This week on Stay Free with Russell Brand: Joe Biden announces he will run for re-election, Tucker Carlson is ousted from the mainstream, and we have a chat with Dr. Ian McGilchrist about how you are being controlled, nudged and behaviourally manipulated by systems and forces way, way beyond your control. Stay free, you're in the middle of a pandemic, and it's time to do something about it. Stay Free, you Wanderer Wunderlisters! - The Dark Side Of is a podcast by about the dark side of the internet, and how we can all use our own mental illness as a weapon to fight back against the forces that are trying to control and manipulate us. Stay Free and spread the word to your friends and family about what's going on in the world, because we're still in the pandemic. - It's Pandemic Pandemic, Pandemic! - What are you still eating? - Is it safe to eat healthy? Is it possible to be healthy in a world where you're being controlled and nudged by systems that don't care about what you're eating or getting enough exercise? or is it possible that you're not getting enough vitamins and minerals in your diet to keep up with your body detoxing enough to keep yourself in peak health and getting enough rest and recovery from your illness? This episode is a must listen, you won't want to miss it! If you're feeling unwell, stay tuned in next week's episode of Stay Free! Stay free! - Stay free. (featuring Ian McGilchrist) - Stay Free. , Stay Free - Russell Brand - and much more! , and much, much love, . . . (and stay free, love you, love, bye, bye! - Your Hosted by You Awakening Wonders, - P.S. - Pravin Thank you for listening to Stay Free - - Love, Love, Yours Truly, Russell Brand, Cheers, P.B. - AKA:) - EJ & Ayn Randi, Caitie, AJ & Glynis, AKA - Rachel, AJ, JUICY, GRAHAM, R.J. & GRAVIN, EJ, M. M. & KEVIN M. BONUS:)
00:00:20.000We've got some news analysis coming up as well as a fantastic conversation with one of my favourite guests that I've ever had.
00:00:26.000Dr. Ian McGilchrist will be talking to you about psychology, neurology and the way that the state is using your own mental illness as a kind of mind dagger against you.
00:00:37.000How you are being controlled, nudged, behaviourally manipulated by systems and forces way, way, way beyond your control.
00:00:45.000We're going to talk a little bit, first of all, about Sama Davos had me a blast.
00:00:53.000Sometimes on a week like this, it can seem like the world is being coordinated by centralised globalist force, where technocrats get together to manipulate our consciousness.
00:01:04.000And that's because, to a degree, that is exactly what's happening.
00:01:07.000If you thought winter Davos in Davos was fun, wait till you get a load of summer Davos in... China.
00:01:51.000Let us know in the chat and the comments.
00:01:52.000In fact, why don't you make your own artwork of Klaus Schwab?
00:01:54.000Be as adventurous and as bold as you want, unless you're watching on YouTube, in which case you should stay within the WHO guidelines, which includes, I think... Which he certainly does.
00:02:03.000He stays well within those guidelines.
00:04:24.000The way in which this is going to impact us is continued censorship because we know those guidelines because we're on YouTube literally now as we speak and having to adhere to those guidelines and those guidelines will continue to inform the way Facebook or Meta approaches censorship so it's like the kind of continued sweeping I don't know whatever you call it of censorship that will continue and I guess it also highlights the kind of power that the WHO have.
00:04:51.000Dr Ian McGilchrist is a brilliant and groundbreaking author and intellectual who I've had the great privilege of meeting because I'm stifling a burp.
00:05:26.000His groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, is often misquoted and misused because people talk about, like, you know, people might say to you, Gareth, oh, you're very right-brained.
00:05:36.000That sort of thing, Ian McGilchrist, you don't want to hear that.
00:06:00.000Don't you dare leave me because there's a lot of actual, I would say, erotic tension.
00:06:06.000I'm not going to start saying there's erotic tension between Dr Ian McGilchrist and myself because I'm about to have a very serious conversation which we're going to talk about a variety of topics.
00:06:13.000Including Tucker's departure and how a figurehead like Tucker Carlson rose up.
00:06:18.000We're going to be talking about Joe Biden, what it means when you have an atrophy and cadaverous figure running for president for four more years, presenting himself as radical when he couldn't be more corporatized and more of an establishment figure.
