The Weekly You Demon full steam ahead. The podcast over the past year or so have centered around a thing called existence strikes back or what I call existence strikes back. More technically, it would be the act of existence strikes back, the act of existence being like a Thomistic term, Thomas Aquinas, or more simply, I might call it the Tao, T-A-O, the Tao strikes back. And then I've been, I've been working on that project literally for 25 years.
The whole concept is why does the philosophy of existentialism keep sticking with us? It got popular, you know, with Kierkegaard, it got wildly popular after World War II and it just sticks with us in various forms. And that topic has interested me for years. I started fleshing it out about a couple years ago in great detail and then I read Ian McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary and the stuff in there, I think perfectly dovetailed with the existence strikes back project and Gnosticism thing that I was developing and the project kind of careened out of control at that point.
I'm estimating I'm up at around 80,000 words at this point, spread across, I don't know, 80 or so essays. So this week I am summarizing the hemisphere hypothesis from McGilchrist and the existence strikes back project. I got down to 2000 words. If you go to the daily demon, you'll also see like a 127 word summary of it, but this podcast is going to be about 2000 words and it's just the summary of these two concepts and bringing them together.
So we start off with the hemisphere hypothesis. It's this, the brain, we know consists of two halves, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. In a healthy person, they work together constantly and do many of the same things. Both halves are necessary for a healthy existence.
But the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere attend to the world differently. Our attention affects the world, which in turn affects us. Quote, the nature of the attention we bring to bear on anything alters what we find there, unquote. And that is a constant theme throughout McGilchrist's work.
If we pay attention to the world with the left hemisphere, we get a world that looks like the left. If we pay attention to the world with the right hemisphere, we get a world that looks like the right. It's a quote unquote vicious circle. And so I'm just going to give you the tautology that drives hemisphere hypothesis.
And it's the first line of a quote from William Blake. As a man is, so he sees. Who he is then determines how he sees. And how he sees determines what he finds.
And what he finds affects how he is. So it's that tautology and so you start thinking and looking with the left hemisphere, you start getting wrapped up in that world and you start acting like a man of the left hemisphere and same with the right hemisphere. And here's the thing. We are meant in the final analysis to attend to the world with the right hemisphere.
The left hemisphere's way of attending to the world is an expedient. It's meant to help the right hemisphere govern properly by bringing to the right hemisphere good information and handling mundane chores. It's meant to be the servant, the emissary of the right hemisphere. If you go to the Daily Demon and look for the elf lays down his harp to kill an orc, that kind of fleshes, I think that's probably the best essay I've written.
That kind of fleshes out how the hemispheres are supposed to work together. But anyway, here are a few key differences in the way the two hemispheres attend to the world. The left hemisphere yields focused attention. The right hemisphere yields broad attention.
The left hemisphere looks at the parts. The right hemisphere looks at the whole. The left hemisphere reaches out to manipulate and control the world for power. The right hemisphere reaches out to the world without purpose.
The left hemisphere seeks to apprehend. The right hemisphere seeks to comprehend. The left hemisphere is better with language and prose. It is a means to manipulate, apprehend, and control.
The right hemisphere is better with metaphor and poetry. The left hemisphere is either or. The right hemisphere is both and. The left hemisphere focuses on explicit knowledge.
The right hemisphere appreciates tacit knowledge. The left hemisphere deals with what's familiar. The right hemisphere deals with what's new. The person with a well-ordered soul will attend to the world with the right hemisphere primacy.
Or with right hemisphere primacy. And if a person attends to the world with left hemisphere primacy, he or she will have a disordered soul. Now shift over to the second major part of this project, the reality spectrum. Reality consists of three parts.
First, the Tao, then existence, and then essence. Actually, it's the Tao, essence, then existence. The Tao has been known by many names. Thomas Aquinas called it the act of existence.
Zen Buddhists call it the first principle of Zen. Noting that if you could name it, it would then be the second principle of Zen. Aquinas was very aware of the elusive nature of the Tao. He recognized it.
He respected it. At the end of his life, he got a view of it and was so awestruck, he quit writing, telling his friend Reginald that everything he had written was mere straw compared to what he had just seen. And this is from a man that even secular historians and philosophers consistently recognize as one of the greatest thinkers of all time. But it was fitting that Aquinas quit writing.
Language is the province of existence and its qualities, essence, traits. It is also the province of the left hemisphere. Part three, the great rejection. Aquinas was the pinnacle of Western civilization.
By pinnacle, I mean a civilization fully engaged with all three spheres of reality, the Tao, existence, and essence. The dark ages had long been gone. Civilization was advancing economically, intellectually, artistically, and scientifically. Aquinas lived from 1225 to 1274.
They're dates worth memorizing because after Aquinas, things fell apart. The 1300s were awful. Materially, things got better in the 1400s, but Europe continued to undergo a lot of emotional and psychological shocks, such as the fall of Constantinople and the discovery of the New World. In the 1500s, Europe was torn apart by the Reformation and the vicious 30 Years' War.
By the 1600s, Europe was tired. In particular, it was tired of the Tao, the attempts to understand it, philosophy, to interpret it in light of revelation, theology, the debates, polemics, the fighting, wars. Europe wanted something different, anything, just as long as it got away from the Tao. That's why a manifestly idiotic theory like Descartes took hold.
Descartes didn't look for the Tao, much less do he try to interpret or imply it. He started with his own mind and told others they could do the same. All truth started with one's ideas, not the Tao. Descartes' philosophy gave people certainty.
Everyone's side relief. The problem was Descartes' philosophy was simply absurd. It wholly separates mind and body, leaving no way for them to interact, which produces a shload of ridiculous conclusions. For example, my mind has no influence over whether I raise my hand or not.
Descartes himself might have been nuts. But that was okay to Europe. Everything was fine, just as long as it removed it from the Tao. Or anything was fine, I should say, just as long as it removed Europe from the Tao.
Tao fatigue is also why the highly questionable empirical approach of the other major pioneer of modernity, Francis Bacon, became so popular. Excuse me. Bacon said everyone should put aside the grand ideas and just focus on things that can be observed. We should build from the smallest to the greatest, induction, not build from the greatest to the smallest, deduction.
Between Cartesian rationalism and Baconian empiricism, the Tao was effectively sealed off. First, intellectual classes rejected the Tao, and then the rejection filtered throughout popular culture. It was a thing I call the great rejection. Modernity is the great rejection.
It is the rejection of the Tao. You see, the mere acknowledgement of the Tao induces a sense of existential humility. No matter how much knowledge or control you have, you're always confronted with that great nameless thing that you can neither know nor control. The Tao, if acknowledged, is an innate existential check against hubris.
Modernity, as projected by Western civilization hegemony over the world, rejected the Tao and thereby lost that existential check against hubris. With the Tao gone, modernity was ready to take control. It was ready to focus on what it could know and grasp. It was ready to conquer and colonialize.
It would use huge strides in technology, a la Bacon, to subjugate whole new worlds, often bringing back slavery, a thing that application of the Tao had largely eliminated in Western cultures. And in the meantime, rationalizing all of it, a la Descartes. Modernity has been a parade of rationalized systems, ersatz religions, men with absolute confidence in their ideas, thanks to Descartes, and science, thanks to Bacon, constructed their own worldviews, and no matter how ludicrous or evil, believed in them. The great Austrian philosopher of history, Eric Voegelin, identified the great rationalized systems, the ones designed to apply special knowledge to affect a change in the human condition, as various forms of Gnosticism, progressivism, communism, fascism, scientism.
Gnosticism particularly afflicts the left side of the political spectrum, but the right isn't immune to it, and even strains of libertarianism, like Ayn Rand's objectivism, are contaminated by Gnosticism. The results of these But perhaps most troubling, the left hemisphere isn't even aware that it's shut off. This is a constant theme in McGilchrist's work. He calls the left hemisphere as a, quote-unquote, silo mentality.
And here's his quote. The left hemisphere not only clearly does not know what it is talking about, but behaves as though it knows perfectly well. It is confident and unhesitating, even when it is talking about something of which it knows absolutely nothing. The left hemisphere, therefore, is entirely comfortable proceeding as though it's in complete mastery.
It's hubris. In fact, it might be the essential characteristic of hubris, exposure to anything that is not within, compatible with, one's own thoughts. It's a kind of existential solipsism, where everything's in your mind, going back to Descartes. Well, next section is The Dow Strikes Back.
Because unfortunately, the left hemisphere's superistic drive for dominance, the Dow can't be suppressed. It's part of reality and indeed is the ultimate reality, so people have an innate desire to find it. The past 200 years have seen scores of efforts to recapture the Dow. Here are just a few of its manifestations.
The rise of the occult and irrationalism. The popularity of existentialist philosophy, especially Albert Camus. The ongoing popularity of existentialist literature, like Flannery O'Connor and Dostoevsky. The popularity of Zen.
The intense attraction of St. Teresa of Lisieux's little way. The character of Forrest Gump. Jack Kerouac.
Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. The current renewed interest in psychedelics. Today's cottage industry of advice for escaping modern culture and the state. Mikhail Foucault's counterconduct in postmodernist thought in general.
Last section, we are today suffering under the minotaurs of the left hemisphere. You see, today's political battles aren't between Republicans and Democrats. They're not between the Beltway, you know, Washington, D.C. and Wall Street, and the rest of us.
It's not between the 1%, the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington axis of powers. It's not between the 1% and the rest of us, the 99%. It's between the minotaurs of the left hemisphere and everyone else. And the minotaurs of the left hemisphere are winning big time.
They have either won altogether or are nearing the endgame. Although the Dow can't be blotted away, truth will out. Artificial intelligence, which is the most extreme tool devised by the left hemisphere to date, might signal the endgame when the left hemisphere will wholly stomp out the Dow by wholly stomping out humanity, just as Lenin's Dow and tried to stomp out the Dow through mass murder and imprisonment in the Soviet Union. In the meantime, left hemisphere jockey minotaurs, excuse me, left hemisphere minotaurs are riding over Western culture and increasingly all other cultures which are squished by American military dominance if they resist.
The modern Gnostics, scientists, tech moguls, and Wall Street bankers, they're all captured by their left hemispheres. It's all they know and all they care about. Everything else is bunk. They can't see the Dow, they can't feel it, and people who think they can are delusional, superstitious, and otherwise beneath contempt, and can be, must be ignored, ridiculed, and otherwise marginalized by the left hemisphere axis powers.
As always, thanks for listening.