Ep.69 - How Do We Know What We Know? (feat. Professor Oli Mould)

It's time for the big one: just how exactly do we know what we know? In episode 69 (nice!), Adam and Jonny have invited special guest Professor Oli Mould to talk with them about epistemology. Can they work out how to tell truth from lie in a post-truth world? Or will they fall prey to the postmodern neo-Marxists trying to spread their WOKE agenda? There's only one way to find out!

Transcript

Please note, this transcription may not be 100% accurate.

Hello, and welcome to Bread and Rosaries, the leftist Christian podcast that is one man down this afternoon, but we also have Jonny returning. Jonny, where have you been? 
 
Lost in North Norfolk. Working very, very hard. 
 
We are also joined today by professor Oli Mould.
 
Oli, how are you? Good to have you with us. 
 
Thank you very much. Yes. I'm delighted to be here.
 
We are gonna talk today a little bit about epistemology, which is a slightly scary sounding word, but we will define that at some point. And Oli is here to to help us talk about that. And, part of the reason I thought you'd be a really good guest for it is because I've seen a lot of your TikToks. And I think you have to have a decent grasp of epistemology to say the things that you say on TikTok. 
 
That's very kind of you to say. I'm not entirely sure it's true having seen some of your TikToks as well, but it's funny. I mean, it is an interesting one because, funny enough, just the other day, I was having the, I did a master's showcase where we have to sort of try and sell all our wonderful master's courses. And, we have people The university, 
 
The commodification of higher education is great, isn't it? 
 
Well, don't get me started. That's an entirely different podcast about the, crisis in the university sector, which has obviously been caused by marketisation.
 
But, yes, we have to sort of try and beat our chests and sell this sell these master's programs. But we get a range of different people because at undergraduate level, if you're doing geography at a level, you go and do geography at, undergraduate level. But when you go off and do a master's in human geography, we get social anthropologists, we get philosophers, we even have an electrical engineer. So there's lots of different kinds. So when you get to sort of that stage of it, the everything bleeds into everything else.
 
And so things like Yeah. Yeah. Social theory, epistemology, you know, ontology, all these different kinds of philosophical ideas, they all get swept up in this broad scheme of sort of social science Yeah. At the postgraduate level. So yeah.
 
Yeah. And you sort of have to have a a decent grasp on on most of these ideas in order to actually talk about the things that are adjacent to that. Exactly. Exactly. And it's almost like Victorian compartmentalizing of different subjects is not actually all that helpful.
 
Well, this is Absolutely. That's how the universities sort of started, wasn't it, when the philosophers and the science the engineers didn't really get on. So they just decided to create their own institutions and, yeah, here we are millennia later. Yeah. Yeah.
 
I mean, we all know that, really, the the only science the queen of the sciences indeed is is theology. So, let's let's do a bit of mind grapes, shall we? What else is on my mind grapes? Don't know if anyone else has anything on their mind grapes. Yeah.
 
Oli, you're looking at me like you've just had a massive surprise. This disembodied voice, which sounded incredibly, authoritative. Was saying being on a field podcast, I was wondering whether this is something you've managed to tap into the It's the voice of God. It turns out it speaks like a I don't know who this person is, but it sounded sort of someone from The Bronx. So it was, which might well end up being quite, poetic.
 
But there we go. If so, if Ben was here, this would be the moment where he explained his spiel about who this was. It's someone off some American sitcom type thing that's apparently very funny, but I haven't seen it, at this point quite deliberately. So I have no idea what it's about. It could be something awful and reactionary, and Ben's just that this is like a blind spot for him or something.
 
I don't know. But, Ignorance is bliss. Let's just leave it at that. Yeah. Yeah.
 
That's why I did theology. No. Right. What else is on my mind grapes? Jonny, have you got anything on your mind grapes?
 
Well, actually, there is one thing that I could talk about thinking about it is the, the VAT stuff for churches and reclaiming it back, the scheme for that. Oh, this sounds super interesting. Well, it has an impact on mission and things. Because if you can't reclaim it, like yeah. I can talk about it later or not at all.
 
I wasn't trying to put you off. I was I was only making a joke there, Jonny. Like, you can talk about VAT if that's if that's the kind of thing you're into. But, no, it's it's more like, so, obviously, the government are slashing lots and lots of different things. And one of the things is the sort of reclaiming, VAT for various things for churches.
 
And one of my churches has, in sort of round figures, a million pound building project. So if we don't do it, like, the building will fall down kind of thing. So the 60 year old building. But it has increased our costs by about a hundred and $80, which Yeah. Is really tricky.
 
And and so we're having to apply for a lot more funding, but that obviously will have a knock on effect on other things and actually will impact, like, what we can do with the community. Because, yeah, we're gonna have to divert resources elsewhere, and it's not a very well off church anyway, and most of that money is having to come from the lottery fund. But, yeah, it's interesting, but Church of England, along with others are pushing forward along with Methodist Church as well and kind of trying to say, well, actually, this will have serious impact and consequences. Yeah. Particularly as the most of the voluntary sector in The UK comes from people working in churches.
 
And, actually, that will also be affected. So there's this this kind of unintended sort of domino effect that ends up happening. I don't know if I have come to a position on whether I think churches should be exempt from tax. I think probably there are some churches that should be exempt that I think should be exempted, some that shouldn't be. So that's that's perhaps my own bias.
 
But, yeah, even so, this is a sort of example of a a government cutting or tweaking a system and having potentially unintended consequences. It's it's quite short-sighted. It it reminds me a lot of, you know, the coalition government coming in and, it's not the same thing, but but getting rid of well, cut cutting everywhere, really. It reminds the, you know, the the there are obviously the recent cuts to the disabled benefits that that Labour government just just remind ourselves that it is a Labour government have announced Really? I think that's debatable, isn't it?
 
Yeah. Yeah. You know, we can, there's obviously lots of parties throughout history which have had very, oxymoronic names. But, no, it's, and and one of the ways in which the unintended consequences or maybe it's intended. I don't know.
 
But the if you narrow the criteria for the personal independence payments, the pips, then obviously, that has a knock on effect of the carers allowance because you can only claim carers allowance for if your the person you are caring for, is in recipient of PIP. And so it has this sort of knock on effect, and so it does spread through the society. So in terms of it's not just the sort of the the initial people that get hurt as much as they are. It kind of does end up rippling through. Yes.
 
So there we go. Yeah. Yeah. There was a brilliant TikTok video that I saw, yesterday, I think, that was talking about austerity and cuts and that kind of thing. And it just did this wonderful thing where it started off with these two people, you know, one pretending to be a politician, one pretending presumably to be a civil servant.
 
And then set the politician saying, we need to save money, so we're going to pay teachers less. And the civil servant, oh, excellent idea. And then it cuts to two more people, and it's the teacher at home and and the husband saying, oh, I didn't get that pay rise. Oh, now we're not gonna be able to afford this. And then the knock on effect of that is two other people saying, oh, we haven't got enough money coming into the shop for this, so you can't have as many hours.
 
And and then it eventually tracks back all the way back to the politician and the civil servant saying, we we have even less money coming in. Why? It's very short sighted. There's a Bluey episode that does about something very similar. That is excellent.
 
Me, actually. It's fantastic, and I show it to my students sometimes. There's there's a it's sort of there's Bluey gets a $10 note, and they pass it around the fair buying all these goods, and it's the same £10 note or $10 note which comes back to the person. And it's just it shows you, well, look. This is this is how economies work.
 
And so, yes, it's, yeah. Anyway Yeah. So Bluey's, anti capitalist practice. Yeah. We're we're Bluey stands on this podcast.
 
