Shamanism has been lurking in the background of our discussions since day one, and our “jingle” is just one of us playing a shaman drum. It was high time we had an episode on it.

What is a shaman? We follow Manvir Singh in boiling it down to people who 1) enter non-ordinary states and then 2) engage with unseen realities to 3) provide a service to their community. They have long served an important role in community helping their fellow humans deal with uncertainty, and as a result crop up in pretty much every human society at some point. They tend to lead very different lifestyles to the rest of their community, othering themselves.

Is it a LARP, or do the shamans actually believe what they’re doing? It’s hard to tell, probably a bit of both. They know they’re performing a role, and the better their performance, the more they consciously fulfil the role of shaman, the more effective they are. The service they offer is not a million miles from a placebo, giving their clients the belief that they are going to get better, and like placebos the cures of the shaman are often effective. And the idea that actions, as opposed to words, can be a lie is quite a modern one. In fact putting on a performance can be self-fulfilling, since the performance helps you get into a non-ordinary state of consciousness so could just be a legitimate part of the process.

And we can see the same mechanisms at play in the modern world. There’s a lot of theatre in medicine, for example, and in hedge fund management. The best UFC fighters clearly have access to a specific state of consciousness when they step into the octagon. Catholic priests are celibate, which marks them out as different to their flocks in the same way that shamans tend to lead very different lifestyles to the rest of their community to other themselves. The big name startup founders also live bizarre lifestyles, bare feet in the office, unkempt hair, drugs, aura, and these things all inspire belief and weirdly often actually deliver results.

And this leads us to some actionable insights that will inform how we approach our jobs from this day hence.

Our co-host just got back from a work trip to Berlin, and his overwhelming impression was one of shiny scar tissue. All the buildings are new and glass and steel and modern, but the city lacks that sense of deep history and organic development that you get in most European cities. He imagined standing there in 1945, surrounded by absolute devastation, and feeling like he was in year zero. It must have been a unique experience to live in a city, a country, that had been completely destroyed - physically, but also morally and spiritually. They had lost everything.

The assumption behind the Allies’ strategic bombing offensive was that, through demonstrating to the enemy the hopelessness of their position, they would cause Germany’s resolve to crumble. They thought that level of destruction would make them give up - as it would later with the nuclear bombs in Japan - and that a swift end to the war would ultimately mean more lives would be saved than would be lost in the bombing. But this assumed rationality. It would have been rational for Germany to surrender in 1943, a series of large defeats followed by nuclear-comparable destruction in Hamburg. It was objectively over by then. But the Nazis kept on fighting, complete madness, and by the 1945 surrender Berlin had been utterly shattered in every respect. What does life look like after that, and how does a city move forward? How does a people move forward?

We discuss “street art”, and a bit of techno, and actually it shouldn’t be a surprise that Berlin of all places has become a world leader in Bacchanalia. It feels like a natural reaction to the defeat, but is it a helpful reaction? This is very clearly a society running away from something. The hyper-liberal modernity hides an emptiness - the physical damage has been repaired many times over, but the spiritual damage remains. Berlin is still processing its trauma, still going to therapy, and we can see this lack of recovery in the government’s attempted clamp-down on the AfD. The culture of the elite still lacks the self-confidence to even allow any challenge to progressive liberalism, and will immediately leap onto any left-coded bandwagon like closing the nuclear power plants or letting in a million Syrians.

But what else can they do? It just takes time to re-grow, to re-emerge as something organic. Germany needs a new story of what it is, and this can’t be created artificially and imposed top-down.

In the last episode we posited that in order to achieve self actualisation, purpose, or peak experience, you have to risk your more basic needs - food, shelter, safety. We further posited that living damages you.

You cannot live without taking damage, whether from the various knocks and blows, mental and physical, or through the process of aging. And the flip side of that is that you cannot live without damaging those around you, whether by eating them or through the moral and ethical decisions we make every day. You cannot live a full and interesting life without hurting people - friends, family, the loved ones who become exes. You cannot have agency without sometimes having to choose the lesser of two evils.

We’re not endorsing this, we’re lamenting it - but it’s still true. You can’t live without hurting people, and you can’t live without being hurt. The question is what does that mean ethically? What are the implications for your life and existence? We must navigate between the Scylla of nihilism - accepting this and not caring about it - and the Charybdis of inaction and stasis, being left frozen and unable to act because to act is to harm.

Once you notice this you see Charybdis in particular operating everywhere. Our government never actually does anything because any decisive action means harming people - take the recent failed welfare bill as an example. Even the best decision will involve tradeoffs, will make some groups less well off in the short term in exchange for better long-term outcomes for the entire country, and so it’s generally easier to make no decisions at all. Our whole culture ends up trapped in the trolley problem, with nobody brave enough to throw the switch. The result is stasis and inertia - a whole country doing the equivalent of sitting in front of the sofa watching Netflix because going outside and trying new things is too risky.

But what is more likely to lead you to an early death than sitting in front of Netflix for your whole life?

So not accepting this idea that life entails damage ends up causing more harm than accepting it. To live well, to rule well, we need to be at peace with causing damage, we need to meet this reality head-on, and as we lament the damage we cause we must strive to ensure that it is worth it.

This episode brings together a number of threads we have discussed recently - injuries, blood sacrifice, museums, Heidegger, nature, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s also the fourth episode in which we’ve talked at length about Roberto Calasso’s book The Ruin of Kasch, which is excellent.

Our co-host’s eye was drawn to a weathered tome in an antiquarian bookshop: The White Monk of Timbuctoo, by William Seabrook. It promised (and delivered) the life story of a French defrocked priest living in great luxury in a mud palace in 1930s Timbuktu, all in electric prose and fitting into a long-standing interest in high-agency colonial Frenchmen doing interesting things in liminal spaces. See also: Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Henry de Montfried.

This white monk, Auguste Dupuis aka Pere Yakouba, had been in the first group of missionaries to make it alive to Timbuktu. They set up a clinic and chapel, and he ended up leading the mission. He was slightly scandalous, a heavy drinker and extremely French womaniser, so was sent on a new mission to Dahomey which he completely nailed. Recalled to become a bishop, he decided that he actually didn’t want to leave Timbuktu so left the church, married a local, and became a local worthy - a career that culminated in establishing a university.

What can we learn from this career? In modernity, we are focused on the bottom rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - food, shelter, safety. We spend our lives chasing more and more refined versions of these, we eat the finest foods, live in the nicest houses, but we fail to ascend. The third level of the hierarchy of needs is love and belonging, but we have dating apps, a low birth rate and a loneliness epidemic. The fourth level is esteem, but depression is rife. As for self-actualisation - joy, transcendence, insight - it is a rare London professional who achieves that.

In a materialist system, the only answer to self-actualisation is better food and a nicer house, cooler stuff, but this white monk shows us an alternative: achieve an acceptable level of food, shelter, security and so forth, perhaps even take a gamble on them and then keep working your way up the hierarchy to meaning, purpose and peak experience - where the focus should be. This feels… better?

William Seabrook’s own career is also an interesting one - we recommend his Wikipedia page.

One of us thought we were going to talk about the nature of nature - what is it we’re thinking about when we think about nature? The other thought we were going to talk about barefoot shoes for strength training. This is our synthesis.

Barefoot shoes promise a return to a “natural” way of walking, to the way we evolved to walk. They’re made from “natural” materials. And “natural” is assumed to be a good thing, it contains a value judgement. The use of the categories “natural” and “unnatural” is fundamental to the way we see the world today, and it is interesting to interrogate where this categorisation came from, how valid it is, and what it means.

Isn’t nature beautiful, we think as we look at the English countryside - but it’s not natural. Fields are not natural. Crops are not natural. Sheep can’t give birth without human assistance. Even the species of “wild” flora would not be there in that way without millennia of mankind shaping that landscape. If we say that “natural” means “untouched by human hand”… nothing in this world is natural.

Perhaps the idea of “natural” involves a concept of equilibrium and harmony - without human involvement, everything would stay the same forever. But we know this is not the case. The climate is a dynamic system. Wilderness changes all the time. And even more poisonous is the idea that we can keep things in equilibrium by stopping doing things and reducing economic activity. Entropy being entropy, keeping systems in equilibrium requires a great deal of human interference.

Man is a product of nature. We are animals, and our evolutionary niche is using technology. A tech bro in Silicon Valley building an LLM is exhibiting natural human behaviour. It’s unhelpful to think of this as bad and unnatural. We are all as reliant on technology to survive on Earth in 2025 as we would be in domes on Mars.

So when did this start? In latin literature they don’t talk about nature. In fact the concept only arises in England during the Industrial Revolution, and through the Romantic movement’s rustic rebellion against it. When we moved to a system of mass production there was a fundamental change in how we saw the world, and as Heidegger might put it nature was split out into its own world picture. Mordor and the Shire became different things, occupying different spaces in peoples’ thoughts.

There might also be something in the fact that the Industrial Revolution removed peoples’ sovereignty - you were no longer growing your own food, instead you were specialised, worked a “job” and used your salary to buy food. And in its turn you became depersonalised - humans are fungible in a production line, their individual characteristics not relevant to the working of the factory.

We shall explore these thoughts in more detail in future episodes, hopefully with Artem’s help. And @vivobarefoot we’re open to any sponsorship opportunities you may throw our way. We’re open to it.

We return to our occasional series on Terry Pratchett’s work, but with a difference. The fourth Discworld book, Mort, focuses on a personification of death. We therefore use it as a jumping off point to discuss personifications, and the personification of death in particular through history. We probably end up spending more time on the Iliad and the Aeneid than on Mort.

The Greeks did not have a personification of the moment of death itself - you’ve got Ares, god of slaughter, Persephone, the psychopomp, you’ve got a king of the underworld, but no Death. The Romans came closer to a Terry Pratchett-esque Death personification, appearing in Virgil when Dido kills herself. Juno sends down Iris (the female counterpart of Hermes), who cuts the link between the queen’s body and her spirit. But this is not Iris’s primary duty, she’s a more general psychopomp.

Pratchett’s Death is medieval - in appearance this is the Death that emerges in Europe during the Black Death, and reaches its final form as a skeleton with a cloak and a scythe in nineteenth century England. In most of Europe, actually, Death was a woman, and in many ways that feels more fitting. One intuitively feels that a woman has a much better understanding of death than a man - and on the Discworld, witches embrace death and treat it pragmatically, while wizards fear death and are always trying to escape it. But Pratchett is playing off English folklore, and Death’s masculinity allows him to explore more masculine traits like duty.

Terry Prachett’s philosophy is that death is an event we need to be comfortable with - scary, inevitable, but it should be accepted. We should be at peace with the fact that we’re going to die. His personification of Death reflects this - yes, intimidating, powerful, dreadful, but also kind to cats, fond of humanity, doting on his granddaughter, sentimental. In fact, Death is one of the most sympathetic characters on the Discworld. This view of death was given more colour later in Pratchett's life when he became a vocal proponent of assisted suicide.

But now we’re all scared of death. In the modern world we do not have a healthy relationship with it. The Athenians had the mysteries of Eleusis, through which they psychologically conquered death and lost their fear of it. We have Christianity, which is supposed to do the same, but we seem to have reclaimed the pre-Eleusinian bleakness regarding death that we see in Homer. If we even think about death at all.

A society’s attitude to death is absolutely fundamental. This is not a test our society is currently passing. In personifying death, we are not personifying the biological process itself but rather what that process means to us, how it affects us, and especially how it affects the friends and family of the person dying. We would probably benefit from returning to a personification of death in the wider culture as a starting point for society's return to health.

What do we learn from a museum? What knowledge is conveyed when you look at an object? Put a bunch of school children in the Egypt room at the British Museum… are they gaining any propositional knowledge about Ancient Egypt? Or are they actually gaining something more valuable, more visceral?

Inspired by a recent day out wandering around some of Oxford’s more random museums (Museum of the History of Science! The Weston Library! The Pitt Rivers!), our co-host proposes that a well-curated museum can epistemologically produce more than the sum of its parts through good presentation and the juxtaposition of different objects. Being confronted by an object is completely different to reading a book. It’s a vibe, it’s inspiring, it’s an aesthetic experience. The muse descends in a museum.

The Weston Library had an interesting exhibition on oracles and soothsaying, very minimalist - an old papyrus, an astrological almanac and an iPhone lined up side by side, all the same size, and the thing was that this was different ways that people have interacted with astrology over time. Make u think. The picture they had of a chicken oracle, and the story of Evans Pritchard using it for several years as his primary decision-making method with a good amount of success, makes one think.

This is in contrast to the Pitt Rivers, which is a small dark room completely packed with random objects from around the world, grouping exhibits by what they’re for rather than geography or time. A Hawaiian spear next to a Macedonian spear, two objects far apart in space and time, have similarities and differences - something you only see by having them side by side. Why are they similar, why are they different? It’s not scientific, but you get the germ of a thought that can flourish into philosophy. We should Return - but why don’t we?

We also spend a lot of time rhapsodising about a 10,000 year old handaxe one of us found in the Eye of the Sahara in Mauritania. It’s still sharp, still as useful as the day it was crafted by a human being long turned to dust by the desert wind.

Here’s a link for the David Abulafia article we mention on the Benin Bronzes: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-danger-of-returning-the-ghanaian-crown-jewels/

We read Meditations on Violence by Sgt Rory Miller, a US corrections officer and martial artist, discovered in some Reddit argument on martial arts. We absolutely tore through it, sub 24 hours, on a weekday too, day job in disarray.

Miller is one of the men who is sent into a prison riot to sort it out, a member of that class of humans who confront violence every day so the rest of us don’t have to. He spends the book pointing out stuff you’ve always known subconsciously but have never really thought about. Stuff that’s obvious when you think about it, but one never thinks about it. Powerful mental models to help you assemble the various observations we’ve all made out in the world.

