Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more We need a new metaphysics What if we give ourselves permission to explore a much larger argument? Toby Rogers Jan 19   READ IN APP   Back in October, I was on a panel following the world premier of An Inconvenient Study at the Malibu Film Festival. Comedian Jimmy Dore served as the moderator. After working through our reactions to the film and discussing the price one pays for telling the truth he asked the much more difficult questions that we’ve all been wrestling with over the years — Why haven’t we won already given that the data are so overwhelmingly in our favor? And, What’s it going to take to finally convert our progressive friends to the rightness of our cause? Some panelist gave good replies but everyone has a different theory of change and at this point no one really knows what will work (these are questions that the movement has been debating since the beginning). [You can watch the full film and the panel discussion here.] Out on the patio at the reception following the film I found myself in a lovely group with an artist, a natural healer (Lisa Cory), a marketing guru who was new to the movement, and a warrior mom (Ronna Yelin). The sun was warm, the bar was open, the DJ was spinning 80s tunes, and we were all still wrestling with Jimmy Dore’s questions — why haven’t we won already and what will it take to convert our progressive friends to the obvious truth. Lisa gamely proposed an answer: Reaching the people who still believe that the Covid vax was good for public health will not be accomplished by engaging the intellect alone, as has been proven by the copious amount of scientific evidence and data already presented yet still being ignored and denied. We must learn how to speak to the heart as well. For at the root of this discussion is the experience of betrayal, the realization that people we trusted to care for us actually harmed us — the many people working in healthcare harmed us via indoctrinated ignorance, the very few in charge of healthcare harmed us via design and intent. It’s the same dynamic at play in abusive relationships, where the abused will ignore, excuse and hide their wounds while defending their abuser, insisting on maintaining the relationship against all better judgement and caution, rather than face the crushing emotional reality of betrayal. Everyone agreed that this was a promising answer that provided a path forward. And then I said, I think you’re right. And I think I like your answer better than I like my answer. But let me lay out my theory of the case so that we can compare them and see where we end up. So I began… Since the Enlightenment, religiosity has declined in society. But it turns out that people really need something to worship. So we started worshipping Scientism — not science itself, but the vague notion that our society should be guided by sciency-sounding ideas. Vaccines are the pinnacle of science as religion — doctors are seen as the new high priests, vaccines are the sacrament and the baptism, and, subconsciously, the vaccinators believe that someday soon they will be able to achieve immortality right here on Earth. As they often say, “death is just a series of preventable diseases” (it’s not, but that’s what they believe). So when we step forward and say, ‘Well actually, your vaccines don’t work very well and they cause more harm than good,’ we have not just rejected a medical product, we’ve falsified their religion and their entire understanding of the universe. We’ve shattered their immortality project. Our work leaves people staring into a giant, terrifying metaphysical void. People will do anything, up to and including murder [Charlie Kirk had just been assassinated a month earlier], in order to avoid feeling that way. So they shout us down and exclude us from polite society and call us names because they don’t want to stare into that existential void. I’m reminded of this scene — Shouting into the Infinite Abyss — from the movie Garden State (sorry for the poor image quality): I continued: And this is going to keep happening until we provide them with an alternative metaphysics* that has greater explanatory power and makes their lives better. It’s like Indiana Jones in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark — where he tries to switch the golden idol with a bag of sand — when we take away their Scientistic Metaphysics we have to replace it with something of equal weight or else they will come after us with poison arrows and try to kill us. (Unlike Raiders of the Lost Ark, I don’t want to just replace their Molochian idol with a bag of sand, I want to replace it with something better.) We have to be able to explain our place in the universe, how nature works, what is time, what happens when we die, how to relate to each other, and how to cure disease. And our answers have to be qualitatively better than their answers. Lots of people, including Patrick Deneen at the University of Notre Dame want us to return to a pre-Enlightenment Metaphysics — the church is in charge; the church knows best; patriarchy, family, and tradition are all that matter. It’s true that evangelical Christians fared better than many other groups during Covid because they had something other than Scientism to rely on when society fell apart. But I don’t think Deneen’s ancient reset point will work for most people. The cat’s already out of the bag. Whatever metaphysics we come up with has to be future-facing. It has to include everything we know right now and also transcend it with a more comprehensive story of the universe, nature, and our place in it. In general, I believe that we need to be much more ambitious and audacious in our thinking — and practice the courage of our convictions — if we are to break out of the current crisis. We spent the rest of the afternoon debating Jimmy Dore’s provocative questions and discussing the possibilities of a new metaphysics. It was the best day I’ve had in a very long time. An Inconvenient Study won Best of Festival at the awards ceremony later that night. Since then, I’ve had a lot more time to think about a new metaphysics and what that might entail. I’ve queried ChatGPT