’s often spontaneous. And we’re going to be talking about that. This is actually unorganized. Spontaneous is a better way of thinking about it because it can be very organized. This is a good way of thinking about response, right? This can be spontaneous too. But insofar as this has a certain amount of this can be this can be concerted, but it’s just not concerted with a with a finely diagnosed understanding of condition. So it’s more that category. So in earlier versions of this argument, I was often talking about negative and positive responses to the meeting crisis. I think what we’re doing here is much better. It’s going to schematize as opposed to just simply contrast. Whereas the negative were supposed to be things like suicide and mental health and the positive was going to be things like the mindfulness revolution of the psychedelic revolution. But now we’re going to take that and we’re improving on that. We’re trying to get something better, something more developed. Right. Because that’s not quite right because some especially the middle category as we’ll find a lot of responses that are spontaneous, they might not be as reflective as something like the mindfulness revolution. But even though they might be insufficient, they might have some productive value. Right. Yeah, the negative positive economy doesn’t quite. It’s too simplistic. I get that. I think that’s an important criticism. Right. OK, so we want to start at the far end here. And I think that the first one and certainly most and this goes back, one is suicide. Right. And so we actually have this divided into two. I’ll talk a little bit about that in terms of what we’re calling the pure suicide. No moral evaluation there. No moral, yeah. Right. And then the. The one that’s mediated through depression. Yeah. I’ll talk a little bit about this. Two central ideas here. This goes to some important recent work by a psychologist who’s doing some of the best psychological work on issues of meaning crisis. This is the work of Tatiana Schnatch now. And she has shown recent research showing that contrary to what you might think, that what happens in suicide is that it’s because people are suffering clinical depression that they find things meaningless and therefore that is why they commit suicide. Now it’s important to understand how much meaning in life is a protective against suicide. And the fact that although globally suicide is going down, it’s going up in North America, it’s going up for young people worldwide. And the world’s suicide in the United States just recently doubled in something in the last five years. All this is very telling. But what’s important is that’s actually mixing two things up. She has evidence that the experience of meaningless in and of itself without it overlapping or causing what we now identify as clinical depression, the experience of meaninglessness in and of itself can be a cause of suicide. Now of course depression. They’re going to term deaths of despair in the United States. Yes. Trying to pick up on that. Trying to pick up on that. It’s very, very telling. Now depression carries within it a sense of meaninglessness. But what’s interesting is, and of course there’s other things that probably contribute towards the suicide from depression, and I don’t want to claim that it’s just the meaninglessness, but what there is is clear evidence of the meaninglessness per se being able to cause and therefore that’s an important piece of evidence for the emergence, the increasing presence or lack of presence of the meaning crisis. Yes. Yeah. It’s a vacuous presence. Yes. So there’s a bit of a paradox. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Okay. Shall we move to the next one? Yes. This sort of feeds laterally right into the next category in that. And that’s just more generally the mental health crisis. It is that, but more specifically, mental health crisis. And we talked a little bit about this also in zombies in Western culture. Right. And how what you got are increasing rates of anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, increasing suicidal ideation amongst adolescent people. And so this, the anxiety and the depressive disorders of course overlaps with some of the other aspects of this. Right. So this is why we’re trying to get on the idea of a continuum. Exactly. These aren’t discrete categories, right? These are blending. Right. But the point nevertheless is that things like depression of course clearly point to this. Anxiety also points to important ways in which we are fundamentally disconnected from ourselves, each other and reality in important ways. So I think it’s very clear that that’s also, it overlaps with this, it’s a distinct category, but it’s also pointing towards the effects of the meaning crisis on people. Please continue. Okay. And again, further along this continuum, but very much related to the two previous categories. Right. Is this ice cream lonely? There’s an E in there. There’s an E in there, right? So the increase in loneliness. Yeah, the increase in loneliness. Which is exacerbated by social media in many ways. It is exacerbated, not caused I would argue, but definitely exacerbated by social media. It’s interesting that we talked in our previous video or made mention of this idea of atomization of time. Right. But arguably the same phenomenon has happened with spatially the way that we live, right? We actually don’t live as communally as perhaps we used to. Spatially and physically we’re much more distanced from one another. And yes, the social media, the sort of the compartmentalization of social life and the digitization of social life certainly adds to that sense of isolation, right? Sort of the co-hering effect of communitas is diminished significantly. Right. So this is definitely a loss of