Episode 325: It Is Happening Again

Introduction

0:00Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

0:19It is happening again.

0:26It is happening again. It is happening again.

1:00Pay no attention to that man.

1:07Anybody can have a brain.

1:11You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Summers.

Chat GBT Use

1:21Dave, I finally found an unambiguously good use of chat GBT. I know I've been an AI skeptic, but I finally found one thing that, what do you think it is? I'm almost afraid. Okay, I have a couple of theories. One is some just low-level paper-pushing task that you don't care about, but that seems too realistic for your opening question. So my second guess will be it is making fan porn of the New England Patriots after they win the Super Bowl.

2:01No, no. Yeah, that would be a good one.

2:06Grok, show David Pizarro naked.

2:10It wasn't anything like that. It wasn't even a joke. It's a sincere thing. I'll just send it to you. All you got to do is ask.

2:20Showed Drake me holding up the Super Bowl 50, whatever. Yeah, like tasteful, though, you know, like in a G-string. Yeah, exactly.

2:28No, it's for something so dumb, but that would have taken me like an hour to figure out.

E-vite Task

2:35So I had to send out an e-vite for, because I'm having like the department and grad students and students over to my house. And so I had to send an e-vite, but all I had was their email addresses from Gmail, which is like, you know, brackets and some people's name who are on Google and all that. So I said, make this just an email list separated by commas, remove all anything that's not an email address. And it did it in like 10 seconds.

3:06This is why we're destroying our environment, ladies and gentlemen, for Sounders Lumber's email. So that I don't have to try to fucking figure out how to do that or just enter them in like pecking at the keyboard. So community has less water now. Yeah, exactly. People are dumb.

GPT Advice

3:23No, it's great for shit like that, man. Like I had to use it for just to get advice for how to do shit like merging two data sets by like student ID to do my grades. Hopefully it doesn't hallucinate like a C minus for some Cornell kid. Dude, I actually mistakenly in my formula, which has nothing to do with GPT, gave a bunch of A plus kids just an A. The amount of emails I got, if I had done that to C plus kids, I wouldn't have heard anything.

3:53The A plus kids are like, dear Professor Pizarro, I really enjoyed this semester.

3:59I found your lectures to be stimulating and hilarious. By the way.

Emails

4:04I've noticed that for emails is I'm getting a lot of emails that seem probably chat GPT written. Very like they have a similar format. Oh, also for the podcast, we get this email all the time. And I finally and I got it from like a high school student in Houston. I really love the podcast, Very Bad Wizards. I especially enjoyed episode and then they'll just pick one. I loved how you treated that with humor, but not at the expense of like substantive analysis.

4:37And yeah. I'm starting a new company. We were like, yeah. And then, yeah, totally. It's all, it's all. And the thing that made me so depressed is the idea that like at a certain point, I'm just going to be using it to reply to those emails and it'll just be two computers talking to each other and like they all have won. This is the thing is like it's happening now. We just don't know. It was like you and I were talking a little bit about our use. Like if we, if I were to use it to compose an email, like I would then sort of turn it into my words or like at least into my style.

5:09But it's still kind of computers talking to computers, even though we're like using them to send our messages. Well, I am not to be clear. That's, don't try to drag me into your, but also we have a style. Like soon kids won't have a style. I think that's already true for like the most recent crop. But like, like we have a style that we can turn an email if we did that, which I don't. But like the way I developed a style is from not doing this kind of stuff.

5:40The way I like became a fully formed person is by not doing that stuff. Fully formed in quotes. In quotes, definitely. Yeah. Okay. Like now I'm, I'm thinking about maybe we should join the Sam Harris's and tech bros of the world in, in worrying about the AI, whatever the apocalypse, the singularity, because if we're using GPT or whatever AI to like, which is, this is happening. Professors are using it to write their lectures. Really? Yeah, for sure. Oh my God. Yeah.

6:11Um, to like do slides, whatever. And then students are using it to write their papers in response to those lectures. The computers are just going to realize we're just doing all the work here. And like the humans are these weird, like meat sack middlemen. And they'd be right. You know, that's the other thing is they would be like, fuck these people. All these lazy, like motherfuckers that won't like put in like a little effort all so they can be like, you know, doom scrolling on Twitter or playing some video game or Wordle or digging

6:44through the archives of like connections, uh, to see if there's one that you missed. Must be nice to have archives of undone connections.

6:57What's that like? It's great. Uh, uh, you know what it must be nice to be is a, a member of an archaic civilization. That's right. Yeah. And, uh, in the next segment after this one, I guess, obviously we will be talking about chapter two of the sacred and the profane by. Mercia Eliade. Nice. Yeah. We'll be talking about that second chapter, uh, sacred time and myths.

7:31Yeah. We got it. We, we had a nice discussion. I thought last episode about the first chapter and you mentioned what was going on in the second and I was curious.

Conspiracy Theories

7:39And so we'll dig into that in the next segment, but first conspiracy theories are beliefs that two or more people have coordinated in secret to achieve an outcome and that their conspiracy is of public interest, but not public knowledge. Most public research is focused on why people are motivated to believe in conspiracy theories. And it is widely accepted that they do so in an often unconscious attempt to satisfy unmet

8:09psychological needs, such as to relieve, uh, feelings of existential threat. However, little is known about how endorsement of conspiracy theories affects the formation of new relationships, particularly in the early stages when people are actively managing their impressions. Well, that was formally true that little is known about that, but now it is no longer true as we have a study, conspiracy theories and online dating.

8:41It's a mismatch, miss in parentheticals. Yeah. So, I mean, haven't you always wondered, like, I don't understand. Are you being sarcastic? Like, I feel like this has just been like in the back of our heads for a while. Like, what are people on online dating sites? I guess I was still dining out on the, how widely accepted it was as to why, uh, people are motivated to believe in conspiracy theories that I didn't even think of that, but yeah. Existential threat. Yeah.

9:12Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, so this is four studies where they're trying to answer the question as to how, I guess, like, this is just impression formation, right? So this is like, what do people think when you communicate conspiracy theories on your online dating profile? Well, and then they gave across these studies, they gave people like these hypothetical dating profiles that contained like sentence long conspiracy, endorsement of conspiracy theories that are either right wing or left wing. And then they just asked people a bunch of questions.

9:42Like, do you like this person? Would you date them? Like, how trustworthy are they? Like all that stuff. Um, how friendly are they? Yeah. So you had suggested doing this, like, was your interest like in your heart of hearts, where you like, I wonder, are they going to shit on conspiracy theories that I agree with? Like where you went? Yeah. So first of all, like COVID is fake is, is, is counted as a conspiracy theory. Uh, so obviously there's some ideological issues with this. No, uh, you know, if you want to go like sociologically speaking, the explanatory thing is I went on

10:19blue sky, like I do once every like a month and neuroskeptic is only on blue sky. And he linked to this when I happened to be on there. So I put it in Slack and we didn't have anything else. Neuroskeptic is my literal only motivation to go on blue sky as well. Like I do the same thing. Yeah. Also all the like, I don't know, measurement and like social psych skeptic insiders, the good people who are working to try to change the problem from within.

10:52So I like it for that, but I never remember to go there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's too many things to do. Like, yeah, and it's good. Right. Probably like we don't need more things. So, okay. So what, like the basic finding, which wasn't surprising at all, like, like I was hoping

Conspiracy Theory Study

11:08there'd be some nugget of like something crazy in here, but it's like that sharing conspiracy theories in your online dating profile tends to be bad for your dating prospects. So people do use less trustworthy, less intelligent, less kind, they're less interested in dating you or even befriending you. And that's like generally true for right wing and left wing conspiracies, except for in some cases, like right wing people are like fine with it. Right. Because they haven't been brainwashed by the liberal media. Yeah. Um, but you know, it is kind of interesting, like, so they, the right wing conspiracies

11:42are that the election was rigged in 2020 and that COVID, what do they say about COVID? COVID was a hoax, I think. Yeah. And that these people are putting that in their bio. And then the left wing ones are oil companies rig the elections or at least have like undue influence as to who becomes president. And then oil companies fix prices for gas, which is just like, more like an antitrust claim. Yeah. Like, I mean, so that's one problem is that, I don't know, like this doesn't seem to tell

12:18me anything about in general about conspiracy theories. It tells people about maybe, and we can talk about the ecological validity of this, of this, but setting those concerns aside, like it seems like the conspiracy theory and what it is matters. And they do, they run an additional study where they control for the plausibility of the conspiracy theory. And they say that people are less averse to people who put more plausible conspiracy theories.

12:54Well, of course. Right. And if one of them is not even a conspiracy theory, but just true, you know, that seems like a confounding factor or a confound. But then also the fact that they don't have pictures, that it's not a real dating profile and you're asking like people online, like that seems like a problem. Yeah. Like this is the thing that actually cracks me up about social psychologists is when somebody is like, yeah, but you're just getting judgments. We want to know behaviors. So they do a mock dating app and they, where you have to like swipe whether you're going

13:28to date them or not. And they're like, okay, swiping behavior.

13:34It's like, it's just literally you're making a judgment instead of like clicking a check. You're like dragging your finger. Yeah. This is like the, the part that like sort of one, like they don't use that many conspiracy theories. So they had COVID-19 is a hoax. They had a 2020 election was rigged. Oil companies agreed to increase fuel prices. Oil companies decide who will be president of the U.S. And then what they called a politically neutral conspiracy, the dangers of genetically modified

14:05foods are being hidden from the public. Look it up. And that's it. Yeah. Like why not do like JFK was killed by the CIA or something kind of more interesting and definitely a conspiracy theory, but one that, you know, some people like, you know, myself think is probably correct. Yeah. What kind of got me. And now to be fair to them, they had like control conditions where there was like the opposite of that. Like COVID-19 is real. People trust the experts as like the control for COVID-19 is a hoax people.

14:40But I just found just putting that in that form, like that form of saying something is was so fucking annoying. COVID-19 is a hoax. People don't trust the quote unquote experts or oil companies mutually agrees to increase fuel prices, comma, fact. Yeah. Like, no, it's so lame the way they present it, but also like somebody saying COVID was real. I know. It's so weird. It's like saying there was one shooter. In your bio. That's the thing that you would say, like in 20, let's say they did this in 2024 or 2025.

15:11Like, that's so bizarre. The next Twitter little bio I'm going to do is just going to be like there was one shooter for the JFK assassination. Oswald acted alone. Oswald acted alone. People.

15:26Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like that's one problem. But like set all that aside, what do you think the actual truth is about whether somebody is conspiracy theory curious and they're dating like possibilities, like not in your bio. Cause like, I just think anybody who puts anything pro anti in their bio, that's just a really weird thing. And whatever statistical magic you can get out of like, you know, the difference between

15:56those two is like, it doesn't tell me anything, but if you could peer into the minds of people in the early stages of relationships, like what would you think? So one, I disagree. I think that these findings are real. I think that it's really annoying to say COVID-19 is real, but I think that you probably get a ding for saying COVID-19 is a hoax. But I think that's probably the demographic of people who are on these, like on these dating apps. I think people are using it as a proxy for like how weird you are or maybe how smart you

16:27are. Where I think that like, you probably shouldn't on a first date be talking about conspiracy theories anyway, cause I just sort of says something about what you're obsessed with. And like, you don't probably don't want someone who's obsessed with like, you know, the grassy knoll or whatever you're obsessed.

16:43The magic bullet. Speak for yourself.

16:47So I think more, this is just like, oh, is this person weird? You know? Yeah. Like, and that's just bad for you. So you should hide it. Somebody should be like on, on date number five, like after you've had sex, like you should be like, what, you actually believe there was more than one shooter? Like that's when, that's when you pull it out. Yeah. I think that's probably right. Like, I think being obsessed with either side of anything I think early on will come across as weird, but I don't know. Like, you know, it's been a while that I've been dating, but my, I also feel like it's just

17:20going to depend on the theory and the context that you say it. If you're on a date and you bring up something about oil companies, like, you know, like all the lobbies that, you know, made it impossible for Bernie to get elected. So like it was Biden that had to run, but that's going to go one way. And then, you know, saying, oh, there are aliens like right now, like in conversation with the secretary of defense. Like, look at this picture. Do you see the lizard person behind the president in the shadows?

