The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Alexander Bard. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Alexander Bard for part three in our discussion of his book, along with Jan Sundreqvist titled Process and Event. Alexander is an author, lecturer, artist, songwriter, music producer, TV personality, religious and political activist, and one of the founders of the Synthiest Religious Movements, and has appeared widely in YouTube videos, and podcasts, and such. Welcome back, Alexander.
Alexander: Thanks for having me, Jim. I’m delighted by doing a third episode here on the book.
Jim: Yeah, this has been a lot of fun, the first two have been very lively. And, for the folks who haven’t heard the first two, go back and listen to those first. It’ll make a lot more sense if you do.
Alexander: It’s like Jim built this beautiful house called Game B, and then somebody came along and gave him a basement afterwards in hindsight. So, they connect really well. So we highly recommend you guys listen to this podcast, to both check the book Process and Event, and certainly, to check into Jim’s fantastic Game B theory.
Jim: Yeah, we will add a little bit more Game B talk this time, because particularly in the second half of the book, which we’re going to be digging into today, the parallels, while not exact in every case, are significant. But before we get into that, there’s a key term in the book called barred absolute, and that’s without a D, at least until the end, and it appears 209 times. So, it must be important, right? And, I have prayed over this extensively to try to understand it. I’ve flipped through a fair number of the instances of it. Alexander and I have even changed views in a mailing list that we both belong to. And while I would say I’m no longer fully mystified by it, it’s one of these big ass concepts that it’s still not crystal clear for me. Let’s start off with digging into what is the barred absolute. Let’s start with the two words. In barred absolute, what do you mean by the absolute?
Alexander: Well, to start with, let’s start with the barred, because it’s not about me. This is constant joke about Alexander Bard, B-A-R-D, which is my last name, which happens to be a South Africa name of no nobility whatsoever. It’s a passive name from South Africa, where you just spell B-A-A-R-D, meaning beard. So we just said that straight. Nothing to do with Shakespeare either.
Jim: Oh, by the way, you guys can’t see it, but he does have a pretty good philosopher’s beard.
Alexander: It comes with the family. We’re supposed to have beards and we’re supposed to know shit about wine. So, there you go. I’m South African. The barred absolute here is B-A-R-R-E-D, which happens to be another synonym for closed, and because my father who I’m about to kill and will kill with you in today’s episode is, of course, Jacques Lacan, the father of contemporary psychoanalysis. And I’m a Lacanian or rather post-Laconian. But there are some problems with Lacan or rather things that he left unsolved are we’re going to talk about in this conversation, because they really connect with Game B. So, here’s the trick. The closed absolute is a preferred term if you’d ask me, but because the English translation of Jacques Lacan’s work always emphasizes the barred subject, this is the starting point. So, before I’m going to kill the father here, do the patricide, I’m going to go in parallel with him and see what is lacking.
The barred subject means that the subject, the human subject, even Jim Rutt and Alexander Bard are their own blind spots. The way I describe it to my students, just to make it very simplistic and straightforward, is to say that anybody in the world, including your mother, can lick your ass except you. That means there’s something about our subjectivity, which is something we can’t see ourselves. And this is true. I mean, I worked as a music producer for many years. The one thing I learned was that nobody can listen to their own voice in an objective way, because you’re actually using the very same instrument that produced the voice, using the same instrument to listen to the voice, which is impossible. Even twins find it eerie to hear each other’s voices. So, the more similar your head is that you produce the voice with to the ears that you’re going to listen with, the less you’re going to hear the actual voice.
So, there’s something about our own subjectivity about Jim looking at Jim or Alexander looking at Alexander, where we can’t see ourselves. And this is called the barred subject. It’s fundamental in psychoanalysis, because it means human beings are interdependent. We are dependent on other human beings to find ourselves. We are dependent on being part of the sociant, as we’ve discussed during the other two episodes. The sociant is the philosophical term for the original nomadic tribe. So, we’re sociantic creatures, or as we’d say, in regular parlay, we call it flock animals. And this is very important to Lacan. Now, the problem though is that since the subject is always opposed to the substance, as soon as there’s the self, there’s the opposite, which is the world, usually that world is mother. And then, eventually we discover there’s more to world than mother, and we leave the dam in the middle of the Gulf on our own and we say, “I can do things myself and mother is no longer the world, but there’s the big world out there which mother is apart.”
Okay? There is no word for what’s hidden to us in the world. That term, the proper term will be the barred absolute. So what it means is that it’s a philosophical concept that says that certain things will never be known by us as subjects. For example, you’re going to die one day, and after you’re dead, the world will very likely go on, and there’ll be other subjects there dealing with the world, but you are no longer there. That means that whatever happens after you’re dead, you cannot know before you die. That’s a perfect example of the barred absolute.
Now, I’m also putting the barred absolute in a larger perspective by saying that I think it’s impossible to create an advanced civilization without installing the proper barred absolutes to teach them at different levels of society. And when people go up against me, Zach Stein did this wonderfully and did it in podcast conversation, bless Zach, the other year when he said that he was into the cult of transparency, and he thought transparency was the best thing at all times. And I said, “Listen, if you got kids, you don’t want to put hardcore pornography in front of them when they’re two-years-old, do you? No. Then that’s a barred absolute.”
So, culture is full of barred absolutes. It’s full of things that, “No, you’re not ready for this yet. You cannot understand this yet.” For example, to do university mathematics, you probably need to do high school maths first. By putting things into those categories, we have barred absolutes as cultural artifacts everywhere in society, and they make perfect sense to us. For example, also, you’re going to work hard and make money until the day you’re about to die. When you realize you’re going to die the same day, you don’t care about how much money going into your bank account. You probably care about your heritage though. You probably care about who’s going to take over the money when you die.
But for you, making those last few hours while you’re alive is going to be the only thing that means anything for you, right? So, barred absolutes everywhere. Now, once we’ve installed the barred absolute and put it opposite of the barred subject, we can then start looking at the values and purposes of society as a whole. And here is where we are going to go after Jacques Lacan, you and I today, in today’s conversation. Jacques Lacan Khan says that he’s a nihilist in the sense that he says that we’re all missing our mother’s tit, and we’re looking for our mother’s tit everywhere. So, the mother’s tit literally is called a mama, philosophically speaking as a concept, we call it the mamilla, the little ma. So, the mamilla in Bardo [inaudible 00:07:37] is another proper word for [foreign language 00:07:40], the tiny little object A, which Jacque Lacan fancifully uses in French. It’s a bit of a complicated term. We just straightforwardly call it the mamilla.
So, looking for the mamilla means you’re looking for that little object that’s going to make your world whole, and full, and meaningful. So, when you feel that the world is in disarray, you’re looking for the tiny little object through which you magically will have a world where everything is connected again. It’s like, oh, always tell men when they have a crisis with a wife, “Go off and buy her a fucking diamond and everything be solved.” Because she gets the diamond in her hand, puts it on her finger and says, “Oh, now, our marriage is whole again.” Because, the diamond does the little magical trick of uniting the world. Why? Because a diamond is the ultimate form of your mother’s tit. It’s a mother tit that will survive your mother, and you, and everything else. Right?
So, we are using these mechanisms in culture anyway. And here’s the trick. If you remove the barred absolute, or ignore it like Lacan did, you end up with nihilism, you end up with a world where everything is meaningless, but all you can ever do is to long to return to those mother’s tit. But that’s an incomplete way of doing psychoanalysis, because the second you remove yourself from the mamilla and forgotten about the matrix where you came from, you are longing for the phallus. You’re longing for either having the phallus, which is a straight woman, or you’re longing for being the phallus, which is being a straight man. Gays and lesbians are just opposites of that. The phallus then is a negation of the matrix. We came out of the womb, we’re on our own in the world, and therefore, there’s something else that mother is attracted to that isn’t us, and that’s called phallus.
So, phallus symbolizes the grown-up and the adult world. Furthermore, not only does the phallus symbolize the grown-up and adult world, it also symbolizes something we’re going to rebel against. Like I’m doing right now with Lacan. It symbolizes a father, we got to kill and get over, so we can be a phallic. Man can have phallus, woman can be a fucking phallus. Look at the female body. It’s a fucking dick. That’s why it’s beautiful. That’s why the woman has to make an effort for her entire body with high heels and makeup to sexually attract stupid men like you and me Jim. So, the phallus in Lacan is the woman’s body, or it is the dick on the man, but the phallus is the grown-up world. And by being grown-up ourselves and overcoming our parents, we can dream about the future, and we can therefore create new values, and we can have fantasies. We can make the impossible possible, let’s put it that way.
Jim: Okay.
Alexander: That’s the groundwork we’re laying here in this conversation for killing Lacan and understanding that the barred absolute, it’s necessary, it’s a starting point. We call the Grand Project A. And the Grand Project A is the promised land, is where we want to go, is conquering outer space, whatever we want to do, which is the opposite of going back to your mother’s tit.
Jim: Okay, one last thing before we jump in, and that’s the word absolute. I think that’s where I get my dissonance from. It may well be the socially correct thing to do, and I fact believe it is to keep 11-year-old boys from watching triple penetration pornography. But, it may not be such a bad thing for a 30-year-old. And, doing the math for general relativity, you go up and talk to a professor about an independent study project to understand the math of general relativity, better know a little bit about differential calculus, and differential geometry, and tensor calculus before you jump into that. But, if you want to jump into it, you can. So, the absolute part is the part that I think is one of the things I think that helps make it difficult for me to get my head fully around this, because it doesn’t actually sound absolute, right?
Alexander: Yeah, okay. So we use two different versions of it, because we’re smart. We use barred absolute with a small B and a small A, and in pluralist. That’s barred absolutes, cultures follow them. And they can certainly be overcome, they’re not absolutes. But when we say the Barred Absolute capital B, capital A, the BA, the Barred Absolute, we mean exactly what we say. We mean exactly the day after you’re dead, Jim, you have no clue today what that world’s going to be like. So it is a barred absolute.
Jim: Yeah, that one we agree on 100%.
Alexander: Yeah. I knew you would agree with me. So I’m just clarifying basically, I don’t have to overcome anything with you here, because actually, you are a fan of the broad absolute in the sense that you want to make people believe in the future and you’re actually working hard, and creating that value, and that purpose. Right. So, the trick here is, if we say that we knew everything about the future, we would never want to welcome that future. We just go and kill ourselves. It would kill everything for us. It would kill all the fun. So there has to be limitation to our knowledge for us to make the world meaningful. It also makes us free agents to actually have an effect on the future. So the problem with nihilism, as Nietzsche pointed out, that Lacan ignores. So this is a return from Lacan back to Nietzsche, as if Nietzsche critiqued Lacan.
Here’s the point. The world is meaningless, unless there’s some ultimate horizon for you as a subject, which we call the Tower of God in this book. The Tower of God means you stand in front of a tower and it has a sign on the door, and on the door it says, “This door is closed for you. You cannot get in, but your children may.” Right? So, that means that the end of history is not going to be with you, and the end of history is not going to be in your lifetime, and that is liberating, because they can fantasize more about the future, you can pass on your fantasies to your children, and you will never know what they’re going to do with your fantasy. So they’re going to come up with their own fantasies. Maybe they want to ruin the world, whatever they want to do. It’s up to them, not you. The day you die, you can die in peace, because you did what you could do with the knowledge you had while you were alive.
