Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Call to minds and voices: Phuck Trumpism
4 Plays3 months ago
#philosophy #politics #socialmedia #resistance #trump
Recommended
Transcript
Intro
Unity of Warriors and Scholars
00:00:17
Daithi Flannery
Do not separate your warriors and your scholars or you will have your fighting done by fools and your thinking done by cowards. There's wisdom in that statement. Wisdom that speaks to the state of the world today, to the way we think and tell stories, to the way we see each other, the way we see ourselves.
00:00:37
Daithi Flannery
The warriors are not those that physically fight. The warriors of today are the workers, the factory operators, the bus drivers, the cooks and the waiters. The construction workers and the nurses, the ones who get up every day and go and do jobs they often don't like to keep things rolling.
00:00:53
Daithi Flannery
They haven't time to build up defences against the surgical dings and beeps from the insistent companion in their pocket.
Roles and Responsibilities in Society
00:01:00
Daithi Flannery
The scholars are their professors, psychologists, politicians, lawyers, poets and artists.
00:01:06
Daithi Flannery
And the scholars need the bravery of the warriors to stand against the coming regimes. And then we have the uber-wealthy that are nearly neither warriors nor our scholars and who live in their own bubble of self-praise and narcissism.
00:01:20
Daithi Flannery
Meritocracy is what's right, they say. We deserve it, they say. We are the natural elites. As you can see, we are rich and successful because of our inherent greatness. We deserve it. And thus, you less great?
00:01:32
Daithi Flannery
Well, you deserve that too, they subtly infer, as we praise their philanthropy. Now do I see myself as a warrior or a scholar or a worker or a poet or a fool or a coward?
00:01:45
Daithi Flannery
Yes to all of the above and I assume most of you honest ones do too. I'm not speaking from above, I'm swimming in the shit stew as well.
Critique of Trumpism and Liberal Democracy
00:01:56
Daithi Flannery
There is an old and dangerous way of thinking that is on the rise again and mounting a monstrous challenge to our way of life.
00:02:03
Daithi Flannery
To be clear, There's plenty to criticise in the pre-Trumpism world. Plenty of mistakes, missteps, corruption, pollution, hubris, inequality. However, the new world order that is emerging with Trump at its head will not allow the criticism that's required for change.
00:02:20
Daithi Flannery
So what is being challenged? Liberal democracy. Oh, I hear you say, let transgender men into women's bathrooms and sports or down with this sort of thing. Bleeding hearts, snowflake liberals.
00:02:31
Daithi Flannery
Harumph, harumph. The level of noise made about this one topic is so vastly magnified when compared to the actual impacts this has in reality. How many of you have had a trouble with women or with transgender people in your women's bathrooms?
00:02:49
Daithi Flannery
However, the topic as a stimulus has massive impacts. It induces outrage and division. And most importantly to the data gatherers, it induces engagement.
00:03:02
Daithi Flannery
Therefore, words like liberal democracy have come to mean something nefarious and corrosive in the shallow zeitgeist that now envelops our consciousness. When people hear liberal democracy, they often think of transgender people in women's toilets or women's sports.
00:03:16
Daithi Flannery
They think of immigrants landing on European and American shores to replace current populations. They think of tree-huggers blocking roads and cancel culture's virtuous whip, dealing out lashes from on high.
00:03:30
Daithi Flannery
People today, it seems, rarely think that liberal democracy is what those who fought in World War II were fighting for, or that it's about maximizing principles of freedom for everyone rather than a few.
00:03:43
Daithi Flannery
or that it's the principles of liberal democracy that allows for private property, that gives people the right to education, to health care, to social welfare. It's only the fundamental principles of liberal democracy that allows us to argue for the regulation of large corporations and financial structures to stop the inevitable oppression that comes with concentrated wealth and power.
00:04:05
Daithi Flannery
Those that argue for freedom, free speech, fairness, Whether they realise it or not, are using the ideas of liberal democracy as a basis for those arguments. Otherwise, we're back to saying, because God said so.
00:04:20
Daithi Flannery
When we say things like it's wrong for one person to harm another, or it's wrong for large corporations to monopolise markets and destroy small businesses, or it's wrong for governments to abuse their power or punish without cause,
00:04:34
Daithi Flannery
Those who carry out these injustices can simply ask why. And what is our answer to that in a secular world? That it's bad for the stock market or the GDP? It can only be because that is not the kind of society we live in.
00:04:47
Daithi Flannery
We live in a liberal democracy where every individual has rights regardless of their place in social hierarchies or wealth tables.
Foundations of Human Rights
00:04:55
Daithi Flannery
Regardless of their religion or race, sexuality or gender.
00:04:59
Daithi Flannery
Regardless of their skin colour, nationality or place of birth. Humans have rights by way of them being human. Every human. These rights were not given by God, but by ourselves, to each other, by way of building a society where these rights were agreed upon.
00:05:18
Daithi Flannery
Of course, agreeing to live as part of a society demands restrictions, or otherwise we have tyranny in a might-is-right kind of existence. So we each restrict our own freedoms to aim for the most freedom for everyone.
