Brent Cooper on the Role of Sociology in Metacrisis Discourse
Brent Cooper is Executive Director of The Abs-Tract Organization, a meta think tank and transmedia project committed to solving the world's systemic problems through a process of complexity reduction known as abstraction. In this episode, Brent and I talk about the critical role of political sociology in 21st-century issues, the limitations of Wilber’s integral theory, the dynamics of modern discourse, and the true meaning of independent thinking as it pertains to complex topics. Brent brings a political and sociological perspective that grounds epistemic thinkers and philosophers in the realities of people’s lived experiences.
Key Topics
00:00 - Introduction
00:58 - Start of Conversation
02:19 - Being an “Anti-Professional”
03:17 - Sociology & Beyond Integral Theory
05:36 - Brent’s Content and Relationship to Integral
07:30 - Integral Theory’s Ceilings and Dead Ends
08:55 - New Paradigm Creation & Epistemic Tension
10:08 - We’re in the Darkest Timeline & Decolonization
12:16 - The Importance of Sociology in Epistemic Spaces
15:26 - The Lack of Sociological Consciousness in Society
19:02 - The Abs-Tract Organization + What Is Abstraction?
26:08 - The Intellectual Dark Web Is Leaving Things Out
28:44 - “Epistemic Humility” and Weaponized Incompetence
31:22 - Dealing With People’s Structures of Interpretation
31:58 - Optimizing Response Through Fierce Grace
35:00 - How the World Was Gaslit on Capitalism
37:00 - The Dearth of Aesthetics of Communism
39:26 - Whole Careers Are Built on Hatred
45:48 - Giving Everyday People Access to More Ideas
49:38 - The Race to the Bottom of the Brainstem
54:45 - Systems Thinking, Dogma, and Brent’s Books
57:26 - The Problem with Steven Pinker’s Work
1:02:40 - Brent’s Work, Patreon, and Links
1:06:36 - Good Abstraction Is Getting Real
Resources & Affiliate Links
Vicious Abstraction and Systemic Racism by Brent Cooper
The Woman Warrior by Rayner Jae Liu
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a Future Without Work by Srnicek and Williams
The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills
White Collar: The American Middle Classes by C. Wright Mills
The Varieties of Religious Experience/Pragmatism/A Pluralistic Universe by William James
Guest Links
The Abs-Tract Organization and Contact: abs-tract.org
Abs-Tract on Medium: medium.com/the-abs-tract-organization
Abs-Tract on Twitter: twitter.com/tato_tweets
Abs-Tract on YouTube: youtube.com/Abs-tractOrg
Abs-Tract on Patreon: patreon.com/abs_tract
Transcript
RJL: Brent, thanks for being here and welcome to the show. I figure we might as well just pick up from wherever we were talking as we were trying to fix the technical issues. What were we talking about?
BC: You introduced yourself and then I asked a question about the coaching world and what works and doesn't, is it competitive or collaborative? And particularly under capitalism, you know, can you even give people useful advice, in a professional or personal sense?
RJL: I can say a lot about that. I would say, it really depends on the context. One of the areas where it works best is when organizations and leaders need to figure out how to make different parts of a system work, where the skill of holistic thinking can usually add value. Now, in terms of whether that is a high priority item for people in more traditional organizations, one of the challenges of the space is you've got the problem of consciousness meeting sales. If you're at a level of development or if your value system actually doesn't include the things that the coach might bring to you and you don't see the point, then why would you go and invest in it? You can do well as a coach, but it means that you're usually having to market yourself a certain way. And then there comes a question of to what degree is this really in line with my values? And so that all really depends .
BC: Cool. Part of the reason I ask, is to get your your perspective I come from a different background. I was interested in corporate consulting coming out of grad school and had some friends that went that path. So that's interesting to me and part of my identity now as a sociologist and thinker is I'm a hard worker, but I'm anti professional. And there's some literature on that. The term actually comes from law. But it's a very interesting subversive concept because there's some pathologies that go with professionalism and office culture and money, in general.
I've kind of gone the other direction, to my own detriment too, right? I was never really successful in the dominant system, in capitalism. I have an interest and a sort of, aptitude for business, but I don't really have any hustle, which you would need, right?
RJL: The reason that I had reached out to you initially, and the reason why I gravitated so much toward your writing and your work and the voice was because I had spent some time in integral land, where you start realizing, ah, there's more than one way of seeing the world.
And actually, they might come together in a certain way, and there are patterns. But as I was spending a lot of time in so-called integral spaces, one of the things I kept noticing was the ways in which, you know—and a sociologist could look at this and give very good reasons as to why it is, so could an anthropologist—but I was in these so-called integral spaces, and everybody was basically saying, postmodernism is the worst thing in the world, postmodernism is awful. And I was like, I would agree with you about the potential pathologies and shortcomings. But I kept thinking to myself, It sounds like they never actually figured out what postmodernism is, and they're just hating on it.
I was reading some of Hanzi's work on Integral Land too, which gave me the sense of, who are Integralists? I'm not saying life is all easy for them, but relative to the average person in the population, they probably have it quite good. And, to be very explicit and blunt about it, there aren't a lot of people of color in that space, and I think that also colors the experience in part. So when I came across your work and actually noticed you're taking integral, metamodern, and critical sociological perspectives, and they were all there, I thought to myself, yes, and I actually remember sending some of your articles to folks in integral land, who were really struggling with others in that space.
I'm saying, "Hey, this resonates with me. Does it resonate with you?" And all of us were with that, aiming to approach these conversations around culture and politics from a very balanced perspective. But what we kept perceiving was this utter imbalance and almost this unspoken, but utter refusal to actually move through green before you get to what you would call tier two, where you go past the so called second line. I think you have a really important voice along with Hanzi, maybe a handful of others who are saying, hey, we can't just turn into, spiritual or philosophical kumbaya as we try and build a new society. We still do need, hard material, critical and sociological perspectives. And that's why, your work really stood out to me.
