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Since a lot of you seem to have enjoyed my video on Alex Jones, this is not the type of thing that I usually talk about, but I really do believe that there are many things we can understand about the world by looking at these subjects. And so I thought that I would go into a little more of this question by looking at the recent appearance of flat earth theories and flat earth conspiracies and looking at what these can mean in terms of how the world has been going in the past last moments and understanding what is this structure that is going on. Why is flat earth reappearing as an idea? This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So one of the most surprising things that have happened in the last few years has been the reappearance of a flat earth theory on the internet. There are many videos, many people talking about flat earth and I think that it’s a very important thing to look at. A lot of the insight I’m going to give you in this video actually also comes from my brother Mathieu Peugeot who has from the right from the beginning of flat earth appearing online has been sending me links and has been sending me some of his ideas based on that and so I have to give credit to him for helping me see a little bit about how important this flat earth thing is. Now one of the very important things to understand as we look at how strange the world has become, I talk to you many times about this notion of what happens when the center breaks down and when things start to move towards the periphery, start to break apart, start to fragment. One of the things that happens at that time is the incapacity to see things clearly, the incapacity to know when something is true or false but also when something is ironic or not, when it’s a joke or not. And in the flat earth moment we really see it as this laboratory of strangeness where so many people who are involved in flat earth are doing it for the laughs, are doing it to poke fun at people, to troll people so that when people take them seriously, you know, they’re just laughing. A lot of it is also a way to make fun of how complacent we are in our thinking and how we tend to accept things the way they’re given to us without questioning them. There are, of course, people who believe in flat earth in a scientific sense. There are those people online as well. But even in those people it’s very interesting to look at the arguments they give for why the round earth theory was developed. Now, I am not a flat earther in a scientific sense, but as those who know about me, I don’t see the world in those terms. I don’t see the scientific vision of the world as being primary. I actually see the phenomenological vision of the world as being primary. That is, that our experience in the world is the first experience. It is the frame out of which we then interpret the world. And so scientific understanding, which is abstract, which is removed from the viewer, I think actually comes second. It’s very useful. It’s very important. If you want to make planes fly or if you want to make an iPhone work or this camera, whatever, of course that type of abstracted and alienated thinking where you step outside yourself and try to analyze the world that way is very important. But it is not the way we live our lives. We don’t live our lives in the scientific world. We live our lives in an experiential world. We live our lives in what I call a phenomenological world. And so when we start to look at what is happening with this flat earth ideas coming up, this is where we can see that what we’re actually experiencing right now in the world is a return of symbolic thinking. It’s happening slowly. We can see glimpses of it. It’s one of the reasons why I’m making the videos that I’m making is because I have perceived that this is going on. And so it felt like it was now time to speak into these questions. What do I mean by the return of the phenomenological thinking? What we see in flat earth thinking is we’re seeing the empirical, logical, doubt everything attitude of the scientific approach. We are seeing it eat itself. It has reached the end of its process and it is now cannibalizing itself. One of the things we’ve noticed in the last few years has been a lot of studies which were recognized as being objective, as being true. Scientists are trying to redo the same experiments, the same studies, and they’re not able to get the same results. And so old studies that people took for granted are now being dismissed. We can see it even in our own experiential life. We’ve seen a time in our life where scientists, rigorous scientists were telling us that we need to eat four food groups. And you have to eat all these different things every day. And this is a balanced diet. And now we’re finding out it seems who knows to what extent even this new thing is true. But now all of this is being cast aside and we’re being told, no, that’s not the way our body works. That’s not the way our body absorbs nutrients. And so because a lot of these scientific experiments are not being replicated, there is, like I said, the process of scientists coming to its end. We’re realizing that so many things that we believe, actually pretty much everything we believe about the world is not based on our empirical analysis of things. It’s based on trust. It’s based on the trust that we have in the authorities that are giving us information. This, of course, for someone who believes in a traditional world, who believes in a symbolic world, this is not strange at all. We know that the world is built on trust. We know that the world is built on the trust of that which has been handed to us before. We know that it’s built on trust of the, as a Christian, of the saints, of the councils, of the church, of the Bible, all these things. We know because that’s how a traditional world works. But the modern world presented itself as questioning all those sources, all those authorities. And we’re going to do the experiments ourselves. We’re going to do the studies ourselves. And then we will get a more real perception of what the world is like. But in the end, what ends up happening is because we are not doing those experiments, at least not you and I. We are not going up into the sky and seeing the world as a ball. We have to trust those who did it. We have to trust those who are giving us these extremely complicated explanations of how we can prove that the world is actually round. And because of that, now the people who, a lot of the people who are becoming flat earthers are doing it. It is the system of empirical data and the system of empirical analysis eating itself. And what’s happening is it’s actually bringing back in a very strange way. I’ve told, I’ve talked to you a lot about this double inversion. You know where the, let’s say the scientific enlightenment worldview flipped the world upside down. Instead of looking towards authority, instead of looking towards essence, instead of looking towards, let’s say, meaning and language as the origin of reality, we looked at the ground. We looked at phenomena. We tried to analyze phenomena itself. And that flip is major. And it has created some great things. We’ve used a lot of the tools we use, but it has also created a problem. And we see it in the meaning crisis that we’re experiencing today. Part of that is what led to this situation that we’re in. And now that it’s upside down, when we reach the end of that, we realize that we are still based on trust. And our world is still based