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00:00:01
Are We Living at the End of Modernity?
50 Plays3 days ago
In this episode, Eric talks with futurist and philosopher Eliot Frick about a question that quietly sits beneath many of today’s biggest debates: what if the anxiety, polarization, institutional distrust, and constant sense of crisis are not isolated problems, but signs that an entire way of thinking has reached its limits?
Drawing from Thomas Kuhn, Nietzsche, complexity theory, developmental psychology, mythology, and futures studies, Eliot argues that paradigms behave like living systems. They emerge, expand into new possibilities, become increasingly rigid, and eventually struggle to solve the very problems they once addressed.
The conversation explores why collapse narratives have become so compelling, why institutions increasingly feel performative rather than generative, why social media rewards outrage over imagination, and why cultures often become obsessed with finding new enemies as they run out of new frontiers.
Rather than asking whether society is getting better or worse, Eliot invites a different question: What if we are living through the end of one worldview and the uncertain birth of another?
At its core, this is a conversation about perception. About the invisible assumptions that shape how we understand progress, identity, institutions, and the future itself.
Questions Answered
- What is a paradigm shift?
- What is modernity?
- Why does everything feel like it’s falling apart?
- Why are collapse narratives so persuasive?
- Why do institutions become increasingly performative?
- What is an egregore and how does it influence society?
- What is adjacent possibility?
- Why do cultures stop feeling optimistic?
- Why do societies become more polarized over time?
- Is progress itself a kind of hidden religion?
- How do civilizations transform without completely collapsing?
- What comes after a dominant cultural paradigm?
Episode Links
- Eliot’s latest article that we discuss: https://www.subjunctivism.org/p/it-was-always-already-there
- Eliot Frick on Substack: https://www.subjunctivism.org/
- Eliot’s previous appearance: https://unfoldingthought.com/16-eliot-frick-pioneering-the-unknown/
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
- Jim Dator, Four Images of the Future: https://foresightguide.com/dator-four-futures/
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker
Elliot Frick, welcome back. This is your second time on the podcast. So I'm excited to talk to you. You and i know each other fairly well, but for those that do not know you, would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself?
00:00:17
Speaker
Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me, for one thing. um I have been a consultant and founded a consulting firm back in 2004.
00:00:32
Speaker
it was eventually trained as a futurist, ah but my great love is philosophy. What i'm I decided that I would do back in January is write a book about leadership um And what inspired me was inquiry into the question of empathy um and how it usually gets handled. um And, you know, I had been reading a lot about ah the sort of
00:01:03
Speaker
psychology behind this, the evolutionary psychology behind it. And it occurred to me that that the sort of ah common description, that the the sort of it's almost at this point sort of liturgy. Here's here's what ah you know empathy is and why it exists.
00:01:23
Speaker
ah But it wasn't quite as coherent as it's usually made out to be. So I wrote a piece about that. um And this led me to a kind of think about it. There's a book by Nietzsche called Twilight of the Idols. I can't remember the subtitle. It's something like doing philosophy with a hammer.
00:01:44
Speaker
And the the idea behind it is if we if we look at the the things that our culture holds up as sort of load bearing, philosophically load bearing for our beliefs.
00:01:57
Speaker
Uh, and we, we walk up to each one with a hammer and we tap on it. We'll discover that it's hollow. Uh, and if we hit it with the hammer, we'll discover that it shatters. Um, and, uh, so it's actually not load bearing.
00:02:12
Speaker
And he does this with a number of, of idols. Um, and ah And I realized i I wanted to sort of do that with the institution of leadership. And so empathy was one of them.
00:02:26
Speaker
i wrote one about um about safety. I wrote one about the idea of organization culture. i wrote one about theory, organization theory. And I wrote one about excellence.
00:02:42
Speaker
So somewhere in there, I wrote ah what you would call a prolegomenon, which is sort of an introduction that ah describes the the underlying philosophy of what you're writing. So that got written in there.
00:02:56
Speaker
And then eventually I wrote a piece, through the last piece that I published, called ah Paradigms and Egregores. Tell me about the most recent article and and what's the the argument that you're making?
00:03:11
Speaker
So ah in order to to set up this article, I need to give you just a little bit of backstory from the last one, ah the Paradigms and Egregores. ah So what I do is I start with ah Thomas Kuhn's work on paradigms.
00:03:28
Speaker
And i I do a bit of the sort of genealogy on the the word paradigm. It goes back to an ancient Greek word, paradigms.
00:03:39
Speaker
that means something like an example of, you know? um And so so that I don't know the proper pronunciation. I think it's paradigma.
00:03:51
Speaker
ah But ah the for centuries, that's what the word meant. um And ah Thomas Kuhn, who wrote a book in the 50s called The Structure of Scientific Revolution, ah sort of reimagined the word as a way of describing a tacit agreement between people working in a given scientific field ah to describe ah the whole matrix of tools, methods, um language, whatever, that defines the coherence within that that scientific field, you know, so
00:04:29
Speaker
Um, you know, the, the, maybe the sort of cardinal example that he uses can an example, uh, is, um, you know, the Newtonian paradigm. Um, you know, so, uh, if you're going to do physics and it's, uh, anytime after Newton, but especially, you know, i don't know, the 19th century or something.
00:04:52
Speaker
ah the The paradigm is defined by the language that flows from Newton's work, the the tool set that he provided, that sort of thing.
00:05:04
Speaker
um The other thing that that Kuhn ah that sort of introduced in that book is the concept of the paradigm shift. And so this notion is that um at certain points... There ah is a sort of traversal from a given paradigm into a new paradigm. And there's some upheaval associated with that or whatever. And again, this sort of canon example is going from Newton to Einstein, right?
00:05:35
Speaker
So, for example, um ah you know space and time were different ah you know concepts under Newton, and under Einstein, they're one concept. you know So this is an example of that. He also talked about how ah paradigms are incommensurable, so they can't make sense of each other from within each other. Yeah.
00:06:00
Speaker
So ah that makes paradigm shift even more sort of upsetting and and difficult. um One of the things that Kuhn did around this because of sort of philosophical commitments that he had is to say that paradigms are not teleological, meaning that one paradigm a new paradigm doesn't represent and an an improvement on the previous paradigm.
00:06:27
Speaker
They're just different. you know um So we could have started with Aristotle's physics and gotten to relativity all inside of the their Aristotelian paradigm.
00:06:40
Speaker
um So when when there's paradigm shifts, again, it's not this is not progress or something. This is just... ah a change and that's it. So what I do is I take his concept of paradigm and I i say that if you start with a sort of field theory that ah there is a field of possibility that we operate in, that paradigms are expressions of what I call metastability,
00:07:12
Speaker
So within the field of possibility, things come to cohere and they cohere for ah ah temporary amount of time. That's why I call them metastable. But the paradigm is the actual shape of that coherence, of that stability. um It's never permanently stable, ah but it is stable for however long it is.
00:07:37
Speaker
And that's actually what a paradigm is. The other thing I add to the concept of paradigm is that um it looks different from the inside than it does from the outside. So from the outside, a paradigm looks like a gestalt, like it's just's just a coherent it's a single coherent thing. But from the inside, a paradigm looks like development. ah And it will have paradigms within it. So that's another piece of this is that paradigms are nested. So they're inside of one another.
00:08:07
Speaker
And so inside of a given paradigm, there are nested paradigms that ah that create a developmental flavor, you might say. One paradigm moves to the next. And so Kuhn's idea of paradigm shift is actually describing the developmental process.
00:08:27
Speaker
ah So the example that I always give of this is ah but like psychological developmental theory, right? um So in the development of a human being going from infancy to adulthood or whatever,
00:08:43
Speaker
that That individual human being is a paradigm. It is a system that is stable within the field of possibility until it dies, right? But within, you know, what it's like to experience being a human from the inside is developmental. It is a series of developmental paradigmatic stages, right? So um I usually use the example of the the ego stage, which is a paradigm in and of itself. So from approximately age three or four or whatever, you know, toddlerhood until about puberty.
00:09:21
Speaker
the center of gravity for a person is ego. I am a me. I am an independent me. And I'm aware of myself, right? um And that over that lifespan of, you know, from toddlerhood to puberty, ah that paradigm, ah you know, has a sort of life cycle that it goes through. And then it comes to die ah and is sort of integrated by the next paradigm, which is the social paradigm. Now the person becomes part of social groups, right?
00:09:59
Speaker
And there's a paradigm shift moment where ah you go from being purely egocentric to being socially centered. um And then that process, you know, continues. But the point is, if you look at the person from the outside, it's a gestalt. There's a person, right?
00:10:18
Speaker
But from the inside, it's a developmental process of nested paradigms um that do have a developmental process to them. Unlike Kuhn,
00:10:30
Speaker
Going from ego to you know being an independent ego to being a social creature does represent a sort of developmental process. you know There is a ah greater level of complexity and sophistication at the social level than there is at the ego level. right So it's not teleology per se. It's not like...
00:10:52
Speaker
It's not like there's some destination that we're going toward per se. It's it's not purely teleological, but um but it is sort of, it is developmental.
00:11:03
Speaker
ah So, okay, so that concept matters because my contention is that everything operates this way. So having having given you the concept of paradigm as I define it, um The next thing I would say is that the idea of human culture is a paradigm, right? That humans have had cultures since we've been around. I mean, probably before modern humans, right? All ah hominids are in part defined by their social nature. in fact
00:11:39
Speaker
A lot of the mammalian world is defined in part by its social nature. um And so you could say that, I don't know, meerkats have a culture. um but But humans definitely do, of course. And so this is this is a paradigm.
00:11:56
Speaker
And I talked about paradigms before being metastable. So ah the idea of human culture was born at some point and has grown and flourished and will eventually at some point, presumably, potentially expire.
00:12:13
Speaker
um But while it's around, it's it's provisionally stable, right? It's metastable. But within the concept of human culture yeah are individual ah cultural paradigms, right?
00:12:31
Speaker
And so my contention is that, especially in the developed world, But it's getting close to being the entire world right now because of the way this has played out.
00:12:42
Speaker
There is a particular cultural paradigm that has been around for 500 years or so, depending on where you want to place the the beginning.
00:12:53
Speaker
And that paradigm is the the modern paradigm. It goes by different names, ah you know, enlightenment thought, modernity, ah ah liberal philosophy, ah that sort of thing. um But that it's been around for a long time.
00:13:15
Speaker
um and you know To sort of understand it, ah you have to acknowledge that nobody who's alive today was around when it was born.
00:13:27
Speaker
And so a lot of the life cycle of the modern cultural paradigm is invisible to most of us. We we didn't see it. I mean, we have we have abstractions about it, historical abstractions that help us understand, but we didn't live through it, so we we don't really know.
00:13:45
Speaker
um what it was like to be there at the beginning. Even if it's not a perfect analogy here, could I roughly analogize this to Somebody is born in let's say that they were born in 1946. So they're 80 years old, I believe, if I'm doing my math correctly here at this point.
00:14:12
Speaker
And they have seen a certain amount of change and progress or development or whatever it is in their lifetime. And so they...
00:14:26
Speaker
They imagine that, you know, arrow of time, more or less continuing straight from before their birth and after their birth and And I think if I'm hearing you correctly, what you're saying is yeah, but there was a start. Like somebody let that arrow fly at some point and that was, you know, paradigm shift or or whatever.
00:14:52
Speaker
and And things were different. ah The trajectory of progress or a darity or I don't know what terms are correct here. were different just 20 or 40 or 100 years before that person's birth.
00:15:08
Speaker
They just can't see that. Is that a fair comparison? Yeah. I mean, let me add a piece to this that I think will help to make sense of it. that um so So the life cycle of a paradigm ah is something like it is for all living systems that we you know basically intuitively understand.
00:15:32
Speaker
something is born, it grows, it flourishes, it declines and it dies. Right. Uh, and this is, we've known this since the furthest antiquity, you know, it, it appears in, in every great myth. Um, uh, you know, so, so, so that, that's, that's a baseline. And then,
00:15:54
Speaker
um On top of that, what I want to add to this is the concept of the egregore. The egregore comes from sort of Western mystical ah domain. um and And the notion is, you might say basically that whenever a group of people get together around some given purpose, that it births a almost living thing that is just as real as any of the members of the group.
00:16:23
Speaker
um That is an abstraction, an abstract thing, a sort of like a spectral presence that presides over the effort of those people and sort of shapes the imagination of those people.
00:16:39
Speaker
Right. ah So it it sort of like everybody involved in a given enterprise, especially if it takes place over time, which it always does, but especially if it takes place over generations, generational time, that this this egregore sort of shapes what is ah what can be imagined by people at different stages in the life cycle of ah the the enterprise. Right. And so um
00:17:11
Speaker
what i what I want to submit to you is that, um you know, we've talked before about Jim Dater's four images of the future. um and so Jim Dater is a guy who used to run the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies and his his four images of the future, that there are these archetypal images of the future. They're basically categories, buckets.
00:17:36
Speaker
That all images of the future fall into, right? And usually they're described as growth or continuation, um ah discipline, collapse, and transformation.
00:17:50
Speaker
And there's a sort of implicit temporal order there, but it's not required. Jim says you can use these for whatever you want. But the implicit temporal order is like a thing is born and it's really exciting. Images of the future around it are like growth oriented.
00:18:09
Speaker
Eventually, you know, maybe it's not not growing as much as we want it to. And so then we try to discipline ourselves, keep it like it is. But then eventually it starts to collapse. So we have images the future like that. And then eventually there's some sort of transformation. We imagine something totally different.
00:18:26
Speaker
ah So I believe that that temporal order is ah incorrect slightly. That at the beginning of the life cycle of instead of enterprise, let's just say paradigm.
00:18:41
Speaker
So let's say a company is a paradigm, because I think it is, right? So a company is born, and the people who are involved in it at the beginning have growth-oriented images of the future. And the egregore sort of ah governs that imagination.
00:19:02
Speaker
When you say egregore, because, you know, you said spectral something or other, I just want to maybe move it out of the perception of mysticism or something of that let me put way.
00:19:18
Speaker
You don't need policy for this to work. That's why the egregore is spectral, right? Because ah what keeps coherence among the people involved in the paradigm is not something that is an overt governance methodology. There's no policy involved.
00:19:39
Speaker
it's ah It is tied to the life cycle of the paradigm itself, right? ah so so it no... No overt action is required for this governance of of imagination to occur, right? I mean, think about it. Instead of a company, talk about a child for or a person, right?
00:20:02
Speaker
An infant ah is... for itself and for the people around it a very hopeful thing, right? A toddler is a very hopeful thing, you know, for the most part, a teenager is pretty hopeful thing, but you can see it's starting to become maybe a little less hopeful as more of its, um, more of its possibility is exhausted.
00:20:28
Speaker
And i don't know, there's so many things to to include in this that I realized as I'm going along that I probably should have included before. But like one thing to point out here is that all paradigms have an adjacent possible. So paradigms have a shape and that shape is surrounded by what that shape could accomplish.
00:20:48
Speaker
What could this paradigm do So again, go back to the person. A person might accomplish a lot of different things in their lives. So there is an adjacent possible around a person, right?
00:21:02
Speaker
It's not infinitely big, you know? I mean, you've only got so much time and you've only got whatever capabilities you've got. ah So the adjacent possible is finite for a person. And when you say that, year you're saying things like the the possibility from when a child is born that the the likelihood that they turn into a butterfly is, either it's it ain't going to happen, basically.
00:21:33
Speaker
But they could become a nurse or world-famous musician or an astronaut whatever. But as time goes by- an evil tyrant whatever. Exactly. Exactly. Those possibilities get closed off because if they didn't start eating right and exercising by the time they're 12 or 18 or whatever, they will never become Usain Bolt.
00:21:56
Speaker
but they still have other possibilities in their future. It's just a narrower set. Right. So as time passes, as the life cycle of the paradigm plays out, um the the size of the adjacent or the the amount of the adjacent possible that has been explored, ah that has been translated into some sort of metastability,
00:22:21
Speaker
ah gets smaller and smaller, right? Right. So by the time a person is in their 30s or forty s a good portion of what they're going to do has been concretized to some degree, right?
00:22:36
Speaker
At the same time, we are not always aware of all of the possibilities that have we've missed, the chances that we've missed.