BC: Cool. Thanks. Yeah. Let me start with that by saying , I still have a pretty low profile on the internet, so it's very meaningful for me and also a learning opportunity when anyone has some sort of reaction or reflection to the articles and stuff I've put out. It's basically three books worth of blog posts and whatever social media I've done and advocacy and the odd interview here and there. I have, for a long time, been trying to map and capture a sort of paradigm. I never had a lot of involvement with integral. It was something I encountered in my, late teens, early twenties when I was, like all other industrious millennials, soul searching and, scouring the internet for new knowledge, you know, it was a very exciting time to at least feel like you were learning, that was before I went to university, and really sunk my teeth in.
Integral was something that stood out to me, obviously very refined synthesized, the big posters and stuff, which are meant to encapsulate all of it. It's very engrossing; it definitely looks like a system of knowledge. I'm not even getting into critical territory yet, but all of that is just to say, the culture and the business aspect of it did put me off one way or another. And this is why, I always say integral and metamodernism are very different, right? Hanzi kind of mashes them up and again, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's a little bit of an integral left sort of faction, but it is marginal. if you look at a group like Integral Global, there's a lot of political perspectives shared that I would say are not so enlightened, and then it's frustrating because it's very hard to change people's minds or engage in rational debate.
This has probably been said and written many times before by integralists themselves, but it kind of creates its own dead ends, like there's a kind of ceiling to it. Ken Wilber is exemplary of that ceiling, being the kind of leader of a movement and turning around and essentially endorsing the thinking of the Intellectual Dark Web, something I was very aggressively critical of. So there's these kinds of intellectual cul de sacs and ceilings and dead ends, and all of that is to say, this is why I appreciate anybody who engages with me in my work and this topic and on that level, cause yeah, I've definitely met plenty of cool people who've kind of come out of an integral path and it makes sense, from a historical, evolutionary narrative sense. This Ken Wilber guy comes along. He wants to synthesize a bunch of stuff in the sixties, seventies, and eighties and nine, whenever his golden age was, but for me, where it stops making sense is really, 9/11 and the turn of the millennium and this kind of wake-up call.
I think what has defined the past, year frankly, come October 7th is, you know, Israel's, end game of apartheid. Like I would call it. I'm still learning, I'm not an expert, but certain things became very stark and lucid. And when we talk about a paradigm—a new paradigm— all the pieces have to fit together. And what I've have felt in metamodern slash integral spaces is a lot of denial and avoidance of those hard questions, or just straight up supporting the status quo. There is still so much epistemic tension blind spots and frustrations, and that's not being resolved by the so-called second-tier type people that I see.
My background's also international relations. That was my undergrad. So I've always tried to maintain a global scope and a kind of loose law of political evolution. In a evolutionary sense, and this is why, again, coming back to Israel, it is indicative of a sort of clash of civilizations that refuses to be resolved, right? There's nothing but indignance from the tyrants, people like Trump and who, when you finally we finally pin them, there's an arrest warrant, for Netanyahu. It's like, first of all, it's so long overdue, but then instead of any sort of compliance or moderation, they just double down. We're in the darkest timeline, and this is what people keep choosing.
RJL: I don't know if this is the reaction you always get, but when I hear we're in the darkest timeline, I nod and go, yes, I'm so glad someone said that. I do think we're there and I'm often saying to people, we shouldn't be afraid to look at it. If we actually look at it and then take it apart, and deal with it, then we have other choices. We'll realize that there were other choices that we could have made.
So I'm going to put aside some of the things that we had just mentioned for right now and start with, because I think a lot of people are new to metamodernism, and as we just discussed, people have different ideas of what that is, what it means, and, trying to be clear as we can and to find those distinctions feels so critical. You mentioned earlier that you and Hanzi actually have slightly different ways of seeing it. I really appreciate some of the things that Hanzi has created. How do you see metamodernism? If you had to give a definition to it or some kind of shape based on where things are now. How would you describe that?
BC: I hope this doesn't sound like a cop out, but it's better represented in my writing than maybe I can articulate. Post modernism is something that frustrates students. That's valid. It means a lot of different things in different fields. But like you said before, you're right. That integralists are wrong to dismiss it. There is a kind of school of thought I call the Dutch school that's diverse, certainly. They're working in a kind of postmodern praxis, if you will, but they're not doing anything with all these great insights.
And that's one of the things that rubbed me the wrong way, because there are things like action research and engage research and also just being a scholar-activist. It's almost obligatory in the 21st century. Where I differ is, being more radical and emphasizing the decolonial aspect, which is both a personal process and a systemic societal, thing we need to be doing. So yeah, given my background, it seemed like an obvious niche to fill, and what I was looking for.
RJL: Yeah, thanks for that. One of the things that I was thinking about before our conversation was the specific voice that you're adding to this space. And this ecosystem is emergent, it's evolving. It has its ups, it has its downs. Sometimes it goes sideways and. Not to overemphasize the sociology, but I do feel like it's really important to talk about. If this is the perspective that you're bringing to this, why do you think it's so important to consider?
BC: There's so many ways to answer that. One simple answer is political gridlock, so many different belief systems and agendas are at loggerheads. Meanwhile, industry rolls on, it's not stopping things from happening, politically. It's a miracle things aren't worse.
We're talking about saving people's lives. One way I think about this, hopefully it's not over simplistic, but you can think of certain sociological data and metrics, like murder or theft or car accidents and you could ask yourself, what is the ideal rate? The ideal rate is obviously zero. People are always trying to get those numbers down. I think it goes without saying, but why are we so bad at figuring out human baselines? Maybe it's human nature. I just think most people—and this isn't to be punching down or anything—most people are too busy living their lives to really get literate in world problems and political systems and social change.
RJL: The way that I'm taking all of what you're saying, is why sociology? I studied anthropology. I often like to think that anthropology and sociology are close cousins, whereas anthropology gets more to the cultural elements and the rituals and process. Sociology is often looking at data and the hard stuff, basically, what's the bottom line. I thought to myself, well, is sociology inherently, about propagating an ideology?