00:05:32
Daithi Flannery
Of course we have imperfectly strived for these things, attempted to maintain freedom while countering inequality and corruption. We have created no utopia. But then there can be no utopia while people are free.
00:05:45
Daithi Flannery
Utopia is a single dream, a single path, a single way, and we each have our own. One person's utopia may be another's nightmare. Freedom for the fox is death for the rabbit.
00:05:58
Daithi Flannery
So we adopted ideas like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which we have strived imperfectly to uphold. What is it that brought about the need for such a declaration and why in 1948?
00:06:11
Daithi Flannery
I'm sure you guessed. World War II. The rise of fascism, Nazism, bad thinking.
Lessons from History
00:06:18
Daithi Flannery
It was brought about after a banal evil swept through the German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese consciousness with simplistic, reductive, instrumental, machine-like logic which had clear answers to every question, where every problem had a final solution.
00:06:35
Daithi Flannery
You can look up people like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh to see that this bad thinking was very present in the West too. I read a book recently called The Forgotten Soldier. It's about that horrible war and those who fought in it.
00:06:49
Daithi Flannery
The main character goes through many hardships and finds solace in its fellow soldiers that fought bravely alongside each other. They share food, stories, pains, talk about loved ones who are waiting for them at home, and the dreams they have about what they'll do after the war ends.
00:07:06
Daithi Flannery
They can't wait to get home and have good war stories to tell about their heroic exploits. There's tales of pride when they achieve promotion or beat back the enemy. There's people fighting alongside one another from different nations under one flag.
00:07:20
Daithi Flannery
This book, The Forgotten Soldier, was about a German, Geisheer, a Nazi. I bring this up because nowhere in the book did this man seem inhuman or demon-like. Nowhere did his fellow soldiers seem as though they were from another world.
00:07:34
Daithi Flannery
They were humans, just like you and me. But the ideas they were following, the stories they believed about what it is to be human, to be good, to be right, were not the same as our liberal democratic stories.
00:07:46
Daithi Flannery
They did not strive imperfectly for the rights of all humans. They strived for the might of a few. The strong ones that naturally deserved all the benefits they could take.
00:07:57
Daithi Flannery
And the many, the ones that were being trampled by this superior type, well, they deserved their fate too. So why were these Aryan heroes allowed to flourish in Germany, Italy, Spain, etc?
00:08:09
Daithi Flannery
Because they were propagated by bad thinking, or perhaps not thinking at all. We have called the generation that beat the Nazis the Great Generation. And that moniker is deserved, not just because they fought against Nazism, but because they resisted this bad thinking.
00:08:27
Daithi Flannery
They resisted the call to regard themselves as better or more important than others that were different. They resisted so that we could strive imperfectly for freedom, for a humanity that cared, that deliberated rather than decreed, that sought to get closer or ten to the truth rather than simply accepting certainty from a confident authority.
Truth and Manipulation
00:08:49
Daithi Flannery
As individuals, it's up to us all to maintain a clear distinction between truth and lies, and to maintain our ability to think independently and critically, to let go of this digital banister and use our own capacity for reason.
00:09:03
Daithi Flannery
Or as Hannah Arendt explained, we become prime candidates for totalitarianism. Think of where truth lies now when Pete Hegseth and others talk about Donald Trump posting a truth about this or that, or truthing.
00:09:18
Daithi Flannery
Look at how they're trying to hijack the very word truth to discombobulate us until we can't tell truth from lies. Double speak, Orwell called it And the time to read Orwell is now.
Purpose of the Podcast
00:09:32
Daithi Flannery
I started this podcast project to talk about ideas and systems of ideas, to think openly and critically about stuff that interested me. I intentionally stayed away from click-baity topics that I saw as distracting from what matters.
00:09:46
Daithi Flannery
I didn't want to join the many purveyors of outrage that have polluted our information sphere. I knew this meant I wouldn't make money at it, and that's okay with me. I could work, as I always have, and maintain some dignity in my podcast work.
00:09:59
Daithi Flannery
I wanted to be okay with what I was putting out in the world, and I have been. I wanted to discuss ideas that might bring about a reunion of humanity and the rest of nature naively, and talk to people I meet every day who've lived through extraordinary situations that intrigue me.
00:10:16
Daithi Flannery
But now, given that my education and interests are in the realm of ideas, I feel a responsibility to stand up against what I see as bad thinking. Trumpism is on the rise and must be resisted.
00:10:28
Daithi Flannery
This nonsense myth of meritocracy must be resisted. We have never, nor can we ever have, a true meritocracy. As the coiner of the word meritocracy was telling us, it's a dystopian idea.
00:10:43
Daithi Flannery
That's not to say some meritocratic ideals are useless, as they certainly can have a part to play, but they cannot be held as ultimate and primary principles. Do all the wealthy people deserve what they get through merit?
00:10:56
Daithi Flannery
Do all the poor merit what they get too?
