The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Alex Ebert. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Hey, listeners. Don’t forget to check out my new Substack at jimrutt.substack.com. Most recent essay is what I mean by metaphysics. And no, I didn’t have to reach for a pistol to write it. Today’s guest is Alex Ebert. Alex is an American singer, songwriter, and composer. He is best known for being the lead singer and songwriter for the American bands I’m a Robot and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Welcome back, Alex.
Alex: Good to be here, Jim. Thank you.
Jim: Not only is he a singer-songwriter, bad dude, and all that stuff, but he also writes a fairly interesting Substack with a great name, badguru.substack.com. And in fact, today, we’re going to be talking or at least launching our conversation from a Substack article he wrote some time ago, actually, which I recently stumbled across called New Age and the Religion of Self, the Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality. So, you know, at some level, this essay is at the highest level of abstraction arguing that new ageism is a pervasive but unrecognized religion. Walk me through what you mean by calling it a religion. Actually, start off with what the hell do you mean by new age? And then, what do you mean by calling it a religion?
Alex: Well, I think religion, you know, obviously, you have to have sort of unseen forces, higher powers, cultic overtones. You have to have some kind of eschatology. And New Age has all that similar to any sort of religion. There is a belief system. There is a sort of tripartite path to enlightenment or a path to, really, to the eschatological savior, which is the new age. It’s sort of like, 144,000 folks are going to be, you know, survive the rapture, that kind of thing. If you achieve personal sovereignty at the end of the day through things like the law of attraction and personal manifestation and then achieving personal sovereignty. So you have the outline of a just a, you know, a basic religion. Then, of course, you have the coherence and the sort of the cultural cliquiness that comes along with all that, and the language, and the specializations, and all of that. So, yeah, I just mean religion in the basic sense that we think it. I also think that, you know, capitalism has been forging a religion or attempting to, and people like Max Weber and so on would see that in the sort of cultic overtones, the mysterious market forces, the priestly class of sort of bankers and so on, you know, advising the hoi polloi and all of that. But capitalism really always struggled to mark itself sufficiently as, well, as spiritually divinated, as something that rebuffs spiritual critique. I mark in the essay that in 1925, like, 30 percent of, I think, just Christian clergy in the United States was registered socialist. Charles Grandison Finney, all these sort of, like, you know, revivalist preachers were just going on about how awful and antithetical to Christ’s teachings capitalism was, and capitalism really did need some kind of integration of the spiritual. And new age, you know, new age came around in the seventies, but its predecessor really sprung out of something called new thought, which really started to gain traction in 1910 with Napoleon Hill’s publishing of something called Think and Grow Rich, I believe.
Jim: Yeah. I read that book, Think and Grow Rich, the most amazing imaginable pile of poppycock. But yeah.
Alex: Yeah. Well, you know, it like and and that all grew out of Theosophy, and then Theosophy grew out of prior things. I would actually trace the entire damn thing back to, back to the the beginnings of the enlightenment, I think therefore I am, which I I believe was actually a reaction to to solar centricity. It’s just a few I think it’s just five years after it was confirmed that the Earth circled the sun and not the other way around that Descartes basically said, okay, well, then in that case, the universe revolves around me. We have to somehow be at the center of this story. And and, you know, anyway, I I I like personally tracing it from all the way back then, but you but just to bump ourselves back up to the eighteen seventies, Blavatsky, this Russian occultist, you know, theosophist, came up with this idea of the law of attraction, and obviously, it it predates her. But she really popularized it, and then all of a sudden, started taking this idea that, you know, what you think turns into what is attracted to you, and you start attracting toward you the very things you think. And we end up with the idea that, well, if that’s the case, then you can think about money in such a way that money comes to you. So you have think and grow yourself rich, and and that really captures the imagination of the capitalist class. I mean, obviously, we end up with a character like Donald Trump, whose pastor as a child was Norman Vincent Peale, who was one of the biggest new thought authors ever. You know, his his most famous line was a powerful and positive thought can overcome the fact altogether. And little Donald Trump was like six years old in his church, listening to this stuff, really, you know, integrating it. He explicitly calls Norman Vincent Peale like a foundational figure in his life. And then you end up in the I think it’s early two thousands maybe with a deposition Trump had to do, and the lawyer is asking him what his what his value is, how much money he had, and Trump’s response was it depends how I feel. And the lawyer it’s amazing to read the transcript because the lawyer continues to ask, what what do you mean it has to do with how you feel? I’m asking what your net worth is. And he said, yeah. It depends how I feel every every day. It fluctuates with how I feel. And then you get to the point where Trump says, well, no. We had the biggest inauguration crowds, or I’m, immune to COVID, or I know the most about this. Any of his declarations that seem like flat out lying, any of his so-called alternative facts in the context of his education as a first generation new ager, which is really what he is, suddenly reveal themselves not to be lies, but to be the artifacts of of manifestation. He’s manifesting, by putting out a powerful and positive thought to overcome the facts altogether per Norman Vincent Peale. So it’s a fascinating basket of poppycock, as he said.
Jim: Yeah. It is. Mean, I actually happened to be watching, beat the press on the episode where Kellyanne Conway actually gave that famous answer of alternative facts. I go, the fuck, dude. Right? And it is nuts. I, you know, I often point out that Trump says lots of things that aren’t true, but is he actually a liar? Does he actually understand the the concept of objective reality, and truth, or does he live in some bizarre alternate reality where what what he says is true or the fact that he says a on Monday, b on Wednesday, and c on Friday, and all three mutually contradict each other doesn’t in any way bother him? I mean, it’s a very odd thing. So it is quite interesting that you pull up this lens of new ageism. Now I do have to pick a bone with you there in the article where you say, well, all of us are new agers. Right? Like, I sure the fuck ain’t. Right? Like, I’m a I’m immune to that poppycock.
Alex: Yeah. I I I suppose. But then again, you’re probably into the idea of personal sovereignty. You’re probably into the idea of money, which, of course, is now fiat by decree. It’s got no pegging to gold, which I’m sure we’ll get into. I mean, there’s a lot that we subsist on, as rational beings that is highly irrational, highly by decree, strictly floating freely by decree.
Jim: It’s collective action. Like, you know, I’ve often referred to our central banker mediated fractional reserve banking money system as a useful collective hallucination. Right? We all have to simultaneously hold hands and jump off the cliff together or the hallucination doesn’t work. And of course that allows us to have a different hallucination. You know, I like to say, you know, the federal reserve was not brought down by Moses from the top of Mount Sinai. It was cooked up on Jekyll Island in 1913. Right? So these are just arbitrary conventions essentially. Right?
