Maria: Hello everybody, welcome back to the Cobra

Ella Simone: Okay.

Maria: Lily Podcast. This is Maria. How are you doing, Ella?

Ella Simone: I'm doing good. How are you?

Maria: I'm doing great. I'm so excited to come back and talk about this topic. So last episode we talked about is reality an illusion? We talked about how it feels impossible to find truth in the modern times. And we also talked about how our perception really isn't built to find objective truth in the first place. We're just kind of more built to survive. So today we're continuing on that topic and we're gonna talk about does objective truth matter? Even if somehow magically we were able to get all of the objective truth all at once. Would it even benefit us? So I thought we could start by talking about a really great book about terror management theory, So why don't you go ahead and start us off, Ella?

Ella Simone: Yes, I found this fantastic book that came out in twenty fifteen, which might warrant its own episode called The Worm at the Core, which is about terror management theory. the worm at the core comes from a quote from this book called The Varieties of Religious Experience, which was published in nineteen two by American philosopher and psychologist William James. So he said, Back of everything is the great specter of universal death, the all encompassing blackness. And so with most of us, a little irritable weakness will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. So he's basically saying that within all of us there is this fear of death and this existential dread, the worm at the core of the apple. Apple, that symbolizes knowledge. in the biblical story of Adam and Eve So this knowledge that we have comes with this little worm saying, guess what? You're gonna die. the original question I was trying to answer in coming up with this episode topic was, how did we come up with the idea of God? And we don't really know when or how humans literally invented God or if it happened at one particular point. I think religious concepts gradually emerge from basic features of human psychology. like animals, our brains have evolved to detect agency to ensure our own survival. And by agency that means a primary cause for stimuli. So if you hear a branch snap behind you in the woods, it's safer to think something or someone caused that than to assume that it was just random. So we naturally look for causes behind things we don't understand, which can lead us to imagine invisible beings that are responsible for storms, for illness, for death, for fertility and other natural events. terror management theory argues that most human activity is driven by this unconscious effort to deny and to transcend death. So there's evidence in the book about how, unlike other animals, humans do have this unique awareness of our own mortality. And that awareness creates a deep existential anxiety. So just like animals, we possess a biological drive for self-preservation. But unlike other animals, as far as we know, we also have the cognitive capacity to realize that death is inevitable. So we want to survive, but we know that there's some kind of futility in us doing that. this biologist Ajit Varki was quoted saying that an overwhelming fear of death would be a dead-end evolutionary barrier because it would curb people's willingness to take risks in hunting to increase the odds of landing big game, to compete more effectively for mates that would throw a wrench into natural selection, basically. our ancestors as a result, made a kind of adaptive and imaginative risk by creating a supernatural world where death was not inevitable. and as a result, they would be more likely to function effectively in their environment and therefore more likely to perpetuate their genes into future generations and further natural selection.

Maria: a lot of these tales were not just what was adaptive individually. Humans survive better in packs. So if you create a society, you create all these ideas around death that make it easier for people to survive in a group, right? I went to Mexico at one point and I saw the ancient pyramid, I believe it was of the Mayans. And they were talking about this idea that if you die a warrior's death, you ascend to blank and blank, and you see that across all different types of religions, right? Are people really gonna go to war and lay down their lives if they are terrified of death and they have absolutely no idea what happens after death? when you're stripped down to your very core, all you have left is faith, and faith gets you through those most stressful moments. And that's why I think it was so cool what he was saying about the dead end evolutionary barrier. Because I think that when people start to approach death, you kind of get stripped of all those things naturally.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the whole part about humans being pack animals. There's a part in the book where they talk about this band of African hominids that we all descended from were highly social and that allowed them to survive humans really, compared to animals like lions, compared to sharks. Like we don't have the same capacity for surviving at the physical level that a lot of other animals do. But our ability to work together is what allowed our cerebral cortices to become larger and larger and for our species to eventually become extremely intelligent. So this fostered cooperation. and we were able to invent things like tools, agriculture, cooking, that animals were not able to invent. I'm gonna read this one quote. The evolution of the human brain led to two particularly important human intellectual capacities, a high degree of self-awareness and the capacity to think in terms of past, present, and future. Only we humans are, as far as anyone knows, aware of ourselves as existing in a particular time and place. Unlike geese, monkeys, and wombats, we can carefully consider our current situation together with both the past and the future before choosing a course of action. Because we humans are aware that we exist, we also s know that someday we will no longer. exist. And

Maria: Yes.

Ella Simone: that's kind of the downside of our heightened intellect.

Maria: I love that 'cause it makes me think of, The fact that dogs have very short term memory and like training dogs can be difficult because it's like, okay, like they don't know that they just did a thing five seconds ago. That idea that

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: we have an understanding of our past, present and future. I think it would be hard for us to find a scientist who doesn't talk about how human intellect has what has allowed us to rise throughout the top of the food chain, right? societies that we have, right?

Ella Simone: Yes. Yes. We don't have the kind of claws that certain animals do, but we have the mental capacity to develop tools that are more powerful than the claws, like guns.

Maria: Yeah, I was gonna say, who needs claws when you have a gun? Right?

Ella Simone: Yeah. this is where they get into religion. So we can't eliminate the fact that we'll eventually die. So we develop these psychological and cultural systems that make life feel meaningful and make death feel less terrifying. And religion can serve this function particularly well. Belief in an afterlife can make death seem like a transition rather than an absolute end. And belief in God, a God who watches over us can provide a sense of protection and order. And religion as a whole, the collective nature of it gives people a sense that their individual lives are part of something larger that will endure past their own lives.

Maria: And I feel like this is a great part to talk about when science gets involved too. Because I love how it says a belief in God watching over us can provide a sense of protection and order, right? However, none of that changes the fact that you need to know where to plant your damn crops and when to plant them. within the Western education system, we tend to think about science really starting to develop for the first time in Mesopotamia. And they were doing science in a way that said, hey, how do we plant the crops? How long is the growing season going to be? So religion was allowing them to kind of understand the why and the should and all the greater questions of how do we endure beyond just our mortal form. And then science was stepping in and say, hey, this is how you just basically survive.

Ella Simone: Yeah, and I would add that science helps us, like religion, anticipate, interpret, and postpone death to ease this anxiety. I mean, look at today if you're looking at Brian Johnson, like that guy who has made it his life purpose to transcend death and all these anti-aging products that are coming out, all these peptides that are coming out, all this money that's being put toward research to prolong people's lives. A lot of science has been used for medicinal purposes. And that is about ultimately postponing death and eliminating or alleviating pain, right? Which is associated with death.

Maria: I would also argue it's about grasping for certainty because we know what to expect from life to an extent. We have no idea what happens after death. you postpone death, you elongate certainty because we don't know what happens after death. But we have a general idea of what life is like. So when we push death back, we start to understand certainty more. Because the longer you live too, you also develop the mental resources, you develop the knowledge, you develop habits, and you start to understand your environment.

Ella Simone: yeah, and the book points out how throughout ages and around the globe, the vast majority of people have been led by their religions to believe in the existence of an afterlife, whether that be reincarnation, whether that be going up to heaven. It's a pretty novel idea in the grand scheme of things that after you die there's nothing. I was really fascinated with the book's accounts from various cultures and points in history of the way that the fear of death has been acknowledged widely. The idea that knowledge of our mortality plays a pivotal role in human affairs is ancient. It can be found in the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, and ancient Buddhist texts. twenty five hundred years ago the Greek historian Thucydides in the history of the Peloponnesian War saw the problem of death as the primary cause of violent conflict. Socrates defined the task of philosophy as learning how to die. And for Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, history was a record of quote what man does with death. more recently, these ideas have been taken up by philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and psychoanalytical and accidental. Psychologists like Freud and Otto Bronck. And then if you go even further back to the epic of Gilgamesh, which is the first known written story, which was inscribed on tablets and based on an epic poem from ancient Sumeria, There's a scene where the main character, Gilgamesh's fr best friend, dies and he says, How can I rest? How can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart. What my brother is now that I shall be when I am dead. I'm afraid of death. I

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: mean doesn't really get more overt than that.

Maria: Absolutely. we do fear death, but what we really fear is the fact that we don't get to decide when we die. Well, we can, but you know what I mean by that.

Ella Simone: Yeah, in the book they talk about how there's this common misconception that kids don't really understand death, but there's a lot of research suggesting that kids as young as three become aware of and uncomfortable about death. there is evidence that they start to employ these kind of elementary versions of terror management strategies that adults come to rely on. then they go on to say there are three authors of this book. That's why I'm referring to them as they. another death-denying strategy that children adopt is the belief in a personal and personified savior. So from a child's perspective, parents are these gigantic, seemingly all-powerful beings So it's natural for them to also believe in stories about omnipotent beings interceding in matters of life or death. Like though Jesus suffered terribly on the cross, he didn't really die. God interceded to take him up to heaven. And in doing so, he saves you, he saves mom, he saves dad, he saves grandma and grandpa, and all those you love from eternal death. And after you die you all meet again in heaven.

Maria: Even the adult perception of God is a basically a template that we learn from childhood. We project the parental figure onto God. Mm-hmm. I like what you were saying about how God is essentially this protector figure, because not every religion thinks of God as a protector figure. some religions really considered their gods to be much crueler than others. something that I found in my research was this theory of environmental determinism, that the idea of how caring the gods were was correlated to how violent their environment was. in ancient Mesopotamia, they had a very unstable climate and environment. There was violent flooding. Spring floods would come suddenly from the melting mountain snow, and it would wipe out entire cities, crops, and of course lives completely without warning. There would be summer heat waves that would quickly dry out the farmland, which would lead to extreme. Food scarcity. And there's also flat plains in Mesopotamia, and that led them to be completely vulnerable to extreme dust storms and foreign invaders. And if you look at the gods within the religion of ancient Mesopotamia, they were, I wouldn't go so far to say it was cruel, but it was very bleak and uncaring. in ancient Mesopotamia there was this idea that the gods created humans because they were tired of doing hard labor. But when the humans got to be too noisy, they just decided they were going to wipe them out with a flood. So this very bleak idea that the gods are not there to serve us, they are just a template for the environment. They are a template for the unknown. And the unknown tends to fuck us over. Versus something like ancient Egypt. in ancient Egypt mythology, it's this idea that the natural world is balanced and if humans live a balanced life, they will go on to the afterlife, which is not a cruel place. Unless you behave in a cruel way. the theory of environmental determinism. Said that the the reason that happened is because their environment was much more predictable. The Nile floods roughly every year at a relatively predictable time, so they could organize around it. So I know that's a lot, but coming back full circle. We basically project our ideas about the environment onto God because in those civilizations the environment was the uncertainty. So we're just projecting this template about our environment onto God.

Ella Simone: Yeah, they didn't have mastery over the environment, which we still don't have either, but they didn't have the same level of mastery over environment that we have today. So you're basically saying that they projected these almost human like qualities of pettiness and jealousy and they weren't just seen as these all-loving, all-caring beings. And that that does kind of make more sense for those the religions of the earliest civilizations being more nature religions. This is not a definitive black and white claim, but then we eventually evolved into religions that were centered around things that were like less tangible and less of the material world than the human body and the nature that surrounds it, if that makes sense.

Maria: it absolutely makes sense. Because basically, religion is the first time that we started to deal with the grander ideas of the unknown. what is humanity helpless of the in the face of? Are we helpless in the face of our environment? And I think there's another book that you were very excited about too, which talks about how religion is a psychological response to human helplessness.

Ella Simone: Yes. if y'all don't already know, I'm a big fan of Sigmund Freud, and this is one of his last books called The Future of an Illusion, which was widely panned at the time it was published, It was called a theological failure by one of his peers when it came out. but

Maria: Rude.

Ella Simone: I thought it was really great. to give you like background context, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, his student, both believe that humankind has a religious. religious instinct. We yearn to believe in a higher power that we can submit to, Freud argued that religion is a psychological response to human helplessness. He basically put forward the thesis that religious beliefs arise because people wish for protection, for justice, and meaning in a frightening world. Religion is therefore an illusion. This book was called The Future of an Illusion, a belief motivated primarily by wish fulfillment rather than evidence. And I want to focus on the helplessness part. I found the Worm of the Core after reading this book and the the points really tied in together beautifully. But in the Worm of the Core, one of the authors writes, Guppies are born swimming, eating, and dodging predators. kittens are fully weaned and completely independent in two months after their birth. In contrast, human newborns are the most immature and helpless of all living creatures. Fresh out of the womb, we can't even lift our heads or turn over without assistance. So forming strong emotional bonds to parents assures us that children get what they need in order to survive and thrive. And John Bowlby, the psychologist who came up with attachment theory, proposed that if an infant is to survive, he or she needs to be emotionally attached to a responsive caregiver the helplessness and vulnerability of little baby humans. creates such an anxiety in us because if you've ever seen like a video of a giraffe being born, they're born, they

Maria: Mm.

Ella Simone: stumble. a little bit and then they get up and they're walking around and we cannot do anything close to that for the first couple years of our lives. I think there is like a biological truth to that existential anxiety that the worm at the core talks about, and that we are born with so few defenses. So Freud basically starts the book saying, Life is hard and human beings are helpless in the face of it. All human beings suffer at the hands of nature, which is comprised of illness, disaster, and death. We suffer from other people, we suffer from random twists of fate, and we suffer from the strictures of civilization, which require people to suppress many of their instincts.

Maria: Yeah, and there's this quote that says, if everywhere in nature there are beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society, We can try to adjure them, appease them, bribe them, and by so influencing them, we may rob them of part of their power. Yeah, exactly. Like we project this idea that the unknown is this human because human is the first framework that we have to understand the world.

Ella Simone: Freud is saying that by Humanizing nature, because the earliest religions were based around nature and not this ineffable, invisible God that we think about today in in a Christian Western worldview. by humanizing nature, then we can try to bend it to our will.

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: it's just another way of like trying to manage uncertainty. And I think at the heart of uncertainty lies the terror of death, right? Like the the uncertainty

Maria: Yes.

Ella Simone: is scary because if we don't know what's gonna happen, all we do really know is that we're gonna die at some point. to return to the future of illusion, he establishes that as children we enter the world helpless, we rely on our on our parents for protection against danger. And he talks about the father and the mother specifically. The father appears more powerful than the mother, who was our first love object. He comforts us, he enforces rules, he protects us from threats, and seems capable of solving problems that overwhelm us. Yet the child's relationship with the father, he says, is also ambivalent. We admire him and long for his protection, but we also fear his authority and punishment. And he goes on to say that adulthood doesn't eliminate this feeling of helplessness. We may not depend on our parents in a literal way anymore, but we still remain vulnerable to illness, to death, to natural disasters, and just the unpredictability of life. So according to Freud, the psychological need for a protector survives long after childhood has ended. He has a beautiful line that I love so much I put in one of my poems. Man's helplessness remains and along with it his longing for his father and the gods.

Maria: Yeah. as we start to grow up psychologically, we gain all this autonomy and authority. But originally there was a safety and comfort in our parents just telling us what to do. Yeah.

Ella Simone: Yeah, and I wanna make it clear that Freud is not arguing that believers consciously invent God because they miss their fathers. And this is a common misconception about Freud. People interpret what he's saying in literal terms instead of psychoanalytic terms. So he's making a psychoanalytic claim that the unconscious emotional template formed in childhood Predisposes humans to imagine the universe in these paternal terms. they don't think of God as my actual father necessarily, but their their idea of what a father is, which is imprinted on them by their earliest experiences of interactions with their caregivers, is projected onto the universe, to the cosmos, to the sky, because that's our template of understanding attachment and safety, because we're so dependent on our parents.

Maria: And that relates so much to things like trauma, to how we deal with attachment, right? So I love this idea that the very earliest template of the emotional caregiver informs everything.

Ella Simone: No, I agree. and then Freud basically says, I know y'all are looking at me like I'm crazy, and I'm anticipating what you're gonna say in response to my to my arguments. So Freud talks about how religion kind of inherently protects itself from criticism. and insulates itself from rational scrutiny because believers justify religion because their ancestors believed it, because questioning it is discouraged or forbidden. So a big part of the reason people believe in religion is because it seems legit because it's been around for so long. And my family has practiced this forever. one thing for me, like with Catholicism, because I am Catholic, I have a little more faith in the Catholic Church because it's been around for so long as opposed to some of the variants of Christianity that are have not been around as long. I'm like, I don't know, the Catholic Church is the original church.

Maria: That's fair. I can understand that. I think like that makes sense because like your religion is so old. Like in those earlier civilizations there wasn't a lot of like literacy and things like that. So there really was a focus on like, hey, like you do what the religion tells you and you don't question it much because you don't even have the tools to do it even if you could.

Ella Simone: Yeah, and so much of it, you know, is kind of about like social control, which we'll get into. but he highlights

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: these different counter arguments. The first is Credo Chia Absurdum, which is Latin for I believe it because it is absurd, which is attributed to this prolific early Christian writer Tertullian. There's a lot of debates about whether or not he actually said that, whether or not there was a translation issue, but that's the understanding that people have gotten from that phrase, It basically Maintains that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason or they're above reason and their truth has to be felt inwardly and they don't have to be comprehended by everyone. But Freud is saying if the truth of religious doctrine is dependent on an inner experience which bears witness to that truth, what do you do about the many people who don't have this rare experience? the second counter argument that he addresses is the philosophy of as if he's basically saying that we believe a lot of things that are kind of fictions in his word for a variety of practical reasons they don't really have the grounding and the teeth that we would need to like fully stand on them In the case of religion, we believe a lot of religious doctrine anyway, because of the importance of religion's maintenance of human society. So to break that down, the idea of having faith is kind of acknowledging that there's a bit of a leap of faith you need to make. There's a lack of full certainty in. the nature of reality and how God works and all these things. No one really, really knows. And even some of the most militant atheists acknowledge that there's a question mark at the end of their statements. So the as if mentality is saying, well, if we think about God as if it's true, that has enough benefits for it to be functionally true, for it to not matter if it's completely true because we can't really know. And I personally buy into the as-if mindset because God feels real to me and I feel better mentally when I think about being protected and cheered on by God. It it seems like a net positive Positive on my well-being, so why not? So I'm thinking about it as if it's true because it seems to reap a lot of psychological benefits.

Maria: Yeah, like it like it really takes that idea of uncertainty and makes it more palatable I don't know what it's like to have the experience as a deeply religious person, but I have to assume there has to be at least one moment where you have doubt. It's like is this really real? And then you make the choice to

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: engage in it anyway. And it's interesting too because like when I interact with certain members of my family who are religious, they sometimes tell me that about the Bible They say, if you just read it, you're gonna have a spiritual experience. You're gonna be like, my god, this is the most powerful thing because I did. And you know, the whole thing that's magical about the Bible is that you will have that powerful magical experience. And I'm not saying anything against the magic that. The Bible has provided people. But as somebody who's read excerpts of the Bible, I have not had that massive religious experience. Right. And and that's okay. And

Ella Simone: No.

Maria: that's okay. people who try to find that absolute blanket certainty in religion. It feels like it's missing part of the point because Religion helps you cope with the fact that there is an inevitable uncertainty in life. And it is super protective. There's like all these scientific studies that talk about it too.

Ella Simone: Well what do you think about Freud's idea about believing in something even if there's a bit of a shaky ground, the as if hypothesis.

Maria: Healthy and I think that's also just the world that we live in. there's a whole branch of philosophy called epistemology, which is all about how do we know that we know anything? that as if mentality I think is healthy because We should recognize that there is no certainty in anything that we know, right? even with science, When you look back at the history of science, like we think these things are so certain, like medicine. Medicine was a hot mess a hundred years ago, right? Like, A really good example is hysteria in women. people who are not informed about the cultural biases of science, they end up being worse scientists because they're so led by these unconscious templates and these things that happen in our culture. I think that having like a healthy skepticism is so important when you're trying to understand the world. Because when people get too rigid in their beliefs, not only do they end up wreaking havoc, they're also less psychologically healthy.

