With regard to your suggestion to follow The Upheaval, and the topic the link led me to, I find it a deep irony that the author writes in this fashion, but am not going to pay to tell him that.
The U.S. has a long history of intervening in other countries—whether through outright military action, covert operations, economic pressure, or media influence—yet it often positions itself as the global arbiter of democracy and free speech. The hypocrisy becomes particularly glaring when it accuses European states of interference, especially given the much more nuanced and, in some cases, restrained approaches European nations take compared to the U.S.'s heavy-handed tactics.
The way the U.S. exerts control—whether through soft power, sanctions, or outright intervention—has shaped world politics for decades. And yet, it frequently deflects from its own actions by pointing fingers at others, especially when it comes to information control. The narrative management at home, where dissenting voices are marginalized or labeled as threats, mirrors the kind of suppression they accuse others of engaging in.
The article is more than a little disparaging to European countries, even if I agree that censorship in the West has become an oppressive force.
Sparks of illumination fly whenever you two are in dialogue! I look forward (yes - with "excitement!) to the unfolding revelations that will come with future conversations -
Thank you, Dr. Gilchrist, for sharing so freely with the rest of us!
I am grateful that your comments are open and a complete stranger like me can say something. You may regret this!
I confess to not loving NS Lyons. This is not his real name, which makes it very difficult to find out who his backers are, although it seems quite obvious.
I find his writing to be disingenuous. He pretends to be merely an observer of international events, but as a speaker at 'National Conservatism' events he clearly has skin in the game. I find him to be an apologist for some of the far right's worst excesses, all while pretending he isn't one of them. Since he is providing intellectual cover for the destruction of liberal democracy, I am certainly not going to pay for the privilege of sharing his propaganda.
I understand that many people might feel that. But I think public discourse has been manipulated by the 'liberal' - in reality authoritarian – left, so that the terms 'right' and 'far right' have lost their meaning. I think the only thing that matters is truth and this can exist on the 'left' or 'right' - no longer useful terms in my view. Much of what is now deemed 'right', or 'far right' even, would have been considered common sense by most people 20 years ago. But I do defend any person's right to put a less often voiced position before us, and I have found him consistently insightful, and never supporting violence, if that is what you are hinting at. Most of us are not wholly right, and it is valuable to have his voice heard, in my opinion. Thanks for your comment, all the same! Much appreciated.
I very much appreciate your reply and agree that other axes (such as authoritarianism) might be more helpful. However, I think it would very much help the search for truth if this person would let us know their real identity and who funds them.
While he uses a pen name, he's definitely not shy about revealing his face, so I imagine it wouldn't be difficult to figure out who he is. Not that anonymity bothers me (Ben Franklin wrote under a pen name). You can see this interview with him on UnHerd.
I'm also not very impressed by Lyons, who has been off my radar for a while. He has written some tortured stuff in the past trying to compare the PMC/"Blob" with the Chinese Communist Party. Felt desperate and unconvincing. Subtle? Not on your life.
I have to say as an admirer of your writing that the subtle distance that Lyons was taking from Vance wasn't clear to me.
He says that Europe has been fighting an information war on the USA, yet is silent on the information war being waged against liberals from Russian actors at an industrial scale, nor how this is weaponised to give power to the far right. Nor how the US has turned on it's allies in favour of a clearly hostile power that threatens its own borders. What does Vance mean by free speech? Freedom to say anything to anyone at anytime? His administration doesn't seem at all keen on free speech they won't let dissenting voices speak at all and threaten physical reprisals if challenged - as witnessed obviously by not letting Zelensky speak, threatening universities if their students protest, and leaving thousands of troops unarmed overnight who they were previously supporting.
I've been thinking about your book and the way it focuses on paths to truth, and the need to do this to overcome the kind of postmodern nihilism where there is no truth only infinite subjective opinions. Vance and the administration he serves seems not interested at all in the truth and only interested in free speech where it gives the freedom to weaponised mis-truths half truths or lies. The kinds of confabulation you attribute to the left hemisphere seem highly present in this
I am sure you are right that there are more bad actors on all sides, and in an era of mis- and dis-information, it is (unless you are in the secret service? and even then), hard to know what the truth is. I hope you might agree with that. In such circumstances it is always good to hear another point of view, especially, as in Lyons's case, where he says he has uncovered information suggesting that official bodies in Britain acted in an authoritarian manner deliberately to suppress knowledge we should have had access to at the time about Covid, and close down all discussions of immigration and two-tier policing on crime. Unless you know he is wrong, and think that all is well in the Britain of 2025, his voice has to be a helpful corrective to the culture that insists there is only one narrative, and even to question it is to make oneself a kind moral leper. I think in other words, we hear a lot about the side of the story you prefer, but we should be in the habit of listening to others. As I am sure you are in daily life. Thanks for the comment, anyway – long live free speech! I welcome civilised discussion with people who have a different point of view from my own.
I think that whilst I agree that it might be hard to know what the truth is, it's quite possible to identify different kinds of power and approaches to power. We know quite a lot about how Russian has approached information warfare, how it uses information dumping to sow confusion, how it used anti-vaccination sites to drip feed clear lies and confusion about atrocities it has committed in Syria and Ukraine, and how it employs people en masse to inflame talking points that further create wedges in social media online. It's been highly successful in weaponizing resentments through anti-woke sentiments.
There are some great sections in your books that illuminate why that might be such a successful strategy. The fixation on being absolutely right combined with moral superiority seems highly toxic and likely to cause moral leprosy.
I think we identify what's true by attempting to evaluate the character of the person we are hearing from. In practice that's difficult, and more so online. But it's what we do naturally and we scale it up to countries. It doesn't surprise me that official bodies would attempted to supress or manage. information about covid or employ armies of fact checkers. I don't think the character of this is authoritarian in the same way as the explicit authoritarianism we are seeing in the US now and Russia. That has a very distinct character. It's reactive, violent and untrustworthy in a different way to the slippery charm of liberal politicians and their desire to control information.
I don't think that all is well in Britain, or online and I do think that progressive tendencies to make people into moral lepers has exacerbated resentments. I think we need to find a more inclusive dialogue. However, I wonder if it's not simply a matter of preferring a story, but in having a clear sense of who is telling it, what kind of idea is standing behind them telling it and what they want from telling it. I prefer your writing, on the whole, because it gives me that sense. I don't get it from Lyon.
Anyway, like I say, I appreciate your response, and will have a look at it again
Typical that the comment section would first focus on your post-script. But nonetheless, thank you for drawing attention to Lyons. I first began paying attention to him after his excellent essay The China Convergence, which helped re-frame for me many patterns I had been observing in politics and culture. Whether I agree or disagree on any given point he makes, he does a good job of zooming out past the partisan narratives and suggesting broader systemic trends that map well on the the hemisphere hypothesis.
Back again after listening to this fascinating discussion, thank you for sharing it! I'll be very curious to hear if Mike discovers lateralization or patterns for integration/reduction in his models (for lack of a better word?)
Your explorations of negation also made me wonder if you've ever had a discussion with Peter Rollins about his Pyrotheology framework?