Alex: They are. They are arbitrary now. What’s interesting though is, like, you know, it’s very tempting to connect the arbitrary nature of life today, whether we’re talking about fucking Bitcoin, memes being commodified and sold under total subjective valuations, or we’re talking about Trump and the post-truth world, or we’re talking about TikTok and misinformation, and the thing with the most attention wins, it all speaks to a tempting finale, which is, well, this is the condition and even the precondition for cognition. It’s all a hallucination clearly. We can see the artifacts of that hallucination in our daily lives vis-à-vis the very things we’re talking about now, and those artifacts confirm the theory that it’s all a hallucination. That I think, therefore, I am, and so on and so forth. But it’s very easy to forget and tempting to forget that, well, at one point, life was actually tethered to extant artifacts, to things that were actually there. And so, you know, and I struggle with this too because I’m basically, like, a borderline German idealist. So a lot of this stuff is like, yes. Sure. It’s all a collective hallucination. We just have to buy in. But the extent to which that is, you know, that that’s disrupted by a good five hundred years during which that wasn’t true at all, and a good, you know, hundred and fifty years here in the States where, you know, it was in the context of economics, you know, you could change in your money for gold. It meant something. It was tied to something you could literally touch. It was literally tangible. And we’ve been unmoored from that, and we’ve equated that unmooring with a truer condition. Somehow, this is now a purer reality that it is untethered, renders it true. I find that interesting.
Jim: Yeah. Interesting. And I sometimes say about postmodernism, its core holding, which is be skeptical of grand narratives, is actually useful. Right? But somehow that lens of looking at the world, if actually applied to reality, you know, is basically a train wreck plus an airplane crash. As I sometimes like to say, can’t say I know any postmodern plumbers or farmers or loggers. Right? It’s an intellectually interesting way to be, but it at least as applied in our evolving culture, particularly from the academic world, not particularly good for dealing with the actual world.
Alex: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. I’m working on a screenplay right now, which is something I slipped into, and it’s for a very famous TV series update. And the entire premise is that somehow there seems to be something at once liberating and confoundingly magnetic about moving into a post-truth disorientation, that there’s something intolerably addictive. And I’m not sure how we get away from it. You know, like, the meaning crisis, which I’m sure you’ve covered a million times on this show, you know, is actually the—if, correct me if, you know, if you disagree, but I would say that the final result of the meaning crisis, philosophizing, ended up deciding, if we’re talking about whether it’s Vervaeke to whomever, deciding that actually what we need is to dive back into the collective hallucination vis-à-vis religion. And so it’s interesting to note that there is something about the collective hallucination we’re talking about that has led to atomization of the real, and yet that atomization requires or seems to require, according to today’s reigning sort of philosophical minds, a return to the collective hallucination. So either way, we’re stuck in either an atomized disillusion or illusion. I don’t know if the atomization is an illusion or if it is the real thing. Because at this point, our option—if our option is the collective illusion, maybe it’s simply our options are an individual illusion and a collective illusion. I’m not sure where that—seems to be the rock and the fucked place that we’re living in.
Jim: Yeah. Of course, that’s what Game B is trying to thread that needle, right, between the two. And I will say, to be fair to Vervaeke, well, I haven’t talked to him in a couple of months. He has always underscored he believes in no supernatural nonsense. Everything he’s saying is grounded in causality, though at in emergence without the non—the non-magical versions of emergence. And he dances right along the edge, and, you know, he says that we need the religion that’s not a religion, which is in his mind, the rituals, the practice, the things that cause our naked ape, our tailless naked ape selves, to resonate with each other and produce higher degrees of relationality and coherence and actually get back to, you know, intersubjectivity and inter-rationality and collective sense making. And I do think there may be hope on that road. But you’re right. The two prevailing attractors, the bad attractors, on one side, you know, atomized individuals and even worse. I mean, at one level, you have the Ayn Randian, atomized individual, and now you have this new age atomized individual, the QAnon types, who just say, what the fuck? I can just make up anything. Pedophiles in the basement of the pizza parlor. They’re the ones running the world. Well, you know, how could I say that? Because I read it on 4chan or something. I don’t know fuck how they get into this stuff. But or on the other hand, you know, people were going back to the old time religion. I know a lot of people moving back to the old time religion, whether it’s, you know, evangelical Christian Protestantism, whether it’s Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, you know, these strong forms of collective agreement, collective hallucinations in my mind are strong. But so to my mind, the right path is somewhere between the two. Let’s understand what is it, why humans have fallen for these collective hallucinations, or what appeals to them about individual hallucinations, and can we find a way of doing collective sense making and individual sense making, which, you know, is based on real thinking. You know? And the one I like to talk about a fair bit is we talk about the objective. You know, ever since Kant, we’ve known that we don’t actually experience the objective world. Right? We have a projection from perception and then cognitive processing, and then in our brain somehow there’s some presentation of what the world is like, which is more or less like the world’s like, but it’s not identical. The same is true for our scientific experiments, we make a bunch of assumptions about what we’re reading out. But the question is, how do we come to rely on this stuff? And here’s the answer that which may be part of this bridging, which is the intersubjective verification of the interobjective. It’s a mouthful of syllables, but it basically means that if we all, a bunch of us, 20 people measure something and we all get the same answer and we all use different rulers, then we can come together and say, yeah, that rock is five inches long. And while it doesn’t prove it, it should provide us with increased reason to believe, let’s say, in a Bayesian sense, how we understand the world. And maybe that is the set of lenses or tooling that can help us escape from these two seemingly bad attractors.
Alex: That sounds like reflexive recursion of some kind where the inputs are generated by the outputs. Is that right?
Jim: No. I would say in this case, you have multiple inputs that are then compared and see if they agree. So 20 people measure the rock using 20 different rulers, which they bought at 20 different stores if they wanna make it more general, and they all report five inches, then we ought to, you know, means independent of dogma, say, probably the rock is about five inches long. So the intersubjective, we talk to each other and report what we have seen, and they say the same thing. That’s how we know that we have something.
Alex: Yeah. Like a mean truth. I mean, that’s, I suppose, what we—that’s what we’re all relying on. Right? Like, I mean, that is the big—
Jim: And that’s all we have. Right?
Alex: And it is still—
Jim: That’s all we have.
Alex: The premise of reality. I mean, we, you know, the premise of reality is still that. I don’t think we’ll ever get away from that.
Jim: I don’t think we can. I think Kant showed we can’t. Right? Kant said we can’t or something like that. Yeah. But that’s okay. You know, once you have enough measurements, then you could say, alright. We can act as if this were true. You know, the number of measurements done, for instance, on the rest mass of electrons is very large. And you can say, like, it’s 14 decimal points now that all the quality measurements all around the world are in agreement that the electron rest mass is thus and such. And so maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but the probability it isn’t is vanishingly small because of measured by various methods, by various people at various times, at various places. And so you basically stack up the evidence, and then you reach a point where you could act upon this as if it were true until somebody proves it’s not. That’s how we operate.
Alex: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that the new ager would bulk at that except that they take the position that they can generate the consensus, and thereby you know, it’s sort of like hunting for a bodiless shadow or or trying to perform forensics on a, you know, holographic crime scene. There is no there there because the there was produced by the the idea of the there. There’s a sort of retroactive causality to Trump saying, well, I had the most amount of people at my inauguration. There is a consensus reality that can build around that that then makes it so. And now, of course, obviously, you can modify images and and and quote unquote prove a truth posthaste. So there’s a problem with consensus reality in the sense that, that thing with the most attention seems to get consensus reality.
Jim: Yeah. That’s and this and with the new nets, that’s happening very rapidly, and particularly amongst people who don’t know how to do sense making. Alright? A person who actually was good at forensic photography and forensic video, could go through videos and photographs of Trump’s inauguration, count the heads, and say, nope. He had about a third as many people as Obama did in 2008. You know, he’s either lying or just enjoying one of his alternative facts. And objectively, it’s not true. And this goes to another, I think, big lens issue and, you know, that’s related to new ageism and postmodernity and other, forms of mental weakness, I would say, and that is the subjective first perspective. My subjectivity trumps, that to use a word, objective reality. Right? And, you know, to our previous conversation, we can never get to objective reality 100 percent. But if we organize our work, if we use intersubjective verification of the interobjective, we can approach objectivity as a north star. If we stop doing that, then we just fall into the into this realm of new ages and whatever the fuck I say is is the truth.
Alex: Yeah. You know, this is interesting. This reminds me of a conversation I had with, Daniel Schmachtenberger before he put out—Zach Stein, I think, wrote the actual articles. It was about propaganda. I don’t know if you remember that.
Jim: Oh, yeah. I do remember that. That was that was actually a very good article.
Alex: Yeah. It was great. But I read a preprint, and I and I suggested way too heavily and probably rudely. I was like, listen. In a post truth in this world, the person who admits they’re lying gets the trust. You can’t you if you want to generate the trust, you have to admit that you are propaganda or something to that effect, and then you can proceed and so on. And he and he disagreed and so on, and and he’s like, no. No. No. We are actually on the side of truth. We have we can’t admit that because that’s not true. This isn’t propaganda. This is teaching and so on. But in my mind, the only way to generate consilience at the at in in in the context of a, you know, topsy-turvy world and a post truth world, or what I don’t know the way that you phrased it. The phrase that, well, I guess just a postmodern world, or or if if we like a metamodern world, is to admit that you are in the soup also. Because, you know, what the reason Trump got trust, if you remember, like, on stage, he his opening salvo was, I have been lying, and that’s why you can trust me. I played the game. I was on the inside. I lied. I greased palms. And everyone’s like, oh my god. I trust him because he’s telling us he lied. Right? So how do you that that’s the only and and this is what, like, a fundamental problem in of consilience building is that you you have to somehow admit to being a trickster in order to to get the trust train moving.
Jim: And if that’s true, then our collective sense making may indeed be breaking down. I’ve, in the last couple of years, been saying, hey, of the various ways our society could collapse, the total failure of our collective sense making might now be the highest probability long before climate bites us in the ass. But I’d suggest that in a reality-based world, what I was pointing to earlier is ought at least to be the better way, which is to be epistemically modest and say we can’t prove it. That’s like what the idiots say the science says. You know, the science that ever says anything definitively. The science says to the best of our knowledge today hasn’t been falsified yet. The following is true. But when people forget to put that conditionality on our state of knowledge, that’s when people stop trusting them to the degree that our thinkers and communicators started to be more epistemically modest or humble and caveated what they were saying with error bars, with the acknowledgement that we might be entirely wrong. The things, but this is the best of our thinking. Here’s the evidence for the best of our thinking. Here’s the intersubjective verification that multiple people have looked at that and agree that this is probably the way it is. That’s the way forward to actually making sense of the world. Not saying, I’m a liar. I’m gonna tell you some more lies, and my lies are somewhat cooler lies than the other guy’s lies. Right?
Alex: This reminds me of a line in the essay, I believe. I can’t remember it exactly, but something like asymmetry of belief equals the proof of the sovereign mind. That there is something and then we can extrapolate from that that means—I mean, this is the problem with, you know, I was writing a book on cool, and it was all about sort of just basic asymmetry, and that ascendant asymmetries are cool. And then as soon as they become symmetrical, they’re uncool, and you have to find another asymmetry. And so, you know, the vanguard is always defined by its sort of cultural asymmetry. And that in a lot of ways, the heroic journey, if I may, for just a moment, is obviously defined by its asymmetry. You have David and Goliath. If David was Goliath, he wouldn’t be a hero. Right? David is small, and he shouldn’t be able to beat him, and so he overcomes odds and so on. And all of these tropes lead to this sort of, like, desire to have epistemic asymmetry, to be iconoclastic, and that that iconoclasm is your only proof of being a sovereign individual. And I see this everywhere. Right? Almost every Substack these days is like, you thought this was true, but actually, it’s this. What if this? It’s always this asymmetrical epistemic that’s being presented. And if that’s the target, well, then the target obviously floats completely incidental to whatever is the symmetrical reigning prevailing consensus reality. And so that is really the problem that consensus reality is facing at the moment is that sovereignty, personal sovereignty only proves itself through epistemic asymmetry.
Jim: I could see how that can be and how and certainly New Age falls into that category and goofy-ass conspiracy theories like QAnon or the moon landing was faked or, what have you. Yeah. I am more sovereign than you because I believe the following low pro—what a sensible person like Jim Rutt would say is low-probability shit. So therefore, I am more distinguished from the herd essentially, and I could call myself sovereign.
Alex: But it’s also problem in sense-making communities. I mean, it’s also a problem in philosophy. I think it might even be a problem in science. Everybody is shuffling for the highest degree of epistemic asymmetry because that is what defines attention. That’s what magnetizes attention. And so it’s just about, well, it’s actually not this because it’s this. And now what is driving these discoveries? Is it the desire for attention, or is it the desire for epistemic fidelity? And I think that that is becoming really difficult to discern between.
