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.
June 9, 2019
MENTIONS:
0.22 - ASMR
0.38 - Soap Cutting
2.50 - Ben Shapiro “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
3.16 - The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek
9.58 - Elliott talks about Go-gurt, how advertising tells you what you want.
19.52 - Government in the Sunshine Act - Law that says that any government, administrative stuff, is open to the public - details available to the media
38.37 - Levi Strauss
52.28 - Judy - film with Tim Allen, Santa Clause - “I see it, I just don’t believe it!”… “Oh, seeing isn’t believing. Believing is seeing.”
52.58 - Hook, film with Robin Williams - At a table having a feast - no food - pretending. You have to imagine it, and it’ll be there.
55.12 - Tim Pool - on Joe Rogan, Occupy Wall Street.
QUIPS and QUOTES:
3.30 - Intro to Ideology and how does ideology relate to facts
4.06 - If you’re talking about fact as a type of reflection of reality that is accurate - the mind can have accurate representations of reality.
4.24 - Ideology is the opposite of factual representation - ideology is any system that obfuscates or mystifies objective reality.
4.36 - How reality is often covered over.
4.45 - Most basic form of ideology, example:
Q - “Why is it raining?”
A - “Well, it’s the gods. The gods are making it rain.”That is obfuscating and mystifying very normal, natural, reasons why it’s raining.
4.58 - Another example:
Q - “Why do I have to serve you?”
A - “Well, that’s because god made it that way.” (Natural chain of being and others are higher)
5.21 - Obfuscating the truth of the social relations.
5.34 - Obfuscate: to hide something behind something else, or to cover - to eclipse, confuse, mystify.
5.55 - We all have some kind of ideology.
6.15 - The question is whether there is any way to be outside of ideology.
6.34 - “To be human is to have a certain distortion. There is a subjectivity brings a certain distortion, a certain misrepresentation into the world.
6:45 - Post-ideological - whether you can free yourself from ideology, or whether the freedom is an acknowledging the misdirection, becoming aware of it.
7.38 - Original type of ideology - more apologetics - where a system is rationalized why that’s the way it has to be, making historical things eternal, “…that’s the way it always was, and the way it will always be.”
7.58 - Ideology - more complicated in contemporary world - we can be more aware of how the world works, of power dynamics, and be very cynical about the world, and yet, still ideology functions behind our back.
8.26 - Slavoj Zizek - ideologies have a sublime object.
Example: “antisemitism” - figure of the Jew controlling everything
9.05 - Sublime object - some object that isn’t in the world, it’s something that is hinted at.
Example: sunset makes you think about beauty, but you can’t touch beauty - sublime notion
9.27 - Example: Figure of the Jew is sublime in a perverse sense. It doesn’t cohere with any reality at all, but people will try to look around and find evidence that backs it up, but they are only bringing it into the world, prior to their experience, like a filter to view the world.
12.08 - Immanuel Kant - synthetic a priori, not logical, the conclusion isn’t in the premise, vs. a priori
Example: “All bachelors are unmarried” - analytic statement vs. “People who are short like Go-Gurt,” that is a synthetic statement that needs to be proven or unproven.
12.54 - A priori - prior to experience, a position you believe before you experience anything except
12.57 - Kant: there are some things that are synthetic, not logical, prior to experience, we bring them into the world.
14.10 - A priori - a position you believe before you experience anything - ideological view.
14.40 - What is NOT ideology, ex. Bloody Sunday (massacre, 1972), Catholic people who witnessed would be rightly angry at British and Protestants, and prejudice against them. Experience led to it. But if your view can be changed by experiencing something different, not interpreted by relation to the position, you can have experiences that break it, i.e. peace and reconciliation talks.
15.44 - If your view is able to be changed by empirical experience, you’re not really caught up in ideology. But if you can’t be changed by evidence, if everything you see, you always try to find ways to justify and back-up your position, you use facts to argue the opposite.
16.08 - Philosopher - “If you thing that all teachers are out-to-get-you, and someone shows you a nice teacher, you say, “Well, of course they’re nice. They’re grooming me but really they’re evil.”
16.35 - Everything is interpreted in relation to the opposition.
18.18 - Ideology hides best behind true facts.
18.45 - J. Lacan - if a guy is pathologically jealous of his wife and finds out that she has actually been unfaithful, he’s still pathologically jealous, he just also happens to be right.