And thank you for the many rich seams around potential - that is a theme that I have been thinking about a lot lately in many contexts and hope to pull into a blog soon. It's wonderful to have some Whitehead to chase down on the subject.
Wow, I can see why you’re excited! I drove across Connecticut today, and so was able to listen. I was shocked a few times in the most wonderful way, like when Mike said that “the solution is reaching out to the agent as much as the agent is reaching for the solution. Symmetry.” I so appreciate that you explored together the question of human creativity all the way down to the molecular level. How extraordinary.
I called my husband in the middle of it to tell him about the spectrum of animacy down to rocks and molecules. He has been talking to our friend, who builds with stones. Our stone building friend insists that all gems have a different good for us like the various good of garden herbs and plants.
I have no personal experience with Shinto, just curiosity, and I wonder how the topic of Kami (the spirit of a place or material?) would intertwine with your talk. It was just delightful to hear.
We had a neighbor in South Carolina who was a builder. There was a little cottage nearby that had been left vacant for two years and I asked him how the roof fell in so quickly? He told me that any house without a person living in it ages seven times as fast, so as far as that cottage was concerned, it was 14 years alone.
Anyway, I loved the conversation and am very glad to hear it! Thank you.
The toolkit the two of you are missing is the Theological Toolkit (I know, I know). Just give me one attempt at telling the story:
First, there was the ground of being, let's call it Gob. Then Gob wanted to play, co-create, co-rule, so things needed to get more complex. Gob created a place of earth, wind, fire, air by zimzum-ing and placed a duality there and gave the duality its very breath/wind/spirit; this allowed the duality to go out into this rugged land and pass this breath along. The duality wanted to play even more, so Gob split the duality in two, but the two still needed each other, so they wed into one while remaining two. All Gob asked for was trust so that they could keep playing and stay in relation to each other.
But the two that became one which came from Gob were lured into grasping for even more of Gob's marvelous abilities. Gob could no longer trust the two and saw no other option, but to push them further out into the rugged land. The two became many and began to occasionally build beautiful things that were in line with Gob's design, like music and bricks and tools. But the potential that burned within them, could also be used for destruction and division, like rhythmic calls for violence or building walls to separate or even turning tools into weapons. Gob watched from afar, trying to reach out and align the many with Gob's direction, but few would reach back to Gob.
In fact, Gob's cosmic creation got so out of order that it was nearly impossible to find a single from the many that was still functioning. Gob searched high and low and only found a single. Gob was committed to the project of creation, so Gob decided to change tacks and try playing with just a single grouping of the many: a line. Gob decided that as long as this line continued, creation could go on. And even if this one line veered into de-creation, this line would be easier to play with than trying to play with the many. As part of this new tack, Gob decided to undergo a massive de-creation project while only preserving the line and creation itself. The many would be wiped out by a great overflowing of energy, in order to play, co-create, co-rule once again...
It would take me quite a long time to do the whole thing, but this gets us to Noah and The Flood using the two of you's language (sort of). I'm 33 years old and I think have some pieces of the puzzle you're missing, which I know might sound arrogant, but I don't know how else to say it. There is a meta-pattern at the center which emanates patterns out from it like language, physical bodies, scientific disciplines and all these patterns seem to draw us in to the same place.
There's lots of roadblocks like money, which is potential. But when potential turns into piles, it seems to rot / corrupt / experience entropy faster and that rot seems to have physical effects on us; why is enough never enough? Every "ism" is an itch, begging for our hand. Also, we're still in an Enlightenment Hangover, using the language of machines and systems without even realizing it. We have to start remembering that there's pictures behind our words, which help us with the Meaning Crisis.
I understood then, that in our Modern age most people do not use language properly, we do not tell the truth.
instead we speak unwittingly from ego within us, and ceaselessly only flatter one another (in the technical meaning from Pieper's book- have a look if you haven't. I know you'll love it.)
You know I am a very great admirer of your work; your books changed my life, I am gladly a member of your site and I’ve listened to countless hours of your talks. So I was a bit disheartened or even worried about this post, mitigated of course in knowing your undoubted good character that will be searching for truth.
I noted your conversations above and if your central concern is that there was a period of time over the last ten years where a lot of nonsense - for want of a better phrase, woke - was blindly parroted, I agree. I also think the “narrative” of the left was dominant in a lot of western bureaucracies, institutions and media. That included at various times, private organisations having their agenda, and left-leaning governments seeking to enshrine in various ways their vision in policy where they could. Regarding COVID, I think nuance is needed. I’m fine with criticisms of the public health measures and the weird sanctification of taking COVID seriously, but it was just a pandemic that existed and needed to be treated, including by vaccines for those would take them.
However mainly what is worrying is the author conflates truth with frankly conspiracy theories and misattributes where power lies. He claims British intelligence services somehow did various jiggery-pokery and manipulated people’s views in the US (and the UK, but it’s unclear). Well, first of all, that does not seem to have worked, so if it existed, it wasn’t a particularly effective authoritarian plan. Second, it is epically fanciful. I’ve worked in our community for 15 years and I’ve never heard of the military intelligence mob he mentioned. A unit of that size might get to the low thousands, with a modest (some millions operating budget). The idea that a bunch of blokes in camo’s in rural England working with whatever likely annoying and out-of-date tech the MoD provided, could even cast a shadow on the technological, financial and now political power of even one of the US social media companies to shape public opinion in the US, UK or elsewhere, is fairy tale stuff. And more importantly, I don’t think they tried - I just don’t think any of that happened and have seen zero evidence of it.
What I do think the EU did, albeit in its uncompetitive and instinctively left-leaning way, is try to curb the power of US social media. So did Australia, before back-tracking, because the government feared the now undeniable impacts of it on the development of young people.
Which brings me to the nub of it. I worry mainly because your endorsement of his position seems to have you strange bedfellows with the interests of US tech, with their transhumanist impulses and Orwellian fusion of the most manipulative technology in history with incredible amounts of capital. I really don’t think Musk is someone at much risk of not being heard, and that you feel like the government’s of Europe defending the perceived interests, however clumsily, seems a misreading to me of where the greater worry lies.
More broadly, Vance wasn’t talking about the internet at Munich. He was disdaining Europe as a strategic actor, and seeing it through the US political culture wars. I was enormously heartened to see the vast majority of conservatives in the UK over the weekend instinctively side with Zelenskyy after the Oval Office performance on Friday. I think the real trick in these times of flux is not to hew too closely to any “side” - judge in issue in its merits, or the tree but its fruits. A good rule of thumb though is if I end up on the side of an actual authoritarian (Putin), or those that want to manipulate my attention for money (US tech), I should be asking for directions. It’s like seeing what I don’t want to be more than I know the right way. Having said that, I quickly read NS Lyon on some other topics - his Taiwan piece was very familiar territory for me and would say pretty standard and reasonable analysis, for example. Which is to say, each occasion and issue should be decided in its context, and I have no idea of his character or background, which matters more than anything. Ideas you helped reinforce to me.
