Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast History of Philosophy Audio Archive

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https://www.youtube.com/@jameslow

Video Source:

https://youtu.be/gf51n8V8vII

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This is an eight lecture series, delivered in 2010 at UC Berkeley by the philosophy professor and overall great human being Hubert "Bert" Dreyfus as part of a Great Books course.

Enjoy.

Reach out and share your thoughts!

williamengels@substack.com

Congratulations on a great 2024 - a couple of channel-exclusive messages and announcements as we take the podcast into 2025. Cheers to a great year.

References:

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose.

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“Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

Original Video:

https://youtu.be/371LobXpUlo

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"The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits - as the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the collective evolution of mankind: this philosopher will make use of the religions for his work of education and breeding, just as he will make use of existing political and economic conditions….the will to self-mastery is always increasing - religion presents them with sufficient instigations and temptations to take the road to higher spirituality, to test the feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence and solitude.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

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(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:00:41) - Nietzsche as Myth and Mythmaker

(00:44:34) - Nietzsche on Truth and Lies

(01:23:54) - Master of Suspicion, the Immoralist

(02:04:23) - The Death of God

(02:46:06) - The Eternal Return (Time is a Flat Circle)

(03:25:04) - The Will to Power

(04:08:08) - Nietzsche as Artist

(04:49:20) - Nietzsche's Bastard Children

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“He no longer cared to live in a house, and he rose once more into the air, this time on the breath of a breeze so sheer and transparent not even the gods felt it. This is the wind that further frees even the free. As his soul rose on that wind, it seemed to expand and flow out in all directions at once. Rising steadily upward, he passed through the arched windows of that celestial mansion and began a journey that would penetrate even the most distant, the most veiled mysteries of heaven. He slipped stealthfully across secret skies, across worlds and all their skies, growing deeper and wider as he did so, traveling beyond the starry reach of any sky, of any universe, to a place where no one could follow. There, lost in the divine and infinite distances of nothingness itself, he too disappeared, his last breath released, like a luminous song, into the void of a transcendent eternity.”
-Astika Royal Mason, A Dream Immortal, 2023

References:

“From Here to Enlightenment” - HH the Dalai Lama

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12505636-from-here-to-enlightenment

Ardor - Roberto Calasso

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/134839029-ardor-by-roberto-calasso

The Mirror of Simple Souls - Marguerite Porete

https://youtu.be/HvivvGZydFA

Agni in Hinduism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni

Rig Veda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda

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Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/fO0OkdUuvDk

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Professor Thomas C. Brickhouse:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Brickhouse

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“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.” 
-Alan Watts

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“And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.” 

-Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947

(00:00:00) - Intro & Host Promo

(00:00:40) - The Stranger, Part 1

(00:30:36) - The Stranger, Part 2

(01:00:33) - The Myth of Sisyphus

(01:29:22) - The Plague & The Fall

(01:58:45) - The Fall, Part 2

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Robert C. Solomon (1942-2007)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C._Solomon

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Original Sugrue Video:

https://youtu.be/mU7hdGKOGyk

Original Skinner Video:

https://youtu.be/CKGuzJ6GwHM

Enjoy.

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Original Video:

https://youtu.be/Auuk1y4DRgk

Enjoy.

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Original Video:

https://youtu.be/uMMJb3AxA0s

Original Channel (UChicago Divinity School)

https://www.youtube.com/@uchicagodivinityschool2166

Continuation of 135a

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“The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.”

-C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, 1964

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Original YouTube

https://youtu.be/8Ojpm6G3PYw

Original Channel (The International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis):

https://www.youtube.com/@isps_us

Lionel Corbett

https://www.pacifica.edu/faculty/lionel-corbett/

(00:00:00): Intro

(00:00:52): Milton and Power

(00:45:31): The Infant Cry of God

(01:33:38): Credible Employment

(02:24:03): Poetry and Virginity

(03:15:35): Poetry and Marriage

(04:02:57): Lycidas

(04:55:10): Lycidas Part II

(05:48:09): Areopagitica

(06:35:08): Paradise Lost Book I

(07:26:50): God and Mammon

(08:17:49): Miltonic Smile

(09:03:49): The Blind Prophet

(09:51:35): Paradise Lost Book III

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A study of Milton's poetry, with some attention to his literary sources, his contemporaries, his controversial prose, and his decisive influence on the course of English poetry.

Description courtesy of Yale University, presented Fall 2007, uploaded November 2008. I opted to split this otherwise 19 hour episode into two parts so Spotify can handle it. See 135b.

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Original YouTube Playlist (Milton with John Rogers): ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2103FD9F9D0615B7

Original Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@YaleCourses⁠

John Rogers, Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, retired.

https://english.yale.edu/people/professors-emeritus/john-rogers⁠

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Talk Originally Titled “Deconstructing Racism and Sexism in the Envisagement of Western Civilization”

The use of the phrase “all men are created equal” was probably not a deliberate attempt to make a statement about women. It was just that women were beyond consideration as worthy of inclusion. They were politically invisible. Though practical needs gave women a certain authority in the home, on the farm, or in occupations like midwifery, they were simply overlooked in any consideration of political rights, any notions of civic equality.-Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1980⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_State-//-

Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/lk4ncpkstAw

Original Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@TheAustinSchool

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“On the other hand, if an experience arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future, continuity works in a very different way. Every experience is a moving force.”

-John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_psychosis

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“All conservative ideologies justify existing inequities as the natural order of things, inevitable outcomes of human nature. If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies and other special considerations - at our expense? Their "naturally superior talents" include unprincipled and illegal subterfuge such as price-fixing, stock manipulation, insider training, fraud, tax evasion, the legal enforcement of unfair competition, ecological spoliation, harmful products and unsafe work conditions. One might expect naturally superior people not to act in such rapacious and venal ways. Differences in talent and capacity as might exist between individuals do not excuse the crimes and injustices that are endemic to the corporate business system.”

― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997

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Original YouTube (1988)

https://youtu.be/4vKfejeruhk

Original Channel (AfroMarxist)

https://www.youtube.com/@AfroMarxist

“The Great Way is not difficult, for those who have no preferences"

-Xinxin Ming, Tang Dynasty Chan Buddhist Poem

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinxin_Ming

https://zenmoments.org/hsin-hsin-ming-the-great-way

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“The [music of the] Blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.” 
-Cornel West, Democracy Matters, 2004

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Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/k5ydesBadno 

Published March 2022 by The New School:

https://www.youtube.com/@thenewschool 

“Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed—even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.”

-Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 2003

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Philosophy could be characterized with only a bit of irony as what is left if you begin with the sum total of human thought and subtract those areas in which clear progress has been made.
-Talbot Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, 2009

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Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/geBkIGDEU-k 

Published February 2017 by the University of Chicago

https://www.youtube.com/@UChicago 

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"Human civilization is the result of ten million years of striving after the unspeakable"

-Terence McKenna

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“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.” 
― Slavoj Žižek, Interview with the Guardian, October 2014

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Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/lorX77nu3Jk

Published April 2024 by Seton Hall University

https://www.youtube.com/@setonhall

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“We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct, she has little chance of evolving another.”

-James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 2009

Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/JtBuJbCwdyo

Recorded 2011, Published October 2016 by CSUMB.https://www.youtube.com/@digitalcommonscsumb2306

“If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.”

-Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 2003

Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/FAHUyHDTphQ

Provided by the Departments of History and Art History at the University of Otago, October 2017:

https://www.youtube.com/@OtagoHumanities

How did the Nazis conceive of war? In this lecture, Professor Evans—a world authority on Nazi Germany—argues that Hitler's belief that war was necessary for the fitness and survival of the German race led him to promote the indoctrination of German society at every level with a will to wage war and the preparedness to do so. Perpetual conflict was the aim, and the idea that World War II would have ended had the Nazis won is an illusion; it would have been followed by other conflicts, principally with America. In this way, defeat was built in to the Nazi war effort from the beginning.

“Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it.”

-Chris Hedges, The Wages of Revolt, 2015

Original YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXE6T1ySNRM

The Sanctuary for Independent Media:

https://www.youtube.com/@mediasanctuary

Description, per @mediasanctuary:

Chris Hedges, whose most recent book "Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt" (Nation Books) was published on May 15, 2015 is also the best-selling author of "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A quote from the book was used as the opening title quotation in the critically-acclaimed and Academy Award-winning 2009 film, The Hurt Locker. The quote reads: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In "Wages of Rebellion," Chris Hedges--who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books "Empire of Illusion" and "Death of the Liberal Class"--investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. Drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and literary figures he shows not only the harbingers of a coming crisis but also the nascent seeds of rebellion. Hedges' message is clear: popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization. Focusing on the stories of rebels from around the world and throughout history, Hedges investigates what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Utilizing the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Hedges describes the motivation that guides the actions of rebels as "sublime madness"--the state of passion that causes the rebel to engage in an unavailing fight against overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive forces. For Hedges, resistance is carried out not for its success, but as a moral imperative that affirms life. Those who rise up against the odds will be those endowed with this "sublime madness."

End the killing now.

