Russell Brand is joined by Rainn Wilson to discuss his new book, Soul Boom, and the Baha'i faith and its role in the modern world. Russell and Rainn discuss the importance of spirituality in modern society, and what it means to be a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Buddhist. They also discuss how religion and spirituality intersect, and how religion intersects with spirituality in the world, and why religion should be seen as more than just a tool to help us understand the world around us. And, of course, they discuss Russell's new book. Soul Boom is out now, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you're not a member of our local community yet, join now by pressing the red button and ask us questions as some people will be doing later. Thank you for joining us, and stay free! Stay Free, Russell Brand - Music: "Chirping" by Birds Chirping - "Astro Boy" by Fountains of Wayne (feat. John Singleton) "Goodbye Outer Space" by The Lonely Planet - "Outer Space Traveler" by Lizzie Borden by The New York Times Bestselling Author of "A Good Omens" - "Into the Void" by David Fincher and "In Need of a Good Life" by Ian Dorsch to discuss spirituality and religion - "Soul Boom" by Robert Fagles in this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand's new memoir, "Solo" . Join us on Rumble by , . . . in Stay Free with Russell Brand - Stay Free - " Soul Boom" Thank you, Russell Brand, Thank You, "I'm Not a Bad Person" by & , and (The Good, I'm Not Yours Truly by Mr. Russell Brand? on Podchirps Thanks to: Don't Tell Me What I'm Good Morning by Kevin Spacey Please Rate Us by . , , "The Good Life Is Good, and , The Good, Good Morning, by Mrs. & More! by @ , & , @ And By: , Thank You & I'll See The Future by:
00:00:37.000In this video, you're going to see the future.
00:00:48.000Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:51.000As you know, every Friday we do an in-depth interview with a radical thinker, a fantastic entertainer, a brilliant philosopher, able to take us beyond establishment narratives and into the netherworld of the constant imagination.
00:01:04.000And today is an extraordinary and special day.
00:01:07.000The first 10 minutes of this you can watch wherever you're watching it now, but after that it will be only live on Rumble.
00:01:14.000Not in order to create division, but in order to create unity.
00:01:18.000If you're not a member of our Locals community yet, join now by pressing that red button and you can join the chat and ask us questions as some people will be doing later.
00:01:27.000Thank you for joining us, and now it's time for me to introduce our very special, beautiful, magnificent guest.
00:02:54.000So, Rainn, this conversation will be formulated around a number of things, but ultimately what we want to explore is you and your unique brilliance.
00:03:01.000I want to talk about the new book that you've written.
00:03:03.000I know it's the first conversation that you've had about your book, and I'm very excited.
00:03:22.000The book is called Soul Boom and even in that title I'm able to evaluate that likely you approach the subject of spirituality with a kind of congeniality and accessibility because I suppose spirituality has come to be regarded as either esoteric or divisive or phatic and imitative.
00:03:41.000Part of the challenge I think of, let's call them for the sake of simplicity, new age takes on spirituality is they sometimes feel Traditionless, rootless, individualistic and selfish.
00:03:53.000What is it about the Baha'i faith and the manner of discussion of spirituality in your book, Soul Boom, that prevents it from being just another tool to help us fit in with systemic thinking and just individualism?
00:04:07.000That is such a perfectly formulated question.
00:05:33.000I don't even know, really, what you mean.
00:05:35.000I was looking at my reflection while you were saying that and thinking, soon I'm going to say some things that are going to be really brilliant.
00:05:41.000This noise coming from this man will soon stop.
00:05:43.000It'll be back to where things are meant to be.
00:05:47.000But in all seriousness, like, Because you posit your arguments, your beliefs, your discussions around this idea that we need to not just tweak extremely broken systems.
00:06:01.000We need to rethink the entire system itself.
00:06:06.000And so my thesis is that we can do that and we need to do that by using spiritual tools.
00:06:13.000Maybe a little bit more than I hate to say political tools, because politics is really about the balance of power, so really good, solid spiritual tools will correct the balance of power, but not through partisanship.
00:06:30.000That sounds like a beautiful and necessary and important book.
00:06:34.000I was thinking in a way, Rain, that politics is functional, rudimentary, and about organisation and logistics, at least it ought to be, but you need to underwrite your vision with some sort of ideology, and even in a secular culture, You still require recourse to ideas that legitimize the direction that you as a political movement or one as a political individual is claiming to be the correct direction for the society that you're claiming the right to organize.