I am not a political animal, and I really will regret coming onto Substack if I end up having to defend political positions against every reader who has a different position. Happen to like and respect Lyons. What I know is that there are more sides to most of the issues we discuss than are acknowledged, and it is definitely not reasonable to say that all the deceit comes from whatever one happens to call the' right'. I believe this to be a toxic position that has overturned our hard fought for, extremely unusual (in terms of world history), belief in free speech.. Please, I don't want to fall out with people on political grounds. There are bigger issues that I am concerned with that transcend the political infighting, and I hope we can be as reasonable as possible about them.
Iain that would never happen - you are an undoubtably great man, and your good faith is plain as day. Moreover, it’s a real pleasure and even privilege for us to be able to engage with you! I explicitly agree with your points above - the shallow-left-tilt of many of our institutions have made problems and blind spots that are now enormous issues for all of us. And I don’t know Lyons so can’t say. I just thought his article was - despite having some solid points - well, off. And some of what he said I have some experience in and made no sense to me. But that’s okay, I may well be wrong!
Thank you for engaging, I do appreciate it, and it’s a delight to have you on here.
perhaps the phrase, "interpenetration" or maybe, "participation" helps with the mistaken sum problem?
maximos understood the person to be of course the microcosm, and mary is "more spacious than the heavens"- the created containing the whole of the creator within her being.
I think of ubuntu: a person is only a person through other persons.
or Silouan: that to love our neighbour as ourself, is to love our neighbour as being our self, and only in this act of loving the other does ourself emerge.
as far as "faculties we have, become atrophied," (around 17 or 18 minute mark),
Have you read much of Wade Davis? he's a fun storyteller, very egotistical but has seen the impossible, over and over, done by humans outside the reach of Modernity.
(he worked for Nat Geo of course and so went and just entered into the tribes, fearlessly seeking to experience and understand (perhaps foolishly and without enough self knowledge, but god knows))
Anyway his stories speak to exactly this intuition- or frankly truth- you have stated about our atrophied capacities.
one can see this also in the new popularization of psychedelics of course.
I enjoyed your exchange with Mike a great deal. You will, of course, have another chance to weigh in on his proposal for a "Platonic research program in biology" once we get the book from last year's conference together.
As for Lyons (and please do not feel obligated to reply to this--I totally understand your desire not to have to talk politics on this platform!), I am not sure if you saw my reply to his post a few weeks ago "American Strong Gods": https://substack.com/@footnotes2plato/note/c-95487319?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2at642 In short, I agree with his diagnosis of what is wrong. His account of the end of "the long 20th century" felt accurate to me. But I completely disagree with the way he celebrates "the new sheriff in town." I felt Lyons was too quick to dismiss the "never again" sentiment that guided the West after Nazism was defeated, and I really don't think he is giving due credence to the possibility that the MAGA movement or other authoritarian nationalist movements around the world could easily slide into very dangerous territory. He may be right about Democrats' and their European allies' attempted censorship of social media (even though it didn't work very well!); but Musk is now using his control over the X algorithm to boost nationalist parties in the UK and Europe. His own AI system--Grok--when asked who the biggest purveyor of misinformation on the platform is reliably points to Musk himself! Do two wrongs make a right? I'd just say, Lyons may be right about what he is criticizing, but he seems to me to be wrong in what he is celebrating. Time will tell.
I'm more optimistic than you are though I may well be proven wrong. This is partly because I think the political and cultural immune systems have hundreds of years of antibodies tuned to the threads of greed and narcissism that run through MAGA, whereas we're not well equipped to deal with the much more subversive totalitarian trends of which Lyons warns. I also just perceive the landscape differently - for instance I do not see an equivalence ("two wrongs make a right?") between Musk sharing disinformation on X on the one side, and the 4-dimensional octopus of international narrative manipulation on the other. The cancer in the system is deep, and some chemotherapy is needed. I like to think that wiping out the rot will be beneficial.
Of course, once as a kid I had a doctor with poor aim apply liquid nitrogen to a plantar's wart on my hand. The wart survived and expanded into the dime-sized circle of damaged skin. That could be the tech broligarchy. Time will tell. But the big push towards New Romanticism that is getting so much play lately makes me think they won't have an easy go of it.
I can only say that I too loved this conversation with Mike Levin and you of course, thank you for the introduction to him and his work. As a mere laywoman in so many of the sciences and philosophies that you discuss, I can struggle to understand some things you talk about, but my brain fires off so much excitement only to want to learn more! However, yet another synchronicity happened tonight with my new, but long planned TenofCups Substack!
When the name TenofCups evolved or, 'found me', through the random and totally unplanned pull of a Tarot card for me, by someone I hardly know, the card meaning she gave me resonated greatly for some reason and so I decided on that name but wanted to dig deeper. When you said 'there couldn't possibly only be 'One' creation as it surely needed something to relate to, I had long thought this too. Then you said you had discovered the Kabbalah and the Sephirot's in relation to this.
Well OMG, the TenofCups rabbit holing took me there too! As I listened to you I literally had a multi-coloured scribbled map on my desk with all my discoveries on this subject as part of my research. Then you talked about vessels shattering! That is the Cups I want to represent and what I am going to expand my Substack about! Not in deep, deep science terms, as I am not clever enough, but more in life and its meaning terms. Maybe related to my life experience perhaps and see where it goes for others. You know Cups half full and empty that kind of thing.
So, this is how my simple understanding led me to the Kabbalah too. The Ten of Cups in tarot is a Minor Arcana card of which there are 40 in a pack. Or, as they used to historically be called Pip cards. Each one is assigned to one of the four letters of the Tetragrammatron. Upside down Pentagram. Tetragram = YHWH or YHVH which means 'to be' or 'exist' read from right to left.
The Ten of Cups is the 'Tenth Cup' or the Malkhut, as you spoke of, and is at the bottom of some say, the Kingship of the Tree of Life or Human Body system. Its meaning - Perpetual Success.
The 10 cups in the Kabbalah represent 10 channels of Divine creative force or consciousness, through which the unknowable Divine essence is revealed to mankind.
As you also say there are 10 Seriphots that make up the Kabbalah or this tree or body. However, there are really 11 vessels or cups, but Keter and Da'at are considered the same principle, as Divine Super Conscious, unknowable human (Keter) and Knowledge Form, Central Brain (Da'at).
Each Seriphot, or in my case Cup, stands for different parts of the body, different sides, left and right, different genders, feminine or masculine and each vessel or cup has particular attributes assigned. So far I have found the positive attributes for each cup or vessel and am now exploring the shadow sides.
Discovering all this stuff also reminds me somewhat of the work that Richard Rudd has done with The Gene Keys. Each Gene Key that we have is designated by our unique birth time, date and chart and his Unique Hologenic Profile which has 11 points. Each point has a Siddhi, a Gift and a Shadow. Are you aware of his work? Its fascinating too and food for thought. www.genekeys.com
Anyway it is late here in Spain and I have rambled on to bore you enough. But thank you again for all the brilliant work you share and especially being on Substack too! And thanks for being yet another synchronicity in my life this last year.
The best part of your conversation, to my ears at least, came at the end: Levin is "going to start looking for a lateralization of function" and "examples of processing that's associated with integration versus reductive analysis". This is truly exciting news.
