I am reading a book about Being and Time by Simon Critchley, with Critchley being a good philosopher himself, by the seminal philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger has a very famous concept of “The They” in Being and Time which states that there is an impersonal social force that demands conformity of opinion through rigid social norms that crushes individuality. Nietzsche’s concept of “The Herd,” is a very similar concept to Heidegger’s concept of The They. So why are people lying about watching the news? Well we live in a democracy (at least in theory) and people are supposed to watch the news and keep up on current events so they can vote in an informed manner. I think many people aren’t really paying that close of attention to the news and when they do it is in a hyper partisan way that already confirms their perferred in-groups biases. So people are lying so they can act like they are part of The They essentially. Someone doesn’t want to be perceived as being out of the loop. Even when they are in the loop it is often in a very dogmatic and confirmation bias way, that conforms to the norms of their political in-group.

Don’t get me wrong, the 4th estate is very important. We really do need the news in a functioning democracy so ordinary people can stay informed. The news though is a levelled down, The They version of thinking. It’s also hyper pastisan as I mentioned before, and in no way resembles geniune philosophical thinking usually. It’s “idle chit-chat” as Heidegger would put it and I think Lie Witness News is showing that. There are good journalists still like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, but they often don’t really have a political in-group. Without Glenn Greenwald I would have never known of a complete warmonger like Victoria Nuland who served under the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden administration. (Foreign policy doesn’t really change that much from the two parties in my opinion.)

Heidegger writes in Being and Time about The They, and how we can possibly get out of The They. So how do we get out of idle chit-chat? Well we have to be shaken out of it, through anxiety or angst. Anxiety breaks us out of The Herd by disrupting our life, by unsettling us. It’s uncomfortable but a chance for authenticity. Heidegger doesn’t think we can remain authentic for very long and that we always slip back into The They, and I agree with him. The They attitudes is just part of what it means to be human. But when we are authentic and out of The They it’s like we have no in-group and are in solitude intellectually. This solitude can feel lonely and despairing but to deeply invesitage something you need to seperate youself from The They and idle chit-chat, and not understand the news in Lie Witness News way of levelled down thinking. (Well the people in Lie Witness News aren’t even thinking in a levelled down manner, they are just straight up lying.)

I suffer from very difficult depression but in a way depression can maybe be a good thing, because you often feel outside of The They. We usually run from difficult emotions like anxiety and despair. Hard emotions though can shape profound critical thinking, and can take us away from the levelled down news, and into a more authentic form of thinking. Thank you.

I can’t emphasize the importance of reading and learning critical thinking skills enough. If one is really taking their critical thinking skills seriously and legitimately wants to improve their ability to think critically and deeply about political, religious, and philosophical issues, one must read and learn to be a good reader. I watch a lot of news and watch a lot of videos about philosophical issues, and you can learn this way, but I don’t think that is enough. Listening to podcasts is important also but reading is what really helps you learn to “think.” 84 percent of Americans read for less than 5 minutes a day, for pleasure, yet this doesn’t seem to stop most people from being very opinionated about a whole host of philosophical issues. It’s not just reading anything either, it’s choosing your books wisely. Reading Heidegger, reading Nietzsche, and reading Isaiah Berlin are musts if one wants to learn to think critically. When only 10 percent of the population reads for more than 45 minutes day, critical thinking skills are not being taken very seriously by the majority of the population.

In phenomenology there is the distinction between “seeming,” and “being.” Seeming is how something appears to consciousness, while being is how something actually is in itself. On first glance most of our assumptions about the world are ontologically seeming. They are loaded with our own religious, political, cultural, linguistic, and personal naive biases. Being though shows the thing you are studying as they are in themselves. I believe that there is a problem with this viewpoint in phenomenology though. As a huge lover of Nietzsche I am not sure it is possible to get to an eternal “being,” of the thing you are studying as phenomenology believes. We are are, in a sense, trapped within a milieu that has a certain political, religious, cultural, and linguistic background that can’t be escaped. In fact most of what people believe, is really just blind allegiance to their preferred in-groups. As Nietzsche thought, eternal knowledge of the item that is being studied is not possible, and everything is a perspective. I think Husserlian phenomenology was a last ditch effort to find capital T truth, but this really was never possible.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability, and low knowledge overestimate their competence on a specific subject, while people with high competence underestimate their own skills. People are very opinionated in our society about nearly every subject yet only 10 percent of the population reads for more than 45 minutes a day. I think this is a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. What deep reading in a subject can do, is show you just how complicated a given subject can be. Political, religious, and philosophical issues are so complicated that epistemic eternal capital T truth seems to be out of our reach for species such as humans that is so cognitively limited. Reading deeply into a subject not only can teach critically thinking skills but it can teach epistemologically humility. Understanding someone as difficult as Heidegger not only is philosophically rewarding, but an exercise in humility. Reading ironically teaches us, just how little we often know.

The difference between “seeming” and “being” in phenomenology was a last ditch effort for finding a capital T truth. Knowledge as Nietzsche notes is a perspective, because none of us have a God’s eye view of the world. The lost art of reading can teach us as humans just how little we know. In a world saturated with distractions such as television, and the internet taking the time to read and learn critical thinking, can actually give us more humility. Thank you.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously had the concept of “slave morality.” As opposed to “master morality,” slave morality is a reactive value system created by the weak, oppressed, and marginalized against the strong. Slave morality begins from resentment, and it reverses traditional noble values by categorizing traits like strength as evil, while framing weakness and humility as good. For Nietzsche master morality is nobility, and it has the traits of open-mindedness, courage, truthfulness, and a correct assessment of your own self worth. In essence, master morality defines the “good” with the powerful.

For Nietzsche though slave morality is based on resentment, slave morality devalues what the master has and what the slave does not have. Slave morality originates in the weak and slave morality vilifies its oppressors. Slave morality inverses master morality, and originates from Judaism and exploded under Christianity. The Biblical principles of humility and pity are the consequences of making universal the plight of the slave unto all mankind, where “the democratic movement is the heir to Christianity.” Nietzsche saw the concepts of heaven and hell tied to slave morality, where slaves were unable to get revenge upon the masters, and engage in a revenge fantasy where the “good” people will be rewarded in heaven and the “bad” people will be punished in hell.

