Stay up to date on my work by subscribing to my newsletter at https://tinyletter.com/jmrphy. John David Ebert is a cultural critic and the author of 26 books (published by traditional publishers and self-published), including Art After Metaphysics, The New Media Invasion, The Age of Catastrophe and Dead Celebrities, Living Icons. You can support his work at https://www.patreon.com/johndavidebert. In this conversation, we talked about John's big ideas about long-term cultural dynamics, Oswald Spengler, Marshall McLuhan, Heidegger, film criticism, Jordan Peterson, the history of Christianity and Islam in Europe, John's religious views, John's perspective on psychic mediums, and John's rationale for his willingness to speak with people who have certain objectionable views (people who might be called "alt-right.") I found this to be a very fun and stimulating conversation, John is a very far-out thinker and his success as a radically independent and prolific intellectual strikes me as highly admirable and inspiring. For easier listening, this will soon be available as audio-only on the podcast. Search and subscribe to the Other Life podcast wherever you get your podcasts. There are now many ways you can support my projects at https://theotherlifenow.com/support/. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7pn1baIgaI

Order my book, Based Deleuze: https://theotherlifenow.com/based-deleuze/ If you'd like to discuss these and similar themes with me and others, you can request an invitation here: http://bit.ly/join-otherlife-via-youtube For obvious reasons, we have strong inclinations to be understood by others. There is a problem here because, to the degree we wish to be perceptible to others, we are conditioning our own expressions on contingent social and political variables. In an ideal community, this might not be a problem. If technological or other contextual variables veer off in a way that biases and malforms popular perceptions, then thinking and speaking to be perceptible can easily lock one into a life of inescapable confusion, suffering, and reproduction of precisely what one despises. This is the problem of perceptibility, in a nutshell. Note that perception refers to sense data. Perceptibility therefore has pre-conscious connotations. You might think of perception as kind of like "understanding,"but the latter is misleading because it connotes conscious intellection. It's worth clarifying this point because the problem here is not the prospect of being correctly understood intellectually. We will seek to be understood, but only by those who can understand. Seeking to be perceptible means catering to the initial and cheapest pieces of others' psychological and behavioral equipment. To be perceptible means that institutions, and their human trustees, know how to manipulate you. Being perceptible means you are easily pigeonholed, and what's worse is that often you are correctly pigeonholed. If you optimize for how you are perceived, and especially if you build a life on how you are perceived (i.e., anyone who's income is based on status in an institutional hierarchy), then your thoughts, words, and actions are easily controlled by anyone above you in the institutional hierarchy. For by definition their edicts have greater influence on the perceptions of everyone attuned to the hierarchy than anything you might say or do, thus pleasing one's status-superiors is a necessity for those who wish to be perceived well. (This matter is greatly complicated in contexts of institutional breakdown and fragmentation, as we are currently observing, so we will need to treat the matter in greater detail later; but for now, most of us are still maneuvering lives overwhelmingly characterized by the inertia of mass institutions, so even if institutions break down rapidly over the course of the next few generations, the general lessons here will suffice for most people for quite some time.) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJMmBjHYivI