In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, Russell Brand sits down with Gaelic poet, writer and journalist, Neil McElroy, to discuss what it means to be a "populist" in the modern world, and how to navigate the new political landscape that is increasingly defined by people versus the establishment, rather than left vs. right as we used to understand it. We discuss the rise of the far-right and its impact on the current political landscape, and the role that Gaelic poetry can play in the process, as well as the role Gaelic language plays in shaping the political landscape. Stay Free with Russell Brand - Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together. Stay Free, and enjoy the episode. How are we going to progress to one another if our hearts are closed? We must wake up together. - The New York Times - How do we get to where we need to be if we don't open our hearts? - What does it mean to be left-wing and right-wing? - Why do we have to choose between the two? - How can we know who we are and who we should vote for? - Is it possible to be both left and right? - What is the difference between the left and the right? - Who are we to vote for in the next election? - Should we vote for Conor McGregor or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? - Is there any such thing as a black or white man? ? - What do we really matter? - And why? - Can we really be left or right? What are we should we have a black and white man or a black man? - and what does it really mean? - Do we really have a right and a white man and a black woman? - Which are we supposed to do about it? - what are we really supposed to be? - ? - And is it possible that we can be left and white? of the left or a red or a white woman ? And so much more? - Will we ever stop being left or white? - Are we ever allowed to get on board with the establishment? - or are we allowed to have a say in what we should be allowed to vote in the choices we can have in the first place? - We ve got it all? We ve all been given a chance to have our say in the final say? And can we be left out of the conversation?
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00:01:38.000It's almost a violation of any privacy acts that may yet remain.
00:01:43.000I've been in that fireplace for the last couple of days observing you, and you have not been found wanting.
00:01:50.000You are a brilliant and wry Gaelic poet.
00:01:54.000I enjoyed our conversation last time and I'm interested to talk, as you might imagine, more about globalism and more about freedom and more about, you know, like what might have happened here.
00:02:07.000Let me tell you this because I sort of ask you this because I trust you.
00:02:11.000Now, over the time that I've been broadcasting in these kind of spaces, I've developed an affinity for what might be called populism that previously I might have been sceptical about.
00:02:24.000I have a deep understanding, for example, why people in Ireland are so frustrated and why they may be considering Vote in for Conor McGregor.
00:02:34.000I'm sympathetic to nations like the Netherlands where you're seeing the rise of figures like Geert Wilders, particularly while Dutch farmers are under such incredible pressure and they're exerting, I say they, and by that I mean corporate globalist forces appear to be trying to control agriculture.
00:02:55.000In order that people do not have direct access to their own food.
00:02:58.000That's, you know, that last bit is an assumption.
00:03:01.000But it's very difficult to deny that centralist, globalist forces appear to be trying to regulate and control agriculture, usually under the auspices of helping the climate.
00:03:10.000But it just seems that whenever we're helping the climate, we also penalize ordinary people and people's ability to run their own lives.
00:03:16.000But these were just illustrative examples, Neil, to point out how You know once I would have been considered a person that was of the left who would automatically be in opposition to the kind of populist movements that I've already referred to and in some cases listed.
00:03:32.000Have you always been someone that's affiliated with the right or conservatism?
00:03:40.000And how do you feel when you find yourself navigating a new political landscape that seems to be much more about people versus the establishment, periphery versus the centre, rather than left and right as we used to understand it?
00:03:56.000I've never been overtly political before.
00:04:13.000I think it was probably ultimately down to a certain kind of laziness, really.
00:04:18.000I think I was letting other people get on with things political.
00:04:20.000And I do reproach myself for having been Apathetic or disengaged for as long as I was.
00:04:29.000But that said, I would never have characterised myself as being of the left or of the right or of the centre.
00:04:37.000I didn't really think of myself in those terms.
00:04:41.000I'm very interested, that said, in the way in which populist has become a pejorative term.
00:04:49.000You know, it's bandied about in the same way as, you know, Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorables and whatever, white van man.
00:04:58.000You know, there's a whole slew of terms that are used to make people feel bad, isolated one from another, as if their points of view are somehow crude or crass or base.
00:05:13.000And I find that fascinating, to put it mildly.
00:05:19.000Populist just means, as you know, of the people.
00:05:24.000And the way in which that's been maligned is, well, I think it's unforgivable, actually.
00:05:31.000And like you, I do feel a great deal of sympathy for populations all over the place.
00:05:41.000Who, in a very short space of time in the scheme of things, have been left with no alternative but to accept major change, major demographic and cultural change that they didn't ask for and weren't necessarily ready for.
00:05:59.000You know, weren't bought so much as a gin and tonic and a bunch of filling station croissants before certain couplings were forced upon neighbourhoods.
00:06:09.000And why wouldn't people be alarmed by sudden change?
00:06:14.000People generally are alarmed by sudden, unasked for change.
00:06:20.000And I do get very frustrated at the way in which people are set against one another.
00:06:25.000People have been moved, you know, whole civilizations all over the world have been deliberately displaced, damaged, carpet bombed, flattened, messed with.
00:06:36.000People have been unseated and unsettled and are on the move as they would be for all sorts of, for as many different reasons as there are people.
00:06:47.000And we are all the time invited to get angry with each other rather than where we should be angry, which is with the people up above us who punch down all the time and then encourage us to punch each other.
00:07:02.000So I find I have a great deal of sympathy for everyone, because I think we have been collectively messed with en masse for decades.
00:07:13.000And I feel like that, you know, points in your answer there, you touched on the idea of migration and the cultural and social impact of migration.
00:07:21.000Interestingly, mate, we've got a lot of topics to cover over the course of our conversation.
00:07:25.000We'll talk about how the pandemic uniquely shifted cultural values, social attitudes,
00:07:31.000created an acceptance of regulation that didn't previously exist.
00:07:35.000It was a time of unprecedented international deception, I feel, and international shaming.
00:07:42.000And those two things obviously correlate.
00:07:47.000But before we get into the pandemic and the unique revelations of that recent period,
00:07:53.000I'd like to sort of touch upon Ireland.
00:07:55.000When we made some content about what happened in Ireland and how the rhetoric that was being used to condemn Irish people protesting about migration in the aftermath of several violent acts involving children and, as reported, Migrants, or, you know, members of the migrant population.
00:08:16.000When we put that content up on various sites, YouTube and, of course, our home here, Rumble, I was struck by the number of, like, I noticed Brazilian people that were resident in Ireland, Polish people that were resident in Ireland, saying, migration has gone out of control in this country.
00:08:33.000Like, people, Irish people feel disturbed.
00:08:35.000There was some brilliant reporting at the time that made it clear that Ireland doesn't have the same kind of trajectory in history as a country like England or the
00:08:45.000Netherlands or any country that has a colonial past. Ireland of course is historically
00:08:51.000oppressed and their ethno-nationalism is a necessary part of their identity as they confronted and
00:09:02.000I felt...two things I'd like to point out.
00:09:05.000It's plain that you can have concerns about migration and not be a racist.
00:09:10.000It's plain that people do not feel like, as you said, like they are being consulted about the direction of their nation.
00:09:18.000And it was just something about what happened in Ireland because of the inability to sort of evoke guilt and shame in the same way you might be able to in a country like France or England or the United States, obviously.
00:09:31.000That meant something was revealed to me.
00:09:33.000And what I feel is, is that globalist rhetoric, it's shallow, it's manipulative, and it's dishonest.
00:09:43.000And then when I started to sort of unpick that, I thought about a lot of the rhetoric around Brexit and a lot of the rhetoric around Trump.
00:09:49.000and this is something you referred to in your first conversation as well.
00:09:52.000There's a large appetite to condemn people just for having an opinion,
00:09:56.000and the solution for this can only be democracy, because all of this anti-populist rhetoric is predicated on
00:10:02.000the idea that there should be authoritative institutions
00:10:05.000that dictate to people the direction of a country.
00:10:08.000You could call that leadership if you want, but when there's been as much deception as we've
00:10:12.000experienced lately, when there's so much contempt for the population,
00:10:16.000when there's so much mistrust for the media, which are now essentially part of the establishment,
00:10:21.000it's difficult not to argue that perhaps people should be able
00:10:25.000to make decisions for themselves, that they shouldn't have information that's kept from them,
00:10:29.000that they shouldn't be condemned and judged in the sort of way that we've kind of circled around,
00:10:33.000even in the first 10 minutes of our chat.
00:10:35.000I wonder what you feel about Ireland in particular and how that's relevant when it comes to this issue of globalism versus, I
00:10:42.000won't just say nationalism, because nationalism is a pretty freighted term, but perhaps
00:10:47.000Well, you're so right about Ireland being a very different case than, say, England, Britain,
00:10:59.000the Long Island of Britain, you know, a completely different experience and a completely different
00:11:04.000means of operating in the world historically.
00:11:09.000There is, there's definitely something very pernicious about the way in which everyone is discouraged from daring to hold multiple thoughts in their head at the same time.
00:11:19.000You know, as you said, you can be simultaneously worried about rapid and mass immigration to your neighbourhood without being, while at the same time being a human-loving, life-affirming, welcoming person.
00:11:38.000You can hold those two thoughts simultaneously.
00:11:42.000We're constantly invited only to pick a side.
00:11:47.000Just take a line, a single line on every issue.
00:11:51.000And if you haven't got the time to think up one yourself, here's a laminated card with all of the pre-prepared lines that you might just help yourself to take.
00:12:02.000And the people in Ireland who are concerned about the speed at which large arrivals are coming, They're instantly just, if they raise a voice about that, they're instantly xenophobic.
00:12:25.000And so people, knowing that that's how they're going to be dealt with, that's the way they'll be responded to, they just keep their heads down and intend and prefer to keep their mouths shut.
00:12:37.000And it's I find that a terrible calumny that's been that's been inflicted.
00:12:43.000It's true of all sorts of there's there's no denying that all over the north of England, you know, communities have been radically altered by the demographically radically altered.
00:12:55.000And people are just discouraged from so much as voicing an opinion about that.
00:13:01.000Without being dismissed as some kind of, you know, racist xenophobes.
00:13:06.000And I feel it's part of a direction of travel.
00:13:10.000It's all about the way in which there's not to be any nuance in discourse.
00:13:15.000There's not to be people having the time to air multiple coexisting points of view without instantly being shouted down for the first thing that you let out of your mouth.
00:13:28.000I think a lot of us liked the Long Island of Britain as a phrase.
00:13:31.000Ian Drummo just said that in the chat.
00:13:35.000I wonder if you're familiar with the writing of Martin Goury, and in particular his famous book, The Revolt of the Public, in which he talks about how the availability of information that the communications age has brought about, particularly in the last 10 years, or he notes in 2001, there was as much information published as in all history up to that point, and it's doubled every year since then.
00:13:57.000That it's such an enormous transformation that it in itself demands a change of all of our systems of governance.
00:14:09.000I suppose it's kind of obvious, isn't it, that whether it's Congress or Parliament or whatever system of government, if it's a democracy in whatever country you're living in, is uh that is in a way based on a kind of pragmatism we send a representative to a central point to convey the perspectives of that community that selected him like that that in itself like the horse was the technology they were using the building was the technology they were using language was the technology they're using
00:14:41.000He said, Martin Gurry, that now the terms left and right are redundant now or use establishment versus periphery has come about because it's a taxonomy-busting technology.
00:14:55.000In the last few days, Neil, We've seen Elon Musk host Spaces on X, where figures that are complete pariahs like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and talking with a candidate for the Republican Party, Vivek Ramaswamy,
00:15:13.000Yeah, and the world's richest man, you know, there or thereabouts.
00:15:18.000And those are all figures that sort of, you know, in the New York Times or on MSNBC or CNN, perhaps with the exception of Musk, just because of the sheer cargo that he wields, are persona non grata.
00:15:35.000That means now that not only do we have two cultures, or beyond two cultures, numerous cultures, and the teleology is that they're moving, the bifurcation has happened, and they're splitting and moving further and further apart.
00:15:47.000If you can have, you know, 2.3 million people watching that.
00:15:50.000If you have spaces like Rumble where You know, you can have uncensored speech.
00:15:55.000And then, you know, even places like YouTube have been co-opted and are now ultimately sort of legacy media spaces when it comes down to it.
00:16:03.000Certainly, you know, take the example of the pandemic, the WHO's laws or regulations are applied there in the form of the community guidelines of YouTube.
00:16:12.000What we're experiencing is the inability of centralised authority to control a population, the inability to control information, and their obvious prognosis that that is going to lead to either disintegration or decentralisation.
00:17:11.000I believe, you know, Christmas is, we're in the season of Advent, you know, the coming, the imminent arrival of.
00:17:19.000And people, I've heard people more and more than I ever have before using, you know, the word apocalypse seems to be coming into people's conversation quite a lot.
00:17:29.000And apocalypse is a Greek verb that means to take the cover off, to expose.
00:17:36.000And I think that, as you're quoting there, this mass access to information has had unintended consequences.
00:17:47.000I don't know what was the objective, necessarily, or all the objectives, when DARPA put together the fledgling internet back in the 50s and 60s and so on.
00:17:57.000Maybe they genuinely didn't foresee What would be the consequences of so many people having so much, well, hitherto unfettered access to so much stuff and being able to draw their own conclusions?
00:18:11.000And I think that collectively what has happened, I think it's happening faster and faster.
00:18:15.000You know, there's a kind of a, there's some kind of, it's moving quicker and quicker.
00:18:23.000That the I do wonder at the extent to which we have lived under an illusion for a long time, even an illusion of democracy and the reality with which we were presented.
00:18:39.000Falling apart as more and more people are able to access and read more and more otherwise esoteric information, you know, the old edifices like left and right and the way in which democracy was portrayed and offered up to us, it's starting to look thinner and thinner, worn out, And I just think there's no doubting that we are at a pivotal point, because whatever you want to call them, the globalists or the cabal, I think are exposed.
00:20:06.000Sorry to interrupt you, forgive me, but it feels like that is what's happening, because have you noticed how much in American media in particular they are talking about dictatorships and tyrants?
00:20:21.000We made a joke the other day, it's almost like Shark Week in the United States, but it's Dictator Month.
00:20:26.000Because they're continually saying, if Trump wins in 2024, he will turn America into a dictatorship, he will exile, he will execute, he will ban elections going forward.
00:20:34.000And like you say, I feel that authoritarianism has a different hue than we'd ever anticipated.
00:20:41.000It's not a progression of the militaristic despotism of the last century.
00:20:47.000It's of course, technological dictatorships In the form that is the vision of Bill Gates that we should be fearful of, not the visions of the military leaders of Europe and Russia in the last century.
00:21:03.000And I think you're right that 2024 is going to be significant.
00:21:06.000Guys, if you're watching us on YouTube, we are going to exclusively broadcast now on Rumble.
00:21:12.000We're going to exclusively stream on Rumble.
00:21:15.000You'll have to click the link in the description to join me and Neil over there because I'm about to ask him about dictatorship.
00:21:21.000Is it Trump that's a dictator or is it the current American administration that is trying to create a dictatorship?
00:21:27.000A dictatorship on behalf of globalism?
00:21:29.000I'm also going to be asking Neil about what was revealed to us during the coronavirus period.
00:21:34.000We are talking specifically about the AstraZeneca jab being labelled defective, Pfizer being
00:21:39.000sued by Texas, the lack of authority in the COVID inquiry, and new information that suggests
00:21:45.000or even reveals that the US government paid the media to promote vaccines.
00:21:50.000All of this, Neil, just because you said then that access to hitherto esoteric information
00:21:56.000means that you can't hold together one consensual public sphere.
00:22:01.000The public sphere keeps seemingly infinitely splitting.
00:22:13.000You know, I'm I'm open about the fact that, you know, I was I was in a state of slumber for who knows how long before I properly started paying attention to all the things I'm paying attention to.
00:22:24.000But increasingly, it feels that we're being discouraged from being seen in the same space as certain people.
00:22:32.000Which is something that, it feels like something from another, it's medieval.
00:22:37.000It's where people were, you know, beyond the pale, people were cast out into outer darkness, into perdition.
00:22:43.000Do not be seen, or in the communist era, you know, where people, if you were seen in the same room as someone, it was as though you picked up their contagion of inappropriateness, whether you were interacting with them directly or not.
00:22:55.000And for me, I've always anyway wanted At times, the company of and to talk to people with what I suppose you might be describing as outlandish ideas.
00:23:08.000You described that X space, that Twitter space, with what a disparate, unlikely fellowship that was, you know, that lineup that you described.
00:23:20.000You wouldn't have expected to see them in the same space.
00:23:24.000And there they were, all these people, some of whom would, a lot of people would think, oh God, I can't be seen in a photograph with that person because that might affect my career prospects.
00:23:32.000Or, you know, it might see me being, you know, debanked or whatever, whatever.
00:23:38.000That inducement to stay away from people has the reverse effect on me.
00:23:46.000If I'm being told by the state and the establishment not to be seen with that person, not to talk to that person, that only makes me ten times more desperate to fight.
00:23:58.000What is it that you think is going to happen to me if I talk to them, if I listen to them, if I breathe the same air as them?
00:24:05.000And I think that is part of what you're talking about that's going to fall apart.
00:24:11.000It didn't hold together for very long, that idea that some people could be exiled, cast into perdition.
00:24:18.000I think like me, people are thinking, well, if I'm not supposed to talk to him or her, I'm jolly well going to, because clearly the state thinks I might learn something that they would rather I didn't know.
00:24:29.000Or that's the way it affects my psyche.
00:24:33.000So many, I think so many things are becoming harder and harder to hold together.
00:24:37.000And I think that's what's so difficult for so many people, because we are, we are having to re-evaluate everything, re-evaluate everything.
00:24:47.000An old picture has just ceased to serve us anymore.
00:24:53.000It's worn through, you know, a bright light's been shone on.
00:24:56.000It's like one of those old masters where it turns out that there's another painting behind it because the artist reused the same canvas.
00:25:03.000It's as if too many people can see that there's something else there that might even be much more interesting.
00:25:09.000And that, I think, in the year ahead, and certainly in the short to medium term future, I think the authoritarians or the would-be authoritarians have no other option than to try and censure and silence and label as misinformation and keep people away from information that they don't want them to read, because the knowledge The resources, the different points of view, the alternative perspectives that people can readily and easily access and share means that that whole edifice just starts to fall away like confetti to reveal something else behind it.
00:25:49.000Yes, even if you take a contemporary and contentious example like Andrew Tate, you have to genuinely believe that the moral outrage generated by the establishment is, as they say, motivated by his alleged misogyny and indeed the crimes that he is alleged to have committed.
00:26:16.000Where that begins to break down is in my near certainty that there is no moral authority in the establishment anymore.
00:26:27.000Indeed the example of Trump's rise being amplified indictment by indictment is a further indication that even if you put aside your own moral judgment of the whatever figures in question, me, Tate, Trump, Tucker, Rogan, you, whoever they eventually determine they don't like today, you have to say, up until now, what is it about their modality that has led you to believe that they care about feminism, that they care about public health, even without tying it to a condemned or exiled individual?
00:27:07.000At the advent of the coronavirus pandemic it was my own um now deeply inculcated cynicism skepticism and fear of the establishment that guided me put into a simple uh understanding or um sort of what do i want to say framing like this hold on a minute if this is all about the sanctity of life like we've got to be locked down in our homes take these medications social distance because of the sanctity of life
00:27:39.000Is this idea that life is sacred playing out generally across our culture?
00:27:46.000Let's look at it in terms of economics and finance and social regulation and poverty and our moral standards.
00:27:56.000If life is sacred, what would be one's attitude to vagrancy?
00:28:02.000What would be one's attitude to a whole host of subjects?
00:28:05.000So, like you said, you get a kind of intuitive and visceral sense of a kind of glitch that you're being given one set of data and another set of data is deeply felt.
00:28:18.000Hang on, these people don't care about me.
00:28:57.000Are any of these figures Virulently anti-establishment in some way.
00:29:02.000Now like you know people who watch our channel a lot know that I enjoy Donald Trump's rhetoric and I enjoy his anti-establishment positions but I don't think that without significant systemic change and decentralization and I would say the dissolution of several significant deep state agencies that America can meaningfully change.