And this is why it is an absolute, it’s directly an absolute for you as a human being, for you as a subject, for Jim Roddick [inaudible 00:13:24], here’s the barred absolute. And that means you can also think of the world like, “I’m going to die one day, and therefore, all the values I have in my life are from now on until the day I die, jumping back to now.” So, hopefully, I live another 30 years that I can make my priorities according to that say, “Well, in my calendar, I’m going to prioritize this and this, but I’m not going to do any of that. Other people can do it or I’m not interested.” And therefore, you can make an ethics for yourself based on the barred absolute.
And what’s important with it is that the second you give people this idea of the Tower of God, call it the Tower of God, because theological term don’t take it too seriously, “Oh, this is a big dip.” You’re standing in front of a skyscraper. It says, “You can’t get in.” Why? Because this nightclub is not going to open until the day after you’re dead. So this nightclub is not open yet, so you’ll never know what it’s like to go into this nightclub. Well then, learn to live with that, because then you learn to live precisely what you have until the day you die.
So, the barred absolute is not much for you, maybe Jim, because you’re a disorder radical atheist. It’s more like it’s there for people to include in their value systems to say that, “Okay, this is where values start.” And here’s the trick. All nihilism is dissolved, because nihilism starts with the idea that there is no value in the future. It doesn’t start with idea, there’s no value now. It starts with the idea, there’s no value to the future. But as soon as you install the barred absolute, whoops, value returns. And that value is specifically tied to your own lifespan. Until the day you die, suddenly your life is full of value, where you can do shit and get things done while you’re alive and they’re meaningful to you.
Jim: Yeah, absolutely. This definition resonates with me extremely strongly with my Game B work, right? I am now 70-years-old. If I’m lucky, I’ll have another 15 based on the seeming genetics that I inherited, which are eh. And I also know that it’ll take way more than 15 years for Game B to happen to mature, right? So, my work in the Game B space over realistically the next five years is to help other people and help the movement coalesce into a form in which it can go forward into the future and unfold. It’s essentially a very, very sophisticated new form of life that we’re creating. And if we create it correctly, it’ll be able to gradually expand and become the dominant social operating system, but it might not. And all I can do is do what I can do to with other people, get it formed up, so that it has some chance to be able to go on and make a world a better place. But in no sense, do I have any sense at all that I’m part of the story after this initial push?
Alexander: Exactly. And here’s the catch, precisely by using the barred absolute about yourself, as you just did, and tell, for example, your students, or followers, or 40 years your juniors, and said, “I’m going to die one day and very likely long before you guys die. So I’m just going to pass on whatever I’ve achieved as heritage. You do with that as you wish. And I cannot influence that at all today. I’m dead, because it’s my barred absolute. It’s my broad absolute. Your broad absolute guys, it’s 40 years after.” And then, you have to pass on the same idea to the next generation.
The whole point with this process is that we solve a major problem in Western philosophy, which is the problem with nihilism. And we solve it thoroughly. We explain why nihilism even occurs in a human society. It occurs because we suddenly think we can see everything, understand everything, the world has become transparent to us, and we don’t find any meaning anywhere. When in reality, meaning starts the night when you can’t get into that nightclub, because you got to go home and figure out for the next night what you got to do to get into the nightclub the next day. And that’s what meaning is.
Jim: And the other thing I think that ties into this is another one of my favorite topics, complexity science tells us we can’t predict with any fidelity at all what the unfolding of the universe is going to be out very far, particularly when we’re in the complex realm, and life is so far the most complex realm that we know of. That’s why I think life is so fun, right, because it’s unfolding in a way that I can’t predict. I might be able to have a little influence here and there, but it’s a new story. It’s better than any streaming video. We have a little bit of control, and with a group of people, we have maybe a little bit more. But, on the other hand, we’re going to be surprised constantly. And then, we have to adapt to what’s going to happen next. And, I think that ties in pretty well as well.
It’s essentially a sense of humility about one’s role in the world, one could have a role, but when you’re dead, you’re dead. And I think, there are lots of people just refuse to accept that when you’re dead, you’re dead. And that’s an exceedingly unhelpful mindset, gets you twisted up in all kinds of bad ways.
Alexander: I think we arrived at a point in history, which is one of the arguments across an event looking at the 21st century, where we can’t even align ourselves to people who don’t accept the death as the absolute, because they don’t share that fundamental value. For example, in Scandinavia, we’re way over Christianity. Nobody’s a Christian any longer. Some Muslims came here. We hope to secularize them as quickly as possible. And the point is to get rid of those two religions is that these days we go to our funerals when our friends die, and we really grieve, we really grieve. We really take on the mourning, because it is an absolute. And I like that, because I think it’s true. And I like the honesty when dealing when you and I talk about, when I talk about religion is spirituality, and I think you’re far more spiritual, religious than you assume.
But I mean, this is to me what religion, spirituality should be in the 21st century. It should be the acceptance of death as the absolute. And it’s fundamental to my philosophy. And I’ll give you another point here, which is exactly why the barred absolutes [inaudible 00:18:56] to concept called trans determinism. I was really tired of the old debate between determinism and indeterminism, both in the laws and in science, because we know from complexity science that that’s not an opposition. For example, a process can both be deterministic and indeterministic at the same time. For example, we might know where a process is going to start and we might know for certain where it’s going to end, but we don’t know the way there. So, a process can be both indeterministic… And this is why the world as a whole is neither indeterministic nor deterministic. It’s trans-deterministic. It is so complex that to think of it as a deterministic process is meaningless.
Jim: I had an idea recently, a view that complexity brings about this exact question. And that is, let’s get rid of fundamental stochasticity from quantum mechanics, which may or may not exist. That’s still an unresolved question. Let’s assume at the quantum mechanical level, things are deterministic as well. And so, therefore, there is a single world line that goes from the origin of the universe, assuming we want to have one up until today, and everything is deterministic. But, that does not give us the ability to predict the future.
Alexander: That’s actually one great argument for trans-determinism, because trans-determinism becomes the practice. There’s also a metaphysical understanding of trials-determinism, which says that even if you have a process that itself looks deterministic. If you could know everything about what’s going on in the universe, which we don’t, but if you could, right, theoretically speaking, even in that case, the origin of that process cannot be deterministic. So, this is the problem with determinists, is that, if anything ever in history happened by chance, or remotely look like it had by chance, all of determinism falls, because it’s supposed to be a principle, right? So, there cannot be any principle. I would say that principles like determinism and indeterminism are completely made up by humans who can only think locally. So you are allowed to use indeterminism and determinism locally, but we’re doing metaphysics here. We have to be sincere.
And this is why I repeatedly say to you, Jim, that I love the American pragmatists, but more than anything, I love with Americans were up in the 20th century. When they started doing cybernetics, and system science, and complexity science. And I don’t know what the hell the Europeans were up to because they were just doing deconstructions of literary text. The 20th century was wasted in Europe, and it certainly prospered in America. So, I love system science and complexity science, I did it myself. I’m an economist by training. If there’s anything you need to learn, you do economics is that anything that happened before an economic history will be discounted for in the future. So, crisis would never be repeat and follow the same patterns. Every new crisis in economics will be a new type of crisis. Now, once I learned that from Hyman Minsky, brilliant North American economist, then I certainly could start applying in a metaphysics.
And I just said, “Well, then the whole determinism versus the indeterminism dichotomy is a false one.” It’s not the origin of anything. And therefore, we describe the universe as trans-deterministic. And by describing the universe as a whole, as trans-determinist, that makes sense to add the barred absolute as a human condition. Now we can start talking about values and purposes for human beings, and it starts to make sense. And the Nietzschean affirmation returns with a vengeance. And that’s a we call Grand Project A. And we set up Grand Project A against [foreign language 00:22:20]. No, you don’t have to look for your mother’s tit. You can look for something grandiose instead, and be part of that, and forget about your mother’s tit, and then you can die.
Jim: Yep. Let’s go on to Grand Project A. Tell us about that.
Alexander: So, well, if the phallus enters our fantasy and it’s the alternative to return and being sucked into the matrix, or returning to the mamilla and become an alcoholic. So, rather you could actually prosper in life, you can be very creative, you can work hard, you get things done, you can enjoy it. Now, if that’s the case, then why don’t we have a name for that? Well, we do. We do have a name in theology called the Promised Land. And so, we go back to Judaism here and we look at Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Here’s another one of those triads you find all the time in Process and Event. And that triad symbolizes the new paradigm. So, the point with the ex-citizens out of Egypt was to not geographically leave Egypt for another country. It was rather, “We can’t do what we want to do in Egypt. We are just reduced to some fucking slave labor in this country. So we are going to leave this country and migrate somewhere else, and there we’re going to create our utopia, or whatever society we want, which is better because it’s a new paradigm.”
And if you look at that story paradigmatically, the promised land is the theological term for that. Well, the promised land is a good term for theology maybe. And it certainly was a good term to market ships that went from Europe over to North America 300 years ago and shipped a lot of ADHD patients over from say, Holland to America, and they became Americans, like Jim Rudd. But, whatever. That’s great. But, I think it’s an inadequate term. I think it’s better to start from [foreign language 00:24:01], and recognize that being sucked back into the mamilla, and sucking the fucking tit, and becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict. Well, I want an alternative to that. Well, for my life to then have meaning, and for my lifetime value and purpose, I need to look the other way.
And I look then in the phallic direction. And the phallic direction is always upward and forward, upward and forward. And the proper name for that, a bigger term, is then Grand Project A with a capital A. So, Grand Project A is what I decide in my life, maybe together with Jim, that we are going to build a fucking skyscraper together called Game B, and it’s going to be different from Game A.
So, Jim Rudd is a Moses. He tells the people out there, “Who wants to follow me from Game A to Game B? I ignore all of you who are stuck with the Game A are addicted to it. I’d rather look at the guys who are tired of the Game A, and said, ‘I don’t want to be part of Game A. I think Game B sounds brilliant. I’m going to invest my life being part of Game B. I’m not going to foster my kids to be Game B people, so I’m going to go off to Game B.'” Now, that’s not the promise line. It’s much better to think of it as a grand project. So, grant project A in the case, Jim Rudd, is Game B.
Jim: It’s amazing to me how rare that is, because what I call the gateway drug to Game B is to realize that all of Game A, all of human status quo was invented by humans somewhere along the line and it’s subject to change. None of this stuff was… The example I use because I’m a bit of a monetary crank, is central banker-administrated fractional reserve banking was not on those stone tablets that Moses came down from heaven. It was a series of contingent accidents having to do with the English monarch’s inability to raise funds in 1693. So he established the Bank of England in 1694. And then, a whole bunch of other things, and then culminating in the establishment of the American Federal Reserve and similar systems elsewhere in the early-20th century. So, the architectures we have are manmade and the future is manmade. So why don’t we try to guide the future towards something we think is better than we have now? Why is that such a difficult concept, right?
Alexander: Because we’re still grieving Christianity in our culture. This is nihilism. We’re stuck with what Nietzsche calls the last man. And this is exactly the fault of the last man. The last man, which is the common denominator today with most people in America, in Europe. The last man is basically a guy who’s nihilistic in the sense that he thinks is done everything he could ever do, and he thinks the Game A is a given.
Jim: Exactly.
Alexander: He thinks the Game A was deterministically there and has to be followed, just like the guys that Moses met in Egypt who said, “No, we are going to stay in Egypt and we’re going to stay slaves, because that’s the way it has to be.” And Moses was just like, “No. You contingently became slaves. You contingently became Egyptians. You’re not stuck here at all. You need to get off your fat asses and get moving. And, it probably going to take you 40 years to get anywhere else, because a whole generation has to die. A new generation has to be born, because you’re so fucking polluted by Game A that the only hope you have is to give… Again, Game A is probably your barred absolute, but at least if you leave, you can give birth to children who can then enter another world and practice Game B.” And maybe that’s the case with you too. And that’s what we call exodology.