communitas. Right. So yeah, exactly. And this goes towards Airstadt’s idea about how the West really lost God. So her argument is that what has actually led towards atheism, nihilism, I don’t see it as a comprehensive account. I’m not saying it. But she’s got a very important point that the countries that are the most secular, the countries that are the least religious are also the countries in which people live atomically, in which they tend to live the most alone. And she argues that what happened, one of the things the Industrial Revolution has done, and then of course it’s been exacerbated by social media and the car and all kinds of things is this atomization that Han talks about, is that we tend to live more and more alone and that has of course been reinforced by a mythology of us being rugged individuals and all this, I would call it bullshit in some very important ways. And so the idea is as we lose this connectivity to other people, as we lose communitas, as you said in the last episode, what we lose is we lose the capacity to internalize other people, other perspectives. Which relates to the loss, I’m writing it here, of philia. Right, the loss of philia. But I’m also arguing it’s going to impact on the loss of perspectival and participatory knowing in powerful ways. Right, and the loss of the mechanism that actually allows us again, we talked about this in the last video, that allows us to elasticize perspective. Yes. And to be able to mature into new perspectives. We grow in concert within a community precisely in the way that we interplay with the people around us. And so to be deprived of that isn’t just to be deprived of good company, it’s to be deprived of an entire matrix within which we grow and are producing persons. So our ability to internalize perspectives, participate in different existential modes and therefore our capacity for appreciating self-transcendence and appreciating. And training it. And training it, right. It gets significantly undermined. And of course the thing about loneliness is it reflects how constitutive of our sense of value and personhood the connection to other people is. One of the ways you can punish a human being is by putting them into solitary confinement. And the problem with loneliness is you do not even have the… I’ll put them on Facebook. The problem with loneliness is you don’t even have the comfort of the jailer. You are put basically into solitary confinement for no apparent reason whatsoever. That’s right. That’s right. Right, because whatever patterns are available to you within that environment become the patterns that you internalize, right, and appropriate. So if you’re actually living within a community that allows for a certain amount of self-corrective feedback, then your capacity to actually exceed into new kinds of perspective or new behaviors is expanded significantly as opposed to if your feedback is limited to a few choice persons who are curated and selected carefully, right. And that’s part of what’s happening with this digitized social life. Well, but there is an overlap here because of the digitization, the automatization, because there’s increasing evidence that the more time you’re spending in social media, especially things like Instagram, has a deleterious impact on your mental health. It tends to exacerbate depressive issues, anxiety issues, feelings of unworthiness. It tends to also make people feel more lonely because they see all these other people out in these… Yes, yes. Everybody else is at a big party and they’re all in love with each other. Yes, exactly, exactly. That’s kind of how I say it sometimes. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And we all… I mean, it’s a joke now because we all know that it’s false. It doesn’t matter. It’s bullshit. Yeah, but we all… It’s so salient. Exactly. It’s bullshit. It’s so salient that you can’t help yourself. You can’t help but to buy into the illusion. It’s a very attractive illusion. And it’s also exacerbating sort of moral confusion because we confuse having a number of likes or having a number of connections with actually being in community with people. That’s right. That’s right. Exactly. It changes the tenor of our relationship not only with other people, but by virtue of that, also with ourselves, right? We talked a little bit about in the last video… The I and the Me. …about parties. I was going to say the I and the Me. Exactly. We get fixated on the Me and we lose touch with the I. That’s right. And what Paul Tillich, we were talking about Paul Tillich and symbols in the previous video, and he has this idea of idolatry. I would argue that what we’re doing fundamentally, the way that we relate to our digital selves is a form of idolatry. We relate to ourselves as objects that we’re able to cultivate. And because of that, not only is our relationship with other people severely constructed, but our relationship to our own capacity, our own promise, our own variability in terms of our identity and perspective, it’s fixated fundamentally. Just wanted to pick up on the idea about the idol as different from the icon. I know Jean-Luc Marion has also talked about this, but especially in Tillich’s sense, the symbol, the icon, has that translucency and it’s designed to take you beyond. Whereas the idol is opaque. You only look at it and you are fixated on it. The idol actually stops the motion of transcendence. Right. Whereas the object of sacred wisdom practices, right, philosophia being one, is to undertake an education that allows you to be able to symbolize yourself, to symbolize the way that you organize your identity and identification, to be deprived of the conditions for that training, to be deprived of phylia, for instance, phylia sophia. To be deprived of phylia is to be deprived of that entire cultural