Episode 123 - Are Those People the Problem?

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[Music] our world is built with stories [Music] sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other the liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart today's story those people are the problem i am so excited for this one rollins is in the house and uh this i feel like this is one of those stories that is so fundamental we talked about we in this season we're pulling apart the stories that pull us apart and this story of our problems being centralized in somebody out there some big other is so foundational and fundamental to stories that pull us apart from each other uh i've been super excited about talking about this with you pete thank you there's no warm-up he just jumped straight into it it's exciting i feel like i'm strapped in we've gone from not to 60. i literally sat down and you went into radio voice mood you just said that sexy voice just started to become sexy yeah nice you don't sound like that in real life that's you that's the real voice well welcome so glad to have you back on the vlog it's great to be back yeah thanks man so let's talk about this story um where's this come from why are we all so engulfed in this uh well i don't even know where to start it's so prevalent it's so like the water that we swim in as as a culture well i loved what you said at the beginning there you said that hi it's it's difficult for us to uh face things we often look for the problems out there somewhere out in the world even in terms of uh if i can't sleep uh the problem is potentially something i can take a pill for the problem is something i can i can do some sort of meditation and get rid of it sometimes i'll do anything but ask the question is there something in my dreams that i do want to encounter and we're so fearful of of questions like that we're always looking for some external thing we can blame whether it's our biology or whether it's our boss um it's just a very common thing for us to do in fact even um a symptom is kind of like an example of this often symptoms in our bodies are the speaking of a truth that we cannot speak so what happens is when we cannot speak a truth the truth finds a way it erupts it always finds a way to get out if you are for example unable to express you know maybe you've got a sick mother and you're looking after and you love her but you also hate her at some level you're having to give so much to this person and it's really dragging you down but maybe you've never expressed that not even to anybody else you haven't even expressed it to yourself and so you find your tense all the time and you find that you've got these piercing headaches and at first you're thinking if only i can find the right medication to get rid of the headache then everything will be great but sometimes the headache is the eruption of the truth that you cannot speak it's the objective manifestation of your frustration and your anger that's within you and we want to externalize it we want to cut it out of our body like a cancer rather than listen to it and so yeah just whenever you said that go like oh yeah it's a very difficult thing for us to do is to um is to face the possibility that many of the symptoms we have and the frustrations we have can connect with something deep within us hmm yeah i mean this we're kind of talking about scapegoating really here aren't we like oh yeah this happens on an individual and sort of daily level all the time like the ways you're talking about but it also happens with groups of us and with our social identities and with our feelings about my problems being because of something not not just external circumstances but people like yeah these are those people are the problem can you talk about that yeah some goat mechanism a little bit absolutely yeah because this this actually just brings us neatly to that is that the scapegoat uh traditionally was uh the goat that carried the sins or the lack of the community um and the idea was that uh the scapegoat is someone we blame externally for all of the internal conflicts within our society so we have to find someone who is the problem and if only we got rid of them then everything would be fine when we get rid of the scapegoat and it can be anybody it can be anything but the escape good is a type of external uh person or thing that we believe is the problem and that we think that if only we got rid of it everything would be great i mean the the most obvious and simple example is uh obviously in kind of fascism where there is a tension and there are issues within the community and then that is put on to the jewish community the figure of the jew and they say if only we got rid of the jewish community then we would find an organic wholeness a oneness again so within fascism there's all of this talk of organic oneness of coolness that is being disturbed by an external enemy and if only we get rid of the external enemy we can return to this organic almost like an eden-like reality but the truth is the community requires the figure of the jew because it's it's actually that figure that holds them together it's you think it's the problem but it's actually the solution to a problem it's what holds that community together just like having an enemy can kind of like hold a group of people together they all share the same enemy and because of that they're able to briefly kind of like uh avoid looking at the conflicts that are within the group itself so this is a problem that only for the racists and the fascists oh yes only for those others so those people have a problem with this exactly yes if we did we got rid of them then everything would be fine yeah how does this how does this uh we were talking a little bit about this at lunch and laughing about that like it seems like we're most dangerous when we're unaware of this mechanism in me yes in ourselves absolutely because it's so easy to be to then to graduate from oh yeah look it it's those it's the nazis it's the racist it's the it's the republicans it's the whoever it is that is the the problem and now we've just like become unconscious of of the same mechanism and just replace the new other yeah there's just new purity cultures of who's in and who's out who's toxic and who's not toxic who's right and who's wrong and uh we create these new purity cultures that's gonna resonate with our audience because a lot of people have come from purity culture quote-unquote period culture where your sexuality is tied to your purity and a lot of us have a lot of baggage and harm from that but how do what do you mean by new purity culture yeah just new purity culture in the terms of there's there's a new kind of rules as to who's clean and who's on the clean what what's a clean action an unclean action what's a clean way of speaking and a dirty way of speaking so it's basically a new leviticus you know a new set of rules that dictate uh cleanliness and interestingly like a figure like jesus is someone who is questioning who is clean and who is dirty there is in fact the the definition of the the christ collective is the the trash of the world literally the dirt but um uh a new purity culture is basically where again we we basically create a whole new set of rules about what is what is correct speech or correct action or correct thought and what is incorrect and how do we protect ourselves from the dirty from the other from the toxicity of that other who threatens our purity actually the philosopher hegel called this the beautiful soul and uh it sounds lovely when you say the beautiful soul but he talked about basically a stage in development uh do you see it with children where we can't tolerate our own impurities our own conflicts and antagonisms and contradictions and so we put them on something else so whenever the child says there's a monster under my bed the monster of course isn't under the bed the monster is inside them but they are engaging in the beautiful soul they are taking that part of themselves and they are externalizing it in some fictional object the monster that's under the bed and of course part of growing up and becoming mature is realizing that the monster that's under the bed is actually something that's within you yeah so what is that what are the dangers of this of this story of externalizing these monsters on the on the first level where it's like yeah the jews are the problem for the nazis that that's pretty obvious for most of us like why that's a problem but then what about when it's separated from that sort of power because you've got you know these powerful systems that let's say in america have scapegoated black people as being part of the problem with society and have made our criminal justice system and stuff it has all these broken biased ways of allowing racism to systematically and with power affect people so there could be an argument about like that type of the kind of scapegoating that actually has power yeah in society is that's kind of like level one we see the really harmful effects of that but what's as that kind of up levels into nuances as it becomes oh now i i'm scapegoating or the the people that are the problem are those people the the people in power or then maybe i get even more sophisticated and go see well look at these people that are still scapegoating the people in power and now i'm up even another level yes you know like but as it becomes more abstract what's the danger like if there's no power and just a philosopher sitting around up four levels yes of scapegoating levels what's the problem is is there a problem when it's just theoretical like that yeah you know the main problem i would i would describe it as the the inability to have novelty right so and it sounds so uh small in comparison so i'm not saying about ethics right or wrong or anything like that i what's what's one of the biggest problems with scapegoating and what could be called splitting in society where splitting is where you turn the world into a type of uh like john wayne movie the goodies and the bodies right we create a world with very very clear uh heroes and very clear villains one of the problems with that is novelty cannot arise and when novelty can't arise movement can't occur so to take northern ireland as an example i'm from northern ireland we had a 30-year war and it was primarily about it was a political conflict and also a religious conflict uh so you know broadly speaking um northern ireland is part of the united kingdom so the conflict was partly about northern ireland either remaining part of the united kingdom or becoming part of the rest of ireland and it was also divided partially on catholic and protestant lines i love this because people think of like religious conflicts between kind of uh islam and christianity or judaism this is a conflict between two different christian sex um this is what freud called the narcissism of small differences because we actually hate people who are very similar to us yeah rather than people who are very different from us and that's a very key thing to realize about ourselves when we hit something that's usually something that's very close to us but it's why christmas dinners can be so oh yeah it's so difficult too absolutely and you're you're divided in the smallest of things whereas you can have someone a friend who you don't agree with anything but you don't fight it's interesting but in northern ireland the conflict got so bad and the splitting was so bad each side saw themselves as the utter enemy and evil and each side could find reasons to justify that narrative so what what broke uh and interestingly so in 1998 there was the good friday agreement it was called cause it was sign on good friday and uh basically every side the british government the irish government the loyalist paramilitaries the nationalist paramilitaries basically all realized that this splitting was just destroying everybody's lives everybody was getting damaged by it everyone was being destroyed by it and that basically we were trying to win by absolutely destroying the other and it wasn't working and so everybody said right we're going to have to sit at the table and we're going to have to talk and so we went from basically war which is the inability to have conflict war where you basically want to destroy the other into conflict where you sit down and you actually fight back and forth and listen to the other once you're able to do that novelty can arise and what i mean by novelty is a way forward that you could not have imagined in advance this is different from progressivism this can be called apocalypticism because apocalypticism means the incoming of something you could never imagine so in progressivism people are imagining that they know what the future holds what the answer is so if i if i'm a progressive and i know i know i'm on the right side of history and i know then that you're on the wrong side of history i can love you but only in a patronizing way right because ultimately you have to come to see my opinion because i'm right in apocalypticism you go we don't know what the future looks like i don't know i'm going to enter into a conflictual difficult uh form of communication with you and something will arise that will hopefully move us forward but i don't know what that's going to look like and so that's the problem with scapegoating is it doesn't allow for conflict of that nature which doesn't allow for novelty and without novelty there can't be change so in northern ireland the novelty erupted and we literally find a way to we have the most successful peace process in the modern world we find a way to all move forward and it's the most bizarre kind of like thing that happened we disbanded the whole police force we uh we now have a special relationship with ireland uh we kind of have a we don't have a border but we do all of these compromises were made and we're still living in the aftermath of the good friday agreement and it's on it's held it's held [Music] one of the things that a fascist ideology has that actually brings us closer to home is it's all about organic oneness unity wholeness cleanliness so if you read mein kampf hitler is constantly talking about viruses and dirt and invasion and penetration like a sexual imagery it's it's all of this kind of like there is a pure there is a pure organic society and something is disrupting it and disturbing it and it's actually the more we give ourselves to a type of purity culture where we think we are the pure and the good and where we're imagining this pure society the more we need a scapegoat we'll look around for someone for some community that's disrupting it and so there's something about a type of secular purity culture that that leads to a lot of the problems that we're we're seeing we got to get more comfortable with being dirty i can see by looking at you that you're relatively comfortable with dirt that's not a problem for you i am looking particularly homeless today i guess what i'm just wanting to make a distinction between equalizing scapegoating as just a principle and saying that all things are equal it feels a little unfair when you talk about it from certain lenses as far as it's different to tell the nazi you're scapegoating jews than it is to tell a jew that's under the oppression of a nazi you think nazis are the problem yeah yes you know that's a different impact yeah we let's parse that out a little bit that's a good good thing to do the first thing to say interestingly is um scapegoating mechanism can operate even when it has a legitimate enemy so here's the funny thing so le cam the psychoanalyst he said that even if your partner is cheating on you your jealousy might still be pathological so in other words if you are pathologically jealous that your partner is cheating on you and then you find out you're right you go i was right but actually the jealousy can still be a pathology it's just it hides noy behind empirical reality so sometimes what we do is we look for a legitimate enemy who kind of is bad is causing problems and uh then we can feel like we can feel justified in our hatred the the the problem with that isn't moral the problem with that it's more complicated it's that we start to need the enemy right i think i talked about this once before on your podcast but hi a hypochondriac they hate their disease but of course they don't we all look like because a hypochondriac is always thinking do i have cancer do i have heart disease or do i have this they're constantly kind of like wanting it they don't want it but they're they're obsessed with it so if they happen to find out that they do have cancer so i say i'm a hypochondriac i think i have cancer and you are not a hypochondriac right and say we both find out that we have cancer right because i am libidinally invested in the cancer i am less likely to do things to get rid of it i actually need it it holds me together it holds my anxiety together whereas you are not libidinally invested in your cancer so you're more likely to do things that might be more effective in getting rid of it so what i'm parsing out there is it sounds weird at first but sometimes we love our enemies like like a hypochondriac loves their disease we actually need our enemy and and and when we need our enemy we're invested in actually you know we don't unconsciously we do want to get rid of them like unconsciously we kind of they they get us up in the morning and they make it exciting for our lives and therefore will be less effective at actually uh challenging yeah it actually can strengthen what they do exactly or absolutely 100 percent strength trump yeah like let's let's be honest would his base love him as much if if the left didn't hate him yeah it's like part of what they love about him is how much they'll have data oh yeah well i i was amazed whenever i saw i saw some democrats with a sign i think mike talked about before but it said love trump's hit and uh they were holding up i think around 2016. and i thought this is fascinating from a freudian perspective because of course the surface meaning is love is better than hate and trump hits but of course this the other meaning is we love trump's head right and of course you could see how much energy some people were getting out of the hatred of the other and that is when you start to get libidinally invested in one's enemy and then with unconsciously one needs one's enemy yeah so that's when it's a scapegoat it's not a scapegoat whenever you literally just go something bad is occurring that needs to be sorted out but you're not so caught up that you are unable to think rationally you're not so caught up in it that you actually are unconsciously rooting for it so once you once you basically disengage from the scapegoat mechanism you become more effective as as a as a force for good yeah just your i mean bringing it back to the personal level if you're caught in it unconsciously in a scapegoat mechanism where if any of any level of where those people are the problem now you're unconscious about what's happening in you and what's some of the actual causes of your misery and and you're caught you're owned by that other person now like you're dependent on some external factor for your own well-being your own peaceful yeah state of being so you're trapped like you you're kind of owned by this person or this group of people in a weird way now you're not free we see this all the time like you see individuals who always end up going out with people who hurt them or betray them and if you know you might be unlucky and you go out with someone and they do that but but you will meet people encounter people who they don't consciously know they're doing it but they actually seek that out they are kind of engaged in this process of looking for that kind of external enemy because there's something about that relationship that they're getting something out of it even though it's deeply painful to them even though it's causing deep suffering there's something what's called a repetition disorder a repetition compulsion where you're repeatedly kind of looking for some unhealthy behavior one of the most important lessons i feel like i've ever learned in my life is that when i'm being affected when that when i'm being emotionally affected by something that's always about me yeah always 100 of the time they're like i can't i think it always seems like it's about that thing yeah like well they did that offensive thing but if i'm offended it's because something in me is unresolved and so like this scapegoating this making them the problem it's not to say that nobody does anything that's problematic yeah yeah it's not to say that obviously there's a lot of people doing really horrible things but my experience of that my emotional response to that only comes from within me and and you can disarm a lot of evil in the world by disarming the own evil within yourself yeah now it's not complete maybe that's the only evil you could deserve yeah i mean and it's funny because at a very macro level we're all part of society so we're all part of economic systems and political systems and so we can't really find a purity and say we're not connected in terms of you know what i wear in terms of what i drive what i drink the conversations i have we're so immersed in a culture together that it's actually very hard for us to say oh i am separate from the various contradictions and deadlocks and violence and problems that are within society we're kind of caught up and so the question is then how do i begin to work through that within myself i'll give you an example of something actually we did in belfast called the evangelism project which was an attempt to disarm the scapegoating mechanism in ourselves but also that helped do that for other people so the evangelism project was where we would go to a community to be evangelized so we would go to either to some group that had views that were very different from our own whether religious or political or cultural and we would sit and we would listen to them for a bit and then we would ask questions but the evangelism of the evangelism project wasn't that it wasn't that we would go to say the islamic society and listen to what they had to say and then maybe convert to islam that's very unlikely for anyone to convert to anything in one sitting and if they do there's probably an issue you know the the evangelism happened when we said what do we look like to you um so say the small groups have christians go what does the christian community look like to you and then when you see yourself through the other's eyes you begin to change you begin to see yourself you begin to see the the blind spots in your own life so in a similar way like essay say i'm a republican and you're a democrat and we go into a debate it's highly unlikely that i'm going to convince you to be a republican and it's highly unlikely that you're going to convince me to become a democrat but that's what a debate usually is you're in fighting for your position i'm fighting for my position with the advances and project the idea is different is that i come to you and i say right listen you're you're a democrat right i can't understand it right it's like yeah i don't know why you don't see that that that position just doesn't hold you know you're just it's just you're too fragile you don't you know you're not seeing the world as it really is you're not like taking real political decisions you want to have these impossible things of you know these political views that sound great on paper but actually if they ever happened would potentially undermine the whole of society whatever it is whatever i'm saying right but i'm going like but i must be missing something because you seem like a reasonable person so tell me what do i look like to you and then i listen to how you see me and i'm not trying to become a democrat you're not trying to make me into a democrat i'm just seeing how i look through your eyes and if i move into that i suddenly start to go oh yeah i can see now that there's maybe parts of my position that are cooled and difficult and wrong and vice versa then you say what what do i look like to you you're not going to convince me to become a republican but but you might help me see why you wouldn't join this side and then basically what we do is you help me become a better republican and i help you become a better democrat but over time the very way we understand those terms begins to change so that's the kind of dialogue that can disarm the scapegoating mechanism or the splitting mechanism that we're talking about yeah that's good how do we come to recognize it because we were as we were talking at lunch like just seeing it is often the big the biggest part of the battle like recognizing that mechanism at play in me yes because it really does the whole mechanism is built on unconsciousness is built on really believing that they're the problem yeah and that this has nothing to do with me yeah and if we solve that external issue everything will be fine yeah so how do we even begin to recognize well this is where and this is what i love about yeah this idea of the good news right there's this notion where like people do uh work where they go to prison population they go to the homeless you know they say it's good news for christians maybe missionaries kind of like this but i want to turn on its head a little bit because you mentioned earlier we didn't go into it but you're saying well what about things like racism or homelessness or prison population whatever well these are these are issues you're going well these are issues if there's racism in a society we have to name it well in this kind of approach you have to say something quite difficult which is the crime and racism and sex many of these problems they're not the problem they're the solution to a problem just like alcoholism is not a problem it's the solution to your problem and if you're working with someone who's an alcoholic and you don't work out what the alcohol is the solution to if you think you can just get rid of the alcoholism through sheer will it'll come up in a different way it'll be like guacamole right you get rid of one and it comes back somewhere else in crossfit or something terrible right so the idea is that if you think that homelessness is the problem and that we can just get rid of it we're not realizing that no it's a solution to a problem that exists within society and if we don't look at what that is then yeah we can give blankets to homeless people but we'll never solve the issue so when we go to the poor or the homeless it's not that we're good news to them they're good news to us because they are the truth that we cannot see as a society the unconscious truth that we are not embracing there's something about how we are living that's generating crime and unemployment and discontent and anxiety and uh generating all sorts of weird symptoms and those weird symptoms are everything from the obvious ones of racism and stuff like that to to a lot of new age stuff to a lot of drug stuff to a lot of homelessness there's all sorts of issues religion you know all sorts of things so whenever you're saying about yeah how do we become aware and part of it is is yet changing our way of looking at things slightly and going okay the thing that i think i can cut out of society like a cancer if i just get rid of them that'll be what if they are the solution to your problems and that group of people they express as a symptom they're a symptom of some deeper problem that i am participating in and suddenly now i'm having to do self-reflection what is it about my life and my part in society that is generating the problems that i am basically standing against so weirdly what you're standing against you suddenly start to go oh oh that might exist because of me hmm that's it that's a really difficult thing to you know to face yeah that's why at the very beginning we started off with that notion that whenever i have a symptom i just want to take a drug to get rid of it yeah i do want to start asking the difficult questions of you know what is it what is it about me that that symptom is uh what truth is that symptom speaking so when you go back to purity culture even somebody who's been wounded and repressed by purity culture the easier thing is to be like now i'm an ex whatever ex evangelical purity culture hater yeah and screw those people yeah and how does that approach limit my ability to actually heal to actually move forward it's so so i mean a lot of my work is is uh revolves around this because a lot of us will convert from one position to another but we don't convert the way that we engage with the position so we the escape mechanism is not um uh taken apart it's not de-weaponized uh it's just put into something else so at the level of what you believe everything changes but at the level of how you believe it everything remains the same yeah right and that's why i see people moving you know people might move from religion to drugs to sex you know communities to political communities to ideologically but you look and you go oh they're still looking for certainty and satisfaction they're still looking for i have the answer and i'm right and the past me is wrong and the other is wrong and the real challenge is how do we not necessarily change what you believe that's neither here nor there how do we change the high of our belief as soren kierkegaard talked about he says we're always changing what we believe but the question is changing you know the the process of changing how we believe it so that we basically can dismantle this type of otherness thinking yeah [Music] when you start recognizing this when you start recognizing that scapegoating mechanism it can be hard and embarrassing it can be you know i've noticed there's been a few times in the last few years where for me it's a good cue if i can feel myself getting activated like emotionally activated in maybe ways that isn't totally uh in ways that i would normally react you know so something kind of sets me off a little bit more it's a great opportunity and those like there's just noticing oh there's more emotion than normal yes yes yeah what's going on in me yeah and what is this related to in me rather than just looking outside the natural easy things to look outside what is the yeah screw them look at that yes but as soon as that emotional activation starts happening to go oh there's some sort of insecurity in me there's some sort of fear in me there's some sort of hang up or attachment in me that's allowing this external circumstance to kind of take control yes and very often there's probably going to be some sort of scapegoating mechanism some sort of like oh these people or that person is making me not happy just making me stressed is making me whatever the thing is rather than looking it's actually my attachment to how that person is being that is making me stressed and and there's nothing wrong with this this is like defense mechanisms are there for a reason is that they're there to protect us from like an over abundance of emotion so you break up with somebody and you hate them and think they are all bad and evil and wrong that's kind of pretty natural the issue is simply that if you stay there it'll eventually make you better and you won't be able to move on and maybe have a healthier relationship and so this isn't even a question of whether it's right or wrong to feel these things it's simply a question of if we're not able to move beyond them then it just ends up damaging us all and as i mentioned earlier then novelty can't happen so novelty in the situation of a person breaking up with somebody is the novelty is someone new some new type of relationship some new way forward that you couldn't have imagined but that can only really happen and by the way there's no guarantee it will happen but it can only really happen when you do the hard work of asking about your emotions and why you're feeling the way you're feeling and are able to kind of take a breath and that can be very helpful but it's not just helpful for you it's also then helpful for the people around you and so there's a there's a guy called wilford beon a very famous psychoanal psychoanalyst and he was working with an organization and someone asked him what do you think about the uh kind of the environment of this organization and he said the situation is not good for thinking in other words he was saying that like you're asking me to to think about where this organization is but my goodness the conditions are so bad that we can't even think right we're all at each other's throats so you know the first challenge a little familiar yeah yeah and so the first challenge is oh my goodness how do we create the conditions for thought how do we create the conditions for real conflict you know really sitting down and having a good old fight not uh to the extent where it becomes war and i will just not listen to you i just want to i just want to get rid of you oh yeah wow yeah war is just what we do all the time writ large right yeah yeah we do that in small ways all the time that's it and there was a big moral thing back i remember in north now times because whenever people were actually murdered and there was a lot of death and destruction and torture during the 30 years of war and so a lot of people said well it's not you know what about the morality of sitting down with your enemy right should you sit down with these people and that's why i almost want to take the morality out of it because actually morally you could say no i don't want to sit down with someone who is like that or who is responsible for murder but uh in northern ireland it was like all sides went no no it's it we're all gonna the whole thing's gonna fall apart the whole the whole of society is collapsing and so it's basically not a question of morality so much as as i said in novelty it's a good situation of going we all sit down try to create the conditions where we can think and argue in the hope that an apocalyptic event will happen i will find a way to move forward and that will stop us from descending into oblivion and that's a it's a very difficult thing to do and you can't tell someone to do it but but a society and really just a society gets to a point where the hurt is so painful for so many people that sometimes you kind of go okay this isn't working and at that point uh change can happen hmm but it's it's a dangerous thing because you don't you know society can destroy itself before it gets there the question is then how do we how do we model a way to communicate any ideas on that well here's funny thing so i do think called atheism for length you know but it's it's funny because when i started it this pastor said to me oh you'll never get 10 theists who'll want to do that i have like thousands now who did and atheism for lenders is interesting thing we're over length for 40 days you get various atheistic critiques but we read them not to critique them but to let them critique us and actually the point is to show that atheism and theism you think they're they're enemies you think you know theology has nothing to do with the atheism but they're actually completely intertwined yeah they're just each other what's that they need each other they need each other and and they need each other they dance with each other sometimes they argue with each other sometimes they're completely interconnected with each other and it's actually this very rich dance and that there is a theological atheism so doing that course is a way in terms of the religious world for atheists to see a theological dimension to what they're doing and appreciate that and for people who are theists to see an atheistic dimension of what they're doing and to appreciate that and um at the end of the 40 days those seemingly impenetrable boundaries between sacred and secular theists and atheists are now porous so need to have equivalent things like that potentially yeah i think when you start confronting this and seeing it recognizing it in yourself and your community and your ways of being in the world it seems like just you being aware of it would tend to lead you towards more inclusion more harmony more peace because like what else could it be when you see the mechanism by which you're being torn apart from your neighbor it's in you yes and you just see it it kind of loses some of its power and then a more natural connection and healing yeah and it's also yeah it's a weird and it's a weird form of like peaceful lack of peace i i contented this content there's a the difference one of the differences between counseling and psychoanalysis is that often in counseling what happens is someone comes to a therapist of some kind and they have a contradiction in them they have some sort of conflict and that's damaging them in some way often in counseling the idea is to get rid of the conflict right you kind of somehow you begin to disappear that you talk about it your anger with your partner or whatever it is and as you talk about it you're able to you know find greater peace now the slight difference in psychoanalysis is actually the the goal is not to get rid of the contradiction but it's rather to deepen up and deepen it and deepen it to such a extent that it until you're able to live with it until you're able to make peace with the lack of peace so you may go in because you're angry with your boss but as you talk you realize no i'm really angry with my partner yeah but then as you talk more you go well actually i'm really angry with my parents you know my brother or sister and then you find that you're dealing with the anger of existence right that existence is difficult and eventually you get to this point where you go oh yeah life is difficult and i have to find a way to navigate that and hegel calls this absolute knowledge actually in philosophy but it's the cure in psychoanalysis is partly the ability to come to terms with your own contradictions your own deadlocks your own frustrations your own impurity your own dirtiness and not let someone else carry it not have to find someone else to take it on board and when you get to that point you find that you are individually a healthier person but that actually your networks become healthier because the way you interact with your networks is different that's for me the challenge and that's why i'm not a progressive or anything it's because i'm not trying to move towards some sort of existence without contradiction some sort of organic kind of utopia what i'm interested in is this more analytic approach which is the various contradictions of society that we address them and as we address them we find that there's deeper contradictions so we find that what we initially thought was about crime right these criminals these people here write robbing houses or whatever we find out oh no that criminal activity is something to do with unemployment wealth disparity et cetera et cetera so suddenly now you're a deeper level you're not like judge dredd just go and there's a criminal i'm going to lock them away you're now going oh the criminals the criminals that are operating will always be a few criminals but systemic crime is connected to all sorts of other things and then we deepen that contradiction and we get to the point where we can accept that there's a certain contradictions part of life and as you accept that the idea is that society will become healthier that basically most of the problems we see today are frenetic attempt to get rid of contradiction to turn it into opposition to take contradiction and make an opposition i.e they're the problem get rid of them and everything will be great and if we can avoid that oppositional thinking and we can see that we're scapegoating if we can have enough communities in a country where hundreds of people are living like that that can have a really positive effect on the society at large so my project is to try to help create communities where literally hundreds or thousands of people are being libidonally disattached from the escape group mechanism so that they can kind of basically escape from this frenetic pursuit of like a wholeness and a completeness embrace their own contradictions and that can actually have massive change in political and economic level i think i've heard you say salvation from salvation yes absolutely yeah something with that next step that's it that's the ultimate salvation the salvation from the need to be saved yeah it's a tough one we're always looking to be you know to find the next thing that that works yeah uh what does it look like to have a community where you embrace the not working a way that i sometimes said i think i got it from i think slavery shizek might have set up is it's great to be free to pursue what will make you happy but it's also good to have communities where you're freed from the pursuit of what will make you happy which means you're freed from the frenetic pursuit of trying to get something that works because when it doesn't work you're always looking for someone to blame well it's good stuff man ah that was fun that's thank you yeah thank you well we hope we see you this sunday the sunday thing which if you don't know what that is you can go to the liturgists.com click on join us we have this weekly meetup with the liturgist community online we use zoom and we talk about the week's episode and we meditate together it's a great time uh check that out the liturgists.com just click the join us button this episode was hosted by me michael gunger thanks to pete rollins for being our guest thanks to tejas lair haydn for editing this episode thanks to the patrons as always for making what we do possible all the love to all of you thanks for listening everybody