Description from Media Sanctuary:

Chris Hedges, the former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and Palestine. He is the author of numerous books including the New York Times bestsellers War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto. He has also taught students in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system for a decade, the subject of his book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison. This talk was co-sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace, Albany Chapter; Muslim Solidarity Committee and Project SALAM; Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace; Palestinian Rights Committee-Upper Hudson Peace Action; RPI Muslim Student Association; UAlbany Muslim Student Association; Women Against War. The presentation was made possible by volunteer labor and thousands of small donations from patrons of The Sanctuary for Independent Media. The Sanctuary for Independent Media is a telecommunications production facility dedicated to community media arts, located in an historic former church at 3361 6th Avenue in North Troy, NY. The Sanctuary hosts screening, production and performance facilities, training in media production and a meeting space for artists, activists and independent media makers of all kinds.

The Sanctuary for Independent Media

https://www.youtube.com/@mediasanctuary

Original YouTube: https://youtu.be/ly6lfhOxTe0?si=t6Uk-TzJLdIyF69S

Published December 8 2023

“What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.”

-Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, 2021

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Original YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V3_Y_FuMYk

Per the Wonderstruck Podcast:

"Delivered at 'A Symposium on Consciousness' on August 2, 2024, at the stunning Kinross House Estate in Scotland, this talk was presented by Wonderstruck, The Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, and Five Books. "

https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod

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By popular demand, Rick Roderick is back on the History of Philosophy Audio Archive. This is his complete series, Philosophy and Human Values.

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00:00:00 Intro

00:00:52 Socrates and the Life of Inquiry

00:47:13 Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics

01:28:45 Kant and the Path to Enlightenment

02:12:47 Mill on Liberty and Utilitarianism

02:56:53 Hegel and Modern Life

03:37:48 Nietzsche on Knowledge and Belief

04:22:21 Kierkegaard and the Modern Spirit

05:08:51 Philosophy and the Postmodern Condition

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"When someone asks you if you would like for your daughter to be honored by the god, always make sure you ask "Which god, exactly?" before replying.

-Roy, in this talk, with a sick laugh, paraphrased.

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Original YouTube (Part 1):

https://youtu.be/wHRJyjvqeYo?si=6rZPXS4G5tja6nxu

Original YouTube (Part 2):

https://youtu.be/uraDUVCRsNc?si=bNOu-n05uT1uS8vB

All rights reserved to the Austin School YouTube Channel, please don't sue me, I'm on your side:

https://www.youtube.com/@TheAustinSchool

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“Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project. It is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a pricing mechanism to institutionalize and therefore legitimate the extraction of human behavior for manufacturing and sale. It ignores the key point that the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us.”

-Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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Art Credit Rose Dixon-Campbell:https://www.woroni.com.au/words/male-gaze-as-panopticon/Original YouTube (Dartmouth, 2024):https://youtu.be/afOWUuimwOI?si=dvmLMDBWpaPlGyqq

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“The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.”

-Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

“It is useful to remember that no matter where we turn, there is rarely any shortage of elevated ideals to accompany the resort to violence.”

-Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival 

“But beyond numbers, it is the deep chasm between reality and representation that is most bewildering in the case of Palestine. It is indeed hard to understand, and for that matter to explain, why a crime that was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present, should have been so totally ignored.” 

-Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

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Original YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLEMpXvr0s1SkexwYQWyM2a1FpMDbuQ-s&si=WsD23qhAmQN-At_M

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Original YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ5m5O-l8sU

Original Channel Page

https://www.youtube.com/@TheAustinSchool

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I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still.

-Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert, 1942.

All chapter titles and source material credited to the phenomenal YouTube channel Philosophy Overdose. The episode art is a still from Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece The Seventh Seal, 1957.

00:00 Socrates & Plato on Knowledge 

10:18 Aristotle on Knowledge 

12:41 Inner Self & External World

33:30 Heidegger & Kierkegaard 

36:42 Kierkegaard & the Infinite

38:43 Kierkegaard: The Temporal & Eternal 

48:01 How Do We Encounter Reality? 

52:43 Merleau-Ponty & the Intentional Arc 

54:22 Meaning in Life - From Heidegger to Dostoyevsky 

58:13 Getting in Contact with Reality 

1:01:14 Sartre's Being & Nothingness 

1:05:15 Human Nature - From Ancient Times to Pascal 

1:12:55 Human Nature - From Kierkegaard to Sartre 

1:20:22 Darwin & Human Nature 

1:28:11 Artificial Intelligence 

1:40:06 Nietzsche & the Death of God

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Original YouTube Video

https://youtu.be/iAxu6pg7JU0?si=Xkuws5V0h-b6HEYq

Original Channel

https://www.youtube.com/@Philosophy_Overdose

The soul, which is created quick to love, responds to everything that pleases, just as soon as beauty wakens it to act.

-Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 18

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Original Youtube:

⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxpl-cIPJg&t=191s

"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1929.

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Credit for the copy below as well as the source videos goes to the great YouTube channel Philosophy Overdose. The lectures were first delivered in 1965.

