ACFM - ACFM Trip 41: Trust Your Gut

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

From fecal transplants to the yoghurt-industrial complex, we’ve never been more absorbed in the workings of our gut. But can we trust it? Nadia, Jem and Keir investigate the mysterious connections between mind and body, reason and instinct. How did capitalism separate our minds from our bodies? Is a belief in intuition filling the gap […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Keir Milburn, and I'm joined as usual by my very good friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're discussing the topic of trusting your gut. Nadia, this was your idea.

What in the world were you thinking of? Yeah, this is definitely my topic, and I'm very excited to talk about this today. So, I'm fascinated by the gut, and its role in our health, our thinking, our emotions, and potentially how it affects our decision-making, and also how this is expressed or not expressed in culture and society. So what sparked this is it seems to me, coming from a Mediterranean culture, after 22 years of living in the UK,

there seems like a distinct lack of what I would call gut chat in culture. Why is that and what function does that absence have? So let's be real, right? Having a good bowel movement is one of the most satisfactory and arguably pleasurable daily habits that humans, as well as other evolved mammals, have. And it's also well known as a key indicator of the state of our health now. So why do we not talk about it more? And my question is, does history and capitalism have anything to do with it? But related to that, I'm also interested in all of this research coming out on the connection between our gut microbiota, as in all of the different microbes that live in our gut, and things like our emotions and serotonin and how we feel and whether it effectively mimics some drugs. So that's really interesting, all of this research coming out of over the last 10 years. But the third point, I'm also interested in talking about this, fall, is this idea of gut instinct, which is also related. Do we make decisions with our gut? Is it good or is it bad?

Is that anti-rational? And what should the ACFM position be on any of this? So those are some of the reasons why I'd love to talk about our gut and trusting our gut in this episode today. So, Jeremy, what do you have to say about this? Are you interested in any of this? Yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah. Well, I mean, the question of the body

and the relationship's body to consciousness seems to be pretty essential to what you're talking about, and that is a perennial topic of ours, and it is a perennial topic of interest to everybody, really. So I think, yeah, there's a lot to say about that and about the history of different ways of thinking about it. Yes, this is a rather unsightly topic, Nadia. Rather surprised you've mentioned impolite.

Impolite. I've surprised you've mentioned bowel movements in the first five years. And how? At the top of a show, I have. I have. I mean, obviously, from my point of view, discussing get biomes and these sorts, of things is a great excuse for a little bit of very British toilet humour. I shall be

indulging in that and then you can analyse my hang-ups from there. I am interested. I'm very interested in this connection between the state of your gut and psychological effects that seems to be being uncovered. I don't know what the cause is of that. I don't quite know what to say about that yet. Let's see what happens when the discussion comes up. It's very, very interesting. I just don't know enough about, I don't know enough about what the cause is. How does one influence the other and vice versa? I don't know what the mechanism is, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not sure anyone does. But like it's really, really interesting. And I like the idea that all of these hundreds of thousands of biomes in our stomach are influencing what goes on in our brains and this idea

that we are sort of colonies and I contain multitudes and these sorts of things, help break down this idea of isolated individuals who are not part of the world, etc. I don't quite know what I'm going to say about that, so that's interesting. I've got more things I can imagine I can say about this idea of intuition and get instinct and that sort of stuff. I'd be interesting in how we sort of link these two threads up, I think. And we'll do that very shortly. But before that, let's just do the parish notices.

is. Of course, we have a newsletter. There'll be a filthy and disgusting, quite unpleasant newsletter emerging around this topic, no doubt, graphic pictures, perhaps sniff and smell. Oh, you can't do that, can you via email? Anyway, you can sign up to our newsletter. Comes out once a month with more bonus content, etc. Just go to Navarra Media forward slash ACFM newsletter. You can sign up there. Of course, you might want more music and less chat and who can blame you, especially on this disgusting topic. So you could just go straight to the air of expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify.

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You can do so for as little as a pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. You know the routine. Okay, let's get back to this. I'm going to hand back to you, Nadia. Where do you want to start? I think we should play Fire in My Gut by the punk rock band Frenzy, who are Melbourne-born-born siblings, I think they're based in Greece.

So the song is Fire in My Gut. So I think we should start by picking up on Jeremy's point around what I will call like the politics of body alienation, right? So this is a huge topic which we could probably do an entire series on. But I think it's important to cover some ground to lead into questions of, you know, why is what I call mostly Anglo-American culture the way it is. in the sense that there seems to me, you know, coming from not having lived in the UK, a sense of not wanting to talk about the body or trying to overcome the body. And obviously, you know, some of that is changing with 21st century culture,

but it feels like quite an ingrained thing to view the body as kind of below, you know, the brain. Like it's the whole mind over matter thing, while we actually know that our bodies are really important for keeping our brains healthy. So I'd like to ask Jeremy maybe, like, maybe let's start framing this in some of the history. I don't think we need to answer this fully, but maybe to raise some of the issues around. Like, what function does it have socially in the way that especially Britain is today for us to have that level of alienation? Because I think, you know, it does have a function, you know, one that I'm quite jealous of as someone who's very in their body, I would say. I'd quite like to be able to ignore my body, but I don't know how. I mean, one idea that's been fairly popular in sociology and anthropology at certain times,

this Norbert Elias idea that actually as societies become more developed and more complex, as people become more civilized, they become more alienated from their bodies. That's not the term you'd use in that tradition. They acquire more and more control over their bodies and become less and less sort of slave to physical function. That's the aspiration of the aristocratic philosopher right back in ancient Greece as well. So there's a very long tradition of thinking, well, what it really means to be a properly successful human is to be a mind which is completely in control of a body. You have the mind rather, not being at all impacted by anything physical that's going on.

And that tradition obviously does contribute to a culture in which people don't really like talking about bodies, people don't really like thinking about the inside of bodies. Anthropologists are always interested in the way in which different cultures, have different ideas about disgust, about different ideas about what is and isn't considered sort of polite or acceptable to think about, and that often has to do with different relationships to the idea of the body mind as an experiential system and the relationship between the corporeal and the conscious. But then, of course, there's also, you know, there's also a tradition which would say, well, that's the whole problem. The whole problem with, like, Western culture

is that it, and capitalist modernity in particular is that it alienates people from their bodies, and it makes people feel hung up. It makes people feel, out of touch with nature, out of touch with the physical world, and that produces all kinds of distress. And I think to some extent, like things like the research into got a biome impact on consciousness and emotions, they are part of a wave, which has been going on for several decades now, of medical research, which is itself sort of endorsing the idea that if you're going to experience any kind of well-being, then you have to understand consciousness and the body

is really integrated in some ways. not separable from each other. So that critique, which was associated with sort of radicals and bohemians, a sort of radical tradition of philosophy and sort of bohemian and alternative cultures, for quite a long time now, I think it's much more mainstream now. It's now much more part of contemporary medical science to think, well, actually understanding the relationship between the body kind of internally, externally, and consciousness is really, really important. Yeah, just as you're speaking, yeah, totally. makes sense. And I think just as you were speaking, I was thinking, well, it's good that I did

the gut, I wanted to do the gut rather than periods, right? Because the gut is a thing that, you know, both male and female experience. But it feels very difficult from a subjectivity of a woman to think that you can ignore your body because we go through this, you know, almost monthly or monthly, most of us anyway, cycle where, you know, it's like your body is telling you every month that things are changing. But there was definitely a strand of feminism, which had in line with your initial argument that you're presenting, Jeremy, which is saying, no, ignore these things, you know, to be a full, like you said, civilized human effectively. I mean, not in those, not using those words. It's important to ignore all these things. It doesn't matter.