training, that entire mechanism that allows you to be able to educate the capacity to symbolize. Because of that, all you’re left with is an idolatrous version of yourself to relate to. The meaning crisis has significantly undermined, and we talked about this last time, a lot of our ability to relate, I think this is part of Jonathan Pajot’s work, to relate to and the function of symbolism. That is now being exacerbated. This is going down, again, not just to something we believe, but into our very participatory sense of agency and connectedness to other people, our very sense of identity. It’s funny you say belief because belief is a word that’s essentially become creedal propositions. Right. When most people say, I believe, I think this exists. I assert this. I assert this, right. In our forthcoming book, for instance, what the distinctions are going to make is a difference in how we frame belief. This is a little bit of a tangent, but it’s somewhat relevant. A belief that, right, which is the proposition of that assertion, and the belief in. Which is part of the original meaning of the word belief, to give your heart to something, to identify in something. So this is, right, to use the from, that modal distinction, or Bueber’s I, thou, I, it distinction. Belief in is what we really mean by the participatory involvement that the symbol has. The belief of that has to do with that proposition. It’s much, much more an expression of the idolatry, exactly the inverse of the symbol. So now we’re moving towards response. Yes. And we’re going to have to make some room, actually, I think, as we go along. Yeah. Okay, so we talked about the loss of phylaea and the perversion of eros. We talked a lot about that in the previous video, so I don’t need to go into all of that again. One thing that all of this obviously tends to is the phenomenon of addiction. Okay, so do we want to? Do we want to? All right. Let’s do, I’m going to pass this over to you, because you’re closer to that one. Let’s do this one, and then we’re going to have to go back. So what I’m asking is do we want to put addiction this far to the right of response, or is it actually sort of situated? It should be here, but we’re trying to give ourselves some room. I’ll do this to indicate that. I think that’s right. It’s not a reflective response. But there is a beginning of response. So the idea here is that what’s happening, because of the undermining of the agent arena relationship, we can see addiction increasing, both because it overlaps with the attempt to escape, which we’ll talk about momentarily, but what we have here, and here’s where I’m putting again Mark Lewis’s idea of addiction is basically anti-anagagay, right? And this is the idea of addiction as reciprocal narrowing. So the older model is the disease model. The chemical is inside of me. It’s like a disease, and the chemical inside of me is compelling the behavior. Now obviously there is a biochemical aspect to addiction, but that model of addiction doesn’t cover most, and I’ve talked about this just to remind everybody. The idea of addiction of reciprocal narrowing is that it is this degradation and perversion of the agent arena relationship. My agency gets truncated in some fashion. The kinds of identities I can assume, the way I can reconfigure, restructure myself in order to change is being diminished, and then that reduces options in the world. And then as the world’s options decrease, I lose more of my cognitive and my existential identity. I lose options into who and what I can be. The world loses options, and eventually it comes that there is, I can’t be other than I am, and there’s no opportunities for difference or change. My world becomes locked down. I become locked down, and we get this whole addiction spiral, which is basically the opposite of anagagay. As we lose the agent arena relationship, that meta-meaning affordance, in the meaning crisis, we would expect this kind of thing to become more prevalent. And of course, it is going to overlap, and right, let’s be very clear, there are also clearly political and socioeconomic drivers to addiction, just like we’re talking about a lot of different things here. But let’s go back to this to suicide. What Durkheim showed in his famous book, literally, what is it, like 150 years ago or something now, right? A suicide is, in addition to, and he was never denying, his book was called suicide because what he showed, with really conclusive evidence, and nobody’s really undermined it, right, is that in addition to whatever mental health issues people have, their own particular socioeconomic issues, there is a cause of suicide that has to do just with the undermining of the orders, the nomological normative and narrative orders. He called that anomie. Anomie is directly related, right? Anomie is directly related, Latin, to the normative, especially the nomological order. This is the loss of order, totally order. And so all along the way, we’re not claiming that the meaning crisis in any of these is the sole cause. What we’re saying is the meaning crisis is going to contribute in important ways all along to the increase in all of these things that we are finding right now. And so the argument here is you’re going to see addiction rising in the world, and things like the opioid crisis, other forms of addiction rising, precisely because we are in a situation of anti-anagogy, because world view attunement is being significantly undermined. Okay, so let’s erase and we’ll sort of slide things. What we can do is we can… Right at the center of that continuum, we’re going to talk about the virtual exodus, which goes very neatly along with addiction. Just to remind everyone, we will be putting up the completed panel so you’ll be able to see the whole thing. We’re just trying to unfold it so you understand the intelligibility, you understand how we’re trying to schematize the symptoms of the meaning crisis. I think it’s a good point you made too, and it’s worth emphasizing that we’re not presuming to give a wholesale account of any one of these phenomena, any one of these symptoms, and we’re certainly not making the claim that the meaning crisis is the sole cause or the sole way of understanding them. You sort of did that already, but it’s worth nodding to. But we’re simply indicating that they are together forming a pattern. It’s a fairly well-defined pattern once we actually plot it out. It’s the pattern, sort of the kastolt view of the pattern that is so defined. Yes, I totally agree with that. I think that’s well said. Okay, so let’s keep going. What would we now put right… Yeah, so now we’re going to talk about the idea of virtual exodus. We’ve already kind of touched on this. So we’re putting that where? Where do you think? Maybe just to the right of the medium. Right, about here. Yeah, it’s pretty close though. It’s pretty close to addiction. It’s pretty close to addiction. The virtual exodus? It’s pretty… Because virtual exodus espouses itself as an addiction in many cases. So what we mean by virtual exodus is a retreat into the virtual world as a compensatory instinct. As a compensatory response. So you can see this in books like… There’s a book in fact entitled The Virtual Exodus. There’s a book entitled Reality is Broken, and it’s trying to document how many people are restructuring their lives and moving out of interacting with the real world and real people and moving into virtual worlds, either the game world or social media world, etc. That’s right. That’s right. So one of the things… It’s worth talking about video games for a moment. And I have to preface by saying that I, unlike most people I know, I actually didn’t grow up playing video games. I watch both of my friends a lot. I speak of this minimal expertise. I have a good friend Patrick who would be aghast to find me talking with any expertise about video games, because I consider him to be the expert. But fundamentally… And it’s worth saying here, before we get into it, that we’re not saying that these virtual elements have no value. In fact, they can have quite a bit of value. Both intrinsic and instrumental value. No, we’re talking about the exodus, not just the virtuality. That’s right. That’s right. So this is not to say that virtual exercises aren’t worth the time, right? It’s not to say that virtual exercises have no value. It’s to say that their use as a compensatory response to the meaning crisis is the issue. It’s not the virtual exercise or activity. It’s the complete shifting of the tension. Yeah. And well, I think it reflects a choice, right? Using the virtual game as entertainment or education is not the same thing as the existential choice to say, reality is broken, to use one of the titles of the book. I choose… I’m going to seek mine out. I’m going to choose to live here. That’s right. That’s right. So we’re talking about that aspect of this phenomenon. That’s right. So I was going to say about video games, because video games are interesting because you’ve talked about the three orders already, the neurological, the normative, and the narrative. The metaphysics of video game recreate those orders to sheer perfection. It’s going back into the axial world, right? Everything is governed by a set of very, very consistent, very legible rules. That fit you or your avatar. You have a storied self within the storied world, right? You have an arc, the world has an arc, they align, they dovetail. It levels up with the normative order, right? There’s the anagogic ascent that happens at key junctures through the narrative. And… All of it unfolds appropriately. And they’re flow induction machines. And they’re flow induction machines. And they’re flow induction machines. But it’s a flow that, of course, has nothing to do. So they’re evolving. And you’re constantly improving and you’re constantly self-correcting. So it’s an incredible, incredible font for narrative, but it’s also a mechanism for attunement. Right. But… Unfortunately, what you’re attuning with, fundamentally, isn’t corresponding. And the world of these virtual realities is exactly what we can’t fit into the scientific worldview. And that’s why those worlds often have a fantastical component to them. Right? That point back to… Well, yes. And we’re going to talk about the fact that pseudo-religious mythologies always have a fantastical component to them. Yes. That’s what makes them worthwhile substitutes. Now, of course, this is close to addiction because, as I mentioned before, the World Health Organization is seriously considering making video games, video game addiction, a bona fide medical disease that needs to be acknowledged because of the way in which it can be so disruptive and destructive to people’s lives. And that, of course, I think makes sense because of the way, as we’ve been arguing, it gives you… it satisfies… it’s like junk food. It satisfies without there being any actual calories. It satisfies the longing for the orders. It satisfies the longing for flow. But, of course, it’s hijacking and perverting that in a way that is sort of definitional of what it is to fall prey to an addiction. So we’ve already talked about social media a little bit when we talked about loneliness, obviously. These two points on a continuum are corresponded to one another. And so we don’t need to tread too heavily on this topic. Again, suffice it to say, even within this topic, there is a continuum. Sure. Gaming, in the broad sense of the term, and especially the narrative component of gaming, is actually collapsing into social media. The idea of operating within a narrative and within a set of tools