Jim: Yeah. Particularly now where the monetization is attached to the attention, not to the epistemic fidelity. And that is the fundamental brokenness of our system is our mutual friend, Alexander Bard, talks about attentionalism and sensationalism, particularly sensationalism. Get those eyeballs. It pays. It does make no one wit if it’s all horseshit or not. As long as it captures the eyes, you get paid. Right? That is a very, very broken system. And that’s why I say I believe that the collapse of consensus, collective sense making may be what does in advanced technological society long before any of the other failure modes get here. Because the incentives are all wrong, and which kind of touches back to your earlier comment about the kind of odd twin-like nature of New Ageism and capitalism.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. And just before we go there for a second, I was gonna—I just wanted to—I made a note here because, well, this is just an aside, but New Ageism constantly references quantum physics. I’m not sure if you’re aware of that.
Jim: Yeah. I’ll tell you what. I brought it to this all the time. Soon, I mean, I am a pretty decent expert on quantum interpretations. Right? I go head-to-head with real physicists on this stuff. And one of the things I do on the Jim Rutt Show all the time is blow people out of the water when they bring in bogus quantum stories, and even really smart solid scientists accidentally do it. And amongst the shipbird general populace of morons, as you say, it’s extremely popular. And basically, soon as I hear them open their mouth, I just rank the quality of their discourse down about 90 percent.
Alex: The thing that really captured the new age mind, I think, is quantum causality and especially ideas about retrocausality and the collapse of causation and so on. And, you know, and this is this is emblematic of, like, you know, you have manifestation, but this idea of retro manifestation, of of rejiggering the past based on your powerful and positive thought. Anyway, a lot of this like, there’s there’s a lot of new age teachers out there charging lots of money. Joe Dispenza comes to mind, who his primary teaching is that you can heal yourself, and I’m I’m linking us back to the the the present in a moment, but that you can heal yourself based on your thoughts. And that the reason you can heal yourself based on your thoughts is because of this sort of, like, quantum causality collapse, which which is poorly understood, misunderstood by by New Agers to begin with. But obviously, they take the coarse grained idea and fit it into this idea of of magic, of personal manifestation, and they have people saying that they feel themselves. Now one thing that science does not take seriously enough is the placebo effect. The mind is super powerful. There is something there for sure. But all of this works into this primary tenet of new ageism, which is the sovereign body, not just the sovereign mind, but the sovereign body. And that if I am a practicing new ager with a strong mind, I cannot get sick, and that all manifestations of sickness are manifestations of a sick mind, of a weak mind. And that’s why new agers were so averse to wearing masks and so on during COVID. Now pre COVID, most new agers were were all, you know, Democrats, for lack of a better term. And during COVID, that’s really when it all shifted, that’s why we saw the MAHA movement, the Make America Healthy movement form, because it was really about get rid of the vaccines because healthy minds don’t need them. If you are sick, if you have cancer, if you have any of those things, that’s something you manifested. I have people very close to me whose own fathers were sick with cancer, and they were telling me, you know, I went to visit them in the hospital. I was like, why didn’t you visit? And they’re like, well, you know, he’s he’s manifesting this. And, you know, and and it’s a brilliant way of negating the social responsibility of loving thy neighbor, of taking care of your neighbors, of caring about anyone who’s sick, poor, oppressed. Because effectively, the oppressed have brought on their oppressions simply by their mindset. And you have and I’ll just just finalize with this, the the the it it’s one of the most astounding quotes, and I can’t quote it verbatim, but the writer of The Secret, which really blew New Age wide open in, like, 2002/2005, Rhonda Byrne. She was asked about 9/11, and she was asked about hurricane Katrina. And she said, and I’m paraphrasing, those events those people perished in those events because their minds were entrained to the same frequency as the events. They they they brought the events upon themselves. So it’s a it’s an amazing way to wash your hands of any sort of social responsibility. So the whole social contract aspect is dispersed or or effectively just just negated in the MAHA movement. The
Jim: whole Yeah. Negated.
Alex: The whole MAHA movement is about the negation of of of the social contract.
Jim: Well, least part of it. I mean, some there is some things about the MAHA movements that aren’t crazy. Like, we should be a little bit more careful about the additives we give to our, in the food, especially ones we give to young children. And simple things like my wife’s big on this, and she’s about as a sensible scientific brain as exists. Just count the number of ingredients on the label. The lower the number, the better. Right? Not a bad heuristic. It’ll work.
Alex: I should clarify. I love a lot of the stuff that the MAHA movement is doing. I’m more speaking to the the genesis. You know, obviously, you’d need any religion needs to present some some absolutely palatable, rational aspects to bring people into the tent. And and then in the back door, you you you introduce the the bullshit.
Jim: It’s like Scientology. There’s some actually fairly good stuff in their tech, but it’s just unfortunately their metaphysics is utter baloney here. Before we move on, I should mention this. One of my recent, substacks is, an essay called unclear thinking about philosophical zombies and quantum measurement, where I actually do get into some very specific cases, a bogus application of, quantum interpretation. It is pretty nuts. Okay. Let’s get back to the essay here. We’ve had fun go dancing to the left and to the right. For those who haven’t followed this, this stuff closely, it might be useful for you to define the law of attraction and the law of personal manifestation.
Alex: Yeah. The law of attraction is a very simple idea. It’s that a thought that thoughts attract what is being thought, that thinking attracts what is being thought. Now that that works, as I just mentioned, in the positive and negative. In the negative, it can attract nine eleven, apparently. It can attract hurricane Katrina upon your head if you are thinking the wrong things. It can attract cancer. It can attract a heart attack, and so on. Of course, in the positive, it can attract money. It is usually the focus of these things, relationships, marriage, and so on and so forth, status. Personal manifestation is the enactment of this law into reality. It’s the the activity actively, proactively applying the law of attraction. So the law of attraction exists as a law. Personal manifestation is the proactive implementation of that law. And then personal sovereignty is that through enactment, you have the ultimate embodiment. You are personally sovereign, meaning external conditions don’t influence your internal state, or and this is the difference between this and Buddhism, or your external state. External conditions don’t necessarily modulate your external state. Your near term like, near field external state, your personal world, your car, your house, your relationships should not be affected by world conditions if you are personally sovereign.
Jim: Very common in religion. Wishful thinking. Yeah. I mean, I snap my fingers in the hottest 19 year old actress of the moment appears on my desk totally naked with her legs spread. Yeah. Sorry. Probability of that’s pretty small even as a quantum event, but it hey. Pleasant thought. What the fuck. Right? And a lot of religions based on, oh, I’m gonna live forever, or I’m gonna see dear aunt Sally again when I die. All horseshit. All, you know, just, you know, wishful thinking manifested as, an ideology. Quite fucking nuts, I must say. Oh, yeah. Let’s get back now to the thing you talked on earlier, which is the cancer example. And I’m gonna use this specifically to tie it to ideological extremist versions of capitalism. So we know we inter objectively, inter subjectively have verified that dioxin causes cancer statistically. The more dioxin you’re exposed to, the more likely you’ll get four or five different cancers. If some chemical manufacturing company is dumping dioxin into the river upstream of a town and doesn’t extract the dioxin as much much as as you know, God made little green apples and puppies, the cancer rate’s gonna go up in that town. But guess what? It costs a lot of money to get the dioxin out of the outflow. So it costs the chemical company real money. But if, you say, well, doesn’t isn’t really dioxin that’s causing, cancer, it’s that people’s stupid ass thoughts or whatever the fuck these manifestation and attractions are supposed to be. So why should we spend the money to take the dioxin out of the outflow? Right? And, you know, that’s just nuts, but that’s that is the logical result of law of attraction and personal manifestation, I would say.
Alex: Yeah. It’s also other logical results are obviously exceptionalism, exclusionary policies, racism, effectively. Certainly, certainly ableism is a huge one. But you have this idea that, well, people that are suffering in Guatemala that are trying to cross our borders, they manifested their conditions in Guatemala. It’s not my problem. Not only is it not my problem at some sort of political level, it’s not my problem at a spiritual level. I no longer have to sort of, like, abide by this love thy neighbor, anachronistic Christlike behavior. Even as a Christian, I can now know, well, these people, this is really the lot, not only the lot they were given, the lot they manifested, even babies. They manifested these things, you know, Palestine, whatever the case is. And it really allows us to wash our hands of any responsibility. Now you take Guatemala, and you’re like, oh, well, I didn’t know that, you know, about the Banana Republic Wars. I didn’t, I didn’t know that United Fruit actually, you know, lobbied fucking, you know, whoever it was. I can’t remember. It was Eisenhower or whomever to to send troops there and disrupt the government and kill their elected leaders and and establish fucking little banana republics. And that that’s why their lives are shitty, is that we install dictators everywhere in Guatemala and and so on and so forth. So and that’s why they’re at our gate. But none of that matters in in the context of, of of New Age because you’re really not responsible for the suffering of others they are. Only they can help themselves. You know? So it’s sort of like the ultimate bootstrapped original sort of, like, conservative concept of you’re in the world on your own, kid, and, it’s dog eat dog. So so think right. Not just do right, but think right. By the way, I wanted to just mention that, like, we’re talking and I’m talking in the abstract in a lot of ways about New Age, and listeners might be like, well yeah. But how popularly manifest is this? Is it just like a segment? And I just wanted to—this is from my, article. You know, Oprah obviously is into this, but I’ll just run through some quick quotes. Oprah, you become what you believe. That’s her quote. Self-help icons like Jane Roberts, you create your own reality. Tony Robbins, quote, whatever you hold in your mind is exactly what you will experience. Celebs like Jay-Z, quote, I believe I can speak things into existence. I remember Lady Gaga saying she became famous because she really wanted to. It is really, really, really a ubiquitous concept. If you look at the airport, next time you’re in the airport and you see books on the shelf, you’ll notice that every, I don’t know, fourth book is some kind of think yourself into high status book.
Jim: Let me make a quick comment here, and you do reference this in the article, but let’s maybe expand on it a little bit, which is, at least to my mind, think yourself rich in the literal sense that if I sit in the attic and think about money, money will magically appear. Not true. However, having an optimistic can-do attitude and frankly overestimating your own ability as long as it isn’t by too much, probably does increase your probability of making money. Right? You go out and do a startup that is probabilistically a bad idea, but fairly often it works and you make a pile of money. I think my first two startups were probably ones that investors bet on and they made lots of money, but it was probably a bad bet. Right? And you referenced earlier, the placebo effect is a real thing. Right? It seems like thinking that you’ve taken a powerful medicine or a magic potion from the witch doctor actually does seem to statistically make you more likely to recover from an infection or a medical condition. And so this is unfortunately the, you know, let’s call it the gradient on which the New Age bullshit, is able to get some traction because thinking positive thoughts is actually good for you within reason.
Alex: Absolutely. Actually, that’s why I tend to call myself a New Ager just because I believe all of those things are real, but, but there is a middle path. Like, your Game B is my fucking whatever I haven’t given a name to. But, you know, a a rational spiritualism of some kind. But irrationality is is part of being rational. It is rational to make irrational choices. It is rational to dive into a collective delusion, here and there. Money, for instance, is a useful concept, and it’s a collective delusion. So there are a lot of reasons that I call myself a New Ager. It’s just that when we start blaming other people for their own sicknesses at global geopolitical scales, we’re fucking up. That’s that’s that’s my main point, you know. And obviously, I I wanna bring this into—it’s not just celebs saying wishful thinking stuff like Sam Bankman-Fried, describing a box token, described it as, you know, quote, this box is worth zero, obviously. But if everyone kind of now thinks that this box token is worth about a billion, that’s what people are pricing it at. And that’s such an obvious statement now because we all understand that speculative value is basically the only value we have in the stock market for the most part, and that it really does fluctuate. I mean, that’s the that’s why stagflation is so curious. But it really does fluctuate based on sentiment, mood, how people are feeling. I mean, these things, like, seem to matter at a at a fundamental level, and it’s not to be totally, dismissed, as you say. There is something to it beyond the magic.
Jim: Yep. Absolutely. And unfortunately, it gives the broader, more absurdist versions of New Age thinking traction. I say, oh, look, placebo effect, it works, therefore, blah blah. And let me get you back to another point, which I was thinking about when you talk about the Guatemala story. It’s quite possible that even if people had most of the facts, Americans still would have opted for backing the United Fruit Company in Guatemala for our own self-interest, but they would have felt guilty about it. I love the saying that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Right? And so if you understand causality and realize that, yes, us setting the marines in to back the United Fruit Company has produced a whole bunch of short-term harm in Guatemala and long-term harm, which is still in existence today. And you might do it anyway because I want cheap bananas, but at least you should feel guilty about it so that that kind of behavior isn’t utterly unconstrained. Maybe there’s a closer case where we don’t send the marines to Nicaragua, you know, because we feel even worse about it. Or, wow, was bad enough in Guatemala. Let’s not do that to Nicaragua. But if you break that link entirely about causality, that my actions cause that harm, then there is no constraint on your behavior other than very narrow self-interest, and that’s hugely dangerous.
