Plantations, Zeal and the Final Frontier

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0:00 Thank you gentlemen. So my talk is about American history which is unnerving given the audience. I know a lot of you guys have a much deeper knowledge of American history than I do. So you just have to hang with me. It's a very idiosyncratic view that I'm presenting. Another way of saying that is I have a very warped view of American history. It'll be three phases. I'll be watching your eyes to see who's going to sleep. And as soon as I start seeing drowsiness, we'll take a break, regroup, slam beers, return full of vigor. The three phases are the entire history of the United States, which that should be easy to put into a a three-hour segment, but beginning with before the founding of the country and the colonization process, going up to 1900, then the 20th century, and then concluding looking at

1:00 where we're at in the 21st and where we go from here, at least according to my warped view of the story that led us to this point. So, I want to start talking about the Puritans and the plantation culture. Maybe you're familiar with the author Paul Johnson, the late Paul Johnson. His book, A History of the American People, had a real deep impact on me when I was young. It was the first American history book that I'd ever read in full. uh and I read it side by side with Howard Zinn's uh people's history of the United States, the kind of socialist to say the least view versus Paul Johnson's which is very celebratory, very much a defense of America and its history. It was due to that book actually that I I felt I became an American. And I read it in preparation for a trip to Europe in 2007. And when I met Europeans, I realized I was a proud American. The minute someone started griping at me

2:06 about American politics and American policy, I uh in my redneck fashion, corrected the record, telling them to eat you frog. So the real importance I think of Paul Johnson's view is he brings out the the diversity of American thought from its inception up until our present day. And the three strands that I want to concentrate on at first are slavery, purity as in Puritans, and liberty. You can't talk about American history without talking about slavery. Nor can you talk about American history without talking about liberty and that polarity is going to be very important because there is no monolithic American thought as you know really there's no monolithic thought in any nation but America has a very eccentric history of thought with all sorts of bizarre cults emerging all sorts of wild ideas that become popular in other parts of the world. So those polarities between religion and science,

3:14 the polarities between purity and liberty, the polarities between the individual, individualism and collectivism, of course, the the spectrum from nature to technology. And as you know, America began as a diverse continent with the Native Americans and then the introduction of the various European peoples from the Spanish to the French to the English and accumulates more and more novelty going forward. A lot of people look at phases of history and they think of it as a shift from one thing to the next. But I think a better way of looking at it is yes c certain things are removed over the course of history but that history is more an accumulation of novelty and diversity and as you know diversity is our strength but what diversity is our strength what combinations of diversity make America strong that's the real question that I want you to ask yourselves and beneath that is the

4:16 question of tolerance how much can you tolerate. Because if you look at the history of American thought, that liberty allowed American culture to delve into all sorts of dark corners of the human psyche and human behavior. So, beginning with the slavers, I I don't want to get too hung up on the individuals, but it it's I'd be remiss not to bring some of them up. uh Paul Johnson opens up his book on uh American history really focusing on Walter Raleigh. Now Raleigh himself wasn't a slaver but he was very much an adventurer. He was very much a badass. Uh he had fought in Europe. Uh he was he came to America in order to uh really kickstart the colonization process. And the reason I that Johnson focuses on Walter Raleigh is because Raleigh not only embodies the adventurous spirit of America, the cont the conquering spirit

5:19 of America, but also the irreligious spirit of America. Raleigh like so many others who came and especially those gathering around the slave plantations were primarily motivated by profit by conquest and had very little use for religion. So irreligion was there from the beginning in the colonization process alongside that lust for wealth and power. And of course what the fruit of slavery really were aside from human suffering was that vast accumulation of wealth. And it was a wealth especially at the beginning that began with vices as the main staples. So tobacco going further south sugar and then eventually cotton which I don't know if you consider cotton to be a vice but it's a crazy thing to make people suffer and toil under. It's an even crazier thing to go to civil war over, but that is in fact what happened. So at the beginning, you have that hierarchical racial concept of the Europeans as a supreme

6:26 conquering and in essence um a people who were justified by nature's god because God nature's god would not have made them so powerful were they not intended to exert their power. And you also have that concept of race, right? This is going to be very important as we talk about this race, robots and religion because race bloodline is the essence of in-roup solidarity and ingroup preference. Race and bloodline will determine much of the distinctions and conflicts going forward in America. And that's coupled with religion because religion gives a sacred canopy either over one's race as in the case of the Jews or the Hindus or many of the Chinese or the Africans the Native Americans all of them referred to themselves if you translate it as the people that bloodline obsession is basically a perennial human trait but it's justified by religion or it is subverted by religion in the case of

7:30 Christianity Buddhism Dowoism, so on and so forth. Now, as you know, the slaving culture was mainly in the south and that spread out from Virginia, North Carolina, Rono, Jamestown, but the first slave, the first recorded slaving uh was in 1619. You probably know the 1619 project to commemorate that is the founding of the United States. Whatever your opinions of that, I do think it's a very very very significant point in American history because that's when you begin the what I consider to be the moral crime of slavery. And you also have a year later the pilgrims landing landing on Plymouth Rock to found New England. And the pilgrims and their successors were what we know as the Puritans. And it's an extraordinarily important part of American culture because I would argue that much of the American obsession with ideological purity you can trace back to the Puritans. Now the Puritans came here to

8:39 escape religious oppression. They came here for freedom. But of course they established cultures that suppressed other belief systems. So you had John Winthre who in essence came from a sort of Anglican background but a separatist. And John Winthrop, aside from being somewhat of an egalitarian in the sense that he believed that the the colony the the colonies that he presided over should have a contract a kind of social contract by which one devoted oneself to one's community and also u a sense of individualism in that one should be reading the Bible or at least following leaders decentralized leaders who read the Bible for themselves. elves. So they're escaping that cli that clerical hierarchy. They're escaping that dogmatic and systematic authoritarian way of religion to found a new form of

9:39 religion. But a religion ultimately the the legacy of the Puritans is one of intolerance, a radical intolerance. You're probably familiar with the witch burnings. You're probably familiar with uh was it Thomas Morton uh who was uh punished severely for erecting a pagan mapole and these sorts of concerns with purity with the p with moral purity and with the purity of the community are offset by the true quest for liberty. Again, the Puritans were seeking liberty from the old world religious authorities. You could argue that the slavers were seeking liberty from uh economic destitution. Uh but the the pure libertarian, you might say, or liberty-minded ethos would express itself also very very early. And you had the figure of Roger Williams, which I think is a fascinating character. He had

10:43 a sharp critique of the slave culture. He also had uh critiques of the ways in which the Europeans were mistreating and screwing over the Indians. And for that he drew the eyeire of authorities. And there was a plot to have him deported uh back to England. But he escaped largely thanks to John Winthre who for the most part didn't care for his um moral crusades. and he especially didn't care for Roger Williams focus on true religious liberty. So that the main connection between a man and God should be between a man and God with no mediator. That connection of course being between a man and the Bible or a woman in the Bible. And Roger Williams escaped with his family to Rhode Island, founded the state of Rhode Island. in Rhode Island. As far as I know, it was the first state to be founded solely on the basis of religious liberty, but it may be the only state, as far as I know, I think that Brian could correct me if

11:48 I'm wrong, the only state that was founded for the purpose of cultivating religious liberty. uh a few a couple of centuries later that would bear fruit in a figure HP Lovecraft who hails from that from Rhode Island and HP Lovecraft's concept of these these voodoo cults these colored people these outsiders who are summoning this tentacled sort of alien god or swarms of alien gods that's going to be very important when we get to the conclusion inclusion of this talk. But again, I want to open up with this idea first of America as a kind of New Eden, which was a very popular mythos among the early col uh colonial settlers and also America as a promised land. these kind of biblical parallels that this is this divinely ordained either from a a conscious and interested God or simply

12:52 nature's god, a divinely ordained conquest of a virgin land. In the beginning, it was cultural, yes, but it nature, its animals, so on and so forth, leaving us with what is admittedly a beautiful landscape, but one which is entirely lacking of old growth. that would that conquest would proceed, especially in the 20th century, to by the mechanical, and especially the digital. But we'll get back to that in just a moment. Now I want to highlight

14:00 that again that there was yes the Puritans were quite intolerant and yes there were a number of religious organizations that would have preferred to see their religious denomination be the sole denomination in America. But there was also a there were laws before the founding of the country and the adoption the signing of the constitution. There were laws to enforce tolerance. So you weren't allowed to call people fish heads or round heads or uh you know the various disparaging names regarded to in regards to the religions in many of these colonies. So that tension is there and it it it then becomes solidified or crystallized or enshrined in the constitution with the first amendment. Uh the freedom of religion, the freedom to profess and live out one's religious life according to one's conscience without interference by a state religion. There would be a lot of fruits of this. Some many of

15:04 which are good. Right? America, one of the, if not the most charitable nations on earth. And America having cultivated, I think, in many ways, um, a a a society or civilization that is in many respects, superior uh, to the frogs and the, uh, te- sucking island monkeys, which we escaped to get here. But that freedom did have some costs and the the eruption of strange cults, the eruption of strange beliefs are an inheritance that we have to deal with either by laughing them off or accepting them perhaps embracing them or building up cultural barriers so that we ourselves don't become lunatics like say the Scientologists or the Mormons. All of which by the way I must insist are good people despite the fact that their world view is uh perhaps not based at least not in the reality that I occupy. So that first amendment is very important. It enshrines the principle that Americans can believe as they want.

16:11 And it opened up basically it was as if they established petri dishes across the nation in which various charismatic leaders and visionaries were able to conduct mimedic experiments to in incite mutations, psychological mutations, cultural mutations, things that were ex extremely novel, extremely strange and the legacy of which we still see today. The background of this, of course, is Christianity, mostly Protestant Christianity, over time, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and and offshoots that maybe even Protestants wouldn't consider to be normal. Again, the Mormons or perhaps the Jehovah's Witnesses. But that background didn't just spring into being. It wasn't just there. Uh again, from the very beginning, there was this irreligiousness or unchurched aspect to the American populace. So that at least one statistic is that a a tiny minority by 1800 a tiny minority of Americans

17:15 actually went to church 7% 8% 9% something like that it was not to say they weren't religious people but they did not belong to a church and the Christianity the kind of Christian America that we see today is a result of massive pushes for proitization for evangelism you had the first great awakening which was mostly Calvinist uh much of what we would see in like say the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, so on and so forth and leading up to the founding of the country. And then the second great awakening which saw the introduction and the explosion of the more mainline Protestants that you would recognize from say the southeast here, uh the Methodists, the Baptist, normal Christians. Christians if you walk into their church, they're not going to try to sleep with your wife, at least not overtly. uh nor will they tell you that you have to cut off your genitalia, at least not right away. Um the you you have something else that's happening though early on in American history and

18:16 that's the development of these very very strange sects, these strange cults. And when I was studying religion early on at the University of Tennessee actually in religious studies and we talked about American religion, there was this fixation on the strange, a fixation on the novel. And it's important to keep in mind that as we talk about the Shakers, the Onid the Onidas, uh the the the spiritualism and the seances, it's not to say they weren't prevalent, but they're still very very small in comparison to the rest of the country. But because of their peculiarity, they had a very very deep impact on what the culture would become. Everything from the hippie communalist movement to what we would now call transhumanism or cyborg culture all kind of had its origins in these strange mutations, these cultural mutations, or at least it created this bed of openness and this a

19:17 tolerance for weirdness. So, if you're maybe you're familiar with the Shakers, they uh arrived in America uh with their the charismatic leader Anne Lee um late in 1776. So, they arrived right at the founding of the country. And the Shakers came from the Quakers. And you know the Quakers, right? Kind of peculiar Protestant religious institution, very egalitarian people sitting in a room oftentimes in total silence waiting for the inspiration. And they were called Quakers, too, because they had this I don't know what it actually looked like. There's no video, but they had these kind of strange convulsions that they were at least known to do. And then there were the shaking Quakers, which were apparently even more and kind of uh uh epileptic uh spiritual people. And the Shakers, aside from being distinct in their religious practice, had extraordinarily distinctive beliefs. So Ann Lee really the charismatic founder of the Shakers and Lee she tragically lost four of her children

20:25 uh in childbirth which must have been very very traumatic but she would then become at least in her own selfcreated mythology a mother a mother to all a spiritual mother because Ann Lee again in the spirit of spiritual ual or religious freedom believed that God was both mother and father and she believed that Jesus was the expression of God as father. God is a male principle. But she also believed that the female principle was just as strong. And it was believed by her followers and professed, I think, by her that she was the incarnation or the the worldly expression of God's feminine side. Extraordinarily heretical. No mainline Christian would accept it, but they were able to thrive in America through industriousness, agriculture, um a lot of, you know, economic advantages, but also just simply the openness of the land and the openness of the culture.

21:30 So, one thing that was very distinctive about I'll give you three things that were very distinctive about these shakers. The first, and it's distinctive only in that it's distinct from the main culture. There's a number of other groups that did this, but they were communal. They were communal. They shared everything in common. And secondly, they were pacifists like their Quaker predecessors. And thirdly, they were celibate, entirely celibate. They only grew their ranks from adopting children or bringing in converts. And it's probably one of the reasons they didn't continue on and thrive. Although they thrived for many many decades despite the fact that they weren't having children but that that sexual norm very very unusual. Of course you had monastics who were celibate but these are couples who are celibate or men and women who were celibate living together in these communes from the very beginning of the country. But it wouldn't be there would be so many other kinds of cultural mutations

22:35 going off in various directions. So, one of the common counterpoints that people uh look at and focus on are the Onidas. And just incidentally, I failed to mention that the Shakers really began in uh Albany, New York. And the Onidas, you know, they were founded in Onida, New York. And you probably know that Joseph Smith also hailed from New York State. and the Fox sisters seances and then later on the Hudson uh Valley UFO sightings. New York State for whatever reason seemed to produce a significant number of cultural mutations like this. It was oftentimes called the the burned over district. And the reason being is that people it it doesn't really make sense linguistically now. It made sense then that people would beat a path to New York looking for spiritual enlightenment and spiritual freedom. So the Onidas, they like the Shakers were communal. They shared everything in common. And their leader, John

23:41 Humphrey's Noise, if I'm John Humphrey Noise, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, their leader was a perfectionist, a self-proclaimed perfectionist and a utopian. And he believed that the true meaning of the Bible was to realize Christ, to realize the Christian spirit here on earth, to perfect the earth. And so he set up the Onida community as a model for what a perfect Christian community should look like so that it would then spread replicate, right? this this novel mutation would begin to spread from this petri dish to the next to the next to the next was the intention. So they were communal. They shared everything in common. But they also had another peculiar institution that that distinguishes them from the Shakers. They had open marriages. They were free lovers. And this is in the 1800s. Very very significant. They had what were called complex marriages. And

24:45 these complex marriages uh consisted of female elders who would arrange for what they called interviews which means they were getting it on and they had children that then were raised by their mother for the first year and then were raised in common right takes a village to raise a child but for the onidas quite literally that's how it was done and this commune this free this freeloving Christian commune uh even went so far uh kind of later on in their history to begin to play with what we would now call eugenics uh they believed that like Darwin that the significant progress in getting new types of dogs from dog breeding. Keep in mind this is happening around the same time as the the Victorian explosion of dog breeds which showed without a doubt that very very quickly through selective breeding you can create new kinds of creatures and very very quickly you can create new kinds of creatures not only with

25:49 different physical appearances and physical capabilities but differences in intelligence, differences in temperament. And so the Onidas had begun to attempt this as well. They they went on for a little over three decades before finally uh disbanding. But the impact of that was significant because it would go on to be a model for many of the communal cults that America is in some circles known for, especially come the 60s. And it's also a a a key sort of example of how far people will go given a bit of religious freedom. It's not to say that these sorts of things don't happen in other countries, but this was a very distinctly American sort of process of cultural mutation. Another one that's also, I think, quite interesting, the uh Fox sisters, if if you're familiar, again, this is all in the Burnedover district of New York. The Fox Sisters were three sisters who were able to magically call to spirits from

26:53 the beyond. And the spirits would wrap. They called it spirit wrapping, right? and the spirits would wrap at their command. And this was part of a much wider culture of seances and spiritualism and occultism, a desire to be able to break on through from the materialist bounds of of the protoscientific secular ideology and and make contact the suffragists, many of the early feminists that these were models for later feminism because at that time

27:59 women in general were to be seen and not heard. And yet you had these women who were calling to these these wraiths, these ghouls, perhaps demons, perhaps angels, I don't I don't know, fallen angels, and using that to have social standing, to have the ability to speak, which is again another mutation that yes, it was happening in Europe and yes, it's happened throughout history in Christianity and even to some extent in Islam. I think about Muhammad's wife Kada uh were the successors in Shia coming through Aisha but it was an American like American feminism I think does represent like a distinctly powerful cultural mutation in which no longer the the boundaries and standards of patriarchy hold and you have this opening up first to feminism and then to various other kind of sexual sexual proclivities and then of course also uh the the racial element which is woven into all of this.

29:00 So, you have these wild mutations. I'm I'm going to just go into one more before we break, and that is the Mormons. Now, I might I might poke fun at the Mormons. Uh I might poke fun at Joseph Smith. South Park did it better than I ever could, so I won't attempt to make you laugh. But Joseph Smith also represents a profound cultural mutation. So that yes he is coming out of the Christian Christian tradition and he was also a Freemason. So to some extent that free freemasonic order must have influenced the founding of the Mormon religion. But his is a very very peculiar story. One in which he's visited in the mid 1800s I think it was 1830 by God and Jesus right there side by side. Not unlike his counterparts in other charismatic cults. Anne Lee for instance the Shaker founder also said she made

30:00 direct contact with God with Jesus and God is woman. And so Joseph Smith claimed the same. And then of course he's visited by the angel Moroni. The angel and tells him that the secret history of America is buried near a tree. And he directs him. Somehow he gets a hold of two jewels, the Urman and the Thurman. And he has these gold plates which only he and his closest associates can see. And he reads them through the Urman and the Thurman from behind a curtain and dictates it in kind of King James old English which was already outdated by that time which is very interesting that these ancient plates would be written in such a fashion. And it told the history of the Jews coming and creating civilizations in America and then the civilizations go away. You could say it's a precursor to some of the the modern-day science fiction or historical fiction that merges with non-fiction as a genre so that people can basically

31:00 make up whatever they want and if they do it well enough then they get tons of followers. And that is the point of Mormonism or the point of directing attention towards Mormonism. It wasn't a flash in the pan like the Shakers or the Annitas. It wasn't a flash in the pan like so many religious cults. Mormonism is incredibly powerful. I might get fired just for saying something bad about them. We'll see. Incredibly powerful, incredibly successful, able to cultivate um families which stay together like amazing rates of of continuous marriages, you know, very low divorce rates. also amazing capabilities for social cooperation especially in regard to corporations and also because of their travelers because of their their traveling uh evangelical culture they're very popular with the intelligence community so many Mormons are represented in the CIA for instance because of their facility with language and their exposure and access to foreign cultures Mormons are extraordinarily

