What would you change?

follow up on a post about Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry", terrific book, and so pertinent. eg this bit about another evangelist-type in the novel, Mrs Evans Riddle:

"Though to the commonplace and unspeculative eye Mrs Evans Riddle was but a female blacksmith, yet Mrs. Riddle and her followers knew, in a bland smirking way, that she was instituting an era in which sickness, poverty, and folly would be ended forever.

She was the proprietor of the Victory Thought-power Headquarters, New York, and not even in Los Angeles was there a more important center of predigested philosophy and pansy-painted ethics. She maintained a magazine filled with such starry thoughts as “All the world’s a road whereon we are but fellow wayfarers.” She held morning and vesper services on Sunday at Euterpean Hall, on Eighty-seventh Street, and between moments of Silent Thought she boxed with the inexplicable. She taught, or farmed out, classes in Concentration, Prosperity, Love, Metaphysics, Oriental Mysticism, and the Fourth Dimension.

She instructed small Select Circles how to keep one’s husband, how to understand Sanskrit philosophy without understanding either Sanskrit or philosophy, and how to become slim without giving up pastry. She healed all the diseases in the medical dictionary, and some which were not; and in personal consultations, at ten dollars the half hour, she explained to unappetizing elderly ladies how they might rouse passion in a football hero."

Sinclair Lewis, 1926. Old wine, new internet bottles, ladies and gents. Nothing new under the sun.

Last weekend I got really high and I randomly started thinking about making sense of sense making. That episode makes me laugh because of how self indulgent the gurus were and Jamie Weals right to reply episode made him sound like a clown.

However last weekend Game B started to make sense to me. I think the basic idea is that the world has changed so much that there needs to be some sort of change in how we deal with problems. For example, without the scientific revolution we wouldn’t have had the Age of Enlightenment which led to the current state of affairs we have now.

Their belief is the world has gone through another transformation and we need something as impactful as the scientific revolution “a paradigm shift” if you will. We can’t fully describe what that is yet because we don’t know what it is hence why it needs to be described poetically rather than through words.

The Age of Enlightenment didn’t come out of nowhere, neither did the scientific revolution, they were proceeded by many schools of thought that proceeded them. For example, physics and biology were named after Aristotle works. They existed before the scientific revolution but obviously the scientific method enhanced them. Ie. they were “touching the elephant,” of a deeper concept but didn’t get to it. Jordan Hall needs to run 70-90 paradigms because they are all hinting to “game b,” but haven’t captured it. Maybe by combining them all we can discover it.

I am relistening to the decoding the gurus episode now and continue to laugh the same way I did when I first heard it. This doesn’t change my feelings about that ridiculous conversation with 5,000 metaphors, and doesn’t change that “game b” is probably a useless concept. But I got high, none of my friends listen to this podcast and I wanted to share this with someone.

Thanks, hope you guys are all having a good weekend.

Recently we have seen a sudden surge of grifters embracing religion as an 'antidote to modern decay'.

While I understand ( to a degree) the powerful discourse around religion, many of the traditionalist values it pretends to uphold seem incompatible with these characters.

E.g. Russell Brand - accused of sexual harassment by multiple women Tate - human trafficker

The bottom line is I don't get the conservative mindset of people for instance They are willing to ignore Trump bribing a pornstar to stay quiet. I'm at a loss here , can someone explain?

Sam Harris' acquitance Maajid Nawaz recently photographed himself with the Russian ambassador at his official residence in the UK. This is a culmination of many (now deleted) retweets, including one that claimed the survivor of a maternity hospital bombing was a crisis actor and others that alluded to the Bucha massace being perpetrated by Ukrainians.

Maajid perhaps represents the most extreme end of this position, yet plenty of others in the gurusphere have expressed views that are either scathingly critical of Ukraine, the aid it recieves or routinely mock its supporters.

Is this mere political partisanship? I honestly can't wrap my ahead around it.

Thought this book would fit nicely here. RIP.

If this had happened five years ago, JP could have attributed it to Donald Trump dancing at the edge of voluntarily play in the spirit that emerges from the archetype of freedom.

but it's the Biden administration, so his best response would simply to point out that the delay was caused by the tyrannical resentment which emerges from the Luciferian ethos of the left . Obviously.

Who are you interested in discussing?

It just keeps getting worse and worse. The hosts were great. But Dr. K is truly insufferable. AAnd he's the first person covered by this podcast that is liked by some of my friends. Matt and Chris, I salute you for sitting through untold hours of his content. Do you guys dislike him as much as I do? To me, he's much worse than red scare.