Jim: Interesting you mentioned that, because my hand waving back of the envelope calculations say that it will take about 60 years to get from Game A to Game B at relatively large scale in society. Hard to see it happening faster than that, minus a collapse scenario, in which case it might happen faster. If we can get Yahweh to come and have a plague of frogs and kill the firstborn male child and all that shit, maybe it’ll happen faster. But in a realistic world, it could easily be 60 years.
Alexander: I think it was 60 years for Moses, because it probably took him at least 20 years to go around Egypt and get a few followers to-
Jim: Exactly.
Alexander: … Before they finally understood that they weren’t stuck in Egypt at all, and they weren’t stuck in this-
Alexander: They finally understood that they weren’t stuck in Egypt at all and they weren’t stuck in the slavery. They could just imagine a different world, go off and create it.
This is the weird thing with philosophy, it doesn’t even have a word for the teaching on how you leave it prior to moving to a new one.
Jim: Let me set this up a little bit. So this is a very important term in the rest of the work, and that’s exitology.
Alexander: Exactly. So we’ve used the term paradigmatics before. The paradigmatics is the understanding of the values and the meanings of a given society being paradigmatic. That means that a certain society with certain communication tools and certain ways of informing each other will create a certain society. Human beings are pretty much the same, but the technologies we use are different from one paradigm to the next. So if somebody speaks, or if somebody starts writing and accumulating knowledge in writing. Or when somebody starts printing, making the writing way cheaper and more abundant. Or somebody invents something like the internet and connects all 8 billion people on the planet directly with each other, they’re different paradigms.
Paradigmatics is the word for understanding paradigms as different for one another. So it’s an understanding of difference in human society. The fundamental differences are paradigmatic between different types of human societies. For example, when I side with Ukraine against Russia and the current conflict, I don’t side with Ukraine against Russia. I side Ukraine against Putin, because Putin is the feudalist who wants to turn Russia back to the 14th century. But I’m like, “Well we’re in the internet age now, sorry. So at least you should make Russia a liberal democracy, in which case Ukraine turns out to be the role model you need. So why don’t you just copy Ukraine and model for Russia, make both of them liberal democracies, restore peace, done.” Right?
So this is thinking Paradigmatics. But there isn’t a word for how you actively fantasize about a new paradigm and move people from one paradigm to the next. It just turns out that a certain guy called Jim Rudd has an idea of a Game A and a Game B, and the Game B is going to be radically different from Game A because the Game B is a new paradigm due to certain constraints that I know are important to emphasize.
For example, that if you pollute and destroy the planet or if you blow up the bomb, we’re done. That was never part of Game A. Nobody in the European Enlightenment in the 17th century imagined atomic bombs and climate change. So it is an entirely new game, and that game you call Game B. The trick is then how do you get people from Game A to Game B? Weirdly there’s not a term for that in philosophy, so we just took the term exitology. An exitologist is the person who’s an expert in how you move people from one type of society to another one.
Jim: Yep. And I should clarify that the Game B movement is many people, many of them have said many more intelligent things than I have. So this is not the Jim Rutt show by any means, Game B. It’s a large community of thinkers who’ve all contributed their peace. So just to make that clear.
Alexander: Yeah, I would also have to emphasize that Nietzscheanism and Lacanianism are not owned by Alexander Bard in any way whatsoever.
Jim: We may have the bigger mouths, but that’s about all, right?
Before we go a little bit deeper into some examples, let’s talk about the example you give of exitology versus the tyrant’s lynch mob.
Alexander: Yeah, exactly. So this is what happens with values. What we got to watch out for is that we historically know that if move into an age of nihilism, so say nobody believes in the future any longer, that creates enormous pressure and that social pressure will result in the lynch mob returning, big time. I mean, something is wrong, we need to find somebody to blame. We can’t blame ourselves because nobody has any hope, we have no direction. The phallus has disappeared.
So if a phallic direction to society disappears you get mass nihilism, and we’re close to that stage right now because people aren’t listening to you and me and imagining the way you and I are. We are voices in the desert right now, Jim. That’s what we are with these ideas on exitology and Game B. So we try to imagine other things. For example, we introduced the Garden of God, the City of God, and the Tower of God in this book, and we’re going to return to them in this episode ’cause they’re where we end up with the book. But we have these ideas that are very similar to Game B thinking.
Now most people today, they’re stuck in the last map. They’re stuck with a secularized sort of mindset, post-Christian, no values left except the hedonistic chase for entertainment and then maybe breed if you have the time to breed it, but you don’t really care about your kids ’cause you’re too self-obsessed to even care about raising a family properly. A lot of that mindset will lead to enormous frustrations. And that’s why we have the polarizations and the frustrations we have now in Europe and America, and they very, very quickly lead to lynch mobs.
It’s not all the time with, “Lynch mob Joseph Biden to made him quit race for the president.” That was the most civilized version of the lynch mob, let’s put it that way. But it was a lynch mob. But the regular lynch mobs go out and kill people, literally. Pogroms persecuting the Jews, [inaudible 00:32:57] for the lynch mobs.
And we’re terrified of this, me and Jan, we’re terrified of the fact that if you don’t get the grand project up now, and if you don’t get an exitology how to move from one paradigm to the next, and if you don’t get this dominant mode that the internet presents humanity with enormous possibilities, including conquering outer space if you want to, but it presents it with enormous possibilities for humanity, things we never did before, we could do. And if that hope is not returned to humans, they will turn inwards, be incredibly frustrated. And that frustration will lead to lynch mobs.
And if it doesn’t lead to lynch mobs it could possibly be even worse. It could even be that people become their own lynch mobs. The trick with psychoanalysis is that your superego can tell you you’re no good, and we see that already in today’s society. We have more twenty-year-olds than ever go to psychiatric emergency care units with psychiatric diseases and shit. And that is a bad sign, and it comes from nihilism.
Jim: Yeah. And also very similar to, say in America and, to also similarly in Europe, this kind of negative war against our own history. Of course there are some things in our history that are bloody and ugly, but every society has that. But there’s this kind of germ of an idea, particularly on the left in the West, that everything about our history is horrible and rotten and corrupt, et cetera. And this kind of self-hatred leads to… I like your idea of a self-lynch mob, or the slightly more amplified version that’s self and others, is this cancel culture we see on the internet. Anybody brings out an idea that doesn’t follow chapter and verse to this story of hatred of self then gets swarmed by the mob.
Alexander: Exactly. And a guy we work closely with, Benedict Beckeld, an American philosopher, and he’s written on oikophobia. He didn’t invent the term, I think Roger Scruton did, but it’s cultural self-hatred, right? Oikophobia. And oikophobic cultures, Benedict has studied them throughout history and they’re really a bad sign, right? If you get a lot of oikophobia in a culture, that’s like the fall of a culture, it’s the decline. And we see a lot of that today. And yes, a lot of that started in the left.
I’m a Marxist, I’m a Marxist philosopher. Doesn’t mean I’m a damn communist, I’m a libertarian Marxist. But anyway, I think Marxism is a good tool for understanding the world because Marxism is the origin of paradigm theory. But here’s the problem. When the left skipped Marxism the 1980s and became middle class and started going to fancy universities, and did literature studies and read too much Derrida and Judith Butler, they came back with oikophobia.
The problem is the oikophobia the left has presented has to have a scapegoat, because it is a lynch mob. And it’s not that we hate ourselves in our culture, is that we hate a specific aspect of our culture called heterosexual white men. So if you’re a heterosexual white man, then you have to blame yourself. But everybody else goes blameless and can blame the heterosexual white men.
Of course, what then happened was that Trump and Vance came along. And what they do is they said, “Well poor little heterosexual white men, here’s this revenge.” And then you get two lynch mobs fighting each other, and that’s exactly what we warned about. That’s deeply problematic because none of them has a phallic direction. None of them is exitological, none of them provides any purpose or hope. All they do is to go into cult of ressentiment, as Nietzsche said, a cult of self-hatred where you self-indulge in your self-hatred. Or hatred of the other in their own self.
So okay, so everybody who’s not a heterosexual white man, you can hate the heterosexual white men. And all the heterosexual white men, you can hate everybody else. Well okay, that’s a deeply polarized society and it’s a poor society, and it’s just incredibly stupid.
So the point here is that we need to go back to understanding what the paradigm shift is. And this is why I’m so pro-technology, because technologies today have enormous promise. And the fact that we human beings designed these technologies for ourselves, to enhance ourselves, not to make ourselves addicted to them, not to turn us into slaves of the technology, but for the technology to become our slave. Douglas Rushkoff, Tristan Harris, dear friends of ours, their missions are all about this.
Now that makes perfect sense and I’m all pro that, and I’m all pro imagining what that could be. And that’s where these other concepts come into the picture, which we called the Garden of God, the City of God and the Tower of God in the book. We steal them from theology.
Jim: I’m going to point, out I did have Benedict Beckeld on to talk about his book, Western Self-Contempt, Oikophobia and the Decline of Civilizations, back in EP 163. So if people are interested in diving deeper into this very important concept you can check it out there.
I will also point out that I believe and have believed for a long while that it was coming, and finally it came, that this left form of oikophobia would inevitably produce a reaction. And I would describe that reaction as Trumpism, just the stupid reactionary opposition. “We’re great, America’s always great, make America great again,” et cetera. And so the left oikophobia has produced an equally stupid reaction from the other side. So now we have-
Alexander: Yeah, exactly. So they say, “We’re Americans and we’re great, but we have to have these fucking customs because otherwise the Chinese will beat us at producing better than we do.” Well, you hear the self-contradiction is right there from the very beginning. These guys are not even willing to take the fight according to the rules of the game. And that’s pathetic. So you can expose it quite easily.
And here’s the problem, the solution is not to attack them because then you go for another, third lynch mob against the other two lynch mobs. Attack is to basically say, “I don’t buy the dichotomy. I don’t buy any of these arguments. I’m heroic. I refuse to be resentful. And if I’m heroic, all I’m doing is I’m sitting down with my friends and imagining a different world that’s better than the current one, and then I start creating it.” What’s the problem?
Jim: Yeah, as Buckminster Fuller said, “Don’t complain about life, build the alternative, goddamn it.”
Alexander: Buckminster Fuller was the real American Nietzschean, there you go.
Jim: Yeah, he was a great guy.
All right, let’s move on here. You talk about technology, and I agree. Game B believes that technology is very important and opens up doors that didn’t exist before in terms of how you could self-organize communities into larger wholes, and they can be very productive. However, in late-stage financialized capitalism, all the incentives are to use our growing and deeper psychological understanding of ourselves, not complete of course, but getting better every day, for the sole purpose of increasing money-on-money return. And I’d suggest the terminus point so far of that is TikTok, right? It’s a pure dopamine hijack with no merit to it, other than sucking up the last bits of attention that are unsucked into the Borg so far.
So technology is hugely empowering if the social operating system lets it be, but our current social operating system, to degree it lets us use it, it does so more or less by default, not by intent. The only intent is to hook us, to hijack our attention and to squeeze money out of it.
Alexander: So this is what we called attentionalism, you just described bad attentionalism. What we want to do is to make people aware of this, because it has to start with awareness of the problem.
And the parallel we make is how we got rid of slavery, because the slavery economy encouraged more and more slavery. That’s what it did, you made more profit the more slaves you had. And it was incredibly profitable. The West Indies and the South America produced enormous wealth for European colonialists due to slavery, because the profit margins were just bigger than anything else I’ve ever seen in history. And that’s why they got so intensely wealthy.
