“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”- Anton Chigurh, No Country For Old Men

In this rather lengthy episode we start with a bit of "told you so", hitting on our predictions regarding the reveal of Julie Andrews and the unwinding of the existing social control structure. We examine these things in the light of current events and reactions to current events. As it turns out, what really upsets people has very little to do with the actual happens in the world, but a lot to do with the dissolving of their comfortable delusions. With the world at an inflection point, it's time for people to decide whether the delusions are worth clinging to, particularly after the realization that it's exactly those delusions that landed us where we are.

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”- Frank Zappa

With the world continuing forward in a perfectly predictable fashion - so predictable that it's becoming tiresome and repetitive to keep addressing it - we launch what we'll consider "Season 3" with a return to our philosophical roots.

In this episode we bring back one of our best lines of discussion: how to live life and create a meaningful existence for yourself without the need to bury your head in the sand and ignore everything else we've talked about on the podcast to do so. We explore the idea of living an authentic, aesthetically pleasing life.

"It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom."

- The Gay Science

“I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil.

Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.
Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche