Podcast
Echoes Underground
Hosted by Echoes Underground · EN
Do you ever look up from your desk and wonder what is going on? Do you yearn to pierce the veil but find yourself trapped by the mundane? You are not alone. Join our hosts (two respectable professionals) as they leave the banal light of the everyday to poke around under the bonnet.
We talk of philosophy and history, narrative and consciousness, and what we did last week and why it was actually pretty strange when you think about it. And when we’ve finished arguing about evolutionary psychology and pretending to know more about physics than we do, we sometimes - sometimes - unearth something worthwhile. For the truth is not to be found above, it is to be found below.
Follow us underground.
Also follow us on Twitter: x.com/echoesundergrnd
New episode every time the muse descends (every couple of weeks)
11episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
On God
2w ago01:12:13Tap to summarizeWithin the frame of materialism, God does not exist, and if you remain within that frame (as our co-host did until the age of 26) then New Atheism is a compelling and comfortable philosophy. If there’s no evidence for it, no scientific backing for it, it’s meaningless because it can’t affect you.But as you grow older you start to recognise that materialism is its own ism. It’s a model that is useful, so that gives it a powerful claim on our attention, but you start to notice its holes. Epistemology, for example - the question of how we know we know things - is something that materialists tend to ignore, but there is plenty of evidence that our senses are not reliable. Think of how a straight stick looks bent when you put it in a glass of water, and the implications of this. We have to accept that our knowledge of an object is separate from the object itself, that the map is distinct from the territory, but how can we define the relationship between these two separate things beyond the vague sense that it seems to work.If you haven’t quite solved this problem of epistemology, there’s this gap. It’s a small gap, but it’s in your foundations and your entire belief system rests precariously on top of it. This is not satisfying. The fact that we have knowledge of the world is not certain. What next?Another problem is that within the materialist frame of reference you have no “why”. Why should we act morally? What’s the point? Yes utilitarianism, yes pain is bad and pleasure is good, but really? There’s a gap between what logic dictates and what you feel deep down, and you can’t help but notice that when a society is run along utilitarian lines (the USSR for example) it’s horrible.What is our telos - our goal, our end, our destination? What’s the point of orientation for us to navigate by? The religious answer, to this and to the problem of epistemology, is God, but God cannot exist in the materialistic sense. So perhaps we need to start thinking of God in a different way. Perhaps God is not a material phenomenon. Perhaps God, rather than the Creator we’re moving from, is the destination we’re moving towards.Francis Fukyama says the end of history is us moving towards a telos - recognising that human beings have inherent worth, ascribing value to the ideas of charity, grace and love as better than domination, exploitation and cruelty. The pre-Christian world contained immensely ethically sophisticated people, but none of them ever questioned the rightness of slavery. A belief in equality is new, and while we might chafe against its excesses it has led to an unbelievable flourishing of humanity over the last thousand of years. This belief, based on Christian teachings, has no material basis, but it has had material outcomes in the fact that everything has been getting better for a long time. A non-materialist belief has materialist outcomes.This unjustified belief, this set of ideas, intuitively seems right and it takes us as a civilisation in a certain direction. A good direction. Perhaps God is an idea we share, an end state that we’re implicitly aiming for in what we do. Perhaps God is the telos, a telos that becomes more refined, more good, as civilisation develops. And in developing this telos, in some ways we could say that we are building God. The Creator, created.
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On Kitesurfing in the Western Sahara
Nov 400:48:51Tap to summarizeOur co-host finds himself in the Western Sahara, the disputed and very deserty region to the South of Morocco. He’s there to kitesurf; conditions in Dakhla are perfect. The water’s flat, the wind is up, the people are hospitable, the food is excellent, and barren wilderness extends for hundreds of miles in every direction.Our other co-host challenges his life decisions, and feigns interest in the local political and economic situation before focusing on the main topics at hand: the importance of isometric training, and England’s place under US hegemony.
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Notes on Attending a Football Match
Oct 600:57:10Tap to summarizeOur intrepid correspondent attended a football match for the first time, and discovered within himself a surprising affinity for hooliganism. It was a women’s football match, the quarter final of the Champion’s League, Chelsea at home against Barcelona and losing 4-1 (8-2 agg). What did he learn?Firstly, you are not anonymous in the crowd at a football match. The people on the pitch can hear you, so you feel that the right shout at the right time, or the wrong word at the wrong time, could actually have an impact on the action. You can make eye contact with the players, they are sensitive to your vibe. You are part of the action, and the team is counting on you.In fact you find yourself part of something much bigger than just the action. Banners celebrating great deeds stare down on you like battle honours in a garrison church or at a feudal banquet. You stand together to sing the club anthem, all wearing matching clothes, thousands of you united in one voice. The team somehow becomes more than just a vector for entertainment. It is the heart of a community, and becomes a big part of your identity - an institution, a gang, rather like the chariot teams of ancient Rome.At the same time, you are treated like a criminal. These stadiums are built like prisons, clearly designed around managing masses of people who are not trusted by the state, thought of as basically animals. There are bossy signs everywhere telling you not to abuse staff or women, there’s a CCTV camera watching every seat. In fact you are repressed to such a degree that you feel like you want to rebel against that. You want to act up.Adding to that, the opposing fans can see you, you, as an individual. They recognise you. They sing their songs, then you sing your songs back at them, and it starts to become quite personal. When Chelsea started performing badly the opposition chants became more smug, more jeering, disrespectful, unbearable, and we outnumbered them, there were 20,000 of us and they were on our turf and we’d been psychologically primed by having been treated like criminals, in short, our correspondent now understands football violence.And violence more generally, actually. Is this how a medieval peasant felt going to war, or a working man getting called up at the beginning of the Great War? Stoked? Screw those guys - let’s go!Also for some context on the Soul Train reference - here’s the sort of situation you need to be prepared for.
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On Ibiza (more or less)
Sep 2500:56:02Tap to summarizeIbiza is well-placed to set the stage for an Dionysian experience. It’s laced with history and mythology - there’s a Phonecian necropolis, a cave temple to moon goddess Tanit, and 500 year old forts everywhere, including a massive one overlooking the old town. It’s also laced with bohemian cosmopolitanism. Islands in general are more liberal than the mainland, and this one in particular has long been a crossroads, a meeting place for sailors and travellers. Artists fled there in the 1930s to escape Franco’s Spain, hippies flocked there in the 1960s, and Freddie Mercury did an enormous amount of drugs at Pikes in the 1980s. And then superclubs happened.This was another masterpiece of professionalism and focus, and we got to the halfway point without even mentioning nightclubs. Topics covered: the difference between nudists and naturists, the history of the holiday and the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, possible Scooby Doo plotlines, the benefits of using technology to automate routine tasks while leaving humans free to be creative, where music can go next, psychedelic-informed management away days… and one co-host mounts an intervention to make the other realise his true self and become a full-time shaman.If you too are wondering what Djent is, we recommend this explainer video.And to cross promote, here’s the video for AM-180 by Trees on Venus.
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On Shamanism
Aug 2000:55:45Tap to summarizeShamanism has been lurking in the background of our discussions since day one, and our “jingle” is just one of us playing a shaman drum. It was high time we had an episode on it. What is a shaman? We follow Manvir Singh in boiling it down to people who 1) enter non-ordinary states and then 2) engage with unseen realities to 3) provide a service to their community. They have long served an important role in community helping their fellow humans deal with uncertainty, and as a result crop up in pretty much every human society at some point. They tend to lead very different lifestyles to the rest of their community, othering themselves.Is it a LARP, or do the shamans actually believe what they’re doing? It’s hard to tell, probably a bit of both. They know they’re performing a role, and the better their performance, the more they consciously fulfil the role of shaman, the more effective they are. The service they offer is not a million miles from a placebo, giving their clients the belief that they are going to get better, and like placebos the cures of the shaman are often effective. And the idea that actions, as opposed to words, can be a lie is quite a modern one. In fact putting on a performance can be self-fulfilling, since the performance helps you get into a non-ordinary state of consciousness so could just be a legitimate part of the process.And we can see the same mechanisms at play in the modern world. There’s a lot of theatre in medicine, for example, and in hedge fund management. The best UFC fighters clearly have access to a specific state of consciousness when they step into the octagon. Catholic priests are celibate, which marks them out as different to their flocks in the same way that shamans tend to lead very different lifestyles to the rest of their community to other themselves. The big name startup founders also live bizarre lifestyles, bare feet in the office, unkempt hair, drugs, aura, and these things all inspire belief and weirdly often actually deliver results.And this leads us to some actionable insights that will inform how we approach our jobs from this day hence.
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On Berlin: Ultimate Defeat
Jul 3100:55:22Tap to summarizeOur co-host just got back from a work trip to Berlin, and his overwhelming impression was one of shiny scar tissue. All the buildings are new and glass and steel and modern, but the city lacks that sense of deep history and organic development that you get in most European cities. He imagined standing there in 1945, surrounded by absolute devastation, and feeling like he was in year zero. It must have been a unique experience to live in a city, a country, that had been completely destroyed - physically, but also morally and spiritually. They had lost everything.The assumption behind the Allies’ strategic bombing offensive was that, through demonstrating to the enemy the hopelessness of their position, they would cause Germany’s resolve to crumble. They thought that level of destruction would make them give up - as it would later with the nuclear bombs in Japan - and that a swift end to the war would ultimately mean more lives would be saved than would be lost in the bombing. But this assumed rationality. It would have been rational for Germany to surrender in 1943, a series of large defeats followed by nuclear-comparable destruction in Hamburg. It was objectively over by then. But the Nazis kept on fighting, complete madness, and by the 1945 surrender Berlin had been utterly shattered in every respect. What does life look like after that, and how does a city move forward? How does a people move forward?We discuss “street art”, and a bit of techno, and actually it shouldn’t be a surprise that Berlin of all places has become a world leader in Bacchanalia. It feels like a natural reaction to the defeat, but is it a helpful reaction? This is very clearly a society running away from something. The hyper-liberal modernity hides an emptiness - the physical damage has been repaired many times over, but the spiritual damage remains. Berlin is still processing its trauma, still going to therapy, and we can see this lack of recovery in the government’s attempted clamp-down on the AfD. The culture of the elite still lacks the self-confidence to even allow any challenge to progressive liberalism, and will immediately leap onto any left-coded bandwagon like closing the nuclear power plants or letting in a million Syrians.But what else can they do? It just takes time to re-grow, to re-emerge as something organic. Germany needs a new story of what it is, and this can’t be created artificially and imposed top-down.
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Life is Damage
Jul 2200:55:25Tap to summarizeIn the last episode we posited that in order to achieve self actualisation, purpose, or peak experience, you have to risk your more basic needs - food, shelter, safety. We further posited that living damages you.You cannot live without taking damage, whether from the various knocks and blows, mental and physical, or through the process of aging. And the flip side of that is that you cannot live without damaging those around you, whether by eating them or through the moral and ethical decisions we make every day. You cannot live a full and interesting life without hurting people - friends, family, the loved ones who become exes. You cannot have agency without sometimes having to choose the lesser of two evils.We’re not endorsing this, we’re lamenting it - but it’s still true. You can’t live without hurting people, and you can’t live without being hurt. The question is what does that mean ethically? What are the implications for your life and existence? We must navigate between the Scylla of nihilism - accepting this and not caring about it - and the Charybdis of inaction and stasis, being left frozen and unable to act because to act is to harm. Once you notice this you see Charybdis in particular operating everywhere. Our government never actually does anything because any decisive action means harming people - take the recent failed welfare bill as an example. Even the best decision will involve tradeoffs, will make some groups less well off in the short term in exchange for better long-term outcomes for the entire country, and so it’s generally easier to make no decisions at all. Our whole culture ends up trapped in the trolley problem, with nobody brave enough to throw the switch. The result is stasis and inertia - a whole country doing the equivalent of sitting in front of the sofa watching Netflix because going outside and trying new things is too risky. But what is more likely to lead you to an early death than sitting in front of Netflix for your whole life?So not accepting this idea that life entails damage ends up causing more harm than accepting it. To live well, to rule well, we need to be at peace with causing damage, we need to meet this reality head-on, and as we lament the damage we cause we must strive to ensure that it is worth it. This episode brings together a number of threads we have discussed recently - injuries, blood sacrifice, museums, Heidegger, nature, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s also the fourth episode in which we’ve talked at length about Roberto Calasso’s book The Ruin of Kasch, which is excellent.
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On Maslow's Hierarchy of (French) Needs
Jul 1400:59:40Tap to summarizeOur co-host’s eye was drawn to a weathered tome in an antiquarian bookshop: The White Monk of Timbuctoo, by William Seabrook. It promised (and delivered) the life story of a French defrocked priest living in great luxury in a mud palace in 1930s Timbuktu, all in electric prose and fitting into a long-standing interest in high-agency colonial Frenchmen doing interesting things in liminal spaces. See also: Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Henry de Montfried.This white monk, Auguste Dupuis aka Pere Yakouba, had been in the first group of missionaries to make it alive to Timbuktu. They set up a clinic and chapel, and he ended up leading the mission. He was slightly scandalous, a heavy drinker and extremely French womaniser, so was sent on a new mission to Dahomey which he completely nailed. Recalled to become a bishop, he decided that he actually didn’t want to leave Timbuktu so left the church, married a local, and became a local worthy - a career that culminated in establishing a university.What can we learn from this career? In modernity, we are focused on the bottom rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - food, shelter, safety. We spend our lives chasing more and more refined versions of these, we eat the finest foods, live in the nicest houses, but we fail to ascend. The third level of the hierarchy of needs is love and belonging, but we have dating apps, a low birth rate and a loneliness epidemic. The fourth level is esteem, but depression is rife. As for self-actualisation - joy, transcendence, insight - it is a rare London professional who achieves that. In a materialist system, the only answer to self-actualisation is better food and a nicer house, cooler stuff, but this white monk shows us an alternative: achieve an acceptable level of food, shelter, security and so forth, perhaps even take a gamble on them and then keep working your way up the hierarchy to meaning, purpose and peak experience - where the focus should be. This feels… better?William Seabrook’s own career is also an interesting one - we recommend his Wikipedia page.
