The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Mark Stahlman. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Mark Stahlman. Mark is a biologist, a computer architect and ex-Wall Street technology strategist. He’s the president of the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Digital Life. You can find out more about that organization at digitallife.center. He also writes an interesting Substack at exogenous.substack.com and he’s a returning guest. He was on EP 174 with Fred Beitler, where Mark and Fred talked about Mark’s ventures Tribune University. So welcome back, Mark.
Mark: Hey, Jim. Good to see you.
Jim: Yeah, this should be an interesting conversation. This is triggered by a comment that Mark made on Assbook, also known as Facebook, for those of you who are more respectful than I, where I was ranting and raving about the evils of Trump, I suppose, which I do from time to time. Can’t help myself, though I should not let that fucker live rent free in my head the way he does. But anyway, Mark popped in with a mysterious and oracular comment, which I’m going to read. And when I read it, I said, oh, I gotta have Mark back on the show. I’m sure he’s got something interesting to say about the current context.
So this is what Mark wrote: “Jim, Trump is not at all what he seems to be. Step back, identify the ground, ignore the figure. What’s really going on? Digital technology has forced us into a paradigm shift. As Dorothy put it, ‘Toto, I have a feeling we aren’t in Kansas anymore.’ Trump is the avatar of this transformation. Unless you articulate the shift now underway, which is the work of the Center for Digital Life, he loses all relevance.”
Now you have to admit that was Rutt bait right there. Right? Because I know that Mark has a very deep philosophical basis for what he says. It may all be wrong and utter horseshit, but it’s deep, intricate, well thought out. So I said, with a bait like that on the water, I’m gonna have to get Mark in here and see what the fuck you talking about, dude.
Mark: So speaking of deep, intricate, and well thought out, I’d like to start with a thank you to you and your fellow Game B viewers and those who were adjacent to Game B, including yourself, obviously including Jordan Hall, including Daniel Schmachtenberger, including Zach Stein, Civilization Research Institute. When I first met you and some of those others eight years ago, you were literally the first people I met and wanted to engage on the necessary shift to a new paradigm. You of course had posited it in terms of complexity theory, having once been the chairman at Santa Fe and having involved Jordan in the trustees at Santa Fe, that was quite natural.
Your initial postulation, which is around the same time that we came to that conclusion as well independently, was that we were heading into a new basin of attraction. And you listed a number of possibilities that might head towards. And you had a notion that you wanted to nudge towards the one that you wanted it to go to. But you had no doubt that it was leaving the previous game basin and heading to something new. And you were absolutely correct. I think the past eight, ten years that we both have been doing this, maybe longer in your case, have proved that to be correct.
Let me offer just a very quick anecdote of the sort of thing that we do at the center. And I think you folks are doing a version of this as well. Twelve years ago, so about the same time that you and I and our various colleagues were working on this, I was invited to the Pentagon to visit the then head of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA reports directly to SecDef. ONA was established by Andy Marshall, who was the one who invited me in 1973. Andy, unfortunately, is no longer with us, but Andy was invited by James Schlesinger to open the Office of Net Assessment in direct opposition to Henry Kissinger.
The thought at the time was that the Pentagon wasn’t getting the straight skinny from Kissinger or from CIA. And so the Defense Department needed an alternative that would not have any strategic responsibilities, would only have responsibility for diagnosing the situation and making long-range predictions. So ten, twelve years is about the right timeframe. And that invitation led to the following conversation. Andy wanted to know what the implication of Obama’s second election in ’12 was all about. And I said, “Okay. By the 2020 election,” I said to him, “what we now know of as the Democrat and Republican parties will no longer exist. The entire makeup of US politics will have been forced into a radical restructuring.”
I didn’t put it in complexity terms. I put it in technology terms. The formal cause of this shift will be digital technology. There’s no way that political parties, which were crafted under television conditions, can survive this. And I got an interesting comment – one of the people who knew about this, an old friend of mine, contacted me the other day as he’s watching what’s going on in Washington and said, “From now on, I’m going to call you Nostradamus. How the hell did you know that was going to happen?”
And we both know the answer to that. If you’re paying attention, if you’ve got some solid underlying theory that deals with changes like this, but more importantly, probably you have an experience and an intuition that can tell you how fast things are moving and something of the direction, but not necessarily the full direction. So you and I came at this from different standpoints, but we reached the same conclusion. So if I may, I will begin with a congratulation to you and your colleagues and all of the conversations that we’ve had together since then.
Jim: Well, thank you. And of course, there’s many more than just the ones you name. One of the things about Game B is it’s radically decentralized, no center, swarming, and both/and as we like to say – it’s coherent pluralism. There’s a center that we all agree to, but it’s fairly small, and everybody has their different perspectives. And we believe that is the correct way to think about the future rather than top-down ideology.
Mark: Right. I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to the Jeff Sachs presentation last week to the European Parliament, but what stuck out for me as he was trying to somehow get Europe to stand up on their own, however many feet they might have – it’s not two, they might have 20 feet, I’m not quite sure. But he said subsidiarity is the principle that has to be applied. And that is a decentralized pluralism.
Jim: Yeah. And of course, we talk about subsidiarity as part of any reasonable Game B operating system as a key component, which for those who don’t know what the term means, I think it was originally part of Catholicism. And the idea is that decisions should be made at the lowest level that’s appropriate for resolving that problem. For instance, the example I like to give is, should there be allowed public drinking of alcohol? Right? Seems to me this is a neighborhood level question. Because it’s a quality of life thing. Do you want people drinking on the street or don’t you? There’s arguments both ways. I would probably vote yes in most scenarios.
Mark: Particularly if you lived in New Orleans on Mardi Gras.
Jim: And I lived in Ketchum, Idaho, which is one of the other five cities that allow public drinking on the street. In fact, when you went from one bar to the other in the evening they’d say, “Hey, do you want a traveler?” if you hadn’t quite finished your drink yet, and they’d pour it into a little plastic cup and off you go. But weirdly in Virginia where I live, it’s a state level law. Why is that? Who the hell knows? Right. When it really should be a neighborhood level or at most town level ordinance, but probably neighborhood level. Anyway, so that’s what subsidiarity is. So continue.
Mark: Subsidiarity was brought in, you’re correct, as a part of something more broadly known as Catholic social teaching. It was initially and has been subsequently reinforced with a variety of encyclicals, but the first encyclical Rerum Novarum occurred in 1891. There are three principles of Catholic social teaching. Subsidiarity, you will not be surprised perhaps, is the one which is least emphasized today by the church. But the other two, which originated in the 1890s, were dignity – human dignity – and solidarity. We’ve actually written a detailed account using a more modern approach, psychological approach, to the question of human dignity. Why do we want to afford dignity to humans, say as opposed to machines and so forth? And we’re working on the other versions of this. We have a publication called Thynoeticon, all of which can be found at the CSDL website.
Jim: Now I have to check that out because, again, a core premise of Game B is that the Game B social operating system ought to ensure human dignity for everybody irrespective of their biological, sociological, familial endowments. If you don’t have dignity for all, then there is something seriously wrong with your civilization.