00:22:48
Speaker
But we do often have a sense of missing opportunities. Oh, yes. Which oh yeah seems interesting. and And when we come back around to paradigm or an egregore or whatever is appropriate seems like their implications at the level of culture or groups or humanity.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah. So what you're driving at is actually really super important part of what I talked about in the paradigms and aggregors article, uh, which is that there is a, it's like a thermodynamic cost relationship. And again, this goes back to antiquity as well. You know, like, um, uh, you know, it's, ah it's, it's in the old Testament, this idea that, that, uh, living has a cost, um, you know, ah the To be alive is to pay to pay a cost, to pay a debt for your existence. And that debt is paid in part by making choices that foreclose other options.
00:23:55
Speaker
And it's also paid in part by eventually dying, you know, ah by exhausting all of the adjacent possible around you, right? And so the relationship between the generativity of the paradigm,
00:24:11
Speaker
And the the cost paid in having ah having foreclosed options and exhausting the adjacent possible is not linear. it's a it has a it It has a dynamic to it that is ah that is archetypal. it it It plays out the same way every time, which is that at the beginning, the reason why the child is you know the infant is so hopeful is because what it can generate is able to easily metabolize what it costs for it to be alive, right? The hopefulness of it, the the amount of of adjacent possible around it is so great that the costs of of its existence are easy you know easy to ignore or whatever.
00:24:55
Speaker
But at a certain point, um the cost of existence ah meets the generativity of, you know, so i don't know, you get to what, sometime in your in your middle age, you know, like your 50s or something like that. And the cost to stay alive are roughly equal to what your generativity is at that point. There are things you can no longer do because you foreclose them, you know. um And you you're really clearly set on whatever path you're on for the rest of your life. And then at the end of the life cycle, that that cost structure completely inverts, right? So it's like a payment schedule for the life of a paradigm, right? You know, like you don't pay much at the beginning.
00:25:43
Speaker
You pay about as much as you're getting returns on in the middle. And by the end, you're paying a lot more than you're generating. Right. ah In fact, in some ways, you can sort of understand death as the final payment in the payment schedule.
00:25:57
Speaker
ah but But the idea then is that the egregore is the the the manifestation of that relationship that cost relationship. you know So um the reason why images of the future are hopeful at the beginning is because of that cost relationship. There's so much generativity relative to the loss ah that you can't help but just be hopeful. you know Imagine a future of growth.
00:26:24
Speaker
My argument is you get to the middle of the life cycle and what happens is it doesn't go to discipline. It actually goes to collapse. That's why midlife crisis is what it is. We're staying in psychological territory here, but it applies to all paradigms.
00:26:39
Speaker
The middle of the life cycle is where collapse images happen. And the reason they happen is not to hasten death or move people out of the paradigm. is because it is because An obsession with collapse actually keeps you engaged with the paradigm, right?
00:27:00
Speaker
um So I'll come back to that. But it is really at the end where the discipline images of the future become what the egregore is concerned with. ah Like keep this thing alive at all costs, right? So discipline is the end of the life cycle. And I said there was a fourth one, transformation.
00:27:22
Speaker
And ah what I'm going to say right now is just that that doesn't belong to the paradigm. That belongs to the possibility field that the paradigm is operating within. And there is an interregnum between ah one paradigm and another in which transformation takes place. So that's not actually part of the lifespan of the paradigm.
00:27:43
Speaker
But that that covers all all four of them. And the egregore then is governing that payment structure, that that like almost thermodynamic energy gradient between generativity and loss affects the experience for the inhabitant of the paradigm ah where what what they can imagine about the future is determined by it. That's what the egregore does.
00:28:08
Speaker
Is the egregore similar to, think it was Marshall McLuhan that said that, you know, first we define our tools and then they define us or something like that. And is, is there something like that Occurring where a new paradigm, I guess, or new enterprise or whatever it is, is created.
00:28:29
Speaker
And then eventually, i guess, servicing it or keeping it going begins to limit what we see as being possible.
00:28:41
Speaker
A paradigm as a metastability is just a shape that can exist within the field of possibility. And it archetypally speaking, you know, the reason why I say it's archetypal is because ah within the context of a field of possibility, the things that can emerge are things that look like complex systems, that look like living systems. They are born naturally. They grow, they flourish, they they ah you know deteriorate, and they die. And that's just what all so all metastabilities end up looking like.
00:29:18
Speaker
That's what a paradigm is, is this archetypal shape, right? And and that shape always has an adjacent possible around it, right? um And so the egregore, it's just...
00:29:32
Speaker
the description of the inhabitant of the, the, uh, you know, of inhabiting one of those paradigms from the inside, the experience hopeful, collapse oriented, discipline oriented, and then,
00:29:48
Speaker
ah separation, you know, with transformation or at least potentially transformation. Right. um But that happens outside the paradigm. So so that's what it's like from the inside is basically. So the egregore is just in some ways a description of the experience of traversing the lifespan of a paradigm.
00:30:07
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yes, I'm with you now. Okay, and this gets this gets more ah sort of ah compelling when instead of just thinking about it, well, it's compelling nonetheless, I think, I believe.
00:30:20
Speaker
But like when you talk about it in the context of a of a cultural paradigm, Because the inhabitant of the inhabitants of a cultural paradigm are are ah a multiplicity, right? There are lots of inhabitants. I mean, there are lots of inhabitants inside of an individual person as well, but that's a harder to see. But it's much easier to see in the context of a culture, right? Cultural paradigm There are a lot of people inside of it. And so the agregore governing the imaginal space um feels more mystical in that context, you know.
00:30:58
Speaker
ah But it's it's not. it's It's just the same thing that I was just talking about. At the beginning of a cultural paradigm, things are hopeful. Eventually, they become collapse-oriented. And then finally, they become discipline-oriented. Right.
00:31:13
Speaker
um So so what I do in this piece, this most recent piece, is I go through and do a sort of like a history of a people over generations or whatever. So there's an old section in there that goes through what it's been like to inhabit the the modern paradigm.
00:31:33
Speaker
And I go through each of these phases, you know, that there was a growth orientation, you know, at the beginning. i mean, if you think about like what it was like for the founders of the United States, you know, you got to imagine that they were pretty excited about what they were doing and they felt like they had.
00:31:50
Speaker
you know, a profound purpose and whatever. And, and there was a lot of hope, uh, the French revolution. i mean, even before that, when you talk about the scientific revolution or the Renaissance or, um you know, the Protestant reformation, I mean, there's a lot of hope involved in all of these things. Right. And that this, this sort of imaginal space of hope and growth and possibility persisted for couple of centuries, you know,
00:32:19
Speaker
And it wasn't until like maybe the middle of the 19th century that you start to see ah this collapse orientation emerge. ah And it starts with sort of, you know, workers' revolts because of the Industrial Revolution, ah Marx's critique of of capital, um she the American Civil War, ah you know, there there are all these examples of sort of collapse visions starting to emerge.
00:32:49
Speaker
um and ah And one of the things that I say about that is that there's an almost sort of pornographic quality to collapse visions, right, that we sort of fetishize it.
00:33:02
Speaker
That's actually the mechanism by which the inhabitants of a cultural paradigm ah remain connected to the paradigm during ah this phase of its existence, right? you know which It is by highlighting the ways in which the paradigm could collapse that keep people from abandoning the paradigm.
00:33:25
Speaker
you know They're like... that there's something exciting and sort of sexy about the notion that things could collapse. And, and, you know, Marx was not only, for example, an important figure because he was so, uh, probative and whatever, i mean, he was, you know, he's brilliant guy, but like, he was also important because his ideas were exciting, you know, like, and they were collapse ideas, you know, uh, revolutionary collapse ideas.
00:33:54
Speaker
So you mentioned like that you might a midlife crisis might be related to a or a manifestation of a collapse scenario.
00:34:08
Speaker
And i think what comes to mind for me is that there's some realization in my life at that point. And maybe for you, it's at 40. And for the next person, it's at 50. But at some time,
00:34:25
Speaker
Yes. There's a realization that there is much less possibility ahead of me than there was behind me. yeah No matter what the reality what the reality is It's this sense that there is less ahead of me than there was behind me. And then when we come to modernity, i guess, or the United States, then we collectively reach a point where the excitement is gone.
00:35:01
Speaker
And now we realize all of those things that we could have been it's going to be so much harder to become one of those things that's further off, ah you know, further from the trajectory that we're already on.
00:35:21
Speaker
Yeah. So if you go if you go back to the analogy, it's not an analogy. If you if you apply this to an individual person and you say midlife crisis is like collapse images of the future, you know your imaginal space is collapse oriented that time.
00:35:39
Speaker
um what i so What I'm trying to to communicate here is that that actually keeps you alive, right? The reason why you don't just kill yourself when you realize that you've exhausted most of the possibility, the adjacent possible around you, right, um is because you your images of collapse keep you engaged, ah keep your interest up in in your own life so that you can eventually come to a place where you start to discipline yourself, right?
00:36:13
Speaker
You know, collapse images don't, aren't actually ah destructive, right? They're actually engagement oriented. And it's not really hard to see why that's true. If you think about the degree to which engagement on social media is deeply associated with collapse oriented images. Right.
00:36:34
Speaker
I mean, what gets the most engagement, right, is like sort of decay porn kind of stuff, you know, like. Is it because this feels sort of motivational? Like things are getting worse. We better do something like we better get to a discipline scenario. But at least initially, it's you feel like you have recognized something that other people have not.
00:36:57
Speaker
That's it. It's this or or you you are seeing something other than the loss of generativity. OK, yes. Right. You know, and seeing collapse is an exciting thing. You know, it's like it's the same reason, you know, storm chasers drive into the, you know, to the tornado or whatever. mean, there is a there is profound sort of frisson that people experience in response to collapse visions. It doesn't drive you away from the paradigm.
00:37:31
Speaker
It drives you into deeper engagement with it. right um And so so that kind of keeps things going. um And and my my argument is that for the modern paradigm, that started around the middle of the 19th century. And it really hit its its sort of fever pitch, its its absolute height ah in the 1960s. But you can see it's the the ah the growth in collapsed visions from the middle of the 19th century until then. like you've got the
00:38:03
Speaker
the the world wars, you know, the, the, uh, the industrial revolution created some really profound, amazing growth or, you know, generativity came out of it. Like all these amazing things came out of it. And then all of that stuff was used to slaughter a whole generation of young men on the Western front. And in, you know,
00:38:28
Speaker
Uh, the, uh, the, the existentialists, you know, spent a couple of decades, like just turning that into like philosophical musings, you know, uh, you had the lost generation, um And then there was a brief attempt, at least in the U.S., there was a brief attempt to sort of revitalize the modern paradigm.
00:38:52
Speaker
And it was because the wars didn't happen in North America. They happened in Europe. You know, the Europeans were... that That's where most of the sort of the most profound collapse images got generated was post-war Europe, you know.
00:39:11
Speaker
ah But in the U.S., we had the, you know, the baby boom and we had an economic miracle and mass-produced, you know, automobiles and...
00:39:25
Speaker
the growth of television and, you know, I mean, there were all kinds of like amazing things that happened in the U S because the silent generation, you know, we're excited to have won the war. um and, but it didn't last, you know, and, and the really, it was the, the boomers who stuck the, you know, uh, the pike in the chest of, you know, that growth, scenario uh they were like no this is all they they sort of brought back lot of uh ah ah lot of the uh critiques that came from everybody from marx through the lost generation through you know the romantics the lost generation the uh the existentialist or whatever and they made the mainstream they said no this is all this is all going ah over the cliff this is all gonna fall apart and so
00:40:15
Speaker
early in modernity, if I can bring it back to that and just tell me if I'm jumping too far ahead at this point, but early in modernity, think you're saying that we collectively, you know, society or some group,
00:40:34
Speaker
could have done almost anything. And there was just so much possibility yes that part of the reason that it's exciting is because almost anything we do makes things better.
00:40:46
Speaker
Or, yeah you know, it's exciting because it is new in one way or another. And then... modernity a at least i think because you i believe you said that modernity is a paradigm as well we reach a point of a collapsed vision of the future image of the future we reached a point where we sort of said hey we're going to have to work if we want something new to occur. If we want not necessarily excitement, but quote unquote progress and, you know, some improvement.
00:41:27
Speaker
And that eventually takes us to, I think, discipline and discipline is that we're just doing everything we can to not allow things to get worse and or for modernity the paradigm to fall apart mostly correct that the the collapse a cycle, you know, that that part of the life cycle where the egregore is demanding collapse imagination from its the inhabitants.
00:41:59
Speaker
um Like I say, it keeps people engaged. what is exciting You're right. At the beginning, what's exciting about the paradigm is that you could do anything because there are so many unsolved problems. The adjacent possible is massive and nobody's done anything with it yet. So you could just do anything.
00:42:15
Speaker
Once you've sort of like made a lot of decisions and you foreclosed a lot of options, the only way to keep people excited about the paradigm is to be excited about the collapse visions. You know, people start to gain ah cultural currency by pointing out what is wrong and and people start to gain cultural currency saying.
00:42:40
Speaker
glomming on to those images of collapse, right? You know, i mean, in some ways, the, I'm sure that the, you know, the early Marxists, for example, the Bolsheviks, you know, they were super excited about the world, about being part of what was going on because they saw something nobody else saw. They saw all this stuff falling apart, you know? So, so, and, and it's especially true in the middle of 20th century in,
00:43:07
Speaker
North America, you know, the U.S. in particular, it there was a great deal of of cultural currency involved in voicing collapse narratives, right? Talking about how all of this stuff, you know, has just got to be, you know, it's got to be destroyed, you know, um because it's all so awful and it's so dehumanizing and so terrible or whatever.
00:43:34
Speaker
So, so what, what discipline is, like, bike
00:43:41
Speaker
yeahve You've exhausted all of the excitement that can come from possibility. And you've exhausted all the excitement that could come from defining collapse. So the excitement is gone.
00:43:53
Speaker
So what discipline is, is the last phase of the life cycle of a paradigm in which instead of metabolizing excitement to get things done, it's replaced by liturgy, discipline, you know, it becomes ministerial.
00:44:12
Speaker
It creates a, you know, in one of the essays, I, I use the, um, the Fisher King, uh, from the grail mythos as a way of explaining this. Uh, I don't know how familiar you are with this, uh, mythology, but the, the story it shows up in different versions, but, um, I think it was Eisenbach, I can't remember, Chautin d'etroir, I don't know, my French is awful, but ah wrote Parzival. And in it, Parzival comes across, guy ends up in this grail kingdom, this mythical world. And the first thing he encounters is this, he doesn't realize it, but it's a wounded king who's sitting by a river or lake or something and fishing, right?
00:44:58
Speaker
And the the wound is ostensibly in his groin. So this indicates symbolically the idea of generativity. His generativity has been undermined. Um, and he goat moves on, ends up in the, the, the grail castle, you know, the castle where this King presides. Right. But he's not there. He's, he's off fishing, which is what he does all the time in the grail castle.
00:45:25
Speaker
There are a series of, of, um, you know, rituals that take place. You know, there's a, there's a, a spear that bleeds and there's the the grail itself is brought out and it's all, and, and,
00:45:40
Speaker
You know, the the hero learns that this happens every day. you know, these these ah ah these rituals are undertaken, these sacraments are are realized, and and yet nobody knows why. They've lost—the whole kingdom itself is a wasteland.
00:45:57
Speaker
ah Which was the inspiration for T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, incidentally, was the the grail story. And so the whole kingdom is falling to waste.
00:46:09
Speaker
And yet all of the rituals of the of that kingdom are still observed fastidiously every single day. But they mean nothing now.
00:46:20
Speaker
They mean nothing now. That's what the discipline of component of the, you know, the imaginal space of discipline looks like. So all the things that have always been associated with the paradigm continue to be exercised, but they have no generative force anymore.
00:46:41
Speaker
initially they were, those things were exercised because they did serve some purpose. And so going back to, you know, philosophizing with a hammer, you're saying sort of that these foundation stones of,
00:46:59
Speaker
culture, if I can put it like that, of of our life or society or an organization or whatever, they had some substance or weight. Yes.
00:47:10
Speaker
And then at some point they did become hollow and we continued to treat them as if they still served some purpose and And Nietzsche realized that, yeah no, these things are no longer load-bearing. But then in this, in this Fisher King sort of scenario, you're saying they serve some purpose.
00:47:35
Speaker
They don't anymore, but we act like they do. And we may even, I guess we believe that they do serve some purpose. Let's put it this way. Solved problems ah do not generate a ministerial function, right? And the ministers of the paradigm are the ah the vector by which the paradigm keeps itself alive at the end, right? So the whole process becomes highly ministerial, right? It becomes liturgical, right? It becomes sacred, right? And so do we believe...
00:48:13
Speaker
ah that the rituals are going to be generative? I think most people don't. um ah Maybe we do. maybe some of Maybe even many of us do. But we have some sense that they're not really working anymore. And generally speaking, what happens also is that the they there there becomes an increasingly rancorous ah you know sort of animus revolve revolving around apostasy. You know, the people who don't perform the right rituals ah are the reason why the paradigm's dying. But of course, that's not true. The paradigm has its own natural life cycle. It will die when it dies. Um,
00:48:54
Speaker
I mean, we could, i guess, kill it, but the the implications of that are profoundly bad, and it would take a really thoroughgoing belief in the desire that we should kill it for that to happen. It's going to die when it dies. It's not a result of, you know...
00:49:13
Speaker
Some bad guys out there that are trying to destroy it. You know, it's just it's where it is. But but the this sense that that like there are bad guys that are trying to destroy the paradigm just ramps up significantly at the end of the, you know, during the discipline phase of the life cycle of the paradigm.
00:49:31
Speaker
And that is part of the reality of a paradigm yeah is that there's a sense, there's a feeling of progress or improvement or something of that nature.
00:49:43
Speaker
And then again, i sort of, um I'm thinking that even if we're not necessarily conscious of, you know, like a belief,
00:49:55
Speaker
that we're, we often talk about beliefs like we're conscious of them. And so I'm thinking more that there's, there is a sense that that things are not working like they used to or that that things are not exciting anymore. I don't know why. And so the the the bad guy that's trying to tear something down is a manifestation of the life cycle of a paradigm.
00:50:27
Speaker
Yeah, well, the discipline phase of that life cycle, you know, ah the paradigm doesn't want you to abandon it it. wants to stay alive, just like all living things do.
00:50:38
Speaker
Right. But it's nearing the end of its life cycle. So it's it's a sort of pathology of the late stages of the life cycle of the paradigm. that, um you know, it's it's less likely that most, you know, in the case of culture, a cultural paradigm, it's less likely that the majority of the inhabitants of that paradigm are going to understand it for what it is, this depletion of the adjacent possible, end coming near. And instead, in in order to contend with how that feels, to to see all of that happen, we look for someone to blame.
00:51:14
Speaker
you know So it's it's those guys over there. That's that's what's causing it. um Now, I mean, what what you can do, too, to understand this specifically with the modern paradigm is to understand what the architecture of the modern paradigm actually is, right? And you could argue you know that the paradigm that preceded it is roughly something like the medieval paradigm, um you know, sort of ah you know, a kind of rational Aristotelian scholastic kind of thing that, you know, you can trace back to, I don't know, ah Aquinas, Duns Scotus and this sort of thing um and whatever. But that, you know, it was very, very different way of organizing
00:52:07
Speaker
ah culture than modernity. And modernity is largely a response to that previous paradigm. You know, um really the sort of familiar name of modernity of liberalism is in part ah about what that response is. it was like We need to liberate ourselves from the ah the oppression of you know the supernatural scaffolding that ah gives um preeminence to a priest class that can tell everybody what to do and that that priest class had at in at the end of its paradigm had become ah you know ah a fairly oppressive force. you know i mean ah A force because it was in its discipline phase. It was ah you know demanding that people stay in the paradigm, you know that you can continue that you must continue to follow the rituals of the medieval paradigm or whatever. And ah liberalism, modernity, the modern paradigm arrived as a hero.
00:53:15
Speaker
You know, it arrived as ah the the answer to the ah the pain, the suffering, the late stage pathologies of the of the previous paradigm.
00:53:28
Speaker
And that's that's, in many ways, it's defining character. And so there's there's some components of that that are really important, like naturalism, for example. you know that like You know, supernatural descriptions of the world become the tools of oppression. So we're going to have natural descriptions of the world.
00:53:47
Speaker
um ah Individualism, you know, that that you, ah each individual, ah Each self is the destination for liberation, right? um You know, it's or for whatever the liberatory activity is, you know, that the if final sort of moral analysis of the of the cultural paradigm.
00:54:12
Speaker
rests in the individual. And you see this in a bunch of different ways. You know, everything from, um you know, ah Descartes, you know, cogito to ah Luther's sola scriptura to, um well, it's just, it's everywhere. It's, you know, it's,
00:54:31
Speaker
all throughout the initial a sort of generative period of the modern paradigm is this focus on the individual. um and Another is, this takes a little longer to happen, but the sort of collapse of of ontology into epistemology. What that means is that Rather than trying to explain what reality is, um we're going to focus on how we talk about it because we as individual selves are the measure of sort of all things, you know. And so, um you know, we're going to ah talk about not we're where we understand the world through our knowledge of it, not through what it actually is. And you see this across all the philosophy in in modernity. Another is the idea of anti-teleology, that you know no no class of people have some sort of special dispensation to tell you where everything's going. you know We're all going to heaven or whatever it is. So we would know there is no there is no teleology.
00:55:43
Speaker
um Another that I think is really important is that what what I call the privatization of the sacred, that The idea of the sacred was not eliminated by modernity.
00:55:55
Speaker
um but it was made it was privatized. you know that you You can have your own sort of private sense of what is sacred, but you can't foist it on anyone else. you know And all of these things, again, were meant to ah put a lid on the excesses of the previous paradigm, to liberate us from those oppressions. And so in many ways, the adjacent possible of the modern paradigm is That whole liberatory project, right? You know, that ah that that whole adjacent possible contained potential oppressions that we could liberate ourselves from, you know, ah in particular, the individual. We could liberate the individual from that. and And yeah, the collapse images of the future came online in the mid 19th century because that was the point at which
00:56:44
Speaker
ah A lot of what the paradigm was doing didn't feel liberatory anymore, you know. um And so we had to start looking for ways to liberate ourselves from some of the things that this liberal project were were was foisting on us. um And of course, that just got worse and worse and worse.
00:57:06
Speaker
Is the egregore here then sort of that spirit that we're looking for things to liberate ourselves from? Yeah, well, in the case of the modern paradigm, its egregore is because the adjacent possible around modernity involves liberatory activity.
00:57:27
Speaker
The egregore moving the paradigm from, you know, hopeful, generative images of the future to collapse images of the future to discipline images of the future. is just its response to the exhaustion of that adjacent possible, which for modernity is defined by liberatory activities, you know, liberating the individual from these oppressions.
00:57:52
Speaker
When we stop finding things that are that are obvious to liberate ourselves from, do we begin liberating ourselves from the rules or the the structure, the paradigm that we are living within? Do we start tearing this paradigm down?
00:58:12
Speaker
Well, the paradigm doesn't want to die. And so in order to stay alive, once it exhausts most of the adjacent possible, It's like there's still bits of adjacent possible left, but the it's harder to see how the juice is worth the squeeze, right? You know, like i could, you know, the paradigm could liberate us from this or from that or from this or from that or whatever, but the cost involved.
00:58:39
Speaker
in that liberation becomes greater and greater. And it starts to outstrip whatever is generated as a result of it. You know, I mean, so many of the things, the oppressions that we're presently concerned with, that we want to liberate ourselves from, we're failing to liberate ourselves from. You know, I mean, there's a lot of frustration that, like, we haven't done more to liberate ourselves from more. And the amount of effort that is involved in that continues to go up and go up and to the point where a lot of the things that we might think we should, you know, collectively think we should liberate ourselves from, um we don't really even have some horizon for resolution around it. You know, ah it's it's more of a thing that we have to remain vigilant about than something that we think we're actually going to solve.
00:59:29
Speaker
And so do we imagine some oppression that maybe is not there? It sort of doesn't matter whether it's imagined or not, because that's just what the paradigm does.
00:59:40
Speaker
This, the modern paradigm, is about liberation. And so that's all it knows how to do. It doesn't know how to do other things. So whether it's imagining things to liberate us from or not doesn't really matter. it's That's what it's going to do, you know, until it's done, you know.
01:00:02
Speaker
um i think that the the more important ah sort of sleight of hand to pay attention to with the modern paradigm is not so much... uh, is what it's liberating us from fake or not.
01:00:15
Speaker
Um, although whatever, you can argue about that all day, but like the, the more, the deeper, more important, uh, thing to notice is that it's architect, it's architecture, it's architectonic, um, it's, it's tool set, it's instruments, those things that I listed before, ah you know, things like, uh, naturalism and individualism and,
01:00:40
Speaker
uh, the collapse of ontology into epistemology and ti that the, the paradigm is to not actually able to reliably, um, uh, coherently demand those things. There's a, there's a sort of performative contradiction embedded in all of them.
01:01:01
Speaker
So take, for example, um, ah the teleology thing, right? So it says we're going to, the the paradigm says we're going to liberate everybody from teleology.
01:01:13
Speaker
ah And ah what it does though, is it replaces that with the concept of progress. And you can see this ah in, in all the great traditions of the modern paradigm, right? so take, for example, the scientific, you know, analytic tradition, right? Um,
01:01:33
Speaker
And, you know, they're very fond of saying, oh, well, you know, science is self-repairing, you know, like it gets something wrong and it learns from what it gets wrong and it improves itself or whatever. And the implication there is that ah it's not totalizing. It's not absolutizing. You know, it's saying, oh, well, you know, I as science am fallible or whatever. But the implication that...
01:01:57
Speaker
ah but sort of can't be escaped is that eventually it will solve everything. You know, that like the only appropriate way to try to understand reality is through the ages of science, ah which means that eventually it's going to answer all of our questions. You know, we don't need any other, ah you know, teleological exercise because science is eventually going to get us there, you know.
01:02:26
Speaker
I mean, that's the origin of things like trust the science, right? is what what that What that turn of phrase really means is that science is the only... And and that of course, the truth is is that science is probably one of the most extraordinary tools that humans have ever created. So that my point in in saying this is not to suggest that there's something wrong with science or that we should return to theology or something like that. What I'm saying is that the notion that we've eliminated teleology is is not something is not true. It's a sleight of hand.
01:03:03
Speaker
you know We do have a teleology. It's manifest in the concept of progress. Right. But I could do that with any of those five things is my point. All five of those things that I mentioned, and there are others beside, but the all of them are ah are incapable of living up to what they claim. And it is in part the exhaustion of the adjacent possible of the paradigm that helps to make that visible.
01:03:27
Speaker
Right. I'm wondering how to respond to someone who says, yeah, but the scientific process, you know, it works.
01:03:38
Speaker
And it does. or are you telling me that things are just going to fall apart or like, what is it about the paradigm? The scientific process works. What I'm saying is that ah the notion that we have eliminated teleology is actually sleight of hand. And one way to understand that is through is by looking at science. Science implies, I mean, you know, the the positivists imply, the the analytic tradition implies without coming out and saying it
01:04:11
Speaker
That the only way to really understand reality, well, sometimes they do come out and say this, the only way to understand reality is through the aegis of science, right? Which implies that eventually, in order to understand all of reality, the only option is science. Science will eventually get us there.
01:04:29
Speaker
It will eventually explain everything. teleology If we're really opposed to teleology, then we would have to acknowledge in some sort of a profound way that even science would be incapable of answering all questions.
01:04:45
Speaker
which would be counter to the ethos of modernity. Think of it like this. Teleology is has always been a purpose-oriented concept, right? That like what what gives life meaning or purpose is the notion that we're working towards something, right?
01:05:05
Speaker
And in some ways, the sort of empirical analytic tradition of modernity uh, like wants to stick their, their thumb in the eye of that idea, you know, that like, Hey, you know, the, eventually the whole universe is gonna, you know, die from heat death or whatever. And that's the end of the story and nothing you did mattered. None of it matters, right? This is Nietzsche talking about having killed God and part of what here in the abyss and all that is the recognition of the fact that nothing you do matters, you know, ah It's Steven Weinberg, you know Nobel laureate physicist. He wrote a book in the 70s and in the in the foreword, he says something along the lines of, the more we understand about the universe, the more meaningless it appears to be. right um So this is the anti-teleology ethos, right, is this notion that and none of that stuff really matters.
01:06:02
Speaker
But if you're really going to say that, that nothing really matters, if you're really going to take – why would anybody care about science? Why would anybody care about the modern paradigm or oppression or anything else for that matter? Right. And so the paradigm knows, the agregor knows that people aren't going to stay engaged with it unless something like teleology exists. So even though it says it's opposed to it,
01:06:30
Speaker
it still kind of so like smuggles it back in through the concept of progress, right? And it's not just science being progressive in that way.
01:06:41
Speaker
oh the whole liberatory activity, you know, politics, all of it, and there's a huge progress-oriented teleological narrative, you know, ah that we're eventually going to get to a place where we've liberated ourselves from all oppression, you know.
01:07:00
Speaker
um so so even though... But overtly, the paradigm is opposed to telos because it it thinks that's a tool of theology and superstition, you know sort of benighted,
01:07:17
Speaker
ah did um you know supernatural BS that's used ah to to manipulate people. ah It does the same thing. you know it's become The modern paradigm has become the thing that it claims to have liberated us from.
01:07:32
Speaker
you know And that's just the teleology thing. I could do that with the privatization of the sacred. i could do that with you know these other items as well. Each of them so ah is is ledger domain. It covers up for having smuggled back in the very thing it claims to be liberating us from.
01:07:53
Speaker
I guess modernity, the ethos of modernity would be that we can wake ourselves up from, or we can extract ourselves from the matrix and we can see the world for what it really is.
01:08:09
Speaker
And you're sort of saying, well, no that's just another when you wake up from the matrix, the world still basically looks the same.
01:08:20
Speaker
There are still people. There's still gravity. There's, you know, all of the rules are essentially the same. And you think you're in a new place. You think you have moved forward. The important addition that I would make to that is that for the first, you know, couple of few hundred years of this,
01:08:38
Speaker
like out of 90 plus percent of what the paradigm did actually did get us out of the matrix. You know, I mean, like the mate the previous matrix was, you know,
01:08:50
Speaker
it inquisitory theological, theological oppression, you know, I mean, that, that paradigm had, had expired itself and it really was doing more harm than it was doing good. And for the first, however long in the modern paradigm, it really did get us out of the matrix. It really did liberate us.
01:09:14
Speaker
You know, the, the, a Great chain of being, sun king, you know sort of monarchies of late medieval Europe were exhausted. you know they they weren't you know They weren't nearly as great and wonderful as they had been previously you know at the beginning of that process. And their replacement with you know sort of a Republican um you know kinds of government um represented an improvement.
01:09:47
Speaker
um It represented liberation. but But, you know, the the point is is that the The adjacent possible has been exhausted now.
01:09:59
Speaker
You know, like it's so much harder for the modern paradigm to produce the same quality of results that it produced when it was new. And it costs so much more. So when we get into culture war sort of stuff, whether it's right you know, the, the classical liberals or conservatives or whatever, arguing against the progressives, or I don't know pick one way of categorizing things or another, then
01:10:31
Speaker
we're, is this, is this discipline at that point? And, and it's still just working within the existing rule set of the modern paradigm.
01:10:43
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, that none of the none of the um adversaries in the culture war are outside of the paradigm. They're all part of it.
01:10:55
Speaker
You know, I mean, like one of the things that's often said, for example, about the conservatives or the the right in general is that You know, they they are their traditionalism really is ah an attempt to undo the liberation that the paradigm has created for us.
01:11:14
Speaker
But the truth is, is that there are no conservatives alive who actually have any real handle on pre-modern traditions. Like the conservatives just want to go back to some earlier version of the modern paradigm.
01:11:32
Speaker
You know, some of them want to go back to the 80s or to the 50s or whatever, you know, ah there there they're not saying let's go back to. I mean, with the exception of very few, very, very few people, I don't know, the Catholic integralists or something, you know, there are very few. people And even then they don't really have a handle on what it looked like.
01:11:55
Speaker
in the 13th century or whatever. they They couldn't take us back there if they wanted to. that So they're not the enemies of the modern. They just want modernity from 40 years ago or 50 years ago or whatever.
01:12:08
Speaker
um the The other big bogeymen that are set up all the time are the postmodernists or the you know the ah the Frankfurt School or whatever, um poststructuralism,
01:12:22
Speaker
you know, even newer versions of this critical theory or, um, you know, people like Jill Deleuze or whatever, you know, like all that whole crowd, um, they, they don't really escape modernity either.
01:12:36
Speaker
You know, they're they're not aliens that came from, you know, some other paradigm hell bent on destroying the modern, uh, You know, they just are taking it to bizarre. They they've found some little spot in the adjacent possible that hasn't been liberated yet.
