Imagination: A Way to Remake the World - Iain McGilchrist & Phoebe Tickell
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- This conversation is part of an online seminar series taking place in the Spring and Summer of 2023 bringing innovative thinkers into conversation with Iain McGilchrist to explore his philosophy as laid out in The Matter with Things. www.amazon.com/Matter-Things-...
In the week following each event, we hold free connection and inquiry sessions online to meet and reflect more deeply with others on the significance of the ideas shared in the previous week’s seminar. Incorporating embodied and relational practices, we’ll alternate between break-out room conversations and whole-group discussion. The emphasis is on authentic connections, epistemic humility, and a sense of wonder in relation to Iain and his interlocutors' work. You're warmly invited to join us!
To join the live events or learn more about this series go to our webpage here: systems-souls-society.com/iai...
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A beautiful flowing chat on comming alive❤
I can’t help but see a correlation between Phoebe and lain’s efforts to bridge the divide with the efforts of Betty Edwards in her book “drawing on the right side of the brain”. Drawing is one way to get there.
It's around 6am here and I'm laughing 😂 Thank you for contributing to the very good start of this day ❤ "I can release you from the terror of this image of me with the light and the darkness.." Brilliant 👌
These beautiful, fascinating deep conversations have transformed my life. I feel absolutely blessed to have discovered Iain and all of his insightful deeply thought provoking discussions with incredible guests. Thank you 🙏🙏🙏
There are many beautiful stars in the night sky, but tonight only two were shining bright.😊
I love these conversations.
For myself, I left my childhood imagination as I ran in the storms of life of seeking forms, shadows, and life would smack me. I tossed and turned, but in the tossing my childhood, imagination returned immediately. The awareness of the unknowable. The dark and the light joined with possibilities as I was a child in a tree house with a flashlight, dark, undercover with my aunt who saw bears and snakes at times. I would gently hold her and tell her I saw them too. She would giggle and laugh and say to me, "No, you don't. I am the crazy one." No, you aren't. I have my imaginary friends." I adored her while others shunned her. My aunt would protect me as a small child. At times, she would read to me, and I would write my poems. Then, she was taken away by people who were unaware of her vulnerabilities and the capacity to love, a tragedy in my heart. My mother gave me her letters she had kept a secret for me to read after she passed. My aunt was placed in an insane asylum by her son, who was not aware, who had been ashamed of her. (12 years locked away , we did go and visit her, and I would cry to bring her home).
Her letters spoke to my heart. Some were coherent and beautifully written, and others were her fearfulness, scribbled. I loved her, and I am glad I had. A child responding to a heart that was alone.
In the understanding of meditation, there is love and love, which are not the systems of habits of following a method. Love can not be taught by thought. Awareness. The brain itself comes very quiet, without any reaction, a movement, and it's strange. The quality of that silence, that stillness.
My inner child remains with me, the dance of life.
With the deepest appreciation and respect for this discussion from all of you today.
This may be just me….but I believe that imagination and intuition walk hand in hand…
Thank you for such a wonderful thought provoking conversation
I’ve had the same thought before. I feel like intuition is basically a synthesis of imagination, reason, and optimism and that you can improve your intuition like a muscle by attending to the other qualities
Howdy! I actually rather enjoy the lighting of your unfortunate situation. It sets a reflective campfire like mood that is good! Cheers to ya'all and thanks for letting us listen in on your lovely conversations.
I felt exactly as Iain did about the question right when the Irish women asked it. She was expecting them to reference modern artists, but wasn't willing to do so herself. Her comment/question came off as judgmental. I was actually looking forward to hearing what artists she would recommend. But she seemed more afraid of leaving anyone out than giving anyone credit. I'm only guessing that, but if so, it's a sad attitude some people have nowadays: thinking that if they give anyone credit, they are somehow doing others harm. With that mindset, one if so afraid of doing others harm that one does no one any good. That's a perverse version of democracy or equity that actually betrays a competitive mindset. It isn't a zero sum game. And if people's feelings are hurt every time their name is left out, that just means they are being driven by the ego, which has no interest at all in fairness.
Well put
This deeply resonates with my artistc process. Thank you.
Your work is vital!!!! (All of you.)
Fantastic conversation! Well done, Phoebe!
About 1:12:00 on Imagination. Coleridge’s clear characterization of the difference between Fancy and Imagination is worth refering to to gain some depth of perspective. Owen Barfield is your best friend.
What Vico understood, what Vedic and romantic poets knew by direct utterance translated from the field of the Ineffable or the Intuitive-Empathic Imagination is something slipped into, entered into, immersed by neither will or an act of decree! It is so simple, yet so profound. What is seen is felt-known, immediate, traveled with the touch-of-soul across planes of being that looks not with disdain but with pity, concern and compassion as it puts into perspective the hearken calls for reductio ad absurdum by the self-anointed left brain and articulates its vision nonetheless,
"To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,-
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong:
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng.
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep..." (Wordsworth)
"Calm Heavens of Imperishable Light
Illumined continents of violet peace
Oceans and Rivers the mirth of God
And Griefless countries under purple suns." (Sri Aurobindo)
Thankyou❤
There have always been imaginative and creative people in the world and there always will be. Nature is the power we need to acknowledge and respect and we can only do so by seeing the spirit within it.
Endlessly fascinating how the word 'we' surfaces. Maybe I'm inured to it but it often reminds me of how we privatise profits and we publicly distribute loss. Such as the bank bail outs of the past and bank bail ins of the present and the future. It is impressive how elastic the word we can be, almost as elastic as the word money which mostly occupies the space between the things that are the matter referred to in Iain's great work
When you talk about the kind of power that "puts oneself open to something bigger than one's self" and the necessary humility to do that, it reminds me of what Bobby Kennedy has said in several recent interviews.
Interesting......
Pheobe, is imagination more powerful than the will? To illustrate, forty years ago I smoked. It bothered me and I was moved to prayer about it. I had been reading a book, in which the author said our imagination was more powerful than the will, so I imagined myself among the Israelites about to cross the Red Sea in their Exodus from captivity and slavery in Egypt, and being led across to the other side to freedom from my addiction. To make it even more real I took my last packet of cigarettes and flushed them down the toilet, imagining they were the Egyptians with all their chariots and horsemen being swept away. (My father joked "they must have been Camel cigarettes 🤣). I thought I would have to endure a period of wandering in the wilderness longing for the fleshpots of Egypt, but my deliverance was permanent. That was 40 years ago and I have never smoked since. I hasten to say it was not simply the "power of positive thinking", as Norman Vincent Peale would have it. It was a deep spiritual/sacred experience, because it was about developing a relationship with the infinite source of all Life, and letting go of a finite thing that diminished my life. So I am careful to say that I did not give up smoking. I was delivered from smoking, by letting my imagination overpower my will. Or rather to reshape and transform my will so that it chooses Life. Which I now understand thanks to Iain is to have my left hemisphere subordinated to my right hemisphere.
In particular, I am struck by McGilchrists affirmation that we can discuss ideas, insights, intuited truths and experiences that are, in fact, beyond words, that "defeat language" (aka "normal" language), or as Terrence McKenna would have put it, "...experiences that are entirely un-Englishable"!
This was such a beautifully flowing conversation, thank you both, just exquisite. I wish you both lived near by!!! :)
"I sacrificed myself for you." or something like that was messaged to someone in an NDE from a seemingly very high being.* I understood this to mean that the being fragmented his wholeness somehow to create the manifest universe (rather than being a reference to Jesus).
Then I heard Terence McKenna talking about how evolution is being pulled from a somehow desirable future state rather than being driven by the pushing forces expressed in current science. What leaps to mind is that the desirable future state that is pulling manifestation is this unified high being.*
And now 1:12:00 Iain talking about how behaviour causation could be due to aspirations toward certain things - "being drawn effortlessly to something good, beautiful and true" - "a final cause" - "and that there are ways of thinking about how things are caused which are beautiful and attractive and not being pushed from behind".
