Today I interview Zoomer Schopenhauer (Philippe Bridau):
His Twitter account is currently locked, but he and I have been mutuals for a while, so it was good to finally speak with the man.
We discuss the personalities of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the economic program of Napoleon III, the future of Africa, the 17th century revolution in philosophy, and the future impact of AI and biological science on religion. I’m pleased with how this turned out.
If you like the interview, I’d also suggest you check out his interview with Gio:
I’ve decided to start paywalling these conversations after 2 weeks, so get the free version while it’s hot!
Topics:
12:50 — Who had an easier life: Schopenhauer or Nietzsche?
14:00 — Is Stoicism toxic positivity?
21:00 — Why did Augustus succeed where Caesar failed? Why did Napoleon III’s reforms fail?
25:45 — Will China, Russia, or the Islamic powers colonize Africa?
36:00 — Why bother colonizing Africa?
41:00 — I forgot the name of Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, funded by Rudolf II.
42:00 — Why did egalitarian religions emerge from empires?
44:00 — Did heliocentrism break the Platonic “flat earth” concept of resemblance?
49:50 — Is AI a scam?
56:00 — Is the basilisk going to kill art or doctors first?
1:02:00 — Should we criticize Christianity?
1:08:00 — How do you start a new religion?
1:11:00 — Can Christianity or Wokism survive technological change?
Full transcription:
DL:
And we are recording here with Zoomer Schopenhauer. He's one of the few people that I have the pleasure of being mutuals on Twitter with, and one of the five people I care about on that website. He is also a Substack writer. There's a lot of people on both of these websites who are successful, but being successful doesn't necessarily mean you're actually a good writer. Not only are his ideas interesting, but also he's just a good communicator. He did an interview with Gio not too long ago, I believe. We're going to get right into it here.
The name Zoomer Schopenhauer always gave me the impression that you were a big fan of the man, but reading some of your material, you also are a big fan of Nietzsche. My starting question would be philosophical, and that would be, where did Schopenhauer go wrong? Nietzsche has respect for Schopenhauer, but it's a respect as an opponent. He thinks he gets some things wrong. Maybe a little speculation, why wasn't Schopenhauer able to foresee those critiques? He's a very thorough philosopher. I mean, he's very analytical. Why wasn't he able to foresee that? Is that just intellectual limitation, or is it something fundamentally about his temperament that blinded him to what you think are those improvements?
ZS: (00:02:01):
There were two Schopenhauers, one of whom was very interesting and the other of whom Nietzsche did not find interesting at all. The first was Schopenhauer the pessimist, the analyst of humans as not having free will and being buffeted around by unconscious drives and human life being far bleaker than previous philosophers were willing to admit.
People forget that Germany in the first half of the 19th century was not industrialized. It was a backwater country. And it was dominated by these hyper rationalistic philosophers, which is German idealism. People think German idealism was something mystical, but it was this hyper rationalistic form of philosophy. Schopenhauer was very critical of that. On all of those fronts, Nietzsche agreed.
But Schopenhauer also has this mystical notion of the world being fundamentally this result of this unified will. And that's something which Nietzsche never had an interest in and never agreed with.
Funnily enough, Wagner is the exact opposite. It's Schopenhauer the mystic that he finds interesting and not analytical stuff.
There's two aspects of Schopenhauer which Nietzsche disagrees with. One of them is an intellectual critique he doesn't talk about this that much but it is in his early notebooks and it is the most prominent critique that people have of Schopenhauer generally, which is that he follows Kant in saying that we have this fundamental limitation. Everything that we know has to be that of a subject with his finite experience. A concept for Kant and also for Schopenhauer is a distillation of our intuitions from our sense data, and it is a function of judgment. It enables you to make judgments and then turn those judgments into a constellation of knowledge, so that you can navigate the world.
Schopenhauer cuts down on the Kantian system in a number of ways. He shrinks it into being something which animals could also have. He says an elephant will be able to see that a bridge would be too weak to hold it and then will not go across that bridge. He says that animals have a basic notion of causality.
But all of your knowledge is via time and space, it's in time and space, and it employs causality to make sense of everything. Given that you have this limit on our knowledge, where does his mystical knowledge that the world is fundamentally will come from? It seems to break the limits, the epistemological limits that he sets for himself, that he's able to make this grand claim. And also the world of will, it's what creates the world which we experience. It has this relation of ground and consequent, to use Kantian terms. And again, you're then applying the categories of your finite experience to something that is beyond that. He seems to be breaking the rules on that because our categories aren't supposed to apply to this fundamental will. How do we have knowledge of this?
There's also just a fundamental difference which is that you could call the difference between factual and evaluative pessimism in that they both agree that life is fundamentally tragic that you will not be able to pursue your desires and achieve lasting happiness successfully in this world. They both agree with that.
But Schopenhauer then says the correct course of action is to renounce life and to live an aesthetic life where aesthetic contemplation of things like art can temporarily leave you. You have to renounce life and devote yourself to compassion towards other suffering people.