Identity politics is a politics that is based on a particular identity such as race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, caste, education, disability, and social class. Identity politics helps those who are facing systemic oppression so that society can better understand the interplay of different forms of oppression and ensure that the “marginalized” are not to be disproportionately affected by political actions. Identity politics gained status with emergence of social activism manifesting in American civil rights, feminist, LGBT movements, and postcolonial organizations.

Identity politics, in my opinion, has it’s origins in slave morality. Identity politics values the marginalized, the people at the bottom, the disenfranchised. The people at the top, like cisgendered white males, are viewed as evil and oppressors. It is also based often on resentment. Identity politics is a reversal of values where the people at the bottom become good and the people at the top evil. It’s as Nietzsche puts it “transvaluation of all values.” Now I understand what I am writing here is controversial but nothing Nietzsche wrote about is without controversy. Identity politcs has become nearly a religion in academia and left wing politics in general. Even classical Marxism has been pushed out because of identity politics. Ultimately a political movement and society based on resentment can create nothing but hatred and division towards other people within that society. When the powerless cannot act out their revenge through physical strength and so reenact their anger through labeling the “powerful” as evil, society gets very psychologically sick.

Even in colloquial nomenclature concepts such as the “suffering olympics” have taken parlance, because people are always trying to one up each other to see who is more “marginalized.” Very little of identity politics is actually based in compassion, empathy, and a true concern for the “underdog.” It’s actually based in Nietzsche’s concept of the slave morality and resentment. Much less categorizing people into huge boxes of the one’s who only can have bad racial, gender, sexual orientation issues squashes out each person’s each unique individual life experience. I personally have had some of my own bad racial experiences despite being a cisgendered white male.

Phrases like “toxic masculinity” have become very popular in contemporary America and among some feminists. While do I think there are many men who have a hypermasculine and overly aggressive attitude and thus the phrase “toxic masculinity” makes sense for them, I also believe many men don’t fit this category. When men don’t fit this category and get labeled as having “toxic masculinity” this is an attempt to use slave morality on men and control them not through physical strength but by shaming them through the creation of values that make it evil to be strong. As Nietzsche thought, it’s a mendacious way to control people not through physicality but by shame, which has its origins in Judaism and Christianity. Ultimately identity politics and toxic masculinity have it’s origins in resentment and as Nietzsche thought, make a society psychologically sick and even mentally ill.

Racism, sexism, and homophobia have been a scourge on society for centuries now but identity politics is no solution to this problem. Identity politics is based on “slave morality” and resentment and creates more anger and division in society. Much less it does nothing to stop endless war in America, and improve the material conditions of all Americans regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. The media, academia, and society in general would benefit from dropping much of the rhetoric of identity politics and move into something much more “life affirming” and “yes-saying” as Nietzsche would put it. Thank you.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously had the concept of a “free spirit,” who was someone who breaks free from the inherited dogma’s of religion, social norms, tradition, and society in general. Free spirits are hostile to conventional morality and hostile to religious and political absolutes. Free spirits have the courage to acknowledge and forge their own perspective and not just the perspective of their given conventions in society. Free spirits also have the ability when presented with new perspectives to hold their own beliefs up to scrutiny and change their minds and not have fixed beliefs when presented with information.

An in-group is a group in which an individual psychologically identifies as a member of. In-group members tend to have solidarity, loyalty, and a shared sense of belonging with other members of their in-group. In-groups often feel either indifference or antagonism towards members of out-groups. People tend to have positive biases towards other in-group members. Nearly all people have in-groups to some degree, because we all identify with certain perspectives. Whether it’s identifying as a liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, theist, atheist, or Nietzsche scholar, because of our communal nature we identify with some community. Humans often think through their in-groups and the language we use can also identify which in-groups we are a member of and which out-groups we are hostile towards. Humans seem to intrinsically have a desire to belong to in-groups.

Problems arise though when someone adopts a team mentality and defends their in-group at all costs even when people within their in-groups do unethical things. In politics I am reminded of people like Sean Hannity on the right, and Kyle Kulinski, on the left who defend their in-group even when their are clear warning signs that some people within their own in-groups are behaving immorally. People cling to the dogma within their own in-groups, often with the certainity of religious cult members. I purpose though that the modern understanding of a Nietzschean “free spirit,” is someone who doesn’t cling to the dogma of their own in-groups. A free spirit is someone who can break free from the inherited dogma of an in-group and take issues case by case, and issue by issue. They can live freely, live without absolute in-group certainty, and know that all opinions are a perspective. To be a Nietzschian free spirit is to live without an in-group. I believe Nietzsche himself was a free spirit in this sense, because Nietzsche attacked the dogmas of religion, science, democracy, egalitarianism, and even truth itself. Nietzsche lived as a free spirit without the dogma of an in-group.

Some of my other favorite philosophers are Martin Heidegger, Paul Tillich, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt. When I think of existential philosophers like Heidegger and Tillich, although Heidegger was an atheist and Tillich was a Christian, their thought was both very heretical when it came to those in-groups and don’t fit neatly into any binary. As political philosophers Berlin and Arendt didn’t fit neatly into the left/right political in-group binary either. Great thinkers live as Nietzschean free spirits without an in-group, and thus change how we think about the world. Our emanicipation and freedom from in-group dogma produces great critical thinking and great philosophy. To live without an in-group is to be the Nietzschean free spirit of the 21st century. Thank you.

Friedrich Nietzsche the famous German existentialist, famously wrote that “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Nietzsche meant that our epistemic awareness of the world, comes through a filter of the subjective understanding of our religious, political, familial, linguistic, and general cultural milieu. This doesn’t mean that facts don’t exist but our understanding of facts is mediated through our own subjective understanding of the world. People tend to like certainty. The world is a messy, gray, and morally ambiguous place. Often in our broken two party political system, there is no good choice, but we have to choose between the lesser of two evils. Philosophical moral dilemma’s like the “trolley problem”show how morally messy our world can be and how there is no objective right answer. Political philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, don’t often fit neatly into any left or right political paradigm, and thus shatter the political certainty of our tribal thinking. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich don’t fit neatly into the theist/atheist debate and show how complicated our understandings of Being and God are.

