Diagnosing the Metacrisis: Reality & Meaning in Modern Life | Iain McGilchrist

In Episode 452 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/diagnosing-the-metacrisis-reality-amp-meaning-in-modern-life-iain-mcgilchrist of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Iain McGilchrist, a neuroscientist and author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. His work on the divided brain has helped millions of people find wisdom, meaning, and guidance for living in the modern world. Iain and Demetri begin their conversation exploring McGilchrist's core thesis about the divided brain, how the left and right hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways, where we see evidence of an increased preponderance in left-brain thinking, and how this has impacted the way we conduct science, reason through problems, use our imagination, and apply wisdom to the world. Iain believes that our civilization is caught in what some have described as a metacrisis, exacerbated by the encroachment of the left hemisphere onto more and more areas of lived experience. We see it in the procedurally abysmal manner in which modern medicine goes about formulating diagnoses, the ever-increasing obsession with process over outcomes, the commodification of writing, the rise in depression, the policing of language, and the reverence for machine-like efficiency and profit maximization at the expense of almost everything else. The two discuss the importance of self-actualization in the context of community and why Iain is inspired by the change of heart he sees in younger generations who are no longer satisfied with furthering a broken paradigm and are willing to imagine something different—a different way forward that makes room for our humanity and which provides people with a relational sense of meaning and purpose. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 12/01/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Ian McGilchrist, psychiatrist, former Oxford literary scholar, and author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, whose work on the divided brain and the nature of reality has become a touchstone for people searching for wisdom, meaning, and how to live in the modern world.

• 0:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Ian and I begin our conversation today exploring his core thesis about the divided brain, how the left and right hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways, where we see evidence of an increased preponderance in left-brain thinking, and how this has impacted the way we conduct science, reason through problems, use our imagination, and apply wisdom to the world. Ian believes that our civilization is caught in what some have popularly described as the metacrisis exacerbated by the encroachment of the left hemisphere onto more and more areas of lived experience. We see it in the procedurally abysmal manner in which modern medicine goes about formulating

• 1:21Demetri Kofinas?

  diagnoses, the ever-increasing obsession with process over outcomes, the commodification of writing, the rise in depression, the policing of language, and the reverence for machine-like efficiency and the maximization of profits at the expense of almost everything else. We discuss the importance of self-actualization in the context of community and being in service to others, and why Ian remains hopeful, especially when it comes to the change of heart that he sees in younger generations, who are no longer satisfied with furthering a broken paradigm, and who are willing to imagine something different, a different way forward that makes room for our humanity, which provides people with a relational sense of meaning and purpose.

• 2:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Hidden Forces is a subscriber supported podcast. If you want access to our premium feed, which provides you with subscriber only episodes, as well as transcripts and intelligence reports for conversations like this one, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe, where you can also learn how to join in on the conversation by becoming a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, where you will have access to bimonthly Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected], and I or someone from our team will get right

• 2:48Demetri Kofinas?

  back to you. And with that, please enjoy this highly reflective and thoughtful conversation about the world and our place in it with my friend Ian McGilchrist. Ian McGilchrist, welcome back to Hidden Forces.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  It's great to be here again, Dimitri.

• 3:09Demetri Kofinas?

  It's so great to see you again, my friend. We had a chance to spend a weekend together not long ago this summer in Italy, which was wonderful. It was the first time I had a chance to meet you in person. And we spent, what was it, roughly three days in conversation?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  It was, yes, yes.

• 3:24Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  So we covered quite a lot of ground.

• 3:27Demetri Kofinas?

  We did. And, you know, everyone knows that we always say it, but there really is nothing like being in person.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  No, I know. Yes, that's right.

• 3:35Demetri Kofinas?

  Do you have these opportunities to travel often? I know you had another trip coming up after the weekend that we spent together somewhere in the United States. How often do you do traveling?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Well, I have to do much, much less, because it's not a matter of opportunities. It's I just get unmanageable invitations. And I've tended to be quite selective, but I have to be even more selective, because after I was with you in Italy, I can't remember the entire sequence, but it involved going to two parts of Australia, then going to...

• 4:11Speaker 01

  L A, then Aspen, then Budapest, then back to teaching a course in the south of England. Then I can't remember what came next, but I did another excursion and I just am all over the place. So I'm just gonna have to rein all this in, otherwise I'll not be able to do anything. However, a couple of things have happened that will mean that I definitely do have to travel to America in the first part of next year. One is that I've been made the Chancellor of Ralston College in Savannah, which I'm very pleased about because it's a wonderful

• 4:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Congratulations.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Wonderful college. I'm very, very much behind them. It's a new venture, but it's it's fabulous. And the other is that I've been awarded a prize, which means I have to go to Texas in March and then I'm going on to open a conference at Duke just shortly after that. So, and then I'm gonna come back and try and spend time here.

• 5:03Demetri Kofinas?

  Let me ask you something. I mean, clearly it's very taxing to travel. Besides the the actual traveling itself, the jet lag, not being at home, not having your comforts, all of those things. What is it that compels you to say yes to such opportunities?

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Well, partly I'm getting very old and I'm at that point where there are certain things, if I don't do them now, I won't do them at all. But I've now come to the position that I just better not do them at all. So there are things where it's very nice to go and meet certain people, the topic interests me, perhaps the place is somewhere I've always wanted to go. So it's a mixture of factors. But Mary and I go through the invitations every week and go, you know, as many as we can, we say no, because it's just become unmanageable for me. But there we are. As my daughter says, my younger daughter, nice problem to have, but yes and no, because you feel bad for not taking. I suppose I have this kind of feeling that I I should, I know this about myself, that I should do these things if I can, which is not necessarily a good move.

• 6:03Demetri Kofinas?

  No, I understand that. When, just a few more questions about this. When did you begin to experience this? Onslaught of requests on your time. When did, was it after you published The Master and His Emissary?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  No, I mean, all that was manageable, but it really took off after The Matter With Things.

• 6:20Demetri Kofinas?

  Really?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:21Demetri Kofinas?

  Now, that published in 2022, didn't it? Am I remembering correctly, or 2021?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Very late 2021, November 2021. Yeah.

• 6:28Demetri Kofinas?

  And what do you think accounts for that? Was it also the way in which you turned it into bite-sized videos on the internet and people were able to consume it more readily?

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of people heard about it and wanted me to go on their show or talk or whatever. So I did a great deal of that. And then that led to invitations and so on. I think also The Matter With Things covers, well, as you know, a ridiculous amount. Just about everything in the intellectual realm is treated at some level in some part of the book. So it's had an appeal to an enormous number of constituencies.

• 7:04Demetri Kofinas?

  So I should just also mention, you've been on the podcast once before in 2022, I believe it was, perhaps March of 2022, or 2023, rather. March of 2023 it was, yes.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  That sounds right, yeah.

• 7:16Demetri Kofinas?