Whereas Nietzsche is not an evaluative pessimist. He thinks that life has all of these problems and he has the same negative assessment, but he thinks that you actually should have a positive disposition towards life.
I don't think that disagreement is something which you can mediate. It's like a fundamental different attitude. But those are, in a sense, the two main things.
DL (00:07:08):
I tend to believe that the influence of attitude is pretty fundamental, and that's not something you can reconcile.
One of the ways I'd explain that is just that in terms of our senses, which is the basis of our attitudes, two people with two different senses. Someone who's colorblind is going to perceive material empirical reality in a different way than someone who's not colorblind. One of the reasons why Schopenhauer would see the logical sense and communing with that and focusing on that why is that more true and good than these other senses? The logical sense is interfacing directly with reality as it is and you're not dealing with this problem of percentage. We can directly deal with numbers in themselves when we do mathematics. There's no secondary difference. Therefore, it's more universal and it's more true. We should dwell on that because dwelling in the senses is going to introduce all this difference, and all this chaos, and all these differences of opinions. Logic is where we can get to to unity and get away from the deception that causes all the suffering. If you're continually betrayed and disgusted and frustrated with your own sensuous experience then that argument is appealing because it's that wheel of samsara idea, that's very intuitively understood by someone who goes through the story of the Buddha where he has all this wealth and then realizes it's superfluous or it's not enough or it gets old.
For Nietzsche, it seems as if his life experience was more of having a greater deal of sensual attachment. And then I believe he had some sort of disability or injury that took him down a notch, some sickness. But he was able to see what life might have been like or how life could be, what life could have been.
And then the contrast of that ability to experience life in that way being taken away in a sharp delineation and having the contrast toward that.
Whereas Schopenhauer took the position of, “You're always going to be betrayed by the sensual experience. You're never going to find happiness or satisfaction in that.” Therefore, divest yourself from it and try to avoid it at all costs to avoid suffering.
Nietzsche would say, “get it while the going is good because you don't know how much time you've got till it's gone.” I view that as having to do a lot with their life experience.
There's a funny anecdote I read about Schopenhauer where his father died and left behind this huge inheritance. And it was tied up in the banks, this weird corporate law. This is before the Prussians get German conglomerates into one single state. There's bureaucratic nonsense in the banking sector.
And there was something going on where the money was tied up for like five years. And Schopenhauer just said wait the five years. And his mother and sister were like, no, we want it right now. And they ended up getting some pittance. They got like a 10% cut of what they were actually deserved.
It's those sorts of like grinding down experiences, the tedium of life, the ignorance of other people, constantly dealing with people's stupidity and just like again and again and again, and trying to communicate ideas to people and they just don't get it. The tedium of life that he had to deal with for many years is also part of the reason why he took the approach that he did. You're more well-read than me on this subject. Do you have any funny anecdotes?
ZS (00:12:48):
Schopenhauer objectively had like an easier life than Nietzsche by a long shot. I mean, he inherited, his father made money in finance. I mean, he obviously went into academia and wasn't that successful until the end of his life, when his books started to sell.
But whereas Nietzsche was born in a very poor rural area to a Lutheran pastor, and he fought in the Franco-Prussian War and then got dysentery, was discharged, and he had terrible headaches his whole life, probably from neurological disease, the same one that killed his father.
And yet, it's very interesting then that he is the one with the positive valuation on life, whereas Schopenhauer is the one who has a very negative one. Although that's only a surface level.
Schopenhauer thinks that you just oscillate between boredom and broadly failed desire with very little happiness that lasts any serious amount of time.
Nietzsche, he thinks it's pointless to try and deny this because he thinks that art is where you have a reinvigoration and you have this inspiration to pursue life. And he doesn't think that you can justify it philosophically, because that's what happened in Greece. You get the development of Socrates, where the idea is, how do you use reason to secure happiness, eudaimonia. It's not like a modern bug man, toxic positivity, workplace happiness, but it's still very much that along those lines. The same with the Stoics and other forms of ancient philosophy. That whole branch is a sterilizing dead end for both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
That's what they agreed on, but then they had different valuations. Schopenhauer, he doesn't believe in God, but he does believe in saints. He does believe that someone who genuinely renounces life, and he's a sentimentalist. He's not a rationalist about ethics. He doesn't think that you can derive an ethical system. He thinks that you have to just see that other people are going through the same problems that you are, and then you have to use your empathy to have some altruistic outlook in a perennial way.
DL: (00:16:04):
The other topic I wanted to get into was you have an article on Caesarism, where you make the point that you don't think Julius Caesar was actually the main man in forging the Roman Empire, which is interesting because I've just been reading the Discourses of Machiavelli, which is this commentary on Livy, and he's extremely anti-Caesar. I had no clue that Machiavelli just hated Caesar. He authentically was a Republican despite what people have said against him as being against people and hating humans, being a misanthrope.
But you say that it wasn't Caesar who actually solidified the empire. It was Augustus, which is interesting.
And then you go on in the same article to talk about Napoleon's economic reforms. I know about his emancipation of the Jews. I know about his military victories. I know about Napoleonic law, for example. But I've never heard of his economic reforms before.