Very much not Paw Patrol. Oh, well, Paw Patrol. Yeah. Copaganda. Yeah.
 
Yeah. Bluey, I've got should've worn my bluey t shirt, but, Bluey is fantastic. Brilliant. I I have I have many things on my mind, grapes, this week, but I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with well, I'll briefly mention that and and, obviously, this is generally a a sort of fairly light part of the show, but, obviously, we have to acknowledge that Israel have restarted their, bombing campaign of Gaza, murdering hundreds of people. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that.
 
We're not gonna talk about that properly today, but that is something that has been on my mind, grapes. Something a little bit lighter, kind of, that's been on my mind, Grapes, is the football team I used to support won their first trophy in about sixty years or something. So I always so I used to support Newcastle United, because, I am from the Southeast, and so I wanted to support the club that was furthest away. But when they were bought by the Saudi public investment fund, I fairly publicly said, I can't this is not good. This is this is the Saudi government.
 
These people behead people in the street. You know? Not that it's better to behead people in other places. It's just, you know, don't behead people. It's not good.
 
So I just sort of said, I I I can't support this football team any more until these people are out even though we see that they're doing good things for the club. But I have really complicated feelings about the fact that they just won the League Cup. You know? Because I watched it. I bear in mind.
 
Right? So I'm doing Lent. And for Lent, I'm, like, giving up ultra processed foods, which is a bit of a weird category because it doesn't really mean anything. But for the League Cup final, I bought, like, a pizza and crisps and fizzy drink, and I sat down and I watched the whole thing, and I pretended not to be happy for them. But my god, I I was, yeah, I was like, in internally, I was like, yes.
 
Yes. And it's so weird because, like, you can't so easily just shed those feelings, those ideas, even of something as silly as a football club because the the connection to it that you've had for decades, really, it means something, you know, even even for someone like me who's not a Geordie. So, yeah, that that's what's been on my mind mind grapes. It's been a very sort of weird thing to to process. I'm both happy and annoyed.
 
I've got a very important question. For someone who's stereotypically queer, is the league, like, the top sort of competition for it? No. No. Stereotypically queer.
 
The so the so the League Cup is not the league as such. The League Cup is like a cup competition that runs concurrently with the league. And it's And you say postmodernism is complicated. I mean I don't no. It's not that postmodernism is complicated.
 
It's that it's bullshit. But, no, it's it's it's, it is. It's a it's a really weird thing. There's a lot of complicated feelings, and I think, you know, I'm probably not not the only one there, actually. Well, I think you're right.
 
I'm a big football fan myself, and, as you can tell by my outrageous scout accent, I'm an Everton fan. And so I was, very happy to see Newcastle beat Liverpool Yeah. Just my allegiances. But you're absolutely right. I mean, again, I, because I'm not I live in Liverpool.
 
There is a sense of distance and but there is having grown up and supported Everton since I've been a little boy, it is there's this incredible cultural association. And, you know, as a geographer, this is the sort of stuff that fascinates us. This as a tribal imagined communities that we create. And they biro into your habitus, if you like. And, they do kind of gnaw away at you.
 
And when and I mean, it's not nowhere near as I guess if we're talking about hierarchies of evil, then being bought out by the Saudi government is perhaps up there. But Everton's new stadium is being built on, their, their landlords are essentially Peel. I'm not sure if you've heard of the, the company Peel Holdings, but they're an incredibly large real estate company up in the Northwest Of England who I've done a lot of work in and around, but they are they are one of the most disgusting evil companies in the country. They're just, you know, they own huge tracts of the Manchester Ship Canal, the Salford Quays, the the Liverpool Heritage Water Fund, and they they're an incredibly obtuse and, obfuscatory company. You can't get at them.
 
They're they're headed up by a guy called Roger Whittaker, who was George Osborne's godfather, which explains a lot. And they're just evil. They're they're pure evil. I always joke with my students that their next project is going to be the death star. But anyway, so there but there but so Everton have built their new stadium on the Liverpool waters Liverpool waterfront, which is owned by Peel.
 
So if if I want to go and see them play, which I do regularly at Goodison Park, I'm going to have to, contribute money to Well, exactly. Indirectly contribute money to Peel. So it it and when, you know, there's a serious point here insofar as it once foot once capitalism strangles football so much that you you it kind of begins to affect those long standing habitus and that those kinds of really affective registers within us, which is why I go and watch all the shop play. Normally, it's just down the road. So The thing is we we invest our time, our money, our lives into portions of our lives into this stuff.
 
You know? It's it's it's not dissimilar to, you know, following your favourite band. You know? It's it's it's the same kind of thing. I mean, I I always get a little bit annoyed when people the the classic one is people get really annoyed at footballers having obscene wages to kick a ball around a field, and I and I get that because the wages are obscene and and they shouldn't be.
 
However, you never hear these people say the same thing about actors or musicians. And these days, you know, football is one of the few places where a working class lad or or lass can actually work their way up if they're if they're actually genuinely talented. With acting or or music, it's it's a lot rarer these days because you have to have contacts, you have to have money, and and that kind of thing. So I always find it really fascinating that people always jump to the thing that is sort of fairly stereotypically working class and have a go at the people who get rich off that rather than having a go at the people who are already rich and getting richer. You know?
 
Indeed. It's like it's it's it's almost as if they believe in meritocracy, but not when they're actually struggling their presence. Exactly. Let's, let's move on to our main topic. Oli, you are a professor of human geography at, is it Royal Holloway, I think?
 
Correct. Royal Holloway. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
 
Why don't you tell us a little bit about what you generally are interested in, what you teach about, and that kind of thing, and maybe we can move into thinking about what epistemology is and and how maybe that might enter into some of the work that you do. Yes. Well, that's a kind invitation. Yes. So human geography is a very broad ranging social science, I guess, and there's lots of different ways into it, lots of different sub disciplines, cultural geography, economic geography, for example.
 
One of the things I always say to my students straight off the bat is that, everything takes place. Everything all the various issues that we discuss and, we can observe in the world takes place. It's a very materialist way of understanding the world, but ultimately, you know, capitalism takes place in various parts of the world. A thought in our brain takes place in the synapses within our skull. And so there's lots of different ways in which we can, study the relationship between the thing and place.
 
And ultimately, that's what human geography is. And so you can see why it ends up going down the rabbit rabbit holes of of various philosophical ideas including epistemology. Now I, my I I guess grew up is the wrong word, but my, bread and butter is the city. I did a lot of work around the city as my PhD was on urban issues, and I teach around urban geography specifically. But even within that, the city itself is such a complicated and complex site of human practice, behaviour, emotion, inequality, all those different things that, you know, the city is itself is a fantastic arena for, discussing a lot of these kinds of big philosophical ideas as well as some of the more practical, I guess, you know, ground level stuff such as activism or, you know, global city policy directives and things like that.
 
So that's so human geography is a very, very broad church to to use the podcast vernacular, and so it's very much, encompassing of everything. And it what I find fascinating is all the it blows my mind all the time, the the the variety of student dissertation projects, for example. I mean, just the other day, I was looking at one that was studying the geographies of of a fish tank and was this person who had spent spent a lot of time just watching this fish tank and and exploring the different ways in which the humans interacting with the fish and how the fish themselves navigated the space and what it did and what the fish tank did to the the atmospheres of the room and the lighting and everything else. And so it has this wonderful ability to narrate the sublime and the big ideas through very, very small things. So, you know, you can narrate there's some wonderful books that sort of talk about capitalism in its global planetary force through a through a mushroom, for example, through it, you know, the production chain of a mushroom.
 