The premise is that a martial arts competition is nothing like violence in the real world. Violence in reality is nothing like what you think it is like, or how it is portrayed in media or in your daydreams.

What is violence? Violence in films, books, video games and even the UFC is ritualised - everyone knows it’s a fight, there are rules, there’s a lot of back and forth, the parties are evenly matched, it lasts a long time, and the fight ends when someone is knocked to the floor. Violence in reality is almost never like that. It’s not a fight, it is a predator ambushing, and a victim unaware they are in a fight until they have been struck. And the victim freezes, both psychologically and as a result of the hormone dump. The biggest challenge in self defence is not freezing. The second biggest challenge is unlearning the unspoken rules that govern our society - like how you’re not allowed to gouge someone’s eye, like how you should stop when you’ve been hurt badly.

But the best thing to do is not be there, or to avoid being drawn into a confrontation, or to project enough of an aura for predators to pick a victim who isn’t you. And the best preparation is to have thought about it - under what conditions do you act, and what are you prepared to risk and sacrifice when you do. Because when you act, you have to commit.

Artem, guest extraordinaire, is back. He made us read Martin Heidegger’s essay The Age of the World Picture, and in this episode he achieves the impossible. Under his patient tutelage what had previously been an impenetrable, fastidious German hallucination became clear, meaningful, even actionable

Heidegger’s work does not stand alone - he’s building on millennia of philosophical tradition, most recently Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel, and on top of that he is reacting to his mentor Husserl. The Age of the World Picture, however, can be read independently of all that. There’s very little phenomenology, the subjective viewpoint and intentionality are not mentioned, and instead we get a straightforward discussion of what modern thinking is, how it differs from the ancients and medievals, the institution features of modern science, and how all this relates to our view of what is in the world and how we interact with it.

We did, however, want to understand a bit of what phenomenology is. A bit of intellectual context helps. Phenomenologists want us to stop thinking of senses as passive receivers. Instead our senses are reaching out into the world and constructing phenomena, applying pre-existing structures (redness, squareness) to help us make sense of what’s there. Our brains are modelling the world and checking that model against the input of the senses. We come to the world with a bunch of assumptions, and think about the world through these assumptions.

The Age of the World Picture describes how the modern way of thinking about the world is just one bunch of assumptions, but crucially a bunch of assumptions that is compatible with the notion that there are other other bunches of assumptions that could be used instead. This idea that there can be different worldviews, that your own view is just one and it is different from the views enjoyed by the Greeks and the medievals, is a key aspect of the modern world view. We are even able to use different ways of thinking about the world, different ground plans, to do different things. The way you approach a physics problem, the ground plan you apply to understand it, is completely different to the way you approach a biological problem, not to mention a historical problem. We shift how we think about the world depending on context, and as a result we’re fragmented, splintered, alienated from having to constantly context switch. We become relativist, and try to reintroduce normativity by creating “values” as objects in themselves that can give us some moral grounding. But as Heidegger puts it, “nobody dies for mere values”. We need to find a new way of thinking about the world if we are to move forwards.

Is opera the pinnacle of high culture, or a boring anachronism?

One of us has enjoyed some excellent recent operas at Covent Garden, the other’s exposure to the artform was a single regrettable unstaged Wagner playthrough at the Albert Hall. Both of us have had a couple of drinks.

The problem is that opera is not really an English artform - the Royal Opera House was better known for pantomime until surprisingly recently, and pantomime is an English artform, and it’s fun, and it taps into a deep lake of tradition, and you can bring in popcorn and it’s participatory. Opera is a stuffy German and Italian tradition, and English opera lovers tend to act in a very German or Italian way, like shouting bravo after a well-sung aria, and that’s pretty embarrassing.

It’s also a relic of a time before electronics. If you want a spectacle, watch Dune in the IMAX. If you want a live spectacle, go to a UFC event or a Sleep Token gig. It’s telling that all the good contemporary composers work in film now - opera is a museum piece watched by old people and only kept alive by enormous state subsidy.

But high culture is important. A lot of excellence has to come together at the same place and time to deliver an opera performance - the best singers and dancers in the world, above the best orchestra and conductor in the world, supported by the best lighting designer, set designer and director in the world, playing music by one of the best composers of all time, and all these people are trying to push the boundaries and create something that transcends the everyday. You are drowning in IRL excellence in a way that is hard to experience in any other context, and if you commit to it it can take you places low culture cannot.

Yes it’s inaccessible, unashamedly so. Excellence is hard to appreciate without a great deal of relevant knowledge and experience, and it takes time and effort to build this. But there’s real virtue in cultivating the ability to be able to recognise excellence when you see it, and then to enjoy it.

So if only for this reason, we’d say opera is worth a try - perhaps with two glasses of wine beforehand.