And I went, No, it's not what it seems to be about for me, is it's an approach and it's a mindset of getting clear cut data so that we can have a more concrete understanding of phenomena and consequence and how things actually show up in the real world. If you go into epistemic territory and there's no sociological mindset whatsoever, it means that you're lacking a major tool that relates to the betterment of people's lives and meaningful change that you at some level actually would want.
What I feel like you might have just been pointing to are all of those subconscious emotions that prevent people from looking at that or from taking a sociological perspective or approach. So to me, one of the things that I'm appreciating is I feel like you're adding an element of that, which is, are we actually thinking about this? Or are we building a castle in the sky with this grand epistemic narrative, which doesn't actually include a really, really, really, really critical part of the narrative. Does that feel fair to say?
BC: Yeah, totally. There's a lot of reasons I chose to specialize in sociology. It's a younger discipline. it's a cousin or sibling of anthropology if you will, but also of psychology. Psychology dominated the 20th century. So did individualism. So, you know, thematically there's very little real public consciousness. There's like an astroturfed version, you know, the centrist moderate Democrat worldview. There's so much richness in sociology, there's a lot of terms that might be common, relatable parlance, like working class, even though people know it, it has very little Real traction these days, like all these concepts have been abstracted, because the working class was more concrete in the past when these terms emerged, they were more visible in a sense, especially as they're made visible by, pamphlets that get mass-produced, like things like the communist manifesto or whatever it may be.
And then, I spent some time learning about sociology bestsellers. There used to be some, believe it or not, like we've regressed in a way, right? Again, the charts are dominated by pop psychology bestsellers rather than sociology, but there are a lot of sociology books that became bestsellers. C. Wright Mills, worked in the fifties in the early sixties, and died sort of young, but produced an immense amount of work and was basically like a godfather of what's called public sociology. He was very good at doing tons of deep research, but then making it relatable and accessible and talking about the power elite. Nowadays, a lot of those terms are deployed in conspiracy thinking, without honoring his intentions or getting at the meat of it.
I don't know if I'm fully answering your question, but I could definitely ramble for hours on the dearth of sociological understanding in the world. And again, I still have a lot to learn even about core aspects of it.
RJL: Sure. But what I can appreciate is that you do have sociological training. That is one approach that you take, and I want to get into The Abs-Tract Organization now. You also have this metatheory-based approach at the same time. There's plenty of sociology happening in academia; here's the data, and then, as you said, though, you'll read a term like working class, and what I felt like I heard was there's no consciousness around it. That thing doesn't mean what it could actually mean through a fully awakened lens. If we were to understand that both in its complete animation as well as what it actually means from a sociological perspective, really not a disenchanted, neoliberal, this doesn't mean anything, papered over, forget-about-it kind of sense, which often is the case in a society where there is so much of a spiritual malaise.
So what I'm really appreciating about your perspective is there seems to be a critical sociological approach, which I think is necessary because these are meaningful differences that impact people's lives. It's access to things or not, living until age 50 or not, these are hard and fast things that happen and I think these things often don't go fully acknowledged in the land of epistemic conversation and maybe even Emergentsia. Then there's also this other side of what you work on, which is metatheory, and the fact that you marry the two and bring them together is really interesting to me. So I'm wondering if you're willing to talk a little bit about The Abs-Tract Organization. What led you to call it that? What is abstraction and why is it important?
BC: Yeah. Thanks. Going back to what I said at the beginning, it means a lot to me because few people ask, you know, why The Abs-Tract Organization? Abstraction is the most important thing I can think of that is the hardest to sell. It's not elusive or complicated, it's just—I can't get it to stick with people. Like, the amount of people who are on the fence about my work or the movie I made about The Abs-Tract Organization. When I try to explain it, it's very difficult, they don't get it or I'm not explaining it well. Anyway, abstraction is thinking, and an abstraction is like a product of that thinking. I think the best obvious ways it's one way to think about abstraction is like a schematic or a blueprint, right, because it's not the thing it's an essential reduction of the thing, it's everything you need to know and how it works. So I love that because that relates to every field to engineering, to construction, as much as to philosophy. And so through, going down abstraction rabbit holes, almost every philosopher has at some point discussed abstraction or mentioned it.
But still there are few philosophers of abstraction, right, and that, Is specifically what drew me to thinkers like Benjamin Bratton and broadly speaking, the new school and a bunch of left academics, self-identified leftists, right? That, think about that. And another great book is Inventing the Future by Srnicek and Williams cause there's. A lot of references to abstraction and, you put that idea through a prism, right? And it scatters into, millions of colors and photons. I was really into abstraction already, but then I had an acid trip that kind of just put the pieces together for me. And that's when I was able to commit to it. That was 2012. That's when it like short of calling it a religious experience.
That's when it was like, Oh, I have to do this. And then the actual Abs-Tract Organization, I didn't really form until 2016 kind of put a business plan together for that. After I made like a sort of artistic abstract art film, right? All of that is to say, I just wished there was some global think tank, some sort of umbrella organization that, that could, be like a guy like Banksy, one day and then be going head to head with the Brookings Institute on another day, because there's also a think tank crisis.
That's not talked about enough in medic crisis discourse. There's all these think tanks that are, that's been, it's been written about a lot. New York Times ran features on it. Think tanks are beholden to their funders. They are supposed to serve the public, but they produce very esoteric knowledge sometimes.
So there's, so all of these things were coming together for me and it's like, well, I want to work at a think tank, but not just anything tank. So, you know, I just named it and stuck with it ever since. And even though it's hard to market and sell the idea, I still think of myself as operating under The Abs-Tract Organization.
RJL: It makes a lot of sense. And I really appreciate the way you explained it, because you helped me to understand the way that word functions for you and what its expression and its emanation can really look like. When I first read it, I thought to myself, because I like to think abstractly, but I also like to be really concrete. And so I read "abstraction," and I thought, okay, here we go. This is going to be colorful metaphor. That's what this organization might be. And then when I think abstract in the academic sense, you know how like people have different thoughts around academia, some people find it cool. critically, critically important and useful.