So, yeah, that's what human geography is, and that's how it relates to some of the the broader philosophical ideas. Part of the reason I wanted to get you on is because we live in a time now of such profound misinformation. You know, this the the whole thing around fake news. Is it fake news? Is it, you know, you've got people spreading fake news telling you that other people are spreading fake news, and then they're saying they're spreading fake news.
 
And, realistically, they're both spreading fake news, but these people over here who nobody's listening to at all are perhaps a bit closer to the truth. So so I wanted to to get you on because I I've seen some of your TikTok videos, and I've always found it really interesting how you frame a lot of your your videos and thought you would be a really helpful dialogue partner. So we're gonna sort of have a chat about that. I have noticed, like many people have, that there's a certain demographic of both older and actually now younger men who are falling down a rabbit hole, you know, starting off with maybe people like Joe Rogan, moving on to people who he has on his podcast like Jordan Peterson, and really being influenced by some quite nefarious ideology. Now I think someone like Joe Rogan is he's not really the big fish in this, I think, because he his main role in this is is to be the person who sort of facilitates the the really nasty voices.
 
But someone like Jordan Peterson is interested because his trajectory has been someone who sort of started off sort of broadly on the right, and and got famous for some transphobic nonsense, but has just really fallen down the rabbit hole himself. It's like he's bought his own propaganda. One of the things that Jordan Peterson talks about is postmodern neo-Marxism. Perhaps we can have a chat about what postmodern neo-Marxism is, if indeed it's anything at all. Where what what does he mean by that, and, why is it bullshit?
 
Well, if that isn't a leading question, I have no idea what it is. It's a pretty steep in a YouGov polling polling, questionnaire there. But, well it's obviously bullshit. I mean postmodernism is an of itself a sort of, you know, it's a pastiche of a particular movement which happened, I guess you could argue, sometime in the sort of 70s and 80s and it was around or even before that to be fair. And it was, an argument which came about mainly through art and through this, idea that there was a lack of meaning in the world.
 
And in many respects, it actually started as a critique. It was a sort of critique of some of these stifling issues around modernist thought, hierarchy, rigid ontologies, that sort of thing. And so it was never anything other than just a critical thought. It was never meant as a way of viewing the world. But it has kind of become this, yeah, I guess, yeah, pastiche is a good word of a sort of movement, which has nothing more than simply, for me anyway, a kind of playful viewing of of the world.
 
And so we hit that's why it still happens in art and in film and in various other cutting edge, if you like, artistic movements. And so it doesn't it it's nothing other than that. It's just a sort of, a kind of poking, a sort of subtle light poking fun at some of the big thinkers of the world. And then when you couple it with neo-Marxism itself a term which obviously is so vague and unuseful, so you're bolting two words together which are just essentially they just alert people. They alert, they sort of fire various images and atmospheres and affects in people's minds, which, oh yeah, you're talking about the left or you're talking about ideologies, which I don't like.
 
And so it's, it's essentially just a, I mean, a dog whistle, I guess, is the, the other phrase to use it's it's to say that, right. I'm gonna be talking about things that you don't like. So get into your angry place. And then the next half an hour, I'm going to be talking about all these different people and all these different groups of people, and I'm gonna frame it in this sort of quasi intellectual way to make it sound like what I'm talking about has some sort of validity. When really I'm just I just don't like trans people or I don't like black people and so the next half hour is just my diatribe.
 
So that that's all it is. It's a it's a sort of quasi intellectual framing, of a rant. And, that's what he's very good at and that's kind of where he made his millions, I guess, if he is a millionaire, but where he made his name in this sort of quasi pop culture world. Malcolm Gladwell is another one and who's the other one? Steven Pinker.
 
These people who sort of were intellectuals, but they weren't quite clever enough. And so they ended up writing these sort of pop culture books, which appeal to stupid people, and they ended up kind of filling out stadiums of stupid people. So this is sounds like a rant myself, but it's This is what the podcast is about. Well, it is. Absolutely.
 
An extended rant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So post postmodern neo-Marxism is just a collection of words to signal to people that, you you know, this is what's going to happen.
 
So that's that's all it is. And And I guess because they're based on half truths, they they almost seem real. Yeah. It's just sort of, you know, if you use big fancy words like that, then you you tend to hooking people. But yeah.
 
And so it's this pipeline which you talk of is is incredibly dangerous because it it does it does sort of funnel people, like you're saying, into this, very, very dangerous ideology. You know, I think it's it would be remiss not to talk about the the TV channel, the TV show, the Netflix show, which has been shown over the last couple of days called Adolescence, which your listeners and viewers may well have watched because it has been remarkably popular. I think it's like 30,000,000 views on Netflix in the last three or four days. And I watched it last night and it is an incredible piece of television, not least cinematograph. The cinematography is incredible.
 
Every episode is just one long take and it's been done, you know, they haven't, there's been no editing. It's all been done. Sounds exhausting. You know, I I find that Not not to watch. I mean, to to to, like, film.
 
Oh, well, I mean, to film and to watch. I think about I to think about the editing of film okay. So I got into academia because I I'm a bit of a film buff, and I ended up reading one of the film cinema books. Oh, no. You two are gonna get on like a house on fire.
 
So good. It's me. Well I'll just I'll just turn my microphone off and shut up for a bit and let you two talk it out, shall I? Oh, thank you. This to that.
 
You might need to sort of, I don't know, have another server because this could could go on a while. But, I mean, the the Like Deleuze does. Well, like like Deleuze. Yeah. So it's, so I was a bit of a a film buff.
 
So I I ended up reading cinema one and two. And Deleuze talks about the editing, the ways and it's quite geographical because he says that it's, any place whatsoever. So film can sort of transport you to different places all over the world and, you know, that's and when you're watching a film, it kind of moves you around. That's the beauty of the editing technology, the sort of cinematic technologies that were invented in the twenties. But the long take and Children of Men is a film I adore.
 
And that that film does it very, very well, but there's lots of ways in which, yeah, fantastic. And it but it kind of because it doesn't edit because there is no quick takes it you feel trapped you feel very claustrophobic and you don't really know why and it's really uneasy because you're so used to watching TV and cinema which cuts. And I do this a bit with my again, you know, I'm not not a film studies scholar but it it speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of it. When I do watch watch some clips with my students and I get them to get them to clap every time there's an edit, every time there's a change of and if you're watching some sort of Michael Bay bollocks you end up in you know but if you're watching something good you know you're you're not clapping that often and so and obviously with this with this adolescence you don't clap at all it's one and so it and because of the nature of the subject matter is quite intensely emotive and it requires you to really be intimate with these characters. It's the perfect cinematographic Technique and so anyway, so it that alone so the cinematography is brilliant, but the film that the the content of it is obviously this radicalization of this young boy who goes on to to murder a woman a young girl, so It speaks to this pipeline and the whole point of this program is like we're letting down our younger men in particular.
 
Yeah, because of you know what they talk about the fact that they weren't the parents weren't there because they had to work two different jobs and they talk up in you're talking about austerity. I mean, you know the lack of any kind of public service SureStart you mentioned but also things like, you know, swimming pools have been sold off football pitches youth activities after school, extra library in my hometown, you know, all these places where young people, not just men, but young people in general over the last twenty years have been able to forge an identity through a particular activity in in connection with a you know an expert a coach or a teacher or a crafts leader or something or a scout leader or whatever it might be and so we we haven't got that anymore and so is it any wonder that you that they're trying to find identity on on screens and in manosphere, you know, forums and Reddit and all that sort of stuff? And and yeah. And so I think that austerity is a has shoulders a lot of the blame for this. Yeah.
 
