https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9smuj4sA1T8
One of the things that happens when let’s say cohesion starts to break down, social cohesion is that we instead of getting a kind of mush we get a succession of little tyrannies. I talked about this in my video on Twitter and the Reign of Chaos. Well today what I want to look at is how that plays into celebrity culture and also certain things like mass shooters. How is it possible that these things come to exist in a world of succeeding little tyrannies of attention we could call them. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. What I’m talking about here is what we could call the tyranny of the individual. One of the things that represents the modern age is the individualism in which we have come to exist. That is as the purposes that we have in common, as the identities we have in common, as society stopped looking towards the same transcendent ideals, the world started to move more and more into a kind of fragmentation. And that fragmentation is ultimately realized in what we could call individualism. That is the notion of individuals as small independent points on a space that aren’t related together in any discernible way. The only way in which in the world of individualism people seem to be connected together is as economic agents. In terms of their capacity to produce, their capacity to consume, all of that is the last ditch of a world that is breaking apart. And it is not sufficient. It leads to some serious diseases that we see in society today. And the problem is that we can’t desire for something more. We can’t desire to heal the issues, the disease, a lack of meaning, the fall into nihilism, the fall into drug use, and the fact that we become addicted to things like pornography and to different drugs. All of that cannot be healed in only its manifestations. The problem is much deeper. And it is the problem of watching our common ideals, our common identities start to fragment. And so in one of my last videos I promised you that maybe I could start laying out more criticisms to Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is my friend and I respect a lot of the things he says, but there are many things that I disagree with him on. And this is of course one of the things I do not believe that the individual is a sufficient ideal in order to preserve societies, in order to help us get out of this meaning crisis or this crisis of Western civilization. I wanted to look at a few specific manifestations to show how it is, what it looks like when our commonality begins to break apart. Now as I’ve mentioned before, when the common ideal, the transcendent ideal starts to lose its grip or we start to turn away from this common transcendent ideals, then what ends up happening is not so much a devolving into a kind of brown mush, you know, like a kind of decomposed apple or something like that. Although that is what happens, but what that looks like really is a tyranny of the specific, a tyranny of the individual. Instead of us all kind of looking towards something which unites us, what ends up happening is in our distraction, in the fact that we’ve lost this common focus, we start to focus on specific things, arbitrary things start to pop up and then take up our attention. The important way to understand it is to always remember the strict analogy that exists between a person as a coherent being and a society as a coherent being as well. The way that a person comes together but also the way a person fragments is similar to the way that a society comes together but also fragments. And we can see that as our attention as individuals breaks apart in certain ways, our attention as societies breaks apart in very similar ways and in ways which are very analogical. So for example as a person, the way that our attention breaks apart or starts to fragment is what Christians, especially Orthodox Christians, have preserved as this notion of the passions. We have in us a bevy of desires and these desires are not bad in themselves. They’re fine if they are, let’s say, gathered together and held together with a common purpose or a common unity. But as we forget that common unity then those desires start to pull us apart, start to rip us apart and start to appear as little tyrannies. And so we have the little tyranny of the belly, we have the little tyranny of the eyes, we have the little tyranny of paying attention to gossip or you know the tyranny of our sexual desires as well. Those things can, because we’ve, as we forget our transcendent purpose, as we forget our common, the thing that brings us together, then those individual desires can appear to us, they can suddenly appear to us as little idols. They suddenly take up all of our attention, we give in to those desires and then all of a sudden we deal with the consequences afterwards. And so in a culture the same thing can happen. You know in a normal traditional culture we are all, let’s say, worshiping together. Hopefully that is what we’re doing. If not then at least we’re worshiping analogically together. That is, we’re not completely, if we’re not completely separate we at least have some things that we hold in common and we have an ideal, societal ideal that we hold together. But as that starts to break apart then just like a person’s passions starts to pull them apart. So too these things analogous to our passions will start to pop up and take up our attention in a manner which breaks us apart. Now this is exactly what celebrity culture does. If in a normal traditional world we are turned towards individuals, we would call them saints, kings, people who manifest the manner in which we are turned towards the same ideal. In a society that’s breaking apart that same desire to identify with people who show us the direction in which we’re going, the same thing will happen in a society that is breaking down and that will look like what we call now today celebrity culture. Celebrity culture, the people who are able to pop up and appear in celebrity culture as grabbing our attention now all of a sudden manifest the very opposite of that unity. They will manifest things like, for example, being an actor, pretending to be something that you’re not. Now there’s nothing wrong with being an actor but the fact that someone who pretends to be something else all of a sudden takes up the most important amount of our