What's important is the thinking mind. And I think you can go too far the other way. And I think there are arguments out there, you know, which are very culturally relativist, where it's all about the body, you know, and you're completely held captive by the body. But I think these are really interesting to think about to try and understand how this phenomena was created, especially in Britain or, you know, in British culture or, you know, what then becomes Anglo, what I would call Anglo-American culture, etc. Because it seems like a huge gap of conversation in day-to-day life from my perspective. I mean, it's hard to me to comment, really, because I just don't have an alienated relationship with my body. We just keep to ourselves, if you know what I mean. He does his

things, I do my things, and if you have a problem, we have a sit down and sort it out, you know, what's wrong with that? No, I mean, I know where Nadia's going with that, and it is this, and we've talked about it before, way, way back when we first started a podcast, we did one about intoxication and sobriety, and interestingly, we got onto food in that, you know, the sorts of food we put into our bodies, etc. And, you know, and we were talking then about why British food culture was so notoriously bad until fairly recently, you know, until the last sort of 20 to 30 years in which it's, you know, there's been a sort of food revolution in the most minimum and meaningless sense of the word revolution you can have.

The arguments are put that like, you know, basically Britain is the first industrialising country, therefore, you know, the population will move into the big cities off the countryside. We don't have a peasantry in the UK or anything that looks like the peasantry, but still sort of exists in France. And Italy, therefore, we're more separated from the countryside, from food production, from food systems, where our food comes from, et cetera, and therefore our food is worse. And perhaps you could make an argument from that is that, yeah,

well, in that case, we'll also be more alienated or distanced from things such as digestion, you know, if we're more alienated from the things we put inside our body, then the effects of those on us might well be at more of a distance in the UK. I do think that the whole Norbert-Elius thing about that process of how you become distinguished or whatever, you know, certain things. things become disgusting, certain things become off topic to discuss, et cetera. Those sort of topics are for the common people, et cetera, and those of us who are civilised don't talk about those things. I think that probably comes into it as well. Yeah, that's interesting. That sounds like

also like a class thing, because I would say that, you know, in a lot of the southern Mediterranean and definitely like North Africa, like it's not like it's not a class thing. Because it's also, it's interesting that you guys brought up discussed because I think that's different. It's not like you're sitting and, you know, talking about the detail of your stools, but it's more what I'm talking about is the conversation of, like, hi, how are you doing today? And somebody will be like, oh, yeah, no, I've got a bit of diarrhea and something's like, I'm so sorry. Like, can I give you this or help you with this? Or do you want me to make sure that there's more bread on the table or whatever? Or if somebody is constipated, it's a well, you know, it's a well-known thing that this is

like a terrible thing that somebody is experiencing and like, what can we collectively do to alleviate it, literally you can have this conversation with almost anyone, as if it's like, oh, I've got a cold. So it's more that than the level of disgust, because I think you're right, I think, you know, but also on a like biological human level, I think it's, it's like any mammal is not going to hang out where it excretes as well. So like, you know, I think disgust is, is slightly different. But going back to like the culture and the development of history in the UK, the bit that I'm really interested in is, so I've got this quote from a book that I happen to be reading by Jeanette Winterson called 12 Bytes, which is about AI actually. And she's just got this quote in it

where she says, by 1860, Britain was still the only fully industrialized economy in the world. And it was producing half of the world's iron and textiles, right? And she says, let's dwell on that for a second. I think we should. Like, this is an intense reality, right? So what I'm trying to uncover, what I'd like to discuss, is to adapt to those intense working conditions, like Britain basically inventing the sweatshop. Or, I mean, okay, that's a gambit. It's probably not, you know, there's probably lots of sweatshops around the world and

various different slave driving. But the idea of the industrial sweatshop, right, it seems to me that people would have to detach from their bodily functions. And I mean, even women from their periods or even from childhood. to a certain extent, to be able to survive psychologically and endure those kind of conditions. Like, you don't have the capacity or the luxury to think about nutrients and health, etc., right? Because you're in those conditions to produce effectively that industrial power that Britain was at the time. And I still see the legacy of that alienation in culture today.

Like, there's all of this stuff, like you said here, around health and whatever, and there's endless columns. But I think when you actually meet and talk to people, like I can see the legacy of that in culture, that kind of mind over matter stuff. So I think that brings me to the point of like, is the anti-capitalist position, if that's like part of the creation of industrial capital, is the anti-capital position one of in a way like reclaiming your ability to relate to, especially your gut, especially because we're going to come on to talking about some of the biological and emotional stuff. I think there might be a problem with your chronology in that.

I think you're right as in like when the first sort of like big cities came along, when the first factories are getting created. And just as a side note, yeah, so Marx is writing capital in like 1870, the 1860s, in 1860s. He was predicting that capitalism would be a system that would take over the whole world, you know, and yet however many, 50% of the goods were produced in Britain and it was an incredibly small part of the world system at that point. That's quite amazing.

But, yes, you needed huge inputs of energy in there, to fuel that first wave. You know, there were two sources of energy that fueled that wave of capitalism. That was like coal and human muscle power. So how do you get the energy for human muscle power? That's when you get the tastes such as like, you know, sugar and bread being a staple of diets and these sorts of things that these come in. They're linking it to the work process, I think, might not work so well. It's really famous that once you have the sort of Fordist revolution, once you have the introduction of conveyor belts and these sorts of things, whether human is like turned in much more into a machine, that's when you could separate your mind from your body. There's all sorts of testimony of people working on the line at Ford, etc. They could send their mind off whatever they want.

You know, people used to write poetry in their heads, et cetera, or think about other things because it's a separation of binding body. that's not such the case, I think, in early capitalism where there's much more sort of like craftwork or specialized work. You know, work hasn't been broken down into such a machinic thing, I think, so it would involve much more of your mind. And I think if you think about capitalism, then, is not one thing, but as a chronology of different iterations, basically, iterations produced by all sorts of stuff, by like inherent contradictions of capital itself, by class struggle and all these sorts of things. You know, you get out the other end where basically it's problematic. to oppose capitalism to artisanal production of cheese, for instance, or something like that. That's just a latest iteration and a sort of like, you know, the whole move towards artisanal

production and these sorts of things. That's how people are trying to make sense and give sense to their lives when they're driven by something which is basically inhuman and contains no sense or meaning of its own, which is like capital. Perhaps that's one way to look at that, I think. I really do agree with you about, like, you know, a lot of the tastes that we've inherited in the British diet were introduced at that point because those were the sources of energy that could be inputted in order to address that problem of like huge concentrated populations, et cetera.

