A Hyperstition for Carbon Dioxide Removal
Would the future reach into the past to create itself?
This blog is based upon a Reversing Climate Change podcast that just came out. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or the entire episode in full right below this paragraph…
Be not afraid!
I know “hyperstition” and “dialectic” seem scary. They’re words that in an earlier era would have had a clove cigarette dangling from their lips.
There is so much to say about all of this. Frankly, I don’t have time to do this topic justice today, and I don’t want to just ship out some AI slop. Consider this a placeholder in lieu of a much more full post. I have a lot to say on this one.
For now, the best I can do is show you some worthy clips. I’ll be back.
No joke, this is a genuinely wonderful intro to Immanuel Kant.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon, host of the show. Today’s episode is a monologue about some big ideas from media theory, from film, from literature. And it might get just a little bit weird.
Before I go there, a couple of quick shout-outs. I have another podcast that I’ve recently started up. It’s on Substack, as writing and as a podcast. If you were a follower of Carbon Removal Newsroom, that feed has now become Climate Workers Anonymous, where people can share their anonymous and unverified information, experiences, and feelings about working in climate. If you want to support that show, please subscribe in your podcast app, or even better, on Substack itself. I’m trying to do a lot more on Substack for both Reversing Climate Change and Climate Workers Anonymous, and Carbon Removal Memes is doing more stuff on Substack now too. It’s still very early, but I’m trying to figure out how to make the best of the platforms without getting endlessly sucked into distribution and self-promotion — the things you have to do in this world to seemingly get stuff noticed.
Today’s show is about two big concepts, two big scary words that are likely to alienate perhaps as much as they provoke. These two words are hyperstition and dialectic. And if you’re scared and you quit right now, I can’t say I’d fully blame you.
Coming soon is a Reversing Climate Change episode I did with D.W. Pasulka. Dr. Pasulka is a religious studies scholar and author who’s written several books that I found to be genuinely fascinating. She started her work as a Catholic historian, as a religious studies professor. She was interested in stories of the saints and hagiographies, and how some of those themes and experiences overlapped with modern UFO — unidentified flying object, or UAP, as the term is more in vogue now, unidentified aerial phenomena. I’m not asking you to engage on whether any of that happens to be true or not; it’s not germane to this episode. But much of the work she points to in media theory and media studies, and some of the people who work on these strange phenomena, have interesting ideas that I think have something to teach people who work in climate. And I very strongly connect this work to my thinking on climate.
In order for this to make sense, I’m going to start with the term dialectic. If you have any association with it, I have to imagine it’s likely negative. It’s one of those terms that’s sometimes abused. Okay. So it’s most famously associated with Hegel, but it goes back to ancient Greek philosophy, and it’s basically a way of discerning truth. It’s a method. It has some commonality with dialogue — it’s between people who are speaking. And in its simplest form, you might have a thesis: someone sets out a thing they believe to be true. An interlocutor, their conversant, has an antithesis, and they sort of battle. And ideally there’s a new synthesis, a new understanding between these two unresolved wholes. And in this resolution, one can progress.
One association you likely have with Hegel and the term dialectic is Karl Marx’s famous inversion of Hegel. Hegel was part of the German idealist tradition; he was working on the level of spirit, or geist — you know, zeitgeist, spirit of the times. Hegel has this line that the state is God marching on Earth, which I always thought was a really powerful, strange sentence. And the historical process is a dialectic that’s working its way toward human freedom. As human civilization grows in complexity and transforms, it engages with both the ideas of the future and its concrete historical past. And it’s in constant negotiation and synthesis between these various forces — huge forces.
One of the big questions of history is: how much do ideas drive progress, and how much of it takes place at a more material level? So if you’re familiar with how Marx inverted Hegel — what determines history is conflict between classes. Aristocrats and peasants, factory owners and the proletariat. In their friction against one another, history advances. We come to a growing sense of freedom and of self-actualization, one might even say.
Once you start thinking in these terms, it’s really easy to see how history might have an endpoint, or a teleology. Humans have something they’re pointing themselves toward that is, frankly, inevitable — it’s going to happen. You don’t have to buy this, by the way. You can obviously see history as chaos, and you can see the various forces running into each other and battling as leading to sound and fury signifying nothing. It doesn’t have to have human freedom as the endpoint. History is not necessarily the development of human freedom. It could be, as is said in Game of Thrones, a ladder. It might just all be power, and at some point it might seem like the average person has a leg up, and then something else will happen and they’ll take a big step backwards. There’s no guarantee that we’re progressing toward greater spiritual and material freedom.
