Echoes Underground

On God

Within the frame of materialism, God does not exist, and if you remain within that frame (as our co-host did until the age of 26) then New Atheism is a compelling and comfortable philosophy. If there’s no evidence for it, no scientific backing for it, it’s meaningless because it can’t affect you. But as you grow older you start to recognise that materialism is its own ism. It’s a model that is useful, so that gives it a powerful claim on our attention, but you start to notice its holes. Epistemology, for example - the question of how we know we know things - is something that materialists tend to ignore, but there is plenty of evidence that our senses are not reliable. Think of how a straight stick looks bent when you put it in a glass of water, and the implications of this. We have to accept that our knowledge of an object is separate from the object itself, that the map is distinct from the territory, but how can we define the relationship between these two separate things beyond the vague sense that it seems to work. If you haven’t quite solved this problem of epistemology, there’s this gap. It’s a small gap, but it’s in your foundations and your entire belief system rests precariously on top of it. This is not satisfying. The fact that we have knowledge of the world is not certain. What next? Another problem is that within the materialist frame of reference you have no “why”. Why should we act morally? What’s the point? Yes utilitarianism, yes pain is bad and pleasure is good, but really? There’s a gap between what logic dictates and what you feel deep down, and you can’t help but notice that when a society is run along utilitarian lines (the USSR for example) it’s horrible. What is our telos - our goal, our end, our destination? What’s the point of orientation for us to navigate by? The religious answer, to this and to the problem of epistemology, is God, but God cannot exist in the materialistic sense. So perhaps we need to start thinking of God in a different way. Perhaps God is not a material phenomenon. Perhaps God, rather than the Creator we’re moving from, is the destination we’re moving towards. Francis Fukyama says the end of history is us moving towards a telos - recognising that human beings have inherent worth, ascribing value to the ideas of charity, grace and love as better than domination, exploitation and cruelty. The pre-Christian world contained immensely ethically sophisticated people, but none of them ever questioned the rightness of slavery. A belief in equality is new, and while we might chafe against its excesses it has led to an unbelievable flourishing of humanity over the last thousand of years. This belief, based on Christian teachings, has no material basis, but it has had material outcomes in the fact that everything has been getting better for a long time. A non-materialist belief has materialist outcomes. This unjustified belief, this set of ideas, intuitively seems right and it takes us as a civilisation in a certain direction. A good direction. Perhaps God is an idea we share, an end state that we’re implicitly aiming for in what we do. Perhaps God is the telos, a telos that becomes more refined, more good, as civilisation develops. And in developing this telos, in some ways we could say that we are building God. The Creator, created.

On Kitesurfing in the Western Sahara

Our co-host finds himself in the Western Sahara, the disputed and very deserty region to the South of Morocco. He’s there to kitesurf; conditions in Dakhla are perfect. The water’s flat, the wind is up, the people are hospitable, the food is excellent, and barren wilderness extends for hundreds of miles in every direction. Our other co-host challenges his life decisions, and feigns interest in the local political and economic situation before focusing on the main topics at hand: the importance of isometric training, and England’s place under US hegemony.