And then others think of it and they're like, Oh my goodness, another abstract. I don't want to read another abstract. I'm done. And so it was interesting for me to hear your side of it, because what I think I'm getting now is one, it is the way that you're describing abstraction is, it is a component of metatheory in a way where you're drawing connection across these disparate things and you're finding a unifying thread or tapestry that connects all these different pieces. Not to mention, when you talked about the art, so to speak, and how that abstracts and the prism, that would be the entry point from which I would at least personally love for people to enter it so that they can understand it more quickly. It's something I often run into in the world of epistemic marketing and this and that, which is, if you market it and you spoil its values, then you could say It's no good at true new paradigm creation, right? You just fall to the old paradigm. And then on the other hand, if it doesn't catch on, if a tree falls in the forest, but no one hears it, does it actually, brings us back into that interesting space.
So I just appreciate your sharing that because for me, it brings me into the space of aesthetic, which I think is really core to what you do, which is you are a sociologist. You do think about the hard and fast things, but there's also an art to it and all that film that you're creating feels like this expression. So it's almost like for me, when I think of you, your sociology and also your art, they exist in the same space, and then they come together as abstraction.
BC: Yeah, appreciate that. I'll also add and clarify too, based on what you're saying, I never want to fetishize abstraction or reify. So if ever I'm trying to explain something, there's always that other side of it. Too much abstraction can be bad or it can be wrong, and there's many reference points, but let me go to like back to C. Wright Mills's era. He was critical of Talcott Parsons, one of the most famous, systems theorists of that time, basically wrote the book on social systems. I know Nicholas Luman, titled the book called that the point I'm trying to make is like too much abstraction, right? You're getting unmoored from the reality and the material and the social relations like is Talcott Parsons sufficiently addressing feminism or Indigenous issues, especially in his time? Of course not. We always got to be wary of that. And I think integral metamodern, a lot of that, those problems are reproduced.
So, you know, I'm putting to people, I'm not telling you necessarily this is how to abstract I'm putting to people, this is the problem, of abstractions, kind of an epistemic and spiritual crisis. And it's a group effort, but everybody is gonna, at the end of the day be limited or held back by their own thinking and, the Intellectual Dark Web, Jordan Peterson types, they're a textbook example and reference to say, look, clearly they're educated, intelligent, but they're just getting things so wrong. So, so wrong. And I just want to grab people like that, you know, Peterson himself or a fan and be like, and be like, you're not thinking right, you're not abstracting, and it's just so clear cut in a case like Peterson because, so I use this term vicious abstraction, which comes from William James and, means a few things, but basically like you're leaving out a key ingredient of the abstraction, so if I say Marxism is X, Y, Z, and, which he does, but he's leaving out all the other letters, let's say, it's such an obvious case study, Peterson hasn't done any of the readings and yet he's, bloviating about what Marxism is and how it's a threat to academia and all that.
RJL: You're making me think of some of my early interactions with folks who just ate field of content nonstop. And one of the things that was often said to me in those conversations were things like—a lot of people who are in the rationalistic worldview, who also really like liberalism and reason, which to which I'm saying, it's not all wrong, there is value in it—they take that and they put it in contexts where it doesn't necessarily belong, or it's not necessarily the most effective solution. And one of the things that often gets said in that world, is something to the effect of, not being too certain.
The scientist ideally will speak from the perspective of we think we know that, or what we think we understand is that, right? It's epistemic humility is in couple words is what it is. One of the things that I'm often appalled by, frankly, in epistemic spaces is the arrogance of, I know,
BC: I'll interject here because I agree with you in a sense. I have a lot of epistemic humility, but some of the people I clash with the most really religiously adhere to that epistemic humility to the point of almost weaponized incompetence and like, Oh, nothing can be known. And it's actually a kind of postmodern relativism, at that point, or that's what it's approaching, which, yeah, I, would hope we know better by now, but so I think epistemic humility is a double-edged sword. Some of these people, promoting epistemic humility, as an ethos and as a praxis almost, and dominating some spaces, they're the people I clash with the most because I'll bring up some of the things I'm certain about, and they'll just wave the finger at me. Like I'm another one of these fake rational people who's overly certain about something. You know what I mean?
RJL: Yeah, it's the, well, it's the weaponization of the concept where instead of what it actually could be, this almost goes back to signifier and signified, use the term, and instead of allowing that to actually express itself as, hmm, let me try and understand where I don't understand things. The person actually walks in with a lack of epistemic humility, uses epistemic humility as a projection and then self-reinforces the idea based on their own epistemic insecurity.
BC: Yeah, and there's many ways that can be, deployed in a nasty sense. I think Peterson uses his own epistemic humility to, say that while Jesus may have been, or likely even, he believes that he was resurrected, if I say things that sound absolute, like, Zionism is wrong, you know, colonialism is, is wrong, even if you want to have a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons.
And yeah, I do think we're in this kind of end game or the beginning of the end of globalization. In which, debates are very tired, I find, and it's very frustrating because on a number of issues , I don't know how to say it other than there are some clear answers, and that doesn't mean they're complete, but they're clear, and there's a winner. They're often leftists and then that makes me a partisan so you know it's this kind of Kafka trap.
RJL: I wonder if there's a difference between certitude of expression versus arrogance, and I think it takes a lot of attunement in conversation to know what you want to step forward with and how, at any given time, and it's a tough one. People's structures of interpretation are often the way they are, and we can sometimes change them when sometimes we can't. The way that I tend to think about it is about probability, which to say, which one do I want to use in any particular instance? Do I want to be more fierce? Do I want to be more gentle or instead of a synthesis-antithesis relationship between ferociousness and gentleness because gentleness might be sometimes it's the best thing to do. Sometimes it's actually weak and ineffective, right? Ferocity is sometimes the best thing to do.
Other times it's going to backfire on you badly. There's a term that I've been floating around and I call it fierce grace and it's this, term that I use to describe this archetype, the psychological system that I teach. Fierce grace is what I see as the putting together of how to actually move the world forward. How much familiarity do you have with Hegel and the whole thesis antithesis synthesis?