00:07:26.000I think it's interesting that you say that the tools that are required are spiritual ones.
00:07:31.000I agree with you entirely because Materialism and rationalism, I think, have taken us as far as they can take us.
00:07:40.000Like, this is the way we can organize our resources on this planet if we extract ourselves from our true nature.
00:07:47.000All of us know that within us there's a sensation of the body, there's the awareness of the thoughts, but there is something else which you might regard as your spirit.
00:08:55.000The Baha'i Faith is a very beautiful religion.
00:08:57.000I'm not here to convert anyone, but I do want to say that the central ideas are about unity and building community at the grassroots and being of service to one another.
00:09:08.000And those elements, like I said earlier, are universalities that belong in every spiritual tradition and every religious tradition.
00:09:16.000If you dig deep enough, if you look at their source, if you look at what Jesus actually did and not kind of what rose up in Jesus' name hundreds of years thereafter.
00:09:26.000So, I grew up a member of the Baha'i Faith.
00:09:53.000I jettisoned everything and anything having to do with spirituality.
00:09:57.000It seemed Old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy, limiting, moralistic, and just not relevant to my daily life.
00:10:07.000And then as I got more and more depressed and dealt with alcoholism, depression, What we call mental health issues now, but in the 90s we didn't have words for it.
00:10:31.000And that led me on a spiritual journey.
00:10:34.000Ultimately, I went back to the Baha'i Faith, but during that time, which I'm really grateful for, where I was very lost, I was very hurting, I had a lot of pain, There were times where I felt suicidal, deeply suicidal.
00:10:48.000I got to explore all the religious faiths of the world.
00:10:52.000I'm sure there's some, you know, pygmy religions that I didn't get to study, but I read the Bhagavad Gita, and I read the writings of the Buddha, I read the Koran and the Bible, and I went on a many, many year soul-searching for personal meaning, and that led me ultimately back to the Baha'i Faith, and I decided that that was my spiritual path.
00:11:18.000And those kind of ideas, what I found along the way, have inspired Soul Boom.
00:11:25.000The World Is Not Enough may be the title of a James Bond movie, but it is also true that The World Is Not Enough.
00:11:34.000I find that your story resonates with me in a number of ways, and is perhaps to a degree archetypal.
00:11:41.000That laying at your feet in early life were a set of spiritual tools that were, for whatever reason, inaccessible to you, and then after suffering and exploration, you find your way back to that grail as it's offered.
00:11:56.000Yeah, that's sort of like a really useful way, I think, to look at it, isn't it?
00:12:01.000To sort of find that there are coordinates that are recognizable, particularly when we live in a culture that seems to be about identitarianism and divisiveness, not that people don't have the obvious right to celebrate their individuality and express it in the Myriad ways that one might, but that it's important to acknowledge, I believe at least, the kind of universality in the same way that we might accept that we all have skeletons, that there are certain psychic archetypes that we are all able to access.
00:12:29.000And me, in all reign, it was like desperation that sort of made me consider a different way of life.
00:12:39.000venture into the world thinking maybe this is the thing that will make me happy some little task that I can fulfill or not fulfill and then when it doesn't work inevitably I return to this point of acceptance because as a 12-step person I know you must be aware that the principle of message as well as aligning with the broad paradigm that
00:13:06.000exists in the triangle of service and unity and community. There is also the idea of total surrender.
00:13:14.000And because 12 Steps and people that come to it via addiction are ordinarily dealing with crisis, a particular crisis, the crisis of addiction most obviously, I wonder if it's understood that what that folk, that new folk religion is telling you is that yourself Your identity, your whole persona is temporary, and you can't organize your life around that successfully.
00:13:43.000You have to live absolutely in the service of a higher idea.
00:13:47.000And I think it's impossible to mobilize that resource in a human being without Some kind of spiritual, without a spiritual conversation and without spiritual principles.
00:13:58.000People aren't, are they, after the last century going to rally for socialism or free market capitalism or fascism ultimately?
00:14:05.000Only in so much as those things allude to either unity or prosperity or solidarity.
00:14:15.000Like, as is true physically, it's mostly space between the molecules, between the occasional nodes of apparently only present when observed phenomena.
00:14:27.000So, I wonder how you reconcile your life as an individual, as a, you know, you've taken, like, you're meant to be doing a film right now, as I understand, it's only some sort of Serendipity, that means that you can travel up here, that you're not in your movie right now.
00:14:42.000How do you reconcile your requirements as an actor, as a father, as a husband, as an author, with this knowledge that, you know, as you said a moment ago, really you're not here at all?
00:14:54.000So, one of the chapters in the book I talk about two of my favorite television shows from the 1970s, which was Kung Fu and Star Trek.
00:15:07.000So, and I use these as analogies of our spiritual journey.
00:15:10.000So, Kung Fu, for those Millennials and Gen Z folks that haven't seen it, is about this guy, Kwai Chang Kane, very racially played by David Carradine.
00:15:21.000Although the concept was invented by Bruce Lee, it should have been an actual Chinese person, but he's Chinese or half Chinese.
00:15:27.000He grew up in a Shaolin monastery fighting Kung Fu, and he goes to the Old West looking for his brother.
00:15:32.000Every episode is about a spiritual journey.
00:15:35.000So, Kwai-Chan Kane is seeking to bring his Eastern wisdom and perspective to these rough-and-tumble racist cowboys that he bumps up against in every episode, and then it ends with a flurry of kicks and fistfights and And whatnot.
00:15:49.000And I use that as an analogy of our personal spiritual journey.
00:15:54.000So that's our meditation, our going out into the world seeking to be kinder, seeking to be wiser, to be more compassionate, to cultivate those divine spiritual qualities that we all have inside of us.
00:16:11.000The Star Trek side of it is that humanity itself is on a spiritual journey.
00:16:17.000And one of the things that we've thrown out is the possibility that we need to think of ourselves as global citizens, as world citizens, as human citizens rather, that we are all 7 billion of us inhabiting this planet, and how do we move forward?
00:16:37.000And how do we help make the world a better place?
00:16:56.000We'll get, you know, I remember back in the day when Barack Obama was elected, all of my liberal secular friends were like, Oh my God, thank God racism has been solved.
00:17:08.000And in a lot of ways, he was a very good president in a lot of ways.
00:17:11.000It was just business as usual, and a lot of big business, and a lot of drone strikes, illegal drone strikes, and a lot of, you know, monitoring, and it was just the same old, same old, and racism actually spiked and got worse after he was... So, the system itself is broken.
00:17:28.000So, when we talk about the spiritual journey, that you talked about New Ageism earlier, and it's something that really rankles me, because there is an essential selfishness at the center of kind of New Age It's a spiritual path which is like I like this yoga class, I like this crystal, I like this meditation app, I like this Instagram of the day, this roomy quote that hangs on my wall and this makes me feel peace and this makes me feel serenity and I'm going to lead it at that.
00:18:01.000No, peace, personal peace and serenity is important.
00:18:13.000So how do we take that, this dance between the Kung Fu and the Star Trek, this dance between our personal spiritual journey and then we take that out into the world We're of service to others.
00:18:24.000We seek to heal, to transform, to build community at the grassroots.
00:18:32.000Again, it doesn't really matter who... If... Russell!
00:18:59.000And that's how partisan Politics is also based.
00:19:03.000So as long as we're in that system, we're headed toward a self-destructive end.
00:19:08.000We're headed towards climate disaster and all kinds of, I talk about all the different global pandemics in the book besides, besides COVID.
00:19:17.000But, you know, racism, materialism, you mentioned, there's so many other nationalism.
00:19:25.000These are all the real global pandemics.
00:19:27.000But if we want to really cure them, if we want to address them, we have to go to the roots.
00:19:33.000So, and the roots of that is our, is our, our personal transformation as a, as a, I'm sorry to go back to this stupid analogy, but going back to our inner Kwai Chang Cain.
00:19:45.000And, and then how do we spread that in the world?
00:20:16.000In a sense, what needs to be rejected is the entire perspective that we're presented with and the successive administrations in your country, America, that you've described.
00:20:28.000are enough to illustrate the futility of a system that ultimately serves the same, what we generally call elite interests, regardless of what set of politicians claim to be representing what particular ideology.
00:20:41.000And the quantitative easing measures that took place in 2008 and the bailing out of the banks and the failure to prosecute anyone for the financial travesties in that era demonstrated that ultimately when it came to it, what you were left with was rhetoric and aesthetics.
00:20:55.000And I feel that the Amplification of the culture at war is to mask the fact that the distinctions when it comes to the maneuvering and administering of power are too similar to warrant debate.
00:21:09.000So the necessary amplification of the small differences is a requirement to legitimize the entire conversation. When you said about it from a cosmic
00:21:20.000perspective, I suppose one might say, and it's certainly an analogy that's used a lot in
00:21:24.000spirituality, that we're seven billion inhabitants of a single cosmic craft. It's a
00:21:29.000metaphor that Buckminster Fuller used to continually use. That's accurate and rudimentary.
00:21:36.000That's not abstract, metaphysical and spiritual in a kind of ephemeral way.
00:21:45.000This is why the solution must be spiritual.
00:21:48.000Because if you regard things solely rationally, then all that's left is how do you distribute resources?
00:21:54.000And therefore, the most potent ideological drives become those that are unwritten primarily, underwritten rather, underwritten by primary forces, i.e.
00:22:09.000This is the palette that will operate well when you're dealing with 70 people in a tribe that have to use their resources pre-agriculturally when they have to hunt and gather.
00:22:19.000You need that energy or a species doesn't survive.
00:22:21.000Of course what's happened is our systems haven't Our evolution has not adjusted to the systems within which we live.
00:22:29.000And with the preclusion of spiritual solutions, we cannot envisage that there might be different resources within us to underwrite and fuel our vision.
00:23:00.000Bill Hicks used to do a bit of saying, like, when there was a debate about whether or not to have women priests, he said, yeah, have women priests.
00:23:06.000Have one with eight titties and two dicks.
00:23:23.000And the only way out of that is through spirituality, even if you use the David Carradine and the Captain Kirk way through it.
00:23:33.000Because I will be, at some point in this conversation, analyze and articulate some of the archetypes in the world from which most people will know you.
00:23:45.000The archetypes of the office and who are those heroes and villains, what are those tropes, what are those relationships set, albeit in a mundane and provincial paper mill.
00:23:56.000But I can see that you are, as is often the case, reaching for your tone, presumably with some direction-changing insight, which I am Nothing but ears and erection waiting to hear those chapters.
00:24:56.000You're peculiar in a very different way than Dwight is.
00:25:00.000Yeah, and I'm very curious about how you captured that sort of... He's a very American character, Dwight, I feel, like sort of the patriotism, the individualism, the libertarianism, and then there's sort of the oddly repressed strangeness.
00:25:16.000And how close it was to Mackenzie Crook's rendering of Gareth initially and how quickly you... Because it's one of the most significant departures is the difference between those two characters.
00:25:28.000Mackenzie Crook was absolutely brilliant and his performance and his characterization was...
00:26:44.000So you see, like, in the roots of someone like that, you see some blight.
00:26:49.000My uncle, my family were farmers on both sides of my family in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, and Minnesota and there's a particular kind of like Scandinavian kind of spectrum-y muscle car farmer that is also kind of in the wheelhouse of Dwight and that's one of the things I will really applaud you know so many people create television shows and they and you have like
00:27:20.000No offense, but like Big Bang Theory, like the idea of nerds and what a nerd is.
00:27:48.000He has so many different facets and it's very rare on a television show that you would allow a comedic character to kind of have those kind of reverberations.
00:27:57.000Yeah, because a lot of real character comes from contradiction.
00:28:02.000I feel like comedy comes from a sort of a continual awareness
00:28:08.000that the reality we operate within is secondary and that there is another ulterior reality,
00:28:28.000But in comedy, you connect with a deeper truth.
00:28:33.000Somewhere in this aperture between the nihilism that the infinite and the eternal suggest, and a deep, profound, yet somehow ineffable meaning that can only be felt in love.
00:28:46.000To avoid the piety that that could induce, you can approach it with comedy, that there is a playful beauty.
00:28:53.000I mean, you talk about reading the Bhagavad Gita, and the characterization of Krishna versus a character like, not character, Jesus Christ!
00:29:28.000There's a playfulness in the character of Krishna, and sometimes evident in the voluptuousness and abundance of the Vedas and Hinduism, the faith derived from it, that sometimes you feel, hmm, is that where New Ageism is right?
00:29:42.000This is the country where many of those relationships began, where Yogananda and Vivekananda, they came to this country a century ago, a couple of centuries ago, and impacted and altered The direction of American spiritual life, where the kind of frontierism of the American spirit can meet with an adventurousness, a spiritual adventurousness, perhaps as encapsulated by your Star Trek adventurous spirit, within a sort of hermeneutics and ecclesiastical quest in.
00:30:16.000I'm saying here, like, how do you see your role as a comic being part of the service of your spirituality?
00:30:23.000That's one aspect of the question I want to ask.
00:30:25.000And then also, I want you to fold into it if you can.
00:30:28.000After being in something like The Office for a very, very long while, which must entirely dominate your life and mean a lot to everybody that you meet all the while, how do you move past it and beyond it?
00:30:36.000And, you know, how do you locate it now?
00:30:39.000I'm going to risk a lot of people rolling their eyes right now, but I want to say that I believe that being an artist is a mystical journey because essentially we're living in a mystery.
00:30:51.000You know, the Lakota word for God is Wakantanka, which means the great mystery.
00:30:59.000And when I view God, when I view the divine as the great mystery, that's when I sink in.
00:31:06.000And the role of an artist is to have a blank page and create something beautiful, to have a silent room and create a beautiful symphony.
00:31:14.000To have words on a page that say Dwight and have some lines and to bring those to life.
00:31:21.000To have a blank page and write a beautiful poem that's just a sequence of words, but somehow it touches our heart and opens up something for us.
00:31:28.000There is a mystical and beautiful, mysterious journey in being an artist.
00:31:34.000And I feel like I at a very young age knew that I was able to just do silly voices and play characters and I love to make people laugh and I was this big weird looking goofball with a giant head and a little belly and I made people laugh and that's how I got the girls.
00:31:54.000All of a sudden I started doing acting and all of a sudden girls wanted me to sit at their lunch table.
00:33:02.000But what is our way to use the gifts that this divine great mystery, I won't say God, but that the great mystery Wakan Tanka has given each of us, to put into service to help transform this very difficult and confusing and unjust planet into some kind of earthly paradise, which Um, again, I'm risking a lot of eye rolls.
00:33:29.000Uh, you know, you may say that I'm a dreamer.
00:33:38.000We have to visualize the possibility of transforming this planet and transforming the way that human beings interact with each other.
00:33:46.000And so, for me, part of that is, yeah, I wrote a book, and, you know, I'm a member of my faith community, and I do service work, and my wife and I have a non-profit, and I do stuff like that, but I also, for me, for whatever reason, the great mystery instilled in me the possibility of playing these weird, delightful characters, like Arlechino the Clown, and I get paid handsomely for it, and if that And I have heard time and time again, like, like it has brought, the office has brought so much joy to people.
00:34:35.000So, um, if we, if we, if we move away again from the worst qualities of humanity, which are self-seeking and we move in toward Instead of self-ishness, other-ishness, then that's the very feeble step one in the eventual transformation of the planet.
00:34:56.000I feel like it might be a significant step, that flip might be more significant than you implied at the end of your statement.
00:35:06.000When things seem only spatial and temporal, contained within that framing, there can be a dull flatness to it.
00:35:14.000It seems like that when I'm able, when I live my life, Rain, and my unspoken yet somehow explicit agenda is self-fulfillment, I want this for me.
00:35:24.000When my religion is Russell, Like, you know, what he wants.
00:35:28.000His preferences become my, they are my stone tablet, my tabernacle.
00:35:34.000Russell's preferences is what I live for.
00:35:37.000I sort of feel myself, like, draining and atrophying as I go.
00:35:42.000But, like, I heard today that someone told me, like, oh, that I'd just done some very small, kind thing for them and how they'd remember.
00:35:48.000They go, I don't remember anything else that happened that month except that thing you did.
00:35:52.000And it reminded me of this idea that how can eternity, like the Great Mystery, be anything other than continually present?
00:36:04.000How can God be anywhere but here in this moment if God is absolute?
00:36:09.000And I feel like The first page, and God knows if it wasn't on the first page I wouldn't have read it, of George Orwell's homage to Catalonia.
00:36:19.000He talks about queuing up to sign up to PUM, you know, to fight there.
00:36:22.000That he sort of saw this, in front of him to sign up was this red-haired Italian, Bella, and he said that even without knowing him, he knew that he could love him.
00:36:31.000Like he sort of thought, this guy, I like this guy a lot.
00:36:34.000And sometimes there are, like, you know, in early life love affairs that last, you know, God a day, an afternoon, or brief moments, connections with people.
00:36:42.000And if you've been held like that, if you've experienced that moment, the timeless, the eternal, what does he say, Wittgenstein?
00:36:50.000He says, if we consider eternity not to be an unlimited temporal duration, but the quality of timelessness, Then eternity belongs to those that live in the present, forever in the present, able to return to this place.
00:37:05.000And so even if it's a cultural artifact, like The Office, which no doubt was sort of the congregation of many geniuses present in that, from the delivering, the conception, all sorts of aspects of it.
00:37:17.000You know, like, you know, one feels, oh, it's being rebooted, like football, like music, like everything, just into commodity, all things commodity, all things commodity.
00:37:26.000If they have in them that spirit, if they have love in them, that we will feel the resonance of that.
00:37:32.000This is why I think it is no small thing to posit that the solution to our problems must of course be spiritual, that it's not going to be organisational.
00:37:39.000There are great tomes, great genres of political writing about this is how we organise it economically, this is how we organise it geopolitically, militarily.
00:37:49.000But unless there is a shift in the consciousness of our kind, then it will reorganize like iron filings back to that template, the way it's reiterated itself through empire, successive empires that conform to the same paradigm.
00:38:03.000You could take Marxism as an example, like essentially at the root of Marxism is how do we heal this incredible income inequality that is holding billions of people back and causing them to suffer?
00:38:15.000Well, let's create an organization in which the resources are spread out among humanity but if that isn't if there isn't the need in the human heart to share then having an administration say you must give up this beautiful Hollywood Hills house and this couch and you must give it to him and you must work as a janitor then if that's coming from above then that's
00:38:46.000You're not going to feel connected to that.
00:38:47.000So, Marxism at its heart, seeking to remedy a big problem in the world is fantastic.
00:38:54.000It has so many great ideas inherent in it.
00:38:57.000But, again, this has to bubble up from the ground up.
00:39:02.000Oh man, that's a real beautiful metaphor.
00:39:28.000When I was in London recently with all of the developments, in Tottenham Court Road, which is a sort of a hub within London, there was something that as if dropped from the sky, some new development at the epicentre of that town, some unlovely Kubla Khan, nothing but edifice and shine.
00:39:47.000And when I walked near it, what I felt was, London for all its flaws, like any entity that exists within a commercial framing with that kind of utility, with that kind of telos, it always had the sense that the culture has come from the ground.
00:40:02.000You know, when you're in a place, you want to feel that this is the expression of grandmothers and grandfathers and ancestors that built this place.
00:40:26.000It's not, this is not, you know like that sometimes.
00:40:28.000And that's the beautiful thing about Rome too, is then you fast forward to the Renaissance.
00:40:32.000And you see the beautiful churches and the Michelangelo and the incredible paintings, and it's all part of that unfolding history of Rome.
00:40:40.000But London, and I think London is the new Rome in a way, and it has that layer upon layer of beautiful kind of human evolution.
00:40:50.000Yes, I suppose, but it feels to me very much that what we are witnessing now is a sort of an ongoing centralizing entity imposing from above this time Masked in globalism, this time using the rhetoric of equality, fairness... Yeah, but I want to challenge you on that a little bit because I understand and I've heard a lot of your talking about like the World Economic Forum and whatnot and I certainly am not a big fan of billionaires getting together and coming up with policies that supposedly benefit the little man.
00:41:51.000I will die for Ecuador or Belgium or Mongolia or insert whatever country you want.
00:41:57.000So how do we, because this Like everything, these conversations have become so like black and white and so simplistic, and you have like globalists versus anti-globalists versus like, how do we have a global transformation on
00:42:15.000on this heart level here, but also with 7 billion of us, so that we are global.
00:42:21.000And that's a different kind of globalism.
00:42:22.000So if we're shouting anti-globalist epithets from every belfry, then we're kind of neglecting
00:42:53.000If someone tries to make me clean, I'm not doing it.
00:42:57.000I feel that the agenda of globalism Is centralization authoritarianism the ability to manipulate and control markets and to generate dominion?
00:43:07.000Now like the love of Ecuador is a not only a metaphor but an evolved tendency towards tribalism, ancestor worship, a celebration of individual culture.
