Episode #250 ... You Must Change Your Life. - Peter Sloterdijk

Introduction

0:00Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. So I've been commissioning artists to do the cover art for these Substack articles I've been writing. Just want to support creators in any way I can afford to in this increasingly AI art world we're living in. It's hard out there for these people. And if you're interested in doing one of the covers, please reach out to me. And if you're not sure if you want to do it, you want to see examples of it so far. I've been posting them on the show's Instagram is just sort of a celebration of human created stuff. Anyway, hope you love the show today.

Book Overview

0:34So the title of the book is You Must Change Your Life by Peter Slaughterdyke. And the one piece of advice I can give you at the start of this is to always keep in mind as we're talking about this book, that it's doing far more than what it's initially going to sound like it's trying to do. Like if I were to tell you that the premise of this book is that we need to rethink what human beings even are, that we need to start thinking of them as fundamentally the kind of being that's a practitioner and trains with every day of their life. And if I were to tell you that seeing yourself in that way, can empower you to make changes in the way you live far more than you

1:04ever have in the past. Well, in one sense, it'd be entirely true to a piece of this book. But it would ignore the deeper effects of how this change then changes the way he thinks we have to see things like religion and ethics, culture, identity. This change will even require us to rethink how we view the entire history of human beings forming civilizations and trying to live together at all. Nothing will escape this way of reframing things for Slaughterdyke, because he grounds this whole argument at the level of anthropology. Again, he wants to open our eyes to a whole different vision of what a human being is. And just a heads up, this is going to take two episodes for me to lay it out

1:39at the level of respect that it deserves. Again, this may at first sound like a motivational seminar in the banquet room of a hotel somewhere. Hot coals, bottomless buckets of shrimp during the intermission. But by the end of these two episodes, I promise you, this is going to bring a lot of clarity to Slaughterdyke's take on modern cynicism we just talked about, why he thinks a response like this develops under this new anthropology, as well as tons of other ways people misunderstand what kind of activity human beings are really participating in every day. And it's going to bring a lot of exciting new ways to see the world. So the first thing Slaughterdyke must do, though, you know, if he's

Rethinking Human Nature

2:12going to rethink the whole human being at this deep level, is he needs to oppose some earlier, widely accepted vision of what a person is, and offer up a better explanation. And a quick question just to get us going in that direction. When someone's acting one way in their life, and then they make a big change and start acting another way in their life, what causes that change to occur, really? Well, there's a lot of classic answers that have been given to this question. And Slaughterdyke's going to be fighting against all of them in this book all at once. It's a bit like he's playing whack-a-mole at Chuck E. Cheese with different ways of thinking about this whole

2:44conversation. Theories that he thinks are far too simple, and as a result, they often get people trapped, unable to change when they're stuck in them. And one of the first targets he sets his sights on in the book is what you could call the sort of belief-based view of changing your life. The idea is people act the way they do because of the beliefs that they hold. You change somebody's belief about something, and that's the way you change their actions. And this could be their belief about who they are, how they fit into the universe. But it goes in the other direction too. People who think this way will see somebody they want to be more like. And they'll often say things

3:16like, if only I could believe in this thing truly, like this other person I see does, then I would just be a different person like they are. That it'd be easy to wake up and live my life differently every day if I just believed harder in the things I know I should be doing. But this is a way of seeing yourself that, while understandable, it gets you caught in what Slaughterdike thinks is a horrible trap. Because if I think the problem here is that I just don't believe hard enough, then changing my life must be something that comes from me thinking about it more up in my head. Got to do some more reflection. I got to read another book. My strategy is going to be to try to come

3:51across a better argument for why I should be a different way. That change is something that goes on intellectually. And then once I finally have it settled up there, my routines, habits, all of my actions will sort of fall in line with those beliefs once I really believe in them. But what Slaughterdike might start by asking is, do you really believe there's such a clear separation like that between a person's beliefs, their actions, and the world they live in? I mean, it should be said, there's certainly a strong history of people that think this way about it. And again, totally understandable when somebody does. A lot of people today inherit, you know, against their

4:24will, some variant of Cartesian dualism here, where there's apparently this clear separation in a human being between mind and body. And Slaughterdike points out how even long before Descartes, there was plenty of work spanning all the way back to Athens, where people split life down the middle like this between the contemplative life and the life of action. Just saying, there's this famous distinction, and it's been long embedded in Western thought that thinking and action are two separate things. And more than that, that the thinking, acting person is something wholly separate from the world that they're navigating. But what if we thought about it another way?