If Caesarism or Napoleonism is a recurring phenomenon, what would those what would that attitude taken into the present day? What sort of economic reforms would that look like?
ZS: (00:17:51):
You are mixing up Napoleon and Napoleon, the third, whose economic policies are the people that I talked about in the article.
Peter Turchin has a concept called the secular cycle, which are these 100 to 300 year long cycles which occur in states. The main problems that you face is something called the Matthew effect. It's a quote from the New Testament, Matthew 25, 29, which is, “to him who hath, it shall be given. And from him who hath not, it shall be taken away, even what he hath.” Obviously this is out of context, but essentially, if you have a lot of wealth, it just generates wealth automatically.
In every society there is a gradual uptick in inequality, where the established elites get an increased amount of the proportion of wealth over time.
At the same time, you eventually tend to get the development of the immiseration of the working class of that society due to an excess of labor, labor oversupply.
Labor oversupply tends to decrease real wages, and you also get elite overproduction, you have a massive uptick in elite aspirants compared to elite positions.
Then you get the formation of counter elites within this system who then appeal to the masses and then you get breakdowns and civil wars. I mean, that's a huge oversimplification, but this is a model with a lot of math.
But essentially, the Republican secular cycle was coming to an end. You had these latifundia, these big complexes, you had a lot of slave labor. The plebeians of Rome were fed up with the system, and they were downwardly mobile.
Caesar comes in as a popular general, and he was a much more successful politician in his consulship before he goes off and conquers Gaul and all that. But by the time later, he's sick due to disease, and he's not a competent politician, although he still wins.
But you get this populist appeal from an elite, from someone from the patrician background, who then promises to solve these problems.
But Caesar gets assassinated, and it's Augustus who crystallizes together this whole thing into a comprehensive program for the Roman people. He organizes together people into a sort of political faction, anybody who had been associated with Caesar. He's not a romantic figure. He hires competent people to do things for him, to deal with military affairs for him. He's a technocratic figure.
Then he establishes the Principate, which is the new political system of Rome, and he inaugurates a new secular cycle. He deals with elite overproduction. He deals with these immiseration problems. And for hundreds of years, this new political system lasts, which is to principate, which eventually falls apart later in the crisis of the third century.
But with Napoleon, he's also coming in at the end of the French secular cycle in the 1780s. He's the person who's able to take over. He's most famous for legal reform, emancipation, and very, very successful military campaigns. Although eventually, he doesn't know how to govern at peacetime. He has seven coalition wars, he wins five of them. But eventually, he's pissed off everybody. And he can't deal with them, especially after he loses horses in Russia.
Napoleon III arrives on the scene. He's very parallel to Hitler in this sense that he has this failed meme coup attempt in 1840, which gets him exiled. But eventually he comes back at the time of the Second French Republic. He takes over via populism again.
He had concreted the ideas of Napoleon into this book, Les Idées Napoléoniennes.
His economic policy is one of pragmatism. It's free trade insofar as it's beneficial, but protectionism insofar as it's beneficial so that we can have agricultural independence.
It was a massive investment into the railways, thousands of miles, which of course is very beneficial because it increases connectivity and lays the foundation for industrialization. But also, when you invest in the rail, you have to get a booming steel industry a booming coal industry and it just leads to massive success. You have huge urban development, massive improvement in sanitation. It's a very forward-moving time period.
But it's brought abruptly to an end because he was not a good military leader at all. He gets the whole of Germany to unite against him, and then he loses.
The reason why Caesarism is relevant is because if you look at a lot of these statistics, we are actually have the signs of a gradually breaking down society since around the 1960s in Britain, since around about the 1970s in America. where you have an uptick in corruption.
The civil services are becoming more incompetent, more cronyist. You are seeing an increase in inequality. You are seeing immiseration in Western countries. A lot of that is obviously due to mass immigration and labor oversupply. You're essentially gradually laying the groundwork for the breakdown of society in this cyclical form.
Caesars are coming towards the end of these cycles and then are actually pulling you out of the cycle.
I don't have a mystical view of these things. They are caused by human decision making and policy.
The point about the economic policies is that every single successful forward developing society has been a state capitalist pragmatic program.
It's not as simple as that, but that is the broad picture.
You actually can fix a lot of the problems we have. The elites don't want to at the moment, but you could.
DL: (00:25:30):
Moving onto the western decoupling from Africa. I follow Peter Zeihan and he believes that we're going through a period of de-globalization. If that's the case, then Europe having less influence on Africa would make sense. Have you encountered those arguments or what would your arguments be for why that might be inevitable?
As a side note, people have speculated that maybe China and Russia will replace the Europeans. Do you think that's likely?
ZS: (00:26:30):
We are, to an extent, going through deglobalization.
The 20th century was very weird. Mass industrialized genocidal wars in the first half, and then this strange ground-to-a-halt bipolar system in the second half. That's very historically abnormal. We're returning to the norm of the 19th century, which is pockets of instability in lots of different places coming from lots of different directions. No one country is able to deal with them or enforce rules in the way that the British Empire or the United States historically have been able to do.