00:43:17.000Their love of Ecuador or Belgium needn't mean hatred of the other. It needn't mean that, but I feel that
00:43:24.000if you start to take away people's right to be Ecuadorian, they're not going to like
00:43:29.000it. And I feel that the kind of globalism, the kind of confederacy that you are alluding
00:43:34.000to can only be brought about democratically. The problem is with the WAF, WHO, IMF, is
00:43:40.000that they're leveraging undemocratic globalist measures without consultation of the people that
00:43:45.000will be affected by those And telling us that it's because of some sort of project to save the planet.
00:43:51.000But when here is a continue... This I can continually observe.
00:43:55.000They never make suggestions or push edicts that will impact the agenda of the powerful.
00:44:48.000Because of course, as we have said spiritually, we need to be able to hold in our consciousness This is one planet, but as they say in some of the great gifts we've had on here, like Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, they talk about, and Gandhi himself, localism.
00:45:03.000Your community must be self-governing.
00:45:05.000Your community must use its own resources.
00:45:09.000The fact that that becomes fueled somehow by hating another community, you can see that that's an evolutionary quirk.
00:45:15.000We know that strangers were the most likely people to bring disease, 10,000 years ago, which is nothing, just 50 ancestors that way or whatever it is, you know, when you line them up, it's no time of go at all.
00:45:28.000What I feel like is that these bureaucracies masking anodyne language, nefarious ideals that were evident in the great ideologies of the last century, the fascism, the communism, how the Marxism ended up emulating the czarism that preceded it, created a new class of serfs.
00:45:47.000They say of English socialism that it owes as much to Methodism as Marx, it had within it Christianity, it had in it fairness, love, and you can sort of feel that in English socialism such as it is, even to this day.
00:46:02.000So what I suppose I feel like is As well, there cannot be autocracy, there cannot be technocracy, there cannot be a cadre of aristocrats of any kind telling ordinary people this is how to live.
00:46:16.000Some say democracy is the only game in town.
00:46:19.000You have to just persuade people, like I would persuade them, I think.
00:46:23.000Look, I think we should allow this amount of immigration.
00:46:27.000But you vote for if in your community you want to take in immigrants.
00:47:07.000I'm sorry to keep going back to the book, but I will say that in Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, I bring up an example from the Baha'i Faith.
00:47:20.000I talk about one of the great evils of the world being partisanship.
00:47:23.000Do you know how much money are spent on political ads?
00:47:26.000I don't have the figure in front of me, but in the United States, it's in the billions and billions of dollars just in advertising for candidates.
00:47:35.000Think about what... You had a little bit of a burp and it was a little bit foul.
00:48:20.000So anyways, so I talk about the... Spending money on... The corruption of partisan politics, and partisan politics are based on like, I can insult you better at the podium, I can spend more money than you, I can make myself seem better and greater than you, it's really moved away from From policy differences and respectful debate and moderation.
00:49:02.000So every year the Baha'is of Los Angeles gather together and they vote for nine people called the Local Spiritual Assembly that will govern the affairs of the Baha'is of Los Angeles.
00:49:12.000It's very much like a 12-step meeting.
00:49:14.000It's like loving servants of the community.
00:49:31.000And you are asked, you get a list of everyone who lives in Los Angeles, and you're asked to write down the nine names of those who you think bring the best service-oriented outlook, the best spiritual maturity to their jobs, to be humble servants of the Baha'is and the communities of Los Angeles.
00:49:49.000Now this goes on also on a national level, this also goes on on a global level.
00:49:53.000So, there's no money spent, there's no narcissism, there's no one-upsmanship, there's none of the worst qualities of humanity expended, and you simply have servants.
00:50:29.000Could the people of Waco, Texas... Well, if we start there, after their history... Well, we need to rebrand a town that has no negative connotations for new expressions of government and power.
00:50:55.000Okay, Omaha, Nebraska decides that it's had enough of partisanship, bickering, backstabbing, backroom deals, moneyed interests clawing their way to the top, and they say, let's do the same thing.
00:51:09.000We're all going to gather at the local Omaha Stadium, and we're going to elect nine trusted servants, or 11, or 7, or 5, or 27, or however many, From the town itself that will devote a year or two years or five years to the service of the community And we're going to do this
00:51:28.000Maybe not prayerfully, but meditatively.
00:52:48.000They can't create hierarchies and organization at that number.
00:52:52.000So it feels like there is nothing in our evolutionary history that would suggest that a good idea would be to centralize power to the tune of 300 million people.
00:53:01.000And in fact, the only people that benefit from aggregation on that scale, I would contest, are the top strata of that society.
00:53:08.000Now people make the free market trickle-down economics argument continually.
00:53:12.000That is what was underwritten in late capitalism for at least the last 50 years.
00:53:17.000But my feeling is that people that benefit mostly from the aggregation of populations are the people that are the top of those populations.
00:53:38.000And in this case, in the local spiritual assembly of the Baha'is, and let's say the local governing assembly of Omaha, individually they don't have power.
00:54:07.000We're blowing ourselves up and we're fucking up the planet, so let's try something different!
00:54:13.000Yes, and also we're not striving for perfection, we're striving for improvement.
00:54:19.000Generally I have found that people that say that no other way is possible are invested in this way, staying the same.
00:54:26.000This system is, look let's give the... And they want you to feel that way, they want I, you know, the great theater teacher and director Andre Gregory from My Dinner With Andre.
00:55:30.000Yeah, you're quite right that we mustn't fall into sallow cynicism.
00:55:36.000And That the optimism is part of the fuel of this change.
00:55:40.000And I feel that if you have a template that rewards crisis for the most powerful, i.e.
00:55:47.000in a medical crisis, the pharmaceutical companies benefit.
00:55:51.000In a military crisis or a war, the military-industrial complex benefit.
00:55:55.000The people, the energy companies benefit even when there is a fuel crisis.
00:55:59.000Record profits of Big Pharma, record profits for Big Tech, wealth transfer of 5 trillion during the pandemic period.
00:56:05.000If what is crisis to most people is beneficial to the elite, and by the elite I mean the most powerful, what set of circumstances do you imagine might continue to emerge?
00:56:15.000If the most beneficial circumstances for the most powerful people are deleterious for the people with least power, that that template will continue to repeat itself.
00:56:25.000What kind of template do you imagine might continue to reiterate itself if a situation that is deleterious to ordinary people is beneficial to the most powerful interest?
00:56:34.000So I feel that this is a time to consider radical solutions, and I think it's going to be about more democracy, more control, assemblies, localism, collectivism, and there will be sturm und drang and opposition to these ideas because finally ideas are being put forth that will affect I think it's important to understand that a lot of people on the political left view social change as not being organized.
00:57:06.000And I'm not saying that you're saying this, but that it's small groups You know, on a farm somewhere and just doing what they like.
00:57:16.000And the fact is, is that we need organization as well.
00:57:21.000Organization gets a bad name, and I'm not talking about authoritarianism.
00:57:25.000You can be organized and not authoritarian.
00:57:28.000but we do need to, the other side is very, very, very well organized.
00:57:33.000And to think that we're going to affect some kind of global change
00:57:36.000in the inequalities and the systems that you're talking about
00:57:39.000by being kind of loose coalition, loose disorganized coalitions, that's a fairy tale that I roll my eyes at.
00:58:04.000That we have to think in a larger sense to have a systematic organization behind that that spreads virally and is transformative because Otherwise they will just keep winning because they're so much better organized than we are.
00:58:26.000And you talked about tribalism before and I'll say also too that we just need to, you know, at first we started with a family in a cave and then it was like a couple of families in a valley and then it was like 27 families in a little town and and our tribes grew and then it's like Ecuador and Belgium and our tribes grew to that.
00:58:44.000We have to view our tribe in a much larger context as well.
00:58:50.000But we are a human tribe sharing a planet that's hurtling through space like Buckminster Fuller said.
00:58:55.000And so whatever happens in this grassroots, systematic, organized way has to include the beautiful, loving, our beautiful human being tribe on this planet.
00:59:11.000That is a beautiful way to wrap up this conversation.
01:00:19.000Yeah, like it's a manageable... I'd say it's a sexy amount of hair.
01:00:23.000I guess because I'm a... What's the issue?
01:00:24.000I'm a child of the 70s and I guess I've never really... My son makes fun of me because I don't know that I've ever even trimmed my pubic hairs.
01:01:29.000The mythologies of religious writings and traditions offer us potential answers to these timeless, persistent inquiries, many of which are to be found here within Solburn, but many more are found within Rainn Wilson's pubic mound, which I will be gnawing down to a barely visible stubble.