As for the political stuff, I recall one of your most erudite exponents, Jonathan Rowson, once said: "The question about the politics of Iain's work comes up in different forms. One way I think is helpful to think about it is that it's not so much political as metapolitical." [1] And, though the terms may share little connection, I do think of you as a "metamodern" thinker. You take into account both the transcendent and the immanent so we can see, as Blake so eloquently put it, the infinite in the definite, in a translucent way. Thank you for helping me to likewise see the world in this way. And when it comes to politics, to see through the words, no matter out of whose mouths they emerge, to the meaning behind them.
[1] Reflections on Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things - Pari Center Anniversary event
It is a privilege and honor to engage with you here. I just finished The Master and His Emissary, and wow, it leaves a powerful impression. I imagine that it has, like someone else said here, changed my life. I’m planning on buying The Matter With Things. I am grateful to have this chance to beg your pardon on a question whose answer could potentially leave some of us with a mind boggling and disturbing cognitive dissonance. In the colossal amount of information to sift through on substack and all the algorithms beckoning us into overwhelm, it is a mammoth challenge to keep an open mind and be willing to alter one’s opinions with new evidence. Your incredible depth, sensitivity, well roundedness, and compassion (right brain right?) comes through in your work, so it is confusing to see you supporting people who, for lack of better words, support an anti-compassion movement, “Strong Gods” or not, and thus an accelerating destruction of the world (movements dominated by the left brain which sees all life as usable, sellable, controllable). It’s the cruelty that’s the thing for me that’s so troubling about the movement toward “Might Makes Right” and lies are all right for America aligning with Russia, Hungary, North Korea, etc. You have every right to avoid political arguments, and Substack shouldn’t be a place where you have to defend every view you entertain. But we will naturally question your political views when we see you advocate here for N.S. Lyons, who obviously supports Trump here. I will try to keep reading him with less need for certainty and more open to nuance. I certainly don’t know everything there is to know, such as which direction Europe should go. Whether it’s Curtis Yarvin, RFK, Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Charles Eisenstein, Micheal Levin--Lyons or Mattias Desmet (who I haven’t read but his Amazon reviews are filled with right wing support, but I still look forward to watching your talk with him), these voices strike a chord of cognitive dissonance. We may agree with parts of them together, like for instance the Pandemic was terrible for children and has led to more atomization in society. But that doesn’t make a turn to the extreme right wing make sense. For some of us, especially in America who still admire the constitution and believe in honesty, integrity, tolerance, and so on, the idea of tacitly or implicitly supporting leaders like Trump or Musk or Vance, deflates the balloon of ideas that was lifting off the inspiration of your work. I watched the video with Micheal Levin and saw two brilliant minds discussing the beauty of life on earth. But reading him I'm reminded of my bias against Trump; character matters to me: the current wannabe dictator is a narcissist, bully, hypocrite, rapist, aggressor, con man phony populist who fills the pockets of billionaires, leading to more inequality and environmental destruction, the epitome of left brain domination? and let’s not forget white supremacist who acts the victim, leading to chaos and destabilization, hopefully not to more imperialistic war. I have enough cognitive dissonance as it is. So it’s almost always my policy to stay away from online arguments. You have every right to avoid engaging with me, and no need to defend your views, but people will inevitably wonder what side you’re on, and not choosing one is choosing one. I’m still left sincerely curious about what your book has me thinking, and how amidst the sea of noise to somehow sway the hemispheres back into balance.
There is so much that could be said in response to this - Even as a person on 'the left', I have several chapters of a book drafted that focus on ways the 'compassionate' left can disempower the very people it aims to help - but I'd invite you to just revisit one of your own comments in light of what Iain's books tell us: "people will inevitably wonder what side you’re on, not choosing one is choosing one". What would the right hemisphere say about this assertion?
Well. I am revisiting my thoughts and comments and agree with you on the complexity here, and on the left hemisphere taking "sides" instead of allowing the more implicit right hemisphere to transcend this babble. Master/Emissary appealed to me profoundly especially as an English teacher, artist, musician, song writer, I have been my whole life immersed in metaphor and see it as a way to understand the world. Through expanding understanding I'm really trying to open my mind more to different views in what seems increasingly dark times. And I'm beginning to get it with more research seeing his videos online that Iain is naturally reacting to the annoying "Woke" rhetoric that stifles the "left" but it is also the easy ubiquitous fad of the right wing to be Anti-Woke. What seems really worse is the cruelty, hypocrisy, ignorance, anti science, vindictiveness, greed, oligarchy, xenophobia, the chilling inability to accept any free speech not propaganda, in my humble opinion, and IF that is not addressed, then we aren't really interested in preventing the destruction of the earth due to domination of the left hemisphere. I am really trying to change my immediate press of the reaction button. I admit to my faulty left hemisphere. Where does anger and moral horror come from in the hemispheres? I'm working on putting up with slight disagreements in my favorite authors... kind of like reading a brilliant writer from the past and discovering they were tinged with a little unconscious racism. How can one simple soul see the whole beautiful perfect banana? Who knows, maybe the way to swing the hemispheres back in harmony is to follow the strong arm of the "Strong Gods."
I’m grateful to play a small part in possibly spurring on your recent piece “Laughter in Heaven”: That piece is what I was looking for. And I’m sorry if I came on too strong--maybe it was my right hemisphere leading my left hemisphere to goad you into coming out more clearly about where you stand. I fully admit my faulty LH in my comment on “sides”. I humbly request you see my interest in aspiring to the right hemisphere; please see my larger comment/attempt and reply to Sage M. And with a little humor in mind, isn’t labeling someone as LH in itself a kind of LH? I’m OK playing the fool. I teach Shakespeare. A person can play many roles.
I'm a little confused by this comment - are you refuting or affirming my point? I was challenging KOLear's point about choosing sides, so we're most definitely in agreement. Perhaps I didn't express that clearly.
Dear Iain, very glad to see you engaging on Substack, you have many, many fans here -- interestingly enough across the entire political spectrum. It's a wild place!
Speaking of which, and the critical comments here regarding N.S. Lyons, I found that when one is triggered by a particular view, phrasing or take, and feels compelled to write a comment in the form of "praise, praise, BUT -- rant, rant", this often can be seen as an invitation to look at things differently, find another angle, reframe things, look deeper. This doesn't necessarily mean one has to agree with the offending thoughts, but usually there's something there, something that calls on you to develop a broader perspective, or perhaps rather allow it to develop, to find you in its own time. As the madness that is our world keeps unfolding, we are all called upon to refine and update our arsenal of perspectives, of frames, of our sense making modes.
Huge fan of your work, particularly TMWT, which has informed and inspired much of my own thinking and writing.
With regard to your suggestion to follow The Upheaval, and the topic the link led me to, I find it a deep irony that the author writes in this fashion, but am not going to pay to tell him that.
The U.S. has a long history of intervening in other countries—whether through outright military action, covert operations, economic pressure, or media influence—yet it often positions itself as the global arbiter of democracy and free speech. The hypocrisy becomes particularly glaring when it accuses European states of interference, especially given the much more nuanced and, in some cases, restrained approaches European nations take compared to the U.S.'s heavy-handed tactics.
The way the U.S. exerts control—whether through soft power, sanctions, or outright intervention—has shaped world politics for decades. And yet, it frequently deflects from its own actions by pointing fingers at others, especially when it comes to information control. The narrative management at home, where dissenting voices are marginalized or labeled as threats, mirrors the kind of suppression they accuse others of engaging in.