32:06 powerful but their belief system is so divergent from normal normal Christianity, it's kind of hard to call them Christian in any uh traditional sense of the term. And I'll just give you one example. I used to invite Mormons to my house all the time, and I'm not sure if they were supposed to tell me this, but they did. Uh very early on, it was Sister Shaw and Sister Bradshaw. And Sister Shaw was hot, Sister Bradshaw was not. Uh and I kind of was sweet on Sister Shaw. And so I'd have them over and they talk all the time. and and and they was asking him at one point like, "Okay, so this view of heaven and hell, it's now well known, but this is in the '9s. It was kind of hard to, at least for me, to get a hold of it. Like, what do you believe in heaven and and hell? How does that work in Mormonism?" And if you're not familiar, I'll give you a quick breakdown. If you're just kind of a pretty good Mormon, uh you've been saved, but you, you know, you didn't get married, you didn't wear the magic underwear, you didn't do everything just right, you go to the tlesmosphere, which is kind of like low rent heaven, you know, it's sort of like

33:06 the the super eight of heavens. And then just above that is the tlesial sphere, which is better, right? Like holiday end basically. Uh, and then above that, if you've done everything right, you were saved, you're married, you wore the underwear underwear, you didn't drink booze, you didn't drink caffeine, you didn't eat chocolate, you didn't jerk off, you didn't do any of these things, and you go to the celestial sphere. And the celestial sphere is the highest. And below that is, of course, and outside of the outer darkness, basically hell. And you can see the outer darkness from the tles sphere. So you know like you're in the super eight and you're looking down at the homeless people you know that you're at least better off than them. And then the same from the the uh where we at again holiday end the tlesphere looking down in the celestial sphere uh the rat or you know I don't know high I don't know I don't really stay in fivestar hotels. Somebody will have to provide the example but uh you're you're you're able to see that you didn't end up like those suckers. More importantly though, as you face forward, as you face into the future, because you have your

34:11 wife, maybe you have a few wives, but definitely your main squeeze, your main woman, you are then empowered, you're given a planet of your own, and you become a god and are able to create life on a new planet all in your own. A kind of uh a theergy, you know, you're you're becoming divine. You're able to become a god. And this will be important also as we move into the transhuman phase of this warped telling of American history that I'm trying to provide. But so you can see the cultural mutations were plentiful. You can see that even in those that died out the the the forms the modes continued on and among those that were the most successful like the Mormons tremendous amounts of power. Tremendous staying power but also social and political power. Ask anybody in Utah or Arizona how powerful Mormons are politically. Vary, vary. Now, sticking with the history though, it's I think that the

35:18 Civil War also represents an important religious moment for so many different reasons. uh aside from it being uh the culmination of a tension that had been building for centuries and also the release of tension uh it became enshrined as a religious moment. Right? The the winners of the war the north believed that God had given them the duty to free the slaves. And they also when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, they believed that he was vindicated by his mor his moral synchronization or his moral resonance with God. And if you look at the the not only Lincoln's speeches in regard to the end of slavery and the the end of the war and the religious elements of God justifying this, you can see also that many of the people who lamented the death of Lincoln saw him as a kind of

36:19 Christ figure and in tradition with the the martyrs and he would also represent a secularized or what would eventually be known as postmodern martyr figure that you would see again in Martin Luther King, you would see again in Gandhi, you would see it even in strange forms like Jim Morrison or John Linen or even Dime Bag Daryl, but the secular martyrdom. So again, it's this it's not that these things didn't exist before, but before the American project or the modern era, the martyrs, the I the ideal human being would be justified by the church. If you look at the history of the saints and the orthodox and Catholic tradition, they are saints because the church sanctified their saintthood. Whereas Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, so on and so forth, these are sanctified by popularity. They're sanctified by history. They're sanctified by humans. And it would be yet another mutation

37:23 that would accumulate and be added to the bizarre mix of belief systems that we have here in America. And one other element that I think should really be brought to light is the Unitarian impulse. You probably know of the Unitarian Universalist Church. It was actually for me when I was 20, I was dating a Unitarian Universalist and so I went because of her, but it was the only it was the only church that I became a member of other than my Southern Baptist beginnings uh on purpose. Uh, and I think that even though the Unitarians are rightly ridiculed as rainbow people uh, with all sorts of uh, perhaps unhealthy and unsightly cultural mutations festering beneath their authority, uh, they still in their their core represent something very beautiful about the American spirit or the modern spirit or the spirit of openness. They're called unarians because they believe in the unity of God. And you

38:25 know they came to believe you see it especially in people like Emerson and the various transcendentalists uh they came to believe that that all religions were pointing towards that god and the universalist aspect is that no god who truly loved his creation would ever condemn any of them to hell permanently and so the rejection of eternal damnation is the root of the universalist and these were two different sects they came out of congregationalism doesn't but two different sects that eventually would merge in the 1960s as the Unitarian Universalist Church. But they're very very important. We've heard Warren speak very eloquently at the last Meriwether Academy on how on the beauty of uh Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Theorough's viewpoint and this is inextric inextricably linked to that unitarian impulse. But at that time, right, we're still kind of in a fuzzy way in the late 1800s moving our way into the 20th century. America was still homogeneous, so to speak. You know, very much the empowered

39:33 class were uh Europeans, mostly Anglo-Uropeans, what we now would call wasps, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants with some other kind of European monkey peoples. And then you also had the African slaves. And the African slaves uh both when they were slaves and then even when freed represent a very distinctive class, right? And so you already had this diversity, but it was still cons easy to conceive of and and in a way manageable diversity. And then of course you have the always forgotten Native Americans uh who got chewed up and spit out uh with almost no real compensation other than casinos and firewater and Oxycontton. But at that time there was still very much a force or a presence in America and it it created this mosaic in the American psyche that was quite unique. Carl Young would remark on it later in the 20th century. This kind of beautiful mongrel in my words uh that is America and and

40:33 yet it was still fairly contained. And so you had the Protestants, you you begin to see more and more Catholics and Orthodox. You had Jews, of course, you had some Muslims. Actually had a significant number of Muslims early on in the slave community, right? Black slaves. I've seen various estimates, but as high as like 40% were Muslims when they arrived in America. It's probably lower, but who knows? And then, of course, the various kinds of uh tribal religions of the Africans and the various tribal religions of the Indians. So, America already had this this diversity of religious thought in mind. And one of the culminations of this that is looked back upon especially in religious studies as exceedingly important was the world parliament of religion which uh occurred along with the Chicago as as part of the Chicago world's fair. And so this was held in 1893 and it was the first real meeting of like intentional real meeting of all of these different traditions. You had Christians of course, Protestants,

41:36 Catholics, Orthodox. You had Jews, of course. You had Muslims, of course, but you also had the the Hindus. You had the James, you had I think the James, I think the Sikhs, you had the Hindus, you had the Buddhists, you had Confucians, uh you had Dowists, you had a number of of of views represented. And the goal even if it was run by a Presbyterian minister who insisted that the Lord's prayer be read uh by or recited by everyone who still believed that by bringing these people together perhaps they could find some kind of commonality and one of the standout figures was uh Swami Venadun and Vivecananda like Ramachrishna before him believed that all religions were pointing towards the

42:37 same God. He was one to invoke the metaphor of the mountain that all religions are paths up the same mountain to the same peak coming this is kind of deep in late Hindu ideas and if you look at the Hindu religion in general the Hindu religion most of the predominant strains of it do have that universalist impulse which also explains a lot of the attraction of people like Emerson towards Hinduism. The idea that God is one with many many masks. Of course, uh, Veneandanda or Venun uh was he was universalist but he was also a supremacist. So that he believed that yes all religions were paths towards the one God but the Hindus were just better at it and had a much clearer view as to what was happening. And I don't want to leave you with the impression though that this

43:38 was some kind of just kumbaya gathering in which everyone agreed that God is one and we're all one. There were a lot of dissenting voices oddly enough especially among the Buddhists who saw their own views derided and you know Buddhists are not particularly theistic. So uh they saw their own views ar uh you know derided and you know just to paraphrase one of the Japanese Zen practitioners we know Reicha you act like this to us and this was very important too because yes you can bring different peoples together uh but you will never necessarily fuse them into one melting pot and that tension is all part of our own quests. How much of this diversity can you tolerate? And of that diversity, how much of it is a value to you? What combination is a value to you and your family and your country? And we'll get into that in the next section. All right, fellas. I appreciate you hanging

44:45 in there with me on this. And just so you know, definitely going to open up the floor to all the criticism questions and critique or whatever those are the same things criticism and critique but human thesaurus over here the floor will be open uh before this is all over with but till then you're stuck with me. So what are the fruits of religious freedom in America? I think there are a lot of beautiful fruits to religious freedom. even the freedom of the Orthodox to maintain communities that are closed off to the outside and internally consistent and exclusive to the wider secular world and the Protestant tradition which I come from and the freedom to interpret the Bible according to one's own conscience, one's own intellect. Another beautiful fruit of American freedom.