  And that was a comprehensive conversation, both about the subject that you pioneered in The Master and His Emissary, namely the divided brain and the lateralization of the brain and the left and right hemispheres, and how they apprehend versus comprehend the world, and some of the further philosophical ideas that you explored in The Matter With Things. My audio was not great in that conversation, because as I told you, I was recording that from a studio in Florida at the time. But nonetheless, it turned out really well, and your audio was great. And I recommend that to everyone, because that's a place where people can engage most comprehensively with your framework. But I do want to, at the very least, just give an overview of what that is. Before we get into that question, which is going to be my next question, my follow-up,

• 7:59Demetri Kofinas?

  and maybe you can answer it with this question that I'm going to ask now, which has to do with your traveling. I asked you what it was that compelled you to say yes when people reach out to you. And my sense is, and you said, you know, you're getting older, and so there's a limited amount of time. What is the message that you feel is so urgent that you need to convey to people? And how does that relate to the work that we've talked about in our previous episode, and that we explored together at our retreat in Italy this past summer?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's something like this, that we getting progressively and ever faster away from an understanding of who we are, what a human life is, what the world is, what we're doing here. These very important questions are simply being neither addressed at all, or if addressed only with a very reductive, very narrow kind of thinking. And it's to try and break people out of the prison of that kind of extraordinarily simplistic,

• 9:06Speaker 01

  you know, unnourishing vision of the world to one that is imaginatively rich and validated by science and by reason. And that's why I spent a very long time showing how that comes to be, hence a very long book.

• 9:22Demetri Kofinas?

  Why do you feel a personal sense of mission around sharing this message? I mean, you could employ it in your own life. Why do you feel the need to expose other people to it?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I think, I mean, it sounds absurd to think that one can influence the way civilization's thinking goes, but if I give up and everyone else who thinks they might give up, then nothing will change. And I think there's something really toxic about current way of conceiving our civilization and at a more local level, our society and ourselves. And if we don't do something to redress this, this whole, I fear to say this, I'm not being dramatic here and I'm not wholly pessimistic, at least I have hope, but I think that unless

• 10:14Speaker 01

  we act promptly and not with just a few piddling around the edges, but actually change our hearts and minds and the way we look at ourselves and the world, we're lost. This civilization won't survive, it will collapse.

• 10:29Demetri Kofinas?

  So let's double back now and just give folks an overview. Again, some folks may not be familiar with this framework, others could benefit from being reminded about it. What is your thesis on the divided brain?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing I have to say is forget anything you've heard up till now, I think, because a lot of stuff that was branded as pop psychology was put about, and indeed it was pop psychology in the sense that it was largely wrong. So it became an area that was difficult to address, but nonetheless, it seemed to me important. And I won't go into why I came to address it, but there are certain things about this brain structure that make you say, what's going on here? Why is the brain divided at all? Why is it asymmetrical? Why is the band of fibres that joins the two hemispheres, only 2% of fibres in the brain cross on that bridge, the corpus callosum? Why is it largely inhibitory in its function?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  So these questions suggest there's something different about these two hemispheres. And although we gave up having done a bad job, it still seems to be important to ask the question. And what I discovered as a primary focus of this is attention. Attention sounds just like another cognitive function, as we say, but attention is nothing less than the way we dispose our consciousness towards whatever it is that exists. And the way in which we do so alters what we find there. And what we find there alters the attention we will pay in future. And so it's easy to get locked into by a hasty conclusion into a certain way of looking at the world.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And the reason we have two hemispheres is, I believe, and nobody has suggested this is not a good idea, that we need to survive by paying two kinds of attention to the world at roughly the same time. One of them is detailed, particularistic, highly focused on some little thing that we know we want, and we know what it is, and we want to get it now. That's like food, or pick up a twig to build a nest, or whatever it is. Functional, utilitarian, how to manipulate the world for our benefit. And of course, it goes without saying, we need that. So, nothing wrong with it. But the trouble is that if that's the only attention you pay, then you don't see the predator, you don't see your mate, you don't see your offering.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  All of these need to be in your mind at the same time while you're having your lunch. Otherwise, you become somebody else's. So, we have these two modes of attention, and they produce two phenomenological worlds. In one, that is the left hemisphere, there are just particles, they're just little bits, atomistic fragments, that don't have any meaning unless we put them together. And they're not connected to one another, they don't change, they're frozen, and that moment of the kill, they're frozen. They are entirely explicit, they are what you're whizzy-wig, what you see is what you get. They are simple, they are, in this sense, inanimate. And literally, the left hemisphere tends to see things that normally we would see as

• 13:39Speaker 01

  animate as inanimate. And it is a world that is just a representation, an abstraction, a conceptualized version of the world, like a two-dimensional print, or more appropriately, a map in relation to the world that is mapped. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere is seeing something completely different. It sees that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Nothing is certain and fixed, but always flowing and changing. That the implicit is more important than the explicit. All the things that really matter to us are degraded when they're made explicit. Love, sex, friendship, religious belief, a poem, a piece of music, whatever it is, a myth, a ritual.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  It comes crashing down to a nothing when you make it explicit. Its whole being can only be conveyed implicitly. And this world is animate and has meaning. It's not the meaning that we make by putting the things together like pieces of Lego. It's a world that already comes with meaning. And it is the real vivid presence of the world, not just an anemic representation such as the left hemisphere has. Now, there's a lot more to say, of course, but, a couple of thousand pages, but I mean, the real point for now is that these two kinds of world are superficially in competition with one another. And when we discuss... What the world is like.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  It is much easier to present a mechanistic picture of something that is just made up of these pieces. So it's money for old rope to put that point of view. It's rather difficult to express a view that actually this misses just about everything that is important. That everything is relational. In fact, I hold that relations are prior to relata, which I can defend if you want. But my view is that relations are what the world is made out of, not things. And the world is in constant process. So these are different versions. There's a static fixed mechanism which we can exploit for our utilitarian pleasure and benefit. And the other world is one which has beauty in it, has true goodness, not just the ticking of boxes

• 15:53Speaker 01

  as a way of determining what's good and appreciates a kind of truth, which is not just in black and white. Is it this or is it that fact? But a truth which is a relational truth. In other words, that we are true to experience. We are true to the cosmos as a large as the whole in which we take part. So these differences are enormous. And in our society, partly because we focus very much on an empire of one kind or another, either a territorial one, a military one, or a, or a commercial empire. Because we want to control very large areas of the world. We tend to do it in a way which brought the downfall of the Greek civilization and the Roman civilization.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  All the subtlety they had when their civilizations thrived goes out of the window. And what you have instead is something that is rigid, hierarchical, loses all the nuances, the sense of harmony, and just as we now say, roll something out so that it can be, this is how we do things everywhere. This mentality is perpetuated by big business.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Bureaucracy has now got it into universities and hospitals and everywhere we see this taking over of the individual by the general. The initiative that comes from being creative is done by rule following. And mediocrity results everywhere and people lose a sense of why they're doing what they're doing. They lose a sense of the pride one has in doing a good job and acquiring skill. Instead, one's told that all of this means nothing and the only thing that matters is just acquiring as much as you can for yourself. And that is an emotionally, spiritually bankrupt vision of the world. And as I say, is a product of a very narrow way of thinking that leaves just about everything that's important out of the picture.

• 17:43Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, there's so many questions that arise from your answer there, Ian, and so many threads that I want to pull on.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Pull away.

• 17:53Demetri Kofinas?

  One obviously is what you mean by reality being relational. But you mentioned the hospitals, I think you said the word hospital. I recently wrote about an experience I had in a waiting room. And I had to recently meaningfully interface with the medical system in a way that I hadn't in many, many years. And I've noticed that it's gotten worse. And one of the things that I've also noticed is that, and this isn't just true in the healthcare system, it's true everywhere. I mean, forget about it if you ever have to make a customer service phone call, it's a total nightmare.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  It is.

• 18:28Demetri Kofinas?

