Can the Algorithm Return Us to Tradition？ ｜ Guest： James Poulos ｜ 8⧸30⧸24
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of Zero Hour, host James P. Polis talks about the TikTok trend, and how it connects back to a more traditional way of life, honor one s ancestors, and honor the culture of the past.
Transcript
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Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
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I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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If you spend any time on social media, you know it's full of all kinds of random trends.
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And one thing that continually shows up over and over again in the sea of algorithmic information is this trend of trad life posters.
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You have people doing different things around their house to try to turn it into something closer to a sustainable farm.
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You have people trying to create traditional art, get back to their roots.
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And the thing that's really been sitting on the top of my mind is can this actually return us to tradition?
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Is there a way that this can lead us back to more organic and healthier ways of being?
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Or has this stuff just turned into some kind of abstract pornography?
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Somebody who thinks a lot about digital life and how it applies to our spiritual well-being is author and host of Zero Hour, James Polis.
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We're going to get into the TikTok trend that has been coming up right now about grave cleaning, how that connects to traditional life, honoring one's ancestors.
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Is this something that can actually lead us back to a value that will bind us into the great chain of being?
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Or is this just more information and entertainment to pour over us and pull us away from real life?
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All right, so like I was saying, I've been seeing a lot of this trend all over social media, very popular.
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Of course, girls going through wheat fields and, you know, the different lives that trad wives can now lead.
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Even had the trend of stay-at-home girlfriends, the LARPing as the wife.
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They just don't need the commitment, all of these things, right?
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But there's something fetishized about, you know, women sitting there and actually doing laundry or taking care of the house.
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All of a sudden, this is something that becomes digital content.
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It's a lot of her, as you would expect, cleaning a bunch of things.
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But the thing that she is focused on in many of her videos is cleaning grave sites.
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Let me play this for everybody real quick so they know what we're talking about here.
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But I believe everyone deserves a beautiful grave.
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I get to do this work because you support and...
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The approach is specifically one geared towards social media and attention.
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But I do have to say, of all of the much more focused trad life posting with the sundresses or the I'm churning butter in the most specific and old way, this does have some connection to what was a much more traditional behavior.
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You're caring about your ancestors, caring about your ancestors, caring about the condition of their final resting place, taking a moment to honor, you know, that they are still, that they are remembered.
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And that, you know, perhaps if you, you know, one of the more ancient ancestor worshiping civilizations, that you're caring for them in the afterlife by caring for their gravesite there.
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What do you think about this approach, James, any hope that this can tether people back to an understanding of something important about life or spirituality?
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We don't, we don't know, you know, we don't know what it is that someone's going to come across in their real life, in their real experience that might turn their heart around toward a spiritual reawakening or rebirth.
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Although, of course, you know, we can, we can sometimes play that role in people's lives.
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Although, you know, you can't just go up to someone and force them to have this experience.
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And so the question is, you know, can it happen over the internet?
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But obviously we wouldn't want that to replace what happens offline, what happens in real life.
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And there are a lot of contradictions in what you see in a video like that.
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An infinite number of attorneys and an infinite number of courtrooms could litigate the relative merits or demerits of that video.
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And I think what's most important about, you know, content like that and our experience with it is to not fall prey to that temptation to just become these sort of, you know, an infinite number of monkeys litigating an infinite number of pieces of content on the internet.
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That will drive us away from real life and deeper into a simulated life more than, you know, the girl who's scrubbing the tombstone on TikTok.
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Would it be better if people scrubbed tombstones in secret?
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But, you know, it's, it's not, what am I really gaining from being the one to stand up and say, your content sucks and you shouldn't be doing that.
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It's really not a very good use of my time or of anyone else's.
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Yeah, the critique of the thing takes you more into the thing.
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You're accelerating down that pathway rather than saying, okay, well, if I don't like this, I'm just stepping away and finding some, some more meaningful thing to plug into.
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But I guess this brings us to the broader question, really not, not so much that specific video, but what do you think about the general engagement with, I guess, tradition posting in digital spaces?
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Do you feel like the medium destroys the message in this way that it's always going to suck us down this path of perhaps critique or, or, or more simulated lives?
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Or do you think that there is a positive side to this type of content showing up and there's an interest, a yearning, does this underlie a critical movement that is happening inside the culture?
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Or is, or is it just, like I said, pornified, it's just, you're just taking something completely out of de-territorializing it completely and putting it in a context into which it really can't connect to any traditional behavior or organic understanding of a healthy life.
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Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, the porn is always an interesting case study or an example, because what is it really, you know, and, and one concept of porn is that it's a simulation of sex, you know, yes, I guess there are some people involved having some sort of intercourse, but maybe not, maybe it's just a couple AIs just moving the pixels around.
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There's another perspective, which would say, well, no, it's not really simulated, it's real, and what you're doing is you're participating in a kind of telepathic form of, of physiological communication.
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And if you turn to kind of the loudest voices, I think, on the internet about the future of technology, the, the sensibility is one that says like, hey, we just want these, these experiences to converge, the simulation and the telepathy can converge into one thing.
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And we can have this collective human consciousness and extend the light of that consciousness throughout the universe and become divinities, cyborg divinities, live, live happily ever after or, or something.
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Regardless of how exactly you, you know, you know, way that up in your minds, I think the proper lens to understand what's going on there is that it's a temptation, it's always going to be tempting to some degree, even for people who think that it would be a tremendous travesty against man and God to go in that direction or to try to go in that direction.
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So when I see trad content flooding various parts of the internet, I see the temptation to turn it into a, a simulation or, you know, an automated simulation of, of what is, there should be.
00:11:01.520
But I also see, you know, I see deep seated yearnings in the human breast for, for a recovery of those forms of those ways of being a deep seated longing to remember the past at all.
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Uh, and then I see a deep seated longing for people to communicate without words.
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There are so many freaking words flying around.
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Um, a lot of them have lost their power and some of them are being imbued with dark spiritual power.
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And I think it's, it's, uh, commonsensical to, to reason that people in that kind of environment where they're just overloaded with words and verbal communication, written communication, want to kind of retreat or recover, uh, the experience of a more, um, a more visual language, uh, uh, a communication through, through imagery.
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Uh, and I think a lot of what makes that kind of trad content catch on and spread so well is, yeah, you know, you can just hit that mute button or just watch, you know, watch the, the feed without audio.
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And in some ways it says even more, you know, silence is powerful.
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And, uh, although these things can get muddled and there are temptations at every turn, I do think that clearly people are seeking out trad content because of how visual it is.
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And because of how the, its visual character pairs so well and is expressed so fully through a kind of silence, which, you know, recovering silence in our lives and in our communication, that's very powerful too.
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And I think, you know, this is a time when we would benefit from more of it and when people are, whether they know it or not, seeking it out for that reason.
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So a lot of people look at this type of content and their first, uh, criticism is that what she's doing here is, and this would, of course, I would recognize this as well.
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It's, it's separated from the actual connection.
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She says, oh, well they had, you know, siblings, the same number of siblings I did.
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So there's, there's some interest in understanding who that person is, but it's not a big focus, right?
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It's more about just watching her do the thing that she's doing, which like you said, could, could itself be, be more powerful than a lot of things that are said.
00:13:14.300
But the criticism would be that she's really detached from what the maintenance of a grave would mean.
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You know, previously the maintenance of a grave would be one that is part of your family or part of one of your community.
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It's, it's a long line of ancestors that you have and you care for this grave site.
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You care for the tombstone, the people, uh, who come to that grave site are there to honor, uh, the past.
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And so they have a very specific generational, particular connection to, uh, this background.
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And that when you take something like this and you uproot it from that, you, you, you break that connection and you just are doing it for the act of the attention.
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These kinds of things that, that makes it harder for people to understand why that matters.
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You know, and we see this across many of the, the trad content.
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Again, the, the, the people who are criticizing it most often are saying, oh, well, you know, that, that person's not part of the real tradition.
00:14:11.140
They didn't, they're not really living in that mode.
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You know, this, this is just, uh, some, some simulation they're doing on top of a very modern life and there's, there's no connection to a past or to a history or to a people.
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And so therefore it, it's separating people further and further away.
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Is there a, is there still a way in which this does connect people to those modes of being, even though it has been, uh, you know, disconnected from those roots that, that organic life, uh, from which it really was supposed to be born in.
00:14:41.960
Um, yeah, again, I, you know, the, the criticisms are easy.
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It's so easy to criticize this stuff or any content or any person.
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And if we get stuck at the level of criticism, uh, we're, we are doing more harm, I think, than, you know, than, than people who are out there, at least trying to, trying to make something happen, trying to take some kind of action.
00:15:03.020
Uh, this is maybe a weird comparison, but I think it holds true.
00:15:06.520
You know, there are, um, there's a certain kind of Russia critic out there who loves like debunking people who say like, well, at least, you know, sort of like more or less Christian country and, you know, whatever they're, they went through communism.
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And like, maybe there's something that we can learn there before our empire collapses.
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And we find ourselves face to face with how incredibly culturally and spiritually impoverished so many of us have become.
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Um, and, uh, it's easy to pile on those criticisms.
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Oh, they're, you know, they're, they're TFR so low or whatever.
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But you know, what I see is I see that's sort of like criticizing, like a dog who got lost and is trying to find its way home.
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And it's like flea bitten and it's been through some fights and it's like eating some roadkill.
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And it's like trying to like crawl its way back to home.
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And a passerby is like, look at this pathetic creature.
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Like it's such a mess and you're never going to make it home.
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And the alternative to that kind of criticism is not enabling people, right?
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This is not the only alternative to that kind of contemptuous criticism.
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You can recognize that people out there are profoundly culturally, spiritually impoverished.
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If you don't have the church, you don't have the extended family.
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You don't have much except one of these and an idea and say what you will about these stupid
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But if you have one and you have an idea and you have a yearning, you can actually just
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get up and go outside and do some stuff and put it in front of a large audience potentially.
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And does that mean that that's the way we should all live?
00:17:06.140
Does it mean that people have these yearnings and they're coming to terms with the fact
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that in an incredibly brief period of time, you know, a couple of decades tops, America
00:17:15.320
has gone from an extremely prosperous feeling, dominant feeling, confident feeling place into
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one where people are incredibly lost, confused, unhealthy, broken, unsure of how to proceed,
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frightened of their own tools, frightened of one another, unsure what's to come.
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What do you do with a civilization full of people like this?
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Or do you try to meet them where they're at and try to find a way with, you know, with
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a combination of sort of, you know, tears and suffering, but also a feeling of joy in the
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And we can, you know, we still have an opportunity to make something of ourselves spiritually that
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You know, it's not, the apocalypse is literally not raining down on us.
00:18:07.780
And, you know, I think in the time that it takes to do a three hour deep dive into the
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cringiest, most pornified trad content and sort of, you know, lambast it and ridicule it.
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Um, in the time that it takes to do that, think of how else you could spend those three
00:18:26.120
You know, not that I think this conversation is, is a waste of time, but all the other
00:18:31.260
Well, maybe not all the other ones, but it's easy to see how that temptation to pull it
00:18:36.060
into that sort of, you know, I mean, Satan is not just the adversary.
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And when we all take the form of the accuser, we are evacuating our, our personal given identity.
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We are burying our spiritual treasure and we are becoming collaborators in a dehumanizing
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So, you know, let's, let's not do that and let's find the opportunity, you know, if that
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girl can go out and find a stranger's grave and clean it.
00:19:02.740
Maybe it's like two ASMR and maybe she sounds like she's a voiceover that was programmed
00:19:07.660
by someone in China, but you know, gosh, I mean, maybe we can go out and find a person
00:19:13.620
in real life and have an encounter with them that leaves us both better off and puts that
00:19:22.820
One of my favorite, or I should say, one of my pet peeves is the term LARP.
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Whenever someone is trying to better their lives, they're trying to reconnect to a tradition.
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The thing that I've seen thrown most often at them is, oh, you're LARPing.
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You don't, you don't really have any connection to this.
00:19:48.240
And I just look around, you know, I am myself 40 years old.
00:19:53.260
So I'm sitting right in that between, you know, I'm on the edge of the millennial closer
00:19:57.940
to Gen X, but, but at the start of the millennial bracket.
00:20:04.780
And, and so many of the people that I know in my life are in this situation where they
00:20:11.460
got to midlife and they didn't connect the way they were supposed to.
00:20:21.580
My, my parents were devoted Christians from the beginning.
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And I always knew that, you know, Christianity was the way forward.
00:20:30.820
But this, I, but I am the exception among most of my friends.
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Many people don't believe, or they don't know how to believe they're showing up to a
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They're trying to connect to the past, their history.
00:20:51.900
And I think the worst thing in the world, the thing I hate the most is really watching
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people who are taking that step, trying for the first time to really put themselves out
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there and connect in a meaningful way, a spiritual way.
00:21:04.620
And then all of a sudden they have to hear all this.
00:21:14.020
This is just the worst thing I see from people over and over again, especially of course,
00:21:17.860
online where everyone wants to remind you that you can't possibly escape from, you know,
00:21:25.640
There's no way that you could actually connect to something real.
00:21:28.940
Well, look, I mean, it's, it's, it's of course, very easy to surface the, the, the most foolish
00:21:36.060
looking individuals in the world running around in some, you know, even more foolish costume,
00:21:41.760
acting as if what they were doing was invested with some great spiritual significance that
00:21:49.260
It's easy to do that in the same way that it's easy for the local news to put the murder and
00:21:54.460
the car crash and the car chase and the whatever, the break in on the local news every night.
00:22:04.380
As a result, I think a lot of people, when they think about LARPing, they think about
00:22:11.900
People out there acting, running around, wearing the costumes, doing whatever.
00:22:15.680
When in reality, you know, the thing that matters even more than that is the LARP in our hearts.
00:22:22.440
You know, like if you are BSing yourself in your heart about who you really are and what
00:22:30.380
it is that you should really be doing, like that is where the rubber hits the road.
00:22:34.640
But in that, you know, in that secret place in your heart, the, the only judge of whether
00:22:44.880
And, you know, that's not even the internet allows us to penetrate into the secret depths
00:22:52.520
And were it to try to become that, that would, you know, that's a story for another day, but
00:23:00.140
that would, I think that would be a, a terrible, terrible affront to God himself and definitely
00:23:09.000
So, gosh, you know, I mean, yeah, there's, there's LARPing out there.
00:23:12.660
It's always easy to, to pick on the biggest fools in town.
00:23:15.560
Um, but, uh, something that requires a little bit more, uh, spiritual discipline and strength
00:23:21.600
and courage and honesty is to confront the fool within.
00:23:27.200
Um, and, uh, it, it, you know, it might even turn out that the fool within is not quite who
00:23:35.000
So, uh, you know, internet wants us to turn outward, wants us to look at appearances.
00:23:39.400
Um, uh, but if we do that at the expense of, uh, of looking inward, then we're, we're really
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00:24:17.120
One of the things that I think is most challenging for people who are trying to make that kind
00:24:22.860
of more organic connection right now, something real in the real world is that those connections
00:24:30.680
And we live in a world that seems to be waging a war on the particular.
00:24:35.920
Specifically in the digital realm, everything is connected.
00:24:42.340
Everything is, uh, breaking down those barriers that would really define a specific connection.
00:24:49.060
Uh, and I think that is a huge problem for people because they don't know where to begin,
00:24:55.100
Like you can choose from any faith, you can choose from any music, you can choose from
00:25:00.980
You can immerse yourself and live in a simulation of any real, really period of pop culture in
00:25:07.820
And it becomes, it feels harder and harder to plug into something that is more grounded
00:25:16.800
Is, is that just a, a casualty of the digital age?
00:25:22.740
Or is it only something that can kind of de-territorialize those, uh, more sacred things?
00:25:28.660
It seems so new, it seems so novel to be presented with this, you know, infinite sushi restaurant
00:25:36.600
parasol of morsels to choose from, um, and to, you know, try to eat them all if you want.
00:25:48.780
Um, that temptation to believe that the simulation of the thing is better than nothing, that has
00:26:00.700
Uh, you can go all the way back to the garden of Eden with that, and you can go to like,
00:26:05.860
you know, Milton and you can go look at, it's better to reign in hell than to serve in paradise.
00:26:13.380
Um, once you are kicked out of paradise, uh, due to your own fault, um, that temptation
00:26:21.060
is extremely strong to like, well, if I can't have the real thing, then gosh, darn it, we're
00:26:28.000
And we're going to make it so good that we forget that we are responsible for not having
00:26:34.480
That is not something that digital technology created.
00:26:39.080
It's not the fault of digital technology, that this is something that human beings keep
00:26:43.800
returning to time and again, and do whatever they can to try to create that substitute.
00:26:50.020
Um, it's just that the substitute on offer is, uh, is a shiny new object, uh, relative to,
00:26:56.940
you know, TV or cinema or radio or the book or the alphabet or whatever, you know, these
00:27:05.220
The temptation is always there and this is, you just seeing the fall play out every minute
00:27:12.400
of every day in every era that human beings have ever lived in.
00:27:17.320
Um, and so for all of the, um, you know, for, for all the commonsensical hesitation that people
00:27:25.200
feel when they really come face to face with the intensity of the, uh, promises that technology
00:27:34.600
is being used to make about, no, no, really, this is it guys.
00:27:38.800
Like, this is the one, like this time we are going to create the fake paradise and we are
00:27:43.600
going to forget that you, we are, you kicked out of paradise because of our own, you know,
00:27:50.440
Um, when people realize that, uh, they have different, um, different reactions.
00:27:58.160
And some of those reactions are, uh, are, are akin to the, the famous scene in the matrix
00:28:04.460
where I'm going to eat the juicy sizzling steak, even though I know that it's not a real
00:28:08.580
juicy sizzling steak because you know, what's the alternative?
00:28:11.560
Um, the, the quip that I have started going back to, to try to help people at a glance,
00:28:18.360
get an understanding of like what this regime is, um, is from, uh, from Ghostbusters, uh,
00:28:26.720
where the big bad appears at the end and says, choose the form of your destroyer.
00:28:34.720
You know, there are infinite ways of, of destroying yourself or offering yourself up, uh, as a blood
00:28:42.440
Um, and as long as, you know, if people just kind of kept that in mind when they approached,
00:28:48.360
uh, things online, um, I think it would help probably give them a little bit more of the,
00:28:56.700
the perspective, uh, that oftentimes the algorithm does not bump up to the top of their own speed.
00:29:05.160
So one of the things that I think a lot of people are looking for when they're looking
00:29:12.680
That's what people seem to be missing more than anything else.
00:29:15.760
It's the lives that we live are ones where we at least can make excuses for leaving our
00:29:22.180
homes, leaving our families, never starting ones of our own, never plugging into faith.
00:29:26.460
And suddenly you realize you're in the scenario where you don't have anyone around you who shares
00:29:33.140
your values, shares your, your worldview, who you want to do life with.
00:29:37.300
And people start to recognize that probably, you know, the, the most important thing may
00:29:41.800
not be chasing that paycheck or that degree, or, you know, that, uh, that hedonistic experience,
00:29:47.940
but there might be something to the fact that most people tended to live in these closer tight
00:29:55.720
And one of the trends I've really seen, and this is probably the most encouraging trend
00:30:00.740
is a lot of people who, you know, they live in areas where no one around them shares their
00:30:05.880
They recognize the difficulty of this, the problems with this, and they're trying to
00:30:12.480
And the only place they can do it is the internet for many of them, because they're so separated
00:30:16.920
geographically from anyone else who shares say a particularly right wing or traditional or
00:30:21.960
Christian rule review, whichever one of these they might be focusing on.
00:30:26.380
And so what has been happening is a lot of people are moving towards creating intentional
00:30:31.000
communities, trying to organize with other people online to create spaces where they can
00:30:38.100
move to and share those communities, share those values.
00:30:41.540
In one sense, this seems a very positive usage, right?
00:30:44.740
You're taking something that was purely digital, purely a simulation online, a community that was,
00:30:49.480
that was entirely artificial, and you're grounding it in real life, you're going to actually live
00:30:54.700
together, you're going to actually create a community, you're going to try to bind people
00:31:02.440
In the same way, most of these communities that originally existed were ones of, in many ways,
00:31:08.480
geographical convenience, their way of being was defined by the fact that their generations,
00:31:14.120
their, you know, their heritage, they grew up together, they formed this tradition
00:31:21.600
It wasn't, it wasn't a, you know, they didn't pick from the sushi buffet, as you're talking
00:31:25.920
about, to create an internet ideology or a way of life that they all wanted to share, and
00:31:32.420
They were in a community, and they found each other in a situation where they needed to cooperate,
00:31:38.020
they needed to communicate, they needed to share certain resources and experiences.
00:31:42.360
And so things like language and religion became the substrate from which the community arose.
00:31:48.840
What do you think about these intentional communities?
00:31:53.880
Are they missing something because they did not emerge from this more organic organization?
00:31:59.840
One way of looking at this is, it doesn't matter if you have community, it doesn't matter if
00:32:07.840
you have friends, it doesn't matter if you have extended family, if you are failing to wage
00:32:17.360
the spiritual war inside of yourself, if you are not doing the ascetic labors required to draw closer
00:32:30.880
Small towns are not going to save you, you know, like all you have to do is like read those early
00:32:36.960
And yeah, the guy definitely not, not a Christian, but definitely right that like the village can be
00:32:46.320
Um, it depends on what's going on inside of each person's heart.
00:32:50.240
And so if you find yourself in a position where, you know, unfortunately you go to work and you
00:32:55.280
come home and you're in your neighborhood or you're in your micro apartment or whatever,
00:32:58.960
and there just doesn't seem to be anyone around you who helps you to wage that spiritual battle
00:33:07.360
in your heart, uh, rather than making it harder for you to do that.
00:33:12.240
Pick up the phone and find some folks who can maybe help you out a little bit.
00:33:15.840
Give you a little encouragement, share some, you know, some memes of saints quotes or what,
00:33:20.560
like it's clear, like one is going to be more helpful than the other.
00:33:26.560
Um, but again, you know, this is like, if you find yourself in the wilderness and you have
00:33:32.960
no food or no water, you know, what you eat and what you drink are probably not going to be
00:33:37.280
ideal and they're not going to be a proper substitute for the, for proper nutrition.
00:33:42.400
But yes, you know, try the berries, like eat the fungus, like see if you can make it to the next day.
00:33:49.760
Um, so there's a role there and, uh, in that I I've seen it work.
00:33:56.160
There are definitely people and definitely situations where having that lifeline to those
00:34:01.920
people who you can confide in people who are helping you, not hurting you in your spiritual life
00:34:07.200
are on the internet and they're getting harder to find in real life.
00:34:10.400
I don't think it's that controversial to observe that, but at the same time,
00:34:13.920
we have to acknowledge like there are costs to more and more people leaning that way,
00:34:18.560
rather than, uh, doing, you know, the, the even more difficult work of, uh, of, of making that happen
00:34:25.040
in real life, in their own neighborhood, turning your back on your neighbor
00:34:29.280
is not going to be the path to, uh, to spiritual wellness.
00:34:35.680
You know, if I can put it that way, um, it's if enough people do that, and I think you're already
00:34:40.800
starting to see this, not just in the big cities, but in rural communities too, where it's like the,
00:34:46.480
the, the civic core of, uh, of the neighborhood is disintegrating because people are saying, well,
00:34:54.400
you know, there's this magic box right here and inside the magic box is, uh, you know,
00:35:00.560
I don't know, a hundred thousand, a million, 10 million people who are just clapping and nodding
00:35:07.360
along to everything I'm saying as if I was Stephen Colbert and they were my live studio audience.
00:35:12.000
Like they can't get enough of me because I'm just like them. So maybe a little bit better.
00:35:16.960
Um, that's, that is extremely damaging to the fundamental structures of real life,
00:35:22.240
not just the family. Although you go to Alexis de Tocqueville and what was he worried about?
00:35:25.840
He was worried about, uh, uh, a, an onrushing future in which people would become so isolated
00:35:32.400
and so, um, interchangeable and insignificant in their own experience that they would retreat even
00:35:38.160
inside the family into their own little rooms and just kind of be stuck in their own headspace.
00:35:43.200
And, uh, and that's definitely happening and it's happening in ways that Tocqueville, uh,
00:35:48.480
understood were a problem for us, but it's also happening in, you know, clearly much more
00:35:52.880
exaggerated and intense ways that he didn't see kind. So you've mentioned a few times that really
00:35:59.360
we can adjust kind of these outside factors and they may or may not have different advantages.
00:36:04.000
It might be, you know, you build those support systems. Yes. Those kinds of things. But you mentioned
00:36:09.680
repeatedly that really it's the internal struggle. Ultimately it's the, the decision to
00:36:15.120
be searching for God or, or, or to be, you know, do, doing that work internally that,
00:36:20.400
that is going to matter most. Like I said, for a lot of people watching this, that's going to sound
00:36:26.240
nice, but incredibly foreign. And they're going to have no way, you know, to, to figure out how to
00:36:33.120
take that first step. So if you're speaking to someone who's just completely disconnected from any
00:36:39.040
spiritual condition, uh, tradition just doesn't know, you know, has heard about, you know, uh,
00:36:44.240
Christianity at some point, that kind of thing. Uh, but, but really is just not familiar with what
00:36:49.520
it would mean to reconnect to that. What, what would you say would be the best way for them to begin,
00:36:56.080
uh, you know, uh, some, some, some attempt at an earnest journey towards, uh, you know, faith.
00:37:02.720
Yeah. I mean, you know, I, honestly, I don't, I don't think it is that foreign to people deep down.
00:37:08.800
I think people are very well acquainted with their, their darkness, very well acquainted with their
00:37:14.720
demons, uh, uh, whether, you know, uh, uh, literally or, or, uh, as, as shorthand or their,
00:37:23.200
their sins, their, uh, the, the, the passions and the desires that, um, are, are dragging them down
00:37:31.120
in life. I think everyone has a pretty, you know, pretty honest, it's, it's hard to ignore those things,
00:37:38.400
to pretend they're not there to rebrand them as, uh, actually the, the most fabulous things about
00:37:45.040
you, which, you know, there's a relentless propaganda campaign in the society to rebrand
00:37:50.480
the desires and passions that bring you down in your life as superpowers. And it's disgusting
00:37:55.440
and it's out there, but people know they really know better. And if you want to begin that aesthetic
00:38:00.320
spiritual struggle, it's not some abstract thing. You don't have to go find a monastery. Although if you
00:38:04.800
want to, you want to go visit a monastery, please do. I think you'll get a window into a whole nother
00:38:11.200
way of understanding how to make it through this life. Um, but you can start right wherever you are
00:38:16.720
right now, you know, unless you're like, uh, driving a fire truck or something, you can probably sit down
00:38:22.960
and be quiet and arrive pretty quickly at a recognition of what it is in your life that you're
00:38:31.040
doing to yourself. That is hurting you spiritually and probably also physically that is bringing you
00:38:37.200
down. That is making you, uh, hate yourself or feel depressed about yourself. Um, it can be something
00:38:45.520
big and horrendous. Like, uh, you know, those 10 people I killed, like still bothers me. Right. Or it
00:38:51.280
can be something relatively trivial. Like, Oh, you know, I've, I see that I've gone from a bottle of
00:38:57.280
wine a night to a bottle and a half of wine tonight. Like, it doesn't make me feel great
00:39:01.600
about myself. Well, what do you do? Do you, do you try to like stop cold Turkey, you know, porn,
00:39:07.200
whatever it is, uh, you, you can try sure. But oftentimes what happens, and this is, you know,
00:39:12.720
you have centuries of, of, uh, testimony of, of saints saying like, don't try to take it all on at
00:39:19.120
once. This is pride. You will fail. And then you will think that you deserve condemnation,
00:39:24.000
that you deserve to be abandoned by God. And maybe that is what you deserve, but this is a
00:39:30.000
God of infinite love. Who's ready to forgive you. If you are ready to even start trying to
00:39:34.080
turn the ship in the other direction. So take that small step. You know, if you're tired of
00:39:39.200
drinking a bottle and half of wine a night, take it down to a bottle and a quarter today, right?
00:39:45.040
Take it down to a bottle by the end of the week. It's kind of like going to the gym. You know,
00:39:49.680
you go to the gym, you're not satisfied with your progress. You're not going to just add two
00:39:53.440
more plates and fail and want to kill yourself. You know, you got to be patient. You have to be
00:39:59.280
patient and you have to have the discipline to trust that it's big things happen from small beginnings.
00:40:05.440
And that, that advancement is cumulative. And if you try to rush it, if you try to shortcut it,
00:40:12.080
if you try to do substitutes instead of supplements, you are going to, uh, you're going to hurt yourself
00:40:17.840
even more. Um, so I think people actually know this and they just feel in their hearts. Well,
00:40:23.600
well, you know, I would do it this way, but I can't, but I'm too crazy, but I'm too much a victim
00:40:27.840
of injustice, but I don't have enough money. There's always, there's always a, but, and that's part of
00:40:34.080
what everyone goes through. So, you know, uh, taking on that, that spiritual journey is,
00:40:40.000
is hard to do when you are entirely on your own. And that's why people who went into the desert,
00:40:48.640
um, you know, a thousand plus years ago to try to take on that spiritual struggle alone. That is why
00:40:56.080
we still know their names and we still talk about them. Uh, it's, um, this has always been with us.
00:41:01.760
And, uh, and I think, you know, if you have a little bit of extend, a little bit of mercy to people and a
00:41:07.680
little bit of understanding and meet them where they're at spiritually, you will discover that,
00:41:12.160
um, that these things are not so foreign to them and that they do have this awareness in their
00:41:15.840
hearts and they're just trying to figure out how to begin. You mentioned earlier that technology
00:41:22.480
didn't create this problem, that the, the, the desire for the simulation as to nothing is, is not a,
00:41:28.160
a new thing, but I do think there is, uh, the question of technology and whether the medium itself
00:41:35.280
or the technology itself can have an overall positive or negative impact. There's a lot of
00:41:41.920
people who think that you basically need to abandon all of this, just, you know, uncle Ted, your way,
00:41:46.560
uh, you know, out of this problem, there are some people who say there's simply no avoiding the
00:41:52.640
technology and it's only going to become more and more part of our lives. So you might as well embrace
00:41:59.440
that, uh, and, and find the best way forward with it. I understand that the, you know, part of the
00:42:04.960
answer is just going to be, well, the answer is going to be different for everybody. I understand
00:42:08.960
that. But in general, do you feel like there's a technological avoidance that's necessary to
00:42:14.800
reconnect with the reality? Do you think that there's just inescapable and you need to find a way
00:42:19.760
to manage it as you move forward together? Do you think it can actually be a positive tool for
00:42:23.760
reconnecting these things? Is there an overall understanding of the role that technology could
00:42:28.800
play in the health, the spiritual health of people? Well, I don't think there's any question that
00:42:34.720
this particular technological system that we are constructing and being onboarded into oftentimes
00:42:44.400
without any say over exactly how that goes on. Um, that the power of this technology is to kind of
00:42:51.840
combine the power of all previous technologies, uh, into a force that has, um,
00:43:03.840
exponentially increased, uh, powers of, uh, of, of escape, I guess you could say like, you know,
00:43:15.280
want to run away from God, this rocket ship will blast you off there. Want to run away from your fellow
00:43:20.400
man, like step right through this portal, want to run away from your memories right this way, folks.
00:43:26.960
You know, you don't, it's admission is free. Like this is different from what has come before.
00:43:33.040
It's not totally different. You know, we've got to remember like the guy at the, uh, at the screening
00:43:38.640
of, uh, of 2001 who ran down the middle of the aisle screaming, I see God and like smashed through the,
00:43:45.840
the screen. I mean, you know, these, uh, these, these feelings have been with us for a long time,
00:43:51.600
but, but there is something about digital technology that is especially disincarnate and especially
00:43:57.360
tempting and especially deceiving. Uh, you just go back to the Turing test, the insanity of the Turing
00:44:05.520
test. Oh, like we can, we can tell whether a computer is, uh, as, as smart as a human being,
00:44:13.360
if it tricks a human being into thinking that it's as smart as a human, like this doesn't,
00:44:19.040
you know, this I, I'm mangling it a little bit, but for dramatic effect, you know, like
00:44:22.880
we really need to like remember, um, that, uh, that, that, that the smartest people are as capable
00:44:30.480
of being deluded as the dumbest people. And in some cases in even more, more important and,
00:44:37.280
and dangerous things than, than the dumb people can be deleted. Uh, that's all out there. So, uh,
00:44:43.040
yeah, you know, I, I think there, there is, there are some unique and special things
00:44:47.360
about digital technology that, that ought to make us exercise heightened discernment. But
00:44:52.960
you look at Ted Kaczynski and, you know, this is an example of this, this longing for escape. I mean,
00:44:57.440
you know, you want to go live in the woods, have some quiet time, like, okay, you know, all right.
00:45:01.520
Uh, but what do you really, why in service of what, um, if you want to prevent, uh, the technological
00:45:10.080
apparatus from taking over the world, um, does it really make sense to move into the woods and start
00:45:16.000
building technological apparati that you then like mail to people for the purpose of killing them?
00:45:20.880
Like that seems maybe not, not to be logically consistent. Um, but, but uncle Ted, you know,
00:45:27.360
Ted Kaczynski wasn't just trying to escape, uh, the technological apparatus. Um, seems to me,
00:45:33.440
he was also trying to escape God and he was trying to escape his fellow man. And, uh, if, if you're,
00:45:38.880
you know, if you're really trying to escape the world and escape your fellow man, um, you would better
00:45:45.680
be doing that in service of trying to really, uh, approach God in a, in a serious and humble way.
00:45:54.160
Uh, because if that's not part of it, then, um, then what are you, what are you doing really?
00:45:58.720
You know, then your motives are suspect. And, uh, and I think, you know, a lot of Americans really
00:46:03.520
like the idea of escape and they like the idea that like, well, you know, worst comes to worst.
00:46:07.840
I can just kind of hit the road and be gone. And it's getting harder to do that. It's getting harder
00:46:14.240
to do that. Uh, just geographically in, in the, in the country we live in, as it's filling up with
00:46:21.120
large numbers of people who are legally speaking, not supposed to be present in this country.