is… Things like Instagram sort of bleed between being social media and being a video game. Yes, very much. Right. So it actually deepens the virtuality and it deepens its participatory allure. Because you get both in one now. You get to be social. You get to substitute your work for communitas. But you also get your three orders and your flow induction rights. And so you get them both together. And that’s why it’s so incredibly powerful. Because you have the ingress into the axial world and you have all the communitas. Of course, you don’t. But ostensibly, you have a specter of the communitas to go along with it. I remember asking my younger son if he actually wanted to meet with the people he was playing with online. And this struck him as an odd, very odd thing to do. Why would I want to actually interact with these people? It’s like nobody wants to call each other anymore. Aversion of the same reason. Because our entire… It’s part of the… The atomization. Is being figured by this. It’s being retrained. And I wonder in 10, 20 years just how much of that sociability will have been rewired even beyond recognizability. Because right now we’re kind of straddling both. Anyway, so yeah. I think that the intersection of the sociability and the ordered metaphysics and the flow all collapse and coordinate to create something that is… Well, it’s irresistible. Sure. Okay, let’s keep going. Okay. Okay. I think here’s our big category. We’re going to need all the space that we can possibly get. We’ll just draw it. We’ll just draw it at the center. The continuum or in the center section at least. Maybe a little bit more to the right? A little bit more to the right, yeah. Okay. Okay. Please remember this. Our use of left and right has absolutely nothing to do with the political connotations. No. No. It’s simply that we read from left to right. Yes. Ah, the neo-Nazisism. Yes, we’ve been talking about this quite a bit. Not to be confused with Gnosticism, right? Right, no. Yes. Which we’re using to have a very positive function. So there was a whole episode, Chris, in which I tried to distinguish between Gnostic and Gnosticism. We don’t need to do that again, that’s okay. Okay. So this is essentially… We’re trying to redraw the map of the world fundamentally in a narrative sense. We’re trying to reintroduce a meta-narrative that is as participatory, as involving, as coherent, as the meta-narrative that will be provided by axial religions, broadly speaking. In our case, I think we’re speaking very, very much within the Christian paradigm. And because there’s been a declension of that, right, because it’s retreating further and further and further away from us, the sense of being disoriented is… Our experience is right with disorientation, precisely because we’ve lost that coherent canopy. So we’re using the term Gnosticism, though, to bring with it the sense of entrapment, and the sense that this attempt to create the meta-narrative is… That the vacuum that we’re suddenly foist with, right, like the canopy above us, right, the coherent set of stars that map the world, map the cosmos, etc., They no longer bring us the orientation of the meta-narrative right now. It’s sort of, by analogy, it’s akin to looking up and seeing a blackened sky, right? And so that’s part of why our next book is titled on shelter, right, because the sacred canopy now removed leaves with it a sense of, again, a sense of declension, a sense of having the narrative of the cosmos retreat away and also falling away ourselves, right, like Nietzsche’s famous quote. Okay, so how does that relate to Gnosticism? But I think that because of that, because in the absence now of that meta-narrative, I think one of the responses to it has been the… It’s almost as though we want to punch our way through that blackened, clouded, unannubilated canopy, right? It’s obscured now, it’s an ennubilated sky, and we now feel like we have to punch through it. Right, so we… And that’s where the sort of conspiratorial nature of Gnosticism comes into play. Yeah, it’s a barrier as opposed to a vacuity. Right. Because at least a barrier we can try to break through. That’s right. Okay, so… That’s right. And a lot of that is the mis-framing too, right? It’s a mis-framing because it’s taking a vacuity, framing it as a barrier, and then it’s like a mirage, right? You’re shooting for it and you end up going right through it. Well, let’s put some… The flat earth phenomenon is a good example. Yeah, the flat earth phenomenon, right. So a lot of these are going to have sort of a conspiratorial edge to them as well then. Right, so it’s the substitution of the meta-narrative. Right. So Jonathan Pajot did an episode talking about the flat earth phenomena and about how people, right… I think we’re taking a slightly different take on it, but there is some convergence on… There is. We both see it as a response, like we and Jonathan both see it as a response to the meeting crisis in some fashion. Right, yeah. That’s right. So let’s list some particular examples of this here. Who do we put in here? Well, we have… See, we have right now, we have bundled into this… Right. The phenomena that we’re calling pseudo-religious ideologies. Right. Or we could also say mythologies. Right. Right? But the term ideology is often used too because they primarily express identity, participation, narrative in political terms and political structures. Right. Okay. Right, right. And so getting back into the agent-oriented structure of worldview attunement, right, you talked about meta-meaningfulness, right, what a meta-meaning system does. A lot of this has to do with, because we’ve lost the overarching meta-meaning system, right, the coherent government. Right. I think that there is a visible and repeated attempt in various arenas and various domains to take