Jonathan Lear

What's on it?

On this card is a single quote from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil.

Simone Weil is fascinating.

She was this incredibly intense radical thinker from the mid 20th century.

at.Right. You need a target for that attention.

If I drop my weapons and stop fighting the quicksand, where do I point my eyes?

This introduces the other major philosophical interlocutor in the book, the British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Well, in 2017, I was introduced to Jonathan Lear's book, Radical Hope, and in that book, he talked about the Crow Nation.

Now, in my book, I talked about the Blackfoot people.

It's not just one indigenous culture and tribe that was impacted by this.

Mm-hmm

... with the hides.

No, the buffalo actually was at the center of the culture, and this is what I got introduced to in Jonathan Lear's book, in which, you know, it, it, it provided ceremony.

There was coming of age in terms of the young men who would go, and they would hunt the buffalo.

And I'm not equating that history to us in any way, but I have learned from it.

And what started to happen that I, I began to say, "Oh my gosh, we have to-- I'm starting to see a parallel, and, and we need to write about this," is something that Jonathan Lear calls ontological vulnerability.

And because the indigenous, their entire way of life, I don't, I don't wanna speak for something I don't know, but much of their way of life through my research was centered around the bison.

And, you know, it was not just material food or warmth, right? It was ceremony.

Yeah? And while many were tragically killed through, uh, direct or through disease, what happened after the, quote, "the bison went away," the buffalo went away, is a life that really didn't have meaning.

And so, yes, many may h- some may have lived on, and, and obviously they have, but their way of life, they suffered an ontological death, their way of being and their way of life.

And so when I start to see, okay- What I re- I read the book Radical Hope in 2017, and Jonathan Lear speaks about this, and I thought, "Man, well, what is our buffalo?" And, and this question has been rattling around in my head for that long.

And, and then when AI came along, along with these other exponential technologies, and I started to see the disruption and the displacement it would do in our work lives, I thought, "Oh, my God.