Why Jordan Peterson is Wrong About Jung with Rob Faure Walker

Why are so many political activists crashing into severe burnout and depression? Can the deep psychology of Carl Jung provide a radical toolkit for modern survival without retreating from the fight? In this episode of Varnblog, we sit down with ecotherapist and author Rob Faure Walker to deconstruct his groundbreaking book, Radical Jung .

We dive into a mind-bending exploration bridging the Marxist radical imagination with Jungian analytical psychology. Rob shares his personal journey through school teacher union organizing, severe activist burnout, and finding spiritual navigation via dream integration and Gnostic texts. Together, we unpack how modern capitalism has become truly nihilistic, why mainstream psychoanalysis often defaults to isolationist individualism, and how right-wing figures like Jordan Peterson have weaponized and essentialized Jungian concepts on hierarchy and gender .

Furthermore, we explore the terrifying intersections of state power, counter-extremism governmentality , and how billionaire techno-oligarchs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg project their own "shadow of privilege" onto marginalized groups while building automated survival bunkers and centralizing control .

If you are looking for a deeper psychological toolkit to understand the algorithm's control over our unconscious mind , structural political failure , and the path toward true recovery , this deep-dive conversation is for you.

✨ Grab Rob Faure Walker’s new book, Radical Jung, out now from Revo Press!

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

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Transcript

Welcome And New Book Setup

C. Derick Varn 0:49

Hello and welcome to Varmblog. And today I'm here with Rob Walker, ecotherapist, former academic, and the author of Radical Young, which is a book coming out already out. I actually should know this, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Um in about two weeks' time towards the end of this month. Oh, okay. So yeah. I got my I got my first copy yesterday. So it exists. I can confirm it exists.

C. Derick Varn 1:17

Coming out from Revo Press. And for full disclosure, I also work with Revo. I am an author. They're releasing a book with Daniel Tutt, which will come out in June in theory, although I don't know for sure. The physical books I don't yet have. And I am under contract to write another book for Revo as well on politics in general, which I have been under contract for for three years. I know those contracts.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

I'm glad to hear that. Glad it's not only me that has books limping on.

C. Derick Varn 2:07

Oh, I'm sort of infamous for getting offers to write books and getting them about 150 pages done, and then realizing that I gave myself like way too much scope and I need to write five volumes, and the and the publisher's just gonna say no, and I'll just stop. Um uh which is not good for your career. But anyway, so yeah, Rob and I share a press, and we were talking off air about my instinctual distrust of psychoanalysis, which has lessened slightly due to my engagements with Daniel Tutt and a few other people in the Lacanian sphere, but only slightly. Well, tell tell tell me about that. You know, what what describe it uh the description that I maybe I have a knee-jerk reaction to to psychological approaches to politics in particular. So, like the like when it comes to the therapeutic, I actually do tend to favor things that are are uh one could saw as post-psychoanalytic or expansions of psychoanalysis as opposed to just like say drug therapy, yeah, because they all don't have a lot of reproducibility when it comes to uh like modern science standards. Uh I also have tended to uh

Distrusting Psychoanalysis In Politics

C. Derick Varn 3:48

for me, and it does come up in in my book, I I saw weird assumptions being projected anthropologically and sociologically from people taking too orthodox of Freudian Arlaconian psychoanalytic stance. And and by that, I specifically think about Christopher Lash, who took every single word Freud wrote on the family literally and even biologically, which can't stand any real scrutiny, uh scientifically speaking. But I I have I have been interested in psychoanalysis as a space that opens up a problem in what we might call like the Marxist radical imagination, and it's one that I think everybody fills up to some degree with even without thinking, and that is the mark the Marxist way of viewing political economy is concerned with aggregates turning into collectives, it doesn't really deal with the way that interfaces with individual human minds, yeah. Even though Marx does have like basically some kind of emergent Hegelian notion of concepts and reification in the human mind, he actually doesn't really deal with psychology at all, yeah, because it's always socially mediated, yeah. And I actually do think it's a problem that we substitute all kinds of shit for in Marxism. Like if you look at the various schools of Marxism, how we deal with the individual mind problem is something that I think actually defines a lot of the different schools of Marxism, even though they're often not framed that way, whether it's world systems or political Marxism or analytical Marxism or Marxophoridianism or even traditional Marxist-Leninism, they all have certain problems. I mean, the biggest one being that even though Marx didn't think this way, a lot of Marxists in the early 20th century basically had behaviorist assumptions about class formation. Yeah. And they were almost blank slated on how people exist. And yeah, you know, Marx doesn't actually believe that, but outside of his initial stuff on species being, he doesn't really address it ever.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think and I think, I mean, I think that you know that's where I mean to answer a few of the different points that you just made, but I suppose for me, the point of writing this book was to try and kind of like you were saying, the person who'd who'd who'd sort of just applied all of Freud's theories. I wanted to look at Jung and kind of queer the hell out of it. Like this this stuff, let's like make this stuff appropriate for now because there's a lot wrong with it. And and then just and then and to well, as I say in the book, it's sort of it's it well, in it I mean this is more of a summary than than in the book, but to my problem with psychoanalysis is that it leads to this kind of this inevitable individualism, and uh and you know, so it's so it's it's it's all well and good, you know, going to psychoanaly psychoanalysis to to be better, to recover from whatever it is that you're struggling with. But then what? And it feels I feel like the next step is not it's like to be better so that you can then act better, and that bit is missing, it seems to me. It tends to be missing, and so I that's what I was trying to kind of tease out here with the book.

C. Derick Varn 7:37

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, it makes sense because act better is always act better in accordance with what art you do what, like, yeah, like there's always a second part of that question, right? Like, and I mean, we can get into you know the critiques to the therapeutic, which range from Phil Reef and Bung Cho Han to whatever. I mean, uh David Smalls, Mark Fisher. I I liked your book because it doesn't quite fall into the problem that I often saw with Fisher, which was like this almost eschatological view of social democracy that you get in the late Fisher, where like beginnings to deal with the social problems will also help us deal with our mental alienation and and almost one-to-one, which to me puts such a personal stake on the success of politicians, frankly.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Yeah, yeah. If we put all of our recovery on into Pollux, it's with facts, basically, aren't we? Yeah, like that's when you know we we need something more to help us, you know, get through this. Yeah, you know, and I think you know it's not it's not too it's it's increasingly not too much of a step, not too much of a stretch to say, like, what would you say to someone on the left in Germany in 1938? Like they need to find a way to just manage to get through that. Like, there's also there's the doing the politics, but there's just like survival. Mental health is an aspect of that.

C. Derick Varn 9:16

Well, that's actually a key thing I was thinking about when I was reading your book, because I think in both our countries, we've seen a left seemingly ascendant and yet also in its ascendancy actually be more powerless than you thought it could be. Yeah, you know. I mean, it it is it I literally had pain going back and reading Mark's writing about Sariza and Corbin in like 2013, 2014, 2015.

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 9:48

Because it it strikes you as so naive and you feel like you're just watching a tragedy unfold. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

But I think I think there's a and this is kind of I don't know, um immediately lip leaping into kind of tin hat territory here, but I think it's necessary, is that my my PhD, which I wrote, I don't know, six or seven years ago, was looking at looking at the emergence of counter-extremism policies or the emergence of street, it was specifically looking at the word extremism and how that's emerged over time as a tool of governmentality. And and so through that, I had quite

Marxism Meets The Individual Mind

SPEAKER_01 10:27

I was I was kind of getting myself sort of ferreting around, getting myself into meetings at the home office in London, you know, go looking at through through documentation and stuff. And I had a few like like really shocking moments at the time, because it was right at the time of the ascendancy of Corbyn. And the thing that really like was a real gut punch was finding out, finding connections that no journalists have ever dared touch because they just sort of were too much of a political hot potato at the time. But that some of the accusations of anti-Semitism, the first accusations or the initial accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn, were

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SPEAKER_01 11:41

coming from very close to the Home Office. And I had this kind of this this kind of dawning realization when I was having this meeting with someone at the home office that those accusations were coming from the heart of the state. And that was kind of terrifying. So I think so. I think that that that that kind of I want to kind of temper that accusation of naivety for people who were kind of seeing this great kind of flourishing at the time, because I think there were kind of dark forces at play that are just never gonna let the left rise.

C. Derick Varn 12:14

Well, I mean, I both kind of agree with that, but then I think my answer to that is is has always been

(Cont.) Marxism Meets The Individual Mind

C. Derick Varn 12:23

this is why you don't play their game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you literally cannot win. Yeah, yeah. Um, but what as far as what that means that people offer it.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

So as in so the naivety comes from them trying to progress through the through it as a political party through the system as as is designed against them.

C. Derick Varn 12:42

Right. Well, I mean, I think we can see this even more with like Sarizo, which gave itself an impossible task that helped the Troika, actually, if we're completely honest. But at a certain point, the Troika's revenge on Greece would have been so bad that maybe the disaster thing that Ceriza threatened should have just been done anyway.

SPEAKER_03 13:03

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 13:04

But that I mean, you know, all their their MMT-based hopes that that Greece could like separate, do a Grexit, and then run an internal economy were basically based on a production apparatus that doesn't exist in Greece currently.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

And they had speaking speaking to that point, have you heard Yannis Verifakis talking about them trying to recreate the currency? Yeah, they couldn't even produce the currency, like that was that was the fundamental stumbling block.

C. Derick Varn 13:34

I mean, Verifakis is fascinating to me, but uh, you probably don't know my stances on that. I tend to admire him for being the one person in Ceriza who seemed to actually realize that they were gonna have to take a principled span stand, at least I shouldn't say one person, one person in Ceriza with power. Yeah. But I also tend to think, yeah, but you should have known this was gonna happen. Yeah, like it was like it was exactly what I I had a conversation with uh the the post-Kynesian academic Steve Keene on an obscure podcast. I think it was like in 2013 when I was living in Mexico. And uh I remember telling him, like, well, what do you do if you can't get the leverage to buy anything to build a productive apparatus in Greece? You don't have a you don't even have the way to print a stable currency, and yet you know that if you play hardball and can't actually deliver on your threat, the repercussions are gonna be worse. And I pretty much didn't get an answer. Like, like, oh, they won't let they won't the answer was they won't let that happen, or currency magic will fix things. And I I I was actually pretty interested in in that. And when it comes to Corbin, I I you probably also I mean like you don't you're probably not super familiar. I I have been a I have been a s a skeptic of Corbin's policies in so much that they seem to be based on returning to a state of labor that not having an empire and being an island would be very hard to do.

SPEAKER_03 15:29

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 15:31

But I also take seriously that there was a great internal effort to the British state to undermine him.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 15:39

Um now unfortunately he has not helped with the current party shenanigans. I always it's it's it's your party or our party. I always can't remember your party.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

I yeah, I mean it's a it's a tragedy what happened with that. Just such a i uh yeah, I mean, just stupid and I yeah, I don't know, it just shouldn't have happened. That shouldn't have happened at all.

C. Derick Varn 16:02

Yeah, so anyway, that's not the the the course of the.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I

Queering Jung Without Individualism

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I used to uh many years ago I was a I was a school teacher in North London, and I was I was the union rep for my for my school and the school was on the same street as Corbyn lived on, and so he was our local member of parliament. Oh, good. And he was he was extraordinary at the time. We were going through like a rough there was a there was some quite serious uh corruption, and we basically had a head teacher who well anyway, there's there was some quite serious corruption in the in the school, the school management that involved us having to run, having to have involved in various bits of industrial action, including like strikes just for the school and stuff like that. And I was in constantly in negotiations with the local council as the union rep. And I mean this is totally by the by to uh to the broader politics, but uh he was extraordinary. He was this was before before he there was any sniff of him being go becoming the leader of the Labour Party, he was just a local politician, and he would he'd be he'd come to these meetings at like until 10, 11 at night regularly, just as kind of to support me doing this, doing this union work. Like kind of and just given that he was kind of doing his full-time job being in parliament all day, and then you come straight to that and stuff, and it was kind of extra his energy for doing local politics was extraordinary. And obviously, the you know the big criticism is always oh, well, he was a great local politician, but he could never run a party, etc. etc. But I don't know, I don't know about that, but he was quite an pretty extraordinary man.

C. Derick Varn 17:46

I don't know. I mean to sing Corbyn's praises a little bit, I was not mocking Labour the during the Corbin period as I am mocking Labour during the Starmer period. Like as awful now, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Um I I I don't think that I I think I mean I've uh I was writing about this long before Starmer was even leader of the party, that forever he's been a he's been a a corporate or an establishment entryist. He's like he's he is an entryist. There's I don't think there's any way you can see him as anything other than that. Well, it is no and he and he's he's achieved you know he's achieved exactly what what is required of him. He's destroyed the Labour Party, he's for the last couple of elections, he's left the door open to the Tories, or it's gonna be Labour, neither of which is any different from the other. Like it's a it's a perfect setup.