The article is more than a little disparaging to European countries, even if I agree that censorship in the West has become an oppressive force.
Yes. John Perkins wrote two books about this under the title The Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Sparks of illumination fly whenever you two are in dialogue! I look forward (yes - with "excitement!) to the unfolding revelations that will come with future conversations -
Thank you, Dr. Gilchrist, for sharing so freely with the rest of us!
I am grateful that your comments are open and a complete stranger like me can say something. You may regret this!
I confess to not loving NS Lyons. This is not his real name, which makes it very difficult to find out who his backers are, although it seems quite obvious.
I find his writing to be disingenuous. He pretends to be merely an observer of international events, but as a speaker at 'National Conservatism' events he clearly has skin in the game. I find him to be an apologist for some of the far right's worst excesses, all while pretending he isn't one of them. Since he is providing intellectual cover for the destruction of liberal democracy, I am certainly not going to pay for the privilege of sharing his propaganda.
I understand that many people might feel that. But I think public discourse has been manipulated by the 'liberal' - in reality authoritarian – left, so that the terms 'right' and 'far right' have lost their meaning. I think the only thing that matters is truth and this can exist on the 'left' or 'right' - no longer useful terms in my view. Much of what is now deemed 'right', or 'far right' even, would have been considered common sense by most people 20 years ago. But I do defend any person's right to put a less often voiced position before us, and I have found him consistently insightful, and never supporting violence, if that is what you are hinting at. Most of us are not wholly right, and it is valuable to have his voice heard, in my opinion. Thanks for your comment, all the same! Much appreciated.
I very much appreciate your reply and agree that other axes (such as authoritarianism) might be more helpful. However, I think it would very much help the search for truth if this person would let us know their real identity and who funds them.
While he uses a pen name, he's definitely not shy about revealing his face, so I imagine it wouldn't be difficult to figure out who he is. Not that anonymity bothers me (Ben Franklin wrote under a pen name). You can see this interview with him on UnHerd.
https://youtu.be/-lNDgLR_DSI?feature=shared
I'm also not very impressed by Lyons, who has been off my radar for a while. He has written some tortured stuff in the past trying to compare the PMC/"Blob" with the Chinese Communist Party. Felt desperate and unconvincing. Subtle? Not on your life.
"far right?" There you go again!
I have to say as an admirer of your writing that the subtle distance that Lyons was taking from Vance wasn't clear to me.
He says that Europe has been fighting an information war on the USA, yet is silent on the information war being waged against liberals from Russian actors at an industrial scale, nor how this is weaponised to give power to the far right. Nor how the US has turned on it's allies in favour of a clearly hostile power that threatens its own borders. What does Vance mean by free speech? Freedom to say anything to anyone at anytime? His administration doesn't seem at all keen on free speech they won't let dissenting voices speak at all and threaten physical reprisals if challenged - as witnessed obviously by not letting Zelensky speak, threatening universities if their students protest, and leaving thousands of troops unarmed overnight who they were previously supporting.
I've been thinking about your book and the way it focuses on paths to truth, and the need to do this to overcome the kind of postmodern nihilism where there is no truth only infinite subjective opinions. Vance and the administration he serves seems not interested at all in the truth and only interested in free speech where it gives the freedom to weaponised mis-truths half truths or lies. The kinds of confabulation you attribute to the left hemisphere seem highly present in this
I am sure you are right that there are more bad actors on all sides, and in an era of mis- and dis-information, it is (unless you are in the secret service? and even then), hard to know what the truth is. I hope you might agree with that. In such circumstances it is always good to hear another point of view, especially, as in Lyons's case, where he says he has uncovered information suggesting that official bodies in Britain acted in an authoritarian manner deliberately to suppress knowledge we should have had access to at the time about Covid, and close down all discussions of immigration and two-tier policing on crime. Unless you know he is wrong, and think that all is well in the Britain of 2025, his voice has to be a helpful corrective to the culture that insists there is only one narrative, and even to question it is to make oneself a kind moral leper. I think in other words, we hear a lot about the side of the story you prefer, but we should be in the habit of listening to others. As I am sure you are in daily life. Thanks for the comment, anyway – long live free speech! I welcome civilised discussion with people who have a different point of view from my own.
Thanks Iain. I appreciate your response.
I think that whilst I agree that it might be hard to know what the truth is, it's quite possible to identify different kinds of power and approaches to power. We know quite a lot about how Russian has approached information warfare, how it uses information dumping to sow confusion, how it used anti-vaccination sites to drip feed clear lies and confusion about atrocities it has committed in Syria and Ukraine, and how it employs people en masse to inflame talking points that further create wedges in social media online. It's been highly successful in weaponizing resentments through anti-woke sentiments.
There are some great sections in your books that illuminate why that might be such a successful strategy. The fixation on being absolutely right combined with moral superiority seems highly toxic and likely to cause moral leprosy.
I think we identify what's true by attempting to evaluate the character of the person we are hearing from. In practice that's difficult, and more so online. But it's what we do naturally and we scale it up to countries. It doesn't surprise me that official bodies would attempted to supress or manage. information about covid or employ armies of fact checkers. I don't think the character of this is authoritarian in the same way as the explicit authoritarianism we are seeing in the US now and Russia. That has a very distinct character. It's reactive, violent and untrustworthy in a different way to the slippery charm of liberal politicians and their desire to control information.
I don't think that all is well in Britain, or online and I do think that progressive tendencies to make people into moral lepers has exacerbated resentments. I think we need to find a more inclusive dialogue. However, I wonder if it's not simply a matter of preferring a story, but in having a clear sense of who is telling it, what kind of idea is standing behind them telling it and what they want from telling it. I prefer your writing, on the whole, because it gives me that sense. I don't get it from Lyon.
Anyway, like I say, I appreciate your response, and will have a look at it again
And thanks for yours, Toby, with which I agree.
Thanks so much for articulating your thoughts. I had read the Lyon article and couldn't understand what was so remarkable about it.
Typical that the comment section would first focus on your post-script. But nonetheless, thank you for drawing attention to Lyons. I first began paying attention to him after his excellent essay The China Convergence, which helped re-frame for me many patterns I had been observing in politics and culture. Whether I agree or disagree on any given point he makes, he does a good job of zooming out past the partisan narratives and suggesting broader systemic trends that map well on the the hemisphere hypothesis.
I totally agree!
Back again after listening to this fascinating discussion, thank you for sharing it! I'll be very curious to hear if Mike discovers lateralization or patterns for integration/reduction in his models (for lack of a better word?)
Your explorations of negation also made me wonder if you've ever had a discussion with Peter Rollins about his Pyrotheology framework?
And thank you for the many rich seams around potential - that is a theme that I have been thinking about a lot lately in many contexts and hope to pull into a blog soon. It's wonderful to have some Whitehead to chase down on the subject.
Warm regards!
Wow, I can see why you’re excited! I drove across Connecticut today, and so was able to listen. I was shocked a few times in the most wonderful way, like when Mike said that “the solution is reaching out to the agent as much as the agent is reaching for the solution. Symmetry.” I so appreciate that you explored together the question of human creativity all the way down to the molecular level. How extraordinary.