Ella Simone: so getting to the point of calling religion an illusion, Freud distinguishes an illusion from a delusion. So he says a delusion conflicts with reality. An illusion is simply a belief whose primary motivation is wish fulfillment. And then he goes on to say, we shall not shrink from asking too whether our conviction that we can learn something about external reality through the use of observation reasoning in scientific work, whether this conviction has any better foundation. And that calls back to what we were talking about in the last episode this question of whether or not Our objective reality is a product of our perception, or is really this objective reality? So he's saying, you know, science, which is so predicated on exact truth, on black and white answers, on reason. he's not saying that that's invalid, but he's saying we should ask the same questions we ask about religion of science as well, because we don't truly know the nature of our own perception.

Maria: Absolutely. When I had some scientific training, that was something we talked about a lot. Like biases, like how to control for external variables. Because if you're trying to find black and white truth, it is a very difficult thing to come upon. So you have to be very aware. Now whether that happens in practice is a whole other story. But you do have to be aware about like where are you getting your information? How are you taking people from a study? There's all these branches of science that are all about like Yeah.

Ella Simone: Yeah, but I think even so, there's so many cultural factors that influence bias. And in science, there's always a question of who's funding this study? What are the what could be the ulterior motives of money being allocated toward this study? I remember watching a documentary years ago, I think in school, I think it was called What the Health, and it was about big sugar in the sugar lobby. And there was some study put out by a well-regarded like research university and it was about how Coca-Cola isn't really nearly as bad for you as you've been led to believe and who funded the study Coca-Cola. we're not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater and be on some weird maha shit where we say that science isn't real, but just like religion, there's always someone who stands to benefit from certain ideas being put forth. And he says that we should kind of apply the same levels of evaluation and skepticism towards science because it is like a man made invention and it is it does come from institutions which are flawed and often there's lots of politics and money wrapped up in that stuff. And he was living in Victorian society, so like you have to remember this was a very different context. So he talks about how religion with all these rules brings with it these obsessional kind of restrictions, just like an individual obsessional neurosis does. Think of somebody with OCD. certain people with OCD have these obsessions and these compulsive behaviors that they enact in order to like keep the fears from those obsessions at bay. So I know someone with OCD who has a thing about closing the car door eight times and he has to close it eight times or he really feels like something bad is gonna happen. And I remember as a young kid in Catholic school having certain thoughts and then being afraid that if I had this thought God would know about it and I would be punished for it because it was a sinful thought.

Maria: That's so interesting because I it's such a religious kid experience

Ella Simone: Yeah, then he at the same time makes a really interesting counterpoint saying that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses. Their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one. Banger.

Maria: Yeah. No, I love that. No, I love it. It's like it's like, okay, you just project all your fucked upness into this religion and then you won't have to construct your own level of it.

Ella Simone: Yeah, when I look in videos of youth camp kids or BYU students smiling and doing cartwheels with their shirts tucked in and they all look like they're on the same page about everything. I'm like, yeah, they probably are at more peace than I am. Because they've chosen to adopt like a mental framework that is a lot more coherent than whatever I'm navigating the world with, which is like very much more based on my own perceptions of things. It's a lot more simple to have like someone tell you what to believe and I think Freud is saying kind of can spare you from like the worst spirals of like personal neurosis, but that's not to say that religious people don't also have these things too. and you see such a wide variety of ideas within the same religion that people have about how influential God is on their daily experience. There are plenty of non-denominational Christians who probably have a similar idea of God doesn't speak directly through you, but he's speaking to you through the Bible, through these different texts, and you like need to carry that into your life. Whereas my ex-boyfriend's mom was non-denominational Christian and she truly believed that God had directly spoken to her about certain things, or she would have a dream and she would make a conclusion based on that. Or I heard when I was praying, God say that. And I can't even really judge her 'cause I had two religious experiences when I was a child that were kind of like that and that have shaped me in a lot of ways and kept me from ever being an atheist. But it is just interesting to see the amount of range that people give God in like their daily life.

Maria: Yeah, but that's the thing too. as much as religion can provide you with certainty, that certainty can also be a little bit dangerous because there's no real possibility for correction. At least in science, like there is a level where you can correct it. Our biases do end at a certain point. With religion, there is very little room for our biases to end

Ella Simone: Yeah, in last episode we were talking about schizophrenia and religious delusions. when I was a mental health case manager, my last job, I worked with about twenty-eight clients with schizophrenia, and almost all of their delusions were based in some kind of spiritual or religious idea. And that's a lot harder to disprove because there isn't really any certainty in any of that. with science An experiment can be repeated over and over and over again and the same result can happen. And that's about as close to objective truth as we can get. Whereas with these intangible ideas about how the universe works and all these things about why things happen. We can't really prove that. Whereas science, because it's dealing with more concrete material reality there is more of a black and white. Just like in math there's more of a black and white than there is in English, for example.

Maria: Understanding science is a task. Like you have to be able to learn to digest scientific literature. You have to learn about the scientific method. It's less approachable than religion. Versus if you can read the Bible, you can understand religion to an extent. Right. So

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: I think at a certain point we also get into like accessibility too.

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. with science also I think it's about believing the premise, which is like trusting the institutions that science is coming from. During COVID, for example, there are plenty of people you could shove as many statistics in their face, you could send them as many infographics from the WHO about what they're supposed to do, but if they don't trust the WHO, it doesn't matter. And that in a way is also kind of predicated on faith. And lots of people I think would argue with the idea that science is something that you can have faith in or not have faith in. But I think it's more complicated than that. that stuff is more indicative of a broader trust in society and a broader trust in institutions. And that's a lot more complicated than just, I accept science or I don't accept science. I consider myself someone who's like a modern person who accepts a lot of scientific discoveries that we've made and at the same time is deeply distrustful of many institutions because I'm deeply distrustful of capitalism. So

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: I'm very aware of the sunk cost fallacy, which is a really interesting psychological idea that people apply when talking about cults. So people who are embedded in a cult for years, they will often start to experience doubt or they'll really start to feel like they're not in the right place and they can't trust these people. But they've been in the cult for so long and their whole livelihood and social circle revolves around it. So they don't really feel like it's worth it to leave because they've already established so much of their life in this cult. And there's an interesting like parallel people have made about People who work in academia or work in science, like for them to undercut their own findings and all this research would kind of be to like invalidate their whole career. if I've worked at the New York Times for 20 years and someone says, Well, the New York Times can't be trusted as an institution, the New York Times writers are probably the least likely to buy into that. And I'm from DC where a lot of people work in politics and they're probably the most susceptible to ideas about these political institutions they work on behalf of being trustworthy because it directly affects them and to explode that idea would be to like explode everything they've been doing in their career.

Maria: All right, so back to Future of an Illusion. So something that Freud said, which I found really interesting, is that religion is an illusion, but it's benefited society. So basically he's saying that religion is what restrains selfish and violent instincts and it promotes social order, but it has failed to eliminate widespread unhappiness. he says that morality doesn't necessarily require God. laws and moral rules should be recognized as human creations. And if we saw them as man made, they would appear as adaptable rather than divinely fixed. What do you think about that, Ella?

Ella Simone: I think it does restrain violent and selfish instincts to some degree. And it provides a common access of morality that people can generally agree on if they're from the same religion and have like the same cultural context. But it also provides a justification for a lot of wrongdoing. By people who feel like they're essentially on the right right team because they're part of the right religion and they can make all of these rationalizations in their head for bad behavior despite being religious. And it's not like religious people have historically, you know, practiced everything that they preach. So I think the promotion of social order is like the most important part probably. actually I don't know.

Maria: I think it's interesting too, because like him saying that it has failed to eliminate widespread unhappiness, that feels like a really big thing to ask of religion or really any framework. What do you even mean by w eliminate widespread unhappiness?

Ella Simone: I mean I think happiness is something that people like naturally expect when they're given something. Joan Dating has some quote, happiness is a consumption ethic. It's it's this thing that we kind of feel like, right, so like when am I gonna be happy now once I start this diet or once I start practicing yoga or Or once I convert to Christianity Christianity is promising eternal happiness in the afterlife. But I think it's more of human fallibility to interpret religion as something that's supposed to make you happy. I don't really think it is, but I think naturally people tend to think, okay, when can I be happy now?

Maria: it reminds me of the nun study. I think we've talked about it at one point. So like something that's characteristic in dementia is things like beta amyloid plaques and tangles in the tau proteins in the brain. if you do an autopsy, you can see this person is showing signs of early onset dementia right? So essentially, it was this big longitudinal study, which essentially means that they followed a group of people over a collection of years or any period of time. They studied these nuns who were living very active lives, they were engaged in the community, they were very social, they read every day. These are just things that the average nun

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: in a community does. And they found that these nuns, their brains actually were very similar to somebody who does have dementia, but they weren't presenting with the dementia. They had the physical, neurological features of Alzheimer's and dementia. They did not present with the Alzheimer's and dementia that they should have. And they said that was partially because They had a lot of community support. They were reading every day They also had a level of optimism. And that was something that was a whole other study. It was talking about how if there was more optimism and positive outlooks in the early writings of these nuns, they were more likely to have better cognitive performance in their later years. So I think that he really said something great there when he was saying that religion has in general benefited society. But there are so many like natural faults there too. In some like small pockets of society, religion is great. when you get to the problem is as a society expands and you have more and more outside influence, it becomes harder and harder to say that one monoculture of religion is helpful.

Ella Simone: Well the nun study reminds me of the quote we were reading earlier about religion kind of protecting you from individual neurosis by allowing you to adopt this like universal neurosis. if the nuns are buying into which they presumably are, the Catholic conception of the universe and how everything works, then that spares them a lot of existential dread. But I think a lot of that also probably had to do with the fact that they didn't have to work at no fuck ass job. I shouldn't say they didn't clock in no focus job. A lot of the nuns do work in education, have jobs, but they have a living stipend provided by the church, so they're not in danger of getting evicted or something. they probably weren't eating a bunch of junk food they're not smoking cigarettes and like drinking and going out late and stuff. So it's probably a lot of lifestyle factors too, but I think purpose is so central to the entire distinction between the life of a nun and the life of a lay person.

