Lecture: The Metaphysical Existential Farce of Modernity & The Primacy of Ontology (9/4/26)

Transcript

00:01 So I wanted to do a video here about entrained perception. If you’ve watched some of the other videos on my channel and maybe read some of my work, if you’ve encountered it — this is the big issue of humanity. It’s the crisis of humanity. One of my favorite lectures is Camus’ lecture, “The Human Crisis.” I think it’s from the...

00:27 ...the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, that he delivered in the US. And that was always a really inspirational lecture to me. And his philosophy, or philosophical approach, is very powerful, because I think it connects the East and the West in an interesting way in his question regarding suicide as being the only philosophical question. And this is something you bump up against and into. Let me just turn off my alarm.

00:58 You bump up against and into this question in relationship to being human. So the ontological question of being, which includes and encases the question of being human, or what is existence at all — this is the question that Western philosophy effectively ends at, or dies at.

01:20 In terms of when we look at the collapse of the philosophical project into the 20th century and the emergence of analytical philosophy, which is just a bunch of logical nonsense, because it’s not asking the real question. The real question is: what is existence, what does it mean to be? And that real question is the pre-Socratic tradition,

01:41 extending all the way back to Heraclitus and the earliest recorded philosophical documents in Greek history that we have. So, to stop with the digressions — this question of what does it mean to be, and the stopping point that occurs with existentialism, whether we want to say that’s Camus or Sartre or...

02:10 I think even some of the disillusioned questions of Céline in Journey to the End of the Night , which obviously was a big influence on the continuation of the emergence of existentialism from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky into Heidegger. I’d say Hegel is also a huge part of that. [unclear] This is an issue — I want to keep taking every thread down to the base, but we don’t need to do that.

02:37 You can see where we leave off with absurdity, or the question of the absurd, and the theater of the absurd — Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee — all around this period of mid-century disillusionment, which is World War II and the absolute catastrophe, which is the...

02:57 ...physical and geopolitical encountering of these radically different ideologies at the speed of light, whether those are religious or national or even ontological in terms of where human beings come from and what human beings are. This collision ultimately becomes absorbed into

03:16 this friction of power, which is effectively the first two world wars, which are consolidations of nation-states, colonial terrain, and economic and political systems of organization and management of beings and currency, which extend all the way back to the 1500s with the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade in Spain, which I believe is 1516. This is also occurring amidst the Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica,

03:48 which is a genocide, the same way that it occurs in the United States. This is a consolidation of violence into technologization, which the easiest way to term that is fascism. It’s the birth of fascism as a modern political and economic system of rapidity, of speed, of sourcing energy regardless of the consequence of where that energy is sourced. That’s political power in a barrel of oil, or political power through the barrel of a gun.

04:18 It’s not discriminatory. It has no concept of humanity. It has a concept of the energetic unit, which is exactly how slaves were stored in the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic. Very, very, very cramped — literally just like storing barrels in the bellies of these slave ships. It’s absolutely gruesome. And what it is, is the ideological container

04:45 from which sprouts Nazi Germany, from which sprouts fascist economics as they occur around the world. It’s a battle for the soul of humanity, in so many words, because it’s a battle of organizing and gesticulating energetic efficiency. So whichever nation controls the greatest portion of oil, or the greatest portion of whatever dominant cultural capital —

05:11 that can be anything from Hollywood to the dollar bill or the euro. Whatever that symbolic standard is of wealth and power and status, that is the organizing metaphysical, ontological principle which guides and dictates all human behavior within the silo or the container of the world, which is a manufactured reality. But of course, this has a thermodynamic base,

05:40 a biological base. It’s kind of like a biopolitics, right? Bataille speaks a lot about this. He kind of — he is the bridge to this kind of

05:54 modern future that we live in, the postmodern future, whatever you want to call it, because it’s based actually on thermodynamic principles of heat energy escaping pseudo-closed systems, right? You live in a body; that body emits heat. You consume energy metabolically through your cells, through your body, through your organs. So it’s a perpetual process of ingestion, digestion, and excretion — as I drink the coffee.

06:24 So it’s actually a more scientifically literate conception of reality. But what that scientifically literate conception of reality has done is it has done away with the lived experience of being human. And this is the question of consciousness, which — you see, it’s like whatever stupid name they’re calling it, ridiculous name of like “the final question” or whatever, “the impossible question.” The reality is, it’s something that emerges through the energetic process of the conversion of the elements

06:54 of stars. That is really the birth of the universe, which has changed over time and evolved in complexity through the human being, in the various different components of the brain — the hindbrain and the forebrain — which is a continuous transmission through the genetic chain of creation, which becomes the modern human existential condition, which is becoming conscious. As I said, the birth of the forebrain is the birth of philosophy.

