The Daily Eudemon
By Eric Scheske
The Daily EudemonMar 08, 2020
Existence Strikes Back and The Hemisphere Hypothesis: A Summary
Modernity is the left hemisphere gone wild. Gnosticism, with its dualistic approach and emphasis on knowledge that gives salvation and control, is a left-hemispheric political religion that thrived during the twentieth century and has today settled in as the dominant cultural disposition that drives public debate. Today’s powerful elites aren’t gnostics, but they ride their left hemispheres like cocaine-fueled jockeys on rabid horses. Because gnosticism and today’s powerful elites are dominated by the left hemisphere, they’re natural allies and they’re coming together in a final effort to do what modernity has been trying to do for centuries: eliminate altogether the Tao part of The Reality Spectrum. It can’t be done, short of eliminating humanity altogether, so the Tao continues to manifest itself in all sorts of ways.
How to Brand Yourself
Pick four traits. The last one must be "victim."
It's because we live in a gnostic culture that rails against the evil "structure." If there's a structure, there must be victims of the structure.
The Gnostic Hates the Structure
Ancient gnosticism used the ancient cosmic system: The earth was in the center, surrounded by the air and spheres: sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and a ring of fixed stars that close it all off.
That was more-or-less accepted astronomical science around the time of Christ. It was nothing novel.
But the ancient gnostic took the cosmological system one step further: it taught that the cosmological system was a prison.
Every ancient gnostic sect taught this idea. Most sects said the cosmos was the creation of an evil god, the “Demiurge,” who created the cosmos as a structure of deception. The Demiurge then outfitted the structure with demons and archons who acted as prison guards to make sure no one got out of this cosmological prison.
Gnosticism offered liberation from the prison. The cosmological prison was the sine qua non of gnosticism: If existence wasn’t a prison, the gnostic’s product—knowledge, the map, the plan for escaping the prison—was worthless.
Gnosticism without a structural evil to overcome is like football, baseball, or basketball without a ball.
The Gnostic Believes His Paradise is a Historic Inevitability and His Movement Will Bring It About
Parts IV and V of an Analysis of Eric Voegelin's Six Gnostic Traits
Alienation is the Marxist bugbear. He sees alienation everywhere because it emanates from the economic substructure and works its way through the socio-political superstructure. Natural economic evolution would eliminate it, but the ruling classes are suppressing the evolution out of self-interest, so a revolution needs to bring about the evolution.
Show notes here
The Gnostic is a Believer
Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?
Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts.
Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it modestly. He was born at the end of the Enlightenment and fully embraced its ideals,[1]which Isaiah Berlin summarized as:
1. Every genuine question can be answered. If it can’t be answered, it’s not a genuine question.
2. The answers to the questions can be discovered, learned, and taught.
3. All the answers are compatible with one another.
Those ideals are captured perfectly by science. Science is the discipline of power: it answers questions and puts them into neat boxes. Physics is especially good at this.
Comte concluded that the principles of physics could be applied to society: “social physics” is what he initially called it before calling it “sociology.”
By applying scientific findings and mathematical truths to social interactions, the government and its intellectual advisers could greatly improve society.
He was positive it would work. He was so positive, in fact, that he popularized the term “Positivism” to describe his and other contemporary academics’ extremely positive expectations of science
Comte was hailed as an academic hero. The French erected statues and monuments in his honor and named streets after him. He had replaced the hidebound restrictions of tradition, king, and pope with the only thing that could be trusted: science, bolstered by math. No more religion, just facts.
Why We Judge. And Why We Need to Stop
This is a podcast episode from "Outside the Modern Limits," a whimsical newsletter that comes out every Saturday that is geared toward helping people understand and thrive in modernity. You can subscribe and find the show notes here.
The Gnostic Never Blames Himself
Rousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.
Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything.
Significantly, Rousseau didn’t see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered philosopher of all time. He was so self-centered, biographers wonder if he was even capable of love. He said of his long-time mistress, a lowly laundress that he,
Never felt the lease glimmering of love for her . . . the sensual needs I satisfied with her were purely sexual.When those sensual needs resulted in five children, he put them into orphanages, which, given the state of orphanages in the 18thcentury, was practically a sentence of torture and early death: only five percent of orphan children survived to adulthood, and most of the adult survivors became beggars and vagabonds.