Maria: this is just my personal opinion as people age purpose becomes something that a lot of people start to struggle with Because when people retire from their jobs, that was a lot of their identity in this very capitalistic society, what becomes your purpose? What becomes the reason to get up every day, to exercise every day, to go engage in a community? So many of your natural supports get ripped away from you. So I think that religion allows people the framework to continue having a purpose that doesn't have to change all that much.

Ella Simone: But the thing with religion is that it's providing you a higher purpose. Your job is like a societal purpose, a purpose in the marketplace. And maybe on an individual level, hopefully it provides you a sense of purpose, but the idea of like a cosmic purpose like kind of trumps all of that.

Maria: No, that makes sense. it makes me think too of this other study that I was seeing and it was about how religious people have reduced activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a part of the brain that responds to like uncertainty and stress. And it was talking about how people with faith have a more comfortable relationship with uncertainty. And I can't read the mind of every religious person, but from the religious people I know, there's a lot of this is God's will. And there's a lot of like natural good and bad to that. Because kind of taking this back to uncertainty, it makes me think of this idea of trad wives. I saw a video and it was this woman. She was talking about how, my man would never leave me because he's a man of God. And if I start having a savings account, then I'm not all in on the relationship and I'm not living a godly life. And it makes me think it's like, yeah, you have a much more positive relationship with the uncertainty that this man could leave you because you're like, I Have faith and I will be rewarded for having faith. That almost seems to be the intrinsic thing that underlies it. I'm living a godly path. And even if I am knocked off my horse living a godly path, I was doing the right thing. And that I think is where it naturally juts with, you know, what it's like to just live in the real world. honestly, you should build up a savings account if you're a trad wife, because you never know when someone's gonna cheat on you and you never have the ability to discern somebody else's faith.

Ella Simone: I mean, I don't think most Christian women even in America today believe that. I think that's a weird kind of perverse, reactionary, anti-feminist roleplay relationship that they have going on. I mean, we could spend a whole episode deconstructing that argument. Religion enforces this group think and this like team mentality of like, well we're on the same team, so that means that like I can trust you more. And the War of the Core talks all about why on an evolutionary level that makes sense. But if you're saying that I trust my Christian husband because he's a man of God to never do me wrong, then you're kind of making it sound like your husband is God.

Maria: Well, I guess that's just my own perception of it too, 'cause like, you know, part of my family are more on the born again Christian side. And it's this idea that you like almost worship your husband because it goes, Your husband then God. he's the leader of faith of the household. I can imagine that it's changed in modern times what it's like to be a Christian woman or a Christian man. But it still provides that general structure of here's how you act. it's changed, but how much has it actually changed? I mean the underpinnings are still there.

Ella Simone: I mean, compared to other westernized, industrialized countries, we still are very conservative and very religious. in non-denominational Christianity and like the born-again stuff, I understand the division of roles of man and woman, but I was never under the impression that it meant you shouldn't have a savings account or and you should be completely dependent on your husband as a woman. I've known women who are Christian but they often did have to have a job. And in this economy, it's not really much of a choice. I think I read something that you have to make ninety thousand dollars to afford a stay at home, wife in the poorest of states. And in like middle upper class I'm speaking with a broad brush here, states is more like a hundred and thirty thousand. So I think her idea that she shouldn't have a savings account because that adds stakes to her relationship or whatever is I would hope, an outlier, but I don't know. I grew up in DC around Catholics, so I don't know. I mean she's also click farming by saying stuff like that. You saw this on social media I'm guessing, right? Or like YouTube?

Maria: Yeah, absolutely. But it's like it hit a nerve because it reminds me so much of the way that some of my family members have like talked over the years. And it's so interesting. I was like, my god, this actually this is reminding me so much of how they are.

Ella Simone: I think the Tradwife thing is kind of like softcore pornography. Like they're kind of like LARPing. They're like, here's your cake, baby. It gives like mommy porn. Like it's like so fucking weird. I think I think there is like a sexual, like kinky undertone to the whole thing. It's just so costumey. It's like ridiculous.

Maria: I was asking that question because I was thinking, like, do you think that religion revises itself? Because I think that was something that Freud was talking about too. He was talking about how science leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but what's great about it is it does revise itself. That is what science is all about.

Ella Simone: I can only really speak for Catholicism and like it's just so vast. I can't really say like religion does or doesn't revise itself. I mean I think in some ways it does, but in some ways it kind of insists on tradition. it's complicated because I'm Catholic and there's lots of parts of the the church and the theology that I disagree with I kind of feel torn because I want the church to adapt to the times, but I also kinda want people to stand on business. And if that's what they believe, then that's what you believe. I feel like they should do like a vote in the church or something, like a vote with among Catholics, not just in the catechism. I also think it wouldn't be the church anymore if they were to like change a lot of their fundamental beliefs. So I don't know.

Maria: And that has something that's really different from science because

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: I remember when I was in a science field back in my undergrad, there was this idea that if you had a source that was over 20 years old, you did not cite it. You do not

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: want to be going off of new and old information because science is about revising itself and being new and finding new things and correcting the old biases. I mean, there are problems with that. There is an issue in science where Not enough people are repeating old studies in order to correct them. People are usually more. Focused on finding new discoveries. And also, you might be less likely to get funding. You might be less likely to have a career if you spend

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: your PhD just repeating somebody else's study.

Ella Simone: No, I had that problem in grad school too. they said it was five to seven years. Anything after that, it was too old. And I was like, Well girl, they they have not repeated this But yeah, I mean who's gonna fund a repeat study? It's not new, it's not fresh, it's not capitalist.

Maria: Yeah. No? Absolutely. Freud seems to be arguing that's one of science's greatest strengths. I would tend to agree. I think that's what makes science cool.

Ella Simone: I agree. he's acknowledging what we were kind of talking about in the last episode about our perception of objective reality being pretty questionable. But he says ultimately science and observation is the best that we have in if we're trying to reach the truth, which I agree with on a material plane, yeah.

Maria: But science doesn't offer us any solutions to like the shoulds of the world or like the whys of the world.

Ella Simone: Don't you think that health is kind of like a religion for science? And that's all about shoulds?

Maria: I'm gonna have to take a step back and think about okay, so you said health is the religion of science. Okay,

Ella Simone: It is. I mean, I think wellness and health and fitness culture has the exact same tone and fervor as religion. And they talk about and they talk about wellness and health in these kind of like purity terms.

Maria: I've just

Ella Simone: Every single day they're like, no no no, you shouldn't be brushing your retainer. You should be putting it in this solution. Actually no, that solution is not FDA proved. You should be putting it here. Isn't that the same thing?

Maria: I g I No, I mean I'm hearing you. I'm just like, wow, I feel like I am the first in my bloodline to have heard that sentence. No, I like that. Like I've never thought about it like that.

Ella Simone: Ha ha ha.

Maria: No, it I guess it kind of I guess it kind of is. this is a small tangent, but bear with me. I remember looking at pictures of Anne Hathaway And people are making jokes that Anne Hathaway is not aging because she Unproblematic. and it's like, no, she's just not going to the clubs and smoking in Newport at three AM. She like, if you've seen that woman in the sun, she just has her hat. She has she's like fully sunscreened out. and no shade to her. Sun protection is amazing, but I would rather wrinkle a little bit faster and be out in the sun. So I do think that there's a

Ella Simone: Yeah, tuto passa.

Maria: Yeah, like I don't need to live the most healthy life in the world. I wanna like live, but I don't want to live so well that I feel like I'm kind of dead inside if that makes sense.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I saw a Joan Didion quote today that I saved that actually applies to this. Didion said, What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you to just live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world.

Maria: when I think of health, I don't think of it as religious. I think of it like, here's us using science to push the bounds of our mortality. Like I think of it as kinda like the opposite. It's like, okay, well, there are n there are no with like vitamin culture, the other day where I was like, why are men so obsessed with like health powders? They like creatine, like super green powder, peanut butter is a fucking powder. Why do we need to make peanut butter a powder? And there's like call they they're just obsessed with like health and efficiency and it gives me this vibe. It's like, okay, everything in your body is under your control, so it is your duty to like maximize it. Or you should be trying to maximize it. And if you can maximize, then you can get all this stuff done. I think of it more as like almost like a weird capitalist push. Like, hey, you don't need to take less hours at work. You just need to drink our green powder. So you can be more productive.

Ella Simone: I mean, I wanna do a whole episode on health and wellness culture and stuff. I mean, I've always thought it had like puritanical underpinnings to it. think about that statement about Anne Hathaway. She's being spared from the you know, physical signs of creeping toward death because she's a nice lady. Because she's not problematic. Really it's that she's a rich lady. She's she's a she was partly chosen to be an actress because she's among the kind of genetically elite and she has access to every type of day spa, Botox, Erawan, the best high most high quality food in the world. it's not because she's unproblematic. And to me that there's like this judgmental underpinning to evaluating aging in that way, which to me feels kind of like talking about sin or Like, I don't know, just the way that like the church ladies can be so like me, well I heard she did this, da da da da. I feel like with wellness and health, the same tone is kind of taken, it's the same kind of self righteousness, it's the same like judging other people, and it's the same evaluating their morality based on these external things.

Maria: Makes sense. I would love to talk about that for like a whole episode. So kind of back to what we were talking about, I wanted to talk a little bit about what Nietzsche was saying when he said God is dead, Nietzsche really takes a very societal lens to this where he talks about like what it's going to do in general for society for us to move away from religion.

Ella Simone: Yes, Nietzsche's phrase God is dead, and we have killed him from his eighteen eighty-two book, The Gay Science, really funny title, is one of the

Maria: Shit.

Ella Simone: f one one of the most famous phrases in philosophy. I'm gonna read the whole quote. The madman, have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly I seek God, I seek God. Where there is God, he cried. I will tell you we have killed him, you and I, we are all his murderers. Just off the bat, what does that make you think of?

