298 - Mary Harrington - Conspiracies and the Return of Myth
The Symbolic World
Jonathan Pageau
4.8 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2023
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mary Harrington is a columnist and editor for UnHerd and runs her own weekly Substack Reactionary Feminist. She's interested in the political and cultural side-effects of globalization, the replacement of class politics by identity politics, the joy of limits, and women’s rights in the biotech age, which is the subject of her first book, Feminism Against Progress.
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/D__CrY3FaWA
- Mary's Twitter: https://twitter.com/moveincircles
- Substack: https://reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/
- UnHerd articles: https://unherd.com/author/mary-harrington/
- Book: https://www.amazon.com/Feminism-against-Progress-Mary-Harrington/dp/1684514878
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Introduction to the video
00:00:40 - Intro music
00:01:05 - How to understand conspiracies
00:05:17 - Eating babies
00:06:59 - Lizard elites
00:09:26 - Why myth is coming back
00:16:48 - Meaning-making and money
00:19:28 - Oral culture
00:21:28 - Artificial intelligence
00:22:40 - How does Mary see Ai and writing?
00:25:56 - Writers VS ChatGPT
00:28:28 - Teams and nation-states
00:31:58 - Crowdfunding and Crowdfeeding
00:34:09 - Weaponizing the conspiracy label
00:43:10 - Anti-normativity
00:46:38 - Making normal mainstream again
00:49:19 - There will be suffering
00:52:23 - Government and Ai
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | the internet because now attention is everything. |
| 0:03.7 | It's in some ways a sped up version of what the ancient world had. |
| 0:07.6 | Because what will survive is only that which gains attention and which is able to keep attention, |
| 0:12.8 | even if it's for a short time. |
| 0:14.7 | And so inevitably the world will fall back into tropes of attention and memory. |
| 0:19.3 | So if I say that Trump is brutish, but it's complicated, and he has this quality, but |
| 0:25.3 | mostly negative things, I won't get anybody of attention. |
| 0:28.2 | But if I say Trump is Satan, then all of a sudden, everybody is listening. |
| 0:33.5 | And so we end up falling back into ancient tropes of mythological patterns, but way faster. |
| 0:53.6 | This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. |
| 0:56.0 | Hello, everyone. I am here with Mary Harrington, and I know many of you have been looking forward to this conversation. |
| 1:11.9 | We've been kind of skirting around each other. |
| 1:14.0 | I've been watching her from the sidelines, seeing very many interesting discussions and her wonderful articles. |
| 1:20.4 | But it is a article called The Fairtale Allure of Conspiracies, which really kind of caught me. |
| 1:27.0 | And I thought thought would be an |
| 1:28.1 | interesting starting point for a conversation with her. And so, Mary, thanks for coming on. |
| 1:33.2 | Thank you for having me. And so maybe you can tell us a bit about what the basic thesis of that |
| 1:38.4 | article is, and we can start the conversation, because I think it comes close to many of the things |
| 1:42.3 | that we talk about on the symbolic world as well. |
| 1:45.0 | Yeah, it's a simple thesis, which is that, I mean, it's what people say about Alex Jones, right? |
| 1:50.6 | That he may be factually wrong, but he's often directionally right. |
| 1:54.1 | Yeah. |
... |
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