These Six Traits Make a Person a Gnostic
Eric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels.
The Swiss theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar was supposedly the first person to draw parallels between the ancient gnostic heresy and modern theories in Prometheus (1937), which examined modern German thought. Albert Camus did a similar thing with modern French thought in The Rebel (1951).[1]
But Voegelin took the strain of thought much further in The New Science of Politics (1952). The book became a Time cover story and, voila, gnosticism was in the limelight, a least among nerds.
Granted, later in life, Voegelin said he wasn’t sure “gnosticism” was the best term to use and thought perhaps it received too much attention, but he didn’t remotely conclude that the term didn’t work. Far from it. Later in life, at age 67, he published his most popular work, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1968).
A Dozen Quotes from Prometheus Bound: A Play about Spiritual Disease
Brains beat brawn. The Titan Prometheus knew that. He joined Zeus in his battle against the Titans.
Prometheus later befriended the race of men. He saved them when Zeus thought about extinguishing them. He taught them arts and science. He gave them tools. Zeus increasingly found Prometheus’ promotion of the human race tiresome and troublesome.
And then Prometheus gave humans the gift of fire, in direct violation of Zeus’ orders.
Zeus was livid. He ordered Prometheus bound: Kratos (Power) and Bia (Force) held him while Hephaestus fettered him to a chain on a crag hanging over the Black Sea. An eagle came every day and ate his liver, which regenerated every night.
The Tao: The Transcendental Router
For the fortunate few, that router is hard-wired with fiber optic. Most of us only get a wireless connection, and a wobbly one at that.
Voegelin’s New Science of Politics Put Gnosticism Back into Our Awareness
If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world.
Solon was a Man of the Tao
Why David Hume is Important
Within 100 years, the Cartesians used impeccable logic derived from Descartes' I think there I am to reach two conclusions: there is no earthly agent of movement and there is no matter. There is only God and mind. Hume yanked God and mind out of these conclusions and the Cartesian Jenga tower came tumbling down.
The First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State Goes Back to 500 BC
Something really bizarre happened around the year 500 BC, all across Eurasia. We started to realize that we live in the metaxy: an area comprised of transcendence and immanence. These ten thinkers, from Italy to China, led the way.
Introducing Eric Voegelin
Voegelin was not charismatic. He was a “gentleman thinker.” He didn’t like small talk and valued his time. His personality didn’t attract a cult-like following. He didn’t establish a school or movement. But he’s important.
We're All Machiavellians Now
Before he published the Prince, Machiavelli published the seducer. Before he published a masterpiece of political philosophy, he published a comedy.
The Mandragola (The Mandrake) tells the story of Callimaco, a handsome young man and seducer of women. He hears about the Florentine beauty Lucrezia and begins a conspiracy to seduce her. The problem is, she’s married. She’s married to a wealthy old man who can’t get her pregnant and they need a son to maintain their political position.
Callimaco shows up, disguised as a doctor, and convinces her husband to give her a mandrake potion to increase her fertility. The problem is, Callimaco tells the old man, the first man who sleeps with her after she takes the potion will die. They decide to find an unwitting dupe to have sex with her. Callimaco, in different disguise, becomes the dupe, much to his delight. And Lucrezia’s. She at first was hesitant, but she relented and, convinced it was divine providence, takes Callimaco as her lover indefinitely.
Everything turns out well. The old man gets his male heir and Callimaco gets Lucrezia.
Keep Sweet and Have Sex
A 50-year-old man had ritual sex with a 12-year-old girl while adult women assisted.
And everyone was cool with it.
That’s just part of the bizarre story told in Netflix’s Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey and the exploits of its prophet, Warren Jeffs.
Keep Sweet’s Fascination
It’s the story of a renegade Mormon group that still practice polygamy. Vigorous polygamy, especially the type that lets old men bang young women and, occasionally, girls.
It’s the kind of thing that disgusts, but it also arouses, at least at some level. Sex sells for a reason. Keep Sweet did, its IMDB rating currently sitting at 7.3 with 11,000 reviews (Netflix’s Murder Mountain, which enjoyed the endorsement of Joe Rogan, sits at 6.8 with 3,200 reviews).
