22 - Phone Warriors

Transcript

hello I'm Jason and welcome to the show so there's this photo that I've seen in the past but that I can't for

the life of me seem to find anywhere I think it was taken around 2020 during the various uh BLM protests

I could be wrong on that but the timing would fit and it would make sense

contextually because there were two clashing groups in this picture so maybe I'm thinking antifa and a sort of more

right-wing contingent the photographer must have been right in the thick of things in that area in the

Middle where the police are trying to keep the different protesting factions apart and maintain

order the photo successfully captures the attenion in the scene there's flags and masks and a lot of angry faces

painting the background it all sort of implies a situation that is at the cusp of boiling

over which really a lot of 2020 felt like that to me the center of the photo the focus is

on two men each of the the Vanguard of their respective hordes there's a tall Burly guy with an almost offensively

smug look on his face pointing the camera on his phone at a masked hooligan who's right up in his face in front of

him and reciprocating the gesture when I saw this picture for the first time it really looked aged

defining iconic sort of the modern equivalent of Richard the lionart crossing swords with one of saladin's

generals this photo was the inspiration for this episode and incidentally if anyone out there knows what the photo is

I'm talking about specifically if they could send it to me I would appreciate it I could have the details wrong it

might not be from 2020 it might not be the BLM protest but it was Modern and I'm describing the Crux of the photo

correctly so with all that being said it is my great pleasure to bring this episode to you today I want to thank you

for listening

it's a scene with which you're likely familiar two individuals engaged in heavy bickering somewhere out in public

the bickering escalates into an argument the argument takes a turn for the worse insults are traded threats are

leveled and then at the apex of the confrontation when the two individuals in question inevitably fail to convince

the other of the cogency of their respective points of view outome the cell phones cameras faced outward and

aimed at their opponent with the intensity of a Stalingrad sniper somehow in this gutless

technology flating Wasteland of a culture we all live in this this gesture has become the ultimate trump card in any kind of Confrontation between

strangers the equivalent of Gunslingers in the old west whipping out their Colt 45s but without the cathartic shootout

that effectively ended the conversation one way or the other in the Middle Ages Knights would

have settled any disagreements with the sword fight pontificating about honor all the while no doubt and supplementing

their blows with witty verbal rejoinders even the aristocracy from the Renaissance Era were always up for a

good duel they'd get decked out in their silk stockings and puffy shirts and with a

relatively cool head saunter out to some pre-arranged local at a specific time to settle things or even formal rules around it a

certain amount of Paces for distance turn to face each other at a specific count you've all seen Hamilton I'm sure

from the way it's been described the whole thing sounded like it played out like a synchronized swimming routine

there was even a referee there to ensure that the premeditated murders adhered to the dictates of

etiquette I suppose you could say we've made progress in this area by all accounts we aren't shooting up saloons

and poker rooms at anywhere near the same rate as we have in the past and I suppose this overall trend toward

non-violence is a good thing it's certainly hard to make the argument that we should move back to the

days when disagreements were resolved with a showdown at High Noon settling disputes without Bloodshed

is of course overall a step in the right direction there is nothing more heartbreaking than a life lost to wholly

avoidable violence but still this toddy pantomime of

thrusting your phone in the face of someone you're arguing with as if warding off a vampire with a crucifix

seems to me to be emblematic of this ongoing Trend in Western countries to sublimate our Natural Instincts to shift

responsibility away from the individual and into the rapacious tentacles of the

state in most western Nations the us being the notable and notorious

exception you can't own a gun anymore except under near draconian restrictions a physical assault can land

you in prison for up to a decade and if you do it while harboring Hate in Your Heart whatever the hell that means your

sentence could be even greater in the United Kingdom you can have non crime strikes against your

record if someone merely accuses you of doing something which they consider to be hateful in Canada you can't even say

certain words unless you want to risk spending quite literally the rest of your life in prison according to the criminal code of

Canada the mere Act of raising your fist as if you're about to strike someone could land you in prison as could any threat of that nature again for up to a

decade of your life because of all of this prescribed aversion to violence the cameras on our

phones have become our last line of defense and for more than a few enthusiastic carens out there they've

become an offensive weapon of choice I think part of what I find so morally objectionable about this trend

stems from childhood growing up everyone knew that only the lowest form of creedon would snitch to the teacher except under under

egregious circumstances nobody liked a tattletail and yet this is exactly what we have now a Coty of tattletales armed

to the teeth with gigabytes of storage and an air of self-righteousness using the camera on their phone as a sort of proxy for

meeting out punishment what's worse they're rewarded for their behavior rewarded with likes

and retweets and slightly elevated social media Cloud I'm not saying that there aren't

situations that warrant the use of such action there are some notable exceptions where a camera phone has been used to

catch some unambiguously awful Behavior but I'd imagine that in a lot of these cases the very Act of pulling

out the phone in the first place is the accelerant that transforms the situation from an argument into a

fight not a physical fight obviously but it's the thing that shuts down the conversation the Line in the Sand that

shifts the dynamic and dehumanizes the interaction any notion of listening to

what the other is saying or making amends or reaching a common ground as just gone out the window and the two

parties in question are now engaged in a hateful standoff with each other cameras running words slung out strategically

with the intention to provoke the other into saying something or doing something horrible so they can capture it on

video and again I don't know precisely what it is about this theoretical deescalation that rubs me the wrong way

once the cameras are rolling the chances of any actual violence breaking out is significantly reduced this is a good

thing right very civilized this is what we'd been advancing toward even before the iPhone

3G came out what I'd like to do here today is investigate why this Behavior has

evolved what it means in the context of social relationships and personal development and why this particular

brand of passive aggressive brinksmanship just feels so wrong to

me I've thankfully been in only a few situations in my adult life or a disagreement between myself and someone

else has flared up to this point to the point of almost becoming physical

it's intense your blood is boiling your heart rate is accelerated all the prehistoric parts of

your brain are lighting up like firecrackers and yes it can be scary not just because you could get

hurt but you're Shifting the social Paradigm when you commit to an open argument and it takes some effort to

break through that membrane separating the world where we engage in polite social discourse to that other world

where we're openly confronting someone maybe it's just people Pleasers like me that find this difficult to do

but once that line has been crossed both parties generally recognize it and the whole scene becomes much more

faal and it's an unusual situation it dislodges us from our daily

reality but the truth of the matter is that once the encounter is over I've always felt good about myself afterwards

any pent up stress is gone that's for sure I feel like I'm living more vividly

during these rare occasions experiencing life in a way that it was in a way meant

to be experienced it feels Primal even natural like that time wasn't wasted no

matter what else you could say about it and once again I'm truly not advocating for violence here I

definitely don't want to be involved in a physical confrontation but what most people don't

realize is that despite all the Pomp and posturing almost no one else wants to fight either they're almost always

equally relieved when a compromise is found or when the argument dies down and everybody storms off in their own

Direction and yet the looming threat of the violence the action of what is effectively two apex predators facing

off against one another forces a focus on each person involved it forces an examination of One's Own behavior and

after the standoff when the adrenaline is worn down one can safely piece together why events unfolded the way

that they did how did the argument evolve did I start it was I being

unreasonable should I not have said that thing that I said we might not even admit to

ourselves how informative such events are but they can help in molding how we behave in

society I think it probably teaches more tolerance of certain behaviors calluses are emotional fortitude depending on how

it all went down it can spark a realization that words have consequences and that life

can be unpredictable so you better be certain that your words and actions are genuinely in line with your

principles I think these kinds of confrontations have played a part inner Natural Evolution and I believe they've served some

purpose maybe they've acted as a vital protective measure or played a part in shaping one's character fortifying them

with experience under duress so that when there is a much Graver threat that person isn't completely like a fish out of

water there's this social media in incer and God how I hate that term um I don't

know if he's even technically an influencer I don't know what constitutes being an influencer but he's this guy on

social media who just uploads videos and makes a ton of money out of it uh Jack dhy is his name if you don't know who he

is congratulations you're living a healthy life he basically just does dumb

[ __ ] all day and gets a ton of views on YouTube or twitch or whatever platform he's using now one of his hilarious

stunts that he does is that he walks around and inv AES people's personal spaces just trying to instigate a fight