It’s actually genuinely challenging to look at history and not see some amount of teleology in there. You look at human civilization in prehistorical times, and there’s a sense that things are developing, moving — something is coming, something is arriving. Some part of that may be true. Some part of that may just be how our brains work. Our brains think in terms of stories, and we’re guessing the ending before it’s even arrived. In the words of Tom Waits, “How’s it gonna end?”
At this moment in history, it’s hard not to start peering into the future and wondering just how radically our lives will reorient with the ubiquity of artificial intelligence — especially if artificial general intelligence does arrive. That would be the moment when human beings are no longer the top species on the planet, but you have a self-reinforcing system of intelligence that is non-human, that doesn’t require human inputs to grow smarter and better — at least in terms of its abilities, if not its wisdom, kindness, or the other things we consider to be humane.
One way I like to think about the dialectic as it applies to working in climate goes back to the fights between wizards and prophets. I had Charles C. Mann on many years ago — journalist, author. He wrote 1491 and 1493, both really interesting books about the so-called Columbian Exchange and the American civilization that preceded it. And also his book The Wizard and the Prophet, about how these two paradigms — ways of seeing reality — exist within environmental movements, and also within human debates writ large. Wizards are people who think technology will improve things, that the future will be better than the past, that we’re largely on the right track. Prophets are those who wag their fingers and say we’ve gone off the track — the course we’re on is bad, we need to revert to an earlier time, a simpler time, a more spiritual time. What’s coming may in fact be worse.
You’ll likely have your reactions to the way I’ve characterized these two groups. You might like one and hate the other, or vice versa. You could probably think of examples of wizards and prophets that you like, and versions of each that you don’t like as much. You could see yourself as a sort of yin-yang, with a little bit of wizard inside a swirl of prophet, or a little bit of prophet within a swirl of wizard. You are large and contain multitudes. You can do that if you want. No one’s stopping you. You can think that all you like, and that’s fine with me.
One place I see this especially come through is in debates about whether or not humans should leave Earth and settle other planets. For the people who say we should leave Earth, the Arthur C. Clarke line is something like, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but we were not meant to stay in the cradle forever.” Meaning we should expand and grow. It might be a good insurance policy. There could be an asteroid that hits Earth and wipes us out, or sends us down an entirely new evolutionary pathway that would take who knows how much time to come back from. There could be any sort of disaster here that would make this really challenging. Or they point to the fact that once we’re doing off-world projects, we’ll have access to microgravity, and that will have pharmaceutical impacts. We’ll learn so much more, and technology will grow so much faster if we’re doing this.
Prophets would say, “We are not living well here on Earth. Things are not going especially well. We are harming the biosphere tremendously. We’re stressing all of Earth’s systems, and until we’ve figured out how to live well without greatly harming one another or the systems upon which we depend, what right do we have to influence another planet?” Alternatively, someone could be a prophet and say even that is not something we should do — that there’s something transgressive about leaving Earth, that this is actually not what we’re meant to do at all. Even if we’ve earned the right and live peacefully on Earth, it signifies some greater dissatisfaction with life on Earth to seek to leave it, that is spiritually, symbolically unwise. We should listen to Indigenous wisdom, stick our toes into the mud, feel the earth, feel our bodies, stop trying to escape all of that. Be content with what we have.
A wizard would retort something like: we have to develop new solutions to the problems in front of us, and that depends upon growth and expansion and trying new things. We can’t solve the problems we’ve created with the technology of today. We have to keep going. I’m doing my best here to represent these opinions faithfully and non-pejoratively.
Of course, a synthesis between the thesis and antithesis here would be to say that if we are to expand and become a trans-Earth, trans-planetary civilization, we need to be at home on Earth. We need to be wise. We need to earn that so that we can leave in the first place. We need to develop good institutions on Earth — not merely so we can live well on Earth, but so that we can become a truly permanent civilization, one that’s not at risk of wiping itself out, but that can explore the universe in perpetuity, in peace and plenty, as a wise human order. And this is very akin to something like David Grinspoon’s Earth in Human Hands — if you’ve heard any of the podcasts I’ve done with him, or a recent episode where I summed up some of his work. This is a big influence on the show. So the synthesis between these two ideas, between the wizard and the prophet, is ideally to earn the right to be wizards by being good prophets. That’s how you synthesize this — not by choosing one over the other, but by trying to unify them and discarding the versions of each that are toxic. That is my synthesis of that key wizard-versus-prophet dialectic.
I suspect we need both of those things. You shouldn’t want one to permanently win over the other, wizard or prophet. The reason this is a dialectic is because these forces are archetypal. If this were an opposed set that could be easily synthesized in a permanent fashion, then one would likely permanently win. But that isn’t the case. There are times we need the bold creativity of wizards, and times we need the stern warnings of the prophets.
And you can tell that you have both of them in you in how you play against others you speak with. If I’m with people who are strongly wizardly, the prophet parts of my personality will come out. They’ll be provocative in ways that I think need to be checked with some of the wisdom from the prophetly tradition. And when I’m with prophets, I often play the opposite role and represent the wizard. The bad way of reading this part of my personality is that I’m a contrarian and I just like picking fights. Maybe there’s a piece of that that’s true as well. But I think what this signifies is that we’re in constant dialectic over these issues.
And you can get to synthesis, but it’s a constant re-becoming of synthesis. It’s almost like — if anyone listening has read Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, an early piece of queer theory about how, quote-unquote, coming out of the closet is not a singular event so much as a process of re-coming out of the closet in various social scenarios, in various ways — it’s not just a one-and-done kind of thing. One is constantly re-coming out of the closet, again and again. And to theorize the closet and the coming-out as a singular, time-bounded event is to misunderstand what it means to do so.
By merely listening to this show, you are participating in this wizard-prophet dialectic with me. You might write me an email, you might run into me in public somewhere. Or maybe you’re just going to be having a conversation with these ideas in your brain about this process of synthesis and its continuing recombination and reforming of both the ideas and the material reality that creates space for these ideas to rub against each other.
If you have more of an idealistic basis — and I don’t mean that in the romantic sense, I mean if you think ideas move the world — you’ll see that in our literary life, in the images we use. If you have a materialistic basis for understanding how the world changes, you’ll see this in fights over data centers. You’ll see it in fights of political economy. And again, even as you try to split idealism and materialism in this way, you’ve just created a new thesis-antithesis complex. Which is the foundation? Which is the structure, and which is the superstructure? Is the basis of reality material — about conflicts between classes and who controls the means of production? Or is it about ideas, and ideas determine those things? And how do those more abstract parts of our reasoning about freedom and identity and ideas generally shape material reality? Is that actually the substrate, and the material stuff is just on top of it? My guess is that the correct synthesis is yes to both. How could you possibly distinguish between these two? Ideas and material reality are so intertwined — how could you possibly think to split them?
In fact, one of the good rules that’s also annoying to operationalize — and many people have grown impatient with this way of thinking — is that whenever you do have a dichotomy, it’s always threatening to break at any moment. If you start pulling on stable categories, even a small amount... what’s the John Muir line? You realize that everything is hitched to everything else. Should it really be a surprise that it’s that way? My guess is no.
I really like the idea of the Lindy effect. It’s one of the ways I choose which books to read. If books have been around for a long time and are still being discussed, they’re often worth reading for that reason alone. They’ve informed civilization in some persistent way. It’s one of the reasons I come back to the classics over and over again. And I tend to be more skeptical of recent literature, because I’m waiting to see which of those will truly be worth reading and stand the test of time. Many of the novels or works of art that later proved to be prophetic, or genre- or zeitgeist-defining, were not that way at the moment of their creation. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it’s only in hindsight that we’re able to look back. Again, the Hegel line — I’ve quoted this before on the show — “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.” Wisdom arrives in hindsight, looking backwards after it’s done.
That dialectic — of carbon dioxide removal, climate tech, working in climate — runs through the show at such a core level that if you at all enjoy the way I present ideas and engage with them, it’s because you probably have some of that in your brain too. You might not have known — until I just explained a little bit of how my brain works — that you can see, “Oh, that’s why I like this,” because it’s not editorializing in the same kind of way that maybe other places do. If the show annoys you sometimes, it might also be for that reason. Maybe you want something that has a sharper edge, that stakes out a much stronger position in one of those dualities. Either way you go, you’re probably going to enjoy the show I’m working on about the Bhagavad Gita. Get ready for that. That’s another one of these that’s coming soon. Whoo. Keeping things weird over here at Reversing Climate Change. Okay — I think that gives the dialectic a fair shake, in how to think about it with regard to climate change and carbon dioxide removal.
One way to reach through the dialectic entirely is something called a hyperstition. There are many ways to explain this funky concept. I think the easiest way is through narrative, and it’s going to be through two films that, funnily enough, are contemporaneous and very similar with regard to their use of hyperstition. If you have not seen Interstellar and you have not seen Arrival — both of them use hyperstition in really fascinating ways.
I sat here for a while trying to figure out the exact right way to introduce you to hyperstition. I’ll share a couple of definitions that live online, and then I’m going to riff on that and add a little of my own complexity and flavor to it. On Wikipedia, hyperstition is a self-fulfilling idea that becomes real through its own existence. It’s also described as memetic ideas that bring about their own reality.
This show is a sort of intro prequel to the D.W. Pasulka show that’s coming out soon. There are some people who work on the paranormal, the occult, new religious movements, new spiritualities. Some of the people who study those ideas will sometimes theorize that what people experience as cryptids — like Sasquatch — or unidentified aerial phenomena, or things like that, are hyperstitions. They are some kind of transdimensional being that exists outside of a human sense of linear time. Humans, as far as I know, experience time in linear, backwards-to-forwards directionality.
As physics has gotten weirder and weirder as time has gone on — and this is especially linked to things like quantum theory — there’s a sense that time can be experienced all at once, going backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, all of it at the same time, and that the way we’re seeing things is because that’s how our senses have evolved to see and experience reality.
If you want to liken this to someone like Kant, and look at Kant’s relationship to someone like Descartes — Descartes’ very, very famous “I think therefore I am” is his attempt to use deductive reasoning outward from the fact that he’s aware of himself. All he knows, essentially, is that he has consciousness in some way, and there is sensory input flooding into his body through his senses. To what degree can one trust the senses? That’s one of those super-basic questions in epistemology — the study of what we can know — that opens up so many questions. Can you trust your sensory input? Descartes was a rationalist of the highest order, and thought that the experiential nature of the senses was fundamentally untrustworthy. He could only trust the pure rationality of his brain’s intellect, and distrust the material world.
In fact, Descartes for this reason is often pointed to as, quote-unquote, “Western man’s split with nature,” because it alienated the mind from the body, and in doing so, it privileges the mind over the body — and that’s extended onto material reality, into which we abuse nature because it’s part of a collective body that we misunderstand. Like all good dualities, it eventually gets linked to Christian Gnosticism, which is a well-known heresy, at least as it’s considered by mainstream Christianity. The world is controlled by a demon. Pure spirit is good, but the world — material reality — is controlled essentially by the devil. And the point of Gnosticism is to become pure spirit and to not trust the things of the material world.
If you run with this idea, it’s really interesting to see how it plays out in something like Hinduism — and, as I mentioned, the Bhagavad Gita show that’s coming. It has a really interesting, nuanced take on material reality beyond what’s typically considered to be part of Hinduism. But Buddhism, and various types of asceticism in general, is very much about rejecting the senses, the body, and focusing on spirit or mind or nothingness, and getting beyond maya — the things of this world that are distracting to us.
In fact, a lot of people see Protestantism especially as a very cerebralized version of Christianity. Older forms of Christianity were much more embodied and sensory, and focused on what’s called smells and bells — incense, songs, liturgy that’s meant to be impressive. Protestantism, in its focus on the written word, so deeply prioritizes being able to articulate ideas in finite form. Protestantism may in fact only be possible because of the printing press. This ability to access the written word privileges reading and writing to such an extent that it reordered our minds. Much of Catholic and Orthodox practice is about the body; it isn’t purely a cerebral exercise. In fact, Orthodoxy is famous for being less intellectual — I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense here. I think Orthodoxy privileges a mystical experience, and the Desert Fathers, and things of that nature.
Judaism is interesting too. I read Daniel Boyarin’s book The No-State Solution recently, which is a really interesting Jewish studies, sort of critical theory / cultural theory text. A lot of it was spent trying to analyze what makes a Jew a Jew. He argues that it’s not Halakha — Jewish law, and whether or not someone is matrilineally descended from a Jewish woman — but much more about connecting to a text line that runs throughout Jewish history. Do you engage with these texts, yes or no? And if so, one has a claim to Jewishness, in a way, among other things. And while that might sound like it privileges the intellect and cerebralizing God’s law or something like that, so much of what is debated — “disputing for the sake of heaven,” as is often put within Judaism — is about what we do with the body, about how the body is meant to be treated. So it’s one of those things that’s both extremely high and cerebral and intellectual, but also heavily embodied as well.
I’m realizing that the way I’m framing this may not feel super great to Protestants, and I’m not doing that intentionally. They’re all different ways of comprehending reality, and I’m trying not to say one of these is better than the other right now. This is something people point to Descartes on. And anyway — back to Kant.
Kant very famously has the split between phenomena and noumena. Kant has this way of understanding perception: that we are locked into our bodies, that what we experience is a set of phenomena, and phenomena are inherently subjective. And there may be a trans-subjective nature to it — maybe — we may not be able to know that, because we cannot see outside of our senses. We cannot sense out of our senses. We cannot reason outside of the rational structure of how our brains work. And so there’s this noumenal realm that might be outside of what we can sense, and we’ve only evolved senses for very specific evolutionary purposes. Does this help survival, yes or no? If the answer is yes, those senses will likely be enhanced and protected over time. If no, less so. And how do we know that we’re perceiving the full range of what’s available in terms of information that exists? We don’t know. And in fact, we get better at knowing this all the time.
If that’s true, one must be open to the fact that there must be information — at the very least, there may be information — that exists outside of our ability to perceive it right now, or perceive it in full right now, or maybe perceive it in full ever. Maybe that’s something that exists beyond human capacity, ipso facto.
If one is open to the idea of ultimate unknowability, and open to the fact that physics may be far stranger than our experience of it — and that, by some accountings, time may not only move backwards to forwards — and it’s possible that non-human intelligence exists, which is another huge question. I did a show about this as a thought experiment last year, about great filter events, with David Grinspoon, that you should check out. Because, again, I’m not claiming there are non-human intelligences in this way — I’m not trying to convince you one way or the other. Right now we’re talking about it in a very theoretical, thought-experiment kind of way. Then there may in fact be entities who are able to access time in the opposite direction, or to experience time in full, all at once. And a hyperstition is something that comes from what we perceive as the future, reaches back in time, to either create itself or create the conditions for itself in the past.
If you haven’t seen Arrival or Interstellar, I basically need to spoil them to discuss them. That’s the tough part about using literature or film as an exploratory device here — there often isn’t a good way to do it otherwise. If that bothers you, go ahead and pause and come back to the show another time. But also, I think it’s okay to have movies spoiled a little bit and then go back and watch them. Sometimes I feel like that even increases the enjoyment of them. For instance, I just watched Mother! by Darren Aronofsky, and I wish I’d read a little bit about it before I just dove in. Sometimes it’s nice to go in with literally no information. Sometimes it really does help the enjoyment to know a little bit about the symbolic order that’s being presented.
In Arrival, extraterrestrials arrive on Earth. Various humans are sent to try to make contact with them, to learn what they can, and to figure out what exactly is happening — because the extraterrestrials are just parked on Earth, floating above it. Amy Adams goes with a couple of other people, chosen from various scientific disciplines, to do this work, and she’s a linguist. Her job is to figure out what they’re saying. She notices that they have a unique orthography. Actually, it’s not even orthography, because they’re not letters — they’re full ideas. The language is circular. The symbols they use are these circles with various types of definition on the outside. It almost looks like black paint has been splattered.
Everyone thinks that what’s going to be learned about these creatures is going to be learned by the other scientists, and that the linguist is essentially there to assist them in figuring out the important stuff. Only it turns out that the language itself is what’s important. Their language is circular, and it conveys an awareness that time is not linear, backwards to forwards — it exists all at once. As Amy Adams learns how to speak this language, her awareness of time also changes, such that she experiences time all at once as well. She experiences her entire life, and can see her entire life and what that means for her.
Near the end of the film, things are not going well. Various governments have sent up their own representatives and scientists to speak with the extraterrestrials in their vehicles above various world cities. There’s tension between the US and China at this point in the film. And because Amy Adams has learned how to see reality in this alien way, she’s able to pull... she knows that she can call the Chinese leader and tell him something that no one else would know, that would get him to stand down and relax this escalation. Amy Adams pulls a memory from the future — which, in our view of reality, hasn’t happened yet — into the present, in order to create that future. Hyperstition.