  There does seem to be, and maybe you can speak to this, there does seem to be this obsession with process at the expense of everything else, including the outcome. So that people have actually lost their ability to think critically, have lost common sense in how they approach interactions with other people. And you're left with a feeling oftentimes that you're not even dealing with a person. So much so that you'd actually prefer to deal with a more intelligent machine at this point because human interactions have become so burdensome. Does that track with your own experience?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely, there's just so much to say about that. I mean, first of all, in my experience, the two areas I know most about are hospitals and universities. And in both, I can see that deterioration over the last twenty-five, thirty years, very strikingly. And the people who taught me at university would probably rather have given up their jobs than by the various things that the bureaucracies in the universities obliges them to do. And, you know, the same thing applies in hospitals where doctors are hamstrung by procedures that are laid down by management. These are people who have no experience of being a doctor and what it actually means. See, there's a big gap between the representation of something on paper, a schema, and what it actually

• 19:43Speaker 01

  means to be in the thick of it. It's a bit like sitting at home, never having fought in a battle, and using schematics on a wall diagram to try and help you understand what's actually going on, on the terrain where people are fighting for their lives. So, the right hemisphere is in touch with life, the left hemisphere is only in touch with the schema it has made. That's a very important first point. And actually resents what it has not made. So I think, just as an aside, that one of the reasons there is now an all-out war on nature and on the body is because of the rise of only-left hemisphere-type

• 20:22Speaker 01

  thinking. Going further on this, the left hemisphere is interested in a procedure, but it is not interested in what it means. Now, there are different contributions of the left and right hemisphere in both mathematics and in language. And it's interesting that the left hemisphere is better at the procedural elements of both, and the right hemisphere better at understanding what's happening here. So the left hemisphere can focus in on what nowadays is all that seems to be taught in schools, which is a bunch of procedures, techniques for doing something, but not what

• 21:03Speaker 01

  it all means. And the rise of so-called STEM subjects is at the expense of the humanities. Now, there's nothing wrong with the STEM subjects in themselves. People will misunderstand me unless I'm constantly putting an opposite to what I'm saying, because I believe that in all these questions, there should be a point, a reasonable point, a commonsensical point, to come back to your expression. But in fact, we alternate between extreme positions, and that also is exactly the way the left hemisphere works. It thinks it's got to be this, or it's got to be that. For example, presented with an image that has different interpretations, it will only be happy locking on to one. Whereas the right hemisphere can

• 21:47Speaker 01

  see, well, it could be this, or it could be that. And this difference between being either-or, left hemisphere, or both-and, in the right hemisphere, goes one level up. So in the way they look at one another, the left hemisphere's view is either what it's seeing is right, or the right hemisphere is right, they can't both be right. But the right hemisphere sees that the both-and includes either-or, the left hemisphere's take and its own both-and take, if you see what I'm getting at there. So it's much more comprehensive, it's much more subtle, it's much more flexible, and it involves all the things that the left hemisphere doesn't really know a lot about. It's not very much good at deeper emotions,

• 22:28Speaker 01

  it's not so in touch with the body as the right hemisphere. And all these things are so important to what's going on now. We're entering into a world in which we're thought of as disembodied and disembedded in our culture.

• 22:41Demetri Kofinas?

  So again, so many questions. Let's just pick one. I feel like in the medical profession, I grew up around physicians. My father is a physician, my uncle is a physician, my aunt is a physician, I have a cousin who's a physician. So I've been around the medical profession since I was a kid. Something that I've noticed, at least from a patient point of view, is that the diagnostic process has gotten significantly worse.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 23:06Demetri Kofinas?

  That we've created all sorts of new forms of intervention and physicians are, in some cases, this is where we've seen obviously enormous progress for the better. But the diagnostic process is where I feel like I'm seeing the biggest failure on the part of physicians, a failure. And perhaps that also speaks to the fact that we are an increasingly answers-based society. And physicians, along with everyone else, have lost the capacity to ask the right kinds of questions, which is ultimately how you figure out what is wrong with the person that's sitting in front of you. Is this also an example, you think, of the same phenomenon we're describing here?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Very much so. When I trained in medicine, I was told that when you went to meet a patient, so you're in a hospital, so there's a patient in a bed, say, you ask questions and you formulate a probable diagnosis before you put a hand on the patient. And when you put the hand on the patient, you do that to confirm what it is, or disconfirm whatever it is you think that is the matter. And investigations come absolutely last. They are just a backup whereby you confirm that your position must have been correct or not. But this is now turned upside down.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  So the first thing you do is put the patient in a scanner. You don't spend too long on the history, but the history, the way I was trained was the history gives you the diagnosis. Pay attention to the history. And if you know the right questions to ask, you will find it's handed you on a plate. Now, this is generally, I think, true and has generally changed. And what it means is that instead of the patient having the experience of another human being who Also like them, has suffered and will die and so on, but has knowledge of a particular area. Instead of having that person pay attention to them, which for some of them is an enormous healing thing to happen in itself, at least it helps the process.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Here is somebody who's actually listening to me and interested in my experience. Instead of that, they get a lot of technical stuff taken down and they're treated as though they're a faulty vehicle that is going in for a service and see what happens when we fiddle around with this bit or that bit. This is very sad. When I was last a clinician, which was probably two thousand and nine, you know, patients used to say to me how wonderful it is to be talking to somebody who hasn't got a computer on his desk. It was just me and a pen and paper. So I think it's become inhuman and I think one of the reasons is litigation. So people are worried that if they don't do something, they'll be sued.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  And this is a problem, which is again a very left hemisphere problem.

• 25:56Demetri Kofinas?

  If they don't run certain tests, so they run as many tests as.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  They don't, they run as many tests as possible, even if they're wasteful, unnecessary, and might even, in some cases, if they're invasive, cause some harm. So they'd rather do them than not. And this is everyone covering their back. And this has a huge dark side, which is that the relationships with a doctor changes, what a doctor thinks of himself as doing changes. And the relationship again is a more pugnacious relationship. I mean, it's arguable that patients perhaps trusted their doctors too much, but if you don't really trust your doctor, then it's not a working relationship. So we've ingress of commerce on a very large scale, insurance companies dictating protocols.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  This is not so true in Britain yet, but it's certainly very true in the US. And the further enlargement and entrenchment of litigation as part of the culture, these I think have pushed it. But it's also that doctors themselves have been taught to think of themselves and their patients as machines. And so we've now got a very clever machine that can diagnose the machine. And in doing this, the whole human side of it has been driven out. I'd just like to mention, for the sake of viewers who might be interested in more of this, I think it was last year at Duke, I did the.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Was it MacArthur, I think, was the name of the lecture. It's an annual lecture on the problem of medicine and the humanities.

• 27:30Demetri Kofinas?

  Hmm, interesting. I'd love for you to send that to me after this conversation is over, Ian, and I could include it in the intelligence report. You know, we just got through Thanksgiving last week in the United States, or a couple of weeks ago, and so I had an opportunity to be with family. And I was asking both my uncle, well, I was actually saying to both of them, you know, I just don't understand why someone hasn't written a book, why there isn't one book out there that clearly explains and diagnoses the problem in medicine today and how to fix it. And they had a cynical response as to why that hasn't happened. But one area where this also, I think, has produced very negative outcomes is on the side of the physicians. So less competent, smart, interesting, thoughtful people

• 28:14Demetri Kofinas?

  are willing to go into medicine to begin with today because of how miserable the profession has become. And it's become harder to be in private practice. We actually sat down and did a mathematical computation of what it costs to spin up a medical practice. Granted, this is New York City. We were looking at the cost of doing it in New York and estimating what it would cost to actually run an office, a single-person office for an internist, a general practitioner. And it's just not feasible. It's not feasible, given what the insurances pay, the deductibles. And increasingly, patients themselves can't even afford the deductibles. You're paying for an insurance, and then you can't even afford the deductibles on the insurance. So what exactly are you paying for? I mean, the entire system is broken. And we can't seem to fix it, which also seems to be, in some sense, a symptom

• 29:00Demetri Kofinas?

  of a society that is sort of stuck in the inertia of too much left-brain thinking.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. And people talk about the polycrisis, because that is a very good example you've just given.

• 29:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Can you explain what that is, the polycrisis?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Well, it means we seem to have a lot of things that are not working. One of them might be the medical system. One of them might be the educational system. One might be even the democratic system. One might be the dispoliation of nature, the destruction of.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Forests and the poisoning of the seas and so on and so forth. There are a whole range of things that seem to be going wrong. And I reject the word polycrisis because it makes it sound like they're different crises that happen to have come together. I prefer the term mattercrisis because there is a crisis at another level that underwrites, or if you like, oversees. It doesn't matter, but it comprehends the whole lot of them. And that is best summarized for me as the complete inability any longer to listen to what the right hemisphere is telling us and working only on left hemisphere type schemas. It's not a surprise that it's all going wrong. It will inevitably go wrong if that is the

• 30:15Speaker 01

  way you go. And let me just put a gloss on that from a neuroscience point of view. So in the first part of the matter with things, I look at what the different contributions of the two hemispheres are to the various ways in which we can get to know anything about the world. So I'm talking here about what I call the portals whereby news about the world comes to us. And they are attention, perception, judgments that we make on the basis of what we've attended to and what we've perceived, emotional and social intelligence, our cognitive intelligence, good old fashioned IQ, our ability to think flexibly, a sort of form of creativity. And on all of these, the right hemisphere is superior to the left,

• 30:57Speaker 01

  measurably superior to the left, on all of them. So it is more intelligent, it understands more, it attends better, it sees more, it makes more sense out of what it sees. And therefore, it is a disaster if the left hemisphere becomes the one that calls the shots. And this has been intuitively realized all around the world. So in China, Japan, Korea, India, in parts of the First Nation peoples in North America, all over the place, people have myths of the being a wise ruler and an intemperate second in command who thinks he knows better and thinks he knows everything. And who therefore usurps the one that has the wise oversight.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  And as a result, everything falls down. This is the story encapsulated in the title, The Master and His Emissary. Because the master is the right hemisphere, the emissary is the left hemisphere. And the word emissary is quite good in a way, because it suggests somebody who goes off on an errand. You send them off to do a certain task and then report back. And that's just what the left hemisphere should do. And when the two hemispheres are working together, it does a very nice job. And at moments when civilization has really flourished, such as the sixth century B.C. in Athens, around the year zero in Rome, and perhaps around the fifteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth century in Western Europe, particularly in Italy and France, the Renaissance, then they work very well together.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  And everything flourished. Sciences flourished, the arts flourished, government flourished, mapping the oceans, mapping the heavens, the sciences. Everything took great steps forward in a humane philosophy. And yet, now we are in a thoroughly inhumane, machine-led philosophy, in which we find all these things are beginning to fail. Even science is less imaginative than it used to be. This is very well recognised. Up until about the sixties and seventies, there were, for at least the previous fifty years, from about nineteen ten to nineteen seventy, there were a lot of Nobel Prizes in science awarded for magnificent steps forward in our understanding. But since then, there's been hardly a thing.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Because what we've gone on doing is digging deeper in the same hole without being able to think, take an overview. In other words, it's very good to dig in a hole, but from time to time, you have to come up and look at the terrain and see where it is in relation to everything else that you're doing that digging. This is the problem. The right hemisphere sees the broad context and the left doesn't. And I have to explain why that's so important, because you said, what do you mean by relations come? We said, well, it's the effect of you wanting me to explain why I say relations are primary. Because there can't be a thing to relate until the relations have done their work, if you like to put it that way. So the left hemisphere thinks, well, obviously, there's a thing here and a thing there,

• 33:56Speaker 01

  and I want to know how they relate. That makes sense. The things come first, the relations come after. But what that neglects is that the thing that you have fixed on is only that thing that it is because of the vast network of connections in which it stands. We don't understand how context changes everything.

• 34:17Demetri Kofinas?

  Hmm. So there's a question I want to ask you that came to me while you were answering part of the previous question. And that has to do with the relationship between one's age and one's tendency to think in a more left or right, hemispherically dominated manner. Do people who are younger, when I say younger, I don't mean children, because my guess would be that young children tend to be more right-brain dominated. But again, I want you to, after I'm finished giving you my impression, I would love for you to tell me what you think. My sense is that, you know, when I look at my young boy, he's 15 months old. I feel like that so much of how he interfaces with the world is in the lived experience of the world. He hasn't schematized it yet. He's beginning to, obviously. He's in the process of doing that.

• 35:02Demetri Kofinas?

  But he still is dealing largely with raw experience.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:07Demetri Kofinas?

  And then it seems to me that when we get to be, you know, young adults, we have already constructed pretty rigid schemas of the world. And we also tend to see things simplistically. That's when I think, you know, in your twenties is when you're, or in your teenage years, you tend to be, see things very, in terms of black and white. And then with age comes wisdom and the ability to see nuance. And so I'm curious, is that true? So you would agree with that, that there is a tendency, on average, for people of certain ages? Interesting. Tell me more about that.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I do, but I'm not sure that I want to make it just a story about hemisphere preferences, if you like. I think it is certainly true that in the first, perhaps, three years of life, two and a half, three years of life, the infant is much more, or the young child is much more dependent on the right hemisphere. And then at four and five, when language becomes very prominent, the left hemisphere becomes perhaps dominant for a while. And then there's a rather good fallow period in which these work together up until... Puberty, really. And I don't know if you've noticed, I think most people have, that children in that sort of golden period between about five and eleven or twelve

• 36:25Speaker 01

  can write extraordinarily good poetry. But when they become adolescents, they suddenly become terribly self-conscious about it all, and they write terribly poetic poetry, which frankly is not terribly good. They also become suddenly aware of the shapes of things, and they say, oh, I see. So you're all wrong when you say so and so, because I can see. So they haven't enough experience to realise that there is, the world is enormously complex, and there's much that is good that can be said for things that you're currently dismissing, and there's much that is bad that may come of things that you're currently intent on promoting.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  So in that sense, I think what happens is that, as we say, life knocks the corners off because it makes you realise how little you do know. And this is partly an aspect of simply acquiring more experience. So that is straightforward. Unfortunately, I think that as one gets into older age, there is a tendency, I don't know how robust it is, but it has been mentioned that we become more left hemisphere dominated, which may be that the the old schemata return, and we're not so flexible in our thinking. Because one very important difference between the left and right, which I think I've mentioned, is that the left hemisphere tends to be dogmatic, it tends to be stuck in set,

• 37:49Speaker 01

  it won't move on. Whereas the left hemisphere is always saying, well, it might be different. And in fact, Ramachandra, N B S Ramachandra, a well-known neuroscientist, says the right hemisphere is the devil's advocate. So I think it's very important that we listen to the devil's advocate.

• 38:05Demetri Kofinas?

  Hmm. So Ian, what explains what appears to be a decline in wisdom in the world today? Again, I don't know if you would agree with that.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Big question.

• 38:15Demetri Kofinas?

  Hmm.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  I would agree with it very definitely. I sometimes think that if there is a future people to look back on us, they will consider us the most foolish people that ever lived, but there we are. And unfortunately, we also have far greater power to destroy the world and ourselves than we ever had before.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  So there's something cheerful to contemplate, but.

• 38:37Demetri Kofinas?

  What is that about and how cross-cultural is it? I mean, how much of that reflects a process that's underway in the West, but isn't necessarily the case in other countries or cultures?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Well, you're absolutely right to point to that. But unfortunately, the almost unstoppable advance of Western ways of thinking and Western technology into just about everywhere in the world is rendering what I always used to think unfeasible. And what was it that I always used to think? Well, if this civilization doesn't work, we will have the East to learn from. But the East is now, at least in parts of it, a sort of ghastly parody of all the worst things about the West. I think that deep down, there are perceptions, there are memories of ways of thinking and being that are much wiser.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  I have hope that people will get fed up with the, both in the West and in the East, with the way of thinking and being that we have brought about in society. And there will be a move to rediscover those ancient wisdoms. And it will demand of others something very difficult to do, which is when you've got luxury and you've got ease, giving up that ease and giving up that luxury. And I'm not a perfect example of this. If people came along and said, no, you've got to do without all these. I don't have a lot of electrical or electronic devices, apart from being able to keep in touch with the internet. But nonetheless, I would be unwilling.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  So I think it will take things coming to quite a pass before we see that actually we have to stop living like this. There are people who are already doing that. But to get back to wisdom, one of the problems with wisdom is that it's not the endpoint of a series of logical steps. There is no algorithm or procedure or set of rules about how you do it. In fact, the one rule is the one that comes out of Zen, which is there are no rules. And so it is you're left kind of having to intuit things. Now, that is a very healthful thing in the modern world. Is we've been taught to disattend to our intuitions.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  And one of the reasons we're in such a mess is, I believe, because we no longer listen to experience to what it tells us and listen to our intuitions about it. And our imagination of how we can get back to something valuable that we've lost. Not by going backwards in time, that can't be done, but by seeing the things that before were important and finding them again in a new way, in a new context. If you think about the Renaissance, which is the start of the rise of the whole story of the modern civilization of the West, it came from looking back and thinking, oh, well, we need to rediscover wisdoms that people had before that we have lost. And by reincorporating them, there was a wonderful golden period when things

• 41:39Speaker 01

  thrived in an almost extraordinary way, in an almost hitherto unseen way in the world. And it's just very sad that this got derailed into a single track vision that everything can be answered by reason. Now, immediately I've got to say that I am a great believer in reason, because otherwise people will say, oh, you know me. No, of course I believe in reason, but listen to me, reason can't answer everything. There's lots of our experience that is beyond what reason can helpfully explain to us, and the same is true of science. Science is a wonderful thing, and I spend half my time defending it against people who don't

• 42:21Speaker 01

  want to listen to its findings because they don't fit their particular philosophy. But that is not good enough. We do need to listen to science, but we also, good scientists know this, that we can't answer all our questions with science. Science is a, is a technique which is very useful in places. Nor can it provide meaning. Nor can it provide meaning, purpose or value, because it starts from a standpoint that we're not going to suppose a meaning or purpose or a value, and now we're going to see what we can find out about the mechanism. And that's been incredibly successful. So don't let me be thought of as somebody who is ungrateful for the advances of science from which we've all benefited. But. Yeah, we now find ourselves in a crisis where not only do we have no sense of purpose

• 43:04Speaker 01

  or values, but we believe entirely wrongly that science says that it has discovered there is no purpose and there are no values. Science can discover no such thing. It's not equipped to do so. It's already ruled them out at the outset.

• 43:18Demetri Kofinas?

  And but also, that speaks to something else you alluded to earlier, which is that science has gone from being seen as a discipline, a modality, a way of approaching the world to an authority. Science says XYZ. And we saw this, of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  We certainly did.

• 43:37Demetri Kofinas?

  Among other places.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  And it's worth pointing out for people who don't know this, that the word "science", meaning what we now mean, was only adopted in 1830. I mean, plenty of science went on, but it was called natural philosophy. And the importance of that is that philosophy rarely gets so sure of itself that it thinks that there can't be any other way of seeing things, and that it is about using a philosophical approach to nature. Unfortunately, science can't work without a philosophy. And if it thinks it can, it's just working with an unexamined philosophy. And that unexamined philosophy is scientific reductivism, and it's very damaging.

• 44:17Demetri Kofinas?

  So, speaking of creature comforts, which we spoke a little bit about earlier, I had your friend Paul Kingsnorth on the podcast some months ago.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Ah, oh, good.

• 44:25Demetri Kofinas?

  And as you know, he, among other things, makes his own manure.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:30Demetri Kofinas?

  So, I actually, when I was both preparing for the conversation and then speaking with him, I was actively thinking about whether or not I'd actually be willing to engage in that kind of lifestyle. And I wouldn't, you know. In fact, I spent, after our time together in Italy, I spent some time up in a farm in Vermont, where the person who had purchased it Had built it so that it could be basically self-sufficient. No solar panels or anything like that because they would require servicing in the event of supply chain disruptions. There were cows on the property that could plow the fields, et cetera. And the reality is that's just a bridge too far for me.

• 45:12Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm not prepared because I also like intellectualizing. I like spending my days thinking about concepts and being in conversations and therefore I require and need someone else to do all that heavy lifting for me.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  I agree with you, but then Paul McKingsnall seems to square the circle.

• 45:31Demetri Kofinas?

  He does, yes, he does. Although Paul, I think if you asked Paul, he would probably say, you probably have had this conversation with him, he would probably say that the medieval period was a better time for people than the modern age. In other words, that he would prefer to live in that period of Christendom than the modern era.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Well, yes, that's another matter. Yes, historians of science and society on this topic that we have been deliberately told that life in the past was unspeakably harsh and people had no time for anything that really mattered. But that is absolutely not true. They had more leisure than we have now, even the peasants, because it was, especially in the winter. And there were a few, I mean, I've stayed on a friend's subsistence farm in Wales in the past where indeed we made our own manure and did everything by hand and so on. And I could see how it fitted actually rather well with a lifestyle of thought and contemplation. And he admitted that there were two times in the year that were extremely busy.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  One was harvest and the other was lambing time. And during those times, they had little rest or peace. But during those times, the community all pulled together to help one another.

• 46:44Demetri Kofinas?

  Are you familiar with Joshua Schreie, Ian? I may have mentioned it to you in person.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Joshua?

• 46:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Joshua Schreie. He's the founder of the Emerald Podcast and he also has developed a course, I think that he calls it the Mythic Body. Anyway, he does some very unique work and I had him on the podcast, I don't know, what was it, maybe a year ago or so, after he published an episode titled, So You Want to be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers, or in the Age of Mythic AI. And he most recently put out an episode, which, again, I recommend the Emerald, people should check it out, it's very different, it's poetic, it's lyrical, I mean, that's sort of what it is, it's like a two-hour lyrical poem. And the most recent one was called, Carry That Weight on Mythic

• 47:32Demetri Kofinas?