00:29:22.000But I recognize now that these operations care about control, not about the
00:29:28.000sanctity of life. I'm sorry that I saw you wanted to come in Neil, I'm sorry I kept talking. Yes,
00:29:32.000no it's, I don't believe that there's any, that the people that are, that have the temerity
00:29:38.000to pontificate and to lecture to us about, about you know, the sanctity of life, they are in no
00:29:44.000moral position so to do. As you, as you pointed out there, that it's hollow.
00:29:52.000The people that we are having to listen to are sock puppet hollow.
00:29:57.000They don't emanate any credible, any believable belief in anything.
00:30:05.000You know, they just have all of the appearance and all of the sound of people who are just working from the contents of today's inbox, from whatever script they're working to.
00:30:16.000None of it's coming from a place of belief.
00:30:20.000And, of course, what happened during the course of the pandemic?
00:30:25.000It's now apparent that there was plenty of advice to the authority figures who laid down the diktats that locking people in their homes was going to be catastrophic.
00:30:34.000I mean, like, you needed the wisdom of Solomon to see that anyway.
00:30:38.000But there was plenty of strident advice being given behind the scenes saying, don't do this.
00:30:51.000Because all of the constant, well, and so it came to pass.
00:30:55.000That the consequences have been desperate.
00:30:58.000Likewise, there was plenty of information out there in advance that they knew that whatever, that the injectables hadn't been tested to see if they would stop transmission person to person.
00:31:07.000There was plenty of suggestion that there were going to be adverse side effects and all of the rest of it.
00:31:12.000And the things were rolled out anyway.
00:31:14.000So with three years worth of hindsight or two years worth of hindsight, it's plain that there was no real heartfelt concern for people.
00:31:22.000I mean, I feel so, so desperate at the moment about what's happening in Israel, Palestine, Gaza.
00:31:31.000The fact that whatever horror unfolded on the 7th of October, it then means that other babies have to die, not just by the hundreds, but by the thousands.
00:32:12.000If that is what it means, the deaths of thousands, and that we're coming into the time of Christmas, where we're very focused on our kids and our family.
00:32:24.000And we're supposed to, you know, the dissonance of that, that we celebrate our own children and our own families, while simultaneously knowing what's happening to thousands upon thousands of people in Gaza.
00:32:35.000I find it makes me feel physically ill.
00:32:40.000The thought of it, and there's an anti-human agenda.
00:32:45.000Elon Musk in that space that you talked about, he talked about how he wants to see more people born, that he is pro-creation, that he thinks that the populations of the world are in steep decline and that depopulation, not overpopulation, is going to be the existential crisis that we'll face in the decades and centuries ahead if we don't get out of this tailspin.
00:33:08.000And I don't feel that the authority figures have any love of life, that they have any love of our species at all, such that I think that so much of what is being done and will be done in the future will come from that place of thinking, people aren't worth it anyway.
00:33:29.000We have voided God from the heart of our systems.
00:33:33.000I think that we coasted on materialism and rationalism undergirded by clear progress in areas such as technology and medicine.
00:33:43.000We forgot perhaps that we had neglected and allowed to atrophy that aspect of the spirit that makes all other progress notable, valuable and worthwhile anyway.
00:33:55.000What you said before, about October the 7th and subsequent action is I suppose
00:34:03.000what it would sound like if you had irrefutable principles and values at the core of your
00:34:13.000Now of course I think we know what the arguments are that are continually made by people advocating for Israel's right to defend herself and those kind of arguments I'm sure have a great deal of validity if you're personally affected or ideologically or religiously affected.
00:34:31.000And I've tried throughout this to maintain a position where I can continue to be useful and I try to simultaneously hold in my mind the people that have been affected from a variety of perspectives when it comes to that issue and I try my best with all issues but what is Irrefutable is that if we don't have anywhere in our institutions the kind of simple principles like actually the sanctity of human life, like the reason that we have to preserve our society is because for us the killing of children is unconscionable.
00:35:07.000I suppose if we don't have that within the values that we're purporting to protect or espouse then In a sense, all that's left, and I think we've touched on this before, is a kind of escalating tribalism and, you know, let the devil take the hindmost, because there is no... And so the reason that I try on this channel to continually talk about, you know, to talk about the presence of God, like there is a highest principle,
00:35:35.000There are values that are transcendent.
00:35:37.000There are things that are worth sacrificing our life for.