Just because the work process isn't automated, doesn't mean it isn't like horrible. Oh no, I imagine it's fucking horrible. I mean, I think that's Nardi's point is that, you know, if you're going to do an 18-hour day, like even if you're not on an automated assembly line, you know, in some sense you have to sort of numb yourself to it to some extent. Like what are you going to do?

do about the fact that, you know, your digestion is all over the place or whatever, or you're coming up in hives or, you know, you're completely undernourished? Like, what are you going to do about it? So it becomes a coping mechanism, is my theory. Yeah, okay, I can see what you're saying, yeah. You have to deal with these conditions and as well, you know, as the point that Jeremy made when we were preparing for the show, like, what was available to eat anyway was not such a varied and nutritious diet. And that's also part of it. So it's not only, you know, capitalism. It's also like what was available for people to eat, which can only become worse when people are like pushed into cities. So this idea of food as fuel in a very technical sense, rather than like,

you know, things that give you energy and that kind of modern, not modern, but I think modern to 21st century kind of to places like the UK, but not as nourishment, but as like, I need to eat this meal as quickly as I can is, you know, not historically how the vast majority of people around the world were thinking about food because they were not pressurized into those conditions. It'd be interesting for me to do a comparison of what it was like if the data is out there for people who were forced to, you know, be slaves and whatever, like build huge structures. I don't think that people were not using food as to basically just fuel in pre-industrial agricultural societies. I mean, all the evidence is people in agricultural societies didn't

have very varied diets. The vast majority of people just had to survive on like really basic grains and legumes for protein. If you want to go back to when people actually seem to have had varied diets and been sort of significantly taller and healthier than the industrial revolution, it's not the immediately pre-industrial, like agricultural societies. It's like tens of thousands of years earlier. It's hunter-gatherers. You know, right from the start, all the evidence is Agriculture involves really, really hard work and a lot of the time and really, really limited diets, especially if you're away from the tropics. If you're away from the tropics, the further you get away from the tropics, the smaller range of stuff that grows anyway that you can eat. I mean, that's partly why this really old mythology around things like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is having to explain to people why they're living these really hard lives. So I think it's difficult to know because we've had we talked about this on the show before and it's you know there's this idea that pre-industrial agricultural people in europe worked a lot less overall because the agricultural cycle just meant there were times

of year and you didn't work that much and there were all these days off but it's still quite a controversial subject like most social historians i think don't think the life of a medieval peasant was that great it was probably better than you know than the first one or two generations in the industrial cities and those first one or two generations in the industrial cities like had a completely catastrophic sort of time of it. But over longer time scales, it's a bit more difficult, I think, to say that people in these pre-industrial agricultural societies are having a really good time. One thing that I might be interested to think about is my sense that things such as food allergies and irritable bowel syndrome and these sorts of things have

become much more prominent than they used to be. My perception could be caused by several things. one, I'm older, and so a lot of my friends are older and are suffering from these sorts of things. Or two, that it could just be that people used to suffer in silence before and now these sorts of conditions are more widely recognised. Or three, it could be that there's something about contemporary life and contemporary food, etc. That makes these sorts of like food allergies and bowel problems much more prominent. Unfortunately, I didn't do the research to work out which of the three options. I mean that is, I think allergies is an interesting one

and I could do a whole other episode on that because I think it's also like highly controversial. You raised three really important perspectives but I think there's other ones which is also about the kind of the subjectivity of where you gain agency, I think, where there's a percentage of people that view themselves in different ways because of how the 21st century constructs like the things that a person should pay attention to,

I feel like is like a massive subject. But, you know, irritable bowel syndrome for sure is like a big thing. There's become a bleed in understanding in popular culture between what's an allergy and what's, you know, like a more developed syndrome. So, for example, like being a celiac is quite a very, you know, like a very serious thing. Like you cannot tolerate gluten, which is quite different to how people use terms around gluten intolerance or whatever. But related to that is the fact of like highly refined sugar and highly refined wheat. And that's also a massively industrialized process, which is one of the things that is, especially the British diet and an American diet, is this highly, highly, highly processed food. And what that does to your gut microbiome, you know, like that's a thing that we're suffering more and more from.

I do think things like irritable bowel syndrome, except they do seem to be more common, though. I think it's been bubbling up for a while, but there's been a real explosion of it recently. Sorry. I've been a workshop in that a joke as you were talking

it didn't quite work. We should play the track Stomach from 2007 that track. Future Sound of London are sort of interesting. They're Gary Cobain

and Brian Duggins So Brian Duggins, he created one of the first acid house hits in the UK in 1988 called Stack of Humanoid. Humanoid. We should play that, actually. Great. But it doesn't fit the theme. So we'll play stomach acid, which is from 2007.

They start They're going to They start They're looking at They start recording as Fuchsander London in like 1992, so the other track would be great to play would be Papua New Guinea, which is their mini hit, and they've been like recording ever since. Shall we move on to this idea of gut biomes?

I don't know too much about it. I find it very, very interesting. I'll do a little bit of top line stuff, you know, and then we'll put in the show notes for the listeners, like some of the key texts around this. And like I said, this is all quite new, but if you live in the UK, and you pay any attention to like popular health stuff,

Like there's a massive explosion of articles and people talking about this. And so this is the stuff around the idea that your gut is your second brain, which has various different implications. And we'll come to the gut instinct question, which I think we're all very interested in in a little bit. But to stay on the biology just for this bit, the research basically shows that our gut biome is, you know, like it's basically there's an ecology of about a hundred trillion micro-oriented. organisms that live in your intestines. So if you put all of these organisms together, it collectively weighs about 200 grams, which is about the same as, you know, a guinea pig. And this is just the microorganisms. So these guys live in our gut and are destroyed by things like antibiotics, which is, you know, that's one thing that's positive about the UK's general culture around

medicine is this idea that you shouldn't be popping antibiotics all the time, whereas, you know, there are other countries where people are taking this, and it wipes out your gut microbiota. So there's more and more research. Apparently, I don't know exact details for this, but there definitely wasn't that much money in this before, and there now is. And so there's more and more research coming out that this is not only has a massive effect on your physical health, like the health of these microorganisms, and your longevity, but also really serious things like keeping cancer at bay and Parkinson's, etc.,

But it has a significant interplay with, and this is the special area of ACFM interest, mental health, anxiety and depression, a huge effect. There's all these arguments being made that being grumpy, being happy, feelings of insecurity, like well-being, worrying, do not originate in isolation in the mind. And so this is starting to create philosophical questions around like whether, you know, you know, all of those tropes around like the viruses are just using us as a host, etc. So there's all of this chat around whether philosophically the gut the gut microbiome is actually like using us as a host because it has such a massive effect on the way that we feel. And this, for example, discovery that, you know, we like talking about the various different hormones in our body. bodies and how they affect the way we feel. We've talked about, you know, dopamine and serotonin before when we've talked about addiction. And it's been discovered that 95% of the serotonin in your body is in your gut. So this has a huge implication to like how we feel and how we sense

ourselves. So what we related to what we were just talking about, about food and processed food and, you know, having irritable bowel and all of the rest of this is that perhaps, you know, we're talking about, you know, there being an epidemic of, you know, depression, etc. Well, we know that an anxiety, we know that this is partly, I think we would all agree on this show. Like, this is partly to do with like the conditions of capitalism, you know, that we're living in. And like, what if it's also due to the fact of like what we're ingesting or not ingesting and how it's affecting our gut, which is caused by the processes of capitalism? So that's something that I find really interesting. That is very very,

literally, partly the way to do with what we feel is also to do with what we're putting in our gut in a very kind of direct sense. So I guess my question is, like, is it time to pivot away from this mentality that we're seeing our bodies as things that we just need to get to fall in line? Oh, no, I'm ill again. Therefore, you know, I just can't wait till I'm better. But rather seeing our body as a kind of ecosystem where actually the anti-capitalist position is if we want to be, you know, well, and I think we've talked about this before a lot, you know, and Jeremy's talked about the importance of like fighting the fight, but also like coping mechanisms, that part of our coping is, you know, taking care of our guts. Do you know what it sounds like to me? It sounds like Nadia is in the pocket of big yoghurt. We've all been tempted by the Yakult dollar Nadia, but there's no need to give in. No, I think it's right. I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it is really interesting. I think it is interesting the way the whole concept actually of friendly bacteria has kind of become normalized.

When they started marketing Yackel in the UK, I think in the 80s or a bit later, like it was really an alien concept of people. People thought of bacteria as something that caused disease. A bacteria is a bad thing. Like anti-bacterial was good. Yeah, absolutely. And the fact that bacteria are actually, microorganisms and that there are good ones and that the body, like part of what it means to maintain the health of the body is to maintain this whole ecosystem with which we have a completely symbiotic relationship. I think it is quite important in moving away from, it's completely individualistic and dualistic way of talking about the self and talking about the body. I think when we're talking about these issues, we're talking about the intersection

of two ideological histories. And one is the history of dualism, and one is the history of individualism. And they're related to each other, but they're also conceptually distinguishable. And so on the one hand, there's the idea of the individual, which, you know, you all know,

I'm just against it. The individual is a bad concept. The word literally means that which cannot be divided, you know, the idea that there's some complete integrity to the self. And it's just a wrong way of thinking about subjectivity and being in the world. This is further proven by the fact that we are in fact, you know, colonies of symbiotic, you know, bacterial and organisms. Yes, let's go with that.

And it's also about dualism. And dualism is the idea, you know, is the idea that the body and the mind are separate things, the body in consciousness or body and soul and spirit are completely separate. And, you know, this is an idea which is often laid at the door of the, you know, early modern French philosopher of Rene Descartes, we hear people talking about Cartesian dualism a lot, but it's a much older idea. It's an idea that goes about thousands of years and which has been controversial and has been argued against by non-dualistic philosophers in both the Asian and European traditions, like for thousands of years. I mean, I think arguably those two traditions do sort of come together to produce this very specific idea of the self, which is both sort of individualistic,

and super rationalistic. It's individualist and its dualist and its rationalist. Sort of in that early modern period when Descartes is writing, which is partly why he becomes so associated with it in the philosophical tradition. And it does have to do with the origins of industrialisation and the origins of capitalism in a way that I think arguably predates the Industrial Revolution, for example. So, you know, the classic argument made by Weber, the great German social theorist, one of the fathers of modern sociology, is that, well, actually, you only really get capitalism at all because you have a bunch of people who are completely hung up on this way of thinking about themselves and the world, which, amongst

other things, is very antibody, against any kind of physical pleasure at all, and is also very individualistic. I'm sure we've probably talked about this on the show before, but it's always worth rehearsing because it's such an interesting argument. I mean, Weber starts from the premise, which is a really good premise to start from, if you are a radical, or if you are an anti-capitalist. And the premise is, well, look, why would anyone ever actually engage in a process of capital accumulation? Like, it's easy to see why people who have an opportunity to make profits, would make profits. but why is the thing you would do with those profits just like constantly reinvest them in your business to keep making it bigger and bigger

with no more be a subjective beyond constantly making it bigger like why wouldn't you just do like the merchant princes of Renaissance Italy and build massive palaces and live like a god like why wouldn't you do that with your money and the argument made by people like Weber is if you do that you never really get capitalism as we know it you never get the levels of surplus available for investment

which you need to get industrial take-off because people who are making profits are spending too much of it, having a good time. But Weber asked the question, well, why would you? It's not like the people who were doing that, the first proto-capitalists

knew that in the long, if they saved up all their money and didn't spend it and have a good time building panaces and stuff, then five generations down the line their descendants would be able to build like a textile factory. They just behave that way anyway.

So he says, why did anyone ever behave that way? And his suggestion is that you only behave that way because you've got this weird psychological type of the 16th, 17th century, Northern European Calvinist, most radical Protestant, follower of John Calvin, the French Swiss theologian, who believed in predestination. You believe that God has always decided at the start of time, like which human beings are going to be saved and which aren't. And there's nothing you can actually do to alter your spiritual destiny. And so if you actually believe that, you're going to be kind of crazy. You're going to go through life, like feeling like you have no real agency. There's nothing you can do.

And you're probably, statistically, you're probably going to hell. So you have to convince yourself somehow that you are, in fact, one of the godly elect who's going to go to heaven. And how do you convince yourself of that where you live this incredibly rigorous life where you basically live like a monk, but out in the world? Because as a Protestant, you don't believe in having monks anyway. And the only way you can really do that is by pursuing a sort of singular vocation in life and never really having any fun. And because you are socially a member of this emerging European urban middle class, then the only real vocation you can pursue in life is that of a sort of business person. And so what you do is you just obsessively pursue your vocation as a business person, accumulating loads and loads of money and not spending it really. because if you spent it on luxuries, you would be decadent,

and that might suggest to yourself that you were not one of the godly elect who's going to heaven. So that is why Puritanism, the radical Protestant belief in both predestination and the idea that everybody's individual relationship with God is completely private to themselves and can't be mediated or helped by the church or the community or the priest or anything else. for Weber is completely at the foundation of what he calls the spirit of the capitalism. And so from that point of view,

you only ever get capitalism at all if you have this bunch of people, you've got this kind of psychological type which is informed by a certain kind of philosophy, which promotes all these attitudes, which necessarily has a completely hostile attitude to the body. And you can trace back, I mean, why do

they have this hostile attitude to the body? You can trace it back through Christian theology to the writing of St. Augustine, and he gets it from a particular interpretation of biblical Christianity and some residues of classical philosophy. And all this, according to Weber, eventually culminates, like in the 17th century, in this psychological type that is both incredibly individualistic, believes in private property and a personal relationship with God and no real community, and is also completely hate to the body and is fearful of any kind of physical pleasure. And without all that, you don't get, you don't even get

capitalism because otherwise people are just going to spend the money and have a good time and say from that point of view yeah there's this complete alienation this completely sort of alienated separated self is that the foundation point of of capitalist modernity as it's quite a compelling argument i think i am quite suspicious of it myself but i mean it's it's a little bit too close to the origin myth of capital that capitalists tell themselves that there were thrifty people and there were non-fifty people and the thrifty people were the ones who became the capitalists and they deserve their wealth, etc. In a way, like that's much more of an idealist conception,

i. The ideas came along first, and they had all these unexpected outcomes. Whereas, you know, you might say, well, look, you know, if you want to know where this huge source of extra money came, which became capital, you could look at the new world. You know, all of this gold, etc., all of this money, which is not tied to land,

which, you know, this deterioratorialized wealth, as DeLers & Guattari put it, emerge into the UK. You might even make an argument. It's like sheep and gold basically create the de-territorialisation of the population. Free labour, not tied to the land and this wealth, this wealth not

tied to land, which like hit together and create the foundations for capitalism. That explains why there's a massive pool of capital. It doesn't explain, it doesn't explain why people aren't just, you know, using that to make, to build themselves gold analysis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah, that is true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

the conventional Marxian response to Weberist is calling him an idealist and the debate goes back to Torni, the British historian, Marxist, socialist historian writing his book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. I mean, it is problematic as it attributes kind of

historical change to a psychological disposition in a way which we don't like to do as materialists. I mean, the truth is you don't have to have a position on that, you don't have to decide, well, is Weber right? You know, what comes first? You don't have to decide whether the chicken the chicken or the egg comes first in this case. What's absolutely clear from the historical record,

this is a very, very tight matchup between the Puritanism as a thing and early capitalism as a thing and a particular kind of capitalist subjectivity, which remained recognisable up until the Victorian period, basically, as being typical. And I think, I mean, I think a properly materialist perspective is you don't really have to differentiate between, like, economic causes and psychological causes.

But Weber, but it is a really interesting question. it's a really, I just think it's a really useful intellectual exercise to reflect on the fact that to engage in capital accumulation at all is kind of weird. I think it's remained a really useful, like heuristic, even for Marxist analysis, to think that, well,

in any historical period, capitalists need a kind of story to tell themselves about themselves to explain, well, why don't you just pack it in? I mean, right, it's a really interesting question even today. Like, why is Zuckerberg bothering? You know, why does he bother? Why doesn't he just take a billion dollars for himself?

I'm sure I've said this before on the show. And I've often, I've said, like, somebody like Bernie Sanders just as a political propositions, you put it publicly to someone like Zuckerberg. Look, why don't you just give Facebook to the users, turn it into a giant international platform co-op? Keep a billion dollars for yourself. Build a golden palace in Sorceloito. You go, have a good time, you know.

We'll create a special honour for you. We call you Sir Mark Zuckerberg. Like, why do you keep doing it? Because the good life is destroyed by that thinking, which goes back to the argument that you were making about the Calvinism and whatever, is that the concept of what the good life is completely dissipates. It's gone because all you're thinking about is quarter by quarter accumulation. It's like you're inside the system. It's very difficult for people who live that life to see outside it, even understand what pleasure and joy is anymore. Like that question of like why, that's a question that's posed in the 1974 Roman Polanski film, Chinatown, where Jake Gittis asks the capitalist in that. I can't remember what his name is now. He says like how much better can your steak tastes the mine? How much more comfortable is your bed than my bed? Like why are you doing this? Why do you do this? You know, you've just destroyed thousands and thousands of lives, etc. And the capitalist comes back and says it's a future. Control of the future. Control of the future. future. I think it's undecidable, Jem, obviously, right? What role ideas play? But it's sort of an important question because if you want to move out of capitalism, if capitalism is brought about just by particular psychological disposition, that's very different to

if it's an outgrowth of the hoarding of wealth in order to... And no one said it's only created by the psychological disposition. No, no, no, but I'm just trying to think this thing through. It's like, one of the reasons we move to agriculture, one is to survive droughts, etc. But also because it produces surpluses which is storable and therefore produces wealth, which can produce hierarchy in these sorts of things. It's more useful to think about capitalism as this abstract dynamic, which could be triggered when the conditions are right. And so you must constantly go back and try to remove those. As I make that argument, I do realize that a psychological disposition

could be one of those aspects of that. I mean, the argument against Weber properly, as I would understand it, is simply that, look, the completely mad position of like Calvinism, which is a completely mad thing for anybody to believe in the first place. The kind of mad stuff that these proto-capitalists are believing is itself partly a function of the fact that these people are already caught up in this process of capital accumulation, which they can't imagine liberating themselves from. And that's partly what, for example, produces belief in predestination. The sense of the validity of predestination is partly an expression of the fact that they're somehow, on some level, they're conscious that they are themselves tools of this

process of capital accumulation, from which they can't simply, they can't actually emancipate themselves. I think that's clearly how people like Zuckerberg imagine themselves. I don't think they really do think they can choose to just step off. I don't think they think they can. I think they can. Maybe anyone like Zuckerberg who tried to do that would just be shot, you know, by hateance of the capitalist deep state or whatever. For having done it. designed that game. I think, you know, what you can do with that Baybarian stuff is simply to observe that there's something irrational about engaging, even just from the pro, there's something irrational about engaging in capital accumulation, like endlessly. There's something

irrational about doing it. But what all this has to do with the gut? I mean, it's really, I think it is. Well, you just brought up rationality, which is really interesting. And that's part of what we want to talk about, as in like, are we pro-rational? Because if we're saying that that's an anti-rational position to be like this kind of extreme form of Protestantism where you engage in all of this no joy capitalist accumulation. What would they say about instinct? Where does that fit in? And what do we think about it? And I think that's what we should discuss next. Their nation of instinct was mostly taken from St. Augustine. It was, you know, it's basically just bad. It's, in all of what we think of as our instincts

is an effect of the fall from grace at the beginning of human history. The whole point of becoming saved is to somehow transcend it. And I get a sense it's also very male-female here, is that part of that, is that transcending the body is like getting away from that kind of base, you know, humours, female, bodily stuff.

Well, part of Protestantism, part of Protestantism is completely breaking with the kind of the Marian cult in European Christianity. Because by the late Middle Ages, the veneration of Mary has become such a big part of Catholicism, that it's more or less polytheistic. You know, it's more or less got a goddess worship element, I would say, objectively. So, yeah, that it totally is part of it.

They totally want to break with it. I've been really interested in that kind of legacy of puritanism, like all my academic career. My first book was about rave. and it was really easy to say oh yeah we'll rave like we're rejecting the legacy of puritanism but the thing you really had to

we really sort of had to confront and we started thinking about that was well like puritanism was like may have been central to capitalism and capitalist ideology right up until like the Victorian period but it doesn't seem to play that much of a role of it in the 20th century

and then later sort of post-Bavarian sociologists like Baltanski and Chiapelo who wrote the book The New Spirit of Capitalism in the 90s I mean, they would say, no, of course, that kind of Puritanism isn't really useful to capitalism. Once you get into the period of capitalism when you need everybody to be buying stuff, that ideology is only really useful when you're in phases of development, when you need some people, maybe everyone, maybe only the poor, the respectable poor, to be happy with not really being able to buy loads of stuff. But once you get into a full-blown consumer capitalism and you need people to buy loads of stuff, that Puritan ideology is not used. anymore at all. You need people to buy stuff and you need people to express themselves

to be buying stuff. And so from that point of view, just being kind of anti-Puritan isn't necessarily to be anti-capitalist in the 20th and 21st centuries. And that sort of comes back to your question, Nadia, about whether the anti-capitalist position is to be like in favour of gut health, because my pessimistic response to that would be to say, well, capitalism in its many mutable and de-territorializing forms is quite capable of a very. accommodating gut health. In fact, that is one of the things that characterizes our conjuncture, actually, is the fact that capitalism has completely lost any need for that kind of dualistic philosophy.

Capitalism is now very, very happy to be selling us, you know, patented psilocybin and all kinds of gut medicine and all kinds of therapies, which completely acknowledge that the dualistic model of selfhood is over. Like, it doesn't work, that you're only going to feel good. if you managed to integrate your physical and mental aspects of your experience. And capitalism is right there waiting in its Californian global capital to sell us all kinds of ways of making sure our gut is healthy and making sure our brains are integrated with our bodies.

Thank you for bringing back the yogurt industrial complex argument that, you know, Keir has been highlighting here. So let's have a chat by, there is a producer, a French producer, name Fabrice Frank Henri, who actually records under the name Guts, a contemporary producer. And the album I've got by him, which is from about four years ago, is called Philanthropic. And the first track on that is a really nice track, and that is called Voyaging Bird. Lovely little track by Guts. We should play a la la la la la la la la la We should play the title track from John Cale's album Guts.

John Cale was sometime of the Velvet Underground, the great Welsh viola player. and usually quite avant-garde musician. This is the title track from his album, Guts, and it's probably as glam rock as John Kale is ever going to have gotten. So, you should hear a bit of that.

Guts, gutt, gut the gut and stitches don't help at all. Yeah, guts, gutt, gutt, gutt, haws in the body, Should we never be holes in the holes at all in the head. Should we move on to talk about gut instinct? It's really interesting that in culture we've got all of these phrases.

gut instinct. She's got guts. I feel sick to the stomach. My stomach is tied up in knots. I've got butterflies in my stomach. And that exists for a reason. Because I think people have always felt emotion in their guts. But we don't really acknowledge this, which is, you know, the argument I was trying to make about the importance of when that research around the gut microbiota has come out. Like now we understand more why we feel these sensations in the gut. But I think we want to go one further. that and talk about the situations where, especially when it comes to instinct rather than just emotion, we've all been in situations where things just didn't feel right and we made a spur of the moment decision. That's your gut instinct. You knew that something wasn't right. I mean, women sense this all of the time when you're in a specific space with, you know, a guy or it's late at night or you're walking back home, you're constantly making these spur of the moment decisions that you don't have the full data for, but you're trying to protect your safety, et cetera,

or around other things where something just doesn't feel right or something doesn't look right and you're in a position where you have to make a statement and you don't have all the evidence. So what room is there for that in politics? Like, is that a bad thing to be going, this feels wrong?

Because we don't have the full information. It's not rational. Will that always lead to bad decisions? I think that's the question that I find really interesting. Is gut instinct ever acceptable? Well, we know that it is in some situations like women's safety, things just don't feel right. But should it be really a plain for politics?

That's something that I'd like to chat about. What do you think, guys? There's different tools for thinking about that. In some ways, what you're talking about, Nadia is it crosses over with certain theories of affect. So affect is apart from as distinct from emotion. We've talked about Affect before from like a Spinoza point of view, haven't we, about, you know, his conception of joy being the ability to affect or be affected by the world, etc. Yeah.

If you want to listen to like an hour long introduction to Affect theory, I did an episode of the Culture Panel Politics podcast just a couple of weeks ago. We don't advertise rival podcasts on there. Oh, yeah. Rival podcasts. Yeah, it's our fucking nemesis. Sibling podcast. Yeah, I held it. Just that one I was on.

So one of them, like, more derived from Bergson and then Spinoza's, is this idea of, like, you can sense an atmosphere, a sort of collective atmosphere, which is produced between people. You can sense it before you turn conscious attention to it and then make sense out of it. That seems to overlap with that definition of intuition, I think. I think the best example for that is when you can feel a fight's about to come on. That's, I think, the biggest one.

I don't know if you feel the same way. Definitely, as a woman, I'm like, oh, shit, shit is going to kick off in this pub. I better leg it or actually with the police and kettling where I'm like I can't see I'm not tall enough I don't have enough information but just judging by other people's facial expressions I think I'm going to try and get out of here is that that's very very close to like intuition I came across this definition of

intuition as the learned positive use of unconscious information for better decision or actions so it's like you're sort of taking this in pre-consciously I think is probably better perhaps unconscious as well. But before your conscious cognition, basically, of a state, you can sense something wrong, and then you'd have to then go through the process of working out why you think that, or you could just react on that information and act. That sort of like leads to Daniel Kahneman's, he's got this theory of like system one and system two thinking, or perhaps fast and slow thinking, I think, was his book, the book he sold lots of, which you could say is sort of like fast thinking

is intuition, slow thinking is deliberation. I'm not quite sure what I think about it. I sort of recognise it a lot, but basically his idea of system one thinking is that like, it's a thing you fall into immediately because it takes he's got sort of like an almost like

an energy use conception of rationality, if you want to put it that way. There are two forms of making decisions. He actually says there are two sort of agents in your brain. The first one is system one, fast thinking, which is much more intuitive. And we make And it's to do with all sorts of stuff like, you know, learned skills such as reading or when you learn to drive, etc.

At first, you have to concentrate. After a while, you don't think about it at all. It's all automatic. And your mind can go off and think about all sorts of other things until you hit the tree. And that sort of understanding of social situations definitely falls into that sort of learned associations. But it's also like learned associations between ideas as well. So it's not just a body thing. It's also a mind thing.

And then like his system to or slow thinking requires like, effortful mental activity. So that takes more energy, etc. And it's much, much slower. So his thing is we're always trying to default back to system one, to use system one thinking. And system one thinking is much more pattern recognition. You see a pattern or we can sense something. I've always found it sort of interesting because I think it can relate to sort of theories of ideology or theories of hegemony in which the hegemonic position is, I think, You and Alex talk about this in the Hedgemoney book, actually. But yeah, so it's like, let me just ventriloquized Jeremy for a moment.

It's like water rolling down a hill. It finds the path of least resistance, basically. And so it's a little bit like that, is that unless we consciously apply effort and an analysis to a situation, we will tend to fall into this thing. So perhaps one element of that hegemonic apparatus might be that, you know, the sorts of ideas that we automatically associate with things. or we might automatically fall back to are the ones that, you know, have been prepared by the hegemonic class, something like that.

I'm quite attracted to that idea that there's a, you know, that we tend to fall into this first one and we only fall into the second one when we think as though things are not normal and not usual because it takes so much more energy and we just cannot go through life only on the second slow thinking because we'd be walking around not being able to do anything. You couldn't drive a fucking car like that. You would be the same as when you were only passed for a week or something like that. Swimming would be very difficult, all these sorts of things. You can see, you can move through those sorts of series of thoughts to things such as like the history of like alienation techniques in like left theory and activities. So like people

like theatre of Bertolt, Brecht, etc. who has these alienation techniques to try to make the familiar seem unfamiliar and therefore need some thought about what's going on. It's actually interesting what you're saying there because there's an actual parallel to the arguments that are being made around like this discovery of the gut microbiome because in a way it's saying well the human you just would not be able to function if every time your gut sent a signal to your brain or your brain sent a signal to your gut via the vagus nerve or whichever part of your brain about emotions or feelings or problems like you just wouldn't be able to do anything you wouldn't be able to either physically move or do any intellectual thinking. So there's already a parallel there by saying, like, part of what it is

to be human is there has to be some kind of, I don't know if it's pre-conscious or if it's unconscious, like way of like going about things. But I guess what I'm interested in there is that when it comes to like politics, what are we saying about decision making there? Because sometimes, you know, I observe it in the left where I'm like, why? It's sometimes things, it seems like things are really obvious to me, and it's like seriously being overthought and over-intellectualized in some situations. And I'm interested in that, you know, because I'm very pro-science and very pro-rationality. How does it affect how we, what we decide to campaign on, and how does it affect our analyses? Do we use our gut instincts, but then don't talk about it in those

terms, because in a way it would be shameful. And I'm not sure if it's shameful or not. Like, should we even be employing, like, what are we saying about that sort of thinking? or reaction rather, when we have those reactions, when we're in a room and, you know, something's being said, and you think, oh, this is just not fucking right, is it? Right. Like, what's going on there? Is that our rational brain? Because we're using all of the political information that we've got. And how does that also relate to tipping points, for example? So it's slightly different when you, I know we hate the concept of individuals, but I'm going to use it as just an example. When you, as one person in a crowd is like something's about to kick off and you leg it is slightly different

to what's produced in a collectivity in a room if one person puts their hand up and is like something is not right here because when you say something is not right here you then get you know the lemming whatever they call it lemming theory effect where like you get a cascade of various different people in the room are going to agree with you because you've put your hand up and stuck your head above the parapet and other people might not. And then you get, you know, there's famous scenes out of politics where it takes one person to be like, fuck off. And then the whole room says fuck off, right? Just before we move on, it just, it made me think of something I wanted to say earlier, but when you were doing that reversal where you were going, well, perhaps

it's the 100 trillion biomes which are actually animating us. I really love that concept, because it reminds me of like, it's one biome, just to clarify, it's one biome, but they're the hundred trillion organisms. It's a hundred trillion microorganisms. It's a hundred trillion microorganism. is there? Ah, yeah, okay. Of course, yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, of course. It's right. But that sort of reversal of, like, the agency, it's wrong. It's definitely wrong, right? And, like, it's a symbiotic relationship. There's definitely, but I really like that idea because it reminds me of like, you know, like that fungus cordyceps, which animates ants, basically, it colonizes ants and then makes them, like, behave in a way that it's best for them. And then, of course, that's where this, if you've ever seen the TV show, played the game of The Last of Us, you know, that's its cordyceps, which causes, like, the zombie outbreak in humans, etc., definitely should play and our watch. So just in fiction and quite possibly role-playing games, I fucking love that idea, that reverse love agency. It's probably wrong. It's like symbiosis, isn't it? And that's probably where you should

think about both, like, body and mind and system one and system two. We're not trying to, like, find the good one out of a dualism. We're trying to break down the, dualism is the sort of answer, I think. But like, you have to think about how they relate to each other. I think that actually goes against what I was just arguing five minutes ago, but that's the beauty of this show done with little preparation. We're throwing out ideas, which are interesting. I mean, going back to the gut microbiome, because you brought it up again, Keir, is like, what this is couched in is like the argument of, you know, when science developed, you know, 19th century, early 20th century, especially around that medical science around the body,

Like thinking about the body as like a machine with various distinct parts which are put together is very useful when you're trying to treat acute issues, right? Because you think, right, this bit isn't working. What we need to do is insert this drug or, you know, solve this problem in the same way that you would think about a machine, like a car or whatever. This bit needs to be oiled and that's why the whole thing has like fallen apart and is not working. that works with acute illness. But when you're talking about long-term health, where the effect of anxiety on the body or the effect of like, you know, like a really bad diet on the mind, or you're talking about, you know, cancer, or you're talking about heart health, or you're talking about all of these kind of like chronic or obesity, like chronic illnesses, it's much more useful to think about the body and different bits of the body as an ecosystem. because then you're in a completely different frame of mind. That's the frame in which this sits in, in terms of how do we think about medicine and how do we think about health?

So it's almost like one step on from breaking up the dualism because the dualism thinking is what takes us to, this is how you build a machine, and this is how you effectively cure a machine. But if you're thinking about it in terms of ecology, and you're not using really ecology as a metaphor, you're in a very real sense saying, you know, you're thinking within the frame of like you were saying here, symbiosis, like what is helping what, what, what is allowing what, then, you know, of course you've got all these, like with the ants and the fungus, etc., you've got very specific examples that stand out that you can use to explain how these things work. But it just makes you sit in a different frame around general, like health and well-being. And I would say a kind of non-capitalist, way, which is that it's much more difficult to commodify around ecology.

I mean, I'd go along with you, but I think if the human body is an ecosystem, that also sits within a whole nest of ecosystems. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. That's probably important in that one of the things, the sort of new attention to health, the way that new attention to health has played out over the last sort of 20 to 30 years has gone along with like an individualized, like it's your responsibility to attend to your own health. that's fucking not true well it probably is true

but like it's not you know I'm not a freely acting agent here some people live in a food desert other people don't you know what I mean some people work long hours don't have time to prepare meals from fresh etc or it's much more difficult for them these choices are constrained in various ways

and so like the politics of it would be to think about food systems how food gets produced etc that sort of stuff and then you know all the way through to how people eat. I think a part of that argument, which I see in left culture, is a cop-out. So it's all true, but I think saying,

oh, unless we have a really progressive ministry of food and we're only working 15 hours a day, then we're not able to take care of ourselves because it's capitalism's problem, doesn't help in being able to take control of yourself in a way where you can live a happy, joyful life, I think. I think it's both. It goes back to the argument

that Jeremy made, like, I don't know how many episodes ago, which I brought up at the beginning of the show, which is this same thing of you can have the analysis and understand, consistently fight and make the argument for those institutions and those processes. And I don't know how else to put it without parking to the self-responsibilization argument, because I agree that that is kind of wrong as a trajectory. But I think you do have to go, what are the things that I can do to make sure that myself, and yeah, people around me, but also. myself are able to cope and find the joy, you know, within the cracks. Like I think that's really important. I think part of that is not going, yeah, it doesn't matter because I'm living

under late capitalism. So I'm just going to destroy my mind and body. Like, come on. Like, I can't be pro that. I know there's a lot of people on the left that behave that way, but I just can't. I can't condone that. Yeah, but I also think at some point in that questioning about what you can do to look after yourself, you're either going to take on board fully the fact that you can't answer that question without thinking in terms of the social nature of your being in the world and your infinite relationality to the rest of the world, or you're not going to take account of that. You have to take account of that. And at the point where you're not taking account of that, you are just falling for sort of, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow, hyper-individualism.

And that's a key distinction, I think, is really, really important. We should definitely play sweet intuition by Bjork from a 1995 album post Very nice track But if you go to the lyrics The lyrics include these Fuck Logic Rival to Instinct and Sweet Intuition

