https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rj1E8Vg1lDA
I’m increasingly seeing the inability to admit to the possibility of there being any complexity to any argument. One of the things that has happened as a result of Facebook and as a result of this particular brand of social media as it’s come down to us is that by its very nature, by the way that it’s been created and by the way that it’s structured, it’s intended to remove nuance. It’s supposed to give you that immediate hit of dopamine from getting a like or from getting a comment. That is the best. Right, of course. And what nobody talks about, or some people do, but we sometimes forget about is that these systems were designed with that in mind. They were designed to do that to us on purpose because that’s the easiest way of distilling the absolute most basic needs and wants that we have for the purposes of advertising, to those basic needs and wants. I mean, there’s some really interesting books that have made their way out recently about the addictive nature of social media and how it seems to be, especially when you have these crises, it seems to be eroding our ability, even intelligent people’s ability, people who have education, people that I know are able to have a complex conversation about ideas they don’t agree with. Something about the nature of this particular event at this particular moment in that particular medium is almost making it impossible to have any sort of conversation in which complexity is allowed to exist. And the idea with the Wild West stories is a really good one, but you need to have a community of creators and consumers of that creation who are willing to exist in that state of suspended complex storytelling and not judge it. And that’s actually why storytelling is so important. But you do have to break through a wall to get past the rational self. That initial movement from, oh, no, I’m not going to listen to your story because it’s offensive and because you’re a white man and because you’re telling me things that you have no right to tell me. Getting from that point to, oh my gosh, that’s a really great story. I don’t care about the color of the skin of the protagonist. There used to be a much smaller wall there. Right now it’s massive. So there’s a lot more impetus on the storyteller to be able to draw people into that nebulous nether sphere between your rational thought and your heart where stories have the most power. And that’s actually something that Elian talks about in this article that I referenced repeatedly in the symbolic world post that I did in that he believes that the stories are… It’s interesting that he talked about fairy tales like I mentioned already during a time of intense ideological divide. Fascist versus communist. This is like the worst. Right? Yeah. We’re recapitulating right now. And yet at that moment he’s like, no, no, stories, stories, stories. Why? Because if you allow yourself to get into that almost somnolent rhythm of the storytelling structures, and by the way, all stories start with a nonsense statement with some sort of absurdity that shocks you out of the reality that you live in. Some sort of bizarre concatenation of circumstances. Sometimes one of the famous pre-stories in Russia is there was this muzhik, there was this peasant man, there was another peasant man, they came at each other, they started punching each other until they were both bloody. And then there was a bull and somebody stuck a knife into it and gold came out of it and in a certain kingdom, in a certain land. And we go to the story. So it’s like everybody’s like, what on earth? You’ve been shocked out of the reality, out of your everyday reality. And suddenly you’re like, oh, we’re in that part of, okay, I can deal with this. So yeah. Yeah. And I think that that’s been also one of the functions maybe of those types of stories is because they’re using categories which are not charged. A lot of these stories, then they’re able to reach everybody. You know, they don’t. The danger that we’ve seen, for example, you know, we saw some recent articles. I don’t know if you saw, people were writing me in private about this and they asked me, what do you think of this? What do you think of this? How people were starting to say how in token the orcs were racist, right? Because the orcs were supposed to represent black people. And I thought, I was like, guys, this is a dangerous road to go down. The people who are accusing these stories of doing that because is that really what you want? Like, because it’s not that in the story. But if that’s what you want, then that can go both sides. That can go either way. It’s not a good place to go in your discussion. Look, Fahrenheit 451 has it right. There are no books left. All books must be burned. It doesn’t matter what they are. It doesn’t matter what they’re good or bad or well told or badly told. If you’re fascist or communist, all books must be destroyed. All right? That’s where it’s going to go if you go that way. And I’m not even going to talk about the idiocy of that argument about orcs being black people. I mean, come on, give me a break. But of course, this only shows how if you’ve lost your connection to your nations or your people’s storytelling traditions, then you’ve lost your perspective on everything. And you’re going to be able to be manipulated by anybody who has the best story or the loudest voice in the room. And you need to be able to understand. It’s so interesting. So, one of the things if you notice, a lot I’ve been emphasizing a lot the idea of the margin. I talk about that a lot because one of the things in a way that I want to help, I feel like that’s the band-aid that needs to be put on. On the one hand, you have people who are wanting to kind of move inside and cut off the margin. Like the conservative types, you would say. And then you have people who live pretty much exclusively in the margin and who want the margin to basically take over the whole system. Right. So, I’m like, no, we need to put a band-aid there. We need to be able to help people understand the function of marginality, its role in the giant pattern, show some examples of it, and then help conservative types understand also that it plays a role in your story too. You need that stuff there as well. You can’t completely get rid of it.