meaning systems, right, politics is a good example of that, right, the political framework is in itself a system that governs a certain dimension… To try and make it a meta-meaning. …of function and experience. Right, right, right. And to make it a meta-meaning system. Which it can’t do because it… Which it can do. So this is a classic category mistake, right? Yes. It’s the idea is we’re taking something that depends on a meta-meaning, a particular meaning system, and we’re trying to make it be a meta-meaning system and take the place of the meta-meaning system. And it can’t because it’s not structured to actually function that way. That’s right. That’s right. And you see that, I mean, you know, to speak of politics just for a moment, and obviously we’re not going to talk about politics in depth because this is politicized too much already. Yeah. And fundamentally it’s not a political problem. But it does manifest itself in political symptoms. Right. Or rather the nature of politics is a symptom of it. And, you know, we saw the most canonical examples of this available to us, right, in Marxism and Nazism. Right. Where a political system assumes the, what we might call the residue of religiosity. And the role. Assumes the role and responsibility of formerly what a religious system provided. Fundamentally, it doesn’t have the complexity to be able to accommodate. Well, it does. I mean, as the episode I talked about, like with the Nazi, the Nazism and Marxism, although you have a lot of religious symbols and ritual behavior, you nevertheless have no articulation within the ideology. That’s right. Of participatory knowing, of respectable knowing, of transformation. All of that machinery is actually lost because we’re stuck at the level of, you know, the level of willful assertion of propositions. That’s right. That’s right. And a lot of it has to do with the way in which we are identifying ourselves with and through these systems. Right. Right. So another example, so I was going to say about politics is that, you know, if you look at the way that the behavior of US politics is very interesting, especially to us as Canadians, we don’t quite understand it often. Because we, it’s difficult to understand, I think for us, just how religious US politics is. Which is not the same thing to say it’s like the Christian right. It’s the, it’s the. No, no, no, no, no. Then that’s not what I mean at all. I’m not referring to any, any end of the spectrum. One thing that I often think is especially observing usually during their presidential elections, and this is either side, either party, is that the best way of understanding the role of the US president is as the role of a church leader. Yes. Right. Right, but the fact that that is now degenerating into adversarial gridlock politics. Right, because that system cannot accommodate the religiosity with which it’s been forced. Right. It can’t be a meta-meaning system. It cannot be a meta-meaning system, right, because it doesn’t have the same breadth of identification. It doesn’t have the same ritual praxis. It doesn’t have the same symbolic affordances, right. It doesn’t have all of that machinery that the religion, the axial religions, for instance, had to be able to cohere people properly, to be able to produce wisdom, to be able to produce discourse. It doesn’t really have, you know, coordinated sets of psychotechnologies for transforming consciousness, cognition, character, and community. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. But de facto, because there’s nothing else that has the role. It gets inflated. It’s remotely as complex as that, right, and as important and has as much scalable impact on the world and on people. I think it de facto has assumed, and this is really true, I think, at the presidential office, is that it has assumed the importance and the valence of a religious system and of a religious leader. Right. So much. So, I mean, a world of importance over every four years is channeled through that system. So what are some other examples we want to put in here? Well, when we’re talking about pseudo-religious mythologies, the example of our fantasies, right, our modern fantasies, right, our superhero mythos. The superhero mythos, the Star Wars mythos, all that. So I think we might at some point do a whole session on Star Wars mythos. Let’s leave that one in the offing for now. But the superhero mythos is arguably the most… The overwhelming success of Endgame, for example. Yeah, exactly. But see what that’s doing, right? That project, right, Marvel’s project, right, the cinematic universe, what it’s doing is it’s casting a meta-narrative. Yes, very much. That’s why the shared universe, yes. It’s threading a continuous narrative that binds together a universe. Right, right. Right? And think of everything that goes in. So not only does it have an entire universe and a continuity of that universe, and now, of course, that universe, as we now know, has a dimensionality to it that extends to the level of sacredness, extends to this cosmic structure. And people dress up and yeah. So then it has that, right? It has the participatory elements. All the conventions. The cross play, the conventions, right? People identifying very deeply. And then look at the characters themselves. They’re an interesting synthesis of Bronze Age gods. In some cases, they are just Bronze Age gods. Axial virtues. Yeah. And this is really interesting to me, and modern psychotechnologies. Right, right. So any title character that begins the entire universe, and arguably more than any other character who frames the universe, right? The Tony Stark character is one whose excellence and whose destiny and whose wisdom and whose agency is bound to his use of psychotechnologies. Yeah, they are epitomized by the suit and all