But I don’t think sex is the only reason Keep Sweetfascinates.
I think it fascinates because, although everyone understands the sex part, they can’t understand how an entire culture could allow such a thing to occur.
If It Doesn’t Fit, Put It on the Shelf
The docuseries tries to explain it, but every interview or explanation came down to the same thing: it’s how these people were raised. It was the only thing these people knew. They were raised in a polygamous culture that celebrated their prophet. If the prophet told girls to do something—or someone—they did it/him.
If something didn’t make sense, they were told to “put it on the shelf.”
And just as the lechery of old men resonates with all men at some level, this kind of rationality resonates too.
These girls who submitted to sex with old men, the parents who gave their consent the women who participated in the erotic ritual: they acted rationally.
It’s All Rational
That’s the real dirty secret in the docuseries and another reason why, besides the sex, it fascinates.
We’re all capable of such a thing.
Not because of our nethers.
But because of our brains.
How to Cure Yourself of Modernitis
You're soaked in modernity. You think like a modern. It's not good. Consider doing the opposite of whatever your rationality tells you to do.
Seven Early Symptoms of the Mental Disease “Modernitis”
Your reason isn’t reasonable.
Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it.
And smoke it and smoke it and smoke it, until you smoke rationality out of your head, until a love for the absurd fills your lungs, and until you breathe the fresh air of freedom.
Let me explain.
“I Don’t See Why”When I look back over my adult life and wince at the unfortunate things I did, there’s a common theme: the inner dialogue that began and concluded with, “I don’t see why” or its negative shade, “I don’t see why not.” I didn’t see why, or see why not, so I did X, Y, or Z. And X, Y, or Z turned out awful for me or others.
Most of us carry the assumption that we can do whatever we want unless our reason tells us not to.
Unfortunately, this tends to be almost identical to the assumption that we can do whatever we want. As Pascal said, as Freud argued, as current studies about cognitive biases show: our minds aren’t nearly as reasonable as we think.
It’s one thing to spend long hours in study, contemplation, and dialogue with advisers and friends to form your conscience when it comes to a weighty matter. It’s another thing to do something merely because your reason doesn’t explain why you shouldn’t.
The former is a sign of wisdom. The latter is a sign that your mind suffers from Modernitis.
Definition“Modernitis”: A mental disease, rarely diagnosed, marked by intuitive confidence in one’s ideas and the findings of science.
It’s rarely diagnosed for the same reason a rational fish wouldn’t know it’s wet. A mental disease that afflicts everyone becomes a sign of mental health.
Descartes was the main philosopher that spread Modernitis. There were other causes and other philosophers contributed, sure, but he was the main culprit.
He died in 1650, a celebrity and conqueror. His ideas had spread; his ideas had won. Modernitis became a sign of mental health.
The effects were seen everywhere.
When Western Civilization Submitted Itself to a Lobotomy
Descartes was a philosophical surgeon who lobotomized common sense from the modern mind without most people even noticing. It helped that western civilization was thoroughly prepped and anesthetized for the procedure.
Descartes Praised Lycurgus. It’s Our Earliest Glimpse of the Problem with Modernist Thinking
Descartes, by placing ultimate importance on one's ideas, gave credibility to the outrageous ideas that littered modernity.
Lycurgus put the “Spartan” into Sparta.
Before Lycurgus, Sparta was like other Greek cities. Its citizens sang, celebrated love and good food, wrote poetry, and crafted fine pottery.
After Lycurgus, Sparta became grim and tough, determined to keep its slave class under control despite the daunting slave-to-citizen ratio (10:1?).
Music, poetry, fine pottery, and good food vanished. Family and love remained, but in twisted forms.
Men were discouraged from marrying small wives. Men with vigorous wives were encouraged to lend them to vigorous men. Men who grew too old to service their young wives were expected to make her available to young men.
The newborn was brought before a state council of inspectors. If rejected, the baby was thrown from a cliff.
At age seven, boys were removed from their families and raised by the state in barracks. Martial training was everything and done in the nude. The teachers provoked quarrels among the boys so they’d fight. An annual ritual involved whipping several boys until their blood stained the ground. At age 12, each boy received only one garment to wear for the year. He was not allowed to bathe much and was required to sleep in the open, on a bed of rushes. He was taught to read and write, but barely. He was taught to forage and steal. Stealth was valued above all, and getting caught doing whatever—stealing, trying to bang one’s own wife—brought punishment (great shame, flogging, etc.). At age 30, if the boy survived all this, he was admitted to full citizenship.
This Monk Understands David Foster Wallace
A Cistercian monk in Austria writes eruditely about David Foster Wallace. He appears to embrace "The Bridge Option" when dealing with modernity: embracing postmodernity and premodernity . . . bypassing modernity.
Jack Kerouac: The Tao on Steroids
He sat on his mother’s couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954. In his 20s and the 1940s, he said he’d like to join his Russian comrades and fight against Fascism.
He coined the term “Beat Generation” which became the proto-countercultural movement of the 1960s. He detested the 1960s counterculture, noting that the Beatnik’s was a movement of enthusiasm and glee, not one of disgruntled whining.
He took Benzedrine, morphine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, and opium. He saw a statue of Mary turn its head.
He died at age 47 from hemorrhaging of the esophagus, the drunkard’s classic death. His corpse held a rosary and his funeral Mass was held at St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church.
Such was the short life of Jack Kerouac.
He was hip before it was hip, crisscrossing America in the late 1940s, from New York to Denver to San Francisco, with stops in Des Moines, Chicago, New Orleans, and points in-between, with a jaunt into Mexico City.
He wrote about it during a Benzedrine-fueled three-week writing session in 1951, typing onto rolls of paper that were taped together into a long scroll so he didn’t have to stop to change the paper. When Truman Capote heard that Kerouac had written the book in three weeks, he sneered, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
But youngsters disagreed. They lapped up the book when it was published in 1957 and took to the road, seeking to become Beats.
New Course/Newsletter: Raising Intellectually-Sound Children. Maybe
Montaigne: Godfather of 4Chan?
Montaigne was the godfather of modern skepticism. His was a “negative skepticism,” which disturbed Descartes enough to prompt him to come up with a positive response, which in turn gave us modernity, its fierce subjectivism, and the parade of “little gods” that have marred the last 200 years.
71 Thoughts to Improve Your Thoughts
1. The wise know they start each morning as beginners. Robin Daniels
2. "In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention." Simone Weil
3. "My experience is what I agree to attend to." William James
4. "To enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with, you have to take charge of your attention." Winifred Gallagher, Rapt
5. "Choice of attention--to pay attention to this and ignore that--is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be." W.H. Auden
6. Your life is the sum of what you focus on. Winifred Gallagher
7. "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." William James
8. "Attention is the withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others." William James
9. The best response to distractions is no response. Robin Daniels
10. "Energy flows where attention goes." Amishi Jha
11. If you stay focused on the right things, your life will stop being a mere reaction to circumstances but rather a work of art. Winifred Gallagher
12. Every saint's life is a work of art.
13. Being focused is the next best thing to being happy. Winifred Gallagher
14. Resign yourself to mere concentration, and you might get some happiness too.
Why Francis Bacon is a Founding Father of Modernity
Bacon’s books proposed a new method of inquiry.
In technical language, he proposed that we rely on induction instead of deduction.
Put a little more simply: Instead of trying to deduce truth from a priori principles and making our observations match the principles, he said we should make our observations and reach a posteriori conclusions from the observations.
Put as simply as possible: Instead of using dogmas to tell us what the science says, let’s just see what the science says.
Bacon was very serious about the rejection of dogmas. He admonished readers to eliminate “Idols” that cloud scientific studies and conclusions. His was a complete rejection of metaphysics when it came to the realm of physics. Separation of church and science. He is properly considered the Father of Empiricism.
Top Ten Mystics of the 14th Century
The 1300s. Europe in the grips of economic depression, war, and natural catastrophes. Europe still experiencing the spiritual wake left by the lives of Saints Francis and Dominic. A deep concern with the interior life seized large numbers of people, both clergy and laity, and the pursuit of inwardness became an intense and exclusive goal of many.