C. Derick Varn 18:42

I mean I was about to say our could even be reform. I mean it's yeah. Um as a perpetual watcher of British politics, it it's been a kind of bleak time, but I've actually used sadly your nation as part of the predictions of the future of ours. Right? Because I'm like, we've done many of the same things, and except the British situation is tragic on the scale of a Britain, and which is not to diminish it, but it it is it is mostly a the the the final bounce from that fall from empire, yeah, yeah. Uh yeah, whereas we are doing the same thing, but we're the empire, and you know, for all that I often give the English shit, and I do, but I have been very much on the like you handled this imperial decline things with slightly more grace for a while than we did. We immediately went into the embarrassing part. Like, I can't honestly, since we achieved you know, unipolarity for all of a decade, yeah. We have been nothing but embarrassing ourselves and destroying our own mechanisms of power.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

So, you know, but I think I mean I think I think Briston Britain has yeah, does exactly the same. We just do it, maybe do it slightly more subtly.

C. Derick Varn 20:27

Yeah, yeah. You do it subtle. Well, I would say it was more subtle till recently.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yes, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 20:32

I I will say, like Storm are flirting with undoing parts of the Magna Carta was not even on my um um bucket list of things I might see. So and and and the other thing that that we've seen with the UK that we're gonna have to deal with here is even if the Democrats come back to power, we are gonna be dealing with a managed economic decline and a king-shaped economy. Yeah, and New York, where Mamdani is, has the same pitfalls as London, it's totally tied into the financial infrastructure, which can be moved overnight as opposed to and yes, it doesn't often get moved overnight, but you know, London reminds us that it can, yeah, um pretty easily in ways it's it's harder to do than when you're moving massive factories around.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

So the whole thing of like the you know, the the right in the UK, where they kind of they hang their whole economic policy on the city of London. And you know, apart from just basically being a mental thing to do, but but the th the thing that they always go on about on all all parties in in the UK go on about this, is they talk about wanting to make London Singapore on Thames. And and and what they what they miss there is that in Singapore, you've got like the rest of the state works, like they've got social housing, they've got healthcare, they've got education that works, they've got all of these things, you know, for for for all of the negatives about Singapore, there's a whole load of other stuff around their financial economy that works, and they just they just use it as a kind of I don't know, it's a thing, it's a thing that really frustrates me with politicians over here when they talk about that, but it's just missing missing it, missing all of the the fundamentals that add on to that that enable it to work.

C. Derick Varn 22:30

Oh yeah, I mean that's actually uh one of the things I pointed out about Singapore, Korea before 1982, uh the Republic of Korea, not North Korea. Um, is that these were Leninist capitalist countries that also were tolerant of social welfare systems as long as they could make billionaires, but they were willing to pick make that trade-off with social peace. And it does not seem like in the English speaking world our elites are willing to make any fucking trade offs for social peace.

SPEAKER_03 23:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

So yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, it's and it's like it's my my equivalent of those economies that I know is my my wife was born Malaysian and now naturalized British. And so we spent a bit, I spent a fair bit of time in Malaysia, and in Malaysia, yeah. Have that thing where they kind of it's presented when you speak to a Malaysian, it's presented as this kind of hyper-capitalist economy. But actually, when you start digging down, it's it's totally a planned economy, it's totally a planned economy. They've got they've got all their kind of nationalized companies that they set up, they've got their 30-year plan to do this, that, and the other. It's all planned.

C. Derick Varn 23:38

Yeah. Well, I I have actually said this to make people uncomfortable, but I'm like, there's not that huge of a difference between what we've seen in China post-dung and what we've seen in Singapore and Republic of Korea until at least in the Republic of Korea until until aught's neoliberalization happened. And and Singapore didn't do that. So and I've also uh pointed out that they explicitly modeled their economic development on the Soviet Union, even though they were anti-communists. So um like explicitly, five up down to five-year plans.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Like it's yeah, yeah, well, I mean that's what happened in Malaysia. They had the they had the 20-year plan, and then it went so well they said, well, we're gonna have a 30-year plan. Everyone talks about the the 10-year plan, the 20-year plan, 30-year plan. Like it's totally in the open to be discussed.

C. Derick Varn 24:32

Yeah, I mean, so there is this. I mean, maybe turn a little bit to the book, but it there is this way in which uh almost dialectically, like I was reading Vivek Chiber saying that we uh socialists need to abandon a planned economy, and I was like, I don't know why you think that, because capitalists don't yeah, like just straight up they don't. Particularly now, since everything's rent-seeking, so it's like these AI things are definitely centrally planned economic moves, they're not happening off of off of the freedom of the market or whatever bullshit you want to tell yourself. That's a good point. Yeah, I I do think though that that we can talk about Young a little bit. The Radical Young was interesting to me because in America we associate Young, and I think this is new, actually. Yeah, we associate him with reactionaries for two reasons. Yeah, weird right-wing occultists sometimes like him, yeah, and Jordan Peterson. Um and I find that interesting. I know Young's politics are actually very hard to pin down. So I I wanted to talk to you a little about that because you don't just shy away. It's not just that you're you're not shying away from Young, you're also not shying away from from some of the weirder, more esoteric slash Gnostic elements of Young. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

I mean, that's yeah, I've fully gone. I mean, I've yeah, I've purposely

Corbyn Syriza And State Pushback

SPEAKER_01 26:08

gone gone into that. I think just subscribe your first point about left and right. I something that I was thinking about earlier today was this daydreaming and about it, and I can't remember who was talking about this the other day, but but within so I I bring in psychedelics at the end of the book, and within within kind of the world of psychedelics, there can be this naive feeling for some people that oh, like get everyone taking acid, and then everyone's gonna become these kind of hippies and and leftists, and it's all gonna be gonna be great, which is clearly bullshit. Like if you if you're a if you're a fascist and you start taking psychedelics, you're gonna become more fascist. Like you're gonna you're gonna see what you what you want to see. And and so I suppose there's probably a bit of that going on with Jung, with the kind of with the right, you know, enjoying it. And I do, I in it's in, I think it's just in the introduction to it when I talk about Jordan Peterson and how he he says I found a couple of examples of him of him saying it on kind of on podcasts and things, where he said that that Jung is Jung is just for it's just for a small number of people who have these this experience, this life-changing experience where they go through individual individuation, which is discovering different parts of your psyche, and and it's just for a small number of people. And he's obviously he's referring to himself. And and I think that that move, which because Jung is not about that at all. Jung is about this is this is about everyone's experience. He calls it immediate experience to have these kind of visionary experiences, whether they be through your dreams or through psychotic states or whatever else. But though everyone is open to those immediate that immediate experience. And when you've got someone like Jordan Peterson saying, Oh, this is only for a select few, that's immediately tending towards fascism because you you've then got this kind of ill illuminated, you know, cadre of people who are better than everyone else, essentially. So I kind of immediately take take take take you know take aim at that. And I think that I think that that move in itself maybe dulls slightly the attachment of the right, because if you if this is you know, this is for everyone.

C. Derick Varn 28:25

I think that's I mean, if I'm honest with you, since I've studied a lot of right-wing occultist figures for reasons, including spending a lot of my 20s in the paleo-conservative right myself. Young was often treated as a gateway drug to people like Avola and Guinnon. And that the actual goal was to get you into these esoteric elitist circles.

SPEAKER_03 28:49

Okay, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 28:50

Uh, yeah, you know, and Young was like the normie entrance that you could understand through psychology, it was less alienating than I don't know, whatever Crawley was onto, or trying to just immediately go to Julius Evola and against the modern world because that's not gonna make any sense to most people, yeah. And so I tended to frame Jung that way as well myself until I started reading him, and then I was like, I can't make head or tails out of this guy's politics, actually. Like, there it's not it sure as hell is in Jordan Peterson's politics. That was immediately clear to me. Like, yeah, like Young's views on gender are are way different than right-wing Jungian's views on gender.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, I do I pick up on that in the book, and I think there's I think it, I mean, what I say in the book is it's simple. So Young Young's Jung's ideas on gender are essentially that that I mean it's obviously because of the because of his time, it's like non-gender critical. So you're born a man or you're born a woman, and you there, you that you are the embodiment of as a man of logos kind of logic and etc. Or as a woman the embodiment of Eros of romance and emotions and everything like that. And then you get to you get to this point in your life where you you discover the other gendered side of yourself, and the kind of the completeness is to have those two gendered sides, which is which I've kind of found interesting. Because when I was reading into kind of indigenous accounts of gender, there is there tends to be that's that's the that's the thing that denotes elderhood, is to appreciate those two sides of yourself. But I think it's quite important with what I've suggested in in Jung is that we that whole equation can can exist as long as you remove that attachment to biological gender at the start. So, for example, I've got I've got trans friends who have basically done that process in reverse because they just happen to be the, you know, someone who's born biologically, a man maybe is the embodiment of Eros, their psyche is the embodiment of Eros when they're growing up, vice versa. So I think I think that that kind of initial assertion of Jung's on gender is something that we can then kind of with with our current perspective and current understanding of gender, we can handle more lightly and a bit more see it as more fluid, as we tend to with gender anyway.

C. Derick Varn 31:23

Yeah, I mean I do find it, I do find it interesting how the the way gender is both a centralized and de-centralized in in Jung is seems both ancient and slightly progressive. I mean, like if you know, it's not just in you see this in indigenous accounts, you see it in early European accounts too. If you like reading Plato or any of the cosmic egg writings about the origins of humanity, and you have them as a unified whole, almost hermaphroditic being that is the split, and then part of your understanding is to come to that back together, and and even in the ancient Greek, it wasn't even particularly you know the the reconciliation of the opposites was not always even of two people of opposite sex, it was it was it was all kinds of combinations.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

So I do find that interesting, and I do think that that really cuts against some of the the stranger essentialism you get out of Jordan Peterson and because of course that like that original that the original like that Jungian description of gender that I gave you is is ripe for someone like Jordan Peterson to use it to say to someone who presents as trans or whatever, well, you are you've obviously not integrated these different aspects of your psyche, and therefore essentially to accuse someone of being like immature or broken or something, which is essentially what he's doing all the time. And so, yeah, it is it's kind of ripe to be used for that. And it yeah, and I and I think that's that's the sort of danger with it, as I was saying. Like it it certainly, like any any young, I think you can apply it to right-wing ends easily, yeah, very easily.

C. Derick Varn 33:12

But I guess you know, I do like the idea that maybe we shouldn't just give up all you know all this, what we might say socially libidinal and symbolic ways of thinking. And the thing that Jung has that is different from Freud is that Jung's understanding of these social callings are much broader than just the reproduction of the media family. It's not that that's not there, but that's not what you like. He doesn't read the entire world as a replication of boot of bourgeois family life, and Freud very much does, like to be frank.

SPEAKER_03 33:52

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 33:54

I I wanted to get into a couple things as a kind of way of talking about your book, because you get into immediately Gnostic and Gnosis, which are in both religious studies and in psychology, too, the most fraud fraught terms that exist. I mean, if you get into Gnostic studies, I was just reading a book called The Gnostic World. That like the first chapter is does this concept even make any sense, like yeah, in the in the groups that used it? Because in these groups, uh and I wanted to bring this up, uh you know, talking to you about the way you talk about it in your book. Both has an elitist and a non-elitist meaning, so in some ways it uh and in some sects it is imminent to all being, yeah. And in other sects, it is something that is exclusive to people who are born

Imperial Decline And Financial Cities

C. Derick Varn 34:58

to know it. And weirdly, when you when you get introduced to to like both in popular culture and in occult culture, it's the second form of Gnosticism you're usually introduced to, which is this elite, yeah, cognitive elite or spiritually elite idea that there's something ungraspable that enables you to have this knowledge. But when you actually dig into the various quote-unquote Gnostic texts, you see a wide variety on how widespread or broad it actually is.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I I was I went, I mean, I was obviously reading a lot of Jung stuff on on Gnosticism, and and then I kind of came was spent a lot of time with the the Nagamedi scriptures, which are these that were discovered fairly fairly recently.

C. Derick Varn 35:50

And there's lots of Play-Doh in there.

