Matthew Remsky (56:29)
Yeah, I think that would be really good test because the question is how can you live in both worlds at once, right? Like once you're exposed to the internal consciousness, how can you ever go back? Like, the only thing that I think of is the Tibetan shamans who go into full oracle mode when they wear the big helmets and so on, but who knows what's going on for them? So anyway, I'm jabbering about this as though Jane's is in my head head because he's talking about the crisis of modern consciousness being part of this experience of the isolated individual with a private mind who suddenly must negotiate a complicated social and inner world. And that comes to its peak when the hallucinated voice of a God dies. So that's what I thought of when I saw that picture of Trump. Trump the God dies when the society becomes too complex for his commands to make sense or to be followed or the God leader literally dies. And that's, I think, what a lot of us were thinking about during the last week, considering the health or illness of the great leader. And as Jaynes story continues, he starts to look at what people do when they suddenly lose a voice or presence of certainty in a very complex world. World and it gets really weird. He points to the story of the Tower of Babel. He says that, quote, the clamor of swelling civilization and its Babylon of languages, metaphorically muffled older forms of more direct communication. Now, for about four years, QAnon spoke a voice in the wilderness of the Internet. And then he disappeared. And the Anons were left with the Babel of Facebook, of X and Rumble. And now we have these fantasies about. And these, they're morbid fantasies as well, about what happens when Trump dies, what will happen. There's also a kind of divination around, you know, the mark on his hand or like, you know, what's happening with his ankles. But when the God dies in the bicameral world, Jane says that the person has to figure out how to keep the hallucinated voice alive so they might preserve the body as a mouthpiece of commands. So at sites like Inan, which is in northern Israel from about 9,000 before the common era, the dead king was propped up on stones and his head was cradled and facing a distant peak, with his tomb acting as a God's house, which is an idea that then scales up to the ziggurat and the pyramid and the basilica. And Jain's suggest that the living subjects would still hear the king's commands in their hallucination. Hallucinations, or the heads of the dead were severed, or their legs were broken or tied up, and the food was. Was placed in graves. In some ancient Greek graves, there were feeding tubes that were leading to corpses or depictions of people literally stuffing food into the mouths of the dead. And of course, the idols and statues are everywhere. And Jane says that the iconoclasm of monotheistic traditions like Judaism and Islamic, and also the early years of Christianity, where they were not in favor of images at all, is partly a rejection of these bicameral vestiges and the attempt to locate all knowledge in a single God that everyone can argue about with their new individual minds and points of view. So I was finishing up this draft a couple of days ago, and Trump hadn't been seen in about six days. And then he pops up looking more or less himself just this past Tuesday at another Cray Cray presser in the Oval. And going forward, there are a lot of possibilities. None of them are good. No matter how much he's hated, right? He's either going to be incompetent or his handlers are going to be in charge and fighting. At some point, he might be dead and going brown and blowing death farts while propped up in The Lincoln Bedroom so that Carolyn Levick can keep taking dictation. But it doesn't matter because politically it's obvious that he's a symptom of the unbridled capitalism and exploitation that escalates into fascism. And that's not going away anytime soon. And MAGA, I don't think will be able to constellate around Vance in the same way because Vance is thoroughly and openly deceptive and conniving. Like he's written a BS book about his, his. His whole internal world, right? Hillbilly elegy is not like Art of the Deal. Art of the Deal is pretty much a bicameral text, right? It's like, you know, the, the market told me to do this. So fascism is this pervasive political condition that's very hard to shift. And I think James's thesis suggests there's a primal psychic level to this, that the MAGA way of being in the world is so locked in that losing, using that imagined voice or God will be traumatizing and it'll lead to all sorts of anxious compensations. And the godhouses have already begun, right? Like 200 million for the new White House ballroom. The Oval Office is already gilded with those spray painted Home Depot sconces. I don't know if you've seen those, right, but they're like $58 or something like that. And I think they're estimating that it's going to cost as much as a billion dollars to renovate the Qatari 7478 gift plane into the new Air Force One. Of course it doesn't have any of the defensive systems or the comms or anything like that. Like basically everything that you need for a plane to be a plane for a head of state, it doesn't have any of that. And you know, whenever he goes, he'll leave the rest of our institutional spaces in disarray, you know, replaced by detention camps and monuments of vengeance. And what will the followers do? Like if they don't attach themselves emotionally to the techno fascist coattails of Vance, you know, if he's not godly enough or huge, they will perhaps be similar to those societies that Janes describes as having to reorganize in that short period of time, they'll have lost authorization. There will be anguish when the voices of Follow the Plan and MAGA and you'll get tired of winning, go silent. And so I would count on an explosion of compensatory channeling and divination and oracles for a certain part of that population. And Jaynes paints a very div. Dark picture of what happens to bicameral societies when their citizens lose that internal voice and devotion. Things collapse into chaos. And I was reminded about those telegram channels that we watched implode, the QAnon channels, while Biden got sworn back in in January of 2021, because they were sure that was the moment when it was all going to come apart.