with them and he's this tiny weasly guy so like a lot of the people he's doing this to immediately start to engage with

them but then as soon as they do his bodyguard steps in between the two of them and he's big enough and

intimidating enough to send the other person just cursing under their breath and like walking away from the the kind

of contrived fight um and he just basically does stuff like this and he gets a lot of likes and a lot of money

from doing from doing this kind of thing um and sadly he isn't the only one doing

this I've seen videos where people record themselves running up into people's faces at random and asking them

if they want to die just kind of running up to someone walking into a store or you know walking down the street and

just asking them repeatedly whether they want to die um you can imagine how unsettling

that would be there's others where people record themselves cutting a cable on some headphones of someone who's just

sitting at a coffee shop trying to enjoy their existence and suddenly they're the cables on their headphones have been cut

and they can't use their headphones anymore I mean obviously it's incredible to me that people post this stuff online

it's just such a stark indictment of the kind of society we're living in right now but my point is that there's no consequences for this type of behavior

it's generally too minor for the police to be involved and if anyone responded in a physical way they could be brought up on charges so they're unlikely to do

that I probably even feel different about these types of antics if these people were just legitimately doing this

for the laws but their motivations aren't even that pure they're doing it because they know

they'll get views and likes and engagement even if the engagement is negative what do they care they can still monetize their brand and make an

incredible living off of it that Jack DH guy is estimated to be worth around $60

million he's 21 he recently totaled his $200,000 car

live streaming and texting while driving and this thing was all caught on video of course because he was live

streaming it and it alone sums up to me everything you need to know about this type of

person it's worth checking out though you may need some anti nauseum medication when you see his

reaction anyway I digress the extraordinary negative effects of having our mobile phone so lecherously Tethered

to us is well documented there is a ton of literature now that shows how addiction to social media apps especially among teenagers

has impacted our physiology our moods and our Behavior there's a popular Netflix

documentary on it which I think was pretty revealing for a lot of people and made them question how they engage with

these platforms but it isn't just social media the devices themselves augment and

amplify these harmful effects these surrogate crack pipes with their titanium charms and come hither

haptics have been specifically and irresistibly designed as a beguiling complement to the applications they host

which of course makes sense it just means the engineers are good at what they do but we as consumers have to

recognize just how intimately involved with our phones we've become that they're more than just an

ultra convenient access layer for a bunch of pernicious social media applications they also damage our sleep

cycles what with all the pratal light that they emanate the blue light from phone suppresses melatonin production

triggering insomnia which in turn makes us more tired throughout the day decreasing our brain functioning

Etc most people have their phones right on the bedside next to them pulsing out whatever

cocktail of radio waves we have it set up for Wi-Fi 5G

Bluetooth all non-ionizing radiation to be sure but is everyone really so comfortable nestling up with these

things at night when there's been no real long-term studies on the physical effects of cellphone

use in the daytime they keep our attention persistently diverted with the alluring siren Call of their

notifications a lot of people myself included mute these now but I'll still have the banners pop up and now I just

find myself listening for that little hoptic buzz all day even if we decide to turn off the banners like we know it's

there we know things are happening on it and it's just so easy to check it's turning us all into ADHD

riddled attention apnea zombies who find it almost unbearable to listen to someone tell a story that last more than 30 seconds even writing this thing I've

had to hide my phone under a blanket and I'm checking it after every paragraph As a kind of reward mechanism and I

wouldn't even consider myself someone who's glued to their phone I've seen much worse I assure you the very fact that so much of our

Lives flow through our phones now in some way or another means it's easy to justify having it by our side throughout

the day and night you want to listen to music open up that Spotify app have 30

minutes to kill in a doctor's office pop open Netflix or Reddit or YouTube do you want to think for more than 2 seconds to

recall what the capital of Nigeria is just open up Google of course you need it by your bed

so the alarm app will wake you up in the in the morning need to have it on the table during a meeting just in case something urgent

happens because our phones are now so integral to our lives we find ourselves grabbing them so constantly that it

really isn't hard to imagine the idea that these things will soon be melded into us as another appendage which is

literally what's going to happen by the way and most people will be happy to have it not everyone and not always but

more and more on average but there's a trade-off here right it's not all bad or we wouldn't

love them so much certainly there's some benefit to having this versatile companion in our

lives I think most people would consider the camera on our phone as one of the few overall beneficial applications but