Well, a lot of people say that that didn't come from Hegel [editor's note: it's actually from Fichte], it's related, but it may not be directly from his text. Interestingly, Hegel wrote a little article called, Who Abstracts or something like that. Or who thinks abstractly. That's my connection to someone like Hegel, right? Cause I'm going through the lineage of great thinkers, none of whom I would put full stock in, but they're also foundational if you're going to, do a PhD in any field.
RJL: You've taught me something new, which is maybe not Hegel and I might have to look into it. What I'm thinking about approach is instead of thinking of, ferocity on the one end and then being overly gracious on the other, which often is a boundaries thing, if one is a thesis, and one is an antithesis, fierce grace might be a synthesis.
Where I'm at constantly is what does that look like in our day and age where everything is complex, where things more often than not need to be confronted if there's going to be enough of a stimulus in the system for something to change. But how do we optimize that response so that whatever is put back into the system has the highest likelihood of transforming the system toward a result that we're actually interested in in the long term.
I think right now, like some of the comments you made around, for example, we're in one of the darker periods. I'm not saying it's because we did thesis or antithesis, but I'd be willing to bet that in some cases it might have been partially because we took one approach or the other instead of a combination of the two and a lot of what I'm interested in beyond, systems and politics and things as a coach is one of the things we talk about is, polarities in the psyche. And I feel like synthesis, I keep saying synthesis, because I love it. Thesis and antithesis, those two are their own poles, they work in their own polarity. And the synthesis is not just the integration point that allows for the resolution of polarity on a social level. But within the individual psyche, it's often what allows a person to be much more healthy, much more functional, and much more well integrated with the world.
These are things that people who have gone deep in social theory and or personal development psychology and evolutionary psychology recognize, but I'm definitely still looking for this to propagate as a real idea in the collective because there's a very, very small percent of the population that even knows about it.
And then even smaller set of the population that actually does the work to live like that.
BC: In terms of the dominant zeitgeist, speaking of Hegel and Marx, the world has been gaslit into thinking that capitalism is mostly good and communism is mostly evil and mostly dysfunctional. What you said there about, you wonder if certain choices going one way or the other, what difference that made historically—I think it made a huge difference. When you get into the minutiae and the details of history, of course, there's tons of little events happening, strikes and worker revolts and social uprisings and laws passing and things like this against capitalism's hegemony. We move the ball forward for humanity very slowly. And that's kind of what the tradition of Marxism is supposed to be.
But we've been brainwashed and gaslit to misunderstand world history, Western, History and systems insofar as our parents and our upbringing to some extent was defined by the Cold War. Right? We're still living in that kind of hangover, where, the unbridled market freedom has been celebrated and a lot of people, arguably most people, have accepted it and found some way to, work in it. But on the flip side, we can say most people, or a lot of people are in despair, they're struggling, they're poor. Even in developed Western countries there is a sense in which global wealth is rising, but the income and wealth gap is also increasing and it makes no sense to anybody.
Like it's not right. So if I was to put it under one big banner to contextualize it, it's because we have no explicit communism. You mentioned aesthetics. Our aesthetics of communism have been bleached, we don't even know what it is, And again, this is why I come back to leftist authors and certain books, like Inventing the Future and Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism. Cause most people are starting to reject capitalism in one way or another, and most people, majority of leftists already have known this for a while. But I think where we're at today, and in terms of, how do we steer a zeitgeist and public consciousness in the right direction, so there is some convergence at some point, It would have a lot to do with, getting literate in these, what feel like new areas again, like communism, sociology.
And also, when it comes to the scaling of it, it's, Very much a political problem, not a personal one, per se. That's really what's at stake. It's like, when can we, vote in the right direction and not only that have it compound. Because we're backsliding when we vote for the lesser evil or Trump or whatever, and you get Trump and, I can speculate too, if Bernie had been elected, it would have been great, but there would have been a lot of pushback, a lot of obstruction and the same underlying problems, right?
The anti-intellectualism, the poverty, the anti-government sentiments, the polarization, those same problems are there, so it's almost as if we do need some sort of like super. Candidate that can break those spells, if nothing else, the one thing I've been doing in metaspaces for the past seven to eight years is trying to not even telling people what to do, but encouraging them to be more politically and social theory literate. I'm not saying it's easy. It's hella confusing. But the more literate you get, the easier and the more comfortable it gets and you start to know who is an authentic voice advocating for peace and who is just a shill or or a pawn, because there's lots of those out there.
Yeah, so I kind of went on a communist path, rant, to like, you know, conclude the Hagel thread.
RJL: No worries. You know, neuroscience, they say it's all about building concepts in the brain. If you don't have a concept in the brain, you can't actually get to the next step. And a lot of actual learning science, I think, is based on, can you actually run an integral in calculus if you don't understand how to do algebra? Probably not. It's pretty unlikely.
BC: That's a very important point. Actually, if I could just say quickly, I don't have great math knowledge. And it would be very irresponsible for me to claim such right, especially let's say I could fake it. I could talk about it, but I couldn't actually do it. Terrence Howard might be in that kind of camp.
But who comes to mind is this, guy, James Lindsay, He has a PhD in math, so he is a math guy. I respect that. He's proven to his peers, he can do math, but his whole career now is anti Marxism. It's, It's, , making a stink about critical social justice and wokeness and his whole personality revolves around that now, in which he had no training and in which he has no serious peers.
It's all this, circus of cranks and grifters. So like stay in your lane kind of thing. Like I'm just, you know, just with math, that's a good point. I respect math infinitely more than he could ever respect sociology or Marxism, cause he's just straight up lying about it.
yeah, what I struggle with there a lot is when the training you have had becomes a stand in for an agenda that you have versus what could be considered a genuine pursuit of a thing for its own sake. So to me, the purest form of what could be a mathematical pursuit is, I really want to understand how things work, again, with that open mind.