It's a wonderful synchronicity of sorts and surely very much in line with the topic of imagination.
The best Iain here
We need the skills to time a direction of movement through the space between the things that we know are around us - to find something new - that once we see it - we wonder why we didn't see it before. The skills for Wow moments.
Great conversation. William Blake was a close associate of the Neo-platonist Thomas Taylor. In neo- platonic thought, particularly of Plotinus, and proclus, imagination is the phantasy or Phantasia. In Corbin, Schelling and Jung the imagination is active imagination.
It is nice to see Iain in this conversation on imagination. Einstein agreed imagination was very important , and physicist Tom Campbell does as well. Tom was more excited about creating Tom's Park, using imagination to develop intuition, than he was writing his TOE because it leads to understanding more about reality through an experiential, individual level than reading about it.
An extremely difficult but profound book that places imagination as the cornerstone of human understanding, is the tome, "Insight" by philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan.
Excellent convo. Tell me more about the moral imagination course pls
Botanical power! ....Great thought indeed. Iain might go to hear the Gallic Psalms.
When you learn you know but when you create you unknow. The necessary tension between knowing and unknowing creates something that is both meaningful and valuable - without knowing your creation lacks value and without unknowing your creation lacks meaning
Fabulous conversation - thank you. Iain McGilchrist, I have been so delighted to see and explore your work, especially in that it adds another dimension and some fresh thinking to my area of study. In the case of Ms. Tickell's project, I will observe that discussions and considerations of 'moral imagination' as essential for a sustainably flourishing future have been around for some decades in ecological art and philosophy, and the practice of artists bringing scientists and other sectors and disciplines on board to undertake large scale and long term infrastructure and social engagement projects and practices. (I use this term 'infrastructure' in an extended sense of an internal infrastructure of who and what we are in and with the world, and the resulting material infrastructure that emerges from such understanding.) This is a much longer conversation, and a significant field of study. I myself have been researching and practicing in this area (perception, engagement and transformative praxis) for some 3 decades, and do tend to verbosity, so I won't carry on long. It does seem to me that it is helpful to observe the range of work in this area, and I will note the words of former Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope: "Artists need to provide the moral imagination for the culture. We are in the midst of an economic, political and technological crisis because the fulcrum of motivation in this culture has become the desire for material accumulation. Artists must help shift that fulcrum." (As cited in my 2000 conference presentation at Lancaster University.)
There is also anthropologist Tim Ingold's rather fabulous recent (2021) book, "Imagining For Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence".
A quite good conversation between/interview with Jonathon Porritt by philosopher and artist Wallace Heim as editor for the Ashden Directory of Performance and Ecology in 2001 is called, "How Does Environmental Drama Work?" That website is archived, if interested, although I cannot post here.
Of course there is a large body and continuum of work, but my point is that this is a rich field of study and practice with a long trajectory - and it is fabulous to see more. We need it!.
This made me think about how one of Banksy’s works exploded when it was sold at auction. What an artist!
Imagination by this definition sounds a lot like the Christian contemplative tradition as taught by Richard Rohr and others. I would love to know what either guest may say about this. A beautiful hopeful conversation. Thank you!
Kant posits in the first Critique that without the faculty of imagination, you cannot have reasoning, because the imagination is what is used TO CONSTRUCT reason, like a raw material necessary. In the second edition, he junked this notion, and many say, erroneously so
Including the following thinker. Kant's idea is taken much further by Mark Johnson in his book The Body in the Mind, The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. An incredibly lucid book.
We are so utterly asleep at the wheel. I try hard to find glimmers of hope and positive change but I fear that at this point, there have been too many generations led by grasping, unwise masters not to mention their emissaries!
Thank you 😍🤩😍
Missing a trick here... boiled down what is imagination but unusual 'imaginative' connections from one thing to another, surprising, beguiling, thought provoking...