I'm actually here to shittle over that idea my brothers and I recently did up a video for my mom whereby we compiled a

ton of old photographs and set it to some Beatles music as a kind of retrospective on her life through

pictures it was quite a lovely thing and she was appropriately touched something really jumped out at me while doing this

though I have so few photos from when I was young fortunately someone was taking

a few pictures of the Family itself during those times but I have so many old friends that I don't have any photos of or at least not the two of us

together I dated a girl for 2 years in University and I don't have a single photo of her and she was a huge part of

my life back then meanwhile I have like 20,000 pictures of the dogs I have now in all kinds of poses and

situations but as adorable as they are the pictures themselves don't really change much in terms of

context it's just like here's here is one of her with her sunglasses on here

she is in her bed here she is with her head tilting slightly to the left usually when inspiration strikes

I'll snap about 5 to 10 pictures of my dog in quick succession so I can grab the best one of the bunch but often

times I'll never even go back to look at them and so I just keep accumulating more and more pictures each one somewhat

reducing the value of all the other ones in terms of supply and demand Theory I don't know there's just a

passivity to how we live our lives now with all this technological abundance things just don't seem to have the same

value anymore in the same way we absent-mindedly like or share a flurry of Instagram posts we're taking pictures

and recording events with that same listless apathetic luster you'll see this at concerts or birthdays or even

sunsets on the beach we're all now experiencing life through this lens as opposed to experiencing it

directly for some reason we feel compelled to record events rather than live them I don't even really know why

I don't even know if there's a consistent reason for this I can examine my own behavior I was at a Johnny Mar concert

recently and I've never seen him play live before and he's kind of iconic to me I've been a massive Smith's fan for

most of my life and I've seen morisy perform a bunch of times but never Johnny and while there I found myself

sort of joining the crowd and just mindlessly thrusting my phone up above the throngs of people so I can NAB pictures random pictures and short clips

of video like halfhazard L it wasn't framed well the angle was off there were people's arms all over the place I was

basically just doing it to do it and I'll never go back to watch that why would I it's a shadow of the original

experience so instead of just immersing myself and living in the moment at the time I was trying to somehow capture

this fleeting spasm of life and lock it up in a cage along with my dog pictures and photos of random food dishes that I

felt compelled at some point to document for posterity our phone cameras dehumanize

us and other more obvious ways as well there seems always to be at least one unscrupulous Jack and ape filming

whenever there's something unfortunate happening really bad car accident schizophrenic talking to himself in the

subway suicide attempt all over social media you can see situations where something really

heartbreaking is happening and there always seems to be someone who decided that the rest of the world needed to see it of course A variation of the

anthropic principle plays A Part here since we naturally would only see videos of these types for someone to be recording them but I've seen this happen

in person too it's ubiquitous this phenomenon it's hard not to blame technology for where we find ourselves

though we are all culpable participants this synergistic relationship that is developed between

us our phones and social media applications is warping how we interact with each other and where we choose to

focus our energy it is incorrectly defining who we are and what we want and we're letting it

happen when we interact with social media liking or sharing or even viewing certain videos will tell the algorithms

more about what we want to see it will Prey Upon Our natural biases and predilections in a way that will guide

us toward the most extreme the most sensationalistic and the most simplistic Notions because fundamentally that is

what we all want there is that passivity it's easy

it's fun it's tantalizing the algorithms are Masters at tapping into all those low-level pleasure

centers when we're scrolling Instagram or Tik Tok corrects we aren't looking to be informed whatever we might tell

ourselves we're looking to be titilated and feel good about ourselves dopamine craving hores that we

are perhaps it's because they're fundamentally binary at their core that the algorithms tend to drift toward

dichotomies this lack of moral complexity this idea of a black and white World manifesting in innumerable

contexts seems to be what it wants to give us and it wants this because as much as we might deny it to ourselves

this is ultimately what we want too we want reality TV we want gossip we

want the horror and the Madonna we want heroes and villains good and evil we want anything to distract us from the

