Episode #251 ... You Must Change Your Life, Pt. 2 - The Worlds That Make Us

Today we talk more about Peter Sloterdijk’s book You Must Change Your Life. We talk about Heidegger, the subject-object view of the world, how environments form us, symbolic immunity, modern cynicism, vertical tension, base camps, civilizations as collective immune systems, and why Sloterdijk thinks humanity may need a new form of co-immunity. Hope you love it. :) Sponsor: Nord VPN: https://nordvpn.com/philothis Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. Website: https://www.philosophizethis.org/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philosophizethis Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philosophizethispodcast X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenwest Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophizethisshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This, patreon.com/philosophizethis. By the way, thanks to all the fine people on Patreon that have tested the Philosophize This app this last month. Just want to get it right before, you know, before we release it to everybody in the world for free, all at once, all the time. It's kind of a big thing, so thanks for the feedback. In addition, there's philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there, if that's something you're interested in. Hope you love the show today. So I made a joke last episode where I said that for Peter Slaughterdyke, in a sense, you're a person that's been trained from the moment you were born. From the moment your doctor rescued you from that spelunking accident on the day of your birth, you have been trained in various ways that shape what you even see as possible in the world.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  It was a hilarious joke. I won the Comedy Congressional Medal of Honor over here for making such a fine comparison. But the really funny thing is that it actually wasn't entirely true of Slaughterdyke. And clarifying this here, it's going to be an important thing for starting this episode because it's going to give us some insight into how his whole project's linked to the work of Martin Heidegger and that famous dismantling he does of the whole subject-object view of the universe and being in time. Technical details of what I think is so cool about this whole book, honestly. It's a book that's essentially approaching the problem of how to change your life, but it's starting from a Heideggerian picture of subjectivity rather than a traditional subject-object one. Let's get started on it, though. So the fact that you're training in every single moment of your life, and I guess even

• 1:27Speaker 00

  deeper than that, the fact that you're always living inside a world of internal relations between things that form important parts of you, that doesn't just begin at your birth for Slaughterdyke. Now, this actually starts long before that, prenatally, in the very first environment that you ever existed in alongside your mother. And as you sat there in that little pouch of yours, in this beautiful world the two of you had together, well, look, each of your respective existences certainly coaffected one another during this time. And we know that even the physical environment you two were living in as you grew, it was already forming important things about the kind of creature you'd eventually become once you got on the outside. And not surprisingly, this is something that didn't magically stop the moment you were born.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  This co-constitution of you and the interior world you've always existed in, when you're actually born, you can think of it as just expanding outward for you a bit, where now it extends to things about your immediate environment, from climate to the neighborhood that you live in that teaches you what's possible to do, to even your family, even your Uncle Murray and all those genius takes he's always got on everything. He'd have won the Nobel Prize by now if he just didn't get injured in college. What are we really talking about here? All this discussion about environments and co-constitution. Well, it's building on a point that we started making last episode about the common ways people usually think about what kind of being they are. What exactly is it to be me as a human? How do you even answer that kind of question if you wanted to?