Alex: It is funny and a testament to the times we live in that we just are pining for some hypocrisy. That if we could only have a little bit of hypocrisy, we might get back on the right track. I mean, you’re right. We have completely broken the link that requires vice to pay a tribute to virtue on any level because of that causation break.
Jim: I had never thought about that before until I read your article in our conversation, and there’s something to that. Right? Yes. We all act hypocritically, but we act hypocritically less often than if we had no concept of virtue, and that’s really important.
Alex: Yeah. It is. And virtue, you know, it’s hard to define virtue in the context of a world that is your, like, mental oyster because everything can be sort of explained, and all of the, like, you know, the wake of bodies in your wake. I was gonna try and come up with a more deft phrase than that. But the wake of bodies in your wake is the fault of the bodies. It’s not your fault in the context of New Age. I won. They lost. That’s their problem. I think that’s always been with us, obviously. Like, there’s always been that dog-eat-dog sort of sensation, but it never had the spiritual backing or spiritual foundation to protect itself from a spiritual critique, and now it does. I think that’s really the point of the essays that it has effectively since the seventies, and maybe it’s no coincidence that, you know, Nixon shock and New Age came about at the same time that, you know, that departure from Bretton Woods and the gold standard came about at the same time as New Ageism. These things are oddly timed.
Jim: Yeah. I would say more than oddly. Whether those two are, but there’s a bunch of other things that seem to have flown from that decision. I where finance finally became untethered from reality, and it could explore the limits of its creative ability to bullshit people through opacity because there was no bottom line anymore. And, you know, and what happened was the financial sector went from 10 percent of the economy to 35 percent of the economy in terms of profits while producing nothing of actual value, or it’s not quite true. Allocation of assets is an important value, but not at the level they became compensated for after voodoo was allowed essentially. A lot of things follow from that. So let’s get back to the article again a little bit. You talk about a concept which I had never even heard of until maybe five years ago, but now that I have heard it, I see it everywhere, and you referenced it in the article. And that’s a phenomenon called spiritual bypass. Maybe if you could talk a little bit about what the hell is that? Why is it a not good thing?
Alex: Well, it’s sort of everything we’ve been talking about. So spiritual bypass is the flip side of manifestation I’ve been talking about where other people are manifesting their negative destiny, allows you to bypass your responsibility for them. But the spiritual bypass extends itself into every category of participation on Earth because the thing that you are effectively bypassing is reality, the thing consensus reality, and your environment, the extant artifacts of the thing in itself, if you will. Whatever is actually happening in the world is bypassed because your interior state declares that it is bypassed because your interior state is something else. And so that’s really the spiritual bypass. So when we’re talking about basically the ability to bypass hypocrisy, to bypass guilt and then hypocrisy, to bypass the sensation of the social contract. And that’s something that is, it’s almost so prevalent now. I mean, maybe five years ago when I was really on about this stuff, especially during COVID, and I was posting about it all the time. It was like it was so easy to identify because it was still somewhat salient. And by salient, I mean asymmetrical. Because once something graduates into symmetry, it no longer has salience, and that’s the fucked-up thing about super salience. And so now it’s more difficult to even identify spiritual bypassing because it is because it’s everywhere, and so it’s no longer somewhere.
Jim: That’s a very interesting point, by the way. That is a very interesting point that once a negative thing gets completely normalized, really hard to get rid of it.
Alex: Yeah. Well, it disappears. You can no longer identify it.
Jim: Yeah. You’re a fish in the water. What water? What the fuck’s water? Right?
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That’s where it’s at. And, you know, and and and just on a personal note, I find myself I’ll snap out of spiritual bypassing. I will snap out of a bypassed state now. Whereas before in my in my youth, I could never even enter it. You know, I was, like, adamant about not entering it, but it is just so everywhere that it’s almost difficult to talk about.
Jim: Yeah. That’s that is interesting. That’s a very interesting point. I’m gonna to ponder that a little bit. Alright. Now let’s, move the clock forward a little bit. You know, all these phenomena that we’re talking about actually had their earlier existence well before the nets. Right? You know, new age in the seventies, particularly in the eighties, the me decade, the nineties where capitalism and neoliberalism really ran fully amok, etcetera. Now what happens, when we have those substrates of dynamics and and you add a worldwide network where anybody can talk to anybody and there’s all kinds of organization of, of discourse and curation at every scale cross linked in every way imaginable. What does that do to the situation?
Alex: I mean, I think that there is a a a global derealization. I think that there is a I mean, it’s interesting, though, what what it does also. So you have this you have this incredible atomization, but the atomization, for a time being, was sort of a a revolutionary force against the preceding mergers of religion and state and, and social conditioning. And you had this sort of, like, you know, Ayn Randian slash new age hyper individualism as this ascendant sort of almost still in a Walden Pondish sort of like Emersonian self-reliance. It still felt like a a a a valiant thing to some people. And and so but it was about atomization. It was about sort of like, what do I need? And and and as you said, the the the decade of me and and all of that. And A Century of Self, which by the way, if anyone, you know, wants to watch the best documentary ever, the the Adam Curtis documentary Century of Self is profoundly apropos of this conversation, and also foundational to thinking about about our world today. You have this rise in in atomization, but what’s interesting is that once the the the constraints on communication, localized communication were lifted, and you had global instantaneous communication, what’s interesting is that the unmoored narratives of, you know, railing against the blue cathedral or the blue church or whatever you wanna say that was, potent, you know, six, 10 years ago, suddenly, we experienced mass mass retribalization. So it’s interesting that the atomization was almost a a and I’m saying necessary not because I’m backing it, but just just functionally and operationally. The atomization was a necessary precursor to retribalization. We needed to, unmoor ourselves from collective myths, collective delusions, in order to reenter new collective delusions more autonomously. And so for whatever reason, and maybe it’s, you know, the recency bias, these new retribalized collective delusions feel more real to people. They feel closer to the truth. Really, people are constantly convinced that they are really close to the truth. I mean, almost like we’re about to pierce the Kantian veil. You know? Like, everyone really thinks they’re close. I mean, and that’s what and the closer they are, the more they they’re doom scrolling. The more they are going into the wormhole. The rabbit the rabbit hole leads to the piercing of the veil. It’s, like, according to them. I mean, that’s why that’s what’s so magnetic about the rabbit hole, is that you think you’re getting closer and closer and closer. And what’s ironic is the closer you get, the more madness there is. The more we have I mean, you know, what is soon to be an epidemic of AI delusions, mass delusion, triggered by sycophantic AIs that are effectively cheering your your self-discovery on. Yes. That’s a brilliant idea. Wonderful. Keep going. You know? You’re getting close to the truth.
