Diagnosing the Metacrisis: Reality & Meaning in Modern Life | Iain McGilchrist

25:56Demetri Kofinas:If they don't run certain tests. So they run as many tests. They run as many tests as possible, even if they're wasteful, unnecessary, and might even, in some cases, if they're invasive, cause some harm. So they'd rather do them than not. And this is everyone covering their back. And this has a huge dark side, which is that the relationships with a doctor changes, what a doctor thinks of himself as doing changes. And the relationship, again, is a more pugnacious relationship. I mean, it's arguable that patients perhaps trusted their doctors too much. But if you don't really trust your doctor, then it's not a working relationship.

26:35so we've ingress of commerce on a very large scale insurance companies dictating protocols this is not so true in Britain yet but it's certainly very true in the US and the further enlargement and entrenchment of litigation as part of the culture these I think have pushed it but it's also that doctors themselves have been taught to think of themselves and their patients as machines. And so we've now got a very clever machine that can diagnose the machine. And in doing this, the whole human side of it has been driven out. I'd just like to mention, for the sake of viewers who might be interested in more of this, I think it was last year at Duke, I did the MacArthur, I think was the name of the lecture.

27:24It's an annual lecture on the problem of medicine and the humanities.

27:30Demetri Kofinas:Interesting. I'd love for you to send that to me after this conversation is over, Ian, and I could include it in the intelligence report. We just got through Thanksgiving last week in the United States or a couple of weeks ago. And so I had an opportunity to be with family. And I was asking both my uncle, well, I was actually saying to both of them, I just don't understand why someone hasn't written a book, why there isn't one book out there that clearly explains and diagnoses the problem in medicine today and how to fix it. And they had a cynical response as to why that hasn't happened. But one area where this also, I think, has produced very negative outcomes is on the side of the physicians.

28:10Demetri Kofinas:So, less competent, smart, interesting, thoughtful people are willing to go into medicine to begin with today because of how miserable the profession has become. And it's become harder to be in private practice. We actually sat down and did a mathematical computation of what it costs to spin up a medical practice. Granted, this is New York City. We were looking at the cost of doing it in New York and estimating what it would cost to actually run an office, a single person office for an internist, a general practitioner. And it's just not feasible. It's not feasible given what the insurances pay, the deductibles.

28:44Demetri Kofinas:And increasingly, patients themselves can't even afford the deductibles. You're paying for an insurance and then you can't even afford the deductibles on the insurance. So what exactly are you paying for? I mean, the entire system is broken and we can't seem to fix it, which also seems to be in some sense a symptom of a society that is sort of stuck in the inertia of too much left brain thinking. Well, exactly. And people talk about the polycrisis because that is a very good example you've just given. Can you explain what that is, the polycrisis? Well, it means we seem to have a lot of things that are not working.

29:18One of them might be the medical system. One of them might be the educational system. One might be even the democratic system. One might be the dispoliation of nature, the destruction of forests and the poisoning of the seas, and so on and so forth. There are a whole range of things that seem to be going wrong. And I reject the word polycrisis because it makes it sound like they're different crises that happen to come together. I prefer the term matter crisis, because there is a crisis at another level that underwrites or if you like oversees, it doesn't matter, but it comprehends the whole lot of them.

29:56And that is best summarized for me as the complete inability any longer to listen to what the right hemisphere is telling us and working only on left hemisphere type schemas. It's not a surprise that it's all going wrong. It will inevitably go wrong if that is the way you go. And let me just put a gloss on that from a neuroscience point of view. So in the first part of the matter with things, I look at what the different contributions of the two hemispheres are to the various ways in which we can get to know anything about the world. So I'm talking here about what I call the portals, whereby news about the world comes to us.

30:36And they are attention, perception, judgments that we make on the basis of what we've attended to and what we've perceived, emotional and social intelligence, our cognitive intelligence, good old-fashioned IQ, our ability to think flexibly, a sort of form of creativity. And on all of these, the right hemisphere is superior to the left, measurably superior to the left on all of them. So it is more intelligent. It understands more. It attends better. It sees more. It makes more sense out of what it sees. And therefore, it is a disaster if the left hemisphere becomes the one that calls the shots.

31:13And this has been intuitively realized all around the world. So in China, Japan, Korea, India, in parts of the First Nation peoples in North America, all over the place, people have myths of the being a wise ruler and an intemperate second in command who thinks he knows better and thinks he knows everything. And who therefore usurps the one that has the wise oversight. And as a result, everything falls down. This is the story encapsulated in the title, The Master and His Emissary, because the master is the right hemisphere. The emissary is the left hemisphere. And the word emissary is quite good in a way, because it suggests somebody who goes off on an errand.

31:58You send them off to do a certain task and then report back. And that's just what the left hemisphere should do. And when the two hemispheres are working together, it does a very nice job. And at moments when civilization has really flourished, such as the 6th century BC in Athens, around the year zero in Rome, and perhaps around the 15th, 14th, 15th century in Western Europe, particularly in Italy and France, the Renaissance, then they worked very well together and everything flourished. Sciences flourished, the arts flourished, government flourished, mapping the oceans, mapping the heavens, the sciences.

32:35Everything took great steps forward in a humane philosophy. And yet now we are in a thoroughly inhumane, machine-led philosophy in which we find all these things are beginning to fail. Even science is less imaginative than it used to be. This is very well recognized. up until about the 60s and 70s. There were, for at least the previous 50 years, from about 1910 to 1970, there were a lot of Nobel Prizes in science awarded for magnificent steps forward in our understanding. But since then, there's been hardly a thing, because what we've gone on doing is digging deeper in the same hole without being able to take an overview.

33:19In other words, it's very good to dig in a hole, but from time to time, you have to come up and look at the terrain and see where it is in relation to everything else that you're doing that digging. This is the problem. The right hemisphere sees the broad context and the left doesn't. And I have to explain why that's so important because you said, what do you mean by relations come? Well, you said words to the effect of what you wanted me to explain why I say relations are primary. Because there can't be a thing to relate until the relations have done their work, if you like to put it that way.

33:52So the left-hand is to think, well, obviously there's a thing here and a thing there, and I want to know how they relate. That makes sense. The things come first, the relations come after. But what that neglects is that the thing that you have fixed on is only that thing that it is because of the vast network of connections in which it stands. We don't understand how context changes everything. Hmm. So there's a question I want to ask you that came to me while you were answering part

34:23Demetri Kofinas:of the previous question, and that has to do with the relationship between one's age and one's tendency to think in a more left or right hemispherically dominated manner. Do people who are younger, when I say younger, I don't mean children, because my guess would be that young children tend to be more right brain dominated. But again, I want you to, after I'm finished, giving you my impression. I would love for you to tell me what you think. My sense is that when I look at my young boy, he's 15 months old. I feel like that so much of how he interfaces with the world is in the lived experience of the world.

34:58Demetri Kofinas:He hasn't schematized it yet. He's beginning to, obviously. He's in the process of doing that, but he still is dealing largely with raw experience. Yes. And then it seems to me that when we get to be young adults, we have already constructed pretty rigid schemas of the world. And we also tend to see things simplistically. That's when I think in your 20s is when you're, or in your teenage years, you tend to see things very, in terms of black and white. And then with age comes wisdom and the ability to see nuance. And so I'm curious, is that true? So you would agree with that, that there is a tendency on average for people of certain ages?

35:39Demetri Kofinas:Interesting. Tell me more about that. I do, but I'm not sure that I want to make it just a story about hemisphere preferences, if you like. I think it is certainly true that in the first perhaps three years of life, two and a half, three years of life, the infant is much more, or the young child is much more dependent on the right hemisphere. and then at four and five when language becomes very prominent the left hemisphere becomes perhaps dominant for a while and then there's a rather good fallow period in which these work together up until puberty really and I don't know if you've noticed I think most people have that children in that sort of golden period between about five and eleven or twelve can write extraordinarily good poetry.

36:29But when they become adolescents, they suddenly become terribly self-conscious about it all. And they write terribly poetic poetry, which frankly is not terribly good. They also become suddenly aware of the shapes of things. And they say, oh, I see. So you're all wrong when you say so-and-so because I can see. So they haven't enough experience to realize that there is the world is enormously complex and there's much that is good that can be said for things that you're currently dismissing and there's much that is bad that may come of things that you're currently intent on promoting so in that sense i think what happens is that as we say life knocks the corners off because it makes you realize how little you do know.

37:16And this is partly an aspect of simply acquiring more experience. So that is straightforward. Unfortunately, I think that as one gets into older age, there is a tendency, I don't know how robust it is, but it has been mentioned that we become more left hemisphere dominated, which may be that the old schemata return, and we're not so flexible in our thinking. Because one very important difference between the left and right, which I think I've mentioned, is that the left hemisphere tends to be dogmatic. It tends to be stuck in set. It won't move on. Whereas the left hemisphere is always saying, well, it might be different.

37:54And in fact, Ramachandran, BS Ramachandran, a well-known neuroscientist, says the right hemisphere is the devil's advocate. So I think it's very important that we listen to the devil's advocate.