And I'd be very excited by the things I find, but often what happens, I think in these spaces, especially, what I think often happens is you walk in. You use the math PhD as your marketing. And then people go, ah, this guy has a PhD in math.
The phenomenology is almost, a random person from whatever background feels insecure. Here's their PhD in math. He's there. Knowledge rescuer. Oh, he's saying these things. Oh, he must be correct. And that's the logic that it really often falls to, which I find frustrating because I think it's such a poor use of what otherwise could have been such a beautiful pursuit of teaching math, giving something, maybe doing something like Feynman did, giving a lot more to the world.
And then instead of doing that, you use all this stuff that you Might've worked really hard for, and I feel really sad when I think about this and sometimes a little angry, but there are people who build their entire careers on negative, and toxic emotions, fear, hatred, whatever.
And I don't know how people who are doing that,. Actually can sustain themselves because it might be financially lucrative. It might be that one very short term circuit in the brain, right?
That says, Yes, I got a hit. Someone agrees with me, but from a deeper level, it's really hard for me to imagine that a person who is spending that much energy on that actually, even personally, is living a life. that feels whole and where, if they weren't so materially comfortable or if, they didn't have all these, vulnerable and, easily influenced worshippers, , their life would crumble like that.
That's what I always think about is, what do these build their lives on? And often that kind of emotion or that kind hatred or disdain When it's not in good faith, when it's not additive, but it's subtractive and it's literally negative or negative, I can't imagine that the individual personal lives are going all that well, as much it look that way on the outside.
My mind's going in many different directions, but Where my mind is going, the Supreme court, right? How are their personal lives going? They've made it that far. With that prestige, with that wealth, with that education, and then they're carrying out a, anti scientific morally bankrupt political agenda of Trump or not just Trump.
Trump's a representative of the conservative agenda, right? Those are, , not. Type of grifters I was referring to with James Lindsay, who's an intellectual dark web kind of guy, but that's where my mind's going to that deeper level, because , first of all, there's millions. I mean, whose life is going well.
Like I can complain. There's these, pseudo intellectual public figures. Yeah. And how their lives are going, and then there's all the people who follow them, all the desperate young men or whatever, who are gravitating towards that type of discourse. There is a kind of parasitic back and forth relationship.
Doesn't help anybody in the end, Peterson and many others. It never ceases to surprise me when you start to see some of the numbers come out, the amount of money. In these fields, it's all conservative discourse. Let's call it, it's an industry. The size of the contracts for people like, what's his name? He actually did get divorced. His, life is falling apart a little bit. He's a guy who had like a $50 million deal with Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire.
The point I'm getting at is the numbers in terms of viewership is massive. The numbers in terms of. The money flows, whether it's right wing, dark money, or just people donating their money or buying the products like Peterson has a product line as well as a Patrion and so on.
You know, millions upon millions of dollars, and there is nothing like that equivalent on the left, on the political left, where organizing is actually happening, where philosophizing is actually happening. There's some kind of a vanguard and then the conservative. Bulwark, if you will, spend so little time actually investigating it.
They just see it as a big woke tsunami that, they want to ring the alarm. Wokeness was a good thing in my cultural upbringing. So I've never thought of it negatively. I totally understand where it hits this wall and that's the kind of the liminal, Membrane, if you will, of where it's you know, woke mind virus.
It's called, cultural Marxism and it's, oh yeah, all academics are left wing. And it just becomes this conspiracy talking point in this grift. And then sociologically that's preying on ordinary people, not good or bad one way or the other, but who are in some sort of despair and, PBS has been shut down and, the education system's being gutted, right?
So it's like society is doing it to itself.
I really appreciate your making this point because when stuff like that happens, and this thing that is actually complex and really interesting and useful gets flattened like that, in this Domping projection, those same desperate people who really could have benefited from additional ideas lose out on the opportunity to learn about it.
They lose out because if this person's not right, if my heroes somehow don't have the full picture, I'm really not safe, then I really don't know what I'll do. Whereas I would love for more people to come into the space of what else is there?
What could I be curious about? Can I keep this thing that, can I recognize what is actually happening in terms of the techniques that are being deployed, keep it at bay and so many people in this space talk about independent thinking. Let us. Actually talk about some independent which is, could I actually go in
and see what would happen?
But I think that often takes and this is what I often find people lack the most, which is an inner sense of strength and belief and self worth and self confidence. But if there was more that it would be easier to reach into these topics that someone says this is terrible and actually go in and go, Oh, I'm kind of curious.
And so it's there are two things for me here. One is, you made me think of this thing that Alan Watts said many years ago, about the radicalism of assimilating a new idea. And I wrote this very short article about it, he talks about how certain ideas that are really hard to get across are hard to get across, not because they're complicated per se, like the ideas behind a lot of, radical leftist politics.
Just as an example, are not actually that complicated per se, it's because they're unfamiliar and that's so frightening to
Yeah. And there's so many different types of intelligence, right? This is why I say, like, most people are just ignorant, but then they can still be very smart in other areas, practical things, whatever it may be.
It may even be like building computers. There is , obviously. , the tech bro problem and Elon Musk, and it's very tragic and it. Speaks to this, crisis of multiple intelligences and people just can't take criticism , or learn along those dimensions. I had thought early in the intellectual dark web days, I kind of knew it would spiral and blow up and become a big cash cow and kind of dominate public discourse. There's a lot of people out there debunking, making a name for themselves as debunkers of this or that pseudoscience or reactionary politics.
Going back to what I said about money, it's a grind and it seems like, It's easy to profit if you're on the wrong side of history, to put it crudely.
RJL: It's often much easier to race to the bottom of the brainstem when you're hitting the, parts that are most destructive to human flourishing, as opposed to, the better angels of our nature, right? If you could give even a segment of the population of these people that we were just talking about, a few more ounces of their own confidence and their own independent thinking, they would not be so vulnerable. And I'm always shocked and even flummoxed. As to why there's so much buy in to this way of doing things when there's this other way of doing things that actually is not as expensive, you'll actually spend less, you'll get more, and your life will actually change. I'm often Shocked that people choose not to do that, or at least don't try to do that, and it's funny because there are things in these spaces that have some truth to it, which is why I think some people buy into it, but I'm always surprised that they don't take that and go, what's really going on?
