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[Music] hello and i am delighted to have the chance to talk to ian mcgilchrist ian hi there hi mark how are you
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look you reached out and i was very glad to respond um to have a chance to talk through some of the troubles of our times um trying to make sense of some of them
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um in the light of the two hemisphere hypothesis um for which you're now very well known and which so many people have found illuminating um and but to try and think through some
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of the you know pressing concerns things which we it feels like we increasingly feel every day in fact um and see what like what you've been developing not just in the masterminds emissary but in the
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matter with things your more recent book as well and you know the themes around power and control um as you put it very strongly the sense that somehow life and nature is itself
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under attack um because of things getting so out of kilter so that that broad area would be good to explore good
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yeah yeah and and maybe touching on things like bureaucracy tradition responsibility a kind of range of of areas that we do feel in our lives um
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definitely yes okay yes and i think of course there was a an area that is very immediate in everyday life and our experience and there's an area that is perhaps more
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philosophical but i'll try and bring them together i've just come back from um america and it struck me again how much the culture there and
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we get their culture a few years after after america has uh has made use of them how much um the rhetoric of power is very important i
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mean even in other amazing circumstances so for example um in the flat where i was saying there was a toaster it was called a power toaster and there was a power handheld hoover and there was a
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power whisk and so everything is um sort of sexed up by adding the concept of power there and you know it's a subject that's very much on my mind because of the astonishing
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growth in control in my lifetime and particularly in the last perhaps 20 years there seems a desire to
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[Music] be able to control things which is curiously coupled with a feeling that people have of being more and more unable to influence the way things are going a kind of impotence
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which probably just intensifies the desire to feel that yes you've got a power toaster and i'm more concerned however about the power invested in
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technology and [Music] bureaucracy yeah i mean it comes right home i mean and i guess you know it's a cell because it gives you the sense that somehow
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you're that bit more in control in command of your life and even as you're making your toast in the morning um i mean just just to begin to to tease out the two perspectives um slightly i
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mean as you talk about power for example um it makes me aware that in the ancient greek texts there are there are several words for power um and one word is this sort of command control
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power exousia is it um is is the word that's often used i mean it's the power of the of the patriarch on the family or it's the power of no it's not always bad it's sometimes
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the power that does keep in order for good reason but then it's power in the service of something other than itself but there's a second word which is the word dunamis um which we do get the word dynamite
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from but it's not actually explosive power it's actually much more the power of allure and the power of desire that wants that which is beautiful um i sometimes think of it as
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the kind of power of grace and space expansiveness and it feels like those two kinds of power um are related to um the two perspectives that you
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develop that are part of our one consciousness i don't know whether that yeah makes some sense to you well it certainly does because um
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in my more recent book particularly the matter with things i talk about the inversion of values in our world where the things that used to be considered incredibly important the beautiful the
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sacred the good the true i know um somewhere way down below the horizon that we're interested in and everything has been replaced by
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a desire for pleasure and power which in a in my view in a properly functioning hierarchy of values should be at the base really and there's nothing wrong with them in themselves but they're they're things that are kind of
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dangerous if they take over our lives so yes my thesis as you know is that the the world is tending in the west and now very very much so in the east as well
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towards um a set of values served by the left hemisphere and the left is interested primarily in command and control so um
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yes to get slightly away from toast there's a very serious point that technology and administration work together
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to a situation where it may be that we can't actually extricate ourselves with dignity or freedom what i mean by this is that technology is only as
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it's neither good nor bad it's only as good as the people who are using it but the difficulty is that in the modern world those who are developing and exploiting the uses of
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technology are clearly those who are in power because they have either colossal amounts of money or are very high up in government or [Music]
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branches of administration and who are those people they're often perfectly decent people i i know but there's a tendency for them to be interested in the excitements of power
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um and to have perhaps in cases it's certainly been suggested and i don't see that there's any reason to doubt it that there is an excess of both psychopathic
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and narcissistic tendencies in those who congregate around power the difficulty with having developed a technology which enables them effectively to enslave the people is that they will do
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and it's about that that i'm i'm very concerned of course the kovid situation has [Music] accelerated this in a number of ways
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um very obviously of course because the mobile phone has somebody somehow become a passport to being a full citizen and that your rights as a citizen are
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controlled by things that you must carry on a phone and you must have a pass and it can track where you are this is reported and so on now i don't actually have
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um a functioning mobile phone i have one for emergencies when i'm traveling but i don't like to be using it all the time because i think it has a toxic effect on on the user it fragments uh attention it
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constantly interrupts it simplifies things it directs us and it spies on us and whether whether you know or whether people do know enough about what their phone stores the information that it
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stores about them i think people aren't um generally aware of how how much that is what do you feel about that mark yeah um well i mean you use this powerful words
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in what you say there you know like psychopathy um like being enslaved and i think they're not necessarily in inappropriate words but maybe what
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you write about helps us to understand how these things can kind of creep up on us um rather than necessarily to be some kind of psychopath you know in
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control although it's not hard to imagine some parts of the world where that is the case of course um which we're pretty aware of at the moment as well but it's more this kind of creep that um i think you capture so well um
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you know the bureaucracy that in one moment um brings a kind of freedom through increased efficiency that and then in the in the next moment loses the end to
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which it was originally intended and so becomes an end in itself and we almost forget you know what life can be about it's that kind of forgetting mislaying um
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lacking um the imagination that i think is as powerful as say you know the person designing the ai and making a world that suits the ai
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increasingly um and so excluding um part of life um that perhaps is the most important part um in in the process as well it's that is these kind of unintended
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consequences that i think are so fascinating and and in a way even more important to identify because you can't just quickly you know blame someone else or identify an evil figure
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it's rising up from within us if we're not careful as much as anything else completely right and that's a point i was proposing to come on to which is a point that's been made for some time
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it was made by adorno back in the 40s and 50s that it's not really to do with toxic individuals wanting to have power over us that's
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often what's projected at the moment there's a general feeling that there's a group of individuals who are going to take over our lives but very often they are as much the victims of the process
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as the uh the rest of us uh indeed bureaucrats are themselves enmeshed in bureaucracy it's not it's not as though they're spared this and once you make you fetishize for means
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which may be um administration or technology to an end and make the thing matter whatever the end it reaches then you've completely lost the plot and that's where we're
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at the moment i've been very struck by quite simple things for example i i gave a talk to my university oxford university
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about seven months ago and i didn't know that they were prepared to pay me for it that was very nice and in the past i i would very soon have had a check from the university chest but
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in fact it took six or seven months of me filling in forms looking at spreadsheets which had nothing whatever to do with giving a lecture they were designed for people who might be cleaning the windows around the
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university literally um there were 71 categories i think but not one of them was giving a lecture which i thought was the whole point of university now i'm not wanting to you know say anything about this experience
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except that when i finally contacted um the people who were trying to administer this they said oh god i mean it's just a headache for us it takes up so much of our time and when you think of
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how expensive the time of all the people involved in this drama is and how many useless hours were used up this is a terrifically wasteful process at the very least
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um so i i've noticed in the last two years that just doing something simple it used to take a five minute phone call can now take up to four hours on the internet as um
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something went wrong and then come back later and we need to check something and they send a no but the code doesn't um tally with the code they've got and so on and actually if you live somewhere where there isn't a mobile phone imagine
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what your life is like because you can't validate these codes so um increasingly things seem to take a very very long time and be very much less human than they
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used to be another example i met my son in london and you know one of the striking things was because i don't live in london as you know i live on a scottish island but um was to see quite how many places in
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london where one could have met for a drink or to eat have closed down i mean that's one of the sad things about the coverage period but the ones that were still working were for reasons i'm sure they would
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justify on the grounds of this is what covid brings required you to order by scanning a qr code so first of all if you didn't have a mobile which i didn't you you were
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capable of not only of going into a bar or wrestle because you couldn't validate your your immune status but you had to do this and my son is very tech savvy and it took 15 minutes for us to place
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an order and in the end he had to go to the bar and say look this process is breaking down and i remembered you know how much of my life i have really enjoyed um going with a friend and going into a bar or restaurant sitting down
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and talking and somebody coming to the table and saying oh welcome you know um what can i do for you and then you'd have a look at this is this good yeah it's very good indeed it's got this and that and the other is it enough for two people or what were you doing you can't
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do that with a mobile phone and gradually gradually contact with people is being phased out of course because people are expensive but the machines actually
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we value your business and because we care and all this nonsense actually just covers up a situation in which life is degraded it's becoming less human it's becoming more difficult to uh
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accomplish any simple task and the higher level you're being monitored your movements and your health status in a way that we would never have accepted a few years ago so one of the
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very important messages for me is we must all of us fight back so we must not rest until all the emergency procedures and rules and regulations that were brought in
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in the early days of covid are repealed during the last war there were various um obligations on the population obviously and they were enforced by law but at the
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end of the war those uh were again repealed i worried that the lust for power and control um was not even as exciting as lust it's a sort of um as you were saying it's
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something that everybody's caught up in and can't do anything about even if they want to but that kind of dynamism of control is such that we won't necessarily see this reversed it's too
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useful for some government to have this data so imagine if imagine if there was an authoritarian government in control like the nazis in germany in the 1930s it was possible in those days for people to go
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around distributing leaflets after dark putting them in stairwells of blocks of flats and sort of pinning up notices on nowadays they wouldn't wouldn't be able to do that i mean imagine trying to conduct some kind of counter
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government um program in china yeah um i mean i i i know the world that you're talking about um and um you know there is the side of the
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kind of activism um to um to to repeal the laws i also feel that there's a there's something can be understood here which i know you'll know about as well and in fact you were talking the
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the a place came to my mind which was big in your past and has played a big one on my part which is the morsely hospital the psychiatric hospital in south london which we've both worked at and um
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when i was there i remember seeing a pattern which mirrors a lot of what you were saying which was that money was allocated for mental health
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but it was allocated um in such a way that it had to be spent really quite quickly um you know within say the cycle of a financial year and that tended to mean that it was used to
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implement technology rather than train people which takes many years um and doesn't deliver the quick returns that can be measured and so on
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but that that sort of bureaucracy getting ahead of itself um you know which you describe but the tragedy of the situation wasn't just that um you know some bureaucrat higher up in the
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trust um wanted more control the tragedy was that there was a real desire to help people who are suffering and a recognition increasing recognition that mental health is a huge problem in the
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modern world um but that desire misfired in the um in you know in investing in the technology because of the pressure to do something almost you
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know this pressure was stoked up by the media by celebrities everybody in a way acting with the best will in the world but with these increasingly inhuman outcomes as you say
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um and so there's something to be understood about that in a way um as well that um our our desire um to make things better
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can um turn against us and um so and seeing how that happens feels really necessary to me as well as the activism you know that the more clear-cut this must stop and
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what you describe as well yes i'm not just advocating i'm not even really advocating activism in the word way that that word is normally used what i mean is that we must be on our guard and fight back in our daily lives
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um for example saying you know no we don't like going to places where you don't have a weight or a waitress you you order through a qr code but in any case the overall point that
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you make very well is this point exactly that this thing is bigger than us it's not that there are all these evil-minded people trying to control us i mean there are a few i'm
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certain of that um but they're in the minority what the point i'm making is that there is a drive which is bigger than any one individual group of individuals that pushes us in this direction
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it somehow is the drive that in evolution made us have a very large part of our brain devoted to manipulation
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and that is largely speaking what the left hemisphere of the brain is for not for truth seeking not for understanding life and improving its quality but having power and control
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of which a little we all need but then when it becomes hypertrophy it takes over and strangles everything else and what you described there is exactly right
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however good people's intentions are what happens is the money gets spent according to codes and also it gets above all spent on administration and technology you said you know
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texology technology is slightly sexy you know oh we've got the latest instruments there's a wonderful satire on hospitals the best that's ever been written there was a series on television in the 90s called cardiac
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arrest and in it there was a sort of very clear distinction between doctors and nurses who are actually on the coalface dealing with patients and the perfectly
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understandable points of view of no doubt very nice administrators and managers which was utterly foreign um to the professionals and i've seen that just grow and grow in my lifetime and of
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course administration is enormously expensive trying to stop mistakes happen you can spend as much money as you like but they'll probably still happen but lots of other things that you could have spent the money on much more positively
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won't be happening so yes i think that is that is right and it it reminds me of a couple of things one is of again
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um as i mentioned people like adorno saying that you know we our whole world is becoming uh he used the word forever altered meaning sort of administered different
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developed and also it's beginning to lack life that life itself is on the way and that's something i feel very very strongly for a whole range of reasons i mean one of course is the rise of
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technology another is of this brain dead administrative mentality which replaces a mind that is live and where somebody has some power or control over their own place in the
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hierarchy i mean just trying to get anyone anymore to make a decision they're also worried that they'll step out of line and get a black mark that they don't they refer it back up the hierarchy this is the way
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the soviet union got fossilized and um as it fortunately seems it in russia is still much less efficient than it might otherwise be partly for these sort of reasons um but
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um we we we've become um a people who i think don't any longer value life for what it is i think that what goes on in the sense of life is is
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thin is feeble is waning because of our alienation from the natural world and our alienation from the body and its intuitions and instincts which are
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extremely important you know people who lose the ability to use their intuitive minds and their instincts become like people that you and i know they're called schizophrenics people
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with schizophrenia who can only use logic it's not that they've gone mad and lost their reason as has been pointed out i think by gk chesterton it's not that they've lost their reasons they've lost everything else except
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reason so they they hit they see something they don't understand and they posit quite logically that that must be beamed in from outer space or being done by the neighbors or so on but they can't use their own intuitions
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and the previous knowledge from experience to say that's extremely unlikely yeah so let's let's unpick some of these um um concerns which um you're raising there but like intuition the the
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approach to risk um the nature of freedom and so on because these feel like and they're really important to to more richly understand and and actually just maybe there's a way in there um you know you mentioned
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there that evolution has given us the left hemisphere and part of the need for survival and but as you very clearly um explore a huge amount too it's given us the right hemisphere
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um which broadly speaking one could say is about making better contact with reality itself not just building the maps of the territory and i feel that's maybe
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a key part of what we need now we need a big story that says yeah we're partly evolved to survive but maybe more importantly even where we're evolved to know life to participate in life and
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even to co-create with life itself um and that that kind of story feels like it gets excluded from the scientific account um and then doubly so when the media picks
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it up because the media tends to reduce things even more and so retelling a story about who we are through our evolution i mean i've even used the phrase that we're homo spiritualists as much as we're homo
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sapiens because i think that if you really look at the story of our evolution of modern human evolution and you need to build in the sense of curiosity enjoyment um imagination
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engagement that in a way was what was necessary to lead to say the development of tools and which were kind of by-product of that curiosity and engagement um you
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know we're very used to the idea that technology appears almost overnight and but for most of human history axes remain the same for millennia say and there must have been something else
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that kept people engaged with life beyond just the sheer need to improve their survival chances and i think it was things like beauty things like knowing not just of their own life but
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of the whole ecology of life around and about them and engaging with that say through ritual um through um sharing in the seasons through story and narrative telling so this whole rich
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side of our humanity needs to come back i think and we need to tell a story about that once more you're not doing that i guess that makes some sense then of course it does you know
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that that i endorse endorse exactly that position um the purpose of writing the matter with things was to ask the question who are we because i think that
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we've completely lost the plot um we imagine that we are these um more or less inefficient mechanisms to do or achieve or grab whatever it is and
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there's an infinite amount more to human life than that as you say so um i'm completing an agreement there another point i think that's of interest is that um
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we have had technology of a kind going back for um thousands of years and tools and fire and so on are all parts on using power or part of that
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but it follows a very familiar path to me which is that when there is a good point at which to stop pushing in a certain direction that is something we absolutely don't understand
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anymore we think that things are just linear that if you keep on pushing in a certain direction you will achieve further and further distance from what you want to leave behind but actually unfortunately space is curved and mental
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space is curved and time is curved and what happens as you push is that you achieve the precise opposite of what it was you meant to achieve so as you say there's a part of our brain that is devoted to helping us to
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survive it's a bit of an irony that it's actually that part of the brain that is now making us effectively soon extinct and along with us many of the wonderful
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vibrant beautiful things of this earth so being able to think more flexibly and to resist the tendencies of abstraction map making theorizing um mechanism and
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come back to embodied knowledge embodied experience to listen to our intuitions perhaps i could just you know gloss the thing on intuition a bit because i think there's been an understandable
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um desire to problematize intuition and uh people like dan kahneman have you know made a reputation out of it which is fine um
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it's very entertaining the um illusions that he creates where you know people intuitively think this but the reality is different but they're just like optical illusions i can show you optical illusions where
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you say it can't be right but it is um but after doing that i never heard anybody say gosh well in that case i'm never going to use my eyes again you know that they're just going to deceive me
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our intuitions most of the time are extremely good and much more alive to what's going on and much more able to blend um in different
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relative amounts uh concerns that are going on in our implicit understanding of the world and can't be expressed only in the explicit account that we give as soon as
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we have to make an explicit account we think only of a few simple words and a few simple thoughts whereas the implicit is where all the richness is going on all that is
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we can contact through as you mentioned through um through poetry through art through the spiritual realm through narrative through indeed myths um which as you know there's nothing in the word
00:30:29
myth that suggests that it's false there may be false myths or there may be true myths and in the modern age we have a false myth which is that we are um the the the greatest um asset the world has
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ever known and we'll soon be able to control it in such a way that we'll be able to banish many of the evils that we we um we have inherited on the other hand i believe that actually this very
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process in its antagonism to life and its antagonism to the spirit in its antagonism to nature can be considered in itself evil well look i want to talk about evil but maybe just
00:31:07
first of all just to um [Music] put in this a slightly different way what you were just saying because it's it strikes me that um part of the problem actually is with psychology too um that psychology has tried to reduce
00:31:20
the workings of the human mind um break it down so it can be tested in a sort of equivalent of a test tube and that's when you get well on the one hand these kind of psychological results that seem to say you know we're all deluded and because
00:31:34
they're not joining up the whole of our psyche but are just blasting broadcasting one little result but of course the other thing that that's occurred in in psychology is this replication crisis and where because i
00:31:48
think the mounting fragmented results of psychology no people not quite sure how to to bring them all together to link them all up because there isn't a bigger ontology a
00:32:01
bigger metaphysics about who we are that can do that discerning and sorting um you get the replication crisis and where you know results um that are true in one moment aren't true in the next because
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the conditions have changed they're so reliant on on the reductive process and it i think there's been a parallel um move in psychotherapy actually which is the bit of psychology that i know most
00:32:26
directly where originally freud say um said that we human beings are nothing if not projecting machines our kind of inner life is a continuous process of fantasy production that we
00:32:41
then sort of project onto the world and everything from god down um is a sort of useful delusion for us um but it was corrected particularly in the british um traditions by donald winnecock who made
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a really interesting point which i think connects with your sense of the value and importance of intuition where he said yeah it's true we do project but our projections can
00:33:05
land on reality and when we feel and they're grounded um in reality we feel reality speaking back to us and we know ourselves to be more in the world more connected more
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participating in life it's broadly the romantic intuition that goes back to coleridge that um sheer fantasy might amuse us but doesn't really take us anywhere where real imagination
00:33:30
is productive um it it it aids um us our knowledge of the world but also our enjoyment of life it it feels expansive of the soul and so that dynamic where um you know a projection can go out but
00:33:44
when it makes contact with something with re that's real it comes back to us as a rich intuition and that can then be used to develop our worldview in all sorts of ways and so i've i've really
00:33:56
liked that kind of sense of because it's also testable you know you could you can test it by feeding it in yourself in your group even in your society um when it um makes for more humanity makes for more life the
00:34:10
opposite of what is so worrying about our times now yes yes that's that's that's lovely um again as you know because it comes very very early on like about page eight
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i talk about my sort of ontology the relationship between the way in which we receive the mind and the way we receive in our minds the world and what how we create the world but it's not that we're fantasizing it's that we're
00:34:37
contacting something that is speaking back to us and the truth doesn't come from pursuing an abstract idea but from testing out ideas on life this is really
00:34:48
the the idea of the whole pragmatist tradition of philosophy which i think has an enormous amount to be said for it and so yes i i think that's right we we
00:35:00
certainly aren't just projecting one of the things that goes on now is you get um people saying um certain cognitive neuroscientists suggesting that somehow and we're cut off from reality and all that we see is
00:35:14
just a projection on a wall inside our heads and i i take that position apart in in the new book and i think it's an extremely damaging idea
00:35:26
it's certainly true that we can be deceived of course we only ever have relative more or less um access to what can be called in any sense true but it doesn't follow that we don't make
00:35:38
contact with reality at all and that reality means nothing so i mean in fact that's exactly the point of view if you ask the left hemisphere which is very self-referring to work out what's going on when it's having experiences
00:35:51
say oh it's all inside it's all in the theory like this is inside my head so yeah we need to get beyond that vision um i think
00:36:03
you your point about replication maybe you were meaning specifically about psychotherapy well i mean as you know again in the book i talk about the strengths and weaknesses of science and as somebody who relies very heavily
00:36:16
on science knowing enough about the strengths and the weaknesses of science is very important to me and some of the weaknesses come from the institution of science itself but
00:36:28
one of the problems is as you say replication i was fascinated um to learn that actually the replication in cancer studies is um considerably lower than that in psychology in fact replication
00:36:40
in psychology is not not one of the harder things in science to to find but you quite rightly point out you know that when the context changes from the one that you're thinking about
00:36:53
or looking at then something new applies and whitehead a and whitehead another of the the pantheon of philosophers that i greatly admire said the question is not is this finding
00:37:06
true or not but in which circumstances will it prove to be true and in which circumstances will it not yeah look i'm gonna um take you back to a big words which you mentioned a few minutes back that we must say more about
00:37:19
which is the word evil um i want to hear more about that um i mean i just as a first thought there my sense is that it's an appropriate word again
00:37:31
to raise in all this context because of the links that many at least have drawn between evil and ignorance that um you know one can meet actively aggressively evil forces in
00:37:44
life but there's a wider notion of evil as well which comes about um from the ground up um and unwittingly because sight has been lost of what's good
00:37:56
beautiful and true and but i also know in your work that um hannah arendt's thoughts on evil um amplify something about this you know huge concept again which again it you know
00:38:10
it's one that's used a lot in our times um and it's really good to understand quite what it's meant so you know say something about aurent's idea um well
00:38:22
it's right to say hannah arant broke more interestingly than than most people about this problem and being herself a a fugitive from nazi germany who found
00:38:35
refuge in america she was in a position to talk about it i think there's something very interesting in that point you make about the being sort of ignorance
00:38:47
as part of evil and when i talked to um i had a friend who escaped with her life from robinsburg
00:39:00
concentration camp and her whole story is completely fascinating gruelling and terribly revealing but one of the things she always said was that it wasn't really that people were so bad it was us
00:39:14
blossom height out of sheer stupidity um and of course one of the things that said in defense of uh what happened in the nazi machine as we appropriately call it is that it was carried out with
00:39:27
bureaucratic efficiency and that hitler himself kept a bureaucratic distance from the realities that were going on so getting back to reality is very important but coming to evil
00:39:40
it again suggests to me if there is evil then it's something bigger than than me it's not something i've created and therefore it has an influence and one of the ways in which it can gather
00:39:51
influence is exactly by taking people who don't think that they have anything to do with the achievement of evil and using them to achieve it
00:40:03
so people who are as you say in a way ignorant i see things happening now in society where extreme points of view are pushed by people with enormous
00:40:17
self-righteousness that people who think more about them can see will possibly quite soon lead to terror terrible evils to injustice to harm to inequality to all the things that they
00:40:30
think they are trying to get beyond again it's this problem that when you push too far in one direction you achieve what you're trying to run away from um so it's always very good to have
00:40:42
skepticism about every point of view and one of the things that is utterly wrong and quite possibly evil in this situation is the the effective muzzling of people whose
00:40:58
points of view are not those of those who um make a loud noise on social media or whatever and who have apparently taken over the universities people are so terrified now
00:41:10
of appearing to be somebody who could lose a job uh preferment or or even find themselves up before a tribunal that everyone is involved in a game which is
00:41:23
really very bizarre um but anyway what i'm saying there is that people can be quite quickly
00:41:35
pushed by a very strong view on something to a place where it's said that it would be wrong for them even to have a doubt and here i'd i just mentioned another very interesting philosopher of
00:41:49
the same period another woman who is simone vay and she said i think very important words that when we try to suppress doubt we are creating evil
00:42:06
so the capacity to doubt to question to say this sounds very um black and white and adamant in the in this way you're expressing it but what about another point of view have we thought about all
00:42:20
the different aspects so i think that i mean at times of course i maybe seem to be advocating for example the right hemisphere over the left but in fact we need both of these hemispheres to be
00:42:33
operating the story is more complicated we need the right hemisphere to be the one that is in overall supervision of what the left hemisphere does because when it goes it alone when it thinks it
00:42:44
knows everything then things become badly wrong and then i think one can talk about evil most of the the evil things that we can think of in the last 150 years things like um
00:42:59
stalinism and nazism and maoism and pole posh and all these things were done by people with an abstract ideology backed up by
00:43:12
a huge bureaucracy and the latest technology so we have now found ourselves in the so-called free world with something that is overtaking us faster than we know what to do about it
00:43:25
so you find people talking in the world economic forum and um you get people um who ought to know better philosophers
00:43:37
like harari i'm saying well we this is what is going to be happening there will be no free will a human being is a hackable mechanism now if we think like that we will end up
00:43:50
um under the control of a tyranny that we can't throw off this comes a point once you're past that you can't row back because too much power will be in the hands of those who you're wanting to
00:44:03
question so it's very important that we don't slip inadvertently down that road all the while thinking we're doing good while actually encouraging a situation where life really will be
00:44:16
given over we will be destroyed it will be just mechanisms and a mechanical being that is neither a proper human nor nor anything else that we know will be
00:44:28
um the legacy of humanity and surely if there is evil that is what an evil outcome would be yeah i mean you're alluding perhaps in part there to the notion of transhumanism and the idea
00:44:40
that we will perfect ourselves through increasingly merging with technology be that procedural technology or or electronic technology i mean the word always stands out to me because i've
00:44:52
spent a lot of time um thinking and writing about dante and it's in the divine comedy that dante coins the word transhumanism and but for him it didn't mean working on our desires such as we
00:45:06
understand them and trying to satisfy them it meant precisely transcending ourselves to discover even more that we didn't even know um you know was was possible to appreciate and sharing and
00:45:18
that feels to me part of the tragedy of now is that this promise of progress is actually a narrowing of our humanity and because we've forgotten um that we are um capable of
00:45:31
understanding more and more looking approaching horizons looking over them and then seeing another horizon and so on and that requires us to change not just manipulate the world to satisfy us
00:45:42
as we exist now and that seems to me to be a key thing it's a bit like you you're i often find this in words which were once religious words you know like transhumanism gets secularized and they're narrows i mean another big one
00:45:56
is the word enlightenment which originally meant not um being able to understand things with your own mind but precisely um transcending your own mind to understand the ground or origin the
00:46:09
wellspring of of that mind um and uh so when these things get reversed i mean you talk about the reverse from the values of course and um maybe it resonates with that as well um but look just to weave in something else
00:46:23
which you've touched on a few times so i want to i mean to say more about which is the notion of freedom too and you mentioned free will there and freedom and this feels to me to be another really key area to
00:46:35
address and re-imagine from the ground up again because um i mean you mentioned what's going on in universities um and the fear of what you might say and the reprimand you might receive and so on
00:46:48
and and what strikes me about that is that the desire again maybe originally was good because it was about making universities say safe places and that is still said of course
00:47:02
and but it's one of these things that can happen is that if you try to enforce safety through bureaucratic means um enabled by technology and you um
00:47:14
produce what eric from um the psychoanalyst writing after the second world war very interestingly given what you've been saying as well um called um the fear of freedom
00:47:26
and this is the idea that um our freedom um to step into the unknown um is too frightening and so in the name of safety people actually end up
00:47:39
insisting on a reduction of their freedom um in order that they won't face the risks of freedom and i think that one of the things that's happened that has created this
00:47:50
vicious spiral around freedom and safety and reduction and and control and so on and is that we've forgotten that our freedom is for something else we've got we've got lots of free
00:48:02
from to use isaiah berlin's famous distinction and but we've forgotten what our freedom is for and to bring in another um kind of freedom which berlin referred to as well which is that it's
00:48:15
the freedom to align more and more with that which is which is more than ourselves which is greater than ourself but which amplifies um and satisfies us even as we join with
00:48:27
it um to use you know the platonic terms it's that we're free to align with what's good beautiful and true um and when you just focus solely on the freedom from
00:48:40
um aspect of that and forget what your freedom is for um that's when you get the kind of collapse um and yeah so that something about freedom and and teasing
00:48:51
that apart too because it's such an important um and misunderstood idea as as you're saying as well yes it's a very important uh issue
00:49:05
and we see being thrown away the right to speak freely uh which has been fought for and achieved only in certain societies and
00:49:16
ancestors shed blood and lost their lives in order to achieve a world in which it would be possible to speak freely even if what you said wasn't agreeable to people i mean the basis of discussion is that it's
00:49:30
possible to say things that the other person won't agree with at all and may be offended by but we're you know coupled to freedom is the idea that yes the things can be achieved that some
00:49:42
people may not like so the the desire to be safe is fine as long as it puts responsibility on you to keep yourself
00:49:54
safe but once you put the responsibility on other people to make the world safer around you you've exported the responsibility one of the things one has to do in the mental health world is to get people to take responsibility for
00:50:08
their feelings not to blame others for them and to say that if you react that way and you feel that then let's look at what you're doing to make that happen because it's not going to be about changing someone else it's going to be
00:50:20
about changing you that that in itself points out that there needs to be a degree of discipline if there's going to be freedom uh everything has this relationship
00:50:32
where opposites come to um not contradict one another but to complement one another for there to be freedom the need some discipline and if it's not us having self-control
00:50:45
then external controls oppressive regimes will take over so it's been fashionable during my lifetime to cast off most of the um obligations the duties the
00:50:59
self-controls that in the in my early years were thought to be rather important part of the sane society and the price of throwing them off has been that
00:51:10
dangers have loomed and now people are saying protect me protect me i don't like it well that's not the adult posture as you well know as a therapist that that is part of
00:51:24
the problem that we're now getting so how are we to do something about that we must stop i think demanding um that the world is made safe around us from things that
00:51:37
are not really the very big threats the very big threats of the threat to freedom our freedom to move our freedom to to go to to act to learn to discuss these are
00:51:49
the things that make for a free society um as you say freedom to go beyond the model that we have um at the moment think is the acme of our wisdom as i said earlier
00:52:03
technology is only as good as the people who have the power to use it and what concerns me is there's nothing wrong with technology in itself except that the transhumanism there they're projecting
00:52:16
is a fulfillment of the values of the people who are in a position to do this and those values are again utility and increased pleasure but they're not the increase of
00:52:30
the freely good beautiful and true which is where and indeed you and i i think would agree um to include there the sacred that these things uh are part of
00:52:42
enlightenment uh understanding what they are rather than rejecting them because you actually don't understand them uh is part of the process of education and of having a safe society
00:52:54
yeah i mean it's i um i've been persuaded by the a critique that um a lot of what can happen in these kind of discussions is a kind of moralizing
00:53:07
which is i think why um in the culture wars there's it's often a sort of moralizing tone and and people are accused of being bad and so on um morality is weaponized
00:53:20
and um it's one thing to point that out um and you know to try and uh prevent that in oneself when you spot it arising but there's something deeper again about the world that's become in a way
00:53:33
strangely become too moral um and what i mean by that is that um again morality becomes a kind of end in itself and so people are constantly judged on whether they're being good or bad and it becomes a sort of zero-sum
00:53:45
game and splitting into sides and tribes and so on and what it feels lost actually is an older tradition again which i know you know about which is the virtue tradition which actually says that
00:53:58
the great thing about our habits our qualities our characteristics who we are um is not actually whether we behave well or not and although that is a useful byproduct what it's really about
00:54:11
is how much we connect with reality and the virtues um that enable us to um say be humble um is so that more and more of life might
00:54:24
flow into us so that we're less defended against life um you know the virtue of love matters because we want to um to exceed um our sense of ourselves now
00:54:36
um and so are prepared to venture and be curious and and and and these other virtues that follow in its wake um someone who is who wrote really interestingly about this i thought was um actually virginia woolf
00:54:49
in a room of one's own where she definitely argues that she needs a room of her her own and because she's a woman in her time that was not readily available to um to her to people like
00:55:02
her as well and but what's also interesting in that essay is that she too writes about the need to reach a point where you don't just exist to protest
00:55:14
against the world for what's gone and wrong for you um but you do as you were saying come to a point where you can take responsibility for yourself and she says that's the moment where the artistic spirit the creative spirit
00:55:28
those virtues really come into their own because interestingly now she has what um she calls the androgynous mind that can say yes to the whole of life
00:55:40
allow all experiences to flow into her as a writer and then um her creativity really flies and because it's not about her and her protest it's about
00:55:52
representing exploring mirroring um capturing more and more of life and so a figure like shakespeare is really um seminal for her here and it's really significant that we know
00:56:05
very little about shakespeare the person because she says that he'd reach this point where he didn't have to exercise his own um difficulties in life which no doubt there were and but could say yes to the
00:56:19
whole of life and so transmit that to us um which is why it's you know so appealing to this day um so that's sort of rather rounded about kind of way saying that um i think that
00:56:33
when we think about ourselves and taking responsibility for ourselves so that we can embrace more and more of life um and that's the kind of qualities that we need
00:56:45
rather than um saying yes to this and no to that and you know there's a time for that of course because you know we need to feel safe um as well and but so that we
00:56:57
can um step more into life and embrace more there's something that feels really important again in our freedom um to be able to do that and what you're eliminating is for human
00:57:12
flourishing um we need to have to take responsibilities and to allow things to come to us rather than being self-righteous again there are many
00:57:24
paradoxes around morality but some people who think they're among the most righteous people are in fact very self-righteous and one of the aspects of morality
00:57:37
is the ability to have compassion and to forgive um in fact all the things that were enjoined on us um when we were growing up and we were presented as though they
00:57:50
were actually about being good for other people uh that they're very good for us to forgive people to let go of things um is as much about liberating oneself as anything else
00:58:03
so achieving a world in which we can talk with one another like adults again not like anxious children and you know
00:58:15
we need to get back to that position because if we don't we will become infantilized by the powers that control our life have the control um now through um bureaucracy and through technology to
00:58:28
take that control and this is a tipping point we've really got to be alert to this and do something uh to to push it back
00:58:39
i would say yes that great artists do exemplify this it's fascinating thing that's happened um is that most the great artists um of the past we know remarkably little about but as
00:58:52
you come closer um to the modern time um you find that actually the person themselves is as much the work of art as anything they've produced so they're sort of marketing
00:59:04
themselves um the actual work of art maybe something rather negligible but there's a long screen about them and their thoughts and how it relates to it which supposedly
00:59:16
validates that work of art and the same is true if it's i'm not just meaning visual art it could be music or whatever but you know it's it's we need to i think trying to get a place where we
00:59:30
understand the implicit in people not these very simplified explicit um themes yeah look we've covered a lot of ground and
00:59:42
there was one other area which i think is really significant for our now that i wanted to put to you and there may be other things that you want to add as well but it's it's the it's come to my mind but
00:59:55
partly because you're talking there about um letting go and um the person disappearing um into their art and it feels to me this is connected to
01:00:06
the issue of death and dying because in great wisdom and spiritual traditions death is not just something to be avoided or get around or delay um
01:00:19
it's not really that at all it's much more seen as the way because it's by letting go of oneself increasingly during life and then ultimately the end of life that one is
01:00:31
able to discover more and more of life and the fear of death um that has arisen i think very much with the narrowing of the sense of what life is um the theme that in a way has run
01:00:45
through all our conversation um has come very much to the four i think in the coverage years i'm involved with an organization called doctors in distress which is about the stress that has been heaped upon the medical profession even
01:00:58
before covid but amplified since and one of their analyses is that the whole of people's anxiety about death is now projected onto the medical profession
01:01:12
with the expectation that it should be removed and what gets lost is the other ways of thinking about our limits about letting go and ultimately about um dying as well
01:01:25
um that see that as part of the richness of life in fact um you know it's about receiving and giving a related dynamic um and i it felt to me
01:01:37
like this would be something that you'd have to say about um not least in relation to the two hemispheres hypothesis because it feels like the left kind of take on the world doesn't want
01:01:50
to let go of what it's got and because it sees that as the whole of life whereas the right is constantly alert to the more that it might appreciate and so disappears even in its experience and
01:02:03
receipt of that more um so anyway the death feels like another really big issue that um we need to get a handle on again um and
01:02:15
old ways as much as modern concerns um might help us with that i completely agree with that and i think that one of the defining periods of our age is this uh attempt to
01:02:29
um thwart mortality which of course is a battle that we can't win and it wouldn't be good if we did for a host of reasons that are obvious for the planet it wouldn't be a good thing but it also wouldn't be good for us and i i remember
01:02:43
reading a very interesting piece by um a geriatrician saying that people feel when somebody dies young that um there's been a great loss and and certainly in a way that has
01:02:56
but that actually living too long is also a great loss as one's faculties change and the people that one loved and perhaps dying themselves and i don't think any answer to that can
01:03:09
be found in technology because we'd have to completely reconstruct what a human being is and if we did that why would we want that kind of person to live forever the kind of person who is
01:03:21
whose main aim is just to carry on with whatever it is they're doing that seems to show a complete lack of understanding of the nature of life that it you know death is built into it there are limits
01:03:34
to it it's this this refusal of limits which is the defiant spirit of the left hemisphere and you said it doesn't want to let go i say in the matter with things that the left
01:03:46
hemisphere's resonant is to apprehend the world literally to grasp it and when the left hemisphere is um uh disinhibited um
01:03:59
by a medical condition um patients start pointlessly grasping with their right hand because this is the default mode of the left hemisphere whereas i like to contrast that with the right hemisphere's task which is to comprehend
01:04:14
which means to take together rather than just to get at and take and and it's that that we're we're in need of is this broader vision of the world of life and of a human
01:04:27
being and i think that in that i want to just say because some people they may have switched off already um because we dare to talk about evil but for those who are still with me and have worries about
01:04:39
that um it's a long conversation one could have and in brief i think that the concept of evil can't be easily um got around by just saying some
01:04:52
a way of describing things we find inconvenient or dislike um again you you you know as well as i do that that's something we could talk about all day but at the end of the day i think that there
01:05:04
is meaning in the idea of something that has a kind of dynamism of its own and that is bigger than people or what they think they're aware of and if you can agree that then as far as
01:05:16
i'm concerned it's okay to call it evil and it's certainly what hannah arendt called evil and she famously talks about the banality of evil which comes back to this idea that it's not sort of
01:05:29
gruesomely psychopathic individuals somewhere i mean there may be some of those i don't there will be i have no doubt of that but it's far more about the general mass of us
01:05:42
being caught up in a machine that is taking us somewhere that we don't want to go and can actually do what should be described in almost in biblical terms as the ultimate evil which is to destroy
01:05:54
god's creation that's what we're actually doing um if you if you um if you listen to the mythology of um of christianity and of course christ himself
01:06:08
in the lord's prayer which is the most central piece of wisdom passed on by christ for christians doesn't talk about us doing somewhat better than we might have
01:06:20
otherwise done he says quite specifically deliver us from evil and he himself according to the gospels was um tempted uh by evil so i think it has a real
01:06:33
meaning and when one comes to think about the great debacle in history of the last 100 years it isn't sufficient to talk about people could have done better and it was an absence of goodness and all this sort
01:06:46
of thing there was a drive there that was pushing in a certain direction and all i would say is that right now whatever you want to call it there is a drive that is pushing us somewhere that
01:06:59
we're not sufficiently aware of and if we're pushed much further down that path we won't be able to come back from it yeah i mean it's i think it's um it's very useful to recognize the
01:07:13
seriousness of our times but also um that is the opportunity for our times as well um you know it it it's calling it's calling much from us
01:07:27
um absolutely in response to them to the much that's happening um and you know that's why um i think that your your work your books your discussions are so valuable to our times because they
01:07:39
enable us to respond partly by the analysis but then also by the remembrance and that there's so much more as well um i'm reminded a bit of dante again um
01:07:52
one of the great reveals in the inferno the place where evil actively um seizes control as you say is that the way out of the inferno is actually
01:08:04
approaching lucifer right at the floor of hell um frozen so solid that they've almost fallen out of existence altogether but the way out is right on the body of
01:08:15
lucifer clambering down his side and then comes the turnaround and i think that one of the insights there is that it's by taking this understanding this insight
01:08:28
right into the heart of the darkness that the turnaround can start to happen and you know i think that's that for me that's one of the things which uh reading and reflecting on your work enables us to do
01:08:41
um there is um evil but there's always more as well and um sensing um the light that returns even as you try to understand the evil um i think is a really important dynamic
01:08:55
to hold on to i mean that whole vision of being able to get out of hell only by crossing the body of lucifer um you're absolutely right is is um a very
01:09:10
powerful image and as you know in in the matter with things i have a whole chapter on the coincidence of opposites and in a way um one of the important insights of jung
01:09:22
is what he called enantiodroma with enantiodroma which is the idea that um by going in a direction where we think we're achieving good we may achieve bad
01:09:34
and by going in a direction that may look bad we may achieve good it's actually a point that's also made by goethe in faust very very clearly so and that i think speaks to us at this
01:09:46
time so being able to move on i think is is the key message in your right that um i do suggest a way forward but it begins in awareness as it begins for
01:10:00
my patients and yours we get people to move in a creative and a benign direction
01:10:11
by raising their awareness of both where they are who they are and what it is they want to um put in its place and unless we're able to have a vision of what a human being can be and what a
01:10:25
human being actually is we're we're stuck because if we buy this idea that we can only somehow better ourselves by um becoming partly mechanical we really are
01:10:39
doing the undoing of humanity achieving the undoing of humanity yeah it's it's it's the loss of you mentioned the word in passing but you're absolutely right it's central for
01:10:51
me as well it's the loss of the sacred which whatever else it might mean is that which our life longs for and is in the service of and finds its rationale
01:11:03
within as well however it's conceived be that in terms of god or otherwise um the mechanical narrowing of life um driven by utility and the grasping as you described um
01:11:16
paul doesn't just forget but would even actively dismiss um you know another kind of evil and but you know there is always more and um it's right that this relationship
01:11:30
between left and right is asymmetric as you um you discuss much as well um and what's in the service of what is completely crucial um oh yeah i hope that you know for
01:11:43
listeners that our conversation has helped tease some of that out um understand these dynamics that you can feel more that's part of the therapeutic task in a way you can sense the space and not just feel trapped and confined
01:11:56
even in periods of crisis um so thanks so much ian i've really appreciated the chance to hear some of these things with you thank you mark too that's been a good conversation thank
01:12:08
you very much
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