38:06Demetri Kofinas:So Ian, what explains what appears to be a decline in wisdom in the world today? Again, I don't know if you would agree with that. Big question. I would agree with it very definitely. I sometimes think that if there is a future people to look back on us, they will consider us the most foolish people that ever lived. But there we are. And unfortunately, we also have far greater power to destroy the world and ourselves than we ever had before. So there's something cheerful to contemplate. What is that about? And how cross-cultural is it? I mean, how much of that reflects a process that's underway in the West, but isn't necessarily the case in other countries or cultures?

38:46Well, you're absolutely right to point to that. But unfortunately, the almost unstoppable advance of Western ways of thinking and Western technology into just about everywhere in the world is rendering what I always used to think unfeasible. unfeasible. And what was it that I always used to think, well, if this civilization doesn't work, we will have the East to learn from. But the East is now, at least in parts of it, a sort of ghastly parody of all the worst things about the West. I think that deep down, there are perceptions, there are memories of ways of thinking and being that are much wiser.

39:28I have hope that people will get fed up with the, both in the West and in the East, with the way of thinking and being that we have brought about in society. And there will be a move to rediscover those ancient wisdoms. And it will demand of others something very difficult to do, which is when you've got luxury and you've got ease, giving up that ease and giving up that luxury. And I'm not a perfect example of this. If people came along and said, no, you've got to do without all these. I don't have a lot of electrical or electronic devices, apart from being able to keep in touch with the Internet.

40:07But nonetheless, I would be unwilling. So I think it will take things coming to quite a pass before we see that actually we have to stop living like this. There are people who are already doing that. But to get back to wisdom, one of the problems with wisdom is that it's not the end point of a series of logical steps. There is no algorithm or procedure or set of rules about how you do it. In fact, the one rule is the one that comes out of Zen, which is there are no rules. And so you're left kind of having to intuit things. Now, that is a very healthful thing in the modern world. is we've been taught to disattend to our intuitions.

40:55And one of the reasons we're in such a mess is, I believe, because we no longer listen to experience, to what it tells us, and listen to our intuitions about it, and our imagination of how we can get back to something valuable that we've lost. Not by going backwards in time, that can't be done, but by seeing the things that before were important, and finding them again in a new way, in a new context. If you think about the Renaissance, which is the start of the rise of the whole story of the modern civilization of the West, it came from looking back and thinking, oh, well, we need to rediscover wisdoms that people had before that we have lost.

41:33And by reincorporating them, there was a wonderful golden period when things thrived in an almost extraordinary way, in an almost hitherto unseen way in the world. And it's just very sad that this got derailed into a single track vision that everything can be answered by reason. Now, immediately I've got to say that I am a great believer in reason, because otherwise people will say, oh, you know, of course I believe in reason. but listen to me reason can't answer everything there's lots of our experience that is beyond what reason can helpfully explain to us and the same is true of science science is a wonderful thing and i spend half my time offending it against people who don't want to listen to its findings because they don't fit their particular philosophy but that is not good enough we do need to listen to science but we also good scientists know this that we can't answer all our questions with science.

42:33Science is a technique which is very useful in places.

42:36Demetri Kofinas:Nor can it provide meaning. Nor can it provide meaning, purpose or value, because it starts from a standpoint that we're not going to suppose a meaning, a purpose or a value. And now we're going to see what we can find out about the mechanism. And that's been incredibly successful. So don't let me be thought of as somebody who is ungrateful for the advances of science from which we've all benefited. But But yeah, we now find ourselves in a crisis where not only do we have no sense of purpose or values, but we believe entirely wrongly that science says that it has discovered there is no purpose and there are no values.

43:12Science can discover no such thing. It's not equipped to do so. It's already ruled them out at the outset.

43:19Demetri Kofinas:But also that speaks to something else you alluded to earlier, which is that science has gone from being seen as a discipline, a modality, a way of approaching the world to an authority. Science says XYZ. And we saw this of course during the COVID-19 pandemic. We certainly did. Among other places. And it's worth pointing out for people who don't know this, that the word science, meaning what we now mean, was only adopted in 1830. I mean, the plenty of science went on, but it was called natural philosophy. And the importance of that is that philosophy rarely gets so sure of itself that it thinks that there can't be any other way of seeing things, and that it is about using a philosophical approach to nature.

44:04Unfortunately, science can't work without a philosophy. And if it thinks it can, it's just working with an unexamined philosophy And that unexamined philosophy is scientific reductivism and it's very damaging.

44:17Demetri Kofinas:So speaking of creature comforts, which we spoke a little bit about earlier, I had your friend Paul Kingsnorth on the podcast some months ago. Oh, good. And as you know, he, among other things, makes his own manure. Yes. So I actually, when I was both preparing for the conversation and then speaking with him, I was actively thinking about whether or not I'd actually be willing to engage in that kind of lifestyle. And I wouldn't. In fact, after our time together in Italy, I spent some time up in a farm in Vermont where the person who had purchased it had built it so that it could be basically self-sufficient.

