The Wes Cecil Podcast

Hello everyone! I want to share the audio of my live lecture from Maastricht, the Netherlands a couple Wednesdays ago, April 29.The lecture is on the phenomenology of AI in the mytho-poetic mind. Hope you enjoy. Here's the write-up:AI, in itself, may not actually be that interesting. However, the way we perceive and respond to the idea of AI marks a central tendency of human civilization, spanning the rise of the mytho-poetic outlook, to centralized religions through digital technology and, now, AI. By reflecting on how the narrative of AI is presented and distributed we learn much about our deeply ingrained cultural outlooks.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Almost completely forgotten as a value today, it was THE central value of a series of different philosophical systems across several different civilizations over 1,000s of years. Without Wisdom as a value, we have less capacity to develop nobility, joy, or beauty as discussed in earlier episodes. Yet, we still seek to understand ourselves and our world and likely wisdom will never truly go away.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Krishna explains that the soul is immortal and that rebirth is unending so there is no need to worry about killing one’s family as you aren’t really doing anything that matters. Instead, focus on wisdom and duty to achieve one’s dharma and everything else that follows will be right. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unlike the other values discussed, Heroism would seem to be a central value of contemporary society. However, upon closer inspection, it is clear that traditional notions of heroism - of which there are a range - are not all that represented. While the idea of suffering and sacrifice remain, the overall vision of transformation, agency and a transcendent goal seem to largely be ignored. While a prominent ideal, our current understanding would be met with derision by many thinkers of the past.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A great opening! “Why, Krishna, should I kill my family and friends?” This question is the ethical question at the center of the work that allows for a complete re-imagining of Hinduism and the spiritual and social contract of ancient India. The layers of background that inform seemingly even simple passages is a bit overwhelming but hopefully this introduction will help out a little. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who could be opposed to Joy? Well, it turns out that despite being a central value in several different philosophical systems for 1,000s of years, contemporary society has little use for the cultivation of Joy. A diffuse concept, I focus on providing several literary examples and suggestions for further study and reflection. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone, I'm very excited to announce that I will be giving two live lectures this week in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The subjects of these lectures and registration for them is included below.If you are in or nearby the Netherlands and are able to attend I would love to see you there.Artificial (Intelligence) MythologyWednesday 29 April, 19:30Karl Dittrich Hall, Student Services Centre, Bonnefantenstraat 2, MaastrichtAI, in itself, may not actually be that interesting. However, the way we perceive and respond to the idea of AI marks a central tendency of human civilization, spanning the rise of the mytho-poetic outlook, to centralized religions through digital technology and, now, AI. By reflecting on how the narrative of AI is presented and distributed we learn much about our deeply ingrained cultural outlooks.Register for Artificial (Intelligence) Mythology here: https://www.aanmelder.nl/175909/subscribeHow Things MeanLecture by Dr. Wes CecilThursday 30 April - 13:30-16:00Room 1.018, Building 76S, FaSoS, To be reached through Grote Gracht 90-92, Maastricht We make sense of the world through our values. Unfortunately, we have become overwhelmed with discourse and media. We no longer feel like we can make sense of the world through our own values. In this lecture Dr. Cecil will share his critical take on our responsibility to slow down our media consumption and to think about our values. The lecture will be done in an accessible and engaging format using parables, stories and personal accounts to make the topic engaging and stimulating. Register for How Things Mean lecture here:https://forms.microsoft.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=AUGsYwXdcUe81i4qVCHl-q12LH4FbzVMj8FQZT-Y1olUMU5WQ0s3RFRRTThHQUNRSDZERTBWM0Q1OC4u&route=shorturl Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A few questions and my own musings on the latest Values episode about the nature of Nobility as seen through the eyes of T.S. Eliot. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Not just a value that is out of fashion, but one that is actively and consistently attacked by our society. The notion of cultivating a noble self governed by humility, self-control, wisdom and uprightness seems both wildly out of fashion and arrogant. However, for millennia, this was a central goal of major philosophical systems. Contemporary culture sees any sense of nobility as a cover for some kind of scam or corruption. We allow little space to see others, and hence ourselves, as possibly or even genuinely Noble in character.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2 weeks we will begin a new series exploring the Bhagavad Gita as a means of orienting oneself within the vast and fascinating literature and thought of classical Hindu thought. An extraordinary and central text that works on a number of important levels within the larger epic of the Mahabharata while also representing an inflection point in the development of Hindu thought. I wanted to share this intro with you in advance so you can have time to acquire a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. The Penguin edition is the version I will be using. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A reflection on the power of biography to inspire and help guide us in our pursuit of beauty. These two examples are, at least for me, immensely helpful in shaking off the cultural assumptions and outlooks that try to shape our goals and, hence, decision making. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With Health, Beauty has historically been considered an intrinsic value. However, our contemporary society does not just undervalue beauty, it actively works to prevent beauty from being perceived either as a value or, even more insidiously, as an active evil. By taking a moment and reflecting on our own perception of beauty and looking to cultivate in our environment we can use a sense of personal values to fundamentally transform our experience of the world.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Not a rhetorical ploy, but an actual question. The strange form of American ‘Democracy’ today raises the very real idea that at some point a lack of competition in elections, the duopoly of the hold on power and the control exerted over the process of elections by un-elected officials produces a system that is functionally no longer really a democracy. Further, and I forgot to mention this in the lecture, the current structure ensures that the most senior and powerful members of both parties are not, functionally, forced to face an actual election. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Often discussed as an ‘implicit’ good, health is nonetheless a relatively low priority in many modern societies. We have both a poor understanding of what constitutes health as well as a strong cultural resistance to pursuing health as a key value in our lives. Any attempt to prioritize health will generally provide a powerful education in the underlying cultural values that shape our lives and, more often than not, resist the notion of health as a core good.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A reflection on our capacity to overwhelm our actual experience of the world with abstract concepts that somehow is often more powerful than even our immediate physical surroundings. I was prompted to these thoughts by recent experiences mowing my lawn and spending time in some very different kitchens.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A brief introduction to the field of values and why they matter as a subject of reflection. Fundamentally, we understand the world through our values so reflecting on our values and potentially even changing them gives us the opportunity to dramatically alter our experience of the world.  Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A brief argument in favor of reading biographies as a warmup for a new series that will be coming very soon!Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A long footnote to the Late Capitalism series in which I discuss the, at least to me, very important difference between these two concepts. While commodification is still going on, it is really the advent of this new financial world that has come to dominate our world in many quite dangerous ways. Perhaps a long discourse that interests only me.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An invitation to explore the power of being wrong. In a culture that emphasizes the importance of rightness over a whole range of other possible values like harmony, beauty, health, fabulousness, inspiration, and so on, being wrong can be a liberating and enlightening experience. Once one begins being wrong, it lifts a burden of outlook and opens up a whole range of different experiences and orientations that are simply impossible within the RIght/Wrong dialectic.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecilImage Attribution: “Guiding Light” by Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

While our particular brand of history is unique, people have been living history for a long time. By looking back to some earlier patterns of living that were more health-giving and joy-supporting than the form of life relentlessly promoted to us today, we can gain a few clues as to how we can adapt in the face of our challenges. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nietzsche is not just presenting a series of arguments, he is modelling a very different approach to thinking and understanding our world than we usually encounter. To conclude our read-along, I reflect on the structure of his arguments and how they are as, or even more, important than the actual content. In the end, like a poem, Nietzsche invites us to participate in the creation of our own understanding. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A reflection on the global structure of Late Capitalism encapsulated in Cheerios as an example that can help us understand the nature of the world we inhabit. I also cover the unanswerable question, “Why has 70 years of efficiency and progress made Cheerios so expensive” and the unspeakable word - “Deflation”. Hopefully having these small examples in our minds will help us to address the complexity and estrangement that assaults us everyday. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The final section finds Nietzsche in usual form attacking the notion of ‘levelling’ and ‘universal good’ and ‘Equality’. HIs driving force, following on Will to Power, is the pursuit of individual ideas that suit individuals and hence refute the drive towards universality or assumptions of ‘good’ or ‘true’. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Okay, I couldn’t help myself. Keurig is such a perfect example of how this entire orientation towards the world is destructive of more or less all the greatness and joy in life that I pause here to reflect in greater detail on the specifics of the Keurig case. I also think the example of FitBit and similar devices renting to us the capacity to connect with our bodies - and hence of course alienating us from our bodies - is similarly bizarre and disturbing. For the record, somewhere between 15-30 BILLION k-cups type pods are thrown away every year. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As long as we keep the values of Late Capitalism we will be trapped within and reproduce the problems associated with our current system. To reorient ourselves within our world we need to articulate for ourselves a new set of values. Two key elements is to resist the notion of money as a necessary arbiter of all things and to reevaluate our desire for haste. It is in large part our addiction to speed, haste, busyness and the attempt to live this way that opens us up to many of the problems we experience. Slowing down, doing less, and doing what we like are pretty much revolutionary today.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I pause for a moment to review the central concept for Nietzsche - the Will to Power - how it differs from the concept of will deployed by Schopenhauer and how it utterly reframes the debate around free-will and determinism (though most people don’t seem to notice). Hopefully, this provides a little more clarity and also suggests why it is both a crucial insight and pretty confusing all the same time.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Following on from the Unaskable Question, is the notion of how our health is intimately linked with our physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing. However, the logic of Late Capitalism, which we have been examining largely from the direction of money and economics, functions in precisely the same way when we look at our health. Unfortunately, but predictably, isolating people in stressful environments does not produce wellbeing nor is it actually being sought. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nietzsche reminds us that pain does not, in fact, correlate with truth. And while these chapters are a little confusing, he repeats his observation that all philosophy is derived from the philosopher’s autobiography - and in this case it is clearly Nietzsche expressing his sense of the world. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Musk's decision to absorb his failed Twitter company into his failing AI company which he is now folding into his cash positive satellite launch company is such a perfect example of Late Capitalism I couldn’t help but comment. Bizarrely, Musk denies he has a car company, or a telecommunications company, or a rocket building company. Why would a successful 19th century industrialist systematically deny the companies he’s built? Late Capitalism. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We know money answereth all things and that as long as we get money, keep money, and have more money then everything will be fine . . . of course this is completely and demonstrably wrong, and yet, the power of the Late Capitalist ethos reinforces this idea relentlessly as it prevents any other value from intervening in the process. However, if actually stop and ask - what is the source of my wealth, my wellbeing, my overflowing - well that is a potentially revolutionary question within the Late Capitalist ethos. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We arrive at perhaps the central theme Nietzsche has been building towards - the Will to Power. That life is not trying to survive but rather to thrive is the key argument he makes. He sees this as an extra-moral condition of existence because it is present in all living things - hence Beyond Good and Evil. That life force is motivating and shaping in every moment fundamentally alters the notion of a disinterested observer working within the framework of perfect reason to derive the Truth about the world.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials and Wes’s audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unsurprisingly, Late Capitalist outlooks have largely colonized our interactions with jobs. Both the structure of employment and the way we think about jobs has shifted dramatically over the last 40 years. Worse, our general cynicism about our current employment environment is itself a sign of how pervasive late capitalist outlooks have impacted even how we imagine our lives might be.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here Nietzsche critiques the whole notion that we ‘live in a simulation’ or that we live in a ‘hologram’ roughly 150 years before those concepts come into existence. In fact, however, he is really working against the Platonic tradition of perfect forms that haunted, and continues to haunt, the western concept of both the world and how we should, as ethical beings, respond to it.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, he's very active on Patreon)Plus, gain access to peer discussion groups, bonus lectures, additional course materials and Wes’s audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month. https://www.patreon.com/WesCecil Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The structure of our contemporary societies promotes an increasingly powerful focus on isolated individuals as not just a model, but the model of a quality and ‘successful’ life. As isolated individuals we increasingly struggle to meet our basic needs by interacting with globalized and financialized systems that exploit us. The increase in loneliness, anxiety, suicide, and other mental health problems is a predictable and necessary outcome of an increasingly exploitative world in which individuals are pitted against corporations. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nietzsche attacks the central moral document of his time - The Sermon on the Mount! Nietzsche argues in favor of subtlety, nuance, and life-affirmation as opposed to clarity and moral judgement. This is one of the key defining sections that allows us to understand Nietzsche mental make up and core beliefs. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just to make it absolutely clear how pervasive and singular the logic of Late Capitalism is, I present a brief reflection on the current events surrounding Greenland, Davos and global financial markets. I rarely comment on topical events, but the logic we have been discussing is so perfectly illustrated in recent statements by global leaders it just seemed to good to pass up without comment.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The emotional sense of contempt for others and the concept of scarcity are relentlessly promoted and reinforced as a NECESSARY corollary to the Late Capitalist worldview. By holding both other people and all possible values in contempt, Late Capitalism undermines alternative outlooks. And the creation of scarcity is necessary for maximum extraction of value from any trade. Together they form a fundamental poison that undermines even the possibility of living in an abundant, respectful world. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nietzsche reiterates his elitist ideals and focuses on the challenges of communication across one’s cultural assumptions. He points out the difficulties of being both misunderstood and outside even of the possibility of sympathy. All philosophy is autobiography indeed.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here are four examples rising from the very personal and small - gift cards - to the national and international difficulties facing governments trying to deal with the rising costs of retirement. The patterns we have been discussing are here exposed in, perhaps, excessive detail. However, I feel it is important to see the many manifestations of this logic before we move on to the larger philosophical implications for ourselves and our culture. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chapter II presents a different direction for Nietzsche to attack contemporary philosophical modes by emphasizing how the obsession with TRUTH has warped the outlook of most philosophers and led them to make dubious arguments but, more importantly for Nietzsche, to play-act as martyrs.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Along with the productivity myth, the GDP myth misleads our decision makers and obscures key aspects of our economic reality - there has actually been rather slow GDP growth for decades and much of what has taken place has made the economy worse for citizens rather than better.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nietzsche emphasizes the difficulties we will encounter as we attempt to abandon morals and see the world as it is -free from natural laws and order and subject only to the interplay of power. If nothing else, you can’t say we haven’t been warned.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An example of what it means to think with VALUES as opposed to FINANCE. Not saying the workers are correct, though I agree with them, but that their arguments are coming from an entirely different value set.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Democratic governments are globally unpopular and part of the reason is the bind the Late Capitalist logic places them in. Growth and investment GOOD we should do MORE so everything keeps getting BETTER while at the same time having to continuously cut budgets, services, promises and often raise taxes - all unpopular. As of yet, they have not recognized the faultiness of the premises, neither right nor left, and hence they cannot begin to address the issues we actually face. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So now Nietzsche wants to point out how systematically our cultures and grammar influence our capacity to think philosophically - further undermining the notion of Philosophy as an arbiter of transcendent truth. Then, in chapter 21, he decides to attack cause and effect, number, law, relativity and many other concepts we like to think help us think but which Nietzsche considers just so much mythologizing.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I ran into such a perfect example of financialization - stepping in between landlords and tenants for rent payments - I just had to share. I try to be cynical, but I can’t keep up.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The elimination of all measures of worth besides price leaves us lost in a world where, with the removal of price, we have no ability to make judgements whatsoever. This is perhaps the single most debilitating impact of Late Capitalism.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A response to some comments about Steam and a note on an interesting quote from Andre Gide.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spotify represents a case study in how the logic of Late Capitalism ramifies throughout our lives in ways that destroys fundamental aspects of our culture. Our love of music is leveraged to destroy the ecosystem of music creation and enjoyment. The pattern represented by Spotify is repeated throughout every cultural sphere. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So much for Free Will. Herein Nietzsche attacks the whole question of Free Will - not taking a side but simply pointing out the meaninglessness of most of the conversations surrounding free will.Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON to get your questions answered by Wes!Plus, gain access to course materials, reading lists, peer discussions, bonus lectures, and Wes’s weekly diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.