Jim: You know, we read things about people, doing that. And I will say, this is an interesting Faustian kind of deal because as it turns out, especially the newest editions of the AIs are actually useful thinking partners in doing real scientific inquiry. Right? At a I know several of the most senior scientists, including some ones that are world famous, who are now really using basically since August 7, whenever it was when GPT-5 and Opus 4 and now Sonnet 4.5 came out, where you really can do real science. But man, your discernment and your self-editing has to be very high so that you don’t fall into the sycophantic, spiral and rabbit hole and end up with, oh yeah, yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s the greatest idea since dope in a bag. Right? When actually it’s just fucking, Internet slop, basically. And of course, the number of people that have the discernment about their own metacognition of a world famous scientist may be rather different than somebody, researching the science about vaccinations, for example. Right?
Alex
Yeah. Yeah. You know what’s funny? I mentioned the screenplay I was writing earlier, and I never ended up mentioning the plot. But, basically, not giving anything away is basically talking about or the backdrop is a premise that a virus is making everybody go insane, but the lead is sort of a Sam Harris sort of like, well, I’m a very, very, very rational person. I could never succumb to an irrational virus. But isn’t the truth—I mean, you know, even if we look at the analysis of the meaning crisis, prevailing analysis of the meaning crisis is effectively that rationality was the virus, that rationality broke up the collective illusion, and we need to return to a rational choice to irrationality in order to basically save humanity. I’m not saying everyone came to that conclusion that they have to make the rational choice to irrationality, but the religion that isn’t a religion is seeming more and more like a religion. I mean, the more he hosts Jonathan Pageau every time he’s talking to anyone, including people like Michael Levin, the more I’m starting to think, well, maybe Christianity is what we’re all talking about, and that is where we all must head. You know? And post Charlie Kirk, it’s growing, that call to return to an irrational choice. But it is seeming to be, according to most people, the most rational choice to make. And so rationality seems to be the viral precursor to the necessary choice to irrationality to reunite us. I just find that fascinating that somehow rationality has fucked us all, turned into the meaning crisis, and robbed us of our cohesion. It’s an—I like it as a problem for someone as rational as myself to confront.
Jim
Yeah. It is a very interesting question, and I talk about this a fair bit, and I call people out on it a fair bit, which is, so are you actually saying that your religious commitment is what you know to be a noble lie? That you don’t believe it, but you believe that it’s useful for other people to believe it and maybe convince yourself halfway. Voltaire famously said, I am not a Christian, but I would insist that my lawyer and my servants be Christians. Right? So that he could sin, scam, because he was one the richest guys in Europe, dude, all kinds of sharp imperialistic colonial business deals and shit, but he wanted his lawyer and his servants to be Christians. And so, you know, I don’t want to call out the sincerity of these folks who’ve adopted, you know, serious old school religion, but I often suspect that they are doing so because they believe in the noble lie or have subconsciously convinced themselves that the noble lie is the way to go. What do you think about that?
Alex
I totally agree. I smelled noble lie all over them. I—and I don’t blame them. I—what do you—what else are you supposed to do? Do you know what I mean? Like, we want to fix things, and so you know? And all of the—most of our fixes are noble lies in some sense or another. There is a reigning, prevailing thought amongst elites forever that the truth will make people crazy, that the people can’t handle the truth. You can’t handle the truth, as Nicholson said. There really is a prevailing ideology that the hoi polloi need a mascot. And I don’t know the extent to which that’s true or not true. I don’t know the extent to which I agree on the consensus about the cause of the meaning crisis. I tend to look at things a little bit more metologically. I think the meaning crisis was probably a good thing in and of itself, and that indeterminacy for me is always a sign of emergence. So there is something to be not enjoyed necessarily, but to be—there’s something to embrace about any indeterminacy. If you’re a fan of emergence or a fan of growth or a fan of evolution or a fan of any of the things we say we are, they’re usually good signs. Now in math, we usually say, well, those are incomputable, and therefore, we discard those moments in philosophies. We—or especially political philosophy or socially conditioned philosophy. We say, oh, those are bad things. We need to get back to determinacy and really know where everything is and be sane because that’s the premise of rationality. But for me, these moments of indeterminacy are always markers of empirical fidelity, of the empirical fidelity of emergence. So I don’t know where we’re headed or what that means or what the, you know, onslaught of intellect, informational flooding, ontological flooding. But back to my point about salience and the ubiquity of ontological flooding, what they always create are new plateaus, new zeros effectively from which to build new scaffolding. So whatever that new scaffolding is, if it’s a new religion, fine. But I’m apprehensive about returning to a previous scaffolding to cure the existing emergence.
Jim: We never do, right? That’s a convenient story people use to sell a bill of goods. You know, the Trumpians, oh, we’re gonna go back to the good old fifties. Well, if you were a woman, if you were black, if you were a sharecropper, man, that sucked big time, right? And we’re not gonna go back to the fifties. It’s horseshit to claim that we are. And yet that sense of nostalgia of a golden age—you can go back and read the Greeks in the sixth century BC, and they’re talking about, oh, we’re in the iron age. There was a silver age, and there was a gold age before us. You know, everything was always better in the past. Well, actually, it wasn’t. You know, the Bronze Age was—no, you know, which was six hundred, seven hundred years before. That was a brutal fucking time. I just reread the Iliad twice last year. Basically, a society of male sociopaths, right, who, you know, thought the greatest thing was rape and sacking cities, and if they didn’t have anybody to rape or any cities to sack, they would make do by stealing sheep, right? That was just hilarious. Achilles, the great hero of, you know, semi-god born of a goddess mother. You know, he brags about his escapades as a sheep thief, right? Hilarious. So now, you know, things were not better in the good old days, at least not too often.
All right. So I’m gonna—we’re moving along here in time. I’m gonna give a last quote from the essay, and I want to get your reaction to it because I will say one of the things that was nice about your essay, you didn’t spend too much time on how to fix all this shit. It was much more diagnostic than prescriptive, but you did have one little prescription towards the end, which is “we must insist on changing our religioeconomic framework from fundamentally avoidant to fundamentally integrative. We must insist on this fundamental recognition to be injected like an EpiPen into the meat of our spoiled human endeavors.” I love that line. You must have worked on that line. It’s got a rolling rhythm to it.
