Matt outlines a new theological worldview on Instagram live, 4.26.20 buy our book: www.chapotraphouse.com/book / chapo-trap-house / chapotraphouse #chapotraphouse #chapo
Agreed and in reflection on why this is the case, I feel like it has to do with the goals/objectives that guide the format. With Chapo it's kind of just a funny acknowledgement that despite being at a sort of self-described apex in terms of technological development and the "progress" of knowledge, life itself is boring, monotonous, and just bad. And dumb. The recognition of this is good, but sort of vague and meandering in terms of "content". While the Christman manifesto currently in development has a focused objective in its articulation of whateverthefuck the machine elves are coercing him to say. In summation, PURPOSE! As it turns out, meaning is cool and in short supply because it's not profitable. I wonder if an incredibly nuanced, meaningful, and empathetic society that could accurately reflect the ideals of communism would ironically evoke a nostalgia for banality/authentic struggle out of some seemingly bs element of "human nature". Lucky for us, we're all but guaranteed to never find out... Or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was feeling suicidal and someone linked me to this and a lot of it spoke to me. I'm sorry to hear folks got mad at you. I get the majority of what youre getting into here and I appreciate the brave attempt at throwing it all into a youtube video. Thank you.
Yeah but the brink of what? Insanity and a terrifying enlightenment might look or feel the same. Then again... maybe I need to get caught up on "Better Call Saul" first.
Be that as it may, it doesn't ensure that he also isn't having a manic episode. (Matt did indicate that no substances had been consumed thus far in the day.)
This whole vlog is a 21st century analogue to when Samuel Taylor Coleridge experienced an opium dream of an ethereal Xanadu, wrote the first 200 or so lines to Kublai Khan, was interrupted and could not remember the rest.
Mundanity is still valuable. Life can have moments of adventure, learning, romance, etc, but mundane relaxation and leisure is also part of that picture. And hell, I have some treasured nostalgic memories of just watching Star Trek or Columbo with my mom back in the 90s, and honestly those memories wouldn’t be enhanced at all if the setting had changed to us climbing a mountain or whatever. Sometimes the boring normalcy of life is just as important as the grand moments.
@@DownUFO - life's only purpose is to show me fleeting joys that I can never attain other than randomness provides. I have mental illness and corona virus. I'm going to buy a nitrogen tank, regulator, and hoses to breathe deeply until I'm gone. Fair the well humanity. My only hope is that you finally overcome the religious facist movement sooner rather than later. Thanks capitalism for enslaving me to debt. It's ironic that I will use that debt to buy a onr way ticket out of my massive suffering. Peace out!
This is legit one of the most interesting hours of content I've heard in a while. Very fascinating stuff. I hope Matty Boy turns this into a recurring segment if the quarantine ever ends.
I’m jealous of your brief second of oneness with the universe... It’s been a couple years since I’ve had one of those, and most of them I’ve had come from staring at the sky on lysergic and/or psilocybin; especially when if was a night sky with very little light pollution... I will forever cherish them, as I forever cherish Camus, and Sisyphus.
Dude I've been pretty fed up lately with being in a rut and I was actually thinking about tripping soon to clear my head. But I've also been trying to be more sober and I got say this has saved me the trip. Like i totally think i see where you're coming from and there were a lot of got insights in here that really speak to my current situation.
Ulysses is pretty good imo. Don't get too caught up in the trivia and minutiae that occupies the minds of the various characters, reading the confusing bits out loud is helpful (and fun) and I think it's totally worth reading. Met em pike hoses
@@waynewapeemukwa8161 The bit about if you meet an asshole in the morning that's one thing, if you meet them all day then it's on you is very similar to the discussion in the library scene when Stephen quotes Materlink.
graduate student in philosophy of religions here, reporting that he isn't going insane, just to assuage any worries. he's just accidentally re-inventing a smorgesboard of ideas from various times and places with the power of drugs. some of it's quite good, though obviously not as refined as you'd get it in better sources.
some profound shit Matt! made a ton of sense to me, "I" experienced the same ego-less state a few months ago I'm pretty sure, and was thinking very much along these same kines
About the satori moments: imo the forgetting is part of the phenomenon. Like no matter how often you have these, you will not be able to keep them in normal existence. But you don't want to love in that consciousness all the time it's neither possible nor desirable. There's no real objective knowledge or "meaning" to draw from them, only personal growth, healing and assurance. It can't be communicated second hand. The moments themselves are a reminder that this level of consciousness exists, more than anything. The enlightened man continues to chop wood
A point about tv as art: yes, the added financialization dilutes the purpose somewhat, but theres an advantage in producing tv being a collaborative process.
