My name is Ross Kennon. If you've never listened to this
show before, I'm one of the Co founders of the Nori Carbon
removal Marketplace and this is no longer a Nori podcast.
This podcast is now a private endeavor of mine.
This is the first post Nori reversing climate change episode
and it's a Halloween spectacular.
As the expression goes, we're talking about Gerita's Faust and
especially contrasting it against Marlowe's Faust.
The reason I wanted to do this with regards to climate change
is this idea of the Faustian bargain is it's very common.
I hear it used all the time. People mention it.
Whenever there's a deal that they assume is just bad, it's a
deal with the devil and they assumption that any deal with
the devil is actually just inherently bad.
That's a cultural meme that I think it's pretty powerful.
But actually it depends on the version of Faust that you're
reading. So Danny and I talk about this
in the show. I'm going to try and give you
some context here so we don't just throw you in and it's too
much to to get a grip on. But the Faust mythology is old.
There ostensibly was an actual person named Phaus who was a
German alchemist and allegedly made a deal with a devil named
Mephistopolis and got amazing powers in return and ultimately
had to give his soul to the devil in exchange for access to
these greatly enhanced human abilities.
One of the most famous versions of the Faust story is told
through Christopher Marlowe, who's, you know, a contemporary
of William Shakespeare's and Elizabethan England.
And that story is a very straightforward moral parable.
It tells a story of how Faust cuts this deal with the devil,
gets his time to shine, and then he has to sell his soul and pay
the piper and go to hell. The Faust story is actually not
like this at all. Faust is written by Gerta, who
comes along about 200 years later, and he is this
wunderkind, polymath and brilliant writer associated very
strongly with the Enlightenment and also with the transition to
Romanticism. So this is always very clumsy
whenever there's big terms that describe entire historical
epochs, it makes people mad that never seemingly fails to people
are still fighting about the dark ages because the dark ages
in Europe were, you know, not to go full coffee talk, but they
were neither dark nor an age. So romanticism, though, let's
just I'm just going to skip ahead here.
Enlightenment, if you're a conservative, is a hoax.
It's not actually enlightening. It's actually this horrible step
backwards where humanity has this revealed truths and
Christianity and humanity is turning his back on it in favor
of lower pursuits like science or deism, where God put the
fundamental laws of physics into motion, but then stepped away.
And everything that we see as a result of those actions that
proceed from those laws naturally working their ways
out. If you're a progressive person,
it is this time when new ideas about how civilization should be
governed, who should have rights, who should have a say in
Rule and science is, you know, obviously making huge strides
all during this time. The Industrial Revolution is
also taking place concurrently. By the end of the 18th century,
the Industrial Revolution is starting to pick up and it never
slows down. And in the early 19th century,
especially in Great Britain are really starting to take off with
wool and textile manufacturing and steam production and mining.
And of course this is where you have that line.
Dark satanic mills. That's a romantic criticism of
industrial civilization. So Romanticism is a post
Enlightenment philosophy of the 19th century, which is a
rebellion against industrial civilization where humans no
longer work in conjunction with the seasons.
They no longer follow the movement of the sun during the
day. They need clocks that tell them
what power and what minute they need to be at the factory.
And this process of moving humans away from the countryside
and the sort of pastoral life into cities where their lives
are heavily regimented and controlled.
And so Romanticism is also very strongly associated with a
rebellion against organization and structure.
It's interested in individual human feeling.
So if you have religious beliefs that are not affiliated with the
church, if you are spiritual but not religious, if you do what
feels right, those are sentiments that are quite
individualistic in a way. And you can use them in ways
that are for the greater good or for humanity or some collective,
but they rely very heavily upon your own judgement and are thus
different from accepting the revealed wisdom of text or
tradition or something like that.
You've broken away. And so Faust is a representation
of this. Danny and I get into this of why
now? Like, why should we be talking
about witches and stuff after the Enlightenment?
I think part of it is there's a calling to go back to this
simple way of understanding natural world.
If you are sympathetic to witchcraft, then you know that
it is often about the interaction of humans with the
spiritual world that is often at play within nature.
It's something that humans can't access within this worldview,
and therefore it isn't an inherently bad thing.
I think within Romanticism it wouldn't surprise me actually.
I don't know about this in particular.
This is speculative. It wouldn't surprise me if there
was a rebirth of interest in things like witchcraft during
Romanticism. But anyways, what's interesting
about the difference between Christopher Marlowe's Faust,
where Faust has to go to hell and pay the price, but that is
not actually what happens. Van Goert's Faust.
So Romanticism I associate with sincerity, and it almost matters
more that you continue. To strive.
That it isn't about outcome so much, it's about sincerity and
attempt in striving. And because of that, the deal
that is struck in the Gerta version is that Faust can have
his enhanced powers, but so long as he never stopped striving for
something greater, which is a deal that he's willing to make
because he actually is never going to stop striving because
the nature of humanity is, is to strive in this way, which is not
a very conservative idea. I'm using conservative in the
sense like, think about how the hobbits are in the Shire, right?
