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Pill Pod 131 - Freedom Isn’t Free · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

0:06
Hello. All right, hello, Why did I press the record button?
0:12
You chose to It was an act of pure free will? Oh, we
0:16
have to we got it. There was this shocking like neuro scientist thing where
0:23
they have their brain wired up and then they tell them to press a button,
0:29
but the brain decides to press the button before the consciousness decides to press
0:34
the button. Yeah, your consciousness justifies after the fact, the fact that
0:40
you intended to press the button. Yeah. I forget how that experiment went.
0:45
Maybe I should have looked it up. I remember hearing about that.
0:47
It was kind of like the experimenters or whatever were able to predict the choice
0:53
that the person was going to make based on their brain patterns before the person
0:57
knew when they like, which was kind of seen as evan for determinism.
1:00
I guess. Yeah, it's like the decisions already made. The muscular motility
1:07
happens before the conscious decision part of it decides something like that, Yeah,
1:11
you're you made the decision before you're aware of it. Yeah, just before
1:18
we like get into the topic. Just like kind of in aside I noticed
1:21
on Twitter. I don't know if this has happened to any of you,
1:23
but randomly like I responded to something about like Canadian politics, like a couple
1:26
of days ago, like some inside baseball Canadian politics like thing from about like
1:32
Paul Martin, and I like, I responded to this one guy, and
1:34
it's been retweeted like that. My response so weird, Like this tweet in
1:40
particular by a bunch of like cam girls, Like it's so weird, Like
1:45
it's all like it's like Evelyn and then her bio is like Hawk Girls waiting
1:49
for you here, and then it's like they're all have the same bio and
1:53
it's just like obviously it's some kind of scam, like they probably just like
1:56
retweet like what they perceive as men's accounts to like try to get them.
2:00
But it's just so weird. Why would you pick like my responses about like
2:01
the NDP not having a majority in order to like give the liberals enough to
2:07
like prevent Stephen Harper from forming his first minority. It's like a super nerdy,
2:12
like Canadian politics tweet, and it's just so weird that that's the tweet
2:15
that cam girls chose to. I guess it's cam girls. I don't even
2:19
know what it is, but anyway, I wonder I wonder if some of
2:22
those accounts are like bought accounts. Oh, I'm sure they are. I'm
2:24
sure they are, so so there must be something like in the algorithm that
2:29
like these. I guess you're right. They're probably like bought accounts that are
2:31
just like for these sites or whatever. And then they there must be some
2:36
keyword in my tweet or something. Who knows, it's bizarre anyway, Paul
2:38
Martin, it's probably because politics perverts. Politics perverts are especially horny. So
2:46
yeah, exactly, So like maybe Canadian politics nerds are like more likely to
2:51
be staffers who, like, you know, cheat on their wives. Who
2:53
knows, it's so weird. Hey, only only fans, isn't cheating?
2:59
Yeah, yeah, whatever, I mean, depending on your relationship. Yeah,
3:04
all right, we're doing We're doing freedom and Twitter. Speaking of Twitter
3:07
completely unusable, but I did want to search it because we're talking about freedom,
3:13
and I wanted to search what is being said about freedom just in passing.
3:19
So I did something you should never do, which is sort by latest.
3:23
And there's there's the normal freedom and democracy, freedom of speech, that
3:27
kind of stuff, which is what I was expecting. But the thing that
3:30
is being pumped with the word freedom in it is this uh QAnon? Well,
3:36
I guess it's downstream from QAnon. But the movie Sound of Freedom.
3:42
Oh sound you heard of this? No? I haven't. Actually, Oh
3:46
it's a it's the guy who played Jesus in the Mel Gibson Jesus movie.
3:53
Nice and I think he's a bit q pilled, but he's saving children from
3:59
sex trap the king like uh taken taken styled Oh my god. So it's
4:03
like it's straight up like it's like a conservative wet dream movie of like seeing
4:11
people from like a pedophile ring. He leaves his uh his job at the
4:15
State Department. I haven't seen obviously, but oh it's Jim Jim caviasl.
4:20
Yeah, it's based on a true story about the US Homeland Security agent who
4:25
did some pedophilia investigation. Oh, so it's a real story. Tim Ballard
4:30
is a real person. He's he's the I'm looking at the accuracy I'm looking
4:35
at the accuratey section accuracy section on Wikipedia. Yeah, it's about his involvement
4:41
with something called Operation under a Ground Railroad. But it was but apparently like
4:46
embellished a lot of details and a lot of people are apparently questioning the validity
4:50
or the accuracy of the movie. So there's there's some kind of embellishment.
4:54
Oh man, I totally thought I'm like a little disappointed that it's actually maybe
4:57
based on something real. I thought it was just like totally from the conservative
5:01
like wet dream like fantasyland. Well I'm sure it's that too. It made
5:05
forty five million dollars on like a ten million or low, low million dollar
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budget, which was Jim Cavizel, one of those actors who's actually like I
5:15
didn't know that he was like conservative pilled. Well he played Jesus, you
5:21
got it. Yeah, But I I remember, like I feel like I
5:25
have a vague memory of looking into whether he was he actually was like very
5:30
religious, and I have like a memory of me finding out that he wasn't.
5:33
But now I'm looking at the Wikipedia, and you're right, it says
5:35
he's a devout, devout Catholic. So yeah, yeah. Well, also
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this studio that's distributing it, I checked. I'm looking at this, they're
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Mormons. So I didn't know this, but the Mormons are cued up too,
5:48
And you're right, it does say that. It does say that.
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In twenty twenty one, cavisl endorse some elements of QAnon theory. I mean,
5:54
it's it's not super surprising. The traditional religious the traditional Christian mythology just
6:00
isn't enough anymore. So you need to put the the white hat stuff in
6:05
there to make it. Remember when all that Remember when all that scientology stuff
6:09
started kind of exploding in the aughts, and suddenly it seemed like half of
6:14
the actors in Hollywood were fucking scientologists, like you know, the weird ones
6:19
like Tom Cruise and Travolta obviously, but then like so many others were They
6:27
just were involved. And then it later came out that like there was a
6:30
lot of coercion and really kind of underhanded shit, and that scientology is and
6:34
extremely like persecutory kind of religion. You say anything bad about them and they'll
6:41
fuck your life up. Yeah, And they keep documents and they threaten to
6:46
expose shit about you, and like it's classic cult shit, right, And
6:50
public figures are the ones they want, right, because that's the most exposure
6:56
they get. And I guess in this day and age, it's also creating
6:59
like fucking social media storms is another strategy now. But yeah, it's not
7:04
surprising to me that some of these actors would then be going for QAnon,
7:10
which is like, what's the difference is it's scientology but like disaggregated and decentralized
7:15
and more online. Yeah, if you are already a Mormon or some kind
7:20
of evangelical, you're primed to believe in some pretty paranoiac fantasies already that you're
7:26
the main character in a Manichean cosmic war where reconvenience store is full of demons.
7:32
So it makes sense that the new Jesus is wearing a bulletproof vest and
7:38
taking on the establishment of pedophile vampires, which is way more exciting than some
7:45
iron age you dying for your porn addiction. Yeah, you know, it's
7:50
funny like speaking of just kind of a conservative fantasies. Like when I was
7:55
consuming kind of for fun out of curiosity, some of these red pill like
7:59
you Tube channels or whatever. I remember like one of the things that they
8:01
would always talk about, which just struck me as a hilarious right wing fantasy
8:05
about basically like why the man needs to be the protector or whatever, and
8:09
the man needs to be It's like their scenarios were always the most ridiculous,
8:13
like well, like if my girlfriend if like some kidnappers come out of nowhere,
8:18
it's like I need to be able to defend her. And it's just
8:20
like it's like what it's the most absurd things. It's like I need to
8:22
be trained in like Kravma god like Israeli military stuff so that I can defend
8:28
my woman from like kidnappers and pedophiles or whatever. And it's it's just like
8:31
the most like fantasy land reason for it. And it's like that would always
8:37
be the thing that they would respond to. And it's like, dude,
8:41
is that the best reason? Like is that is that like the most like
8:45
practical reason to be in shape? Right? Like that would be the shit
8:48
that they would talk about or oh as long as as long as they're in
8:52
shape, this is taken. Is the same thing like what if what if
8:58
my daughter goes to Croatia and gets like stolen? And speaking of Liam Neeson,
9:05
was he even in that much in shape in those movies? Like you
9:07
have a certain set of skills? Are there three Takens or more one?
9:13
I think I think there's at least two. I don't know if there's three.
9:16
I mean, speaking of Liam Neeson, he totally trafficked a kid in
9:24
Star Wars episode one. Oh yeah, he literally bought him. You know
9:28
what, Star Star Wars episode one. This should be This should be the
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analogy for why child trafficking is wrong because some elites freedom some elites, well
9:39
did did they? Did? They? Some elites come out of the sky
9:43
in a very in a very expensive ship. They buy a child based on
9:48
his Medachlorian count i e. His good adrenochrome. And then what happens to
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the mother sells because she has no other options, so she agrees to it,
10:00
and then he gets passed from elite to elite, from the Jedis to
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the queen to the emperor and who knows what's going on there offscreen? And
10:09
then you know this is the birth of a great evil throughout the galaxy caused
10:16
by child trafficking. Well yeah, you know, you have a slave market
10:20
that functions on money, and you have a legit market that functions on money.
10:26
You can use money to free slaves, which is what Qui gon Jin
10:31
supposedly does. He buys them from Wato and gives him his freedom, But
10:33
he doesn't actually buy his freedom because he forces him to go to a boarding
10:37
school where he's not allowed to leave or feel anything anymore. Yeah, exactly.
10:41
Yeah, and then yeah, subjected to all kinds of really becomes Darth
10:46
Vader, because we forget that that is Darth Vader too. Because anyways,
10:52
these these these kinds of activities would would supposedly fall under the the under the
10:58
ambit of free right like the freedom of economic activity, the freedom of religion,
11:03
freedom of those kinds of choices. Right, So very nice segue,
11:09
Eric, that was great. Like what we think of dealing with freedom in
11:13
that way is like, okay, now we got to put what's the limits
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to freedom? Now, that's that would be like the question that emerges.
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But then you're in this horrible contradiction now because it's like, well, you're
11:24
either free or you're not free. You're not a little bit free, just
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like someone's not a little bit pregnant. They're either pregnant or not pregnant.
11:31
Yeah, circle with a hole in it. It's not a circle. You
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either got a circle or you don't. But yeah, this is a We
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kind of just said, let's put an object on the table, and we
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picked one of the most general and overcoded possible concepts. So if it's freedom,
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versus determinism. We're going to get to phenomenology, which I think makes
11:50
a pretty good case that we are free in a very limited sense. But
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why don't we go through some of the idiological codes of the concept of freedom
12:01
and justification of it that we have. What do most people mean when they
12:05
say we need freedom? Are we want so like politically or like just in
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our life? If you search it on Twitter like I tried to before I
12:13
got sidetracked by the Cuban the sound of freedom I mean, I mean you
12:18
can. You can slice it up like laws of nature, right, that
12:22
apply to non human things, and they are not free. They have no
12:26
free will, They're just determined. They bounce off of each other. We
12:28
can figure out those laws. And then on the side of politics, that's
12:33
where humans are free. We're free because we're rational. It's like the the
12:39
origin of the liberal arts kind of thing, right, The origin of the
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liberal arts is not liberal, doesn't mean political. It's in opposition to the
12:45
mechanical arts. Right, So the liberal arts literally freeze your mind from drudgery
12:52
because you're doing mathematics and music and poetry rather than doing menial work. I
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love how okay, I asked what most people mean when they use the word
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freedom, and your response your good, good response. But I don't think
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most people immediately think of the context of the Renaissance University curriculum when using the
13:18
word freedom. But I was trying to get at I watched a few clips
13:20
of the NATO conference, right, and I even in the few clips,
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freedom was mentioned multiple times as sort of a justification of NATO's existence. And
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then part of NATO's mission is pursuing freedom. So that's a little bit more
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what I was trying to get at. I mean, I wonder if at
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that level what people mostly mean is like uh, like like maybe it's more
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easily identified through in a negative conception, right, So it's like an absence
13:52
of structures of domination or like an absence of direct interference, so like there
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is you know there or is that kind of which is kind of liberal freedom,
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right, which is negative freedom, just like not having obstacles that overly
14:07
interfere with you. Whereas you know, some kind of more positive account of
14:11
freedom, which I find, like I guess spookier in the sense that it's
14:13
a bit more unclear what it is, is like some some kind of positive
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account of like giving yourself laws that you that you follow, like kind of
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like in the kantient sense, I would say Kant gives the most I think
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crazy but like strong endorsement of something we would call philosophically freedom. But probably
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at that like more common sense level, people probably just mean the negative version,
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right, just like not having these things that get in your way.
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But when we go from when we go from the sort of original concept of
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freedom, let's say, is like residing in in what distinguishes humans from the
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rest of the universe, which is like, I don't know, cognitive ability,
14:52
reasoning capacity. And for Kant, you know, there's nothing in the
14:56
object which the mind hasn't put there. And on the side of nature you
15:01
have these unfree kind of law determined necessary laws that things follow. They're not
15:09
free. And then the next stage is kind of Marxism where freedom is kind
15:13
of redefined in two ways, and one of them is one of them is
15:20
the freeing of people from their ownership over the means of production, which is
15:28
what capitalist freedom is about. Right, It's about, you know, getting
15:33
ownership out of the hands of people, which the United States has an extremely
15:39
extensive history of doing. I just was reading about the Congo today in the
15:45
cobalt mining industry, which has been completely expropriated from the Congolese people. And
15:50
then the second aspect of Marxist freedom is the freedom to sell your labor on
15:54
the market. So they claim, oh, you're free because you can choose
15:58
to freely dispose of your labor, to which the responses should sarcastically be like
16:04
like, oh, yeah, I love to have the work for a living,
16:07
right, that's great. Yeah, I'm free to I'm free to either
16:11
not be able to feed myself and my family or I'm free to go sell
16:15
my labor to some shitty employer. But yeah, that's the kind of that's
16:22
kind of a negative conception for freedom. Right, freedom from ownership of the
16:26
means of production. So you become a kind of free floating agent. And
16:29
then freedom you can be then, you know, assimilated into a labor pool
16:33
where you're quote unquote free to dispose of your own personal labor as you choose,
16:40
which is very much the opposite. There's also, like, I think
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there can be a weird fantasy of like being free on the Marxist side.
16:48
I think where no matter what, you're gonna have to work, right,
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Like, there's things you just have to do in your life that require your
16:53
attention, that require labor, that are annoying, like as things as banal
16:57
is, doing your launch, cleaning your house. Like, there's just shit
17:02
that you have to do, getting food. I mean, even if you're
17:06
thinking about some kind of like a narco primitivist society, there's like a bunch
17:10
of shit to do. There's like a bunch of work that you got to
17:11
do, right, Like, you can't get away from that. Well,
17:15
that's why the question of social freedom is more like like do you have power
17:19
to make other people do that shit for you or do you have to do
17:23
that shit yourself and make money and survive on the time, right, Like,
17:27
So that's there's a sliding scale there. When you're at the you're in
17:32
the lower classes, right, you're much less free. Yeah, of course
17:34
for the upper class and the lower classes, they're humans. They have to
17:38
do those things, but there's a big difference in the way they get done.