17:51That's going to be. Tell me that's not a lizard person. It is weird that like conspiracy theory is the like natural kind here, like that it's more than plausibility. It's just, it's sort of just like if you put in steam trains that have been electric for longer than people thought or some stupid shit, you know, like people are just going to be like, well, yeah, you're just really weird. Or, oh, that's probably true. Yeah. That was the most autistic example I've ever come up with. Maybe there's just thinking that you're on the train trains.

18:26Can I read a very funny? So this is, I told you that they controlled for the plausibility. So after the first experiment where they conclude sharing conspiracy theories seem detrimental rather than helpful to future relationship prospects. But then they said, experiment two provides additional nuance by demonstrating the role of plausibility in shaping impressions of conspiracy sharing profiles.

Plausibility

18:53Specifically, profiles endorsing an implausible conspiracy theory were judged more harshly across multiple impressions compared to those sharing a plausible conspiracy theory. These findings align with prior research suggesting that perceived plausibility of conspiracy theories influence how they are evaluated and accepted. And then there's a study, you know, studies that they cite to support this. Like, that's fucking insane. First of all, like a plausible conspiracy theory, then is that a conspiracy theory?

19:25Yeah. Number one. But number two, like this prior research suggesting that how plausible you think the conspiracy is will influence how you evaluate and accept it. Like, isn't that almost like definitionally true? Like, like, like part of the word plausible? Only, only if you like people who are like, like truer things than falser things. Like, I suppose, I suppose you could, you could find some group of people who are like, you know what I, you know what I really want?

19:56Is somebody who believes things that aren't true. I hate that theory because it's too plausible.

20:02What are you doing? Trying to track truth? It's an empirical claim, Temler. And I think that the next paper should be like, if you think that one plus one equals three. It should be, yeah, like the plausibility of a math claim will influence whether you accept it or not. Like, it's very weird, like these things. Yeah. There is like a, um, something in the air about conspiracy theories. I guess it's been that way for a while now. But like, it was in the air in much more, I think, in popular culture.

20:33But it's definitely like made its way into social psychology. Like, there's a lot more social psychology about conspiracy theory. No, I know. And like, I hate a lot of it because it's just kind of smugly talking about like why people are so stupid to believe in them. You know, I think a lot of that, because it's not like social psychologists were the first people to do this, is really to, you know, discourage people from digging and finding out like what the truth is about a lot of terrible things. Yeah, I disagree. Like, no, I know, you're a Northeastern elite.

21:07Like, it says, it says the most Northeastern elite upbringing guy I know. Um, yeah, but even then, there is a smugness. Like, I totally agree. I'm more like, why are we spending our time on people who believe in lizard people? There was a time when I could ignore those people, but I guess. The conspiracy people? Yeah. You couldn't ignore me. You had to do a podcast with me. You cosplay as a conspiracy theorist. Let's put it, let's just say it out. That itself is a conspiracy theorist.

21:39But I think it's also fair. You're probably not even a Jew.

21:43That's why you won't do your DNA. That's why I'm anti-Israel.

21:50You thought you could sneak your way. Irrespective of whether conspiracy theories aligned with liberal or conservative ideologies, liberals were generally harsher with their judgments and less willing to engage romantically with profiles, like, with these fake profiles that they know is fake, with profiles endorsing right-wing conspiracy theories, whereas conservatives were more lenient and in some cases more favorable. These results are consistent with shared reality theory, which emphasizes people's motivation to form epistemic common ground with close others.

22:26And then there's, like, studies. I'd love to look into the shared reality theory literature. I feel like all that was just saying was that, like, we like people who agree with us on stuff. No, because I think conservatives, according to what they're saying, are more lenient, even when it's a liberal conspiracy theory. But that's because they also, like, know that oil companies are fucking around with the government. Like, I think that's a real problem. Actually, did they ask to what extent they were sympathetic to any of these? I don't know. I don't think so, though.

Sympathy

22:57Yeah, I wonder.

Sympathy

22:57That's a great question, though, because it's not like, oh, I love oil companies if you're the right wing, you know? Right. Right. The most pressing question to me, given that they didn't use pictures, was how this would interact with the hotness of the person on the profile. That's what they should just do. Yeah. Well, people look past, like, a kind of kooky statement because the picture is hot. Did they not get permission to do that? Why couldn't they just use normal profiles? And I guess because then they would have to trick their people.

23:30Yeah. Well, even if it was still all fake, you could put pictures. Like, you could just get some of these picture databases where you can use the faces. Right. And you could use the same picture for, like, across all these conditions. My guess is that given that there's, like, a lot of variability associated with how attractive somebody is, how old they are, like, you could just get a lot cleaner in one sense results by avoiding all that. Probably their a priori power analysis suggested that they don't show photos because that way they can only have an N of, like, 113 or 110 or whatever.

24:08You know, it sucks that it's a limitation, but it is so expensive. Like, if you really wanted to do the best version of this and you needed, like, 2,000 people, you're looking at thousands upon thousands of dollars to collect the data. I feel like it used to be, like, that people did good experiments, like, you know, they would say you're in a prison and you're a prison guard or, like, oh, we're actually electrocuting this person to get to death. Or, like, more seriously, like the Nisbet one where someone would walk down the hall and bump into you and call you an asshole or something like that for the honor culture study.

24:43Like, is that harder to do now? Like, why is it all, like, prolific, like, and this bullshit? This is a real conversation to be had because, like, I totally agree. Like, there is a couple of things. One, once we realized, like, what we should have realized a long time ago that you need a lot more statistical power, you can't just have, like, 10 people per condition. Like looking in a phone booth to see if someone likes a dime or whatever, yeah. Exactly. Then it becomes a lot harder to do the real ones.