44:58Demetri Kofinas:No solar panels or anything like that because they would require servicing in the event of supply chain disruptions. There were cows on the property that could plow the fields, et cetera. And the reality is that's just a bridge too far for me. I'm not prepared because I also like intellectualizing. I like spending my days thinking about concepts and being in conversations. And therefore, I require and need someone else to do all that heavy lifting for me. I agree with you, but then Paul McKinsey seems to square the circle. He does. Yes, he does. Although Paul, I think if you asked Paul, he would probably say, you probably have had this conversation with him.

45:37Demetri Kofinas:He would probably say that the medieval period was a better time for people than the modern age. In other words, that he would prefer to live in that period of Christendom than the modern era. Well, yes, that's another matter. Yes, historians of science and society on this topic that we have been deliberately told that life in the past was unspeakably harsh and people had no time for anything that really mattered. But that is absolutely not true. They had more leisure than we have now, even the peasants, because there was, especially in the winter, and there were a few, I mean, I've stayed on a friend's subsistence farm in Wales in the past, where indeed we made our own manure and did everything by hand and so on.

46:23And I could see how it fitted actually rather well with a lifestyle of thought and contemplation. And he admitted that there were two times in the year that were extremely busy. One was harvest and the other was lambing time. And during those times, they had little rest or peace. But during those times, the community all pulled together to help one another.

46:43Demetri Kofinas:Are you familiar with Joshua Shrai, Ian? I may have mentioned him to you in person. Joshua? Joshua Shrai. He's the founder of the Emerald Podcast, and he also has developed a course. I think he calls it the Mythic Body. Anyway, he does some very unique work, and I had him on the podcast, I don't know, what was it? Maybe a year ago or so, after he published an episode titled, so you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers or in the age of mythic AI. And he most recently put out an episode, which again, I recommend The Emerald. People should check it out. It's very different. It's poetic.

47:22It's lyrical.

47:24Demetri Kofinas:That's sort of what it is. It's like a two hour lyrical poem. And the most recent one was called Carry That Weight on Mythic Burdens and Cosmic Supports. And he talks about how we tend to believe that we've been unweighed by the burdens of tradition, and in some sense we have. I mean, there are certain traditions that weigh heavily on people and also communal expectations that weigh heavily on people and our ability in some cases to unburden ourselves of those burdens has allowed us to live more authentic lives. That at the same time, we also labor under the illusion that we can carry all the burdens of the world on our own shoulders, on our own individual shoulders.

48:05Demetri Kofinas:And I think that in the past, we were much more attuned to the forms of not just communal support, but also in a world that wasn't electrified, we lived by the rising and falling of the sun and we were more exposed to the elements of the seasons. And there was a sense of living in the world. We lived more in the world than we were today, which is sort of outside the world. And so much of the world that we live in is a construction of the left hemisphere. It is the streets, the roads, the fiber optic networks, the graphical user interfaces that we use to interface with each other. The question that I've had in my mind that I want to ask you, Ian, is, so we've talked a lot about the problems that we have diagnosed in the world, but it also does seem to me that there are many people that are seeking out folks like you, folks like Paul and others, Joshua Shrai.

48:59Demetri Kofinas:You're on the receiving end of these requests. Do you feel like an awareness is growing and has been growing for some time? Do you see a change in the world? Are people seeking you out more and more? And if so, what is the common element that you find? What do people who seek you out and who seek out your compatriots, what do they share in common, attitudinally and otherwise? Well, of course, you're asking me to generalize rather wildly, but I think that there are common threads. One is the feeling of having been sold short, so that they have been told that the world is so and so, and they find it not to be, and they just can't believe this.

49:42they miss things that used to be taken as read because there was a cultural handing on of wisdom from generation to generation which you mentioned as tradition and of course what we don't understand is that tradition evolves it means the handing to somebody of something handing over or something And it would be stupid to have spent all your life acquiring a degree of a kind of wisdom from experience and not hand it on. The idea that everybody has to invent it for themselves from the word go, assuming they're as intelligent as all the people that lived before them, is ridiculous. And there's nothing wrong with the tradition.

50:26It does not mean ossification. It means a continuous flow. And that flow changes. So tradition always changes. So when you come to look at the history of the West since 1300, you'll find that just about every 50 or 100 years, certainly, the zeitgeist was different. Things had changed. Lots of things changed in all aspects of life. So although that was a tradition, it wasn't an ossification. So we're wrong to have got rid of that tradition since about 1910. We've spent a lot of time attacking it, breaking it up, ironizing it, rubbishing it. And the same with religion, which is another kind of handed on wisdom about how the world works.

51:08And they found themselves suddenly stranded with all the toolkits having been stolen or thrown away or burnt. And they're looking for the toolkits that will enable them to understand where they are and what they're doing there. I mean, it's literally as basic as that. And I'm very, very heartened by the reactions of particularly young people when I go and talk who come and ask me afterwards, you know, that's so interesting to hear and what can we do about it and so on. Of course, I haven't got all the answers to those questions, but I can help point people in certain directions and I can say something about that if you like.

51:45Demetri Kofinas:But do you find that there are more young people coming to you today than there were, say, 10 years ago? Yeah, definitely. And I think also, and I don't think this is just my experience, in fact, it's mainly things I gather from more general reports, is that churches, their attendance is burgeoning. And it's largely young people who are seeking something that has been wrongly taken away from them. And they need to recover it for the health of them and for the health of the society that they belong to. So I feel very strongly about that. And I do feel that it's strange that at the same time we know so little about our own history.

52:26That's almost been, again, one of these ludicrous political things where it's all terrible and the West is something we can only be ashamed of. Look, excuse me, if you know anything about world history, if you're talking about slavery, every civilization in the history of the world has had slaves. there is one civilization that actually abolished slavery voluntarily at its own cost its own financial cost and that was british culture which decided this was not a good thing for a civilization and the other bits in the scale are not talked about about you know the whole idea of democracy of humanity you know comes the way we think of it comes out of a western tradition and it's very, very rich in its art, in its literature, in its music, and in aspects of the religion that it has brought forth.

53:24And I'm not saying it's the only one or the only civilization or the only anything. We're not in this stupid, it's got to be all this or all that mode of talking. I'm saying this is something that needs to be thought about in a balanced way. But if you are not taught about your history and you don't know your own literature and poetry and the works of Shakespeare and you don't know some of the history and you haven't been taught how to argue on both sides of a question, you leave school as frankly uneducated. Yes, you may know a lot of tech, but you haven't got an education and none of the tech means anything, anything at all, unless you've got a coherent context into which to sit it.

54:05You know, context literally means the weaving together and it is that weaving together of relations that makes a world and we are unweaving it we're destroying it we're rending the web sometimes refer to this image in the Vedanta of Indra Indra's web do you know that Indra was an Indian god I'm familiar with Indra he cast a web over the world and that web was a net and at every crossing point in the net after all a net is only connections there are no things there It's just a mass of connections. And at every point where the threads cross, there was suspended a jewel. And in every jewel, all the other jewels in the net were image.

54:47This is a wonderful image of differentiation with integration, without damaging the integrity of the whole. That there are different levels within a whole that they are what one might call a wholearchy, different levels of a whole on.

55:03Demetri Kofinas:You know, I was wondering when we're talking about young people being especially drawn to religion these days, I've seen this as well. How much of this has to do with the economic challenges that they face and the greater difficulty in climbing the economic ladder today for young people, as opposed to, let's say, when I was younger or when my parents were younger, that the promise of self-actualization is breaking down in the modern capitalist West. And so, the reaction is to look elsewhere for ways to sort of find meaning in life. Do you think that's sort of part of what's happening here? Yes.

55:40I think there's an interesting coming together of two things here, which is the whole idea of self-actualization has been oversold. And at the same time, we've ensured that it's harder to do.

55:52Demetri Kofinas:And a specific type of self-actualization, self-actualization in the marketplace, self-actualization through the progression of one's career and the accumulation of capital and material wealth. Well, yes, but of course, that whole idea, even though I've been used to hearing that for a long time, strikes me as different from what I'm thinking of, which is there is two things. There is your self-actualization as a scientist, as a doctor, as a teacher, as a lawyer, as a policeman, as a whatever. These are things that you feel are calling to do and you really like to do them. But they are not done for wealth, or at least they shouldn't be.

56:36I mean, I'm afraid nowadays a lot of them are. But it's not about the accumulation of capital. It's not about a marketplace. It's about the fabric of a society. The whole idea that a doctor provides a commodity in a market is an appalling idea to me. I mean, that's part of the breakdown of the idea of a cohesive society in which we are held together by duties, by obligations which come from affect, from knowing that there are things that are important here and that you can up to a point trust somebody. But by emphasizing only one thing, which is the bottom line, trust breaks down. And, you know, that is the source of so much that's gone wrong in that very world.

57:17I sometimes refer to the fact that in the 80s, a number of very large corporations which were thriving were taken over by big international conglomerates. And the men in suits called the shots and said, we're only going to care about the bottom line. And as a result, those organizations went belly up. and the reason they did was they stopped caring about their customers and the fact that they were there to actually do and take some pride and pleasure in doing a bloody good job and instead once you say it's only about money well nobody has any incentive frankly i mean because the idea that we do things only for money is quite wrong we do them for other reasons a perfectly good example is if a friend says oh gosh i'm struggling to change this wheel can you help me i will say absolutely and give him a hand but if he says will you help me change my tire i'll give you five pounds i'll say but hang on what's that about you know it's actually disincentive there are many things that we wish to do because they're good to do we must get back to a vision of ourselves as not greedy narcissistic atomistic individuals who only desire things we feel we're entitled to

58:34Demetri Kofinas:Well, I totally agree with this. And I also think that part of the story involves the encroachment of capitalism onto more and more parts of our lives. I remember when in New York City cabs, I don't think this is the case in London. I mean, I've ridden in black cabs all the time, but I just can't remember now if I've actually ever seen anything like this. But I remember when years ago, this was more than 10 years ago, New York City cabs introduced screens into the back of the cap. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. And it was such an obscene and obtrusive presence when it first showed up. And it remains to this day, but I think that's a great example.

59:17Demetri Kofinas:I can come up with other examples as well, the way in which sports has been monetized, the way in which professional athletes monetize their celebrity. But this is a great example because from the perspective of a capitalist, and when I use the term capitalist, I don't mean this in the sort of way that we traditionally think of the dichotomy between capitalists and communists and in any political sense. I just simply mean the person operating with a framework for the maximization of profit. From that perspective, leaving any spaces empty that could otherwise be used to advertise and promote a good is an inefficient use of space.

59:55Demetri Kofinas:And again, this concepts of efficiency and also viewing ourselves increasingly as machines is, I think, a feature of modernity. Absolutely. And my first question when I get in the cab in New York is switch this thing off or how do I switch it off? But your point is absolutely right. That it's like the encroachment of advertising onto every platform. and it's a kind of blackmail because if you pay them they will take the advertising off but you have to pay them to get rid of the advertising and of course what the advertising is doing is is treating you as a machine that if i press these buttons you will respond by spewing out cash and and you know we're therefore you know walking cash machines that are being raided by these techniques.

1:00:48Just to get away from that, let's go back to self-actualization for a moment, because very few people actually have an idea of who they are, and even less nowadays, and who they want to be. But there is a kind of thing in which you decide that what you would like to do is you would like to be a good whatever it is. As I say, in my case, a good teacher and then a good doctor. Okay, so that's fine. And I never, never saw it as a way of making a lot of money. And I'd have been a fool if I had thought of it, certainly the teaching. But these things are themselves fulfilling. And instead of seeing that there are roles in society that you can take, that society is like an unfolding drama with a plot and characters, and you can play certain parts in it.

1:01:43I'm now thinking of Much Ado About Nothing and Jake would speak about the ages of man, but you know. That is a different way of thinking. And when one talks about the difficulties of getting into these things, I think back of my grandfathers. My two grandfathers were both the seventh of seven children. and in both cases their father died by the time they were eight or nine and in those days there was very little provision for widows equally there was very little that you could get in the way of grant to get education but each of them went ahead and one of them trained in medicine at edinburgh and the other one got a degree in chemistry in manchester and they did this by doing all kinds of other things.

1:02:29So I know that my maternal grandfather worked days and studied nights or whichever way around it was for most of the time. And I know there are plenty of people who do supplement their work with these things, but in a way we've got slightly softer. We expect that everything will be given to us by the state. And that's not a healthy state of affairs in itself.

1:02:51Demetri Kofinas:Is it also fair to say that the kind of self-actualization that you and I value necessarily comes within a broader community. That in other words, it's not an isolated process. And I think also, is it also fair to say that it comes, the mechanism through which this operates is being in service to others? A hundred percent. And what people have been blinded to is that just thinking about yourself and getting stuff for yourself makes you restless, gloomy, and constantly unfulfilled. And, you know, one of the things that if, I mean, of course, there are people who are depressed and are far too ill to do this.

1:03:34I understand that very, very well. But for some people who are not so badly depressed that they couldn't actually motivate themselves to do some little work as a service for other people, if they do that, it does probably as much for them as any antidepressant they begin to feel already that they matter and the business of giving to people is actually in itself enjoyable so I mean I don't want to sound pie here but one has to realize that these things all work both ways they're good for others and they're good for you so I mean at school we were always taught to forgive people and to be grateful to people.

1:04:14And the way it came across was that this is about doing something purely for others. But in fact, it's doing something for yourself. Actually, if you don't forgive people, it eats you up much more than it does anything about the other person. If you don't have gratitude, then you don't appreciate the things that you have. And so these things are actually things that have to be purposed for another, but do something for yourself. Of course, doing them for yourself is not a good reason. It's rather like when people ask, well, what should we do to clear our minds of all this left hemisphere junk?

1:04:48And I say, well, of course, you can practice mindfulness. But if you do it in order to make yourself a more efficient stockbroker, that is not the reason for doing mindfulness. And it's like the Zen problem. What do I do to become wise? And they'll tell you some completely absurd thing because what they want to say is there is no path to this except by self-forgetting. Now, one of the reasons we're not wise nowadays is that we think that doing is more important than abstaining from doing, that thinking is more important than abstaining from thinking, sometimes. So ignorance is not the same as the unknowing that a wise Zen master has.

1:05:27Unknowing is what you have after knowing. Ignorance is what you have before knowing. And there's something the same about our obsession with doing things. Let me explain this in a very concrete way. So as a psychiatrist, obviously, one of the things is people come to you with a problem and they want to know what to do. And it would be very easy. And sometimes when I was naive, I fell into the trap early on of telling people things that I thought would help them. but this isn't really the way to it works what you have to do is to get them to realize that the things they are doing that are actually very unhelpful and to stop doing them and not say but i do 30 press-ups or you know mental ones every day but instead stop doing the damaging thing and see what comes in its place because life comes to us we can't make life happen life comes to us We can either block it out or we can open the hatch, as it were, and let it in.

1:06:29And our culture is driving life away. And we do frantic things to get it back again. But those frantic things are just the kind of thing not to do.

1:06:39Demetri Kofinas:That really resonates. Absolutely. I mean, I think also that's part and parcel of the creative process. You can't force your way to the creation of art. You have to open yourself to inspiration. And you have to have faith. You have to give yourself up to it. You have to have faith that it will come. Yeah, you have to have faith that it will come. So in closing, Ian, what are you most hopeful about? We've described some things that give us both concern about the world that are sources of sadness and frustration. What is it that you see in the world today that gives you hope? largely I feel there is a change of heart in the young and the young are the future so I believe they will not be satisfied with just furthering the broken paradigm that we have bequeathed them it's one that actually all my life I have not believed and disliked.

1:07:32And so I have to say, it's my generation that created this. But I was always of the party that wished for something more and greater. And I think that that is coming now. I think people are fed up with pseudo creative art and are actually starting to produce, again real viscerally imaginative pieces of art that don't rely simply on some clever concept or some piece of text that tells you the clever idea behind it that is not how Raphael Bach or any of the great artists of whatever kind worked and I think that people are now I hope going back to understanding the value of intuition and imagination.

1:08:22Because as I have to keep repeating, we need science, we need reason. But we also sure as hell need our intuitions. And we need to listen to them. And we need above all imagination. Imagination completes and humanizes pure rationalization. Imagination is what actually led scientists to their great discoveries. is imagination is necessary for art imagination is even important for understanding our social world in which we are without it we can't see what people are doing why they're saying what they're saying so that all these insights which are very right hemisphere derived or based are I think now coming back largely because we feel I think a lot of people feel very clearly that we've bankrupted ourselves by acting in the foolish way we have.

1:09:13So one of the commonest things I get, and I'm so delighted that I get this very often, is people writing to me saying, thank you for changing my life. Thank you for changing my life. People say this all the time. And believe me, I love to hear that. I cannot hear it often enough because it's my problem and doctor heal thyself, but I'm a kind of person who naturally doesn't believe that I'm able to do things really but the evidence I have to now accept that people say it's changed their life and one or two people will say you saved my life which is something I could never have imagined so seeing certain things is important and people are resonating when they see it often they say you know all the things you say you've got the science you've got the language and so on but what you were validating was intuitions I had that I I thought had to be discarded and I didn't know how to validate them myself but now i have the the language i have the ideas i see how they fit into the world so gosh and you know here's another thing that is hopeful okay so the future is in your hands in a very literal way and not to impose a burden on you you said very early on that at the same time that we've somehow lost the cohesive sense of belonging to the world We hope to take the whole world on our shoulders.

1:10:33And that's made worse by the presence of tragedies and horrific scenarios around the world that are pressing on us all the time by advancements in media, which people in the past had very much less often to deal with. but people say so what can i do and i say well you know on a vast scale you can do things like join greenpeace or other organizations that are that have an agenda which is for the good and if their agenda was adopted would no doubt benefit civilization but i have to say that in it you may find yourself frustrated by the structure of the organization because all organizations in the end become if they're too big rather frustrating and also to be honest the track record so far is not terrifically impressive secondly coming much more locally you can do things like take part in or found or join a community a small community of people whose ambition is almost like a monastic community to live more simply to live closer to the earth you know, a bit like the King's North idea, to share your life, to trust one another, work together, perhaps worship together.

1:11:52And that this will be, will form a little powerhouse that can radiate something out. If the big structures collapse, then there needs to be something that is giving warmth and life. And these could be little centers that are seeded. But the most important thing is the thing you think is least important, because it's about you and what goes on inside you. And in a way, the only thing that you can be responsible for is you. But maybe the odd thing is we try to take on responsibilities we can't be responsible for, but neglect the one that we will be held responsible for, which is what have we done with our hearts?

1:12:31What have we done with our souls? Not just what money did we make or whatever. And that is so important. And you can do it right now. I mean, you don't have to get a grant for it. You can actually do it at home tonight. And the point that then is made is, but I'm so small. What does it matter? But hang on. If everybody thought like that, the same argument could be like almost anything good. If everybody thought, well, what's my contribution matter? Nothing good would ever happen. You don't know how big your contribution is because we're not dealing here in the world of the measurable. We're dealing in something that has quality.

1:13:05And the quality of your ardour, of your love, will come across and becomes part of who you are. And this is an important message, I think, to get across. And finally, I go back to the words of Margaret Mead. They're very famous. I can't remember them exactly. But it's like, never doubt that a small group of people who believed in something could make the world change. In fact, nothing else has ever worked. don't be put off be hopeful because without hope nothing can be done we're all lost we don't know the future we're much much less good at predicting the future than we think so you know doom mongers and and at times there is a part of me that says looking at it rationally doesn't look good but there's another part of me that says but remember predicting the future is a game there's lots of times when something happened that you didn't bargain on and i think that comes out of humans.

1:13:59When humans are really put to it, then they will respond. And at times of when a lot was asked, a lot has been given. And I think one of the problems with the age in which I have lived is that frankly, it didn't demand much. There was no war for us in the West. There was general increase in affluence. We thought everything was just getting better and better. Things were getting freer. There were no authoritarianism. The gap between rich and poor was getting smaller. And now we find suddenly that it's quite the opposite, that the gap between rich and poor is getting larger. And there's lots of people going around behaving like tyrants and telling me what I can say and what I can't say.

1:14:42This is not a good place to be. But I think what happens is that when you push people to the limit, then they turn around and become highly creative. And I think there'll be a lot of inspiring figures coming out of the younger generation as they see what it is they have to contend with.

1:15:02Demetri Kofinas:What an inspiring message, Ian. My blessing on them all, really. Well, in closing, I just want to reaffirm that you are one of those people doing important work. I feel somewhat uncomfortable giving you compliments here because I feel like a lot of times in these podcasts, people compliment each other. But I want to say this in the simplest way possible. I think that we benefit from folks like you who are not just out there exploiting the rage and the anger and the anxiousness of people, but also pointing to a way forward, giving people a path. And people are so desperate for that. And I think people respond to that kindness.

1:15:41Demetri Kofinas:I think that besides your message, I'm sure that when people reach out to you, Ian, they reach out to you because they feel like they know you and they like you and you're a warm, good-natured human being. And so I'm one of those people and I deeply appreciate you and the work that you've done. For people who want to learn more about what you do, about the matter with things, about your philosophy, who want to reach out to you, what is the best way for them to do that? It's to go to my website, which is called Channel McGilchrist. And if you just Google that, it will take you straight there. It's not, you don't have to pay to see most of the material there.

1:16:18You can browse in it happily for months and you don't need to be a member. But if you feel inspired to become a member, that's great. And it brings certain other privileges, as they say, I also have a sub stack, which I have neglected for about the last five months, because I've been so busy traveling and dealing with a number of problems that nobody needs to concern themselves with, but that I just haven't really contributed much. I'd like to get back to that. If you don't feel like splashing out on the matter of things, The Master and His Emissary is a fairly affordable little paperback. Little is 600 pages, but there it is.

1:16:55And there's also something which you can download to a phone for less than a dollar, I think, which is a 32-page short called The Divided Brain, Why Are We So Unhappy? And that might be a very good place to start because you can read it in an hour. And it gives you quite a lot of insights into what I've been thinking about and why I've gone to the places I have done.

1:17:20Demetri Kofinas:And you have an events page too. It looks like you've finally given yourself a break. There's no upcoming event listed on the events page. But there are a list of previous events. And I'm sure at some point you'll be back on the road. There are an awful lot of events online. So one of them is happening immediately after this. And there are several over the next few weeks, some quite interesting ones. Well, it was really wonderful seeing you again, my friend. I hope we get a chance to meet in person again soon. I know Selly would love that. So do I, Demetri. That would be lovely. Yes. And thank you for hosting this.

1:17:51Very, very pleased. My pleasure.

1:17:53Demetri Kofinas:Take care. Okay. You too. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

1:18:39I can barely see a GRAISTENT Electric, A Amanpat jogos