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What do we mean by "Natural"?
Jul 701:06:56Tap to summarizeOne of us thought we were going to talk about the nature of nature - what is it we’re thinking about when we think about nature? The other thought we were going to talk about barefoot shoes for strength training. This is our synthesis.Barefoot shoes promise a return to a “natural” way of walking, to the way we evolved to walk. They’re made from “natural” materials. And “natural” is assumed to be a good thing, it contains a value judgement. The use of the categories “natural” and “unnatural” is fundamental to the way we see the world today, and it is interesting to interrogate where this categorisation came from, how valid it is, and what it means.Isn’t nature beautiful, we think as we look at the English countryside - but it’s not natural. Fields are not natural. Crops are not natural. Sheep can’t give birth without human assistance. Even the species of “wild” flora would not be there in that way without millennia of mankind shaping that landscape. If we say that “natural” means “untouched by human hand”… nothing in this world is natural. Perhaps the idea of “natural” involves a concept of equilibrium and harmony - without human involvement, everything would stay the same forever. But we know this is not the case. The climate is a dynamic system. Wilderness changes all the time. And even more poisonous is the idea that we can keep things in equilibrium by stopping doing things and reducing economic activity. Entropy being entropy, keeping systems in equilibrium requires a great deal of human interference.Man is a product of nature. We are animals, and our evolutionary niche is using technology. A tech bro in Silicon Valley building an LLM is exhibiting natural human behaviour. It’s unhelpful to think of this as bad and unnatural. We are all as reliant on technology to survive on Earth in 2025 as we would be in domes on Mars.So when did this start? In latin literature they don’t talk about nature. In fact the concept only arises in England during the Industrial Revolution, and through the Romantic movement’s rustic rebellion against it. When we moved to a system of mass production there was a fundamental change in how we saw the world, and as Heidegger might put it nature was split out into its own world picture. Mordor and the Shire became different things, occupying different spaces in peoples’ thoughts.There might also be something in the fact that the Industrial Revolution removed peoples’ sovereignty - you were no longer growing your own food, instead you were specialised, worked a “job” and used your salary to buy food. And in its turn you became depersonalised - humans are fungible in a production line, their individual characteristics not relevant to the working of the factory.We shall explore these thoughts in more detail in future episodes, hopefully with Artem’s help. And @vivobarefoot we’re open to any sponsorship opportunities you may throw our way. We’re open to it.
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Terry Pratchett 4: Mort (On Death and Personification)
Jun 2901:00:58Tap to summarizeWe return to our occasional series on Terry Pratchett’s work, but with a difference. The fourth Discworld book, Mort, focuses on a personification of death. We therefore use it as a jumping off point to discuss personifications, and the personification of death in particular through history. We probably end up spending more time on the Iliad and the Aeneid than on Mort.The Greeks did not have a personification of the moment of death itself - you’ve got Ares, god of slaughter, Persephone, the psychopomp, you’ve got a king of the underworld, but no Death. The Romans came closer to a Terry Pratchett-esque Death personification, appearing in Virgil when Dido kills herself. Juno sends down Iris (the female counterpart of Hermes), who cuts the link between the queen’s body and her spirit. But this is not Iris’s primary duty, she’s a more general psychopomp.Pratchett’s Death is medieval - in appearance this is the Death that emerges in Europe during the Black Death, and reaches its final form as a skeleton with a cloak and a scythe in nineteenth century England. In most of Europe, actually, Death was a woman, and in many ways that feels more fitting. One intuitively feels that a woman has a much better understanding of death than a man - and on the Discworld, witches embrace death and treat it pragmatically, while wizards fear death and are always trying to escape it. But Pratchett is playing off English folklore, and Death’s masculinity allows him to explore more masculine traits like duty.Terry Prachett’s philosophy is that death is an event we need to be comfortable with - scary, inevitable, but it should be accepted. We should be at peace with the fact that we’re going to die. His personification of Death reflects this - yes, intimidating, powerful, dreadful, but also kind to cats, fond of humanity, doting on his granddaughter, sentimental. In fact, Death is one of the most sympathetic characters on the Discworld. This view of death was given more colour later in Pratchett's life when he became a vocal proponent of assisted suicide.But now we’re all scared of death. In the modern world we do not have a healthy relationship with it. The Athenians had the mysteries of Eleusis, through which they psychologically conquered death and lost their fear of it. We have Christianity, which is supposed to do the same, but we seem to have reclaimed the pre-Eleusinian bleakness regarding death that we see in Homer. If we even think about death at all.A society’s attitude to death is absolutely fundamental. This is not a test our society is currently passing. In personifying death, we are not personifying the biological process itself but rather what that process means to us, how it affects us, and especially how it affects the friends and family of the person dying. We would probably benefit from returning to a personification of death in the wider culture as a starting point for society's return to health.
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