@@shakespearefan I'm not following why more input inherently results in a more degraded form of art. A function of art, at least in how people consume it, is that its purpose is sometimes broad and vague, and doesn't have any one set meaning. When you're dealing with a show that is about many things, sometimes those added voices can expand something's purpose and be targeted at different things, where they doesn't need to be any singular purpose - as if that's what makes something great art to begin with. There are films made by people which don't have thematic unity, and something containing thematic unity doesn't immediately elevate it, especially when a piece of art deals with multiple things. There are plenty of great albums that don't have thematic unity, and books which are scattershot as hell in what they're approaching and what it's trying to say. You could just as well say a film is just a longform video where it changes from scene to scene in terms of its aesthetic quality or how the film might shift what it's about over time. You're making a case for why it's less specific, and more broad, but not making a case for why this means it's inherently degraded or worse. I don't buy into the notion that art needs to be vision of one person or a handful of people for it to constitute a true artistic vision. This also applies to what Matt is saying. I follow his point well enough, that because of the financial incentives to make a show as appealing as possible to everybody it degrades it as an artform, but there are a lot of very esoteric shows out there with niche audiences. This is to say nothing of authors who write certain things in or out of a work because they don't think it'll be appealing to a publisher, which is something that we're less aware of but I guarantee you happens. If we remove the financial incentive that'd solve the problems to a certain degree, but it's not like shows with bad ratings would continue to exist infinitely under communism, because there's a finite amount of space and resources with which to produce art, and there needs to be at least some incentive to keep backing certain art while not backing others. I'll say this: television is a much more micromanaged medium of art/entertainment than other mediums, which is what Matt is talking about. And in this sense, it is a degradation of art, but it's not inherent to the medium, and it seems like a show you would least be able to make this complaint about is something like *The Sopranos* or *Better Call Saul*, which HBO and AMC were very hands-off about in their approach to telling David Chase and Vince Gilligan what to do, or what needed to be in the show to get good ratings.
@@alfiewillis4893 I agree with both sides of this revealed dialectic and I think it parallels the pros and cons of imposing more siloed specialized academic disciplines vs a more generalized cross-disciplinary framework and what assessing that even means. But to use Matt's musings here to maybe elaborate (though I agree with your general principle of a collective "pilot wave" _probabilistically_ getting closer to truth in certain contexts with authentic consensus *_cough_* George Lucas *_cough_*), this is kind of elaborated with the sentiment, "all existence is translation. All art is translation." So like, the process of translation _necessitates_ a loss of information as a restraint of physics itself from its "pure" ideal form, so extra noise can further obscure/deteriorate the "vision" of an artist _but_ to your point it can also achieve the opposite in certain contexts. The only real issue I take with it, instead of just embracing both means, is what capitalism seems to reveal, which is that the sort of novel, nuanced, or generally _moving_ art, the art that we appear to _actually_ value, the art that gets at the closest representation of the intention that drives its creation and offers a glimpse at some sort of connection to a world of forms, is in some regard "lost in translation", as in order to appeal to the widest margins of consumers it must conform and appeal to the lowest common denominator of consumption which allows extracting the most profit. I think you get all of this since...you said it all in a different way, but I think your specific analysis is, much like it is to _every person on earth_ , tainted by a domineering frame of capitalist realism that cripples the most foundational mechanisms of imagination and I think _this_ is the more foundational underlying idea Matt is attempting to articulate here via the case study of Better Call Saul. I'm extrapolating this largely from this sentence which might just be a coincidental oversight if it's not as revealing as I'm making it out to be: "If we remove the financial incentive that'd solve the problems to a certain degree, but it's not like shows with bad ratings would continue to exist infinitely under communism, because there's a finite amount of space and resources with which to produce art, and there