Repeat after me Sweet Intuition Jake van trance, honey, honey, sweet intuition. I think what's coming out of a lot of this discussion for me is the absolutely irreducible importance of a non-individualistic way of thinking about selfhood. You know, I can't say this too many times. I'll be saying this till the day I die. The individual is not the same as like the singular person. There's a certain singularity to everybody's experience, but your singularity is entirely a function of the specificity of

your relationships, the relationships which make you, you know, constantly making and remaking you. It's not something else. There isn't anything outside of or secretly inside that network of relationships. And that's the idea of the individual, the idea that there's this this asocial core or kernel or residue and is that you have to kind of let go of any belief in that is just a myth and that will affect the way you think about things like you know so-called self-care and I think we can you can have a kind of non-dualistic thinking which is still completely caught up in capitalist logics but you can't have a genuinely non-individualistic thinking I think which is still caught up in those capitalist logics and I think that's for me that's

the crucial thing. It's the crucial thing when it comes to the question of things like intuition. I think intuition is obviously a really important part of everyday cognition, whether you're talking about political matters or not. But if I'm having an experience of intuition, it's because of my situatedness in some wider assemblage of social forces. And what is that wider assemblage of social forces that's producing that feeling? If you just think, oh, well, this is my feeling, therefore I'm going to record it some authority because it's mine, the moment you say that you were lost to, you were lost to bourgeois ideology, which is why I think, you know, you can at the same time say that, for example, as we sit on

the show loads of times, like your attitudes to political institutions have got to be totally unsentimental, which means there is no trace of kind of individualised psychic investments in things like the Labour Party or as leaders or whatever. And on the other hand, you can say, well, you have to also be, can try to be aware of the way. in which your feelings about things are always sources of information about what's going on in the world, even if you can't really always resolve the reason why at the level of kind of rational cognition. I think the difference between a really a bad way of thinking through those things and a good way of thinking through those things is always to do

with individualism or its alternative. And this, I mean, we can think about this just in terms of that notion of gut instinct. If you think, oh, I'm going to trust my gut instinct because it's mine, because it's my feeling, then you are lost to bourgeois ideology. It's my phrase for today. If you say, well, I have a gut, I have a gut instinct for something, and that means that the complex ecology, which is my body mind system, and it's multiple interactions with the rest of, you know, the rest of my environment is producing some sort of signals, like I wonder what those signals might mean and what they might be connecting with, then that's good. That's the, that's the right way to think about it. And I think there's an important distinction there. Yeah, I think I think you're

completely right. And I feel like we should almost do a whole episode where we flesh these things out even more about like the self, you know, and what is the self. And I think almost the gut microbiota like even helps us here, you know, even only if for a metaphor, I think what I was trying to get at is what's the action rather than like what's the analysis. So what you're saying I completely agree with And you're totally right, Jeremy. But like in that moment where you get a sensation that something is wrong, I don't think we'll be able to answer this. But that's the question that I'm really interested in,

which is that when you get the sensation of I don't like this or this sounds wrong, especially in an arena of like politics, like how do I act? Do I leave? Do I speak up? Or do I go, well, I haven't heard it out or this is not rational or I. or I need to trust the process, which are kind of some of the ways of thinking that I would attribute to a kind of political environment. That's the question that I'm interested in. I understand what you're saying, but I don't think one can generalise without knowing the

specificities of a situation. Yeah, but I do think it's an interesting thing because it comes up as a kind of, that kind of instinctive feeling. Not to deflect from your question, but to deflect from your question, one of the other things I'm really interested in is whether there's been a rise in the popularity of intuitive sort of thinking and then using things such as like taro and astrology to prompt intuitive thinking amongst millennials and Gen Z. I had a chat with my friend Mr. Stats earlier, and he said that, in fact, there is some He had a feeling. He has a strong feeling. He doesn't know for sure, but he senses that this has taken place.

I do actually have a survey in front of me, but I'm not going to, you're just going to have to trust me on that, and we won't go into any more detail. Because my sense is, thank you very much, that there's been a really explosion of interest in light or use of taro and astrology, etc, but it seems to be separated from any, or at least more separated from sort of the supernatural or even the occult, I suppose, to some degree of taro. use much more as an A to sort of like self-therapy or something like that as a way of like people use tarot in order to to try to produce some sort of like new angle on their problem or to try to intuit some sort of connection between whatever the meaning of this tarot card is or astrology of course works in the same way and their own lives. I'm not convinced there's been this increase. I need to hear more about this because I'm instinctively really suspicious of all of that occult and tarot

stuff, but I know that you've recently become a fan, Kea, so, you know, sell it to us. I don't become a fan. I have, I have actually. It's worse than that. You're a tarot practitioner. Somebody bought me a very nice tarot card, a tarot set the other day. I just think there was loads of that. There was loads of that stuff around in the 90s. I remember everybody was, like everyone in our, like half the people in RTS were like into the Yiching and stuff. My impression at that time, I might be wrong, was if you were in, like, a residual, a surviving enclave of like 80s, an arco-punk in somewhere like Leeds, and there was probably less of it than there was around here, but there was loads of it around here. Let Keir do his thing. Well, I'm trying

to get Mr. Stats on the phone, but he's fucking not picking up. I have got to hear about how millennials are more spiritual and less religious. Than who, though, than who? I mean, that's been a thing that's been a statistical cliche for like 30 years now. I just saw a thing in the New York Times yesterday saying, oh wow, like a third of Americans are doing yoga or something. It's like, well, they were exactly the same feature was running in the mid-90s. It might have been like 20% rather than a third. I don't know. That sounds like a trend to me. Well, yeah, it might be a trend. I don't think it, but I think it's a really persistent trend. And then, but there's also like, there was a massive boom in astrology in like the 1920s, for example. Yeah. So I'm not sure is anything

really recent. I did have a poll earlier from the US, which was, so in particular amongst people who are non-religious Christians and none of the above's, where it was like the very, very large proportion of them believed in one of four New Age concepts. And one of those was like basically spiritualism rather than spirituality. And one of them was just like astrology and all that sort of stuff. That was Mr. Stats. I can't actually find it now. No, no, I know that. But I mean, what I can say for sure is like the thing about taro and astrology being like, oh, you don't really believe them. They're just aids to intuitive thinking. That is not new at all. There was loads of that like in the early 90s. There was tons of that stuff.

The reason I got interested in Tarrow was because a friend of ours, Will Barker, was using tarot in a role-playing game that me and Jeremy were playing. It was great. I thought it really worked with that. Released, I think just last year, Pop Sensation Olivia Rodrigo released an entire album called Guts. I think one of the funnest tracks from that album is Love is Embarrassing, a bit of contemporary, sort of punkish pop. It was pretty clever lyric, pretty fun. God, love's embarrassing in here.

Yeah, yeah, I give up, give up, I give up, not just in the idea, not just in the idea of trusting your gut, to somehow refer to a notion of embodied to somehow refer to a notion of embodied self, of embodied selfhood, which is in some way, like, more authentic and deeper than like the brain self. But, yeah, we talk about guts, meaning like bravery. You know, people have encouraged. And I remember when I moved to the States, when I was nine, when I was a kid, encountering this phrase to hate someone's guts. Like, that was like the worst you could hate someone, to hate your guts. It was a really sort of visceral, literally, I suppose, like visceral way of talking about things. So I think it is sort of fascinating.

to think that in colloquial language, there's this anticipation of what, as Nadia has pointed out, as we now know to be, like a biochemical reality, that the gut is indeed, like the sort of source of consciousness, or a site of kind of embodied selfhood and perception in a way that is really quite interesting. Nadia, I think we should end by coming back to you because it was your topic, and we've actually gone into loads of different areas. I'm just wondering whether the whole discussion has changed the way you think about gets in like, you know, the various meanings that we've been discussing it? Yeah, I think it has, actually, because I think I feel like I'm definitely more situated in like some of the kind of historical and political factors that influence

know why culture is created in a certain way and where kind of the gut sits, especially in kind of Anglo-American culture. I still think it would be a good thing if people were more able to talk about their gut health, but I think it might be a few more years down the line before that can be done in the UK, especially in an anti-capitalist and anti-wellness sense. Collectiviser cheesemakers, that's my answer. Wow, that's too far out.