Show notes.

If the left hemisphere's grip on people's minds can be loosened, McGilchrist says, their perceptions will change. They will see "into the depth of things . . . all at once [and] recognize them for what they are, no longer overlaid by our projections."

When this happens, the conventional notions and mental clichés we live by in our everyday world get shoved aside, and the "hall of mirrors" (a favorite McGilchrist phrase to describe our left-hemispheric perception and experience) will come crashing down as we see things in their naked--beautiful--existence.

We then get a taste of Huxley's experience with mescalin. We get a glimpse of what Thoreau saw at Walden. We become like those patrons at Alice's Restaurant.

We start to break through that door to the other side.

Show notes here.

00:10: Thomas Sowell

04:15: The Death of Chevron

11:25: Fatty Bolger

Show Notes:

Thomas Sowell's Hemispheres

The Death of Chevron

Fatty Bolger

Gardening is just a hobby, and it might not always be practical. But it is arguably the pursuit that postmodern man needs the most. A Copernican revolution in metaphysics explains why.

Link to essay from which this podcast is adapted

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.

Show notes here

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. 

Show notes

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.

Show notes here

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

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.

SHOW NOTES HERE

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.