Thinking about the world ending, is this something that we see consistently throughout history or does it pop up more sometimes than others? What are the cultural conditions in which apocalyptic discussions are, I guess, happening? In

terms of the fervor of apocalypticism as a cultural, social, political phenomenon, it's not consistent.

You're absolutely correct that you have certain periods where it kind of becomes much more fervent or zealous in terms of people thinking that they are living in the end of days.

So oftentimes you'll hear people identify the turn of the first millennium in the year 1000 as a particularly apocalyptic minded period of time, though there is disagreement on how widespread that necessarily was.

Certainly by the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, you had a high degree of apocalypticism among both Catholics and Protestants about the end of the world happening sometime then.

And there were always disagreements about what date, depending on you know, what thinker or whoever you're talking about.

And then we've had a kind of apocalypticism crop up, I think, in our own day as well.

apocalyptic thinking?

When I talked to Ed Simon, he questioned something more fundamental about this very concept.

I mean, that's the thing with these kind of like, you know, singularity, philosophy, whatever we want to call it, and transhumanism is they bolster the status quo of like, you know, there are certain people who are supposed to be better and wiser and more powerful than us.

And we should like that.

It's a very convenient, it's kind of a technological form of the divine right of kings or something.

Is anyone finding this information other than me? I asked Ed Simon about that.

I definitely think that there's a bit of seepage and an undercurrent that exists, regardless of if we can explicitly say how much of an influence there's necessarily been.

I mean, my suspicion is like the day-to-day people who work in tech who have probably as diverse a number of political beliefs as there are in the United States.

Maybe they veer more towards a libertarian type of politics or whatever, but I don't think most of them are, like, reading Curtis Yarvin per se.

What do these things have to do with [laughs] apocalypse singularity and everything we're talking about?

Yeah, so effective, uh, altruism and longtermism, uh, were as philosophies, and they do come out of an academic context, basically contemporary forms of utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism's an 18th century enlightened philosophy oftentimes associated with Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, uh, that argued the ethical system which is the, the best is that which does the best for the largest number of people, basically.

So if you can maximize happiness across the largest number of folks, then that's a good system, right? So, uh, effective altruism as kind of a modern permutation of that is supposed to ask, what is the best way that we as an individual can help the largest number of people? It basically said, well, the best way to do this is to make a lot of money as a entrepreneur and then to give away a certain amount of your wealth.

So it has kind of the, the, a social gospel of wealth in it.

It's got that kind of philanthropic Andrew Carnegie sense of things because it's not about maximizing, uh, well-being throughout a political system through regulation and solidarity, but more people who are supposed to be wiser than us because they've made more money deciding on where that money should go, right? Uh, and a lot of people who e- embraced effective altruism, like Sam Bankman-Fried was a, a proponent of it, tended to be younger tech entrepreneurs, and they liked it because it very much flattered them, right? You make lots of money, and then you're the person who can decide where that money goes to.

So originally, it was kind of like, you know, regular rich person philanthropy kind of stuff.

Here's Ed Simon again on how he believes EA changed when longtermist thinking was introduced.

[laughs]

Yeah, I mean, I've always, um... and I say this as someone on the left, but someone who's not a Marxist.

Uh, but I've often been looked at askance by people who are Marxists when I say, you know, Marxism, in some formulations at least, has absolutely a, a religious gloss to it, right? I mean, there's a sense that, like, history is supposed to operate in a sort of predictable way, and that it culminates in this revolution, and then you have the state that withers away and a type of perfection that exists after it.

It seems very clear-- I mean, it might couch its philosophy in materialist philosophy, but the kind of certainty of that feels to me as a pretty obviously secularized form of Jewish and Christian eschatological concepts.