4:56What if your beliefs, your actions, and the world you're doing it in are actually things that are sort of interlocked together, co-constituting each other in important ways that can't be neatly pulled apart like that? That sure, it may be useful in some conversations for us to isolate these things and talk about them as separate. But are these things really so separate that the most accurate way to think of what we are is that we're first of all this detached inner subject standing back from the world, then reflecting on it, arriving at beliefs about it. And only then do we decide to act out those beliefs with our body in the world. Slaughterdike might ask, what if

5:30that's not the real order that this whole process goes in? And what if these things are not as separate as it might be tempting to think inheriting the ideas we do about it? To begin making his case here, first of all, we just got to admit for Slaughterdike that none of us are starting from a totally neutral place when we decide what seems plausible for us to believe. In fact, in one sense, you're a being that's been trained in this regard from the moment you were born. From the moment your doctor rescued you from that spelunking accident on the day of your birth, you have been trained in various ways that shape what you see as even possible in the world. And there's this really old way of thinking about

6:04people's beliefs, where beliefs apparently are these really stable things. And how it works is someone's up in their head in a moment, and they make a conscious decision to assent to a belief in something, where then once they believe in it, well, now some kind of switch has been flipped where they can start acting on that belief. But when you really look at beliefs and how they function, they're not things that operate in such a clear cut way like that. Like for example, how many of your beliefs really have a bearing on your life on a day to day basis? What percentage of them are even tested on any given day? How often do you know perfectly well what you believe in

6:37theory, but then keep on living as though something else was true? What you might notice is that a lot of your beliefs are kind of in a gray area, if we're being honest. They're fairly provisional, certainly not going to die for any of these beliefs. And many of them are about things you may be easily convinced otherwise on. But Soderdijk would say there are certain beliefs that do mean a lot to us. And when it comes to these very few critical beliefs that are things you build your life and identity around, for him, it's not a coincidence. When you look at them closely, these are all beliefs that are corroborated by your actions and then are reinforced and maintained by the world you live

7:11in. That it's a repetition of the alliance of these three that makes the belief something that actually becomes a part of you at a strong level. I mean, take the belief that other people can be trusted, for example. Think about how that belief is even formed in the first place. Is it by thinking really hard about the philosophical essence of trust, believing in it? Or does it get formed through moments where you actually risk trusting somebody and then see what happens? Moments where who you decide to trust or something you act on is the thing that opens up the actual experiences that

7:43either reinforce your belief or weaken it. Put another way, you could say that there's a big difference between a belief you can just entertain intellectually and a belief that's become livable inside a form of life. And here's his point. Beliefs may be very important. Soderdijk certainly agrees with this. But when people over-focus on belief as the thing that needs to change for their life to change, the reason this is such a common trap for people to fall into is that at one level, the belief-based person is right. There is a big difference at the level of belief between them and some other person that acts different. But this ignores the fact that beliefs change

8:16not just by thinking your way into them harder. They also change when your world changes or when you begin acting in the world differently, which then gives you access to different experiences, which can then strengthen and reinforce a different set of beliefs that have now become truly plausible for you to believe in for maybe the first time in your life. In other words, the reason it's not working when you just try to persuade yourself to believe harder is because you're trying to intellectually force yourself into a whole different relationship with reality. And this is where we get to an entirely different picture of what a human being

Human Beings as Trainers

8:44even is. For Soderdijk, a human being is fundamentally the kind of being that trains. Meaning, first of all, everyone is always training with every second of their day, whether they think about it that way or not. Sometimes you're training yourself. Most of the time you're being trained by the world around you. But either way, try to think of your life as being primarily made up of exercises, where many things about the person you'd say you are right now have been produced by exercises that really don't feel like exercises to you anymore. Now, to be clear, it's important to say that you obviously do have certain biological realities