The ones who made the most progress were like today’s American Idol contestants. They made it to the top and everyone wanted to listen to them.
10. Richard Rolle (1300–1349)“Little wonder when a man is first made a true contemplative, and tastes the sweetness and then feels the warmth, that he almost dies through excess of love.”
Richard Rolle: ladies’ man. Women were a source of temptation in his youth, an object of tender concern as a spiritual father in his prime. Most of his written works are devotions for his female listeners. Our culture can’t imagine this, of course. Or rather, our culture can imagine this only too much, letting its imagination run to the lascivious. He lived 31 of his 49 years as a hermit. The only Englishman on this list. Never canonized, but inspired a flourishing cult in England, where his books were more widely read than Chaucer’s in the 1400s. Sometimes credited as the first master of English prose.
9. Gerard Groote (1340–1384)Blaise Pascal: First Anti-Modern
Rene Descartes was kind of a dick.
His famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of all authority—even objective truth—in favor of a defecated rationality and fierce subjectivism that belittles anything outside one’s own mind.
The modern attitude created by Descartes does two things:
1. It enshrines one’s own beliefs or preferences as the exclusive source of truth (fierce subjectivism).
2. It elevates the logic that flows from that fierce subjectivism (defecated rationality) into a truth (my truth, your truth, his/her/its truth, etc.).
If you draw a thick cocaine line from Descartes to today’s Trans Wars, you’d be drawing coke lines better than Hunter Thompson.
Accused of being an atheist, Descartes claimed to be a “devout Catholic,”[i]but he left his Catholic France to live among the Calvinists and Jews in the Netherlands. He espouses odd (and bizarre) theories about the soul. He spent his final days as the court philosopher for the Lutheran Queen Christina of Sweden and died without Last Rites.
One academic thinks that Descartes was such a poor Catholic that a priest thought his example would prevent Queen Christina from converting to Catholicism, so the priest poisoned the father of modernity by lacing a host with arsenic. The story doesn’t ring true—a priest who cares enough about Catholicism wouldn’t desecrate the host like that—but hey, the Queen converted after Descartes’ death so maybe.
The Pope thought Descartes was kind of a dick. Urban VIII put Descartes’ writings on the Index of Forbidden Books about a dozen years after Descartes died.
Pascal Surpassed DescartesBut most people thought Descartes was brilliant. He was the toast of Europe. But Descartes wasn’t the smartest guy in Europe. Heck, he wasn’t even the smartest guy in France.
A young upstart was his intellectual superior. Descartes knew it and resented it (did I mention Descartes was kind of a dick?).
When the 16-year-old Blaise Pascal published a mathematical paper on conic sections when Descartes was 43, Descartes knew he’d been eclipsed when he was at the height of his intellectual power and reputation. At first, he refused to believe someone as young as Pascal could’ve written something so impressive, but when he learned that it was true, Descartes turned to belittling him. When Pascal invented the syringe and the hydraulic press, Descartes mocked him and said Pascal had “too much vacuum in his head.”
Four Quirky Post-WWI Utopians
Mystical Erections, Violence, and Theft
No, that isn’t a passage above the front door of Jeffrey Epstein’s residence on Little Saint James.
It’s a popular saying of a medieval sect known as the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” which has long been regarded, according to historian Norman Cohn, as “one of the most perplexing and mysterious phenomena in medieval history.”
So perplexing, in fact, that Cohn himself conflated a genuine mystic, Henry Suso (1300-1366), with the Brethren. Suso, a disciple of Meister Eckhart, was one of the most Zen-like mystics in Christian history. Zen has Gnostic tendencies, but Suso was a legitimate mystic, as evidenced by his beatification in 1831.[1]
Suso lived in Cologne, Germany, which was the stronghold of the Brethren, but he was hardly like the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
Consider Suso's direct contemporary and fellow Colognian, John of Brunn, who lived at the Brethren’s House of Voluntary Poverty.