attention is very problematic. The same with music. There’s nothing wrong with music but the fact that musicians, that people who are there to entertain us, clowns basically, the fact that our clowns have now become the top attention grabbers in our society shows us what direction those are going. And then if you look at what those celebrities will manifest, they will be equivalent to the individuals passions, you would say. And so people who now all of a sudden grab attention are people who will be excessively full of pride, who will be excessively full of sexual energy, who will manifest a kind of boastfulness, a kind of excess which is equivalent to the excesses that we ourselves can encounter at our margins, let’s say. So there is this strict analogy, constant strict analogy between the individual as a person and his or her passions on the fringes and how a society as it breaks down, how the individual can suddenly take up attention. And so we end up with a very strange world in which all of a sudden someone who pretends to be a, you know, something else for a living, someone who is basically a clown, will have political opinions that everybody thinks are important. And they will be expressing their political opinions or their opinions on religion or all kinds of things that somehow we somehow think that that has value. That is because as this breakdown happens these little tyrannies pop up. And one of the ultimate examples of this has been the event of the mass shooter. Now the mass shooter is very much a symptom of this breakdown in meaning that we’re seeing because one of our, let’s say, desires that we have on our fringes is this desire for violence, this desire to show our strength upon others, to impose our power upon other people. This is something that we, if we’re attentive to our desires and to our thoughts, we will see kind of appearing in our fringes. We usually do it with words. We usually do it by making fun of someone, by talking about someone behind their back. We do it by, you know, by playing the victim in a manner which will then give us power against the other person. We have all kinds of strategies in which we are, we try to show our power upon others. But the ultimate version of that is of course a violent action, is of course the possibility of ending someone else’s life. And so that desire, you know, if we let ourselves go to our fringe, that desire starts to manifest itself as well. And we could understand also how in a society that desire on the fringe can be related to war. That is, as something on the fringe starts to bother, as another empire, another people, another group attacks us or is taking our resources or whatever, then that desire will manifest itself in order to impose our will, impose our power on the other group, whether it’s to defend ourselves or whether it is to attack another group. You know, if you invade another country, that’s what it is. You are, you are imposing your identity, your will on that other person. And so the mass shooter becomes the individual version of that. The individual is, so the mass shooter has everything of our culture kind of boil down together. And that is why they have become so important. And that is why they won’t be going away anytime soon, no matter what we do, because they are a symptom of a much more profound disease of culture. And so the mass shooter, because of our celebrity culture, the mass shooter ends up accomplishing what they hope to do, which is one, to attain, get people’s attention, become the focus of everybody’s attention. And they so they become a moment, a momentary center, just like the the church in a village, traditional village is the center of the church in a society where that breaks down, or that our saints aren’t the one who are bring our attention to that which transcends us. Then in celebrity culture, anybody who can get that momentary attention becomes a small tyrannical center for that moment is able to impose their identity on everybody else for a single moment. And that is what the mass shooter does. If we look at what happened in New Zealand, the New Zealand shooter, we see one of the most egregious, but also one of the most potent examples of this happening. The shooter went so far as to tell us what he wanted. The shooter wanted for the culture war to escalate, wanted that people start banning guns so that those who have guns will then have to defend themselves. He wanted to smear, you know, more centrist conservative thinkers so that people would have to take sides in the culture war. And by doing what he did, he became this little center of attention, this little tyrannical center. And all of a sudden, the change that he wanted actually happened. And it is a very, very sad reality, which is that the mass shooters tend to get what they want and they tend to accomplish that, which it is that they are trying to do. And our society at this moment does not have an answer to the problem of the mass shooter because we have completely and fully embraced celebrity culture, because we have fully and embraced individualist culture where we have we do not see how we need these transcendent ideals to bring us together because we have embraced that culture. We can fight as much as we want the symptoms of this problem. But the disease is too profound and this you can you will not be able to get rid of the symptoms that easily. And so I know that is a bit of a bit of a sad finish for my video. But I think it’s important to understand how serious the situation is becoming and that although I do talk about Twitter and talk about culture, we have to understand that this breakdown of meaning, this meaning crisis in which we are is has effects which are not purely in terms of meaning, which have effects in everybody’s life. And the mass shooter sadly has become a little inversion of an icon for the contemporary age. If you enjoy the symbolic world content, there’s a lot of things you can do to help us out. If you’re not subscribed, please do go ahead and share this to all your friends. If you can get involved in the discussion. We have a Facebook group in which people can talk about these subjects. I will put all those links in the description. And also, if you can, please support us financially by going to my website, www.thesymbolicworld.com, slash support. And I also have a Patreon and a subscribe star. So thanks again and I will see you soon.