  Burdens and Cosmic Supports. And he talks about how we tend to believe that we've been unweighed by the burdens of tradition, and in some sense, we have, I mean, there are certain traditions that weigh heavily on people, and also communal expectations that weigh heavily on people, and our ability, in some cases, to unburden ourselves of those burdens has allowed us to live more authentic lives, that at the same time, we also labor under the illusion that we can carry all the burdens of the world on our own shoulders, on our own individual shoulders. And I think that in the past, we were much more attuned to the forms of not just communal support, but also, you know, in a world that wasn't

• 48:13Demetri Kofinas?

  electrified, we lived by the rising and falling of the sun, and we're more exposed to the elements of the seasons. And there was a sense of living in the world, we lived more in the world than we were today, which is sort of outside the world. And so much of the world that we live in is a construction of the left hemisphere, it is the streets, the roads, the fiber optic networks, the graphical user interfaces that we use to interface with each other. The question that I've had in my mind that I want to ask you, Ian, is, so we've talked a lot about the problems that we have diagnosed in the world, but it also does seem to me that there are many people that are seeking out folks like

• 48:55Demetri Kofinas?

  you, folks like Paul, and others, Joshua Schreie. You're on the receiving end of these requests, do you feel like an awareness is growing and has been growing for some time? Do you see a change in the world? Are people seeking you out more and more? And if so, what is the common element that you find? Like, what do people who seek you out, and who seek out your compatriots, what do they share in common, attitudinally and otherwise?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Well, of course, you're asking me to generalize rather wildly, but I think that there are common threads. One is the feeling of having been sold short, so that they have been told that the world is so and so, and they find it not to be, and they just can't believe this. They miss things that used to be taken as read because there was a cultural handing on of wisdom from generation to generation, which you mentioned as tradition. And of course, what we don't understand is that tradition evolves. It means the handing to somebody of something, handing over of something.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  And it would be stupid to have spent all your life acquiring a degree of a kind of wisdom from experience and not hand it on. The idea that everybody has to invent it for themselves from the word go, assuming they're as intelligent as all the people that lived before them, is ridiculous. And there's nothing wrong with the tradition. It does not mean ossification. It means a continuous flow, and that flow changes. So tradition always changes. So when you come to look at the history of the West since thirteen hundred, you will find that just about every fifty or a hundred years, certainly, the zeitgeist was different. Things had changed, lots of things changed in all aspects of life. So although that was a tradition, it wasn't an ossification.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  So we're wrong to have got rid of that tradition to, you know, since about nineteen ten. We've spent a lot of time attacking it, breaking it up, ironizing it, rubbishing it. And the same with religion, which is another kind of handed on wisdom about how the world works. And they found themselves suddenly stranded with all the toolkits having been stolen or thrown away or burnt. And they're looking for the toolkits that will enable them to understand where they are and what they're doing there. I mean, it's literally as basic as that. And I'm very, very. Heartened by the reactions of particularly young people when I go and talk who come and ask me afterwards, you know, that's so interesting to hear and what can we do about it and so on.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Of course, I haven't got all the answers to those questions, but I can help point people in certain directions and I can say something about that if you like.

• 51:45Demetri Kofinas?

  But do you find that there are more young people coming to you today than there were, say, ten years ago?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. And I think also, and I don't think this is just my experience, in fact, it's mainly things I gather from more general reports, is that churches are, their attendance is burgeoning and it's largely young people who are seeking something that has been wrongly taken away from them and they need to recover it for the health of them and for the health of the society that they belong to. So I feel very strongly about that. And I do feel that, you know, it's strange, at the same time, we know so little about our own history. That's almost been, again, one of these ludicrous political things

• 52:31Speaker 01

  where it's all terrible and the West is something we can only be ashamed of. Look, excuse me, if you know anything about world history, if you're talking about slavery, every civilization in the history of the world has had slaves. There is one civilization that actually abolished slavery voluntarily at its own cost, its own financial cost. And that was British culture, which decided this was not a good thing for a civilization. And the other bits in the scale are not talked about. About, you know, the whole idea of democracy, of humanity, you know, comes, the way we think of it, comes out of a Western tradition and it's

• 53:15Speaker 01

  very, very rich in its art, in its literature, in its music. And in aspects of the religion that it has brought forth. And I'm not saying it's the only one or the only civilization or the only anything. We're not in this stupid, it's got to be all this or all that mode of talking. I'm saying this is something that needs to be thought about in a balanced way. But if you are not taught about your history and you don't know your own literature and poetry and the works of Shakespeare, and you don't know some of the history, and you haven't been taught how to argue on both sides of a question, you leave school as frankly uneducated. Yes, you may know a lot of tech, but you haven't got an education. And none of the tech means anything, anything at all,

• 53:59Speaker 01

  unless you've got a coherent context into which to sit it. You know, context literally means the weaving together. And it is that weaving together of relations that makes a world. And we are unweaving it, we're destroying it, we're rending the web. Sometimes refer to this image in the Vedanta of Indra, Indra's web. Do you know that? Indra was an Indian god.

• 54:25Demetri Kofinas?

  I'm familiar with Indra.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  He cast a web over the world. And that web was a net. And at every crossing point in the net, after all, a net is only connections. There are no things there, it's just a mass of connections. And at every point where the threads cross, there was suspended a jewel. And in every jewel, all the other jewels in the net were image. This is a wonderful image of differentiation with integration, without damaging the integrity of the whole. That there are different levels within a whole that they are what I might call a wholearchy, different levels of a whole on.

• 55:04Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, I was wondering, when we're talking about young people being especially drawn to religion these days, I've seen this as well. How much of this has to do with the economic challenges that they face? And the greater difficulty in climbing the economic ladder today for young people? As opposed to, let's say, when I was younger or when my parents were younger? That the promise of self-actualization is breaking down in the modern capitalist West? And so the reaction is to look elsewhere for ways to sort of find meaning in life? Do you think that's sort of part of what's happening here?

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yes, I think there's an interesting coming together of two things here, which is the whole idea of self-actualization has been oversold, and at the same time, we have ensured that it's harder to do.

• 55:52Demetri Kofinas?

  And a specific type of self-actualization, self-actualization in the marketplace, self-actualization through the progression of one's career and the accumulation of capital and material wealth.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Well, yes, but of course, that whole idea, even though I've been used to hearing that for a long time, strikes me as different from what I'm thinking of, which is, there is two things. There is your self-actualization as a scientist, as a doctor, as a teacher, as a lawyer, as a policeman, as a whatever. These are things that you feel a calling to do, and you really like to do them. But they are not done for wealth, or at least they shouldn't be. I mean, I'm afraid nowadays, a lot of them are. But it's not about the accumulation of capital, it's not about a marketplace, it's about the fabric of a society.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  The whole idea that a doctor provides a commodity in a market is an appalling idea to me. I mean, that's part of the breakdown of the idea of a cohesive society in which we are held together by duties, by obligations which come from affect, from knowing that there are things that are important here, and that you can, up to a point, trust somebody. But by emphasizing only one thing, which is the bottom line, trust breaks down. And, you know, that is the source of so much that's gone wrong in that very world. I sometimes refer to the fact that in the eighties, a number of very large corporations which were

• 57:24Speaker 01

  thriving, were taken over by big international conglomerates. And the men in suits called the shots and said, we're only going to care about the bottom line. And as a result, those organizations went belly up. And the reason they did was they stopped caring about their customers and the fact that they were there to actually do and take some pride and pleasure in doing a bloody good job. And instead, once you say it's only about money, well, nobody has any incentive, frankly, any, I mean, because the idea that we do things only for money is quite wrong. We do them for other reasons. A perfectly good example is if a friend says, oh, gosh, I'm struggling to change this wheel. Can you help me?