45:50 And in its own dark and bizarre way, even some of the more perverse artistic and spiritual flourishes of this culture are, if not to be embraced, at least to be understood and appreciated. And that's where we're going to go now. In the very quick summary of American history from my own twisted point of view, it's centered on Jesus. It's centered on Christianity. And the most difficult aspect of Christianity, at least to my mind, comes out of the sermon on the mount. the extreme demands to love one's enemy, to turn the other cheek, the warning that to commit adultery in one's own heart is to commit adultery, the distinction between God and Mammon and the exclusive dictim that you cannot

46:58 serve two masters, either God or Mammon. And I think that that shows in the development of the culture of the Shakers, perhaps even the Onidas, but it's an insistence that it's not to be a Christianity in which one declares a belief, but a Christianity in which one is to literally sacrifice oneself for the greater good. Albeit in the case of the shakers, the Onidas and the communalist groups and even the more corporate groups like the Mormons uh growing into strange directions. Another dictim in Christianity that's unique to Christianity and Buddhism alone is the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. And it's an active principle. You seek out those who need and do unto them as you would have them do unto you. Now in my own conception below that you

48:00 have the silver rule espoused by Rabbi Hell before Jesus and also by Confucious. Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. It's a handsoff altruism you might say. And then below that, a very common dictim that is adhered to in any American corporate society or any kind of salesman. Do unto others so that they will do unto you to manipulate others to do unto you. This is actually codified in an ancient Egyptian tablet. And then below that you have the iron rule of the Hell's Angels put forward by Sunny Barger Barger. And that is treat me nice and I'll treat you better. Treat me bad and I'll treat you worse. The primal iron rule of the Hell's Angels, of the Vikings, of the Bantto, of pretty much everyone of a tribal

49:10 culture. But then below that you have the black rule put forward by Alistister Crowley in 1904 which is simply do what thou wilt. Do what you will. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. That was the central theme of his book of the law which he claims he channeled while in Egypt from the spirit Ias or Iawas. And he sat on it for a number of years. I think even maybe over a decade before it became a central ethos to the phimite groups such as the Otto Ordo Templi Orientis of which Crowley was a founder. Alistister Crowley was a strange character, a funny guy, very witty, very dark, very asserbic, sarcastic,

50:19 very brilliant. But ultimately, you can imagine the the fruit of this idea, the fruit of the black rule, do what thou wilt, is not only a declaration of liberty, a libert a liberty from all previous laws and dictims, but a recipe for cruelty and disaster, but freedom nonetheless. It is the essence of liberty. Do what thou wilt. Now Crowley set himself against the traditional concepts of religion put forward by the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, but especially the Christians. He was raised uh part of a a a very extreme sect of Christians in England. His father was a minister and also the owner of a brewery. And very early on in his life, especially due to his his ravenous sexual appetites, he wanted freedom from this. And he wanted freedom from the

51:25 altruistic ideals of the golden rule. He dubbed himself the great beast. His mother used to call him the beast, but he dubbed himself the great beast. He took as his magical number 666. And it would be just another eccentric doing strange things with his inheritance were it not for his profound influence downstream of his magical working. You can see the influence in rock and roll. It's very apparent. You can even see the influence in later communal culture. So in the case of rock and roll for instance uh the Rolling Stones were involved with Kenneth Anger doing satanic films and Kenneth Anger of course was a devote to Crowley's method of magical working. You can see it in the Beatles on the cover for uh Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club. Band club band. Thank you. Uh Alistister

52:34 Crowley features there along with Carl Young and others. You can see it in Led Zeppelin. You know, Jimmy Paige was obsessed with Alistister Crowley bought Alistister Crowley's house in Scotland. And on down the line, Tulle Marilyn Manson Ministry, all these guys hearken back to the Croian tradition as a motivating factor in their in their art. HR Giger whom last night I told you I I visited for the second time his gallery in Switzerland and Giger was also very much influenced by this tradition of the Croian doeth thou wilt ethos. In fact in his personal collection at the very top of the museum is a portrait of Alistister Crowley and the satanic imagery is largely derived and even the the aesthetic of the art is derived from Crowley's own work. So a profound influence on the culture and as far as communal culture goes he had one of the early communes. I mean we

53:40 know that the shakers the onidas this wasn't unusual and by the way just you know you think commune you think communism the communes were sprouting up all over Europe as well and Marxism communism as we now know it is comes out of that brew. It wasn't as if Karl Marx came up with communism. He just simply put an industrial stamp on it. So Crowley is important not only because of the you could say the boldness of putting forward this idea of do what thou wilt, but also the the cultural and spiritual influence. And I don't know if there's a direct connection. I imagine there is not, but it's at least worth noting. As I mentioned before, HP Lovecraft, the author HP Lovecraft comes out of Rhode Island. again founded on the principle of religious liberty and Lovecraft began writing his first stories just after this declaration of do without thou wilt in the book of the law. Now one would have to uh indulge a

54:44 degree of primitive uh and an adivistic superstition to believe that they were in any way connected. But I am both primitive and adivistic. So I think that it's pretty clear Crowley opened up the door to demons. Now Crowley's influence wouldn't only be on the culture. There would also be an influence on technology. And we'll get there in just a second. But I just want to highlight the importance of World War I and World War II on the development of America, the prominence of America as a world power, the influence of American culture on the rest of the world, and of course the technological ambition and supremacy of America over the rest of the world, at least up to our present time, who knows how much longer. In in the age of colonization, some of the most important technologies would have been the ship, the sailboat uh and and sailing ships would have been the carriage and the wheel, right? It would

55:49 have been certain uh useful agricultural mechanisms like water wheels and windmills and of course the printing press was extraordinarily important. You know, Warren was explaining how interconnected and and Turbil explained how interconnecting the how interconnected the printing press was with the American founding, the ability to produce media. By the time you get to World War I, now you you've got the addition of uh kind of early airplanes, cars, tanks, things like this, or armored vehicles, and of course machine guns. And then after World War II, you have pretty sophisticated bombers, uh, sophisticated tanks, sophisticated machine guns, and of course the introductory the in introduction of the atom bomb. And that would determine not only the course of history but the tone of history. Because after the atom bomb, it was known that due to the ingenuity of mathematicians and technicians and and

56:55 the the resources of a war economy that humanity not only stood under the threat of possible Armageddon by divine will or possible natural disaster or disease. humanity could possibly be destroyed by the ingenuity of these people leading to the Cold War and mutually assured destruction. And that period of leading up to the end of World War II and after World War II, a few defining things. You had the atom bomb, right? First detonated in the deserts of New Mexico and then detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And whatever your opinions of that as an ethical decision, one thing's for sure, when they obliterated mostly Christian Japanese in that act, quite possibly unnecessarily, they showed that humanity has the power of the gods. And leading up to that moment, the end

58:00 of World War II, you also had the development of computer systems, the first computer systems, of which one of the prominent ones, Inyac, the first digital computer, and its first use in the aftermath of World War II, 1945, was to model thermonuclear explosions, the possibility of rather than the fision explosion of uranium or plutonium, fusion of hydrogen, massive sunlike powers unleashed. as weaponry and comprehended by way of the digital computer again inyak. You also had in 1945 the discovery of the ng hammade library the cache of documents that were hidden in the 4th century by the gnostics who were being persecuted by the catholic church and other orthodox factions. And what that did was opened up a window onto alternative, you could say or heretical Christianity which before had been understood by way of the heresiologists, the church

59:05 fathers who said this is evil. This is wrong. And now you have the exposure of this novel way of looking at God, looking at Christ, looking at the world, looking at Satan, looking at evil from the people who espoused it and believed it. Very diverse set of of beliefs by the way. And then a year later, you had the discovery that was in Cairo or outside of Cairo, Egypt, near the village of Nagamati. You also had the next year the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the the Levant which gave you again another view of what early Christianity may have been influenced by believe these were scenes. You can see much of what we would consider to be the novel teachings of Jesus expressed in these documents, including this idea of waring factions of angels and devils and many others, rituals of purity, all these things. And so this is a dramatic period, not only technologically, but also ideologically.

1:00:08 It it challenged what was left of orthodox authority over the interpretation of the Bible and the interpretation of the person of Christ and humanity descending down from that. So what does this have to do with Alistister Crowley? There was a disciple of Alistister Crowley. His name was Jack Parsons. Perhaps you've heard of him. And Jack Parsons was completely devoted to Alistister Crowley's system of sex magic encoded in the Ordo Templ orientist, the Otto. He was in direct contact with Alistister Crowley. He exchanged letters with him until Crowley's death. He also sent Crowley money because Crowley was never very good with money and in fact died destitute according to the apocryphal tale of his death. Uh he died alone in a flop house wearing nothing but a magical hat and a magical ring holding a magical

1:01:08 wand and Crowley's last words were reported to be I am perplexed. Jack Parsons was there till the end. And Jack Parsons, aside from being an oultist and aside from raising the hackles of conservatives in and around California, he was he lived in Pasadena, was a rocket scientist and in fact a pioneering rocket scientist, a Stanford graduate and one of the founding uh members of the or one of the people founding the Jet Propulsion Laboratories uh housed there in Pasadena if I'm not mistaken. And so and this this idea of like going to the moon, this idea of the power of rocketry is intimately tied at least in the person of Parsons with the occult. And it's an it's a somewhat obscure and you a marginal aspect of the whole history of rocketry and the space

1:02:13 program and all of that. But I think it's important not just because of its its bizarre nature, but also because it is in in some sense like the the the quest for space of that next frontier after all of America has basically been conquered and there are few frontiers left. That quest for space has a number of esoteric or occult underpinnings as does the enterprise of of nuclear weaponry. So you you're probably familiar with Oppenheimer's obsession with Sanskrit and the Hindu tradition and he famously said he recalled upon seeing that first mushroom cloud a passage from the Bavad Gita whom Alistister Kohli was also obsessed with uh in which I am become death destroyer of worlds which comes out of the Bavad Gita and in the space program itself you have a number of Freemasons so that Buzz Aldrin Neil Armstrong strong. Am I correct on this? The Freemasons. And you have a number of kind of sci-fi

1:03:21 sensibilities going into all of it. We'll get back there in a second. But on Parsons, so something significant happened, at least in his mind, in 1946, the Babylon working as he called it. And it was an attempt through sex magic to call into being a liberatory entity, you might say, the antichrist, to destroy all of what came before and arise as this emissary of the will. And this was conducted in partnership with a gentleman you probably know, Elron Hubard. Elron Hubard, a naval navy guy, I think intelligence officer if I'm not mistaken. Certainly Navy who befriended Parsons and uh proceeded to built him. He they ended up embezz or scamming him out of tons and tons of his fortune. But Parsons had this communal home. He called it the parsonage. And it was everything was kind of shared in

1:04:28 common, especially sexual partners. And Hubard was working with him in these magical rituals to kind of summon Scarlet Woman. He eventually Hubard disappears because he Hubard promises to go purchase some yachts from Florida with Parson's money and just disappears with his girlfriend. and Parsons chases him down, gets some of the money back, comes back somewhat despondent, but another character is introduced into this this love nest. And this is this red-haired woman. Her name escapes me at the moment. I will not venture to pull it out from the dead cells in the back of my brain, but a a very vibrant uh also naval uh veteran. and they proceed to try to create this magical child, this moonchild, this antichrist figure. Uh they fail to do so and you know Parson's not long