Maria: it made me think we don't have God anymore because God helped us understand the unknown. And the more that we have these tools to kind of understand the unknown, the more that he becomes useless in our lives. And that's how we're killing him.

Ella Simone: I think a lot of people interpret it as kind of an atheist statement. And I think that's sort of the level one analysis of it. Although Nietzsche was an atheist, he was not an anti-theist, which means anti-religion. So when he said God is dead He's not just making the claim that God doesn't exist or that he did exist and now he doesn't. Atheism was already well established as an intellectual position in the 19th century when he was writing. He was making more of a historical and a cultural argument, which is in our pursuit of scientific knowledge through the Enlightenment, through the scientific revolution, we have weakened the strength of the divine, which raises this question of whether or not we can really cope with the world without it. And he also asks. I'm not sure if this was in the same book or passage. Is not the greatness of this deed meaning the overthrowing of God too great for us? So he was observing how Christianity was losing its ability to function as the unquestioned foundation of European culture, bringing up the scientific scientific revolution, enlightenment, rationalism, and secularization, kind of Doing more every year to undermine the intellectual authority of the Christian worldview. So during the time that Nietzsche was alive and writing, like I said, atheism was an established intellectual position, but it was not held by the average person, and most people were still definitely firmly religious. But there was this anxiety creeping across the collective about What are we gonna do now that we're kind of becoming God? we've made amazing medical discoveries, but in books like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, we also explored the potential catastrophic effects of playing God through these medical discoveries by creating new life and trying to resurrect the dead. I mean, a lot of it had to do with like the collapse of the idea of the monarchs being appointed by divine right, that started to make a lot less sense in this increasingly secular world. And a lot of people weren't fans of the monarchy, but it was a central axis around which society could unify. there was a leader. And a big anxiety at that time was what do we do now that we don't have a leader and now that we might not even have God.

Maria: Yeah. And that's something that you also said too. That's like a belief in God was often behind the idea of how things should be. Like art should be beautiful, children should honor their parents. We should value the truth more than a falsity. That's kind of what I was saying earlier by religion being about shoulds. It's like a guiding force for society to take on. So like when he says, is the greatness of this deed too great for us? It's not just science is taking a place of God. What I'm kind of hearing from you is this idea that religion is the framework for our entire society and morality and the way things should and shouldn't be. And if you take religion away, what underlies our morality? Which is something Freud was asking about too. It's like where does morality kind of come from?

Ella Simone: Yeah, like It was pretty common that time to feel that shoulds and ideas about beauty and virtues and value like came from God and most people would agree that we have to have the idea of a God to have those values. And Freud was saying, well, maybe not, maybe we could have morals and laws independent of God, but both thinkers would would definitely acknowledge that this was the bedrock of European civilization. If you just Pull the rug out from underneath it, are you gonna find a bunch of bugs underneath? Like what what now? and Nietzsche kinda talked about various different predictions for what would happen. To humanity as this change came about. And it's not like he in this one book closed this topic and then moved on. this was like a lasting theme throughout his work. he posited that people might collapse into nihilism, they would perceive the world as chaotic and meaningless and just kind of sink into despair without reason to go on. and that is what he categorizes active nihilism, and then there was also his idea of passive nihilism, basically being an NPC.

Maria: Yes, I was hearing about that. Yeah, this idea that human annuity would just become mediocre and become passive if they did not have that idea that religion would help them achieve this like massive potential because of this idea of the afterlife almost, because it kind of is what helped

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: individuals like strive towards better.

Ella Simone: Well, religion does challenge you to strive toward better, the couple years in like my early twenties when I was way more into Catholicism, they do have a lot of answers for modern problems. Like, I wanna just like lay in bed and go on my phone all day. Like, what's stopping me from doing that? the purpose of having a Christian God, which is so humanoid in a way is to orient your own lifestyle in God's image. Not to say that you are God, but the idea of being made in the image of God is saying that we should strive to like live up to a higher purpose and hold ourselves to like a higher standard of what we should do. And I think this is why I have this averse reaction to DoorDash and Uber

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: Eats and GoPuff. I can't get down with the concept of me just rotting in my apartment and putting my head through the little trough and then getting my little snack and then going back into my apartment. I don't care if other people do it. I've used it a couple times before But I think because of my Catholic school education, I'm like, no, I will go out and get my own food or I will at least challenge myself to go pick it up. The idea that I will just like go out and get my little like slop bowl from Kava and then go back into my little trough that's like peak like passive nihilism and I can't get down with it.

Maria: I just wow, I love this. I had no idea it went that deep.

Ella Simone: it actually is that deep for me. It's so serious.

Maria: No, but like that's what I'm saying. Like that I think that's what Nietzsche is saying, and that's what we're all saying with this whole certainty thing. structure is so important for the human mind because structure provides us with comfort. Not even just talking about humans. I really like the analogy of like grapes having to climb up something. Or if anybody here has Monsteras, like they really do well when they have like a trellis to climb. This idea that like if we grow too tall without something to grab onto, they collapse under their own weight. That I love that analogy for what Nietzsche is talking about. Because

Ella Simone: Yeah, before I knew about the passive nihilism thing from him directly, I would say to people, like, being an NPC mindless consumer to me is worse than death because it's not only the theological stuff to me, but I see it as just completely collapsing into the like soft narcosis of capitalism and just and just absorbing stimuli and being like, thank you for my slop. I love my AI slop. I'll never demand more than this slop. My slop is delicious. it's not that I never use conveniences, but I am kinda old school about it. Like I like walk my ass at the grocery store and like I don't use Amazon. If I wanna buy something, unless it's like Etsy or something, I like have to go out into the world and go get it. Cause I think I just need to give myself these like side quests and challenges and I wanna be able to like I wanna interact with my fellow man. I don't wanna spend too much time like comfortable in my apartment with all my amenities.

Maria: No, and like that's something that I believe Nietzsche also talks about, like the worship of convenience. So I think you're

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm.

Maria: a really great illustration of how religion can be beneficial, like specifically Catholicism, because there is that focus on vigor. Tell me if I'm wrong,

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: because I was raised early to be Catholic, but I kind of fell off when I was younger. But there was this idea of you have to have a strong work ethic, you have to work hard to serve your fellow man and I know you've talked about it too where you said that you want to go to small businesses more because like you want to live in a world where they exist.

Ella Simone: Yeah. Convenience culture to me is just passively lying down and letting these like huge conglomerates come in and just like eat up all these small businesses, all these like vestiges of human life and of, entrepreneurship and just being like, yeah, it's okay that like Jeff Bezos come in and I can't just like let him do it. you have to like try. that's how I am with Siri too. I'm like I know that they have my data and they're listening to me, but I can't just give it to them. I'm never

Maria: No

Ella Simone: gonna spit in a tube and send it to 23andMe. Like I'm never gonna do that. I'm like come and take it but I'm not giving it to you.

Maria: I feel very similarly about thrifting. Like I've had so many people recommend like like fast fashion to me and I don't judge them at all. Like I love fashion, but like for for whatever reason that's like my personal hang-up where I'm like Even if it's like really ethically sourced, I'm like I'm not gonna create more clothes. The clothes problem in this world is already so bad. I will pretty much only go through rifting. But that's the thing too, like that's just my own personal hang up. Like I'm not going to judge others for doing that because they I'm sure have certain moral hang ups that I don't have.

Ella Simone: No, I don't really give a fuck what people are doing. Like I mean I I judge extreme versions of it. I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but on a personal level, I do feel strongly about it. But anywho, the first one is active nihilism that he posited. The second was passive nihilism. He also didn't say it was all gonna be one thing. He said like I imagine people are gonna go in different directions. The other idea was humans will just submit to the next dogmatic set of values after religion.

Maria: Mm-hmm.

Ella Simone: Which I think has happened for many of us in many different ways. I don't know, what do you think about that?

Maria: Like which dogmas? I do think that humans love something to just give their whole heart to.

Ella Simone: Protestant work

Maria: I think was another

Ella Simone: ethic and the spirit of capitalism. That like

Maria: Yes.

Ella Simone: the dogma of like work being I mean that's a whole other conversation of work and morality being like tied up, but I think a lot of people like practice religious fervor in like small ways about things all the time, like Swifties, for example.

Maria: I think there's something very human for just wanting again like a structure you can devote yourself to. And you talked about this in the last episode too. we were talking about men and war. and this idea that you want to self-sacrifice and give yourself to something because you want your life to have purpose. And outside of that like trellis of structure and meaning and morality, we kind of flounder under our own weight. And we find religious fervor and all these little things and it doesn't really feel cohesive at all.

Ella Simone: Yeah, and it's never gonna be because people are just multifaceted. But I would argue that the male urge or like instinct to sacrifice for something has a religious undertone to it. It's just for the idea of country or justice or freedom instead of literally a god. But, you know, patriotism in America at least is very like tied up with Christianity. God and country are kind of linked. but a lot of other philosophers of Nietzsche's time pontificated on what would happen, like Schopenhauer, he was like probably the most famous pessimist and he predicted that people would start to only see life as worthy when given hedonistic pleasures. I mean I think a lot of us are on that spectrum.

Maria: that's like addiction. Like how many people are like, I'm just living for the weekend so I can go to the fucking club and drink my face off.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I mean, I've never had a problem with addiction or anything like that, but I sometimes it's it's like eleven AM and I'm like, damn, I can't wait for a cigarette after work. Like, I need something to kind of like blow off the steam. So I don't know, I think there's some there's some truth to that. But Nietzsche's more optimistic or was maybe people will rise to the occasion of creating their own life-affirming values after thousands of years of living by inherited values, which is essentially the project of existentialism. Existentialism, which we talked about in episode one, versus nihilism, the way I described it in very simple terms was like, nihilism is life has no meaning and that sucks. And existentialism is life has no meaning and that's awesome. That gives me the freedom to create my own meaning. And that's where Nietzsche kind of veers from pessimism and muses on the exciting possibilities of a world where humans can look to life itself for meaning rather than to the heavens for finding meaning.

Maria: when I think about the fact that I don't believe in a specific structured organized religion, I like to think of it as a beautiful thing. Like, I get to kind of decide what feels meaningful to me. But I'm also not ignorant to the fact that like a lot of my morality and my moral code does stem from deep Christian underpinnings. I don't think that we're gonna be able to escape that regardless. Because

Ella Simone: No.

Maria: that's what I'm saying with like the beliefs get inherited. Even if you're not religious those Christian underpinnings, they get perpetuated. And it's kind of hard, like chicken or egg. Like be kind is not just a Christian thing. I'm sure the Greeks believed that, and that was way before Christ was born. But like because so much of our morality is tied up in Christianity, it becomes really hard to separate it.

Ella Simone: yeah, Nietzsche's critique of modern science even goes past what we're talking about now. He wasn't really saying that science was another religion. He wasn't rejecting science as a way of understanding the natural world. He was questioning the deeper value judgments underlying the modern commitment to truth. in his book on the genealogy of morality, he argues that modern science can be understood as kind of an heir to Christianity in the sense that both have an extraordinary commitment to the idea that truth is valuable in and of itself. So modern science rejects Christian explanations of the world, but Nietzsche asked whether it has fully escaped the moral framework surrounded by the pursuit of truth. That makes the pursuit of truth into something sacred in of itself. So in that sense, science can be seen as not the simple opposite of Christianity, but as part of a longer historical development emerging from Christianity.

Maria: love that too 'cause prior to hearing 'cause you introduced me to a lot of his work, I never really thought about the fact that truth is kind of universally thought of as something that has so much value. And I never really thought about where those ideas come from, but it's true. Science and religion both have a very big focus on what the truth actually is. And yeah.

Ella Simone: Yeah. And true nihilism tends to embrace relativism, which is that there is no truth and that there isn't really a point in trying to find it, which I disagree with. But that leads to like one of his unsettling questions, which is why do we value truth above false falsehood in the first place? And in Beyond Good and Evil, he challenges the assumption that the pursuit of truth is automatically the highest intellectual or moral good. And that sounds counterintuitive. It's like, why wouldn't we want to know the truth? But he wasn't just asking whether a belief is true. He wanted us to examine what the belief does. If we find out something is true, does that mean it's also gonna like promote life, that it's life-enhancing, that it makes people feel better, that it makes people want to get up in the morning? And that doesn't mean that he thought that. truth was irrelevant or anything can be true. But he was questioning the assumption that truth possesses this unquestionable value independent of its relationship to human life. I wanna pause there and like see how you're feeling about this.

Maria: No, absolutely, because I go back to my favorite word of the day, which is about uncertainty. Truth provides certainty. If I have this bracelet in my hand and I know that gravity is going to make it drop. That's truth, right? It

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm.

Maria: helps us predict our environment more, right? And I think that's the thing about the complexity of human life. Sometimes the truth does not actually Help us. Sometimes the truth depresses us. Sometimes the truth reduces our motivation. But I think on the most basic level, people seek truth because Truth has a way of mitigating anxiety because anxiety is based in uncertainty.

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm.

Maria: So the more things that you can predict, the less uncertain you will be. And the more pockets of truth that you have, the more that you can understand how the world will go. But I mean that also can lead to depression. when you're more aware of like the prisonal industrial complex, when you're more aware

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm.

Maria: of capitalism, when you're aware of these things, you feel like you truly get robbed of your own power. And I think that's what's interesting when you think about like the time that Nietzsche existed in and when we're talking about like he came where in the Enlightenment?

Ella Simone: I think he was post scientific revolution. He was post Enlightenment.

Maria: Yes. so going back to the Enlightenment, it was this idea that man was starting to realize and understand their own power. There was more of a focus on the individual, right?

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: So it would make sense that it's like, okay, well, truth may have had more of a direct connection to people understanding their own power. Right? Because there was idea

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm.

Maria: that man has more power than they originally believed. Because you have the ability to take things into your own hands. Like you have the

Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah.

Maria: ability to have your own personal independent relationship with God outside of the church.

Ella Simone: Yeah, and like we talked about in episode one, that's where the idea of individualism came from, that you're not just a subject of the monarchy or or a subject of the church. You are an individual that can draw your own conclusions. And before mass literacy and before the democratization of knowledge, it was really hard for the average person to have much knowledge about anything. So that was what was so powerful about these advances in literacy and advances in science.

Maria: Well and that's what I think about what it feels like just live in twenty twenty six. this is just my general vibes, I feel that the more truth I learn, the more I understand how powerless I truly am.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I mean I have this compulsive need to like understand The depths or like the reality of things that I'm interested in. I do want to know how the prison industrial complex works. Because when I was a kid, when I learned about human trafficking, it caused this existential crisis that shattered my world for, I don't even know for how long, but probably help helped launch me into preteen depression. I didn't know what to do with that, just like all these emotions I had about just like the abstract injustice and ugliness of that. And I didn't really start to get a hold of my general like sensitivity to all these things around me, like, why are why is capitalism like this and why Why do these systems like the prison industrial complex or the military industrial complex function this way? I couldn't really get out from underneath the weight of that without educating myself on how this stuff works on like a minute level. Because without that knowledge, it's all just like this ugly mass of unfairness. But once you start to understand like what is capitalism and how does that play into the market and how does that play into people's desires and da-da-da, that started to like give me a sense of control. even though th the truth is really ugly and proves to me day in, day out how I don't have that much control. Does that make sense?

Maria: Yeah, no, it absolutely makes sense. So even if it doesn't necessarily provide you control, it provides you with enough understanding and you can make peace with that.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I mean I try to I try to practice radical acceptance to some degree. Like we've both seen a lot of suffering as social workers. I mean I've worked with people who are tremendously crushed by trauma and poverty There's really no way to spin it and say that it's it's okay and there's a silver lining. Like it just is tragic. It just is ugly. And I don't think I'd be able to do it. And I still struggle with doing it if I didn't have like a broader framework for like on a societal level why these things happen. I still have beef with God about like why human trafficking is allowed to exist. But I can like have enough radical acceptance mixed in with my knowledge about how systems work and stuff to like get up out of bed in the morning and still want to help. And I think that's the point of despair that Nietzsche's talking about when you give up on even trying to make it better.

Maria: Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of social workers get to that point too. Because the more that you really start to understand the societal pressures that people face, sometimes it does you do feel kind of helpless. You feel like you're just fighting an ocean of injustice. And that what's that's what can burn people out sometimes. if you stay rooted in those uncomfortable truths all day, every day, it will start to eat away at you slowly.

Ella Simone: I mean you are fighting an ocean of injustice. I feel like there's almost no way to spin that.

Maria: you have to compartmentalize. You have to put it away and not think about it because the truth will I dunno if the truth will set you free. Yeah, the truth

Ella Simone: The truth is also set you free but also you are.

Maria: will set you free but also piss you off. But you also can't think about it all the time.

Ella Simone: Yeah, you gotta go like have a nice day. Like you you can't there's a certain point where you have to let stuff go and you have to just like get on your tropical time and and listen to a good song and be like, you know what? I did what I could. But we're we wanna title this episode Does Truth Matter? Because that's kind of the question that Nietzsche's raising here is say we were to find out tomorrow that there is no God He's saying, Would that even be good for people?

Maria: Yeah, I'm not gonna say one way or another, right? Because I think truly that's such a big question. I mean I personally think that it probably would not be super good for people would cause massive collapse. I'm not a religious person, but belief in God, there's always an understanding that it could not be true. It's possible.

Ella Simone: I mean I think the problem is a lot of religious people don't have that nuance.

Maria: I think that if someone was to find out that God was not real tomorrow, it would really d destroy where faith is beneficial. the whole point, what's awesome about religion is it's hope that you can't disprove. that's what Freud was saying, right, when he said that religion is protected from rational scrutiny.

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: You can't really disprove it.

Ella Simone: Okay, so New Atheism. This was essentially a movement in the publishing industry. It was really marked by the release of a couple books, which were The God Delusion by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 2006. God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. The End of Faith by philosopher Sam Harris, and Breaking the Spell by philosopher Daniel Dennett. So in 2006, Dawkins writes this highly influential bestseller that I remember seeing on multiple bookshelves of my friend's parents when I was a kid, The God Illusion, which argued that A supernatural creator is statistically highly unimprobable and he advocated for a widespread embrace of atheism. This became a foundational text in this movement called New Atheism, Partly because the rhetoric was so strong, Hitchens argues basically that believing in God is unreasonable under any circumstance, and at various points calls it stupid and prideful.

Maria: Yeah. I and that's something that like when you told me about this, I kind of was very turned off by. It's a very this very arrogant idea of not only do we know what's best, anyone who doesn't believe it is also very dumb, which I really didn't appreciate when I was learning about it.

Ella Simone: It's offensive. I mean new atheism wasn't just atheists, it's anti-theist. It's anti-religion. And the God delusion other books from that canon spend a lot of time characterizing religion as this corrupting force on society. And this differs from atheist philosophers like Schopenhauer who didn't believe in God, but they saw religion as a potentially positive force if used correctly. And Freud was saying the same thing. He wasn't he wasn't saying that religion is good for society. period, he was saying that it has benefited society, but it also hasn't reached the like peaks that we thought it would, I guess. But let's pause there. What do you think of I don't know, what you've heard so far?

Maria: it discredits the fact that so many resources come about through religion. Because religion provides community, religion provides charity, religion provides unifying cultural force. I think that the Yeah

Ella Simone: Yeah, mutual aid.

Maria: and I don't know, like when I hear about these people, I always think like wow, you've never had to rely on resources from a church. Cause when I think about rural communities, this was a big thing in social work too. Like if you live out in the country,

Ella Simone: Mm.

Maria: one of the best places to meet up with other people is a church. A lot of charity runs through the church. A lot of like h I don't know, like I'm I can't even begin to say all the different things that run through the church. Yes.

Ella Simone: Disaster relief. I mean the religious people are always pulling up when there's a major disaster. I read

Maria: Yeah, absolutely.