That's definitely the direction we're heading in terms of decoupling with Africa. There is not a will to do it, but it probably would have to happen at some point, because what you saw after African independence was the establishment of a new African elite who looted African society and through corruption, embezzlement, stealing.
In Nigeria, I can't remember what the study is or what the exact time period, but there was something like $220 billion worth of stolen in embezzlement.
You get round about the top 3% of African societies where there's a lot of money which goes into prestige projects, which goes into personal salaries.
In the 1960s, you're getting 50 plus percent of entire state budgets going into civil service salaries. It's a patronage network where people's loyalty is literally bought.
The attitude that Africans have is that if you're able to get access to state money, then you're bringing it back to the tribe and you're getting everybody is getting money out of the trough. And that's just what you're expected to do. That's the entire culture.
You've seen very little consistent economic growth. It's not quite as bad because the Cold War came to an end, and there was less competition over who would ideologically dominate Africa. Also the emergence of Chinese middle class buying commodities from Africa.
Through urbanization, you saw an increase in wealth there, but the situation is essentially unchanged for the most part. The other problem with africa is the underclass. Ahuge number of people have no public spiritedness, who seem to be incapable of abstraction, and who will loot public infrastructure railroads to resell copper. That makes running these countries hard. Almost everything just has to be achieved through bribes or violence.
But the relevant thing going forward is the population increase, which is that you have a big population increase in Africa. It's not indefinite. It will probably tick off and go down and reach normal. Everywhere has a collapsing fertility and Africa isn't ultimately an exception to that. It will peak around two billion by the mid-century.
The problem is that African countries have, and the African ruling class in particular,
have neither the willingness nor the ability to create the adequate infrastructure for these new people. You have the increase of the bidonville also known as the slum or the shantytown. If you don't have enough money to build new sanitation, waste management, teachers, or schools to accommodate new people and put them into the system, then just the emergence of these slums.
There's an obvious problem here, which is that these people do not want to be in these countries, and they do not want to be subjected to these conditions. They want to leave.
The problem with attempts of working with African leadership is that when you send money to Africa to try and crack down on human trafficking, you have two patronage systems. You have the military patronage system where the military and the border guards will take money from people who want to leave slums and go to Europe, or America even, through Mexico.
In Mexico, it's the same situation. Cartels in Mexico actually make more money on human trafficking than drugs. It's incredibly difficult to crack down on these gangs in Mexico because they have money. They are able to hide security cameras in lampposts. They have very decent military equipment. It's a very difficult battle for the Mexican government.
In Africa, you saw coups in Niger, Burkina Faso, and different countries where the EU sent money to the government to crack down on human trafficking. That's one patronage network.
The other patronage network, the military, said, “fuck this,” and they just couped them. They could just continue doing whatever they wanted to, what they were going to do anyway.
In Africa you don't have the western style tradition where the military is depoliticized. That's just not a reality there. The only way if you wanted to actually stop this problem of mass human trafficking which will escalate into the first world is you'd have to stop it on the European end. There doesn't seem to be a way to cooperate unless you were to have some fanciful recolonization or retaking over the government. That's pretty unlikely to say the least.
DL:(00:32:35):
I mentioned the potential of of Russia or China to recolonize Africa. Obviously, that's going to look different from what happened in the 19th century. But another possible player is Islam, and this doesn't seem very relevant right now because the Middle East is a mess. The idea that they're going to be colonizing anyone seems a little bit unlikely right now. But relatively speaking, the Middle East has the proximity to Africa. The attitudes of Middle Easterners regarding Africans is probably a little less humanitarian than the Europeans and maybe even less humanitarian than the Russians. There's a long history there. North Africa didn't used to be Muslim. It was already colonized. The Islamic penetration of sub-Saharan Africa is limited and that's generally the the area we're talking about.
ZS: (00:33:54):
It's hard to envision right now because Middle Eastern states are corrupt and problematic. I can't see them overcoming their internal problems to then go off on some colonial experience.
People forget this, but Colonel Gaddafi invaded Chad. And it went fucking horribly. They weren't able to do it.
And also Sudan is a country with the north of Sudan dominated over the south of Sudan. They called them Abid. They were more Arabic. And they lost control of the situation. For the time being, the Arabs genuinely do not seem to have the capacity to dominate over sub-Saharan Africans.
You saw the beginning of that when the Arabs were completely massacred and driven out of Zanzibar. That was an early example of that happening. It's possible if they got together.
Neo-colonialism is a buzzword. It's something which Africans try to blame or African sympathizers try to blame for the failure in Africa, but Neocolonialism is a real thing.
A lot of countries outside Africa try and exploit the resources of Africa and to try and get the resources out of Africa and make money and get the money outside of Africa.
What's the point in taking over these countries and being administrators when you can already do that? Because 40% of all African private wealth is outside Africa. You have this huge just loss of income and lack of reinvestment in Africa, which is already happening.
The African ruling class are willing to sell their people out to make money and then leave the country and own their wealth in other places. The resources that they have are extraordinary and it should be making them money, but it's not because they're run by parasites. There isn't enough of an incentive to colonize Africa.
When the Europeans moved in, it had 130 million people in Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. And they were all illiterate, politically disconnected tribes. That's just not the situation anymore.
Theoretically, you could militarily defeat the Africans and take over. If you look at how the Rhodesian military or the South African military or the Portuguese military performed against the Africans, they did pretty well because they were able to outsmart them. They generally have disproportionate casualty rates. But the political will was lacking because it was costing and draining a lot of money. In the South African Rhodesian case, it was more massive embargoes at that stage. But the Portuguese were bankrupted and the military couped the government. They just couldn't be arsed doing it anymore. It wasn't worth it.
DL: (00:37:41):
Yeah, South Sudan has been a disaster. That's where the Darfur genocide happened.
I don't know if people use the term third worldist or Nazbol, but they believe Gaddafi was fighting the globalists and he was this super competent guy and he could have fit everything together. That would be the Jackson Hinkle take.
ZS: (00:38:24):
There's a lot of talk about African unity and third worldist rhetoric, but very little reality of it.
I mean, the first independent African country from a European colony was Ghana. You had the Gold Coast Experiment, which was started in 1953, where the British started giving them parliaments. It very quickly got overtaken by this guy called Nkrumah, rather than the planned black elite that they had trained that they wanted to be put in. They lost control of it immediately.
But, Nkrumah, when he takes over, he starts engaging in subversive activities in all the neighboring countries to try and push towards African unity at the expense of trying to run his country. And everyone's just furious. He gets removed. Then he's very unpopular. African unity, it's, it's just something which is talked about. Nobody takes it seriously.
Whenever somebody does try and take it seriously, they end up not lasting very long.
DL (00:39:39):
The fourth topic I wanted to bring up here was space exploration and philosophy.
You talked a little bit about the 17th century revolution in philosophy. You say it's one of the most significant philosophical revolutions. You talk about that shift in perspective, especially as it pertains to space, that a medieval or even platonic conception of space is that we are on the earth and then there are these heavens and everything.
You talk a little bit about the flat earth. There were Greeks who didn't believe in the flat earth, but you talk about that limited cosmology or that idealistic cosmology where everything fits together. It's all traditional.
Maybe the world is chaotic. Maybe the world is crazy, but we can rely upon the Pythagorean cosmology.
But then people start to look into it and they start to see, actually, we have a heliocentric model or these other things we have to take into account of observing how the planets go into retrograde and things like that. They don't actually fit into these ideal models. It's not a perfect spherical orbit, as far as they could tell. They were proven correct.
So can you talk a little bit about that, almost the trauma of figuring out that the old models were wrong and how that impacted philosophy and maybe why were even people bothering to do that? One of the guys we could talk about would be like Rudolph II, who started to fund Tycho Brahe. Why were European elites or scientists even interested? Why were they even taking telescopes and trying to figure these things out as opposed to just accepting the received knowledge?
ZS: (00:42:09):
When you look at history, there's two intellectual revolutions which have just this gigantic impact in history.
The first is the Axial Age, which you see across every large society from around 800 BC to 200 AD. You have the Mauryan Empire, where you get the Ashokan edicts in China under the Han Dynasty. And a bit before that, you get the development of Confucianism and Taoism as unifying philosophies. In the West, you see the development of philosophy itself, and then you end up with Christianity. In Persia, you see the development of Zoroastrianism.
What all of these have in common is these are empires with populations of about 50 to 60 million people. They are pagan countries with totalitarian patriarchal societies, with despotic rulership. They're unstable. All of these philosophies, these universalistic egalitarian philosophical worldviews, are adopted by the rulers who try and create this image of themselves where they're doing the best for everybody. This completely changes everything,
Before this point, all rulers have it's just been despotic vanity projects and a celebration of murder and conquering. You can see this in ancient Egypt with any of the writings that they have, or the Assyrians.
But this is the first transformation and it tracks with literacy, with the invention of writing. It's a huge intellectual revolution.
But the second major one is in the 17th century. This one is very important because this is the second major event in world history where the West diverges from everyone else, where the West has the Industrial Revolution, science, and modernity, and they conquer the entire world.
What are the underpinnings of that? It is the mathematization of nature.
The mathematization of nature happens because you have the breakdown of the entire previous worldview, which is based off of resemblance. In Plato, it's the resemblance of things to their platonic forms.
The resemblance model can't encapsulate an idea of an earth spinning around the sun, because when you look out, you don't see that.
But the math, tells you that that's what's happening. It's this highly abstract reasoning where, for example, the area of a right angle triangle means acceleration in these calculations. An equation is what defines a circle and a timeline, a line can designate a temporal sequence. This is all completely abstract reasoning, which has nothing to do with any resemblance to ordinary experience.
The reason why Flat Earth is the ultimate conspiracy is because it's a total rejection of abstract scientific reasoning completely in favor of what you immediately see in front of you, even if it breaks down completely. It's trying to put everything back in a box.