Another German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, had the theory of the phenomena and noumena in his famous book The Critique of Pure Reason. The phenomena is the world as it appears to us as through the senses. Objects are filtered through the innate structures of our minds. The noumena is reality that exists in itself, completely free from our empirical understanding of the world. The ultimate nature of the noumena is unknowable to us and thus we are limited in bias free, and objective understanding of the world. Sometimes people who are religious fundamentalists and atheists like Pat Robertson and Richard Dawkins, while hating each other, end up mirroring each in their dogmatic like certainty in either religion or science. All our experiences are filtered through us, as living subjective human beings, whose lives are often a contradictory mess. First person consciousness is the starting point of all knowledge, because the world comes through me.

Nietzsche had a perspectivism approach to epistemology. There is no God’s eye understanding of the world for Nietzsche. This doesn’t mean though that all answers are the same. Some answers that are very thoughtful, and are clearly better than others, but the God’s eye perspective is beyond our reach. Derrida wrote that “there is no outside the text.” This doesn’t mean that we only understand things through books, but that all our understanding is linguistic and in a cultural context. I think Nietzsche, Derrida, and continental philosophy, are in agreement on this point. I believe that the world is often a dark place, but do I think I have a capital T understanding that the world is a dark place? No. Nietzsche, the anti Christ figure, and scathing critic of religion in general was also critical of scientific positivism. Nietzsche thought the world was in constant flux and didn’t follow the principle of non contradiction. Philosophers search for truth, but we humbly walk in uncertainty. Thank you.

St. John of the Cross famously wrote the poem the “Dark Night of the Soul,” as a sort of existential spiritual crisis in which spiritual despair and God’s absence pervades your whole sense of being. There is an intense sense of a loss of meaning and purpose in one’s life, along with feeling abandoned by God. For me personally it feels like I am knocking on a door and asking God to open it, but there is just no one on the other side. As someone who suffers from depression and anxiety, and has treatment resistant depression and anxiety, medication and therapy don’t seem to work so well for me. In a world often full of a morass of war, poverty, mental illness, violence, and hatred in general, God’s presence is the only thing that gets many people on the edges of society through a very often cruel and uncaring world. Hegel famously described history as a slaughter-bench, and a quick glance at the news, can confirm as Freud notes in Civilization and It’s Discontents that “man is a wolf to man.” Mystics like St. John of the Cross, feel this despair not just as psychological phenomena but as an existential state of being. Honestly probably a lot more people feel this way than are willing to admit in public. Kierkegaard believes that we hide from our despair by getting lost in the mass-man and the public, and by conforming and distracting ourselves. Despair though for Kierkegaard is the key to finding God, and because despair is a universal existential condition for Kierkegaard, if you find yourself in despair, and you ultimately will according to Kierkegaard, you can make that leap of faith and ground yourself in God’s sustaining love.

Now back to St. John of the Cross and the “Dark Night of the Soul.” Theodicy is the problem of evil, in Christian theology. If God is all powerful, all knowing, and pure goodness, why in the world is there so much suffering in the world? Why couldn’t God have created a world without suffering? As someone who suffers from not often feeling God’s presence and having treatment resistant depression and anxiety, this existential despair at the injustice in the world and all the horrific malevolent acts of human beings do, certainly can exacerbate feelings of despair and God’s lack of presence in the world. St. John of the Cross felt this lack of God’s presence deeply and so still resonates with our contemporary society. I think the problem of evil, or theodicy, defeats the traditional notion of God in Christianity but I still believe in a “Ground of Being,” as Paul Tillich would describe God. Jesus cried out near the end of his crucifixion, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The cruelty and indifference of humans, along with not feeling God’s presence can make life unbearable at times. With all this said great philosophy, great theology, a few good friends, and a great science fiction novel can sustain me, even when life feels very lonely and hopeless. God’s free unconditional love, while often not felt by me and St. John of the Cross, is still there and God’s grace won’t go away just because of the terror of the world.

“Shi* happens,” as the cliche goes. The random sufferings of life will continue to go on, regardless of whether I want them to or not. Being will persist whether the human race destroys itself, or continues to survive. Great thinkers such as Martin Heidegger will always come around, and make life a little more worth living for. Despair and St. John of the Cross and his “Dark Night of the Soul,” will also always be around also. The dialectic between these two modes of existence will continue to go on. Through all my hardship, I am still standing. You are too. Thank you for reading.

I recently finished a book a couple of weeks ago by the esteemed journalist Stephen Kinzer. The book is entitled “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” Wikipedia summarizes the book as containing “untold stories of a Central Intelligence Agency chemist called Sidney Gottlieb who tried to ‘find a way to control the human brain.’ In 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles appointed Gottlieb to ‘run the covert program.’” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoner_in_Chief In “Poisoner in Chief,” Kinzer explains that Gottlieb developed MKUltra and details how drugs like LSD helped the CIA to control the minds of it’s perceived enemies. Kinzer uncovers in the book that Gottlieb was the chief chemist, helped the CIA with poison when they needed it, and the former prime minister Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was murdered by poison made by Gottlieb. Needless to say this was not a very good start for the CIA as an agency, in regards towards ethics, clandestine behavior, and nefarious activity.

During this time period the CIA imagined that communists discovered “some kind of a drug, or a potion, or a technique that would allow them to control human minds.” It was thought at this time, by many movies and books, that mind control was possible, and that the CIA needed a way to find out how to control people’s minds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoner_in_Chief The CIA started and ran the MKUltra program for roughly 10 years.

As I mentioned earlier, this was a horrendously unethical and immoral period in the history of CIA, and the United States government. MKUltra was done in the name of patriotic duty to America, and the dogged pursuit of furthering scientific progress to beat the USSR and communists. Science though needs to guided by ethics. Researchers studying human subjects must tell them that they have a right to refuse to participate in the research and human subjects must be fully informed of their role in this research. https://flexbooks.ck12.org/cbook/ck-12-middle-school-physical-science-flexbook-2.0/section/1.6/primary/lesson/ethics-in-science-ms-ps/ Gottlieb did experiments on American citizens and used techniques of torture and testing that were done by Nazi Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoner_in_Chief All of this to say the least was very immoral and without ethics, and made science can run amok in MKUltra.