Isaiah Berlin gives a series of 6 lectures on Romanticism and some of its sources. For Berlin, the Romantics set in motion a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity’s view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of the Romantics elsewhere: “The world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed dramatic, not to say terrifying, change in men’s outlook in modern times.” In these brilliant lectures Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define Romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how its lasting legacy permeates our own outlook. Combining the freshness and immediacy of the spoken word with Berlin’s inimitable eloquence and wit, the lectures range over a cast of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. Berlin argues that the ideas and attitudes held by these and other figures helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, individual self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art. This is the record of an intellectual bravura performance–of one of the century’s most influential philosophers dissecting and assessing a movement that changed the course of history. These Mellon lectures were delivered in Washington in 1965.

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Philosophy Overdose:

https://www.youtube.com/@Philosophy_Overdose

YouTube Source Material:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhP9EhPApKE_9uxkmfSIt2JJK6oKbXmd-&si=6livdDSyZL9-vzhk

This is a personal post, I hope you enjoy.

"Our joy today is equal to the pain that made it"

-Aeschylus, Agamemnon.

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In this episode, Chris Hedges interview Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin, exploring his work in books like Democracy Incorporated and Politics and Vision.

Recorded October 2014.

Professor Wolin passed away in October 2015.

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Original video

https://youtu.be/YjfKosDBOzQ

The Real News Network

https://www.youtube.com/@therealnews

Sheldon Wolin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Wolin

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In this Professor Roy presentation we get to hear about how international sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, how Saddam Hussein was first backed, then baited, and then finally killed off by US foreign policy, and the true reasons we invaded Iraq in 2003 and kicked off what Chris Hedges called “the greatest strategic blunder in the nation's history” and what Noam Chomsky calls “the greatest crime of the 21st century”. 

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Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8BGpohOupQ

Posted December 2018

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In this conversation with environmental ethicist Guillermo Zapata we discuss the role of indigenous philosophy in shaping our approach to environmental problems, the most pressing threats emerging from climate change, and how we can resist the encroachment of corporate and political interests that are contrary to rational and urgent action of climate change and the Sixth Mass Extinction.

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Citations

1. Indigenous philosophy and Rousseau/Enlightenment: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything
2. French philosopher who conceived technology as an organism: Jacques Ellul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique
3. Dutch microplastics study: https://phys.org/news/2022-03-scientists-microplastics-blood.html
4. All rainwater is poison: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069
5. The Green Scare 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare
6. Sheldon Wolin concept “Inverted Totalitarianism” is developed in his book “Democracy Incorporated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Wolin#Fate_of_democracy 

Guest Reading Recommendations:

1. Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465709-braiding-sweetgrass
2. Right Story, Wrong Story - Tyson Yunkaporta: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199122606-right-story-wrong-story
3. Sand Talk - Tyson Yunkaporta: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45449501-sand-talk
4. How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42771901-how-to-do-nothing
5. Indigenizing Philosophy through Land - Brian Burkhart: https://msupress.org/9781611863307/indigenizing-philosophy-through-the-land/

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Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.

-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

00:00:00 Intro

00:00:51 Part 1: The Grand Wealth Redistribution Scheme

01:57:01 Part 2: From Poland to Reagan

03:54:18 Part 3: The Promotion of Unfettered Greed

05:38:33 Part 4: Radiation and Madness

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Original YouTube Page - https://www.youtube.com/@TheAustinSchool

Original YouTube Video (Part 1) -https://youtu.be/8Dnp7lOObjU?si=ju8L-KH9Vzu7Bcwg

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Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.

-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948

The Rainer Maria Rilke text that Merton references is Letter Seven from "Letters to a Young Poet"

https://genius.com/Rainer-maria-rilke-letter-seven-annotated

Later Merton cites Rilke's "Book of Hours"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Hours

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Original Reference (Titled “Rilke and his search for God”) - https://merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/page/AVnovices

Publication Date - February 2nd, 1966

Thomas Merton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton

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When we are the victims of illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty…. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

-Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

Presented by Sr. Ann Astell at the University of Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.

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Original Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X3vuOiFYKc

Publication Date - August 25th, 2014

Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture - https://www.youtube.com/@ndethics

Simone Weil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil

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According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

-Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

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The Master and His Emissary - https://a.co/d/2gDbuCW

The Matter with Things - https://a.co/d/2jJVXZg

Original Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REB7GOxX5Mk

Dr. McGilchrist's YouTube Page - https://www.youtube.com/@DrIainMcGilchrist

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

-Slavoj Zizek, 2005 citing Frederic Jameson.

Happy Labor Day, you disgusting proles (I love you)

-Will

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Original YouTube Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgPqk8-HPGQ&t=1380s

Pervert's Guide to Cinema:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuI4SFw4g0 

Frederic Jameson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson

Slavoj Zizek:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEe