The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 195
When we face the question of what makes us who we are, different people have different answers. Some see ourselves as receptacles of tradition. Others see us as a self to be discovered in the world. Still others see us as blank slates who can become whatever we can dream. In some sense, these dispositions are in all of us, and that’s healthy. They also define broad political orientations and movements. Importantly, they can also all go bad. Some months ago, James Lindsay, host of the New Discourses Podcast, wrote an essay for New Discourses called “Man with Three Faces” discussing this idea, and in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, he talks through it casually, explaining its meaning and relevance for a wider audience. Join him for a deep exploration into what it means to be ourselves and what it can teach us about our politics.
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4 comments
I can understand how Conservatives can look at Liberals and Leftists and fail to see the distinction. I can also see where Leftists can look at Liberals and Conservatives as being “Other” and therefore dangerous to their “reality.” But why do so many people who are actually Liberals see themselves as “Left?”
I have friends who are Liberal by any measure. They believe in objective reality, but if asked would classify themselves as “on the Left.” Is it just that we’re stuck in the Left-Right polar scale, with no room for a third, (fourth, fifth or sixth), way?
Is this an outgrowth of our two party system? Or is the two party system an outgrowth of a polar us vs them mentality? Or something else? Do we have a genetically encoded in-group preference that gives us the us vs them response to the different?
What is your empirical, physical evidence that irrefutably proves the existence of a supernatural/spiritual dimension to existence, i.e. that reality is dualistic, and that human beings possess a spiritual aspect that essentially defines their nature as human beings?
Nobody has this. What we have is the fact that every culture on the planet developed some sort of spiritual belief system. They could all be delusional. Maybe we didn’t understand what dreams were, and we thought we entered a spiritual world and built mythologies off that.
In that sense we can say that man is a spiritual being, even if no such thing as a spirit exists.
I’m not a math expert, by any stretch, so I can’t fact check this, but I recently encountered the theory, put forward by actual experts in math, that there simply has not been enough time since scientists say the Earth cooled to now for entirely RANDOM genetic mutation to account for the millions of species that have evolved since life first occurred. That might point to some intelligence in the universe that is DIRECTING the mutations. Or it may point to the idea that mutations are a RESPONSE to environmental factors and not random mutations that happened to survive, which would not require a spiritual component.
What is missing from this discussion is the “newest” (oldest) view of self – that we are immortal spiritual beings. Of course, it takes some investigation and explanation of how we managed to arrive on Earth in biological bodies, but that’s all part of the fun of discovering the truth.
The amount of “baggage” that we have all accumulated is a marvelous thing. One of the most famous living authors to recall several past lives – Dena Merriam – has lived under about ten different religious belief systems and as many different languages and cultures in just her last few hundred years on Earth. What then, really is the “delivered self” or the “discovered self?” These almost amount to platitudes when you contemplate what you could discover about yourself if various suppressed memories were carefully unearthed and investigated.
In this view, the whole concept of modern political ideologies and cultures becomes enormously superficial. Something much deeper is actually going on, and the sooner we discover what that is, the better off we will all be.