fact that we'll all be dead one day I honestly think that that's probably what it all boils down

to a while back there were memes that circulated showing DED up women at the gym thrusting themselves in front of men

while simultaneously crying that they were being objectified this was sort of the male response to a Tik Tok Trend where women

would surreptitiously record men ogling them while they worked out and then post the outrage

online now there were undoubtedly some miserable wretches out there who were glaring at women so obviously and

lasciviously that the women felt they needed to strike back against this despicable behavior and this was a good

way to do it but after those first Clips got popular some other more disingenuous

videos began to appear which have been clipped together to make it seem as though a woman was being objectified

when really the man was just kind of doing their own thing at the gym and made me glance in the woman's Direction a few times in the course of

it it was videos of this sort that inspired the forementioned memes and so we have two rather ugly

behaviors pumped out into social media videos where a man is legitimately learing at a woman while she exercises

and videos where the action is more ambiguous and it isn't upon closer examination where one concludes that

this is more or less a hatchet job made to appear as though it's something it's not these messages are the distorted

amplifications of events that did actually happen but they're making the behaviors seem

far more prevalent than they actually are and since they're highlighting the extremes of an issue they're pumped full

of that algorithmic octane saturating our social media feeds and Landing somewhere in the nether regions between

our conscious and unconscious mind both narratives are now trending inundating the various social media

silos on Tik Tok Reddit 4chan and others with two extreme but opposing

narratives number one in this case any man who so much as glances at a woman in

the gym should be drawn and quartered number two any woman posting

this kind of video is either an attention-seeking whr or a Ravid postmodern feminist bent on the subjugation of the male

species as a consumer of this media these are the options presented to you not that you'll have a conscious choice

on this particular matter the alos will just feed you whichever bias it is determined would resonate more with you

based on what you like to watch both of these extreme viewpoints are perpetuated by subsequent videos

that reinforce this bias and they're further calcified by comments on the various videos with the most ideologically Orthodox comments

generally rising to the top there is a weird if diabolically

beautiful symbiosis happening here between algorithms and the humans engaged with the content the alos are capturing and

exploiting a spectrum of psychological vulnerabilities our need to be a part of a tribe our tendency towards

sensationalism our preference for opinions that agree with our own among others it isn't that we're being told

what to think necessarily it's just that the options we're given are simplistic sensationalistic and utterly bere of

nuance because there is of course a middle ground that was completely lost in this particular controversy but which

anyone with an ounce of sense would probably agree upon learing at a woman repeatedly and constantly to the point

where they feel uncomfortable is wrong merely glancing in their Direction a few times in the course of one's workout is

not of course this perspective isn't very interesting to people mostly because it just represents the run-of-the-mill

reasonable way that people already think and any responses propagating this message aren't likely to receive that

same algorithmic Elixir if you want to be part of the conversation on these platforms you need to make your message

loud and simple similarly posting a video which shows a police officer bullying someone

they've pulled over or flagrantly disregarding the law is a positive corrective measure on the other hand

posting a video of an officer who was doing everything they can to resolve a situation lawfully and with respect but

it was constantly baited by the subject until the officer raises their voice or uses harsh language is a negative these

videos too fluff up our individual biases and the social media algorithms duly inundate our feeds with whichever

side of this distinct polarized Viewpoint they think that we're most likely to gravitate

toward again the middle ground has no voice here it's the extremes that attract it's the extremes that get the

clicks also there probably is a whole lot of middleground source material to go on not many people are uploading

videos of a mutually respectful administration of a speeding ticket of course the middle ground does exist

logically in our minds but because these videos are so numerous and so consistently fed into our stream and

hence into our Consciousness it's as if there are only two polarized perspectives after enough time our minds

find it difficult to resist this most of us will feel ourselves nudged toward one extreme or another I can sometimes see in the

public people trying to foray into this Middle Ground which is essentially like wandering into No Man's Land remember

that Matt Damon interview with ABC News where he claimed that there was a spectrum of sexual assault he basically

said that there was a big difference between a slap on the ass and rape which is of course obvious nonetheless despite

the disclaimers he gave and the fact that he condemned all the behavior on the Spectrum in any case he was still castigated in the media and even by some