Like they can't see beyond the meta of what's being pushed onto their phones. And if they could take, for example, even the principle of 1 percent better, which in certain ways, depending on what is meant by that, I'm very supportive of. And they said, can I get even 1 percent better at my own metagame? What is my own metagame? And it's just always interesting that there's what could be done, and then there's actually what is done. And, over time how that gap gets bridged or what might change.
BC: Yeah, and I will say on that point, I feel very ineffective, and I've had to kind of accept and reconcile that. That's like a protective mechanism at the end of the day, because I still care about the outcome more than myself, and then it comes back to well, I got to take care of myself. How do I psychologically love myself? While still wanting to make a difference, I'm still trying to develop, but there is a cost to it.
Everything has costs, like even running a think tank, which is why it's in sleep mode and I still have a lot of unfinished stuff from the past. Just today again, I was butting heads with this person who, , said they would debate me like half a year ago and it still hasn't happened. I'm at my wits end with how to change that person's mind and how much time can I or should I invest? And full disclosure, right? At the end of the day, I'm just like, you know, what? Burn it all to the ground.
Tell these people how harmful they are and contributing to the meta crisis. I don't want to completely personalize it because it's really not. It's a very abstract, tenuous connection, right? It's not like this person is physically harming people out there, but they believe in Zionism and Zionism physically harms people so coming back to systems thinking, that's a system. You believe that dogma and it privileges your right over the other, whoever that other may be.
RJL: It creates a psychic petri dish for lack of better terms. Having those mindsets. Creates the conditions in which a thing such as the extermination of entire peoples can actually happen.
Whereas if you didn't have that, and you actually had a vector shift, you would have a very different outcome. And I can honor what you're saying about the difficulty of how much energy do I have to invest in this particular thing so that the larger system can shift because I'm part of the system. I have needs too. And there's a lot to think about for sure. Thank you.
BC: Yeah. And this is something I struggle with when it comes to the books. I put my content out there for free and it more or less got to the people who, Should have seen it. But then, a number of things happened and, momentum was captured. And I don't have enough feedback to know what's worth pursuing. I actually, I want to finish the books for my own sake, knowing full well, either a, I don't have a market, or B, if there's a market, I'd be swimming up current to get to it. Yeah, it's tough because I'm not out there doing sales but I'd have a book on metamodernism, a book on abstraction and, a book on, politics, let's say, left out of the other two—culture war, political economy, culture stuff. Yeah. Because you can group a lot of my writings into those three categories. In fact, the title for that one is A Theory of Conspiracy because that was something that has always intrigued me.
I never committed to anything fully, but there are definitely real conspiracies, right? And I'm not trying to, inflate or sensationalize conspiracy thinking, I'm less interested in crackpot tinfoil hat stuff and more interested in, how does racism persist in systemic racism? It's a kind of systemic conspiracy. This is actually the sociological way to think about it. So I thought it was fitting to, pursue that book idea and then, naturally a lot of case studies go in there, but also just culture war stuff, culture commentaries. Yeah, I wish I had this stuff done years ago, but—
RJL: Well, part of that is getting it out there, seeing what interest there is. In entrepreneurship, we sometimes talk about a presale, which is to say, sometimes you go out and you send signals. And you say, Hey, are you interested, you can show support by doing this. Business types would call it the value proposition, and in politics, it is about buying and selling, but it's a buying and selling of ideas. It's its own marketplace, so to speak. And I truly believe that a marketplace can extend beyond the very limited ways that capitalism has tried to describe markets.
Or at least, the disenchanted reductionary form of capitalism seems to have in terms of as far as imagination goes. You also have me thinking systemically, which is to say that if you were one person trying to do that, that would be a lot of work. And do I, am I up for this?
Do I want to do that? And this is part of why I think this space exists, not only so more people can hear about it, but also so that, People who are interested can be sent your way, so that it's much easier to write the books when people are giving you money because they want to see the books come along.
So can you tell us a little bit about the other two books and what those might be about?
BC: Yeah, basically the metamodernism one. It's the closest, to being done, but there's still an enormous amount of work. It's mostly my articles compiled and then some new stuff, which, which I wouldn't publish. I would just have in the book and, yeah, I figure it out later, getting to that finish line because I've written so many articles about this concept and that's not what I want to contribute necessarily. I want to be thought of contributing a book because that's what's already out there. So that would probably be. The first one and the other two abstraction there's still so much more research that could be done.
I don't even know how worth it. It is, what I've put out there is about half of a book's worth and the same goes for the theory of conspiracy. In one sense , the world is changing so fast, especially with AI, I got to mention that it's a big part of my thinking, a part of my research.
But at the same time, I don't know, necessarily what to write. Before I forget, there's one thing I want to mention. Because you mentioned that, Lincoln quote, the better angels, of our nature.
It made me think of Steven Pinker because that's the title of his book. And I just recently, saw a clip of him talking about Israel in a pro-Israel sense. And it's just par for the course. But it's just so upsetting to me. So unnecessary that he's this prolific guy. He's got all the accolades you could imagine. And he can't take criticism. He can't open his mind on certain topics. So he gravitates towards that anti woke kind of culture, like, oh, we can't make jokes anymore. And that kind of, bemoaning and
RJL: Was the Lincoln phrase co opted and used for that context, or what's the connection?
BC: The title of one of his books is The Better Angels of Our Nature. It's part of his thesis that the world's always getting better.
RJL: It's a very convenient narrative that feels good to buy into and also very convenient narrative that can be used to look away from things. And if I this is the challenge of describing thought if you look quote unquote objectively at certain things, yes, the world does make progress in a certain direction.
