James Poulos is an author, a key member of the Claremont Institute, and the host of Zero Hour on the Blaze. In this episode, we discuss the recent executive order from the Biden administration that calls for the development of artificial intelligence.
00:00:33.380I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:37.600So I think a lot of people understand that the competition between state actors,
00:00:42.580whether it comes to between different countries or the culture war inside of the United States,
00:00:48.480that technology is a huge aspect of what's going on.
00:00:51.660And of course, artificial intelligence is a huge buzzword,
00:00:54.820a huge talking point of people who are looking at what's going to shape the future here.
00:00:59.460Now, the White House went ahead and issued an executive order recently.
00:01:03.660The Biden administration told us that they need to go ahead and tame artificial intelligence,
00:01:07.920that they need to train it to obey the DEI and CRT requirements of the progressive religion.
00:01:14.420And I wanted to go ahead and bring somebody who thinks a lot about artificial intelligence and other technological matters in to talk about this.
00:01:21.240He's an author, he's a key member of the Claremont Institute, and he is, of course, the host of Zero Hour on the Blaze.
00:01:28.460James Poulos, thanks for coming on, man.
00:05:48.420Sometimes we're throwing around concepts that people don't immediately understand.
00:05:52.260But I kind of had to learn on the job and write my way through it.
00:05:54.980You know, some people tweet their way through it if they're experiencing some kind of PR crisis.
00:05:58.940I had to kind of write my way through it and learn in real time.
00:06:02.400And so by the time 2020 rolled around, people started to kind of realize that things that I was talking about somewhat cryptically a few years ago
00:09:11.600You know, it's sort of Kubrick, Spielberg film of that name, artificial intelligence, AI, back also in ancient history in the primordial era.
00:09:23.720These things are automated simulators.
00:09:31.120You can go back to Jean Baudrillard or other social theorists who saw a lot of this coming.
00:09:38.880You know, 1987, Baudrillard, the ecstasy of communication.
00:09:42.720Great slim little volume if you want a taste of what the folks who saw this coming saw so relatively early in the game.
00:09:50.400There were others, you know, we can we can run through the list maybe maybe in a minute.
00:09:56.360But whether it's a film like Videodrome or, you know, Clive Barker writing about the Cenobites from the Hellraiser universe, like there was Annoyeners building in the building in the 80s, continuing into the 90s.
00:10:08.700Obviously, The Matrix and other films, Dark City, sort of bringing this thing into into the mainstream as it grew and developed.
00:10:17.000And it's not that technological development is inherently bad.
00:10:20.400But what is inherently bad is is giving into the temptation to retreat from reality and to try to substitute in a simulation for the given world in which we live and our given selves and and our given relationships.
00:10:41.460Trying to simulate everything is a powerful temptation, not just for ordinary people, but for especially for smart people.
00:10:48.880And this is, I think, one of the key points that we need to sort of recognize is at the heart of what's going on here.
00:10:55.040Smart people like to think that if they just have enough power, if they build the right kind of tools, if those tools heighten their intelligence, that intelligence is really capable of solving any problem.
00:11:05.640If it's not working, you just need more of it.
00:11:07.620And what you're hearing out of some of the smartest people right now is, well, if the technology isn't working, that just means that we need more of it.
00:11:14.520I think Bill Clinton back in the day saying there's nothing wrong with America that can't be solved by what's right with America.
00:11:19.960And this kind of attitude toward technology is just kind of the latest version of a longstanding view about intelligence, which is the same.
00:11:28.920The smarter you get, the better off you'll be.
00:11:31.400Smart people, however, obviously very blind to the fact that, no, intelligent people can be very easily deceived.
00:11:38.580When intelligent people make mistakes, they tend to be very large mistakes.
00:11:43.160And there's a price to be paid, not just if you're the smart person making mistakes or being deceived, but all those who are affected by the artifice that you've constructed on top of the world we live in.
00:11:54.620So automated simulators, very impressive things.
00:11:58.940They can simulate, you know, perhaps even the human soul.
00:12:01.760Perhaps they can even simulate something like the Holy Spirit.
00:12:26.120And if we do not take seriously the spiritual and theological and religious implications of these machines, of these tools,
00:12:33.120then we will be inclined to say, wow, human beings really suck now.
00:12:36.900And wow, I guess our only hope is to listen to the smartest people tell us that we have to obey the even more intelligent machines that they create.
00:12:46.880That can be a powerful, self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:12:49.180And that would be a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.
00:12:53.440We don't need to get totally blackpilled, but we do need to be spiritually mature and understand what the stakes are here.
00:12:59.560Yeah, really dangerous to be assembling our own hyper-agents or even worse, probably like rediscovering ones that were best left locked away somewhere.
00:13:08.000But we'll dive into that here a little bit later.
00:13:10.880I wanted to focus first on this executive order.
00:13:13.580So, like you said, obviously a lot of intelligent people who think they should be able to run every aspect of humanity really believe in that social engineering is the way forward.
00:13:23.180We can rebuild man and reshape it in our own image.
00:13:25.880Love this kind of stuff because it lets them believe that they can centrally plan every aspect of humanity.
00:13:31.260But what's really interesting about, I guess, this executive order is while in theory AI would allow them to wield this kind of power, allow them to have the kind of the computational power they need to plan everything and alter everything and such, they're already starting out by basically lobotomizing it.
00:13:50.560They're saying, okay, well, yes, we understand that this could possibly accurately model things, but we don't want it to actually accurately model things.
00:13:59.920We want to make sure that there are certain caveats that make sure that realities that might manifest themselves, if we took too hard of a look at statistics and that kind of thing, we need to make sure that those are already cut out.
00:14:11.340And so the executive order specifically mentions having an AI bill of rights and making sure that, again, we don't have this algorithmic discrimination.
00:14:19.960It specifically singles out things like criminal justice, healthcare, housing, as things that might be reflected in these algorithms might be things that will select against certain groups, certain favored groups.
00:14:33.420Do you think that there's any kind of cognitive dissonance, any kind of confusion for these people between saying, well, we have this tool that could allow us to range society because we're so smart, but we also want to make sure it's specifically dumb in a way that will keep it from identifying problems that we don't want people to see?
00:14:52.920Well, yeah, I think this is a case in point of why what we're dealing with is ultimately spiritual, theological, religious, and not just a matter of intelligence or IQ or processing power.
00:15:03.440Yes, from a secular standpoint, it is kind of ironic and concerning to watch people say, well, yes, we need these machines and not just smarter than human beings, but actually dumber than human beings in some, a few important respects that we will determine because we know best when a machine should be smarter than you, but also when it should be dumber than you.
00:15:25.240It doesn't really make sense. It doesn't really make sense. And, you know, I think an understandable but incomplete at best reaction that has bubbled up to the top in the face of things like, you know, wokeness or whatever you want to call it is, wow, this is just crazy.
00:15:41.920This craziness, it's so out of hand. These people are, they've lost their minds. And well, I suppose in a certain sense, but in another sense, they recognize that when you have technology that is this powerful,
00:15:53.700that calls so fundamentally into question who we are as human beings, what our purpose is, what our destiny is, the only kind of response that is going to assert a kind of authority over determining how this technology is developed and how it is used, that authority has to be spiritual authority.
00:16:15.400That authority has to be human beings saying there's something about us, which you might not be able to see, but which we know is real, and which preserves our authority over these tools that we've created.
00:16:28.640And the Wokies understand this on some kind of level. And so from that standpoint, they're not trying to lobotomize the bots as much as they're trying to catechize the bots, as much as they want to ensure that these machines adhere to their religious or theological worldview,
00:16:51.520in the same way that ordinary Americans would probably prefer that if we are automating parts of government, that these entities have fully internalized the Bill of Rights that we already have.
00:17:07.480You look at the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, freedom of expression, freedom of association, right to bear arms and use them.
00:17:14.860These things implicitly protect what we already inherently have, which is a right to access and use fundamental digital technologies in order to protect ourselves, protect our community, and freely constitute our communities.
00:17:39.380Right now, right now, we are going down a path where these people who are offering to us something like an AI Bill of Rights, they don't really want us to have free association.
00:17:50.680And they don't really want us to have access and use of fundamental basic digital technologies without which we cannot be free through those technologies or with them.
00:18:00.320They want to impose on us a top-down social credit, social justice system, and they want to use basic technologies to enforce that system on us.
00:18:13.060You can't have wokeness without a woke supercomputer at the end of the day.
00:18:16.520You need some sort of complex superintelligence in order to decide, okay, well, this person has suffered this number of microaggressions today,
00:18:23.900and they need this degree of, like, micro-justice payment, you know, it's so complex, it's beyond what human beings can do.
00:23:59.280And in the U.S., we're having a cold civil war over which version of religiosity is going to be our touchstone.
00:24:09.400That's that's going to be a big deal. But the point is there are going to be other paths taken by other countries,
00:24:16.320and it's not going to be the U.S. saying we run the show over the entire world and we're going to dictate AI policy around the entire world.
00:24:23.000It's not the way it's going to go down. So in that respect, yeah, we have to be prepared for for AIs to do things and behave in ways that are radically different from however we end up doing so in the U.S.
00:24:37.200At the same time, you know, look, in order for America to be America, we need to take on the risk of protecting American citizens right to keep and bear compute,
00:24:51.740to have that access and and use of those basic technologies.
00:24:56.060I'm talking high power GPUs. I'm talking, you know, certain kinds of AIs.
00:25:01.500I'm talking things like Bitcoin. I like Bitcoin not because you watch the number go up and we all achieve nirvana just without having to lift a finger.
00:25:10.580No, I like Bitcoin for the opposite reason, which is right now the technology is well enough developed that regular ordinary people can use it to build culture,
00:25:19.640to build institutions, algorithmic markets, buying, selling, exchanging goods and services that strengthen our form of government, strengthen our way of life, strengthen our humanity.
00:25:28.480That's why I put my book Human Forever on the website called Canonic.xyz.
00:25:33.560It's on sale in for Bitcoin. It's encrypted right there onto the blockchain.
00:25:39.500Fundamentally different way of doing things. Very powerful way.
00:25:42.060I think that's why regulators and others really want to get their hands on it and nationalize it in the same way that I think ultimately they want to nationalize AI.
00:25:51.140So you got this AI safety conference going on right now in the UK. Why is it there? That's an interesting question.
00:25:57.320I'm interested in, you know, the deeper question of what is human safety with regard to this technology?
00:26:03.760Who can you really trust to exercise proper spiritual discernment with regard to the development of these technologies?
00:26:11.220It's not all about just saying, oh, well, if we purify the law, then we'll live happily ever after.
00:26:16.140That's not America. That's not something that law can do even before super powerful technology enters into the picture.
00:26:23.200But that's where we are and falling prey to that temptation of saying like, well, look, you know, just like Europe is trying to do, we'll just get the regulations right.
00:26:30.400Right. As long as we have the pure and virtuous regulations, the law will rule and humans will be safe.
00:26:38.380Not exactly. We need to look inside. We need to look in our hearts. We need to look in our souls.
00:26:43.460We need to understand how to reestablish spiritual trust in the digital age.
00:26:48.440And if we do that, then, yes, we can have nice things.
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00:27:24.780I guess we can get into it a little bit here.
00:27:27.840Theology, you know, injecting the spiritual into this conversation seems to be a critical part of the future for you.
00:27:34.740So I think one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest disadvantages that the right has is that the left, while it's a it's a mystery cult of power in many ways, it does have some kind of stand in for religion.
00:27:46.360It does have a unifying world vision, no matter how corrupt that might be, that they're moving towards.
00:27:52.840However, the right has this vague notion of just returning back to something.
00:27:58.160They don't even know what Christianity might be somewhat involved in it.
00:28:02.200But even people who talk about Christian nationalism, there's all these warning bells that go off.
00:28:07.900You know, oh, this is this is an attack on the Constitution.
00:28:10.360And so I guess the question is, is this a major disadvantage for the right?
00:28:15.000Because I hear all these people talking about, well, we need to symbol the logos or we have to return to constitutionalism.
00:28:21.180All these really vague, non-particular ideas of binding spirituality that feel like they just have no hope of fighting against what we're doing now.
00:28:29.540What would be something that would unify and bring a coherent kind of front to the opposition to the current regime?
00:28:39.880I mean, you know, look, it's what has unified America in in the recent past war, the the the use of technology to create ever more powerful weapons of war and have that be our source of authority.
00:28:57.260You know, it's it's worked out to our advantage, relatively speaking, until quite recently.
00:29:02.760And I think, you know, hitting that wall, being like, well, wait a minute, like we did create the most technology and we did sort of take over the world.
00:29:10.860And it was going to consummate, turn the world into America and, you know, all sort of live happily ever after.
00:29:18.000That is what people at the elite level who were basically raised by television, formed by that kind of televisual medium that was the most powerful thing on Earth before digital came along.
00:29:28.500They really did think like, hey, you know, we're building these things.
00:29:31.240These things are going to be our friends.
00:29:32.360They're going to work to our advantage.
00:29:39.400We did all those things that, you know, people were taught in grade school before DEI came along and we built the Internet and we we won the Cold War.
00:29:51.000So it only makes sense that these tools are going to allow us to perfect our domination of the world and sort of, you know, terraform a planet Earth until it's all basically America.
00:30:27.240If you're the statesman and you're trying to figure out how to navigate, sometimes you do need to muddle through.
00:30:32.000But muddling through is a lot different of a brand than the brand that says we have established rules for the entire world and their objective rules.
00:30:40.100And you need to follow them or else the missiles are going to rain down on you.
00:30:46.720We've got these radical differences, different civilization states, different approaches to technology, different kinds of spiritual authority.
00:30:52.600And so the U.S. is really in uncharted waters.
00:30:57.640That's especially hard for the right because the right is divided and it has been divided.
00:31:05.400It's been divided on what's the best regime.
00:31:08.500It's been divided on military policy and military adventurism.
00:31:16.680It's been divided on commercial issues, cultural issues, lots of divides.
00:31:21.140And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
00:31:23.020You know, I think people on the right have some justification to pat themselves on the back a little bit for saying, you know, we can sort of discuss things openly and we can debate like basic political considerations.
00:31:38.140You don't want to just sort of enforce mental conformity onto everyone who's aligned with you.
00:31:46.260That takes us back to, you know, why the rule of law seems like a good thing.
00:31:50.120Yeah, you want sort of like predictability and social interactions to some degree.
00:31:55.840And it helps economically if it's not, you know, you wake up in the morning and all the rules have changed.
00:32:00.680Like, obviously, yes, like in that sense, the rule of law is a pretty good thing.
00:32:04.000But when you start worshiping the law, when you start seeing the law as the thing that will save us, that becomes really difficult.
00:32:11.040So on the right, there's kind of this, you know, well, what about the rule of man?
00:32:15.920Perhaps we need stronger men to come along and kind of take charge of things and just kind of tell people what the new rules are.
00:32:23.140You know, you look back at the historical record and even in circumstances where a regime is collapsed and needs to be rebuilt or when you're coming out of a war and you're just kind of like,
00:32:33.440well, we need, can someone, anyone sort of take control for at least a minute while we clean up the rubble?
00:32:38.640Even in those circumstances, the track record of strong men is not super great.
00:32:44.260And it's basically pretty inconsistent with the way Americans think about the point of life and why we should bother going through the struggles of life.
00:32:54.300So for me, what that means is we have to look to spiritual matters.
00:32:58.820You know, we got to look to, I'm a Christian.
00:33:01.060You got to look to the presence of the Holy Spirit.
00:33:03.720And if the spirit is not moving among the people, if we're not, if our relationships aren't mediated by God, then what are they mediated by?
00:33:13.460Well, probably by the worship of something else, whether it's money or weapons or fame or fantasy or anything else.
00:33:23.180If the spirit is mediating our relationships, if it's flowing through us, then we can be spiritually fruitful.
00:33:30.800We can take our spiritual treasure that we've been given by God and we can put it into circulation the way we've been asked and perhaps ordered to do.
00:33:38.940And then we can see the fruits of those things and you can know the tree of our society by those fruits.
00:33:46.660If we don't do that, what will happen?
00:33:48.860I think what will happen is we will put all of our energy into trying to simulate that experience, trying to simulate spirit, trying to build an invisible, omnipresent technological entity in the hopes that it can substitute
00:34:08.080for the lack of the life-giving spirit moving through ourselves and through our relationships.
00:34:15.840And I think we're starting to see some of that happen already.
00:34:19.080Technologists are becoming increasingly overtly theological or religious, more openly tech worshiping.
00:34:26.520That's, you know, you might see something nefarious in that.
00:34:28.980You might see something awesome in that.
00:34:30.720Your mileage may vary, but it's to be expected because of these dynamics that we're discussing.
00:34:36.760If the right in America doesn't kind of have that in some ways literal come to Jesus in Jesus moment, but in other ways, just kind of like recognizing that this is the environment that we're in.
00:34:50.320They're not rules that come out of a law book.
00:34:52.280They're not rules that come out of a strong man.
00:34:54.060They're rules that come out of the kind of environment that we've created for ourselves, like it or not.
00:34:59.440If the right doesn't recognize that and adjust accordingly, then yes, I think there is going to be a lot more pain and more tears.
00:35:08.520Are you optimistic about their ability to do that?
00:35:11.280Because I feel like the core of the right really has been this legalism.
00:35:15.000It really has been this idea that, well, we just need a constitutional convention.
00:35:19.200Once we can write one more amendment, if we can just go ahead and find a trick around the Washington swamp, then everything will be set right again.
00:35:29.640It feels very difficult, and it might be due to the scale.
00:35:33.280I feel like at some point, the problem is the scale of social organization.
00:35:38.560The right is looking for one national election to just kind of swoop in or one quick adjustment to a document to go ahead and set everything back to the 1950s.
00:35:50.840I think it's a lot harder for people to kind of come to grips with the idea that they're going to need to center their lives spiritually in communities, families, regionalities.
00:36:00.420I think that's a lot longer road to hoe, and I think that very few people on the right are in touch with that reality.
00:36:08.380We're still running around and expecting a new Speaker of the House to make a significant difference instead of understanding that this is going to be something that's a much longer and deeper project.
00:36:19.200Yeah, I mean, in theory, in principle, in the abstract, I think you're absolutely right.
00:36:24.300We do, however, have an amendment process.
00:36:34.240Perhaps that could help us remain American in a digital age.
00:36:39.140And so, you know, I support a digital rights amendment.
00:36:41.540I support, you know, that kind of broad, overarching language of the First and Second Amendments explicitly laying out that, you know, look, America is not going to be America.
00:36:51.180But if ordinary people are alienated from our most powerful technologies, we need to be able to put our hands on these things to restore our competence, to restore our confidence.
00:37:01.680And with that competence and confidence should come spiritual humility.
00:37:06.460Without that ingredient, then we're just going to fall prey to the same delusions of grandeur that people throughout history, including Americans, have had in the past.
00:37:15.460So, you know, I do think that addressing in an explicit way the constitutionality and the way that, you know, natural rights that are addressed in the Constitution, these things do not stop at tech's edge.
00:37:28.880They need to go into that area of life, which is so dominant, and they need to be present there as well.
00:37:33.540Otherwise, we can say goodbye to the regime that we have.
00:37:37.100And, you know, God knows what will come after that, but it won't be good.
00:37:47.280There's a lot of talk of tech optimism going around these days.
00:37:50.020Mark Andresen, the venture capitalist, dropped a tech optimist, techno optimist manifesto that's been making the rounds.
00:38:01.240And, you know, I've gone around with Mark a little bit on this, but thanks to those conversations, I can be a little bit sharper in this conversation.
00:38:09.580I'm more concerned, really, about the optimism part than about the technology part.
00:38:14.420Mark I am less worried about having too much technology than I am worried about having too much optimism, because I don't really know what optimism is.
00:38:23.400You know, you look under the hood, and if in the box marked optimism, it just turns out to be tech worship.
00:38:29.520Like, well, no, not only is that not optimism, but it's not good.
00:38:32.660But it's hard to explain what optimism is, and I think it always pulls us into this kind of secular key that is especially unhelpful or even harmful or especially dangerous in a digital age.
00:38:46.520The worst thing that we can do is to succumb to this temptation to hail technology as our savior, to give in to that kind of giddy experience of like, it's happening, you know, but elevated to more than a Ron Paul level to like a worship of the Antichrist level.
00:39:10.340This is, you know, people can sometimes start backing away when you start talking about the Antichrist, but it's, you know, conceptually, it's not that bizarre to think that there will be something very enticing, tempting, a feeling of real sort of shared catharsis.
00:39:32.000That feeling that says, like, we finally did it, you guys, we finally, like, cured what ails us, we left behind all the bad things about our humanity.
00:39:40.080And, you know, here's our hero, here's the superhero, who is, is, is the man meets the moment of super intelligence.
00:39:49.680And that figure is someone we can all rally around, we can finally have that unity that we crave, you know, this is it, all our prayers have been answered, right, but it's not going to be Jesus, it's going to be this other figure.
00:40:02.420And technology can really pave the way for that.
00:40:04.940And we have to guard against that, because it's not intelligent to do that.
00:40:08.980It's not smart, it's not clever, it's not wise, it's, it's, it's lying to ourselves, and encouraging all of us around the world to be complicit to be conspirators in the same grand lie.
00:40:22.740Um, that's, you know, that's been a bad idea since the beginning.
00:40:29.540So, uh, optimism, I don't really know what that means.
00:40:31.900You know, I, I think that being hopeful, being prayerful, uh, being discerning, um, not giving in to panic, not giving in to despair.
00:40:39.700Um, those are all good, and now more than ever, um, if we have all those things, uh, the development of our technology is going to be something that is under spiritual control in a healthy sense.
00:40:53.380It can grow, it can, uh, um, it can exist in a kind of harmony, um, that I think reflects and represents the proper harmony between, uh, between church and state.
00:41:08.060You know, theocracy is bad because it tries to combine church and state into a single entity, and we know historically that that's not very good, and we know what, that the, the cost of that can be very high, both to, both to the state and to the church.
00:41:21.920Um, at the same time, you know, having a strict separation, uh, that usually doesn't work out very well either, historically speaking.
00:41:28.560So, the, the harmonious dance between these two, uh, institutions, it can be messy, it can be imperfect, it can require a lot of patience.
00:41:38.060It can require a lot of discernment, uh, but welcome to earth.
00:41:41.920You know, this is not, there's no way to speed run this.
00:41:46.320Um, it is demanding, and what is demanded of us right now is, I think, something that, uh, in some senses is, is simpler, more humble, more straightforward than optimism.
00:41:56.160But in other senses, yes, is more demanding, requires more discernment, and requires us to get out of our heads and to come down into our hearts.
00:42:04.780Yeah, and, uh, while I, I, I hope for the, kind of, the discernment that you're talking about, I, I worry that it's going to be in short supply.
00:42:13.620You know, uh, uh, philosopher Nick Land said that the thing about being an accelerationist is it doesn't really matter what you do, because it's going to happen either way.
00:42:21.180And I, I feel like that, that just seems true.
00:42:24.620There's, there's a certain inevitability.
00:42:26.300You know, we look at the way that, uh, that technology has accelerated since kind of its escape from, from kind of regionalities.
00:42:34.400And the entire time that humanity has kind of thought about the consequences, I mean, I don't know, you know, probably predates, uh, you know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
00:42:44.700But that's kind of the first thing that pops in my mind, where you, you just have this inevitability.
00:42:48.760You know there's something dangerous around the corner.
00:42:52.600You know that pursuing this is going to have a, kind of, an inevitable, inevitable bad effect.
00:42:56.760But, but humanity just seems compelled to chase it no matter what.
00:43:00.580Yeah, no, we probably shouldn't go ahead and engineer viruses to maximize their lethality or their ability to spread.
00:43:07.440But we're going to do it anyway, because it's an option.
00:43:09.380And somewhere, someone is going to kind of cross that bridge no matter what.
00:43:13.100It feels like the ability of individual humans to discern might exist, but the nature of technology and its ability to kind of spread throughout the globe means that individual discernment doesn't really kind of put any kind of limiter
00:43:26.640on what technology, uh, what technology will develop and where it will go.
00:43:33.360Um, you know, I, my, my response is there's one thing that, that moves faster or stays one step ahead of technology and that's religion.
00:43:40.680And I think we see that happening around the world right now.
00:43:43.940Um, no matter how fast technology moves, what it's always going to arrive in a place in space and time where, uh, worship is already,
00:43:56.460already in full swing, uh, different kinds of worship.
00:43:59.100And yeah, you can have, uh, worship of technology itself, but even that, you know, even that seems to me to be kind of just, uh, you know, like, uh, an antecedent or a, an attempt to kind of present, uh, something as, as other than what it is.
00:44:15.480Um, it's funny to me that, uh, uh, the kinds of people who say, you know, it is written, technology is going to eat everything.
00:44:23.560Like whatever is going to happen is going to happen, um, are also the kind of people who tend to look at like the book of revelation and go like, this is ridiculous.
00:44:35.200Um, it's, it's pretty clear what human nature is.
00:44:38.340It's pretty clear what, what the temptations are, uh, and it's pretty clear that, you know, the way of the world is to double and triple and quadruple down on itself and on the idea that, you know, gosh, darn it.
00:44:49.860We are going to solve our own problems.
00:46:05.900But that, that longing to go back to be great again, whether it's the, you know, art deco or the Norman Rockwell, you know, you're grasping for these signifiers.
00:46:18.800Um, and there's a lot of energy going into like, no guys, like, we'll just innovate more and then it'll be awesome.
00:46:25.700We'll have jetpacks and we'll like, uh, the NFL will play games on the moon and we'll just go in the sphere and you two will be cool again.
00:46:34.560Like, will it though, will it really, I think more and more people are becoming just disenchanted with all of these kinds of like attempts to just zap them with more voltage to get them to get up and do stuff again.
00:46:48.480Um, a lot of people just think that it's all kind of a joke and they are hungering for spiritual reality, for spiritual nourishment that is nowhere to be found in these, you know, optimistic camps about like innovation and dynamism and all that.
00:47:04.180They are thirsting for spiritual life.
00:47:07.700Um, and it's looking increasingly like more people are going to turn away from the world in order to find it.
00:47:15.940Um, I think we're going to see more monasteries.
00:47:18.360I think we're going to see more monastics along with, unfortunately, more suicides, more, more, you know, people shutting themselves in their, their basement with their VR headsets, more efforts to withdraw from the world.
00:47:30.460Now, in order for us to respond to that deep seated longing in a way that is constructive and healthy and, and protects our humanity and restores it, we have to be able to provide spiritual institutions that give people who want to withdraw from the world, a way of, uh, asserting, um, a healthy kind of authority over our technology.
00:47:58.760It is an alternative to, uh, disappearing into addiction, disappearing into suicide, disappearing into the sphere, disappearing into the VR headset, disappearing into porn.
00:48:09.820Well, no, you can, if you want to renounce the world, great.
00:48:12.700Come into the monastery, um, gather your spiritual energies with others and apply that spiritual energy to the shaping of how basic technology is used.
00:48:23.760I think that's going to become a more important part of life as life goes on.
00:48:27.900Um, but this is America, people still like to mix it up.
00:48:31.200Um, there is still a lot of, of restless energy out there.
00:48:35.440You look at Europe, you got very, not a lot of land to go around, even if population goes down, America is going to be a big place for a long time, I think.
00:48:42.940And there's a lot of room to roam and try things out, um, and experiment, uh, in a, in a practical sense, uh, in the sense of, of trying to restore, uh, the basics, not some potted vision of what the cool future could have been.
00:48:56.320Um, but really just the basics of like, okay, you know, the tables have been turned, like the, the, the hourglass has been flipped around.
00:49:03.700Um, America isn't what we thought it was going to be.
00:49:08.200Uh, building from the ground up in a way where the spirit can move through us and, uh, the things that we do are, are fruitful and, and, uh, increase our flourishing.
00:49:16.220Oswald Spengler, uh, predicted that the West would walk away from science and technology, that it would grow sclerotic.
00:49:26.220It would find that it had put itself into these containers and these rules that were simply just a straitjacket to defining the, the metaphysical could no longer manifest itself.
00:49:37.260And so they'd need to basically leave those, those restraints behind by kind of releasing those stringent rules.
00:49:44.600I also think about somebody like Alexander Dugan, who has kind of said that once you get to the end of the strictly logical present, the idea that, you know, we're, we're, we're, uh, we're postmodern, we're post-liberal, that, that kind of opens an absurdity up there, lets the spiritual return.
00:50:03.240And I wonder, is it necessary for people to walk away from these things?
00:50:08.680Is it necessary for these things to collapse for the return of the spiritual?
00:50:12.460I, I, I would like a world that you're describing where people bring that, which was America forwarded to these things or that, that, which was, you know, I guess there will always be some aspect of that, but I have a hard time seeing it kind of reform itself into something that allows that spiritual manifestation while still holding on so tightly to what many people have, have kind of assembled as the American identity.
00:50:38.120So, yeah, uh, yeah, a couple of things, um, it's hard for me to assess Spangler as, as thoroughly as some people in my orbit might, might want me to, just because there's this question of like, well, wait a minute, what is the West anyway?
00:50:56.160You know, what are we talking about here?
00:50:57.640Is this, is this a name that applies to an actual thing?
00:51:02.000I mean, just to take a, a semi-random example, if you're Eastern Orthodox, like what does the West mean to you?
00:51:09.020Uh, you know, Orthodoxy, you do Russia, you got, uh, Syria, Greece, Romania, uh, Georgia.
00:51:17.900Uh, like it's, it's, it's part of, um, a, it's part of Christendom, uh, in a way that, that goes beyond the boundaries of, of East and West really, uh, or, or, uh, rises to, um, a higher level of organization than is captured in the, the sort of East West dynamic.
00:51:38.740Uh, so I think we need to be a little bit more precise about, you know, what, what the West means, if we're going to assess, you know, what the West needs to do or, or how the West is going to end up.
00:51:48.440Um, but I think, you know, you're, you're right to suggest or to hint that as important as that spirituality is, um, it's not enough.
00:51:58.620You can't just like drive around the country, just like spreading spirituality around and expect things to go well.
00:52:07.100Like America's always been a very spiritualistic place, uh, great awakenings, cults, uh, utopian communities, heresies, just from every poor, you know, in some ways.
00:52:20.480Um, and this is, you know, this is like sociological analysis here.
00:52:24.800I'm not, I'm not here to, to point out people's denominations or whatever and go, you know, heretic, heretic, heretic.
00:52:35.000Um, my point is that there's a lot of talk, um, in our digital age about networks and about the importance of networks.
00:52:44.140You've got technologists out there saying like, Hey, you know, you can, you can build new forms of governments on the network or use networks to do it.
00:52:52.240Um, and yeah, there's something to that, but, but more importantly, um, spirituality needs to have a certain kind of institutional ballast or else we know from experience that it spirals off into a bunch of like weird and unhelpful and oftentimes very deeply damaging directions.
00:53:12.100Uh, or, you know, if it, if it doesn't go that wrong, then at least you just end up with, uh, I mean, when I think of what's the West, I think of religious war.
00:53:20.740Like the West is a place where the wars are religious.
00:53:23.840Uh, I, I include Islam in this, you know, you got jihad, you got the wars of religion in Europe and Protestant reformation.
00:53:31.160Uh, and you can go to America and you say like, well, America has been quite free of religious war.
00:53:36.620And it's like, well, you know, civil war was basically like a religious war.
00:53:41.060Um, uh, the, the Indian wars, basically religious conflict.
00:53:47.060Um, and all that craziness with sort of the Mormons getting chased out into the, the Utah desert, um, lots of religious conflict.
00:53:57.240Uh, and when conflict erupts in the West and in America, it oftentimes takes on a religious character.
00:54:02.360Uh, not just cause the Bible thumpers are at it again, but because this is something that's, that's deeply rooted in our civilization.
00:54:09.800Uh, so if we want to somehow find a way out of that kind of trap, um, I think people are going to have to recognize that a, a strong and ancient church is going to be a help.
00:54:25.300Uh, just sociologically speaking, if you walk away from a strong and ancient church, you are going to have the kinds of problems that is going to, that are going to make it too difficult for you to get on top of the technological problem.
00:54:38.860Uh, if your spirituality is dispersed, if you are, um, organizationally weak, if you don't have that ballast of a strong ancient church, uh, then you're probably going to be too divided, too confused.
00:54:52.860Um, too, uh, too, uh, focused on haggling over interpretive disputes to, um, muster the spiritual authority, um, that scales to a level where you can really, uh, restore some, some basic controls over technological development.
00:55:13.860Uh, so that's, you know, that's my view of things.
00:55:17.340Um, I think, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's for some Americans, that's something that they're, they're going to be reluctant to, uh, accept, but you know, look, uh, sometimes it takes a long time for someone to have a religious conversion.
00:55:35.760Um, just the, the, the, the whipsawing events of the past, you know, four, eight years, uh, there's such dramatic change, not just in, uh, in governance, not just in the economy, not just in technology, but in people's spiritual experience.
00:55:51.280And it's really been profound, especially coming out of lockdowns.
00:55:55.760And so what seems to be outlandish or, or, uh, far-fetched today, uh, might become something approaching conventional wisdom tomorrow.
00:56:07.980Yeah, I, I hear what you're saying and I think there's some merit to it.
00:56:11.660I would say that America is probably more spiritually Protestant than it is spiritually anything else.
00:56:16.360Uh, that's more core of the American identity than, than many other things.
00:56:20.860And, and a discarding of that would probably be a discarding of American identity in general.
00:56:25.200But, uh, you know, that, that's a longer discussion to be sure.
00:56:28.920Well, yeah, let me just say one more word about that though.
00:56:32.120Uh, lots of Protestantisms out there, lots of different kinds of Protestantism out there.
00:56:35.960Uh, when you look at high church Anglicanism versus, uh, uh, Pentecostalism, I mean, you got Unitarian Universalists running around saying, oh, we're Protestants too.
00:56:45.160And it's like, well, I don't believe in the Trinity.
00:56:47.160You know, I mean, it's there, there's so much, uh, variance here.
00:56:51.300Um, where's the center of gravity in American Protestantism?
00:56:54.760Um, I think that's a very interesting question.
00:56:56.280I think that in, in some cases, um, I mean, it's really almost a jump ball.
00:57:01.380Like you look at the retention rates of even some very successful churches, uh, that are bucketed together, uh, as, as Protestant.
00:57:11.260I, I think, you know, Latter-day Saints is about 50% retention.
00:57:23.360Um, and people are, you know, uh, looking for a lifeline, something that they can grab onto that isn't going to slip through their fingers.
00:57:31.160Um, so I think, you know, I think the, the religious future of America in that sense is very wide open, perhaps more wide open than it's been in a long time.
00:57:38.360Um, and, uh, yeah, I think you're right.
00:57:40.620You know, there is a kind of, uh, uh, tendency toward, uh, uh, an anarchist sensibility with regard to spiritual matters.
00:57:51.260Uh, but, you know, how's that working for you?
00:57:54.460Um, I think that's a question a lot of Americans are going to be thinking through.
00:58:53.480At James Polis, first name, last name, uh, I'm on Twitter, uh, trying to, to, to tread lightly, but DMs are open.
00:59:01.280And of course, guys, make sure you go ahead and check out the new blaze site, uh, articles from both I and James are over there and, uh, they've redone everything.
00:59:09.600They've gotten rid of all those really ugly ads so that you can go ahead and enjoy, uh, all of the different articles that they put up there.
00:59:15.800Of course, they've gotten rid of the problem of demonetization with big tech because you don't have to worry about the ads anymore.
00:59:20.500But of course, that means they do need your support to make sure that work like ours keeps showing up on the site.
00:59:25.160So make sure you go ahead and check out the new blaze, uh, new site.
00:59:29.620I think you're really going to enjoy it.
00:59:39.840Uh, well, man, that's a, that's kind of a wide question.
00:59:42.500Of course, if you mean religions, there's many different options there.
00:59:45.200If you're talking about, uh, you know, political systems, uh, I don't, I don't know, uh, James, where would you suggest someone start if they're looking at different worldviews?
00:59:53.960I mean, I would start with what is a worldview, you know, what, what are you really studying and is that really what you want to be studying?
00:59:59.240So I think, you know, taking some time to just dig into that question, uh, understand, you know, who, what that concept is, where it came from, uh, and whether it's leading you really in the direction that you're trying to go.
01:00:51.940I mean, this is obviously a, uh, kind of a famous argument.
01:00:54.820There's, there's the old joke that, uh, most of Nick Land's argument are, are like trans cat boys or something.
01:01:00.400So, uh, there's, there's certainly an overlap there to be sure either way, I guess it is an, a, an abandonment of humanity.
01:01:07.280And that's why I think that James's, uh, work is interesting because of course he's focused on keeping the humanity, uh, first and foremost, when we're talking about tech, not walking away from tech, not, uh, not avoiding the question, uh, not becoming Luddites,
01:01:20.000but also ensuring that humanity is the one being served by tech and not the other way around.