07:23 Without the forebrain, there is no possible

07:26 metacritical reflection. This is why postmodernism is so interesting. It’s an evolution of philosophy. It’s reflection upon the capacity to reflect, in the farcical nature of that turning upon the world in a Cervantean sense and saying, we’ve been looking at this windmill like it was a castle. Or, I was looking at myself like I was this drunk god, or whatever, right? Whatever sort of ridiculous conceptions we have of the real. And postmodernism is the

07:56 [emergence] of this kind of paradigm-shifting evolution, where we’re reflecting upon this creative capacity that we built that we didn’t even really understand. It’s very funny — which leads me to: the end of postmodernism is just profound humor. Existentially, ontologically informed humor about the nature of existence.

08:20 So the reason I actually even created this, or thought about doing another video, was reading about this young man — very young, um...

08:37 what, his late teens? He created this whole scheme of private investors whom he systematically defrauded through this idea for a company. You know, all of these company names, like Transience, or Generation TCZ

09:00 LLC, right? It’s all of these things which are very Pynchonian, for lack of a better word, right? They’re these strange, conspiratorial — it’s like, these are not even good names. They’re just weird. They don’t signify anything. Like “Sinzen,” or “Sinzedine.” It sounds like a toothpaste brand. But really what it is, it’s a multinational corporate entity which is absorbing technology companies to build a quantum particle reactor, right? Just totally ridiculous shit. So...

09:28 He’s building a corporate entity, right? He’s building one of these surrogate human beings, as it is called in the law, right? These corporations are humans, apparently. So they have human rights, I suppose. And he’s a teenager, right? This is a kid who has so thoroughly absorbed the cultural, political, economic, ontological logic of capitalism, which really is just fascism.

09:56 It’s the continual innovation of not critical thought, not ontological thought, which is the actual reflective capacity on existence and nature itself, which is the foundation of pre-Socratic philosophy, which is really the only question.

10:15 Let’s be real. That’s really the only question. It’s not the evolution of that capacity, which is the evolution of all meaningful and substantial human history. People will debate that foundationally. They’ll say the meaningful history is Napoleon, or Alexander the Great. The people who believe that are the people who are indoctrinated into this cult of speed and efficiency and symbolic power, which is really the race for thermodynamic energy

10:45 in a cooling universe. But it’s all ideologically masked. And these people — it’s like the death of a star. A star that’s crashing and burning because it’s attempting to gorge itself on energy that it can’t possibly contain or hold. And I’ll get to this: the metacritical vision of the self through scientifically informed ontology. That’s very important. So.

11:15 He’s being accused of fraud, this guy. Eighteen, nineteen years old. Being accused of fraud by investors of all ages and in all of these different countries. And dies at age 23 of mysterious circumstances. He’s flying these private jets. He’s going to these crazy multimillion-dollar investor meetings, trying to accumulate this billion-dollar entity. And we hear this story every day. If you have a LinkedIn account,

11:43 if you look at whatever sort of ridiculous human news or media, every day there’s a new person who has this new idea of making something better — and “better” means faster, more efficient in economic terms. So it’s a fascistic idea of making human existence more convenient.

12:06 You see where this all leads. This is our modern culture. It’s entirely based on convenience. It’s trying to make one thing half a second faster, and then marketing that as the solution that’s going to save your life. And this is the ontological debasement, slavery, and emptiness of modernity, because we have confused speed and efficiency with meaning, with existential meaning. So you see this cratering

12:34 of the Western philosophical tradition — and I would say the global philosophical tradition — after 1950, 1960. Because what happens? This ontological mode, which is really an anti-ontological mode of extreme fascistic capitalism, is actually what takes over. So they say, what, Hitler was defeated in the war, Nazi Germany or whatever? No. Fascism just became a global phenomenon.

13:04 It was based in this pseudo-ethnic or racial ideology, which of course many nations continue to believe and propound — most nations, in fact — because it creates a natural class hierarchy which they can allude to as the ideological base of their religious tradition, of the idea of the self and the nation. And it allows for an extraction based on tiers of considered humanity and inhumanity.