Now the “deep state,” is a very controversial topic, but I think one that needs to be addressed in light of the understanding of what MKUltra was and what was done in the name of the “science” of MKUltra. According to a definition by Wikipedia “the deep state is a type of governance made up of potentially secret and unauthorized networks of power operating independently of a state’s political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state MKUltra was in essence a covert and secret part of government, that got nearly unlimited funding, wasn’t subject to ethical review boards, and acted as if they were above the law. The CIA might have acted like they were above the law because Sidney Gottlieb and his associates really were above the law. Gottlieb served no time in prison for his torturous regime and much of the files of MKULtra were shredded before anyone could read them.

According to “Poisoner in Chief” by Stephen Kinzer on page 67, “On November 4, 1952, Americans elected Dwight Eisenhower to the presidency. His victory ensured that Gottlieb would be free to do whatever he could imagine.” I am not sure what else to call MKUltra but the “deep state.” MKUltra was a part of my American government that was so powerful, so clandestine, and so lacking of any transparency, and ultimately so lacking of any ethics, that I think the word “deep state,” is appropriate. Now that the Twitter Files has come out, I am not sure that the FBI and likely the CIA and NSA has changed much over the years, because of the recently uncovered meddling the FBI has been shown to be done on social media. Conservatives might sometimes over-broadly use the term”deep state,” but that doesn’t mean the deep state doesn’t exist at all, just that the word and concept of the word needs to be applied more carefully.

Ultimately I want to leave my audience with two points from this blog. One is that science without ethics, cannot and shouldn’t exist. MKUltra showed that without ethical considerations science can run wild. Lastly parts of government that are so powerful and so covert that they lack any accountability, like MKUltra, cannot happen in America. The human temptation to abuse power and have a part of government that acts like the “deep state,” is too alluring to resist. We need more transparency in our government here in America, and without this, things like MKUltra and the Twitter Files are bound to still happen.

I am almost done reading the book “The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution.” In this book the authors, Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, postulate that the French philosopher Michel Foucault became a neo-liberal during the last decade of his life. If you are not familiar with the term and definition of the word neo-liberal, a broad definition of neo-liberalism is, “the late 20th century political reappearance of 19th century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War. A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them, it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

According to the book “The Last Man Takes LSD,” by Dean and Zamora, Foucault by the mid 1970’s had become very disillusioned with the far left politics of communism and had basically given up on Marxism and communism. Foucault was searching for a political philosophy and came upon neo-liberalism. Now I think Foucault was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, and can understand his disillusionment with communism because of the places like the USSR, and also what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution, but it doesn’t seem to me that neo-liberalism is a sensible answer to the problems of communism.

We have had close to 45 years of neo-liberalism in America now, and while hindsight might be 20/20, neo-liberalism has had a very damaging effect in America and in the world. During the Carter years we can see the early roots of neo-liberalism with the deregulation of trucking, banking and airline industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States Reagan furthered the neo-liberal agenda by the 1980’s and this included tax cuts, increased defense spending, financial deregulation, and trade deficit expansion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States By the time the Clinton administration came around with Bill Clinton’s passage of NAFTA, continuing the deregulation of the financial sector through the passage of the Commodity Futures and Modernization Act, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, neo-liberalism was triumphant. When George Bush W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden took office, the neo-liberalism mentality, was so ingrained into the psyche of America again, these four administrations could do nothing but act in fashion that supports the free market and neo-liberalism.

So what do we do to get out of this predicament, that neo-liberalism has left us in, with massive wealth inequality, global climate change happening, crime an ever worrying problem, mental illness on the rise https://www.banyanmentalhealth.com/2021/07/01/rise-in-mental-illness/, a corporatist government, and a hyper race conscious society that can’t seem to get along very well? While this might not be a novel answer I think it is the best option we have, in which a restarting of what begin in the 1930’s under FDR, where a beginning anew again of the “welfare state” takes place. When both parties in America are captured by lobbying and serve at the whims of neo-liberalism, a broadening of the “welfare state” can help stem the tide of the massive inequality that is taking place, along with re-regulating the financial sector. Foucault might have missed the disastrous outcomes of neo-liberalism, but we can stem the tides of ruin by finishing what FDR started, by a broadening of the “welfare state,” and hopefully giving candidates like Bernie Sanders (although Sanders is far from perfect), in the future a chance of becoming president.

I personally go to an Episcopalian church here in Sacramento, and I was raised as a Lutheran in Northern California. So I am heavily influenced from my childhood and now in my adulthood in the mainline Protestant tradition of Christianity. There are many Christians who were raised as an evangelical though and some were raised as an fundamentalist even. In fact in the mainline Protestant tradition it seems to be dwindling and dying fast while evangelical Christianity hasn’t dwindled in numbers nearly as much. https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/july/mainline-protestant-evangelical-decline-survey-us-nones.html Since Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx the death of God has come about in the modern world. We are a people adrift without a meta-narrative to guide us through the often very difficult world full of arbitrary suffering and senseless pain. A worldwide pandemic and political turmoil has enhanced our suffering to a greater degree than it already normally exists in the last 2 and 1/2 years.

When fear, death, mortality, and nihilism show their ugly faces to humanity we look for certainty wherever we can find it. Predictably and certainly historically too, religion has provided people with comfort when times are tough. Thinking the Bible is the inerrant word of an all powerful and all good God makes people feel safe in an uncertain and absurd world. It can give people meaning in their lives and a type of teleology.

Secondly, America has gotten very political partisan in the last decade. We are clinging dogmatically to our beliefs as if the politics of the left or the right have been handed down on high to us on the Mount Sinai, like we were Moses. In an uncertain world with the death of all meta-narratives politics can give us a false sense of certainty too.

Thirdly, science has weirdly also taken on this dimension for some people in our society. Looking for a capital T “Truth,” in science easily drifts into scientism where people can believe that empirical truths are the only way towards valid knowledge. A man like Richard Dawkins while I am sure is a very fine scientist, has drifted into philosophy and latched onto a scientism that although provides comfort for people in an absurd world, comes across as philosophical naive at best.