I called my husband in the middle of it to tell him about the spectrum of animacy down to rocks and molecules. He has been talking to our friend, who builds with stones. Our stone building friend insists that all gems have a different good for us like the various good of garden herbs and plants.
I have no personal experience with Shinto, just curiosity, and I wonder how the topic of Kami (the spirit of a place or material?) would intertwine with your talk. It was just delightful to hear.
We had a neighbor in South Carolina who was a builder. There was a little cottage nearby that had been left vacant for two years and I asked him how the roof fell in so quickly? He told me that any house without a person living in it ages seven times as fast, so as far as that cottage was concerned, it was 14 years alone.
Anyway, I loved the conversation and am very glad to hear it! Thank you.
I'm so glad you felt the excitement I too felt! And thanks for writing to tell me.
Iain
The toolkit the two of you are missing is the Theological Toolkit (I know, I know). Just give me one attempt at telling the story:
First, there was the ground of being, let's call it Gob. Then Gob wanted to play, co-create, co-rule, so things needed to get more complex. Gob created a place of earth, wind, fire, air by zimzum-ing and placed a duality there and gave the duality its very breath/wind/spirit; this allowed the duality to go out into this rugged land and pass this breath along. The duality wanted to play even more, so Gob split the duality in two, but the two still needed each other, so they wed into one while remaining two. All Gob asked for was trust so that they could keep playing and stay in relation to each other.
But the two that became one which came from Gob were lured into grasping for even more of Gob's marvelous abilities. Gob could no longer trust the two and saw no other option, but to push them further out into the rugged land. The two became many and began to occasionally build beautiful things that were in line with Gob's design, like music and bricks and tools. But the potential that burned within them, could also be used for destruction and division, like rhythmic calls for violence or building walls to separate or even turning tools into weapons. Gob watched from afar, trying to reach out and align the many with Gob's direction, but few would reach back to Gob.
In fact, Gob's cosmic creation got so out of order that it was nearly impossible to find a single from the many that was still functioning. Gob searched high and low and only found a single. Gob was committed to the project of creation, so Gob decided to change tacks and try playing with just a single grouping of the many: a line. Gob decided that as long as this line continued, creation could go on. And even if this one line veered into de-creation, this line would be easier to play with than trying to play with the many. As part of this new tack, Gob decided to undergo a massive de-creation project while only preserving the line and creation itself. The many would be wiped out by a great overflowing of energy, in order to play, co-create, co-rule once again...
It would take me quite a long time to do the whole thing, but this gets us to Noah and The Flood using the two of you's language (sort of). I'm 33 years old and I think have some pieces of the puzzle you're missing, which I know might sound arrogant, but I don't know how else to say it. There is a meta-pattern at the center which emanates patterns out from it like language, physical bodies, scientific disciplines and all these patterns seem to draw us in to the same place.
There's lots of roadblocks like money, which is potential. But when potential turns into piles, it seems to rot / corrupt / experience entropy faster and that rot seems to have physical effects on us; why is enough never enough? Every "ism" is an itch, begging for our hand. Also, we're still in an Enlightenment Hangover, using the language of machines and systems without even realizing it. We have to start remembering that there's pictures behind our words, which help us with the Meaning Crisis.
Ta ta for now.
just a quick response to your delightful written introduction before I press play;
have you ever read Pieper's "Abuse of Language"?
That very tiny book, easy to read (Pieper's particular charism was in this quality), changed my life as a young man.
https://ia801708.us.archive.org/25/items/abuse-of-language-abuse-of-power-josef-pieper/abuse-of-language-abuse-of-power-josef-pieper.pdf
I understood then, that in our Modern age most people do not use language properly, we do not tell the truth.
instead we speak unwittingly from ego within us, and ceaselessly only flatter one another (in the technical meaning from Pieper's book- have a look if you haven't. I know you'll love it.)
K,
look forward to watching now!
your brother;
-mb
I am already a n admirer of Josef Pieper,
Dear Iain,
You know I am a very great admirer of your work; your books changed my life, I am gladly a member of your site and I’ve listened to countless hours of your talks. So I was a bit disheartened or even worried about this post, mitigated of course in knowing your undoubted good character that will be searching for truth.
I noted your conversations above and if your central concern is that there was a period of time over the last ten years where a lot of nonsense - for want of a better phrase, woke - was blindly parroted, I agree. I also think the “narrative” of the left was dominant in a lot of western bureaucracies, institutions and media. That included at various times, private organisations having their agenda, and left-leaning governments seeking to enshrine in various ways their vision in policy where they could. Regarding COVID, I think nuance is needed. I’m fine with criticisms of the public health measures and the weird sanctification of taking COVID seriously, but it was just a pandemic that existed and needed to be treated, including by vaccines for those would take them.
However mainly what is worrying is the author conflates truth with frankly conspiracy theories and misattributes where power lies. He claims British intelligence services somehow did various jiggery-pokery and manipulated people’s views in the US (and the UK, but it’s unclear). Well, first of all, that does not seem to have worked, so if it existed, it wasn’t a particularly effective authoritarian plan. Second, it is epically fanciful. I’ve worked in our community for 15 years and I’ve never heard of the military intelligence mob he mentioned. A unit of that size might get to the low thousands, with a modest (some millions operating budget). The idea that a bunch of blokes in camo’s in rural England working with whatever likely annoying and out-of-date tech the MoD provided, could even cast a shadow on the technological, financial and now political power of even one of the US social media companies to shape public opinion in the US, UK or elsewhere, is fairy tale stuff. And more importantly, I don’t think they tried - I just don’t think any of that happened and have seen zero evidence of it.
What I do think the EU did, albeit in its uncompetitive and instinctively left-leaning way, is try to curb the power of US social media. So did Australia, before back-tracking, because the government feared the now undeniable impacts of it on the development of young people.
Which brings me to the nub of it. I worry mainly because your endorsement of his position seems to have you strange bedfellows with the interests of US tech, with their transhumanist impulses and Orwellian fusion of the most manipulative technology in history with incredible amounts of capital. I really don’t think Musk is someone at much risk of not being heard, and that you feel like the government’s of Europe defending the perceived interests, however clumsily, seems a misreading to me of where the greater worry lies.
More broadly, Vance wasn’t talking about the internet at Munich. He was disdaining Europe as a strategic actor, and seeing it through the US political culture wars. I was enormously heartened to see the vast majority of conservatives in the UK over the weekend instinctively side with Zelenskyy after the Oval Office performance on Friday. I think the real trick in these times of flux is not to hew too closely to any “side” - judge in issue in its merits, or the tree but its fruits. A good rule of thumb though is if I end up on the side of an actual authoritarian (Putin), or those that want to manipulate my attention for money (US tech), I should be asking for directions. It’s like seeing what I don’t want to be more than I know the right way. Having said that, I quickly read NS Lyon on some other topics - his Taiwan piece was very familiar territory for me and would say pretty standard and reasonable analysis, for example. Which is to say, each occasion and issue should be decided in its context, and I have no idea of his character or background, which matters more than anything. Ideas you helped reinforce to me.