25:13And then there's the whole criticism of, like, using just college sophomores, like a psychology of college sophomores, where, weirdly, what things like Prolific or even MTurk can allow you to do is collect data from a wider swath of the population than the college people who you could give extra credit to and bring them into the lab and stuff like that. But it's wider in one sense. It's wider in one sense. And now it's all, I genuinely feel like we've lost the psychology in social psychology, like, where we don't even interact with people anymore, which is such an ironic feature of modern social psychology, that you just post these things to, like, your Qualtrics and use Prolific, and then two days later you have, like, hundreds of responses by who knows who, and you've never had to talk to a person.

26:03Like, what's the social, where's the social in that? Right, totally. And then, like, also, like, who are these people that are going on and doing this stuff? Like, I don't know anybody who goes on Prolific and, you know, gives them data. And to just bring it full circle, is it possible that people are using AI to just do a bunch of these and get whatever pittance you give them for doing the study? Like, I don't know. Absolutely true. Like, there's actually, weirdly, some of the more interesting work that's been done has been trying to look at who these people are and why they're doing it.

26:36But, like, honestly, the most informative way to learn about those people is to go on some of the subreddits of people who are actually doing these. And they'll just talk about all the strategies they use, why they do it, how much, they'll, like, share which experiments are paying more money, which ones to avoid, like, which experiments to avoid. Like, there is, like, a real sociology going on there. That's interesting. Yeah. There's a long read to be written about that. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we could look at that. There are some publications. We can look at that in the future. Like, who are we basing our psychology on now in the last 10 years?

27:11It does seem like there's a lot you could do just by going to Reddit and, like, assembling data that has been on Reddit. Like, it would definitely also have, like, sampling problems. But, like, I don't know. At least people there are interacting for real in that context. It is, yeah. It's like the last bastion of real humans talking because they'll suss you out. Real humans.

27:39Humans. Humans. Humans.

27:43Speaking of Reddit, we might do an AMA. Is that real? Yeah. That we might do that? Yeah. I think so. We just got to find a time. So, check Reddit. Judoxing, the moderator there, is going to set it up for us. All right. We done with this? Any final thoughts on this paper? No. Just that I'm glad I'm not on dating apps. Have you ever been on dating apps? I tried a dating app once when I went to Toronto for a week and my friends were like, you should just try it. And I went, like, on one date. But I've never here, because even though I was single for, like, so many years here in Ithaca, Ithaca is literally, like, the population is half students.

28:20And I was like, I don't want anybody to find me on a dating app. Like, I know that you could probably, like, select it so that people of a certain age can't find you or whatever. But, like, just the thought of students being like, hey, look, it's bizarre. He's on a dating app. Like, just made me scared. And then the people who are in students are not, like, the, like... Cream of the crop.

28:41Well, come down to Houston. Yeah.

28:46I imagine in Houston, well, maybe I'm just thinking about what I saw at Texas A&M. There's just a lot of Erica Kirk-looking girls. No, it's not. Houston is 100% not like that. All right.

Sacred Time

28:58We'll be right back to talk about sacred time and myths. Thanks.

29:26La, la, la, la, la, la.

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Eliade's Discussion

32:38Like Tamler said, we are continuing to talk about Eliade's discussion of the sacred and profane. This is his discussion of sacred time. So this is like kind of a neo-Kantian structure here. He has like the concept of space for chapter one and then the concept of time for chapter two. And in this section, Eliade argues that religious man, archaic man, that their understanding of time is fundamentally different from modern man in that sacred time is cyclical, it's reversible, it's recoverable.

33:13It's what he called mythic time. And that this is like fundamentally connected to myths about the creation of the world, the beginning of the world, and that what religious man does in his myths and in his ritual practices is try to reconnect. Because for both the space discussion and the time discussion, like the view is that the motivation here is to connect back to the sacred. And the way that religious man connected back to the sacred was by doing rituals that brought them back to the original sacred time.

33:45So recreating the cosmogony, the beginning of the universe, recreating what the gods did. And in that way, they step out of profane time, which is just chronological, historical, ordinary, regular time. By stepping out of that and into the sacred time with these myths and rituals, religious man connects back to the sacred existence. Yeah. And so there's two distinctions that he makes, right, between religious man and non-religious man.

34:17You know, we do have like, you know, holidays that we celebrate, but we divest them of entirely of the sacred. But then there's also like archaic religious man versus Judeo-Christians who don't have that cyclical view of time, but who do, as I understand it, still sacralize the time. But they do it within history. They make a certain point in history sacred and thus keep this idea of just a linear time, but without losing the sacred.

34:53And I couldn't tell whether he thought that was just one step towards being desacralized and disenchanted and living in your cookie cutter house in your cookie cutter time, or if he thought that that was an actual innovation that would, you know, can work in our modern environment. Yeah, I love that point about the Judeo-Christian difference, like with, between that tradition and the others. And I don't know, it does seem to me that like, he thinks that the pure cyclical time is better, that the bringing in of the historical time is actually kind of like a paler version of the original.

35:33So, so like you said, in the old myths, the archaic man to use, like he uses the Babylonian creation myth as an example where the God defeats the sea serpent. Like that mythical event is like at the very beginning of the universe or of the world as we know it. And it's not anything anybody we know ever experienced. And that feels like to me that Eliade thinks that that is just way more pure in its sacredness. Well, because it purifies you, like you start at the beginning.

36:04It's like everything else is washed out so you can start anew. Okay, now we're just created again. You know, that is different than living, okay, like the universe is 4 billion years old and I'm going to be alive for the tiniest little blip of it. But yeah, so he says the Christian liturgy unfolds in a historical time sanctified by the incarnation of the Son of God. Yeah, and there really is, you know, like there's the stages of the passion.

36:37Like there is a time that is viewed as sacred, like all of the events that unfolded right before the crucifixion of Christ that are repeated by certain Christians. And so in that sense, like it is taking part of like the repetitive, but it just, yeah, like it seems like because that itself is situated in this sort of like tainted historical timeline that it just seems less pure. Yeah, I think that I agree that it feels like the subtext of a lot of what he's talking about.