needs to be at least some incentive to keep backing certain art while not backing others." This description is seems absolutely agreeable from our current societal episteme of neoliberal capitalism, but I think it might be forgetting _that_ very point. Specifically that we are stuck in this societal reference point and might be ideally degraded through the assumption that, ratings themselves are emergent from the very same profit motive, rational consumer logic that drives...everything. I don't know, maybe I'm just over or under complicating things, but I do think our current clusterfuck of a situation is primarily the consequence of a _lack_ of incentives or at least actually meaningful incentives. I mean fuck why did any of us write these long ass introspections in the form of youtube comments that maybe like 4 people will read? I feel like it's some deviation from our socially imposed deification of wealth as a means to "progress" and a lack of nuance into...well, anything. I like Fredric Jameson's paraphrasing of what I'm trying to say for its succinct efficiency in preserving this conception, "it's much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Fuck this is already long as shit, but rereading your last paragraph gives a self-contained rebuttal to some of this, as indeed I think the noticeable increase in "quality" TV comes from this somewhat recent embrace of artistic carte blanche or at least more hands-off corrupting corporate force (though I'd argue this arises simply from technological advancement reducing artistic production/distribution costs and allowing things like youtube which sort of forces corporate power to make such a compromise), but even subconsciously (or maybe _especially_ subconsciously) such profitability factors will no doubt influence artistic direction. Soo yeah, not sure if I said anything or just reworded the same thing 20 times but uh I guess that in and of itself kind of highlights the loss of resolution during translation. Or something.
One advantage tv enjoys over more personal art forms is that it is understood by everyone to be an event, and not an artefact, addressed not to an abstract audience but *this* one, at this moment. The repetitions, intertextual communication, and generic conventions are glimpses this audience catches of its own reflection in the mirror. Streaming has done more harm to tv than the profit motive as such ever could.
Matt has articulated my own thoughts to me and confirmed I need to do paychadelics soon. As someone who wrestles with my pre-concious habits and my concious sense of self this helps me realize two things. The wrestling is the heart of being alive so being unhappy that it doesn't abate is a waste of time On a long enough timeline it will inevitably end
“There is loss at every level of translation” I came to a very similar conclusion during a very intense and profound trip. It’ s an isolating thought but it’s comforting in a way.
Reminded me of similar theories that were discussed during the Alan Moore interview by Will Menaker. Chapo/Alan Moore book club talks after Ulysses. ? Cheers Matt!
I really dig this, there's so much insight and honesty and, I don't know, revelation? But I also kind of wonder whether the cat is really the one being kept out of the rest of the apartment, or whether the cat just happened to get caught in Matt's sequestration. "I'm not locked up in here with you..." Kidding aside, a great talk, thanks very much.
You gotta listen to 22, A million Matt. The last song in particular feels very resonant with some of what you’re talking about. Also listen to the whole album on acid I’d say
every time someone wonders why i complain so much about all the bs commercialized entertainment everyone else seems to enjoy so much, all i can think is "that shit ain't no Shawshank Redemption." Why the hell should my standards for entertainment not be as high as the best examples i've had the pleasure of experiencing? Why should I be satisfied with an industry whose greatest pleasure seems to be the absence of any thought save that of the instinctual fascination with special effects and the lexical analyzation of intertextuality?
The problem with this is that there are undoubtedly people out there whose lives were enriched more by 5 seasons of Breaking Bad than Shawshank Redemption. And I love Frank Darabont and think he's a great, interesting director who gets bashed too much for being a normie just because he made Shawshank Redemption and Green Mile, but that film is the embodiment of commercialised Hollywood schmaltz. There's a reason it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars and resonated with an entire generation of film-goers. Ultimately, I've found that how commercialised something is or isn't doesn't affect its quality as much as people say it does. I've seen movies made on a budget of less than a million dollars that are shit and forgettable, and I've seen 50+ million dollar films that have stuck with me for years.