Like there's almost no time, there's no history in the Shire.
Sure, events happen, there's gossip about which families do
what. I get the feeling that if you
are an ambitious Hobbit and you live in the Shire, you would
face tall poppy syndrome, where your neighbours would want to
cut you down to size for thinking that you are better
than them and that you were trying to step out and make
yourself seem above them in some way.
This is actually a common problem in more egalitarian
societies. Places like the Nordic countries
have a concept called log em, which I believe is the Swedish
term, but it just means sort of like average good fine.
And there's a tendency to drive towards this like everyone has
enough, no one's trying harder than they need to, and we're all
just sort of content to be equal in this way.
And that's not to say the striver or the contented 1 is
more or less good than the other.
Your mileage may vary depending upon what kind of life you'd
like to live, what kind of civilization you'd like to be a
part of. And obviously this is going to
influence your beliefs. Like someone who's very content
is not hoping for a transplanetary trans, solar
system, transgalaxy, future civilization.
You know, they probably think that's a bad idea.
And that's much beyond humanity's capacity is to even
desire. And in fact, desiring it may put
us at risk. So this is part of the classic
problem for Faust and the Marlow version, is that this desire for
capacities greater than what is natural for humans is inherently
dangerous. Now, it's a very conservative
idea. And you'll see that type of
conservative thought within environmentalism too.
It's not just a capital R Republican way of thinking or
that type of conservatism. It's in a lot of places.
It's one of those trans partisan intuitions that humans have that
represents itself in many different places.
It's not just a political party thing or just a politics thing.
It's a worldview orientation thing about humanity's place in
the cosmos, in the world. Where should we be?
How ambitious should we be to live lives that are appropriate
to our nature? Gerta thinks that actually, we
should never stop striving. And because he never does, he
wiggles out of this deal, never actually has to go to hell,
never has to pay for his sins, and is somehow saved.
He's saved by his sincerity. He's saved by his desire to
never stop trying. Wow.
I mean, that's an entirely different story, right?
Goes from being a fable about morality and about humanity's
place in the cosmos to being an exhortation to follow your own
judgement, to reach for the stars, as it were, and to just
really make a know of it. I don't actually even know what
it's supposed to say for climate people.
The the Marlowean version of the Faustian bargain has a very
natural fitting within climate politics, because that's a way
of saying that if you mess with this technology or this belief
for this policy, it's without doubt going to lead to
Mephistopheles coming and collecting your soul.
But if you are more of a in my freestyling here I was called
Gerta. An eco modernist?
You know, I haven't, I know because in in the Faustian
bargaining for Gerta, there is there is risk and as we talked
about with with Danny here, it's about probability.
So there is a chance that actually Faust, you know,
wearies of his of his increased abilities and finds that being
so much better and so much more astute brings him less pleasure
than when he had to work harder at it.
Or that he doesn't actually like knowing all this information,
that it actually is more of a burden and in which case he
would eventually trade it in and lose the deal and have to give
his soul. But that actually does not
happen. But the fact that there's risk
involved actually makes me like it more because it means, sure,
there is plenty of of technology that within climate that is
risky because all of it's risky. We're pumping carbon dioxide
underground and that could go poorly.
There might be geoengineering that's coming.
There might be solar radiation management.
There might be the spraying of materials in the stratosphere to
increase the Earth's albedo and make the planet more reflective.
And that might be necessary at some point.
I guess we'll see how extreme weather events and climate
change plays out. But it's very possible that that
gets deployed in the next decade or three.
I think it is a Faustian bargain, actually, in the
Gertian sense, because we don't know how that will go.
It might be a bargain that humanity can win and save our
souls. It could be the case that we
never stop striving, by which I mean we never can stop spraying.
We always have to keep striving, which is a criticism people make
of this particular type of geoengineering intervention that
once you start, you can't stop. So that's another funny way that
you can apply the Faustian bargain in a guerotine kind of
way. But I think what's interesting
about it is because there's so many versions of the story here
or ways that you can apply this key insight about what is
happening to Faust, that it's a more complex phrase to use in a
climate context that maybe meets the eye at first blush.
So at the risk of being absurdly pedantic and making an entire
show on this topic in order to explore this idea, I hope you
enjoy. Danny and I talk about a lot of
topics. It goes into all sorts of fun
Halloween ideas about the occult turn normal.
I hope you enjoy. You should definitely read the
classics. They have so much to say.
They're still speaking now. And thank you so much for
listening. Here is your show.
We just got started at the beginning here because otherwise
we're going to get too far away from it.
Everyone knows about it. And the climate connection here
is Faustian bargain, which is a term that people use a lot.
But it's actually one that I don't really.
Like very much. Why is this a book people will
talk about? Can you just introduce this for
listeners? Yeah, so I mean, Faust is
probably a name a lot of people have heard before.
And if you're like me, it, it's not something that would be at
the top of your reading list. But I, I was inspired to get
into it because I heard a bunch of occultists talking about it
on a podcast and it, the way they were describing it made it
sound extremely dynamic and just extremely dark and like more
psychedelic than what you might expect from something that was
written 200 years ago. And so it's also just for a
personal connection. I read it in my first year of
teaching and it's all about a guy that had kind of exhausted
all the possibilities of knowledge and he found himself
really no wiser than he was before, which is a Direct Line
from, from Faust. And so he does what I think a
lot of people would do is he turns to black magic.
He's like headaches. Well.
If logic and rationality and science and medicine are working
out for me, then yeah, let's let's conjure some demons and
spirits and, and that's, and that's the premise.
It doesn't even end up there. That's kind of where things
start. So it's it's got a lot more
genre trappings that people might expect.
It has a lot more genre trappings that people expect.
What does that mean? Well, I guess since it's so old,
maybe it's not fair to call them genre trappings, but it's, it's
got a lot of stuff related to like alchemy and magic.
And so like, if you've ever read Harry Potter before, then, if
I'm not mistaken, I, I, I have to write wrong about this.
But like Nicholas Flamel is, is referenced in Faust Part 1 as an
early alchemist. And if you've ever seen like
monkeys used in connection with, with witchcraft, as you might
see in like the Wizard of Oz, there's a scene that will reward
you for like having seen that before.
And obviously this is older, so it wasn't inspired by any of
those things. But when people think 200 year
old poetic verse, a Christian allegory, it doesn't sound very
fun. But it's like it's very metal
and it's very, it's very magical and kind of dark and maybe not
Dirk's fantasy, not quite into the castles aspect of it, but
they're they're visiting witches and and her talking monkeys and
making potions and, and wishing for different things and
conjuring spirits. It's it's a blast.
You know it's a. Strange area for subject matter
because post enlightenment the world is not typically
considered as enchanted as it was.
Renaissance sort of starts it. Enlightenment really stabs it
good. So you would expect subject
matter like this hundreds of years before the romantic era in
the 19th century. But why now?
Like why would it be worth talking about witches and the
the early 19th century? I mean, it's, it's a fantastic
question. And I think a lot of the answer
is revealed in the flaming that Goethe brought to a lot of his
like, scientific and literary investigation because he he
really wanted to legitimize himself as a scientist.
And he actually discovered or rediscovered the intermaxillary
bone and the human, the human skull, I believe.
And that sounds like a very cut and dry legitimate thing to do.
But the reason he found that is that he was looking for a reason
why humans were different from the rest of the animals because
we are, you know, created in the image of God.
And so even though he didn't explicitly write about his
belief in hermeticism and alchemy, it is all over his
fictional work. And so it's not clear to me if
he was intentionally trying to disguise it in his personal
writings, but it doesn't seem like he's doing it just for the
imagery. Like this is a guy that believed
in the Hermetic ideal of as Above So Below, which isn't just
about transcendent influence on the microcosm, it's also about
how you should expect to find parallels between the sciences.
And just to be perfectly clear, this is scientifically
inaccurate, but it's wrong in this really beautiful way that
like the the growth of a flower should mirror the human
aspiration toward God, you know, and, and so a lot of his stuff
in Faust and also his novel Elective Affinities is about
kind of creating these parallels between metals and and human
development, or finding these these connections between
different scientific processes that again, have since been
discredited. But as an aesthetic and a symbol
set to work with, it is just absolutely gorgeous.
For symbolic reasons, it's hard to argue that that's not an
extremely useful set of tools to have in your tool chest.
And obviously there's crossover with the development of science.
I associate Newton pretty strongly with the cult interest
and I don't think you will talk about that probably as much as
it might want to. But there's a lot of alchemy in
the development of chemistry. It's in the, it's in the name
alchemy. It's like right there, but I
don't know, I think at some point this got separated and
somehow occultism and alchemy has a parallel life outside of
the sciences. It was deemed no longer an
acceptable pursuit of knowledge and became either associated
with alternative lifestyles, rejection of traditional faiths,
music that is not part of the mainstream, witchcraft, the
Rams, upside down crosses provoking suburban parents, and
I don't know how did that even happen historically because it
it was once overlapping. Yeah, I mean, I, I think a lot
of the more recent stuff is actually just a matter of like
the Satanic panic and, and one of the reasons that it's kind of
hard to research is not all of the alchemists agree on like
what the symbols mean. And so it's not like you can
easily go out and like brush up on, you know, oh, the color red
always means this, light always means this.
It's like a lot of them are are speculating when they're when
they're creating these framing devices.
So all of that is to say that like even something like the
Baphomet, if I understand correctly, did not originally
have like a satanic implication to it.
But since it's non Christian and outside of the mainstream, I
think it was just deemed satanic because it's not Jesus, right.
And it's scary too. It's this hairy goat person or
hairy goat man, you know. So I, that would be my
assumption is that it's, it's not mainstream and so people are
going to assign some, some evil tendencies.
But all that is to say is that Satanism is part of the occult
too. So like, it's it really?
Depends on which direction will take the conversation.
You know, some of my friends who are quite devout Eastern
Orthodox Christians. The husband of this couple
formerly was an occult practitioner.
And so as I dove into this topic, I'm trying to wrap my
head around why is this so popular now?
Because I know so many people who.
Like for instance, you will hear as above, so below a lot.
It's like one of those occult dog whistles.
Or once you hear it, you're like, oh, this is kind of
everywhere. Like people say this a lot.
Like it's that and astrology and, and crystals and pendulums
and things that you associate what they call.
They're kind of, they're all over the place.
This Orthodox couple, the husband was saying that he used
to be really into witchcraft in the occult and he was saying
that he thinks it's inherently anti Christian.
Well, one, he believes the Christian story is just the
truth. So you don't have to accept that
if you're listening. But in his world view, that's
the truth. And that he he said that he had
the strongest, most powerful occult experiences at the very
beginning of his experience with it.
And over time it weakened, which is the opposite of what you
would expect as you get more skilled in certain applications
of magic, if you think that's a a real thing that you can
practice and get better at. But he actually thought that it
was a way of almost inducing a sort of narcotic effect on
someone where, you know, wow, that was thrilling.
We had, you know, the chandelier Shuck when we did the Ouija
board. And every subsequent time, all
the responses became just enough to make sure he never quite
forgot about it, just enough to make sure he didn't just go back
to church and follow something that he thought was probably
more likely to be true. So he thinks it is just more of
a, a distraction than something powerful.
So from there, though, you're going to love this, he also
loves Hereditary. Danny and I, if you're listening
big RE Astor fans, all of what we're talking about will help
you appreciate horror films much more than you ever have in your
entire life. He has a hard time believing
that that is real. He thinks the occult is real,
but it's more of a distraction than it is meant to be an
actual. Like stuff like what happens in
Bowser and Hereditary is not does not happen.
Or in Robert Edgar's The Witch, he thinks stuff like that is not
really a commonplace experience, but we exaggerate it and it
distracts us from the true pursuit of the divine.
That's how he might frame it. What do you think about that?
You know, I mean, I sense it's such a deep and diverse study
and practice. I think that's, that's
completely legitimate, especially if, if that's what he
values. Because I mean, you know, me,
I'm, I'm kind of a postmodernist, but I, I like to
think of myself as an assertive postmodernist.
So it's like it's not a, a nihilism sort of thing, but at
the same time it's like it is kind of secular and atheistic in
the way I think about the occult where the rituals you do are
really to try to shift your mindset.
And so like, it's kind of like you could think of it as
exposure therapy. I could give you some examples
of some like really simple rituals that I've done.
And again, I'm, I'm coming at this not from the idea that I'm
summoning a demon or a God or something, but sort of like
using the power of symbolism to induce a, an experience for
myself. And so the, the first one that
comes to mind, it is I, I was invited to a wedding and it was
a group of people that I know pretty well, but I'm not really
the most dominant person in the group.
And so every once in a while when I would go out with them, I
would kind of shut down and be, play kind of safe and really not
be the most sociable version of myself.
Because, you know, not everybody wants to talk about Thomas
pension when we're all drinking champagne, you know, and.
You can believe it. So what I did is my my magic
ritual and this, this should resonate with any Catholics.
And I'm not, I'm not sure of the definition of sacraments and
other faiths, but a sacrament and Catholicism, which is this
own kind of ritual is it's an outward invisible sign that kind
of bears the mark of God, right. And so it's not enough to just
have a positive mindset, like you need some kind of totem or
some kind of thing in order to induce the experience for
yourself. And so mine was kind of the no
brainer is I just went out and bought this really nice suit and
I kind of made that my my totem with the specific intention and
specific preparation of priming myself.
And I just told myself it's like, I'm going to like socially
dominate this wedding and like be really on and like talk to
people and, and it, it, it sounds silly because it's so
down to earth, but like I, I treat you not.
I framed that entire experience through the lens of a cult magic
of me being like, I'm going to have this physical thing.
And especially an outfit is not a benign totem to give yourself
at your, your outfit can really affect how you move and operate
in spaces. And so I, I just like really
made sure that I cultivated the mindset that I was going to be
so Trimble and I wasn't going to shut down and what I would do if
I felt like I was kind of withdrawing.
And I had a blast, you know, And so I think if you look at it
through terms, through the terms of like you have a subconscious
mind and you'd have emotional predispositions.
And just like exposure therapy can kind of shake you out of a,
a slunk. I think magic can kind of do the
same thing. That if if you put yourself in a
situation that you know is going to give you an emotional
experience, sometimes that's more interesting than thinking
of that as exposure therapy or like cognitive behavioral.
Therapy or something? Oh, that's a fun example of
Denny. That's really illuminating here.
He also reminds me very strongly of.
Yeah, well, I think I was really interested in early American
history when I was an undergrad in the 19th century.
I was fairly obsessed with the several courses on and the
burned over district of upstate New York always fascinated me.
And Mitch Horwitz also is very interested in this the, you
know, New Thought movement, Swedenborgianism, Mormonism.
There's a lot of things in here that even positive thinking
sounds innocuous at this time, but there was a period at which
that was actually a fairly heretical, it's sort of a cult
belief system. Do you agree with that?
Well, I mean, I, I think that especially a long time ago, if
your idea of religion is just about these, these truth claims,
and that if something kind of falls outside of that, then,
yeah, it's going to feel super radical.
And especially something as like ego driven as like getting what
you want. But that's why it's, I think
really illuminating to think of Aleister Crowley, who I, I
believe the, the main like tagline.
I'm, I'm using incorrect language here, but it's, it's
something to the effect of like do what thou wilt.
And that doesn't sound that crazy.
But if, if it's all about kind of responding to or
contradicting the will of God and putting your will above what
God wants, then yeah, that's going to sound like really scary
and really evil and really like, like, how dare you?
How, how dare you like not humble yourself before God's
plan and his whole thing was like, no, like what, what really
makes you powerful is getting what you want.
And like you can, you can use magic just to become more
assertive and, and to, you know, express your will.
And in a lot of ways, they, I mean, it kind of reminds me of
what Nietra was talking about and Beyond Good and evil is that
like, maybe morality actually isn't about following these
rules that are written in the sky, but it's just about opining
on things that have nothing to do with you when you're really
just too afraid to do what you want, you know?
And so, yeah, I, I, I think in a lot of ways it's going to sound
evil if you think that, you know, speaking up and getting
what you want is, is against God, you know?
I think there's something, well one, it sounds Capital R
Romantic, that is a very strong individualistic romantic style
of interacting with the world. You were saying there.
My personal experience is the sublime thing that I am choosing
to follow, not something someone else has laid before me.
I will walk into the woods myself and come out with the
truth on the other side. Well, the downside of this way
of thinking though, is you can think of how many people do you
know of that came up with their own answers, that we're not a
part of the conventional. This is kind of what you do at
the political ideology side of things.
None of the options are very good.
You end up with Hitler, you end up with Lennon and Stalin.
Or now, like those are people who are sort of explicitly
atheistic, but we're saying that actually Christianity is sort of
a Jewish attempt to corrupt the Aryan man.
And actually it's a way of glorifying weakness so that the
the Jews who rule the world can keep the Aryan man down.
I'm just quoting his bad ideas. But just thinking about like,
OK, I know how the world should be ordered.
The world should be ordered where the proletariat should
rule, and the bourgeoisie and those of their useful idiot
allies should be put to death or enslaved for the benefit of the
proletariat who may oppress. And that doesn't really lead to
any place worth going either. It's pretty bad as well.
I even see that sometimes where people who don't follow
convention and don't get married and don't have kids and don't go
down, that there's plenty of ways to legitimately be happy
doing that, and there's plenty of unhappy people who did do
that. But you take a greater risk when
you disobey the collected, passed down wisdom from a very
long, long, long time and try to do something that is unique.
There's there's comfort in the norm, there's comfort in the
ritual, there's comfort in the path.
And if you stray from it, you do so at your peril.
Your your risk of return goes up.
Potentially you might end up with a lifestyle no one else has
and end up with like Faust, like Faust has something that
basically no one else on earth has.
And it is by all accounts sublime.
And it even works out for him, unless it's the Marlow version,
in which case you are, you really made a bad deal and it
ended up on the bad side of the scale.
It's the expected value is negatively infinite is how you
might say it in probabilities. It's bad.
It's real bad. So I don't know, I think there's
something to be said about just being that conservative person
and not going over. Otherwise you're like, you're
worshipping devils and then you're judging people who go to
church. Like, come on.
Like, like, one of those is clearly more dangerous than the
other, right? Well, yeah.
And, and that's why I, I ultimately think that it's, it's
really less about what's inherently found in this belief
system, which is, you know, often self contradictory and
like one author is going to tell you the exact opposite of what
the other author tells you and, and really much more about your
disposition. And so it, it's interesting
because I am not really into Christianity, but I am also like
a corn fed Midwestern boy who was raised in the Catholic
Church. And so as much as I as an adult
kind of consciously reject some of that, I think a lot of that
is in my forward wiring. And I'm the kind of guy that my
magic ritual would be to be like sociable at a wedding, you know,
like I'm not really somebody that would really use it to do
something super devious. And so like, I, I think it is
going to come down to just like, you know, if I can use the word
soul, just like what is in the soul?
And if it's about expressing your will and getting what you
want, then a beautiful soul will probably just want to be a
better asset to other people and use magic in order to be more on
and more emotionally available and maybe take some bigger risks
than they would otherwise. And then, you know, just to get
back to Hitler, I believe he was in a cultist.
And I don't know if he was doing it in like an atheistic way or
with firm credulity and all of the gods that he believed that
he was contacting or whatever. But but it was really his
intention that made the magic bad.
And so again, I got I think some of the evil connotation is more
of a 20th century reaction where it's like a lot of these guys
were just scientists and they were catching stuff on fire and
they thought like a weird chemical reaction where fire
burned pink was that that must be God because they had no other
explanation for that. So that's, that's my
justification. And I, I definitely hope it
doesn't, you know, have me burning down houses anytime
soon. But that's well, he's have to
keep the tabs on me. I mean, like some of the, OK,
some of it ends up maybe on the, oh, this is sort of like sweet
old women gathering herbs and creating poultices.