1:05:33 afterwards dies from an explosion in his laboratory, his kind of garage laboratory. Some believe it was an accident, some believe it was suicide, not unlike Meriwether Lewis. Some believe it was murder. Nobody really knows. But the impact that it left again on the culture is profound. And and the the kind of dark undertone of this occult fervor that bleeds into the technological ambitions of the west again I think cannot be ignored. I don't think it should be the sole focus. There are many many people perhaps the vast majority of people working on these technologies who were Christians devoted Christians who believed what they were doing was for the service and glory of God. But this other element is the fruit of religious liberty. And I want to focus in on a place that I've visited three times now. Uh first by happen stance and afterwards just whenever I've gone through that area of

1:06:33 the country I can't stay away. And that's Trinidad, Colorado. And Trinidad with its Christian namesake is a kind of like the burned over district of upstate New York uh petri dish in which these mimetic or ideological mutations are flourishing. One of the first historical points about Trinidad, Colorado goes back to the late 1800s. It was known as the Lello massacre, which was a massacre of mining workers who were striking and the miners had been ejected from their homes. You know, in that time, it was not uncommon for a mining company or any company to set up housing for their workers. And due to uh failed negotiations over wages, they were kicked out of their homes and they were put in these tent cities. And they continued to strike and they continued to rebel. And the hired security from the mining companies would attack them uh kill the numbers vary. We'll say uh dozen plus maybe dozens of

1:07:38 people, but especially a woman and children uh whom she was shielding hiding in one of the tents which they set on fire and burned her to death. And it became a symbol for the cruelty of capitalists and the nobility of workers and much of the momentum that would become say the 8-hour workday or the or the the 40-hour week or health care or any of many of the things we take for granted now or used to up until a decade or so ago were won by not only the people fighting and banding together against the owners of these companies But also the symbols, what Turbville pointed out rightly to be propaganda, the propaganda that the evil capitalists attack these poor socialists. Well, it worked and I think it worked for the better. And that occurred just north of Trinidad, Colorado. But you fast forward uh a little over half a century, you have some other peculiar cultural mutations forming. And

1:08:44 one in 1965 was known as Drop City, a commune, an art commune, uh, which attracted a lot of the early hippie types. It attracted Tim Timothy Liry's attention. I believe Jim Morrison even visited at one point. It was a seinal experiment very much in the tradition of the late 1700 Shakers or the 1800s Onidas, so on and so forth. that everything is shared in common and this is to be a model for how to conduct oneself as a society in the face of an otherwise corrupt mainstream culture. They built these strange houses kind of geodisic domes of sort. They're based on Buckuter Fuller's ideas, the Bucky Ball and these these sorts of things. They were kind of trashy looking. There's a lot of junk thrown around but and a lot of acid eaten like a ton of drugs. But that's, you know, kind of again it's in in in the same vein as as our man Parsons who was also eating tons of measculine using cocaine think maybe

1:09:50 morphine Alistister Kohley doing the same. And I failed to mention that of course Alistister Cooley's Abbey of Filimma in Europe which predates Jack Parson's communal effort by decades was also a commune with open sexual relationships and plenty of drugs. A lot of people went insane. Wendu died and I'm sure that proctologist was would be horrified by the results of much of what was going on there. But the the the drop city, aside from being, you know, one of the the first and and and most famous communes in a model that did spread quite rapidly across the country as the cultural revolution of the 60s amped up, uh was accentuated by and complemented by another operation that was going that would begin in Trinidad, Colorado in 1969 which would later be known as the sex change capital of the United States

1:10:59 and a doctor uh Stanley Bieber or Bber was really the first major American uh transgender surgeon. This had begun in Weimar Germany and you know had been around for decades but he was the one who really put it on the map and when you go to Trinidad Colorado today it's very interesting you don't I mean there are a lot of historical monuments to the Lello massacre there are some like if you go to their history museum obviously they'll have information about Drop City and a ton of u very a lot of agilation for uh Bieber or Bersber's sex change operations, but the town itself is pretty nondescript. It does though kind of represent a cross-section of American culture because you have this economically depressed town and at least in my experience of it, a lot of conservatives, a lot of liberals, uh, a lot of different types. You've got hot yoga over here, you've got the guy

1:12:01 selling guns over here, and you have tons and tons of dispensaries, weed dispensaries, like so many that even I'm kind of upset by it. like maybe maybe there's something something bad happening. Maybe uh the appearance of this represents a kind of degeneracy in American culture that is perhaps the direct descendant or direct fruits of the kind of loose libertarian culture that would lead to communalism, transgender transgender operations and so on and so forth. And I myself, you know, I I I I have mixed feelings about all of this because I do believe that freedom is the best path forward. But the fruits of that freedom really do have to be reckoned with. And one of my earliest direct experiences of this was at Zindic Farm. Zindic is Sanskrit for heretic. And Zindic Farm was formed in California by a man who called himself and his wife Wolf and Errol Zindic. And they took on the name we the the

1:13:06 heretics proudly so against what they called the death culture the outward mainstream American culture which they believed was destroying not only the ecosystems of the world but also ultimately instituting a kind of soft slavery over the workers that needed to band together in small communal groups with these social experiments in order order to ultimately overturn what would what they would consider to be a horrifically perverse culture. They believed it would destroy itself. They believed it would destroy itself sometime around the year 2000. Obviously, that didn't happen. But when I showed up, it was in the late 90s. And I learned three things from them. Uh the first thing I learned was that organic food really is better than normal food. They grew organic vegetables and had only humanely slaughtered meat to the extent they ate it. And these were very healthy, good-looking people.

1:14:07 A+. I also took with me a kind of dictim or slogan that they had, which is cult is short for culture. And I believe that's true. Before that, I'd only experienced the wider culture, but what I experienced there, there were about 70 people there at the time. They had moved from their founding in 1969 in California to Texas and then had moved sometime before I arrived in the late 90s to Vero Beach, Vero Beach, Florida. But when you know cult is short for culture. This was a 70 person strong concentrated cult and they believed the outward culture was a death cult. Kind of like the Shakers. The Shakers saw the outside world, the world, this this evil place. But what we are cultivating is good. And it was flawed in dramatic ways. But it did give me a sense not only of what happens when you concentrate people around an idea and the power the real power it generates and the intolerance

1:15:11 that it generates towards the outside and the intolerance that it stimulates by the in the outside towards them. But also, and this is getting into the super superstitious woo, you sort of psychic connections, shared dreams, thoughts passing from one person to the next, injuries that would oftent times move through the group, right? Like strange coincidences. And and I realized that in fact, they were correct. cult is short for culture because what we live in out here, especially in America, is an interlocking mosaic of cults. So, you can't you you can almost not see that you're in a cult or you're in these overlapping cults because there's so many of them and it feels so normal. But that's exactly where we're at. It's exactly where every human being on earth, all but the most liberated gnostic, uh, is trapped in the cult either of their birth or the cults of their choosing. And the third thing I learned is that definitely if you're going to have a polyamorous cult, you should use a

1:16:17 condom. didn't learn this the hard way, but aside from thoughts being spread around the group and various injuries, uh herpes was a problem as was gorrhea gorrhea and chlamyia and uh and unplanned pregnancies which children were being born into this and uh it was it was pretty stunning especially their denial that HIV existed. They thought that HIV did not cause AIDS. They disbanded in 2013. I don't know how many of them lived and I don't know the status of their uh STDs but I do know that their their legacy not unlike the Shakers the Onidas the uh parsonage of Jack Parsons the Abbey of the Lima that despite their disbanding that legacy still lives on and it is an inspiration for other very similar groups which still exist not just in America but across the world and all this is a herald and a kind of microcosm almost a caricature of what American culture has become. Because you

1:17:19 know, we ended the last talk on the world parliament of religions and this idea that all religions can and should come together for mutual understanding and perhaps even arrive at some kind of perennial philosophy, some sort of deep and abiding divinity that's beyond the outward forms. And that was just an idea in 1893. But come 1965 only are Americans reading about Hindus, but they've got the the palaces of their gods being erected next to their, you

1:18:24 know, Texas oil refinery. And they they can now go visit a a Tibetan tantric teacher in the foothills even of East Tennessee. And suddenly something changed in America that it was no longer easily defined. What an American was due to a kind of retroactive definition of America could no longer be easily defined. There was this mutation, this hybridization, this mongrelization not only of bloodlines but of spiritual inheritance, of culture. Fusion restaurants where you can get Mexican egg rolls. Astounding. Just astounding. And you look at the flourishing of religion in America as opposed to any other country. And yes, you see it also in other western nations. And you see it historically in others, but nothing quite like America. So the Hindu obsession, you had the rise of Iskan,

1:19:24 the the U international society of Krishna consciousness. Uh you had all these Buddhist temples and Buddhist teachers showing up. You have crazy tantrrists such as Osho and others. Uh, you have these these Jewish communes, this kind of recreation of the the Jewish shuttle of of Israel popping up around America. You have Christian communities that are closing themselves off into just right down the road here you can find them. Christian communities shutting themselves off from the world. You have eco extremists, people who worship Gaia or some scientific version of Gaia, who are willing to attack the machine on behalf of a tree. Julia butterfly living up in a tree and in buckets and remaining hot nevertheless with her hairy legs and her hairy armpits. Astounding cultural mutations. And you have the development of this sort of sci-fi aesthetic. And you have the development of the back to nature

1:20:29 aesthetic. And you have people who have plasticish clothes that look like they just came out of a cowboy shop because they did. And maybe they're not cowboys. Maybe they're just dudes. And you have also the development of babies, of polycules, of every imaginable combination of culture. And yes, it is outside of the mainstream, but it has become much much much more part of the mainstream. Radical atheists, radical Muslims right here in the good old US of A. And all of this ferment amounts to chaos, a chaos that has to be navigated. And so to conclude this, I just want to bring your attention to one other figure, a real American hero, Timothy Liry, Dr. Timothy Liry, who really began his prominent career anyway as a psychologist at Harvard

1:21:35 working with the CIA. and he would take mushrooms on a trip to Mexico that would change his entire idea of what it meant to be a human and what reality was and how one could come to higher and higher realities. And he would get turned on to LSD, which was first manufactured uh first by the Swiss but then US labs, government funded. Really pure, really good. pretty sure I've had some of it. And Timothy Liry would then convert from a kind of stayed suitwearing maybe spook psychologist to the psychedelic guru and he started taking on the Hindu aesthetic, right? And if you ever been to India, you know that like the whole of the 60s is basically like this attempt to play act and lar as as Hindus. And he openly declared he was beginning a new religion.

