Untitled AI Meeting Notes

You know, it's a rare commodity in the earth, so we ascribe value to it.

I think it felt good because we look at gold and we say, "See, there's only so much..."

Of it, it has a lasting value, and it feels really nice to be attached to something physically where we know the value will stay on exactly the same

Gold will always be valuable.

That feels nice. So I can have people talk about land and property these days.

Buy a property, it will always be valuable.

Having land will always be valuable, 'cause it's unlimited.

That idea, I think, ties back to this basic foundational premise that there are eternal values, things that last

That will never leave you, they will always stay there.

That is a vast and hard contrast with the principle of capitalism, which is anything can be developed.

So for centuries it was very important

Christian missionaries used to say a sacrament is a specific material thing that can never be devalued, and if you have a fake thing that-

Is it real? Is it sacred? We're gonna call it a fetish.

Is this device very important to the battery?

There are real sacred eternal things that never change by it, and there are fake things.

And Mark's a total brain dead idea.

Now we live in a space where we're like, I don't know, does anything have eternal value?

Don't values just keep changing? Isn't that the brilliance of capitalism that the thing you thought was once valuable, now you can actually devalue it?

Or it's worth a ton.

But then living in that kind of a world for long enough, you also begin to wonder, do I have a solid foundation under my feet?

Does anything last? Is anything meaningful?

You know this idea with jobs, right? How people used to have jobs, but like one job for their whole career, and now it's like, how many times will you switch your jobs?

Of course you're creating like seven, eight, nine, ten, who knows?

You begin to wonder, "Well, I lived in this community for a long time, I might have to move to other cities."

Other parts of the year. Well, I feel like I'm actually going to be in one place.

What is my foundation? Well, I then drift to my partner, maybe the person I choose to be

You have nobody else in for me, and we'll get married and be happy, but will that last?

Or will I get divorced several times?

You don't even have to wonder, right? 'Cause even marriage, that was something that religions, Catholicism, Buddhism, they would say it's an eternal value, right?

It lasts forever, and now they're kind of like, well, I don't know, shit happens, and then maybe you, you know, get divorced.

Okay, we re-married again. We've had to lesson up on that one.

That's part of this secular mindset we're living in.

Nothing seems fixed.

I can understand and listen carefully to this.

I can understand how some people say, "I'm just gonna go back to being like hardcore religious."

This looks really appealing. There are values that don't change.

I want, I want to have them as a foundation in my life.

I want to know something

It can't be shaken again. And specifically as a response to the unstable world I'm living in, which in part, at least, or maybe significantly, is caused by a capitalist structure

I have a lot of sympathy with that, I have a lot of empathy for that.

I'm not knocking that.

It makes a lot of sense.

If you wonder why fundamentalism in religious terms is a particularly unique modern phenomenon, that's partly why

The world is very shaken. People aren't sure where value lies, and then people come and say, "Value lies in religion.

Don't ever leave it. These things are eternal."

Okay, I'll breathe a sigh of relief. And maybe I won't be so anxious all the time, right?

Because otherwise, oh my God, I mean, what would we-

We have to determine these things. We gotta determine things we never had to determine before.

You, you have to know all kinds of things, and then you have to cement your identity and stand up for it in ways people never had to do

So listen carefully, I'm not mocking these things, but we have something to even think about these days, like, okay, which, which gender am I?

Which pronouns?

Which lifestyle will I lead? Will I love someone, heterosexually or homosexually, or, or will I just be queer and defy the labels altogether?

What if the food I eat, do I become vegetarian, a pescatarian, and do I justify being a carnivore, and people will be okay with that?

Or then, how do I feel about that?

And this is, I'm just

Touching on some of the, what you know, talked about ones, but the list goes on and on.

And I have to defend these, and if I don't, then someone's gonna say, "Well, what do you believe?"

You stand for. But I'm just exhausted. I'm not sure I wanna take stands on everything.

Which political party are you part of? You know, and you have justified this, and I mean, I can't imagine

Being young these days, right? Like you gotta try and find your identity, determine who you are, making all these choices, and then figure out, am I authentically living my best?

And then you read magazines about how to lose weight, and you read magazines about how to have the best sex life, and the list goes on and on and all these things.

You can't just simply host into an existence and say, "I'm not gonna justify who I am, I don't have to." I just, I have to figure out how to justify quite a few things that

People in the past never justify as far as their identity.

I'm just wondering, like, about the, like, marks I read a while ago, so I'm trying to

I remember in the sense of the idea of, religion as like the opium of the masses, as like distracting yourself from like these bigger

Or larger, larger ideas, or that little horse won't, or isn't charging, whatever.

It's like that connected also to what you were saying before about the whole

Like persistent fixations on how we need to like identify ourselves and what kind of job we have.

Like, are we gonna talk about that? Maybe that's a

Yeah, I think, I think part of what Marx meant by this, I'm not a Marxist scholar, but I think part of what he meant by this was,

But yes, when it provides eternal, lasting values, it's deeply comforting.

And if you read Mark's full quote in that context

He's not just ripping on religion saying it's like you're taking a drug and you're not facing reality.

He's not saying it's actually, and it actually provides a lot of alleviation for people.

It takes away those high highs and lows.

So in that sense, if you're living in a world where you're like, "Oh my God, I feel the anxiety of having to justify my existence every day,"

Getting high isn't such a bad idea, right?

I mean, you wanna escape in a sense, you wanna find comfort, but you also wanna find a foundation that feels

Thirteen. So for Marx, when he says it's an opium for the masses, it provides something like a lasting utopia, it has something of substance that people cling to

Provides comfort and relief. So in that sense, yeah, I would say it's a very good thing to have over here.