And I think there's something similar when you talk about the singulatarians or the transhumanists in tech, right? If you read, like, Hans, uh, Moravec or Ray Kurzweil, uh, they will claim at least un- you know, for most of their, their careers that they are materialist thinkers, they are atheistic thinkers, that they reject traditional religion, and yet they have this faith, and I'll use that word very, you know, purposefully, that we will have this post-singularity moment that ushers us into this type of digital utopia where we all live together or live forever, right? As, like, downloaded consciousnesses or something.

And that is so clearly and obviously religious in its, in its formulation that whether or not it's a supernatural belief seems to me secondary in a lot of ways.

I mean, the, the materialism of that, the philosophical materialism of that, I think is like a fig leaf over what are pretty obviously theological concepts.

Here's Ed Simon again on effective altruism and longtermism, the E, A, and L.

Actually, talk about that one, because I think we want to give more of the... flavor no no pun intended for sure but how in the world did you arrive with a little you know reflection on general chow's chicken which i which by the way i used to consume all the time you know when i was living in harvard square for after college it was just you know it seemed like almost every other day for lunch i was eating general chow's chicken and man did i like it

Well, it's sort of like, you know, there were certain themes I knew that I wanted to hit.

So obviously you have like the big literature and politics and culture and whatever.

Then there's like specifically kind of American things.

I thought if you're writing a book like this, you got to have them in there.

So you have to have like baseball and you have to have jazz and you have to have comic books.

And I wanted each one of these capsules or meditations or vignettes or whatever you call them to kind of have an entry point through one particular thing, but then be about the wider issue in a kind of more abstract sense.

So why that pairing? I

Và tôi thích thịt General Tso rất nhiều.

Có một số mục tiêu mà tôi muốn đánh giá.

Những mục tiêu lớn như lịch sử, lịch sử, cộng đồng, các gì đó.

Và có những mục tiêu Ấn Độ.

Nếu bạn đọc một bộ như thế này, bạn phải có những mục tiêu đó.

Vì vậy, bạn phải có những mục tiêu như bóng đá.

Và các bạn cần phải có jazz và các bạn cần phải có bài hát.

Vì vậy, tại sao... tại sao... tại sao... tại sao... tại sao... tại sao... tại sao... tại sao... tại sao... tại sao

flavor no no pun intended for sure how in the world did you arrive with a little you know reflection on general chow's chicken which i which by the way i used to consume all the time you know when i was living in harvard square for after college it was just you know it seemed like almost every other day for lunch i was eating general chow's chicken and man did i like it

Well, it's sort of like, you know, there were certain themes I knew that I wanted to hit.

So obviously you have like the big literature and politics and culture and whatever.

Then there's like specifically kind of American things.

I thought if you're writing a book like this, you got to have them in there.

So you have to have like baseball.

And you have to have jazz and you have to have comic books.

So how why that pairing? I

I spoke with writer and Carnegie Mellon professor Ed Simon on the definition of apocalypse

apocalypseLiterally from the Greek, it implies like an unveiling or a, a revealing of secret truths.

It has come to mean the end of the world, I think, in popular parlance, and it's certainly been associated with that because the term has been in scriptural and pseudepigraphical literature, has been applied to kind of the unveiling of truths about the end of the world.

But strictly speaking, apocalypse is not synonymous with that per se.

That's more of a kind of cultural accumulation that it has acquired over the centuries.

I apologize in advance for any sleeplessness, rumination, or unwanted weight loss or gain you experience as a result of listening to this series.

I mean, in twenty minutes, the whole world could be like reduced to radioactive ash.

That is a difference, uh, from what the world was like in 1944 versus what it is like every year after that, and I think that can't help but have a tremendous cultural change.

Uh, I mean, we have all...

Unless you are, um, you know, well into your nineties, you cannot remember a world where that was not a possibility, and I think that that hangs over everyone's head if they're being honest about it and they're being aware of it.

And sometimes you have it, uh, kind of, um, shunted into traditional religious rhetoric and language, which is kind of ready-made for talking about those things.

But certainly you've had any number of secular explorations of what like a nuclear apocalypse itself would mean.

Can you tell me a bit about that?