Nietzsche knew that people needed meaning in their lives and if they couldn’t find it in religion they would look towards politics and even science for “Truth,” and meaning, to stab off the terror of nihilism. While I agree with Nietzsche that some type of transcendent metaphysical values that can be handed down to all human beings in a universal and perennial fashion is now dead, I do think that each of us can find meaning in our lives for ourselves without dogmatically clinging to an ideology that gives us a false sense of security. We can all find meaning for our own existential selves in life still. We do many hard things in life, like exercising, learning an academic discipline, having a job, raising a family, and learning how to play an instrument, despite it’s difficulty often because it gives us meaning in life. Our postmodern task is to find meaning for ourselves without dogmatically forcing what we find meaningful onto others in an aggressive or bludgeoning manner. While this is not easy and requires a lot of discipline from ourselves, nothing Nietzsche said was easy. Our task might be hard, but that’s alright, because as Nietzsche famously said “whatever doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger.” Thank you.

John Keats was a poet who lived from 1795 to 1821, so really not a very long time. In this short time though Keats came up with a remarkable idea which he called “negative capability.” “Negative capability” is an idea Keats first wrote about in a letter to his brothers George and Tom in 1817, which basically states that it is a psychological framework where someone is “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. https://theconversation.com/john-keats-concept-of-negative-capability-or-sitting-in-uncertainty-is-needed-now-more-than-ever-153617 Rather than coming into an immediate conclusion about some situation or event that took place, people should rest in doubt and ambiguity, all the while continuing to pay attention to understand the situation and event even more. Daniel Kahneman the author of the very great book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” also cautions us against a naive and simplistic view that “what you see is all there is.” It is a good idea to look at things from multiple viewpoints, so we can not “judge a book by it’s cover,” as the old cliche goes.

The thing is though, living in a state of “negative capability,” and ambiguity, is very difficult. There are literally hundreds of world issues out there, where the world issues are always changing and very dynamic. For some odd and often very partisan reason, most of us think our opinions on these hundreds of issues are almost always correct, right, and true. For example the situation in the Ukraine, and their war with Russia, while being very dangerous, also changes so rapidly that it is hard to keep up on all the news about the war. We all have an ego that wants to be Right with a capital “R.” “Negative capability” though shows us the importance of humility, where Keats described this as the “capability of submission.” https://theconversation.com/john-keats-concept-of-negative-capability-or-sitting-in-uncertainty-is-needed-now-more-than-ever-153617

None of this is to say that some type of affirmative and positive knowledge isn’t possible. Science, especially since the enlightenment, has exploded our understanding of the world and given us great technological advancements. This computer I am writing this blog on, to go out on the internet, is one of those great scientific advancements. The internet also though can spread misinformation, make people feel isolated and alone, and even have a Kierkegaardian “leveling” effect, where individual thought and individual greatness can get swallowed up by the herd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_(philosophy)

Ash Wednesday is today, and I plan on getting the ashes on my forward later today myself. The first day of Lent is a time of prayer and fasting for many Christians and a time to reflect on not our epistemological arrogance but our epistemic humility, and the utter ambiguity of our complicated and confusing world. The dictum “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” is the dictum of the day in Christianity where we not only remember ambiguity but ultimately our own mortality. We are limited, and finite, and in the end creatures that will die. Late stage capitalism has provided us with many comforts but trying to stay in a space of “negative capability,” and especially on Ash Wednesday a space of death awareness is very important. In the end though, we are as people all star dust, on a rock, shooting through outer space, while revolving around the sun, ultimately waiting for the day we will all become worm food, groping for some meaning in our lives. So, what do I know? :) Thank you.

One of my favorite philosopher’s Martin Heidegger had a concept that he named “Das Man,” or the “The They,” in his book Being and Time. Das Man is basically the notion that people get caught up in the crowd, the herd, conventional cliched thinking, and are essentially inauthentic. Rather than facing up to our own death and finitude we get lost in the crowd, and get lost in the modes of being which entail curiosity, ambiguity, and idle talk. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Heidegger-German-philosopher#ref822956 Heidegger, following Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, had an illiberal critique of modern society. There were a few individuals though who could see through this modern’s society Das Man inauthenticity, and could heed the “call of conscience,” and face their own mortality and become authentic.

Modern day mass media breeds conformity. People who are conservative watch Fox News to reaffirm their own biases. But people who watch MSNBC and CNN, aren’t much better, and are often getting told just what they want to hear. William James famously said once, “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” People follow politics the way they follow sports, they are blindly on one team or the other in our two party system. The funny and sad irony, is that on many issues like the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and NSA spying the two parties aren’t actually all that different. Both parties are full or warmongers, take money from Wall Street to get elected, and both parties support the NSA’s shredding of the 4th amendment to spy on us all. Even such reputable media outlets as the New York Times and Washington Post, while much better than cable news, will rarely let you know that the problem isn’t one party or the other but that without systemic or institutional change nothing much is going to shift in our society.

So why do I bring up Heidegger’s notion of Das Man, and link it to the three kings of dissent; Chris Hedges, Cornel West, and Noam Chomsky? Well mass media breeds conformity as I previously noted. We tend to think only of our own in-groups political talking points. I think the task of our societies critics, for men like Hedges, West, and Chomsky; and the task of the philosopher, ultimately is to think outside banal tropes. When a Democrat starts drone striking poor people in the Middle East, or spying on us through the NSA, its just as egregious as when a Republican does it. The same goes for when Republican’s bomb and spy on us too, they shouldn’t get a pass either. We need people like Hedges, West and Chomsky who can think outside the Das Man two party system and be a critic of the institutions and the structural components of our capitalist society.

So much of contemporary politics seems to be about culture war issues, and a power struggle. Philosophers are supposed to look beyond power struggles and get at a deeper truth. Our task as a philosopher is to see beyond the toxic discourse that currently exists, and challenge power. It’s to be a Socratic gadfly, for lack of a better term. It’s to be a thorn in the flesh of society, as the apostle Paul might put it. My smart friend Nic points out Chris Hedges, Cornel West, and Noam Chomsky, are all getting older, so we need some new philosophers and dissidents to take their place. I hope the new philosopher’s come very soon, because our society sorely needs them. Thank you.

Recently one of my favorite contemporary journalists, Matt Taibbi, wrote an article about how the news and politics is America’s new religion and how we are as a result in a new secular “religious” war. I was only able to get half the article and read half of it for myself, but regardless, it is a very interesting article that is available for a read. I recommend reading it. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-is-americas-new-religion

Religion is dying in America. Church attendance is down below 50 %, for the first time in our history. https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx Since Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, the three great atheists of the 19th and 20th centuries, that ended Christianity and religion, faith has been in a rapid decline. As someone who attends church, its very noticeable how much of the congregation is very old and how the middle aged to younger people don’t often attend church anymore.