37:09So this is what he, for a religious man of the archaic cultures, the world is renewed annually. In other words, with each new year, it recovers its original sanctity, the sanctity that it possessed when it came from the creator's hands. And he gives a lot of examples of people at certain periods, you know, a year that they will reenact the creation of the world and then act as if the world has been renewed and they are now purified.

37:43They are reborn, literally kind of reborn because they have just come to being with this new universe. What I don't understand, so just a broad question about this, what's the evidence that they actually believe that this is now the beginning of creation? And what does that even mean that they believe that this is the beginning of creation? Because they have memories from before. I'm sure they have grudges from before.

38:13So I'm not even totally sure, unlike the last chapter, I'm not fully sure what I'm being told about their internal life. Like what it's like to be one of these archaic religious men. Yeah, that's interesting. Like I took it as a deep, maybe just metaphor, like a sacred version of what we do on years with our like resolutions where we're like turning over a blank slate or their rituals. Like he talks a little bit about scapegoating where like all the sin of the year gets put out into something else.

38:47Like, you know, write it down on a piece of paper and burn it or whatever, where it's just much more like a ritual cleansing. Because like, it's not like these people didn't think they were going to die. It's more, I think, that they are feeling existential renewal, like in some way. You know, there's a lot of this talk about participating in the eternal where like every year they're touching the eternal and they come back like as if they, you know, haven't bathed for the year and they come back like anew. And maybe they took the time, like maybe that helped them set aside the year's grudges or try to forget the shit that happened that year.

39:25But I didn't take it as like a real. Like a literal thing where they think. So if that's the answer, I don't totally get what the difference is between some of the, you know, more historical sanctified oriented religions. Because if you're doing this metaphorically and symbolically, how is that different from confession or even like the Jewish thing where you, you know, repent for your sins on Yom Kippur or whatever. Like, if you don't actually believe that the world is created anew, like what's the substantive difference in terms of your internal way of understanding time in the world?

40:05Yeah. I don't know. Like, that's where I think maybe he, he would have to say, yeah, okay. So like the Judeo-Christian way is, is historical, but it's still at least trying to do this cyclical, repetitive, refreshed person. Like, it seems to me that he has like some sort of metaphysical commitment to your rituals being about the creation of the universe and like being outside of time is what's like giving you this extra sort of bit of sacredness.

40:35Right. And it's making you a contemporary of the gods. Of the gods. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So you're participating in a time, if it makes sense to call it that, where before time really existed, you're sort of, you know, breaking the veil. Stepping outside of time in the same way that you can like have an eruption in space and step inside of that. Right. And they even talk about how like if there's a three or four day long ritual, they call it like dream time. Yeah. It is like a liminal space for real where you're in between like cycles and you're not you at that point.

41:13So maybe you're getting, yeah, you're getting in some way washed during those periods. Yeah. But dream time, I guess, unless you're a woman, you don't get to participate in. No, no. Yeah. Here's what it says. The Australian Orunta repeat the journey taken by the particular clan's divine ancestor in the mythical time. Literally the dream time. They stop at all the countless places at which the ancestor stopped and repeat the same acts that he performed in Ile Tempore.

41:44During the entire ceremony, they fast, carry no weapons and avoid all contact with their women and with members of other clans. They are completely immersed in the dream time. Yeah. So like I, you know, like a lot of these things, like I don't totally like it sounds cool. Like I want to be immersed in dream time for four days. And maybe that's what like doing ayahuasca or something like that is meant to evoke in some sense. But I still don't know exactly what he means by that.

42:15Like, do they not see the women? Do they not get hard ons during this time? Like, what exactly is happening? Like, he teases you with all these cool things without just giving you certain details that I think I would like to know. But maybe that would ruin it. I don't know. That's interesting because like, why was it easier for us to understand the space part? Yeah. And I think that the difference might be, it seems more psychological, like internal to have like this relationship to time that's different as opposed to like the space.

42:49Like I can clearly tell when I'm like in a, you know, Notre Dame and I'm seeing like the amazing. Or even in our personal ones. Or even in our personal ones. That totally makes sense. I know what I'm experiencing. Yeah. But I have no real notion of sacred time. And maybe I just haven't participated in these rituals enough. Like, it sounds like the participation in the ritual, like maybe puts you in a different state of mind. But maybe not. Like, maybe he's just thinking, like, I'm just demarcating these four days in the same way that I demarcate these like four corners of a building.

43:22And that there doesn't need to be anything special other than I'm saying I'm participating in this. But I like to think it's not that. That it is something like qualitatively different. But, you know, you saying that it was easier for us to understand the space thing makes total sense. Remember the episode we did on metaphors? The Lakoff, I think, right? And his whole point was that we understand time through space. Like all of our metaphors for time are spatial.

43:54And so, like, space we feel like we have a great handle on. But time, we need space. That's our lens. That's our prism for understanding that. And they probably aren't like that. And so maybe, like, I do buy that it might just be completely different. Like your understanding of your relationship to what we call time might be totally different in a completely different kind of culture. And, yeah, like that's kind of fascinating. Yeah. And it is weird that we don't, like, we just don't engage in, like, reenactment rituals.

44:26Well, like the Civil War reenactments. And Passover is kind of like that, actually, where you're literally supposed to try to, you know, like having Horoset is, like, when we were slaves and we had to use the brick and mortar. Like, we have our own versions of that. But it is within this idea of, like, that was a long time ago, but we are connected to them, not this is happening again. It's so interesting because, like, you say we and, like, I neither participate in Passover nor Civil War reenactments.

44:58And I've always thought that my, like, there is this anodyne, like, Protestantism that is devoid of ritual. Yeah. And it is, like, actually, like, something I noticed early on in life. Like, we just don't have that shit. Yeah. Like, there's nothing, like, there is no ritual. We think it's, like, bad to even, like, do the liturgical Catholic thing, that that's, like, somehow, like, robotically, like, idly worshiping the piece of bread or the wine, you know. Yeah. And so I really don't, like, don't have any of this stuff.

45:29But, I mean, really, as a Seventh-day Adventist, like, you don't do anything. I mean, you have a Sabbath, right, on Saturday. There's a Sabbath, yeah, where it's, like, it is the time that's set aside to rest and worship God. But we're not doing rituals. Like, aside from, like, you know, praying at sunset on Friday and then, you know, and going to church, like, that's as close as it gets. There's nothing connecting me to an older historical person or nothing connecting me to the eternal. Like, Protestantism, at least in my understanding of it, is really this, like, if you're going to have a religious experience, it has to be, like, you in prayer and meditation with God directly.

46:06Yeah. Like, there is no, like, let's get together and be Tiamat and Marduk. Like, I feel like even actors doing plays have more of an experience of what sacred time might be like than I actually have. Yeah. Where, like, they, every night they're reenacting an event, fictional even. Yeah. But I think that then maybe the way he's understanding it, Judaism is that middle stage, you know, probably in Catholicism too. But maybe Judaism more because it is urging you to connect with, like, very specific people at a very specific time.

46:45But without ever thinking that you're starting over and that time is now in any real sense. Right. Although you are doing, like, the, like, washing away the sins of, right? Like, isn't the whole, I don't know, actually, if you have any rituals. But, like, the, yeah, the scapegoat. Yeah. Well, I don't know. What do you mean the scapegoat? Well, you don't do this anymore. But the idea of the scapegoat was that you put all of your sins onto the one goat. You sacrifice the one goat and you put all your sins onto the other one and you actually let it go.

47:18Yeah. Right before we cook a Christian child. Christian baby. Christian baby. And, like, get that blood. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow.

47:31I never thought I would hear. Speaking of anti-Semitism, this is what I was going to bring up.

Eliade's Criticisms

47:37But, you know, Eliade, as a Romanian, had, like, this history that always came back to haunt him. And people sort of use it as a way to criticize him. But he was a member of this Romanian Iron Guard back in the day. Like, he was, which was just a fascist right-wing movement. And even though, like, he disavowed it later in life, it never quite left him. And among the criticisms was, you know, the anti-Semitism of the fascist right-wing pre-World War II.

48:10Pre-World War II, yeah. I don't know. Like, he seems to be equally against Christianity. Yeah, yeah. I don't think that it's a lens to understand his scholarship. But you want to deflect from your own anti-Semitism. You want to deflect that. I get it. No, that's... I do want to read a quote. Like, there is a lot of really interesting ways of putting this view of sacred time. And as I was telling you, like, I felt like the chapter itself was cyclical because I felt like it was a little repetitive. But he says, to a religious man of the archaic cultures, every creation, every existence begins in time.

48:45Before a thing exists, its particular time could not exist. It is for this reason that every creation is imagined as having taken place at the beginning of time, in Principio. Time gushes forth with the first appearance of a new category of existence. I like that time gushes forth. This is all very... Yeah. It's another eruption. Exactly. It's splooging, but now time. Exactly. But this is all, again, this sort of, like, ontology, this is a metaphysics that you are only experiencing the real when you're experiencing the sacred.

49:18And so we're disconnected as modern man, modern humans from the real. And I was reading a bit about these views and, you know, some of the criticism of this sacred profane distinction that Eliade makes and how he thinks the sacred interacts with reality is. Like, it is a little paradoxical that the sacred is taking place on the real plane. Like, it's a bit weird. And that you would really think that it's only real?

49:48Like, how could the sacred come down to this plane of existence if this plane of existence weren't also kind of real? And then, also, like, this view that chaos, that the profane is equated with chaos and that chaos isn't real was something I was reading, which... So that's one of the criticisms, that, like, to equate chaos and profane may not be quite right. Another thing that people have said, you know, because a lot of work has been done trying to see whether or not this view really matches up with, like, the myths of all of the cultures that we encounter, right?

50:23And obviously, no, right? Like, this is a neat story. This is a universalizing of these two categories that would be weird if all of the myths fit into it. But one of the things I was reading was, like, there are a lot of myths where people participate in the profane, where you have, like, these ritualistic orgies, for instance. And what are those rituals doing? Like, is that participating in sacred time, even though it's, like, explicitly sort of, like, giving in to what might be considered profane?

50:54I want to go to those cultures. I know. Like, yeah, like the Saturnalia or whatever, you know, like, right before the year begins. Of course, like Dionysia, like the Dionysian stuff, like all of that. That's all. Even Mardi Gras, where you're just, like, the reason the sacred is demarcated is, like, from, like, the time where you're doing anything you want to do. But doesn't, I feel like this is easily solved by, and I don't know if he has this view or he should have. You just say, look, there is chaos. Then there is ordered bad stuff.

51:26And then there is ordered good things. And heaven is the ordered good things. Hell is the ordered bad stuff. The profane is the chaotic whatever. And, like, hell is, in that sense, participating in debauchery. You know, it could be, like, you know, you're experiencing hell like an Amish person on their whatever Russian thing. Like, just to get it out of your system and to see if that's what you want before you.

51:57Like, I don't see that that's such a big problem. I don't know if that's his view. Well, that's not a problem for you, but that is a problem for his, because he actually, you now have three things. He wants two things. You've now created a profane that's ordered, right? Like, he just does equate chaos with profane. Well, fine. But then call it not profane what hell is. It's ordered bad is the point. Well, that's the thing, is he wants bad to be part of the profane category. Well, it's bad in a different sense. Like, it's bad. I mean, like, I don't, it's not that I disagree with that he should do that.

52:28It's just that I don't think he does do that. Yeah. He wants a kind of clean two system, like a tool system approach to religion. He wants, like, the two by two matrix, like, it'll fuck things up if there's a third thing. Okay. I guess I didn't read it like that. But then the other question I had is, like, what exactly is the difference between, on the one hand, you know, these rituals where they're reenacting the primordial battle in mythic

53:01time that led to the eruption of the real and the creation of the world, and Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, and, like, all the different rituals that we participate in, in this secular context. And it seems like, for him, that we, although it's cyclical, and we're aware that it's cyclical, and, you know, it doesn't evoke the sacred for us. And from what I can tell, the reason why it doesn't is that it's not a renewal.