on trust. Because we decided to trust other people, not the same people that the ancient world started to trust. And so it’s happening in a mythological way. This whole flat earth thing is really a mythical structure which is showing itself in the world. And what’s happening is a return to the basic experience of the world that you can have. And that basic experience of the world that you can have is true. It’s true in the sense that it is true that this is our experience of the world. Nobody that you know has ever experienced the planetary systems that is described in science. No one you know has ever experienced the earth as a globe. We do not experience that. And so at the end of this process, we are flipping back and returning to a world where meaning is primary. Where the human consciousness is first, and then looking at the world through that filter of human consciousness. Now a lot of the flat earth type people don’t necessarily frame it that way. To be honest, I don’t think they totally know what’s happening in a broad scale. They’re just doubting everything and doubting everything and then coming back to the very, very ancient cosmic image of a dome and a flat surface. And it’s hilarious. But it’s also hilarious because we are in this moment where the world is wobbly and nothing is certain anymore. And people don’t know what is true, what is ironic, what’s a joke, what’s serious. If you look at even our political leaders, Donald Trump is basically memeing and trolling people. The very president of the United States is saying things in a manner which is meant to create this kind of destabilization. But then what it’s leading to ultimately, I believe, is a return of the symbolic worldview. And it’s not just of course flat earth, which is going to do that, but flat earth and also this whole science of consciousness, this whole return of understanding that hierarchies of meaning are inevitable. All of this is kind of coalescing into this crazy moment where symbolism is returning. And the image of the dome and the earth below is really, secretly you could say, a return to this world of meaning. Now if you look at some of the flat earthers, it’s very interesting to see what, because obviously they have to imagine a vast conspiracy which exists from the time of Copernicus basically up to today. And you have to wonder why would they do this? Why would they lie systematically until today? Why would they fake all these things, all NASA and all this, why would they fake it? And the solution that many of them end up coming to is that they did it in order to subvert the world, in order to remove God, remove all those things that make the idea that the earth is the center, that man is the center. And so they’re faking all this conspiracy in order to reduce the idea of man in relationship to God and this notion of the human person as the center of the cosmos and earth as the center of the cosmos. And so the truth is that they’re right, they’re right that that’s the purpose. But you don’t necessarily have to posit a scientific flat earth in order to see that. The change which happened, which subverted this, the change which happened, which subverted and changed all this, was the change from understanding the world as manifesting itself through the human person. Today we could say something like manifesting itself through human consciousness, because without consciousness the world has no form, has no hierarchy, has no structure. And so human consciousness becomes the vehicle by which the world ends up laying itself out in its meaning, in its hierarchy. And so the inversion, the subversion, by positing a world which is outside of human perception, which is more real, but more real, you know, we say that it’s more true, for example, that the earth is turning around the sun. It’s more true than the sun turning around the earth. But our perception of the sun is that it turns around the earth. That is, if we view the universe through the guise of human consciousness, that is the first perception you could say. The first perception is that perception of the sun going around the earth. It’s not a mechanical perception. It’s a perception which puts meaning first. That’s the difference. Now once you flip it for a kind of mechanical descriptive meaning, that that is the most important, then what you’re actually doing is you’re putting the emphasis of meaning, you’re putting the center of the world outside of the human being, outside of human consciousness and consciousness itself as the vehicle for meaning. Of course, in the traditional manner, the ultimate summit of knowledge is not the human person, it’s God, but God working through the human person who is the image of God in creation. So that is the actual subversion which happened. So if you’re interested in that, I have given several talks. There’s a talk on my channel called Full Affront on the Copernican Revolution in which I discuss how this change, this change from a geocentric in the sense of meaning, of anthropocentric in the sense of meaning worldview, changed to this, this de-centered universe of mechanical causes, what that means for us and how we’re reaching the end of that today. And now we’re seeing this flip as we understand the inevitable hierarchy meaning, hierarchies of meaning which manifest themselves in the world. I’ve also written an article which is called Most of the Time the Earth is Flat. And you can already see in the title that I am trying to explain how we do not have to posit other mechanical forces, other mechanical descriptions to regain the anthropocentric vision of the world, to regain a cosmic vision of the world in which the human person, human consciousness, in which love, in which hierarchies of meaning are the center. And if we look at, once we understand that that’s the key, the key to understanding the world is to understand how our first experience of the world is through consciousness and through that filter, then all of a sudden so many things open themselves up. All the stories, all the ancient stories, all the ancient rituals, the shape of a church, the way that we have certain social rituals of turning around centers, all of this suddenly becomes clear once we understand that the meaning, that the center of things, that the hierarchy of things is not the mechanical description of them. It is the manner in which we experience meaning through consciousness. So I hope that this is a little helpful in terms of understanding why something like Flat Earth Theory seems to be participating maybe even despite itself in a return of a symbolic worldview, in watching the analytical empirical world eat itself by coming back, despite itself, to the very, very ancient vision of the world as being horizontal and the heaven as being circular, which has a very profound meaning. I also wrote an article called Heaven is Round, Earth is Square, which you can find. I’ll put all those links in the description in which you can read about how the ancient cosmologies describe the world and why it’s important that they do that and what it means for us and understanding how the world lays itself out. So I appreciate everybody watching this. I appreciate all the sharing the videos. And as usual, subscribe to my channel if you find this interesting. There’s a lot of stuff about symbolism on my channel. I want to say hello to all the new subscribers that have come through the Alex Jones video. So thanks again, guys. If you want to support the channel, you’ll also find a link to that below. And I’ll see you soon.