The thing is though human beings and thus human nature have not changed a lot in the last 2000 years, so we still have the same psychological and existential concerns we have always had. We are still a deeply tribal species with a need for in and out groups, who crave meaning in our lives. We want to belong and the whole cliched left/right political divide fulfills some of this need in our secular age. Religion and family can still fill the hole in the human heart for many people, but things like sports, movies, pop music, and consumerism with their vapid promises are increasingly filling our existential holes for us instead of religion and family.

Nietzsche wrote his famous “Parable of the Madman,” and proclaimed loudly the Christian God of the last 2000 years is dead. Nietzsche though warned with the death of God comes a groundlessness in western society that has never been seen before. Nihilism in other words, would strike at the heart of western society. We would find anything we can to fill this existential hole because of a metaphysical groundlessness at the heart of the 20th century, and as a result we saw totalitarian Nazism arise in Germany and communism arise in the USSR.

This isn’t some conservative screed to return to the 1950’s though, that era was full of problems of sexism, racism and homophobia. But if we take sin to be separation and estrangement, as Paul Tillich tells us, we are living in a deeply nihilistic and now sinful era, just as much as in the 1950’s and if not more. In a post Fall, or post lapsarian world, I don’t think a utopian paradise is possible but mindless consumerism and endless capitalism won’t bring about lasting meaning to people’s lives either.

Maybe a return to big B, “Being,” as Martin Heidegger tells us in a post consumer, post capitalist, and post monotheistic religious fashion is the answer. Maybe that’s not the answer though either, I don’t really know. I do know that using the traditional left/right or Democratic/Republican paradigm won’t get us very far in bringing about less separation and estrangement when looking for meaning in a nihilistic age. Thank you.

William James the American pragmatist philosopher in his book “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” had a notion of two different types of people; “healthy minded people,” and “sick souls.” Healthy minded people were people who were essentially seeing the good in something and making that the most important thing. Reality is seen to be good and bad is ignored or excluded. Healthy minded people feel happy and positive about things without any pre-thought or intellectual evaluation of the circumstances. Everything is experienced as good in of itself. Healthy minded people tend to feel at one with the world and with the divine. They take the view that is world is good, then as they are part of the world, they are also good. James calls healthy minded people “once born.”

James though thought there was another another type of person, and that person was the sick soul. James thought the sick soul maximizes thoughts of the evil in the world and ignores the existence of the good, believing it to be unreal. James said the sick soul thinks “the world now looks remote, strange, sinister, and uncanny. It’s color is gone and its breath is cold.” http://www.malbank.com/images/RS/Unit%203%20Part%204/Healthy%20Mindedness%20and%20the%20Sick%20Soul.pdf

Some sick souls feel despair, anguish, and complete lack of joy. Really profound sick soul feelings can include loathing, suspicion, fear, anxiety, and even suicide. James argued that while healthy minded people are happier, sick souls have a greater insight into the human condition and are more connected to religion because faced with the apparent meaninglessness of the world, they turn to religion to find an answer to their sick souled condition and possibly a new way to view the world. James writes, “the most complete religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us. They are essentially the religions of deliverance; the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.” James thought if you could work through being a sick soul, you could become “twice born” through religions like Christianity and Buddhism. Admittedly I fall much more into the sick soul camp, than the healthy minded people camp, and need to be twice born.

Soren Kierkegaard the 19th century Danish philosopher noted that in his book “Sickness Unto Death,” he thought that despair was a kind of sickness of spirit. The self for Kierkegaard is a kind of composite of various elements; finitude and infinitude, possibility and necessity. When these elements that constitute the self become out of balance, despair is the result. Despair for Kierkegaard is a “sickness unto death,” but unlike physical sickness does not necessarily lead to death. Unlike a physical sickness, then, despair does not simply run its course on being contracted but instead of simply killing someone it involves not being able to die, even when death would be an escape from the torments of despair. Despair for Kierkegaard also has nothing to do with what is external to the self. To despair is to despair over one’s self, one’s own being, one’s own existential condition. Lastly simply because someone does not recognize that he is in despair, does not in fact mean that he is free of despair. He is simply unconscious of his despair. http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/grunthaler_despair.pdf

In a culture such as America’s with its obsessions with optimism and hope James sick souls and Kierkegaard’s notion of despair are heavily frowned upon. In fact just yesterday in the grocery store I saw a magazine touting the glory and benefits of having a hopeful attitude. Can anything good come out of having a sick souled personality and recognizing that you are indeed in despair though? I think the answer is yes, and so did Kierkegaard. Despair is a type of suffering but this suffering can end “when the self is grounded transparently in the power that created it.” What Kierkegaard thinks is that if we become aware that we are in despair and acknowledge it’s presence, and then come to God we can overcome despair.

Both James and Kierkegaard thought that people couldn’t stop being sick souls or in despair all by themselves. People needed religion and God to do that. America is a country awash in the talking point and cliche of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.” Personal responsibility and being mentally tough seem to be the answer for people to overcome nearly every problem in America, from getting a job, to overcoming poverty, to overcoming drug and alcohol addiction, to even overcoming mental health problems. I don’t mean to suggest that people don’t have some agency but I think American society vastly overestimates how much agency will all really have, and some problems like being a sick soul or in Kierkegaardian despair can’t be overcome all on our own. As the recovery program AA says, “we came to believe in a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” In fact looking for help can be act of political dissidence and even a politically courageous act in our culture of personal responsibility and late stage capitalism. Even if that help is from religions like Buddhism and Christianity and God. Thank you.

Saying Friedrich Nietzsche was critical of Christianity might be a slight understatement. He thought it was an oppressive, mendacious, and all around sick religion that put people in bondage essentially. Nietzsche’s notion of master and slave morality in On The Genealogy of Morality was a legendary and devastating critique of Christianity. With Christianity’s emphasis on empathy, compassion, and pity as actually a veiled notion of resentment, it seemed that Christianity was busted for being nothing more than an upside down power move to bring down the class of people on top of society and bring up the people on bottom of society. Nietzsche thought that what controls us is not so much the coercive force of other people but the values and morality of Christianity that govern society. Instead of directly lashing out at the person who hurt you, like in master morality someone would do, slave morality demands that we “turn the other cheek.” Slave morality demands that we pity our enemies and show them compassion even when they are malicious and cruel. Nietzsche thought this was an inversion of healthy and strong values and that this ultimately embodied resentment.