In terms of capital intensity and art, I remember a line from "He Died with a Felafel in his Hand" where the main character only uses a spool of paper for his typewriter since 'the pages impose an artificial construct on his stream of consciousness.' I understood this, like other things in the movie, as hilarious, intentionally egotistical, self aggrandizing and deluded. Yes capital imposes a structure on art, but can we evaluate this as good or bad by the required concentration of capital? Low tech doesn't make better or 'purer' art. Your book had to be formatted for printing. The subtlety of hand written prose is lost with print, just as the subtlety of speech is lost with writing, but so what? We evaluate a form for how we experience it. Books are great and they are not just poor substitutes for a verbal tale. Films and television are also enjoyable for what they are given both their economic and technological constraints. I suppose standardization is a convenient sacrifice for accessibility, but this is not always such a big deal. Some subtlety is lost, but this is not necessarily better than the convenience. Back in the 90s I liked to read 'Finnegan's Wake' on acid. That was a fun one! I could not imagine this in another form. If it was it would be a different thing altogether. I've read about the attempts to translate it have been decades long philosophical exercises. Probably one of the least accessible books ever, but fun none-the-less. finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm
"Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you're vine! Sendday's eve and, ah, you're vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again!"
I really liked this one. Possibly one reason why some are having problems with your more mystical concepts is that socialism is superficially a materialistic dogma so socialists sometimes have difficulty with mysticism. Possibly the best attempt to synthesize the two is Latin American liberation theology. I'm not a catholic (or a christian) but the little bit I have read makes me think I should read some more.
"and the rock started rolling back down the hill, and i was sisyphus, and i got to walk down it. and the thing about sisyphus is: Camus says you must imagine sisyphus happy. that's one of those things that just sounds like a zen koan or something; i understand it now. because happy sisyphus is when he gets to the top of the hill as often as possible, because being on the top of the hill is fun, and walking down the hill is not as fun as being on the top of the hill, but it's a lot more fun than pushing the goddamn rock up the hill. so, you just gotta increase the circuits. you can't just keep pushing the boulder up one long gradient, which is what most people do. and which we're cursed to do, because of our material realities that constrain us, and chain us."
Just gonna go ahead and admit that I have absolutely no idea what any of this means. It sounds kinda like the first time I did acid but also the opposite in a lot of ways
Ok so the pursuit of pleasure exists to cope with the inadequacies and anxieties of poverty and toil and general material scarcity and an inability to develop our full potential. This is represented by the demiurge, today the machine because we killed the spirit in favor of pure rationality, which is sort of like a base instinct to just get by and live? This keeps us alive and reproducing, giving us a material base to maintain existence and seek pleasures, both mental and physical, that make life bearable, but at the same time it alienates us from others as well as from ourselves and our true potential. So the goal is to elevate human society and consciousness to a new level that transcends scarcity and unlocks true human potential. And the only way to do that is to harness productive forces in a way that distributes work and pleasure equitably, allowing both material production and human mental development to rise together, eventually making pleasure no longer alienating or harmful to others because it will be less and less a scarcity that only some can have in any meaningful way. am I getting this at all?
John Ralston Saul is a scion to the Canadian metaphysical tradition, and therefore committed to a project of putting dresses on chair legs. This is what happens when Prebyterians are allowed to read Blake.
I find Better Call Saul to have different atmosphere than Breaking Bad, myself. I honestly much prefer it. I don't see how TV is any more commercial than film, honestly...
I don't fully agree with Matt, but the heart of what he's saying is true. TV exists on a week-by-week basis, and the minute that ratings start to plummet it's in danger of losing its ability to tell the story it wants to tell. The studios basically fund directors and, with major blockbuster exceptions, generally leave the director, producers, and writers alone to hash it out. Television shows operate differently, where the studio heads and development team will constantly give producers and writers notes to incorporate into the show, because they want to keep the ratings up for advertisers. Literally the only reason television as a medium of entertainment exists in the first place is to sell bleach and toilet paper, which the studio heads know even if that's not an obvious thing to most viewers, and that impacts how shows are run and operated.
@@alfiewillis4893 Totally agree in general but I feel like BCS could literally do whatever because they are AMC's prestige baby. Like the climax of many episodes is legal fuckery or a speech. Sure, there is action and I'm sure producers and executives have say but after BrBa Gilligan and Gould have em by their nuts.
I wish I had flex in 2016 so that when I got into an argument about how the only interesting parts were the black and white vignettes. Any scene with violence involving Saul or Mike I know they'll be fine ice seen the shot show that is breaking bad
Okay, after having watched this all the way now, I gotta leave another comment and just say that this is your best of these so far, by far imo, and I want to hear you talk with Michael Brooks now, bc in the rare occasions I get to hear him wax poetic and philosophical about his spiritual views and practice, I hear someone who I think would connect with a lot of this. A dialogue could be fruitful, and I think injecting these bits of non/anti dogmatic spirituality into leftist discourse is useful, and healthy, and possibly even desperately needed! (Imo it’s actually essential for the left, whether or not you want to call any of it “spiritual”, I always use that for lack a better term, and certainly don’t mean the “supernatural”, which I also use for lack better term.) Anyway, much of this has been things I’ve been thinking a lot about, and trying to make sense of in an actually intelligible way (to the extent that’s even possible), and a lot of this monologue actually helped out, some of it quite a bit. Not that entheogens are the answer, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the “lazy” or “cheap” way of getting there, and damnit, I really wish I had some during this crisis, and not just bc my access to good spaces for meditation are highly limited at the moment.. ✌️❤️♾🕉☸️🔯☦️⚛️🧠💦
Tie this in with the groundswell of studies around psychedelic substances and their therapeutic application (which I am somewhat skeptical about) but more broadly the resurgence in popularity of these experiences may lead to a broadening of a lot of minds.... I know that's pretty vague but I think it ties in pretty well. I agree that Matt & Michael would probably have a fascinating discussion, especially if they disagree on something.
Brendan Costello Word! I’m curious, what aspects of the “therapeutic application of psychedelics” are you skeptical about? No judgement, just interested in hearing what aspects you’re more skeptical of, and/or what ways you’re skeptical. It’s been quite a while (3-5 years) since I’ve looked into studies being done on psychedelic/entheogen substances, but at one point in my mid-late 20s, I kept up with that stuff pretty regularly, especially when I was at uni, as I was a psych major, and it was relevant to multiple things I studied and papers I wrote. I didn’t necessarily always care for the frameworks that the research was done in, or how it was being contextualized sometimes, but as far as very significant (statistically, and otherwise) results are concerned, most studies that I was aware of really did show them, and gave good reason to be optimistic about serious potential for psychedelics coming back into “respectable” contexts. Granted, many of these things are in early and preliminary stages, and a lot more research needs to be done (and replicated) if we’re to have more hardy data, but I really don’t recall many (if any) instances of the studies I read showing a lack of efficacy of the substances, whatever the context/content of the studies. Again, I’ll repeat that it’s been a few years since I’ve really dug into the matter, for various reasons, not the least being I no longer have access to research like I did in uni, and I refuse to pay the high price to get access to full details of research as it’d appear in academic journals. (which one doesn’t need per se, but there’s obviously a massive difference between reading an abstract and some parts of a conclusion, vs reading everything, particularly the methodology, participants, stats breakdowns, etc., but I digress.)
"What about when someone, coming from looking at divine things, looks to the evils of human life? Do you think it is surprising that he behaves awkwardly and appears completely ridiculous, if while - while his sight is still dim and he has not yet become accustomed to the darkness around him - he is compelled, either in the courts or elsewhere, to compete about the shadows of Justice..." Republic, 517d, trans. CDC Reeve
Dialectic Materialism is a really good analysis of the economy. Anwar Shaikh models it pretty good in his economics he does better or at least to me it makes more sense the Keynes or Friedman or Hayek. I don't know what y'all think of him but he models economics what he calls classical tradition (capping off with Marx) and that later economic interpretations are misunderstandings in later schools and Shaikh incorporates their insights into the original Classical or Marxian understanding.
You are right Russell used that in a Key paper in his project I think he wrote a paper in it for Mind it was supposed to be a key paper in Analytic Philosophy On Denoting www.goodreads.com/book/show/29782075-on-denoting
It's not that it's incoherent; what you're trying to say is beyond words like you said (or language is a lie), so it's difficult or possibly impossible to translate an experience like you had into the medium of language. Anyway keep at it brother, I bet many of us are on our own paths towards enlightenment and this is a nice reminder of that.
