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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Leon Trotsky’s Revolution Against God and Christ with James Tunney
01:10:52
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A
I find a comical Swedish book written in the 70s for children, explaining it was obviously from a left perspective, explaining that Jesus was a revolutionary, but he was a failed revolutionary because he didn't understand that you had to use violence against these people, et cetera. It is quite humorous. So he can't be. He couldn't ever fit into any of the definitions. He couldn't fit into any of the ideas that the revolutionary has no morality, for example. But what he can be described as is a spiritual revolutionary that he was calling for a spiritual revolution.
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Keep watching. To learn more. You can now download all nine copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org new thinking allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu Book 4 In the
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New Thinking Allowed Dialogue, Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.
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Thinking Allowed
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Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Hello and welcome, Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is Trotsky versus Jesus, and my guest is James Tunney, who has written two novels and two books of poetry. In addition, he is a fine artist whose works have been displayed in several countries. In addition, he is also a barrister who has lectured on legal matters throughout the world. He is the author of many books including AI Governance, Care and Possession in Dustopia, the Mystical Accord Sutras to Suit Our Times, Tech Bondage, Slavery of the Human Spirit, the Mystery of the Trapped Light, Mystical Thoughts in the Dark Age of Scientism, AI Posthumanism, A Cryptic Soap Opera, Plantation of the Automatons, Rule of an Automaticity Loop, the Mythic Aim of AI Maiming the Mind Empire of Scientism. Today we will focus on his newest book, Trotsky vs Battle of the AI Millennium. James lives in Gothenburg, Sweden. And now I'll switch over to the Internet interview video. Welcome, James. It's a pleasure to be with you once again.
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It's fantastic to see you back in the seats, Geoffrey, and I'm delighted to see you looking so well and thanks for the opportunity.
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B
Now, I've known you for quite a few years since you first came to visit me in Albuquerque, and I can say that consistently throughout that time we have had conversations about Leon Trotsky. I know he has loomed large in your consciousness. And yet, I have to confess, until your recent book, I knew very little about Trotsky myself. And I suspect that many of our viewers may not even know who Trotsky was.
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A
Yeah, It's a curious fact that one of the most significant political figures of the 20th century, and certainly the most significant world revolutionary, has kind of fallen off the scenes for a number of reasons. And some of the present theorists who are experts in Trotsky argue that Trotskyism is over. There's a book called the Twilight of World Trotskyism. And for example, Professor John Kelly in Britain, who has studied Trotskyism very particularly believes that it has not been successful. So there are some theorists which say the time is over. But I argue something different. I argue that Trotsky has been one of the most influential political figures. He keeps coming up again and again in unexpected places. So I kept running into him, and I had to try and make sense of what drove him. But insofar as he is known or he was involved in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 in Russia, I'm one of the principal leaders of that. And in the revolution in 1905 that preceded that, and later on, when he was in exile from the Soviet Union, he laid the theoretical framework for a lot of philosophies and ideas that we'd recognize today, and that manifest in particular movements. Anti war, anti Nazism, anti fascism, anti racism. We can trace a lot of them to Trotsky influence. So he's hugely significant. And there are specific reasons why we may not hear about him. Because in many senses, as a revolutionary, his technique and some of the techniques he advocated involve a kind of subterfuge. So there's not necessarily going to be an advertisement of his methods or his aims or objectives or they're camouflaged. But if we take it from a historical perspective, it's clear that Winston Churchill regarded him as one of his greatest enemies, as one of the greatest threats to his visions, as far as I can see. And certainly his opposition to Stalin made him a very significant figure in the 20th century.
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One might assume that because he was opposed to Stalin. In fact, I believe Stalin actually had him assassinated when he was living in Mexico in 1940. One might assume that he's against an authoritarian dictator, but I'm under the impression that's not exactly true.
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The narrative by his supporters was easy to create, that he represented the successful Soviet Union. That could have been. He was the hero that was tragically taken out of the full potential of his movement. And that if he had been in charge, the Soviet Union wouldn't have been a degenerated worker state, as he called it, and that it would have been much freer and a totally different place. But unfortunately, this requires us to ignore the fact that he was the leader of the Red army, the founder, in many senses, or the developer of the Red army, that from 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution, it was him that proposed to Lenin that they institute concentration camps. And that was the name after the British practice and the Spanish practice, particularly in South Africa, it was him that instituted imprisonment. And I was reading in the papers today about Russian techniques with their own deserters and shooting them. He initiated those techniques in the Russian army. He was ruthless in pursuit of his aim. So the idea of this nice avuncular theorist writing books fails to consider that he was a revolutionary. He was always a revolutionary. He wasn't against, of course, he wasn't against violence. And we have to remember, in the Russian tradition of the revolutionary, going back to books like the Revolutionary Catechism, the revolutionary has absolutely no restraints on what their conduct is. And in particular, insofar as they don't subscribe to any morality but the revolution, there's nothing which is beyond their power. So the. There is a large myth from the. Or there was a large myth that the Trotskyists would have been different. And if only the Trotskyists had Trotsky had come to power, everything would have been different, it would have been a success. And most historians don't think that that's true, but he was certainly able to position himself as wanting something different. And when, at various stages, when the Soviets moved into Eastern Europe, people were able to turn away from Stalin and say, well, I don't like Stalin, but Trotsky is not bad, you know, so he has this ghostly potential, a resilient quality that brings him back again and again into the frame and makes him relevant in a time when people say he's gone.