01:12:54
Speaker
And they're applying with as much effort as they possibly can the most convoluted Rube Goldberg version of, you know, modern philosophy to try to liberate that little bit of stuff, you know, but they're not going to succeed. They don't. They haven't. You know, there's a whole section in the essay about that. You know, it's funny.
01:13:15
Speaker
You know, so like, i don't know, just for example, the the ah ah the Frankfurt School, um you know, Marcuse is often associated with the creation of the new left.
01:13:26
Speaker
And there's a lot of, you know, late 60s is a lot of like sort of student protests that goes on. And another guy who was really important in the Frankfurt School is a guy named Theodore Adorno.
01:13:40
Speaker
And, you know, this is this is their thought is the the. genesis of what we now call critical theory, right? Um, uh, the, the student protesters were really unhappy with Adorno and started protesting his, ah his talks, his, his lectures, uh, over, over a very, you know, ah um, abstruse, uh, you know, complaint.
01:14:11
Speaker
And, uh, So critical theory, which not that long ago became the source of the argument that we should abolish the police, right? Here's Theodore Adorno being ah protested and got so flummoxed by it that he called the police on the protesters, right?
01:14:29
Speaker
So you see what I'm getting at, right? That that none of these, none of these ostensibly, ah you know, demonic, you know, satanic, ah ah you know, ah ah products of the postmodern world are actually capable of undoing the paradigm. They're utterly stuck inside of it.
01:14:56
Speaker
um And, and, You know, ah there there was no way that the paradigm when it first formed wouldn't, when it got to its senescence that it's in now, you know, it became aged the way it is and it's in its discipline phase of development, that it wasn't going to produce people like...
01:15:17
Speaker
you know You name it, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, you name it, any of these, ah you know Adorno, Horkheimer,
01:15:33
Speaker
And is this why it feels like for so many people that that there's just this sense that nothing works like it's supposed to or that the, what what are these stats that, you know, ah a few years ago, a higher percentage of Americans thought that their children's lives would be worse than their lives were or something of that nature yeah is is this result?
01:16:01
Speaker
a result of where we're at the senescence of, I guess, the modern paradigm, if I heard you correctly. Yeah, right. the The paradigm is aging out. You know, it's like on life support now, essentially.
01:16:16
Speaker
It's in hospice. And because it's it's it's exhausted all of the sort of low-hanging fruit, if you will. You know, the the ah analogy that I use in the in the essay is, um, imagine that you're dropped on a, deserted Island in the middle of the ocean and the shape of the Island, the Island is a paradigm and, and its shape defines it's adjacent possible. Something I said earlier in this conversation, uh, and it's adjacent possible.
01:16:50
Speaker
is the shallows that surrounds the island, right? So we can easily see what's above the water level. It's the known. It's the the stuff that is the the tools that are provided by the paradigm.
01:17:05
Speaker
We can use those tools to explore the shallows, right? But it's hard to see, right? The water sort of obscures. We can venture out into it fairly easily or whatever.
01:17:16
Speaker
um Over time, we're eventually going to explore all the shallows. Now, beyond the edge of the shallows, the it you know maybe it gets as deep as whatever, 15 feet or something you know before it just drops off. There's a cliff and there's an abyss. It's the it's annihilation. It's emptiness. you know um Eventually, we explore all those shallows all the way out to the edge of that.
01:17:43
Speaker
If not all of it, the vast majority of it, it's not clear what else we might easily, you know, extract from the shallows. And to come back to something you were saying earlier, i think that the word that you just used there, easily, feels important to me because you said, I forget your phrasing, but basically with, you know, when the United States was young, when a child is young,
01:18:10
Speaker
It doesn't take a lot of work for something good to happen. And you're saying the more that we have explored the shallows, the more we have to work to exactly explore some unexplored territory and get something out of it.
01:18:26
Speaker
Right. And with enough time, you know, maybe you've explored...
01:18:33
Speaker
99.2% of the shallows. And maybe there's, you know, in that 0.8% that's left, there's still something to extract that we didn't. But at the cost, at find that 0.8% and figure out what we've got on the island that will allow us to extract the value from it is just way higher than then whatever you're going to extract from it. Now, once it gets to that point,
01:18:55
Speaker
Some people are going to swim out past the shallows and they're going to look back at the island. They're going to have this experience that they are somehow, you know, extraordinary because of their ability to have gotten that far away from the island. They they might feel some something revelatory about being suspended over the abyss. and you know But the truth is, there's nothing out there.
01:19:22
Speaker
right? And those people come back to the island. They didn't come from another island. They were on the island with us. They went out there. They got all wild eyed and came back red faced and said, ohho the whole island is bullshit. And here's why I figured out all this stuff, you know, whatever. And some people are going to be like, they're the saviors. And other people are going to be like, no, they're demons, you know. But the truth is,
01:19:47
Speaker
they They're just people from the island who went a little bit further out and didn't really find anything. They're from modernity and they're working within a mental construct of an understanding of life or the world that still is defined by modernity.
01:20:06
Speaker
Right. And that those guys are the post-structuralists, the post-modernists, you know, that whole crap. And you've got a bunch of people on the island going, oh, they're going to save us from everything. there're That's delusion.
01:20:18
Speaker
And it's a delusion that is implanted by the egregore because it keeps people engaged with the island. Oh, you know, these people who are not from elsewhere, who haven't transcended the island, you know, let's keep focused on them. And then there are going to be people who say that they're the great Satans. They're trying to destroy the island. They couldn't destroy the island if they wanted to. They came from the island and all they did was swim out into the deep water and come back with, you know, ah you know, a story that is convoluted and overhyped, you know. So that's what's going on with so much of the culture war stuff right now. It's an internecine battle between inhabitants of the same island
01:20:58
Speaker
And they're you know the the example I use is Sayers Law. i don't know if you're familiar with Sayers Law, but it's this idea that the ah the ah intensity of a dispute is inversely proportional to this to the importance of the dispute. We're like rats on a so sinking ship fighting over scraps you know is what's going on.
01:21:20
Speaker
Another way of saying Sayers Law is something like, you know, the, uh, the melodrama is so high because the stakes are so low, you know, and that's what's, that's what's happening, you know? And it's, it's, it's, um,
01:21:34
Speaker
I'm alternately amused and um frustrated when I watch people argue over this stuff and they they the the moral posture that they take, you know the certitude that they have that the other side is destroying everything is wholly unjustified.
01:21:53
Speaker
And it is the egregore keeping them all on the island. It's the last little bit. that the island can do the, the paradigm can do to keep people engaged. When we hate on each other for destroying whatever we've built on the island, uh, we're still sticking on the island.
01:22:15
Speaker
And really what, what's got to happen is, um, You know, this is so when you go from the ego of, you know, preteen, you know, like from toddlerhood to to puberty.
01:22:31
Speaker
You go to being a social, you know, having having your psychological center of gravity be in in a social context. um The ego isn't destroyed.
01:22:43
Speaker
The death of the ego paradigm is not the death of the ego. The ego is transcended by the social context, but it's also included, right?
01:22:55
Speaker
And so so if we're going to, and and it's interesting too, because when that happens, when you have that sort of paradigm shift, um the problems in the old paradigm are not solved.
01:23:09
Speaker
They're obviated. Right. i mean, think about think about I talked about Newton and Einstein before, you know, one of the big debates before Einstein came along was around epicycles. Right. And so this is because, you know, classical Newtonian physics doesn't describe things well at over great distances. So, you know, in particular, like it was like Saturn, you know, like where is Saturn observationally versus where the math says it should be?
01:23:39
Speaker
and And it didn't line up. And so you end up with these fierce debates over like this sort of math being bolted on to Newton's equations, epicycles that were intended to explain why it was that Saturn wasn't where we thought it should be. And these debates got pretty intense in some cases, right? um Well, ah when Einstein came along and presented relativity, it didn't solve the epicycle problem.
01:24:09
Speaker
It made it go away. All that, like, you know, obnoxious debate over who was going to get funded because their epicycles were better than the other guys or whatever,
01:24:22
Speaker
It didn't, it did like somebody didn't win that debate. It just stopped being a debate. It no longer mattered. And so if if we are able to sort of transcend the modern paradigm, which we will, um all of this infighting is not going to be, no a winner will not be declared.