I am not a political animal, and I really will regret coming onto Substack if I end up having to defend political positions against every reader who has a different position. Happen to like and respect Lyons. What I know is that there are more sides to most of the issues we discuss than are acknowledged, and it is definitely not reasonable to say that all the deceit comes from whatever one happens to call the' right'. I believe this to be a toxic position that has overturned our hard fought for, extremely unusual (in terms of world history), belief in free speech.. Please, I don't want to fall out with people on political grounds. There are bigger issues that I am concerned with that transcend the political infighting, and I hope we can be as reasonable as possible about them.
Iain that would never happen - you are an undoubtably great man, and your good faith is plain as day. Moreover, it’s a real pleasure and even privilege for us to be able to engage with you! I explicitly agree with your points above - the shallow-left-tilt of many of our institutions have made problems and blind spots that are now enormous issues for all of us. And I don’t know Lyons so can’t say. I just thought his article was - despite having some solid points - well, off. And some of what he said I have some experience in and made no sense to me. But that’s okay, I may well be wrong!
Thank you for engaging, I do appreciate it, and it’s a delight to have you on here.
perhaps the phrase, "interpenetration" or maybe, "participation" helps with the mistaken sum problem?
maximos understood the person to be of course the microcosm, and mary is "more spacious than the heavens"- the created containing the whole of the creator within her being.
And then as far as co-creation:
I think of ubuntu: a person is only a person through other persons.
or Silouan: that to love our neighbour as ourself, is to love our neighbour as being our self, and only in this act of loving the other does ourself emerge.
(sorry sort of commenting as I'm listening ;)
as far as "faculties we have, become atrophied," (around 17 or 18 minute mark),
Have you read much of Wade Davis? he's a fun storyteller, very egotistical but has seen the impossible, over and over, done by humans outside the reach of Modernity.
(he worked for Nat Geo of course and so went and just entered into the tribes, fearlessly seeking to experience and understand (perhaps foolishly and without enough self knowledge, but god knows))
Anyway his stories speak to exactly this intuition- or frankly truth- you have stated about our atrophied capacities.
one can see this also in the new popularization of psychedelics of course.
yours;
-mb
Iain,
I enjoyed your exchange with Mike a great deal. You will, of course, have another chance to weigh in on his proposal for a "Platonic research program in biology" once we get the book from last year's conference together.
As for Lyons (and please do not feel obligated to reply to this--I totally understand your desire not to have to talk politics on this platform!), I am not sure if you saw my reply to his post a few weeks ago "American Strong Gods": https://substack.com/@footnotes2plato/note/c-95487319?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2at642 In short, I agree with his diagnosis of what is wrong. His account of the end of "the long 20th century" felt accurate to me. But I completely disagree with the way he celebrates "the new sheriff in town." I felt Lyons was too quick to dismiss the "never again" sentiment that guided the West after Nazism was defeated, and I really don't think he is giving due credence to the possibility that the MAGA movement or other authoritarian nationalist movements around the world could easily slide into very dangerous territory. He may be right about Democrats' and their European allies' attempted censorship of social media (even though it didn't work very well!); but Musk is now using his control over the X algorithm to boost nationalist parties in the UK and Europe. His own AI system--Grok--when asked who the biggest purveyor of misinformation on the platform is reliably points to Musk himself! Do two wrongs make a right? I'd just say, Lyons may be right about what he is criticizing, but he seems to me to be wrong in what he is celebrating. Time will tell.
Yours,
Matt
Well said, Matthew!
I'm more optimistic than you are though I may well be proven wrong. This is partly because I think the political and cultural immune systems have hundreds of years of antibodies tuned to the threads of greed and narcissism that run through MAGA, whereas we're not well equipped to deal with the much more subversive totalitarian trends of which Lyons warns. I also just perceive the landscape differently - for instance I do not see an equivalence ("two wrongs make a right?") between Musk sharing disinformation on X on the one side, and the 4-dimensional octopus of international narrative manipulation on the other. The cancer in the system is deep, and some chemotherapy is needed. I like to think that wiping out the rot will be beneficial.
Of course, once as a kid I had a doctor with poor aim apply liquid nitrogen to a plantar's wart on my hand. The wart survived and expanded into the dime-sized circle of damaged skin. That could be the tech broligarchy. Time will tell. But the big push towards New Romanticism that is getting so much play lately makes me think they won't have an easy go of it.
Dear Iain,
I can only say that I too loved this conversation with Mike Levin and you of course, thank you for the introduction to him and his work. As a mere laywoman in so many of the sciences and philosophies that you discuss, I can struggle to understand some things you talk about, but my brain fires off so much excitement only to want to learn more! However, yet another synchronicity happened tonight with my new, but long planned TenofCups Substack!
When the name TenofCups evolved or, 'found me', through the random and totally unplanned pull of a Tarot card for me, by someone I hardly know, the card meaning she gave me resonated greatly for some reason and so I decided on that name but wanted to dig deeper. When you said 'there couldn't possibly only be 'One' creation as it surely needed something to relate to, I had long thought this too. Then you said you had discovered the Kabbalah and the Sephirot's in relation to this.
Well OMG, the TenofCups rabbit holing took me there too! As I listened to you I literally had a multi-coloured scribbled map on my desk with all my discoveries on this subject as part of my research. Then you talked about vessels shattering! That is the Cups I want to represent and what I am going to expand my Substack about! Not in deep, deep science terms, as I am not clever enough, but more in life and its meaning terms. Maybe related to my life experience perhaps and see where it goes for others. You know Cups half full and empty that kind of thing.
So, this is how my simple understanding led me to the Kabbalah too. The Ten of Cups in tarot is a Minor Arcana card of which there are 40 in a pack. Or, as they used to historically be called Pip cards. Each one is assigned to one of the four letters of the Tetragrammatron. Upside down Pentagram. Tetragram = YHWH or YHVH which means 'to be' or 'exist' read from right to left.
The Ten of Cups is the 'Tenth Cup' or the Malkhut, as you spoke of, and is at the bottom of some say, the Kingship of the Tree of Life or Human Body system. Its meaning - Perpetual Success.
The 10 cups in the Kabbalah represent 10 channels of Divine creative force or consciousness, through which the unknowable Divine essence is revealed to mankind.
As you also say there are 10 Seriphots that make up the Kabbalah or this tree or body. However, there are really 11 vessels or cups, but Keter and Da'at are considered the same principle, as Divine Super Conscious, unknowable human (Keter) and Knowledge Form, Central Brain (Da'at).
Each Seriphot, or in my case Cup, stands for different parts of the body, different sides, left and right, different genders, feminine or masculine and each vessel or cup has particular attributes assigned. So far I have found the positive attributes for each cup or vessel and am now exploring the shadow sides.
Discovering all this stuff also reminds me somewhat of the work that Richard Rudd has done with The Gene Keys. Each Gene Key that we have is designated by our unique birth time, date and chart and his Unique Hologenic Profile which has 11 points. Each point has a Siddhi, a Gift and a Shadow. Are you aware of his work? Its fascinating too and food for thought. www.genekeys.com
Anyway it is late here in Spain and I have rambled on to bore you enough. But thank you again for all the brilliant work you share and especially being on Substack too! And thanks for being yet another synchronicity in my life this last year.
The best part of your conversation, to my ears at least, came at the end: Levin is "going to start looking for a lateralization of function" and "examples of processing that's associated with integration versus reductive analysis". This is truly exciting news.
As for the political stuff, I recall one of your most erudite exponents, Jonathan Rowson, once said: "The question about the politics of Iain's work comes up in different forms. One way I think is helpful to think about it is that it's not so much political as metapolitical." [1] And, though the terms may share little connection, I do think of you as a "metamodern" thinker. You take into account both the transcendent and the immanent so we can see, as Blake so eloquently put it, the infinite in the definite, in a translucent way. Thank you for helping me to likewise see the world in this way. And when it comes to politics, to see through the words, no matter out of whose mouths they emerge, to the meaning behind them.
[1] Reflections on Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things - Pari Center Anniversary event
https://youtu.be/CWSctIuLdUY?t=6857
It is a privilege and honor to engage with you here. I just finished The Master and His Emissary, and wow, it leaves a powerful impression. I imagine that it has, like someone else said here, changed my life. I’m planning on buying The Matter With Things. I am grateful to have this chance to beg your pardon on a question whose answer could potentially leave some of us with a mind boggling and disturbing cognitive dissonance. In the colossal amount of information to sift through on substack and all the algorithms beckoning us into overwhelm, it is a mammoth challenge to keep an open mind and be willing to alter one’s opinions with new evidence. Your incredible depth, sensitivity, well roundedness, and compassion (right brain right?) comes through in your work, so it is confusing to see you supporting people who, for lack of better words, support an anti-compassion movement, “Strong Gods” or not, and thus an accelerating destruction of the world (movements dominated by the left brain which sees all life as usable, sellable, controllable). It’s the cruelty that’s the thing for me that’s so troubling about the movement toward “Might Makes Right” and lies are all right for America aligning with Russia, Hungary, North Korea, etc. You have every right to avoid political arguments, and Substack shouldn’t be a place where you have to defend every view you entertain. But we will naturally question your political views when we see you advocate here for N.S. Lyons, who obviously supports Trump here. I will try to keep reading him with less need for certainty and more open to nuance. I certainly don’t know everything there is to know, such as which direction Europe should go. Whether it’s Curtis Yarvin, RFK, Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Charles Eisenstein, Micheal Levin--Lyons or Mattias Desmet (who I haven’t read but his Amazon reviews are filled with right wing support, but I still look forward to watching your talk with him), these voices strike a chord of cognitive dissonance. We may agree with parts of them together, like for instance the Pandemic was terrible for children and has led to more atomization in society. But that doesn’t make a turn to the extreme right wing make sense. For some of us, especially in America who still admire the constitution and believe in honesty, integrity, tolerance, and so on, the idea of tacitly or implicitly supporting leaders like Trump or Musk or Vance, deflates the balloon of ideas that was lifting off the inspiration of your work. I watched the video with Micheal Levin and saw two brilliant minds discussing the beauty of life on earth. But reading him I'm reminded of my bias against Trump; character matters to me: the current wannabe dictator is a narcissist, bully, hypocrite, rapist, aggressor, con man phony populist who fills the pockets of billionaires, leading to more inequality and environmental destruction, the epitome of left brain domination? and let’s not forget white supremacist who acts the victim, leading to chaos and destabilization, hopefully not to more imperialistic war. I have enough cognitive dissonance as it is. So it’s almost always my policy to stay away from online arguments. You have every right to avoid engaging with me, and no need to defend your views, but people will inevitably wonder what side you’re on, and not choosing one is choosing one. I’m still left sincerely curious about what your book has me thinking, and how amidst the sea of noise to somehow sway the hemispheres back into balance.
There is so much that could be said in response to this - Even as a person on 'the left', I have several chapters of a book drafted that focus on ways the 'compassionate' left can disempower the very people it aims to help - but I'd invite you to just revisit one of your own comments in light of what Iain's books tell us: "people will inevitably wonder what side you’re on, not choosing one is choosing one". What would the right hemisphere say about this assertion?
Well. I am revisiting my thoughts and comments and agree with you on the complexity here, and on the left hemisphere taking "sides" instead of allowing the more implicit right hemisphere to transcend this babble. Master/Emissary appealed to me profoundly especially as an English teacher, artist, musician, song writer, I have been my whole life immersed in metaphor and see it as a way to understand the world. Through expanding understanding I'm really trying to open my mind more to different views in what seems increasingly dark times. And I'm beginning to get it with more research seeing his videos online that Iain is naturally reacting to the annoying "Woke" rhetoric that stifles the "left" but it is also the easy ubiquitous fad of the right wing to be Anti-Woke. What seems really worse is the cruelty, hypocrisy, ignorance, anti science, vindictiveness, greed, oligarchy, xenophobia, the chilling inability to accept any free speech not propaganda, in my humble opinion, and IF that is not addressed, then we aren't really interested in preventing the destruction of the earth due to domination of the left hemisphere. I am really trying to change my immediate press of the reaction button. I admit to my faulty left hemisphere. Where does anger and moral horror come from in the hemispheres? I'm working on putting up with slight disagreements in my favorite authors... kind of like reading a brilliant writer from the past and discovering they were tinged with a little unconscious racism. How can one simple soul see the whole beautiful perfect banana? Who knows, maybe the way to swing the hemispheres back in harmony is to follow the strong arm of the "Strong Gods."
I can't go along with this. It is as wrong as 'if you're not for us you are against us.' There is the hallmark of the LH about it, I'd say.
I’m grateful to play a small part in possibly spurring on your recent piece “Laughter in Heaven”: That piece is what I was looking for. And I’m sorry if I came on too strong--maybe it was my right hemisphere leading my left hemisphere to goad you into coming out more clearly about where you stand. I fully admit my faulty LH in my comment on “sides”. I humbly request you see my interest in aspiring to the right hemisphere; please see my larger comment/attempt and reply to Sage M. And with a little humor in mind, isn’t labeling someone as LH in itself a kind of LH? I’m OK playing the fool. I teach Shakespeare. A person can play many roles.
I'm a little confused by this comment - are you refuting or affirming my point? I was challenging KOLear's point about choosing sides, so we're most definitely in agreement. Perhaps I didn't express that clearly.
Dear Iain, very glad to see you engaging on Substack, you have many, many fans here -- interestingly enough across the entire political spectrum. It's a wild place!
Speaking of which, and the critical comments here regarding N.S. Lyons, I found that when one is triggered by a particular view, phrasing or take, and feels compelled to write a comment in the form of "praise, praise, BUT -- rant, rant", this often can be seen as an invitation to look at things differently, find another angle, reframe things, look deeper. This doesn't necessarily mean one has to agree with the offending thoughts, but usually there's something there, something that calls on you to develop a broader perspective, or perhaps rather allow it to develop, to find you in its own time. As the madness that is our world keeps unfolding, we are all called upon to refine and update our arsenal of perspectives, of frames, of our sense making modes.
Huge fan of your work, particularly TMWT, which has informed and inspired much of my own thinking and writing.
Thank you very much! I very much agree.