Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, spiritual, philosophical, and political ideas,

and engaging in an accessible way. Well, friends, a cultural and literary critic who was very

influential on me was the late great Edward Said. And he once wrote that artists who are seen as

intellectuals end up wanting to shape the political realm as an almost sort of natural extension

of making art, of creating images and worlds with their art. It just ends up extending into wanting to shape the way people relate to each other.

I mean, political realms are realms of relationships, and they are, in some ways, the art of managing

relationships and what rights and problems come up when we manage those kinds of relationships.

So now I also think that there is a further extension from the political into the spiritual.

So from art to politics to spirituality. And what I mean is that to examine

relationships between people through politics is to find a spiritual landscape, a space between people,

and also language or communication between people. In fact, language is a sort of dimension where people meet.

And that dimension is an artistic dimension.

And language is, you know, the substance of politics, really.

I know violence is also the substance of politics for a lot of people.

But really, when we get down to it, the kinds of communications we have are what direct the feeling, the sentiment, and yes, the material conditions of the political.

Something that we do on this show a lot is show, represent the transit between these realms, the way that the spiritual, economic, and political interpenetrate.

Usually, on podcasts that do that, people end up looking at magical and occult parapolitics.

They end up looking at conspiracy and issuing messages of conspiracy a lot of times.

And I really try not to do that

because the rabbit hole of going down to parapolitics when it comes to the occult and magic

and conspiracy is always just kind of a variation of materialism because it's always like,

...