Its oddly interesting that as someone who considers himself to be a Christian and someone who loves Nietzsche, these contradictory impulses and likes would cause me to have a lot of cognitive dissonance. Firstly though, I agree with Nietzsche that often slave morality can make people “sick.” Slave morality turns people inward, makes them hesitant and second guess themselves, and ultimately full of resentment. Slave morality does give people a soul though as Nietzsche thought but that comes at a very heavy cost. We are a people in bondage to our values, and as the 20th century philosopher Foucault wrote the mechanism of control in society has moved “from the body to the soul.” We are simple put not free as a culture of people in Christendom. So with all this said and at times it certainly being hard to reconcile these two belief systems in Nietzsche’s ubermensch values and Christian pity and empathy, I think Nietzsche missed something in his critique of Christianity.

In western Christian Protestant theology, “grace” is the freely given given gift from God for the forgiveness of sins. Grace is the unconditional love that no matter what we do as humans we are forgiven and that God loves us. So if everything is forgiven, then everything is also permissible. I don’t think this is license for us to go out and act grossly immoral, but “grace” does also give us back our freedom. Jesus said in Matthew 22: 37-40, “He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” A Christianity that emphasizes love and grace allows us to be free. Much of Christianity has turned into a rule bound religion, that judges anyone it deems to be a sinner very harshly. Christianity has a long and dark history towards anyone that it deems to be in an out-group, but there is another side to Christianity. A Christianity that emphasizes love as love and not an upside down power move that is actually resentment, can free us. Forgiveness and grace is what makes us free. Jesus said in Matthew 18: 21-22, “then Peter came up and said to him, ‘Lord how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.’” In conclusion Nietzsche just forgot that Christian grace and forgiveness can make us free too. Thank you.

Heidegger wrote about the ontology of Dasein in Being and Time. One of the conditions of Dasein’s being is that we have “thrownness.” We are thrown into the world through no choice of our own, in a certain body, with certain limitations, in a certain time period, and within a certain cultural milieu. Thrownness is part of our ontological subjectivity.

A curious part of our throwness, is that Dasein comes completely out of the universe and is completely made out of the materials of the universe. For some reason though people think we are separate from the universe. Its like we have an odd ability to abstract and reify ourselves from our concrete circumstances and think we are separate from the universe when we come completely out of the universe. It’s like we are the part of the universe that became aware of itself, but forget that we come out of the world and universe. It’s quite a tragic condition actually. Animals can’t, at least as far as I can tell, agonize over their place in the universe while forgetting they are made out of the universe. Animals have no ability to forget about their throwness.

Dasein does have some other unique abilities in my opinion though. Dasein gets to be a “witness” to the events that take place in this universe. Without subjectivity there would nothing to record the events of this universe and be a “witness” to what is taking place here. By “witness” I don’t mean that life is all good either. Lots of suffering, injustice, and pain exist through no fault of our own in this world. Joy and pleasure exist too, but whatever emotion we are feeling and thought we are thinking we get to be a “witness” and participant to the events taking place here. Of course a complete materialist and atheist would roll their eyes at my next speculative statement but it might be that God got lonely in being the only “witness” to the universe and wanted someone else to witness what He/She/It/ The Ineffable, was also “witnessing.” Whatever it is, it seems that we are the part of the universe that came into being to have a phenomenological experience and be a “witness” to the world and universe.

I would never call myself an ethicist since ethics was never my speciality in school. I took a seminar once in grad school though on utilitarianism and we ultimately even studied some deontological theories about ethics. While my understanding of ethics is very limited I thought I would still write a blog post about it. :)

One of the perplexing things I have noticed about people who are attempting to be ethical is that they tend to find some ethical maxims and then follow them slavishly. People pay their bills, go to work, and don’t steal as if following these rules is what makes them ethical. I even have a family member who I know who thinks this is what ethics is all about. While I wouldn’t claim that this isn’t a part of ethics, thinking this is what comprises of the totality of ethics reminds me of Christians who go to church on Sunday and think that this alone makes them a good person. The rest of the week matters too. In the Bible the Pharisees seem to be obsessed with with law and order as if following the law is what makes them a “good person.” Being a “good person” involves much more than following rules and as Jesus noted the two most important commandments are in Matthew 22: 36-40 as “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’38 This is the first and greatest commandment.39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

If someone pays their bills on time but still treats the people in their lives with cruelty, dominance, and a lack of compassion, I believe there is something missing severely from their ethical code. If one lacks compassion in their motivation for being ethical, it seems to me that their whole telos for being ethical is so that they can think of themselves as a “good person” instead of acting with charity and beneficence towards others. From my limited understanding of Kant’s categorical imperative I could just be restating his concept in deontological moral philosophy with just a more Christian ring to it.

Although what I am saying might be nothing new in the study of ethics, I still believe it is an important message to convey. In 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 Paul writes, “4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” So without love and compassion as a motivation for our ethical code, the following of rules is no better than what the Pharisees were doing in Bible. Thank you.

Yesterday January 6, was a shameful day in American history. We had an insurrection happen at Washington D.C. You Donald Trump did nothing but instigate the situation with your flat denial of reality that you lost the election and your “supporters,” more like rioters and thugs, totally embarrassed themselves today. Granted the political class has sold us out for around 40 years in this country, but your shameful presidency has taken it to the next level of unethical behavior. All Americans should bow our heads in collective shame today, and you have done nothing but make this nation a worse place. Trust me, I am no Joe Biden fan, but the sooner you leave office, the better. Shame on you Donald Trump.

It seems to me that people often think of others as either a virtuous person or a person who is full of vice. What do I mean by this? In psychology there is a well known cognitive bias known as the “halo effect” that is defined as “The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their character. Essentially your overall impression of a person (’He is nice!’) impacts your evaluations of that persons specific traits (”He is also smart!’). Perceptions of a single trait can carry over to how people perceive other aspects of that person.” I think the opposite can take place in which a type of “devil effect” happens, and if we notice a person has one bad characteristic we might possible think their whole personality is immoral or bad.

For example lets take a look at the plight of Lance Armstrong. Armstrong had cancer, which he beat, but he cheated his way into winning the Tour de France seven times. Also, though, nearly every person on the Tour de France who was competing was also cheating. So no matter who won those seven years, it was almost guaranteed to be a cheater, because of the competitive advantage cheating gives you. Overall I think Armstrong is a very dishonest person, but so was everyone else in the Tour de France those years.

Does this mean Armstrong didn’t work very hard though as a cyclist? No, not at all. I am sure he worked very hard to become a world champion cyclist just like Barry Bonds, who used steroids in baseball, also worked very hard to become a great baseball player. So in one sense Armstrong and Bonds are very vice ridden people because of the cheating but in another sense they are virtuous individuals because of the hard work they put in towards their sports. Bill Clinton could be another example of this dichotomy, between the “halo effect” and “devil effect,” because he cheated on his wife in very unethical ways, but he also worked his way up from being poor in America to become the president of the United States. I even have a family member I know quite well, who is a very active person and works quite hard at his many projects but is often an unsympathetic and sometimes even cruel person.

So what is the philosophical point of this blog post? Well people have a tendency to think of others through the “halo effect” or “devil effect,” as either saints or sinners, or virtuous or full of vice like people. I think though being a saint or sinner is often a domain dependent endeavor. In one domain Woody Allen is a genius (screenplay writer), and in another domain he has questionable sexual morals (father). In one domain Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century and in another he is a unrepentant nefarious Nazi. Even Martin Luther King Jr., in one domain was immoral for having many affairs on his wife, but was also the greatest America civil rights leader of the 20th century likely.

So when thinking of people its best to not fall prey to the cognitive bias known as the “halo effect” or its counterpart the “devil effect.” It might seem like an obvious truism or a cliche but people really are a complicated mixture of virtuous and more vice like tendencies and when making an assessment on what type of person an individual is, its helpful to ask what domain do you plan on judging them in. Ultimately although we are all a mixture of good and bad impulses, maybe as Nelson Mandela said succinctly, “a saint is just a sinner who keeps on trying.” Thank you.

A quick definition of agency is “agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. Facticity is “something that already informs and has been taken up in existence, even if it is unnoticed or left unattended.” Facticity is in essence the “givenness” or “thrownness” of existence as Heidegger would describe it. Prayer is “ in the narrow sense, the term refers to an act of supplication or intercession directed towards a deity (a god), or a deified ancestor.” As a phenomenological point it seems to me that much of life is out of our control. In fact psychologists have a term and definition for it called the “illusion of control.” It is defined as “the illusion of control” and “is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events; for example, it occurs when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence.” Kierkegaard once wrote that “I shall certainly attend your party, but I must make an exception for the contingency that a roof tile happens to blow down and kill me; for in that case, I cannot attend.” So much of our life involves contingency and randomness. The “givenness,” “thrownness,” and facticity of life dominates much of our existence. We lack agency in much of our environmental circumstances.

So what does agency and facticity have to do with prayer? Well prayer is, and I mean prayer in the colloquial sense of the term (I don’t intend to debate all the different types of prayer out there for the purposes of this blog post) a type of appeal to a supreme being with more agency than I possess. When I make a prayer towards the Judeo-Christian God I am asking for help or help towards someone I care about from a God that can control more of its environment than I can. God can take responsibility for the situation. I think one of the contemporarily fallacious arguments of American society is the trope that all success is because someone needs to “take personal responsibility for their life.” Someone just needs to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and “make their own way in the world.” Both parties in America believe in the meritocracy to some degree and have notions of the worthy and unworthy poor. I think much of this fallacy is predicated on the “illusion of control.” For people with addiction and mental health issues this fallacy is all too apparent despite outsiders looking in on these demographics phenomenological experience and ordering them to take personal responsibility. There is a reason one of the tenets of AA is that “we saw that we are powerless over alcohol.”

Prayer at its best can subvert the “illusion of control,” acknowledge our powerlessness over many circumstances, and ask for help in environmental circumstances that we don’t control. In a way prayer is a subversive value in late stage capitalism, despite many evangelicals slavish adherence to the prosperity gospel and a capitalist value system. Well, just a quick little post on agency, facticity, capitalism, and prayer.

Life begins in media res, so to speak, or as Heidegger might put it, Daesin has a thrownness towards its “being-in-the-world.” As the cliche goes we are thrown into life with no instruction manual. So is this true? Well not quite actually. Many religious texts and philosophers have spent thousands upon thousands of hours trying to figure out this existential mess called life. As someone who enjoys the study of philosophy and theology I think religious texts in all the worlds major traditions contain wisdom in them to a greater or lesser degree. I also think great philosophers (and artists of all kinds for that matter) have much to offer in our understanding of our existential predicament. The problem arises though when these great religious sages, and philosophers come they are often “untimely” as Nietzsche might put it. Well what could this mean? As my friend Nic recently introduced me to Beach Boys song “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” explains, it succinctly expresses how great thinkers are often “untimely.” They aren’t necessarily luddites but the philosophical and religious genius doesn’t quite fit in with their contemporary milieu. Nietzsche was a very sick, lonely and ultimately mentally ill man. Kierkegaard seemed to struggle with depression for most of his life also, and was ridiculed mercilessly by the press during the Corsair affair. Heidegger was actually probably a luddite and a man deeply out of step with the modern world. Marx and Luther both deeply challenged the status quo of their societies, and well, Jesus obviously had some, shall we say, slight trouble with the authorities during his lifetime. Often greatness for truly great men (and women) is delayed in their lifetime. As Nietzsche put it “some men are born posthumously.” Even great journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges get overshadowed by the bigger names in the mainstream media who have more money and exposure. For every Luther there is an Erasmus, for every postmodernist there is an Nietzsche, and for every Jesus there is a John the Baptist. Greatness in philosophy and religion (and art) comes at a price and that price is frequently a life of loneliness, despair, and just not fitting in. In the Gospel of John Jesus says, “For Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country.” So this blog post is for the misfits, the rejects, and the Charlie Browns of the world, because if you are an intellectual misfit you might just be in the company of philosophical greatness.