Ella Simone: I read something interesting. It was not like a research paper, it was like a substack, and this woman was saying she was from South Carolina and she'd noticed how a lot of the NGOs, like the nonprofit organizations in the Northeast would just be churches in the South. They function very differently, obviously, and with with religion there's a bit more of a hook. you're gonna be benefiting from the charity, they usually do want you to like engage in the religion somehow. And there's lots of ethical qualms that we could talk about in another episode there, but they functionally are the same. Like they're providing a lot of the same resources to people. It was just like

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: it would be more secular in these like northeastern cities that she was around.

Maria: Is just like partially my own bias, like functioning as a social worker. I immediately, when I think about these men who probably publish these books, I think how divorced must you be from your own visceral emotions? I have noticed that in some very hyper-logical people that I have met, there is a there is a lack of awareness, insight, understanding of how guided they are. by their biases, by their emotion. Logic, I think, is sometimes people think, I am ruled by logic. I am superior to you. I am not guided by my emotions and my

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm.

Maria: fear. I don't give up in that way. it's just bullshit because if you don't acknowledge how your emotions and your bias is leading you, you will just use logic as a way to rationalize your own bullshit and biases.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I think human history has shown that emotion often does trump logic. And people forget that anger is an emotion. Jealousy is an emotion. I think there's kind of a sexist underpinning to that because it's usually men saying that kind of stuff, they're kind of implying that like women are emotional and they're led by these soft, nebulous, gushy feelings, and like I'm logical, I'm practical. But you making every decision throughout your day based on peacocking To other men and fulfilling your ego, I mean, I think that does serve an emotional purpose. And

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: you getting like really mad at the TV and screaming at it, that's anger. That's an emotion. You just think it's permissible because it's a masculine emotion. Wait, wait,

Maria: Yeah. No, I would agree.

Ella Simone: that connects to Bell Hooks talking about how anger is like just perceived as like part of the patriarchy. Like it's it's just a natural part of it. It's all connected.

Maria: No, yeah, as you were saying that I I was like, Yeah, like masculinity is a is a prison. Like traditional masculinity is a prison. And it's and that's No, but like genuinely,

Ella Simone: It's all connected.

Maria: like, yeah, absolutely. Like w women are kind of conditioned to be the emotional heart of a

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm.

Maria: family. Religion is deeply cultural. It's not just about like the books you read, the things you believe, it's about what you are passing down from your ancestors. Religion just tends to be like a big unifying force between different people's ancestors. when I hear about new atheism, I really think that like this feels like a dystopian level of modern dismissal of anything that came before them. You know what I mean? It's like this is something that's existed

Ella Simone: Like hubris.

Maria: Science is also very cultural. Where we spend our money, what we push people to fund, where scientists decide to divert their energies. And I feel like new atheism does not do a good enough job of critiquing itself. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's just this arrogance that I hear when they talk about religion. It's like, You don't think you suffer from the same problems, dude? I don't know.

Ella Simone: Yeah. why did in science we only study men's bodies up until really recently? Isn't that a cultural thing? Like and

Maria: yeah.

Ella Simone: there is this there's this kind of like worldview called scientism, which I don't wanna go too deep into, but it's basically the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or the only way to render truth about the world and about reality. I think the new atheists are very much guilty of scientism. And New Atheism has been widely panned, by the way. It's kind of considered a dead movement. And a lot of these the they call themselves the Four Horsemen of the New Atheist Movement. have had like kind of somewhat public downfalls. I'll just give like a bigger like bird's eye look at it. It was a 21st century movement attributed to some atheist academics, writers, scientists, philosophers who were opposed to superstition, to religion and irrationalism. They're always talking about irrationalism. And they and to be fair, for their context, they were writing these books in like the early 2000s. They were probably in part reacting to the reactionary like patriotic conservative Christian flavor of the Bush administration. And, you know, after the 9-11 attacks happened, we got we, you know, really dug our heels in. We'll put a boot in your ass, kind of like American exceptionalism. So we have to give them grace for like that was the environment that they were writing from. And I don't disagree with their idea that various forms of theism should be examined and countered by rational arguments. And put to task, basically, but I don't agree with the idea they should just be rejected outright so many of the scholars of this movement openly decried religion as harmful to society, and they weren't wrong in that in ways it fosters war and bigotry. But the difference between new atheists and their atheist predecessors and the atheists who came after them. Is that atheist philosophers usually present the idea that there isn't a God as a logical conclusion to their arguments, that there just isn't enough evidence. New atheists take this a step further by arguing that there are no good reasons to believe in God.

Maria: Yeah. Sorry, I just what do you mean there are no good reasons to believe in God?

Ella Simone: Girl, like, has it ever gotten that bad for you? and I need to point out that the new atheist perspective is, in the words of Sam Harris, somewhat intrinsically male, he said. there were female new atheists and there were non-white new atheists, but it was criticized for being kind of a movement that largely appealed to like highly educated white western men.

Maria: Yeah. I know and it makes me think of one of the things in social work ethics, this idea of cultural humility. This is a very privileged way of thinking about the world. There's no cultural humility here. There is no way of saying, There are things outside of my awareness. you, you know, the purveyor of extreme logic has decided and figured out that there's no good reason to believe in the afterlife at all. It's pushing your ideas around the world. And also this is I think another criticism of new atheism, which is you can't just rip people's beliefs away and offer them nothing to fill it.

Ella Simone: it's mean. The way they write it's very much giving like smug nerd. you can really pick up on like a tone of resentment in their writing and it kind of weakens their argument because it feels like it's about being right and not about like searching for truth. And their fervor about their own anti-theism mimics that of religious fervor. the biggest problem with this whole movement is that they stopped being curious. Like a lot of atheist philosophers like David Hume have entertained the idea that there maybe is a God and what does that mean and what do we do about morality if there's no God? what do we do with all the all these existential questions? But I feel like they just have this kind of finger wagging, Ben Shapiro, well actually, impulse where they just want to be right. They don't really want to like have dialogue with people and talk about, okay, if not religion, what do we have? it's so boring and it's it's a vibe killer. and it's arrogant. It it's it's the kind of hubris that was written about in the Bible, ironically.

Maria: Me think of an interesting question too, because part of what we were saying is humanity kind of does better when we have a structure to follow, like the Monstera and the trellis, you the grapevines collapsing under their own leaf if they don't have something to climb up. If we do manage to create our own structure for understanding the world, Is there this arrogance that comes with it? I don't think all the time, but I mean religion does provide like a framework for humility Like don't go too far with trying to become God.

Ella Simone: I think it it enforces humility but it does also enforce superiority in that most true believers feel like they're in on some kind of truth that the rest of the population doesn't understand. And Catholicism leaves a ton of room for doubt and for scholarly debate and has a long history of welcoming in people who have a lot of qualms with the beliefs, but Catholics refer to the Catholic Church as the one true church. So, you know, there's still a bit of an idea of we're entertaining other possibilities, but like we got it like that. but the whole idea of faith is also asking you to make that leap.

Maria: Yeah. I do see a lot of infighting and smugness in religion, so I guess it's not always about humility

Ella Simone: yeah, for sure.

Maria: all the time.

Ella Simone: I mean, I think the the new atheist smugness was like matching the energy of a lot of religious people's smugness too. I find them more distasteful because I can't imagine viewing the universe in such like cold and absolute terms and I just think it's so boring and lame. But They were also like matching the energy of megachurch pastors. or like snobby church people who are very judgmental. So they were reacting to the time in which they live too. But I think one of their biggest flaws is their idea that explaining the origin of a belief makes it automatically false. just because we can understand why. people believe in God from a evolutionary or psychological standpoint, which is what we just try to do, doesn't mean that God isn't real either. That's what nuance is. I thought I would read The Future of Illusion and it would blow my mind and I would feel so differently. But I suppose my faith is strong enough where I'm like, yeah, good point, but I just feel that God is real. It just feels real to me and like that does trump logic at a certain point. And like I said earlier, it seems like a net positive for me to believe in that.

Maria: Well, and I think that's a powerful thing too. one of the big defining things in twenty twenty six for me is feeling like I don't really feel that I have that visceral connection to any authority that I trust. someone will recommend a medication for me and I immediately think about big pharma. someone says something great in politics, and I'm like, okay, I don't know if I trust where that comes from. And I feel like

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: I have all this information, but I don't know what to log as true or not true. And that's for me, I think, why truth matters. I don't want to be truly led by my biases all the time. I don't want to be sidelined into thinking one way about the world, but I feel like I can't trust anything around me.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I don't trust much around me either in twenty twenty-six. I mean, it's kinda hard to it's just so apparent, like the political and monetary motivations behind so much of what we see and what we're told and what we're given. that's why religion continues to appeal to me and why my belief in God has not faltered despite what some would consider as like mounting evidence. all I know is that I saw my dad die when I was 18 and I almost died. And I did feel that God was was with being that experience. And I had two religious experiences as a child when I also had a lot of turmoil going on in my family and stuff, and I just know that to be true for me and like the feeling of it is more powerful than any kind of logical treatise that someone could shove in my face. I could read the God delusion and say he makes amazing points. I agree with a lot of what Freud was saying All that stuff can register to me on a logical level, but what about my spirit? What about my soul? What about my intuition? Like what about the things that feel real to me at a level that's like not just logical and not just emotional?

Maria: so does truth really matter to you?

Ella Simone: Truth definitely matters to me. I wouldn't say I'm as much even of an existentialist as you are, even though I somewhat am. I do believe in a lot of the ideas from Catholicism, but I also think all ideas should be up for grabs and We should play with taboo and We should kinda do whatever we want in art within the bounds of like ethical treatment of people. But yeah, I think we do need to have pro prosperity pro happiness pro health pro freedom values and I think those are like the closest things to truth that we have and those do matter.

Maria: I think we can get closer and closer to it, but Truth is not entirely possible for us to discover, but I

Ella Simone: Mm-hmm.