Notes on Attending a Football Match

Our intrepid correspondent attended a football match for the first time, and discovered within himself a surprising affinity for hooliganism. It was a women’s football match, the quarter final of the Champion’s League, Chelsea at home against Barcelona and losing 4-1 (8-2 agg). What did he learn? Firstly, you are not anonymous in the crowd at a football match. The people on the pitch can hear you, so you feel that the right shout at the right time, or the wrong word at the wrong time, could actually have an impact on the action. You can make eye contact with the players, they are sensitive to your vibe. You are part of the action, and the team is counting on you. In fact you find yourself part of something much bigger than just the action. Banners celebrating great deeds stare down on you like battle honours in a garrison church or at a feudal banquet. You stand together to sing the club anthem, all wearing matching clothes, thousands of you united in one voice. The team somehow becomes more than just a vector for entertainment. It is the heart of a community, and becomes a big part of your identity - an institution, a gang, rather like the chariot teams of ancient Rome. At the same time, you are treated like a criminal. These stadiums are built like prisons, clearly designed around managing masses of people who are not trusted by the state, thought of as basically animals. There are bossy signs everywhere telling you not to abuse staff or women, there’s a CCTV camera watching every seat. In fact you are repressed to such a degree that you feel like you want to rebel against that. You want to act up. Adding to that, the opposing fans can see you, you, as an individual. They recognise you. They sing their songs, then you sing your songs back at them, and it starts to become quite personal. When Chelsea started performing badly the opposition chants became more smug, more jeering, disrespectful, unbearable, and we outnumbered them, there were 20,000 of us and they were on our turf and we’d been psychologically primed by having been treated like criminals, in short, our correspondent now understands football violence. And violence more generally, actually. Is this how a medieval peasant felt going to war, or a working man getting called up at the beginning of the Great War? Stoked? Screw those guys - let’s go! Also for some context on the Soul Train reference - here’s [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lODBVM802H8] the sort of situation you need to be prepared for.

On Ibiza (more or less)

Ibiza is well-placed to set the stage for an Dionysian experience. It’s laced with history and mythology - there’s a Phonecian necropolis, a cave temple to moon goddess Tanit, and 500 year old forts everywhere, including a massive one overlooking the old town. It’s also laced with bohemian cosmopolitanism. Islands in general are more liberal than the mainland, and this one in particular has long been a crossroads, a meeting place for sailors and travellers. Artists fled there in the 1930s to escape Franco’s Spain, hippies flocked there in the 1960s, and Freddie Mercury did an enormous amount of drugs at Pikes in the 1980s. And then superclubs happened. This was another masterpiece of professionalism and focus, and we got to the halfway point without even mentioning nightclubs. Topics covered: the difference between nudists and naturists, the history of the holiday and the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, possible Scooby Doo plotlines, the benefits of using technology to automate routine tasks while leaving humans free to be creative, where music can go next, psychedelic-informed management away days… and one co-host mounts an intervention to make the other realise his true self and become a full-time shaman. If you too are wondering what Djent is, we recommend this explainer video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTkuJ4vRQZM]. And to cross promote, here’s the video for AM-180 by Trees on Venus [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INANxRRAqZc].

On Shamanism

Shamanism has been lurking in the background of our discussions since day one, and our “jingle” is just one of us playing a shaman drum. It was high time we had an episode on it. What is a shaman? We follow Manvir Singh in boiling it down to people who 1) enter non-ordinary states and then 2) engage with unseen realities to 3) provide a service to their community. They have long served an important role in community helping their fellow humans deal with uncertainty, and as a result crop up in pretty much every human society at some point. They tend to lead very different lifestyles to the rest of their community, othering themselves. Is it a LARP, or do the shamans actually believe what they’re doing? It’s hard to tell, probably a bit of both. They know they’re performing a role, and the better their performance, the more they consciously fulfil the role of shaman, the more effective they are. The service they offer is not a million miles from a placebo, giving their clients the belief that they are going to get better, and like placebos the cures of the shaman are often effective. And the idea that actions, as opposed to words, can be a lie is quite a modern one. In fact putting on a performance can be self-fulfilling, since the performance helps you get into a non-ordinary state of consciousness so could just be a legitimate part of the process. And we can see the same mechanisms at play in the modern world. There’s a lot of theatre in medicine, for example, and in hedge fund management. The best UFC fighters clearly have access to a specific state of consciousness when they step into the octagon. Catholic priests are celibate, which marks them out as different to their flocks in the same way that shamans tend to lead very different lifestyles to the rest of their community to other themselves. The big name startup founders also live bizarre lifestyles, bare feet in the office, unkempt hair, drugs, aura, and these things all inspire belief and weirdly often actually deliver results. And this leads us to some actionable insights that will inform how we approach our jobs from this day hence.