9:16to the creature that you are. Nobody's denying that in this book. We all start from different baselines. But then beyond that baseline, every second of your life is essentially you being faced with a situation and then exercising or training a response to that situation in a certain way. And as you can imagine, for Soderdijk, you're training things from moment to moment that you hardly even think about. And these are things that span across every dimension of how you carry yourself in the world. From your attention, how you use your body, the ways you cope, what a quote unquote normal responses in a situation. I mean, to list everything here that you're training in every

9:49second would probably bore most of you to the point it'd be dangerous for you to operate machinery. Just know that for Soderdijk, you should be proud. You've trained hard and repetitively over and over again to get here. And look, you've gotten really, really good at being exactly who you are right now. You're very used to this particular life you're training every day. In fact, this training has become so standard to you that he thinks we often mistake one way of training with unchangeable parts about our personality or what it is to be a human being more generally. But he'd say one of the most defining characteristics of the kind of creatures we are is mutability. And while no, you can't

10:22literally be anything, that'd be a straw man of what he's saying. But he'd say there is a huge amount of variance in terms of the possible lives you could be living right now. It's just a matter of whether your current life is training you for them or not. He has a great chapter in the book where he talks about a guy named Carl Unten. Carl Unten was somebody born into this world without arms. And more than that, he was a guy born into the year 1848. So there was no possibility of any kind of cybernetic RoboCop arms he could have had. There was no elaborate pulley system he could have used as arms in the 1800s. And so faced with this fact, even though he didn't have arms, that didn't stop

10:55him from when he was around the age of 10. He decided he was going to try to teach himself to play the violin with his feet. And by the age of 16, he was at a conservatory for music. By the age of 20, he was playing with orchestras. A little later, he'd become so good at the violin that he was touring, playing to concert halls that were full of people. In fact, there's a story of a time he was up on stage and a string on his violin broke in the middle of a song. But the show must go on for all the people in the crowd, he said to himself. So he paused the show temporarily, replaced the string on stage, and then retuned the violin with his toes. Now, the reason Soderdijk brings this guy

11:30up is to give an example of the true plasticity that human beings are capable of. Again, he's saying this as an anthropologist, that this seems to be something that's built into the kind of creatures we are. I mean, how easy would it have been for someone to look at Carl Untham, the biological reality that he was born into, and then to make the claim that it's impossible for this man to ever play the violin? Like, what idiot's going to say otherwise here? And by the way, how easy is this to do with our own baseline situation? And as he reads Soderdijk, it becomes really obvious that his intention here isn't to say something like that limits don't exist. And it's clear he's not saying

12:03that you're some kind of a failure if you're not trying to overcome every obstacle you can possibly see. But if you're someone who genuinely wants to change your life, why be stuck telling yourself that something's impossible for you, especially if you've never even tried to approach whatever it is as something you could be training? See, because Soderdijk says another thing about the kind of beings we are, is that we're often the kind of creature that is called upon or calls upon ourselves to do the improbable. Think of the last time you saw somebody do something wildly impressive, whatever it is you're into, where somebody does something that makes an inhuman level of skill

12:35look effortless, where what they're doing would seem impossible to you if you weren't completely aware that they've been training for years to be able to do exactly this. Well, how many of the things that you want to change about your life are you saying are just impossible or highly improbable because of some immutable trait about who you are? I'm just this way. And the bigger question here is, how many of those things are only improbable? Because simply by coincidence, you're living inside of the exact training regimen you're in, where certain responses you have are being rewarded every day. A lot of stories people have about what it is to have a human experience, what's too much,

13:09what's too little for them. And Soderdijk's going to refer to all this in the book is what he calls a kind of acrobat ethics. The point is that nobody's born into this world an acrobat, right? Anything that an acrobat can do has at one point in their life looked totally improbable to them. And the same way you might do this with your procrastination, or the way you react to certain things, insert something here that applies to you. But to change into an acrobat, this person has had to consistently put themselves into exercises with an impossible looking thing, break it down, try at it, fail a lot, suffer through all the learning experiences, and then they've had to repeat this process until doing something like

13:42a double backflip goes from something that seems impossible to now something that's practically second nature to them. See, this is where the heart of ethics truly lies if you're Soderdijk. Again, forget about a purely belief-based approach to change. And maybe it's time to pause and connect this to things like ethics and religion a little more explicitly. Remember, I started this episode by saying that this book is always doing more than what it may initially seem like it's doing. And maybe you can see what I meant by that now. See, this is a philosophical anthropology, which then is going to ladder up into a place where it forces us to think about giant pieces of our world