But if you then ask what is it about connections that is so very important - connections throw a line of relationship between parts that before were disperate, but now are connected.
That then ties to the ability of the Right Hemisphere ability, capability to scan the landscape looking for signs of danger - good at discerning patterns, putting meaning to those patterns (is that just a Bush or a Leopard in that Bush - you would want to know...), and through pattern recognition builds an understanding of how things relate in the landscape and their meaning.
In the round, imagination a RH trait, skill, process. If McGilchrist is about right on the demise of the Western world, it will be largely because we (collective) have stopped seeing connections that point to our destruction - in short stopped being imaginative....
Iain seems to think strongly and with animus that AI will not be able to genuinely feel and care ( tho he does say here the door 8s not closed on this possibility). Vervaeke says that if u really know the science you know it is highly likely AI will. I would love it if these 2 men met and talked about precisely this matter, detailing and exploring their views for the enlightenment of all of us.
Thankyou all for this vid❤
If you can recapture the word moral you can recapture any word - sacred spiritual
"The Veil of Familiarity" was a very good way of putting 'it', btw. ;)
Good Morning Iain 6:24
I just discovered Perspectiva, and wondering if you have a mailing list?
When at University some decades ago l sensed something sadly lacking in the intellectual endeavour. I was a mature age student so had some life experience and had read quite widely. I was familiar with Jung and decided that I would like to not only read but experience that process. When l made enquiries within the psyc. Dept. I was literally laughed at. None the less I found a Jungian therapist and that changed everything. Now an interesting dream from that first year clearly revealed that l was, in it's images, surrounded with media and because of this my vision was impaired. Now this was over 40 years ago. Now it was undermining then, what is it now. I would answer that by saying full on brainwashing.
We can talk about this forever and not bite the bullet, and experience the pain of transformation. Jung said, and is correct people will do anything other than look within. This change that so many are speaking about is painful and personal. It's a process where we reach beyond the conscious ego to the deep Self. We end the chatter about and connect to what is real beyond the numbing of mass media, entertainment and date l say education. Dancing in the flames as Marion Woodman framed it in her book of that title. By the way the same people who laughed at my enquiry lined up to a Symposium we ran at the University some years later. Things had changed but oh, so, slowly
Kindness is demonstrably cheaper imo great discussion
What a great interview.
Regarding the the question about what a left hemisphere society or system would look like:
Perhaps it wouldn't replace capitalism, but have a handle on it/be a guiding force. And perhaps it wouldn't be a system as such, as it would have to be highly dynamic and, well, creative and constantly in flux. I can't quite wrap my head around it (and again, this might be the point), but maybe the key is "simply" an enlightened people on the wheel of capitalism.
In the reality im being sent our imagination isnt ours and neither is intuition. Every idea, thought, and gut instinct is lined up to create a specific outcome that whatever thing we are has no control over.
Imagination is probably easier to define by elimination than by any direct grasp of a tangible object.
It is not encyclopedic knowledge; it is not a matter of memorizing lines, facts, or diagrams of what the way or order of the world is or most resembles.
The first is a post modern curse, making things in some sense beyond relevance. In many ways, we are boring ourselves to death with the encyclopedic mentality.
In some middle class circles, it is believed one may, with regard to imagining, somehow acquire a "good" technique.
One may imagine many childish or stupid things until one luckily imagines something that is better than worthless.
But imagining is mysterious.
The second, memory, is a matter of ego, or maybe being concerned with overcoming insecurity with a barrage of supposedly "learned" quips, quotes, and the better ideas of others. Memory is likely absolutely identical to emotion.
It is a common fact: with rare exceptions, the child prodigy, the memory savant, fades into obscurity. Having swallowed the academy, there is nothing left to do -- far less Think.
The rehearsed person is a living tape-recorder, maybe a bad actor. At any rate the opposite of the writer's inspiration, which is always sighting the previously unsuspected.