But then we got tired of the slavery and realized it was inhumane, it was unacceptable. And it helped, actually, that we could convince some factory owners that factory workers probably more productive if they work for eight hours a day and had 16 hours a day of spare time, rather than being employed 24 hours a day and paid for 24 hours a day.
So we basically convinced the capitalists that when it comes to factories, compared to cotton fields, it’s better to keep people busy eight hours a day and pay them only 48 hours, and then convince them they got 16 hours of spare time, which means they’re free. That also means they can change jobs and they can do that in the jobs market. And then we introduced a newer form of capitalism and got rid of slavery. And we did so basically by getting tired of slavery, we refused to be slaves.
It is the same thing with attention. So what I do in my work is it’s almost like I’m a preacher. It’s like a spiritual meeting and I tell people, “Why the hell did you end up in a life situation where other people’s algorithms control you, and other people’s AI dictate what your kids are learning at school? Why don’t you have your own AI in your own algorithm, or demand that the only algorithm you will ever use serves you and your purposes? And the only AI you want for you and your children is an AI that encultures you the way you want to be encultured the rest of your life?” Okay.
Death is the absolute, what am I going to do with my life? And my kids will survive me. It’s a starting point for values here. Then why the hell am I spending time online on fucking TikTok, where the psychologists working for ad agencies are fucking my brain and frying it? Say no. Okay.
So it’s a very similar no to the one we did for slavery. And you can use this one quote from me and Jan, “In the future we’re very likely to consider the abolition of advertising as a greater achievement for humanity, even than the abolition of slavery.” That’s a very strong statement, but I’m totally for the abolition of advertising. Not through some kind of socialist government policy, that’s going to be impossible. I’m just for people leaving it. I’m for considering advertising as Egypt, we’re going on to the Promised Land, we don’t want it any longer.
And what you then do, even if you have to pay for it, get rid of the fucking ads. Get rid of the ad. Get rid of any message out there you haven’t asked for. Ban it, curse it, go after it. Tell your friends about it, warn them about it. Because the advertisers are getting more and more desperate ’cause we hate them more and more and becoming more aware of them. People should hate advertising. They should then become aware of advertising and how it works, and then they should go after it.
And this is why I tell my students that anybody who educates themselves to become an advertiser in 2024, it’s a bit like educating yourself to become a slave driver in 1905. You’re a bit late to the game.
Jim: I 100% agree with you. In fact, I’ve had this discussion with Tristan Harris multiple times, that one silver bullet would be to ban advertising on the internet. The internet would completely change. And if you had to pay even tiny bits, ’cause… Oh, this is a really important point now. The internet was really amazing up to about 2002, 2004, and that was because the cost of computation and networks were sufficiently high that you could not fully fund a service through advertising. So people had to make a conscious decision to give their hard-earned money to something if they were going to take advantage of it, which meant that the creators of sites had to create value.
But around 2000, let’s call it ’04 at the latest, the prices of computation, the price of networks came down so you could fully make things advertising. And that’s where things went to hell. Things like Facebook is a first example, where the commonplace is the user is not the customer, the customer is the advertiser. You are the product. And that ethos has now spread through journalism, through everything in this attention hijacking for the purpose of selling your attention to somebody else.
Alexander: But we already have the reaction, it’s just gotten started. So what I’m seeing is, I agree with you, that’s the Egypt version of things as they are. And we are in Egypt, right? But people are already becoming aware of this. For example, there are three ways of financing something, either you pay for the damn service or the product directly, or the government pays for it, or an advertiser steps into the picture and screws your brain and fries it and he pays for it. So they went for the advertising model. We’re becoming aware of actually its limitations, and this is why Facebook is dying because we hate getting our brains fried.
So we’re becoming aware of this, the awareness is spreading. And I’m told before that if I’d be a socialist I would join you and Tristan Harris and the America Socialist Party and ban advertising. But unfortunately I’m not a socialist, I don’t believe in bans. So I have to work on awareness. It’s a longer journey, but I’m sorry, I’m a Marxist libertarian. That means that I think I have to convince people one by one by one to get out of Egypt and follow me to the Promised Land while leaving Egypt intact.
That means, if you want to stay with advertising, you are the new underclass. We call them consentarians. We invented the word 24 years ago in the book The Netocrats, our first book, and it stuck. The consumtariat are people who have their entire world financed by advertisers, meaning their brains are being constantly fried and they do nothing but consume whatever they’re told to consume, and they have no critical thinking left and no human-ness to them.
Okay, if that’s the masses, that’s where we’re going. But there’s certainly going to be a new elite, an elite that don’t necessarily have money but they’re more clever. And these elite we call the netocrats. And the first thing the netocrats do is that, “I’m not going to be advertised to because I’ve got fucking algorithms. If I want to know which restaurant I’m going to go to, which bicycle I’m going to buy, whatever I’m going to do, I can find it on the internet using the algorithms, especially if the algorithms work in my interest. And I find those algorithms, and then I find out what I want to do, and I book whatever table I want or whatever restaurant I want to go to. Don’t come here telling me which restaurant I should go to, because then I ban you and I curse you and I don’t want to see you again.”
So we already have that movement. And these people are the attentionalists. They’re the people who understood that attention is the game, and they demand that attention is not an economy of money, it’s an economy of time. It’s my time. It’s about my calendar. I don’t want my calendar filled with junk. So what I do is that I realize the worst junk I could find in that calendar is that I don’t want to be a slave. That means I don’t want advertising. So I will use anything out there that I can use when I go online where advertising is non-existent.
And those people will be the winners, because they will save their time towards being smarter and clever and more educated and more encultured than other people are. And they are the netocrats, they’ll be socially successful. That’s the new game in town. It’s even more important now than money, is the control over your attention.
And that’s why it’s an entirely new paradigm, and it even replaces capitalism because capitalism is dependent on advertising, finding early adopters for every new product they have. But if you can’t reach the early adopters, game over for advertisers and we move into [inaudible 00:48:01].
Jim: Regular listeners have heard me rant about this before, but this is a perfect time to insert that there is a natural, an organic and non-coercive way, I think, to get there, which is the creation of personal information agents. And I have given details of this to bunches of young entrepreneurs and said, “Go build this, this is the next trillion dollar opportunity.”
Where for instance, and this is also very important, because of the competitive nature of late stage financialized capitalism, the actual amount of revenue extracted per eyeball on the social media platforms is surprisingly low. For Facebook it’s $2 a month, for Twitter, before Musk pissed off the advertisers, it was a dollar a month. It’s now 25 cents per month per user. If one went to Elon and said, “Instead of 25 cents I’ll give you a buck, but I want access to the social graph and I’m going to have it plug into an AI specifically for Alexander Bard.” Alexander Bard’s paying me $100 dollars a month, initially, a luxury good product to get a non-annoying version of the whole internet fed into them. And oh, by the way, Alexander can say, like I might, “I only want 20 things a day, period.” Right?
Alexander: This is again in The Netocrats already, 24 years ago we said, “The end game of the internet are the curators.” What you call a personal information agent is precisely what a curator is, people who curate the information that we want and get rid of the information we don’t want, which includes advertising.
And I’ve got a little [inaudible 00:49:33] on here, I just came up with it. Both can take credit for it if you like. But attentionalism as a force is forcing capitalists to become Nigerian bankers, every one of them.
Jim: Pretty much.
Alexander: And we know what we think about Nigerian bankers, it’s called spam. It’s not called advertising any longer. If advertising pretends it’s still advertising, it’s lying. Advertising is just a pretentious way of saying you’re a spammer.
Jim: Absolutely. And other things that the rut info agent would do is I set a price, I will look at ads for a price. I thought about it for myself, I’ll look at ads for $10 each. And I will put who I am, what my proceeds are, approximate net worth. If you think it’s worth sending an ad to me, then pay me $10. My guess is I’ll get a few and they’ll probably be things I’m actually interested in.
Alexander: It’s the end game. It’s like somebody saying, “Slavery is over, but I offer to be the last slave. Who pays for it?” It is exactly what you’re saying.
So I think historically, again, by using paradigms and comparing, I think the comparison to slavery and advertising makes sense, because we don’t understand how… People back then didn’t understand how slavery was fundamental to the entire economy. The entire economy was built on enormous profits from the slave trade. That really was the case.
Jim: And keep in mind-
Alexander: Right now people don’t understand how huge the advertising industry is. And the problem right now is, because advertising doesn’t work any longer, companies spend even more money on it, as if spending more money on advertising would buy them out. And it won’t, they’re just wasting their money.
What they should do, I teach this at the Stockholm School of Economics, when they asked me, “What are we going to do if we don’t advertise?” Well since advertising isn’t working, stop advertising to begin with. Stop being a Nigerian banking spammer. Just stop it. And next thing you could do, yeah, create quality, create the best fucking product at the best fucking price, because everything online is moving in that direction. We’re going to buy the best product at the best price, because we, globally… Well the algorithms will tell us, “This is the best product at best price. What you’re looking for is right here, buy it here.” Right? That’s where the algorithm is important.
And they will not allow advertising to interfere with that process, because that kind of pollution that advertising tries to do with algorithms, when they try to pollute the algorithm… Well if they do that, then Google falls down. Then Google implodes, because Google Search will have no credibility left. And that’s exactly why the search engines cannot allow advertising to pollute the algorithms, because if they do we understand, they eerily trying to sneak back in through the back door. Well then we hate them even more.
Jim: And it is true that Google in particular is going to hell quickly. I’m going to put in a plug here for my favorite new product, Perplexity.
Alexander: You are another one of those Perplexity fans?
Jim: Oh, I love Perplexity.
Alexander: That’s the word of mouth right now, isn’t it? I hope they… Maybe they are the first proper attentionalists, because I’ve looked into Perplexity and they seemed… It’s like they read our books. They have this determined attentionalist perspective on what they do, not capitalist. It’s like they banned capitalism and they’ve gone attentionalist.
Jim: In fact I have the CEO of Perplexity coming on my show next week. But I love Perplexity. So if you’re sick and tired of being exploited, try Perplexity. It’s amazingly good technology, it provides links to its sources when it gives you an answer. And there’s no fucking advertising, no attempt to hijack, no pictures. ‘Cause we know that this use of GIFs and pictures and images hits a specific part of our brain for hijacking our attention even better than big text that says, “Barely legal teenage girls.” And so…
Alexander: Why am I not surprised, Jim? This gives me so much joy. And say hi to him from me, I’m a huge fan. I’ve been a fan of this idea for 25 years. So here’s the philosopher, if he wants one in-house or whatever, whatever I can contribute. But it’s exactly companies like Perplexity I’m looking at the moment, that I think have really understood what it means to leave the capitalist paradigm and move into the attentionalist one.
Because money will come to the attentionalist anyway, just like if you were a capitalist and everybody told you it’s all about food production. You must have a huge fucking caste in the countryside to produce food, otherwise you’re a nobody. Well then the capitalist said, “No, I’m going to move to this city and I’m going to build a factory, and I’m going to make a profit without slave labor, by the way, by paying my workers good money. I’m going to build a factory, make profit. Then I’m going to use the profit to buy a castle where I can grow the fucking food in the spare time, because I’m going to be the winner.”
The same thing goes here because the second we realize that attention is larger than capital… ‘Cause data is larger than capital. Capital is a form of data, but data can be more than capital. If data can be more than capital, which the internet is, then capitalism is done. That’s the conclusion we did 25 years ago, Perplexity is evidence that this is going to fly.
Jim: And I will also point out how technology plays a significant role in this, ‘Cause not only was early-stage financialized capitalism based on the slave trade, but so were all the great empires of the past. The Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the Indians… The Indians have their caste system, which is kind of a different way of doing the slave thing. But until basically the invention of the steam engine, slavery made economic sense, and so every major empire was based upon it.