that stuff. Yeah, so he’s literally encased within a technology. Identified with it. He’s cyborged completely. Right, right. And his cosmic journey, his cosmic narrative destiny, right? His anagogy. That’s interesting. His anagogy. So you get the Bronze Age, the Axial Age, and you get the psychotechnologies. And the psychotechnologies all encased literally, right, within a character who we then identify with and who essentially charts an entire universe worth of importance. We’re running out of time, so let’s get to our last category. Renewing Gnosis. Right. So these are people who are trying to create responses to the meeting crisis by giving us new ecologies of practices, new psychotechnologies. So we’ve got people like Ray Kelly, who is doing, you know, the idea of movement practices being enmeshed within ritual. I talk about people like Peter Lindbergh, the authentic discourse trying to create new ways of talking and discussing with each other. The secular monastery. Like one of the great gifts of the series, in fact, is I’m meeting all these people. I get to meet all these people who are trying to create, right, basically a new culture, a new set of psychotechnologies, ecologies of practices, communities, right, that will allow them to renew the machinery, a participatory, perspectival, bring about Gnosis, you know, try and get anagogy going again. And so seeing more and more of that happening right now. Right. Right. And what’s interesting is I think a lot of these, what a lot of these are trying to do is to rescind a lot of the creedal irrigation that’s been characteristic of other responses. There’s generally a move into the body. There’s a move into flowing discourse. The level of meaning system arbitrarily, right? They’re not basically superimposing. They’re not inflating some system into a metameter. They’re not inflating something to be endlessly meaningful or to use your terminology to be endlessly or ultimately relevant unto itself. Right. Right. Which is, again, to the poor otillic’s term is that idolatrous instinct to try and take something. Yeah. There’s a deep resistance to idolatry in the renewing Gnosis projects. That’s right. That’s right. It’s it’s and that’s why a lot of those praxis and practices are and there’s sort of another somewhere here, which we’ve kind of glanced over for the purposes of time is this idea of serious play. Right. Right. The serious play space in which to reengage a state of play that is characteristic of the phenomenon. And that’s in a lot of these a lot of these things in a lot of these. Right. Because one of the ways of understanding the credo ossification of religious praxis is understanding how the credo, the set of constraints that were meant to condition the state of play. Right. A mnemonic device that provokes you into a state of connectedness and becoming the end to the practice. Yeah, that’s right. Instead of conditioning the arena for play, they end up actually enclosing on it. And so what I think this is trying to do is open up the arena again. Right. By by and open up the agency to by slackening the grip that this these creeds have. Yes. But open up both of them. Right. So yeah, it’s a and I think these are only accumulating more and more and more. So yeah, I think we’ve got serious play there and that and that’s overlapping with renewing Gnosis. So I also see that there are people who are doing serious play and renewing Gnosis with, you know, with the framework that’s been sort of tattered to do like Christianity. And I’m thinking of people we mentioned him multiple times. Jonathan Pajot, I think of the really interesting work that Paul VanderKlay is doing in which there is an attempt. I give them a lot more credit than I think they do. I think they’re attempting to bring these elements or claim that these elements can be found, rehomed within Christianity and revive Christianity as an attempt to do that. Like like like symbolic rehabilitation. Yes. And in a very serious way. I would like to take a symbol again, like to use the example of the Christian framework to take a symbol again. You know, this is only one dimension of the complexity of that symbol. But taking a symbol fundamentally that has been constricted somewhat by the ossification of the creed that surrounds the praxis, that surrounds the conductivity of that symbol that has been inhibited by the the the the sort of the burgeoning fundamentalism and atheism. Right. Those twin, totally confused responses to the diminishment of the power of that symbol and to try and take that symbol and not to act certainly not to extricated from its mythos because it has to be couched to some degree in a mythos in order to be viable. But it’s about figuring the mythos in such a way as to free it from what have become a parasitic sort of creedal impositions. So we would put things like the mindfulness revolution here, for example, right, because it’s an attempt to especially if they’re trying to situate themselves within a community ecology of practice, not just meditate. So they relax or reduce stress. But if they’re pursuing it as a philosophy, as a transformative way of life, then we’ve got that also going. I would think we might want to. Like I said, the authentic discourse. Like I mentioned, Peter Lindbergh’s work. Right. And we’ve got the wisdom renaissance. There’s more and more people talking about wisdom, ways of life and trying to bring about not only in the popular world where stoicism, for example, is becoming something that is becoming more and more adult. Stoicism is having this incredible, reliable. Rebirth, right. But. Unfortunately, it’s mistaken a lot. But it’s having a reliable. But I was also going to say the and I’ll get to talk about this later in the series, the academic scientific interest in wisdom has now come back. What