So, yes, the poet is first of all most imaginative, achieving the inspired by somewhat missing the mark of perfection.
Imperfection is irritated by almost everything, as is the poet.
The poet is lately most dismissed, or despised.
Always liable to be put to death -- otherwise a philosopher, perhaps.
But, be careful: too many videos like these, and you'll just start living and repeating the irritating poetry of others.
Peace.
What is deeper laughter or worship🌪️🦁⌚
Nietzsche speaks of power as a continuous overcoming of ourselves & our present achievements. With respect to the idea of moral imagination, this suggests to me that perhaps Nietzsche's notion of power might be a very moral approach to our present dire situation. What do you think about this suggestion?
Yes #visionaryart
The dissecting left brain: ‘How do we define imagination, distinguish it, and moderate it’ 😂😂😂
Catholic is Faith and Hope . The love and blessing of God , a gift to the world. Imagination Alive
Iain seems much more animated in this video that many of the others I have seen. Phoebe gets him, and unlike others seems to offer a route to movement forward in the world. I’m sorry it’s late … but I felt moved to write… a bit inadequately.
It's not inadequate, you're just a tyrant. You should embrace inadequacy -- the very world you live in is such. Take some pressure off. Embrace mediocrity. You'll feel a lot better when you.
But you're probably not adequate enough to embrace inadequacy, so forget I said anything
Also, biorhythms. There are certain days when the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual rhythms are aligned positively.... And days when they are off. This is a factor many do not consider; it is a tool for prediction.
The last cycle I mentioned, is not commonly known, whatsoever, but it is an 18-day cycle. You can see yours by searching, "adept biorhythm bring 4th" and typing in your birthday.
There are also cosmic configurations which are influential in determining tenor of the moment, or as you say, animation. See Project Hindsight, and the scholar Robert Schmidt. Who doesn't look to the ancient Greeks for secrets has lost his starting point.
They are very in sync tho !
They are in rapport. This is a French word meaning sympathetic vibration. We must understand that life force is a living charge capacitor. Dan Winter goes into depth with this.
Mesmer posited animal magnetism, a life-force charge, and was ridiculed and died in exile. Afterwards there were mesmeric clinics in England dedicated to painless surgery using mesmerism as the only anesthetic. You could also control the bleeding and the healing response was heightened drastically. So much for that
Younger woman’s energy levels
YES! I feel like after probably a 100,000 words he has written, he has finally now gotten to the actual fruit he was largely intuitively seeking.
Forms effortless efficacy? Having listened (read) to Iain's work(s) for some month now I have been making artworks that encapsulates his asymmetrical argument. The funny thing is, they look like his wallpaper. I carve asymmetrical geometric lino prints within a symmetrical asymmetry and then print them in a combined quad of the same print. The result is a pattern that is asymmetrically symmetrical within an asymmetrical pattern. Flow. Might sell them to airport carpet companies. I think I said that right. Form is a fetter in the East.
Excuse the quote: The Sixth Fetter (no I am not a non-dualist, but they love the fetters), "lust for material existence, lust for material rebirth". Could be worse. You could: "lust for immaterial existence, lust for rebirth in a formless realm". Imagine that.
Although I feel a few powerful people are striving for that in our current society.
Power outage that keeps internet? Wait, is it a "phase loss"? If it is, wifi could go out at any time.
Great timing for this video, btw. Earlier today I was studying imagination based on the works of McGilchrist and Schelling.
Imagination is not the opposit of reality. To use your imagination means to use your mental resources to imagine solutions for real problems.
Imagination is what we use to solve puzzles, for instance. Imagination is a key to access or think about the possibilities within reality and nature, it is a gateway to investigate the real world, it is a driving force that pushes us to think about and observe everything, including ourselves.
Our dear works of fiction are a product of imagination. In part, yeah, they contain elements of fantasy. But another thing ficction does is to point a finger directly to reality. Even if it's done in a figuratively way, fiction still talks about reality, our reality, not the reality if aliens. So don't think fiction is simply fantasy that talks about things that has zero to do with humans. If you don't understand that, you don't understand what fiction, like literature and movies, is. Or art in general for that matter.