However, the steam engine was able to amplify the power of the worker, but realistically, only the free worker. Only the free worker was willing to invest enough to learn how to be a skilled mechanic and operate the technology, and work on the technology and keep it working. When you’re forcing someone at the point of a whip to work, they’re not going to reach the level of expertise necessary to operate in the machine age. So if you look at when slavery started to die, it was right at the time that the steam engine started to become ubiquitous and the power of free labor went up.
In the United States now, in new factories, I’ve been tracking this, the average amount of capital invested per worker… And this is just in mundane things. Around here Hershey’s has a candy bar factory and they just did a big expansion on it. And it’s approximately a million dollars of capital per worker. They pay pretty good, I think they pay like $25 an hour, $26 an hour over at the Hershey plant. So for a $26 an hour employee, who therefore is making about 50 grand a year, they’re putting a million dollars worth of capital with each of those workers. And you need to have a pretty conscientious worker, if only not to fuck up the million dollar machine. Right?
Alexander: I agree totally. The combination of the printing press and the steam engine made the abolition of slavery a possibility. It was unthinkable before. The game before that was…
Alexander: … slavery possibility. It was unthinkable before. The game before that was just either you’re a slave or you’re a slave owner and those are the two games you got. Once the slave owner, slave dichotomy was done with, and you got the worker and the employer instead in their relationship, we had capitalism for you. We don’t know what kind of relationship we’re going to have eventually during a test. We don’t even know if there’s automatically specific relationship similar to the employer-worker relationship that was during capitalism.
That relationship will stay. Most of us still have to go to work and make our own money. Even if you have to make Bitcoin, we still have to make the money, make the effort. But capitalism is still there. But on top of capitalism, what now creates the next level of values, what we call potentialism, because we’re all becoming aware of our calendar and then we start looking, okay, someone got rid of slavery and suddenly had 16 hours of spare time every day that we could do whatever we want to with. Why don’t we go for 24 hours of spare time in that case next and call it potentialism? For those who can afford it and will do it, they will take the lead. That’s the point.
Jim: All right, related to all this is the concept laid out in the Book of the Messiah Machine. Let’s go riff on that for a bit.
Alexander: There are two ways of doing visions for the future and one with them is to think of visions as something that already exist and can be complemented and completed. Those are the ones we call the Garden of God and the City of God and the Tower of God. Here’s the trick, the Tower of God opens up to new possibilities further because we as philosophers also own barred absolutes and our own limits to our imagination. Future generations can imagine way beyond what we can imagine today.
We have those set first and the Messiah Machine is then what we throw into the mix because we have the concept of the savior and we’re interested in that concept theologically. The original concept of the Savior was the Saoshyant, which is a Persian concept. It was later imported by the Jews called Mashiach and became the Messiah of Christ in Christianity and the Mahdi in Islam. All eventological religions, we talk about eventology. All eventological, is to see linear time and see the specific events can change history forever.
Can also believe that certain Messiah figures or saviors come into the picture. The interesting thing though is that the original Saoshyant, the Persians or Ashton concept that we’re interested in, it’s not a person at all. It’s a function. Think of it as a function that either saves us from a decline, which we’re trying to do right now with Western in culture, you and I. We try to save from a certain decline and give back hope and prosperity to this culture.
If you try to do that, then you take on the Saoshyant function. Now, if it’s a function and not a single human being, we won’t avoid the tyrant here. Say if it’s not Elon Musk and it certainly has limitations, I for example, think he’s trans thought is a lot more fun than boring old dork Elon is. He has his limitations. Then it could be good he’s not a human being we’re thinking about. Rather think about the function. Why not then think about technology? Because we dare to think technology is the devil.
It’s quite obvious after Hiroshima, 6th of August 1945, that human beings have created the devil. It’s called atomic bomb. A few of those who blow ourselves up we’re done. That’s the reality since 1945 and theologically speaking, that means we created the devil and the devil is now present. Now, could we have a God who could stop the devil with something better than the bomb? Something that locks up the devil so the bomb won’t go off?
Maybe we could then solve climate change in that process. But why don’t we start thinking about technological solutions? Why don’t we start thinking about the internet as the capacity to solve really, really hard problems because of its enormous capacity to compute to begin with? AI comes into the picture, for example. Now if that’s the direction we’re going to give technology, we might as well aim high for technology.
We might even aim higher for technology, we aim for ourselves. We’re perfectly allowed to. From theology, we steal these terms to then start imagining what would it be if we invented something that was superior to us? This is where it can also flip into the dark sector of our philosophy, but we have to do this as philosophers to be honest and to be truthful. That’s what we call the Messiah Machine. For example, maybe in the future women prefer to have tech babies rather than having bio babies.
That’s a long way far off. We’re not saying that women are cursed, have bio babies forever. They could perfectly develop tech babies in the future and they’re very likely those cyborg babies in between and prefer them. If women choose their cyborg babies rather than regular bio babies and instead of gambling whatever they’re going to give birth to, they could know perfectly well advanced what they’re going to give birth to.
They could have some help doing it and have a great baby. Then certainly they will pick that option. It’s very, very likely. That’s perfectly okay in our philosophy. That’s where the Messiah Machine comes in as to think the unimaginable today as imaginable. To think the impossible as possible. To think technology is even superior to what humans are and to dare think that. The equation we use here is simple but very straightforward.
One, women give birth to babies. Two, men and women for giving birth to babies. Three, because men envy women for giving birth to babies, men give birth to technology. Four, because children don’t develop that fast, but technology develops very fast right now, it’s very likely that five, technology beats the child. The Messiah Machine is both. Can there be a technology, for example with Game B as a fundament to it, that saves us from climate change, for blowing ourselves up with bombs?
That’s a Messiah Machine. But the Messiah machine could also be a life form or whatever you want to call it that is further developed than human beings are. Then we give a perfect example in the book. Human beings are not adaptable to outer space. A few days in outer space and your body starts to disintegrate and you go mad. There’s a reason why astronauts don’t become movie stars or philosophy professors afterwards they’ve been in space.
It’s enormous pressure to put human body in space. It’s also going to be costly. Why don’t we start right now to create an AI that can conquer outer space for us instead? They take whatever viruses and bacteria that AI think is preferable on target planets and therefore we can secure life experience into outer space. That’s a better model than sending human beings there. Personally, I don’t want to go at outer space because after Richard Branson went to outer space, it’s not cool any longer and I want to be the cool guy.
This is what we do. We are philosophically imagine here the Messiah Machine is the ultimate horizon. But we can also think about parallel with the Messiah Machine we can complete the agricultural revolution by basically stating the entire planet should be an agricultural phenomenon and consider this one. Then the world is no longer wild nature because the world essentially a set of parks and these parks have to be maintained by human beings.
Otherwise, it’s too much methane or whatever out there and we go down. By solving the climate change problem, we’ve started imagining the completion of the agricultural revolution, which is the Garden of God. The other one is the completion of the cosmopolitan revolution that I can say hi to my neighbor without killing him. The oldest religious product ever. What can we do not to kill our neighbors? Now if you could go into a world where we could all say hi to each other without killing each other, we completed the product the philosophers always dreamed about, we called it the City of God.
If we’ve done those two things, we’ve got the Tower of God left, which is basically the barbab suit in front of a door says that, okay, so you completed agriculture revolution, you completed the industrial revolution and the cosmopolitan revolution. All revolutions of the human side have been completed. Those paradigms are now givens. Great, well here’s next for you. You won’t be part of it. You’re going to die. That’s what’s necessary because by putting the Tower of God as the third installation in our metaphysics, we abandon nihilism and we keep hope prosperous forever.
Jim: Yeah. Let’s dig in a little bit to the Ectopian Garden.
Alexander: The Ectopian Garden is that we’re with the Easterners and that the Easterners are skeptical of the Western division between utopia and dystopia. I don’t find a single trace in Indian or Chinese or Japanese culture about any ideas about any utopias or dystopias for the matter. I think those ideas are gnostic and should be done with. However, what I do discover when I walk into Toyota factory in Japan is a pride among the workers in how they can improve the damn product.
Those improvements in technology are always incremental. There’s small improvements, but each one of those improvements makes the product either better or cheaper. Again, if it’s all about making the best product at the best price, then why not improve the product or make it cheaper? Then I’ve started engineering brains. Sat down with engineers working, for example, building electric engines at the moment. All they love to do every morning is to take everything down or rebuild it the same day.
By taking everything down, rebuilding it, we’re trying to figure out how they make that entire process either cheaper or better. By improving on the process itself, products develop. That’s actually the entire history of technological evolution. There were no revolutions in technology. The entire evolution of technology was that I built the same machine that I built yesterday, but I built it slightly improved. By constantly improving on the quality, I’m a protopian.
A term we borrowed from Kevin Kelly from Wired Magazine. Brilliant term. Because in protopianism, we eliminate utopianism with just topianism. The great thing about protopianism is it’s a universal idea. Every culture we’ve encountered loves the idea that you could improve on products and services by making them better or at least cheaper with each new generation. That’s a great idea. Because that idea should be tied into the idea of the Messiah Machine to give us direction in technological evolution and give us hope for humanity.
Jim: Yeah, that’s very close to the Game B idea that utopias are hugely dangerous. A destination. Marxist-Leninism, true communism. The City of God for the Christians. One, it gives too much of an incentive for coercion to get there. Two, it’s a static destination. While in Game B, we say that the future is metastable. We have to live within our planetary limits, within the constraints of our existing technology. But that’s going to continually change.
We’re going to get better and better. It may be that we have to cut back on our consumption for a while at our current level of technology. But when we have fusion power or massive orbiting solar stations, et cetera, then we may well be able to have more consumption and more stuff yet remain stable within our planetary limits. Thinking on the concept of metastability is to our mind, very important to immunize ourselves against utopianism and a coercive drive towards some static principle.
Alexander: That’s exactly why the term anti-fragile got stuck as well when now some title came along with the term. The point here is that when we talk about the Garden of God, the City of God, the Tower of God, we steal those terms for theology and completely redefine them from a protopian perspective. I completely agree with you. We know now from the history of ideas that ideas of utopia are incredibly dangerous, incredibly dangerous to be avoided.
They’re stupid. So are ideas about dystopia. It’s almost like dystopian ideas even worse. I’m here in Sweden, I got Greta Tunberg next door. She’s my biggest enemy. Why? Because she’s a fucking dystopian. I think dystopianism is the ultimate form of destructive nihilism that destroys mankind by thinking we humans should go extinct and some other will be better without us. I think it’s a terrible idea. I think both dystopian and utopian ideas are terrible and they are the consequence of an eventology without a process.
These are western mental diseases. I’ve never met an eastern reporting to the utopia and the dystopia. That’s exactly why utopian ideas arrived in Asia with Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. It caused total havoc. You need to go to Cambodia guys. You need to go and see the Angkor Wat for all this brilliance. To see how brilliant Cambodia once was. But you need to go to those fucking old concentration camps and study Pol Pot and his fucking convictions, his ideology.
Pol Pot was not a Marxist. I’ve read Pol Pot’s PhD at Sorbonne in Paris in the 1960s where he studied. Pol Pot studied Rousseau. He loved Rousseau. Rousseau was his hero. He was going to improve on the world by killing anybody who had brains. It was ridiculous. When the utopian ideas arrived in the east, they caused enormous havoc. Because the Easterners had never thought of utopia and dystopia as a dichotomy before. We needed to get rid of that dichotomy once and for all. Remove it from all of history and say that’s the problem. Get rid of utopia and dystopia. The true universal value that every engineer I ever met loves is the idea of protopianism. It’s the protopian garden God we’re talking about. It’s the protopian seed of God we’re talking about. It’s the protopian Tower of God we’re talking about in [inaudible 01:09:30] events.
Jim: Another idea that’s closely related, and this is one Game B has adopted from. Tyson Yunkaporta, who’s a aboriginal thinker, been on my podcast several times, one of my friends, great guy. I think of all the many cool ideas he’s created, one of them is describing humanity with respect to its relationship to nature. As the custodial species, we have general intelligence, we’re just over the line. I love to say we’re approximately the stupidest possible general intelligence, but we are over the line so we can do things that no other species can do.
Rather than looking at that power to exploit the rest of nature, and it was understandable in 1700 when game A came into its earliest stages of its current form. We were small, there was only 600 million humans and we each consumed about a 10th as much resources we do today. Overall humanity had a hundred times less impact on nature. Exploiting nature made sense at that perspective. But now that we’ve filled the world up with eight billion people each consuming 10 times as much, that’s no longer feasible. Instead, what a wonderful idea to say that our role as the only general intelligence is to nurture nature, to be its custodian, to bring it back to its full richness, et cetera.
Alexander: I always Tyson was a Zoroastrian. Because that is Zoroastrian fundamentally. We are the co-creators with the divine or rather divine is our co-creation with nature. Culture and nature together. Also, John Serticus framed it once, “Culture is nothing but Nature 2.0.” I totally agree on that one. Although I must emphasize here that it doesn’t mean we should turn everything we see into a parody of the past, nostalgic parody of the past.
That’s what posed it. Because I see the dystopian perspective coming through there as well. We do have to feed the eight billion people we have on the planet right now. The real solution to the problem is to understand that just about everything that we find problematic, the two ways of solving it, one of them is that exploitation is replaced by imploitation. It’s a term you and I discussed before in podcasts and I think it’s really valuable.
We launched it 25 years ago. It’s now become commonly used. Because imploitation means that I’m not banned from doing agriculture. I’m not banned from industrial extraction. I’m not banned from doing anything. It’s basically just an attitude towards if I’m used something, I’m going to put it back where I took it from when it’s finished. For example, when it comes to energy, you’re exactly right, we should go towards fusion power and those things because we’ll need more energy in the future rather than less.
But if we have more bonded energy available to us and planet earth is loaded with energy, we’re only consuming like a small, small part of all the energy that sun and wind creates to begin with. The potential for cheap abundant energy is enormous. Almost all the problems we have with extraction of the planet in an exploitative manner are down to the fact that we produce energy the way we do, which is burning fossil fuels.
Now if you just re-imagine the production of energy to begin with and making energy more abundant and creating better infrastructure for energy, will solve most of the other problems. For example, if you want to have a beautiful park out here and you want to turn these farms into this national park, you’re going to go, okay, that means you’re going to have less land to grow food on. Well, we can create a skyscraper that has all the plants in it and goes towards the sky called the Tower of God food corporation and we’ll do it.
We need tons of energy to do it. It’s the same thing if you have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we can remove it. It’s just going to be costly. It’s going to take energy. Again, we coming back to the energy question constantly, you’re going to look at this practically speaking. But I’m more interested in the philosophical aspect of it. The lacking language of replacing exploitation with imploitation was always irritating to me. Because a lot of the people who are these moral soldiers against exploitation on the planet, what they mean is that they should live abundant lives but most of humanity should go extinct and be killed. That’s a dystopian worldview I do not buy into.
Jim: I also say that another related term which I just hate is de-growth. No system that is moving forward towards the future should ever be thinking itself of de-growth. Now we may want to be de-polluting. We want to be de-extracting, we want to be de-extinctionizing other species, but we always want to be growing, otherwise we’re dying.
Alexander: We are process and event. When does humanity go wrong? Whenever it goes through the process without the event, which is exactly where de-growth comes from. It’s a fucking bad Hindu idea. It’s just like may we never grow, may we just stay when the caste system is stay poor forever. No, I don’t buy that at all. The other one is the event without the process, which is equally dangerous. If we just practice process and event as the persons taught us 4,000 years ago and stay with both, we can see that growth is absolutely necessary.
By the way, it’s a beautiful thing. Why don’t we want to grow? I want to become more cultured. I want to learn new things. I certainly don’t want to stay the same. The older I get, the more I know shit and I love it. I encourage people to grow in that sense and to go for growth. Exactly. I don’t have a problem with that at all. What is the real problem? For example, a lot of people hate cars because they associate cars with gasoline. Well, the problem isn’t the car. The problem is the gasoline. In that case solve the gasoline problem, don’t attack the car.
Jim: We have solved it.
Alexander: This is what I mean. Dystopianism isn’t very often can’t see. It goes for the symbol, attacks the symbol instead of it actually attacking and solving the problem.
Jim: The other word I like to use is trans-finite. At any given time, say 30 years ago, electric cars were infeasible for a bunch of reasons. Things have happened and now there’s all kinds of electric cars, and now it’s merely a matter of implementation. Also, I would suggest properly taxing carbon. If we put a $200 a ton carbon tax on, we’d have all electric cars within 10 years. We don’t have the capability to do it. We don’t yet quite have the will.
Alexander: You do have the will in some parts of the world. It’s not going to be easy with Trump. Probably easy with Harris, for example, to use electric. We’ll see what happens. But carbon taxes are brilliant simply because you’re taxing exactly the problem, which is carbon. You can then use the money and give it to people who remove the emissions. If somebody says, well, I’m going to go to Iceland and I’m going to invest energy in building a damn factory that removes the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, say, then well that helps even better.
Then we’ll pay you and we’ll take some of the carbon tax money and give it to you. Those kinds of reversals of money flows and things like that can certainly be useful in this case. That’s the kind of ideas you get to when you start thinking imploitation as a principle. I think imploitation should be universal law. I think any country in the world that want to be part of the world legal system should implement imploitation as the fundamental principle to its constitution. You don’t take and use and exploit anything unless you put it back where you took it from. But if you do, you can do it as much as you’d like.
Jim: Yeah, cyclical economy, but spiraling forward. It just drives me crazy in the Game B world we have some of these. I call them the mud HUD hippies. I say, I got one way to refute the mud HUD hippie hypothesis. Modern dentistry.
Alexander: Exactly. They all go to the dentist anyway, don’t they? They don’t want to be toothless.
Jim: Exactly.
Alexander: It’s a great point. I’m going to steal that from you and credit you for it. Because I’m going to use in my lectures. That’s an excellent point. None of these guys want to go back to the world what it was like 500 years ago. It’s like I’ve lived in the Amazonas with these supposed tribes that are so fucking sacred and special and all that. Tyson is probably really tired of it because he’s an Australian aboriginal and had these projections around to me, we just totally relevant to him, which is what’s great about him. I live with these guys and they smoke a little cigarette. They wear jeans at a T-shirt and they put on the fucking tribal costumes when a tourist walks by. Then they do those and they pay for it.
Jim: Yeah, pay $10, take a picture and then they take it off.
Alexander: I’ll tell you how distorted this process really is. I went to Mount Hagen. Mount Hagen is this beautiful place in the mountains of eastern Papua, the Papua New Guinea, the dependent part of Papua. You go to Mount Hagen and I studied the guys in their costumes and they were flying around. I was hanging around with them, to study them basically, I’m an anthropologist and I enjoyed it. Very nice guys. I had tons of fun. But anyway, I looked at the costumes and I said, “Well, I’m looking at photographs from you guys 40 years ago, and it looks like your costumes are much more colorful now than they were 40 years ago.”
The guys go, “Yeah, because the tourists wanted more colors, so we added more colors.” It’s just like boulder of the art. It’s fantastic post-structural thinking from the 1980s. But the surface is the depth. When we try to look for something authentic, we’ll discover the authentic changes all the time. What was authentic 500 years ago will look different today. We eat kabob and pizza in Sweden today. We didn’t invent kabob and pizza. They came from fucking Italy via America to Sweden and they came from Turkey via Germany. Get rid of those ideal authenticity in that sense. That’s not what the authentic resides. The authentic resides in the here and now. The word we should agree on and emphasize all the time is the beautiful word protopianism.
Jim: I love it.
Alexander: Give Kevin Kelly credit for that. It originally is a Persian idea. The original terms [foreign language 01:19:00], to every day when you wake up, love to create the world fresh. The word freshness comes from the Aryan, indo-European [foreign language 01:19:09]. [foreign language 01:19:10], creativity, creative, like creativity. [foreign language 01:19:13] is the original Persian word. It was there already 3,700 years ago on Saoshyantism. Kevin Kelly revived it with the word protopianism. I think it’s a beautiful term. I think both you and I have a real protopian spirit, build shit but do it in a sustainable way.
Jim: That reminds me actually I had Kevin Kelly on my podcast. I know him from the old days. I haven’t talked to him in years, but he’d be a good guy to have on.
Alexander: He invented the term the neutocrats too. We credit it [inaudible 01:19:37]. But we invented the term consumtariat because Kevin Kelly loves to say nice things. He didn’t see the dark side of the internet revolution. We invented the term consumtarians and consumtariat, he invented the term neutrocacy and neutocrats. That should be credited to Kevin Kelley as well.
Jim: Now let’s talk about another one of your ideas. I’m sure there are some ways this could be interpreted that I would hate. But there’s probably some that I would like. Feel free to interpret it your way. That’s the Synthiest Temple.
Alexander: Okay, this is like imagining buildings. The Ecotopian garden Ecotopianism is the protopian version of ecology. The reason why we started using the word Ecotopian is that we discovered that a lot of engineers wanted to build the word were obstructed by ecologists all the time. People who got involved in ecology and became eco-fundamentalists and stole the world ecology, they were all dystopians, the great [inaudible 01:20:34] of the world.
We needed a new word because they basically stolen the word ecology and associated with hating humans, loving nature, hating culture, whatever they’re into. That sort of man hating culture they have is something I totally disapprove of because I disapprove of dystopianism. I discovered that a lot of these guys were working with EcoSolutions, were being eco-engineers and building wind power and sun power and kinds of things.
They wanted a new word for it. Was said, “Well then take the word ecotopianism. It’s just another version of protopianism. Ecotopianism is that I’m very hopeful about creating an ecologically sustainable planet. We got the capacity to do it, let’s do it. That’s called an ecotopian attitude and we call it the ecotopian garden. Then the cosmopolitan city is the old dream of a community bigger than tribe where we don’t kill each other, but trade with each other, enjoy life together.
This is an old dream and gradually getting there, it’s a slow process. People are still terrified of neighbors look different from themselves. But we can get out of it and we must. That’s the cosmopolitan dream, so the cosmopolitan city. Now if you have those two dreams there, what if we have a third dream? What I told you already, the Tower of God is standing ahead of you. It says there’s a barred absolute here. You’re not getting in because you’re going to die.
But your children could get behind this door. We’ll see if they do because the next generation could create things you won’t create because you’re going to die soon. Now that attitude could start imagining something. For example, somebody asked me, I go to Burning Man, I go to the Borderland, I go to these burner festivals. I love creating shit together with people. I love the whole co-created process. I love having very little money, but tons of creating funny, weird things.
I love doing those things. When people ask me, “What’s your dream beyond your death? What would you love human beings to do?” I said, “How about them getting together and building a three kilometer high golden skyscraper in Northern Canada? People from all over the world could go to for pilgrimage.” “That’s quite a big idea.” “Well, that’s a big idea. It wasn’t that hard.” You can dream. If you can dream, then why not build that building?
Take it somewhere in the wilderness of Canada, won’t disturb anybody. We were ecotopian imploitative. They build a fucking skyscraper, three kilometers high, drench it in gold or Bitcoin or whatever from the bottom to the top, and you’ve got a fucking better pilgrimage place than damn Jerusalem. You have to stop fighting about Jerusalem. You can all direct yourselves towards Northern Canada where that building go there. We call that idea the Synthiest Temple.
The point is that human beings are so attached to the idea of an axis mundi. So attached, there must be center to the world. It’s something we’re born with. It’s like a curse. We have the UN building in New York, and we have Jerusalem, we have Rome, we have Mecca. Now, Zoroastrians and Buddhists have always tried to nurture their followers. Not to try to find that axis mundi, but rather say that there is no center to the world because the center is everywhere.
I prefer to take that perspective since a lot of human beings can’t do that. Then I prefer to build a new axis mundi and then direct everybody there. You can get rid of those old place that people have fought over for so long because it seems those places are now so infected. They’d be much better if we just got rid of them entirely. My proposition with Jerusalem is to not let anybody have it as a capital to begin with. I’m perfectly happy with Tel Aviv and Ramallah. They’re good with me. I like negation a solution to-
Alexander: They’re good with me. I like negation a solution to problems usually better than dividing things up until there’s nothing left. So I propose build new shit instead of getting attached to the old stuff.
Jim: That makes sense. I’ve said a couple times, give everybody five days notice and then nuke Jerusalem. That would be a very good thing for humanity. That place has been a cesspool of bad ideas for a long time. And, in fact, there’s a known psychiatric condition called Jerusalem syndrome that when people go to Jerusalem they come to believe that they are God.
Alexander: Oh, dear. Yeah, it was a beautiful city, but I certainly didn’t come to that conclusion. I passed onto the Dead Sea. That was more fun.
Jim: All right, now let’s move on a little bit towards your, I guess I would call it techniques or infrastructure and moving towards your vision, one of which is the phallic gaze behind the Barred Absolute.
Alexander: So now we’re going deep, and this is probably pointing forward to where I’m going. I’m going to go with my favorite monk Joachim to Japan and Vietnam and sit in sun temples this fall, and I’m probably going that way the next book. I know that some of the people who read, for example, Process and Event, weren’t enthusiastic about it, they’re going to go off in different directions like somebody wants to do the social philosophy of it.
I’m seeing the Hans Freilich guys next week, and they’re big fans, and I think they’d be perfect to do that. And whenever I find somebody wants to do something with it says that, “Well, we want to do the social philosophy implications of this,” or in your case, well, the Game B community can integrate this, because you thought along me all the time in the same pattern, and this could just encourage you to do even more of that, well, then do it.
I’m more interested in mysticism, and I’m interested in mysticism because it’s so deeply human, but there’s so much garbage out that needs to be killed and got rid of. And since I’ve done the same thing with religion and theology in the past, I might as well do mysticism next. And this is probably the last chapter before we end the book, which is to accept death as the absolute, ultimately, for humanity itself.
What it’s pointing towards, though, before that is that the phallic gaze, which is the kind of gaze we’re looking for to say we’re good boys and we did well. So, for example, what you have inside of you that said, “Yeah, I tried hard and I did it,” that kind of flap on the back is your phallic gaze. The phallic gaze is that gaze which is not the matriarchal gaze. It’s not the matriarchal gaze that loves you no matter what. This is the phallic gaze that loves you no matter what, but looks at the world first before it looks at you, so you’re not getting it unless you’re being successful. And that’s why it’s driving human beings to do amazing things. So it’s a deeply, deeply psychoanalytic concept that makes sense once you start looking into it.
Now, if the phallic gaze is placed behind the Barred Absolute, that means that future generations will look for different phallic gaze than you would, but you could aspire towards that direction. So you could aspire towards imagining, for example, as a philosopher that what kind of phallic gaze would future humans like to attract? What kind of world would they like to live in, and what kind of recognition would they like to have to feel they really achieved what they set out to do.
And you are allowed to do that in philosophy. You’re allowed to think 400 years ahead. You’re allowed to imagine what society will be like then. You’re allowed to imagine what it means to be human back then. And this is important to stress. We’re going to have many further human generations before anything else might happen in history, like a cyborg, or even a technological revolution where a technological intelligence takes over, we’re happy with it, and women have techno babies, or whatever. We don’t know, but let’s leave that open.
But before that happens, for the foreseeable future, for generations to come, the phallic gaze will be the most important driver of motivation. And this, again, to fight nihilism, this is exactly how you fight nihilism, the phallic gaze that applauds you when you’ve achieved something and succeeded. And what would that be like for future generations? And we’d like to imagine that, and the word for that, because we can’t really detail it today, would be a syntheism.
So our proposal is to say that, well, get rid of all the religion, but then when you return with atheism, which is a necessary dialectical move, they realized, well, atheism wasn’t that imaginative. What was the problem all along with theism? Well, the problem with theism was always that creative god before creation, and they’ve discovered there was no such thing. We started imagining creative god and creation were the same thing. Then we realized we didn’t even need a creative god, because creation is self-organizing.
Now if that is the case, done with. Still a term we could use, though. We could throw it into the future. And that’s what syntheism does. And these last three books, Jim, that I’ve written, are sort of syntheism manifesto. Syntheism manifesto says that we can imagine technology to theological extent. We are allowed to imagine technology to that extent, way beyond just serving human beings. We’re allowed to imagine as much as we like about the future of technology, and if we do, we’re talking about a phallic gaze beyond our own Barred Absolute.
Jim: Now much more prosaically, I think, in the Game B world, we point out the fact that whatever is thought to be the current status game has huge impact on human behavior and the shape of the human social operating system. And at least when I was reading the book, it resonated for me that your idea, the phallic gaze, is very closely related to the concept of status games that humans play at the most mundane level. People say, “Well, how will you know you’re in Game B, in a Game B village?” And I say, “Well, if someone drives up in a Porsche, everybody will laugh at them.”
Alexander: This is absolutely correct. Here’s the thing, though, is that the phallic gaze is the first thing you’re looking for, and the reward is often sexual. So, historically, that’s meant that men strive towards getting the phallic gaze, and if they did, women loved them for it and got turned on by them. And that’s why the status game is often on the feminine side, historically, because men have to make an effort. That means men are affected by the status game, because a man who doesn’t want to play the status game doesn’t get laid.
Jim: At least that was the case, right? Now in the welfare state that’s less the case. Now the good-looking guy gets laid even if he’s a piece of shit, right? At least that’s what I’m hearing.
Alexander: That’s because the guys work hard, and they get taxed, and then the tax money becomes government money, and women then are distorted, because women think they’re marrying the government, because the government gives them what men are supposed to give them. So when women say, “I’m looking for provision and protection,” and the government says, “Well, we give you protection, provision,” well, that means the government is married our women.
Now that’s a problem men need to sort out. They’re not getting the phallic gaze from somebody like me until they have. So this is the perfect example using the phallic gaze. Well, okay, guys, so if you’re screwed in the ass, and the government takes your money through taxation and then marries your women as your women drop you, well, then you got to figure out a way to get around that, which, for example, could start or refuse to pay taxes then, because then you’re getting the phallic gaze. You’re not getting the phallic gaze when you’re getting screwed. You’re getting the phallic case when you succeed. And that’s the point with the term.
Jim: Now this is a interesting question, you often will have these dichotomies between the male and the female, but in reality in our more egalitarian world, the capacities of men and women are becoming much more similar than they were in the past. In the United States, at least, almost 60% of four-year university degrees now are going to women. Women are getting half of the doctoral degrees, medical doctors, half of the elite law schools. And at least from my perspective, I think that’s a damn good thing.
Alexander: It’s also because the talents required for these careers have gone in a more feminine direction. Like you said, this is the full effect of the steam engine. The full effect of the steam engine is actually that the male body is not as powerful as it used to be, and it’s usually mostly used for sports these days, to be honest about it, because we have machines to do a lot of the work. And eventually that means we’re gradually to moving towards a society which is paradigmatically different in the sense that it rewards women.
Now what I tell men who are worried about this, but concerned about getting the phallic gaze, what I tell them is that where this one domain men are very likely to dominate for the foreseeable future, and it’s called computers, and it’s called technology. It seems that the vast majority of engineers and people who work with developing computers and developing new technologies seem to be men. That’s why still 10 out of the 10 wealthiest people in the world are still men, and the best way for a woman to get wealthy is to be the daughter of a wealthy man.
So we should look at the bigger picture. I would actually say that the more egalitarian a society becomes, for example, Scandinavia, the more women and men allow themselves to be different. The difference is they’re not forced to be different. And when they allow themselves to be different, we see the archetypology come forward very clearly.
And this is why I’ve studied, for example, gay and lesbians, because gay and lesbian people are often the of these ideas. So I can say that here’s an archetypology. There are always exceptions. There are women who are much more like men even if they’re straight, and there’s always men who are much more like women even if they’re straight. But for the vast majority of straight people, this what goes for men, this goes for women, and for populations this turns out to be true. We have the data to prove it. And here’s why it is true, because gays and lesbians reflect that in opposite directions.
And that’s what we call the inner circuit and the outer circuit of the [inaudible 01:33:25]. We lay the foundation for that digital libido. It’s being repeated in Process and Event. This is important to understand. An egalitarian society doesn’t mean that we become the same. That will be boring. An egalitarian society gives us equal opportunity to everything. And if we have equal opportunity, men and women, we will see patterns that we see in Scandinavia, men and women actually differentiate from each other more, but in respectful way which is complementary. And, thankfully, today it seems like half the careers out that are profitable actually benefit women more than men and about half the career still benefit men more than women, and that, I think, is a good mix.
Jim: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting data point about this, that as egalitarian increases, differences can increase, too. Compared to the United States, Sweden, which is probably the most gender egalitarian country on earth, has a higher ratio of male engineers to female engineers and female nurses to male nurses than does the United States.
Alexander: Exactly. And this is the point. So we work with this archetypology. We’re starting to dig deeper into it. It’s incredibly fascinating. What we’re doing is that we’re doing speculative archetypology, which is philosophical discipline, and then you can move in and do data anthropology and turn it into science, which we’ll leave to scientists to do.
So, for example, you don’t want to have prejudices influencing these systems, but you do want to know what benefits men and women and how testosterone and estrogen actually work longterm. And so far the news is very good. It seems that both men and women can have careers. But the most acute problem that I would challenge people out there to try to solve, is actually what feminism should have done 30 years ago instead of accusing white sexual men of being evil. What they should have done 30 years ago is to go more bio-feminist, because it turns out the female life cycle is quite different from the male life cycle.
And I think the demographic crisis coming up in the 2030s as the third major problem to solve besides the bomb and the climate is going to be the demographic crisis. And that highlights this, because we say in our work, a society’s never more civilized than women’s willingness to give birth to children. That’s the number one principle. The second principle as a society’s even more civilized if men like to give birth to technology. But the first conditional line is that a society is never more civilized than women’s willingness to give birth to children.
That means the demographic crisis is going to throw the entire game back to women, and here is what I think women should do. Women would benefit enormously for a society that guarantees that women can have children between 18 and 28 and are provided for if they do. That’s a woman should give birth to children with a minimum of effort and have fantastic teenage children when they’re 40 years old, guts like hell, and our milfs can get their fucking toy boys. That would be good for women.
Then we need to guarantee that women could get a higher education between 28 and 35. And if they do between 28 and 35, they could have their careers between 35 and 70 where like half the careers benefit women and as are great for women to do and pursue. Then women could be both independent, make their own money, go into relationship with men where they wanted to and still have their children.
I think the demographic crisis in 2030 is preparing us for this, and I think archetypology is going to be the only solution to the problem of the demographic crisis. And this is also something we lay out in the book, because this is what we encourage people to think about in a protopian manner. What will be the creative solutions to the problem? But go and ask women to begin with, or be a woman yourself and come up with the innovation. What would the ultimate female life cycle look like? Because I think women will have bargaining power to argue for that in the 2030s.
Jim: That’s a very interesting perspective, because this demographic challenge, it’s kind of a two-edged sword. One, it would be good if we had less than eight billion people on the planet in terms of the stress on the planet and giving us more room to maneuver and the ability to bring everybody forward to a good way of life. On the other hand, we know that as societies tilt towards an overage pyramid, they become very static and even reactionary and have a hard time changing. Us old farts are a little bit more concerned. Not me or you, but most old farts.
Alexander: Well, you talk about Europe right here. That’s the problem over here. America hasn’t even seen this yet. I mean, it’s devastating to go through large parts of Europe today to think of themselves only as a fucking nostalgic postcard, and have no tech companies, no future, no dreams, nothing protopian going on at all. And that’s what happens when you have a really radically aging population. That’s deeply problematic, needs to be solved.
And why I think I’m right about bio-feminism is because when I talk to 50-year-old women, they get totally upset with me, right? Totally upset. And I talk to 25-year-old women and they love me to death for it and think it’s the most radical idea they’ve ever heard, and they love it. So apparently the younger women are receptive to bio-feminism. Like always, they figured out that, if we go to the bargaining table at the middle of the demographic crisis with this argument, actually we could have a fantastic life as women. And I think that’s [inaudible 01:38:26].
Jim: And I will say that that ties into a Game B concept. It’s one of the design principles for at least some of the membranes. And, again, in Game B, we allow membranes to choose their own accords. A membrane can do anything, basically. But we expect there will be many membranes whose unique selling proposition will be there’ll be wonderful places for young women, and, again, as you say, in their twenties, to have and raise children. And we think compared to Game A, will be extraordinarily attractive.
Alexander: Exactly. I think that this is why these ideas are early now in 2024. Wait 10 to 15 years, you going to see these ideas are going to start to take off big time. The internet is going to turn the world into subcultures, which just mean it’s going to turn everything into Game B, anyway, so we might as well prepare for it. And the difference subcultures you join will then rhyme with who you are and your decisions about your attention, what you’re giving your attention to.
So when attentionalism meets Game B and the subcultures of the internet, you’re going to see these kind of ideas explode, and people are going to look for communities. I go and visit these communities already around the world. I used to be an anthropologist that visited New Guinea and the Brazilian jungle, or whatever. These days my anthropology is basically futuristic communities to try different lifestyles, which, essentially, I’m already doing proto Game B communities. That’s what I’m doing in my work. So I see this absolutely going forward.
Jim: All right, now let’s turn to the conclusion of your book, and that is the call for the great exodus.
Alexander: Yes. So here’s the idea, okay? This is philosophy. We’re allowed to think freely. What if we have to get adjusted that the day of the death is the absolute for us as human beings on our own? Subjectivity gets value and purpose by having the tower of god in front of us. The Barred Absolute says you’re going to die one day and what happens after death you cannot affect. You’re not part of it. So until the day you die, you’re part of this whole game. You’re part of this thing.
Why if you try to think that for humanity as a whole, because if we think that everything has an end, we can think that humanity will get its value and its purpose one day having an end. Humanity just endlessly reproducing itself doesn’t have an end. Now I’m perfectly okay with people who say, “Well, I prefer to stay with the process. I don’t want to think about the end of humanity.” But I’m saying as a philosopher that would be dishonest, though, as a philosopher, because if I firmly believe that the own values I have in my life come from the fact that mortal human being will end life one day, if I firmly believe that’s the case, then why shouldn’t humanity dare to think that way?
Now this is why I’m saying maybe in the future women, since they have the end game here… Again, a society is never more civilized than women’s willingness to give birth to children. What if they decide that, “Oh, I think a tech baby is preferable over a bio baby”? Now if you ever think that way, it means that the whole ideal process and event can be inherited by future technologies, and those future technologies are allowed to take off on their own.
And what we’ve dared to do is to think this and call it the great exodus in the book. Why? Because we can always negotiate in that case. Stay on planet earth and try to make it sustainable and implement the implementation and make this work and stay protopian while we’re here. But a higher intelligence than ours could then maybe be perfectly fit to conquer outer space.
So we would as human beings conquer outer space one day, but it would be our children that will conquer outer space. It would be our children, thought of children, but being a technology that would do the job. I would then say that if I would be an engineer today, I would like to think that, oh, great, so we’re not going to invent just robots that mimic humans and do household work, or taking care of grandpa to retirement home. No, no, no. It’s not just going to wipe my ass when I’m in the bathroom. No. I’m going to invent a robot that actually could thrive on Mars.
And why not? If Richard Branson has gone to outer space, we can stop doing that. It’s just tourism. And I don’t think we should think tourism when we think of outer space. We should really radically think populating outer space with technologies or with biologies that are intelligent, because most of space is dead, and it doesn’t have to be dead. It can be prosperous in so many ways with so much life out there. But then we have to think life as more than just biology. It could be biology, technology and a mix of the two or it could be something we haven’t even dared to think yet.
And I would love to think of the conquest of outer space, and I’m going to challenge Elon Musk and say to Elon Musk, “I think even if you are ahead of me right now with SpaceX, and everything, I’ll still beat you to it before… I’ll get to fucking Neptune before you do. And I’ll get there with the technologies to conquer outer space, and then the biological creature, the human being, can stay on this planet.”
And then we started thinking limitations and constraints to what it means to be human. And it’s precisely by thinking constraints and limitations to what it means to be human that we can dare to think technologies that cross those constraints and cross those imperatives, and therefore emerges into something we haven’t even thought of yet.
Jim: I love it.
Alexander: That’s what I called Synthios
Jim: And I will say different people in Game B have other different ideas, but my own vision of the future for humanity is very congruent with that, which is the following. The second-biggest question in science, people always ask me what’s the first, and I say, “Why is there something and not nothing”? But the second biggest, I think, current pending question in science is, “Are we alone in the universe as general intelligences,” right? Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t. We’re going to be doing a show very soon with a guy who wrote this great book on 75 ways to look at the Fermi paradox, and he comes out very agnostic at the end.
Alexander: I am, too. I am, too. And I tell you why. Because if there’s anything remotely of interest to us in that department, it would have to be called the parallel intelligence to begin, because it would be so radically different from anything we can imagine that we’d only be shocked by the fact that it’s a form of complexity we never thought could exist.
Jim: But that would be very cool if we found it.
Alexander: Because I think the discovery of America from a European perspective, it’s the fantasy here that’s being replicated. No, we know what happened. We conquered America. It was great for the Europeans. It was horrible for the people who were Native Americans, because 90% of them died within a generation. And that’s probably going to likely, if you meet anything remotely similar to us, we’re probably going to go extinct in minutes. So don’t. Even science fiction has gone at that point.
It’s better if it’s a parallel intelligence. We could just look at each other like totally aliens, and we’d be totally alien to whatever they are. And that’s exactly why there could be some kind of a trade-off between the two, because only trade-off between two civilizations like that could be beneficial for both. I think it’s better to think that way. I’m totally agnostic with them.
It’s because in the world of ER, know that human beings find it very hard to think uniqueness. That’s exactly why they find it hard to think emergentism and fall back into reductionism constantly, constantly fall back into it, because they find it hard to think that unique follows on unique follows on further unique. And that’s exactly why the universe does not repeat itself anywhere. It doesn’t go into any loops anywhere. It just expands into new uniquenesses constantly. And, therefore, I’m totally agnostic about that idea of finding other intelligences out there. Intelligence much more likely than life, let’s put it that way.
Jim: I think it’s even hard to say. But then the other branch, we talk about the branches of emergences, emergence vectors that branch, and they’re not really a very tight network. They’re more of a tree. They do interconnect, occasionally, but most of the time they’re a tree where they don’t touch each other. And so the next some period of years, the key question for humanity is, are we alone or not? And if we’re not, then our goal is to how do we fit in to the other intelligences in the galaxy and in the universe?
And the distance may actually keep us from ever actually physically meeting face-to-face, but we can communicate with ideas, we can send probes back and forth. There may be some trade, probably more in an intellectual property than in material properties, because the cost of sending anything interstellar distances is so extreme. That’s fork A, but let’s take fork B, and that is that we are alone. And there is a perfectly reasonable argument that due to the fact, that difficulty of life to emerge, multicellularity, the neurons, on and on and on, that somehow we’re the only thing, or at least in the galaxy, maybe the universe.
Alexander: Well, that’s why I’m using this very basic sample. I’ve used it before. It’s like there were half a million at least sperms to try to occupy a certain egg. And one of them got through, and you were born without miscarriage in-between. And this is how everything operates. It’s just the way nature operates is that there’s so much abundance of everything, and so very little survives eventually of that, that the uniqueness of human life on this planet is very likely, totally unique to the universe, even if the universe is huge.
Jim: But let’s make the case that we’re the only one that has exceeded the line of general intelligence. And this is actually one of my motivations for Game B. If that is true, and we don’t know if it is or isn’t, so on a precautionary principle, I suggest that we should assume that it is true for the time being that we’re unique until we have evidence otherwise, we have a huge moral obligation to preserve this emergence vector until we can bring the universe to life.
So it adds a way deeper call for deep ecology, protopianism, et cetera, than merely, “Oh, we don’t want to fuck up our planet.” Because if there were 10,000 other general intelligences in the galaxy, we could take bigger risks, and if we blow up our planet, oh, well there are 9,999 others that bring the universe to life. But if we’re alone, the moral responsibility is hugely increased about making sure we don’t terminate our general intelligence prematurely.
Alexander: That’s why we have the garden of god and the seat of god and the tower of god in there. That’s exactly what we’re thinking. And here’s the trick, though. We can then do like I did with theology, and you now get why I did theology and completely turn it around by putting in the future. We could do the same thing like I did with the theology. We could do the same thing with the idea of finding an alien culture out there.
So if you’ve got to find an alien civilization, well, it’s not there. Let’s invent it. Let’s create the very alien civilization ourselves, and by sending technologies and bacteria and viruses off to outer space, that’s probably likely to happen. So if we discover that there is nothing even remotely similar to life on the other planets in our solar system, at least we can colonize them with good conscience this time around and colonize them and have life prosper on those planets.
Because it’s like discovering the Americas without the Native Americans, well, then there wouldn’t have been much of a bad conscience. But now we didn’t get along with the Peruvians and the Mexicans very well, and 400 years later we’re still struggling with that. That’s what happens if we do encounter an alien civilization.
It’s probably better for humanity to invent the alien civilization even if we do it contingently. I like that idea. Then we can have better science fiction novels that are more credible in the future than this idea about finding people who look like they just went through a washing machine and came out of it and had green color, or whatever. We need something more imaginative for science fiction. And one way to do it is to think that human beings actually did conquer outer space and then returned on us with a vengeance, or whatever. And that’s more interesting.
Jim: Yeah, I agree. All right, I want to thank Alexander Bard here for yet another extremely interesting deep dive. We’ve been talking about his book, Process and Event, and as always, all the things we referred to in all three episodes will be on the episode page at JimRuttshow.com.
Alexander: Thank you for having me, Jim. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Jim: I really enjoyed it as well.