• 2:52Speaker 00

  And we talked about how in the modern world, because of ideas that we inherit from the history of thought, ideas that we often don't even realize we're inheriting at the time, it becomes very easy to think of ourselves as detached subjects navigating a realm of neutral objects, subject versus object kind of thinking, that I'm me, a being standing right here, and the world is something that is over there, that's simply having effects on me standing here, where what I am is something that looks out at that world, decides what's good or bad about it, and then tries to choose what the right thing to do next is. In other words, it's very easy to think that the most primordial way that you ever experienced the world is separate from it at the level of making abstractions about it. And it should be said, we certainly do think about the world through abstractions all the time. It's a very important part of what we do.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  But the idea is that this comes slightly later. This is actually a secondary activity to something that comes ontologically prior to it. And the point for Slaughterdyke here, when he brings up the womb, is to destabilize this whole set of assumptions that you're fundamentally this fully-formed subject on the inside judging a realm of objects out there. Because where is the moment at any point in your past where you and the environment you're in are not literally forming each other? To Slaughterdyke, then, one simple way to put it is that what you are is part of the world, and the world's a part of you. You're not something looking out at the world. Again, it's co-constitutive, a unified condition. He has this great line where he says that we need to think of human beings as in part the effects of the environments we create.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And so with all this in mind, the first important thing we got to recognize here for Slaughterdyke is that these environments we're talking about, you know, these interior worlds that we're supposedly always in, he said that we need to always be very clear that these are not neutral worlds that we're moving around in. This can be a common assumption, but if you look around you, wherever you're at right now, you are not in a neutral spot wherever you are. Again, you are in a spot that is always already training you in important ways, whether you think about it that way or not. And how about a really simple example of an environment here, just to get us started thinking about his whole point? Imagine yourself inside of a casino. I think this will help illustrate what can be some pretty technical distinctions going on. So it's possible to experience what a casino is in terms of these abstractions we've

• 5:06Speaker 00

  been talking about, where what it is, is it's this physical space full of a lot of stuff that is ultimately neutral. There's slot machines, flashing lights, scantily clad people handing out all the free drinks, where as you stroll across the vomit-colored carpet and smell the cigarette smoke, the complete lack of windows in the place makes you practically forget about the fact there's even an outside world. In other words, it's a way to look at this whole situation where you're a subject in a room, and you got all this stuff in the room with you where it's not good, it's not bad necessarily, it just comes down to how people use it. If a person starts misusing the slot machines, maybe using them a bit too much, getting rowdy, acting immorally, well, that's the point when the casino turns into something more problematic stuff maybe going on.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  But the casino itself as an environment has no real moral content. But there's a whole nother way of viewing this same exact casino, where it's describing it in what you could call a more raw, primordial level of the way we experience things, a pre-theoretical version of the casino, the picture of which Martin Heidegger lays out in his work Being in Time. And by the way, this will be the foundation for Slaughterdyke, too. Now, this other way of viewing it would say that the person that goes into this casino we're talking about never actually encounters a room full of these neutral objects that they only then reflect on and decide the value of. Whenever we step foot into an environment like this, we always already encounter all the different parts of the casino as different parts of a network of practical relations

• 6:32Speaker 00

  that they are in, relationships between these things that already carry meaning to us when we enter the casino. For example, the slot machine appears to us not as some, you know, a neutral box sitting on the floor there, but we encounter it as a chance to win, maybe. The free drink appears to us as maybe hospitality. The money appears to us as the stakes of this whole activity. Even the vomit-colored carpet has its own kind of invitation to it, you know, to just let loose that night. See, to Heidegger, the way that our experience even becomes intelligible to us as beings in the first place is through an already existing network of practical involvements that we find ourselves as a part of. And importantly, this is a version of our experience that's going on prior to any abstraction that's being made about it.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  And you may notice that at this more pre-theoretical level of our experience, the casino starts to look more like something that's actually loaded with meaning all throughout it, certainly not a neutral environment is the point. But Slaughterdyke's going to take this picture of the casino one step further than even this. Now, it should be said, he certainly thought Heidegger got this whole part of it correct. This is a more primordial form of how we experience reality that many philosophers don't account for, where in most of their work, they usually just begin at the level of abstraction. But Heidegger's whole move there is still massively incomplete for Slaughterdyke in terms of an explanation. For example, how exactly do we become the kind of creatures in these sorts of relational networks? What is it about the most fundamental relationships we have with the actual world that produces

• 8:01Speaker 00

  a creature that's even capable of inhabiting something like this in the first place? So for some context, one way to understand what Slaughterdyke's doing here is that he's adding more of a spatial dimension to Heidegger's work that he thinks probably focused a bit too much on time as a structure of design. He apparently said at one point that his whole three-book project he does in the middle of his career called Spheres, where he lays out this whole thesis, that you can think of all three of those books as titled Being in Space instead of Being in Time, just a memorable way to think about what he's going for here. Anyway, there's again a third way of looking at this exact same casino that builds off of the second one, where in this case, we're of course beginning from a place where the casino's a meaningful environment, it's certainly producing a very specific world for the people living inside it. So the real question for Slaughterdyke now becomes, and this will be the case when it

• 8:46Speaker 00

  comes to any space we're in, what exactly is it about this whole spatial arrangement of everything that helps to progressively form the kind of person that continues to operate in this environment? And so when you take that question and you look at something like a casino, there is a borderline predatory level of cultural forces that are being constantly blasted into people, carefully designed to train them into a kind of perceptual cycle that they get stuck in. But the key thing to remember here is, don't picture this as just a bunch of effects that are being delivered by the world onto a bunch of independent subjects. No, think of this as an entire organized space or a practice world that people step into and progressively become formed through. That's the better way to read what's actually going on in this scene, where the whole thing

• 9:31Speaker 00

  is its own kind of human-making machine. There's stimulation all around you, trying to draw you into something, where then you're driven to anticipate the next thing, place a bet, and sit around and wait to see if it's your turn to win. Then you either feel the rush of winning in a moment, or you feel the pain of barely losing supposedly, only to be hit by yet another flashing light or a gong sound that's supposed to send you right back towards trying to win again. All this, among many other repetitive cycles, they want you to get into. I mean, the places are open 24/7 because they never want you to leave. And the point is, you stay in that cycle that this whole arrangement of things puts you in for long enough, just statistically, you're gonna give them all your money eventually. And of course, that's the whole design.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Now, the idea that any of this environment would be totally neutral starts to seem pretty ridiculous. It's not neutral. The casino starts to look more like something that's always acting upon us and that we are always acting upon. So for Slaughterdyke, when examining an environment like this, the more relevant question starts to become, what kind of a person does this whole arrangement of things produce every day? And now, consider how this question applies to every environment that we are ever in. The casino is just a simple example I picked to illustrate the point here, but imagine having to live inside the casino all the time. It'd be impossible. I mean, given enough time, you'd either become a part of the casino, wear a little vest and start working there, or you'd have to live every second of your life fighting against what it's constantly training you to become.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  So the point is to now reflect on your own interior worlds. How does the same dynamic apply to the specific room that you're in right now? What sort of lives or choices become more or less available to you simply by virtue of its atmosphere? Think about this even applies to the digital environment you live in. Or whatever algorithm you're training every day, it is at the same time training you to stay in a kind of digital casino that you've curated for yourself. Where the possibilities that are even available to you as a way to think or to get out of any situation you're in are conditioned every day by whatever you're getting on that feed. See, the environments that we are always already in, these are incredibly important to Slaughterdyke if you really want to change things about your life. And it's only when you start thinking of yourself as a subject that's detached from

• 11:42Speaker 00

  the worlds you're in, it's only then that you start thinking in those overly narrow ways we talked about last time, that the reason you're not changing is because you, as a rational agent, just haven't reasoned to the right set of beliefs about the world. Or because you, as an isolated moral agent, just isn't morally strong enough to fight against the casino each day. No, how about the fact you're living inside of a casino each day? It is so critical for Slaughterdyke, if you want to change your life, to understand just how co-constitutive you and the world truly are. Again, you gotta get really serious about how belief, action, and the world you live in are all things you should focus on changing if you don't like where you're at. You can't just expect to change one of these things and then have the other two just fall into place naturally.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Because the world that has helped form you up until this point conditioned so much of what even seems possible as a response for you to have. Imagine one person grows up in a home where, in that house, to disagree with a family member is taken as a sign of disrespect, and so they're punished for it every time they do it. Imagine another person grows up in a home where it's seen as a good thing because it shows you're actively listening. They get a pat on the head in that particular home. Well, the first person, when they have to challenge somebody in the world, they might almost instinctively feel a kind of anxiety or guilt about it. The second person might genuinely feel like it's a sign of respect to correct someone. And the point is, neither one of these people sat around, reflected on it, and chose either of these things. No, there was something at the level of their very formation that crystallized in completely

• 13:09Speaker 00

  different senses of what their speech even means, of something as basic as which responses in language even feel reasonable for them to use. And I cannot stress to you enough how much this extends to practically every scale of your entire life for Slaughterdyke. He's talking about far more than just your preferences here, is what I'm saying. So anyway, all this discussion so far, you know, rethinking the metaphysics of changing your life, this focus on these interior worlds brings us to something very important about this whole view he's been building so far, that what it is to be a human being for him is to be the kind of creature that is always exposed and vulnerable to threats and factors in these worlds we're living in. That is as fundamental a piece of what we are as anything is, as fundamental as breathing.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  And what follows from that is that prior to any moral system you might want to create about how you should be living, we're at a more descriptive level to Slaughterdyke, the kind of creatures that respond in various ways to these vulnerabilities we face. May seem like a very basic statement for a philosopher to be making, and it is, but that's what makes where he goes next so interesting. He's trying to start with something almost impossible for someone to deny, but then use it to explain all kinds of stuff human beings do that usually seems completely unrelated. So when it comes to responding to these threats and vulnerabilities, this could be as simple as just putting a calendar up on your wall because it's something that helps you organize the chaos of everyday life. But for a lot of this other stuff we're talking about, again, because of the vastness of what

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Slaughterdyke's trying to do here, as your philosophical sherpa, I had to make a judgment call out here on the slopes today, there are two main categories I want to break these responses down into. He doesn't do this, but I think it's a pretty helpful way to explain it and make it manageable. Two main categories of response here. Now, you could say one way of responding to any environment that we're in is by building more capacity to be able to face the things that are hitting you. In Slaughterdyke's terms, you could call this using those anthropotechnics we talked about last time to strengthen certain things about yourself. And examples of this would include, of course, bodily strength and health. This could be emotional awareness, control, this could be artistic skill, professional ability. The point is, this is the approach that builds capacities to be able to take on all the stuff that life requires of us.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  That's one category of response. The other main category we can use here is one that builds what he calls immune responses towards things in the world. Now, this of course includes biological immunity. That's certainly something we do. But importantly, this also includes what he calls symbolic immunity, or psychoimmunological practices. A general way to describe this whole class of things would be, it's any symbolic framework that serves for somebody as a kind of mental armor, as he calls it at one point. Some examples of these that genuinely make our lives better. We create stories about our own identity. That's a form of symbolic protection we use. We have funeral rituals to be able to deal with death easier. There are contemplative practices like meditation, religious or ascetic practice that help us frame the day to day.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Even something like humor is used as a kind of symbolic immunity sometimes too, he thinks. I mean, when you can take a difficult emotional situation and turn it into a joke that truly allows you to move on from something, that can be an incredible defense system for a person, a form of symbolic immunity is the point. Something you also might be thinking right now about this whole joking as a defense system kind of thing, is that it can also be used in a totally different kind of defensive way. A joke can also be used as something that prevents a person from ever having to truly be affected by anything, something that prevents the world from actually hitting them in a way that might require them to change. In fact, it's not just the case with joking. You might notice the same thing I just said there is true of a lot of these different forms of symbolic immunity I just mentioned. See, that's one of the things that complicates this whole picture, that Slaughterdyke would

• 16:47Speaker 00

  say we always have to keep in mind. The same practice on the surface can both be something that really enables you and the world you're living, it can also be something that's totally avoidant of the world, depending on how you're using it. And if there's one example we need to talk about of a truly avoidant, complex form of symbolic immunity that millions of people all across the modern world use today, it's gonna be the thing we talked about two episodes ago with Slaughterdyke, the trap of modern cynicism. And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through our single sponsor today, NordVPN. A VPN is a virtual private network. Imagine an app on your computer or your phone. You open it, you click a button, and from that moment forward, your internet connection is encrypted and routed through a secure server.

• 17:30Speaker 00

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• 18:15Speaker 00

  By the way, all this only costs about the price of a cup of coffee per month, and it's a great way to support the podcast. To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/filothis. Our link will also give you four extra months on the two-year plan. There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box. And now, back to the podcast. See, that is ultimately, for him, what is so appealing about the modern cynical position that so many people use every day. And notice how I didn't say "believe" there. They use it as an immune response. Modern cynicism allows for someone's intelligence about the world to stop them from ever having to let what they know become something that changes how they live. Think about it, it's a worldview where, again, every ideal or attempt at changing things

• 18:59Speaker 00

  is seen as just naive, where every sincere person out there is actually just performing in some way. Everything that looks like it's changing, ah, that's just an illusion. Again, the mantra becomes, things are really messed up out there, but hey, what can you really do about it? That's just the way that things are. The modern cynic becomes such a good example of somebody that encounters all these problems in the world, all those threats and vulnerabilities that humans always have to deal with, but then they build an entire defense system out of the very knowledge that could have otherwise allowed them to respond to the threat. But I guess here's a very important thing to realize about all this. The point isn't to berate the modern cynic here. And here's where those interior worlds we always live in with Heidegger and Slaughterdyke come back into this whole discussion.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  The point to realize is that the modern cynic is also somebody that's formed inside of a world as well. I mean, if you felt a little called out that episode, which I got a ton of messages from people saying as much, look, you gotta give yourself a little grace here. It's not like you sat in a room one day and decided that you were gonna become a cynic. No, you were formed inside of a world that makes this option incredibly available to you as a choice every day. We'll talk more about this here in a second, but I mean, as you can imagine, if you found yourself, for whatever reason, living in a very different kind of world, then being passively cynical all the time might instantly stop being such an available option for you. Still though, for Slaughterdyke, it's important for us to recognize what a symbolic immune response like cynicism ultimately stops people from doing. Because really, what's so wrong with using it?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  After all, we gotta survive as these exposed beings, he says, right? Why not just be passive and cynical? Well, remember the image you gave us last episode of the statue of Apollo from that poem? And how when you're looking at it, you know, its aura is shooting off of it, and how it sends to people almost through telekinesis, an imperative of "you must change your life, you." The idea being that there are many other lives out there that are available for you to be living right now. And the statue seems to point towards the fact that there are higher forms of life that maybe you personally feel called to in a moment. But what he's referring to here is yet another example of one of these mostly anthropological claims that he wants to make about human beings generally, specifically about the ways we tend to organize the practices we engage in. Tell me, have you ever noticed how many of our shared practices are arranged in sort

• 21:11Speaker 00

  of a vertical fashion? Like, for example, a music school, where people try to go from being a total novice at an instrument to really good at it through participating every day? Or how about a trade, where the goal is to build your skills as an apprentice every day as you go to work? How about even something like a Taekwondo belt selection process, where now you want to be able to break six boards with your flying crescent kick? Slaughterdyke thinks when you pay attention, there are just so many examples of this architecture showing up in the world, that it starts to almost look like something that's truly about us and the specific kinds of creatures we are. That human beings just orient themselves in the world around gradients and distinctions, things like better and worse, mastery and incompetence. And that we often live in what he calls a vertical tension, kind of like different hills

• 21:56Speaker 00

  we're always trying to climb up all around us. Where for reasons that we sometimes don't even understand why at the time, human beings aspire to higher forms of life that we look to and admire. Now, not necessarily talking about you running for city council here, this could be as simple as you just know that your family's an emotional wreck, you guys are all getting together, and you want to be the one person at the reunion that holds things together. Sets a good example for people, a vertical tension, he would say. This could be as simple as just wanting to always be the friend that people know is going to pick up the phone if something ever goes wrong. Again, you could be slightly less dependable to your friends and they'd still be your friend. You could be a little less controlled emotionally, but for some reason, we are called to these higher forms of life, and we feel this way about many of the things that are going on

• 22:41Speaker 00

  all around us. So it's worth getting organized here. If what we're experiencing all the time is this higher calling, you know, this pull upward as we go throughout our lives, then maybe a good metaphor to be able to describe this whole situation would be to think of it like you're climbing up a giant mountain. And if life is climbing up a giant mountain, then for Slaughterdyke, a good way to describe what most of us are doing at any stable moment in our lives is that we're constructing a kind of base camp, as he calls it. A base camp is essentially going to be your current settled form of life, whatever that looks like. Think of it as a crystallized form of everything that we've talked about on this episode so far. It is your physical environment, it is your body, the things you're exposed to, it's all

• 23:24Speaker 00

  the ways you deal with it symbolically, including whatever exercises you do to strengthen yourself, whatever immune responses you have set up. All of these have produced certain habits that culminate in whatever your life is right now, and let's call all of this your base camp. Now, Slaughterdyke talks about how we build these base camps primarily because we have to. Nobody can live their life completely exposed to every uncertainty out there. It'd be inhuman. We need some kind of an arrangement that allows us to actually live life with any kind of real stability. But he said, "And never forget the fact that this base camp we're talking about could always become the starting line of some kind of vertical journey that you decide you want to take." See, the mistake that a lot of people make is to think that their current base camp they set up, you know, the life that's comfortable and familiar to them, that that's just what

• 24:08Speaker 00

  it is to be them living in the world at all. You can imagine the cynicism example applied here quite easily. Someone will sit inside of their safe base camp, you know, feeling that calling towards some kind of higher form of existence they feel attracted to, and then they'll use a whole collection of immune responses towards the world to make sure that they never act on it. They'll be hit by those inevitable threats, they'll have to face their vulnerabilities, and a common reaction, he says, is for someone to offload whatever pain they're feeling throughout this entire process onto the world or to the other people who are immediately around them. Anger, control, blame, I mean, take whatever pick you want of immune responses here. But the point is, they make it so that the people around them have to carry the burden that they refuse to face.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  The important visual for this picture here, then, one that'll become incredibly important to our discussion here in a second, is that this base camp that's been set up seems to the people that are in it like a totally stable place on the inside, but it's only in this case because the person in this base camp has exported all the pain and instability somewhere else. Slaughterdyke thinks the metaphor of this base camp can be really helpful in understanding how to change your life. Because if your current life is just a base camp, then to change your life means you've got to move your base camp to another place on the mountain. Now, this could of course include physically changing the space you operate within, and this is no doubt in line with why a lot of retreats and rehabs take people to a totally different location when they do them. They want to give people a fair shot at letting some new choices become available to them.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Either way, though, to Slaughterdyke, if you want to change your life, whether it's physical or symbolic, you have to find a way to gain some distance from the world that has formed you so far. And whether that's philosophy, travel, therapy, he thinks even conflict can interrupt things in a way that allows you to see new possible ways you could be living. Where then, once you're faced with the moment where you have to make that choice to either do the new thing you want to do or not, change your life, you've got to really try to sit with the alternative choice for a minute and try to feel the truth of what it would be like to actually live in a different way. Feel how a totally different way of doing things is really available to you if you want it. So it becomes kind of a synthesis of belief, action, and the world, not just a single one of those.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Now, another really important part of moving a base camp like this while climbing a mountain, especially if you're trying to move higher up a mountain, I'd imagine, is that it's probably not the wisest for you to do this completely by yourself. And it has very little to do with your own personal level of moral strength or intestinal fortitude. It has to do with the fact that you need some kind of a trainer or a teacher to guide the way for you. You can't let your ego get in the way of the fact that you're trying to do something big here. You're trying to form an entirely new relationship with the world, and that it helps to have someone who's already there. I mean, to continue the extended metaphor here, because I'm enjoying it, from inside the walls of your current base camp, there's only a limited number of options that even seem available to you. Again, it's not that there aren't other lives you could be living, it becomes almost a

• 27:01Speaker 00

  navigational problem at this point. You don't know how to get to the place you want to go on the mountain, and all the paths to be able to get there seem impossible, like the ground just caves underneath you when you try. And a teacher, in whatever form this may take, there's many of them, it's just somebody that understands how the path from one form of life to another is actually traveled, someone who can tell you what the next step to take is, and that if you make a mistake, correct you quickly before it becomes a new repetition that turns into a whole other set of bad habits. To Slaughterdyke, the way to think of it is that this is a person that can help hold open a door to a different way of living long enough for it to actually become available to you as a real choice. Anyway, I realize none of this he's saying here becomes some easy task for someone trying

• 27:42Speaker 00

  to accomplish it, but the hope is that when change is viewed more through this Heideggerian lens, you can at least start to address the things that are the actual obstacles you have to overcome, instead of just desperately reaching for your whole life, trying and failing to either violently force yourself into a new life, or to just believe harder and wondering why neither of them work very often. Now, I'm going to be honest with you, and please don't take this as a complaint, Adam, it's not, but the sheer scale of what Slaughterdyke's been trying to do in this whole book, and many of his others, by the way, has been incredibly difficult for me to cover accurately as a writer. I mean, how do you explain what he means by something like a human symbolic immune response in a way that's satisfying to all the different kinds of lives there can possibly be out there?

• 28:24Speaker 00

  How do you account for any possible objections someone might have to any single piece of this when we're dealing in terms that are so broad? I hope it's been at least okay for you to listen to so far. I always try to take people's time very seriously. And every one of these podcasts has a different, unique challenge to it, that's part of why I love it, but I'm just a hostage to the scale of the work that's in front of me at a certain point. And as though Slaughterdyke himself was waiting outside my window for me to say that, and thunder goes off in the background, in the final movement of this book, he decides that all that we've been talking about so far is something that in many ways can be inflated up to the scale of civilization too, as well as become something that can help us see an alternative framing of the entire history of the human species. You know, just a bit of light reading tonight.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  At this point, I feel a bit like I'm standing in front of Apollo's statue myself, but here we are together, just letting you know, folks, let's do this. So here it goes. If individuals have base camps that are themselves giant collections of physical spaces, organizational tools, habits, symbolic immune responses, et cetera. And if these base camps are things that allow the people in them to feel stable and safe, but sometimes only because the people in these interior worlds export their pain and vulnerability onto the people around them, then large groups of people at scale are going to share very similar qualities to this for Slaughterdike. Think of a nation then, as a sort of collective base camp, that by the way greatly multiplies all the complexity of how any of these symbolic immune systems and habits work together.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  These are collective interior worlds that we build, that reliably provide people with a number of important things, provides us with a shared sense of "we," as he says, with a story of what threatens our world. They give us laws, borders, institutions, not to mention the very practices that train people to belong inside of that world. And again, just like a single person, when a nation faces a crisis, whatever it is, even when a nation just has a collective kind of insecurity, or a maladaptive behavior it uses to deal with the fact that it's an exposed being, nations, just like individuals, can also export their problems onto other distant people around them, making somebody else carry the consequences of a form of life that the people inside the camp don't want to change. Or, as he puts it famously, quote, "All history is the history of immune system battles,"

• 30:36Speaker 00

  end quote. There's what he calls the "holy egoism," so the way most civilizations have worked in the past, where the recurring assumption has been that it's kind of a zero-sum goal of every group of people that you gotta win. And you know, unfortunately, don't want to do it, but winning in the case of nation building is something that only happens when some other group of people is completely defeated. And if this were a football game, that'd be a perfectly reasonable thing to say here. You could even make an argument that that's the way it's worked in the past. But Slaughterdike's point is that we're not living in the same kind of world that we were a thousand years ago. The world we live in now is facing problems that are so protracted, that people involved so interconnected with each other, that if you were an aspiring nation and you wanted to offshore some of the problems you're facing onto another group of people on the outside,