However, my response to Pinker based on what I've heard as a whole is it doesn't then follow that all the other stuff is just moot because all in service to this grand narrative of progress, which, by the way, anyone who's actually studied meta theory long enough knows that that grand narrative of progress is what drives modernity in a single direction, which is now taking civilization pretty much off a cliff.
We're already past the cliff. And so it's this very convenient thing where a person who wants to see that depending on where they are developmentally and in their story. I support the progress narrative for what it might mean for that person in a certain way, in a certain context. But way too often that thing gets taken to mean, so all this other stuff doesn't matter.
So this is wrong. So you can't make jokes anymore. And it's you can even make a legitimate criticism of the shadows of postmodernism. But The usage of that phrase in that context doesn't even get to the core issue, it deflects its own issue, and what it's doing is it's revealing its own discomfort, which is, this is what you see from I've met a lot of smart people, people from Harvard, people who have all these credentials, and they can't get these basic things down.
And I think that says a lot about where we are. Are it's not to say that there's nothing to what they can contribute, but it says a lot about where we are as a whole, as a system, the world is becoming topsy turvy. Whenever we evolve, whenever society is evolving, you flip from one ethos to another. That's the nature of dialectical process as far as I see it.
BC: Yeah. You know, I find myself wondering sort of in vain, Speaking of Pinker, like, when is he going to change? What's it going to take? Cause I've written about metanoia and epiphanies and stuff and critical thinking. I'm looking at people always trying to figure out whether it's Peterson or Pinker or whoever, because clearly they are capable, they have the aptitude, but it's like they're too far gone, if I can put it that way.
RJL: You've invested all of your intelligence all of your brilliance and all the things I actually really appreciate into things that may not necessarily serve life at all, not even your tribe per se, it just doesn't serve the whole and that's where I always find myself feeling sad and disappointed and even angry. What a waste when we could have people that brilliant apply themselves in a different direction. Can you imagine? That's what I think a lot of the time. I feel like we've covered a lot of good ground.
BC: Yeah. There's definitely avenues that were opened. There's a lot of very smart people out there, and I'd love to see them network even more and make breakthroughs together and maybe even especially people like yourself who are ongoing professionals whether you're helping people or you're teaching something or kind of deploying something like you recognize the need for it to be done in groups and in tandem and, a lot of my ideas. One going back a few years is consensus building. I learned so much researching and writing about that. People are pessimistic about it, but it actually works better than you'd expect. And. It actually is most practical and necessary in times of uncertainty and, crises of authority.
And yet everybody's tiptoeing and being epistemically humble. Instead of, doing the work for lack of a better phrase.
RJL: Where can people learn more about you if they want to learn more about your work, if they want to support you, if they want to, throw some money your way, if they want to give feedback on scholarship or other work you're doing?
BC: It all goes through The Abs-Tract Organization, abs-tract.org. The website's not really got any info on it now, but it looks way cooler than it used to. Twitter, Facebook, I'm me. Patreon, I think it's just patreon.com/abs-tract, and there's also, abstract org, Facebook group and YouTube channel, but none of it's really active, The works out there, I'm grateful for people like yourself and others that engage me because you've said lots of interesting things and it makes me think on my feet and hopefully there, we have listeners too, like it's always been a tough sell, very few of these nuanced discussions have really broken out. I would love some of it to go mainstream.
So yeah, there's definitely more conversation to be had about not just the metacrisis, but metacrisis discourse. I've always been a kind of critic and interventionist cause we're going through it. You know? There's no getting off this ride. It's literally like you're a millennial, right? I assume maybe, a younger millennial. This is our lives and it's really, you know, the expression. It's an interesting time to be alive. Right? Like, Holy shit. Is it ever?
RJL: Took the words from my mouth. If we want to, be present to the world that's here now, we have to grow our ability to handle complexity, and that requires higher orders of intelligence, a deeper level of nobility and, a willingness to really confront all of it: all the stuff that we want to sweep under the rug, push down into the subconscious.
It is a transfiguration process, and a transfiguration process necessitates a kind of ego death and no one likes to do that, except those who have actually gone through it and gone, "Wow. I'm so glad I did that." Because you don't have a resurrection unless you go through your own psychic crucifixion, in order for it to transfigure in order for the beauty to come through. A lot of these people who are, these whole industries that you speak of, it's like you never really get to the solution. You keep people on loop, you're 40 years in the desert.
Well, no wonder. It could take two months. In two months, you can do a lot of work and many people spend two decades getting nowhere because of the choices that they make. So I'm eternally fascinated by this, and I'm always hopeful that more people will say, maybe I will try something different. Maybe I will really give thought to a different way of doing things. That's really my hope.
BC: That's all really beautiful. And I like that you're at the end here, raising the stakes to self-sacrifice and eschatology, cause yeah, that's where it all synthesizes for me too. And where my thoughts were going, where my feelings were going, as you were saying that, because it's very graphic, right? Crucifixion, which the Romans did, but also, to put it bluntly where my mind went, cause I've written about this as well, but like self-immolation. Because that's still happening quite a bit. I think the third person to do it just like a few days ago or a week ago, at an Israeli embassy, I think, I might be missing some details, but they're of sound mind.
They know what they're doing. I don't want to do it, but that's where my heart is. That's where I think and feel because they are the realest people, right? So I want to end on that note. Good abstraction is about getting real, being reality-literate, politically and scientifically literate and engaged, but then that presence of being real or that action of being real, you dedicate your life to a cause and it's not going anywhere. So you're like, "okay, I'm going to escalate." I'm not saying we should all go and do that, but we need to just be getting real because there's other choices. And we can and should do those things figuratively try to save each other, and actually go through this transfiguration, as you say.
RJL: Yeah. I was going to say earlier, you could put that on a shirt, and if you wanted, whenever we set up our shirt business, we could make one for you if you don't want to do it yourself. Something along the lines of good abstraction is getting real or something like that. I think it explains well actually what you do around abstraction, but also sociology, and I think there's something beautiful to that. So with that, Brent, thank you for being here. It's been a pleasure and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
BC: Awesome. Thanks, Rayner, and good job.