01:24:44
Speaker
It will be obviated. Do you see a timeline for that? No, I don't know. I can't. All I know is that the generativity to loss equation is definitely in deficit now. And we're in this, it seems to me, diagnostically, I argue that we're in this discipline phase of the life cycle of the modern paradigm.
01:25:10
Speaker
So it can't last much longer is my my contention. i How long? I don't know. Right. but But there is one more thing I would say about all this that speaks to the question you just asked, but indirectly. And I i think it's important.
01:25:26
Speaker
you know you You mentioned something about McLuhan, like we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us, right? So um I also mentioned earlier that the fourth image of the future doesn't belong to any paradigm. It belongs to the possibility field in which paradigms emerge. So so these two things connect, right?
01:25:51
Speaker
my My belief is that there the last thing that a paradigm does, doesn't have to, but it could, can, often does, is to generate something that is a result of the paradigm, but it transcends that paradigm.
01:26:10
Speaker
So a good example of this might be the printing press. The printing press was a was a tool created by the the medieval paradigm, right?
01:26:24
Speaker
And you could see why. it was trying to solve a problem within ah the medieval paradigm, like we need to get Bibles in the hands of more people or whatever. um But it transcended the medieval paradigm, and it it undoubtedly had a huge impact on the scientific revolution, on the Renaissance, on the the Reformation.
01:26:46
Speaker
All of those things were connected deeply to the invention of the press. um You could also make an argument for the mechanical clock, you know, being inexpensive and whatever. I mean, like, but I think, um you know, the emergence of ai um yeah you know, could very likely be ah similar, you know, like the sort of last gasp of generativity of the modern paradigm and and ah a product of modernity, but also something that transcends it. um
01:27:20
Speaker
So what does that mean in terms of, and you know, you can talk about this through the lens of, uh, Oh, whatever accelerationism or effective altruism or, uh, you know, the, uh, Kurzweil singularity or whatever. um I'm not sure that I buy any particular description per se, but I do think it's at least possible that it is...
01:27:49
Speaker
ah a herald of the coming paradigm shift and that there will be an interregnum, there will be a liminal space that follows the modern paradigm during which we're essentially traveling over the ocean to a new island, right?
01:28:08
Speaker
And that during that time, we will recall what we experienced in modernity ah but we will also start to imagine a transformed future.
01:28:22
Speaker
um And that will be what gives rise to the paradigm that succeeds the modern paradigm. I can't tell you exactly what that looks like. i could i could propose things that I i think are you know decent candidates for what might replace it or whatever, but I'm not quite um arrogant enough to think that I know.
01:28:45
Speaker
What does believing this or understanding, you know, paradigms in this way, life in this way, what are the implications for somebody listening to this? Do they live their life differently? Do they just see a different color in the rainbow that nobody nobody else sees?
01:29:07
Speaker
Well, that's why I'm writing the book about ah leadership as an institution, right? Because um I think leadership, like so many other modern institutions, has been deracinated. It's been it's been hollowed out.
01:29:22
Speaker
And the reason for that is that we're in this this disciplined phase of the life cycle of the modern paradigm. And so all of the institutions have...
01:29:34
Speaker
ah their Their own energy, their own generativity has had to be sacrificed in the service of maintaining the paradigm, of maintaining its last part of its life. fit it you know the the The life support that the paradigm is on is in part fueled by the hollowing out of its institutions. Right.
01:29:57
Speaker
However, ah i think that what leadership can do in a moment like this is to hold open certain apertures four because there are, I think, exceedingly few people ah who can maybe imagine what the next paradigm might look like.
01:30:22
Speaker
ah it's It's, I think, very difficult to know ah who those people are and whether or not any of them actually have ah an accurate vision of what that might be.
01:30:36
Speaker
But i I do think they exist. They're out there. They're maverick-type thinkers. They're you know sage, magician, archetypally-type people.
01:30:47
Speaker
And that leaders can hold open apertures in which ah that kind of thought is protected right now in the context of what is otherwise an extraordinarily, um you know, ah conformist,
01:31:05
Speaker
um you know ah totalizing kind of sacred ah culture that we're seeing, you know this sort of ossified, sclerotic expression of modernity.
01:31:18
Speaker
ah you know You mark yourself as an apostate by thinking different ideas, whatever they might be. And leaders are maybe the the only or one of the very few um ah institutions available or you know, sort of figures available to hold open apertures where people can, where these people can talk about ideas, can discuss what might be on the other side, ah you know, sort of protect them from being labeled as apostate for doing so.
01:31:54
Speaker
And so that's sort of the the purpose behind the book is to try to ah give some ah give give some insight about where the exits in the current paradigm might be, where they're situated. And so we give some encouragement to leaders to to protect the... the um to protect the visionaries that, uh, might be seeing something different.
01:32:22
Speaker
Uh, because I think our ability to get off the Island, um, and to find a new Island, um, you know or at least the quality of that experience, if not the ability to do it at all, will depend to some degree on ah something being seen but around where the exits are and what you know why we should go to another island and what that island might look like and so forth.
01:32:51
Speaker
If I'm imagining this in the in a fair way, let's say, All of the energy that we expend exploring any remaining possibility space in the current paradigm, any people that we lose along the way, whatever we want to refer to as all of the assets that we might have, people or energy or who knows what.
01:33:18
Speaker
It sounds to me like you're saying those are things that we risk not being able to take with us to the next paradigm. Those are people that we lose. Those are assets that we lose.
01:33:31
Speaker
And the more potential bridges, I forget the word exactly that you used, but the more people that leaders protect that might see the bridge to the next island, the more we can take with us in ah in a sense of value, perhaps, that we can take with us to the next paradigm.
01:33:56
Speaker
Right. There's no guarantee that the paradigm shift will result in fully fledged inhabitation of a new paradigm. Right. I mean, like, you know, I was just reading about the the the DNA bottleneck. in humans that's happened somewhere between 50 and 70 some thousand years ago, where they think there were as few as like two or three thousand
01:34:27
Speaker
ah you know individual humans left on Earth. at that point. ah the The amount of time necessary to reconstitute humanity after an event like that, now who knows what all was and involved in that. um you know some There are different theories about what caused it. But the point is is that a paradigm shift ah doesn't have to come off cleanly, you know. In fact, it it's not guaranteed not to result in an actual collapse, right? um and And I think, you know, just by analogy, ah it's probably fair to suggest that the ah the development of the modern paradigm is at least in part a result of
01:35:14
Speaker
of late ah medieval leadership protecting novel ideas, up to and including clandestinely, you know, like Freemasonry or, you know, the Rosicrucians or, um you know, i mean, ah Northern Italy, ah you know, when when Petrarch emerged and whatever, was this sort of island of possibility that was surrounded by, ah you know, something much more dour. Um, and so, ah that's what I'm talking about. You know, like, unfortunately i don't, for most people, it's like, I don't know what to tell you, but anybody who's in a position to, ah to sort of protect the possibility of, you know,
01:36:11
Speaker
considering what might come next and, ah you know, sort of maybe prepping people for ah those possibilities or giving room for discussions of those things, even if it has to happen clandestinely. Yeah,
01:36:27
Speaker
yeah I think that's that's the biggest takeaway, you know, and it's usually going to be people in positions of leadership that have the potential to do that. Where does someone go to learn more? Where do they go to read your articles? What do they do next after listening to this?
01:36:45
Speaker
Well, I'm on Substack. um You know, please subscribe. ah the The ah publication is called The Subjunctive, ah which is spelled S-U-B-J-U-N-C-T-I-V-E.
01:37:01
Speaker
ah But you can also just, you can get to to my substack by going to subjunctivism.org. ah So same spelling, except add ISM, get rid of the E. ah But yeah, so go there. I mean, I i would be grateful if you subscribe, ah you know, comment, feel free to attack my thesis, tell me I'm wrong or evil or whatever.
01:37:29
Speaker
And that's fine. yeah It's all good. But I, you know, I do think that, ah you know, ah having this kind of conversation, I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is, right? Like, I'm trying to open up an aperture for this kind of conversation.
01:37:46
Speaker
Well, we'll send people there. And Elliot, I appreciate you coming back for a second time. And as I said, we know each other well, so I always enjoy talking to you, but I'm glad to have the second conversation that we could record together. So thank you for being here.
01:38:02
Speaker
Likewise, I enjoyed it a great deal. i i appreciate you having me on.