Mark: As well as solidarity. Solidarity with the rest of the human race, which puts us in a very interesting position relative to the machines.
Jim: Or Sol and I would say, our view of solidarity is that it is very complex in that you’ll have higher solidarity inside local membranes, which will define what Jordan Hall originally called strong sauce, which we now call accords. So no drinking on the street in this little membrane, right? Might be a few hundred people. And then the next membrane up would be less coherent, but still significantly coherent. And so you have this very interesting interpenetrated series of membranes with accords and differing levels of solidarity, but still organized by a small core of coherence.
Mark: I’ll just note in finishing with Catholic social teaching, the two most famous, although there were other encyclicals that followed that. The first of those was by Pope Pius XI, and the last of them was by John Paul II. So there have been three big encyclicals, but as I’ve discovered as a practicing Catholic myself who has interacted with the Vatican and others, you will not be able to get into a serious conversation about these things today with today’s Vatican. Today’s Vatican after Vatican II shifted away from all of this stuff and has yet to catch up. As the priest who is the primary advisor to Pope Francis who writes all of his material when he talks about AI – so he would be the AI czar – has told me the Vatican is not ready for digital yet.
So institutions are facing these transitions in different ways. What I meant when I said that Trump is not what he seems, which is the way he’s portrayed in the media as a selfish transactional orange Cheeto, “orange man bad,” is that in fact, something quite remarkable has happened here. The core of, and I don’t know how much this was emphasized frankly in all the discussion about Game A, but as you’ve indicated, the A to B transition is from a centralized to a decentralized organization operating system. The centralization Game A is usually called globalism. And globalism cannot be sustained. Globalism has already crashed and burned. And that is one of the big components of exactly what Trump is now doing. He is attempting in his own way with the audience that he has and with the colleagues that he can assemble – he’s attempting to withdraw the United States from the previous globalist arrangement. And that is inevitable. That I think was a part of my 2013 prediction at the Pentagon.
Jim: Let’s continue this line. But before we do this, why don’t you briefly introduce us to your concept of the three spheres?
Mark: Exactly. So the obvious question, if you posit that a new technology is taking over – digital is taking over from a television paradigm – there needs to be an answer to the question: what comes after globalism? What comes after that centralized system using the United States as the global enforcer, in many ways using the UK as the global policy agenda maker? Various historians have referred to it as a continuation of the British Empire.
But as that fragments, the first thing that becomes obvious is the separation between East and West. It turns out that we have a great deal of expertise on China. I’ve been there quite a few times, but my partner in founding CSTL, Phil Midland, a retired naval intelligence officer, has spent as much as half of his life there. He probably has access to a wide variety of developments in China unlike any other.
East and West may be relatively easy to understand as the way the world fragments. So a globalist one world has to fragment into multiple worlds. But the real sphere which has caused this to happen, formally caused this to happen, is what we call the digital sphere. As you know from astro-cosmology, when you have a three-body problem, there’s no canonical solution. You can reduce it to two-body problems and there’s a few of those in there and you can try to project them, but you can’t solve for it.
This is one of the conceits behind a very interesting Chinese science fiction series by Cixin Liu. The whole series is called “Remembrance of Earth’s Past,” and the first novel was called “The Three-Body Problem.” The conceit here is that there’s a system somewhere else that has three suns that causes all sorts of issues for them, particularly in relationship to Earth, which only has one sun.
What has happened here is that the two human spheres, East and West, have taken different approaches to the third sphere, the newly emerged digital sphere. What happened in China, of course, is that they incorporated it. They didn’t allow it to grow independently. My first trip to China in 1997 to speak at a conference in Wuhan on technology, put on by the PLA (People’s Liberation Army), was in fact to deal with just that question. The Chinese, through a PLA general, offered me a job, so to speak, a consulting job, if I would help them establish China’s independent role in the internet. I declined that job for the obvious reasons – I did not want to pursue the rest of my life as somebody who has to register under the FARA Act as a foreign resource. That didn’t mean that my relations with China or our relations with China disappeared – they did not by any means – but I’m not an agent of China. I am a researcher, a net assessor of China.
The other approach is going on now in the West. That approach is to allow the digital sphere to take over to a degree. The staffing of the Trump White House cabinet and major departments, as you know because I know you follow this stuff, is now very thoroughly VCs and entrepreneurs from the digital sphere in the US. This takeover – Elon Musk of course is the primary target of this, but it goes much deeper than this. David Sacks, the Treasury Secretary – these are all guys with VC backgrounds. This is a digital sphere. It’s human instance. These are the guys who are pushing AI, which is digital sphere.
So the two major human spheres after the one world broke apart, two different approaches were adopted as you might expect. And so here we are with a Western sphere in the US that has enormous momentum – “move fast and break things” momentum. To indicate the date which will eventually be shown when this is all posted: tonight is Trump’s speech to the joint Congress. Last night, Trump threw 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. That is not a one-world approach. That is very much a post-globalist approach, which is why it comes up with so much complaints. So we’re already well into the transition that you, your colleagues, me and my colleagues, and others anticipated ten, fifteen years ago. We’re well into this transition and this is how it looks.
Jim: A quick question on the Canadian tariffs. I mean, globalism is one thing, but the Canadian and Mexican tariffs and tariffs on aluminum and steel and things are also intra-West conflicts. Right? So this is not just breaking down globalism on a worldwide scale, but it’s even fragmenting the Western sphere.
Mark: Correct. Absolutely correct. And maybe even more importantly than that is the divergence between the hemispheres, the Western Hemisphere and the Eastern Hemisphere, the way Europe is clinging to this globalist exercise when in fact, as anybody who’s had the chance to talk to Europeans, they hate each other.
Jim: Not only do they hate each other naturally – for instance, we went to Scandinavia a few years back, first and only trip there. I had no idea that even the Scandinavians dislike each other.
Mark: Absolutely.
Jim: They all think Norwegians are a bunch of West Virginia hillbillies. Danes are a bunch of drunks. Swedes are a bunch of arrogant snobs, and Finns are just a bunch of weirdos. I mean, you know, from an American perspective, you would have thought they were as similar as herring in a can. But turns out, they dislike each other at least as much as your average countries do.
Mark: When the EU was being formed, I had a front row seat. I had become close friends with a man by the name of Vittorio Cossohni. Mr. Cossohni was the head of Olivetti. His boss was Carlo De Benedetti. The EU was formed by people like Benedetti. It was formed by European bankers to try to overcome this natural hatred of one for another. And I wound up spending a lot of time in Europe at that time. I was working on Wall Street, and so I was flying to Stockholm to talk to investment clients. In my adjacent seat, I got into a conversation with an experienced European businessman. And we were talking about how is the EU going to work? Do these people really want to form a union of that sort? The United States of Europe? He looked at me smiling and said, “No, hell no. People in every valley hate the people in the next valley.” And this goes back so many generations. But there are attempts now within the West to put together some sort of a subsidiary United States of Europe – that was the Jeff Sachs speech last week to European Parliament. I don’t give it very high probabilities, but you’re absolutely correct. There are many divisions now being talked about and many attempts at bringing people together out of a defense and other basis which are unlikely to succeed.
Jim: Indeed. Alright, so let’s now recap what we said so far is that the digital sphere is an emerging sphere, been emerging since what 1972 or thereabouts – you could even say 1948. And the East and the West are dealing with them quite differently. With the East, from my perspective, attempting to use the digital sphere as a main means to build a post-Orwellian total state that has total surveillance, your social credit system. You fart in public too many times, you’re banned from the subway, all this sort of shit.
Mark: There are more closed circuit televisions in London than there are in Beijing.
Jim: Yeah. Yeah. The Brits just aren’t very good at it. There’s 2 million CCTVs, but no one’s watching them. The Chinese have plugged into their AI, so it’s a big difference. While the West is, I think one could say, letting digital happen, because the West is an “if it’s not forbidden, it’s allowed” culture. And so since digital is not forbidden, it’s allowed, and digital is doing its own thing in the West. And we’re building some new mutant thing of the West plus digital, with neither actually in charge at this point, I would say. Tell me what you think about that. Am I unfair to the Chinese, and am I absurdly delusional about the West?
Mark: Well, let us just say that for those who have had a chance to study Chinese culture, both historically and contemporarily, it’s very clear that the differences here are fundamental. So applying Western terminology – political, social, religious, economic – to China requires a fairly large dose of “they don’t do things the same way.” So what we’re calling totalitarian might be a fine description of Chinese culture over millennia. But it doesn’t come out of the words “authoritarian,” “totalitarian,” and so forth that we use in the West. It’s just a whole different approach. A different social operating system, if you will. Much as Game B is a different social operating system. I have come to the conclusion – I’m not sure I’ve convinced anybody – that social credit is not being used to catch people who fart too many times in public, but rather is being used primarily to find the good guys. It’s a meritocratic effort to figure out who the people are that can be counted on. There’s a long history of this in China, of course – this is the Mandarin system.
Jim: The examination system. Yeah. They worked hard to find the at least book-learning best and brightest, whether they were actually the best and brightest is another story. But the ones who had absorbed this gigantic body of arcane knowledge, which was then subject of this examination to come into the Mandarin, which was meritocratic. You could be the poor son of a peasant in the outback, but if you could make it to Beijing somehow and pass the test, then you too could be a Mandarin.
Mark: That’s correct. And this was in many places, existing Mandarins on horseback would ride through the villages in all the various provinces and ask the village elder, “Who’s your candidate this time?” And so it began at the very lowest level. One aspect of this, maybe not so widely known – perhaps the most important Jesuit missionary in China, at least from the Chinese standpoint, was a man named Matteo Ricci. A Jesuit priest who landed in China, figured out that if he dressed up as a Taoist priest, he would make his way to Beijing and he got stopped very quickly. Then he figured out, “I’m going to be a Confucian.” That’ll get me to Beijing. Well, it did get him to Beijing, but he didn’t get there because of the clothes he wore. He got to Beijing because he began teaching people about what we would call in the West a memory palace. This is a technique that involves imagining a large structure divided into various rooms, into which various ideas and memories are placed. It turns out that he introduced a Western technique that was very effective in the Mandarin tests. That ultimately got him to Beijing and also got him rewarded the observatory that is right outside the second ring in Beijing. Throughout the Cultural Revolution, Matteo Ricci’s tomb, which is rather lavish, was protected by soldiers, as was the church that he was associated with. He was taken off the list of what needed to be smashed in the Cultural Revolution. So there’s a very deep connection here between Ricci and the Mandarin test. I believe what’s happening now with social credit, as opposed to social blame or social debt, is in large part an attempt to under digital conditions, reinitialize a version of the Mandarin test.
Jim: It’s an interesting perspective, but why is it focused on like petty transgressions, like jaywalking?
Mark: Well, I’m not sure who told you that it is, but it isn’t. Having been there and seen it in action, that’s not the way it works. The Chinese are inclined not to jaywalk anyway. And if somebody’s jaywalking, there’s probably a whole lot of other things going on, which are well known for other reasons. So I have asked Chinese officials, I’ve asked experts on China: “Can you give me examples of how this is being used?” And the answer is it’s not being used for jaywalking and farting in public. I was in China when one of the major sweeps of the Uyghurs was beginning. I was in Shanghai and told about this and that’s pre-social credit. So there are many mechanisms built into Communist Party of China’s relationship that don’t need social credit. They didn’t need it to find jaywalkers. They needed it to find their version of the best and the brightest.
Jim: Could you give a tangible example of how they’re using digital signals to identify the best and the brightest?
Mark: I’ve been told, because I’m not immediately in the midst of it – I’ve been told and have met some people who said that they wound up being elevated. One of the ways that this plays out is that, as you might expect, the Communist Party of China, which is a relatively difficult thing to get into – anybody who applies doesn’t get approved. There are a variety of ways that this is done. And one of them is a college that I have visited in Beijing, which took provincial kids. It was a junior college. I have discussed this with the president of that college and how they use social credit to identify the kids and accelerate their development.
Jim: All right. So let’s now go to the second part of my grotesque chainsaw summary, which is the West by its traditions, where that which is not forbidden is permitted, particularly in the Anglosphere. We have a digital which is emerging and yet coexisting with the previous Western traditions. Talk us through that a little bit.
Mark: Well, here I think Jeff Sachs, who’s American, in his speech last week was quite correct. He categorically separated the US, which is where if it’s not forbidden, it’s permitted, and Europe. That is not the scheme. It has traditionally not been a scheme in Latin America, although a libertarian president in Argentina may be changing some of that.
The simplest answer to your question is there is no West, there is no East. These things have always been fragmented. So some version of federated had to be put together. You know very well that Massachusetts, California, Arizona, Louisiana, Texas – these are not all the same place. They’re all federated, but they all have quite different cultural expressions.
What I would say is that the West, broadly speaking, which is where globalism originated, has so degraded itself with Europe being further down the degradation scale than the US, that you’re seeing the sort of reactions that are now ongoing. So the West is fragmented. Attempts to unify it into one world… Let me give you an anecdotal example of that.
One of the primary promoters of the one world globalism was the Rockefeller family, and in particular, David Rockefeller, the banker. He founded a number of organizations, but one of them, although it usually goes under the name of Prince Bernard of Netherlands, he pretty much founded the Bilderberg Group. The Bilderberg Group is a fascinating example of how this is all developing in the West. Bilderberg Group historically had nobody from the East. It was largely Eurocentric, but was formed by an American, David Rockefeller.
So one day in the late sixties, David Rockefeller goes into a Bilderberg meeting and says, “I’d like to expand the membership to include Asia, in particular, Japan.” The relationship between the Rockefeller family and Japan was and is to this day massive. Sony Corporation – at one point in my Wall Street career, I became the only analyst following Sony Corporation who didn’t live in Tokyo. There was a brief period where the headquarters of Sony had moved to New York. In fact, I proposed that the best way to understand Sony is a federation of samurai castles. These were the divisions within Sony.
When I became the analyst, I put my thinking cap on and I went and took a look at what the ownership of Sony Corporation was. Who owns the damn place? And it turns out that a vast amount of the Sony stock was in trust at Chase Manhattan Bank – David’s bank. It turns out that there are many parts of this relationship. And most importantly, Bilderberg said no, not allowed. As a result, in 1973, David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, at their resort on Lake Como, Bellagio, formed the Trilateral Commission – three sides. That was an attempt to get Europe, USA, and Japan all together. I don’t know if you follow the history of the Trilateral Group, but it failed massively.
When we began this three spheres discussion back in 2015, we had India, we had Africa, we had Judaism. We had a number of other spheres. And I think we got up to seven or eight and we said, “No, this is going to be impossible if the audience that we’re presenting this to needs something far simpler than that.” But the reality is more complicated. It always is. So we settled in on the three: East, West and digital.
The United States is permitting this – this is what’s happening with all this in the cabinet and the rest. And the reason why I said in my reply to your post, Askbook, as you put it, that he’s not what he seems to be. What he’s doing is he’s bringing in the digital sphere to completely remake the US system. That has not happened in Europe. Europe, as you know, has antitrust. They have all sorts of regulations on AI and so forth. So they are in the “we’re gonna tell you what’s permitted and what’s not” mode, which you’re describing broadly to the West.
It’s more broadly perhaps European, although from time to time, it has been an American approach. We’re just seeing further fragmentation here. But that blending of the digital sphere – Elon et al – with American libertarian-style approach is very much on display. And as you know, all of the usual suspects parade on television with their hair on fire as a result of this every night. It’s really quite exciting. As I’ve discussed with some friends, I will sometimes deliberately tune into CNN to get a good laugh. I have almost fallen out of my chair a few times at how funny CNN has become. I hope it survives as a humor channel, although their ratings don’t seem to indicate that’s happening.
Jim: You could feed the output into an LLM and then continuously generate CNN-style commentary even after it’s no longer successful as a business. Like, that would be the humor version of it – straight-faced deadpan humor.
I will say, I’ve been very clear on Facebook – I could never vote for Trump. Orange man bad. He actually is bad. He’s actually evil. And I could go on for hours on why. So yes, I held my nose with channel locks and voted for the alternative. But I also, at the same time, and probably for similar reasons to you, find the whole Democratic Party and the alleged progressive side today just sort of laughably inept and not having any clue what’s going on, which scares the hell out of me. Because if orange man bad and his henchmen actually do prevail against nothing, which is pretty much what their opponents are now, we may end up in a very bad place.
You mentioned some of the Game B analysis earlier. One of my papers that’s gotten the biggest takeup is a precursor paper called “In Search of the Fifth Attractor,” where we talk about Game A and then we talk about four attractors that the system could go to. We talk about neo-fascism, which I define as China because it hits all the attributes of traditional fascism; neo dark ages, which would be a new theocracy – that would be your attractor over there. Well, we’ll talk about that later, just kidding you a little. And then, neo-feudalism. This is what I argue – even at the time in 2015 when I gave that talk, which then turned into the essay – that Peter Thiel was the exemplar of neo-feudalism.
If you listen to Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos – who was recently quoted at a Washington Post editorial board meeting saying “Oh yeah, the future of the West is most people providing services to the rich” – whoa. One of the people on the editorial board said, “Hey, that sounds like revolution to me.” But if they’re able to build sort of an analog of the Chinese totalitarian system to keep the masses down so that the guillotines don’t roll out to the estates, they might pull it off.
When I look at this fusion, it’s bizarre because every political party in America is a weird fusion because of our institutional dynamics, which make it very hard to have more than two parties. The Trumpian coalition is actually a combination of multiple factions, but two of them actually fit into my analysis of bad attractors. One is the Silicon Valley boys, who I would argue are neo-feudalists, and then the Christian nationalists who are also quite influential and were very influential in the Project 2025 report. They are to a greater or lesser degree neo dark ages people or at least neo-theocrats.
One of the games going on beneath the surface, which is not yet fully in the public view, is the war between the two. The spokesman for the neo dark ages people is Bannon, and he’s officially declared war on Musk. You don’t hear about that too much. But those two bad attractors are both in the same bag, which is gonna be quite humorous. What say you to that, sir?
Mark: I was invited once to go on Bannon’s War Room, so I got a little bit of an inside view. And you are absolutely correct. As is shown on a shelf behind him, he is a birth Catholic, Latin Mass Catholic, attempted to start a seminary effectively outside of Rome that failed. And he’s probably gonna start it again someplace here. So I think your description is quite correct. He, in an early biography – not an autobiography, but one of the first biographies of him – claims to have become a disciple of Erasmus. So this is, I think, quite correct. And you, I think you’ve identified the reason for the problem there. But you should also note that Bannon has backed off in his most recent public comments. Bannon is not really a significant part of the MAGA movement at this point. And I think he got some one of his appendages handed to him for all of these attacks on Musk. So he’s backed off on that. Another character in the mix here, who probably deserves a little discussion, is Curtis Yarvin.
Jim: Ah, yes. Curtis has been on my show twice, and I’ve had some dealings with Curtis all the way back to the Urbit days, the very early Urbit days, where I made some suggestions.
Mark: Yeah. That was his software, right?
Jim: The inner workings of his, the inner language in the Urbit world. So, yeah, I know and unlike most people, I’ve read most of his Mencius Moldbug stuff.
Mark: Yeah. Well, I know you posted that you assigned ChatGPT or some LLM to go pull it all for you.
Jim: Yeah. No, I had previously read it back when it was first published, but I figured for other people’s benefit, and also to refresh my memory, I got deep research mode in ChatGPT Pro, which is unbelievable to go back and read all his stuff and summarize it in fairly long form. It’s well worth reading. It’s on my Twitter as I’ve been doing that, posting results of deep research, which are every one of them amazing that I’ve done so far. But anyway, yeah. So Curtis Yarvin, he’s clearly a neo-feudalist. He literally advocates for a monarchy, right?
Mark: Correct. Correct.
Jim: And an oligarchic monarchy with something like the electors of the Holy Roman Empire to choose the next monarch. So he’s the most pure, unabashed neo-feudalist. But J.D. Vance has talked regularly, apparently, with Yarvin. And J.D. Vance is that interesting oddball sitting right on the line between the neo-feudalists on one side and the neo-dark ages people on the other, because he’s also a religious nut on top of everything else. Right? So, we got ourselves quite a hairball there in Washington.
Mark: Well, we have a practicing Hindu Director of National Intelligence in Tulsi Gabbard.
Jim: But not a birth Hindu. People think she’s Indian – she’s not. She’s actually Samoan. And her family picked up kind of a heretical version of Hinduism somewhere along the line. I mean, this whole thing is nuts, right? But it’s kind of fun.
So let’s get back to our original topic, which is the figure and ground of Trump, trying to understand him. Now pull all these threads together. So we have the Eastern sphere, the Western sphere, the digital – which is being handled in three different ways: one in China, one in Europe, and one in the US and maybe its closest kindred – Canada, Australia, maybe UK, New Zealand, the Anglo settler societies.
And I would love for you to include in your stew the fact that the Trump administration has two bad attractors in it – or you can call them good attractors if you like – neo-feudalism on one side and neo-theocracy or dark ages on the other. And then, of course, the other thing, and this is why it works, because neo-dark ages and neo-feudalism are both relatively small minorities of taste. Maybe 15% of Americans would opt for neo-dark ages and maybe 1% would opt for neo-feudalism if they actually saw it coming.
But what Trump adds – and here’s the secret ingredient of Trump – is that he has this magic spell to hypnotize stupid people. So he basically brings a large mass of stupid people to support the other two factions, which are the actual energy behind this. In fact, I said this back in 2016: the main innovation Trump has brought to politics is he decided to pitch his campaign at the IQ 90 voter. In the past, American campaigns, at least since World War II, probably since ’33, have been pitched at the IQ 110 voter, which is too high to be optimal. Because keep in mind, by definition, 100 is the middle of the road. But Trump decided to flank them by going to IQ 90. And as Mark Twain said, you know, get the fools behind you – that’s a big enough majority in any town. And remember, the entire US population doesn’t vote.
Mark: So it’ll tend to be the higher IQ people who don’t vote – that skews to higher IQs.
Jim: Does not vote based on higher IQ?
Mark: I believe there’s a higher percentage of higher IQ people who are in the certainly an independent category, belong to any party, but I think it goes further than that to the not voting.
Jim: Well, that’s interesting – I don’t know that. That’s interesting. So anyway, those are a bunch of dishes I put on your kitchen counter. Now cook me something. Cook me something.
Mark: Okay. So I’m going to talk about something called net assessment. I very much appreciate your readers and your audience appreciates the fact that you are so blunt and that you don’t mind using words that wouldn’t appear in the New York Times. You tell people exactly what you think. Net assessment, which is the methodology that we apply at the Center for Study of Digital Life, deliberately avoids that. There are no goods and bads – there are only diagnostics. Now privately, that becomes quite difficult. Between someone and their spouse or their close friends, they’re going to have opinions. But in public, I’ve often said, I do not express opinions. If I don’t have a very good diagnostic reason for it, I’ll keep shut in public.
This is a different style. That’s not the approach that you take, but I appreciate yours. And by inviting me on, you appreciate mine. We have come to roughly the same conclusions, approaching it from different directions. But from a net assessment standpoint, it turns out that your evaluation of Trump feeds into my evaluation.
Twelve years ago to the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon, down the hall from SecDef, I said that the two-party system cannot last indefinitely. In fact, the current situation I would call a no-party system, although the underlying mechanisms are certainly still two parties. But we don’t really have a political party at the moment. The Democrats will probably fracture. Same may happen with Republicans. As you know very well, the Trump administration thinks they only have two years to pursue this, that everything is going to get very messy in the midterms.
But here’s perhaps the most important assessment answer to the ingredients that you have put on the table: security through development. If there is an alternative to war, it must be development. Resolution of both the Middle East and the Ukraine situations, which are part of this crumbling of the previous global order, is proposals by Trump, who is himself a developer, for development. That is a net assessment. It’s not saying that development is either good or bad. It’s just diagnosing it as the only real alternative to war.
And to the extent that war becomes a necessary result of the dissolution of the one-world view – let’s take Israel for example. My girlfriend is Jewish. I am philosemitic, I guess. My children are Jewish, not from my current girlfriend, but from my wife at the time who was Jewish. I live and work in New York, much of it was on Wall Street. So I have friends who refuse to talk to me. I know antisemitism – that’s not me.
But in fact, what is happening here is the dissolution of the global system is understood in Israel. Israel has understood this for a long time. They are the only state in the world who attempted to establish their own version of Andy Marshall’s net assessment. It’s not operating at the moment in the form that it was originally put together, but Israel is very smart about these strategic things, and they’ve seen this coming. Therefore, what is often called Greater Israel, sometimes drawn to compose all the way up to Turkey and even beyond, is the Israeli strategic response to the end of globalism.
What obviously happened in Ukraine, however you want to prioritize these things in terms of “starting the war” – it didn’t even start at Crimea. It started before that. The February 2007 speech by Putin is what many people point to. But what Putin has been attempting to do on behalf of Russia is to fight back against sort of the last throes of the globalist exercise. So joining NATO, joining the European Union, all of these conditions which are still being voiced by Zelensky, who will very likely not survive as the president into negotiations here – not saying that he’ll be assassinated, but that he will be removed. That’s a globalist approach which is simply no longer appropriate.
My net assessment, not saying this is either good or bad, and I understand from the standpoint of attractors how you make these distinctions, which are not distinctions that I feel I need to make because you’re already doing a great job of it – so why should I duplicate your effort? But what is going on here is the absolutely predictable results of the end of globalism being replaced by free spheres leading to global conflict, leading to people who cannot imagine themselves. The reaction of David Brooks, New York Times columnist, is “I was nauseated.” This is nauseating about the Zelensky thing. That will actually be in my blog post tomorrow where I’ll discuss some of what we’re talking about. This nausea, this hair on fire – I just got one of the Substacks I see that you subscribe to. You’re on seven Substacks, so you’re a busy, busy man if you actually read all that stuff and more, and collaborate as you do.
But this is absolutely predictable and it cannot possibly wind up in a new globalist Game B. That’s gone. That’s out the window. The only question on the table as far as I’m concerned, and which you’ve already answered, and I have been hesitant to put good and bad adjectives on this, is what does Game B really look like? By the way, as you probably know, others have been taking your neo-feudalism bad vector and renaming it techno-feudalism.
Jim: Yes, I have seen that lately.
Mark: Yeah, there’s a European socialist economist, Greek character actually, has a book with that title, “Techno Feudalism.” The characterizations here are all sort of lining up. What people plan to do with it, and how seriously they take it remains to be seen. But we’re not in Kansas. Dorothy was correct. By the way, in the movie, if you remember The Wizard of Oz, there’s a very long section after the house lands on the wicked witch with no dialogue. “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” is the first words spoken by Dorothy after she walks around and tries to take in Munchkin Land.
And in many ways, what’s happening now is a version of landing in Munchkin Land. And it is nuts in much the way you’re talking about, and very much what should be expected in a transition of this sort. We don’t have a lifetime to figure this out. We’re gonna come up with some new structures, new operating system. I believe within the first two years of Trump, we will have a new US Techno Feudalist operating system of some sort. I’m not saying that it will necessarily survive all of what’s going on now and more. But we’re on a relatively short course, at least for the near-term resolution in the US and probably in Europe on all of this.
So it’s an incredibly fast-moving topic to try to stay on top of diagnostically. I only subscribe to 20 Substacks, and I don’t really read them all that thoroughly, but it’s a very busy job now to try to keep track of how fast things are moving.
Jim: Yeah, you’ll have to subscribe to the Rutt Digest soon when I kick it out, which is an AI ranked and sorted of all my Substacks, and then me curating for a day, and then AI generating detailed summaries and artwork. It all works. And so you can get the Rutt view of what’s worth reading, for $5 a month or whatever the hell it is I charge for it.
But anyway, let’s drill back into what you just said. So you think that in the current administration—I’ll avoid the use of the word “shit show,” but, you know, be polite. But that’s part of your job to not be polite. Exactly. They call me Salty Jim for a reason. Right? That you think the techno feudalists or the neo-feudalists will outmaneuver the neo dark ages crew, and/or tell them to shut the fuck up or we’ll kill you or whatever it is they decide to do. And at least for a while, neo-feudalism will be on the ascendancy in the United States as our reaction to the synthesis of American West plus digital.
Mark: Correct. This is the pioneer spirit that you have spoken about many times. America is not one place either, obviously. I was born in Boston and on Wall Street primarily followed California companies. There were many attempts to get me to move to California, but I’m a Northeast sort of guy. That’s a different America from California. I didn’t want to wind up in San Diego or something like that. That would not be my ideal outcome. But where I am now in New Jersey is just fine.
But yes, what you have termed neo-feudalism is going to be the operating system of the US, and all of these tariffs and all the rest of it that you’re seeing – Western Hemisphere domination is an expression of that. China is not slowing down either. DeepSea was, shouldn’t have been, but was a surprise to many who had thought that the Chinese are existing, are subsisting mostly on stealing things from the West. That is not true. I’m not saying there isn’t stealing going on, there is. But I’m not saying that that’s the only thing going on. They’re graduating more PhDs, they’re filing more patents, and a number of people – this is interesting, Jim, I’m sure you’ve seen this – a number of people, including the major technology lobbying organization in Washington, DC, ITIF, the largest technology lobbying organization. They have been very aggressive in publishing the accomplishments of China, not based on stealing stuff from us. So a number of people who are broadly speaking in “the government needs to spend more money on the technology leaders in the US” camp, so the US comes out leading at all these contests, they have found it very, very useful to emphasize the success of China. David Goldman is another character who does this. I’ve known him for quite a while. His basic philosophy still goes by the name of dirigisme. It’s a French term.
Jim: Yeah, it’s French. Yep. Top-down command and control of the economy. The Japanese MITI was, you know, at least allegedly the Japanese equivalent.
Mark: Correct. And Japan will play an important role in this development, security through development exercise. Japan was the one that Trump had brought in to the North Korean situation. So Riviera on the Gaza, as some have noted, had a predecessor Riviera in North Korea. And Trump will meet with Kim, I’m sure sometime this year, sooner if not later. And that will be back on the table. Let’s try to get development going. Let’s get Japan involved in this whole exercise. So this is the alternative to war in a net assessment sense – it’s got to be development. It doesn’t have to be casinos. It has to be manufacturing. It doesn’t have to be any of the globalist schemes – those are out the window. The same thing is being developed now in Latin America, Argentina and Brazil particularly important in all of this. So this is something that cannot be stopped. It cannot be avoided, but it can be cause for nausea and all sorts of other psychosomatic reactions.
Jim: Yep. And reaction. Right? I’m gonna get from my Game B chair, put my Game B hat on, take my podcaster hat off for a moment and say, this is more or less what we predicted, that the osmotic pressure for people to leave Game A and join Game B will be increasing relatively rapidly, to the degree that we can offer a more humane, more strong sauce, less alienating, more humane way of life. And so from our perspective, tactically, it’s a good thing, though it may not be good for the human race.
Let me respond, though, to the other thing you said, which is the idea of security through development rather than war. Now that is a great idea. Right? Of all the things invented by humans, probably the most pernicious is war. It destroy – I mean, for the longest time it’s what held humanity back. People would build a civilization, and then nomads from the plains would come and sack it, steal the women, steal everything they built, level the city. People don’t realize how extreme war was. Even allegedly humanish people like the Athenians, famously, killed all the people – was it Melos, I think it was? And then the Romans traditionally sold everybody into slavery. War has not just been horrible in the twentieth century. War has always been horrible. And getting out of the trap of war will be one of the most amazing things if humanity can figure out how to do so.
But it’s not clear to me at all that neo-feudalism is the answer to that. If we look back at feudal times, constant war all the time at every level, because the thing about feudalism is it’s multilevel. The dukes fight the counts, the counts fight the barons, the barons fight random bandits. Everybody fights everybody. And when the king says, you know, send some knights to go fight another king, sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. So not clear to me that neo-feudalism is a prescription for avoiding war.
Mark: Well, we’re going to have to – and we’ll both contribute to this project, I hope – we do not call it feudalism. We call it scribal paradigm. So in other words, a world before the printing press is what we’re looking at. The sensibility, the psychology of those who are primarily involved in doing what you’re doing right now, writing with your hand. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to involve machines. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t various contributors to this. But effectively the mentality associated with handwriting and the memory associated with handwriting is a critical piece of the scribal set of attitudes.
As we know from anthropology, war is much older than that. The invasion and burning of villages and carrying off the women is prehistoric. And humanity has never existed in the mythological, matriarchic world that some have attempted to describe. There’s simply no evidence of that. The evidence is strong against that. So we’re trying to become in some sense – and I often use this term, I don’t think that you do – we’re in a Humanity 2.0 sort of moment. This Humanity 2.0 moment is forced upon us by AI. So we have been, for millennia, we’ve been losing our sense of what it means to be human. The American Anthropological Association, as I believe, has removed human beings from their mission statement. This notion that machines are like humans, that they are like being alive, that they could somehow be as intelligent as we are – that is simply impossible based upon that approach as we’re now being shown by LLMs. I’m very happy that you are using them productively, but as you know, it’s impossible to get rid of hallucinations.
Jim: But you can reduce them to a very low level. And keep in mind, if you ask the average man on the street 10 questions that they use to see if LLMs hallucinate, I guarantee you the average schmo at the Walmart parking lot will give you worse answers than even the cheapest LLM will.
Mark: What I would assert is that until artificial intelligence researchers give up on the notion that human beings are information processors, that we are computer-like. This is the sort of thing that I was very fortunate to be friends, or at least a correspondent with Freeman Dyson. His son, George is a fellow at the center and a friend. And as you probably know, the last book by George is entitled “Analogia,” in which it posits, if you actually want to build AIs, they’re going to have to be analog.
Jim: I’ll have to read that book and engage him. I know George slightly from when he used to hang out at Santa Fe Institute a fair bit, and I’ve chatted with him, and I know his sister, Esther, pretty well. So I should go read that book and get him on the show. That would be interesting. Let me react to a bunch of things you just said. Humanity 2.0, I think, you know, and it’s not just AI. I like to point out there’s lots of things going on. Humanoid robotics are gonna invade other domains and particularly coupled with AI. Things like Neuralink are gonna produce chimeras where machines and animals, including humans, are interoperating together. And then the one you didn’t mention, I’ve had some dealings, mostly semi-hostile with the transhumanists. The ability to hack our genetic code is here, people.
Mark: Synthetic biology. Yes, friend.
Jim: Oh, and even just do CRISPR on our own cells and then call through the embryos and pick out the ones with big dicks. Right? Because I want to raise an army of porn stars, you know? So, you know, that ability is probably pretty close. I mean, that one might not be quite today, but within five years it will be there. And we have to make some decisions. Well, the interesting thing about it is people will make different decisions. There will be no global decision about whether we should select for big dicks.
Mark: We posed the question simply, what does it mean to be human? Since we have focused on that question, undoubtedly in part as a result of attention being paid to this on our own part. But there’s almost no place you can go today where you won’t find in any domain, at least the ones that I traffic in, where somebody isn’t asking a version of that question for all the reasons that you’ve noted. The old human has already been obsoleted. And so constructing a new one will involve for some, not all, a deeper understanding of what we mean by soul, which is the form of a living creature.
Jim: The Aristotelian version of the soul, which I do, under your prodding, have adopted.
Mark: Thank you so much. The Greek word for what we in English call soul is psyche. Psychology is a study of the soul, therefore, in English. And Aristotle’s work on the soul, particularly as translated by Joe Sachs, who was translating for the Great Books program at St. John’s at Annapolis. That is the best English language translation. It comes with a glossary. It comes with all kinds of additional material. So I would recommend for those who are interested, read Joe Sachs’ Aristotle translation on the soul.
Jim: And just for my audience, don’t think I’m fucking slipping here. Aristotle’s soul does not involve any supernatural horseshit. Right? So it’s an entirely naturalistic idea.
Mark: It is the form. His approach philosophically has been called hylomorphism, which is a unitary integrated view of matter and form. And you’re absolutely right. This is not supernatural. This is matter and the form of the matter.
Jim: As I like to say, the difference between the dance and the dancers. Right? This is why I don’t call myself a materialist. I call myself a naturalist in that in order to bring Aristotle back.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And the dance. The fact is that, hey, we’re… you know, if you took Jim Rutt’s atoms, boiled them down, put them in a 55-gallon drum, they would just sit there. Jim Rutt in the big tank.
Mark: Big tub of water with some things floating and some things on the bottom.
Jim: Yeah. And by the other hand, with the dance going on, Jim Rutt’s gonna decide to go over to Hardee’s and get himself a triple burger for lunch. Right? Or hopefully he won’t too often, but he might. And he’ll drag all those atoms along. The atoms, top-down causality is real. But anyway, it turns out that homomorphism and Aristotle in particular have for the past maybe 10 years become a relatively newly hot topic in Western philosophy. There’s no reason that, in fact, I can reconcile Aristotle’s – well, not exactly his science, because some of his science was bogus and was ex cathedra, like bodies falling proportionate to their weights and such. But some of his deeper ideas are actually totally compatible with complexity theory. And he doesn’t quite nail it, but he is a clear predecessor, much more so than later philosophers with the exception of Peirce. Peirce just fucking nailed everything. He’s sitting there on his farm in Pennsylvania.
Couple more things here. I’m gonna just throw out – these are just sort of Rutt craziness, but what the hell? My show. I’ll say what I fucking want. Right? I’m gonna react to your scribal thing. I have gone back since the first of the year to my Cyber Sabbath Sundays, where on Sundays, I do not touch any electronic devices other than my Kindle to read books on – but not order them. And I keep next to me a Moleskine-like notebook and a pen that I’m holding up, and I write my thoughts down from the readings and the doings and just the thinkings I do, and they are qualitatively different than what I do when I am digitally engaged. Monday morning, I get the notebook out and I go through and say, okay, what of these things were just hallucinations? And some of them were. What some of them are just goofy musings, and what some of them are things I ought to do and things that I ought to think about. And I would strongly recommend as a practice, Cyber Sabbath any day of the week. Just pick one and just refuse to engage at all with digital technology and let yourself return to this scribal tradition. Now, good old Socrates would say that’s fucking decrepit and bad. You should not be writing. You should be discussing. Don’t write. But I’ll go back and just use writing as one somewhat retro thing.
Mark: He was in another transition. He was in a transition from oral to scribal and holding on. And Plato didn’t want the poets who were the oral, in his Republic. And so I’ve recently been in conversation with a friend who is a big promoter of Plato and a big detractor of Aristotle. And our communications have stopped. I haven’t heard from him in a couple of weeks because I said something that Jim Rutt might have said. Where the hell do you get this idea that Aristotle didn’t agree with Plato? He studied with him for twenty years. Aristotle just said there’s some things you didn’t talk about. There’s some things you didn’t put in your dialogues. Let me add to you. And that’s the reason why Neo-Platonism, which is a combination, a blend of Plato and Aristotle, was the dominant philosophy in the Middle Ages. This is why John Vervaeke says we’re going to need to go back to Neo-Platonism. Not that I’m agreeing with everything that John says, but he’s pointed in the right direction here. We’re headed back towards scribal, but in a very different way.
Jim: I don’t know if we’re headed back. I mean, again, here’s another insight I’ve had fairly recently is that trying to go back is not going to work. And here’s why.
Mark: I misspoke. We’re retrieving. We’re not going back. We have to go forward, basically take the best of what we know, compound it with the new operating system.
Jim: And here’s the pruning rule, right? Evolutionary systems have pruning rules, right? If you can’t survive in an evolutionary context, you don’t survive. And one of the key pruning rules for social operating systems today is that we’re getting to the fairly steep part where the exponential really shows itself in terms of technological change. I have always felt like I could easily keep up with the important things that happen across many disciplines. Not that I’m an expert in very many of them, but I know vaguely what was going on in biochemistry and cognitive science, computer science, superconductors, foundations of quantum theory, cosmology. But now shit’s going so fast. I just can’t do it anymore. And our social operating system is the same way. I mean, American political system was designed brilliantly in 1787, but it is not appropriate for, you know, 2025.
Mark: It’s a print paradigm constitution with a lot of flexibility then. Do you ever watch Sabine Hossenfelder?
Jim: You know, it’s funny. I’ve made a note I need to reach out to her. We kind of interact on Twitter from time to time. I really do need to dig into her work. She seems like she’s got the right mix of smarts and skepticism, to be worth talking to.
Mark: Yes. For your readers who may not know, she is a PhD theoretical particle physicist who got tired of applying for grants for nonsense, for playing the game. She got tired of Game A in physics. So she’s an excellent candidate for a Game B version of physics, but she’s expanded that. Her most recent rant on her website is asking the question, should the federal government end all academic research funding?
Jim: Recently, as a thought experiment, that the US government should stop all funding of universities and put it all into trade schools and technical schools for ten years and just see what happens as a controlled experiment.
Jim: Introduce you to Sabine. That’ll be fun.
Jim: Yep. And one last thing, the Ruttian reaction to all the above is I think what’s missing here is the extension of the enlightenment project. And this is where, it’s an insight I had with a conversation very recently with my good friend Peter Wang. It was his statement of it, which rang with me, which is The Constitution of Knowledge, which was a podcast I did very recently with Jonathan Rauch, which is a brilliant book, by the way, which talks about how the constitution of real knowledge exists in science and in journalism and in law and in local teaching how to fix cars. And people who listen to the show regularly know I use this term a lot, which is the inter-subjective verification of the inter-objective, inter-objective meaning the real world that is indeed out there, even though we can’t know it.
Jim: Right.
Mark: All we can know is our subjectivity, but we have tools and probes and the way we can get more confidence in our tools and probes is through the inter-subjective comparison of the inter-objective where we all agree that we’re seeing about the same thing. Well, what Peter pointed out is that today’s form of digital, at least with the affordances and the incentives of the major players are producing intersubjectivity without inter-objectivity. And what a fucking simple statement, because it explains QAnon, Flat Earthers, the popularity of Trump, anti-vaxx. It explains every kind of morality at loose in the world because, yes, if you were just intersubjective without being inter-objective, then you could believe anything. I’m not sure Nazism came around the same way.
As a matter of fact, to translate this into the language we use, which is a faculty psychology language – the two key faculties which stand between the objective and the subjective are memory and imagination. These are terms that go back again, as we mentioned before, to Leo the Thirteenth and nineteenth century. This was his promotion of Thomas Aquinas as an Aristotelian. And so a lot of work has been done on this, and then subsequently a lot has been forgotten and ignored.
What we describe this as is a reintegration of matter and form. You can’t have one without the other. Your subjective and objective – subjective is form, matter is the objective. They need to be reunited. We can rag on Descartes – we can rag on anybody, he wasn’t alone by any means, of course. But he’s an odd one for various reasons. But it was the printing press that separated the matter from the form. We’re not doing that anymore. The Enlightenment was a printing press merging into electricity, so it was a transitional project also.
So again, I’m doing an assessment on this. I’m not going to endorse the eighteenth century Enlightenment, but the overall sense in a Human 2.0 version, which is not transhuman, but is human. Taking advantage of all that we have developed, but with a very new sensibility, a scribal sensibility, we would say. That seems to us to be a version of what you have been calling and organizing for Game B. And so it sort of takes the best. There are a variety of people who have been doing this in the world that describes these things, our current condition as liminal. There are a variety of people who – I’m thinking of folks, Scandinavians, Danish woman, name escaped me at the moment, who has divided up history into various paradigms and says we need to take the best from each of them and make something new.
Jim: Lene Rachel Andersen has been on my show many times.
Mark: Yes. Right. We’re all marching sometimes in orthogonal directions, but I think we’re all marching towards the same thing. And you have been doing yeoman’s work in all of this. So again, I want to thank you.
Jim: And yourself as well. You’ve contributed in your own way. And we’ve argued at times over the years and even fought a little bit, but I think it’s always been a fruitful interaction as the show was. I mean, like, the show is gonna be good. I’m gonna finish out with the last thing and give you the last word because you can respond to it. You said you were – you did not care to endorse or, of course, playing the analyst, you know? I have no opinions, I am merely the analyst. You’ve not endorsed the eighteenth century Enlightenment. I mean, I proudly say I am an Enlightenment man, goddamn it! Right? And we’ll fight the enemies of the Enlightenment.
Mark: You want to attach any names to that?
Jim: Voltaire, not Rousseau.
Mark: Okay.
Jim: I would say Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and Adam Smith, as the French branch to the Scottish, and then to the Americans, of course, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin. Right? So I am an Enlightenment man of that stream. I’m an enemy of the Rousseau heresy which led us to Hitler and Stalin, but of course, the Enlightenment was based on Newton plus Kant which were useful but not fully correct. We then had an Enlightenment 2.0, starting around the turn of the twentieth century when we started understanding things like electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity. And then I would say we had an Enlightenment 3.0 starting in the eighties. You could go back further to the fifties to Norbert Wiener, who I know you know very well, his work. Let’s call it the lens. And if we could stay true to the Enlightenment, expanded by the insights of the early twentieth century, adopting the lens of complexity, then we have a – and the key thing about the Enlightenment is it was intersubjective verification of the inter-objective. They never lost sight of the inter-objective, never got lost in – nor on the other hand did some people did. I would call it naive Newtonism and still exists today. You know, Laplace and his famous idiotic claim that “if I knew the position of every particle and its direction, I could produce the history of the universe.” Wrong, dude. Right? And we now know why that’s wrong. But anyway, he was trying. So I’m gonna put forth Enlightenment 3.0 as a co-project to produce a sensible humanity 2.0.
Mark: I thought it was 4.0. Are we on 4.0 now or we’re still in 3.0?
Jim: I think we’re still in 3.0. I think we still have not worked through what the complexity lens says on what how humans ought to cooperate. I think we’re still struggling with – so I’m gonna make some endorsements here to close this out.
Mark: I am very strongly a Leibniz guy and I am strongly a Dao guy, Daoist guy. I think it’s important if we’re gonna think about Enlightenment to not dismiss the Chinese. They’re going to play a very important role in this. And as it turns out, as what was documented in the Science and Civilization in China, multi-volume 50-plus volumes by Needham, Joe Needham, a biologist from Cambridge, is that the Daoists are the ones who invented everything. So if it’s going to be security through development from China’s standpoint, then it’s going to be Daoists, not Confucian.
Jim: That makes a lot of sense to me. And I will say, I’ve looked into Daoism a bit. I did read that book. Was it I Ching or whatever the fuck it is, right?
Mark: Well, the I Ching actually predates both of those. The Daoism and Confucianism and Buddhism in India are all Axial Age. The I Ching itself is pre-Axial Age. But anyway.
Jim: I’ve looked at the Daoism enough, not much, but as regular listeners know, I like to dunk on religion. I think it’s mostly just, you know, ridiculous horseshit leftover from the fear of the dark when you were a kid. But I don’t have any objections to Daoism just as I don’t have any objections to Spinoza religion. Right? Which you could also say Einsteinian religion. And so, yeah, if the future is Daoist, that’s probably okay.
Mark: For the East Sphere, it will be Daoist. That includes China and Japan. It turns out that the Japanese emperor is invested in a Daoist ceremony – very important at the hardcore that Westerners rarely hear about. As you know, Chinese and Japanese often don’t tell us what their principles really are. They have a different conversation with us. We’re gonna need a synchronization across these spheres. With your help, we’re headed there.
Jim: Well, and all of us working together on this, but you know, to the final point – if we could get rid of fucking war and mediate our differences of view other ways, and very importantly, the coherent pluralism. If the Chinese want to live in a totalitarian dictatorship, great, you know, just don’t try to impose that on other people. And I will say the Chinese don’t seem to be trying to impose their system at gunpoint. They put it out there as a model. If you want to adopt it, great.
Mark: Right.
Jim: You know, if anything, the West is more guilty of cultural imperialism than the East at the present time.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jim: If both sides get back down, you know, people want to live different. If you want to oppress the fuck out of women in Afghanistan, you know, just keep in mind, you can’t both own a woman and own a knife, because the woman can take the knife and cut your throat in the night. But you know, good luck with that people. And if we learn, you know, more willingness to accept pluralism in the world, I think we’d all be better off. Amen. It’s been a fun conversation and hopefully useful.
Mark: Thanks, Jim. I think it will be.