13:36 This is Wynter and Hartman in particular, in cultural theory, who talk a lot about this, and this is deeply based in racial codification of perceived human being. Again, it’s an ontological problem of the consideration of humanity, which is ultimately a consideration of what it means to be, what it means to exist. And looking at this young man, this is a

14:06 preventable loss. Preventable loss of life. And the reason why I say this is because this is an example of the world that we live in. It’s an extreme high-contrast example of a man who was so thoroughly and so entirely indoctrinated into this ideological world, this vessel of extreme hyper-fascistic power, energy, status, focus.

14:35 Right? And part of this is ingrained and baked into human biology. This is kind of what I wanted to get to. This is the evolution from the ape, and the long history of the attempt to survive as an individual organism with a closed cage — pseudo-closed, right? Because it’s thermodynamic. It’s leaking heat, it’s leaking energy. We see this all the time with sweat, bodily excretion, et cetera.

15:00 The attempt to survive in an entropic universe. And what it means to survive when you are competing in one way or another — and I’ll say this very casually, and I’ll explain why — competing in one way or another to sustain the body. And the brutal evolution of the industrial — several different industrial revolutions, including the recent technological ones, digital technological — have created a universe where it is increasingly more practical

15:29 to manufacture, communicate, and share information and energy. And what this should do, right, is this should naturally change the way that we act and behave with one another. But the problem is that this condition is genetically inbaked into the human being,

15:52 that for so many hundreds of thousands, even millions of years of forced competition for energetic resources, the human being is still obeying these laws. And we call these laws human nature. We say that they occur naturally. They say that it’s part of being human. And all of that may be true on a superficial ontological level. But it’s not asking a deep enough question. And if we’re not asking a deep enough question, we can’t get to a deep enough answer which actually solves our problems.

16:20 So what this current economic, political, ideological system is — we could call it global fascism, we could call it global capitalism, we could call it the rapid acceleration of energetic “solutions,” quote unquote, whether that’s AI or shipping or the internet, whatever you want to call it. Consolidation of power through the creation of currency systems, control of national or world oil.

16:49 These are all energetic attempts to contain this leaking thermodynamic entropic universe — not consciously, but to subject it to an ideological code, whether that’s a religious or national or personal or communal existential idea of what it is or what it means to be human. Because beneath that, what is there? The fear of death. And so there are many, many,

17:17 many, many deaths that are occurring because of this problem. This is the leading source of death in the world: ontological confusion. Not just personally, but politically, as a global and communal condition of the self.

17:37 Our failure as a species is the failure to educate, learn, and innovate based on foundational knowledge of what it is and what it means to be. That if we are a profound

17:54 trans-epochal solution that has been created and inborn from this — I could say — entropic problem of the universe, and we have developed all of these different faculties, including the most recent, the forebrain faculty, the faculty of critical reflection: are we capable of,

18:16 so to speak, turning over a new leaf, understanding who we are, both scientifically and metaphysically, and then changing our world to accurately reflect those conditions, even in the face of the experience that we have of this programming, right? Which is the survival nature and the survival instinct. I’m not saying abandon that. I’m not saying forget it. It is a part of where we stand at this current point in evolution. But

18:44 to include it consciously.

18:49 To be aware of it as we attempt to innovate our world through the existing technologies we’ve already created. The primacy, due to the extreme fear — right, we see this with Stalin, we see this with fascism in Nazi Germany — these are fear factories, for lack of a better word, for rapidly failing, entropically and thermodynamically speaking, organizations of massive amounts of people.

19:16 And the nation-state itself is a consolidation of massive amounts of people into an attempted political system of control and organization of energy.

19:28 These all naturally fail. This is the nature of civilization. You can’t organize that many people, because no one’s on the same page. And this is what we experience in the modern day with immigration in the United States. There’s no good or bad about it, realistically. It’s the failure — like, a civilization fails to contain itself because it’s not real.

19:54 It’s something that’s created under a temporary organization of laws. Those laws are organized historically

20:03 by an attempted metaphysical conjecture, metaphysical sketch at best,

20:10 of what reality is. And the people within these civilizations organize themselves under it. Myths, manuscripts, religious documents. And so this is the way of creating a coherent nervous system organization

20:28 of self, which is the day-to-day affairs of humanity. You go to the market, you understand what the government is saying to you is this, that, or the third thing, and you go home, and there’s a predictable organization of energy because everyone is in some degree of collective agreement as to what existence is, and thus what we will do within it. This is the great power of religion in human history. It is a way of organizing people.

20:55 Whether that organization is good or bad, again, is irrelevant.

21:00 And again, what we experience in modernity — and this is why I brought up Pynchon as such a funny and powerful interlocutor — we experience, through the collision, the high-contrast collision of these ideologies, the absolute and utter absurdity of our closed-mindedness.

21:18 And it creates, as with Pynchon, this kind of paranoid sense that there’s always something greater or beyond even our strangest conceptions. And I think you also see that in Lovecraft, interestingly. Pynchon is sort of a localized cosmic horror. And that is effectively what postmodernism is. It’s a pastiche of the broken fragment itself, which emerges from modernity, which I would say really ends with the atom bomb.

21:45 1950s. The realization that the powers at hand, as they have manifested — right, the thermonuclear power of the sun — has now, like a phenomenological artifact in the casing of human history... They exceed human understanding. And this is critical, because it is the next paradigm of philosophy. It is to

22:09 bring these fragmented shards back together. That naturally is a project that is more Goethean or Leibnizian, or even Spinozan, than any sort of contrived analytical philosophy or attempted silo-disciplinary project. And this asks of our great minds. And the reality is, there are never very many great minds on the planet at any given moment in time.

22:37 That’s the reason a great mind is a great mind. So we have this problem that has not been solved. In fact, it’s just been getting progressively worse, because the energetic conditions are changing due to — whether you want to call it climate change caused by human beings, which I think there’s plenty of evidence for, or you want to call it some sort of larger event like ice ages, et cetera — it’s undeniable.

23:05 These changes are happening, which are changing the thermodynamic landscape through which we reliably, at least for 100 years or so, obtained and mined energy from the earth, whether that’s coal or oil. That was an energetic paradigm. The past century itself was an energetic paradigm of relative stability, obtaining energy from relatively stable sources.

23:31 And when you see not only the landscape through which we obtain that energy, whether that’s oil fields or coal mines, whatever it is — that landscape itself, the larger

23:42 geopolitical landscape of the earth ecosystem, is changing. The nation-state is becoming increasingly unreliable, right? It’s being harvested, it’s being exploited with increasing predictability and regularity. Not only that, these states are crumbling ideologically, and it’s revealing the emptiness within them, right? Which is their resources for energetic harvesting,

24:11 as well as the earth resource for energetic harvesting. This is what Heidegger spoke so fluently about in the period of Nazi Germany regarding

24:25 the evacuation of the sacred, in relation to his work on Hölderlin. And this is why I did a series of, I think, significant lectures on Hölderlin and Heidegger, because it leads to where we are now, if you want to trace that source, so to speak. So the death of the agrarian, highly localized, highly regionalized conception or version of the self — that did retain, even in its [limits],

24:55 a real connection to the sacred through the myth-making. And when you lose the myth-making in the postmodern collision of ideologies, which is really just globalization — and this is what so many people rebel against. They say, or they think, they’re rebelling against all of these different symptoms of globalization, and all of those may be relevant and true, you’re welcome to that ground. But the real rebellion

25:22 is the rebellion against the loss of the sacred, which occurred in localized, regionalized communities of in-group people who all believe the same thing under the same constellation. However ridiculous or ludicrous, true or untrue those stories were, they still were stories that created a real foundational sense of community. And the real foundational sense of community now that we have

25:45 is the logic of fascism extended across all corners of the globe. This was the true victory of World War II: the instantiation of fascism through force power.

25:56 This is the detonation of the atom bomb. Understand this, because this is the real event. This is the ontological event, which is really — it’s like, if Heidegger was experiencing the death of the sacred, a decade or two later, it happens.

26:13 Forcing action through exertion of force. If that makes sense, right? It’s entirely coercive. And this logic of coercion, in terms of global geopolitical control, is what comes to the Cold War, the Vietnam War. These attempts — and they’re actually primarily United States, obviously — attempts to incurse

26:37 onto the world and exercise... people will use the term “soft power.” It’s just a ridiculous way of saying, we have tons of nuclear weapons and you have maybe slightly less nuclear weapons, so do what we say. This form of extortion, which is a behavioral — right, we trace this back, this behavioral drawdown from the ontological well of utter debasement of the sacred, which is the logic of fascism. Again, the United States is foundationally born on

27:04 transatlantic slavery. These human beings who are not being classed as human beings are being classed as slaves, or second-order beings. This caste system of race, which exists in many places in the world, but which was extremely modernized — right, you take your Alexander the Great, or you take whatever your template is — through the extraction of human resource. “Human resource,” quote unquote. What a great term in our modern world.