00:06:28.000And how was the pandemic used to induce mass compliance as well as the ensuing and demonstrable mental health crisis that was exacerbated and potentially even, well not caused because the mental health crisis has been going on for a little while, but it certainly got worse during the pandemic.
00:06:47.000Lots and lots of things to talk about.
00:07:02.000You said that I was incorrectly anticipating the conclusions to our conversation.
00:07:07.000Any particular instance where I've been misapprehending what's likely to take place?
00:07:13.000Oh, I wouldn't like to prejudice our subsequent conversation.
00:07:16.000God, you're brilliant at this, aren't you?
00:07:19.000I think that what our viewers will be most interested in initially is understanding the nature of your work.
00:07:26.000We've of course had a conversation before, enjoyed very much your conversation with Jordan Peterson, and I wonder if we can start by talking about how the principles of psychiatry and psychology more broadly, even though I understand that much of your work has a neurological basis rather than just analytical psychiatry, How these tools are applied in sociology and in particular in the kind of messaging that we might receive from, for example, government authority.
00:07:52.000Yes, I thought the things that you said were right, that there are many things in the social sphere to which my hemisphere hypothesis is very relevant.
00:08:04.000But I just didn't think that the conclusions were necessarily as straightforward as the ones you might have outlined, that's all.
00:08:10.000I'm afraid I have been accused of reductivism before, Doctor.
00:08:14.000I think one of my main messages is that one of the problems with our era is the lack of ability to see both sides of a question.
00:08:22.000The inability to have nuance or to finesse an answer.
00:08:26.000Everything has to be, if you'll pardon the expression, black and white.
00:08:30.000And that's not a good world in which to live.
00:08:33.000We've been discussing this week in particular how the rise of polemicism is underwritten by the collapse of the previous economic models of mainstream media outlets that could previously confidently appeal to a broad mainstream base, knowing that they would be talking to both, in the case of the United States of America, Yes.
00:09:19.000These kind of silos are, I think, leading to any number of problems, including a sort of a cry for more centralised authority, perhaps even a return to outmoded ideas like ethno-nationalism, which I would I'm not saying I'm sympathetic to you, but I appreciate and understand how that might happen in a bifurcated media and sociological space.
00:09:45.000But before we get into some of the particularities of our current affairs-oriented conversation, can you please tell me some of the common misunderstandings that are applied to your work so that I can stop making them?
00:10:03.000No, the first thing I have to say to anyone who hasn't read either The Master and His Emissary or The Matter at Things, my two works on this area of difference between brain hemispheres, is forget everything you think you know, because it'll be wrong.
00:10:18.000And what that's about is that back in the 60s and 70s there was a new operation pioneered to help people with epilepsy that was making their life unlivable.
00:10:29.000And basically epilepsy is an electrical storm and if it goes right across the brain the person loses consciousness.
00:10:36.000And so these people were losing consciousness very, very often.
00:10:40.000And the idea was that if they could just divide the two hemispheres one from the other, which you can do by cutting a band of fibers at the base of the two hemispheres called the corpus callosum, then you would stop it spreading and they would have at least one hemisphere working.
00:10:56.000And for those individuals, this was a life-saving procedure.
00:11:01.000But then what happened was that psychologists quite rightly thought, we can find out more about the differences between each hemisphere by interviewing it on its own.
00:11:10.000There are techniques in the lab whereby you could engage, if you like, one hemisphere at a time in a split-brain patient.
00:11:17.000And see what the differences were and out of that arose a sort of quick and dirty consensus that the left hemisphere was logical and linguistic whereas the right hemisphere was, I don't know, given to painting pictures and a bit of fantasy and rather emotional.
00:11:49.000It lateralizes to the left hemisphere.
00:11:52.000And I can talk more about the differences between those two hemispheres and why that changes the world if you like, but one of the things I suggest in The Master and His Hemisphere is that we have slipped more and more into a world in which the kind of things that we know via the left hemisphere dominate to the expense of knowing really or understanding or receiving.
00:12:14.000Any of the rich stuff that the left hemisphere could tell us.
00:12:17.000And the right hemisphere is the one we should be listening to.
00:12:20.000Not just because of my prejudice, but because I've demonstrated at great length in The Matter With Things, it's deluded, it's false, it's wrong, it's non-veridical.
00:12:31.000The left hemisphere on its own, it needs the right hemisphere to guide it.
00:12:36.000One way of thinking about this is that the left hemisphere has a targeted attention to a detail, and this is to enable us to grab stuff.
00:12:45.000But if the only kind of attention you pay is this very narrowly targeted attention, very precisely to a detail that you want to get, You won't last because, at the same time, you've got to have a completely different kind of attention which is broad, open, vigilant, looking out for predators, looking out for your mate, looking out for your offspring that you also need to be feeding and looking after.
00:13:07.000So, in nature, going back at least 700 million years, all neural networks are asymmetrical because, I think, of this need to do two completely different kinds of things at the same time.
00:13:23.000Are you then suggesting that our cultural institutions and our systems of government are unduly biased by this meticulous focus that is attributed to the left brain at the expense Of the more visionary aspect of the right brain, even though I'm sort of tiptoeing down this imaginary and real equator in order to avoid toppling into misinterpretation.
00:13:58.000I mean, broadly speaking, the answer is yes, but I think I ought to do a little more unpacking first, otherwise people won't see what I'm getting at.
00:14:05.000Yeah, I'm sick and tired of people's ignorance.
00:14:07.000Unpack everything, if you would, please, Ian.
00:14:16.000Effectively, I've described two kinds of attention, and that may not electrify people.
00:14:20.000In fact, when I first realized that the fundamental difference between the two brain hemispheres was the way they pay attention to the world, the penny didn't immediately drop.
00:14:30.000Because I've been brought up in this very machine-like system of psychology that, you know, it's a function of a machine, the brain.
00:14:41.000Attention is something a machine can't give.
00:14:43.000It can be made to, you can turn the camera where you like, but it's not attending.
00:14:48.000Only a conscious person like you or I can attend.
00:14:51.000And when we attend, we bring about a different kind of world.
00:14:55.000I mean, if you think about it, the same body on the mortuary slab in a model's artistic setting, the body of your lover, the body of your aunt, they all evoke different things and are seen differently, but they're still bodies.
00:15:15.000And so the way in which we look at something Matters a lot.
00:15:19.000If we look at something in a very detached way in which we're fragmenting it and not allowing ourselves to interact with it, we see it as a thing that we can use.
00:15:28.000Whereas I think the importance cannot be overstated of relationship.
00:15:34.000That really everything is made of relations, not of things.
00:15:37.000We have an idea that the world is full of things and then how are they related?
00:15:59.000But there's Deleuze's ideas that we should look at things in the model of machines, that they are interrelated systems that are ultimately relational, that a bicycle isn't a bicycle until you use it as a bicycle.
00:16:11.000And that takes one to the business of context.
00:16:15.000In the left hemisphere there just appear to be these isolated things that it targets and then moves to another target and so on.
00:16:21.000So it sees the world as built up from fragments and they don't have any meaning until it's put them together in some kind of a way.
00:16:29.000And it sees them as static so that it can grab them easily, familiar because it's what it's looking for, food or a twig to build a nest or whatever it is.
00:16:39.000Decontextualized, disembodied, deanimated, in other words inanimate, and effectively something that is only of use.
00:16:50.000Whereas in the right hemisphere, you see that nothing is actually completely separate from anything else.
00:16:55.000That everything is connected in a sort of flowing web.
00:17:02.000When you take something out of context, you change it.
00:17:05.000That the world is embodied, that it has emotional and moral value, and that it is a living world, a complex and beautiful world.
00:17:14.000So we have these two quite different visions, if you like.
00:17:17.000It seems that based on what you were just saying Ian, that the right hemisphere has a capacity
00:17:21.000for a temporal and a spatial thought, not governed by the presumption of context
00:17:27.000that perhaps could be regarded as animalistic, i.e. even concepts such as space and time
00:17:33.000are quite sort of almost spatially subjective.
00:17:36.000It's only when you live in an environment that needs to function in a particular way
00:17:39.000that ideas like time as experienced through entropy and space as it appears through the relationships
00:17:46.000one might achieve in space even become relevant.
00:17:49.000I was wondering while you were talking also about what type of relationship might an ape
00:17:56.000such as our species have with a tree pre-linguistically.
00:18:01.000How do we distinguish ourselves from our environment prior to language?
00:18:06.000Before we sort of delve into that subject, can you give me a conclusive answer please?
00:18:12.000Beaten around the bush, metaphorical or otherwise.
00:18:15.000Before we get to that, I want to let our YouTube audience know that we're going to move exclusively to being on Rumble now, because I'm going to ask Ian McGilchrist about how, during the pandemic era, Lockdowns and government control induced a degree of compliance and whether or not there's an advantage to locating our behavior and our decisions in this more empirical left brain.
00:18:43.000You know, like a minute ago, you talked about like how the ability to focus on detail and utility.
00:19:50.000That's there in the real world, but the map is highly selective.
00:19:53.000If the map was for paedophiles, they would probably... Thank you, Russell.
00:19:58.000If you were at a map... Thank you for elevating the level of this conversation.
00:20:06.000You can't imagine the jokes I discarded when you said if it was a lover or an aunt when you used the cadaver on the slab example.
00:20:14.000As I was saying it I was thinking, is this wise with Russell?
00:20:17.000I thought it was interesting that even in the example you wouldn't use a mother.
00:20:21.000I thought that showed incredible sensitivity that even in a rhetorical For example, you used a detached family member that you could survive the grieving of.
00:21:06.000Shall we start with COVID because it's more sensational and it will be helpful for our audience and then we'll move into atemporality, aspatiality and pre-linguistic models of cognizance.
00:21:18.000Well, I mean, the first thing I'd like to say about Covid is that I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon of saying that either those who were pro taking strict measures or those who were against it were right.
00:21:32.000I mean, I think it's all very well being clever after the event.
00:21:35.000But when you're suddenly presented with something where people were projecting that there would be deaths so numerous that basically society would break down, the hospitals wouldn't be able to cope and so on.
00:21:47.000If people didn't take fairly drastic measures afterwards, they would have been criticised as having destroyed the nation.
00:21:56.000And then on the other hand, you have to be flexible as different bits of science come in.
00:22:01.000And so you may change your mind and swither about.
00:22:04.000And it's, again, easy to be retrospectively clever.
00:22:07.000But at the time, you haven't got the advantage of knowing what's coming down the line.
00:22:12.000What I think I can say is that whatever happened in the initial phase, you can't really blame anyone, but it went on far too long.
00:22:20.000And the introduction of this business of trying to keep everybody safe was a huge mistake.
00:22:26.000But you see, this is not just about COVID.
00:22:30.000This is about how we now think about us and our relationship to society.
00:22:37.000I was brought up at the tail end of a culture in which it was thought good to be self-reliant, to be resilient, not to fall apart if you were opposed or criticised, and to take responsibility for yourself.
00:22:52.000Those were the general ideas in the culture I was brought up in.
00:22:57.000And I know I'm anti-Diluvian compared with you, Russell, but there we are.
00:23:02.000And what has happened during my lifetime is that I think we've got lazy.
00:23:07.000I think we've got used to having everything easy, which is extraordinarily unusual in the history of the world.
00:23:14.000And we've also, because it's comfortable, outsourced looking after ourselves to the state.
00:23:21.000So the state will do everything for us, protect us and make us safe.
00:23:27.000Well, if you were made ultimately safe, you would be cocooned in a bubble and you might as well die now and order your coffin, you know, because life is a risky business, starting from the fact that in the moment you're born, you're going to die at some point.
00:23:40.000And I'm not saying that a society has no role in keeping Peace, it clearly does, but not by extreme authoritarianism, infantilization of the people and so on.
00:23:56.000So we should have been in a position very soon where we were able to make our own decisions about that and not certainly tracked in the way that this technology of the mobile phone does.
00:24:07.000I mean, I'm very concerned about that.
00:24:20.000But when you say that there's been an almost generational shift, and I can understand that argument to a degree, between a kind of attitude of self-reliance, autonomy, self-responsibility, etc, to one where we outsource responsibility to the state.
00:24:37.000I wonder how an epochal shift like that might have occurred on the basis of individual decisions.
00:24:44.000Isn't it likely that such a significant shift has been somehow culturally brought about and is to some degree the responsibility of the state that has now assumed this responsibility?
00:24:53.000And I would say in this context another word for responsibility might be power and authority.
00:24:57.000And that it isn't inadvertent or accidental, but it's quite deliberate, and that this very technology is being used to present the idea of individuality, but individuality that's usually expressed through consumer choice, while in important matters, the state, who ultimately, I would argue, acting as brokers on behalf of globalist and corporate interests, continue to subdue the population and induce compliance through a number of measures.
00:25:24.000And one of the, perhaps, inadvertent side effects of the Covid pandemic has been increased authoritarianism and increased obedience, something that you alluded to and touched upon whilst I acknowledge also that in the initial phase it would have been negligent to have done anything other than be cautious in a relatively unique situation.
00:25:41.000Subsequently it's quite clear that surveillance was increased, monitoring was increased, censorship was increased, very powerful interests all profited from this crisis.
00:25:52.000And I'm not the first person to observe that we seem to be living in a time where one crisis begets another.
00:25:57.0009-11, economic crisis, the sort of crises around Donald Trump, the pandemic, the endless wars.
00:26:05.000It seems to become a kind of sort of a living or literally Orwellian dynamic where the legitimization for increasing authority occurs and then that authority is imposed.
00:26:17.000So I just would like to query your assumption that it's sort of somehow the What do I want to say?
00:26:24.000The individual's negligence that has led to this infantilisation.
00:26:43.000But one is that We have got further and further from real community which is local and involves things like extended family and embeddedness in a place which perhaps where your parents also were brought up and died.
00:27:03.000The locale, the sense of a place and a group and a rooting, a belonging, a place of belonging.
00:27:10.000And because of mobilization and industrialization that has shifted over 150 years towards people who are uprooted, may come from almost anywhere and they're put together in urban settings and that basis of trust which is there in a palpable, intuitively felt society has been lost.
00:27:31.000And in that vacuum, various things come up to take control.
00:27:52.000So that was before the breakdown of the kind of way of thinking I'm talking about.
00:27:57.000People have been through the war and they still thought more or less in that way.
00:28:02.000But I think there were a number of things that happened.
00:28:04.000One was this virtualisation in which we were no longer sort of living in a place and a time that was connected and embedded in a society with whom we knew we were safe.
00:28:17.000Another is that civilisations get lazy.
00:28:21.000If you look at the downfalls of other civilisations, what happens is that the first generation that establish it are enormously courageous, very self-sacrificing, rather authoritarian.
00:28:35.000And then the next generation comes up and they can afford things like philosophy and science and art.
00:28:41.000And then eventually another generation comes who just takes all that for granted and thinks, well, I'll cruise on it.
00:28:47.000And I think what happened was that after the war, people were fed up with, you know, the sacrifices of the war.
00:28:53.000And they wanted to have fun, basically.
00:28:56.000And I think the 60s and 70s were great, and they were a push against lots of the things that are so terrible that we're seeing around us now.
00:29:04.000But they were also somewhat irresponsible.
00:29:06.000I mean, the idea that we could learn things from the past, from our culture, was somehow lost.
00:29:13.000And I think once you lose that connection with your own tradition, with your own culture, A people is destroyed.
00:30:18.000Ian, but I also feel that some of those arguments are used to mobilize a kind of exclusivity and othering of potential outside groups.
00:30:30.000I also would like to offer potentially That this did not take place because of the absence of ideology, but because of the presence of an insidious and invisible ideology predicated on individualism, materialism, post-enlightenment rationalism, deracinated from any sort of sense of, as you say, tradition.
00:30:53.000I'm interested very much in what you say that somehow there are anthropological cues that we might regard in the same way as we would understand diet as being informed by our evolution in the obvious example of excess sugar inducing diabetes.
00:31:08.000Perhaps there are subtler cultural forces that play a part in our evolution that if extracted or needlessly amplified become detrimental that an advanced civilization ought bear in
00:31:20.000mind precisely as you say not only traditions which can be sometimes oppressive, exclusive and
00:31:27.000potentially tyrannical but traditions that are in place to carry our relationship to
00:31:33.000the soil, our relationship to one another, our relationship to our values and our
00:31:39.000principles and I feel that those things have been kind of annihilated in order that
00:31:48.000As I say, insidious and difficult to determine economic models so that they can be transplanted and transposed.
00:31:57.000For example, take once more the pandemic, just because it provides such a convenient lens.
00:32:01.000During this time where sort of safety was brought to the forefront, during this time of crisis, just because I believe it is an economic ideology ultimately, so by observing the economics, one can or at least it plays out economically and those are observable symptoms.
00:32:17.000Um, you know, if there was a wealth transfer, there demonstrably was, there was, that if like big tech platforms benefited, government benefited from the ability to regulate, the pharmaceutical industry saw record profits, the media benefited, there are sort of institutional forces that benefit from ongoing crisis, and we have in fact, look, some facts here.
00:32:39.000For 2022, the total global pharmaceutical revenue was estimated at 1.48 trillion U.S.
00:32:45.000dollars, and antidepressant drugs market revenue across the U.S.
00:32:51.000is predicted to be at 22 billion dollars by the year 2027.
00:32:54.000Some of these statistics relate to mental health, some of them obviously relate to particular medications.
00:32:59.000But I suppose what I'm bringing to bear is this, if people do not have an awareness of individual traditions
00:33:05.000and do not revere their own heritage while respecting other people's heritage,
00:33:10.000that it's very easy for our ideologies to be usurped.
00:33:14.000And I think that this culture of consumerism and commodification of everything is--
00:33:18.000Well, you're right that a capitalist society is benefited by destroying human bonds, traditions,
00:33:26.000because it will get in the way of the mechanical manipulation
00:33:32.000And of course, that's such a terrifically impoverished vision of what a society is.
00:33:38.000I mean, one can hardly begin expressing how negative that is.
00:33:44.000But I just want to comment, before I say anything else, about your point that perhaps if we pay too much attention to tradition, outsider groups will be not welcomed.
00:33:57.000And there's something in that, because a tradition can become sclerosed.
00:34:01.000But to throw away a tradition on the basis that if you don't look after it, it can become sclerosed is not a good one.
00:34:08.000And in fact, in my lifetime, what I have noticed is that relations between the races have frankly got worse.
00:34:18.000During my lifetime, relations between the sexes have got worse.
00:34:22.000In my lifetime, the gap between the super-rich and the poor has got greater, not smaller.
00:34:30.000In my lifetime, freedom has become curtailed in very obvious ways, disastrous ways, that make this look like On the way to being a totalitarian state.
00:34:41.000So at the time, in the 60s, we wanted freedom.
00:34:44.000We wanted men and women to get on well, the races to get on well, and for, you know, the gap between rich and poor to be closed.
00:34:53.000And exactly the opposite has happened.
00:34:56.000And this is partly because of the inability to think in more than one One thread.
00:36:20.000The utopianism of the Cultural Revolution I felt was earnest and I feel that the journey from the kind of collective goodwill that the counter-cultural, anti-war, civil rights movement, I feel that that too was Devoured and repurposed by the machine.
00:36:43.000I think it's very easy for things to become commodified, for identity to become commodified.
00:36:48.000For example, if we look at just one current media furore, the Budweiser light scandal in case it has escaped you.
00:36:58.000What happened was is that Budweiser Light used a trans woman to promote their beers.
00:37:04.000This called provoked blue-collar Americans, the traditional one might argue, consumers of Budweiser Light to sort of protest and sort of vocally and publicly reject this new advertising model and a kind of cultural war in miniature ensued all around the product of Budweiser
00:37:46.000Yes, yes, because that's the only metric by which it survives and succeeds.
00:37:50.000It's the only necessary or relevant metric.
00:37:53.000And I think that this perhaps can be mapped onto many of the conflicts of our time that people are... It was the gay rights activist Peter Tatchell that told me a long time ago that in his experience around civil rights issues, whilst they are obviously significant, he dedicated his life to gay rights, for example.
00:38:10.000He said that whilst he had discovered in his personal experience that people would cede on civil rights issues ultimately and eventually when it came to matters of finance he had noticed that there was a sort of a hard and impermeable edifice that could not be breached and I feel that what's happening is the cultural conversation is being directed into areas that cause more conflagration and infighting among ordinary people rather than and allowing people to come together
00:38:36.000to confront the centralized authority that is better centralized authority,
00:38:39.000authoritative institutions, be they governmental or corporate,
00:38:42.000that are benefiting from these ongoing conflicts.
00:39:42.000So everybody is just a category and a representative of that category.
00:39:47.000This is how the left hemisphere works.
00:39:48.000It abstracts, takes things out of context, Gets rid of their individuality, fits them into a mechanical model.
00:39:55.000Now if you start doing that in society, what you will get is a great deal of opposition from people who resent this feeling that they're no longer allowed to speak for themselves but have to be part of a group and so forth.
00:40:11.000And the more it's promoted the more resentment it will build up and eventually you will get populist people who will not be doing good but will be voted for because they alone seem to have any Possibility of moving things away from a world which I think has been generated by patronizing liberal middle class intellectuals who basically don't...
00:40:42.000They secretly think that people are stupid.
00:40:45.000And anyone who doesn't belong to their clique is stupid.
00:40:48.000And they have made this so obvious now that they're destroying universities, they're destroying the law, they're destroying politics.
00:40:57.000Of course technology must, not ultimately, but perhaps is currently a reflection of the human intelligence that designs it.
00:41:06.000And the way that these models function, in particular currently, affords a great deal of data analysis.
00:41:13.000And perhaps this data analysis is an interesting reflection of what you are saying about the hemispheric biases.
00:41:21.000That may be informing our current cultural trajectory.
00:41:25.000Perhaps this is bolstered by the ability of technology to accrue data, but only on the basis of observable data points, leading to conclusions that, while deductive, are also reductive.
00:41:41.000Is it possible that the tools that are being used are incapable of incorporating the aspatial, atemporal qualities that you referred to earlier in our conversation?
00:41:50.000Well, I'd have to talk about that separately if we have time, but because I don't think... We do have time!
00:41:58.000I mean, first of all, let's talk about economics, because there are two points in economics that really demonstrate what I think we're both getting at here.
00:42:09.000One is the old saying, well, we've shown that it works in practice, but we can't prove that it's right in theory.
00:42:16.000That's the wonderful left hemisphere inversion, you know.
00:42:20.000This economic thing works, but it's not our theory.
00:42:23.000And the other observation is that, and made by economists, that over, you know, the last 20 years, events that were palpable, aspects of the picture that were very obvious, were deliberately ignored because they didn't fit into the theory.
00:42:41.000Or maybe not even deliberately ignored.
00:42:42.000I mean, there's something like this, that if you have a theory that says it's got to be like that... You're observing some of the messaging that comes through.
00:43:05.000Well, I'm not an economist, unfortunately, but I can see in the world around me that people deny things that seem to me pretty obvious, you know, and they I want to go referring to a brilliant philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who was a German-Jewish philosopher, as you know.
00:43:30.000And the first-hand experience of Nazism.
00:43:34.000But she said a couple of things that really strike me.
00:43:38.000One is, when there are things that you cannot say, you live in a tyranny.
00:43:42.000So right now in 2023 in Britain, we live in a tyranny.
00:43:46.000One we have brought upon ourselves by just not...
00:43:50.000Opposing these kind of moves that I think are the sort of Wokarati's moves which will eventually destroy our institutions and destroy the culture that is very important to us.
00:44:03.000Of course it has its weaknesses but it's got an awful lot also that it's achieved and is, you know, used to be admired all around the world for that.
00:44:12.000And the other thing she said is The best person for a totalitarian regime is not the prototypical Nazi or the prototypical communist, but the person who no longer knows the difference between true and false.
00:44:32.000And I think that's the world we're coming into now, and it's a big issue.
00:44:35.000There are all sorts of ways in which it's harder to know what to trust, who to trust.
00:44:41.000And a third century Chinese emperor said, in a society you need three things, guns, food and trust.
00:44:48.000If you have to give away one of them, it's guns.
00:44:51.000If you have to get rid of another, it's food.
00:44:53.000But you should hang on to trust because no society can flourish without trust.
00:44:59.000The bewilderment of not having a strong foundation, and I suppose the connection between foundations and traditions is one that needn't be overly emphasised, is I suppose what we're experiencing is there is not a consensus anymore.
00:45:22.000There is not a consensus around how we ought to organize.
00:45:27.000I think it's very clear what the consensus is.
00:45:30.000It's what a group of far-left leaning intellectuals decided was the only moral way, or the only right way, and they're already being proved drastically wrong by the things it's now leading to.
00:45:43.000In other words, all the opposites of the good aims that it was supposed to be achieving.
00:46:23.000The ambassador wrote home about the Puritans going around in the Reformation.
00:46:29.000And what he said was, a rather disciplined band, a small band, went from church to church, taking sledgehammers to these wonderful statues, breaking the stone glass, burning the old manuscripts.
00:46:41.000And these were probably a handful, 20, 30 people, and the population was 10,000, and they all stood at the doors and just looked, and watched these people going about their business, and did nothing to intervene.
00:47:28.000And I don't mean in a Luddite way, let's retreat to the caves.
00:47:31.000I think we should observe how—but there were some ideas in there that are quite radical,
00:47:36.000and I mean literally anarchic, because it would seem to me that with the type of technology
00:47:40.000and capacity for communication that we currently have, that even ideas like centralized state
00:47:46.000authority, the nation itself might be exposed as temporal.
00:47:52.000And that is a challenge to some of the traditions and institutions that you plainly revere or hold at least in some regard and believe have a great deal to offer us, as I do.
00:48:04.000But what I personally am led by is the belief that at a time of ongoing cultural conflict, a way that it might be diffused is to acknowledge that there are many different ways of being a human being.
00:48:16.000There's nothing in our evolution to suggest suggest that we all be corralled together in groups of 300
00:48:22.000million and simultaneously governed by one set of ideologies and that and when I've
00:48:27.000been having conversations with people that are described as being sort
00:48:30.000of right-wing the thing that I've bought to the conversation continually
00:48:33.000is would you be willing to stand on a platform with people that you're ideologically
00:48:37.000opposite to although I reckon you would refute the idea of opposition from the
00:48:42.000basis of your own study and expertise if it meant that you were able to have
00:48:49.000For example, like Ben Shapiro and people that are sort of openly libertarian or conservative, they said of course they would stand on a platform that people had different views on the pro-life, pro-choice, pro-gun, anti-gun, in order to In a sense, it would seem to me that we all be emulating the conditions of our origin and our evolution where possible, whether that's diet or the governance of a system or a group.
00:49:14.000I mean, there's a very civil society and in a different sense, we've become a very uncivil one in which people are not willing to listen to someone else with whom they disagree and then say, that's interesting.
00:49:58.000Well, would the attributes or at least traits that you just listed there in conventional psychiatry, am I right in saying, would be regarded as potentially unconscious responses?
00:50:08.000And I'm not sure how much you value that kind of terminology.
00:50:13.000But sometimes what I feel is that we are governing from a place of unconsciousness, from unawareness.
00:50:17.000You talked extensively about attention, and it feels like that, you know,
00:50:20.000when righteousness, anger, these are sort of, I would say, motivated by lower levels of awareness.
00:50:27.000That's using a more sort of, I guess, a sort of spiritual dialectic to analyze it
00:50:31.000as opposed to a psychiatric one, but you must acknowledge that spirituality
00:50:34.000and psychiatry overlap almost continually.
00:50:39.000A lot of my work is under the aegis of exactly that kind of a script that religion and science don't have at all.
00:50:48.000It's a myth that they have to be at war with one another.
00:51:02.000What I'm saying is that we ought to be able to talk about these things and it should be absolutely wrong for anyone to be denied the right to say something.
00:51:13.000And I think one practical thing would be that government funding for universities would be depleted by 10% every time there's an event at which somebody is barred from speaking.
00:51:24.000And, you know, that's perfectly practical.
00:52:08.000You're such a wonderful communicator and educator.
00:52:10.000Thank you Ian McGilchrist for joining us.
00:52:13.000The Matter with Things, Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World is available now.
00:52:17.000There's a link posted in the chat and I would recommend you read the work of Ian McGilchrist, that you become better equipped to have conversations in a confusing world.
00:52:27.000If, throughout this conversation, you were thinking, I wish that bearded man would shut up and let Russell Brand just flow freely, then you're in luck, because it's time now for...
00:52:43.000You've been slowing me down throughout this conversation, impeding me intellectually, my flights of fancy tethered.
00:52:50.000Let me fly like Icarus, who I believe flew towards the sun triumphantly without consequences.