17:42
Right. Most people aren't Like a lot of wealthy people don't even need
17:48
to raise their own fucking kids, right, But the payout the thing that
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you get so you don't have to pay attention to that stuff, not the
17:55
freedom of production. We sell that, get rid of that, and then
17:59
we get the freedom of consumption to make up for it, so we are
18:03
free. We have a free market. But freedom in that sense is just
18:07
a marketing slogan because the consumer gets to perceive is distinctive behaviors as freedom.
18:17
But it's a choice to choose between you know, two brands of bread or
18:22
two brands of cereal, or two brands of milk, two brands of car
18:26
kind of poor substitute for freedom called variety or selection on those different fucking brands.
18:32
Yeah, I mean, I think that the distinction can come when thinking
18:36
about with a West versus China, Right like, you have the difference between
18:38
maybe liberal freedom or well or even just like freedom is non domination or something
18:44
like that, right like that there's more potential for a kind of arbitrary interference
18:48
in your freedom. Yeah, but the freedom that I'm talking about in terms
18:52
of consumption is compelled upon you because that's the only one that there's left when
19:00
they doesn't exist. Doesn't that exist in China too? I mean, I'm
19:03
not I'm saying about the perception of China. I don't know anything about actual
19:07
China. But if you hear anyone speak about China, it's, oh,
19:11
they have social credit whatever and we don't, so we're free and just putting
19:18
aside whether that's correct or not. I don't know if I assume it's not,
19:22
because you know, try buying a house here without our version of social
19:26
credit, which is, uh, you know your bank credit score. But
19:30
anyway, I just mean to say that freedom in this context is used as
19:36
a designation of us a free society as opposed to them, they the unfree
19:42
societies. I mean, that's a there's a fundamental point to be made that
19:47
you cannot tell, like, as an individual, you cannot tell how free
19:51
you are until you start comparing yourself and your life with other people and other
19:56
places, right, you can't. You can't know what freedom is until you
20:00
have a society in which you live and have some idea about right. And
20:06
so you know the fact that we do. You know, we don't know
20:10
what goes on in China, but we assume that they're less free, and
20:12
then we use that as a comparison were Now, I certainly don't know what
20:18
goes on in politics in South America and Central America. But but I mean
20:25
I assume, yeah, okay, people come here. I've had roommates immigrant
20:29
roommates are foreign students, and they say, yeah, yeah, it's great
20:33
here. Back home, you know, you could get in trouble for this
20:36
or that, and it's like, yeah, you guys have economic opportunities.
20:40
Right, there's just like, you know, more problem, Like, well,
20:42
so is there some absolute scale of freedom, because then the concept of
20:47
freedom in relation to determinacy. They're complete opposites, right, they cannot coexist,
20:52
right, absolute freedom and necessity. You can't have both. But we
20:59
kind of have the way of reconciling them, thinking of like, yeah,
21:03
we're free, but then there are constraints. We're born free, and then
21:07
there the constraints are all external to ourselves or something like that, which I
21:11
think is a bit simplistic, but that seems to be the general. You
21:15
know, so I find less external constraints to my freedom here than I do
21:19
elsewhere. Well, well, maybe those constraints are hidden, right, Like
21:22
like buying a house. I'm not free to buy a house anymore. Maybe
21:26
that's my fault for not making enough money, but it's certainly not my fault
21:30
that they cost a fraction of what they did twenty years ago. Right,
21:34
So I'm less free just as a result of these natural laws of the marketplace
21:38
and inflation. There's a lot of reasons to be really distrustful of the word
21:44
freedom because it's the most ideologically loaded concept for what you for what it's used
21:49
to justify. But even the judgment of I am free as opposed to someone
21:55
else, therefore I should be like happy with what I have, that's not
21:59
a judge made in freedom. It's a judgment made in basically media projections of
22:06
places and people that I've never experienced in my life. But I believe that
22:11
by default because that is my experience of you know, China, for example.
22:18
And that's not a free judgment either. That's a judgment made based on
22:23
an apparatus that has decided for me what I can consume, just like they
22:26
can decide what I can consume in the grocery store. My understanding of my
22:33
own freedom is determined by what I relatively rate other versions of freedom that are
22:38
usually for you know, jingoist reasons said to not apply in other places,
22:44
that do apply to me. One last thing about freedom to bring up is
22:48
probably relates to NATO and any other kind of political decision making process is well
22:56
deliberation. Right, we tend to look at at at a decision, the
23:00
outcome of a decision making process, how like with the freedom of the deliberations.
23:06
That's that's one thing you look at, right, like what are the
23:08
what are the factors and the motivations? How free how freely are the parties
23:15
really negotiating? And and how is the outcome? You look at like inputs
23:21
and outcomes, and then you can kind of look at the process itself,
23:23
which is which is kind of backwards according to Ponte, Right, we we
23:29
we make the decision, and then it's afterwards that we kind of contemplate whether
23:33
or not it was a free decision or not. We don't we're not aware
23:36
of our freedom in the moment of making a decision. It's not it's not
23:40
a factor. It's only something that comes afterwards. So you get it backwards
23:44
when you say like a decision was made freely. No, the decision was
23:48
made just as we were saying in the beginning. It's already made and then
23:52
only afterwards we we think about whether it was free or not. But again
23:56
we tend to sort of get that flipped. Well, freedom is actually a
24:00
metaphysical term, because you're deciding which causes have effects and where the causality comes
24:07
from. And I think this naive, the humanist view, the naive view
24:12
of freedom is that inside you, somewhere there is and this is what I
24:18
wanted to get your opinion with the phenomenology, because inside you, somewhere there's
24:23
an open space that is causal and long for a long time, it's been
24:29
called the soul, and then sometimes it's called the reason, and it's called
24:33
it's this capacity to act, to produce causality without external interference. So if
24:40
we're making our decisions and we believe them to be free, that doesn't really
24:42
matter. It matters if this causal apparatus inside a person is acting on its
24:52
own or whether it is being influenced by external causation of which it's unaware.
25:00
So them we're looking at the conditions. We're looking at like the kind of
25:03
conditions under which the decision is made. Yeah, I mean the way conditions
25:08
of freedom. In other words, I mean the way that I see it
25:11
is like I think that what Mary le Ponti and others, And actually this
25:15
relates back to the episode we did two weeks ago with that paper that you
25:18
really hated pills like that, there's not really such thing as like being determined
25:25
and determining, like I think it's just one phenomena that like there is a
25:32
sense in which there's a decision, but it's always in the background of other
25:34
factors. It's conditioned. Freedom is I think one of the sections in Mary
25:37
L. Ponti where he talks about it. And you know, even when
25:41
we with our more popular like or discussion of what the popular rhetoric around freedom
25:45
is, it's like, I think all of that rhetoric gets it kind of
25:48
wrong, Like even when talking about how, oh, like we're not free
25:52
because of these social structures, which to some extent, yeah, that's true,
25:56
but there's another extent when which like there's not really such a thing as
25:59
like all a free a free or state. Like I think even just talking
26:03
in terms of freedom is almost like the wrong the wrong way of looking at
26:07
those social problems. It's more like wait, if I can cut you off,
26:11
Sorry, if I can cut you off, because I can tell you're
26:14
moving in the other direction. So to summarize so far, we've been speaking
26:18
of the liberal conception of freedom, which is to say you're free to live
26:25
your life without external impingement, usually from this stay or the sovereign. So
26:32
freedom is freedom to act without external constraint, causal efficacies on your side,
26:40
and the state limits it as little as possible. Hopefully. It's focused on
26:44
the individual. It's focused on the individual. The social context is a problem.
26:48
And merlot Ponte, he says, you cannot have freedom without social context.
26:55
I intersubjectivity. It's not individualistic like liberal freedom is is like your individual
27:02
freedom being either impinged on or enabled by government, society, whatever. Right.
