Inspired or curious about something The Fundamentalists chatted about on the podcast? Browse these carefully curated show notes to reference and recap where you heard a particular mention, concept, or other thought. Did I miss something? Please let me know and and share your thoughts or suggestions!
Please note: These show notes were a personal passion project. As an avid listener of the show, I created these for a select number of episodes.
May 19, 2019
MENTIONS:
2.35 – Zizek and Peterson’s debate
3.53 – Psychologist Jordan Peterson says lobsters help to explain why human hierarchies exist – do they? (theconversation.com)
9.28 – The Good Enough Parent - Winnicott
12.34 – Little Lies You’re Told by Joy Wave
27.37 – Tony Robbins documentary, I Am Not Your Guru
30.27 – Jacques Lacan
48.28 – Your Mom’s House – Tom Segura with Pete Holmes responding to Christian jokes
55.40 – Paul Tillich
QUIPS and QUOTES:
2.35 – “Lobsters aren’t castrated,” – reference to Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson’s debate
5.05 – Serotonin – lower = negative emotions, higher = positive emotions
6.00 – Nietzschean perspective – dominate/submissive hierarchies to human society
Conservative – meritocracy exists, work hard, honest = success
Liberal – don’t believe we have meritocracy yet because the structure only gets those to the top who don’t merit it
8.20 – Within the animal kingdom, the word, “hierarchy” is used to describe relative strengths and weaknesses, imposed on the system to explain it. Whereas within the human society, “hierarchy” pre-exists us, we are born into it.
9.14 – Authority already exists. You can occupy a position of authority that doesn’t reflect your strengths, skills, expertise. This is what Winnicott means when he talks about the “good enough parent,” basically, symbolically, a type of family where individuals play those roles (i.e. parent, child, etc.). We just step into them
10.10 – “Symbolic Castration” – you realize there’s a difference between you as a judge and you as an individual with conflictual desires – you realize you are NOT your role.
12.20 – If we disavow symbolic castration we start to think we deserve it.
13.10 – Start to think of yourself as the “strongest lobster” – but lobsters are just trying to survive and may be genetically stronger
14.22 – Difference of language – when you become self-conscious and you’re creatures of language, you enter into symbolic worlds that are different from the material world.
15.00 – Whenever you start to become a subjective being you’re divided, “What is it to be human? What is it to be me?”
16.05 – Peterson has reinvigorated the fact that you can at least give the illusion that you have control over your life – and start making active decisions that actually perpetuate you positively forward.
19.20 – The issue with the lobster is that it’s incorrect – it’s not a moral issue. Once you realize hierarchy is not a way of describing dominate/submissive, but actually are just symbolic structures that pre-exist us, you realize that in meritocracy there is something wrong.
19.55 – Think about it in fetish terms: you get someone to dominate you in an S&M scene. They don’t have to be “it” they just have to play the role.
20.50 – We want the symbolic structure. The issue with the evolutionary psychology approach that Peterson takes, if you think that authority works, you discover symbolic castration and what you get is tyrants – they get off their own supply.
22.02 – Whenever someone identifies with their position absolutely, they are wrong. No one is fully the role they play.
23.05 – There is a danger to some symbolic structures dying and that does create problems in society.
23.25 – Current times, running theme, because of internet, we are seen behind the curtain on everything and everything is being revealed to be absolute shit.
24.49 –2 Interconnected dangers
the non-castrated leader, i.e. the militaristic father, so strict
complete breakdown of authority, i.e. your parents are just regular people
26.10 – The trick is this: what is good in psychoanalysis and through radical theology, you have an authority figure who knows themselves and know they are inhabiting a role. Gradually the other person realizes that the leader is a castrated-other. Once that happens they become free to embrace their inherit antagonisms of life (the last guru)
28.45 – Transition of parents shedding that role and becoming more like friends.
30.00 – Part of the child’s birth into freedom is at the point they experience the symbolic death of their parents.
30.10 – We hate our freedom – we want authority figures who will tell us what to do and how to think.
30.27 – Lacan calls a subject-supposed-to-know (SSK) – “There is another out there who knows the answer for me and I’ve got to find it.”
34.24 – Elliott, “I feel like if I understand everything, something is wrong.” Good! Often if we don’t understand something, we dismiss it. But actually, any profound, deep insight, the first tie you hear it, it may seem crazy or too simple. In any discipline, if you can understand it too quickly, you’re not getting into the heart of it.
35.59 – The lobster idea seems simple, understandable – but once you give it an extra twist, humans live in a symbolic universe; authority is different than in evolutionary psychology.
36.38 – Symbolic world, weird virtual reality, when we all believe in it, it works. (Conversation begins to go into examples of the “symbols” – i.e. police officers, money, etc.)
39.39 – “Success is the best revenge,” in that if you pretend to be all powerful, hiding the symbolic castration from yourself or others, it is not helpful. You aren’t helping others to reveal there’s no real guru or supposed-to-know so they can embrace the contingency of existence and make their own decisions.
40.42 – Like dating – going to be The Lobster, Mr. Suave – continue playing the role, never revealing who we really are.
41.50 – Hierarchies exist for good reasons. You step into them, these symbolic roles, but they are also NOT you. The rules pre-exist. Healthier place, “I am not my job, husband, father, etc.”
42.48 – The thought that there is no authority whatsoever is also dangerous. There’s a real increase in people being manipulated by new age (palm reading, astrology, etc.) even if they don’t believe in them, they’ll pay their money to them.
44.57 – Christian world, in my experience, believing in a symbolic god and then exiting evangelical Christianity, it became more about mysticism. (Elliott)
47.24 – Ontological lack – the experience of the rupture of the other that helps you embrace your own freedom – salvation – you die to it.
50.09 – “Only a Christian can be an atheist,” Cizek. Within Christianity you have the death of God, where God experiences the death of God. God undergoes symbolic castration and so if you don’t experience the death of authority of the other then you have not gone into the true atheistic experience. You will weirdly not believe in God but you will still have a subject-supposed-to-know, still be to that at an unconscious level.
50.47 – So only when you go through symbolic castration will you experience salvation.
TAKEAWAYS:
51.01 – Pete – basically, authority structures pre-exist us. We are born into them and we are not one with them. We play certain roles and dangers arise when you disavow your symbolic castration or you hide it from other people. That part of becoming a mature person is experiencing the symbolic castration of the other – your mother, your father, political figures – and then embracing your own symbolic castration. Very hard to do, but that is the path to freedom and the path to freedom is one that we’re terrified of but it involves embracing that.
53.20 – Elliott – I feel that I’m at a very exciting time right now and it speaks to the fact that even though it’s terrifying to accept that these things are symbolic and to accept that these things are castrated… it is worth it to go through the salvation.
55.00 – One of the values of confessional Christianity is that it actually exposes the structure that we’re all caught in. So pre-converted Christianity is this idea of, there’s an “Absolute,” “Whole,” and “Complete,”… get caught up in, then one experiences the collapse.
55.40 – The danger for a lot of people is they experience the collapse of it but they don’t experience the collapse of the subject-supposed-to-know and so are still susceptible to another world view, another position. Whereas the real trick is moving from an unbroken myth to a broken myth – Paul Tillich talks of this… where actually you experience the auto-deconstruction of your own position.
56.35 – Elliott, “I think there’s also something to be said for the ‘death of these things.’ You can’t intellectualize your way to it. I really think it’s a felt experience – and it is existential, just engaging with life more fully.”
58.18 – Existentialism is about embracing that freedom – that there’s not that subject-supposed-to-know.