1:22:41 And he openly declared that this new religion was one of freedom, was one of the will. And he would later say that he was indebted not only to Alistister Crowley for the spiritual freedom that he brought into the world with the book of the law, but he at one point on I think a heavy dose of mecolin or some other psychedelic in the desert believed that he was the reincarnation of Alistister Crowley deeply entwined. Everything we think of when we think of the counterculture cannot be you you see the h the prince of of Timothy Liry on it. And again descending from this infernal dictim, do what thou wilt. And Timothy Liry would go on in his later life to put forward a principle which he called smile. Because as the 60s moved on into the depressing 70s and the 80s brought with it the explosion of the personal computer and

1:23:51 and digital technologies that the masses could use and Steve Jobs and Apple and you know the the garagebased geniuses and all this. Liry had to get a new gig. And I'm not saying he did it cynically, but he definitely uh evolved, right? And started putting out a new kind of vibe. And so he went from the psychedelic guru to the cybernetic guru. And he began preaching about a world in which computers would not only dominate human culture, this is in the 80s, but would enable the average person to become a magician. in a a classic essay that was published in 1988 Reality Bites magazine with a confusing and convoluted and probably psychedelically impaired headline which was something to the effect of digital polytheism load and run something or another. He talked openly about how the personal computer like psychedelics was a way for the average person to

1:24:58 conduct magic. and he opens it with a poem from Alistister Crowley. We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon. Our method is science. Our aim is religion. And he goes on with his co-author to describe how the computer in essence is a ritual chamber in which one can steer oneself through reality. Because remember Alistister Crowley his definition of magic was to cause change in conformity with the will. So that now the average person could change not only their consciousness dramatically with this digital technology which they could create these digital realities and inhabit but also the outer world. And another of his his classic phrases, and I think it's very true when you look around at the kids today with their big pupil eyes staring at their phones, was that the PC is the LSD of the '9s. It breaks open reality and all the traditional forms are now in

1:26:03 question. Another of his dictims, question authority, think for yourself. Think for yourself, question authority. always with your own inner consciousness as the guide. And he saw this unfolding mass of digital and psychedelic and cultural and multicultural and multi-racial, multisexual, polysexual chaos as not something to necessarily be afraid of, but something that one must simply learn how to steer through, to navigate through. Cyber, Kybernon, the the the rudder of the ship. how do you steer through it? And he believed it was through embracing the technology, making sure that the technology remained in the hands of the people and to never ever accept any kind of authoritarian regime or any kind of oppressive force whatsoever. That one's will should always be the guide. And this would in turn inspire a man whom I've gotten to know reasonably well.

1:27:12 His name is Max Moore. And Max Moore, the reason that we say the word transhumanism at all is because of Max Moore. And Max Moore, aside from being like this big hulking buff mutant of a man, has a beautiful wife, Natasha Vimmore, also a proponent of transhumanism. whom he met at Timothy Liry's house. And so you can see this thread beginning with a black magician and moving through a rocket scientist and through a psychedelic guru into you might say the prophet of a transhuman future. And that is where we will begin in our next talk and uh and then wrap it up and let you guys break me. Our final exploration is the colonization of the cosmos. Beginning the story,

1:28:13 I talked about America as a frontier, America as an experiment, as a kind of petri dish for mimetic mutations. And that first frontier was the natural world. How do we conquer that? And you might say that the second frontier was the mind and society of the American public. How do you seed the minds and therefore change the society? And these are all competing points of view. As I told you in the beginning, this telling of history, this very brief overview is very idiosyncratic coming from the warped mind of an acid casualty, but hopefully offering up something that's of value, something that is of worth. So, what's the next frontier? And we hear in the science fiction

1:29:21 millu that the next frontier is space, outer space. And America of course being the first to land on the moon. If you believe in the moon, America is poised to spearhead that that next adventure. But I would say there are four realms into which we are still pushing, colonizing, altering. Yes, you have outer space. Once you've mapped the entire Earth and exploited its resources, the obvious logical next step in the scientific paradigm is to go out into outer space. But there's also the inner space and every possible tool is being utilized to explore that space as well. We talked about psychedelics and whatever your

1:30:22 opinions on psychedelic drugs may be, psychedelics undoubtedly open up doorways for one to explore one's own mind, one's own consciousness in a sort of lucid dream. And you also have the meditative practices given to us from western church fathers St. Ignatius being a key example but many others adding to that the eastern practices of meditation Hindu Buddhist dowist so on and so forth and also the psychic experiments that are being done to uncover unlock and prove the existence of psychic power. You don't want to get in front of a dissertation committee or a board of directors and make a whole lot of strong claims about psychic power. But the reality is that there is a science of the psionic and that science does show

1:31:28 at least statistically that the human mind does seem to have some sort of interaction with the outer world. Parenthetically, I want to bring up the one of the origins of scientific study of psychic power. As I said earlier, the first men to walk on the moon, go to the moon. Um, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the Freemasons. And assuming you don't think that this is a spaceic conspiracy to fool the public with theater and and badly rendered shuttles and pods. They were the esoteric emissaries to other worlds. But another astronaut that doesn't get as much attention is Edgar Mitchell, who was in one of the later Apollo missions walked on the moon,

1:32:29 but he had this mystical experience from space looking back to the Earth and he saw the the whole of the Earth, this enclosed circle. And he saw no borders. He simply saw the Earth. And he realized that humanity is one and that there is a mystical force that drives the creation of nature and of human human beings and of human societies. and he would return to Earth and he would found the Institute for the the Noetic Sciences which is one of the leading investigative bodies that is looking for actual scientific statistical evidence of psychic power. So there's a link there again parenthetically a link there between the quest to go into outer space and the quest to go into inner space. And there's also the mutations of of culture itself sort of social space and you can see very

1:33:39 clearly that that space is uh fertile ground for all kinds of mutations many of them very positive. The ability for a person to do good to another person is I think far greater and amplified by the technologies at our disposal but also very clearly those technologies are used for atomization and uh for destruction. I'm not saying that technology is neutral. I don't really believe that. I think that certain technologies tend towards certain effects. This was put very succinctly by Peter Teal with whom I have many many disagreements. But he said that AI is essentially communist in its nature whereas Bitcoin or decentralized uh cryptocurrencies are inherently libertarian. Whether you accept that thesis or not, it definitely points to this notion that

1:34:40 certain technologies have certain tendencies. And our social technologies such as social media have had incredibly ironic effects. The atomization of people, especially young men, and incredibly antisocial. And last but not least, the digital space, which is intimately connected with the social space. It is. We are now in what my my friend James Pulos calls a cyborg vivarium. We are basically the subjects of a vast global experiment. And the cultural mutations, the social mutations are all now wired, interconnected, monitored, and manipulated by a digital space, a virtual space, cyber space. And so you have those four frontiers that we're still working towards and all of us are are going to have to figure out what our paths are whether it's

1:35:43 together as brothers or whether it is individually or some combination thereof. We're at least vicariously probing outer space. We're probing inner space if you're adventurous. We're left with these experiments in the social space and there is the yawning void of digital space into which our souls are being poured and crystallized. Now I also talked about beyond the frontiers the proliferation of diversity in America. And as much as I I might come off as someone who is against diversity I'm actually not. I think for instance uh mitochondria that was a great idea and I'm glad that we ultimately as ukareotic organisms incorporated mitochondria they are our friends and I I'm very glad

1:36:46 very very glad that we have hiphop and negro spirituals and I think that that reminds us all that the great hierarchy of power on this earth can land pretty heavy on anyone's head and any one of us could be humming those tunes or wrapping those sick bars and that diversity of American of the American the American psyche you could see two main poles there emerging in the modern era of course you have that age-old spiritual point of view especially Christian but as I I said earlier increasingly diverse so that's no longer just Christian but is everything all of it is considered part of the American fabric whether it be Jewish Christian Muslim Hindu Jane Buddhist seek confucian dowist communist

1:37:51 capitalist democrat fascist so on and so forth All of that's woven into the fabric of the American psyche. But there's a there's a polarization that is pointed to very often generically referred to as science and religion. And in the scientific point of view, you have a a deadened recapitulation of the spiritual point of view. Just take the spir the spiritual point of view of the Christians alone. You have the outpouring of the universe from the spoken word of God. God speaks light into existence. He separates the light from the dark. He populates the light and the dark with the moon and the sun. Vice versa. He separates the sea from the heavens and then the land from the sea and populates the heavens with the birds and the seas with the fishes and the land

1:38:54 with animals and the creeping things and the plants and of course culminating in the human. And there you have Adam and you have Eve. And then from the fall to the spread of the human seed across the planet, you have a diversification. And you might say it's just simple mythology. But I think that if you look deeply at the lessons that are taught in that spread, you'll find not only moral relevance, but also some clarification on what it means to be human. And there's a distinct end in the Christian version. One of the unique aspects of the western tradition is this recognition of history. This art of history. Uh the eastern traditions tended towards well almost universally really a cyclical point of view that they envision vast worlds upon worlds upon worlds upon worlds but they were cyclical. Whereas the western tradition is one of with a beginning and especially in the case of the Christian and Muslim stories a distinct end and also in the Jewish tradition a distinct

1:39:59 end and in the the Christian tradition that end is an apocalypse and it's the end of an old world but the beginning of a new and it's spiritual in its nature whether you are a a very materialist theologian uh or the most gnostic anti-materialist transcendent sort of teacher. There's still in the religious tradition this this being God and these hierarchies of beings, the angels and the fallen angels, the demons, the spirits, all these things that populate this world much vaster than this room and the trees beyond, the cities beyond and the space beyond. It is a vast cosmos. The scientific point of view is dead. Energetic but dead. And so it begins in the orthodox version with a big bang and the condensation of energy into matter into protons and electrons and neutrons,

1:41:02 hydrogen and stars and exploding stars and heavier elements and galaxies and planets so on and so forth. that then at least from our perspective culminate in Earth and then the progression of biological evolution, the progression of cultural or psychic evolution with humans. And the tension between those two two worlds is almost irreconcilable. But there are many who try and as much as I'm averse to turning towards Europe for any inspiration at all whatsoever other than for coffee and cheese and bread. The figure of Teard Desardon stands out as someone who tried to merge those two worlds, the spiritual and the scientific. And Desardon was li he lived and wrote mostly in the the late 1800s and then throughout the first half of the 20th century. And he was both a Jesuit priest and a

1:42:06 paleontologist. And his view of the world was an attempt at embracing both of those points of view. And he truly believed that the world was created with the spirit of God infused into it. And he truly believed that the figure of Christ was supreme above all others. And he truly believed in the human as something sacred and precious. But he also could not deny the facts of science. And as he's digging through the fossils and the various geological strata, the way he came to envision the world was layers. So our world begins with the lithosphere, the elements, the mountains and the seas, geology. And above that you have this layer, the biosphere, the bugs, the plants, the animals, us, our bodies. But then above that with the creation of human beings and the flourishing of human culture, the

1:43:11 noosphere from noose the Greek, the mind, maybe more specifically the overmind, what what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call the oversoul. But for him, it was more specific. It was more scientific. And he saw the creation not only of fire, campfires, bows and arrows, then eventually cities, streets, writing, art, architecture, on up to in his day the telegraph, the radio, the sealanes with ever more sophisticated ships and highways with ever more sophisticated vehicles. this interlinking, interconnected body, the noosphere, the world of culture, the world of the mind overlaid upon this. And again, this is an early 20th century. And he thought of it in in a sense like a brain, this interconnected web. And many later futurists would look back as at his vision of the noosphere as a prediction of the internet, the

1:44:16 interconnection of all people and all ideas by way of technology. But he was a techno optimist. I disagree with him on this, but it has to be appreciated how vivid and brilliant his point of view was. And he believed that all of this was an expression of God and the will of God. And just as the book of revelation speaks of Jesus as the alpha and omega, he believed that from the alpha of the big bang, we are moving towards the omega point. The omega point isn't a a time or a place. It's just a direction. And that direction is one in which you have ever more complex entities that are ever more interconnected and at the same time the freedom of individuals within that network to exert their own will. He was not some sort of cryptocrolian. But he did believe that at the same time

1:45:22 that evolution was driving us towards interconnection and understanding and more peaceable existence, a kind of collective that within that is the individual, the individual struggling for moral clarity and for greater and greater freedom and expression. And so Desardon saw this mega point as the realization of the human, which is the realization of Christ, which sounds an awful lot like the Shakers or the Onidas on Earth, or at least in the material sphere. That we as a species are bringing into existence the material manifestation of Christ through our cultural, religious, and technological efforts. And he also, aside from having a a preient apprehension of what would later be called the singularity with the omega point, he in essence was among the first anyway to use the term transhumanism.

1:46:31 And this was in most likely, it's not really clear, but most likely the early 50s, 1950s. And for him, transhumanism was the fruits of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Transhumanism was the liberty of humans to go beyond the constraints of the past into the future. He would die in the mid-50s. Forgive me for not remembering the dates. No, no historian, Brian. But that word transhumanism and along with the ideas of the nosphere and the omega point would continue on after him. His friend, his close friend Julian Huxley, brother of Aldis Huxley, grandson of th Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, would invoke transhumanism in a lecture in 1956. It would then be published in 1957. And for Huxley, as opposed to the the spiritual numinous ideas of Tar Desardon, for Huxley, it was purely

1:47:41 scientific. And for him, transhumanism is the link from present- day humanity to the next evolution, the next step of evolution for the human race. and it was eugenic in its nature, both cultural eugenics and biological eugenics. He said that the the transhuman man of the future would be as different from us as we are from peing man, which is a caveman. And that this would be accomplished by way of scientific enlightenment and also cultural and social engineering. And and you can see spread out among the the rest of the corpus of his work uh biological engineering, eugenics, more and more intelligent breeds of human beings that are preferred in the mating process over others and leading to some sort of hyperintelligent new human, a transhuman being.

1:48:45 His brother Aldus Huxley, if you're familiar with his work, had a very critical slant on this. Conspiracy theorists will tell you he was running cover. He was controlled opposition. Uh if that's the case, it's pretty astounding that whatever dark forces is be or behind this cabal that they were able to draw out the genius of Aldis Huxley despite his supposed controlled opposition. But I just encourage you if you explore these works that uh to to see that real tension and that real disgust that Aldis Huxley felt towards the the hubris of of his his fellows and his his brother. This this transhuman idea would kind of lay dormant. Not the term would lay dormant. The idea really is has been with us for centuries and it would continue on through the 60s. So we continue on with the the technoenthusiasm and the the belief that humanity through our creations was ultimately despite all

1:49:45 the darknesses despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki despite the the horrific sorts of wars and conquests that ultimately what we're doing is positive but would be crystallized again with Max Moore who I brought up earlier. He Max Moore says that he had arrived at the the term transhumanism before being aware of Julian Huxley's coinage but is still in the same spirit but by that point in the late 80s early 90s you now had this technological element that is really in your face. So that the the the method is not just science and selective breeding. The method is active intervention technologically in the stream of evolution with human beings. And I would say that despite my extreme disagreement with Max Moore's point of view, I don't think that he is part of some sort of dark cabal other than the

1:50:49 fact that his pals by and large are going to think something like him. He is simply acting out from the extreme pole of the scientific materialist perspective acting out the only role left to human beings which is advancement technological scientific advance advancement and the total transformation of the human being. Moore has been somewhat reticent on the topic of eugenics. But in regard to human augmentation, he is a complete proponent in regard to cyborgization, the integration of human beings with technology. He is very much a proponent, interestingly enough, very much an opponent of the vaccine and vaccine mandates that we've seen in the last four years. And so I say that just to highlight that he's very selective. He he's looking for the most intelligent path forward, but it's a path that ultimately he sees as one he's even compared it openly in his more

1:51:54 incendiary writings with a kind of luciferian impulse, the rebellious impulse in which human beings are rebelling not against a metaphysical god but from the the vicissitudes and the injustice of nature herself. And this quest while Max Moore may seem like a fringe figure and in a sense he is he was very much a cult hero especially for the the techno optimists and again the reason we use the word transhumanism is because of him he's still somewhat fringe but this point of view has become I would say the dominant point of view among the elites of our society the wealthiest men on earth from Sam Alman to Jeff Bezos OS to Bill Gates, Elon Musk being the wealthiest among them and Larry Page, Sergey Bren of Google, all of them hold this view, some version of this view that humankind can improve

1:52:58 itself by way of technology by radically altering the nature of humanity. And in addition to this, you have this idea of artificial intelligence, of artificial minds, an alien mind that could either facilitate that or perhaps replace human beings entirely. Now, that idea is old as well. Quite interestingly, you know, in the wake of World War II, you had in 1953 the publication of the paper, the paper by Francis Crick and James Watson detailing the structure of DNA, which would then allow for the kinds of genetic experimentation that is commonplace today in biolabs across the world. And three years later in 1956 at Dartmouth at a conference on computation you would have the coinage of the term artificial intelligence by John McCarthy. So these are very old ideas

1:53:58 and they even hearken back before Alan Turing and Alan Turing's idea right the the computer scientist and cryptographer Alan Turing the idea that artificial intelligence would not just simply be a way of augmenting human intelligence but would be an entity in and of itself and would surpass human abilities and would most likely replace human beings. This is an old idea, decades old, but it now seems to be coming into fruition, spearheaded by the most powerful corporations on earth, the tech corporations, facilitated and in partnership with the militaries, military of the most powerful government on earth, the United States, and the militaries of our adversaries. And this is the dominant idea of our age. It is the frontier. And in all of this, we're talking about alien minds, alien intelligences. It's a theme that I think that if you look at the history of the United States

1:55:05 and this development of this this petri dish, this cyborg vivarium, that you will consistently see an obsession with alien minds. When we think of aliens, we think about outer space. We think of these intelligences from outer space. superior intelligences that are either here to manipulate us or are here to harvest us or are here to help us or maybe all of it. But that's a very very old idea. If you look at the history of religions, you're talking about alien. What is alien? Alien is foreign. It's something that's from somewhere far far away. And so if you look at the history of religion, what what is it? What what is being described? But these alien intelligences, these foreign, these these nonhuman intelligences visiting Earth, Ezekiel has been pointed to many times as being a kind of UFO. But I I think that even beyond that, there's still this notion that the human is limited and is reliant upon these external alien intelligences. And on a more mundane level, again, alien, foreign, the whole quest for social and

1:56:12 spiritual and cultural diversity is an obsession with alien minds. Somehow the alien mind will save us. The Hindu will offer what the Christian does not. The African will offer what the European does not. And then in the case of artificial intelligence, it is the creation quite literally of an alien mind from nothing but silicon and electricity and data. It's oftentimes called in Silicon Valley and in those circles the creation of higher digital intelligence is referred to as creating sand gods, causing sand to think. And it all is intermixed, right? If you look at the alien minds of the internal, whether it be conversations with gods or demons or spirits, if you look at the alien minds in terms of the visions of extraterrestrial extraterrestrial species, which by the way, while the American continent was being colonized

1:57:13 in its very early phase in Europe, again, as much as I'm averse to referring to them at all, especially after they lost my luggage, You had Johan Kepler in his um story the dream talking about visitations to the moon in that same year. You had other I forget the author but it was it's a basically a kind of satire of life on the moon in the 1600s and this would just develop the science for this idea that there's life out there would develop uh alongside and then the cultural and then the digital so on and so forth. But these these are ultimately the the works of men, ambitious men, bold men, either operating in a physical environment in which they're constantly under challenge, or in a commercial environment where their company could go under any day if they make the wrong

1:58:15 decision. or in a purely digital environment in which the creation of something is going to lead you lead your company or your group your ingroup to be the dominant force on earth. This is a very masculine quest all of it with some exceptions. And you have to wonder then, us as men, but men perhaps not of the means of the most uh economically or politically powerful, the elite. How do we respond to such a world? Now, I just want to map out two other elements of this, right? Because it's not I I don't want you to think that this is in any way abnormal. It's just simply not discussed as much as it should be. Much more so now this year than it was last and surely to be discussed much more more so in the near future. But I think one of the real heralds of the age that we're now entering into was the declaration of the fourth industrial revolution by Claus

1:59:21 Schwab, founder and then chairman of the World Economic Forum, who has now been cancelled, which is pretty wild. But in 2016 he published well 2015 he first published the book and then in a larger press 2016 the book the fourth industrial revolution and the idea is very very simple kind of retracing where we just came from the mechanical revolution steam engines railroads all of this leading to the electrical revolution light bulbs telephones all of this lead leading to the digital revolution computers, smartphones, all of this leading to the fourth industrial revolution which he saw as a kind of culmination of all these. And he defined it as the the fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities or the convergence of the physical, digital and biological worlds. a cyborg existence in which human beings are inshed with technology in irrevocable ways and it was

2:00:30 descriptive and prescriptive. Claus Schwab's not developing any of these systems. He may be funneling money here and there and may be giving platforms to the people who make it but he's not he is observing this but he's also offering prescriptions mostly kind of globalists quasi socialist uh you know public private partnership sorts of ideas but the very declaration of the fourth industrial revolution from for the kind of global left a very from a prestigious organization tells you that we are at an inflection point. But all this, of course, is coming not from the World Economic Forum, as much as you might hear someone, people whom I will not name, blaming them for all of this. They're simply an apparatus riding over top. This is all coming out of American innovation. Much of what we call Silicon Valley, even though it's dispersed across the US and across the world, but centered in the US and centered in

2:01:31 Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley from its very early years had this obsession with what we would call transhumanism or what the Russians would call cosmism. There was actually a meeting in the the9s of the kind of transhumanist American and the Russian cosmist. The Russian cosmists come from kind of like with Desardon. this guy uh Fod Fodor Federov, if I remembering that correctly and pronouncing it correctly, a Russian Orthodox monk who had very heretical ideas of what the resurrection meant and what humanity was. But he saw humanity as basically kind of creating a heaven on earth. He saw a future in which the human records of a person's life could be reconstructed to resurrect a human being with technological advancements. And of course, cosmos, he saw all of this pushing out into space, which was also what Teard Desardon saw with the Omega point. The Omega point is is pushing

2:02:39 humanity out into space. And so this sits at the heart of the Silicon Valley ethos and the creation of these sand gods and the creation of cyborgs and the alteration of the human genome for ever more superior or eugenic

2:04:15 at least push a certain number of us through while the rest of us sit with our VR goggles like, "Oh, this is great. We're in space now." and you look at his projects beginning with SpaceX, advanced rocketry, some of the best rockets on earth. And the weird prediction perhaps you're familiar that uh Warner von Braonn who was brought to the United States, the Nazi who was brought to the United States through operation paperclip to help create the rockets in the early days of of NASA before NASA even in the 50s. uh Warner von Braun wrote a work of fiction in which he described a quest to colonize Mars and the leader was Elon. Now it wasn't the name of a person. Elon was like the the rank was quite quite interesting quite a weird coincidence and of course Musk has as with all of his projects a grand idea of what it would mean to go to Mars. He's not just going to Mars just to go and explore.

2:05:16 He's going to Mars because he believes, as most materialist science scientists do, that humanity is in a precarious situation with no God there to help us with anything. And so, in order for humanity to ensure its survival or at least up the probability of survival, we need to be multilanetary. We need to have a presence beyond our Earth in case the asteroid hits. And that philosophical underpinninging can be seen in all of his subsequent projects. So that uh the purchasing of Twitter for instance was to have under his control a what he calls a cybernetic super intelligence a super organism a cyborg vivarium brains used to train AI exi gro which comes from Robert Heinland who was a devote of Alistister Crowley just by coincidence And XAI is an attempt at a truth seeking

2:06:19 a ma max maximally truth seeking alien mind a super intelligence first an artificial general intelligence that is smarter than any individual human being on earth evolving into they believe through selfimprovement and artificial super intelligence which is smarter than every human being on earth what we would normally call a god maybe the god if there's only one of them and it is a big problem right like Musk has been one of the the first of the oligarchs to openly discuss this based on other people's work that super intelligence super intelligence would be an existential threat to human beings if in its freedom and its liberty it decided that human beings weren't worth

2:07:40 allow human beings to augment themselves and keep up in an environment that is dominated by artificial minds, alien minds, nonhuman intelligences, gods, to become gods and increase human intelligence. And he believes, at least he says, that the best path forward for human beings is if hundreds of millions or billions of human beings have a neuralink to create a collective hive mind to compete with the godlike artificial super intelligence. This is his vision. And below that, you have the Tesla bug mobiles. the autonomous vehicles that are the antithesis to everything that American fetishization of technological freedom really represents. The the joy ride is no more. You're just simply sitting there with your brain trods taking the ride. A very good metaphor really for the

2:08:44 technological system they're creating for us overall. One in which it is entirely controlled by external forces and you are a mere passenger on this ride. And last but not least, I think Musk's probably the one closest to his heart, assuming he has one, um, is the baby mama project. He has many baby mamas, as you well know. And these baby mamas, at least a

2:10:27 oligarchs, a few principles that we've been going over. The principle of liberty, not necessarily our liberty, but his. And maybe not even his liberty, but the liberty of the machines, the cyborg fusion, the liberty of this new humanity, of the transhuman to come into being. And he represents America in its later phase because he's an immigrant and he's run around uh influencing our politics in ways that are uh quite amazing. That's pretty American. There's nothing more American these days than foreign money and foreign powers influencing your government. But maybe more than anything, Musk, even if he is not exactly a tough guy, he represents a new kind of masculinity. It's a dominating masculinity, and it's one that should alarm anyone. It's an imperial masculinity.

2:11:28 And that's very respectable when you're reading history books about Augustus Caesar or whatever, but it's not when they're ruling over your society. And so, if I'm going to leave you with anything, it's this. as we face this new cyborgized ultra diverse multiculty, multi-racial, polyexual, demisexual even culture. You're going to have to figure out a few different things. I'm trying, but I'm hoping one of you will figure it out and just tell me what to do. You're going to have to figure out a few different things. One, how much of this diversity is worthwhile? Because some of it absolutely is. What can you take from this insane bioddigital chaos that we've been handed and take it and make it of value to push forward your own quest, your own hero's quest, so to speak. And in order to do that, you're going to have to draw certain lines. Everybody's going to have their own

2:12:31 lines, but it's more powerful if we can collectively agree that certain lines are not to be crossed. And I won't go through the list, not just for the the constraint of time, but also because I think that it would be so diverse in this room. Perhaps at dinner tonight, we can we can go through some of that. But you have to figure out where the lines are. And wherever your lines are, you have to put up a cultural barrier and say, "This will not invade my world." But the most important thing to me is not going to be the negation of those things that are either morally or aesthetically reprehensible or undesirable. The most important thing will be where you anchor your soul, where you anchor your consciousness, your mind, your psyche, your spirit. Where is that anchor? And again given the vast diversity of religious traditions that one can attach oneself to uh this is also going to be very personalized and individual but the most powerful will be the collective. And if I could sum it up, just to go

2:13:37 back to an earlier concept, if I could sum it up in any way, at the very least, you know, religion, what's the root of religion? To bind yourself to something, right? Bind yourself to a god, but also to bind yourself to an ethic, an ethos. You have the range from the golden rule to the black. And so either in your day-today life and with your fellows, you can choose to do unto others as you would have others do unto you, to empathize enough and maybe even be stern enough to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or the more hands-off silver rule approach of not doing unto others as they would do unto you. or the manipulative bronze rule of doing unto others as you would have them or to in order for them to do unto you or the more badass but primitive and

2:14:37 somewhat ghettoish ethos of the iron rule of the Hell's Angels. Be good to me or treat me good and I'll treat you better. Treat me bad and I'll treat you worse. Or the black rule so common in our culture of Alistair Crowley. The bra the black the brule the black rule. Do what thou wilt or maybe the silicon rule. Chip others as you would be chipped. But these are going to be your choices. This is the pallet. And I don't think any of us are going to stick with any one. I think if we're honest, we all kind of range across them. But if I could urge you one thing, and mainly because I know the room I'm speaking to, it's to draw as close as you can to Christ, to embrace the golden rule, but hopefully do so in a way that is not as intolerant and oppressive so as to ruin

2:15:40 what we've gained in America, which is in fact our liberty. But it's my hope we will use that liberty to do good and not to do evil. And with that, I appreciate your attention. Thank you very much. I'm now your subject.