SPEAKER_01 35:52

I I have that exact edition of the book, but go ahead and yeah, yeah, there's lots of play-doh in there. And I don't know, I think I've I think I I think a reason for me kind of alighting on Jung was was his he basically says that he he he was brought up in a kind of good Catholic family, but just going to he found church to be just a totally spiritually dead experience, whereas he'd go outside and look up at the mountains and was filled with awe and wonder, and there was kind of more going on there. And and similarly, I was brought up, my dad was a my dad was a vicar, and so I was brought up in a in a Protestant family as a as a as a Christian, and and I don't know, I I felt I suppose I felt reading Jung and then reading the Lancavandy scriptures a bit like when I first read Max Wave Max Webron the Protestant aesthetic. It was like, oh, now I understand why all these stories have been were being pushed in church, like it it makes sense now. And and yeah, the way that Jung talks about actually, you know, we're all open to these immediate experiences, which is your your former definition of Gnosticism. And and then and and then and also like I suppose the other there was a kind of inevitability that this also comes from my own individual experience of Gnosticism, for want of a better word, which is you know, I've centered the book around this kind of these poems that emerge in my in my dreams. Um and and it was kind of for me, this was like this was right on cue in my early 40s. I suddenly started remembering my dreams, and they had me and I found was able to find meaning in them through reading Jung, and and yeah, and and and the it kind of went deeper than that actually, that that when I do you know you you see you you've you've read a bit of a bit of you know the some of the Gnostic Gospels, but they talk about they keep coming to this thing, the mystery of the bridal chamber. And there's this thing, yeah, there's the thing about the mystery of the bridal. And you read through the Gnostic Gospels, and it's like they keep referring to it, but like what the hell is that? What are you what are you on about? And I I meditate quite a lot. I meditate morning and evening, and I had a period, I guess it was around when I was starting to write the book. Maybe or maybe it came just before it anyway, sort of I suppose it sort of spurred on the book, but where if I if I had a difficult conundrum, if you if I had something, if if you've got something that you're worried about or you're anxious about, it's about establishing, and this is quite jungian, but for me, I found that if I could establish that that anxiety was coming because there was one part of my psyche that wanted to do one thing, another part of my psyche that wanted to do another thing. And if you could, and if I could really disaggregate those two aspects of my psyche so that I knew that that one wanted to do that thing, that one wanted to do that thing, and I then meditated. I had a few times where I got this full, it was like a psychedelic experience, but I was totally sober, of like white light, all love kind of experience of that, which to my mind seems that seems to be, I think now, what they're talking about, the mystery of the bridal chamber. And so, and I suppose I'm telling that story to say that this this book for me comes from a very a point of my own imediate experience, a very, very kind of personal experience of like there is a a value and every I'm gonna say and a and a reality to the kind of symbolism that occurs in dreams and in waking life through synchronicity that I certainly have found hugely guiding. And also, as I say in the book, this comes off the back of me being involved in quite kind of active, quite activist politics for the last kind of decade or so, and getting really burnt out, kind of dangerously burnt out. And talking to, you know, talking to Mike about about this as well, of you know, being, you know, I think there's a lot of a lot of people on the left who are burnt out, particularly at the moment, and we need to find a way to navigate through that, you know, and it pushed that the my kind of activist work had kind of pushed me to a point of almost suicidal depression, and I had to find a way to get through that. And and then then particularly, I talk about this in the introduct introduction, reading, you know, there are more and more books coming out from particularly climate activists, like young climate activists who've found themselves in kind of terrible mental health struggles. And you know, we need to figure out how to navigate that because you know, without without having a sort of having a toolkit to to understand how to navigate through that, like more and more people are going to be lost from activist politics. And that was the the other point of that was that like the psychotherapeutic solution to that is basically to retreat from activist politics and work on your individual mental health. And and I wasn't I wasn't comfortable with that as a as a as a solution. I wanted to see like, can we do this and then carry on? And you know, there's there aren't any like massive answers to that in the book, but I think there's it's worth kind of just hanging on to that question of what do we do with this once you know if we do if we can find you know health or whatever it is or recovery, what do we do with that?

C. Derick Varn 41:30

Oh, that's there's a lot to uh pull apart there. As a I've also I'm also stepping down actually this month as high school teacher union rep. So I've done that job. Well that's okay, I've done it for six years actually. Yeah, and I also did the unfortunate teacher mercenary world tour, which sounds like a joke, but from 2009 to 2017, I traveled the world teaching at first colleges and then at elite IB high schools.

SPEAKER_03 42:11

Um friends doing that.

C. Derick Varn 42:15

And since as a server of elite, but since I went to where there was the most money to be leveraged at a time, I tended to end up in places that were dangerous. So I ended up in Egypt during the counter-revolution and Mexico during the Zetus and a Loar Cartel War. Um, and so not only did I get burnout, I gave myself massive post-traumatic stress disorder aggravations. I already had PTSD before I did any of this, but like now I have it like soldier level bad. And the other thing that I've done, similar to you, although

Capitalists Still Plan The Economy

C. Derick Varn 42:58

I don't come from a Protestant background, I come from a Catholic and a secular Jewish background. And my father did the thing that he jumped religions and for a while was a Buddhist, so I was actually supposed to relatively orthodox Theravada Buddhism as like a teenager. So I have used those kinds of religious-esque experiences to like maintain some level of sanity, and I also meditate semi-regularly, I read a lot of religious texts, which surprises people for you know, someone who will and when it turns to politics or philosophy, I basically am a materialist, but when it comes to how we actually live, I actually just like it, I don't find it particularly psychologically helpful. So, and I've thought a lot about this because you know I was talking to someone the other day, and I was like, look, the DSA has a hundred and five thousand people in it, right? But for every one DSAer I meet now that I'm in the organization, I also meet seven burnt-out ex-DSAs of various varieties. For some of them political, some of them getting mad at the entryism, some of them just burn out, they just see it as a time stock. And I've also seen a lot of people do something that I think is personally destructive, which is to go into politics as a way of fulfilling social needs, but you know, and I think at first, because it because politics is inherently social, it can help you start to get out of your own head, but the area of the social that interfacing with political power brings about is you know, like you were implying. We all anyone's ever dealt with a state has their like you know, I'm always when we talk about like conspiracy theories in the left or whatever, I'm always like, Well, how do I draw the line? Because I don't want to I think a lot of this Alex Jones level, the the Richie baby shit is absurd. Yeah, but also it's not nothing that there's elite conspiracies that that exist and that they take advantage of people and abuse their power and even set up the most horrific cabals of of shit that we could metaphorically see as child sacrifice for sure.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

Yeah. That's interesting actually. Yes, if you see if you if you were to see all the Alex Jones shit as as mythological, it's a it works.

C. Derick Varn 45:42

I mean in this weird way. I mean like like I've actually pointed out like some of the right wing talking points are things that if you don't take them literally which they inevitably do they actually are critiques of both our current governmentality and capitalism. But because they have literalized them they actually spare capitalism and the state from the full implications of what they're saying.

SPEAKER_03 46:06

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 46:07

Which is this fascinating I mean like you know it's a fascinating problem that leads to all kinds of contradictions that don't bother these right wingers at all. They bother like liberals who are trying to make sense of them but it doesn't bother like Alex Jones does not lose sleep that that he is both siding with with the deep state a lot of the time now but also like thinks they're you know baby sacrificing cabal that are literally ran by the devil but also they're his own people are implicated. I don't think he thinks about that much period.

SPEAKER_01 46:43

Well I think yeah but but it's interesting though that that he if he you know he winds himself up and then lets this stuff out he's you know to to to put you know to put a Yunion lens on it he's he's projecting his immediate experience isn't he he's he's this is as he his the world as he sees it and he's just splurging it out with no filter oh yeah that's a that's that's almost yeah I mean there is an almost automatic writing but he's just not he's not doing the thing he's not he's not reading the symbols he's just regurgitating them.

C. Derick Varn 47:27

Right. And and that's I mean that's interesting it's interesting to me to think about a lot of a lot of these areas where like you know people will talk about this and they'll say like oh we need to pay some kind of populist coalition with Turco Carlson or whatever. And I'm like that's absurd. But there is something that they're speaking to yeah that we should acknowledge and expand without giving into their literal like you know everything's run by Satan way of viewing the world and I I know that's hard and I know that you know as a Marxist part of me wants to lean into this very scientific worldview that uh scones all that but I can tell you that weirdly that doesn't seem scientifically viable that like I can't find a society that actually does that including secular ones yeah yeah yeah um so I I was gonna ask you I mean like we could talk about the first chapter of the horror and the call the adventure a little bit maybe go through this we're I think we're gonna alternate between systemic discussion of the book and and jumping around and we're already 15 minutes in but um but I wanted to talk to you about like the way you see unconscious political psychological projections fueling a lot of modern politics from from you know the weird libidimal economy around our like executive leaders be they trump or starmer or whoever Boris Johnson for you guys of back when the Tories were in charge.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

How do these psychological projections play upon that well I mean so you've asked you've asked a lot there I mean one of one of the things I talk about and well I think there's a there's a there's so many bits to pick up on I think one of one of the the points that I talk about is this Jung's idea and I can never pronounce it right but of an anantromia which is where we basically end up if you oppose someone you end up fueling their position like people just dig their heels and you and I think in that that's obviously been kind of catalyzed by social media and and so there is there's that going on which I think we need we need to be aware of because that's happening at every level of politics that's happening you know like at a at a at a macro level that's happening between like the USA and Iran at the moment like those two two societies are very different and that kind of opposition not leading anywhere not leading anywhere positive for anyone and needing and then you know the sort of you know I talk a lot about the horror and the you know as we've all experienced through social media of seeing you know

Reclaiming Jung From The Right

SPEAKER_01 50:49

horrific horrific things cut things coming out of Gaza and wherever else and being projected you know straight straight into our faces from our phones and and that's not historically that's not normal to be to be witness to these horrific things all the time and and I don't think we are currently prepared to deal with it because you've got these algorithms that are not thinking in the way that we think the algorithms are looking at our are mapping our emotional reactions to things and they have done have been doing that for years. So the algorithm has got a really good handle on our deep psychology like it knows what's going to trigger us and and it then projects the images that it knows are going to trigger us the most to us and we react in a predictable manner that the algorithm can predict and manipulate and you know we're doing a lot of our politics online and so we need to somehow gain control of that situation because we're not in control of that situation. And I suppose that's where the this you know for me why you know particularly deep psychology as we're talking about here is so important because we the algorithm knows our deep psychology better than we know ourselves. And I don't know if it's possible but I certainly know that it helps and I know from from my own experience that it can help to engage in our deep psychology to help us to not react to this stuff in in an unthinking way which is what we're doing otherwise so I think that's that's an aspect of it which is hugely important. And then this other bit of that you're saying about about how yeah I think there's a there's a quote in the book isn't there about how he's saying and and it obviously this carries on playing out today but how few people see the wars that are going on between countries as an unmitigated psychological disaster. And I don't think I actually write about this I wrote about it extensively in my last in my last book I don't think I wrote about it in this book but Gregory Bateson wrote about schismogenesis which is his idea and then David Graeber wrote about it with David Wenberg in his last book they they used used a lot about schismogenesis but schismogenesis being again it's kind of on a on a on a it can happen on an interpersonal level or it can happen at a at a at a nation state level that yeah again as I as I as I said before that one one country opposes another the other one dig that and and it's just this process of escalation that becomes inevitable. And and I think that you know so as individual as individual political agents I think it's really important that we have a better understanding of our deep psychology so that we can act we can understand how we're acting not not even about acting better or worse but we just understand how we're acting because I think without without kind of a lot of introspection we don't understand how we're acting and then the and then the other I mean you you talked about Starmer and Boris Johnson I'm kind of more interested in I think I think people like Starmer and Boris Johnson I'm kind of I'm not that interested in them psychologically I think they're just they're just paid agents you know they've got but I am but I am interested in in our increasing our increasingly powerful oligarchs kind of Elon Musk and and the rest of them and particularly I mean it it'll show in the in the bits that I'm writing about about musk that I was writing this when he was kind of taking taking a a chainsaw to the to the American state with his with his doge initiative and and and you know continues he and other other oligarchs they sort of talk they talk disparagingly about anyone who is they basically they they they take aim at anyone who is from from an unprivileged minority and then they say they're really privileged. That seems to be like the general general vibe that comes out of them. And it's the same in the UK here with we've just had this there's been a massive fascist march in London today and that's like that's the whole thing is is is talking about DEI and how all these people who are massively privileged and in in this country it's that that migrants are being put up or refugees are being put up in hotel rooms. You know it doesn't matter that you've got like 12 of them crammed into a hotel room but that's used as you know that these people are saying that therefore these people are massively privileged and the thing I suggest in the book about that those accusations of privilege particularly coming from the oligarchs is that I think that privilege is their shadow like if if they were to if someone like Elon Musk was to really engage with how privileged he is like how much wealth he's got what that wealth could achieve he couldn't cope with it. He couldn't maintain his social position he couldn't maintain his wealth if he were to really engage with with that and so therefore they have this shadow of their privilege which means that they attack anyone so they attack anyone who hasn't got privilege and they accuse them of being privileged. And I and I don't know you know we can't I I don't know you know Elon Musk isn't going to read my book and suddenly changes mind he's not gonna read my book anyway but but I think that I think it's helpful to understand that because at least you know understanding where it's coming from is is a start i yeah again I don't I don't have solutions but I think it's important that we have an understanding of why people are acting in the way they're acting well the thing about the oligarchs is actually fascinating to me I mean one of the things that that we've seen with these oligarchs particularly ones with more fascist politics is that they're immigrants in the societies that they're working out of Musk is not from here.