• 31:19Speaker 00

  well, Slaughterdike thinks there is no outside for you to do that in anymore. Many of our problems now are global, with logistical consequences that a single nation can't possibly handle alone. See, maybe the hope of a would-be nation is to get really cheap clothes manufactured. And the hope is that these people somewhere else that we never see will just sew the sleeves onto our shirts for almost zero pay every day, and that our whole experience of it will be that we just stay inside of a protected consumer interior, where I click a button and stuff just gets delivered to my doorstep for a very low cost. But the cost of doing this is greater than just what you see on the price tag. His point is that we're progressively living in a world where that cost may be able to be pushed out of sight for a little while, but it cannot be pushed out of the whole

• 32:02Speaker 00

  planetary system that that protected consumer also depends on to be able to live. That as the years go on, even the people who are supposedly protected see it show up in their supply chains, the biosphere, food production. I mean, it used to be a question of whether exporting all this stuff was just morally right or not. That used to be the only conversation worth having. But that's not the only conversation we need to have anymore, he thinks. The question now is more like, is externalization like this even still technically possible as a strategy, even if you wanted to do it? Is it even still effective? I mean, how do you externalize your problems if the problem you're exporting creates a global pandemic, or global levels of climate effects, or whatever it is? The best way to describe this problem then, he thinks, is that we're a planet full of

• 32:47Speaker 00

  people that are synced up from a technology perspective, but we're not in any way united by a common symbolic narrative. Or, put in a slightly different way, that I think's a bit better, we're technologically connected enough for the consequences of what we do to circulate everywhere around the globe, but we're still so symbolically divided with all of our different base camps, that we still think other people should be carrying the costs of whatever we're doing. Now, the good news here is that Slaughterdike's not saying all this so he can run for president and make a case for a one-world government. He actually has a lot of respect for the solidarity of particular cultures, local communities. Different forms of life need to exist, he thinks. Just like individual people need immune systems and base camps, cultures need continuity as well.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  The real thing he's calling for here is for us as a species to start asking a whole new question that we haven't before. Since we all need these protections to some extent, we're not getting rid of that. Is it possible to construct a kind of protection that doesn't just preserve one interior world by destroying another? Or by destroying any of the shared systems that make every interior possible? He calls this new directive we should be shooting for "co-immunity." Or at another place, he calls it "protectionism of the whole." Either way, to put it in a sentence, co-immunity is where we try to build systems where my protection becomes more durable, because your protection becomes more durable too. And again, one of the important things to remember here is that for Slaughterdike, this isn't solely motivated by the moral argument that externalization like this is unfair

• 34:14Speaker 00

  on people. It may be, certainly, that's a discussion to have. But the reason this may actually become a discussion that competing societies have together is because the driving force of this conversation is that the strategy itself is not working anymore, given what this whole organism we're a part of has turned into. In this way, it's almost like he's a doctor, or a biologist that's looking at a life form that has some kind of self-destructive pattern it's trapped in. Where it's not like the doctor's morally judging the life form for being in a bad place, Slaughterdike's just saying, descriptively, this thing needs to change its behavior, or it's not going to be alive for much longer. He thinks the same way that many of us as individuals can choose to change our lives. And how doing that will not ultimately involve changing solely your beliefs, or just telling

• 34:57Speaker 00

  yourself you need to be morally stronger, the same thing can be said of humanity. Humanity as a whole needs to change its life as well, he thinks. That the current set of exercises that we are training collectively every day, we're at a point with the problems we're facing, that we can't just improvise our way through this stuff every time there's an emergency anymore. Again, we won't survive it. Patreon, Substack, thanks for all your support. Most of all though, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.