I mean, I don't I don't wanna get ahead of ourselves here, but there are real questions about what we do about that, you know, as communities, not you know, as individuals and communities, how do we I mean, it's, you know, fifteen years too late, really, but how do we how do we approach that issue of austerity, especially with this latest round of cuts from from, apparently, Labour government? Yeah. What do we what do we do about that in a way that doesn't actually end up reinforcing the austerity, the cuts that have, you know, and propping it up? No. I I agree.
 
And so, I was chatting to a student of mine. She was, recording a conversation that she had with a friend of hers husband who had gone down this pipeline, who had been red pilled is the phrase. And she was, kind of saying, well, you can't necessarily have a conversation with these people because the defences go up automatically. Yeah. And I think it's in large part because of and she was admitting her frustration with this because actually this this person, this man was, they lived at home with them with his mother and he was like, oh, I love my mother.
 
I'm I'm I want to stay here because I want to look after her. So there was a sort of contradiction there to a certain degree. But I think one of the you can't have these conversations because as as we see in with the MAGA cult and the and on on the broader geopolitical narratives that we've seen over the last couple of months, if you try to argue with these people, it automatically becomes a social media conversation. If you just sat down over dinner with someone who's you're trying to kind of have a conversation with about this, the very act of conversation, the very act of you talking with them suddenly becomes a performative space. It suddenly becomes a space in which that kind of politics is performed.
 
Yeah. It doesn't become and it loses any of the sort of social conditioning that a conversation between friends has down the pub or over dinner or whatever it might be. And so I've and I've I've had similar conversations with people who perhaps aren't quite as far down but it's it's difficult to talk to these people because the moment you even begin the act of conversation, yeah, it just if just to them it's like it's another comment thread, you know, and it's like oh who can who can insult each other the best and who can kind of ignore each other's and who can get that one over, you know. And so there's more validity in exploring the the material conditions of these people. And I think that that's a really important part.
 
And, again, I'll give you another vignette of a of a TikTok video which I saw. And it's not about the manosphere, but it's of a similar sort of ideal insofar. It was a NASA scientist. She was a climatologist from NASA. And, the podcast person asked her, so well, your dad was a climate denier and what changed his mind?
 
And she was like, well, I'd like to think that it was his love of his daughter who was doing this amazing work in climate science in NASA, but she said no. The thing that changed his mind was the fact that his insurance company didn't pay out when his home was destroyed by flooding. And then he subsequently found out that all the insurance companies in America and indeed beyond that had climate scientists and climatologists involved in their actuarial science in their decision making. And so his, his argument was, oh, well, if, if it's good enough for capitalism and insurance companies, if they're taking this climate stuff seriously and it's factoring into their insurance and payout things, then it must be true. And so her argument was that it was his material conditions and and the sort of structures which he was very, very reliant upon.
 
Once he realized that they had the sort of were were treating climate change as truth, then he began to change his mind. And so I think that there's a that's a there's a real nugget of important information there is that I mean, the the the upshot of that is that, well, we have to wait for their material conditions to worsen before they begin to change their minds, which is obviously not good because it means putting them into destitution. But I think that that at this stage, like you said, with post truths and all these other horrific postmodern neo-Marxism and all these other things which floating around it, until people's material conditions worsen, like the prices of eggs rocket, then it then it won't make a jot of difference. What what I'm hearing from this is that, it will be capitalist insurance companies that save the world. That's that's what I've taken from that.
 
I don't know if that's what you intended. But Well, it isn't what I intended, but, well, yeah, that's that's the postmodernist postmodernist in New Adam coming. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
 
I I retract it all. I retract it all. Yeah. I guess, yeah, there's something about these material conditions because what a lot of the, sort of MAGA and essentially fascistic ideologies sort of get at, they are touching that nerve of your suffering and your material conditions are bad, but they keep poking at it and saying, oh, it's that person over there who's poking it and causing you to hurt? Not us.
 
But as soon as the sort of almost that veil is kind of taken away, you know, going behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz and realizing, actually, oh, it's you. You're not actually that thing. I I mean, I think there's only so long that Donald Trump can blame Biden for the worsening material conditions. I mean, he will try and I suspect there's be a large number of people that will believe him. But I think that that hopefully there's enough people that don't and realize that actually maybe fascism isn't all that good.
 
And so, ultimately, what it comes down to is a it's a battle of the, you know, the material world. I mean, that's comes back to classic Marxist, you know, Marxist epistemology, I guess, in that respect. But, yeah, it's it's it's bleak, but it's certainly one avenue of of kind of thinking through this. I think one one of the kind of concerning things about this is that, like, a person doesn't have to be fully sold out on on Trump. They don't have to be a Trump supporter for this stuff to actually have an effect on them because the way a lot of this stuff works is that you throw out so much bullshit that you are just completely muddying the waters, and people don't know what to think.
 
So I know people who don't like Trump, don't support Trump, but they definitely believe things without realizing it that have been put in there by Trump or or Trump's, you know, Trump adjacent kind of people that have meant that they they they have no idea what they're supposed to be thinking, what they want to think, and and who's saying what and and why and no idea how ideology is functioning. And I think this is why it's helpful for us to have a a strong grasp on a a theory of knowledge that can help us pick through some of this stuff. So I wonder whether we should talk a little bit about a Marxist epistemology. What what does that kind of look like? Well, I think it would fall back on a kind of dialectical materialist view of the world insofar as history is moved forward by particular struggles and particular in Marxist case, obviously, class struggle.
 
And so a Marxist epistemology would be one which understands that the material conditions of life are incredibly important, but they're not set. There there is no sort of, I don't know, there is no end game here, at least although I guess the communist horizon is one which he would probably move us towards but there's always going to be a sort of debate to be had or there's always going to be a kind of a conflicting ideology which will change those material conditions and so I don't know that but the, I mean, I didn't want to lean on the idea of kind of optimism and pessimism or hope and despair but I think that there is a sense that you can always try and change those conversations by appealing to the material conditions of people's lives and say look your lives have got worse, you are no better off than your parents were, you can't afford a house, your school has got a crumbling roof and so there is a tangible reality in front of your eyes which suggests the current ideologies of this world are simply not working. They simply do not serve you as a person, you know, a marginalized person working class, whatever it ends up being.
 
But you can change those conditions. You have agency insofar as you are part of a collective, a body politic, whatever kind of word you wanna use that can change those conditions. You can change the political ideology either through non violent political means, through changing governments, or through, you know, revolution, which is obviously where Marx was trying to get us towards. So I think that those messages need to sort of be heard because there's a lot of despair and a lot of people kind of thrown, particularly around climate change. Oh, what do we do now?
 
So Marxist epistemology would be one that, you know, you you do have agency. You do have the ability to change your material conditions. But, yeah, I mean, it does that doesn't negate the fact that requires a huge amount of work and resources, which obviously none of us have at the moment. I think as well, like, even when we talk about material conditions, when when you think about that, that makes perfect sense. But I think to a lot of people, even that kind of phrase is is not necessarily something that they've thought about in those terms before.
 
You know? People don't, I mean, people do think about material conditions, but they don't necessarily know that they're thinking about material conditions. Does that make sense? Yes. No.
 
It does perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, you know, it's it's In some respects, it's slightly Easier is that if that's the right word to think about the in today's interconnected particularly climate riddled world. I mean climate deniers notwithstanding, I think that the vast majority of people will understand that climate catastrophe is a thing.
 