27:08
That's it's individualistic. And then to be very simplistic, Marx is the
27:12
opposite. It's social. It's all on the social. It has nothing to
27:18
do with the individual, because worker and capitalists are just roles, they're not
27:23
referring to people. And so social freedom is about that social conditions which enables
27:30
the individual to be free. It's not a problem, it's the source.
27:33
So we have these two opposites and they're irreconcilable. I mean, I take
27:37
issue with that like definition of liberal, like I think it's a bit that's
27:41
like a little bit of a simplistic but I mean that's fair enough. I
27:45
think like my both focused on both they're both overly simply. I mean I
27:48
think, yeah, sure, like like it is more focused on the individual.
27:52
But it's complicated because, I mean, liberal theory is really just a
27:56
theory of government, and it's just like all we can have are like to
28:00
make a government maximally liberal. It's to like reduce the number of direct impingements
28:07
from some kind of centralized authority. That's liberal the freedom from the government perspective.
28:11
But I don't know if I think a lot of people take that and
28:15
then think that liberals have a really like robust metaphysical commitment to some kind of
28:19
individualism, when I think, really they're just mostly talking about government and kind
28:23
of stay neutral or don't say that much about like the metaphysical question. Couldn't
28:30
you still say though, that it's just downstream from like sure you could.
28:34
It's downstream from like a Hobbesian view of what the government is. The subject
28:41
is created by the sovereign as an inverse. Yeah, Like in a way,
28:45
Hobbes is like, yeah, freedom opposite from Rousseau. I mean,
28:49
Rousseau's a little more complicated because I would say he has as what some in
28:53
the literature call a republican notion of freedom, which is like freedom is self
28:57
determination. It's like a positive account of freedom, which is kind of what
29:00
he does in the social contract, as like, it's not just that a
29:04
government doesn't put constraints in front of you, it's that there's actually a positive
29:11
mechanism that lets people come together and actually like self determine. And if we
29:15
shift to phenomenology, then from a governmental subject versus authority type of framing of
29:25
this problem, which is I think we've all agreed, not a very good
29:27
framing. Merleu Ponte. If I could summarize this in like two sentences,
29:33
no matter where you are, who you are, what governmental system you live
29:37
under, even if you're a slave, you have a sort of freedom by
29:40
virtue of being conscious because as a human in time, with a sort of
29:48
phenomenological consciousness, you are always in the midst of projects, and you're not
29:55
free to not pick a project. And a project in the sense means a
30:00
project means to throw forward. You're always imaging the future and then getting towards
30:07
a future. And you can start a project and quit it, but then
30:11
you're already starting a new project, even if the project is not overthrow the
30:15
government. But I need to go to the fridge to get a glass of
30:18
milk. That would be a project that you comport yourself towards. And just
30:23
by the nature of time and the nature of our experience of time, in
30:27
those types of things, you're not free to not be free. You're compelled
30:33
no matter what the constraints are you are on you, even if you're in
30:36
a cell, in a prison cell, you still comport yourselves towards certain futures.
30:41
Though that sounds really existentialist. It sounds like a starts existentialist freedom until
30:52
you bring in the world into it, because the world is you're negotiating with
30:57
the world here, which is say, here's a bed. It's a sort
31:00
of a good thing to lay down on while you're in prison. Here.
31:03
I think one of the things that's a bit tricky about this chapter, and
31:06
when I was reading it again, is he does that typical thing that he
31:08
always does in this book, which is he'll he'll, he'll, he'll say
31:11
of you, and then like later he'll be like, oh, but that's
31:15
not actually what I'm like talking about. And I feel like the first parts
31:18
of this chapter he is, I think, kind of talking about the Sartrey
31:21
in view in a few places and then shifts back and forth, and they're
31:23
similar. So like, I don't think it's straight up what you were saying
31:26
there is wrong, but I think he does want to talk more about the
31:33
situation, the kind of existential situation and the way that that frames your possibilities
31:37
for freedom. But he's still at the same time wants to say you're still
31:40
free. So like the cell example is a good one. I think sart
31:42
actually has the same example in Somewhere where he says, you know, you
31:47
can you can be free to sit there and take it, or you can
31:49
be free to you know, scream and bash on the bars or whatever.
31:53
But there's also a part I liked it in the Mary Leponti where he talks
31:57
about you know, if I am ugly, then I have a choice to
32:04
either be an outcast or to condemn others. That is, I am left
32:07
free between masochism and sad sadism, but I am not free to ignore others,
32:13
right, Meaning that's the inner subjective part, right, Like the weight
32:16
of the inner subjective does like kind of force you to react to that thing,
32:22
but it's like how you react is free but that situation. You can't
32:25
get out of that situation. And I take that The reason I was actually
32:29
looking at this for my dissertation is because I'm looking at a lot of habit
32:34
and the way that habit habituation interferes with the possibilities for radical politics, right,
32:38
as some of you might know. And and I think that free Like
32:44
it was important to me to like go and revisit the freedom chapter because it's
32:46
like, I need to talk about Okay, well, what does he say?
32:49
Is he like fully, like, am I just saying there's no hope
32:52
or something like that? But no, no, I mean I think he
32:53
talks a lot about first of all, that framing things is free and unfree
32:58
doesn't really make sense anyway, but also that like, yeah, like you
33:01
are free insofar as you're in a situation, but that situation is structured by
33:07
a lot of things that you can't get away from, right, So can't
33:09
get away from the social can't get away from habituation. Right. That's something
33:14
like you have a habituation, it's part of your actual situation, your kind
33:16
of existential situation. And then there's a series of ways in which you can
33:21
react to that ground and one thing that I really like about what he does
33:24
in this chapter is sort of say, well, look like even talking about
33:29
freedom without a situation makes no sense, right, So it's like, oh,
33:30
it sounds like it's a constraint on your freedom, but it's like you
33:35
actually need a ground to make a decision on, and that ground is your
33:38
existential situation, which can feel like a constraint, but it's also a condition
33:44
of possibility to even do anything. I think he's trying to dissolve that dichotomy
33:49
between determinism and freedom, and he's still using the language is if they're both
33:54
separate things, but ultimately he's kind of saying they're one interconnected system, right,
34:00
Like you're there's an agency, there's a social and then there is like
34:04
the upsurge of a decision that can be made that can only be made in
34:06
that context of the situation of the situation, if that makes sense. But
34:09
that's how I was reading it, and I guess I don't know if that's
34:13
in I don't know if that's inconsistent with anything you said Pills like directly,
34:17
but I do think that one of the differences between Start and Mary Leponti,
34:21
as I take them to be is. I think Mary Laponti is paying a
34:22
lot more attention to those things, to the way that the actual existential situation
34:28
is structured that you can't avoid. And I think maybe Start like wants to
34:34
lean more into well, no, like, you know, there is some
34:37
kind of transcendental ego that can that can you know, rise out of it
34:40
more easily or something Start almost Well, I haven't read him in a really
34:45
long time, so I don't want to put my foot in my mouth,
34:49
but he seems to think that any situation is constraint and the opposite of freedom,
34:54
and somehow the ego ideal can liberate itself from that through thought. And
35:01
you're right like murleu Ponte's saying there is a universality to consciousness, but that
35:09
consciousness is not free from restraint. It's free because there are restraints. Exactly.
35:15
The only way, the only way you can have a possibility is by
35:20
having a whole bunch of I don't know, inclinations or habits or a situation,
35:25
whether it's a prison cell or a marketplace. You have to have projects,
35:31
yeah, exactly. And it's also important to note that those are not
35:35
conscious. I said conscious a few times. But this is not rational forethought
35:40
consciousness. It belongs to your state of body consciousness, knowing, knowing how
35:46
to do stuff. Yes, I can say one thing about this too,
35:52
because I did pick up a little bit, and I think here you can
35:54
correct me if I'm wrong. But when it when when the Pontisa's freedom requires
35:59
a yield, right, What I think, what I think he's doing is
36:01
he's he's he's removing you know, social we say social constraint or or what
36:07
enabling social conditions. He's just going to call it a field, right,
36:12
and freedom cannot exist without a field. So starts starts conception of freedom that
36:17
you just described as starting with an existential situation. This is this is I
36:22
think it's it's the centrific, centrifugal freedom where freedom kind of radiates outwards from
36:30
us. We decide what we are and what our projects are. We decide
36:35
these things, and then freedom is centrifical. From there, social constraints are
36:42
beaten down. Right. But but for Ponte, this is this is only
36:46
partial. Freedom is both centrifugal and centripatal, meaning it flows both outwards into
36:52
a field and inwards towards you from a field. Right, So when he
36:58
says, you know, start himself observes dreaming is incompatible with freedom because in
37:06
the realm of imagination, we have no sooner taken a certain significance as our
37:10
goal than we are already, than we already believe that we have intuitively brought
37:17
it into being, in short, because there's no obstacle and nothing to do.
37:22
So there's no freedom in dreaming, because there's no doing in dreaming.
37:27
Right, in order to have freedom, we must have doing. But then
37:30
he says, a few lines later, but we can see beneath these noisy
37:34
demates and the fruitless efforts to construct ourselves, the tacit decisions, whereby we
37:39
have marked out around ourselves the field of possibility, right, like a world
37:45
is given to you as a kind of whole right you can't sort of separate
37:50
yourself from it ahead of time and assigned freedom to yourself. And a simpler,
37:54
maybe a simpler way to say it is just that the world elicits freedom.
38:00
It pulls you into projects you don't project yourself. Maybe I said that
38:05
to Sartre and earlier. Yeah, I mean, I think I think you
38:08
can. I think both are true. The world pulls on you like if
38:13
you have a prison cell, there's a space in there, there's a bed,
38:15
there's I don't know whatever you got into prison cell. But those things
38:20
illicit projects just to keep yourself busy too. I mean, maybe that's too
38:24
radical of an example, like, you know, take something more like I
38:28
mean, I think habituation is a good example, right, because your habituation
38:30
is pulling you in something or like laziness whatever that means, right, Like
38:35
you don't want to work out today, and it's like, okay, that's
38:37
the poll. It's soliciting you to fucking sit on the couch and play video
38:43
games. But then freedom is to be like, no, I'm going to
38:47
exercise, right, It's like, but it's only because there's that ground of
38:51
the poll. Right, you have a solicitation and and then you you can
38:54
you can be free and it's still freedom to be like yeah, I'm gonna
38:59
I'm gonna be a lazy right, Like that's there's still a sense in which
39:01
that's freedom. But it's like that is part of it, right, Like
39:05
you can't you can't be like free of those pulls, of those solicitations.
39:12
And to think that that's freedom, that wouldn't make any sense. It's it's
39:15
like, it's only because you have all those things that then you can you
39:17
can do otherwise, or you can do something, you can react to it,
39:21
and you're making a choice by doing that. And some choices are easier
39:24
to make than other ones. Right, It's it's harder to be like,
39:27
no, I'm gonna go fucking do an hour workout instead of sitting on the
39:30
couch playing I'm playing Demon Souls right now on ps five and it's excellence.
39:36
So and I would rather be I think I might have screwed up with some
39:40
people saying consciousness because body consciousness. It's not the same as the division that
39:46
we have in other discourses between conscious and unconscious, because the sound of it,
39:52
consciousness implies like a thinking about thinking, And the whole point is that
39:57
none of this stuff happens via th thinking. So the un the not doing
40:01
is an expression of the freedom. But also the not doing is the expression
40:09
of freedom. The decision part of it doesn't have to be made with like
40:14
in a reflective state when you're thinking like how should I use my time today?
40:19
It's more that you are free to both be polled and to resist polls,
40:24
to have habits and to break habits. Yeah, exactly, And it's
40:30
interesting. I think he even has an example of like someone who has an
40:32
inferiority complex, right, and he's like, you know, you know,
40:37
you might have built your life on an inferiority complex, right, reinforcing them
40:42
for twenty years, and he says, it's not likely that you'll change.
40:46
He says at one point, right, but that doesn't mean that there's not
40:49
a sphere of freedom there that exists. It's just that it's just being like
40:53
upfront and realistic about the fact that there are these things that sediment right into
40:59
you that you have to and with and without those things, it's like you
41:02
wouldn't be an existential being, you wouldn't be anything. So therefore, like
41:06
the question of some freedom that's more pure than this, I think what he's
41:09
trying to show is like the idea of some freedom that that is like free
41:15
of these things doesn't make any sense. That like that it's almost like a
41:21
you know, it reminds me, you know, to connect it to sort
41:22
of popular analytic philosophy. I remember reading this really short, little kind of
41:27
simple book on the philosophy of the analytic debate of freedom versus determinism. And
41:30
I remember one of the thoughts that the author had, or one of the
41:34
arguments the author makes, is he's like, okay, like, let's try
41:37
to get clear on what it is we're talking about when we say freedom.
41:39
And then he says, okay, like, imagine that you before a thought
41:44
popped into your head, you had to decide that that thought was going to
41:47
pop into your head. It's like, was that something that we would want?
41:52
It's like he's like, no, that sounds horrible, right, that
41:53
wouldn't be so okay. So surely the thing that we're targeting is in some
41:58
kind of crazy pure or freedom where you're deciding about literally everything. There's obviously
42:02
things that happen. And that reminds me actually a lot of one of the
42:06
quotes from Mary Leponti that I kind of that I kind of marked off.
42:09
It's like he says something like, yeah, he says, everything happens as
42:15
if, prior to our judgments and our freedom, someone we're allocating such and
42:20
such a sense to such and such a given constellation. Right, So what
42:22
he's saying is like, prior to us even thinking about something, it does
42:27
feel like there is a sense to things which is right. Right, It's
42:30
like there is a sense to things. That doesn't mean that there's not some
42:34
way in which that can be ambiguous and that can be acted on in a
42:37
different way. But there is something that is kind of like not really a
42:39
choice that just like shows up as if some other force is giving it to
42:45
us, right, like some sense of there's sense. Yeah. So it's
42:50
like this idea that like freedom could exist in some pure sense, like maybe
42:54
the way that Kant wanted, which is fucking insane, like you know,
42:58
pure practical reason, right. That is that's literally what constant goal is.
43:01
Right in the groundwork of the metaphysics. It's defined a like practical reason reason
43:07
that we can use to act on things that is free from any constraints or
43:13
free from any influence in the world. Right, that's like only mental which
43:15
is fucking insane. So like, and I think that in some ways this
43:21
the phenomenology perception is definitely an attack on that kind of contient freedom. Yeah.
43:25
Yeah. He says that the Kantian idea, which I mentioned earlier,
43:30
finds in things only what the mind is put there, what consciousness is put
43:34
into them, which is one side. Right, that's the centrifugal side.
43:37
Right, But if we define ourselves and this is seems to be the way
43:42
it goes. We define ourselves I said sense giving earlier, singabung. If
43:46
we define ourselves as the universal sense giving but by our powers of universal sense
43:52
giving, right, then you think think of any project, right you think
43:57
of think again in phenomenological terms of being in the world and being involved in
44:00
projects. Right, A rock could be an obstacle if your project is hiking
44:06
through the woods, or a rock could be a useful tool if you have
44:10
if you're if it's windy and you need a paperweight, right, like the
44:14
like, there's no there's no absolute constraint or instrumentalizing of of anything. We
44:22
give it those senses. Okay, yeah, yeah, so it's centrifugal.