27:33 These people are resources to be extracted from. This is the inborn logic which we experience today. And so you see the casualty of this young man, 23 years old,

27:46 trying to build his great monument to the self, right, as all of these young men are doing. The great monument to the self, which is a corporation to extract wealth from the earth, from other human beings, by this great grand innovation, which is nothing more than the promise — which is rarely, if ever, fulfilled — of saving five seconds more.

28:12 And in that saving of five seconds more, a rainforest dies. Right? This is the logic of humanity. This is the madness and insanity which we currently experience. And Goethe says — great quote, one of my favorite quotes of all time —

28:29 it’s just to reduce it, that the world is a madhouse. The world is an asylum. You don’t need to go to an asylum to experience insanity — just walk out your front door. There’s that, and the Osho quote — not that I’m the biggest Osho fan — but he says, what is democracy? It’s like a decision made by the people, but the people are retarded. Right? Like, this is the point at which we’re at. Because we don’t have

28:59 an ontological foundation, a meaningful one at all. No conception of what it is to be human, no conception existentially of what it is to be. And the fact that Heidegger is asking these questions in the midst of Nazi Germany — the irony is not lost on me, because the entire project of Nazi Germany is the question of what it is to be human, and the question of what it is to be, filtered through the question of what it means to be German. Right?

29:28 The questions we ask ourselves in the modern day are debased, diluted versions of the primal, primordial existential question of what it is to be. And thus our ideas of how to be, how to move, how to act, are all informed by this conception of self. And these are highly indoctrinated conceptions of selves, which are enforced coercively, right? At the baseline, there is no survival.

29:55 We live in a modern world where all resources — whether you think those should be provided by a state or a community, an ecosystem of care, whatever your word is, is irrelevant — the provision of very, very basic human needs, community, support systems, networks of shared resources: this has all died.

30:23 So when people talk about the death of community, or even they talk about the death of religion or the death of ideology, what they’re referring to is the death of provisional community. And this is why many religious ecosystems still have so much power, even as they continue to be just brutally debased by the financialization of humanity. Because people still desperately need that. It’s a foundational part of what it is to be human. Is it a foundational part of what it is to be? That’s a question.

30:53 But what it is to be human — hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve relied on community ecosystems to survive, not wandering in the wilderness searching for food and attempting... it’s a very, very short lifespan. So you can see this battle that occurs, right, which is the financialization — again, I’ll use the financialization of humanity, because that necessarily includes all of these weird terms like transhumanism, or

31:20 AI, fusion of chips in the brain. It’s all the attempt to mortgage human life into the logic of fascism. And this is what we experience every day with these obscene acts of violence against human beings. But these are made logical through the discourse of conceptualization of a human being as a racialized or ethnic body, or

31:48 you know, right, it’s divorced from humanity. It’s just that this person is this thing. You don’t actually see them existentially. There’s another story of a 20-year-old boy from Haiti who committed suicide because he was forced to wear an ankle bracelet, because his immigration status as a temporary protected immigrant was revoked. So whatever you think about any of that is totally fine, right? I’m way past debating that with anyone.

32:17 Just look at — this is a human being. And he continually said he felt like he was being treated like an animal. He was on his way to getting a doctorate degree in neuroscience, right? He’s one of the soccer players for the college team. He couldn’t play soccer. Right, just kind of look at the situation. And the question here is, there’s such a — I won’t even say the name — this whole discourse around

32:45 “empathy is weakness,” right? Or whatever term you want to use, empathy or compassion. This is all logic of fascism. That’s being said by one of the main spokespeople of this pseudo-logical paradigm. This is the logic of fascism extending all the way into infiltrating, mortgaging, and conquering humanity.

33:11 And we look at this and we say, what is so schizophrenic about capitalism? What is so schizophrenic about modernity? The answer is very simple. It is: we have created a logic that is so fundamentally inhuman, so fundamentally irrational and violent, right, that it is collapsing and caving in on itself, even as we do everything we can to hold its walls up, because it’s insupportable.

33:38 And this is all based around the ontological fight, which is the emergence of the scientific paradigm which we currently live in, which is an evolutionary Darwinian paradigm coupled with a thermodynamic, thermonuclear paradigm. Atomic energy coupled with the understandings that we now have of the thermodynamic nature of the universe. You have Maxwell, you have Planck, right? These have foundationally changed the way that human beings operate.

34:09 These paradigms, these scientific paradigms, are consciously and unconsciously absorbed into the larger geopolitical circumstances of humanity. These are culture shocks. Because what a culture shock is, is the revelation of a way in which to potentially — I mean, do something better by the logic of the universe.

34:32 The global suicide pact of modernity and postmodernity that emerges with the atom bomb is the use of this massive force power to coerce people into doing everything and anything. It’s the same logic as money, as it continually splits across these class strata, right? It’s very difficult — and I think this is why, again, I’ll bring back Pynchon,

35:03 because the absurdity of just how much the human experience has fragmented into the logic of fascism, power, control, is not really trackable,

35:19 because it’s everywhere and it’s nowhere at once. Just the beauty of the Pynchonian novel, or even some of the film adaptations: the sense that there’s this larger, overarching ideological system which is not really being elucidated. Nobody knows what it is, but it’s exerting this extreme force upon the protagonist. This is what it is to exist in modern global fascism as an ontological construct.

35:48 Because the belief is so pernicious, right? And this is what I was trying to say about this young man. This is such a preventable casualty, in so many ways, right? A 23-year-old who dies trying to build this global corporate entity, duping his investors against a concept that has no real bearing behind it. I mean, come on. That is the —

36:13 it’s the revelation of the ideology behind exactly what we’re talking about. It’s just nonsense. And the reality that happens is, this 23-year-old dies. A horrible and sad death. The same way I was talking about this young man, this Haitian immigrant who walked in front of a car, or a truck, this massive truck. It’s obscene. But these obscenities emerge from

36:41 this extreme pressure, this extreme downstream pressure of a rapidly fragmenting attempt to consolidate energetic power, which are the political systems which are working faster and more viciously than ever, their levers being pulled by increasingly incapable and incompetent people, because nobody believes in them anymore.

37:07 And this is the terror and the fear, that we’ve built a world — right, if you look at the foundations of American history or world history — built a world which is, at its bottom historically, so horrific, so inhuman. And we’ve continued to press its levers and exert force against this machine and build these mining towns and factory towns which employ four-, five-, six-year-old kids to work in the mills,

37:37 to work as breaker boys, right? We have photographs of this thanks to people like Lewis Hine in the early 1900s. We’ve manufactured a world which is so horrific to actually look at, right? Because it’s so based in the unconscious, so based on this fear of death through the end of the thermodynamic universe — which, you know, it’s kind of unavoidable. Ernest Becker is great about this, but I think I already talked about him in the lecture on The Denial of Death. Modernity itself, and the cult of modernity, is

38:06 a denial-of-death cult, which is pretty funny considering it manufactures death at every turn, right? What irony. And that’s exactly why it manufactures death at every turn: because it can’t have a real encounter with death, which means it has no real pulse. Every great philosopher, every great thinker, every great spirit in human history — excepting maybe some of the scientific ones, which is highly abstract —

38:37 had real encounters with death. And that was the high-contrast existence of the life that they lived, which was a life of deeply considered existence.

38:53 So this denial of death creates the absurdity which we experience as life. The Transignians, LLC, multinational corporate entity, which is just ruthlessly extracting labor from these offsite — you could say laborers, or you could say, like...

39:18 The line between slaves is very thin. Paying them next to nothing as their rooms flood

39:29 from extreme natural events which are occurring with increasing regularity, right? What are we doing? And all it is, is the attempt to survive. And those who are perhaps most indictable are the most — it’s sad. It’s very sad. But there’s real consequences to that sadness.

39:53 And we’ve based our entire world on this hypocrisy, with increasing regularity, increasing assurance that there’s a payoff at the end of this road. Whether it’s AI, whether it’s some sort of great technological revolution which is going to cure humanity of this ill of its existence. The greatest technological revolution we ever had was the forebrain, but we don’t use it.

40:16 There’s no interest in asking the questions about existence, because in the modern world, right, what is the death of philosophy? The death of philosophy is the conviction that it’s just not valuable anymore. So you see these modern American universities which are gutting their humanities curriculum, and it’s hilarious. It’s incredibly sad. Because what are they doing? They’re systematically destroying the only possible human education.

40:44 And what we’ve done — again, the Industrial Revolution just reveals this with a brutal efficiency — we’ve turned humanity into machines. So when you talk about replacing human beings with machines, it’s not really like, why not? Why not? We’re not losing anything. And the reason we’re not losing anything is because we’ve built an entire world ecosystem around human beings, the premise of human beings being that they are machines, that work itself is a machine,

41:12 that the human being should function as a machine in terms of an agreed-upon cultural consensus. We all think the exact same thing. And if we don’t, it’s fucking weird, right? And this is the horror of the fear, which is really pitiful. So you kind of can oscillate between the pity and the horror, but the consequences are just viciously real and viciously regular.

41:40 And having to deal with that on a day-to-day basis is what creates these young people. And it’s profoundly sad. I personally grew up in a period where there was not as much internet, not as much social media — no social media until I was really coming of age in a young adult sense. By then I was far past my early teens and mid-teens. And what these technologies are...

42:08 All of these technologies are emerging from a common ontology: the manufacturing of the human being as image of labor. The production of labor images.

42:23 I mean, even whether that’s like having kids, or whether that’s working for Sensodyne, LLC, or whatever sort of your name inside an institutionalized bureaucracy which is performing acts of violence in the world, which you are supposed to pay into.

42:44 We’re not deep enough. We’re nowhere near deep enough. The layers of the conception of reality are so thin, and so barely baked into this immensely deep groundswell, which is kind of abyssal. This is why people fear it so much, because there’s so much death baked into that earth, from whence we truly came and who we truly are.

43:08 Can we even begin to ask those questions? That’s the only way that any of this changes. It’s not that all of a sudden there’s this great technological innovation which makes things better. It makes things worse. Because again, you’re building in more and more layers of conviction that some surface-level solution is going to solve your existential problem. Your ontological problem with being. That my DoorDash is five seconds faster. Or my AI can tell me the best doctor.

43:38 You don’t even know what it means to live.

43:42 Why do you need a doctor? Because you’re just desperately trying to survive. And I understand.

43:49 We’re animals. We’re desperately trying to survive in a dying, cooling, entropic universe, in an entropic body. But can we live? Right?

44:05 And this is our great political crisis. It’s the same crisis that it ever was, wearing new clothes, moving faster, weirder, more erratic, more seemingly complex than ever before. Because there’s so much movement on the surface. It’s like a really shallow pool, and there’s a bunch of little kids in it stomping around, and there’s all this mud and dirt being kicked up from the bottom, and you can’t even see down to the floor. That’s what humanity is.

44:35 And how many people are there even trying to figure out what’s at the bottom?

44:40 Serious question.

44:46 Otherwise it’s just more. More of this. Whatever this is. It’s different for everyone, right?

44:54 But together, all of our existential, ontological experience forms our political reality. And what you’re watching is like an off-the-rails train. And it has been an off-the-rails train.

45:11 And this is why — I mean, you have Nietzsche kind of yelling into a storm as the 1900s [approach], saying, this is all ridiculous. We need to change our value system at the root and begin to examine the actual real problem. And this is why Nietzsche is so obsessed with the pre-Socratics, because they’re asking the same question that he’s asking. And he’s looking around, he’s saying, who’s asking this question? Nobody.

45:41 They’re too busy complaining about the dying nation, or religion, whatever the ideological system is. And I think what we can understand pretty readily: all of these systems have some version of inherent value. All of these systems are telling some version of the truth. Why? Because they’re coming from a shared experience. What is the shared experience? Being human — but also, at a deeper level, being.

46:13 This is our question. And we ask ourselves, when this monstrosity of history lurches forward and we continue to experience these events which are just absolutely inhuman, right — these events which actually stretch back thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, of these terribly inhuman behaviors, which themselves are behaviors of fear and cowardice.

46:40 And not to call names, right, but to look at it from a logical perspective: if we can understand and come to terms with what it is to be and what it is to exist, our common humanity extends very far. Our common beingness extends very far, because we found the true ground of existence. Our beingness extends to all beings, to being itself.

47:06 This is what is historically called the mystical state. But the reality of it is, it’s just the understanding of the ground of life. And when we live at and from the ground of life, naturally, ontologically, our ethics, our behaviors, and our morals emerge from a place that’s far beneath trying to convince someone that this story is real. But that’s the world. Stories that exist here on the surface:

47:36 who you are, what you should do, who you should be, what you should buy, who you should believe in, who you should vote for. It’s nonsense.

47:48 But we have these kids who grow up indoctrinated into family systems, political systems — I’ll say even religious systems — that are methods of controlling and codifying behavior and thought. So they can’t think critically. It’s outlawed, it’s illegal. And we see this all throughout the history of modernity in terms of stuff like banned books, or the question of critical thought which emerges through

48:16 Zamyatin’s We , which is a great kind of dystopian — I think one of the first dystopian novels. I really loved it when I first read it when I was younger.

48:26 If we can’t really ask those questions of critical thought, because we’re not actually living in an ecosystem that encourages critical thought through education, right — whether that’s schools, whether that’s seminars, whether that’s family systems, whether that’s cultures, whether that’s communities — the fear of critical thought is so deep.

48:50 And why is the fear of critical thought so deep? Because we’re sitting on the surface, and the moment we dip a toe in the water, it’s so cold, the sense of fear is so profound, the toe just goes right back out.

49:05 The surface feels so much safer. But look — is the surface safe?

49:12 Are you living a life that is meaningful, that has any value to you beyond the car it buys, or the status that you appear to be in, in a totally superficial and empty social milieu that you post on Instagram or Facebook? Or that you put as your title in your LinkedIn? I mean, come on. What does it do? Nothing. Nothing.

49:38 It just postpones. It gives you this brief satisfaction that you’ve accomplished something which is entirely empty and fading, temporal, based in how you appear to someone else.

49:54 It’s the death of ontological existence. It’s the death of a truly grounded, existentially grounded existence. What is at the bottom of that? Is it free creativity? Is it the primacy of the imagination? Is it the realization that the self is a pseudo-fixed construct, which is really riding a thermodynamic wave of genetic evolution in time, and that there are many different cells which are the same cell for —

50:21 is it all just one self? Is it just a field, a configuration?

50:29 These are all of the great questions, and the great minds answer them, or attempt to answer them. Where are we going? What is the black hole at the center of the universe? Why does everything fall towards the heaviest star? What does it mean for a star to die? What does it mean for a human being to die? What is death? Right? But we’re not asking

50:59 these questions. Instead we’re asking: what did Suzy buy from Temu?

51:08 What did insert-dictator-here, or mad-with-power person, do today? And how long am I going to obsess about that?

51:18 Um, wow. The variety of other questions which spring up, which are utterly empty.

51:26 We’re all just concerned with concern, “distracted by distraction from distraction.” T.S. Eliot. Really good one.

51:35 It’s a joke. It’s funny.

51:40 Can we do that? Can we live in that space of thought, or consideration of what existence is at the ground level?

51:50 That requires a change in our education — the way we educate, the way we encourage thought. Not just what we encourage people to think about, which is pretty clear, look around: the way we encourage thought itself, architecturally.

52:10 The way we encourage consideration of the real inquiry into the only thing that matters, the only kind of wealth on this earth that stays. Everything else is provisional, transactional, and conditional. The ontological ground of being itself. And this saves lives. This is not a joke.

52:32 Because if we know who we are, or if we are finding out who we are, we are on the path to something substantial. What is real? Not what did Bitcoin do today. What did the stock market do today. The more that we — I’m not saying don’t invest in those concepts. Money is important. But

52:52 the more that we invest our entire being, our entire life... Gambling is a great example. These are all springing up from ontological failure. Like, ontological system failure. Flatline. OnlyFans, social media, whatever. It’s not that there’s no value to sex. It’s not that there’s no value to money. But what is your life based on? What do you spend your time and energy on? What do you think about? Were you encouraged to think deeply?

53:22 Did your culture, did your community, did your schools, did your education teach you and encourage you to think deeply? No.

53:33 And maybe we disagree. Maybe thinking deeply doesn’t matter. Maybe survival is the only thing that’s important. I’m not saying survival’s not important. We would not be sitting here if it wasn’t.

53:46 But is there anything more than that? Because if there isn’t, we’ve thrown away the ontological roll of the dice, which is our beingness itself, and consigned it to a deeper force which we’ve hopelessly decided we’ll never understand, and maybe we never care to. Which means we don’t care to understand who we are. We don’t care to understand what it is to be. We are just simply being in the consequences of a greater force which we can’t understand and don’t care to.

54:15 And that’s actually very religious.

54:22 The most deeply religious people in human history were not actually religious. They were mystical. They were philosophical. Kierkegaard is a great example. Meister Eckhart. The great sages of Hinduism and Buddhism. Taoism. Zhuangzi.

54:40 They were asking these questions. And at the bottom, what is possible? A real sense of who we are. That’s the gold. It’s not money. Money is a good thing.

54:57 A real sense of who we are.

55:01 All right, that’ll do it for me. Thank you, guys.