https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=u7BQaQE_Jn8
One of the things I’m constantly talking about is hierarchy. The notion that the world exists through these hierarchies of meaning and the consequences of what happens when those hierarchies break down. And I thought that I would give a very particular example that we’re seeing today, which is in the rise of social media. We are actually seeing the, what we would call the reign of chaos. And it doesn’t look like, only look like a kind of mush. You know, you can imagine something decomposing and becoming a kind of incoherent mush, but rather it appears as the succeeding tyrannies, you could say, as a form of all these mini tyrannies which pop up and try to assert themselves. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. And so in our society we’ve been seeing the notion of hierarchy break down ever since, for several hundred years by now. And we’re seeing accelerate in the 20th century and in the 21st century, which is the time of the 20th century, and we’re seeing accelerate in the 20th century and in the 21st century with postmodernism, this notion that hierarchy itself is bad, that we talk about multiplicity, we talk about all these terms which tend to emphasize diversity and all of that. Now, one of the difficulties that happens when chaos starts to reign is that it ends up actually looking like a bunch of little tyrannies. One of the things that I noticed, my first glimpse of that was actually when I lived in Congo, and in Kinshasa the state had broken down, we were living in a state of chaos, and so that did look like a kind of lawlessness, a kind of far west reality where anything can happen, anything can, anything goes, but it also manifested itself explicitly giving room for little tyrants, warlord type figures or people who could abuse their power. So in a state of chaos, a policeman can abuse their authority much more because there’s impunity, there’s no structure to judge his actions. And so encountering a police officer, for example, as you’re driving, can become your worst nightmare because that person is going to impose themselves on you like a little tyrant. And so I had to deal with that quite a bit when I was in Congo. I tried to get myself out of sticky situations where I had been stopped by the police and they were trying to get some money out of me or some kind of impose their power on me. And so when someone has a weapon, that obviously can become a very scary thing. Now, obviously most people have not been in Congo or in those types of countries, but we can see something like that happening right now on social media. And we can see it happening especially through Twitter. Now, as we’re watching, let’s say, the narratives break down, as we’re watching the narratives fragment, social media is becoming a series of little tyrannies. And what do I mean by that? Now, one of the ways that the little tyrannies have been, we’ve been seeing the little tyrannies appear in our space, is the notion of fashion. So the notion that something becomes fashionable and then goes out of fashion is a caricature of a tyranny. And so in a world where people are not turned towards a common goal, a common purpose, a common center, then our desire for centers is not going away. That’s how we’re made. We’re made to desire something which brings things together, focuses our attention, focuses our desires, our energy into one direction. That’s just how human beings are made. So in the absence of an all-encompassing center, something which transcends us and which kind of brings us together, what ends up happening is not just a bunch of random occurrences, but rather the appearance of extremely strong points of interest that succeed each other. And so what it does is the breakdown of hierarchy accelerates time. What do I mean by that? Now, fashion is a good way to see that. So in fashion, what you can see is things appearing, you know, all of a sudden everybody has a mullet. And then the mullet is the thing to do. And everybody’s getting a mullet and a mullet and a mullet. And then all of a sudden it falls out of fashion. And then you’re an idiot to have a mullet. You’re such a moron. And we’ve seen that happen quite rapidly. What is it? A year and a half ago, every single child in the world had a little hand spinner. And everywhere you would go, you see these children with little hand spinners. And then a year later, they’re all gone. They’ve all disappeared. And so you can see that happen in all kinds of domains, in music, in fashion, in all kinds of cultural manifestations, because we’re not focused on a transcendent ideal, because we’re not looking towards something which will stabilize the hierarchies, where we actually end up having all these little things pop up and succeed each other in rapid succession. And so that’s what I mean by it. What it does is it actually accelerates time. And I think most people can feel that time is accelerating right now. Most people can feel that the world is accelerating. And part of this has to do with the breakdown in a normal hierarchy, because of the rapid succession of what you would call focuses of attention, in terms of what’s happened. And so we can see that now with this whole idea of the news cycle and all these crazy news cycles that pop up and these things that appear. Another thing that can help you understand the problem of these little tyrannies is of course the whole idea of something going viral. The very name viral is a great name for what that is, because a virus is exactly that. A virus or a disease is a breakdown in hierarchy of your body. There’s a breakdown in the normal functioning and the normal hierarchy of the body. And there’s something, there’s a disease or a microbe, a parasite which all of a sudden takes up all the attention and becomes… And so in the breakdown of the bodily hierarchy, there’s a little tyranny which appears and then which will draw all your energy, draw all your attention into that parasitic thing. And so the idea of videos going viral or posts going viral is exactly that. Something appears all of a sudden and everybody’s talking about it. What was it that crazy meme about, what’s her name, was it Momo or something? Some hoax online about an evil, this evil thing that people were doing. And then within, in a few days everybody was talking about it. My whole Twitter feed, my whole Facebook feed was full of people who were talking about this one thing. And then a week later it’s as if it never happened. And so the idea of virality is a caricature of the desire that we have for focusing our attention, for focusing in a hierarchy. And so you can see that there’s an analogy in that to our own self, into our own bodies. And so giving into a passion is exactly that. When we give into, when the normal hierarchy of our being, let’s say, with meaning as being first, with our spiritual identity as being first, once that starts to break down, we now start to focus on lower things and we get these little tyrannies. Now the little tyranny could be an obsession with a food. It could be an obsession with eating chocolate or eating certain things. It can be all kinds of desires that pop up and that completely suck away your attention into that desire. You know, pornography is probably one of the best examples because it fragments into all these little types, all these little genres, and every little genre becomes this obsessive thing where people focus only on that one genre. And so it becomes this strange tyranny of attention that will drag people into it and will take up all their attention. And so this is a phenomenon that we’re seeing all over the place. And one of the symptoms of this breakdown is, of course, the way that Twitter works. The amazing thing about Twitter is it shows you what it means for there not to be hierarchy. And so on Twitter, you know, you have all these people speaking. It’s even crazier because a lot of them are anonymous. And so you have all this bubbling up of all these little things that people are saying. And a lot of them are anonymous. And so what happens is that you, the media on either side, can draw a narrative, any narrative that they want. And they can increase the breakdown of culture by doing that. Now, let me give you an example. Let’s say something happens in the world. Let’s say there’s a shooting like we saw in New Zealand. And so someone in the media will write an article and say, people on Twitter are saying this. And then they will find the craziest thing that they can find on Twitter. And they will put it up there. Someone who says, because of the New Zealand shooting, we need to ban Jordan Peterson and ban Sam Harris and ban all these people from the platform. And so, you know, other people are freaking out because all of a sudden people on Twitter are saying this. It’s like, who are these people on Twitter? We don’t even know who they are. They’ve just been, they’re this sea of crazy chatter, of tweets, of Twitter exactly, of a kind of inane chattering. And then someone points to that and pulls something out and says, this is reality. This tweet that I found here that maybe has 12 likes or even if it has a thousand likes, it doesn’t matter. It’s nothing in the main narrative. But they take it out and they say, here, this is reality. And so you can see how the absence of hierarchy and the absence of a hierarchy of meaning really does create this strange capacity to make anything all of a sudden, make anything real. And that’s what happens with the absence of authority. The fact that every voice is somehow equal, that we actually do believe that every single voice is equal, means that you can just pull out some random voice and you can write an article saying, this is what people are saying on Twitter. And you can have four or five, you can have ten tweets. Oh, look at these ten tweets that are saying things that cause me outrage or ten tweets that are saying things that I agree with. And so look at what people on Twitter are saying. And what’s crazy about Twitter, especially Twitter, is that we don’t know who those people are. They could actually be people who are pretending to be what is there. We have no way of knowing who these are, what their intentions are, and on what side they are. Every time someone will put up some tweet of someone saying something crazy, you always have to ask yourself the question, is it someone from their side who’s putting up something crazy so that they can then point to it and then say, look at what the other side are saying? We have no way of knowing. And that’s really the very notion of the incapacity to discern, which comes in this breakdown of hierarchy and the breakdown of meaning. And so you can see, and then you can also see how in the breakdown of a normal hierarchy, what ends up happening is you start to get these warring sides. And because there’s no way of qualitatively distinguishing voices and qualitatively distinguishing information, what they’ll end up doing is they can point to little things on the other side that exist, but that are not important in the hierarchy, and they can say, see, look, this is why we oppose them. This is why we’re against them. And because there’s nothing to bring us together, there’s no transcendent ideal to move us in the same direction. There’s no way to discern. And because the problem is that the facts that are being quoted are true. It is true that there are people on Twitter saying crazy things. You can point to the tweets and there they are. So you’ll see all people, people on the left, but also people on the right. You get people online, even people like Sargon of Akkad, who will make entire videos, pulling out tweets on Twitter, which he thinks are insane, and then making fun of them on his podcast as if those tweets are anything but a bunch of gibbering chatter from people that you don’t know who they are. They could be 12 years old. They could be larping. They could be pretending to be their enemy in order to mock them. And we saw that even conservatives got caught up in that. You know, when they did that, I forget the name of the group that did it, but they did these studies about sexual predators and dogs. And they published it on a liberal, in a kind of left leaning journal. And the more conservative or more straight journalists got caught up and saw that as something which was actually real. And then the people on the other side also thought that it was real, that they were someone pretending to be their enemy in order to make their enemy accept things that maybe they wouldn’t even have accepted without that happening. See, that type of insane incapacity to discern, that is what it looks like when there’s an absence of hierarchy. And it ends up looking like a rapid succession of little tyrannies, which will only speed up, guys. And it’s going to go faster and faster. You know, the news cycle now is absolutely insane. And not only is it insane, but the speed at which we forget the previous news cycle is also insane. Because that is also a thing that is necessarily going to happen when hierarchy breaks down. Hierarchy is memory. Hierarchy is the manner in which things remember their purpose even though they’re far away from it. That hierarchy is a form of normal memory. And as hierarchy breaks down in society, as the common purpose, the common goal, the common direction breaks down, then one of the things that will break down is also memory. And so these rapid succession of little tyrannies that are quickly relegated to the past, and we just move on to the next one. And we see this getting faster and faster as the cycles accelerate. And the only, you know, I wish I could tell you what the solution is in terms of society. Sadly, I cannot. But I can only help you understand the problem. See it in your own lives in terms of this, also these tyrannies of desires that you experience. And how they also, let’s say, pull you away from the normal hierarchy, from your normal purpose. The things that you really would like to want or like to value. And see how this is a pattern which manifests itself at all different levels. And if we can at least work on our own, let’s say, passions and our own little tyrannies, our own desire to give in to fashion, to give in to fashionable ideas, to give in to the clickbait, the rage bait, this kind of mob mentality where we move from scandal to scandal, because a scandal is exactly that as well. A scandal is a kind of inverted hierarchy where some dark thing appears as attracting all our attention. So if we want to get away from that, we have to start with ourselves. And hopefully it will help us then also pull away from the other scandals. And so maybe that will also help all of you to understand why I am very careful and I try to not comment too much on current events. And I know that this might seem strange to some, but the idea that these current events are meaningful is extremely dubious. We need to be able to pull away from current events and see the patterns. But when we get caught up in this succession of current events of Donald Trump’s latest tweet or Justin Trudeau’s latest idiotic thing that he said to the media, we lose the capacity to pull away and to view patterns in a bigger sense. And so I can only plead for everybody to take the time to do that in your life and also as you look at society as a whole. So thanks again, guys, and I will see you soon.