But the whole of the development of science originally goes back to astronomy. That was what they were allowed to do in the Middle Ages. That was where a lot of these mathematical models were created, was predicting the movements of the heavens. What they discover is something which radically de-centers humanity.
We think that we're at the center of everything, but no! We're a random spinning planet in the middle of nowhere. It's like Nietzsche said, that since copernicus man has been radically falling away from the center towards towards the indefinite. In terms of space exploration, you do have the the faustian spirit. This is one of the things spengler is right about. That is what characterizes the West for a very long period of time.
The only way I can realistically see space exploration is through transhumanism. I don't see how you transport the weak flesh bodies to other planets because they're far away. They would just decay.
You'd probably need radical enhancement. Upload your mind into a computer. I know that's not very popular on the online right. But you've got to think big.
DL (00:47:22):
I find myself hitting a wall or having a conflict with the idea of silicon-based technology as the technology of the future. Silicon-based technology makes a lot of sense when you have a very safe, controlled situation. The situation we have today where, you know, there's a couple of wars going on. I mean, they're limited wars. Russia's not using its nukes. NATO's not using its nukes. What's happening in Israel is all the countries around Israel are just watching and spectating. Nobody's getting involved. All of these are limited wars.
Corning the relationship between technology and warfare, it's great to have a Google center where you've got this giant server room filled with all these supercomputers and you can run all these calculations. And it's very cold in there and it's controlled. There's air conditioning and everything.
People are bringing up with drones, that, if you just have 100 or maybe 1,000 drones or something, you can take out an aircraft carrier. I've criticized that specific idea, and I've gotten some feedback from people saying drones are a very effective weapon against aircraft carriers. The metaphor is, when I hear about uploading human minds to silicon hardware, it's the opposite. If anything, silicon hardware is a way that we can under controlled conditions do a bunch of calculations that we need to do in order to refine biological technologies. A cell is a form of a nanobot.
ZS: (00:49:51):
People have a computationalist model of how the mind works, and there's a lot of truth to that. The mind does seem to engage in subconscious predictive programming. The problem is that we know little about how this actually works. Any analogy you draw with what a computer is doing is incredibly vague. It's like explaining how a horse works in terms of like an analogy to a car. There are analogs, but it's pretty limited in terms of explaining exactly how the movement works in a horse.
I'm a bear on AI. I don't think we should even use the term AI because what we have is just statistically associative inference. You can make that bigger, but that doesn't actually make something a self-reflexively conscious thing. I'm not somebody who thinks that it's intrinsically impossible to develop something like an artificial intelligence, but it's way far ahead of anything that we have at the moment.
Our understanding of how the brain works, neuroscience and cognitive science are both Newtonian levels, they are way behind in terms of understanding how they work. People have very rudimentary theories as to how they work in general. There's tens and tens of billions of neurons. Having a picture of how that all fits together, it's rudimentary. It's just sci-fi.
The people who actually own what we currently call AI, they have created the whole AI safety thing. “We need to keep control over AI, give us more money so that we can make sure that it doesn't get out of hand.” It's a way of generating hype by making it sound like a scary product. I'm not saying that it's not interesting or that it's not useful in certain circumstances or there won't be applications or people won't get fired from their jobs. These things all could happen, but that's not the same thing as like Terminator happening in real life.
DL (00:52:20):
There are huge sociological implications. If I'm able to go into my web browser and
type in, “make me an AI video of Donald Trump sex tape” — in terms of the evolution of consciousness and solving the problems of physics and mathematics,
we already can do that,
We can create a hyper-realistic photo,
and then we can string a bunch of hyper-realistic—it would take a long time.
it would take an incredibly long time to create—
But that's what Hollywood does, right? They've been creating CGI footage for a long time. They can create footage.
They've taken dead actors from Star Wars and they've,
put their face on some old person and then they've spliced together with essentially fake videos that can convince people. We already have that at the Hollywood level.
ZS: (00:53:29):
I get a real sense of poetic justice from that. These fully automated luxury gay space communists said we'll all be able to just like have a great time, produce art, the whole full original Marxist village, idea of what people would do after the revolution. But the first thing that the AI goes after is artists, where you get all of these people who make art on the internet going out of business and and not getting commissions from these companies anymore because they can do it with AI. I did take a certain amount of satisfaction in that.
DL (00:54:17):
It can be a destructive technology from a social perspective.
I've already observed this on Twitter, even if the videos are real, I'll see all these like violent beat down videos on Twitter. We live in this country of 330 million people. Every day, somebody's going to be beating somebody else up on the street. You can take a video of that and then 300 million people can watch that and get upset about that. Maybe that would result in reduced crime if people got upset enough about it.
The social contagion or the ability of of A.I. to create moral panics, to accentuate and to distribute, is a dangerous technology. All religions are founded on various forms of hallucinogenics. Even the baptism is you are asphyxiating somebody and forcing them to drown and having a near-death experience and then reviving them. That was the original baptism experience. Now you sprinkle some water on somebody or they dip under the water for five seconds. But it used to be like, “we're going to kill you and then revive you,” which is pretty intense.