Maria: do want to live in a world where I feel like I can edge closer towards it. Where I feel like, okay, I'm seeing something, it looks to be objectively true. I have information that feels objectively true, so I can correct my ideas and biases about the world. And that's also the thing that's been bothering me so much. This idea of like misinformation that we live in. you can't really trust anything that you read, you can't trust anything that you see. Anything could be AI, everything is fake news, all this stuff because I truly wanna learn more about the world. I want to be not just shaped by tech companies. I wanna feel like I have some source of autonomy I wanna have a source of like my own humanity. Because I'm actually

Ella Simone: That's what I mean about DoorDash. I don't wanna lay flat and just like take the slop and eat out of my trough. Like I wanna go get food. And it it means more than just the literal action of getting food. It's about like using my own damn legs and like using my own agency

Maria: Yeah. I'm noticing this in like some of my older family members. They use chat GBT for everything and I'm like, God, please stop doing that.

Ella Simone: Old people are the worst about it. No, they have the worst digital hygiene they don't understand.

Maria: how are we even supposed to evolve a digital literacy at this point? I went to a store the other day and I had the sales representative actively asking the questions I'm asking to chat GBT while they're in front of me about what they're selling. this was a very, very simple question that I'm asking? And you're just saying, tell me about this chat. it's mushifying our brains a little bit.

Ella Simone: What was that phrase you used flooding the zone?

Maria: Yeah, so it's a phrase that was attributed to Steve Bannon, who of course was the former chief strategist for Donald Trump, and he talked about how

Ella Simone: Mm-mm.

Maria: yeah I It's this idea that

Ella Simone: Yeah, this is not a pro Bannon podcast. We're just quoting him.

Maria: definitely not. It's this idea that you release rapid fire succession of major announcements, executive orders, social media posts, and basically the opponents are so on the defensive, they can't catch up or build a focused response. if you've ever seen anything on Truth Social, it feels so ridiculous and absurd. It gives like people who are very liberal something to latch onto and complain about, but you ignore like these big sweeping terrible things. things that are happening.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I think that's really evil. I mean, it's obviously an astute political strategy, but I think there's something really heinous about that in trying to confuse and overwhelm the public that you're supposed to be working on behalf of. And it's just cheap you should be able to have a strong enough argument and strong enough campaign to win. You shouldn't have to scare and confuse grandmas who don't understand that the video of you and Charlie Kirk is AI. If you follow the White House account on Instagram, it's just all these insane TikTok edits made by 21-year-olds and like AI slop pictures of Donald Trump. it's just so confusing and bizarre but that's by design. That's the entire point. And that's why truth does matter. I don't want to live in this completely relativist, like completely nihilistic world of like, you know, it doesn't matter, bro, just content. It's content. Everything is content. It's it's it's disgusting. it really obfuscates morality. It obfuscates people's humanity. I wanna be able to talk about stuff in an intellectual way. Like that's the point. of doing this podcast. I wanted to have a structured time to talk about stuff with people in a good faith way and not just trying to get clicks or trying to get reactions or trying to be right about things. And like that's what the flooding the zone thing kind of warrants itself to.

Maria: That's what the administration kind of wants. It wants you to not trust anything. Like I just saw an article where Trump just banned CNN from entering the White House because they're

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: fake news. And that's just like Yeah, I just I can't even get

Ella Simone: Fascism.

Maria: into how terrible that whole thing is. I saw this fucked up horrible video. it was like the Pokemon theme song, the whole gotta catch them all thing. And it was people deporting illegal immigrants and it was ice capturing them. And I'm just like

Ella Simone: God.

Maria: that's what feels so dehumanizing. it's this slow desensitization and this sense of chaos, and it's just extreme. Extremely troubling to me. and when I see those AI slot videos too, it feels like it's going further and then just distracting. It feels like it's almost this weaponized absurdism making people not even understand what they're seeing as fake versus not fake. It actually kind of feels weird because Trump's whole thing is like anti fake news. It's just so chaotic and confusing. You can't even see where truth could lie.

Ella Simone: Yeah, I think that's the point because you need to create conditions of chaos and desperation to appoint yourself as the demagogue who's gonna fix it. This is what they did in Nazi Germany too. people naturally do want to point themselves in the direction of truth and coherence. I'm not even gonna say morality, but they wanna understand what's going on. That's just a survival thing. And I think the more chaos you create and the more distrust you create in these institutions, in what you thought you knew, the more of an appeal that someone like a charismatic demagogue like Trump has, because he always says, trust the plan. he's like saying, I'm gonna come in and I know it doesn't make any sense to you and they're turning the frogs gay and blah blah blah blah. But I'm gonna come in and just like Andrew Tate in the other episode we talked about, like direct you in the direction of truth and in, you know, the future that you kind of want. Which ironically

Maria: Yes.

Ella Simone: is really the past But that just creates the conditions for someone to come in and like take over.

Maria: Yeah, when you hinder people's ability to digest information, you hinder their ability to critically think.

Ella Simone: Yeah, and I mean if we want to get a little conspiratorial with it, I don't think this is the reason that AI was created. I think the reason was for efficiency and ultimately the maximization of capital. But it does help that political leaders can say, well that's AI, and that they can play around with people's own perceptions. it's awfully convenient that all this stuff comes out around the time of the Epstein files coming out. it's interesting. I'm not saying that that's the only reason, but I'm saying it does play right into the hands of people who are already in power to say like, well you don't even know if that's real. So you should just trust us 'cause we're the learned rich white men. And it seems to always end up being them who have like the keys to the kingdom, doesn't it?

Maria: fuck yeah. there's a show called The Boys. it becomes this big critique of like Trump's America they basically got a video where the villains of the story were doing something insanely fucked up. they basically took the video, doctored it to make it look like there was more AI involvement, and then said, look at that. There are six fingers on that hand. Because the average person, how are they gonna be able to figure out whether something has been doctored to look like AI?

Ella Simone: I mean, I can tell when stuff is AI most of the time, and I think most young people can, but a lot of Trump's base are old cells who don't know the d distinction between an AI video and a real video, and AI's only gonna get more advanced, so we have that to be excited about. and you

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: know, old people are the ones that come out and vote. They're always the ones who come out to th those damn polls, so it works better on them. But I don't wanna be too doom and gloom about everything because this is a pretty bleak topic. we've agreed that truth does matter, but in a world of such dizzying, hyperconnected, glitchy chaos, how do you find truth? How do you find values?

Maria: I was thinking about this the other day we're disconnected, but we're more connected than we have ever been in terms of our ability to connect with people all over. And I think a lot of the what was he said, the abfusification? it's the word.

Ella Simone: Obfuscation.

Maria: obfuscation of truth is to try to make us think that we don't have any power or ability.

Ella Simone: Well that's yeah, we didn't even really talk about that, but that's the other function that flooding the zone serves too.

Maria: Yeah, it's like trying to convince people that they have absolutely no power and even if they do engage in critical thought and protest, nothing will change. And that kind of just perpetuates the corporate oligarchy.

Ella Simone: Yeah, and you know, ten years ago people were saying that a socialist like Bernie Sanders would never get elected and that could never happen in America and now we have a Muslim democratic socialist mayor of a city that was attacked by Muslim extremists twenty five years ago.

Maria: Yeah.

Ella Simone: it's like so easy to feel like it's so over and I totally feel like it's so over in a lot of ways and I've spent portions of my life being kind of like a cynical edgelord. but my belief in God did keep me from getting too too listless with it and I'm not telling anyone to go believe in God, but I'm telling you you have to go f believe in something. the impulse toward the sky and toward God is in everyone. And if you don't fill that with something, you probably will sink into despair. So it doesn't have to be God, but you could believe in friendship, you could believe in a political cause, you could believe in art, just find something that is meaningful to you. And don't listen to people who tell you that there isn't any meaning and we live on a floating rock and nothing matters.

Maria: I I know that you and me are big, like Mamdani fans. his general campaign I find to be so effective to me because he's actually preaching. For hope, which I know is something that politicians have been doing for a long time, but it feels so foreign to me. this idea of new values, new excitement. And I think it speaks to the fact that like hope is still something that appeals to people. we can't choose to believe in things. It's just We have to critically think about things. And I wanna go back to what you said. Just because you can understand all of the problems with something doesn't mean that you still don't believe in it anyway. I understand how science has been affected by corporatists, money, the defunding of education and the defunding of science organizations. I still believe in science. I'm still gonna go and get a fucking vaccine, right? But when I consume these things, okay, am I thinking about bias? Am I thinking about all of these larger factors? Doesn't mean we throw out the entire baby with the bath water. We can think critically and still have hope.

Ella Simone: hope can be such a manipulative political tactic and I think what Mamdani is doing is he's giving us hope, but it's a different framework. It's democratic socialism rather than neoliberal, democratic values, and he's backing it up with action. hope is kinda paralyzing. hope is manipulative if it's not backed up by real change. So I don't even just mean this in a political sense. I really encourage people to like shake up their life. Like start a podcast. start pole dancing or whatever. ignore all of the TV shows that you've been watching for the past six years and like watch something completely out of left field. You gotta shake it up. stagnation is like where human excellence goes to die. So it's better to try new stuff and fail and to be going up and down and up and down than just to stay the same, I think. Yeah.

Maria: Variety. Truth is also found in variety because you have to have a variety of sources. You have to have a very extensive

Ella Simone: Yeah.

Maria: life to truly be able to find it.

Ella Simone: Totally. Okay, this was awesome. This was like my favorite episode.

Maria: Yay, no, I love this too.

Ella Simone: Do you have any closing thoughts?

Maria: I guess my closing thought would just be we don't know if truth is possible, but doesn't mean we stop striving for it. And figure out why truth is important to you, because it will tell you a lot of stuff about your own self and your own values.

Ella Simone: I think the pursuit of truth is the truth. You know?

Maria: I love them.

Ella Simone: it's like not about the destination, it's about the journey type of thing. So yeah, that's our that's our take on whether or not truth matters. We solved the issue, clearly. Yeah.

Maria: Yeah, clearly. Clearly we solved the issue. I love it.

Ella Simone: Nietzsche walked so we could run on Cobra Lily Podcast.

Maria: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he's like, that's our baby boy right there.

Ella Simone: Yeah, that's cute what he was doing, but we just we just reached new heights.

Maria: Yes.

Ella Simone: All right, guys, thank you so much for listening and we'll be back in two weeks. Bye.

Maria: Ai y'all.