22.55 - Within capitalism, money is the sublime object because if you use money to just buy nice things, you’re still NOT caught up in money as the sublime object. But when you start treating money as if it’s magical…
23.40 - Using the world “Greed”, in this way, Kant said if you’re pathologically interested it means you’re just calculating and want the best, but if you just want money for the sake of money, but not using it, you have made money the sublime object, magical ideology.
26.26 - Jouissance - we get pleasure from doing things but there is a weird dimension where we can get pleasure from the renunciation of pleasure.
26.59 - Facist - renounces pleasure, the ultimate sacrifice.
27.36 - Zizek - in ideology there is a kernel that you get attached to and it doesn’t have any empirical value, not useful, but you sacrifice yourself completely to it and get pleasure from that; surplus enjoyment.
28.41 - Jouissance - comes from French, “orgasm”
30.53 - Jouissance vs. regular pleasure
Jouissance - attachment, irrational, not a means to an end, beyond value.
Regular pleasure - reason for it, getting pleasure from it.
31.36 - Divine and Demonic
Divine - love
Demonic - obsessive attachment to an ideology, fundamentally destructive
31.47 - Love - similar, non-utilitarian attachment that is incredibly positive.
33.44 - We are all caught up in ideology, i.e. when you coral facts in a certain way
34.43 - ideology is un-falsifiable position.
36.33 - “The form of ideology” = everything makes sense, rational sensible in some actions with good reason to do it, but there’s something weird about the form itself. There is something that is distorted… that there are certain antagonisms in life that are not being dealt with.
37.00 - Ideology - covers over antagonisms and contradictions, trauma/insecurities, lack of security
38.25 - A myth - a way of covering over the antagonisms and questions of a society with a story.
39.01 - YouTube, when a person only shows data and evidence to back up their position, example of ideology hiding behind the facts.
42.39 - (Ben Shapiro) “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” why do people ironically get so excited about that? It seems so self-defeating.
43.06 - People who have more of an obsessive structure are more likely to get into. They really want to get rid of any antagonisms in life, they want to cover over any complexity - to simplify and make everything consistent.
44.21 - Mythology covers all… every confrontation.
44.30 - Ideology simplifies stuff… things are more complicated
46.54 - Arguing with an obsessive, arguing with an hysteric: The obsessive is trying to cover over any antagonisms and give all these facts from reason. An hysteric tends to get all the facts wrong, but they’re feeling is they perceive something in not working in society.
47.36 - On the surface, it looks like the obsessive is winning the argument, because they have the facts. But actually, what they are missing is what the hysteric understands/sees that, “No, there is an antagonism of social reality that needs addressed.
48.04 - Kathy Newman, Journalist Channel 4, she’s articulating that there is some social antagonism in the current political climate; not an external problem that can be reasoned away with facts. It’s a social reality that has to be addressed with action.
49.24 - The falsity isn’t in the facts, it’s in the obsessive need to use them.
50.44 - “If all this stuff is true, why is it that everyone isn’t a Christian?” - The “facts,” apologetics, don’t work, but produces a huge amount of anxiety.
51.58 - Medieval scholastic theology - you believe in order to see, don’t see and then believe, and that is how ideology works.
52.13 - Hard kernal of real - when you attach to the ideological dimension that’s non-rational, you already believe it, so you see it everywhere.
53.55 - Love, you don’t see until you believe. You fall in love - it’s not that you see something in a person and then fall in love. It’s, you fall in love with them and then you see all these things. Initial act of commitment, filters everything.
54.25 - The complexity, these are functions of subjectivity that have good and bad dimensions to them.
55.33 - If you’re so obsessively arguing for a position, are you trying to cover over a real antagonism that is much more complicated - until you face it, there’s a pleasure in this obsessive avoidance of the antagonism, and then you can move forward.
56.06 - The lie isn’t in the facts, the lie is in the form and the form is 7 days a week you’re ranting at a computer screen for an hour at the level of ideology.
56.46 - Elliott Take-Away: be more aware of personal obsessive tendencies.
58.02 - When you’re dealing with somebody who has an obsessive structure in general, personally they have to set up so many defenses against the unknown, the contradictions/antagonisms of life.
59.25 - Ideology = if you have a position that you feel is not falsifiable, the lens through which you see everything, you’re caught up in ideology. But if you have a position that is open to change through interaction with the world, then you’re probably more free.
59.53 - To be human is to be caught in ideology - what you want is an ideology that is broken, that helps you not avoid life but helps you confront/make peace with life.