According to Brunn, since God is free, everything should be free: held in common. If anyone had more than he needed, it was merely so he could give them to the Brethren. If an adept ate at a tavern, he shouldn’t have to pay and, if the tavern keeper insisted on payment, he should be beaten. Cheating, theft, and violent robbery were all justified for Brethren adepts, according to John Brunn, who also testified in 1340 to lying, fornicating, orgies, incest, sodomy, and murder (including infanticide).
From Renaissance "Follow the Magic" to Modernity "Follow the Science"
In 1598, a huge renegade friar organized a revolt to liberate Calabria from Spain.
Tommaso Campanella started the revolt with astrology: he announced to his followers that the stars portended great changes and revolution. He then added numerology, noting that the numbers agreed with the stars: the year 1600 was approaching and 16 is numerologically significant.[i]
The new century, Campanella preached, would mark the dawn of a new age—an age with a better religious cult, better moral laws, and an excellent ruler (to wit, Campanella, who thought he was astrologically destined to bring the world into the new age).
In order to prepare for the new age, Campanella taught it was first necessary to overthrow Spanish rule, but he believed so strongly in his personal magical powers and the magical signs that he scarcely prepared for Spain’s inevitable response. His “revolution” was quickly crushed and Campanella was imprisoned for 27 years.
During his imprisonment, he channeled his Utopian-magical desires into writing. In Citta del Sole (The City of the Sun), he drafted a blueprint for his ideal city, a mountain city ruled by a priest named Hoh. Hoh and his bureaucratic aides would rule over sex relations, which would be organized to bring about the best humans. There would be no mental or physical disabilities. All things would be held in common, including the women, and children would be raised by the community. Both sexes would be trained to fight. Everyone would work, but only four hours per day. Everyone would practice perfect virtue, and there would be no crime.[ii]
The City's structure would be dictated by astrology. It would be divided into seven divisions named after the seven planets (Neptune and Pluto hadn’t been discovered yet). The walls which divided each division would be covered with astrological depictions. In the middle of the City, there would be a vast temple with an altar containing a great "mappamondo" on which all the heavens would be depicted. The dome would contain the greatest stars with a listing of the powers each has over the earth. In short, Campanella's City was "a complete reflection of the world as governed by the laws of natural magic in dependence on the stars” and was "saturated through and through with astrology."[iii]
The Magical RenaissanceThe Black Arts Have No Nonsense About Them
150 Years that Shook Europe
The Satoshi Nakamoto of Mysticism
He first articulated the western mystical tradition. We don’t even know who he was. But he pointed to the Tao.
Dr. Faust and Mr. Lao-Tzu
When Dr. Faust insulted the Tao, the devil appeared.
We Golf. Therefore, the Tao is.
We intuit the Tao. That’s why our active hobbies engage us.
Thomas Aquinas: Pinnacle to Obsolescence in 200 Years and Why It Matters
Thomas Aquinas was an existentialist, in his own way. His existentialism was forgotten . . . to western civilization's detriment.
How to Kill the Tao
Seven Great Quotes About Money
How Do We Account for Thomas Merton?
How to Survive the Atheistic Hurricane
How to Kill that Feeling of Thankfulness
How to Escape the Selfishness Paradox
Five Pieces of Furniture for Your Intellectual Living Room
How to Start Detaching the Door of Reality from its Hinges
How to Break on Through to the Other Side
Lady, You Have One Ugly Kid
Who Exactly is Trying to Take Down Joe Rogan
The full-court breakdown of Joe Rogan has begun.
Neil Young started it when he demanded Spotify remove his music because Rogan permits a compelling COVID narrative to exist that violates the official narrative. The compelling COVID narrative is supposedly wrong and because we’re in a pandemic (which is waning, according to my most-recent issue of The Kiplinger Letter), it’s dangerous. Because it’s dangerous, it must be stopped.
That’s how the Neil Young logic runs.
And now we’re learning that he has significant financial ties to Pfizer. I guess Pfizer owns his music catalog, which presumably means there’s a financial symbiosis between Neil Young and Pfizer, but the heck if I know.
An Elf Lays Down His Harp to Kill an Orc
Synopsis: Owen Barfield wrote about the importance of pre-rational thought and language. It heavily influenced Tolkien’s work. Iain McGilchrist has written about the same thing in The Master and His Emissary and the importance of the brain’s right hemisphere. Complete show notes.