C. Derick Varn 57:14

Yeah they uh from apartheid South Africa yeah I mean I was about to say him and teal are yeah anyway um they often don't even plan on living here like Teal's got his compound in New Zealand Zuckerberg's got his super bunker in Hawaii and they all want to go to space yeah they all want to go to space which they're not gonna get to go but whatever yeah uh they might but it probably won't work out super well for them but it's clear that they imagine that the that the exploited oppressed and marginalized are actually somehow not because that's a so that's a self-defense mechanism against what the mass words wealth and honestly if we're talking about this set of oligarchs even though some of them do have some legitimate technical skills all of them were empowered by government policy they are not they're not even the same kind of people as the last round of mega oligarchs we got in the United States during the you know the robber barons period yeah some of whom really did come from nothing yeah yeah and some of whom really did get relatively rich before they started getting integrated into the government and getting more money from that although they all did that too but these tech oligarchs have like why is Elon Musk the richest man in the world it's because Obama gave SpaceX a contract and that's seriously the the the the the main reason thanks Obama yeah um and there's more than a little bit of an irony of these people who are totally integrated I mean Alex Carp Elon Musk to lesser degree Bezos and and Zuckerberg but they've all tried to become existentially tied to the security state yeah in ways that should be very alarming because it's like okay so Starlink is tied into multiple government security apparatus in a way that during the Cold War you know even some some real sketchy figures like Robert Maxwell could not completely achieve yeah um I wanted to ask you about like how does this play into you in in your second chapter you talk about God of Dameron syndrome and you particularly talk about Kim Stanley Robinson talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 59:51

Yeah how does that tie into what you're talking about with this this privileged shadow stuff that you're seeing with these oligarchs yeah well so the God of Gostadamaron syndrome it's a that comes from Kim Stanley Robinson's book what is it The Ministry of the Future and yeah he suggests that what is it it's it's he says that mostly powerful powerful men some women but mostly men who feel that their privileged position is under under attack and they would rather destroy the world than see that privilege lost and yeah I think I mean I think that that's that's that's my launch pad for this idea of of privilege as a shadow so I think we've got yeah I think I think that's in

Gender Integration Without Biology Traps

SPEAKER_01 1:00:38

many ways you know so it's therefore you know it totally fits with this kind of trajectory for Teal and Musk at least from a part out to South Africa.

C. Derick Varn 1:00:46

Like if they can't have their white supremacy then like the gloves are off for the rest of the world basically those and they were okay with progressive stuff as long as it as long as they could still have secretly their white supremacy. Yeah yeah yeah and now that they can't have that they've turned and and in in ways that sometimes I mean I it is dangerous to psychologize individuals who you don't know but it does seem like some of it just comes down to some of these oligarchs felt slighted yeah by various democratic administrations and even though ironically all of them teal became wealthy off of democratic party policies like that's you know that they all were beneficiaries of the Obama recovery they were all given all of them have sweet deal government contracts they've all been able to leverage neoliberalism and and protections to get monopsony pricing power etc etc and now they're just interested in in well there's two things they seem to be interested in one seems to be getting so tied into the defense state that you cannot get that their AI debacle which shows no sign of actually being profitable beyond NVIDIA chips will be supported by government largesse even at the expense of I mean draining the entire eco base of certain areas where I live Kevin O'Leary is going to open a data center in the desert that's double the size of our it's the size of Manhattan or larger than Manhattan and uses double the power of our entire state which is and we're the second driest state in in the United States which means that we might be the first driest state very soon.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:42

Yeah yeah we've we've we've got it we've got it here in in the Thames Valley so the kind of the main kind of motorway corridor leading down to London they've been opening up day centres and there were already water shortages there.

C. Derick Varn 1:02:56

And you know the politicians who just keep rolling over and allowing it to happen it's it's yeah it's kind of it's kind of they are extraordinary times and I yeah I don't I don't see yeah I don't I don't I don't know what what do you think where where do you think the AI bubble goes from here well I the the question is does the United States and the Western powers broadly are they willing to give up all their industrial capacity to attempt to invent God? Yeah and so far it seems like yes even though there's no evidence they're gonna be able to do it. Yeah but it really will I mean it is parasitic on it has been hard for Marxists to explain because it is parasitic on things that normally you wouldn't think the bourgeoisie would tolerate being parasitic on which is property rights yeah which is commodity production large tolerances of of research costs that are not productive to cap to capital um and the the what you seem to be seeing here is that there does seem to be some kind of acknowledgement or belief that capitalism as we've known it is is reaching some kind of uh endpoint but you know and I don't I'm not a believer in techno neofutalism or any of that I've actually got specific reasons why I don't but these actions only make sense if you assume that they don't think the current society and civilization survives that does not mean that they think that all of humanity dies actually want to be clear on that yeah yeah but from their actions we can see that they don't care if much of humanity dies like that's already happening no they'll see it as a great win winnowing basically yeah which in my dark in my darker moments I used to argue with primitivists back when they were a political force to argue with they're not anymore they kind of went away but one of the things I used to say to them was exactly this is if what you predict about human population dynamics and resource use is true and if it's obvious to you it's obvious to the oligarchs why do you think you're gonna survive because you fetish Ice hunter gatherers wouldn't the people who are now hoarding massive amounts of resources with their massive amounts of cash hoards which aren't really the same as profits but I'm not gonna go into that wouldn't they be better positioned to survive such a win owing and I got no answer. Yeah and I think we're kind of seeing that like and in this weird way these techno utopians are also weirdly also like they they buy into the the logic of a lot of of like 90s primitivist arguments that we're gonna have to reduce the world population and they want to do it by attrition. Yeah how much they think it needs to be reduced is unclear but dramatically yeah and I do think that does lead to a left that is fighting something that it's not used to fighting which is which is a capitalism that is truly nihilistic in a different way than prior forms of capitalism yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I can see that and I what it doesn't know doesn't know how to face it so therefore doesn't yeah doesn't doesn't know what it's what its argument is right and and to be fair I mean a lot of the traditional arguments and justifications for capital even used by this very regime and administration here just two years ago have been dropped you know like the promise of jobs the promise of reasonable pricing all that stuff is going away and like it's I wanted To to get into this though, maybe maybe to ask you though how this relates to Anima, Animus, and Shannon integration, because weirdly I think it does.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:26

Yeah. Well, I I mean I took I I do I write about that. How Zuckerberg, do you remember sort of 18 months ago or so he was he was talking about how companies and corporations needed more masculine energy. And which I talk about because as we talked about at the start, there's this idea of kind of elderhood or just being kind of having an understanding of yourself comes with from appreciating the male and female aspects of ourselves. And so I think that the the way that these oligarchs are behaving, the way that Trump is behaving, you know, destroying the forests and you know, whatever, you know, just massive environmental destruction, a lack of care for the environment, and and this just kind of this kind of ploughing forward is is all very masculine. And I think it it shows actually I wrote an essay for for Bram for Strange Exiles the other day about this, about how for his series on the crisis of masculinity, about how they through their through their words and actions, they're they're all revealing a profound immaturity. They're behaving like teenage boys. And yeah, so from a Jungian perspective, I do think that shows a lack of integration of the anima of this female aspect of ourselves that that Jung says is there for all of us to discover.

C. Derick Varn 1:08:55

I wanted to talk to you about the crisis of masculinity. I was watching some liberal mock, and of course, liberals like to mock things here. This seems to be their favorite pastime, and they don't I think this is their own self-defense mechanism because a lot of them are also relatively privileged and they just want to feel smart. Yeah. But they were mocking the fact that men lost a lot of work in this economy and then basically arguing that they deserve it because they won't take female roles. And I was like, look, I work as a teacher, those roles aren't offered to them, yeah. Yeah, as just like, okay, you're sure they can go into nursing. I mean, there's lots of want for male nurses, except that we just also cut our social health care stuff. So the only growth area of our economy is actually going to be flaming out by gov by governmental policy in the next two years. I mean, that's I don't know how much you know about our healthcare system, other than it's privatized, but it is still supported by the government at larger amounts than yours is, yeah. Um even per capita, even adjusting for the difference in the size of our countries.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:00

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:10:02

And that that is being gutted, and there's good there's two political flaw uh things for that, is it's going to reclaim a lot of that boomer wealth that existed in the United States that you guys have in the UK, but not to the same extent. Yeah, it's gonna be sucked up in these healthcare debacles that after medical.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:22

Boomer wealth actually is becoming a lot more visible in the U in the UK.

C. Derick Varn 1:10:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:27

As it's becoming becoming more visible as younger people's jobs become more precarious and less well paid. And they're as if you know about the triple lock in the UK, where the pension just keeps going up, it's just like the pension constantly ratchets up if you're a boomer. So their pensions are are increasing as other people's wages are being depreciated.

C. Derick Varn 1:10:49

Well, we have uh we would have had similar problems like that, but our medical system is sucking all that excess up, right? And but it's

Gnosticism Dreams And Immediate Experience

C. Derick Varn 1:10:58

going to do that in crash up because basically there's not the capacity for it. They're they're also trying to reduce the wages of nurses and whatnot, so they can't get anyone to do it. It's the insurance liabilities for non-specialist doctors are too high. We can't get anyone to do that either.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:15

And we're we're also gonna see in the UK, we're gonna see so where Streeting, the health secretary who just who just stood down. He basically his work had had been done that he's uh in further privatized many aspects of the NHS, particularly in uh removing NICE, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, which which were the was the body that licensed all the medicines that went into the NHS. He's basically removed them now. So now it's a free-for-all from the pharmaceutical industry to be uh selling straight into the NHS. Right. So we're gonna we're gonna see that we're gonna see NHS costs go through the roof.

C. Derick Varn 1:11:58

I mean, so it seems like we're both sitting on with different time bombs, but time bombs, and it does tie into this masculinity crisis. But I do I do want to push not back on you, but on this idea that this is just because like men need to be more enthropicated into a female system. And I'm like, I even know liberals who, when they think of a male elementary school teacher, get uncomfortable because the social pushback on that is so is so significant, and it's just assumed that they're basically pedophiles, yeah. And that is and that is not something that just comes from the men themselves, yeah. And I have thought about this in the way we talk about gender dynamics right now in general. There is a war on women's work right now, but also women's work is the women's work in quotation marks, but what the work traditionally care fields are traditionally signed to women more than men, yeah. I happen to work in one of them and I like it, so you know, like nonetheless, it's also under attack, but it's the only area of growth at all in our kind in our country. Blue collar work, despite all the talk about the trades and all that, has been neoliberalized for the like in some ways for the first time because private equity is coming into it now, and treating it as a way to just extract more and more value for nothing and burning a lot of people out, and the social safety net to deal with disability is being gutted, yeah. But you have this irony of one in three men here don't have work, but we only have a five percent unemployment rate, which is how does that happen? And you realize oh, these men are permanently out of work, they don't count in the unemployment calculations for our country anymore, yeah. And a lot of them are on disability or they're retired, but they cannot work. Yeah, and then you add to that large numbers of young people who don't count because they've never really been in work to be unemployed, yeah. Um like at all. I mean, you know, the average age of entering a job was already up to 24 or 25 in this country, and now it's like there's no jobs for them, period. Yeah, it does seem like we've had the subjective crisis of masculinity for a while, like there's the whole like going back to the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you know, stuff about men. But now there's there, I don't think it's just subjective, there's an objective crisis of masculinity, and that since 2007, the fields traditionally associated with men have been declining in the Western world. Uh there has not been a whole lot of social safety net to handle it, particularly in the US. I mean, there you for as bad as things are in the UK, and they are quite bad. I'm not gonna uh put that down. Uh you guys at least had something to fall from. Yeah, yeah. Um like we never got most of that, yeah. Um, and you're just wondering what's gonna happen, and then you're also wondering like, what does it mean in a society where even though it's a small generation, you have Zoomer boys who are unemployed by in large numbers who also have access to guns, yeah. And I'm just like as a social world, that's actually a little bit terrifying, historically speaking, and the it does seem like the uh the our oligarchical elites just do not have an answer at all for how to deal with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:46

Is there any is there any discussion in the US on universal basic income?