All religions throughout history have always come about through some ability to create a huge emotional impact.
If you distribute technology that has the ability to create huge emotional impact to everybody, that creates social chaos and furthers breakdown. Trust in institutions goes away. You can't believe anything you see anymore. That leads to government censorship. Now there's more censorship, so people trust the government less. It seems to be a runaway trend toward this fragile Chinese-style authoritarianism that I'm not a big fan of.
That's the big consequence to look out for, rather than the AI is going to become sentient, and it's going to decide that it hates humans, and the basilisk is going to kill everybody. That's silly. That sells fiction and it sells apparently startup dollars.
ZS: (00:57:00):
The whole AI safety and AI alignment. is all a cargo cult. But yes, there are actually very real economic and social impacts, which are potentially negative. I don't actually think that the art one is a big deal because it was like commissioned online artists.
A person who comes up with an interesting artistic idea, like Picasso. He makes a bicycle look like a bull by putting the handles on top of the wheel. There's always going to be people who come up with clever stuff like that.
And then AI, it's just calculating the most likely image pixels, configuration of pixels based off of previous things that people have put together. All of the available data. So, you know, I don't think it is going to wipe out artists.
But it could wipe out doctors. If you can describe your symptoms accurately enough, and then put it into an AI, which has access to like all medical databases, it's probably going to give you a more accurate prediction than a real person. There's a lot of people that could be fired where you just need far fewer checkups and the odd physical person who's going to do an independent assessment.
There's a huge amount of lawyering which can be automated. if you tell an AI how to fill out various forms of paperwork given xyz exact circumstances then you know it can do that job. There is a real sociological impact. Unfortunately you often lose these real conversations in ridiculous hype or paranoia.
DL: (00:59:13):
My takeaway from this discussion on AI, is that if you're an artist, the reward that you get for spending thousands of hours figuring out how to draw circles and squiggles and do shading and all of that, probably that's going to pay less. AI is probably going to be better at engineering the way that individual pixels are shaded on a screen sort of thing.
I would relate this to the 19th century. Camille Paglia makes this point that when photography came out, it stole the thunder of hyper realism from painters. In order to stay relevant or to to be novel or attractive, painters had to start becoming impressionists. They started to do crazy things. It's not that photography killed art, but it forced art to be more creative, more innovative, and to tap into new things.
In the same vein, with AI art, it's going to be easy to create hyper-realistic things, pictures of anything. But then artists are gonna have to say, “no longer is this about my technical skill in making something hyper realistic. It's about the ideas. How can I blend genres like a prompt engineer?”
That's a joke, “my job is a prompt engineer.” That's what artists could become now. I'm not an artist, so maybe there's something I'm missing here.
There's one last topic I wanted to get in here, which is related to the point I just made about religions and psychedelics and hallucinogens and AI being parallel to that.
You referenced that the online right is pretty antagonistic to uploading your mind to a to a computer or something, and a lot of them would say that's like the Antichrist, Satanism, globalism.
You're not a Christian and you're a Nietzschean, There are some people who are anti-Christian to the point that I find resentful. Nietzsche's critique of resentment is good, and we should listen to it. But I also think there's a point at which I see some criticisms of Christianity that are obsessive and petty. I think, “What Christian hurt you? You must hate your Christian parents.”
ZS: (01:02:30):
Nietzsche personally had a very good relationship with his father, who was a Lutheran, and he didn't have any traumatic experiences with Christianity when he was growing up.
He felt like he had to critique Christianity because he thought that the rise of destructive forms of nihilism were inevitable because of the previous generation of atheists in the 19th century, people like Draper, although Draper probably came slightly after Nietzsche. They critiqued like the Byzantine Empire for suppressing medical research. They critiqued the suppression of Galileo, all of this history of the clash between positive developments and religion.
But there was no question or questioning or searchfulness about values because, the death of God, it comes within the context of Nietzsche's free spirit works. And the free spirit journey is of following through the project of the enlightenment and reason and modern scientific knowledge and liberating yourself from false ideas that involve religion.
But at the same time, it's saying that people are just moving on from the death of Christianity and just acting as though it's business as usual and the values of 19th century bourgeois society will essentially just continue. And that obviously is a mistake.
You have seen the collapse of Christianity in the subsequent century. In terms of people who actually go to church every week, it's a very consistent decline and collapse. And wherever you see these trends where they try and cope and say, “we Catholics have a higher birth rate.” But you also have like six times the deconversion rate of Protestants in America. People are leaving anyway, and these are very short-term looks at this secularizing trend.
Nietzsche wanted to essentially revive Homeric sort of pagan, pre-axial in some ways, values. I don't think that you've seen that in a major way, especially since the second half of the 20th century.
But I do think that you need to have something which ties together an imaginary community. By imaginary community, I mean that you have your actual bonds with the real people that you know, and you need to tie your society together where people trust each other because they have shared beliefs.
That's maybe not sufficient. I'm not arguing for necessarily a propositional nation, but you do need some way to tie together an imaginary community.