Would you say then, then to like, if, if you say that like capitalism works out how it's supposed to and you're like, set?

I'm having trouble explaining this, but you like have the right job, you do the right things, like that would be similar, like you're overdoing that kind of thing

Like into doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

Yes and no. So I'm, I'm gonna leave this as an open-ended question that we'll pursue in the

We're doing all semester

I would, I would say in a certain sense, capitalism is awesome if you look at it from a very, like, pragmatic standpoint.

As we're talking about, is it

Does it feel great to everyone to say you have to presume that you belong to a particular religious way of seeing the world?

No, not everybody likes that.

I don't want to have a choice. Capitalism comes in and says as a foundational premise behind how we operate, there is no belief you have to adhere to

To, to be part of the EA community, you can simply come out here and say, "There's gonna be an open exchange of ideas, things, everything, and that will take care of our problems."

No one's committing any one particular belief or worldview.

That appears to be wonderful in some sense, the freedom that a person can experience

To critique particular communities, ways of life, you can devalue things that someone tried to force on you.

It's valid, that's not valid to me.

So in turn, since capitalism appears to promise this massive critique of all things, you are allowed

To devalue anything. In that sense, you're allowed to critique anything.

And capitalism fits right into that paradigm, doesn't it?

So in the modern period, we're questioning

Religion, we're questioning why you belong here and not there.

We live in a space right now where we question everything, and that's just like for some people it's

It gives us a freedom we didn't have before.

At the same time, it isn't everything we needed it

Right, that's probably where I learned this semester too.

Capitalism promotes a certain freedom, but you also don't have a choice with that system.

Sort of forced to go home and look at the economic consequences, and you're left with time saying, "Do I have to accept the fact that everything can be devalued?"

Then what is it that I value then?

Can I have a lasting internal value?

What does that mean? And it also means something

Deep anxiety or insecurity because you can say someone, as you put it, like they followed, they got the right job, they're doing this thing, but it also leaves you with this-

Sense of, do I really know what the experience of satisfaction is?

Because capitalism thrives, it thrives particularly and uniquely because

No one is ever fully satisfied. So this is how Ben and he wrote about it, but sort of this in the last class.

And that, that sense of guilt, that sense that I'm not good enough, I'll put it that way, not good enough.

That I'm never gonna have enough, that kind of thinking, that never really leaves us either.

And it's why you see a lot of people say

I love my job, but it never ends.

Like I'm constantly on, I always have to do something.

I'm all in, thinking the next thing I gotta do, and then people start, you have this weird thing where people say, "I'm afraid to retire," like I'm kinda nervous, like if I retire, who am I?

How will I obtain my satisfactions in life?

Because I get them directly tied to the way I work, the work that I do.

You guys might not know this yet, but listen to your parents or grandparents

Parents or uncles, you'll hear people who are scared to retire because the way in which you derive your identity and your satisfaction comes from the work that you do

So it does beg the question, do you ever fully feel as if you're satisfied, or is it that the mechanism of satisfaction isn't so regulated for you?

You don't know what to do without. That becomes the question, "Who would you be without your job?"

You guys are young enough, hopefully don't do this, but once you go out there and work in the real world, and you meet someone at a party you don't know, especially in a hyper-capitalist context

First, first question I get from them always is, "So what do you do?

What do you do?"

Your job defines you, it's the way in which you orient yourself to your life

The question becomes, "Who are you beyond that job?" And that terrifies a lot of people.

So again, it begs several questions. Are we actually

Out of debt, right, right, right, right, right, guilt.

Can you ever be good enough to save yourself?

And that's what's tricky, and in a capitalist system where anything can be devalued, you never really have a secure foundation for that satisfaction

Religion was much better at that than allowing people, although it never fully did either.

But religion, I think, sometimes excelled at saying, "You're a good person."

And you did enough, you can probably feel good about it.

But even in a lot of religious contexts, there was always that guilt

You can never really do enough, you can never forgive enough, you're always the sinner, sin is always creeping around the door to get you, and then you feel guilty about that too.

We're struggling here with all of these things.

So credit, faith becomes secularized, so to speak, in modern periods, credit and guilt becomes

I think they're rising by a year and a half.

You're never gonna have enough, you'll always feel like you're not enough.

So here, I actually forgot what I was gonna say.

No, no, no, wait, okay.

I was, I was gonna say something about capitalism's ties to materiality.

I think that's fascinating, how like, especially

When you sever the tie of value to something material, something that is real, it's almost-- I'm draw- I'm drawing-

logical equivalences from time periods, but it's almost like what the rationalists did, which kind of gave reason bounds to do everything it wanted

And then gave con the right to say it's metaphysical twaddle.

Like it's almost as though because now you have completely severed it from what is finite

It can go on technically ad infinitum, and that's why we're producing more than ever, we're seeing more things than ever, but I don't-

No, but you're wrapping in this idea. So the individuality, we're back at this

This idea of my body,

but this is, this is basically just like pure rationality, and this was like the age is coming about science and technology

When you live in a space where it's all being materialized, but it's in joint to how a rational framework operates?

We expect science takes off. That's why it's a uni- part of why it's uniquely modern phenomenon, we're now obsessed with science and things and jobs that don't

Because we're living in an immaterial space, that's where rationality thrives.

This is all just pure thought. Does it logically make sense?

Doesn't

That rationality flows in the modern period, but it's completely detached from the embodied existence as we actually live.

So we devalue the

The body's experience in our modern context, and we elevate the rational.

That's why I think you get a lot of jobs these days that are science-based, that are deeply detached from

That's why we're teaching doctors things like

The patient, you're gonna do, you have to tell them they're gonna die soon.

You shouldn't try to be empathetic toward them, right?

Like basic things you shouldn't have to tell a human being.