about the psychedelic renaissance? I think this is also an attempt to renew Gnosis. It’s an attempt to use psychedelics. As long as. It’s interesting, though, because the use of psychedelics can fall on a few different places. Sure. Fair enough. So what I would argue and what I’ve argued is where psychedelics are being set within, again, a set of psychotechnologies for the function of bringing about a higher state of consciousness and bringing about some fundamental avenue and affordance of self transcendent, the cultivation of wisdom. Then we’re getting that kind of thing here. That’s right. OK. So yes. Use of psychedelics as situated within a practice of some kind that trains it and then culture it. So I think all of this end is very for me, it’s very hopeful. But I want to make a criticism here. And it’s meant to be a constructive criticism, not a negative criticism. I see a lot of this. And again, I’m not trying to detract from the value, but I see a lot of this as being very, very bottom up. Right. And that it there’s a lot of these practices that are emerging. But how they should be coordinated and how they should be integrated, related together and how that is supposed to ultimately fit back with the scientific worldview that is the dominant worldview of the West. So what I mean is there isn’t we’ve got the bottom up processing, but we don’t have the top down. We don’t have anything that is yet analogous to what the sacred canopy is. And what I and so what we’re still struggling with. Right. And when I talk to people about this, they write some of these people, this comes out, which is what I talked about this hard problem. Right. We did this is still taking place against the backdrop. Right. The socioeconomic crisis, right. The ecological crisis, all these things that are very exigent. Right. And so it’s having to it’s also it’s an uphill battle because what it’s also doing is it’s having to it’s it’s it’s having to somehow circumnavigate all of this. Right. Right. Because especially, I mean, this specieates that sort of that what we call generally neonostic, but the general responses tend to speciate a lot of independent meaning systems to the tribalism is sort of a yes. Yeah, very much. Very much a having mode. Yeah. Having an identity. Right. A lot of different systems that all extend to the level of meta meaning. And they’re all now in competition with one another. That’s where the tribal issue of tribalism. Right. Right. Right. Right. These single modes of identification that want to fashion themselves into prisms through which to to like like, you know, through which to see and interpret all things. Right. Right. And they are they. And so any effort to try and there is there’s a tension with their there’s an aspect in which this could be sucked into a lot of the bullshitting that’s going on here. So there’s there’s that difficulty. There’s also the difficulty of trying to do this with an avoid the right the totalitarian trauma that a lot of these things are associated with. Right. But but but also a lot of these people the nostalgic attempt to go back to an organized religion is no longer available to them. So here’s what I’m saying. They they are pursuing and I think sincerely and not ineffectively but they are pursuing a comprehensive transformation of consciousness cognition character and communities. But the only thing that has successfully done that for us in the past is religion. They they they they find that the the orthodox existing religions are still very powerful. I mean, we’ve you’ve you made a reference. You know, in our previous video and it’s like we still we still speak and think in the language. So there are people trying to break break out of that. Like I know Jordan Greenhall is trying to get break out of that grammar and some of his work. But what we’re saying is trying to not get sucked up into the nostalgia that is almost imprinted on us because of the grammar. We don’t want to go back to the pseudo religious ideologies that drench the world in blood. And so these these nascent right. I don’t know what to call them. These nascent cultures, these nascent communities or whatever. Right. They’re they’re they are they’re they’re they’re they’re facing tremendous difficulty on in terms of what’s the template. What do they pattern themselves on in order to try and create the overarching structure that will organize the bottom up change? Because arguably at the center of that structure, the way it has been right. Our legacy from the actual religions is that that structure is anchored by us by some fundamental symbol that has enough by valence and complexity. Well, at least sets of symbols like the two worlds mythology and all kinds of things like to be able to to be able to conduct that entire structure. So in the absence and I think that’s why there’s an attempt to salvage some of those axial symbols, if not the entire praxis, if not the entire mythos. So what degree you can separate them is a really hard question. Right. Can you remove something from the matrix that has essentially birthed it and nurtured it and have it. This is all this is this is running through the whole series. This is the degree to which we can salvage things from. To what degree can we is the question. But there’s an understandable attempt to salvage something because otherwise it’s as though it’s as though we’re working from a blank canvas. Right. OK. That was excellent, Chris. Thank you very much for the dialogue and way of trying to articulate the symptomology of the meeting crisis. And I hope that the viewers found this helpful both as a way of giving a deeper understanding of what the meeting crisis is and how they can identify its effects in both their individual and collective lives. Thank you very much for your time and attention.