00:35:40.000There are things that are worth sacrificing revenge for.
00:35:43.000And it can't be enough to say that, well, if you found yourself in this position, then you would, you know, if there was an intruder in your home, if you were similarly aggrieved.
00:35:53.000I sense that throughout our culture, and in far less incendiary issues than the conflict in the Middle East, we're being invited to pursue our lowest values.
00:36:02.000We're being invited to engage with our lower selves.
00:36:06.000As an addict in recovery, I cannot help but note how often the media and professions connected to commerce, marketing, advertising, continue to solicit Fear, desire, objectification of the body, or many sacred aspects of life, humor, sexuality, continually are objectified and mobilized in order to, in a sense, desacralize us and promote our animal nature.
00:36:38.000Both fear and desire, I would say, being almost atavistic aspects of our Our pre-civilized or pre-evolved or pre-awakened nature.
00:36:55.000We've had whatever it is, 300, 400 years of science, and like a new shiny bobble, you know, our species has been transfixed by science.
00:37:05.000All it can do, and I'm not denigrating that or running it down for a moment, it's astonishing what science and then technology have delivered unto us in the recent centuries, but it has also provided an incomplete You know, the thirst that from the soul doth rise, doth ask a drink divine and all that.
00:37:25.000There are other questions which science cannot and does not address itself to.
00:37:31.000And therefore there are answers that science will not give us.
00:37:35.000And with the dark side of great works like Darwin's Origin of Species was that once and for all, The people of the West were invited to think that, well, we're nothing special.
00:37:50.000We're not, you know, we're not the work of a creator God.
00:37:53.000We're part of a mindless process of evolution.
00:37:58.000And we've just kind of happened because we, you know, some of our ancestors had characteristics that gave them an advantage in an ecological niche and so on and so on.
00:38:08.000And the dark travelling companion of that undermining of that kind of sanctifying of the human species was eugenics and all that that led to, you know, if humans are nothing but other animals, the accidents of evolution, the accidents of a process, then might we not experiment on them the same way we experiment on any other animals?
00:38:30.000And so science Takes as well as gives, unless and until people are simultaneously invited to eat from another menu at the same time, you know, to draw upon other flavours.
00:38:48.000Which are different and separate from what science and technology delivers, but we still need them.
00:38:52.000You know, man cannot live by bread alone, as it says in Deuteronomy.
00:39:28.000At least three quarters of the people writing to me have declared themselves as being people of faith, that it was the faith that enabled them to, say, resist the vaccine products, enabled them to stand up to employers that were threatening them with this, that and the other.
00:39:45.000You talk about the battle between light and dark, good and evil, and the sheer weight of it, the deluge of that kind of thinking from so many people from all over the world has meant that I have kind of renewed my comfort in having those conversations.
00:40:04.000I had muted almost a conversation that I instinctively wanted to have.
00:40:11.000And to be a part of, and I know that you talk on here about spirituality in all its many forms, everything that that means, and I feel the need of that.
00:40:22.000And I think if you don't have that, if that component of life is not welcomed into the daily consciousness, then we are the less.
00:40:34.000We are made the less for it, and we will function far more happily if that other aspect of our natural thinking, if room is made for it once more.
00:40:48.000Neil, it's so beautiful talking to you, and I could talk to you for another couple of hours if I wanted to make people on my team have a mental breakdown, because we've got to go and record some other content immediately.
00:40:59.000Loads of you joining us on lockdown, I'm sorry I didn't get to pass on your questions, I really am, but I'm just, like, there's so many good ones from Judy Denmark, Kay Kottwa, Seakeasy, Jobsdog, Viv & Carlo, Sunpatch Patriots, so many good questions, but our day got a little bit out of control, I do apologise.
00:41:15.000Neil, do stay on because I've got something to ask you, but that was beautiful as always.
00:41:19.000Thank you so much for bringing both poetry, reflection, gentleness, kindness to a political conversation that sometimes can feel extremely bombastic.
00:41:31.000And I think that from bombast we won't get resolution, we won't get progress, we won't get the kind of synthesis that's required for us to move forward.
00:41:41.000Thank you for being a gentle contributor to a complex debate, Neil, and thank you for coming on Stay Free today.