00:02:39but at every point in the system you are divorced from the direct consequences of your actions.
00:02:43everything has become abstracted into something you do not control. You are not personally
00:02:49securing the means of your subsistence from their source. You are securing the means of
00:02:55securing the means of your subsistence from someone else. We do indeed lose our autonomy,
00:03:01and with it, we lose an ontological status as free men that Kaczynski thought was fundamentally
00:03:07at the root of our modern malaise. What if this system's failed? What if there is nothing to buy
00:03:12with your money? What if your money itself becomes worthless? All of your surrogate activities would
00:03:18be as dust in the wind, and you would begin at square one, no different to your savage ancestors.0.99
00:03:2410,000 years of civilization would disappear in an instant, as you stood alone and naked before0.89
00:03:32the yawning chasm of your own evolutionary inadequacy. Kaczynski has a point. But there are,
00:03:38of course, downsides to being a savage man. One can only imagine the attrition rate such a brief
00:03:44life would have lived in a constant state of cold, hunger, and insecurity. At the end of savage man's
00:03:51life, as Rousseau commented, they cease to be without others perceiving that they are no more,
00:03:57and almost without perceiving it themselves. How little does the existence of the savage matter
00:04:03to himself and others in that pursuit of what Kaczynski called his real goals. Even if his
00:04:10life was lived to embody some Evolian solar man, it can only be temporary, and if nobody knows
00:04:17about it, what good did it do? There is another way to look at this bleak view of human nature.
00:04:24Perhaps the savage man was not so savage after all. Across the world, there are many thousands
00:04:30of quite remarkable prehistoric cave paintings. These consist of animals, humans, and abstract
00:04:37motifs that demonstrate remarkable talent by the people who only had the most primitive of means.
00:04:44And some of them have genuinely incredible portraits of the world that they experienced.
00:04:49At Chauvet Cave in the south of France, there are dozens of portraits of the natural world
00:04:55painted approximately 30 to 40 thousand years ago. Not only are they startlingly accurate
00:05:02representations of the fauna of the time, but they often have a strange series of lines that
00:05:08match the form of the beasts around them, like an echo. These were for quite a long time quite
00:05:13the mystery, but what is concealed by modern lighting is revealed by using the technology
00:05:19of the time. A French archaeologist called Marc Azema realised that if you were to look at them
00:05:25in the flickering light of a fire, the paintings appear to move. The constant changing shadows
00:05:33cast by the fire put these prehistoric animals back into motion and brings them back to life.
00:05:40As Werner Herzog put it, these images must have been painted as such to form a kind of proto-cinema.
00:05:48I couldn't paint these pictures under the best conditions with modern lighting, paintbrushes,
00:05:53and reference images, let alone under the dim light of a Paleolithic flame, using only my thumb
00:05:59and some ground-up ochre and charcoal in order to draw them from memory. And so I'm put in mind
00:06:05of Friedrich Nietzsche's foreword from The Birth of Tragedy, which is regarding Wagner, where he
00:06:10said, art is the highest task and the properly metaphysical activity of this life. I think Nietzsche's
00:06:17thoughts here, more closely aligned with the revealed preferences and desires of our Paleolithic
00:06:23ancestors than Kaczynski's. These paintings were drawn by the very people that Kaczynski was
00:06:28modelling his theory of surrogate activities upon as the counterexample to modern life.
00:06:34Even in the most dark and primitive time of human existence, talented artists felt compelled to
00:06:40document to us what they had experienced. Lions pack-hunting the buffalo, the charge of a woolly
00:06:46rhino, the fleeting leaps of spotted horses. They wanted us to know about this and drew it in such
00:06:53a way to try and capture the motion of it all. The purpose of art is to transmit across time and space
00:06:58some fundamental truth of man's existence to his fellow man. They wanted us to know what it felt
00:07:05like to be there and 40,000 years after they were painted we are still appreciating them. It's easy
00:07:13to imagine, the cavemen in the depth of winter huddled around the warmth of a flickering fire
00:07:18and admiring the beauty of the animated hunting scenes on the walls. Many natural things are
00:07:24beautiful, but art is the singular and peculiar artifice by which mankind truly distinguishes
00:07:30itself. Though beauty is an artificial goal, it's not a surrogate activity. It is the end towards
00:07:37all of what Kaczynski termed real goals are actually aimed. The fact that we have the
00:07:43opportunity to engage in these surrogate activities and make things that are beautiful
00:07:49is a testament to the victory of our ancestors over adversity. Those cavemen warming themselves
00:07:56by that fire and watching the dancing animals on the walls must have been the closest they could
00:08:00be to a feeling of safety and nostalgia that they could possibly have experienced. And in my view,
00:08:06it is this feeling of warmth and togetherness in the presence of beauty in which nostalgia itself
00:08:12is rooted. I think there is a kind of reminiscence of the 20th century in England, in the mind of
00:08:19people like Peter Hitchens, that is essentially a modern recreation of that feeling. In the
00:08:24abolition of Britain, Hitchens laments the spread of central heating and double glazing, which
00:08:30allowed even close-knit families to avoid each other's company in well-warmed houses, rather
00:08:35than huddling around a single hearth forced into unwanted companionship and so compelled to adapt
00:08:41to each other's foibles and become more social and less selfish beings. Post-war Britain was a
00:08:47quite destitute place. Indeed, Hitchens himself was born three years before the end of rationing.
00:08:54Zoomers don't often realise this, but many of the boomers grew up in utter poverty,
00:08:59in conditions that are almost inconceivable now. In 1950, a Ministry of Works survey found that
00:09:06only 46% of British households had a bath, and only 20% had a washing machine. But fundamentally,
00:09:13it gets even more crazy, because only 5% of families had central heating. The Great Central
00:09:19Heating Revolution was still decades away, and it was only in the 1980s that most households had it.
00:09:26Before gas central heating, everyone had to huddle around the coal fire in the living room to keep warm,
00:09:31in a remarkable echo of our Paleolithic ancestors huddled around their fire in a cave.
00:09:37The English in the 1950s used to do all sorts of quaint and lovely things to provide their lives with beauty in the face of these harsh conditions, though.
00:09:45One of my favourite things was the vintage tea cards that they used to collect.
00:09:49You can see whole collections of them on eBay.
00:09:52You'd get these cards randomly in the boxes of tea that you'd buy,
00:09:55and you could put the whole set into a collector's book. They were pretty, simple, and quaint.
00:10:00These are nostalgic for me now. They remind me of what Peter Hitchens was talking about,
00:10:04a time of closer togetherness and a concern for the beauty around us, even in small things.
00:10:10Tea itself is a British social ritual. Putting the kettle on is still the first thing we do when
00:10:15company is over, and we've been doing it for centuries. Making the tea is a part of a continual
00:10:20communalness in human life that is being damaged by modernity, and we are losing it without even
00:10:26perceiving it. So why am I telling you all this? Well, you're not going to believe this,
00:10:31but this whole video has been an advert. But let it never be said that we don't write the best
00:10:36and most intellectually stimulating adverts anywhere on the internet. In short, last year,
00:10:42we had the idea of creating an old-fashioned Christmas hamper. We thought it would be a
00:10:45lovely thing to have for Christmas, but of course, we didn't have time to make it. It did, however,
00:10:50give us a year to put it together and we are incredibly proud of what we've managed to achieve.
00:10:55Each of our Christmas hampers has been packaged by us in Lotus Eaters HQ and includes something
00:11:01that we are very excited to present. I would like to introduce you to our new brand of tea,
00:11:06Sarsen and Wold. We've wanted to make our own tea for a long time and we wanted to put it in the
00:11:11tradition of classic British teas of eras gone by. I think it was about two years ago that Dan
00:11:16suggested doing it and so we decided right if we were going to have our own proprietary tea
00:11:21we would have one that i particularly wanted now there are lots of tea companies who can do lots
00:11:27of different blends but we found a blend that i personally love and that is best described as an
00:11:32incredibly rich english breakfast tea now i'm not some kind of expert on how to describe flavors
00:11:38but normally tea is quite bitter without milk i find at least well sarsen and wald english breakfast
00:11:44tea tastes incredibly smooth with or without milk, and it has a really warm and delicious
00:11:51aftertaste. I don't have any better words to describe it, I wish I did, but it is by far the
00:11:57best tea I've ever had, and I've been waiting two years for us to be able to produce it so I can buy
00:12:04it for myself. When we got the samples in to try, there was a lot of revealed preferencing going on,
00:12:09as this particular blend absolutely disappeared, while the other ones were being more slowly used.
00:12:15So, you can imagine how annoyed I was when I couldn't get any more.
00:12:20It comes in little pyramid bags, which I noticed that other brands have abandoned because of decline,