• 58:06Speaker 01

  I will say, absolutely, and give him a hand. But if he says, will you help me change my tire? I'll give you five pounds. I'll say, but hang on, what's that about? You know, it's actually disincentive. There are many things that we wish to do because they're good to do. We must get back to a vision of ourselves as not greedy, narcissistic, atomistic individuals who only desire things we feel we're entitled to.

• 58:34Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, you know, I totally agree with this. And I also think that part of the story involves the encroachment of capitalism onto more and more parts of our lives. You know, I remember when in New York City cabs, I don't think this is the case in London. I mean, I've ridden in black cabs all the time, but I just can't remember now if I've actually ever seen anything like this. But I remember when years ago, this was more than 10 years ago, New York City cabs introduced screens into the back of the cab.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

• 59:06Demetri Kofinas?

  And it was such an obscene and obtrusive presence when it first showed up. And it remains to this day, but it was, it was a, I think that's a great example. I can come up with other examples as well, you know, the way in which sports has been monetized, the way in which professional athletes monetize their celebrity. But this is a great example because from the perspective of a capitalist, and when I use the term capitalist, I don't mean this in the sort of way that we traditionally think of the dichotomy between capitalists and communists and in any political sense. I just simply mean the person operating with a framework for the maximization of profit. From the perspective, from that perspective, leaving any spaces empty that could otherwise

• 59:49Demetri Kofinas?

  be used to advertise and promote a good is an inefficient use of space. And again, this concepts of efficiency and also viewing ourselves increasingly as machines is, I think, a feature of modernity.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and my first question when I get in the cab in New York is switch this thing off, or how do I switch it off? But your point is absolutely right, that it's like the encroachment of advertising onto every platform. And it's a kind of blackmail, because if you pay them, they will take the advertising off, but you have to pay them to get rid of the advertising. And of course, what the advertising is doing is cheating you as a machine, that if I press these buttons, you will respond by spewing out cash. And, you know, we're therefore, you know, walking cash machines, that are being raided by these techniques. And, you know, just to get away from the, let's go back to self-actualization for a

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  moment, because very few people actually have an idea of who they are, and even less nowadays, and who they want to be. But there is a kind of thing in which you decide that what you would like to do is, you would like to be a good, hmm, whatever it is. As I say, in my case, a good teacher and then a good doctor. Okay, so that's fine. And I never, never saw it as a way of making a lot of money, and I'd have been a fool if I had thought of it, certainly the teaching. And, but, these, these things are themselves fulfilling, and instead of seeing that there

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  are roles in society that you can take, that society is like an unfolding drama with a plot and characters, and you can play certain parts in it. I'm now thinking of Much Ado About Nothing and Jake Wood's speech about the ages of man, but you know. And that is a different way of thinking. And, you know, when one talks about the difficulties of getting into these things, I think back at my grandfathers, my, my two grandfathers were both the seventh of seven children. And in both cases, their father died by the time they were eight or nine. And in those days, there was very little provision for widows. Equally, there was very little that you could get in the way of a grant to get

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  education, but each of them went ahead and one of them trained in medicine at Edinburgh and the other one got a degree in chemistry in Manchester. And they did this by doing all kinds of other things. So I know that my maternal grandfather worked, um, worked days and studied nights or whichever way around it was for most of the time. And I, I know there are plenty of people who do supplement their work with these things, but in a way we've got slightly softer. We expect that everything will be given to us by the state and that's not a healthy state of affairs in itself.

• 1:02:51Demetri Kofinas?

  Is it also fair to say that the kind of self-actualization that you and I value necessarily comes within a broader community? That in other words, it's not an isolated

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Cannot be.

• 1:03:03Demetri Kofinas?

  process? And it comes in, I think also, is it also fair to say that it comes, the mechanism through which this operates is being in service to others?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And what people have been blinded to is that just thinking about yourself and getting stuff for yourself makes you restless, gloomy, and constantly unfulfilled. And, and you know, one of the things that if, I mean, of course, there are people who are depressed and are far too ill to do this. I understand that very, very well. But for some people who are not so badly depressed that they couldn't actually motivate themselves to do some little work as a service for other people, if they do that, it does probably as much for them as any antidepressant. They begin to feel already that they matter.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  And the business of giving to people is actually in itself enjoyable. So, I mean, I don't want to sound pie here, but one has to realize that these things all work both ways. They're good for others and they're good for you. So, I mean, at school, we were always taught to forgive people and to be grateful to people. And the way it came across was that this is about doing something purely for others, but in fact, it's doing something for yourself. Actually, if you don't forgive people, it eats you up much more than it does anything about the other person. If you don't have gratitude, then you don't appreciate the things that you have. And so these things are actually things that have to be purposed for another,

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  but do something for yourself. Of course, doing them for yourself is not a good reason. It's rather like when people ask, "Well, what should we do to clear our minds of all this left-hemisphere junk?" And I say, "Well, of course, you can practise mindfulness, but if you do it in order to make yourself a more efficient stockbroker, that is not the reason for doing mindfulness." And it's like the Zen problem, "What do I do to become wise?" You know, and they'll tell you some completely absurd thing, because what they want to say is, "There is no path to this, except by self-forgetting." Now, one of the reasons we're not wise nowadays is that we think that doing is more important than abstaining from doing, that thinking is more important than abstaining from thinking,

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  sometimes. So ignorance is not the same as the unknowing that a wise Zen master has. Unknowing is what you have after knowing, ignorance is what you have before knowing. And there's something the same about our obsession with doing things. Let me explain this in a very concrete way. So, as a psychiatrist, obviously, one of the things is people come to you with a problem, and they want to know what to do. And it would be very easy, and sometimes, when I was naive, I fell into the trap early on of telling people things that I thought would help them. But this isn't really the way to... It works. What you have to do is to get them to realise that there are things they are doing

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  that are actually very unhelpful, and to stop doing them. And not to say, "But I do thirty press-ups," or, you know, mental ones every day, but instead, stop doing the damaging thing and see what comes in its place. Because life comes to us. We can't make life happen. Life comes to us. We can either block it out, or we can open the hatch, as it were, and let it in. And our culture is driving life away. And we do frantic things to get it back again, but those frantic things were just the kind of thing not to do.

• 1:06:38Demetri Kofinas?

  Hmm, that really resonates, absolutely. I mean, I think also that's part and parcel of the creative process. You can't force your way to the creation of art. You have to open yourself to inspiration and you have to have faith.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  You have to give yourself up to it.

• 1:06:51Demetri Kofinas?

  That it will come. Yeah, you have to have faith that it will come. So in closing, Ian, what are you most hopeful about? You know, we've described some things that, you know, give us both concern about the world that are sources of sadness and frustration. What is it that you see in the world today that gives you hope?