And one of the major explainers of that is that, well, it's infinite growth on a finite planet and that is one of the reasons in which climate is changing is because we have extracted far too much material out of the world and the ground and we are burning it to such on the profit of on the on the alter of profitability. And so you could actually point to a real kind of tangible climate, material and say, well, look, the current capitalist ideology has created this worsening material world, you know, the the floods and the heat waves and the wildfires and everything else. And so I think that there is that. And so you can point to the issues around climate change to just show how ideology is linked to material. And interestingly, I find it fascinating that when anyone strays beyond the climate change agenda to say what becomes an anti capitalist, for example, Greta Thunberg, they get immediately pushed out of the media.
 
It's like she was wonderful. She had all these book tours and TV shows when she was let's change, you know, let's all stop using plastic straws and doing all this. The moment she became an advocate for anti capitalism and indeed Palestinian rights, the moment she started making all these links together, that's it. She was out. She was like, that's it.
 
No no more BBC talk shows for you, young lady. So it's you're battling against the media framework, which obviously wants to keep everything separate, wants to keep everything kind of in its box. But, yeah, but there are there are ways around that, such as your podcast, for example. And it it and what you're saying there reminds me of how with with things like, various climate activists, you know, whether protesting in shops and just getting in people's way or stopping people from going through roads and whatnot. People get really irritated with the fact that they're doing that thing rather than going, yes, this is calling us to think about the climate and we're heading towards catastrophe.
 
And it's again, yeah, the media like to compartmentalize all these different things. Yeah. And it's it's classic. I mean, you know, part of that wider divide and conquer technique. But yes, and so when this going back to your question, Adam, about, you know, material that what does it mean?
 
It's like you can point to different parts of it. I mean, you know, the cost of living is another one. You know? And it and this is why I think that people, you know, I've seen on Blue Sky and other social media how Bernie Sanders and AOC in The States at the moment are going around trying to whip up people with sort of saying, oh, is it against oligarchy or a kind of, you know, there's and and that it's really catching on from what I can see at least insofar as that they're actually saying to republicans and people who are fairly rough are like look look around you like you're not getting it your life isn't getting any better it's it's purely about you know people's lives and like they are getting worse And so that's why that has gained a lot of traction because oh, yeah. Yeah.
 
Maybe it's because Elon Musk is the richest guy in the world and he's got £4,478,000,000,000 or whatever it is. So I think there is a sense that pointing to that is a way to cut through. I think we're gonna move on for a moment and talk about our saint of the week. Saint of the week. Yes.
 
We have a jingle for everything. That When were you earlier? Jonny, you said you were in North Norfolk. I am indeed. So you live in I I I apologize for it's presumably, all these jingles, it's very reminds me of Alan Partridge in the mid morning matters.
 
Digital and, it's it's it's right up my alley. It's perfect. Perfect. Excellent. I was so happy when the, software that we were using got a soundboard.
 
It's I don't know. I don't know if I'm just showing my age a little bit or, what's going on, but, I feel like it's very uncool, and I and I like it for that. The uncool is now cool, isn't it? Yeah. And Adam is very old.
 
So You're older than me. I'm 40 I'm 43. And what I have found is that no one told me this, but in the four in your forties, for some reason, I now really enjoy just standing at my window and staring into the garden for for no good reason. I do that already. And, well, I I'm only a few years younger than you, so I'm a bit premature, but not far off.
 
Yeah. I don't you know, it's it's weird. I mean, it's I quite like it, but, obviously, I had no idea that that was a thing. You just sort of stand and stare for ages. Let's let's talk about our saint of the week this week.
 
Our saint of the week this week is Edo Fimmen. Now this is Ben's choice. Ben couldn't join us today. He, he got called away at the last minute. So he sent me through this information about this guy.
 
So I've had to very quickly, before we started, read up as much as I could about him. And he seems pretty cool, to be fair. So he was a Dutch trade unionist. He was born in 1881, died in 1942, and he went to Amsterdam Trade Public School where he he had a talent for languages and worked as a translator. And ultimately, later on, he becomes interested in Christianity and a similar time becomes interested in anarchism.
 
So he sort of is a Christian anarchist who, is also kind of working with a lot of other kinds of socialists as well because he his big thing really is that he's very much into the trade unionist movement. One of the things about saint of the week is that people nobody's perfect, and, we don't expect people to be perfect. But there are also kind of gray areas where I I don't quite know what this guy how this guy conceptualized some of this stuff. But one of the things he was particularly interested in, for a time was, kind of purity stuff. So he campaigned against, things like prostitution, sex work.
 
Sorry. That was one of his big things, and I I can't find much about what that looked like for him, but that was one of the things that he that he campaigned against. He contributed to a magazine that means I I don't know how to say this word. It's like Vrede or something, but it's cool. It's it's Peace in Dutch, and that was a really big thing for him as well.
 
So he was a pacifist. He did join the army, I think, at first, but he later went on to become quite outspoken in the in the peace movement and encouraged conscientious objection. He was actually nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1937. I don't think he won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he he was nominated for it. Question for you both.
 
If you were nominated for a Nobel Prize, would you would you accept or would you, throw it back where it belongs? Well, I again, given the last bit of your sentence there, I think. I I love a leading question. Yeah. I don't know.
 
I mean, you know, there's a lot of quite horrible people have got them in the past. So, you know, Barack Obama and and not horrible as best as he's drunk. He's definitely kind of warmongers. But, I can't believe you would say that about Barack Obama, our messiah. Our messiah.
 
Yes. Yes. I think I don't know. I mean, I would I would certainly, have to think long and hard about it. I don't yeah.
 
I I suspect that any kind of accolade like that would would be something you'd have to look very far into the fine detail. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I don't I do find myself when I mean, I know this isn't but when I was when the when the knighthoods and all the various British stuff come, I always look at the Wikipedia page of people who have refused knighthoods and stuff. Much much better reading, isn't it?
 
And I'd love to be on that list, but I can't imagine I'll never get offered it in any time soon. But, yeah, Nobel Peace Prize, I probably would just throw it back in my face and throw it back at their face and then make a TikTok video about it perhaps, and then maybe. I wonder if it's like, with a a knighthood where they say that the the best thing is if you can turn it down and it gets out to the media so you look cool, but it's not you who leaked it. Yeah. That's, that's that's that's the best way.
 
So you still get clout is what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What about you, Jonny?
 
Would you would you accept? I have never even considered it, so I doubt I'll ever receive anything like that in my life. Bringing peace to North Norfolk? I mean, it would be a real task. It's a bit of a shit answer, but the same as Oli, really.
 
I'd have to really think about that and weigh everything up. Possibly not. But it's also what benefit it would do for other people as well, which would be more of the thing. So I knew someone who worked for quite a good, homeless shelter, still is. And he ummed and ahhed whether he would receive, an OBE or whatever it was and eventually received it because it was good for the charity that was working for the shelter that he was working with or not shelter Yeah.
 
But the organization he worked with rather than for himself. So that's that's kind of where I would be with it. Like, is it gonna benefit others? If not, probably not. Are there subdivisions of this?
 
Or am I am I thinking, like, Nobel Peace Prize for Nobel Prize for chemistry, Nobel Prize for Yeah. Other things, but then the Nobel Peace Prize is Yeah. Its own thing, isn't it? Yeah. Okay.
 
I don't know if because I know that the Nobel Peace Prize, they make the medal out of the metal of of a cannon or something that, I think that's what it is, something like that, that Alfred Nobel had, I don't know, got from some because he you know how he made his money, was he was an arms dealer, essentially. Yes. Yeah. And, and that's, I think, where they where they make the medals from. And I'd but I don't know if that's the case.
 
I I kind of assumed that that's only the case for the peace prize because, you know, nothing says peace like, a cannon. Although, I suppose you are breaking it up. So you know? Would you, Adam? Oh, no.
 