Might we say that Imagination (as a function or aspect of the Right Hemisphere) is that mode of being which maximises the ultimately infinite contexts within which the reductively isolated Particulars analysed and utilized by the Left Hemisphere 'live and move and have their being' (and thus their meaning). I think this might apply especially to the moral imagination.
Do we currently have a test for imagination and its qualities
Imagination is creativity from past experiences good or bad. It’s truly better than education as Einstein said. Imagination opens the mind to possibilities rather than just believing the world is x or y.
Reasons help as stepping stone but there is more to everything because of infinite possibilities. E. G water can be ice, steam , orange juice, human blood etc etc water can have possibilities of endless only in spectrum and observe reality…
Ken Welber
Love the language and the laughter!!
Can use a bit more detail and a bit less abstraction
There comes a time when, from some great reservoir of distilled water, the water becomes so transparent yet liquid, so apparently lacking sophistication while at the same time actually lacking sophistication. So tastless, yet wet. 🙏❤️🌎🌿🕊🎵🎶🎵
Goya saw through things in his artistry as they were with his paints hidden as one aquires eyes to see. Jackson Pollack, modern art, he cracked the egg open and penetrated with new eyes with an entire new way of painting.
Capitalism devours with grinding forces of greed. Yes, we need a new way of living together without conflict and chaos with new leadership with a moral compass. What that is, one has to have awareness with insights and wisdom.
Free Palestine is a new beginning.
The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the moutain remains.
Li Po
With deep appreciation again for being able to hear this conversation again.
Indigenous cultures have much to teach our world. We hear their voices as they continue to march with colorful bird feather and paints of their cultures. The continuous efforts to save our nature , rivers, our oceans, filled with mammals, starfish, coral reefs, forrests, jungles, our elephants, lions, smallest creatures, the nectar of flowers, one hummingbird keeps the ecology alive in Costa Rica.
Thankful to all the people in varies fields in marine biology, sciences, begin with Jacque Cousteau and all others who have deidcated with their specialized degrees care for our world. Plus , all those who create the documentaries that allow the world to see what is important to save our planet.
21:12
If we teach the holistic and entangled nature of existence to our children, as they mature into the power brokers, they may well prove to make descisions, and create economic and social systems which align to such ideas very rapidly. I argue they would do so with the same efficiency that reductionist science drove the creation of our current economic, social, and education systems. The young, educated using modern thought, utilising modern technologies may well be more able to assess the systemic cost of production instead of nominal price; better realise and assess how local action may affect the whole in ways both forseen and unseen. In the acceptance of the unity of process and being, new and more appropriate systems are highly likely to be imagined and actioned by the young. This is why it is such a tragedy our education systems are still so grounded in past ideas and processes, both mechanistic and reductionist. By educating the young in the new sciences, utilising the freedoms and expansions available through modern communications, we may quite rapidly gain the social and economic changes we need. If so wrestling education out of the past and into the ever expansive present becomes a priority. In the UK at least, we appear to still be using our schools to create factory fodder for elite industrialists who haven't existed for around half a century, using methods created by the victorians.
I'm not sure modern technology and communications is making young people think better, or will provide some solution to our problem. So far, the opposite seems to be the case. What do you mean exactly?
Also, what type of education do you favour? If our current system aims to churn out "factory fodder", why do we send 50% of young people to university? Instructing children in classrooms pre-dates the victorians by centuries, if that is what you are referring to.