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Well, I know one of the points that's of particular interest to you concerning Trotsky is that he was, I guess you'd have to call him a military militant, atheist.
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He was influential in the 60s, for example. And I remember hearing about the figure Trotsky, and he appears, and he was cool in some senses. And I was amazed that he met Vladimir Lenin in London. That was the first place. And I knew the area very well where he met him. And I had to try and work out, well, what are all the Bolsheviks doing in London? Why did he meet Lenin for the first time in London. Why did he meet Stalin for the first time in London? Why were the Bolsheviks so involved in London or Geneva? So I began looking at a number of elements, and they're paradoxical. For example, you have to look at the influence of Trotsi on figures that appear very right wings. For example, the neoconservatives often came from a Trotskyist background. So how does this come about? How do we have this fluidity between people that seem to be on different poles? And there's great supporters of Trotsky. For example, Christopher Hitchens. Well, when you look at Christopher Hitchens support of the military intervention and the military industrial complex, you say, well, how does that fit in with Trotsky? So there was all these issues that made me read the literature and study the literature. But in the end, what I come to is that the driving force, not just for him, but in particular for him, is his atheism. And the evidence for that is from his biography, My Life. He describes, for example, when he came to the conclusion that God didn't exist. And in his testament, made in Mexico before he was assassinated in 1940, his political testament, he says he will always be a Bolshevik revolutionary and in favor of world revolution. But he ends off by saying and will remain an atheist. So this is a. You're saying the last thing that he is saying about himself is his atheism or describing himself. So it's the alpha and the omega. And it wasn't as obvious to me initially. But you can see this phenomenon in other people who are great admirers of Trotsky. And Christopher Hitchens is an ideal example. When he did his last interview on Newsnight, he. He talks about a number of issues and a lot of people thought it was very brave of him because he's dying and he's very defiant in his atheism. And you're wondering, why is it so important for him to emphasize this of all issues? And when we compare him with other Marxists, we see that there's two strands. There's certain people that just cannot believe in the spiritual world. And that seems to be Trotsky's position. He believed that everything was explicable in scientific terms. He was. He was into. He was into Freud and he was in Vienna. So he was very interested in the mind and the science of the mind and psychoanalysm, but he believed everything was internal. And therefore the spiritual world wasn't real to him. Therefore religion was a con. And he describes this in his studies of literature and revolution. So he believed it was all made up. And when he's looking at Russia, he's believing it's merely a way to get economic power. And he genuinely saw it like that compared with other people. If we look at Marx, for example, Marx was more Promethean, so he seems to believe there was something there, but he was defying it. He was defying. He wasn't ruling out necessarily, but Trotsky clearly did. And in that sense, when he comes into power, when he's in government, there are memos in the archives where he's explaining how they can effectively take all the goods out of the churches, they can strip them of the precious relics and melt them down. And he suggests a campaign of misdirection in order to use people to pretend it was for famine relief. When it wasn't, they had other reasons to. They needed money. But you begin to see that really it's the opposite of if you want to call a holy and unholy. It really is in some different dimension now. It's not from a spiritual sense, but there's really profound consequences from that failure to believe that the world is spiritual. And also that means that the methods that you use for me, the dialectical materialism that is fundamental to most Marxists, can never answer the questions because it leaves beside the spiritual dimension of humans and it lacks a proper anthropology. So that the only result can be technocracy. The only result can be a post humanist empire of scientism, as I've talked about before. So that's really where he began to represent the ultra materialism for me.
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B
On the other hand, I think it's fair to say he must have been a brilliant tactician. I gather that when he was the leader of the Red army during the Civil War right after the Bolshevik Revolution, there were many forces called the White army that he was opposing, including armies sent in from foreign countries who didn't want to see a Bolshevik revolution and internal forces in Russia who were opposed to the Bolsheviks. And I guess it's fair to say that Trotsky outsmarted or outbattled them all,
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A
insofar as the British supported these forces and the Red army won, that this was the source of Churchill's genuine fear of him, insofar as some of the British forces had been defeated by this revolutionary who didn't come from a military background. So he was. There's no doubt that he was a brilliant tactician in that sense. If you talk to Stalinists, they say this is propaganda and made up, you know, and it was exaggerated And I understand that. But what he understood, he understood very early on the power of things like the printing press and the power of the pen and the power of propaganda. Because when he went from his. He was born in the Ukraine. And when he went from his village in Yanovka to Odessa when he was about 8, he was staying with his relatives, and they had a printing press there. So he became familiar with that. So the printing press is critical in relation to his worldview and the power of the pen. So he was known by the word pero pen in the early Bolsheviks. So he knew all about propaganda. But he also had a worldview which was mechanistic. And I related to emotion and the dynamo. The dynamo is a critical motif of this era, about constant movement. And I see this behind the idea of permanent revolution, which he espouses, which is more complex, but it has that implication. So we understood, if we cast our mind back to the Ukraine, he comes from a farming background, and this is the early. The growth of mass communications. So people are beginning to realize the implications of these technologies and systems and industrializations, particularly from Germany. So he understands all those things, and they understand the world was being changed through the power of the dynamo, the generator. And in many senses, I believe he kind of took that motif for how to understand the world. He understood that there was the power of pictures and cinema, for example, and how they could be used to replace the church. He understood the power of these things, and he understood things in motion. So therefore, in 1905, he rose to the top in St. Petersburg when the revolution happened there quite quickly. And he was able as well. One of his main objectives was to spread propaganda, to explain and communicate. And so they commandeered printing presses around St. Petersburg at various Times. And in 1917, there had, of course, been the February Revolution. So the Bolsheviks, in many senses are, for many people, they're launching a coup in the October Revolution. And he made decisions. He was able to make decisions on the run, like in dynamic situations. And he knew what he was after. So they didn't go for obvious targets. They commandeered strategic nodal points. So he had a very strong sense of networked theory, if you like. And that made him very useful and very significant in the revolution. Better in a practical sense than Lenin was. And Stalin gave them credit early on. And then he organizes the Red army, and there's 16, something like 16 different foreign contingents against them, as well as internal divisions, as well as fighting against other socialist republics. Now, you can argue, which I would, that really they're creating, they're doing away with any opposition internally. At the same time, he's fighting, for example, if you think about it, against Russian national or against Ukrainian nationalists, people from his own country as well. But in that he was very successful. At the same time, while he was doing that, he was launching and involved in the projection of communism onto the world. So the international Communists were congregating during 1919, for example, when the Soviet Union was under attack and involved in wars. And so he was urging the start of a world revolution. He wasn't going to stop with Russia. So there's no doubt about that. And there's no doubt that in relation to working with small resources in exile, that he. He espoused a coherent doctrine and suggested techniques. For example, the French turn in 1937 about infiltration into other organizations that became determinative. So his brilliance can't be questioned in that and his strategic sense in particular. Although his weakness may be on the personal sense in relation, if we think of the dynamo and the constant movement, we can oppose that. To Stalin, who became fixed. He set up his office beside Lenin. He became the general secretary of the party. He began to appoint people. So he was able to create a position through stability that was able to oust Trotsky. So there was a weakness in this constant movement as well. But we cannot question his vision. And one of the elements of that was because he understood the nature of globalization, in my view, and that's why I was interested in him, that he understood where this was going. And in that sense, why he's also important is because he can be taken by some of the people in Silicon Valley, for example. He can be taken by people on the right because he understood this. In fact, in the Epstein files, the one that talks about them a little is Steve Bannon, who is, you know, you say he's often talking about revolutionary figures, but the implication is that the Trotsky's theories are also operative on the other side. And this is my argument, is that both the left and right revolutionaries, including the States, will end up with technocracy. So it doesn't matter whether you use the black cat or the white cat, you'll still end up with technocracy. This is my objection to the materialist direction from a spiritual perspective.
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B
Well, you've highlighted a number of ideas that seem central to Trotsky's thought. One of them you just mentioned is the notion of infiltrating other organizations. Another key idea is the idea of a worldwide revolution and also the idea of a permanent revolution, that it should never stop.
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A
The permanent revolution is a specific doctrine, not originated with him, various incarnations. We can trace it back to Karl Marx and it's really a specific doctrine about who you need to lead the revolution. And in particular there was various shifts over time. You have the intellectuals leading it or the bourgeoisie and then the. The workers of the proletariat. And then you needed help from the peasants, if you like. And Trotsky was always cautious with the peasants as a revolutionary idea. So then you had the question of, well, if it's a wider revolution, what happens when a country doesn't fit a kind of model? And therefore you had this sense that there would have to be an interchange between different countries. So that led to a contrast with Stalin, who believed that you had to concentrate on one country, you had socialism in one country, and this was the big division. We can also see a similar thing, arguably with Mao and the concentration on China. So there is a sense, a definite direction in Trotskyism that it can't end till everything is in revolution. And this is one of its great weaknesses, in my view. But it's one of the great dangers to other contexts because Trotskyism is like big business. It's anti homeostatic. It's going to disturb the situation, it's going to change. And there's a lot of talk when you read in the Marxist literature about reactionary forces. Reactionary forces come because you have created an action, so the action comes first. So people give him great profit. They say he was a great prophet in relation to the rise of fascism in Germany. The problem is that when the communist revolution happens, Trotsky describes fascism as the reaction to the communist vanguard. So the communist vanguard is the first step which will induce a fascist response, unsurprisingly from people who didn't want it. So he anticipated this would happen. He also anticipated that it would lead to the annihilation of the Jews in Germany because they were a vulnerable community that had suffered from pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia and had moved in often. So he knew that they would suffer at this. So this is why people like Dennis Prager, who I don't listen to, but on this point he said that because he came from a Jewish background and his Jewishness was of no relevance to him. In fact, people like Dennis Prager said that the Trotskyists caused problems that the Braunsteins, his family name, would suffer from. This was the thing that Churchill said as well. So he was really an international figure. There's an argument about this Jewish input into revolution. In my view, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny because he was clearly rejecting his Jewish heritage, in particular his religious heritage, and he was adopting European Enlightenment ideas. When he went to school, he was at a Lutheran school in Odessa, and they imbibed a culture from Protestant Europe. I locate in my book the significance of Protestantism in the background to communism. The infiltration thing wasn't his invention, but it was a necessity when he was in exile. And they were. They had to adopt this camouflage position. But as a revolutionary, you would always be subject to this type of subterfuge. But in relation to small numbers, they had to infiltrate other parties. And this was developed subsequently by a wider sense of Trotsky, a wider idea of Trotskyism after his, which meant that people were entering into organizations that they didn't believe in, if you like. Now, this is not peculiarly or solely from Trotsky, because of course, if you look at the Google Ngram use of some of the terms like burrowing in, for example, the Pope had complained about it. In the 19th century, particularly in the early 19th century, there was a lot of infiltration of organizations. And of course, the British had always infiltrated organizations, had always infiltrated Irish revolutionary organizations. But he developed it into a useful technique so that people were not expecting that they were dealing with people who didn't agree with the supposed aims. So that's permanent revolution, the infiltration element, or the French turn, or entryism, as it's called. And the first point you mentioned, you mentioned another point as well.
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Worldwide revolution.
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Worldwide revolution. It's critical. So this distinguishes him from Stalin and Mao in many senses, and he commits himself to this globalist perspective. And this may have been why Churchill was concerned about him so much, because Churchill had been through the Irish revolution, if you like, and he knew what a small group could do to disturb administration. And Trotsky was very successful at his job as a revolutionary. And being a world revolutionary, he was going to compete with the Churchillian desire to establish or to contribute towards a new world order. So we see this sense of Trotsky representing the main revolutionary figure. Of course, he's represented in 1984 as Goldstein. We see him in Animal Farm as Snowball. He keeps on coming up as a figure who represents this revolution, but he. He did really have such incredible ambition that he's one of few people that could believe they could literally take over the world. And that's what is critical about his vision, if you like, that. It didn't stop at anything and it won't stop. And so the implication of the continual revolution, which is within the subset of the permanent revolution, reflects an older idea that we see, funnily enough, in people like Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson talks about perpetual revolution. And anyone that has seen the United States foreign policy in the last whatever 50 years understands that there is a revolutionary aspect of the US foreign policy. Now you're not expecting it to come from the right, but in relation to this idea of American expansionism and revolution, it's very, very similar to me and it hasn't been sufficiently studied. People like Connor Cruz o', Brien, who wrote about Edmund Burke, believed that Jefferson was a prototype for many modern revolutionaries. And it's not a figure that people think. But again, this is a kind of mechanistic idea and it's a very serious idea because it means that nothing will stop. It means that tomorrow what you believed yesterday is not going to be true, acceptable. And it also means that it must change everything. It's totally anti homeostatic, which leads to, in my view, technocracy.
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B
Now, by way of contrast, I think it would be fair to say that Jesus Christ could be viewed as a revolutionary as well. In fact, the rise of Christianity could be seen as a revolutionary move movement.
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Yes, there's two readings of that. Certainly he is described as a revolutionary, but he's not a revolutionary in any sensible terms, consistent with subsequent definitions of what revolution is. And in fact, I argue that there is a single revolution which is against, if you like, an idea of monotheism that we can, we can trace back from Bolshevism through the French Revolution, through the American Revolution, through the Protestant Reformation. That is a consistent idea. So Jesus was not a political revolutionary in the ways that a number of people suggest. There are a number of books now that say that Jesus was a political revolutionary and therefore supports. It's not true. There is a kind of, I find a comical Swedish book written in the 70s for children explaining it was obviously from a left perspective, explaining that Jesus was a revolutionary, but he was a failed revolutionary because he didn't understand that you had to use violence against these people, etc. It is quite humorous. So he can't be. He couldn't ever fit into any of the definitions, he couldn't fit into any of the ideas that the revolutionary has no morality, for example. But what he can be described as is a spiritual revolutionary, that he was calling for a spiritual revolution. And this is what some of the early church fathers believed in some sense. And if we look at Gregory of Nyssa, he talks about epictasis, which is an idea of a continuing spiritual evolution which is associated with revolution. Another reading that you could say is that if we go back to Psalms 2, right at the start, back to King David and back to 3,000 years, we see right at the start of Psalms is this idea that the kings of the earth are going to rebel against the heavens. We see it in the Chinese sense of does heaven rule us or do we rule the heavens? Now, I argue that there is a revolutionary tradition which is against this idea of being controlled by a superior force that underpins a lot of revolutionary ideas. And in that sense, Jesus is the epitome of the counter revolution. So that's another way of reading that Jesus is espousing a counter revolution. Now, one of the practical difference or reasons why it's important is because modern Marxism is heavily dependent on this idea of dialectical Marxism or dialectical materialism. So when you're talking to some Marxist, you can see that they shift from one position to another, but it's all within these boundaries. And once you go out the boundaries, it doesn't work. And the problem is that I believe that there is a. A spiritual dialectic, if you like, which is manifested right from the start between God and the world, if you like. And that all of the stories are about the assertion of an idea of uniqueness which comes in conflict with this rejection of a higher authority. But when you remove the spirituality from the idea, you're limited in your answer. You may be very successful at manipulating the world because you're not concentrating on anything else. But the result of that mechanistic mindset will be a mechanical world. It can only be there. And Trotsky said that technocracy in the United States can only come about through communism. And if you look at a lot of the Silicon Valley people, they're very consistent with some of the Trots or some of the Marxist ideas. It fits in very well with their world domination thing, which I call the blackrock Bolshevism.
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B
Blackrock Bolshevism. In other words, there is a movement, one might say, amongst the high tech companies to establish a world government based on whatever operating system seems to work universally. Like, at one point I had a guest who suggested that we already have a global society because of the iPhone or the smartphone. You might say that practically worldwide now, I think over half the global population are using smartphones.
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A
Yes, but it ties into the earlier critiques that we've talked about, about transhumanism and posthumanism. And we can go back to J.D. bernal, the world, the flesh and the devil. He's a Stalinist scientist, great crystallographer and he's looking for, he says that scientific corporations will take over the world and they will institute this system. They will live, the elite will live off the world. The humans will be transformed into silicon. That might explain why we have Silicon Valley. And the humans that didn't want to be transformed could live in a human zoo. So this was 100 years ago. So there's no surprise in what's happening here. And you can see people sometimes get on to me and say, well, it's all about Trump or Biden or Vance. You don't know about a few years ago, you don't know about Vance. And I'm saying, well, in my theory a lot of these figures are not the driving figures. These are the front men or women for a system which is much bigger than that, which is clearly manifesting in alliances between the intelligence systems in various countries, the corporate, international, trans corporate or transnational corporate domain, international institutions. And they were set up for that purpose. I argue it's a neo imperialism and you don't have to be a genius that we were told if you look at the United States straight away in the new term of office, the AI was on the cards. All the big companies were telling about the new future. The plans to govern us with technology are really comprehensive. Elon Musk is saying that already AI is going to move into space in the next couple of years. It's all laid out the interest in Mars. It's no coincidence that the Bolsheviks had the Red Star. They were fascinated with Mars, they were fascinated with space travel. All of these elements go back to the end of the 19th century Russian cosmos. There's nothing new in many senses with H.G. wells. So the democratic systems are not working in many senses because of the revolution, the materialist revolution, both left and right. So I would say now I don't have anything against Trotskyists. I knew a good few Trotskyists and they're one of the most hard working groups in the political spectrum. They're renowned for their hard work and after some very bright examples. But my argument is that if you follow what Trotsky said in his various ideas about technocracy, but also about the future of the human, there was a proto eugenicism in his work about. He believed that the human wasn't finished. They had to be worked on, the human had to be worked on. A New man, which is consistent with the new Soviet man. But this allows it to fit in perfectly to the new world order. There's no difference between the new world order as defined by H.G. wells and the Communist Manifesto, save the ownership of private property. And in the context where the world is $111 trillion in debt and they're working now in Switzerland and the central bank, digital currency, and we're going to get digital currency, which will be able to solve the problem, communist problem, of not being able to have a price mechanism, which was a big factor in the fall of the Soviet Union, that private property will be abolished in many senses. So that the communist idea and the new world order, capitalist idea enables a new iteration. So Trotsky believed that capitalism was always going to collapse. They had this naive idea that would just fall and disappear in some sense and implode. And it was always in his mind and a driving force, and he was premature on that. My argument is that capitalism inevitably moves towards technocracy and post humanism. And it does. So whether you're on Elon Musk's team or Leon Trotsky's team, it comes to the same result once you have a lack of theology, an anti theology such as Trotsky had, and you have no anthropology of the human. And it's the same thinking as underpins Geoffrey Hinton, for example, who said so. Geoffrey Hinton says we have to do something about AI, but he was one of the leading developers. And as well as that, gratuitously, he says now we've discovered with AI that humans are not special, there's no God. So he has a whole theological construct behind it. And this is the same modus of thinking. So it's not a left right issue. It's an issue about materialism and the fallacies of materialism and the failure to understand or accept the spiritual world and the idea that we don't have a spiritual dimension. Which is why I think your work in parapsychology was important for always emphasizing the fact that there are different dimensions to the human. I think that is a critical part of your work because coming from your perspective, I don't think you can ever reduce the human or a system which solely sees the human in material terms.
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B
That's certainly true with regard to my perspective, but what I found fascinating in your book is your argument, and correct me if I'm not stating it properly, but you seem to be arguing for a renewed look at the Catholic Church. You seem to be suggesting, and I think TS Eliot in his Poetry like the Wasteland was suggesting much the same. That we can't simply ignore our long history of established religions, in particular the Catholic church with its 2000 year history. If we just dismiss it as something made up by humans, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- [43:46]
A
When all our conversations, hitherto we've talked a bit about my Catholic background, but it's never been critical in relation to me advancing an argument, or I haven't personally, because there are arguments that you can make independently. And the issue of my critique of technology is not grounded in the books on that. In this context I'm confronted with a. An adversarial attack on the intellectual roots of the things that underlie my belief system and in particular the anthropology of humans and the justification. So in this there's another issue, and it's the issue about what I'd call a civilizational metaphysics, about trying to understand what's happening in civilization without being too close to what's going on. And this has an impact in relation to my studying in the last decade in particular of issues about consciousness and spirituality and religion. And I've had most contact I've had has been with spiritual but not religious people, for example, and people who are studying consciousness Now I argue, and I will argue when we talk about this more, that the study of consciousness, as has been revealed unfortunately in the Epstein files, if you look at it, is associated with an idea of the control system that's part of it. It's not about enlightenment of the humans, it's about systems of control, of governance, which is what my work on AI governance is about. Now that's not all of it, but there is a dimension that's there. I'm not reducing it, but there is this concerning dimension. There's also the issue about. I don't believe that we have ever jumped successfully from the pre existing idea of spirit and soul to something which is called consciousness, which is divorced from spirit and soul. So that's why I argue for spiritual consciousness, as Evelyn Underhill does, which allows us therefore to have a wider view. And of course for someone, that's important both for you and for me and William James, he talks about the variety of religious experience, it's not the variety of spiritual experience. So there's another issue. So there's that general issue, I think, in dealing with friends, different people, people I communicate with in the spiritual, not religious. They're very hostile to the Catholic Church. And this hostility is not grounded on an awareness of the vast history of it. It's often grounded on a propagandistic thing. In particular, the British Empire espoused, and I've studied a lot of the issues that people say and usually come up with. Now, this is not to justify the things that are wrong with the Catholic Church. In fact, the divisions are in the Catholic Church at the moment. There is a possibility of a schism coming up very, very shortly. Geoffrey in relation to the Latin Mass, there's this schismatic moment at the moment. So there's turmoil within the Church itself. But if the genealogists say that my family came from the same root, as we've talked before in Donegal, of the place that or the family that Columba came from and early Christianity. So hypothetically, there could be a 1500 year connection to Christianity in my father's family, a direct connection. Now, this generation has rejected that in Ireland. As they reject it, the country has transformed irrecoverably from that perspective of an indigenous tradition. It's something else. Whatever. The new Ireland is a different Ireland. It cannot be the same Ireland. So what? And in that, we don't understand some of the stories. We don't understand, for example, why the Normans invaded a Catholic country as Catholics in 1169 coming back from Jerusalem, because people forget that the Normans had three states or there were three crusader states in the Holy Land in the 12th century and that some of them, when they came back, invaded Ireland. These connections are obscured. People don't understand that before the schism in 1054, that the Pope had been captured by the Normans in South Italy. And you begin to look at these issues and you see there's a massive complexity that people don't understand. And most of the things that people see at the base of Western society go back to the Catholic Church. And in particular, I would emphasize the Gregorian reforms. The idea of the modern legal system that underpins a lot of the Western system is associated with the Pope. So what I'm saying, the Magna Carta, for example, from which people know from the basis of their rights and the kind of codification of the basis of the right to trial by jury, wouldn't have come about without the Church. It's absolutely certain. And the nephew of Columba instituted a law in 697 which was codified, the rights of women and children in the event of war. So that's a long, long tradition that people are throwing out because of their concerns with the sexual abuse and this, that and the other. But the amplification of those issues is in Stark contrast to the people's unwillingness to look at similar problems across the board. We're going to see a lot more of this stuff. It's coming out in the Epstein files. We're going to see it in the Protestant context a lot more. We see it in sporting context, film, the whole lot. And you know, so anyway, so the point being in this context, what I say is that if you go back and look at the magisterium of the Catholic Church, the encyclicals of the Catholic Church, their prediction in the mid-19th century about modernism, they're the same problems that people are talking about today, but people are not willing to do so. They've never read the documentation, they've never read the arguments in favor against certain things. They've never read about the protection of workers rights. And they have embraced a very simplistic analysis of the Church as solely an economic power, like Trotsky argues that they were solely a clever device to keep the poor under control. And I don't agree with that. So, yeah, hands up. I'm more interested now in the future, coming out of the closet as it was, to argue for a Catholic perspective and in particular. From someone from a parapsychological background. The Catholic Church has the greatest repository of studies in relation to paranormal activity, in relation to issues like levitation, et cetera, as you know. So the idea that it is this, it's just been caricatured. And I see that a Catholic church burned in Montreal. There's been loads of Catholic churches burned in Montreal. There's loads of Catholic churches being destroyed around the world. There's loads of Catholics being persecuted in places like Nigeria. It's constant. This stuff is anti. Catholicism is rife. It's also there intellectually that people are very flippant about dismissing this. So, yes, I do argue. That's why I do juxtapose Jesus and Trotsky. And for many Protestants, they won't like that. I've emphasized the Catholic Church because the Protestant history doesn't give it that perspective. It doesn't have a magisterium that engaged in a lot of these sociological, civilizational issues. So that's why I felt compelled to say, well, hold on a second. There's something we have to look at here and it is in a unique position. I believe that if you look at the history at last point, Protestantism in Europe, all of the countries that became Protestant are no longer effectively Protestant. This will happen in the United States. Christianity will become, as a descriptor is very, very soon going to become a minority or not the majority in the United States. If you look at the statistic, Protestantism will decline despite its big numbers. It's not persistent. It's not persistent in the state. The most secular countries in Europe were Protestant countries, and I'm sitting in one in Sweden. It's not a persistent from a civilizational perspective. So a lot of these things are going to fall away if you look at a long trajectory. So yeah, I'm going to do that. And that will annoy a lot of people when they say, well, and they start listing off all the knee jerk things they've learned about telling me about the catars. And I've studied a lot of these issues and there's a lot more complexity and nuance not to defend those things. But if you do not understand, for example, on issues like women rights, if you looked at the United nations record, all of the countries that did well were historically Christian, Catholic and then Christian countries. So now we're being told that there was nothing there, that that was just an accident, a coincidence. There are consequences when you reject when you reject a total intellectual system. I'm not talking about for governing what people do, but in relation to a worldview. So yeah, I have taken a position on that.
- [54:07]
B
JEFFREY I'm under the impression, James, having had many conversations with you, that your view isn't so much a pro Catholic church view as maybe more consistent with the traditionalists who suggest that we have to pay attention to longstanding religions. If someone is, for example, in Thailand, you would probably argue that they should be concerned about Buddhism rather than modernism in Thailand or Hinduism rather than modernism in India.
- [54:43]
A
Yes and no. My view has always been and I don't change on that. I'm always respectful for other traditions and I agree with the traditionalist ethos, but in that all of them would say you really have to stick to the thing that you know and where you come from, you know, so they're not a lot of them are not in favor, as far as I can see. If you look at the reading of they say yes, you should pick a traditional one, but a number of people say you should stick to the thing that you know. So that's one element. But my point now on Catholicism is different, Geoffrey, and there is a change and this is because of the unfolding of events when you take the great traditions and I have a lot of great communication, for example, with Muslims and intellectuals and there's a lot of things we talk about in common. But if I compare Catholicism with Protestantism with Islam and Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, whatever. And we look at the challenge that I have identified about AI, posthumanism and transhumanism. The one that has the best antidote to that is the Catholic trajectory, because it focuses on a continuous connection back to Christ, which emphasizes the Incarnation, which emphasizes the dignity of the human, which argues that the human is involved in a divine plan and that God became man. So it's two persons in one. And that distinguishes it from all the tradition that's corroborated by the tradition of art and music going back to the Council of Nicaea, which said that it's legitimate and important not to worship images, but to use images to reflect the human figure and to reflect divine icons. So that we have this tradition in Western Europe that leads to the Renaissance is a focus on the human and the individual, which was the underpinning of humanism that you don't find in other traditions, because the one God didn't become human. And secondly, they had prohibitions on the representation of divine figures so that you had that abstraction, for example, in Islam. So now we face a post human scenario which says, well, the human is going to disappear. I started off my study in art, if you like, when I gave up law, saying, well, why is the human disappearing from art? It was journey to abstraction. You have this abstract dimension in, for example, in Islam you have a lot of concentration, if you like, in Catholic terms, on God the Father. But this idea of the divine becoming human, which was noticed and reinforced by people or Christian anarchists or who come from a Marxist background, like Jacques Ellul. He said the solution to this technological, or the growth of the technological, society and technique was a focus on incarnation, meaning the manifestation in flesh in this fine tuned context for whatever strange purpose it is. So only Catholicism has that continuity and a focus on that. And so, for example, Buddhism, I think is more open in many senses to some of the ideas that are popular in Silicon Valley. There's an ease of movement between them. You can say it's all. There's a number of ways to reconcile it. You cannot do it in Catholicism, and not only can you not do it, but the constant reiteration of the significance of the dignity of life which is in its critics, even if you like, Ivan Ilyich, for example, believes that the concept of life as we understand it comes from Christ through that tradition. Jung believed in individuation being associated with Christ. Rudolf Steiner believed that Christ was, you know, the Golgotha was. The Golgotha was the was the greatest event in history. Dostoyevsky and the Russian tradition goes back to that. I believe in the future that the Catholicism and Orthodoxy will overcome the schism and be reunited in some way at some time in the future that's going to happen. I believe that Protestantism that is associated with the state will fall away, that you will have some denominations, for example, that have maintained their coherence in separation from the state. They will continue, but in a much reduced form. And so in this context, I have to commit myself to that tradition because I think it is the deeper tradition. And I think most people do not know intellectually a lot, lot deeper than people are given the credit. So what I'm going to try and do is to bring out some of those things, to bring out some of those themes which is also necessary in a self correction sense in the church itself. And also I don't want there's an influx of people into the church now espousing views I never heard from Catholicism. You know, there is a concern I have that I never saw, I personally never saw in the Irish context in the same way, anti Semitic, for example, which I don't believe is in there. And I think the church is again, so I don't want to allow that. There's other things which I don't like. You hear Nick Fuente has gone on about being a Catholic, as far as remembering, saying he's an admirer of Stalin. You say, hold on, that cannot go together. It just cannot go together. So I'm skeptical about some of this, some of the new movements. And I think part of the problem was when all the intellectuals are not in the religions. That's when we're going to have the biggest problem. When they've said, no, no, that's all nonsense. And of course they're rejecting the spiritual world. And I also think that there's an unfinished story of the original tradition which I like. The Irish tradition, which was different, which was monastic, it wasn't diocesan in the same way. It was focused on nature, it was close to nature. It was adventurous, ambitious, had different ideas. It was behind a book of Kells, it was behind great art, it was behind legal codifications and protection of the weak. And it was also, I believe, and we've talked about this in the Columba video, I believe the Druid tradition and the early Catholic tradition went together and we're going to have to rediscover some of those things, some of the more opennesses. So while I support all and always have done that has been the objective. I haven't changed my view on any of that. But in relation to the theological anthropology necessary as an antidote towards post humanism, Catholicism is one of the deepest we can make a claim for Judaism in this. But again, if you believe that the trajectory continues from Judaism through Catholicism, which the church does, it's a similar answer. And I do, I believe that it's clearly the foundation from which Catholicism grew. And also I believe that that history has been corrupted unfortunately by evangelicals in the Protestant context who are espousing what were imperial goals in relation to the Middle east, et cetera, et cetera. And I believe in that context Jewish people who are not involved in this are going to suffer from association that they don't have with this, this Christian movement. But again, Christians in America say that I'm not a Christian. You know, they say Catholics are not Christian. And I don't want to be identified with that type of Christianity which is militant, which is not subject to moral scrutiny, which is the Protestantism that was involved in the repression in Ireland for 500 years. There's a long tradition of this taken land taking stuff, the Reformation taking all the good things and then saying, well, this is actually the Protestant work ethic that gave it to us. Now I don't want to sound too anti Protestant on this, but there's a cultural dimension to the spiritual beliefs. There is this culture, this political history. We can't ignore the history is there of what has happened. So in that context, I'm not saying as adversarial.
- [64:18]
B
You've used a term a couple of times that I don't fully understand, so I hope you could elaborate on it. And that is a magisterium. I don't know what the magisterium is.
- [64:30]
A
The authority or the expression of the authority of the Church based on the kerygma, based on the stuff that was revealed in the life of Christ and the Gospels as elaborated on the basis the idea that Jesus says to Peter, you're the rock on you we build a church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. There's an idea of continuity and an idea of elaboration that Jesus words on their own were difficult to understand and had to be interpreted in context. And sometimes, or well, not sometimes and interpreted in the context of the Old Testament because Jesus was often referring to testament. So some of the things he says cannot be understood unless you go back to the earlier sources. It just doesn't make sense because he's making references to them. My God My God, why have you forsaken me? They're referring back to earlier things. They don't make sense on their own. So the idea of the authority within the Church was to develop and have pronouncements. So in order to have authoritative statements, there had to be agreement through various councils. And there was, you know, there was always a coming and going but about the issues such as what was the nature of God, how do we do we rationalize this idea of God and two people and the Trinity and all of these ideas, what were legitimate and over. So we have these set of pronouncements over time which were elaborated by the encyclicals in particular, which create a whole body which is an expression of the message of Jesus in an authoritative form so that you can find an answer to an issue. So that there isn't. Well, it could be this and it could be that, that the wave function has collapsed in relation to, well, what does it mean? What is the position on things? Now a lot of people don't like that. But what it represents is an accumulative body of work and authoritative statements which one can find an answer to. Now Pope Benedict said that it's a mistake to believe that the Catholic Church ever wants to have a total rule of society. That wasn't the idea of its authority. It was to have a total view. And in that total view it, over various stages, integrated Stoicism and the logic of Greek philosophy and Aristotle, and it was integrated. So it's an integrative, intellectual, civilizational unfolding of the message of Jesus.
- [67:20]
B
Your thinking is very subtle, but I'm glad that you've come out and taken this strong stance with regard to the Catholic Church. It gives me a lot to think about and I'm very hopeful that we will have many, many more conversations.
- [67:37]
A
Nuance is not a thing that you're lacking in and you can understand the broader position. And you've always been open and you've also been very open. I have to stay publicly to any issues that I want to go on, which a lot of people wouldn't be. So I credit you with that and thank you for that. And it's always a privilege to talk to you. I'm very grateful to talk to someone, as you know, with your experience. My wife will give out to me if I don't mention that. I've started putting some articles up on Substack. I'm not very good at self promotion so I forget to do these things. But there are some articles up on Substack. If people want to read some of the arguments I've been thinking in relation to revolution and revelation and reflection and looking at some of the nuances on this book. Thank you again, Jeffrey, and I look forward to the next conversation.
- [68:31]
B
It's always a pleasure, James. I have great admiration for both the breadth and the depth of your thinking, so you will be welcome as a guest on New Thinking Allowed for years to come.
- [68:45]
A
Thank you very much Jeffrey. Appreciate that.
- [68:48]
B
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. You can now download all nine copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingalowed.org book4 in the New
- [70:03]
A
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- [70:17]
B
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