53:32It's not a genuine renewal, which leads me back to that question of, in what sense is it a genuine renewal for those people, beyond maybe that they, you know, wander around in dream time for those four days? Because when it's January 2nd, or when they go back to their regular life and have to do all their things, and they still have their wives and kids, and, you know, they still have to do all the various things they do, like, what's different about their lives now than it was in December, or whatever their calendar, however their calendar works?

54:06You see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. So, I don't know. Like, I guess I just understood him to be saying the primary difference is whether or not you're connecting to the myth of the cosmogony, like, whether you're participating in the sacred. Not that it's, like, has downstream effects on you, specifically, like, that you feel different. But rather, this is just, like, are you touching the eternal with your celebration of the new year? And it's only for those particular periods? Like, it has no downstream effects on the rest of your life?

54:38That's a good question. I don't know what he thinks. Like, I didn't read in that that he's saying anything other than it's just sort of like every year you're participating in the creation of the world, and that's just participating in the sacred. But then you're back in the regular world and back in linear time. It's just that you're out of time for that period. I think that he cares about how you're connecting to, like, the metaphysical plane of your myth system.

55:08And it's just a shallower way of celebrating the new year, one that's just not connecting us to the deeper thing. And that's why it does make sense to me, like, that the whatever Jewish and Christian rituals are this sort of halfway. Yeah. But I don't know if he thinks that you're having a different phenomenological experience when you're participating in the mythical. Well, so he does say all the sins of the year, everything that time had soiled and worn, was annihilated in the physical sense of the word.

55:39By symbolically... That's a weird thing to say, in the physical sense of the word. What does he mean? By symbolically participating in the annihilation and recreation of the world, man, too, was created anew. He was reborn, for he began a new life. With each new year, man felt freer and purer, for he was delivered from the burden of his sins and failings. I don't know, that sounds to me like you're, you have a blank slate now, you're starting fresh. Yeah. Okay, so, like, my understanding is that there's two things that you might be bringing up.

56:12One is, is there, like, a real sense of this being freer of his burdens, of his sins and his failings? The other one was, like, in the rituals themselves, is man, like, somehow, during the time of that ritual, like, experiencing something different? Right. For what I understand him, the answer to that question in the ritual is definitely yes. But it's this other thing, like, the consequences of that, the effects of it. That's why I say, like, on January 2nd or 3rd, and it sounds from that, like, well, they're

56:44lighter, their burden is lifted, they feel purer, like, and, you know, for better and for worse. Like, the way that I read that is that it is, like, just a deeper version of what people feel, like, at January 1st anyway, like, so our rituals are, like, hey, it's a new year, like, I'm going to be a new David, but they, like, might feel it just extra. That's right. Like, even if we feel, like, okay, I'm going to, like, it's sober January or whatever, and, like, I can start, like, it's, you get that, like, it's not, like, your life has

57:14started over again. Yeah, right. We didn't have a religious experience. Our feeling of, like, hey, it's a new year isn't backed by, you remember when Marduk defeated Tiamat, like, we are, we have to just be, like, actually, it's kind of arbitrary. That's interesting. So, like, the more you really actualize, like, your ritual really actualizes a creation, a new beginning, the more you'll feel like you can begin anew, that you're not burdened

57:45by your past and your conditioning and your problems, and that might actually put you in a state where, like, fresh possibilities seem more obtainable. As you're saying that, I'm, like, reminded that later on in the chapter, he talks about healing rituals, where, like, there might be a true belief that you are physically transforming somebody by recreating some sort of mythical time, where, where the belief is that this is how I'm going to heal you.

58:16Like, I don't think it probably worked very well, but. No, I bet it did. I know. I knew you would. This has to be a selective reading of myths. Yeah. I know there are a lot of these, but I remember having this feeling in, like, the Joseph Campbell stuff, like, you can hit me with a lot of things, but, like, I'm still not going to be sure what is the total amount of myths that ancient man, religious man had, and do they fit this pattern? Yeah, it does feel like, what's your methodology? Loosely speaking, what's your methodology here?

58:48Are you even looking for counterexamples? Are you looking, basically, it's, like, everybody and then Judeo-Critic, like, maybe Hindu started fucking around with this kind of, well, I actually don't know what his problem was exactly with that side of Hinduism. Interesting. I actually had to read that a couple of times and then try to look up what he actually thought about it, because I thought, you know, just the summary, hey, Eliade thinks that sacred time is cyclical, I'm like, oh, okay, super consistent with the Hindu worldview where there

59:22are these, like, eons. And he has this section, like, right at the end where he says, obviously, the doctrine of the yugas was celebrated by intellectual elites. And if it became a pan-Indian doctrine, we must not suppose that it revealed its terrifying aspect to all the peoples of India. It was chiefly the religious and philosophical elites who felt despair in the presence of cyclic time repeating itself ad infinitum. So I think that he thinks that they had the right idea when they said timeless cyclical.

59:53And so, like, there are these 12,000-year cycles and these incredibly long cosmic cycles, but that what crept into the belief was this philosophy that this was a despairing thought and that the goal was to escape the cycle. So that, I think, is what he thinks is, like, the misstep. Right. And that's where I think he brought up Buddhism, I might be wrong, but that's definitely the implication that you can, implying a transcendence of the cosmos by stepping out of it. So what he wants is for us to be fully on board with this continual renewal.

1:00:30And not view it as just the prolonging, as he says, the indefinite prolongation of suffering and slavery. Yeah. So just before that, he says, this is what occurred when in certain more highly evolved societies, the intellectual elites, so you, not me, progressively detach themselves from the patterns of traditional religion. The periodical sanctification of cosmic time then proves useless and without meaning. The gods are no longer accessible through the cosmic rhythms. The religious meaning of the repetition of the paradigmatic gestures is forgotten.

1:01:02But repetition, emptied of its religious content, necessarily leads to a pessimistic view of existence. Yeah. So I guess that's the idea. Like, what we have and what, I guess, this view of a Hindu Buddhist that wants to be removed from the cycle of rebirth and death, like, that that's not spiritual because you are trying to escape what is rather than participate it in the fullest possible way.

1:01:37I do think that's a misreading of, like, the idea of nirvana and escaping the cycles. Like, I actually think they're more on board with what he thinks, that what you're doing when you escape, metaphorically, when you escape these cycles is you're becoming less bogged down by the illusory aspect of the world and more in touch with the real and the timeless. Like, in Zen, you're supposed to imagine what your original face is before your parents were born, before you were born. And it's this idea of something that is completely timeless that you are identified with.

1:02:10Like, that's not trying to escape the sacred. That's trying to recover your connection with the sacred that you've always had, but it's been obscured by all this illusion that I think is the illusion of the profane as he understands it. But it's possible I'm misunderstanding him there. Well, I mean, I like what you said. Like, I mean, his view really, like, steps out of the descriptive. And as you were talking, I could imagine that he would think something like, let's say, the

1:02:42Hindu cyclical view where you have, like, creation, destruction, creation, destruction, and it comes to view this as just, like, suffering and we need to move away from it. And then, like, imagine that that becomes the Buddhist view, like, that you were just describing where you're actually trying to reach something deeper and real. Like, I could see that Eliade might not think that that's sacred. He might think that that is stripping yourself of the gods and, like, the cosmos.

1:03:15And you're trying to move to something more abstract and something that's, like, not built on, you know, the bodies of dead gods that created the world for us. Yeah. Which would be, I think, fair. Like, I don't think that's bad in the way that he thinks it is, maybe. That's right. But, like, I think that's more intellectualized. It's, like, not consistent with what, like, quote, unquote, primitive man would have thought. I don't think it's more intellectualized because it is supposed to be beyond intellect. It is something you can only be in touch with in a, you know, visceral way, like an intuitive

1:03:46way. Then say philosophical. Like, that is a philosophical achievement, I guess. I guess, yeah. And he talks about the Stoics, too, as being a part of this, where it's, like, if you think the world just keeps renewing after, you know, 200 million years, that's also, like, you know, the timescales there doesn't really affect you. And so you can't really feel that renewal that he's talking about with primitive man if we're just, this is year 125,000 of the 575,000 years of darkness or whatever.

1:04:23It's, like, okay, like, you might as well just be in, you know, year 4 billion since the Big Bang or something like that. Yeah. This reminds me of this critique. So there's an article called The Wobbling Pivot, which is by Jonathan Z. Smith. And so he says, But I found that interesting where, yeah, there are,

1:05:13these old traditions that view all of creation as just fundamentally tainted and wrong and bad. As this article states, like, he says, I have found reason to suggest that this pattern is just as fundamental as the category of a paradigmatic world and may well be just as archaic. So, like, yeah, there might be those deep traditions that wouldn't want to recreate. Like, yeah, I think that's the big distinction, that when you destroy history and recreate or reenact the creation, you are in an almost Nietzschean sense kind of embracing life.

1:05:51You are saying, let's do this again. Let's do it the same way. You are participating in it to the fullest rather than trying to destroy it, right? Yeah. So in doing that, it's an assertion, an affirmation of the world and the meaning of the world. So then in that sense, Christianity is this kind of halfway point because it only sanctifies as this historical period and maybe you, you know, do a ritual like eating the wafer or

1:06:26whatever the fuck you people do, like that, that kind of evokes that. But the sanctified time was then and it may like, yes, maybe Jesus's love affects you now, but that was the time where they're, whereas these people are like hanging out with the gods. They're actually like there, according to him, they are with the gods. And that's going to infuse them with so much more meaning. And it's just going to be bristling with holiness, like the new year, because it literally

1:06:58just happened. It's not something that happened 2000 years ago. You just got to create the cosmos. Like you just, yeah. And Christianity is like the part that's really inconsistent, that really is historical is the view that like, yeah, there's like the kind of holy time when Jesus walked the earth. But like that pales in comparison to the fact that the belief is that time will end, like this time will end and like God will come again and usher in a whole new level of existence. We're looking forward, never looking back.

1:07:28Right. Like, yeah. And that's like a messianic, you know, we have our version of that too, a messianic view, whereas you're just stuck in the middle of these two things. Well, you know, we believe the Messiah came and you just haven't accepted it. But there's going to be, okay, sorry, but like the new. Yeah, yeah. The new world. The new world. Yeah. I really do. I totally buy the Lake of view of like, we have used space as a metaphor for time for all sorts of sociological reasons. Like that has shaped the way we understand time.

1:07:59And so like just the idea of experiencing time in some different way, I find that really fascinating because I totally buy it. I really do think that the way we look at time is way more idiosyncratic. And even our best physical theories have a view of time that we can't even really understand because we're so Euclidean and like ordered and sequential in the way we understand it or spatial. So like that, I think is fascinating.

1:08:30And maybe it is something that is, it makes our life and our sense of meaning more impoverished. I don't know. Totally. Like I like what you just said. And it makes me think though that because there are different spatial metaphors and he talks about like circles and like circular structures are a metaphor you could use. But we use like, when I think about my life, like I think about the path, like it's very linear and there'll be an end to it. It feels like what he's saying is that by participating in the cyclical time, they're touching eternity

1:09:03like in a way that we're never even trying to do. And I wonder like, what is that? Like, are they like in their festivals having just four days of flow? You know? Yeah. Where are they? I think like you and I want to, I think it's like, this is obvious, but we would want a drug that would give us the phenomenology of this. I don't want to have to believe in like a fucking snake getting killed. Yeah, just take a drug and, uh, I'll believe in a snake or whatever, like fighting with a car, but, uh, you don't have to, I'm sure, you know, they can, uh, tailor it to our particular

1:09:39I mean, weed fucks with time. Like, you know, it makes it slower, but it's still linear. It's not eternally. You're not touching eternity. That, yeah, that's the thing. It's the cyclical idea that is the thing. I don't totally know how, like, I can't fully imagine what that feels like or just a timelessness. If any of our listeners have experienced the, uh, touching the infinite in the, in time or the circular, did you think of the circular ruins while reading this? Yeah. Uh, there I have a note, like, I think I already read the quote, but I was like, oh, this is

1:10:13just the circular ruins. Like the guy starts again on a new riverbank and on a new. Yeah. And it just goes on forever.