The reason modern technology isn't advancing our current education system is that it isn't being applied to it in any coherent way. We live in a world where we can select and feed to our children leading edge thought and discussion in almost real time. A time where we are capable of using technology to tailor education programmes to the needs of individuals and the societies they live in on a personal, local, cultural, regional, and global basis. We don't do so. We gather children together in ever increasing numbers to undertake outdated, misdirected, and increasingly irrelevant education programmes, using outdated methods and outdated technologies. We worry about how easily children access and learn unwanted information and behaviours from social media and the Internet. Instead of analysing and using these demonstrably effective methods of education and guiding their use to effective and desirable outcomes in our education systems, we seek the doomed path of prohibition. As to the numbers in University, that is a complex result of historic governmental policy decisions in relation to youth unemployment, an over inflated concept of the value of academia in relation to the needs of the individual and society, and a reflection that the whole of the UK education system currently lags societies needs by at least a decade and more. I may well be wrong, as a teacher and educator of many years of service, across all age groups, including adult education, these are some of my thoughts and my observations.
Utopianism👀
I am recalling that in the Medieval world, when people had visions, when they met an angel or a shining being, they really did. They met an angel, or... I lived for some time in the old countries that now comprise the South of France, in 'la France profonde', close to pilgrimage routes that were (then anyway - 1990s) well kept and honoured, and they were used. One close by ended, or began, at a tiny hamlet called Lumiere (light) - well, actually after the wee church there - Notre Dame de Lumiere. Our Lady of Light. A young girl met a shining being in that place a very long time ago. We do encounter other beings and powers, and we are not mad when we do. Loving this conversation about engagement and perception
The artists, especially contemporary artists have struggled with right brain dominance in a left brain world.
What would a “right hemisphere” economic system look like? You only have to look at a variety of North America indigenous cultures where the gift economy is paramount. There, what is good is given back as a moral imperative. The potlatch ceremony of Northwest societies before the Hudson Bay Company corrupted it, is one small example. There are many other examples.
Insomnia informs me that the idea that there is no such thing as time is just wrong. Sorry. That's the least hurtful way I can put it. It struck me that the exchange between Iain and the artist was a bit like what you could read in a digital exchange of information. But whether the fault of my Insomnia lies with the Left or Right hemisphere, is quite irrefutable that time will have its way with living beings. We may all be connected, but we are also individuals as death proves to us all, eventually.
That's why councils have so much respect for Life and not follow the strict obtrusive book of their law...Good big money spent!
IMMMAGINATION when coupled with life energies and earth particles could change World, and that comes without any philosophical or motivational or validating portfolios talks.
30 some comments here that free of charge Ian can reply?
Capitalism is a social construct deeply indebted to a particular notion of morality. (I would say a dog-eat-dog kind of morality. It's not as merit-based, as we've been brainwashed to believe.)
I think it very much needs to be exposed as a kind of moral question and not a political one.
Thank you for at least touching on the subject. It's the elephant in our room, afterall.
Because both Phoebe and Iain are liberals, and as such take their liberal priors for granted, their critique comes to rest prematurely at 'capitalism' rather than where it ought to, at 'liberal modernity'. Iain mentions that he is interested in "the things beneath politics" rather than politics itself, but ironically if he did take an interest in political philosophy he may get closer to the heart of the matter.
You'll note than when questioned about power - a key subject in political philosophy - neither can offer anything more than vague platitudes that amount to little more than "let's wield power better"; when then could have taken the chance to talk about, for instance, how elite interests shape modern culture, who these elites are, etc, etc.
Exactly. For a start, if you uncritically apply the term capitalism to the currently entrenched global political economy it becomes practically meaningless, as in many ways what we have now is precisely the inverse of capitalism: wasteful, frivolous consumption, capital strip mining, market manipulation and intervention, debt-fuelled speculation, public private partnerships (i.e: fascism), never ending bailouts (socialism for the rich), a permanent tax on the middle and lower classes through inflation, the systematic dismantling of private property, a top down moral code championed and enforced by a moralising, preachy elite clerical class under the guise of ESG, none of this is remotely capitalistic - and it’s intellectually lazy to label it as such.
That young girl with the blonde hair needs to be re-educated from some kind of indoctrination into "stupid " anger.
Another 'brief' introduction...
At 25mins he isnt as smart as he thinks if he believes in climate science. Politics not science.