Alex: I like writing. So, yeah, half of what I say is just incidental to my fetish for words. You know what’s funny? I’m gonna admit something. I don’t even know where I’m going with this, but I know that for a long time, especially while I was writing that, and basically all my life, all my political life, certainly starting maybe age 19, 18, as a fucking card-carrying socialist, and then moving on into whatever else, anarcho, fill in the blank, I was really into the idea of a shared reality. Shared reality was, you know, like, I was at one point writing a declaration of interdependence. Right? And I think that that always still has this shine of, of, you know, ethical height. And this idea of interdependence, this idea of a shared reality. I know you’re big into a shared reality. You brought it up here during this conversation. At least this intersubjective consilience is basically reality, almost defines what we can ascertain as real without getting to the, you know, piercing the Kantian veil. The more, you know, and this is the danger of moving deeply and deep, you know, really deeply into philosophy is you get really into, you get really confronted with perspectival anomalies. You get really confronted with the diaspora of subjectivities. You get confronted with the reality tunnels, the conflicting reality tunnels. And then you also get confronted with the multivalent structure of facts, that facts can be interpreted in any which way to support any opinion.
So when I say that the, I don’t know if I said religiopolitical or religiospiritual or whatever it was, but the religioeconomic, I would say that I guess, you know, when I was 20, whatever it was, I flipped to Republican in order to vote for Ron Paul in the primary because I really wanted to return to a gold standard. Right? Now I’m laughing at that now because, like, that just now, I’ve been conditioned to think that that’s ridiculous because I am also in the soup. Right? I’m in the soup with you guys. I’m not above the soup. But back then, I thought, fuck it. Let’s return. Let’s peg the dollar to the gold. And that’s basically, if I don’t mean that, I mean something like that. I mean that at least a mind frame where, you know what I would just say to this? Simply, as you said, diagnostic. Let’s just admit what’s happening and regain some hypocrisy, some sense of hypocrisy. Let’s admit what’s happening openly and then regain the sense of hypocrisy.
Now the question is how to regain the hypocrisy to me, how to regain the guilt, how to regain some semblance of the reality from which we’ve departed and have a valence on that reality that prioritizes it over the surreality. Otherwise, we can’t experience the guilt. Right? If we’re like, oh, I mean, there’s a part of me at this day and age where I’m like, oh, we departed reality? Hooray. Good for us. Wow. We should celebrate. What an amazing thing to do to transcend one’s biology. And I was thinking the other day, what is it to transcend biology or undo biology? Well, it’s to become prebiotic or postbiotic. Either way, it’s against life. Either way, it’s the antidote to life itself.
So I guess there is some hope in the retribalization. If I was to paint a silver lining, there is some return to land. There is some return to locality embedded in retribalization, in, you know, the network state concepts. Obviously, they’re diasporas, and we can communicate online. But there is definitely a return to, and always going to be again, this comes back to the brilliance, I suppose, in the end of epistemic asymmetry, and the desire for iconoclasm, and the desire for cool, and all of that being associated and entangled with identity. Because dispersed communication, asynchronous communication, especially, is the reigning symmetry of communication and cultural tapestry. There’s gonna be a return to the synchronous, localized, communal retribalization. And I think that those things obviously entail fucking gardens and farms and aspects of economics or oikos that relates to the home, your actual homestead.
So I don’t know. You know, I haven’t, it’s been a while since I’ve thought specifically about that, but I suppose, you know, that is the new asymmetry, and that is the thing moving out of the cities, so to speak, and into the hubs may hold some keys, and maybe retribalization is actually an economic imperative. I mean, game b, isn’t game b sort of like a localized retribalization? Doesn’t it economically, like, fend for itself or self-sustaining on some level and so on?
Jim: Yeah. The, I think the current formulation of Game B is that it’s a series of membranes, and each membrane has to work. Right? Think about, membrane is equal to a biological cell. Every cell has to work or it dies. Right? And the Game B civilization will consist of membranes within membranes within membranes and interpenetrating membranes. You know, you have a bunch of organic farming villages who belong to a cooperative that helps them market their products and buy their stuff. But then you also have the guild, the guild of, you know, sugarcane growers who may be all over the country, et cetera. And so it’s a series of membranes, which every membrane, the word I like to use is it has to work. Right? And that’s what people forget when they try to do this kind of stuff is they, oh yeah, a bunch of hippies get together and buy some land. Well, if you don’t think through how that membrane is going to work, it’s going to dissipate. Second law of thermodynamics is always, always happening. And so yeah. So Game B does have this localized, but also, self-organizing aspect presumably eventually all the way up to the global scale because we still have global questions. You have to manage the atmosphere. A global commons. We gotta fight off asteroids when they’re detected, et cetera. So you can’t be only local. You have to be, on the ground building your own personal life locally in the flesh, you know, touching grass as the kids used to like to say. But we also have to be part of a set of protocols and interrelationships that eventually span the globe. So I would say Game B is some of what you’re saying, a lot of what you’re saying. The idea of strong sauce within relatively small membranes as opposed to atomized individuals in the great sea of the Internet. And there’s a libido for that. And to say some of it’s good, some of it’s insane. And so the more general theory of embryonics, I’d suggest that even the most stupid-seeming retribalizations might have potential to evolve. Right? It’s, these are little incubators, most of which will fail just as most of Luca life’s contemporaries, Luca being the last universal common ancestor, which every piece of life on earth from yeast to a redwood tree to you and me are all descendants without fails from Luca. Luca had a bunch of competitors and predecessors. They all failed except Luca. And so we can think of these silly and goofy retribalizations as a whole series of membranes that probably, maybe, hopefully, one of them will evolve enough to become Luca for the next round of our social evolution in which we could become fully self, or as fulfilled as we can be in our human well-being while at the same time taking very seriously ecological well-being and ecological richness at the same time. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that’s sort of the Game B version of the story.
Alex: Well, I would say then my answer is your answer. That sounds pretty good.
Jim: I’d like to thank Alex Ebert for an extraordinarily interesting conversation. We went this way. We went that way. We went up. We went down. I thought it was excellent. Really like to thank you for that. And remind the readers, listeners, I should say, hopefully, some of you are still readers, not just drooling watchers and listeners, to check out Alex’s essay, “New Age and the Religion of Self, the Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality,” which as always can be found on the episode page at jimruttshow.com. Thank you, Alex.
Alex: Alright. Thanks, Jim. That was cool.