And I feel like a lot of the stories you hear, maybe it's
because it's more sensational, but they end up in this.
It's grim. A lot of it sounds great.
A lot of it sounds like people who dabble in things that
frankly, if there are supernatural beings like this,
that people engage with them in a frivolous way that is
extremely dangerous in exactly the same way that happens in
Talk to Me. Which do you like that film, by
the way? You know, I don't know if I ever
saw that. Was that another 824?
Sure was. That's good.
It's Australian film, you would like it.
It's it's basically about teenagers who find a severed
hand that is enchanted in some way and they invite spirits into
their bodies and it talks through them.
And that's basically how I imagine a lot of people that
engage with the occult is if it is real, if there are spirits
out there who are interested or willing to speak with humans,
it's likely on their terms. And we don't understand that
world very well at all. A lot of it is very
transactional, too. A lot of it seems very quid pro
quo. It's like you do something for
this entity. It does something for you.
But it always has this, like, monkey paw logic to it where it
never quite comes back to you in the way that you want.
It's always like, tainted, like, none of the stories you hear are
just like, yeah, I got to deal with the demon.
Everything worked out great. It's always just like Dad.
Yep. No, I mean, I, I, I think that's
a valid, that's a valid point of view because.
Well, on the other hand too, though, it's like I think you'd
only hear about the crazy stories of somebody who.
Like, you know, was. Possessed or somebody like they
lost their soul because they were dabbling in it too much.
And so maybe the more modest, healthy applications are just
not as sensational. That's true.
So maybe I'm being unfair then. So are there places where you're
saying either in your social life or other places where
people are using this in a way where you might think, wow, this
might be a spiritual practice that is not inherently chaotic,
dangerous, exposing? Yeah, yeah, there's, there's a
guy I really like named Jason Louvre, who he his whole vibe is
actually like, you shouldn't really read that much about it.
You should just start practicing it and you kind of approach it
as an atheist. And so you're skeptical of
everything. And then his, in his words, he's
like, you just see what sticks. And so that's, that's been kind
of my experience too. And I didn't follow his advice
because I got to him kind of later.
But I'm reading The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manley
P Hall right now and you know, I'd say for every insightful
point, he's got a bunch of stuff that I am just immediately like,
Nope, Well, that's not right. You know what, when it gets into
numerology, when it gets into him claiming the pyramids are
70,000 years old, it's like, I can't prove they're not.
But I, I'm just going to play it safe and kind of go with the
mainstream view on that. But, but again, it's like 1.
I don't think it should be the only tool in your toolbox.
You know, I, I think you should probably hold it with a loose
grasp. But then, but then too, I'd, I'd
really kind of go back to the like the, the postmodern framing
is that this is about like inducing an experience on
yourself by suspending your disbelief.
And so since I go into that, I are with it, with that framing,
I feel kind of protected because I don't necessarily believe in
spirits. Or demons you know.
I've, I've had interesting experiences before, but I can't
really prove that they took place outside of my mind's eye.
And if I've had dreams before, it seems closer to me, closer to
a dream than the idea that like a majestic being opened my
apartment door and like sat with me for a second, you know?
And so I think you could probably lose your mind if you
go into it being like, let's create some truth claims about
reality and about another dimension that we don't have
access to. Whereas if you go into it kind
of like, Oh yeah, maybe the fact that all of these different
Greek gods have these like different names in different
societies or like the Jesus story is, is not that some or
not that dissimilar from Dionysus.
Then you can see that it's not as much about the specifics of
anyone's story, but that there are these kind of trends that go
through history and there might be something archetypal about
them that you could benefit as an object of like meditation
with, if that makes sense. One thing that's difficult for
me, and maybe this is psychologizing myself in a way
that might help us make sense of some of my questions or why I
ask the questions that I ask is I think once you're open to
supernatural claims, besides the religion that you were raised in
or that you were brought up in, there's like the the first step
out of that is some sort of milk toast agnosticism where you're
like, maybe we either don't know or all streams lead to the same
river, to the same ocean. And that's like, it's all a way
of connecting with the divine. And they're all somewhat valid,
or many of them are or somewhat valid, maybe uniquely valid if
you take the stronger version of it.
But then once you start getting to more outlandish beliefs, like
you have to bite the bullet with agnosticism at some point where
you're like, OK, so it's not just that Islam and Christianity
and Shintoisms animus beliefs are correct.
You also have to believe that all of the strange enchantments
and demons and things that show up in horror movies might be
real. This might not just be, you
know, nightmares from our collective unconscious here.
This might actually be a real thing, which is what I was
hinting at earlier. Like if you, if you don't have
to agree with what I'm saying, you're not to listen to this and
say Ross is clearly right. But if you're listening to this,
then what is it like to entertain for a second that
there might be paranormal or supernatural experiences beyond
what we typically in our everyday lives think is
possible? It definitely makes horror
movies much scarier. You're like, what What even do
horror movies do in a universe where the supernatural and
paranormal or everyday lived experiences that we've hit the
tube and unable to see or unwilling to acknowledge, I
think they become much scarier, much better films.
And once I started going down this path with you, I, I love
horror films now. I never did my entire life.
And now I'm like, I, I love, I love just working my way through
the Canon. Well, I, you know, I haven't
seen a lot of horror movies since I've gotten into this, but
it, it definitely makes me want to give Hereditary.
And you know Bo is afraid to rewash.
I don't know, Afraid is like, what do you?
It's that that film is so allegorical, I'm not even sure
it knows what it's trying to do. But Hereditary is amazing.
Yeah. Just watch Bo is Afraid.
I don't want to be mean to it. Yeah, that, that one, it's like,
it's so abstract. I, I haven't been too interested
in any interpretations because it, it almost is like pure, pure
it, or like pure, you know, pure archetype or something.
So yeah, I, I, I definitely see it.
And I can see people taking my kind of postmodern perspective
as something that kind of takes the magic out of it.
But I, I really see it as something that like, if you
acknowledge that our minds are kind of bending reality and
we're not directly interfacing with the world and we're kind of
primed by our cultural conditioning and stuff, then I
don't think it does take the magic out of it to to see them
just assembles. But but at the same time, on a
topic that's kind of caught my interest recently is that a lot
of people in Hospice several weeks before they die start to
interact with their dead relatives.
And that's like not an uncommon experience.
And it'd be different if it was just one off kind of a crazy
story, your uncle on his deathbed, you know, saw your
grandma or something. But I think a lot of people have
experiences with their dead relatives and and even different
things of like not just being reminded of an ex-girlfriend,
but like feeling her love again. Like people have experience like
that, that I think you know it to to say that that's just the
construction of your mind kind of misses the point.
Is that like, no, you're, you're maybe struck with such grief
over loss that your brain produces something for you.
But I think it kind of hints to the idea that there might be
this other dimension. I couldn't prove it and that's
not really my interest anyway. But I think that maybe I'm
playing it safe by talking about it only symbolically.
You know, I, I think it's just easier to talk about if I say
that it's symbol symbolism. But like, yeah, I mean, the the
world is a mysterious place and maybe we just haven't created
the antenna yet that can catch that field or describe it
quantitatively, you know? Yeah, I love that.
I'm very, I'm very open to that possibility, more open than I've
been in the past toward it. Do you like The Sixth Sense?
You know, I haven't seen it since I was a kid.
I remember loving it as a kid though.
Rewatch it. It's one of the best ghost
stories that I've seen, and mostly because of the way it
describes ghosts, which Hailey Joel Osmond describes them as
like, they don't know that they're dead.
They're caught in these loops and they're reenacting these
plays and they cannot break. It's like a very literary
reading of ghosts, right? Because I think of ghosts, I
think of unfinished business, you know, like they're, they
were so preoccupied with things in their life they were unable
to finish. They might not even know that
they're dead. They're trying to finish
whatever task they were. They might even forget who they
Did you watch a ghost story, by the way, the Casey Affleck 1.
I've not, I know it. It's kind of like low, low
production, but like high writing and stuff like that.
Is it right? Yeah, but it's pretty similar to
that. It's about attachment to place
and about loops and being caught in them and and what is time.
And there's a lot of there's like some really sophisticated
smart ideas in both of these films.
The 6th Sense is more straightforward, but I love that
rendering of ghosts too. Where, you know, they they're
caught in their own pain, they're caught in their
unfinished business and they cannot move on.
And whether that's literary, whether that's actually how the
afterlife may or may not work in reality, it's sort of besides
the point. The reason it's why it's so
prolific in literature and human experience is because it's a
beautiful idea that makes us think about how we're all going
to die with unfinished business. And that's a beautiful tragedy,
probably more tragedy than anything of what it means to
have a body that will one day pass away.
Oh yeah, I mean it God, that it, it immediately makes me think
that like, you know, on one level it would be scary to die
and then to be judged in either sense of heaven or hell, you
know, that's existentially terrifying.
But I think even more terrifying would be to die and then have to
like prove your credulity and to be like, you actually don't get
to go to heaven unless you believe it's real or you have to
like be committal because like, you know, I love, I love ideas
and reading and, and philosophizing and investing in
the question more than the answer.
And so to me, that would be my hell of being like, you're dead
now. You have to like double down on
what you think is true. And that's where you'll end up.
And I'll be like, oh God, like that.
I I can't have anything more terrifying than that, you know?
This has come up on so many podcasts I've been up on
whenever we talk about Christianity because the people
who get the worst of it from Jesus are the people who, you
know, put their hand on the pile and look back, right?
They're not worthy of the Kingdom of God.
So if you if you once were believing or if you're like kind
of believing, but you don't pick up your cross and follow Jesus,
you're in like literally the worst spot you can be in.