C. Derick Varn 1:15:50

Yes, actually, there is, and but it's mostly coming from the AI people. The problem that you have is they don't want to pin it to inflation, so it wouldn't be particularly meaningful, yeah. And there's no political basis to pass it through, even though you get this. I mean, even Elon Musk talks about like prosperity needing some kind of universal dividend, yeah. But they're so you're getting Musk doing that, but at the same time, he's gutting every social safety net we have. So, what is this based off of? Like, oh, they're just gonna give you currency, okay? Well, that's great. If the everything is inflating by three to ten percent a year, that's not gonna matter, yeah. Um yeah, yeah, so I don't know. I mean, it's also clear that there's a crisis of Western masculinity in the sense that like normal productivity is even on a on a cultural scale. Like, if you look at the the real value of GDP output not measured in a nominal currency but measured in the ability to buy commodities, the United States has been in like significant decline for seven years. Yeah, the UK has been in significant decline for a while, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:02

It's probably about that that that time scale as well. I would imagine.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:05

Yeah, I I feel like when I I felt it personally because I used to, I've uh for some reasons I tend to work for UK publishing houses, not US ones. I have no idea why. And it's always piecework, and they would always pay me in like so many pounds per book. And at first I felt like, oh, I'm getting like $30, because it was like 10 pounds per book evaluation or whatever. I mean, like 30, and then later on, it's like this is now worth 10 bucks. Yeah, yeah, and my pay has not been lowered at all, but I get paid in pounds, and this sucks. Um although lately it's gotten a little bit better, not because your currency has gotten any better, but because ours has declined. Um, so dollar value has been dropping. I mean, nominal value was going up and up and up during the Biden administration in the first like year of Trump, but now it's been yeah. So yeah, most Americans, however, don't know that or feel it. Like they don't, I mean, they feel it in inflation, but they don't feel it in yeah, yeah. We don't deal with with like currency exchange. I mean, we're a giant country, you don't you and almost everywhere takes dollars, yeah. Or well, at least they used to, yeah. So you don't feel it in the same way as you do now, and it's hidden from a lot of people. But I do think I I wanted to ask you about the the I mean, initially it's what I want to talk about. I read your book, and I'm like, oh, we can tie it together, but like the crisis of masculinity, I do think liberals just kind of mock, yeah. And I actually do think it's a real crisis that we don't have a good answer to, and it's not just subjective anymore. That might have just been a loss of privilege, yeah, in the past, but I do think we we haven't come up with any real ideals for like you know, what does a leftist man look like? Yeah, what are their dreams? What is their hero's journey? What how do they avoid burnout? Like, yeah, what what is their uh what is their narrative of normativity? Yeah, and I don't think we're providing one right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:14

No, no, no, no, no, and and and you and you get yes.

C. Derick Varn 1:19:17

I mean step it stepping into that void, you've got these kind of I what what like what's his name, clavicular and all those kind of looks maxing type of people, which is literally like I I was talking to uh Quinn who's off in this is revolution and he's 25, and I was like, are you guys really that nihilistic that you're embracing masculinity in the kind of way that people have done with women for a long time, but in a way that's also actively and publicly killing yourself, like like at a very young age, like taking the you know, looks maxing away as it means taking tons of meth um in your 20s and burning out and ending up recording yourself having a nearly fatal OD while also recording yourself breaking like micro fracturing your jaw.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:18

Well, it's but it's it's it's the same as you as you've just just alluded to, it's the same trajectory as women in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and 80s. Oh yeah, it's the same. So it's just it's a shift in the social positionality of the genders.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:38

I was talking to a friend of mine who was uh who is a male academic, but a good feminist, and sometimes annoyingly so, to be quite honest. So just so you people know the type, but he was talking about he was noticing male students were aware of their

Burnout Survival And Activist Mental Health

C. Derick Varn 1:20:58

gender roles and feeling the need to perform them, and he's like, Well, that's a proof. And I was like, actually, it's not a proof of male dominance. If male, if yeah, if if men were dominant clearly, they wouldn't have to worry about that, they wouldn't have to worry about performing the role that it would just be there. This to me seems like a real crisis in masculinity, and I'm not saying that we need to like you know, what's the stupid phrase in America here? We need a Joe Rogan of the left, and I'm like every time I hear that it makes me want to vomit. Yeah, but I I do think we need an answer to like, well, what do you expect men to be? If they're like, what do you expect the left myth man to be? And I don't mean that in a bioessential way, I don't care about like what what role you have, and actually studies of transgender men really make this obvious, like the the amount of change in social recognition that they often feel if you talk to a lot of transgender men about this, that the that they were oppressed and objectified when they uh were perceived as female bodied, but now that they're perceived as men, they're just not perceived at all, and are only usually even brought up in the context of like detransition or something that's usually in in most of the dialogue in the states the only time you hear about them. And to me, that says a lot about like where what we aren't doing, and I also I mean I also agree, like you can go to leftist circles, particularly Marxist circles, and found a bunch of dudes who, except for having good politics on labor, would be unreconstructed chuds, yeah. And I don't want that either. That's not that's you know, it's not like I want to make a uh a politics that like um like here's your chudness, and I do think you know, uh for you know there was a popularity for a little while with Marxist just claiming that like toxic masculinity wasn't real, and I was like, nah, dude, I have an honor complex, and I would uh part of me wants to kill you when you look at me wrong. That is toxic, yeah, like that is not socially helpful, yeah. Yeah, it it may have been socially helpful, like if I was in a highly hierarchical society and what like blah blah blah blah blah, but I don't live in that society, I don't want to live in that society, yeah. So this impulse I have of like of like you know, male competition and dominance and stuff, which I have, I'm like I openly acknowledge it.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:42

Like so, where do you think that comes from? Um as in, do you think that's something that you've learnt culturally?

C. Derick Varn 1:23:53

I think it is I have a complicated answer to that. I think I think some of the hormones are are priming you for certain things, like if you like testosterone increases aggression, etc. etc. Yeah, yeah. But I do think it's how that manifests is totally culturally primed. And like, for example, I would say it's culturally primed, not just by national culture, but also like class culture and whatnot. Because as a person who now works in a white-collar world but comes from a blue-collar one, yeah, there are things that people who were raised in a blue in a white-collar world that they'll say that I have to remind myself as someone coming from a blue-collar world, yeah, that I don't get to hit them with a baseball bat for saying it.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:42

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:44

Like, because I was enculturated that certain kinds of slights should be responded to with violence, yeah. Like, particularly between men, like, not you know, if a woman does it to you, I mean, and there's some there's a main sex in it, so woman does it to you, women are weak, you just let it go. Like, and I was enculturated that way from a very particular time. I'm from a very reactionary culture because even though I'm I'm not Protestant, I and but I grew up in the deep south of the United States, which is culturally complicated because it has a history of defeat, but also defeat that it kind of deserved, and so like that that plays into our our psychology, it's very honor-driven, uh, very and that is cultural because you meet other people, even from the same country as me, who don't have those same concerns, yeah. And then there's class concerns in it too, like there's certain ways you slow you show the ways you show love, slight, you know, what is the the modern psychology uses your love language? Well, love languages tend to be slightly classed, like and stuff like that. And I think there is it is the it is the view of people who have been downwardly mobile for a long time running into people who are downwardly mobile only recently, yeah. And I mean this in the sense that, like, from an objective standpoint in my world, I am two social classes on the liberal strata in terms of income from my parents. My parents were my mom was a waitress who became a nurse in her 40s, yeah. And my father was my my stepfather was a mechanic, and my father is a con artist. Yeah, and all but one of them have died relatively young, like in their 60s. The the I am I have a master's degree, I have like most of a of a terminal degree, but my income level is in you know it's above 50, it's above the median income, not hugely above it, but it is above, and yet I couldn't replicate my parents' life. I couldn't buy the kind of house that they were able to buy, yeah. And so, you know, uh, even though I am upwardly mobile, I am still experiencing this as a downwardly mobile situation, and I'm encountering leftists who are downwardly mobile too. So there's often culture classes there, and I do think this is this is partly cultural. I also think it is based off of models of masculinity that do not always help people, but as I've said before, we have to talk about then what we could do to help people, and just saying, like, I I remember you know, I would hear stuff like all masculinity is toxic, and I'm like, I don't know how that helps you, like I don't I don't know how that helps, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:01

Do you know what this this this feels like it relates to when I was teaching, so I was teaching in high school for for about 15 years, and I stopped teaching about seven years ago. And and we had a I remember quite early on in my career, was teaching in this school in North London, and there was a working group was set up, which I joined because it just seemed so ridiculous. There was a working group was set up, which was about how to stop young boys taking risk taking, engaging in risk-taking activities. And so these were like, I don't know what, like 13 to 16 year old kids who were gambling, fighting, like doing the stuff that kids do. And and I was the only person who was there saying this is happening because they don't have enough risk in their lives. Like they need to be given risk. Like they're doing this because like and so and this is like my my greatest pleasure was always taking kids out of London, going taking climbing mountains. I was a geography teacher, so that was kind of my bread and butter, and uh and so I used to Say, you know, a lot of the kids who were having a you know were seen as particularly problematic by the school, I'd often let them tag along on the next trip that I was doing, and they'd be great once we took them out and were doing stuff that was stretching them and you know they were found challenging, they were great. And uh and it's I wonder if there's something in that of like you know, you can't just deny masculinity, but but how do people you know how do men enact masculinity? They you always need to be sort of both modeling

Conspiracies As Misread Political Myths

SPEAKER_01 1:29:48

it and teaching people how to practice it, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:29:52

Which is which is why I find the liberal scorn around this to be so problematic because I'm like, no, we need to be offering an alternative that's meaningful that has them incorporate risk. I've had similar experiences. I don't I haven't been able to take kids on field trips in forever. We don't really do that anymore. But when I taught at least private schools, I took you know like a bunch of Egyptian kids into the Sahara, and there was a real chance that we could all die. It was not insignificant. Yeah, nobody did, we were all fine, but like it was a learning experience and a way to be a mentor, yeah. Um that you don't see, and I've also talked a lot about this. Like you and I are I'm gathering we're about the same age. I've taught for 20 years. I started teaching when I was I started teaching when I was 25 uh in college, and I started teaching high school when I was 27. So then I'm also like you an ex-academic. I still do, I guess I've tried to replicate the amate the academic world without being in it for yeah 20 years because uh it was a really bad experience for me. I mean it that's class too, but like being in academia, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I loved I loved what I was told academia was, yeah. But the actual politics of being in academia was was bloodthirsty in a way that I used to be a corrections officer, aka a prison guard, yeah, and I felt like I we were less bloodthirsty than what academics are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:31

We had a thing uh a few years ago when I was still working as an academic, there was the the UK Home Office, the government basically sent that we had to start doing filling out forms every month for the for all of our foreign students to say like we'd seen them and stuff and all this kind of shit. Basically, that we were to be border police. And we sat through this meeting and these are all like academics who were you know writing books on decolonization and like you know, there and sat through this meeting with them everyone just agreeing to do it, and and I I was the only person saying, Well, like what like you're still and yeah, that would it's just yeah, it just it isn't it isn't I mean that's another you know a different example, but yeah, certainly from from my experience, academia is not doesn't do what it says on the tin.

C. Derick Varn 1:32:25

Oh, yeah, I I had this issue, uh similar thing, different motivation. I was sitting there with uh education academics, and we were talking, we talk about equality all the time and educational quality, and this is you know the beginnings of what it was not yet called wokeness here, but it was gonna be. Yeah, and yet my boss who was pushing all this and doing all these studies on social justice and act and and and education was also deliberately recruiting from the richest neighborhoods in the in my state, and I just couldn't square that. I was like, so all this is just talk, this is just this is just the appearance of of meritocratic fairness, yeah. But it's you know, and and as a person who came from a blue-collar background, I was not prepped for them not to mean what they said, yeah. Like, because you know, yeah, like I heard all kinds of crazy shit come out of blue-collar people in the deep south, but they meant what they said, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:29

Well, my my my privilege, I actually I come from a from a very privileged background myself, but my quite recently both my kids have been diagnosed as autistic, which explains a lot for me. And I think so. I think my experience has been an autistic experience of thinking thinking autistically that everyone always meant what they were saying. Right. Like what? Like, like, yeah, exactly. Yeah, some some similar dynamic.

C. Derick Varn 1:33:58

I have uh this is actually quite funny. I I am I'm with the uh the neurodivergent person, but I have also like specialized in working with autistic kids here for a long time, and I really appreciate that about them because they do exactly what you asked them to, yeah, and it and nothing else. So you have to think like, okay, how do if I assume a person doesn't understand all the let's to use a Bactinian term, dialogic subtext of everything I'm saying, yeah. How do I communicate? And it's been very good for me actually because because I've learned in communicating with autistic kids, and I also like obviously worked abroad, so I've communicated with non-English speakers for a long time. That you are just generally clearer when you assume that people will take you at your exact word.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:56

Um this is the thing, the the the the the the accommodations that you make for neurodivergence are good for everyone.