and Claude and they are surprisingly adept at discussing these ultimate questions. I believe that my theory of the case — that we need a new metaphysics — is correct. And I have a few additional thoughts about how we might proceed on this journey of discovery: 1. It turns out that nearly ALL fields of inquiry are captured and have been captured for about a century. Bret Weinstein and his brother Eric have done much better work than I have in exploring how capture happened in nearly every field. But my sense is that after World War I, and certainly after World War II, the U.S. didn’t have any viable competitors in any field. So the university gatekeepers in physics, chemistry, biology, political science, sociology, art, etc. hired people who think and act exactly like they do, and this continued for five generations — copy, upon copy, upon copy… — until all disciplines were a hollow imitation of their former selves and there had not been much real innovation in 100 years. We’re in an epistemic crisis right now because so many things are either factually wrong (owing to corruption) or obviously outdated. However, one is not allowed to break paradigms without getting one’s knees broken by the gatekeepers these days. 2. Karl Popper’s An Open Society and Its Enemies and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method give us tools for unlearning dogma and starting innovative scientific inquiry again. As I’ve argued many times before, we need to have a big, messy, on-going conversation about the philosophy of science in order to survive and break free from our captured era. 3. I thought that “Everything is energy” might be a good candidate for a new metaphysics. Dr. Richard Gerber wrote a thought-provoking book called Vibrational Medicine that operates from this understanding. Australian Substacker, Lies are Unbekoming, explores this idea as well — building on the work of Liam Scheff (1971-2017) who was skilled at breaking existing paradigms (by actually doing the reading and showing the weaknesses and contradictions of existing theories). But ChatGPT chastised me by saying that “everything is energy” is already embedded in Einstein’s equation E=MC^2 and that’s already more than 100 years old. I pushed back and said ‘now wait a second, that may be true, but so-called modern medicine has not incorporated “everything is energy” into its theories nor has it incorporated the insights from quantum mechanics which is now already 100 years old as well.’ And ChatGPT was forced to admit that indeed, with the possible exception of MRI machines, modern medicine is still stuck in an 18th century mechanistic understanding of the world and has yet to incorporate the insights from physics from 100 years ago. 4. “Everything is plasma” and “The Living Universe” are also intriguing possibilities that are related to “Everything is energy.” String theory, “multiple universes,” and “everything is a hologram” seem like dead ends to me. 5. Rachel Carson probably did the best recent work at moving to a new paradigm in Silent Spring when she showed that everything is a system. But it’s still a materialist worldview (albeit more comprehensive) and I think we can do better than that. 6. I’m pretty sure that The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohllenben and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer offer us some starting points — with their vast, scientifically provable work on previously unseen networks of communication in the microbial kingdom, between plants, and between animals. 7. One can make a strong case that we don’t need a new metaphysics, that we are winning the materialist argument already. In this view, our job is just to call for a return to proper (materialist) science — vaccines are not adequately tested, the data that we do have show that vaccines don’t work very well and they come with horrendous side effects so we’d be better off with proper nutrition, clean water, antibiotics, and antivirals. Just take the win and be done with it. The thing is, the materialist worldview ALREADY crumbled 100 years ago with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics (and the tensions between the two that are begging for a higher synthesis). It’s just that nobody has been able to accurately describe what comes next because of extreme gatekeeping and capture across nearly all fields of inquiry. Materialism was always an incomplete picture of our universe and our place in it. Perhaps one reason the existing gatekeepers have become so monstrous is because they are already staring into the abyss — on some level they realize that their theories are insufficient. In the meantime they are looting as much as they can from the existing system before the new paradigm comes in and dislodges them from their comfortable perch. Stopping the ruling class from enslaving humanity via chronic illness is the defining task of our generation. It’s going to require all of our talent and tenacity for the foreseeable future. I just think that paradoxically, this work gets easier if we are simultaneously building a new metaphysics that provides a more comprehensive view of reality than bougie mechanistic materialism. What do you think — do we need a new metaphysics and if so, what, for you, are the starting points for that journey? *Definition of metaphysics from Claude: Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the fundamental nature of reality — what exists, what kinds of things exist, and what are their basic properties and relations. Core metaphysical questions include: What is existence? What is the relationship between mind and matter? Do abstract objects (numbers, properties) exist? What is causation? What makes something the same thing over time? Is there free will? What is the nature of time and space? Blessings to the warriors. 🙌 Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏 Huzzah for everyone building the alternative society our hearts know is possible. ✊ In the comments, please share your thoughts on the above questions. As always, I welcome any corrections. Share Upgrade to paid Leave a comment You're currently a free subscriber to uTobian. 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