of his colleagues for being toned deaf like there was clearly a distinction in things here there's clearly a grade of

sexual assault admitting this doesn't mean that the Lesser events are therefore permissible but it does mean that one is

more acceptable than the other one is more egregious than the other it's okay to have scale here and admitting that

there are gradations like I doubt that there are too many women out there who have post-traumatic stress disorder because

of that pinch on the ass they got at the bar that time it's funny in that interview

because you can tell from his body language and how he's waiting into this that he knows that even though this is a completely reasonable statement he's

about to make that he needs to choose his words carefully simply due to the incendiary nature of the subject in the

times we live in of course it didn't really matter how carefully he treaded his crime was daring to have an opinion on the subject

at all it's unfortunate that we're living in a society where we need to delve into this granular level of human

behavior on topics which should otherwise be perfectly obvious to any reasonable person but social media and its Borg

likee contingents of Ral rousers care nothing for context or ambiguity there are no Grays in this milu

only interchangeable solids of black and white it doesn't matter to these people that it would be perfectly natural for a

man to glance toward an attractive woman a few times at the gym even were such an action deliberate we're literally

talking about tens of thousands of years of evolution at play here and it doesn't matter to them that a police officer May raise his voice

when addressing someone who is going out of their way to be a problem since that officer is also a human being subject to all our emotions and psychological

limits the good news is I think most of us fundamentally understand this I believe that most people have a fairly

similar moral compass they are what we would have traditionally called good

people but it's becoming increasingly irrelevant what the silent majority want or believe as the extremes are now

capturing the attention and even guiding policy the political class and the

legislation they're developing are mere reflections of what the loudest voices are saying one side is collectively

shreking about racism and colonialism and the nebulousness of one's biological sex and the other side is ranting about

foreign isolationism election fraud and pizz gate you're eventually going to have political candidates emerge whose

platforms largely Target these talking points whether explicitly or implicitly they'll Pander to this crowd

and in so doing perpetuate the idea that there are two opposite groups of people in the country with polar opposite views

and not just a massive Middle Ground where most people agree with most things while the systems in Western countries

have been set up in such a way that there are inherent checks and balances to keep a lid on some of the more egregious Notions there is still a gr

ual drift away from issues of legitimate concern because the silent majority are too busy working their jobs living their

lives and paying their taxes to inject themselves into all this insanity and so they're pulled against their will toward

the extremes that are being shuted by those loudest voices it's hard to be an honest broker

in 2024 the rewards and incentives have fallen by the wayside these days we teach that words

are violence and that morality is subjective we teach people explicitly or otherwise that a 10-second clip of

someone's Behavior encapsulates everything you need to know about that person and that any past mistakes are indelible scars upon one's soul for

which they should forever pay reparations all of the beautiful and variegated complexities of human nature

have been reduced down to one-dimensional templates and our Judgment of others has become fiercely

binary there's been a distinct shift toward passivity in our society and it

isn't hard to see why with new is harshly criminalizing hate speech and with mainstream rhetoric propagating the

idea that white supremacy is the number one problem facing America today it's easy to see why more and more people are

clamming up and looking the other way major companies like Target and Walmart are maybe not routinely but very often

ransacked by shoplifters who brazenly liberate goods from their stores in full view of the security guards who in turn

don't dare interfere L they be caught on camera engaging in behavior that will be pounced upon by The

Herd time and time again we see stories of individuals who have said something or done something that require a longer

more serious investigation to why they did what they did or said what they said whether the person in question was

acting in good faith or not is often lost in the knee-jerk Avalanche of condemnations that follow a viral video

clip if you're on the wrong side of a narrative and you're caught on camera the bottom feeders that troll the

newswires for sensationalistic fodder will pluck you out of context shellack your story with easily digestible

assumptions and present you to Their audience with extreme prejudice where you'll be judged sentenced and socially

executed before the truth even has a chance to come out and so the prudent strategy the survival strategy is to

keep your mouth shut and your head down we used to all be on the same page more or less as to what was considered

morally right the wholesale Slaughter of women and children for example was previously frowned upon by pretty much

everyone in October of last year however we saw that wise swaths of the population were quite able to count on

such a thing at least so long as they're Jewish well it's certainly shocking to

watch throngs of westerners shout murderous epitet in college protests with the same casual inscience as if

they were chanting Make Love Not War it wasn't hard to predict that that's where we'd end up given the Reckless

Indulgence we've seen to radical ideas since the mid-2010s what was harder to predict and

what is clearly emblematic of this massive shift toward trepidation and passivity is the general lack of

response to overt anti-Semitism by many college administrators and also the relative lack of indignation coming from

mainstream America we're all afraid now we all cower before the almighty iPhone and its

cloud-based permanent record and who can blame us who would want to risk their own Freedom when ideas of right and

wrong have become so thoroughly ambiguous when anything you say or do could be hacked up and spewed out into a

vicious media landscape or overly simplified political narratives poison the common well we all draw upon who

would trust in such a system deep down I think we all know this template is wrong that this

deference to the extremes to the morally weak and the intellectually lazy does

not make for a stronger friendlier more well adjusted Society on some level we see it for what

it is a blistering a front to humanity as a whole to our instincts and

inclinations we humans come with a whole host of ideals built into us we want love Adventure Freedom we want

challenges to overcome and causes to fight for it's fused into our bones and it's coursing through our

veins it fuels those same actions that otherwise present as illogical or suboptimal if the only goal is survival

and yet these are the things that Propel us forward as a society that send us up into space Against All Odds racing out

onto the battlefield under a barrage of artillery and gunfire only to gain an inch of ground we're a species that is well

aware of its own mortality and yet keeps calm and Carries On regardless we were not born to be meek

to stand down and look the other way when confronted with decisions that trigger ideas of right and wrong the logic part of our brain may

know what the new rules are in so far as it can make sense of their various in congruencies and contradictions and it

knows that it should follow these rules in order to safely navigate this chaotic landscape but the spirit rejects these

Notions it rails against all the costic ideas permeating mainstream culture which seem to fulminate

division we can't quite reconcile this dissonance between our survival instincts and our humanity and the best

we can do is angrily thrust a phone in the face of someone else because that is the limit of what is now socially acceptable in human

Discord we need to be very careful with where we are right now it's quite possible that the physical and verbal

confrontations we've had in the past were part of some evolutionary pressure valve that vented periodically to avoid

a catastrophic buildup or perhaps they were simply a corrective measure a

non-official method of keeping people align with the unspoken rules we all commonly agreed upon I don't know what

effect shoving our cell phone cameras into each other's faces is having on us as a culture but it doesn't feel good or

natural I'm concerned that this is just driving the Beast inside us all deep underground into a kind of gestational

hibernation and I fear that when it emerges it isn't going to be for some light dust up in the parking lot but rather something deep dark and

abhorrently violent the first world war was a tragic Affair over 40 million people were

either killed or wounded by all accounts life in the trenches was unrelentingly

brutal a soldier's day-to-day consisted of ducking bullets dodging mortar shells

fending off increasingly audacious rats and every now and then scaring out of the trench for a suicidal charge toward

a thoroughly fortified well-prepared enemy and yet even within this decidedly

maob milu the German and French forces still honored a brief ceasefire around Christmas 1914 when soldiers all across

the Western Front emerg from their trenches to come together and share drinks smokes and Mart with the other

side I think some people see in this event a sort of Madness a perversion of

the human condition that involves a kind of Psychopathic split in our behaviors whereby we can play cards with a new

friend one day but then go right back to the business of killing them the next but I love this story I've always found

it profoundly uplifting to me it wonderfully encapsulates the paradoxical nature of the human condition we have a job to do

bills to pay political egos to glorify But ultimately the camaraderie we have

with our fellow human on an individual level trumps all that if given the opportunity we'll look

for any excuse to bond with one another to break bread and to empathize we want to like

people I think that old Reagan quote about how quickly we'd all pull together as a species in the face of an alien

threat is spot on if we strip away the abstractions and the distortions that come from technological or ideological

structures plac between us we're quick to identify the best and worst aspects of ourselves in each

other and though we may disagree on some subjects it really is a case of US versus the system rather than us versus

each other we truly are all in this together again I want to thank you all for listening today please feel free to

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