14:13totally different as well. So first up here on that front, if what he's saying about the core of the human being is true, then one of the main things this should impact is the way we see what people are really up to when they practice something like a religion. Some important context, we can understand this argument from them. This book comes out in the year 2009, where at the time, you know, in tons of fancy intellectual circles that none of us are ever going to be invited to. It's a world at the time where religion is being talked about as something that's returning to the world. Meaning the work in theory was that sometime around the year 1960, religion as an institution had started a decline that

14:48they say something like 500 years from now, we're going to look back and see it as the beginning of the end of religion. The idea is that as societies modernize, they become more educated, more technologically advanced, and over time, religion will lose its power in the public sphere, which will then cause it to retreat into something that's only part of people's private lives. And they give it enough time with real alternatives available in the end, religion just won't hold the same level of standing in the world as it once did. But over the years, what actually happened is you have the Iranian revolution in the late 70s, you got the seizure of the Grand Mosque and Mecca that same year. There's the moral majority and the rise of the Christian right

15:22in the United States. 9-11 becomes something where people that have this whole theory can't possibly ignore it anymore. And again, the climate that Slaughterdike's writing this book in is that people are saying we're living in a post-secular world where religion is something that's returning to a level of prominence where we got to start saying, hey, religion's back, baby. It's back. This is the theory, at least. And Slaughterdike's whole point is that this theory is mostly something that's a myth. And it's a myth that's only made possible by a wrong understanding of the human at this anthropological level that we've been talking about. And just so we don't got to

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Religion and Anthropology

18:25that it's worth asking, how would he answer the very basic question, what is religion really? I mean, it seems to be this thing in the world that's incredibly important to many of these human beings we're talking about. Where then in some cases, a religion is something that's been going on proudly used by people for thousands of years. What sort of thing has that kind of staying power culturally? And if you're looking at it like Slaughter Dyke is, a couple important things to start this with. The first thing that matters here, if you're trying to understand religion at an anthropological level like this, is obviously not going to be whether this is actually divine knowledge that's being delivered to people from the creator of the universe.

18:59Just saying it doesn't seem like that's the best explanation we got for the staying power behind every single religion out there. He wants to know what these religious practices actually do to the people living inside them. Secondly, the value of religion is clearly not only what it turns into in a belief-obsessed culture, where the way that some religious people treat their faith is to turn it into something like a celestial debate club, where we mostly just sit around, read scripture, and then argue every day about whether the stuff in the book is true or not. No, the value that religion provides is something obviously much more connected to a form of life

19:30that people are living out. So under Slaughter Dyke's view, what he's going to say is that religion becomes something for people, where it's best understood as a comprehensive shared practice world, where it's most importantly, something that forms a particular kind of person, that that's the way to think about what religion is really doing. If you wanted a metaphor then, for clarity's sake, for Slaughter Dyke, religion is something like an ancient technology that trains and produces a person. It's a collection of exercises that are centered around rituals they use, answers to difficult questions. It gives responses to tough

20:03moments, prohibitions for what to stay away from. It's got ways to discipline yourself. Religion even gives you a language that you can use to describe it all with. And so seen in this way, how to truly understand the value that this technology continues to provide to people over all these years is that if a person immerses themselves into this training system fully, and they live it out every day of their life with conviction, again, religion is something that ultimately produces a particular kind of person. It is something that trains people into a very durable way of life that they can use every day. Now, it should be said that durability there can mean a wide variety of things. And Slaughter Dyke's

20:37very clear about this. Religion, in practice, can absolutely produce somebody that has trained themselves for years, and they've used all these exercises to develop an incredible capacity to deal with whatever life throws at them. But religion is also something that can create a highly durable version of a person that's trapped in guilt and self-denial, a passive person, too ignorant to argue against all the people telling them what to do every day, unable to see new ways of thinking about their life that are outside of this calcified, overly narrow religious view of what's possible for a human being. And the point is, when it gets broken down in this way, religion shouldn't be

