Physicalism

Our world is obsessed with creating a life of escapism, but life in the physical is how we are designed to live.

In one of the more awkward conversations I had as a parent with my four teenage boys, we discussed the dangers of pornography and the temptations that surround the voyeurism of others. My premise about this dark world has always been that its most insidious aspect is its illusion that the woman on the other side of the screen is actually interested in you, the consumer. They pretend to be in the midst of the most intimate satisfaction available and that you are who they are being satisfied by. It’s sick and a lie. The person on the other side of the screen is interested in money. They are likely not even interested in the sex as anything more than the vehicle to obtain more of the green stuff. The explosion of Only Fans and other do-it-to-yourself porn sites would indicate that there are plenty of people out there who think the digital world is a playground to achieve their needs.

Porn is the leading edge indicator of our desires for a digital-style life, but it is certainly not the only one. The world has transformed from the hard reality of the physical world, where people had to hunt and gather for their food and work to keep warm, to one where all of the convenience of life is at the touch of a smartphone. Everything can be done by an oversized gluteus on the couch. Buying groceries, finding endless streaming entertainment, adjusting the heat, listening to music, and turning down the lights for that intimate moment with Destiny Devine are all possible from the wifi in your home and the interface of an app. It’s a strange new world.

I have been obsessed with the fires in California. I feel terrible for the people being displaced, and the loss of property and possessions is unimaginable to me. It all feels so unnecessary to me. The fires, while not entirely preventable, had no reason in one of the most populated cities in America to have this much destruction. The incompetence on display by the government is epic. In a town that battles fires every year and has since people started to interface with that landscape, to be this ill-prepared is a crime - plain and simple.

Michael Shellenberger was on the Tucker Carlson podcast discussing the fires and, at one point, ventured into a philosophical discussion about physicalism. It was the first time that I had heard articulated what has happened to our world. This insistence that the opulent virtual world is how we should live instead of being in tune with the brutality of the real world that happens in front of us is what has led us down this primrose path to a digital and real-world Hell. Only in a world of make-believe can you place all of the emphasis on governance upon things that aren’t germane to the function of a society. The conversations by the officials in the government and the questions being asked by most are indicators of what has happened. Only in America does the sexuality of the fire chief have any relevance to an entire city being lost to fire. But because we have insisted that her lesbianism is more vital to the needs of the people in L.A., the focus becomes from both right and left about her choices for sleeping arrangements. This is not a serious conversation for a civilization to survive. It emphasizes something esoteric rather than the fire that is burning down the house in front of you. Our insistence that the physical world is something that can be overcome by escapism and affluent philosophies is a dangerous road we have decided to follow. The root of all of this is in the same vein as pornography. We pretend that the person on the other side of the screen is interested in an intimate relationship with us and that they are there exclusively for our desires. The reality is a cold, hard one, opposite to that belief. The people who are in charge have been put there for all the wrong reasons and are tools of the ruling class who can be used for manipulation and money.

We have been conditioned over the last 20 years of cell phone dominance and instantaneous communications that we can have it all; we can get rich from the chairlift in Vail or can work from the beach in Venice. We use our cell phones as a portal into the real world and believe that we can control any situation via the godlike powers that technology has provided. We are the masters of our own domain and have the capacity to control anything. We can flitter from work to cat memes to watching our favorite boobzilla shimmy for our desires, all in 30 seconds’ time. It builds up an illusion that we are the center of all things necessary in the universe. We are the divinity that blesses the land - and our presence is the peak of all existence.

It’s not healthy.

In the Christian religous tradition, there was a movement early on in the church that ultimately was dismissed as a false teaching called Gnosticism. There’s a lot to it, but generally speaking, they were a sect of the faith that believed that the material world was an illusion and that God allowed us to see the material world, but it wasn’t actually real.

“Gnostics considered material existence flawed or evil and held the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the hidden divinity, attained via mystical or esoteric insight. Many Gnostic texts deal not with concepts of sin and repentance but with illusion and enlightenment.^[2]”

What we find ourselves in with the era of politics is a denial of the physical world that exists before our eyes and a reliance upon the ethereal design of our own minds - that somehow, with enough emphasis on the sexuality of the fire chief, you too can prevent forest fires. For most of us, it seems crazy and laughable. But to the elite, there’s a real belief system in this - that salvation comes from good works and from the right belief. In this new Gnosticism, redemption, and repentance come from self-deprecation and veneration of incompetence. The belief that the Western world was stolen and the only sacrifice for atonement is to place people who meet demographic quotas in positions of power as the way to Nirvana is childish thinking. Regardless of any one person’s position on the church and heresy, the wisdom from the early apostles to dismiss this philosophy as bad thinking has some merit. We can’t escape a physical world by thinking it doesn’t exist. We aren’t digital figments placed in a movie adventure. We are flesh and bone. We break and bend and hurt, and we see real things like fires and floods in our landscapes. We clean up the messes from our choices and from the impacts of intersecting with the environment…in real life.

Our emphasis as a culture going forward must be upon the physical. We must stop this incessant nonsense that by wishful thinking and willful ignorance of the obvious, we can change the laws of nature. This thinking must be called out and discussed for what it is: A false teaching of the human experience. We live in a real world, with real relationships and real heartbreak. We must embrace that for the sake of our survival. There is a symbiotic relationship between pain and suffering and joy and success. They need each other to demonstrate any real value.

Embrace a physicalism. Our world and our politics will be better for it.