44:25
But then think of if you've ever heard of the term affordances from Gibson right
44:31
of the world also has a sense of itself. There's a there's a kind
44:37
of sense that emerges from the world which is kind of given to us that
44:39
doesn't sort of originate with us. And we can that's not a metaphysical claim
44:45
because we can distinguish that within experience. I can distinguish things that reduce to
44:50
my experience of them, and I can and I can distinguish between objects of
44:55
my experience that don't reduce to my experience of them. There you go,
45:00
there's the difference between a thing and an object which may also or may not
45:07
also be a thing, but we don't know. There's no markings on our
45:10
objects of our perception that tell us whether they originate from us or outside of
45:15
us. Just as when you look, you think you see a continuous field
45:20
of vision, but really there's two big doughnut holes in the middle of both
45:22
your eyes called your optic nerves. Right, is that the illusion part and
45:27
everything else is the real part? Now? Because there's no that's even that
45:30
distinction is inferred from within our experience of things of failure, of surprise,
45:36
of learning something we didn't know before, or and then being able to do
45:42
something more easily with that knowledge. We understand there sources outside of ourselves of
45:45
meaning as well. They can be centripetal that It gives the example of the
45:50
mountain climbing, right, Like, I look at the mountain and I proportion
45:55
it to my own body, and I see that I can't, you know,
46:00
take it in a single stride. Right, I can go get a
46:04
glass of milk from the fridge. That's something that doesn't challenge my bodily proportionality
46:08
to the world. But a mountain does, and a mountain present and so,
46:13
but is that coming from us? Of course we're assigning that improportional,
46:19
that massive extension to the mountain. Of course we're assigning that in a cognitive
46:22
judgment. But is there not some role of the thing in that meaning as
46:31
well? The affordance? Right, it affords you know, why do I
46:35
climb a mountain? Because it's there. It affords the possibility there's a certain
46:38
kind of meaning outside And we shouldn't go into a phenomenological analysis with an a
46:44
priori kind of determination to distinguish between things that originate in humans and things that
46:50
originate outside of them kind of thing, right, Yeah, exactly, he
46:54
says, actually really short, like kind of two sentences. He says,
47:00
the world is always already constituted, but also never completely constituted. In the
47:06
first relation, we are solicited. In the second, we are open to
47:08
an infinity of possibilities. Right, And I think like that grabs those two
47:14
things. And I would say, like, what I like about that?
47:15
Quote too is you know from my own work that I'm doing. I think
47:21
that too many like people who try to take kind of insights from continental thought,
47:27
I think they spend too much time on that second part, Right,
47:29
we are open to an infinity of possibilities, but don't take up the really
47:32
serious implications of the first part, which is we are solicited by the world.
47:37
Right Like so anyway, Yeah, what this kind of boils down to
47:42
is that almost all people are not free almost all of the time we're speaking
47:50
here. I mean, this whole book is about an exceptional state where you
47:54
can sit back and reflect on your freedom, which is why it comes at
47:59
the end of a six hundred page book. And despite the fact that we're
48:05
not really aware of our freedom almost all of the time, all of the
48:07
meaning that's experienced in life, the meaning of life, you could say,
48:14
comes from that little bit of freedom that we have. And he gives these
48:19
examples. If you're in an automatic state, what better example is there than
48:24
say, sleepwalking? Right, and yet you could still your body is still
48:30
you know, proportioning out its own actions to a world without your conscious involvement.
48:37
People have gotten into cars and driven successfully if you can call it that
48:43
on sleepwalking, some ambulatory kinds of experiences like that are unconscious. And again
48:52
Start would say, well, I don't know what he would say about sleepwalking.
48:54
We know what he would say about dreaming, though, where you're not
48:58
free because there's no obstacles there. Well, even when you're sleepwalking, there
49:02
are obstacles, So even if you're in an automatic state, it's still there's
49:07
still a question of this freedom, right, Like I'm sure a sleepwalker is
49:13
somewhat aware of what it can and cannot do. I mean, freedom isn't
49:19
simply a conscious thing either. Your projects, which are proportioned to your goals
49:25
and desires and whatever those the world and your social media gives those projects meaning.
49:31
Like my simplistic take is that, for you know, Start, our
49:36
projects give the meaning the world meaning. But for Ponte says yes, but
49:40
also the world gives our projects meaning. So we did talk about this in
49:45
another episode, but I thought it's worth kind of mentioning to the listener,
49:50
especially if maybe the listener didn't hear this previous episode. But the freedom chapter
49:54
is also the part of the book where Mary le Ponti does talk about revolution,
49:58
which is kind of fun, right, And I believe we read that
50:01
fragment. At the time, I want to say, Pills, you were
50:05
released your video about the CIA maybe and radical theory, and I feel like
50:09
you were on that arc where you were like, look at how like you
50:12
know, there's no such thing as you know, like thinking about some revolution
50:16
than doing it. And Mary la Ponti kind of exactly says that here,
50:19
right, he's sort of like class consciousness doesn't come around, and he really
50:22
takes a shot at theorists, right, He's kind of like, you know,
50:25
class consciousness isn't helped by theorists like who come in and theorize it.
50:30
It's like you have to be a concrete agent in a situation where you see
50:35
you're like, oh wow, like that other person lost their job, or
50:37
that other person doesn't can't get food on the table, and I can't either.
50:42
And it's like and class consciousness comes from Actually it relates to what Eric
50:45
was just saying about comparison inner subjectivity. Right, It's like you find yourself
50:51
in a situation with others where you all realize you're like, holy shit,
50:53
I'm being starved by this factory. I'm being like exploited. It's not because
50:58
you have some kind of moral stick ideas in your head. It's because the
51:01
world around you is changing in such a way that it solicits you to kind
51:07
of spontaneously be like, well, we got to fucking do some different shit
51:09
here, you know. I think he says at one point, he's like
51:14
most we can say the revolution is at the end of the paths they have
51:17
taken and is in their projects in the form of a things must change,
51:24
which each concretely experiences in his own difficulties and at the basis of his particular
51:30
unquestioned beliefs. So it's like, you know, it happens because you have
51:36
a visceral, concrete experience. It's not because you're a persuaded that you know,
51:39
capitalism must be brought down or something right. It has to be a
51:44
concrete which also I think explains why revolutions don't happen in a lot of industrialized
51:49
places, because there's not enough visceral stuff that leads to class consciousness. It's
51:52
not because we don't have persuasive enough theorists. But I mean, we talked
51:57
about this in the other episode, but I just thought it's mentioning worth mentioning
52:00
that's in this chapter, the freedom chapter. Yeah, yeah, he was.
52:04
He had difficulty reconciling SARTs Marxism with with SARTs kind of existentialism because of
52:12
this sort of focus on the individual and self definition and and the choosing projects
52:20
to be involved in. He saw that as kind of incompatible with the Marxist
52:25
social analysis side. Yeah, where where you've become aware that, yeah,
52:30
there's a group of people like me who are being exploited, and then there's
52:32
another group of people unlike us who are exploiters, right, and then you
52:37
then there's you have a start to have the inklings of a class consciousness there,
52:43
which is which is very different to say to saying to saying that I
52:46
choose my projects for myself and this factory is a constraint on my self realization.
52:52
Like, that's a very different kind of way of those are like two
52:57
almost almost two double vision going on there. Yeah, he says, a
53:00
class is coming into being, and we call it a situation, or we
53:06
call a situation revolutionary when the objectively existing connection between the segments of the proletariat,
53:12
that is, those connections that an absolute observer would ultimately recognize between them
53:16
is finally experienced in the perception of a common obstacle to each one's existence.
53:22
There is never a need for a representation of the revolution to arise. I
53:28
was just going to say that because this idea that if we can convince enough
53:32
people is he calls it elsewhere the reflective state, and kind of the ground
53:42
floor of Merlo Ponti is that the reflective state where you're sitting and thinking about
53:46
thinking like he is when he's writing a book, the thinking about thinking doesn't
53:51
actually make anything happen. In large part, it's the world that makes things
53:58
happen. So in terms of changing habits, I think one thing we've we've
54:02
we've seen is that it's far more likely to compel people to act when they
54:07
see, like in their lifetime, conditions getting worse, Whereas if conditions get
54:14
worse very slowly, then the most likely outcome is that nothing happens. But
54:19
the reflective state, just for us and everyone else to remember, is the
54:24
is the least likely way to change things. It's more likely the world does
54:30
it. I would finess that a little bit, saying that the not saying
54:36
that the reflective state is you know, a form of action or anything like
54:40
that, but you know it does depend on our sort of embodied being,
54:49
our habitual being, right, because when you think and the like. This
54:53
is the problem also with what start said about dreams, that there's no freedom
54:58
in dreams, right, And and it's like a psychological experiment, right,
55:02
Like if you grew up as a dog lover, say, and you pet
55:06
a lot of dogs in your lifetime, and then you see a representation of
55:09
a dog being pet on a television, it still activates that sort of peripheral
55:15
nervous connections in your own body that recalls those So when you're sitting there dreaming
55:20
or contemplating, right, you're activating these connections that originate in experience, but
55:25
you're just doing it in a more abstract situation. It's not that reflection is
55:31
completely sort of dissociated in Ponte from you know, making changes in the world.
55:38
It's just that the like, yeah, it's kind of downstream from all
55:43
the other stuff in a way. If I can adjust my formulation, then
55:50
certainly our capacity to reflect and whatever else you want to call it, dream,
55:54
meditate, do nothing the reflectively, write books, write philosophy books.
56:00
If this all stuff happens, it's very directly part of our comportment towards the
56:06
world. The problem is for him, political theorists have always thought, no,
56:12
we have to get the idea part of it, right, which is
56:15
in the reflective state, and that will produce an outcome. Whereas he's saying
56:17
that reflective state, all the stuff you're saying is true, it's still part
56:22
of our unbodied experience, but that doesn't produce the outcomes that a revolutionary outcome.
56:28
Perhaps that start would have thought it could have, and it didn't because
56:32
like, by the time you've convinced everybody about if classformations are in flux like
56:37
that, but the time you've convinced everybody of something in their concrete situations that
56:43
this theory kind of you know, points out, classformations will have shifted and
56:47
it might not be the same anymore. Right. That's why those representations don't
56:52
work, is because they represent a world as kind of static, as opposed
56:57
to this flux of you know. This part of the point of like E.
57:00
P. Thompson's the Making of the working Class, right, classformations are
57:04
always in the process of dissolution and formation and negotiation. Right, there's no
57:10
static picture to be had there. That's why representation doesn't work. If we're
57:16
going to say that, like, you know, you gotta do theory and
57:20
then you've got to represent the state of things, and then you got to
57:22
tell people about it so they'll change their behavior as well. That's that's maybe
57:27
the wrong root. You you've flipped Hagel on your head, on his head,
57:30
okay, but but you haven't. Maybe you haven't flipped them on his
57:32
head enough. Well. The thing is, though, there's not much of
57:37
a route here. You said root. Why do you say root? And
57:43
why do I say route? I say root? I think I say both
57:46
depending on the context. I think I probably say root. Usually is that
57:51
a west east thing? I don't know, just because he's here for me
57:54
to You said the sentences right next to each other, so I yeah,
57:57
okay, what is there a route two? I guess we're in the what
58:02
to do with this stage because you're not going to get the endpoint that you
58:07
want insofar as it's inundated with representation and fantasy. Here. This kind of
58:12
then feels to me kind of it's a fun activity, but it's kind of
58:16
solipsistic and it sounds pretty self healthy. Is that good enough? Or is
58:22
there something more in here? I would say it's very very basic. Still,
58:27
I wouldn't I wouldn't say it's like a luxury or like some kind of
58:30
like adornment on what people are. I think it's still pretty fundamental to reflect
58:35
those philosophy. Well, I mean, I think the upshot of this Mary
58:39
le Pontin account is that because of the world impinges on us all that this
58:46
representationalism, even if you're not a philosopher, like I think popular discourse is
58:53
saturated with representationalist thinking, I think in many ways, and I think like
58:59
the value of MARYL. Ponti is that it can show you that that's bullshit
59:02
or like or that at least it's like much less significant than you think.
59:06
Yeah, yeah, because the choice there is either like my, the world
59:10
causes itself in me, like like I'm a realist and I see the world
59:14
the way it is because it causes him, or I'm an idealist and so
59:17
that I think gives the world meaning and makes it the way. So the
59:21
self help part is, I think it can help you just chill. I
59:24
think I think I think it made me feel a lot better about stuff,
59:28
Like when I understood marylle Ponti. I remember in my early twenties, I
59:31
was like, oh shit, like just chill, like just like it clarifies
59:37
things in a way. There's kind of no way to get from this version
59:42
of freedom up to something like freedom of speech. That would just be building
59:49
on top of a pyramid, on top of an empty tomb. Well that's
59:52
kind of why I was trying to say that. I don't even think that
59:55
freedom is the right way of top. Like I think the language is wrong,
1:00:00
but like I mean for him to use no, no no for people
1:00:04
when we's like freedom of speech like a right. Yeah, okay, yeah,
1:00:07
Like I think that's not even the right language to use. But I
1:00:09
still would say that I'm still going to be a supporter of like not having
1:00:14
the Like all that means to me is just something that is totally i think
1:00:16
consistent with a Marilt Pontin account when you take the like the metaphysical baggage of
1:00:22
that language. All it means it's just like you're not going to have the
1:00:24
government that rules over you, like prescribe the kinds of things that you can
1:00:29
say publicly. And I think that seems like a fine thing, but it
1:00:31
doesn't have that much to do with freedom. In like the metaphysical sense.
1:00:37
Yeah, because it's like when you when you consider all these different things,
1:00:39
Ponty brings up like you're an embodied being, but you're also a subject and
1:00:45
when you think, it kind of pulls that body behind you in a certain
1:00:49
way, and it pulls it out of view. And there's a world and
1:00:53
there's a society that we live in intersubject and then there's a world yeah,
1:00:59
that we're born of and in two that pre exists us and that we come
1:01:04
into it. But it's also not complete, like it's open, and it's
1:01:08
it's open for us to make meaning and out of and assign meaning too.
1:01:14
And so when you have these sort of four factors body, subjectivity, the
1:01:19
social and and the world the being in the world, like it's like,
1:01:25
okay, so then how do we thread freedom through that labyrinth? Like it
1:01:30
doesn't Yeah, I can see why you're saying it as a concept. It's
1:01:36
it's kind of yeah, it's it's it's not it's not very concrete like if
1:01:43
the if the con if the abstract is what the concrete makes it to be,
1:01:46
then then freedom has lost a lot of its bearings. It sounds like,
1:01:52
and the way we tend to use it and rhetorically especially, I mean
1:01:55
maybe the way that we could talk about it when it comes to something like
1:01:58
freedom of speech or like it like, it's not really about freedom necessarily as
1:02:02
much as it is well, like government policy and laws does change our situation
1:02:08
to some extent, sometimes indirectly, sometimes more directly, right, And and
1:02:13
I think that like if you have a government apparatus that is, you know,
1:02:17
has some kind of sense, like you know, department of censorship,
1:02:22
I mean that does change things concretely in terms of like the affordances to use
1:02:28
the language of your life. Right, But that's not because it's like freedom
1:02:31
in this metaphysical way. It's just like some other shit. It's about affordances.
1:02:35
It's about the existential situation. And I still feel, even though I
1:02:38
think the Marrily Pontin account is right, I'm still comfortable saying like I would
1:02:43
prefer as state of affairs where the affordances are not a government structure that has
1:02:46
a bureau of censorship. I think the other kind of freedom we talked about
1:02:52
earlier, freedom of labor and freedom of consumption. The freedom of consumption is
1:02:59
far more dataangerous to this kind of freedom than like repressive government apparatus is disciplining
1:03:06
you because the whole strategy of the supermarket was my metaphor, or you could
1:03:13
just say tech companies, social media competing for the attention economy. I think
1:03:16
people call it. Those things are much The freedom to consume in that way
1:03:21
is far more threatening to this kind of freedom, because they are trying to
1:03:25
recreate the world in which you form habits such that it is a forever attention
1:03:31
slot machine. I'm talking about absent screens now, and you are habituated only
1:03:37
to that world, and it's literally hacking your brain at the point where this
1:03:43
freedom exists towards the world in general, such that their notification bells, whistles
1:03:51
and endorphin rewards are the only thing that are training your habits from now on.
1:03:55
Yeah, totally. And I think if there's a little self help bit
1:03:59
to really Ponti here, it's that you have the freedom to not do that.
1:04:02
You have the freedom to unplug and touch grass. But they're but the
1:04:09
competition there, I think is almost proving Merleu Ponty right in this sense.
1:04:14
They want to make the world into their app Basically, your experienced life world
1:04:20
is going to become Twitter. That's like the goal. I would say that
1:04:25
what makes this modern situation particularly grim too, because you kind of set it
1:04:28
up as a choice between I mean not that you were actually committed to this,
1:04:31
but you set it up as like a choice between either like you know,
1:04:34
government bureau of censorship or the informational. But the reality is we just
1:04:39
have both, right, Like because like even in the countries that have a
1:04:42
bureau of censorship, they also have social media, right like China has we
1:04:46
Bow and like, I mean, it's just it's both, Like you can't
1:04:50
get away from the informational one. Unfortunately, that's grim reality we're in.
1:04:55
Yeah, and the rhetorical side is like, yeah, the Russia in China
1:05:00
have censorship, but the America has a strategic secrets and national security. It's
1:05:05
a very different thing. Right. So the fact that they're lying to everybody
1:05:10
about the Ukraine War, as those papers came out from Daniel Ellis, I
1:05:14
think improved that there's no hope of victory in sight, and they kept that
1:05:19
information secret. They would have if it didn't leak out, and then they
1:05:24
would have continued saying we got to send more weapons. Ukraine's going to win,
1:05:27
everything's going to be great. This is kind of the opposite of what
1:05:30
I'm saying, though, like over informing you, the freedom to be over
1:05:34
informed as we are is more of a threat to what merlu Ponti finds valuable
1:05:40
in freedom than government secrealysis through choice kind of thing. Yeah, endless choice,
1:05:46
so that you can never actually exactly you know, reflect I enter your
1:05:51
reflective state and decide on a project for yourself, the project is always fed
1:05:57
to you. Yeah. The oversaturation of information, the things to be outraged
1:06:00
and upset about, is actually like horrible, but it works because of our
1:06:05
freedom. Think about what about in this situation, because we're this is relevant
1:06:11
right now in Canada, because in Ontario healthcare is being privatized, and so
1:06:17
from the perspective of a kind of liberal freedom that focuses on the individual,
1:06:24
then you're creating some kind of freedom aside. Apart from there, you're adding
1:06:29
some kind of freedom into the medical system by letting private surgeons now open private
1:06:35
practices and perform surgeries and decide who their customers are and and kind of charge
1:06:42
what they like. Although I'm sure there'll be some kind of benchmarks for it
1:06:45
or something versus government administrated healthcare, or at least government funded and regulated healthcare,
1:06:51
which is more like what we have in that case. I think privatization
1:06:58
is going to increase the range of freedom for medical practitioners of a certain kind
1:07:02
surgeons and stuff, but it's going to make the rest of us a lot
1:07:05
less free because you're either going to have to go to government places where the
1:07:11
waiting time is going to be even worse because they're pouring resources out of the
1:07:15
system into private stuff, or you have to yeah, cough up a shitload
1:07:18
of money which most people probably won't be able to afford, go to a
1:07:23
private surgeon, have good wait times, quality care, but it's going to
1:07:26
cost an exorbitant amount. I think that that from this perspective of the social
1:07:31
conditions of freedom, that is the wrong direction. But yeah, it's this
1:07:36
thing where we have to sort of hold both of those kinds of freedom,
1:07:41
individual freedom and social conditions like together in a way and not you know,
1:07:46
fall into the Sartre and trap of kind of seeing it only as radiating outwards
1:07:54
from our existential situation and everything out there is an obstacle to it. We
1:08:00
have to sort of learn to flip that picture and and and then hold both
1:08:03
of these contradictory centripetal and centrifugal notions like somehow hold them together in some kind
1:08:11
of single concept of freedom, which is which is really really difficult to do
1:08:15
as as because as evidence by our ongoing lack of clarity over what the fuck
1:08:21
freedom really is. Well, good thing, we solved it. Yeah,
1:08:28
we've solved it into a into an intractable problem. So it's that's what it
1:08:34
is. Yeah, Well that's a good place it is. I mean,
1:08:40
one more thing freedom. Then we kind of think of it as a capacity
1:08:44
or like a quality that humans have and other stuff doesn't have. But this
1:08:49
totally takes away the human centricness because it's not a property, it's not a
1:08:56
possession. It's a condition for you. Anyway, we should wrap up any
1:09:00
other thoughts though, don't tempt him. Oh yeah, I'm good. Anyone
1:09:08
anyone besides Eric on freedom. Yeah. I I always enjoy reading Mary le
1:09:18
Ponte. I recommend it. I think he can be a little frustrating at
1:09:21
first, but but I always find him to be like psychologically satisfying. I
1:09:30
think you've said that before too, that you always feel like you read him
1:09:31
and it's just like I feel like he's just so right all the time that
1:09:35
it's just like he's so right, soothing in a narrow enough scope. You
1:09:42
know, you always want to do something else after. But if you're doing
1:09:45
too much, if your mind's too frenetic, then it's a good calm down.
1:09:49
It's like he's so precise and specific exactly, and he's just like so
1:09:56
careful. It's just great. It's a pleasure to read. I don't know
1:10:00
what Buddhism is like, but this feels Buddhist. Yeah, I know from
1:10:04
my fantasy is about it. I think it's about It's about relations, right.
1:10:11
The secret of freedom is not on the side of the subject or the
1:10:15
object. It's in between. It's those it's the relations right. He finishes
1:10:20
by quoting someone and that the last quote is really nice. It's a man
1:10:25
is but a network of relationships, and these alone matter to him. It's
1:10:29
about our relationships with the world with other people. Like you know, history
1:10:33
is fucking history. Freedom is relative in that way, in that sense that
1:10:39
it's relational, in the sense that freedom only obtains within the network and the
1:10:46
and the mesh of these relations as they come into being and are preserved and
1:10:51
enacted on a daily basis, and new ones are made and old ones are
1:10:56
are are kicked off, people die, people lose contact, whatever circumstances change.
1:11:00
But yeah, it's the relations that that define freedom and not not some
1:11:06
simple self other binary where where there's nothing in the middle. That you literally
1:11:12
have an excluded middle in most of these ways of thinking. And to frame
1:11:15
it, we opened up talking about that that psyche or neuro experiment where the
1:11:24
brain acts before you're aware of the brain acting. And what's interesting about this
1:11:28
is that doesn't even matter. That's still yeah, that's still the world and
1:11:31
you are the world. Yeah, it's not an argument saying we're not free
1:11:36
because of that. It's just another dynamic to take into account. Because what's
1:11:40
conditioning our brain. We are free. It's conditioning our brain. And there's
1:11:44
the difference between a brain and a mind and a body. There isn't one.
1:11:48
All right, guys, we'll wrap up there all right by Yeah,
1:11:58
hope this liberated y'all.