21:11thought of as something that has a privileged status, anointed by a god, very different than what non-religious people are doing. But it also shouldn't be something that just gets dismissed as superstitious nonsense that people simply choose to believe. That's not a really good description of it either. See, to Slaughter Dyke, if religion is best understood as a shared practice world that people train in, then he thinks it's also important to remember that this is just one shared practice world of many. That there are many other training regiments out there that form people like this. In other words, when he writes this book in 2009, religion isn't back, really. Because to him, the function

21:45religion serves at an anthropological level never left us in the first place. Human beings need these durable forms of life that train them each day into a type of person. And when religion was supposedly gone, he says people were just doing it with other things. More people were using other training exercises. And so they were becoming different kinds of people. So the big challenge for Slaughter Dyke, if he wants to do this, you know, if this is how he wants to reframe what's going on when someone's immersed in a religious practice, he needs to create a more general vocabulary to be able to describe what people are really doing when they engage in these exercises that are training them. And the word he

22:18chooses to go with here, couldn't find a smoother way to introduce this idea. But he calls these exercises anthropotechnics, meaning simply exercises that train a human being. So to be clear, in a religious context, things like prayer, fasting, attending church, volunteering at a soup kitchen, these are anthropotechnics that train a kind of person in a religious form of life. But examples are also going to be things like, like going to the gym, meditating, playing sports, listening to a philosophy podcast like this. These are anthropotechnics that train you as well. See, to him, there's an

22:52aesthetic impulse that's part of this whole anthropology he's been laying out, that he thinks just gets metabolized into these different self-forming kinds of exercises that we mostly see as just optional activity in the modern world. And he certainly wouldn't say that all these things are equal when it comes to the kind of person these anthropotechnics produce. But he would say that whether the exercise is religious or secular doesn't matter as much as we typically assume it does here, that ultimately, we can think of these as part of the same category of training that forms a person. Now, as you can imagine, if we're always training, and if we're always

23:24immersed in exercises that are forming us, then things like the gym and listening to a podcast are fine examples. But you may notice that these would just be the kind of things where we may be conscious of the effects that this training is having on us. But Slaughterdike thinks when you really take this whole anthropology seriously, when you see anthropotechnics operating throughout ordinary life, it has to have an effect on the way you see entire cultures of people more generally. See, culture usually gets described as something like an abstract collection of values and tendencies.

23:54Something like there, you know, there's a particular group of people out there who express themselves through their actions. And a culture is what we call the sum total of those values and actions. In fact, the way it's often talked about is that human beings are said to live inside of cultures, where culture apparently is almost like a physical space there. It's a sort of environment of symbols that people exist in every day. And his point is when you view culture in this way, like it's this strange receptacle of values, it becomes very easy to make the same mistake as the belief-based view we

24:25just talked about, where you assume a level of separation between ideas and people that doesn't really exist here. You assume that the people are just the things that are acting out what the culture truly believes. But this misses the most important piece of what Slaughterdike thinks cultures even do for people. He thinks we have to start seeing culture as its own kind of shared practice world as well. Meaning it's not a passive box of values that people pull from and then decide to act on. Culture is best understood as something that is acting upon and training people into ways of

24:56life constantly. It's yet another set of exercises that people are repeating each day, where then by repeating it, they keep producing both the culture and the kind of person that seems to belong to that culture. One way to think of it then, I guess, is that culture is a kind of anthropotechnics that's going on at a very large scale. He has a great line in the book where he says that culture becomes a kind of monastic rule for us, where we don't technically live in a monastery every day, but we're still trained by culture into certain rules for living our life. These shared disciplines that have been

25:27repeated by us so much that they no longer even appear to us as rules, to the point we actually start internalizing them as unchangeable pieces of what we are. Think about how much you're trained, for example, by simply the shows that you watch, the way that you were taught to behave when you're in school. How about how a phone can train somebody into a person where just a few minutes of not being stimulated is genuinely a tough thing for them to sit through? See, that's the thing. Another important part of this to understand for Slaughterdike, that by the way is going to be very useful as we build out this anthropology of his next episode, is that an anthropotechnic is not just talking about the

26:01good ways that people are training themselves. Anthropotechnics are just training exercises, meaning they're also going to be things like doom scrolling or compulsive gambling, binge drinking. Again, the point is you're always training in every moment of your life. It's just a matter of asking what things you're repeating and then reinforcing so that it strengthens us as part of your identity. Again, culture becomes something that is always, in a sense, acting upon us, training us in certain directions, and it becomes very easy to ignore because it starts to feel like just the world you're living in. Now, as you can imagine, if religion and culture have to be