00:46:26.080
Um, it's also getting hard to do conceptually and spiritually. Uh, and the internet is, is part of
00:46:32.560
this project that has formed to fill up the world and to fill up a, a clone of the world, uh, so that we can
00:46:43.040
all move over there and really, really escape God this time once and for all and escape creation with
00:46:49.360
it and escape all the limits, uh, of our, of our given human form and escape, uh, the, the humility
00:46:58.400
and the patience and the discipline that is required to actually achieve divinity instead of this, uh,
00:47:04.320
uh, off the shelf version, which, you know, people, it looks good. It sounds good. You get in the box and
00:47:12.400
then you realize that, uh, that it's not what it seemed. Uh, you know, if you want to watch something
00:47:18.400
that dramatizes this, you can watch like Hellraiser where, uh, where the, you know, the sort of demonic
00:47:24.480
guy from another dimension who looks like, uh, you know, he, he's earned a stripe on the, on the pride
00:47:30.640
flag all his own says, uh, the box you opened it, we came. I mean, this is, you know, this is, uh,
00:47:36.800
this is ancient stuff that we are confronting, uh, with, with new force, uh, not for the first time,
00:47:42.320
but in a distinctive way. And, uh, and I think, you know, we, we must always interrogate ourselves as
00:47:48.480
to whether we are trying in our lives with, uh, our, our eyes glued to screens or not, whether we
00:47:54.000
are trying to, uh, to escape or avoid, uh, God's presence in our life. Yeah. That makes me think
00:48:00.240
about Oswald Spangler. Of course, he refers to Western man as Faustian, which, you know, has obviously
00:48:06.080
the very important connotations. And one of the, uh, one of the traits of Faustian man that he points
00:48:12.000
out is the need for infinite space to the point where he says, you know, once Faustian man has conquered
00:48:17.280
all of this open space, he will create new spaces. And you can think of, you know, for conquest,
00:48:22.640
but also for escape, as you say, you know, the conquest is one way to understand it, but another
00:48:27.120
way is getting as far away as possible in all of these situations from where you were. And, you know,
00:48:33.040
while the digital realm has created what seems like infinite space, you can lose yourself forever
00:48:39.840
in social media and video games and the infinite worlds for you to conquer infinite places for you to
00:48:45.040
run to, uh, infinite simulations of important experiences for you to have. Ultimately, we,
00:48:51.920
we eventually do come back to this spiritual emptiness that, that we can't truly ever really
00:48:58.720
avoid. And it does feel like in many ways, while the technological realm has created this infinite space,
00:49:07.280
we are coming to the consequences of that in a very real way. We are feeling the edges of that.
00:49:13.360
The space might go on forever, but can we survive moving through it? You know, and I think that's
00:49:19.120
really something that a lot of people are feeling right now. They thought that that escape would be
00:49:24.160
available to them forever, but once they hit a certain point of life, or once they get to a
00:49:29.040
certain point where the meeting is so abstract and they no longer feel any connection, they recognize
00:49:34.160
that actually there is a time is running out. Space is running out. There is only so far you can go.
00:49:39.520
There's only so much escaping you can go or you can do. And especially as the consequences of in the
00:49:46.320
real world of, I think, uh, you know, uh, competency collapsing and law and order collapsing and these
00:49:53.360
other things that hold that artificial world aloft falling apart under it as more of the more and more
00:49:59.600
of that base erodes, uh, people come into contact with their reality in very harsh ways and recognize that
00:50:06.960
they do have to find a way back to something real. Yeah, I think that's right. Uh, you know,
00:50:11.840
there's, uh, there's this guy, Nick land who you're, you're probably familiar with and maybe,
00:50:16.000
maybe some others aren't, maybe that's a good thing. You know, it's for another day. Uh, but the first
00:50:21.840
thing that I ever read from Nick land and, uh, and I will out myself and say that it was the first and
00:50:26.640
the last thing that I read from Nick land because I felt like it was, it was all that I needed to sort of
00:50:32.320
take and run with. Um, and that was an essay called the lure of the void. And, uh, I won't
00:50:39.280
spoil it for those, uh, those watching at home who want to know what's in the box. Um, but, uh, I think
00:50:46.880
the lure of the void is real. Um, and I think what's so dangerous about it is there is no void. There is
00:50:53.280
no place where there's nothing in this created universe in all of creation. Um, and when you talk
00:51:00.400
about Faustian man and the desire to just stay one step ahead of your own creator by, uh, by
00:51:10.080
frantically and ingeniously filling up more space, uh, you do get to a point where you're like,
00:51:16.640
well, we need more space. How do we create more space? Uh, okay. Well, we created cyberspace. Nice.
00:51:22.480
Now there's a new thing for us to fill up and then we fill up cyberspace and then, uh, what do we do?
00:51:27.680
Well, I guess we need to get off planet and we need to go, you know, I, this is, uh, uh,
00:51:32.560
maybe a, a less arcane reference is the film interstellar. And, uh, you know, the big joke for
00:51:37.920
me about, about interstellar is like men will literally fly into a black hole instead of going
00:51:43.440
to church. That is my take on interstellar, but this is Faustian man, right? Faustian man ultimately
00:51:49.200
finds himself in a position of, uh, needing nothing in order to sort of like, okay, you know, we, we
00:51:56.640
raped nature, we raped man, we raped, uh, the planet, we raped everything that we could so that we could
00:52:03.680
conceive this new stuff. And so now the only place that we have left to rape is the void. So we got
00:52:09.520
to go out there and find the void and maybe we'll be sort of, maybe the black hole will destroy us,
00:52:15.600
but it's a risk worth taking because we need to create more stuff. And the only way that
00:52:20.720
we can create more stuff is by forcibly reaching into the void and creating something out of nothing
00:52:27.120
that ain't going to happen because there is no, nothing in our created cosmos.
00:52:33.840
All right, guys, I think we're going to head over to the questions of the people, but before we do,
00:52:38.960
James, where can people find all of your great work?
00:52:41.360
Uh, assuming that it's all great. Uh, I mean, where can they find the bad work? Tell them that
00:52:48.640
first. Then that's a story for another day. For sure. Uh, I'm on x.com at James Polis. I am also, uh,
00:52:58.560
on YouTube and at blaze TV. The show is zero hour. Uh, gotta get you on there at some point soon.
00:53:05.040
Um, scattered across the internet. Uh, also, uh, in, uh, in, uh, blazes tech vertical return,
00:53:12.960
uh, where you can see my, my various scribblings. Um, one of my leaving out, uh, there's lots of stuff,
00:53:19.600
uh, maybe too much stuff. So, uh, so, uh, read with, uh, discernment folks.
00:53:25.680
I think that's a good start. All right, guys, let's head over to your questions. Tiny stupid demon says,
00:53:31.840
greetings from Aurora, uh, Aurora, Colorado, really, uh, where you call an, uh, where,
00:53:37.280
what you call a narco tyranny, we refer to as co-governing with our new Venezuelan friends.
00:53:42.240
Yeah, man, I've seen, uh, I've seen that video on Twitter. Uh, stay safe. Uh, look, looks bad. Um,
00:53:52.560
I'm sorry. This is the land of wolves now. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Excuse me. All right,
00:53:59.120
let's see. Um, Michael Robertson says, clean your grave, bucko. Well, well done. Nice. Well done.
00:54:06.080
Uh, let's see here. Uh, John Morton says it's possible to LARP it till you live it. Uh, if some,
00:54:14.080
if some stopped drinking and went to church every week, would it matter if they didn't believe
00:54:19.440
in God? Well, and I think more importantly, once you start to take those actions, you find yourself
00:54:26.400
believing more and more, you know, CS Lewis had the, I'll butcher the, the quote real quick as,
00:54:31.520
you know, I find myself, or, you know, I'm told to love my neighbor. I don't love my neighbor.
00:54:37.440
I act as if I love my neighbor. And sooner or later, magically I find myself loving my neighbor.
00:54:43.600
And that doesn't sound real until you've lived those experiences and you recognize that's exactly how
00:54:49.040
life actually works. It's, it's very rarely an intellectual decision you make right on the spot
00:54:54.560
and is much more often a, a way of being a pattern of behavior that leads you closer, uh, to the
00:55:00.320
things that are, are true and real. Um, but one of the great lines from Hamlet where he's, uh, he's
00:55:06.480
chewing on his mom for, uh, sleeping with his, uh, you know, his father's evil brother. He's like, look,
00:55:12.560
you know, just, just start not doing it because you know, like habit can change the stamp of nature.
00:55:19.040
John also follows up with, plus you might not believe in God, but if you bring your children up in the
00:55:22.960
faith, then they will at least, uh, have healthy values. Yeah. And, and again, you know, that by
00:55:29.760
simply sharing that experience with your children, by making that something that your family does
00:55:34.560
together, by being, having that be something that binds you together, you are much more likely to grow
00:55:40.720
in that direction. And I have so many friends, um, who, who really are in this position who say,
00:55:46.960
I don't believe, and I'm not sure how to believe, but I want my kids to believe. I want the next
00:55:52.320
generation to, to know this joy, to know this piece, to know, uh, that, that this is something
00:55:57.760
that they started young. And so I, I think it is available to you, but if you're bringing your
00:56:02.560
children to it and that's your motivation, well, that that's a great motivation, man.
00:56:06.400
So I, I thoroughly encourage that. And it is also a token of belief in its own right.
00:56:12.480
Very much. That's very true. Just having, having, being willing to sacrifice that time,
00:56:17.120
make that time, invest that is itself a, a statement of, of belief on some level.
00:56:22.640
And then, uh, Darth Novikov, sorry if I pronounced that incorrectly, uh, two of my favorite prophetic
00:56:28.240
voices. Thank you for the conversation. I feel a sense of loss for my children who are growing up
00:56:32.960
in a world so foreign to what I remember. Any words of encouragement? What do you got, James?
00:56:39.520
Uh, help them remember, teach them what was, uh, things, all things come and go, uh, um, on this
00:56:49.520
earth. And, uh, and we do have to, you know, every, every single day we got to get out there and, uh,
00:56:56.320
and do our part to keep, uh, to keep things from, um, from passing away and for, for being lost to
00:57:03.440
memory. So, uh, it's always, you know, it's always work that needs to be done. I think that's the
00:57:08.400
constellation. Yeah. If you want the flame kept, you've got to keep it. You can't, you can't sit
00:57:12.480
around waiting for someone else. You can't, uh, lament, uh, that the whole culture is no longer
00:57:17.200
behind you. Uh, there are, there are many religious traditions, many communities, uh, that have survived
00:57:24.560
much worse, uh, and, and have managed to battle through all of these things because they were
00:57:29.840
dedicated to who they are and what they believed in and what they stood for. And they were willing to
00:57:35.200
pass that down to their children and defend that, uh, you know, uh, with their sacred honors.
00:57:40.160
And I think ultimately that that's really what you have to remember is, uh, you know, you can't,
00:57:44.560
you can do that. You, but it's, it's gotta be about, you know, you taking that action. It's,
00:57:48.800
you can't just lament the fact that the rest of the culture is not doing that for you.
00:57:53.040
All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap, wrap this up and make sure you are following
00:57:56.720
James that you're watching his show. He does great work. If it's your first time on this YouTube
00:58:01.200
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00:58:10.000
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00:58:14.880
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00:58:18.960
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00:58:22.320
Thank you everybody for watching. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.