But funnily enough, almost the same mechanism exists in Interstellar. Matthew McConaughey, an astronaut on a dying Earth, goes through some wormhole — much like Contact — and ends up in a tesseract. Or at least what the movie says is a tesseract: a sort of four-dimensional cube that has a temporal element to it that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. What exactly this might be isn’t super important for the purpose of explaining this. But inside this tesseract, Matthew McConaughey is back where his daughter is, when his daughter hears a ghost in her bookshelf — and it’s Matthew McConaughey, trying to reach her from the future, or a trans-temporal dimension, to tell her to do something in the present, as she experiences it, that will impact the future. The future calling back on the present to change, or to enact, the future. Hyperstition.
It’s a very cool literary device. Or you can be critical of it and say it has a little bit of the deus ex machina. There’s a famous scene from South Park where they make fun of the fact that the rules of time-travel movies never really make sense. Maybe I’ll put the link in Substack if you really want to watch that little clip. But let’s just take for granted that this idea of hyperstition is a worthwhile literary term. Ignore all the other stuff about whether or not this exists in some sort of real sense, and just think about it as a story about history that we tell ourselves.
Our ability to handle climate change is a hyperstition. Think about it this way. Future humans — whether ourselves or our descendants — are calling to us from the future to create the conditions of a planet they now live in, with a stable, livable climate. It’s only a hyperstition if we hear it this way. If we don’t do it, it’s a daydream. But if we’re able to pull it off, it’s because in some sense the future has called to us in the present to enact the future that they now inhabit.
It’s a weird way of seeing this. It may not be immediately actionable to understand it this way. But I find this way of experiencing working in climate to help me make sense of it, and to work toward making the daydream a hyperstition. It’s motivating. It’s beautiful. I like to be open to the possibility of things like this, because I used to be much more closed off to them. And I’m just open to the fact that reality might be a really bizarre thing that we’ve all sort of lost sight of.
It reminds me a little bit of when I was a younger person — I really liked Bill Hicks. If you’re out there listening and you like Bill Hicks, shout out to you. He reads as so much angrier now that I’m older, but there are parts of him that I find helpful. I especially like his famous speech from one of his standup specials — that life’s just a ride. We get so distracted by conflict and by pleasure and by our own suffering that we forget that this is a... what is this thing? How did we end up here? We have bodies, there’s an atmosphere. We grew out of a space rock — and isn’t that amazing?
And I think spiritual practice should do at least two things. It should probably do some others too, but the two I’m going to focus on here are: it reminds us that we ultimately are not in charge of everything. It reminds us that whether it’s a living Earth, whether it’s the cosmos, whether it’s a god or gods — humans are not the ultimate power. We don’t actually have to decide literally everything. It’s too much responsibility for us. And moreover, believing that we can and should be this powerful can have a toxic effect on us, and it’s better that we don’t embrace and try to do this in that way.
Secondly, it should remind us that life is incredibly sacred and important, but also kind of funny. It’s amazing that this exists. And if it’s amazing that this exists, and it’s kind of funny that we control bodies and are on a space rock, then can’t we just be nicer to each other? Can’t we just laugh about why we set everything up like this? Why are we choosing misery when we could have a world that’s beautiful for everyone? And ideally that should make us more humane and connected with one another, and better able to do this work. Because life’s just a ride, right? We can laugh at it a little bit, right?
And if you’re thinking about that hyperstition reaching back into the present, I imagine it just piercing all the way through synthesis, all the way through thesis and antithesis, breaking that dialectic and sort of shaking us out of this conflict, and getting us to think about: how do we create the world that is calling to us from 2050, that needs us here to create it? Some of the dialectical suffering we’re experiencing may not be necessary at all. Maybe some of these things we can set aside, so we can make sure we’re oriented in the right ways to achieve the things we so desperately need to, in order to become the species we must be for us to continue and to develop as a permanent civilization on Earth.
We can do it. If I didn’t believe we could, I’d be building a bunker somewhere. That’s not what I’m trying to be about. And some days, ideas like the hyperstition just give me that little boost I need to stay on track and continue with this very difficult work.
Thanks for listening. Hope you loved a strange, monologue-y kind of show. Tell you what — think about this. Don’t tell anyone about it. You can just think about it privately for a while, and don’t do anything on any of your apps. Just think about this privately, and I’ll consider that a win for this one. Ugh — you made it to the end here. You’re one of the real ones. I really appreciate it. Hope this gave you something new, something to chew on. And be sure to listen to the show with D.W. Pasulka that’s coming out, and the episode about the Bhagavad Gita. Bye for now.