C. Derick Varn 1:35:03

Yeah, they absolutely are. The accommodations you make for most things are good for everyone. Like like my big frustration, for example, with like the ADA is that it's not funded. I don't have a problem with the accommodations, I have a problem with the fact that we're just we enforce them by lawsuit, yeah. Which ironically, for our country, means the government's actually more exempted from meeting ADA expectations because we're the government's harder to sue. And so, like, you have these little mom and pop stores, and look, I'm not here to like pity the the petite bourgeois, don't get me wrong, but I do think it's kind of ridiculous to expect like small businesses that are run by people who probably have an income of forty thousand dollars a year after expenses to try to be super accommodating with no help, yeah, when we could easily and not expensively use orders of scale to and help everybody meet the ADA, yeah, and you know, and I say that to me that's not even a Marxist point. That's not me making a point about like revolution, that's just like this is how you run a society in a way that makes any fucking sense. Um, and most accommodations really do work for people, but people resist that, and I I think it's the same reason that you're talking about that they don't there's two things. One, they imagine that they're not gonna benefit the accommodation in some kind of special treatment, yeah, which protects them, I think, from realize from realizing that they are a bad day away from mental or physical collapse.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:39

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:36:41

Uh you know, as a person who recently broke my foot and was back on a cane for a while, I was like, Yeah, this sucks.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:50

But it's there's a there's a related to that in in certainly in the UK, and I I wonder if I'd be interested if the same thing has happened in the US. But in the UK, particularly through Boris Johnson's government, the last conservative government, anyone, anyone who and but it's now the standard that if you uh if you are if you were go against your government or go against your party, you're either excommunicated from the party or you're or you're back you're put on the back bench in parliament, so you don't get to sort of you don't get to speak up, you don't get to get to say things. And and does this uh there have been a few over the years in the UK, there have been a few politicians who have stood up for disabled rights, and they have tended to be people who've got a disabled family member. And so what happened under Boris Johnson is that anyone who spoke up would get backbenched or kicked out of the kicked out of government, and so that very, very small and weak protective characteristic of the parliamentary system has now been lost. So now because because the government so willfully just knock people knock politicians out, you we don't have that that reality injection coming into

Algorithms Trauma Loops And Gaza

SPEAKER_01 1:38:08

parliament anymore, which is kind of terrifying.

C. Derick Varn 1:38:12

I I I suspect in the United States you'd have something similar, but it's harder to backbench because our parties are not as structured as your parties, frankly. Yeah, I mean they are structured, but they're like it's like it is being being backbenched in the United States will not actually end your political career if you if you play it right, yeah. But I still suspect the scale of politics here, like you know, we have like 600 representatives, so like even 100 with disabled family members, they can be shut up, yeah. Like, or they can be appeased with something very minor, yeah. I do think as one of the things that we're having here is just the amount of physical damage on blue-collar workers is becoming undeniable. Like, like one in six of them are on disability now and permanently can't work. Um and so just the strain on their bodies has to be dealt with, yeah. Um, and that used to mean accommodations for other kinds of disabilities, too. But they want the they are chipping away at that as much as they can here.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:36

Um because this goes back to the earlier point about kind of the winnow the desire to winnow away the population. Is is it I mean, are these people literally just being left to die? Like, is that that's the plan?

C. Derick Varn 1:39:52

If Idaho is an example when they they uh stopped using Medicaid to pay for patients for extreme schizophrenia by a state level mandate in Idaho, they have put that mandate back in because within a few weeks they had five deaths. Yeah, so it uh the politicians do freak out when they actually stopped doing what they stopped covering people with severe schizophrenia, wow, with with Medicaid, right? So they just let them die, and they did. I mean, five of them died in two weeks, and like they are reestating some of the funding because they're horrified by like that being that blatant. Because you know, if that happens in two weeks, think of what happens in a year or two, yeah. But that is the policies we are gearing towards, and I think we see that with COVID, actually. I mean, with COVID, we were willing to in America we lost a million people, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:48

And so there has my experience with co with COVID was I'd recently moved out. I live in a quaint thatched cottage in a in a village in in Wiltshire, west a few hours west of London now. But I was living in London for 20 years, and uh when I was last uh working, well, I was living in London, I was teaching in a school in Tower Hamlets where the school I was teaching in was we had the highest rate of free school meals in the country, so that's the highest rate of kids living in poverty in any school. And and much and and uh the the school this the staff body of the school was uh was kind of representative of the kids there, like I was I was kind of one of the one of those a few white white white white teachers, but it was kind of it was certainly was not a privileged staff body, it was kind of representative of the k of the kids there. And so when COVID hit and everyone living out here in the countryside was kind of laughing about the restrictions, saying this is bullshit, dah, dah, dah. I'd had I had three colleagues died in the first week of like in in March when it first hit. And and then, but still talking to people out here, you know, privileged people living in the countryside, they're like, it was nothing, like they don't know anyone that died, but because it was because the people that I was working with, they all lived in multi-generational households where someone worked in the NHS, someone works in a mini-cab driver, they just got they got hammered by it immediately. So it's so again, it's kind of it's it's you know, using that example of a million people dying in the US, you know, similarly huge number of numbers of people died in the UK, and it was a disaster. But a lot of people, particularly people who are kind of talking about politics, engaged in politics, didn't see any of that.

C. Derick Varn 1:42:45

I I had a very torn my experience of this was similar. I I lost two family members. She died from cancer two years later, but she survived her COVID attack. But I lost an uncle and a cousin. Wow, and they were in their 60s, so you know, and they were in multi-generational housing too. One of the things that I was pointing out to people though, and the United States, the divisions are a little different. Living in the countryside does not actually equal not being impoverished, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:28

But we still have rural poverty here, like it's not okay, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:43:32

I would actually, I mean, but it was strange because that was the biggest tell, not even your income level, was how close you were to a city. Okay, and I and I was actually trying to explain, and eventually it eventually it actually would burn through those those rural communities too. It did eventually, but at first I was like, we need to talk to these people, realizing that their experience of COVID is going to be different than ours because their population differences densities are different. And like when you do, you know, like why are truckers you know particularly bothered by COVID regulations? Well, let's be frank, they aren't actually that affected by them, except that they're possible carriers to the entire planet. Yeah, but you know, if you work mostly in a car, mostly by yourself, and you're not in a community for any long time, uh you probably don't experience this as a threat until you get it.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:31

I I was we I was at the time I was running a um I just set up a it was quite there was it was a project at SOAS University of one of the universities of London where we were teaching academics to as well as you know, most academics will write their paper, they write their 40-page paper, it sits online and they kind of that's that's it done for them. They then shuffle off looking at our shoes and they don't want to talk to you anywhere again. And so I set up a a project where we would teach those academics how to turn their paper into a one-page brief and then set up a comms strategy to get the briefing paper in front of politicians before debates. And so we I just set this up just as COVID hit, which was kind of amazing because it meant that we were able to, as kind of as everyone went online, uh, we were able to step in and we were getting briefing papers to politicians that they weren't getting briefed on uh otherwise. But one of the ones we sent in was just wrote it wrote a I can't remember who wrote it, but this briefing paper which was comparing uh the the COVID experience of the security guard in an office block to the office workers, and the security guard who has to keep it, and this was based off the the government statistics, the mortality statistics that they were they were publishing. But that person, the security guard versus the office worker, had a I think he I think uh he had a 12, or he or she had a 12 times greater risk of mortality from COVID as the person working in the office who was immediately switching to working from home, wasn't having to go anywhere, etc.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:11

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:46:16

There's a couple of things that come up to me, come up when I think about this, and maybe we can talk about the end of the book and about like your book kind of ends up using young to talk about what we might call acid leftism or acid communism. Yeah, I'm going to tell you that I am of two minds of this. One, I have lost a lot of people on the left to addiction. Yeah. And this has been something that the two main I mean, if I think about like

Oligarchs Shadow Privilege And Fascism

C. Derick Varn 1:46:59

colleagues of mine from Fisher to to Michael Brooks, Michael Brooks was just a freak accident, but like or a freak hemorrhage. But in general, the the two most common causes of death for leftists I know are either suicide or addiction-related diseases. Yeah, and so I'm always very careful with substances, and also I struggled in my teens with addiction myself and got out of it. But I will say ironically, and this is where I want to talk about some of the stuff you talk about in your book that maybe leftists don't normally consider. I got off of my substances cold turkey, and it was terrible and awful. And even seven years later, I was still having like cravings and flashbacks and whatnot. The biggest thing that helped was a psychedelic treatment. Yeah, like it really did. It really I it was it's a treatment that I did partly legally on a brief trip to Europe where we were able to get eye bogain, and um it caused a thorough enough disassociation that I had a break with cravings. Yeah, and it was a permanent break, yeah, it was gone. Yeah, like and so you know, I have tried to replicate that by by uh by extreme feats of meditation, and it is you know, you meditate, so you you know this, but it's hard to describe this to people who don't, yeah, where I'm like, no, the the brainwave changes do weird shit to you, and there are times where colors seem brighter, and you have weird, unexplained, like experiences of deep joy. Uh, also occasionally, though, you have you have ego death, and you can feel like your personality completely splintered, and you don't know who you are anymore. And in those periods, you can also kind of go insane, but like it is not without risk. I want to be very clear on that, yeah. Uh, and that's without any drugs, yeah. But I I do think this is something that leftists should actually deal more with and not see right now. This is being seeded over to like ma hostile right, yeah. And you know, it's one of these things. Like, I I think our national health healthcare apparatus is being destroyed by uh Robert Kennedy Jr. But every now and then his crazy ass will say something like kind of fair and true, like you know, maybe we should study psychedelic effects on on addiction. And I'm like, Yeah, well shit, I agreed with Robert Kennedy, like and I kind of had that going reading your chapter about this, and then the way that they adopted traditional culture, like I've read the Tibetan book of the dead, I have it over there. It's it the way that like Metzer and Leary used it has nothing to do with the actual text, really.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:25

Yeah, but but well, it's an it's a it's a I've got it up here somewhere as well. It's it's yeah, their their book is is it's kind of three pages from the translation that I've got that they've um elaborated.

C. Derick Varn 1:50:37

Yeah, I mean I've read a lot of Rom Doss, and I'm like uh like you. I have I've noticed that when we were talking, uh reading your book, and I'm like, yeah, yeah. Ramdas, like you know, we'll take a page of a 800-page ancient tome and like make an entire philosophy out of it. And I don't love that.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:56

I'm I'm less I'm I'm a bit more open to that approach than I used to be. And I'll explain explain that with okay. I so I where I live at the moment, I live halfway between Stonehenge and Avebury, which is another massive Neolithic henge monument.

C. Derick Varn 1:51:14

And so we're kind of the there's a weird hippie drew.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:20

It's a weird social divide that we used to have Peter Mandelson living down the road from us, and it's kind of there's a lot of those type of people, and then there's the weird druid hippies. There's like, and there's not really like they don't they don't intermingle or they're two very separate separate tribes. And so we go, yeah, we go quite regularly to kind of solstices and equinoxes at Stonehenge and you know go and chant along with the druids and stuff, and and I used to be really cynical of of druidry because they basically they've they've invented this whole religion from kind of half a sentence of of from some Roman historian from Tacitus. And there's like there's nothing there, there's no basis to it whatsoever.

C. Derick Varn 1:52:06

And then we'll even admit that, actually. I kind of admire when it's like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they do admit it.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:13

And I and but then I, with my like ecotherapy work that I do now, where I'll for myself, so I meditate at home, I meditate in this room I'm sitting in now, but but I also spend a huge amount of time in the forest. And and I spend enough time in the forest that stuff like strange stuff starts to happen. Mind emerges outside of me. And and I spend enough time in the forest for that to happen for me, so that I can then help other people, help clients to experience that themselves. And and I realize that that's actually what I mean some of the some of the druids, people who claim to be druids, are I don't know what they're doing, but some of them, when he speaks to them, this is what's happening, is that they it's it's an emergent thing that's going that's going on for them. And so yeah, I can't remember, I can't I can't remember what your example was just then, but certainly for the druidry, I do now have a lot more time for it, for it, because I can see it, and this this goes back to kind of Gnosticism as well, of that these these things are can be emergent from us.

C. Derick Varn 1:53:31

Well, I'm up two minds a bit, but part of part of me is a very strict historicist, and I'm like, Well, you're not a druid, I'm not a druid. Yeah, I'm also not a Platonist. I'm not sure even if I'm a Marxist, even though I would call myself that, but I don't know that the context is exactly the same. And and the same token, you know, I have been a Sramana, I like lived in a Bahara for for a few months, and I have lived in I have gone to live in monasteries for months at a time, mainly because I've been very lucky and lived it where that was an experience you could do for like a hundred bucks. Yeah. Um as long as you were contributing to the food fund, or you were a true monastic, they didn't care. Yeah, whereas, like if you try to do it in the United States, it's gonna be inordinately expensive. But and when I was when I lived in the Bahara, I was actually temporarily homeless, and they I just did work for them and they were okay with that. Um but most people don't get those experiences, yeah. And you do kind of have to be very lucky if you're not rich, but it does help. I mean, like it does like like I talk to people about PTSD and trauma culture, and I have been kind of sympathetic to some of the trends here in America where they're they're complaining about the overuse of trauma and leftist spaces and all, yeah. And I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to that, but I I am sort of like, but don't think the concept doesn't apply like if you've seen a lot, and we all have seen a lot more than we've used to see, and I think part of the part of the problem with that I'll give you an example. I have seen people like shot enough that I've had to clean blood off of my clothing, yeah. But weirdly, the tactile experience of that is horrifying, but yeah, it in experiencing it that way, you do have there's a it is such a visceral experience that you're actually processing it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:50

Yeah, whereas physically processing it, even even you washing the blood out of your clothes is an act of process, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:55:58

Whereas when Charlie Kirk was shot, and I want to be very specific, not because it's Charlie Kirk getting shot, but because it's at a school, UVU, which is a commuter school, it's not a major university, which I don't think people outside of the United States, even in the United States, understood, that is literally 35 minutes from my house, and I I I go there twice a year to take students to it, and I have stood at the exact spot that Kirk was shot. And I don't really give a shit about Charlie Kirk. I want to be very clear on that, but like watching that because of the context of mean being there but not being there, seeing it, yeah, was harder to process in some ways because I can see that, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah, and I think a lot of people are stuck in that position when it comes to trauma where they're encountering things being shown to them that they can imagine themselves in. They can they know like when it comes to Gaza, you've been around kids, you know what it's like to be around kids, you can't imagine watching a kid starve or be blown up.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:08

Well, and actually, the the the the same dynamic, psychological dynamic for me would be when I see in these kind of images coming out of Gaza, when I see kids who are the same age as my kids, I immediately break down, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:57:24

And it's like you know,

AI Bubble And Nihilistic Capitalism

C. Derick Varn 1:57:28

child death is not something actually, not something I think works the same way, but most people I know don't recover from it. But I do think it's very similar because you you process this like another example for me when it came to contextualizing Gaza. I I lived and worked in Egypt for two years, and one of the things is I taught a lot of people who either had family or were Palestinians or intermarried with Palestinians, and I taught two relatively privileged little girls who and I they were little, they were like 10 at this time, who had seen uncles and cousins killed in the silent antifada. So this would have been they they would have been this would have been in the early very early out teens. And it both contextualized it, but made it I like every time I see this shit on TikTok or whatever, when you get the atrocity exhibition coming out of Gaza, yeah. I I think back about them, I have trouble processing it. Yeah, because like even though I was with them and I could process it with them when I was there, now I'm like, well, okay, now there's all these kids, and they're gonna be like this kid that would just like occasionally break down. And how am I like and you know, I can't do shit about that, I'm not there.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:57

Like, and I do think we are gonna need ways to cope with that, and yeah, and just on a on a very simple level, it's it archaically, like going back in back a long way. If you saw something like that happening, so go back 200 years or further, 500 years, go back a thousand years. If you saw something horrific like that happening, the first thing you would do is run or you'd fight, because it's a fight or flight, you know, your cortisol cortisol levels spike. That activity burns your cortisol. So we're sitting watching this, and we're not responding in any way whatsoever. So we're not we're not physically metabolizing what's happening to us. So there's that is is uh immediately a problem. And then as you say, that yeah, what just physiologically that's a problem. But also, as you you say, like what do you do? And when we, you know, again, these these are these images are being beamed at us to solicit these responses, like we don't have it, we can't do anything in the moment, like there is nothing you can do in the moment, and and so yeah, so I think this, you know, this again, so back to the book. This is this is kind of getting to the core of why I wrote this book. It's like we've got to fucking figure out what to do. We like we need to know how to navigate this because the the the ways that we have evolved aren't working right now. We now need to kind of take we now need to sort of gain some agency in this because we're not in the situation that we've evolved, our bodies have evolved to be in for these, you know, to deal with the the ways that our our bodies are reacting physiologically is not evolved for the current situation.

C. Derick Varn 2:00:49

Yeah, I think that's actually a good point. And even though a lot of what you and I are talking about here can sound like what I would call hippie shit, which can often go very reactionarily, admittedly, I do think that there are certain pathologies that you see amongst the highly political. I don't think it's just the left, although there are some that I would say are more acute on the left, but where you don't know how to deal with what you're seeing because you can't, you are also moving from a state of cortisol reactivity that if it is acute and you can act on it, is even kind of good for you, yeah. Like, but if it's chronic and you can't act on it, it literally destroys your system. Like, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:42

And actually, and this is this is actually something that happened to me. That I basically had a massive midlife crisis because I got COVID. I had long COVID. I used to run, I'd run 100 kilometers a week, like quite obsessively. But I think what I was doing there, I was burning off all that cortisol all the time, and then I got long COVID and I couldn't run. I haven't I haven't been on a run for like five years now. And suddenly I wasn't burning all that cortisol off, like suddenly the shit hit the fan and it was hard. So yeah, that was that was me having finding up finding a way that doesn't involve that exercise.

C. Derick Varn 2:02:20

Yeah, uh similarly, I broke my foot recently and I I I don't run, I've never been runner, but I'm a lifter. And but there's been periods where I couldn't like I I got I got typhoid in Mexico, and I have colloidal scarring, so talk about my medical stuff, but like I lost parts of organs and what was like bedridden for two months, and then had another thing where I didn't eat solid food for like seven months. Wow, and I was hard to deal with, yeah, and I think about that a lot when I talk about people because one of the things your book is talking about is like burnout and and and activism, and I do think your your use of Young is helpful for that, in so much that you have to deal with the fact that like you can't ask people to put in time and time and time forever and not do any self-development, self-care, whatever. It's not even good for the movement for you to do that.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:29

And also, and also I was I I found for for years I was amongst amongst fellow leftists who were saying, like, stay angry, you've got to stay angry. And and and I really took that on board. And and and you you can't you just can't stay angry, it doesn't it doesn't work, like our bodies not our bodies don't cope with it, and also it doesn't achieve anything, it doesn't you're not changing other people's minds from being angry.

C. Derick Varn 2:03:57

I guess the last thing that I would think about is is is and I'm agree in agreement with you about the I'm an angry person, the last thing you want to tell me is to stay angry all the time because yeah, also eventually you attack the people who are nearest you, yes, because those are the people you can get.

SPEAKER_03 2:04:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 2:04:18

And that's not really helpful to leftist, to pro-social anything, like I was gonna say, but the other I think the other which you sort of alluded to before, but this problem of and yeah, I think I'm sure it's on the right equally, in fact.

SPEAKER_01 2:04:37

But when uh when you when I personally, and talking to other people about this, have got overwhelmed to the point of mental health crisis, it's it's it's normally uh because it's not because you're delusional, it's because you are you have you have such a clear understanding of reality of the political situation at the moment. And and if if you don't then have these kind of tools, whether they be Jungian or whatever other kind of hippie shit you want to bring in there, if you don't have tools to deal with your engagement with reality in that situation, then you're lost.

C. Derick Varn 2:05:23

Have you ever read David Graeber and Marshall Silence's on Kings?

SPEAKER_01 2:05:26

I've not read it, I know of it though.

C. Derick Varn 2:05:28

All right, yeah, that's where Graeber, and I don't always I I give Graeber a lot of shit, I'm not gonna lie, but but but Graber talks about like and he doesn't do it in Jungian terms, but he might as well have talks about offsetting hierarchical tendencies by like creating hierarchical mythologies so you can actually live in a okay a relatively equal life by like forming a mental king but distancing yourself from it, and like I think some of this is you know almost James Fraser like bad speculation, but yeah, some of it I have actually found useful for offsetting destructive or our anti-social tendencies, and and this is something that I actually do find Youngin psychology useful for, not you know the comparative mythology, and and you write about Joseph Campbell. And while I find the hero's journey interesting, there are times where I'm like, Yeah, but you know, I I kind of think you're full of shit. Yeah, like I don't actually think all heroes work this way at all. Um but I do think

Crisis Of Masculinity And Meaning

C. Derick Varn 2:06:38

that cylindrical understanding symbols, symbolism is more important than just branding, and even leftists will sometimes think, oh, we're just doing these things for brands or we're trying to represent these things. And I'm like, it's more important than that because I I think we cannot get out of the fact that both I think I don't know if it's cultural or not. I'm not gonna say if it's I'm not gonna say it's inherently biological, I don't know, but I don't know of a culture that doesn't have symbols and whatnot that you use to understand, yeah, both as ideological myths and as ways to channel your own psychic experience, and psychic, I just mean psychological, yeah, yeah. Towards that help deal with some of the stuff that you encounter, yeah, which is why I have found a lot of this insistence on the left that we are like 19th century almost mechanistic materialists to be honestly not even particularly scientific, right? Because I can't think of a healthy society on the planet that's ever operated that way, yeah. So yeah, and I do think this is hard to get people to to approach, and maybe maybe like trying to reclaim parts of young as a way to get people towards it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:08:07

Yeah, no, well, uh I mean my my last book was called Love and the Market, but the the subtitle was How to Recover from the Enlightenment, and and I do think that I mean I the all the Young stuff came after that, but you can kind of see in my last book why why I headed to what was heading towards that. I suppose that the the the book How to Recover from the Enlightenment was kind of me kind of speculating on where to go next, and then it was kind of the young young came in and filled the gap. But yeah, I think I think you know, yeah, exactly. Well, exactly as you've as you've said, and and uh you know, pre pre-reformation, particularly, but pre-Enthuman, pre-reformation, Europe and uh almost any other uh society you care to find in the world does have an appreciation of symbol and mythology and and kind of some unexplained stuff. You know, we we need to there needs to be space for this for the unexplained the unexplained stuff, and uh and that I think from my my personal experience that tends to appear symbolically and uh and it's useful, like it's useful and it's important.

C. Derick Varn 2:09:24

Yeah, I I think that's a good place to stop. Maybe I I do I do want to ask you though, yeah. One of the things about Jungianism that is both a benefit and also a problem, yeah, is the way in which it can give you ways to compare traditions that are really otherwise very different from each other through overlapping symbols, narrative patterns, narrative structures. Uh do you think that the left by and large, for whatever reason, whether it's our enlightenment rationality or our postmodern distrust of meta-narratives, or I don't I think that was a bigger problem 20 years ago, but yeah, but um, but whatever. I because I do find some of these things inevitable even in secular societies, like I will point out that like you talk you you like some of the communists I know, and I say this as a communist, but like they talk like Protestants, yeah, with eschatology, yeah. And you know, and they get really pissy when you point that out to them. And I'm just like part of me is like, well, you should be I think you should be aware of it, but the reason why you should be aware of it is not so you can excise it, it's just admit that that's what you're doing, yeah. And that it's it's that it's in some ways unavoidable.

SPEAKER_03 2:10:55

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 2:10:56

Is that what you would advise people to do in this place? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:00

I I mean I and I I think I mean I'd go further than that. I think I think there is there is a huge, hugely puritanical tendency within the West. Probably probably more pronounced in the UK and the US than other places, I would have thought. English, but yeah, I think I think I think we're incredibly puritanical. And and I think as you say, it's not that's not necessarily to denounce that, but but it need you need to be aware of what you're doing. Which you kind of again, which is the whole point of my book, is just you know, we need to increase our awareness of why we're acting in the ways that we do, and that's not to say that you necessarily change the course of action, but it's gonna be helpful to be aware of that, right?

C. Derick Varn 2:11:47

Yeah, I I think my my big takeaway is even if you're not religious and whatever that means, which I actually I can get on my big philosophy and sociology kick, where I'm like the religion non-religion distinctions actually fake. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:03

Um whatever. Um well this actually, this was my my first book, which is about extremism, was the the the biggest the biggest point I was making, which was as as we had these well, I was gonna say conservative politicians, but politicians from across the board were promoting the idea of counter-extremism, which was based on the presumption that secularism is a neutral ideology, which is nonsense.

C. Derick Varn 2:12:36

Yeah, that's absolutely true. Although I would say it our right is not as given toward secularism, but not regular anymore, no, but no, although weirdly they are also more secular than they've been in the past. It's it's that that whole dynamic is quite interesting, almost like Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:13:00

Who believes what?

C. Derick Varn 2:13:01

Yeah, like like we have all this promotion of religion and explicit call for Christian nationalism by people who are some of whom are transparently not Christian.

SPEAKER_01 2:13:12

Yeah, well, that was the this big march in London today was a was a load of people shouting about Christianity who Have probably never been to church in their life. Like it's just me. With with my my kind of work on counter-extremism was it was largely within that the kind of activist circles around that, it was me working with predominantly Muslims. And and and also whereas teaching as well was predominantly Muslim kids and other teachers. And I've I've always felt really comfortable around Muslims because Muslims in the UK, because you can't you can't be a Muslim in the UK without and and not know your positionality.

Risk Mentorship And Healthy Outlets

C. Derick Varn 2:14:42

And I'm like more of them were quietists than not. Like just like I don't understand why we care about this one way or the other. And you know, I mean, and and me also like on certain things the salafists were even were even better, like like on stuff like female circumcision, they rejected it, yeah, uh, because it wasn't Quranic, it was cultural, and and there wasn't any good had it, yeah. And then I also realized Americans, you know, they hear the words Sharia and they don't even know about how hadith work, and I'm like, you don't it's just I don't know. Like I had a lot of explaining to do, yeah. Um, because this is not this is not a religion that you can just declare belief and everything, like anyway. But I do find it interesting. The assumption of secularity has always fascinated me because I like you have noticed that secularity is not only not neutral, it is very much shaped by the prior religious context. Like, yeah, like I've talked about to be a secular American is to be an obnoxious Protestant somewhere deep down, yeah. And even if you don't have a Protestant background, and to be uh to be a secular Korean was to probably still had a whole lot of fucking Confucianism, yeah, in your and some shamanism actually in your assumptions about the world. And I'm just like it doesn't there is no like as much as we might want it to be, there is no enlightenment neutrality to be found anywhere, yeah. Yeah, and I I don't even think it's scientific to pretend that there is, and that doesn't, you know, I'm not saying everyone should go off and join a religion or whatever, but I I am saying like we should take these things probably a little bit more seriously about why they exist because they no society has ever completely gotten rid of it, and even societies that tried to, they had to create dynamics that replicated it, like the Church of Region are yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:16:54

Some of the weirder practices about the new year and the Soviet Union are something like well you think Jung's point on religion is that he's not he says he's not he's not interested in God as such, he's interested in man's experience of God. And and he said, and he goes on to say that uh God in this context is therefore a legitimate subject of scientific exploration, which I go for, but then but then the the I think the the kind of the the new ageism of of Jung comes in because he then he then makes the point that uh whether whether God has experienced is an evolutionary relic of the evolution of the human psyche or is God as an external force, is we don't experience that in it in any different there's no difference in differentiation in our experience of that, whether it's one or the other. And he says throughout his works he's he's he's not interested in that question because it's unanswerable, which is fair enough.

C. Derick Varn 2:17:55

Like most I do I I am one of those obnoxious people who will tell people that you don't you can't actually prove an anti-naturalist metaphysical assumption or a naturalist metaphysical assumption within a naturalist framework, you just can't do it. It's not like it's not the the whole I mean like you you can talk about the relative like you can talk about relative versus not relative belief, and you can try to do your Russell's teapot thing, but the thing is everyone ends up with these unexamined experiences, uh dreams, metaphors, etc. That if you don't have a way to channel it, yeah, it can go in very like I don't know, I've just seen it go in very strange directions when actually people don't have a place. That's to me when like cult shits arise, that's when you get like political Islamism. That's I mean, there's there there are wild. I mean, uh people get very confused when I say modern evangelical Christianity in the United States is actually proof of the depth of secularization of the depth, not death, depth of secularization, because a it tries to replicate a Christian shitty version of everything secular, and b they don't justify themselves on mythical are other are other terms. They actually adjust themselves in quite literalistic terms, it's not healthy for them to do. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:19:31

Yeah, that's that's that's really that's really that's interesting, actually. Yeah, they they don't they're not which comes back to that point of not being aware of the symbolism in the world. It's it's it's back to Alex Jones, isn't it? Which is very so what we were sort of talking about. But I mean I've I I think one of the reasons I write certainly my last couple of books is to make sense of those strange those kind of transrational experiences. So I I spent Do you know the philosopher Roy Baskar, father of critical realism?

C. Derick Varn 2:20:02

Yeah, yeah, critical realism, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:20:04

Yeah, so so he for his one of his last books, The Philosophy of Meta-Reality, which is where he kind of goes into transcendental critical realism and kind of goes, he basically has his midlife crisis and starts talking about spirituality. Yeah, and uh and I ran a reading group at UCL for for out a year to read that book because it's kind of it's it's so dense and impenetrable, it kind of I don't know, it helped to have a reading group, and so we we'd meet together once a month and read a chapter or whatever. And and there's a lot in there about consciousness and the nature of consciousness, and it's quite sort of Hindu in its approach of kind of consciousness coming before materiality, and and just after I we'd finished that reading group, I was actually having a I was having a WhatsApp conversation with a friend, and it got into talking about the nature of consciousness. So I suddenly had a full kind of I don't know, spiritual experience where materiality fell away and consciousness was there. And and what was interesting for me there was that I basically through intellectually going into that, I'd solicited the experience, and then and then and I've had other experiences of that with like getting more when I started started training in ecotherapy and and nature connection, having having kind of more shamanic experiences with animals and plants and stuff, and then similarly, then getting into Jung and I start getting into Gnosticism, and I start like I mentioned before about the bridal chamber, I start having Gnostic experiences, and so this comes back to that kind of this emergent spirituality or religiosity is yeah, I just find I just find I find that interesting, and if and so and so it's and it speaks to your point about where you know whether you're in Korea or the US or wherever, that secularism kind of births

Disability Class And COVID Reality Gaps

SPEAKER_01 2:21:58

these other aspects. And I think you know what you just said about um about the evangelical right is really interesting because they're you know they don't have the understanding to appreciate these potentially, I don't know if it's exactly what you're saying, but in part manifestations of the psyche that they're experiencing, and therefore they end up doing terrible shit or proposing terrible shit. Whereas if they were able to kind of have a have better guidance and understanding of what was going on, then they might not be proposing such shit.

C. Derick Varn 2:22:31

Yeah, I actually uh one of my critiques of the Reformation and not even the Enlightenment, so I guess, and I've been called a crypto reactionary for saying this, but that that form of Protestantism eventually, because of its removal of like liturgical structures and structure of consciousness and symbolism, renders belief into the purely ideological. I mean, particularly when you focus on belief itself, like you they're really concerned about what you believe and not even what you do, yeah. And I think that that weirdly is copacetic with what we might call ideological things in modernity because it doesn't give you a whole lot of way to process things embodiedly, it's just something that you have to kind of process through either politics or through pure belief, and also somehow separating those two out, yeah. Um, which you can't really do.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:31

There's a great book. Have you read the book Um The Sacking of the Altars? No, I have not. It's about the the British Reformation. Uh it's I can't know if it's it might be up here in front of me. I can't see it, but anyway, but but it talks about you know, he tries to reconstruct what the church was like before the Reformation, the church in Britain was like before the Reformation. And yeah, I mean it has I think it would be he describes something that's far more like a kind of Hindu, like like what you might see in India at the moment, where there are you know angels and demons, and and I think and I think I'm my understanding of Jung was helped massively. My so my wife is is Indian Malaysian, and so when we get to Malaysia, we spend quite a lot of time in the Hindu temple. And you go into the Hindu temple and it's kind of all laid out for you, like all the different different Vedic entities and stuff. And and yeah, and I can I and yeah, I can I can I've experienced that. So it's definitely I definitely find through you know, I'm not a not a Hindu by any stretch of the imagination, but but going into the temple and and seeing the different images and the stories and stuff is certainly there's there are processes, there are mental processes going on for me when I go into that space.

C. Derick Varn 2:24:47

Yeah, I mean, I I've had similar responses. I feel comfortable in most religious things, except for Protestant churches, because they feel weirdly blank. Yeah, it's just yeah, it's just uh yeah. I mean, it and honestly, Church of England is not the worst offender on that at all. Like, we yeah, like your Protestants are mild, yeah. Yeah, um, but it it it is interesting, you know, growing up in that world because I grew up around I mean, I grew up around like primitive Baptists, like snake handling was not out of my realm of knowing people who did that, yeah. Yeah, uh, so it's it is an interesting problem. And now I live in Utah, which you may know is not a theocracy, but it is, yeah, yeah, by an otherwise marginalized religion that doesn't really understand that the other Christians hate them, but they don't want them to hate. Yeah, it's just weird because recently there's been a push here to like teach the Bible, and I'm like, you know who's gonna push back on you on that? All the not Mormons, like, because they're not gonna accept your reading of this Bible, I can promise you. Uh so and it's it's interesting how that matters, and but I find Mormonism also interesting because it's somewhere in between the two spectrums, it's not yeah, it still does have some liturgy, although not a lot, and it's mostly Masonic and a little bit strange, but like but then it's also very Protestant. If you've ever been to a Mormon temple, which most people haven't, but I have not I have it looks like a shopping mall, right? Like a very weird blank, not even a shopping mall, it looks like the Fourier to a shopping mall with that is that has like one ancient font for baptism in it, and then everything else looks weirdly blank.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:44

I have read it's up here somewhere. I have I've yeah, I've read the Book of Mormon. There you go. Yes, a friend of mine, Mike, gave it to me. He was who isn't who is a Mormon with his test testament in it. And I don't know. I mean, it's great, like it's they they've still got a lot of magic in there.

C. Derick Varn 2:27:05

Oh, yeah, they they do. Um they're weird quasi-scientific Gnostics in a lot of ways. Um it's they also have a very dialectical relationship to capitalism because they're the most capitalist church today, but at one point they were basically communists for real.

SPEAKER_01 2:27:24

And but they're also like there's not just power corrupts.

C. Derick Varn 2:27:29

Oh, it's part of it's power corrupts. Part of it is the is particularly the Smith and Young got more and more into profit making later on, particularly Brigham Young. But I will say part of it is when you enforce tithes to get into the afterlife, you tend to have a lot of money, right? And so, I mean, the Mormon church is the second richest church on earth, and it it might be the richest in terms of just cash, because they require 10% of your gross income to even be kind of considered for temple marriage and whatnot, which you have to do, yeah, yeah, to be a fully fulfilled Mormon. So so yeah, I mean, part of it's corruption, although they're also strange in that all evangelicals claim to do charity, and Mormons aren't evangelicals, but they actually do charity, yeah. So, like they they they they do actually keep the poorest amongst them from starving and whatnot, which is not always true for everyone else. Although, weirdly, also, and this is something that'll shock my European like well, maybe not, I don't know. You can meet state block grant requirements for social services by Mormon charity, right? And that was something that that they got put in. So, like to get federal aid, the states have to do so much of their own spending on social

Psychedelics Ecotherapy And Symbolic Life

C. Derick Varn 2:29:08

welfare to get that welfare money, but the LDS church and Utah and the Utah government got the state to consider religious spending as part of that equation. Wow, um, so yeah, so yeah, there's this weird uh there's there's this weird way in which the US is a more secular country than like formally than you guys are in Britain, but also not at all, because we like we even have religious stuff written into our laws for meeting social welfare needs. So, and I don't think even most Americans don't know that, like that's not something that's common knowledge. So on that note, I I think people should read your book. Where can people find your work, Rob?

SPEAKER_01 2:29:55

So Radical Young is out from Revol later this month. You can pre-order it now. So go to Revol or Google Radical Young Revol, you'll find it. And yeah, just look out. I think it'll be all this you can sign up to the Revol Substack. I've got an essay coming in next week. I think what's what's the essay? The essay next week is following on from this talk, Acid Extremism Now.

C. Derick Varn 2:30:24

Yeah, I am um I found I've actually found your work from

Where To Find The Book

C. Derick Varn 2:30:28

from the Revo Substack. I scandalously have not written for it because maybe my tendencies to talk as opposed to write, Daredevil get a kick out of that, but um are are strong. But yeah, I think people should go find you on the Revo stuff. You're also you also work a lot with like strange exiles, right? With Bram over there, which is tied into Revo.

SPEAKER_01 2:30:51

But what yeah, I mean I've written I've written a couple of us, a couple of essays for him.

C. Derick Varn 2:30:55

Yeah, but people should check out your work. I find it interesting. Thank you so much. Thank you. Nice chat. Have a good evening. It's late there, so yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:31:04

I'm gonna get to bed now.