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Lately, I feel there is a change of heart in the young and the young are the future. So I believe they will not be satisfied with just furthering the broken paradigm that we have bequeathed them. It's one that actually all my life I have not believed and disliked. And so I have to say it's my generation that created this, but I was always of the party that wished for something more and greater. And I think that that is coming now. I think people are fed up with pseudo creative art and are actually starting

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  to produce, again, real viscerally imaginative pieces of art that don't rely simply on some clever concept or some piece of text that tells you the clever idea behind it. That is not how Raphael, Bach, or any of the great artists of whatever kind worked. And I think that people are now, I hope, going back to understanding the value of intuition and imagination, because as I have to keep repeating, we need science, we need reason, but we also sure as hell need our intuitions and we need to listen to them

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  and we need above all imagination. Imagination completes and humanizes pure rationalization. Imagination is what actually led scientists to their great discoveries. Imagination is necessary for art. Imagination is even important for understanding our social world in which we are. Without it, we can't see what people are doing, why they're saying what they're saying. So that all these insights, which are very right hemisphere derived or baked, are, I think, now coming back largely because we feel, I think a lot of people feel very clearly that we've bankrupted ourselves by acting in the foolish way we have.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  So one of the commonest things I get, and I'm so delighted that I get this very often, is people writing to me saying, "Thank you for changing my life. Thank you for changing my life." People say this all the time, and believe me, I love to hear that. I cannot hear it often enough because it's my problem and doctor heal thyself, but I'm a kind of person who naturally doesn't, doesn't believe that I'm able to do things really. But the evidence, I have to now accept that people say it's changed their life. And one or two people have said, "You saved my life," which is something I could never have imagined. So seeing certain things is important and people are resonating when they see it. Often they say, "You know, all the things you say, you've got the science, you've got the language and so on,

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  but what you were validating was intuitions I had that I, I thought had to be discarded and I didn't know how to validate them myself. But now I have the, the language, I have the ideas, I see how they fit into the world." So, gosh.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  And, and you know, here's another thing that is hopeful, okay? So the future is in your hands in a very literal way and not to impose a burden on you. You said very early on that at the same time that we've somehow lost the cohesive sense of belonging to the world, we hope to take the whole world on our shoulders. And that's made worse by the, the presence of tragedies and horrific scenarios around the world that are pressing on us all the time by advances in media, which people in the past had very much less often to deal with. But people say, so what can I do? And I say, well, you know, on a vast scale, you can do things like join Greenpeace

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  or other organisations that are, that have an agenda which is for the good. And if their agenda was adopted, no doubt, um, benefits civilisation. But I have to say that in it, you may find yourself frustrated by the structure of the organisation, because all organisations in the end become, if they're too big, rather frustrating. And also, to be honest, the track record so far is not terrifically impressive. Secondly, coming much more locally, you can do things like take part in or found or join a community, a small community of people whose ambition is almost like a monastic

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  community, to live more simply, to live closer to the earth, you know, a bit like the King is North idea, to share your lives, to trust one another, work together, perhaps worship together. And that this will be, will form a little powerhouse that can radiate something out. If the big structures collapse, then there needs to be something that is giving warmth and life, and these could be little centres that are seeded. But the most important thing is the thing you think is least important, because it's about you and what goes on inside you. And in a way, the only thing that you can be responsible for is you. But maybe the odd thing is, we try to take on responsibilities we can't be responsible

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  for, but neglect the one that we will be held responsible for, which is, what have we done with our hearts? What have we done with our souls? Not just what money did we make or whatever? And that is so important, and you can do it right now. I mean, you don't have to get a grant for it. You can actually do it at home tonight, you know? And the point that then is made is, but I'm so small, what does it matter? But hang on, if everybody thought like that, the same argument could apply to almost anything good. If everybody thought, well, what's my contribution matter? It would, nothing good would ever happen. You don't know how big your contribution is because we're not dealing here in the world of the measurable.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  We're dealing in something that has quality and the quality of your ardor, of your, your love will come across and becomes part of who you are. And so this is an important message, I think, to get across. And, you know, finally, I go back to the words of Margaret Mead, they're very famous. I can't remember them exactly, but it's like, never doubt that a small group of people who believed in something could make the world change. In fact, nothing else has ever worked. Don't be put off, be hopeful, because without hope, nothing can be done. We're all lost. We don't know the future. We're much, much less good at predicting the future than we think. So, you know, doom mongers and, and at times there is a part of me that says, well, looking

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  at it rationally, it doesn't look good. But there was another part of me that says, but remember predicting the future is a mug's game. There's lots of times when something happened that you didn't bargain on. And I think that comes out of humans. When humans are really put to it, then they will respond. And at times of when a lot was asked, a lot has been given. And I think one of the problems with the age in which I have lived is that frankly, it didn't demand much. There was no war for us in the West. There was general increase in affluence. We thought everything was just getting better and better. Things were getting freer. There were no authoritarianism. The gap between rich and poor was getting smaller.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  And now we find suddenly that it's quite the opposite, that the gap between rich and poor is getting larger. And there's lots of people going around behaving like tyrants and telling me what I can say and what I can't say. This is not a good place to be. But I think what happens is that when you push people to The limit, then they turn around and become highly creative. And I think there'll be a lot of inspiring figures coming out of the younger generation as they see what it is they have to contend with.

• 1:15:02Demetri Kofinas?

  What an inspiring message, Ian.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  My blessing on them all, really.

• 1:15:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, in closing, I just want to reaffirm that you are one of those people doing important work. I feel somewhat uncomfortable giving you compliments here because I feel like a lot of times in these podcasts, people compliment each other. But I want to say this, you know, in the simplest way possible. I think that we benefit from folks like you who are not just out there exploiting the rage and the anger and the anxiousness of people, but also pointing to a way forward, giving people a path. And people are so desperate for that. And I think people respond to that kindness. You know, I think that besides your message, I'm sure that when people reach out to you, Ian, they reach out to you because they feel

• 1:15:47Demetri Kofinas?

  like they know you and they like you and you're a warm, good-natured human being. And so I'm one of those people and I deeply appreciate you and the work that you've done. For people who want to learn more about what you do, about the matter with things, about your philosophy, who want to reach out to you, what is the best way for them to do that?

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Is to go to my website, which is called Channel McGilchrist. And if you just Google that, it will take you straight there. It's not, you don't have to pay to see most of the material there. You can browse in it happily for months. And you don't need to be a member, but if you feel inspired to become a member, that's great. And it brings certain other privileges, as they say with it. I also have a Substack, which I have neglected for about the last five months, because I've been so busy traveling and dealing with a number of problems that nobody needs to concern themselves with, but that I just haven't really contributed much. And I'd like to get back to that. If you don't feel like splashing out on the matter with things, The Master and His Emissary is a fairly affordable little

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  paperback. Little, it's 600 pages, but there it is. And there's also something which you can download to a phone for less than a dollar, I think, which is a 32-page short called The Divided Brain: Why Are We So Unhappy? And that might be a very good place to start because you can read it in an hour and it gives you quite a lot of insights into What I've been thinking about and why I've gone to the places I have done.

• 1:17:20Demetri Kofinas?

  And you have an events page too. It looks like you're finally giving yourself a break. There's no upcoming event listed on the events page. But there are a list of previous events and I'm sure at some point you'll be back on the road.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  There are an awful lot of events online. So one of them is happening immediately after this and there are several over the next few weeks, some quite interesting ones.

• 1:17:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, it was really wonderful seeing you again, my friend. I hope we get a chance to meet in person again soon. I know Selly would love that.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  So do I, Dimitri. That would be lovely. Yes. And thank you for hosting this. Very, very pleased.

• 1:17:52Demetri Kofinas?

  My pleasure. Take care.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Okay, you too.

• 1:17:57Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.