Fuck that. I don't want any, I'd I just I'd frankly and look. None of us none of us can see into the future. Right? So I I wanna leave myself some wriggle room, for when I am, you know, inevitably offered a Nobel Peace Prize.
 
But, I think, yeah, for for me, I'd I would not be accepting it. I'd probably turn it down fairly vociferously. I don't particularly want any kind of state, especially state kind of sanctioned recognition or awards or anything. I I get the argument that, you know, well, if it helps such and such organization. And we had Chris Howson on here who got a British Empire medal.
 
Chris is probably our, I I think, our most, I can say, most common guest, but you know what I mean by that. Yeah. And Most frequent. He's got a British empire medal. Most frequent.
 
Yeah. Yeah. And also common. But, no, I get I do get I do get the argument that if it helps the organization, and that's what Chris House and said as well. I just don't think I'd be able to bring myself to accept that kind of honour without vomiting in the direction of the person who gave it to me.
 
Anyway, so back to what we're actually talking about. So Edo Fimmen was a trade unionist. He, was a peace activist. He was general secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation for, thirteen years, so that's quite a while. And he was very involved in sort of trying to foster internationalism.
 
So, yeah, pretty cool guy. Very much influenced by his his faith. As I say, edited a bunch of Christian stuff, including Christian anarchist magazine piece, and all around seems like a a a pretty good guy. So, yeah, that's our saint of the week for this week, Edo Fimmen. I'm sorry I didn't give it as, in-depth a treatment as Ben would have, but, we we we're dealing with what we're dealing with.
 
So Say of the week. Let's move on to talk a little bit about how we can think about epistemology in terms of our faith as well. Because one of the things that when we think about, say, a Marxist, theory of knowledge, we talk about sort of dialectical materialism, One of the things that we have to differentiate between is a materialist way of thinking and an idealist way of thinking. And often we get caught up in, as Christians, in kind of idealist ways of thinking. Do you think there are ways that we can try and use a Marxist epistemology to try and undo some of that?
 
How can that inform our faith? How can that help us to make better decisions about who we're listening to? And how cool what I'm really asking is, how do we know who's bullshitting us? Yeah. It's a it's a fascinating question, one in which, I've had numerous conversations with people in in my church just down the road.
 
And, funnily enough, the the the vicar is a guy, Neil. He's very, reminds me very much of you, Adam. He's he's he's very kind of, clearly on the left and, but kinda struggling a little bit with this hierarchy and the, issues of the church itself. And No. It doesn't sound like me at all, to be honest.
 
No. You find them really easy. Yeah. I love it. I'd fly around here.
 
I'm so yeah. All this, you know, these, deference is is perfectly natural. But, no, he, he comes from an art history background, and he, does a lot of sort of his he's a very visual guy, and he's very dyslexic as well, actually. And, he he sort of uses a lot of, paintings and visual art in trying to describe some of these ideas. And he he grew up in this area where he spent a lot of his time in Uganda.
 
We have a partnership with a with a church out in Uganda. So a lot of the images he shows are obviously kind of black Jesus and some of the African or indigenous depictions of faith or of Jesus and biblical, stories more more broadly. And to me, that is a that is kind of a at least an attempt to try and break out of the shackles of a sort of slightly idealist version of Christian thinking, which is kind of get locked up in, for one of a better phrase, or perhaps controversially white supremacy, this, you know, this sort of whiteness of Jesus and everything else. And I think that something as simple as that, something as simple as perhaps not the right word again, but it's something as kind of simple as depicting Jesus as non white or trying to suggest that there are other versions of Christian faiths which exist outside of the Western canon plays into a part of that material understanding and so far as that it's the human's conditions and the different cultures that we have built up all over the world over time which refracts the the ideal or the the spiritual through that.
 
And I think what that and this is where the conversations and those various theological discussions I have with Neil end up. It's like, well, what what is it that's being refracting here? Is it a sort of, is it just another material condition? Is it some sort of absolute divinity or is it a kind of human consciousness? I mean, that's obviously where the faith comes in but ultimately I think that you can make a play about the various indigenous cultures that depict Jesus as evidence that there is a material or at least a sort of differentiated materialism to what we consider to be the ethos of everyone's Christian faith, which is, you know, divinity itself.
 
So, yeah, that that to me is is one way of thinking about it, thinking about the the variations of how Christian cultures exist around the world. I'd want to add to that actually of of the sort of material things. Even if you look at holy communion and the actual elements themselves of bread and wine, you can easily make an argument that it's Christofascism to say it has to be bread and glutinous bread, and it has to be wine, alcoholic wine, and ignoring the fact that the expression of that meal or, you know, that Thanksgiving meal could be different elements. I mean, the fact that you have to say it has to be these things rather than allowing for any variance. At Methodist church, we're a bit more lax on that.
 
It has to be alcohol free. It's not allowed alcohol on premises anyway. But we Fascist. Can't have it one way and not the other, Jonny. No.
 
It's okay, Adam, because it's done in the name of equality, so it's fine. But we're less prescriptive, but there's still yeah. I mean, as you say, Adam, in a serious way, it still has to be alcohol free, but it still has to be, fruit of the vine, and it needs to be bread. So even then, it still can't be expressed in other ways if if there are different cultures, different understandings of the world, different, yeah, materialities and experiences. Which is a real problem actually from you know, I did a lot on post colonial hermeneutics and liturgies and and that kind of thing for my masters, and it's it's a real problem, a a practical material problem that we think about it in those ways because we're using a grain, from The Levant to make the thing that we have decided that must be.
 
And when you transport that to a part of the world where, you know, that grain certainly didn't exist and perhaps, struggles to grow and it's expensive and that kind of thing. And you and you say to those people, well, okay. You have rice, and you want to make your bread out of rice, but that's not good enough because Jesus used wheat. It has to be wheat and bread. I just think that, a, that's a colonial mindset, and, b, it just completely misses the point.
 
It could and so often we Absolutely. Completely missed the point of what of what Jesus is getting at and what the gospel is for these kind of very strict ways of thinking. And it's inter it's interesting because, you know, I'm I'm trying to talk about a materialist dialectic, and it's leading me to more diversity, more, less certainty. And I think this is where we start to get into the places where, say, a Marxist and a postmodern kind of approach start to have those conversations, which I find very interesting. Deleuze is really interested in difference and newness and things like that.
 
And I'm currently working on have been working on for a while now, actually, of talking about communion, but and and and a sort of sexual intimacy and using that sort of I mean, you took consent to understand, what happens at communion. But also throwing in there that I I've been thinking about it and how difference and newness relate to God and relating it to, Moltmann and how he understands God and how God can change. And I think that works really quite well. So if and it and it allows an idea for an expression of or understanding of God to be contextual and and the sort of the activity of God in the world to be contextual. So instead of having a kind of real strong hierarchy of, for example, saying it has to be bread and wine or wheaten bread and wine for the elements of the Eucharist, you can say, well, actually, no, God is contextual.
 
Therefore, the Eucharist can be contextual. And it allows an opening to different experiences, and different understandings as well beyond the kind of, yeah, very post enlightenment colonialist input. Are you, familiar with Alain Badiou's work? Because Alain Badiou is another sort of French continental philosopher who was he's still alive, actually. He's kind of in his nineties now.
 
Oh, is he? I didn't realize he was still alive. But I think that Alan Matthieu's work is interesting because I mean, I'm not particularly on board with a lot of what he says, but he is very clear that, this newness that you've just talked about is a quality of an event, a rupture in the world, which only comes about through various criteria that are met. But the meeting of that criteria is not at the time. It happens through a kind of fidelity to the event.
 
And so he says that there's various events that he can point to over time. So in politics, for example, you've got the French Revolution. In science, you've got the apple on Galileo's head and these are such important events because they change everything about the state of that situation and arguably the French Revolution still is changing the state of, but anyway, what he talks about as the alternate event is the resurrection of Christ because without that event, there is no modern world. There is no, because the entirety of the, you know, last 2,000 of the modern world is dependent upon the truth of that event. And so his argument is that that is the ultimate truth and therefore if it's the ultimate truth, then then God in that respect is immutable.
 
And I think that's the distinction that him he makes difference to Deleuze is that God is is it is it immutable. It is the only immutable we can ever think of. Can't even hope to experience it but we can only ever think of and everything else around that is contextual and has contextualizations but that's the only immutable in the universe is God or whatever kind of conceptualization of God you want to choose, nirvana, faith, fate, whatever you want to be. And so that only ever exposes itself in these events, in these ruptures, ultimately in the resurrection of Christ but through in the political realm and something like the French revolution or the Chinese revolution or in the scientific realm or in love he talks about some Greeks, is it Habalar? Anyway, I forget which one it is.
 
And so there are various arenas of that, truth event. Anyway, so I I just find if you could tell Yeah. Badiou stuff is really interesting. It's sort of counterpointed to Deleuze. When it comes to that Yeah.
 
That's helpful. And I I still disagree and push back against Badiou because if the way so the way I can, understand love, I quite like, Richard Gilman Orpalsky's, book, The Communism of Love. And he talks about love being as being involved, the becoming, and someone's becoming what they are not yet. I think that's the the quote in the book. And in order to be involved with someone's becoming and then being involved with your becoming, because there's there's an element of reciprocity.
 
There's there's got to be an element of becoming in God as well, I think, because you can't be involved with someone and love them without being changed yourself. And even, like, with language, I'm not bilingual or multilingual by any means, but those who I know who are, they almost when they start speaking a different language, they almost need to change their the sort of almost the cultural mindset in their brain in order to start thinking and and and speaking in that language. And it's almost like, you know, there is a change, a difference in that person in order to do so. And surely there is in God as well when God interacts with us in whatever way that looks like. So those two things are quite Yeah.
 
And I Yeah. And, obviously, Moltmann's, ideas about the crucifixion and God changing and all that stuff. No. I I I think that's that's a good way of putting it. But, yeah, it's just it's it's just an interesting way of kind of understanding the stuff.
 
Yeah. No. I'll look into that. Yeah. And then use it as saying, you know, Badiou says this and I disagree.
 
Yeah. Just quickly, the other book on love. Have you read, Shreko Horvath's The Radicality of Love? No. It's a fantastic book.
 
I can thoroughly recommend it. It's, yeah. Anyway, sorry, Adam. We've we've got fine. It was it's an interesting divergence.
 
I think we are we are heading towards the end now, but I want to bring us back a little bit to the pipeline, the rabbit hole. You know, we were talking about something earlier where we were talking about how difficult it is to have conversations with people who are, at some point, down the rabbit hole. And I suspect that for people who do escape that eventually, it takes a lot of people, especially those who are close to them, saying, I think you're down the rabbit hole, for it to gradually sink in and for you to start to think, maybe I am down the rabbit hole. Maybe this isn't quite, and it is a battle of narratives, really. If you are someone who has been told this and you start to think maybe there's something to this, maybe I am down the rabbit hole, particularly if you're someone with, a Christian faith as well, how can epistemology how can different different theories of knowledge, but also a sort of Marxist theory of knowledge, how can this stuff help us to move forward to try and learn where we where we really might actually be at to maybe try and get ourselves out of that rabbit hole, particularly without it destroying our faith?
 
Because I think one of the issues is that we're talking about very literalistic thinking, very binary ways of presenting facts or indeed fictions. And when the opposite threatens your worldview, threatens your faith, that can be a really hard place to be. So how do we how can the epistemology help us get out of the rabbit hole without destroying our faith? I think so just to break it to break it up a little bit, to break the question up, I think that the epistemologies of this rabbit hole or the red pilling or whatever the phrase you use, it is a sort of a conflation of fact and fiction. And so you have to deliberately muddy that binary in order to put people on this journey.
 
And so if you're coming out of that, then it is a realization that the narrative that you have been told or the reasons that you have been told for the, why your life is so shit is a lie or it doesn't represent the kinds of realities that you've that you have subsequently experienced. And so building that back up into, something which doesn't just represent nihilism is gonna be really, really tough because if you suddenly realize that your world, all the reasons that you thought for why your life was shit, that the immigrants are coming over on boats or women are just these horrible gold digging people or whatever it is. If that's not, if you suddenly realize that's not true, then you're, you're scrabbling around for a reason as to why these things exist. And so you could just fall onto another, I'm gonna use untruth. I don't mean that, but another sort of constructive reality.
 
If you have a faith, then I think that that there's a real risk of that falling into that kind of breaking up. And I guess you just have to be very careful to delineate when someone is coming off that pipeline or coming out of it, you have to be very careful to them to say, well, there are parts of your reality which were affected by this lie but there are other parts of it which weren't. And I fall back to this this conversation I had with my student because this guy who she was talking to he was incredibly red pilled and he and she was saying that when the moment she mentions Andrew Tate he kind of all got very defensive but he was very much kind of saying that I want to stay here with my mother in this house and he just had a baby, he's just with his wife and so he was kind of you know it wasn't the traditional sort of nuclear family setup But he was very much like, I love my mother. I want her, I don't want her to be lonely. That was what the phrase that they're using.
 
I don't want her to be lonely. And so there's a sense of care in that. There's a real, there was a real sense of sort of care, familial, filial, not necessarily agape, but a real kind of sense of love, which seems to be very contradictory to the kinds of ideas that Andrew Tate and everyone else put forward. And so there was there can be these multiple truths existing in these pipelines. And so, you know, I didn't it was just a con it was conversation I had with them, and I don't know how it kind of ends up.
 
But ultimately, in that situation, and I'm I'm assuming in others as well, you can actually try and distinguish between the kinds of things that are important and constructive, such as the love for your mother and the desire for her not to be lonely and all this other shit, which is just kind of poisoning the well. And so you you have to kind of make sure that you don't, completely obliterate all the their world view in one go. I'm sorry. Everything you've been told is a lie, mate. I'm sorry.
 
Let's start from the beginning again. Whereas you just have to kind of deconstruct it a little bit. And funny, I think on Twitter, there's a load of Twitter, not TikTok. There's a whole load of people who you might follow who, you know, they've kind of they make their thing as like oh I've been deconstructed out of the evangelical kind of prosperity gospel sort of thing and they they go through their journeys and say it took me a long time to actually say well no this bit's good this bit's bad this bit's good this bit's bad. And so they still have a faith that it's very different to what it was.
 
And so they they talk about these it's actually quite a long process to defragment the different bits of the narrative which they've been told. Yeah. Therapy, I guess. I mean, there's there's lots of different ways of thinking. I was just gonna say it sounds like therapy.
 
In, transactional analysis, which is one of my favourite models of personality, but also it's a psychotherapy as well. The idea of scripts. So we form scripts as a child, and we live them out, and it's it's to do with our values, how we perceive ourselves, how we perceive others, and and and the sort of interactions we get, and and we and we do things to sort of reaffirm that script. That's the idea. And I wonder if that idea of script could be quite helpful in starting to understand where people are at in terms of their understandings of the world and what messages are being reinforced, but also, obviously, what their life experiences and and what they're going through and how that kind of interacts.
 
I suppose with your idea, Oli, of where things are taking place, it's those different systems interacting with one another, isn't it? And and and what's underlying those things. It's it's a cause and effect that are happening at the same time as it were. Yeah. Right.
 
And I it just as you were talking there, I mean, it reminded me of the, the 12 plan. Is it 12 plan that alcoholics anonymous put in place? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah similar kind of I mean deconstructing your, dependence on addiction on a substance.
 
So there's lots of sort of yeah, off the shelf tools, I guess, that because it can be applied quite, well to these kinds of things. Because, ultimately, you know, it's cult behaviour in many respects. To finish up, I wanted to talk a little bit about Novara Media and Ash Sarkar who have been, it's died off a little bit now, but they've been doing the rounds, kind of pointing to a way of thinking about politics and Marxism that some might argue is erring on the side of a sort of class reductionist way of thinking about things. And, certainly, pointing a little bit of a finger at, certainly identity politics, if not a sort of more left wing intersectionality. And you recently wrote a blog, the limits of Marx in the age of Trumpian Christofascism, that I think is kind of instructive on that kind of stuff and maybe could offer a kind of counterpoint to that.
 
Yeah. I found Ash Sarkar's stuff kind of difficult to to square, largely because I've always been very happy that she's been around insofar as I've I've always thought she's spoken truth to power very articulately and and very well over the last few years. But this, yeah, this was interesting. And but that that blog in particular, I think, came out of a a kind of frustration that the the traditional Marxist critiques were not just were were just just weren't cutting it when it comes to what was happening in Trump's America. And it just you know the sort of particularly around what the what Bezos and Zuckerberg have been doing you know these are in in many respects quite anti capitalist moves you know and they're sort of feudal and you know they're kind of aristocratic lords back in the day as sort of like Janice Balafakis's new book was it techno feudalism yeah that's a good way to describe what's happening there although you know there are some issues with that but but it so so I think that when it comes to thinking about the onset of this sort of Christofascism which is arising in The United States then we have to make sure that we understand that race, sexuality, disability and ability, everything else, queer, neurodivergence, they all play a part in this class makeup.
 
This it's it's intersectional. I mean, it's it's you know, we can't throw the baby out of the bathtub. This class first approach ignores the fact that class itself as a construct is made up of race and everything else. And these are constructed concepts alongside class. And so it was an attempt to try and resituate a lot of this debate to say, well, look, you know, the because Trump has shifted the meta narrative from kind of turbocharged neoliberal capitalism to crystal fascism, then the critique has to move with it.
 
And that requires understanding that the targets of fascism, particularly Trump's fascism, then it's not a sort of profit motive. It's eschatological. They're trying to usher in the end of the world. That is what these people are doing. That's what fascism does.
 
That's their timeline. Fascists, if to be very reductive about it, like the left want to open up history or the future, sorry, the left want to open it up for everybody. Capitalists want it to stay exactly the same to sort of capitalist realism, but fascists want it to end. They want it to come to a point And very clearly with the rapture and this is why the Zionists are sort of aligned with the Christofascists so neatly because they want all the pawns in place for Christ's return in Israel. This is exactly what this project is all about.
 
For fascists, future is coming towards, some sort of apocalypse is coming towards them and they have to be ready. And so this doesn't, the critiques of that, Marx's sort of class first capitalist only will will only get us so far. And so far and so you need to understand that these fascists don't construct society around this traditional class model. They construct it around a white supremacist, you know, heteronormative class model. And that has identity politics firmly in the critique.
 
And so which is why I was a little bit upset with Ash Saga because it's basically just trying to yeah. It's trying to kind of hold on to a a kind of traditional class Marxist critique when I just don't think that cuts to the heart of the matter anymore and just briefly at the end This is why I think that the this pipeline stuff is one of the kind of critiques that people such as Labour MPs and even Gareth Southgate when he gave a quite a good speech last night or the other night and maybe not Gareth Southgate but he maybe didn't say but there was other people that said oh, well, it's it's the woke mob and and you know woke overreach which has caused these people's you know young men to react and but ultimately the material conditions of the lack of Sure Start and you know the fact that there's just been complete gutting of the public services of the last twenty years has far more of an impact on people's lives and their decisions to run to Andrew Tate than some feminist on Twitter, you know? So I think that to claim that it's some sort of woke outreach or overreach is a little bit reductive and I think that ignores some of the sort of basic understandings of austerity and what is what is it done to our, you know, the generation of children that are being affected by this.
 
So, yeah, that that's what that's my issue was with that particular debate. I think it's one of those things as well about recognizing the difference between, you know, a a sort of leftist intersectionality and a culture war. Right? The right wing started a culture war. They want a culture war, and we need to sidestep that culture war, I think, and not and and sort of say, actually, these things aren't up for debate, but we do actually need to look at these intersections in in a materialist way and and recognize, yeah, that austerity has really had a a an awful effect on these people.
 
It's, I I liked I liked it because it sort of it's not saying that Marxism or or materialism has nothing to say about that. It's saying that we open it up, which I which I appreciate. Yeah. You know, that's kind of been been my point for a while and in the last latest book the seven ethics against capitalism book was which by the way the the the last chapter on love is in which I kind of have my christianarchist sort of manifesto almost but Opening it up is really really important because you have because it's such vital. I mean, the mechanics of those critiques are important, but you just have to kind of it's a moving target to some degree.
 
I mean yeah. So we have to kind of just adapt those critiques to counter the horrific horribleness that Trump is espousing at the moment. Yeah. Oli, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.
 
Do you want to let us know where people can find you and, maybe let people know a little bit about what each of your books are about, any stuff you wanna plug, anything like that? You want me to advertise myself? You want me to be a marketer? Do do the marketing bit. Okay.
 
So on social media is @ollimould, o l I m o u l d. I'm on Blue Sky and TikTok, I guess, are the two main ones. Yeah. I've got a few books out. My blog is Tacity, tacity, Tacity.co.uk.
 
And there's a list of my books there, which is a three books at the moment. I've got one coming out later this year about post capitalist cities. Yeah. Just check out that and send me an email or to send me a comment or a DM or something, and we can have a chat. My brain read it as TA City as in, like, Territorial Army City for some reason.
 
So No. Well, that's I've not got that before. No. It's Tac Tacit. Yeah.
 
Tacit. Yeah. Thank thank goodness. Thank goodness that's what it is and not Yes. Absolutely.
 
The TA. I'm not Dallas from the office. No. Fantastic. Well, thank you for joining us.
 
We really do appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Jonny, where can people find you?
 
Are you still basically I am in, yeah, North Norfolk. The most rewarding party Turn up to North Norfolk and see if you can find Jonny. Jonny's the only person in North Norfolk with blue hair. They're a couple. And we all know each other.
 
Yeah. Basically. You can find me, most places, Blue Sky, TikTok, other places @commiexian. I've also just written an article for Shibboleth magazine that touches on some of the stuff we've been talking about today. So, yeah, have a look at that when the next issue comes out.
 
In fact, subscribe. Subscribe now and and get five issues for whatever the price is because it's it's great to support new left wing Christian media. So Shibboleth magazine is worth a look. You can find the podcast. You probably already know this if you're listening to it.
 
Let's be honest. But you can find the podcast at breadandrosaries.com. You can email us breadandrosaries@gmail.com. We are on the, x, the everything app. We probably will get rid of that and go on blue sky at some point.
 
I just haven't got around to it. But, yeah, go and follow us. Have a look. We've got blogs and stuff too. And thank you so much for joining us, and we will see you next time.
 
Bye bye. Bye.