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Second part of conversation with Sheldon Solomon, on death as an adviser, coming to terms with death, tranquilizing with the trivial, Livingston’s blissful brush with a lion, life without apprehension, the birds and the bees, “The Ticker” death watch, how death awareness increases hostility, starting with a negative, exploring the dark side as a way to study the organism, a way to the better, the hot sauce paradigm, Milgram shock experiments, hot sauce felonies, the suicide bomber test, British and US parallel results, how entertainment media triggers death anxiety, video games and smart phones, a capitalist can of worms, how consumerism fuels the war engine, what Marx understood, creating desires via anxiety, Norman O. Brown and the inexorable logic of capitalism, The Blood Poets and how TV violence + sexual advertising seeds violent behaviors, a pending cultural implosion, the thin and the thick of transhumanism, Facebook existence, ancient papyrus vs. digital data, the Big Data Delusion, the new alchemists’ quest, a medieval future, Danny Brower and the biology of denial, mental time travel, self-deception as adaptive strategy, the survival function of supernatural belief, how culture is created, civilization as the projection of a baby’s fear of the dark, culture as fundamental defense strategy, the origins of self-awareness and violence, the disease called man, a devouring machine, a new humanity/a non-defensive culture, autism as a shift to uncultured humanity, the option of withdrawal, the cultural implant of language, evolutionary biology and theory of mind, seeing how the system has been compromised, Nietzsche on philsophy, offering oneself as an individual, is eternity a mystical concept, Einstein’s dream.
Songs: “El Mariachi” and “Monkey Said” by The Freak Fandango Orchestra; “Bury Me in Shellac,” by Al Duvall; “The Stories We Tell Ourselves,” by The Womb.
The part where you mention how libido gets punished through consumerist propaganda reminds me of Wilhelm Reich’s Function of The Orgasm since his theory is that distorted forms of libidinal, or sexual energy, can cause dictatorships to arise. This might even relate with how some languages can block a person’s ability to properly express direct perception since they can distort the more harmonious forms libidinal energy takes. All of this also got me thinking about how the body can pull the ego back down to Earth by getting mentally, or physically, sick whenever the ego neglects it’s body since our bodies just want their needs met and don’t always care that much about what ego wants. This may also tie in with certain environmental issues too as well as trans-humanism because of the fact we’re attempting to leave a dying planet behind through space travel and virtual reality rather than healing it but, overall, these are just some little brain-farts I’ve decided to share for now.
It paints a compellingly coherent picture, doesn’t it?