And there's going to have to be something which replaces Christianity. However, it's much less relevant to directly go after Christianity since it's dead in many ways already. Railing against Christianity doesn’t have the same salience or relevance that it did in the 19th century.
You have people that go to church every week, but they go to a church where “this is a trans affirming church.” You have been over coded culturally by a new hegemonic force. You don't care about what is written in the New Testament or whether you have some basis to support what you're saying in the church fathers. That's not relevant to most of the churches that you see in Europe.
It's also true in Africa and South America, because even though Christianity is very strong there compared to us, it's a highly syncretic religion, local form where they have pagan influence and it's much more a part of local identity than it is as part of a universal religion.
Christianity as a genuine universalist project is moribund and eventually this will happen with Islam as well. If you look at the youth of countries like Iran, they are far less conservative. They are less like this is a global trend.
I can't possibly proclaim that there is like an ascendant Nietzschean Homeric replacement just waiting around the corner because that's that's ridiculous. But something is going to fill in the vacuum.
DL: (01:08:00):
I've been asking that question, and if I had an answer, I would be the prophet of a new religion. But it is a question that people should be asking. It's not immediately answerable. There is something empirical about religious formation.
You have to throw things out there. It's a dialectical process between people who try and fail. They form cults and then ultimately somebody learns from those mistakes, learns from those failures, syncretizes opposing forces together and then is able to make that work practically.
It's almost impossible to figure out what would work practically effectively.
From a theoretical analysis, you actually need to just start throwing things out there and doing things.
I'm not going to put a cult together, but that there is a place for theorizing and speculating. Someone who can translate that into the real world action can look at that, get some inspiration, take that as a basis. And then, the people who have the charisma to enact that and then try and fail and try and fail.
You're talking about the over coding in churches where you walk into a church and hear, “This is a trans affirming church.” That might not be sustainable for the long term for a number of reasons. It's not just that one issue. There's a lot of different issues. But even if that's not sustainable for the long term, it is technically working. We have a society. We go to the grocery store. The electricity works in the house. That moral code is functional for the moment.
The big threat could be AI. We've discussed that. But I also think just genetic engineering and the transgender experiment will be its own undoing. If you take transgenderism seriously enough, instead of injecting somebody with hormones, why don't we just figure out some mRNA vaccine where we can endogenously change someone's genetic instructions so that they endogenously produce more testosterone and more estrogen?
ZS: (01:10:55):
The ability to change people's genetics through mRNA, go ahead. The problem with that is the people is people's bone structures. People can do like a carefully coordinated photo to where they don't look that bad. Particularly women who transition to being men, it's a sort of easier process to pass. But actually, if you see them in real life, it's fucking jarring that they are short and the stature is off.
DL (01:11:32):
I agree that we're never going to get perfect trans people. That's not where i was going with this. That would be funny and interesting. A more effective way to achieve that would would to be have like surrogate bodies which would be done through human trafficking. You would find the body of the person you want, like some slave on the market going back to the 15th century. You find the slaves whose body you want, they cut open the skull and they do a brain transplant. I don't know if that's possible, but that would be a lot easier.
But I'm saying either of these ways, the fact that there is this moral permissibility on the left to think about things like hormone replacement therapy even again mrna vaccines, gene editing, brain transplants… all of these ideas which on the right are taboo
We don't want to go there because they understand christianity can't survive under those material conditions. If those sort of technologies exis, you can't even cope anymore, it's not possible.
But also at the same time, what the left doesn't realize is that employing those technologies is also going to destroy that sort of safety-ism that you describe as the moral center of all of these ideas: “people are suffering. We have to give them new bodies to to help them feel more comfortable.” Once you have those technologies advance to a certain point, they begin to have military applications. A lot of these people become irrelevant, our entire bureaucracy.
Historically, when you have a military technology, whether it's the chariot or the mounted archer or gunpowder, the result of that is typically that you get the huge conquests, reordering, and the destruction of old bureaucracies, and that ultimately has religious implications. That's a pretty big theory, but that's what is on the horizon.
ZS: (01:14:03):
I agree with you that when you go through technological changes that does enable different religious transformations.
There's a lot of ways in which the Internet is in continuity with previous culture. People say that the internet is this democratizing force. Well, no. People have the same attention to a small percentage elite of people on the internet that celebrities follow it, like the number of followers that celebrities have on like Instagram is like comparable to the percentage of celebrities that a normal person gets on tv. A lot of the identity confusion comes from the internet, where people are creating virtual avatars and identities for themselves, which they feel are more real than their physical one. You can't imagine a lot of the mentally ill stuff from the left without without that technology.
It also does undermine traditional religions in that it doesn't necessarily make people illiterate, but it changes the way in which people interact with literacy. It doesn't favor a high attention span, like Bible reading Calvinism as a social form.
Even if reddit atheism itself has gone out of fashion for a number of reasons.
That's a huge topic and very speculative. That's like Dune. You have very different religion in Dune depending on the military stuff that they have. Yeah, I definitely think that is food for thought.
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