The non believers, the sinners, the publicans, like they get
some free passes. But if you're half hearted about
this, you're bad. That's that's my fear is that it
ultimately ends up being true. I am in literally the worst
possible spot. Yeah, You know, I mean, it's,
it's definitely a question that keeps me up at night, but
doesn't necessarily occupy me during the day.
You know, and I, I got into a lot of this stuff because I, I
had kind of a spiritual experience when I got into
teaching. And that, that's given me a lot
more faith, if I can use that word, because it felt very
obvious, you know, and it, I would say almost every other
decision in my life has always been kind of rolling the dice
and just, you know, seeing what happens because I suck at
planning. But this, this felt like, oh,
wow, no, like you really stumbled on something.
You need to pursue this for, for spiritual reasons.
And so I, I found the more that I lean into stuff like that, the
more belief about the details might not be as important.
But again, I'm, I'm still sweating at night sometimes.
So one thing I. Don't like is whenever there's a
technology or a plan that people don't like or that it has undue
risk or they perceive undue risk, they'll call it a Faustian
bargain. And this happens in climate,
especially with things like spring aerosols into the
stratosphere to make the Earth more reflective, to reduce the
heating effect of the planet. And people will say it's a
Faustian bargain, which is another way of saying you're
making a deal with the devil. And what I don't like about this
is that it implies that it didn't work out well for Faust,
but it only makes sense in the Marlowe version where he gets
his comeuppance in the Girta version, as long as you spray
aerosols, but you keep striving and you keep trying in your
heart for more and more pleasure and more fulfillment, then
seemingly you you get to avoid punishment.
Is that a correct reading? I, I'm all for replacing any
Marlowe references with Gerto 1. So I, I like the, the direction
that you're going. And I, I don't know, I think
people are probably trying to bolster the argument by making
the reference to Faust, which is not like something that a lot of
people even read. So yeah, it, it seems like it
may be a little politically charged, a little, a little or
Luddite because I mean, I, I don't know, it, it seems to me
that technology is disruptive and I don't think we should
blindly trust it. But I don't know if there's a
lot of examples, especially in America of us being like, oh,
guys, there might be negative consequences.
Let's not, let's not follow technology.
And so maybe that's kind of cynical and pessimistic, but
like it seems to me that we would probably like innovate our
way out of climate issues before stopping carbon emissions.
Is that is that too heretical to say?
I mean, people think it, and I don't think it's a wrong thing
to think or plenty of smart people think that we are going
to innovate our way out of it. If they didn't think that, then
I don't know what they would be spending their time doing.
They probably wouldn't be working that much in climate
because I feel like climate work, especially climate tech,
is almost inherently based on a sense that we will either stop
climate change, reverse it, or at the very least slow it down
and make it less bad. If you didn't think that it'd be
hard to engage in this work with any sort of gusto, I would say.
Yeah, yeah, OK, Well, that's good.
I, I, I know, I don't know, because, I mean, you're
obviously more involved in the space.
And so like, yeah, I, I think if people are going to call many
technological solutions a Faustian bargain than it is.
Yeah, it's kind of appealing to like sinfulness or be like
you're, you're being greedy or, or like you're, you're looking
for like a loophole. Whereas like the actual Faustian
story, especially the the Goethe version is, is much more about
like, you know, that the, the nature of desire and the nature
of experience and stuff like that.
And so it, it might be like a pithy headline, but I'm, I'm not
convinced that there's a lot of, a lot of significance there, you
know? It's amazing that to do a
podcast that's entirely about being pedantic about a phrase
that is used incorrectly that well, like actually technically
is correct. If you read the Marlow like
them, certain technologies are fallacian bargaining because
they could and very well might lead to you just going to hell.
But I don't know actually, because there's risk and
weighted probabilities in this. It actually might be inherently
guillotine instead, like maybe it actually every every
fallacian bargaining is actually guillotine because it's all
about risk and no one knows that, you know, if you do solar
radiation management, we only get 20 years and then we all go
to hell. Actually, some people might make
that claim. Maybe some people would claim
that it the input output is 1 to 1.
So it's a lot of show for that little insight on that climate
topic. But wasn't it fun?
Oh my gosh, I it was a blast. I I could do three more hours.
Danny, we're at the end here. Is there anything that you'd
like to to plug? Anything that you're working on
right now? 100% So yeah, I've been working
on a novel that has some Faustian themes called The
Kingdom of Liminal Space that's going to have a concept album
with A2 and some other little mixed media goodies that are
currently under wraps, but that'll be coming out probably.
I'd originally said Christmas. It's probably looking more like
July at this point, but yes, stay tuned for that.
And also if you check out my channel off the wall novels on
YouTube and I'm Daniel Backer author on those social media
platforms, so. He has great videos too, very
educational. Even those weird things like go
to Edith Wharton's home, which, come on, that's, that's not your
style, Danny. You're trying to fool with that,
by the way. You know, it's for every
postmodern I I've got to, you know, do some critiques of the
Gilded Age. I I.
Yeah, keep you balanced. Thanks for being here, Danny.
Thank you, Ross.