00:11:01
Daithi Flannery
My podcast is very small. I have a small voice as most of us do, but I do intend to use that to stand up against this rise of bad thinking, Trumpism. The new tech monarchs are not simply an American problem.
00:11:14
Daithi Flannery
They are impacting the entire world order and bringing us further away from a good democracy. That's not to say i have nothing to criticize about what preceded Trumpism. But let's get back to constructive criticism of democracy to make it better.
00:11:27
Daithi Flannery
Not simply hand it all over to gangsters because we've been persuaded it's all corrupt. Right now, it's between freedom as best we can or whatever type of authoritarianism Trumpism will eventually be called.
00:11:41
Daithi Flannery
This is a call to minds and to voices. I am offering this podcast as a space to discuss ideas and do some critical thinking around the issues and how to resist the bad thinking that is dismantling our systems of governments and institutions which uphold our values and are where we can plead for justice.
00:12:00
Daithi Flannery
I'm calling on the warriors and the scholars, the workers and the thinkers, the fighters and the planners, the scientists and the poets. How do we resist in a time of persuasive technologies?
00:12:12
Daithi Flannery
How do we maintain authenticity, sanity? We need to think to ourselves, what do you want to add to our story? How do you want to communicate with your descendants?
00:12:25
Daithi Flannery
Every time we accept without reflection bad thinking of ourselves or others, we let a banal evil flourish into our children's future.
Impact of Social Media
00:12:37
Daithi Flannery
What kind of ancestor do you want to be?
00:12:41
Daithi Flannery
So who do I want to speak to here and about what topics? I want to speak to everyone. I want to speak to the warriors and the scholars, psychologists, sociologists, politicians and philosophers about the many things that are brought about this imminent change.
00:12:54
Daithi Flannery
And I want to talk about social media. I've had very disappointing conversations with people in academic psychology on this issue. When bringing up the dangers of social media, I have been told that it's the same as reading a newspaper, or that the horse has bolted, so stop going on about it, or that it's great for combating loneliness, which I argue it has also created.
00:13:16
Daithi Flannery
To be clear, I think we can have a social media, but most right now, most are anti-social medias. It must be becoming absolutely clear that the narratives pushed by persuasive technologies to garner human attention are simply designed to outrage, as that's what we engage with.
00:13:33
Daithi Flannery
And our attention is valuable, as data to the tech bros for persuasion, but as our very way of being in the world for the rest of us. What we attend to is who we are, and it's who we become.
Engagement with Diverse Perspectives
00:13:48
Daithi Flannery
I want to speak to people who have a high understanding of thinkers like Hannah Arendt and authoritarianism, Michael Sandel and meritocracy. I want to talk to Tyson Yonca-Porta.
00:13:58
Daithi Flannery
I want to talk to Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagen. I want to talk to neuroscientists about how social media is hijacking our dopaminergic reward system and changing our minds into skittles.
00:14:10
Daithi Flannery
I want to talk to Ian McGilchrist or someone with a good understanding of his work where he has the left brain, right brain distinction that gives us a really useful way to think about a lot of these issues. I also want to talk to the warrior workers.
00:14:23
Daithi Flannery
I want to talk to the people we take for granted every day. The deliveroo cyclists, the farmers, the nurses, the cleaners, the chefs, the taxi drivers, the construction workers, the people that keep us fed, keep us warm, keep us sheltered, that keep us alive.
00:14:39
Daithi Flannery
The warrior workers that get up every day and do the hard, the monotonous jobs. That put in the hours and get the weekend to recover so they can put in the hours again next week. Many of these people have lived interesting lives and have interesting ideas beyond the service they do for us all. And I want to hear about it and let others hear about it.
00:14:59
Daithi Flannery
I truly hope that in a few years people come up to me and say, dude, remember when you had that moral panic over Trump and the rise of the bad thinking? Dude, you are so wrong. I've never wanted to be wrong as much as I do right now.
00:15:12
Daithi Flannery
But I don't think I'm wrong. And I see this as a responsibility. When I got injured, my country was good enough to educate me about thinking. And I should be good enough to use it.
00:15:24
Daithi Flannery
Please remember that everyone you meet, everyone is fighting a battle you don't know about. The people you think have no problems. The wealthy, the successful, they have problems. You're not the only one.
00:15:35
Daithi Flannery
You're not alone. We are all together in this existence. Let's resist those that are trying to tear us apart. Let's resist the bad thinking that encourages hate and outrage and disgust towards people in need of help and compassion.
00:15:52
Daithi Flannery
If you want to come on the podcast or know someone else I should have on, send an email to philosophicory at gmail.com and we'll go from there. I do have some guests lined up to bring you over to summer, some returning, some new.
00:16:05
Daithi Flannery
We will be trying to think through the state of things and trying to use reason to find the better ways to think through things.
Resisting Harmful Ideologies
00:16:11
Daithi Flannery
Yes, we are in a different social environment than in the 1930s and 40s, but the ideas that are rising about what it is to be right, what it is to be good, what it is to be human, they are the same.
00:16:25
Daithi Flannery
And the bad ones must be resisted. as they were resisted in the past. Thank you.