26:36reframed to something totally different than we usually see it, then ethics becomes something like

Ethics and Anthropology

26:40that as well. Because what's the typical way people like to see ethics? Well, it's usually thought of as a set of ideas about what you should or shouldn't do. And it's often described in terms of a set of rules to follow, or at the very least, criteria for what makes something right or wrong in a particular moment. And for whatever it's worth, Sauterdijk doesn't think this is a total waste of time. There's some value to thinking about this kind of stuff, for sure. But he'd say this is an incomplete way of viewing ethics in the same way that the belief-based view of change is incomplete. Because he thinks if we're talking about what ethics really is to the kind of beings we are,

27:13then look, somebody can know what the right thing to do is and just never actually be doing it. So if that's what's going on, would you say that that's ethics that's going on at that point? Or is that just knowing the right answers to a moral question you're asked, but they're never actually doing good things in the world? Like you might ask here, what makes somebody a generous person, for example? Is it deep down in your heart believing that generosity is the right way to act? Or is it actually doing generous things? When you start to think about it that way, ethics expands into something that's much less about reflecting on some abstract idea about what good or

27:47bad is. And it becomes much more about the formation of a person, much like religion and culture have undergone similar shifts in this episode. We start to realize is that the same way there's a person that over focuses on belief as the reason people don't change their lives. There's a whole other kind of person that over focuses on moral strength as the reason people aren't changing. The thinking is that if you want to change your life, you just need to become morally stronger. And then once you're strong enough to force yourself to do what you know is right in every moment, then everything else in your life will just fall into place. Again, the thinking is this is the best strategy for change. But Sloterdijk

28:20would say this is a common trap people fall into as well. And for the sake of having a clear example here, I want to use one I saw myself the other day in person. There was a young man who made the grand proclamation in front of me that he wanted to run a marathon for the first time in his life. And he said that his expectation was that all along the way that he's training for this marathon, he's going to be battling with this inner weak version of himself that's going to try to tell him to quit the entire time. He said he needs to beat down this voice inside of him that, you know, 12 miles into a run starts to complain about how his ankles are

28:53hurt. You know, I can't go another 14 miles, the voice says. No, stop that. Stop thinking like that. He said he's gonna wake up at three in the morning and get a run in before he goes to work. And the voice says, Oh, I don't want to get frostbite. You know, as I run shirtless for two hours, getting nipple frostbite at three in the morning. No, stupid, stupid, stupid. He talked about it almost like it was demonic possession going on inside of him. And he was comparing himself when he said all this to ultra marathon runners that he knows about on the internet. And he was talking as though the real difference he sees between those people and

29:24him was that they've developed a level of moral strength and intestinal fortitude in these moments that makes him realize his level of moral weakness and how he's just being a pansy when he thinks it's impossible in the moment. And so his conclusion here was there's nothing more that he can really do right now other than just stop complaining and force himself to run the 15 miles where if he just forces himself and pushes through these demons inside of him trying to get him to stop, then somewhere around mile marker number eight, he's going to learn about the true nature of moral strength like these

29:55other people know about it. And he'll finally become an ethically strong person. Now, just like the belief based view of things, there's at least some level of accuracy to this take, which is why it becomes such an easy trap for people to fall into. Again, there is a big difference between this guy and the seasoned marathon runner when it comes to their ability to push past a voice at 3am that wants to stay in bed instead of running. But again, this ignores the fact that this is something these marathon runners have often trained to be able to do for years of their life. Always remember that you have trained

30:26very consistently every day of your life to be exactly who you are right now. And do you really think the ultra marathon runner has the exact same internal experience as you do at 3am? Is it the exact same experience? What would make it different for them? Sloterdijk might say, is it possible that through all their training, they make something that seems extremely morally difficult, even torturous from the place you're trained into? Does waking up at 3am become less of a moral lift for them? Because their whole form of life is already organized in a way that supports that capacity.

30:58Is it possible that much like the belief based view is trying to intellectually force yourself into an entirely different relationship with reality? Is this marathon guy trying to morally force himself into things that his current training in life simply can't support yet? I mean, imagine you just started playing the piano. And on day three of trying, you decide you're going to try to play some Rachmaninoff or, you know, some really difficult piano piece you saw somebody you admire play. And you try and you fail miserably at it. And you rightfully get to a place where you say, look, it's obvious I can't do this right now. It's impossible. My fingers just don't move this

31:31way. Well, yeah, you're right. They don't. And that's why you got to train in smaller ways to make these other experiences even available for you to access. You got to play Baba Black Sheep for a little while on the piano, hot cross buns or whatever it is. You know, people accept pretty easily that we need to train ourselves when it's something physical like on the piano. But when it comes to most things, the same dynamic applies for Slaughter Dyke. You may have to train more minor ancillary skills for months or even years ahead of time. But one thing is clear to him. It is a

32:02misunderstanding at the level of what kind of creature you even are to assume it's simply moral weakness or strength of the will. That's the thing that separates you from doing what other people you admire are doing or stops you from changing ethically. We have to recognize that some experiences are just more available to you than others right now. And think of all that changes, again, at every dimension of how you carry yourself in the world, when running marathons just is the person you are every day, when you've trained yourself in order to get there. What is torturous to you right now would be indistinguishable once you were in that new place. And Slaughter Dyke would say

32:36consider the change that goes on, not just when it comes to the conscious thoughts you're battling in a moment, but even the unconscious parts of you that make choosing in a particular direction feel more natural to you. So for Slaughter Dyke, ethics then is something that begins when there's a gap between what a situation is morally asking of you and what responses are available to you through the person you train to be in every second. How do I train myself through anthropotechnics to close that gap and make the better decision more available to me when a tough moment comes around? And that there's not

33:07only no shame in training one step at a time like this, but doing it that way may just reflect a greater level of wisdom someone has about how our capacities actually change. Maybe a lot of this credit that people give to what seems like inhuman levels of moral strength. Look, this person's not a superhero. Okay, they may have just trained over time, but doing the better response doesn't feel like something they have to violently force out of themselves anymore. Now, at this point in the

Conclusion and Preview

33:33episode, maybe the title of the book starts to take on a whole different meaning than you expected it to at the beginning of the episode. For whatever it's worth, that phrase, you must change your life, comes from the final line of a poem Slaughter Dyke really liked, where the poet writing it, a guy named Reiner Rilke, is looking at a statue of the Greek god Apollo. And as the poem goes, as he's standing in front of this broken old statue, where the god Apollo doesn't even have a head anymore, the head of the statue was broken off long ago, Rilke says that the statue still feels to him in that moment, like it's staring back at him in some way, like its presence is commanding him to do something in his life greater than he

34:08currently is, where the final line of the poem that he writes, you must change your life, is what he thinks Apollo's statue seems to be telling him. And Slaughter Dyke uses this as the title of the book because it captures yet another piece of this anthropology he's been laying out. See, Slaughter Dyke thinks that if you examine the way humans exist around each other at the level of anthropology, you start to notice there were the kind of beings that find ourselves often pulled in a sense, vertically, toward forms of life that are higher or more demanding than what we're currently living in. Now, I fully realize this is a pretty big statement to throw in at the end here, especially when it's something

34:40that's not going to be grounded ethically. But rest assured, he's going to have many examples that support this claim next episode. We just ran out of time to do it today. But next week will be the dramatic conclusion to all this we just talked about. We're again, by the end of it, we'll have to rethink the entire history of our species and how to make sense of it. Because of this episode has been him laying out how individual human beings are trained into a form of life. The next episode is going to be about what happens when entire nations build symbolic worlds to be able to protect themselves that then train millions of people together along with it. See, this is where he

35:13starts talking about our whole history as something we should ultimately see as a conflict between different kinds of immune systems that we develop, where individual people create symbolic immunity themselves. Whole civilizations do this, trying to make life more secure for the people inside them, and they often protect themselves by pushing their own suffering onto another group of people somewhere else so they don't have to look at it. We'll talk about how maybe the true crisis of the modern world that's starting to emerge for us is that we're realizing that there may no longer be a somewhere else to push all this stuff onto anymore. So by the end of next episode, we're going to

35:46understand why the title, You Must Change Your Life, actually becomes a command by Apollo that he thinks is directed towards humanity as a whole. Patreon, Substack, thanks for everything you do. Most of all, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.