Pints With Aquinas - Technology, Politics, and Radical Christian Living w/ Marc Barnes

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Me and Marc rant about technology. On Youtube. On the Internet. You're welcome. Marc's articles with NEWPOLITY: https://newpolity.com/technology NEWPOLITY Magazine: https://newpolity.com/magazine Marc's Band: https://dearother.bandcamp.com/ Cassettes releasing soon! 📼 Marc on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6VezESetgpqYkrRKGNJUJi Christians shouldn’t use smartphones https://medium.com/@marcjohnpaul/christians-shouldnt-use-smartphones-64cddc2b3527 🔴 FREE E-book "You Can Understand Aquinas": https://pintswithaquinas.com/understa... 🔴 SPONSORS Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd Ethos Logos Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔴 GIVING Patreon or Directly: https://pintswithaquinas.com/support/ This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer co-producer of the show. 🔴 LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔴 SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Gab: https://gab.com/mattfradd 

Hey, Matt Fradd here, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. If this show has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting us directly at pintswithaquinas.com.com. Or at patreon.com. Matt Fradd, when you do that, even for a dollar or $2 or $10 a month, you help this show to continue and to expand. We're flying people out every week to Stupendale putting them up in hotels paying for debaters upgrading our equipment Not to mention trying to pay people who work here at pines with Aquinas So any dollar amount would be a blessing to us. Thank you so much for considering mark Barnes Tis I like how I say your name. It sounds mark Barnes Mark, but you know, I did you know my father's name is Mark Barnes also

No, but I met him once you know that I didn't I get a talk somewhere at a university and he came up to me And he said that his son was nice the founder of the bad Catholic blog the bad Catholic blog. Yep Mm-hmm. It's that's a that's a bit of a relic from the early days of the internet now, you know Yeah, well not the internet but is it still going Christian blogging? No, no. And it's my fault. It's because I always forget to update the... URL thing. Yeah. And then it cancels and then all my work gets deleted. And yeah, there's this one thing I wrote for what it's worth. Please. I'm rarely funny, but every now and then I have a moment. Yeah, and I did a nice like Buzzfeed style post of all the medieval attempts to draw lions

Next to st. Jerome because st. Jerome's picture with the lion, but those medieval's bless them They had never seen a lion and so they were going on the basis of report from travelers what exactly a lion looked like and the result is is lions that look like like they do meth really I mean there's something like a lion there but but it's going sort of it's being degraded. I had no idea about that that makes a lot of sense and it was funny it was a funny post and it's gone forever every now and then there's this there's this dear person that sends me messages saying can you please find the lion post and I haven't had the heart to tell her like it's It's really gone. So someone else needs to do you could do this. What's that come up with a lion article?

Were you crushed when you lost all that work? No, no, no, that's is that detachment or is that something else? You know, I don't know it's it writing is sort of a like a birth process or at least That's gonna get me in trouble the closest that I can imagine In the sense that it's it's sort of it's within you and then it's sort of painful and you get it out Yeah, but you don't want to revisit it Okay, so for me, it's like it's like done once it's written. And writing is also the way that I think things through. Yeah. This is this is sad for some people because they speak with me as if I'll be able to be clever

and intelligent in the same manner that they read me. But I'm not because the writing was the way that I thought about the thing. But now that you've thought about it and have gotten it out, are you not then better able to articulate that thought in a more clever way? I sure hope so, but I don't know. You are a clever writer. You're a very gifted writer. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. I know if you saw this, but I quoted you the other day and I think this was yours. It was

a talk you gave called Why Christians Shouldn't use cell phones or Christians shouldn't use smartphones. Yeah. And you were complaining about the car car car. Where's the car? Uh, and you said, um, yeah, uh, a man with a car in a world made for feet is a God. A man with a car in a world made for cars is in traffic. Traffic. That's fantastic. That's fantastic.

That's right. That is, see, and to me that sounds like a surprise. I'm remembering that. That's quite good. No, writing is painful. I, part of what's, I don't know who it was who said that a book, maybe an article, same thing, is never complete, only abandoned. You get to a point where it's just gotta be good enough,

even though you know that it's not. Do you feel like that when you write? Yeah, to the chagrin of people that notice all the typos in it. No, I mean I read a... I read... This is why I write is because you know, you have to take the time here. I wrote a book that was really a collection of essays that wasn't very good and that's it. Did somebody say that to you or did you just... I just knew, I

knew it wasn't very good. So that was a good experience. I'm writing a book now. What is it? It's on technology. Okay. Because you know I'm just trying to stay hip and relevant with the children of the world and I hear That they like the technology and so I'm writing one of them books I don't have a name for it if you think of anything. Who's the publisher? Do you have one yet? New polity press. Okay so new polity are They're the best boys, you know. In fact, it was Alex last night who was, was it Alex? Somebody told me to say,

make sure you tell Mark to remind people of the link, newpolity.com slash technology. Is that right? Sounds like I don't need to do it now. So that's where people will find your articles on technology. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Ren was telling me last night.

Okay, good man, good man. He's great. Yeah, newpolity is a, one of those things that's hard to immediately explain because we have so many pans in the fire. But basically it's a extended critique of culture and a extended boosting of the Catholic Church as the salvation not just of our souls but of our bodies our economies our polities our roads so that's nice you work for them yeah yeah so it was very nice of them to publish this book well it would be awkward well

I I fancy that it might have some merits but it is it would also just be like the second book we've done so it's hardly a yeah yeah y'all do beautiful renders beautiful work with the article journal the journal yeah he's very good i'm so i'm sure the book will look beautiful too it's a somewhat of a lost art maybe not a lost art but a underrated art in an age in which you can do print on demand things. I don't know if you've ever ordered a book, usually something that's been in public domain for a while, and then the cover is like some insane picture that's nothing to do with the book and the print is... Yes, and the spine doesn't line up with the text.

Yeah, you just feel cheated. It's ugly. No, absolutely. So what's the premise of the technology book? That's a tough question. But I suppose the premise is that Christians need to take technology seriously and it's very difficult because the world is a technological and technocratic world and so what's demanded of us is very much a stepping back from everything that seems

normal and ordinary and it puts us into the very cringy sort of position of You know critiquing people's daily bread and and just being Obnoxious I think but but I think that What technology is in its essence? And then what technology has become in the hands of the billionaires who run our world has become detrimental to human life that it's creating a society in which people own less and less and rent more and more from fewer and fewer people who have greater and greater mastery over us. Interesting. Yeah and I think this is all in the Bible which is... What did we mean

by technology a hundred years ago? Because when people talk about technology today they mean computers. Yeah totally. They don't mean bicycles. Well it's it's one of those words where this is sort of a cheap thing but I'm more apt to say well you tell me what you mean by the word and we can talk about that. Yeah. Because technology from Technae, the Greek, indicates a making, something that's made. That's obviously a massively broad category and I would presume that Catholics even in the most outlandish and maybe exuberant mood would not put the ban on making.

After all, the Eucharist elevates the work of human hands to order the given world into a pleasing construction for God. It's just what gets us up in the morning. At least it should be. Does it always know? But within that there's another kind of making that I think should trouble us. Do you want me to talk about it? Yes. I do want that. It's why you're here. Pontificate, please. If you don't, it's just going to be a very quick episode.

I was really hoping that we would just idle away the time and mindless chatter about Steubenville politics and the... We can get there, but... Yeah, no, I mean, this is something I'm super concerned about as well. I mean, what's ironic and what will be pointed out a thousand times in the comments section is that we're on YouTube, on the internet, being watched through a computer. That's true. I fully get the irony.

I also fully think that social media sucks and people should get off it as somebody who's on social media. So fully acknowledging my hypocrisy and wanting to be better and wanting to be more in touch with reality. Yeah, well, you know, it's, I think we can have a further discussion on maybe some practical ways of

dealing with technology, but One of the first things to acknowledge in reference to that irony is that we're all in it, right? We're we are very much born into this and the critique is a critique of our own lives. And if it's not, then it's not Christian, right? If it's a critique of other people's lives, then it has the quality that C.S. Lewis once pointed out of a man who takes as the worst possible sin the one that he's never been tempted towards. You see this a lot. No, that's a good point. Yeah. So we have to apply this to ourselves. Man who takes as the worst possible sin the one that he's never been tempted towards

But that's a good point. Yeah, so we have to apply this to ourselves But this being said that could be a cowardly answer at the same time, you know saying like oh, well, I'm just self-critiquing I'm gonna do it for the next 30 years and rack up as much technology as I can in the process No, I mean, I think Christians need process. No, I mean, I think Christians need to put a timeline on themselves to say, okay, what year on what feast day do I give up the next thing that I know is preventing me from a deeper relationship with God. But this is really jumping the gun. Yeah, you've begun by saying there's this like, techne, this creating, and you said it's within that. Yeah, so let's go back to the beginning Let's go to Genesis because I don't know where else to start. I literally

Ratzinger our boy says something really Interesting, maybe it's obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me when I read it. He says that all technology is a response to man's need for Maybe it's obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me when I read it. He says that all technology is a response to man's need for security. Okay. Man in the beginning didn't need security. Why? Was he fit by nature? Did God give him talons and wings with which to deal with the problems of the garden? No. He gave him an intellect but more than this he assured his life and his happiness by his superabundant grace. This is the beginning. This is man in the beginning. A being who is helped by God. Right? God gave the rest of the animals what they needed but for man he

said, I want to... the way you will live is in relationship with me. I will give you your continued life. I will... I mean one way to think about it now is it's almost like we came pre-saved from death. Okay, my point is we were secure and so we didn't have technology in this sense. Now this gets tough because I think we had making but what I mean is Within the garden You can see how there would be no drive to make things in response to fear Right adam didn't wake up scared sweating

Saying oh gosh if I don't figure out a way to store all of this fruit Then winter's coming and Dear Eve and I are going to starve. All right. That is not the situation of original harmony and justice in the garden I don't think yeah The first instance of fear-based making was the sowing of fig leaves Yeah, I think that's right so Adam and Eve sin, what's the sin? Well, they reject the security that comes from God They say we will be like God and therefore We will suffice for ourselves, right? And of course

Once they do this the immediate recognition that eye-opening recognition is that they can't. And at the very least, it's gonna be very difficult. And the first thing they do in recognizing that they're bereft of the grace, the super abundant provision of security is they make. They go out and techne You get the first sort of tool use description, it's just so odd right and they they sew fig leaves

Which it you know, there's a lot more you can say about that because it seems to me like they're sewing the very Very fruit of the tree which is supposed to be the fig tree is the same leaves that they're sowing to cover themselves but that that act of Covering yourself. It's It's not an idol Metaphor it's not just in there because reasons it It is what technology does it covers man's lack Man has a need for security. He now

lives in fear. He toils for his bread. He experiences pain and loss and hunger and he is oriented towards death. That's the universe he's thrown into now or thrown out of in some ways. Technology is always a covering, right? It's always a response to that lack, a response to that need. A somewhat technical term is scarcity. It's a response to the sense that the universe is scarce now, that I do not have the assurance of provision, and so I must order creation to cover this lack in human nature Okay So that's maybe a Beginning distinction I'd really like to make or for Christians who take the Bible seriously to make

That's really interesting it because when you said the first tech name, I thought you were gonna talk about the Tower of Babel Yeah, I'm sure you'd have a lot to say about that. I mean that's oodles In regards to what you've already said, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important though to not let our imagination grow dull and imagine every kind of making to be a response to fear. It's not all technology in this sense. An example I use because it's easy, though I think hopefully it can be fruitful and apply to a lot of other situations,

is making a sand castle. Because what I wanna, when we talk about technology, I want to describe like two ways of living. The city of God, the city of man. Man pre-lapsarian, before the fall, post-lapsarian, after the fall. Not to say that all fear-based technology is bad in itself because the scarcity is real. Yeah. Okay. And we'll get into that but to point out that is always

a response To sin to being cast out to the fiery sword. It's always that covering Maybe that makes us a little uncomfortable. I don't know No, I mean that makes sense to me. So I like what you think like there are legitimate threats Yeah, so we need to create things to protect ourselves against those threats Absolutely, but the fact of there being threats is of course that we have a fallen world. Yeah Yeah, we've lost that that communion that we're all now striving for. Yeah, and I hope we'll get soon I mean, I feel like I'm gonna die in like ten years. What about you? When am I gonna die?

Yeah, if I keep smoking cigars at the rate, I'm smoking. I'm probably 15. Yeah, so we'll meet up. We'll meet up Sandcastles though. Yeah think about sitting on the beach and Then desiring to build a sandcastle. Hmm, maybe not a sandcastle. Maybe you just want to make a big old mound Maybe you want to bury your kid up to his head. Yep, so you can flick them without consequences. Mm-hmm These are the things that I think Well, I would argue that you're not responding to any felt lack, to any need for security, that thing that Ratzinger said all technology is based on. Maybe there's some

obnoxious people that might say like you have a need for order or something yeah well yeah yeah but I would say that those things it'd be wrong to ascribe them to a sort of panic strike striving so what are you responding to well I think you're actually responding to the to reality as it is given so what I mean is when you see the sand you notice that considers it as sand it has certain qualities it has a nature it can do things as powers and those powers can be activated and and that might sound overly philosophical but I find it very exciting to notice a power that can be activated it's why if I put a red button in the room everyone wants to push it, right? Because that's what human beings are. We are secondary

causes in the universe. It's amazing, right? God didn't hoard causality to himself. Like I will make and create and make the universe what it is gonna be and you're gonna occupy it. He said, I'm going to create something incredible. Nature's ideas that I have will have powers that exist because of the millions of relations that everything has to everything else. Well, you, like the angels, will be able to activate those powers.

You'll be able to respond to the the given in a creative free way. And so when you see that sand its power Its capacity cries out to you. Mm-hmm to me it does but I'm on the beach anyways, yeah Cries out to you. It's like it sings shape me I am I am shapeable. I am the shapeable thing and so your hand starts to do it Maybe before your mind can do a sense to it Okay, the reason that I'm using a really leisurely Metaphors because I think we need to reach into those moments of like obviously fearless peaceful making

To find them again in this fallen world and say okay. Okay, it's not all Panicked covering that's your wife my friend that is my one take it i don't know if i can i should uh hang up on her she'll understand though she won't feel too panicked i i've met your wife and i i feel like she's gonna just destroy you in fact i'm constantly amazed that your wife hasn I feel like she's gonna just destroy you. In fact I'm constantly amazed that your wife hasn't just like body slammed you. Why do you say that? She's just a she is a force. She is a powerhouse. She I mean there's like... Let's call her. Cameron is like um it's like it's incredible that she's sort of incarnated in a particular woman because she's more like like like a West Wind or

something you know. Hey love how are you? hey love how are you good you're on speaker and you're also live on YouTube a friendly place notoriously our batteries dead I feel afraid I want to make something but I can't pay someone to pay someone to do it. Yeah you want me to call someone? And she's taking me to school. So. I'm taking Avila to school. Okay. Do you need a jump? Do you need a jump? The painters just jumped me. Oh okay. But I'm just letting you know because I may need you to get Avila after school. Yep no worries love. I'll yeah I'll give you a call when I'm done with Mark. And I love you enjoy your interview. I clean up lots of vomit in your house. You're welcome. Thanks love. Bye You know My wife powerful rule king has batteries that are really well priced

And they'll give you 12 bucks if you bring in the old battery interplay so just so you know, okay Sorry boys local discussions, you know, yeah interrupt this broadcast for... Alright. Yeah, okay, there are things that we make that we enjoy. Another idea I'm thinking would be we're in fall right now, so building a leaf pile. Yes. Jumping in it.

Yes. Yes. That's absolutely true. And I think like tree houses. Yeah. And I think you like tree houses. Yeah, we have these Not but then but then there's a temptation which is to make a distinction that I don't want to make which is the difference between Techni That's fear based and tech and a that's nature based

I would say is is one of seriousness like the real things we make are for fear and for covering our need for security And then the things that are appropriate for children and the independently wealthy are That's the garden the garden was just idle play You know what I mean? Right? This is where it gets really difficult precisely because our fallen world just screams with need and lack and it's like get up and rise and grind and make things and make them well and all that awesome Ohio Valley kind of thought. Okay, I don't think it was this way at all.

I think in the garden, it was always the cry of nature that Adam was responding to and that this was in a certain respect, the fulfillment of Adam but not because he saw the universe as scarce and lacking but because it was his vocation both as a part of the universe and as its priest it's the one who is supposed to construct it into a pleasing offering to God. That him, Adam caring for himself and caring for his family and making and building,

while it wasn't a response to fear, was in fact serious. It was real making, it was farming. I mean, he tilled and kept. I'm just hoping that my house isn't burning down. I don't know if that's in there You know, it's terrifying. Here's a terrifying thing that no one ever seems to understand my terror when you hear a car alarm go off How do you know it's not yours? You know, it's someone's and it's still no, I don't know the sound of my car alarm I wouldn't be like no, that's not it. It's someone else's and I'm up on the seventh floor and it keeps going it's not an efficacious technology the car alarm is like

Everyone's reaction is I just gonna wait till that shuts up there There's this one alarm that you've never heard a car alarm and thought someone must be breaking into a car And it doesn't even matter how wild they get I was up playing soccer with Andrew Jones and a few other guys and There's like this place near near the field where when someone Something happens that there's an alarm that goes it says like intruder intruder you have entered a restricted area leave immediately And we're all like well, that's annoying. annoying yeah that's really annoying and no one did anything speaking of annoying and useless

technologies maybe not useless but hey this is really good because yeah like there is this desire to talk about like the leisurely life right yeah which may not be in fact that but the idea of I moved down to Florida get a beach house play dominoes and smoke cigars that actually sounds great to me yeah but now the idea is I don't do anything

I'm not responsible for anything and that so that's not what you know that's not what we're talking about we took about the prelapsarian man I mean the the one of the weirdest things in Genesis is that it says there were no plants because the rains had not yet watered the earth and there was no man to till them okay which is odd because it sounds like the plants are waiting for the man in order to to be but what this is describing is that in the beginning To raise a plant Still I think this is still true I shouldn't say in the beginning to raise a plant for food is

To perfect it in its nature Aquinas talks about this like there are some beings that are perfected by being brought up, right? So when I eat the plant, it becomes in me personal. It becomes me. It quite literally is elevated into a life of worship because the plant can't worship, but the plant as man can worship. It's similar with the animals, right? Like the animals are dumb

They cannot contemplate the divine man can contemplate the divine But by a participation in man by obeying him or by being eaten by him They are brought up into his life now That is to describe a That is to describe a natural order of the world. Like, that is the reasoning with which Adam approaches his garden and tills and keeps. And at no moment is there this agony of fear, like maybe the universe is against me. Maybe God has not provided and so that's why I need to farm and maybe I need to farm

extra and maybe I need to build a storehouse and start you know you start to realize why Jesus Christ had a bit of a thing against storehouses. But so there's a motivation that we have lost or at least don't think about, right? Like, why do we persist in being? Why do we keep ourselves alive? Why don't we just jump off a cliff? Well, part of the reason is that the world belongs to us and we belong to the world. We're not here by accident. The world waited for its tiller and its keeper, right? And it still waits for us to perfect it into a pleasing offering to God. So there's a motivation of making that's entirely on the basis of the desire to perfect the natures as they are given to us. I want to perfect the plants. I want to perfect the animals.

I want to perfect you. You should want to perfect me. I mean, this is like a social order of Now this probably sounds pie in the sky and in some ways well, we are talking about the art of Eden, right? So I don't want to I don't want to linger on it too long, but I just want to say that That there was a form of making and that this form of making is still accessible within the fallen world though now with great difficulty and That when we speak about technology the reason I want to go back to the beginning is to say Catholics Christians anyone who takes the Bible seriously has to look at technology as Something that doesn't quite fit with the kingdom in the end of the day. The Fiat based technology. Yeah because you know perfect love will

cast out all fear and in the same way that we ultimately envision ourselves as having resurrected bodies free of shame so that we can be naked again. The clothes, the making is also something that goes away. There will be no techne in the sense of covering the lack of mankind. And in fact I would go so far as to say the very idea that man lacked was a lie, right? I mean you think about who really introduced technology in this sense? Satan. Because he was the first one to insinuate that mankind didn't have enough. You know when he said you shall be like God, it sounds like a purely positive statement like you're gonna be like this thing that you like. Hooray! But

if it was it wouldn't really be that bad I don't think rather to say I really should be like God is precisely to say this human nature this non-divine nature that I have is not very good or it's not enough it's not sufficient right the first sin is what we would call the presumption of scarcity. Now, fancy title, I like how it sounds, it has a nice ring to it. It does. But what I mean is that the first sin

is to say, I am not cared for. Like this is not enough. What I've been given is not enough. I need to be like God. Well, so how that worked. The problem with being like God is then suddenly you're no longer in the relationship of receiving gift. Now you're in a relationship of competition because you want to be like God. Well, what the answer what's difficult now as you you say, in post-Lapsarian era, we now probably make things for leisure and that are beautiful for good reasons, but then there are other things that we make out of fear, but we're not wrong to do that.

Correct, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what's difficult, right? So it's not like you can draw a line and say, therefore, these are the activities you can engage in that are good and all these should be avoided. Right, absolutely. Absolutely. That's tough now.

It is tough and you know this is the great joy and adventure of being Catholic is that everything becomes tough. At least at the outset, right? Like you have to step back, kind of get your feet out of the flowing stream of history and things and events and say What ought I do? What's reality? Wow, who should I be? Yeah, and Most people hate that hate doing that. Could you give us an example of a technology that for the most part? You believe is a response to fear and is a negative and should be avoided? Well in fact and I and I hate to disappoint such a clear question. Yeah because that rocks

but I will. Okay. Because I don't think any particular technology could have that quality in itself quite maybe like an IUD you know but we'll get there what I mean is this that the same technology could be devoted to the perfection of nature which includes humankind's persistence or it could be based in fear and then let's just consider fear based technology for now you're absolutely right, the answer is not okay don't do that because we have a lot to fear we are outside of the garden

and man, it's a threatening a threatening world no matter how much we try to pad ourselves with uh with technology ironically um the sin or at least the air when it comes to technology is what i would call permanentizing or absolutizing the conditions of scarcity. So what I mean is something like this. When there's a lack, it is good, right, and just to make a technology to fulfill that

lack. But this is a limited reality, right? Because once the lack is fulfilled, then the norm of human existence is rest. It's to say, okay, we've got that sorted. Now we're back. We're back to the given world. So like a properly ordered post-slapped Syrian world develops technology as a response to a real, to a perceived lack.

Which is why I think there's no particular technology that's, I shouldn't say this. I don't think there's a particular like scale of technology that's off limits because it depends entirely on the scale of the evil famine strikes Okay There are things that we should do Technological responses to this massive lack that are Good appropriate. I mean like a Joseph Joseph

are good, appropriate. I mean, look at Joseph. Joseph faced the famine in Egypt and he immediately went to technology. You got to build storehouses and store all the grain and actually he kind of made all of society a sort of technological mechanism for the storing of grain because then he put new land distribution patterns and then got the Egyptians grain and then kind of rationed it out So it wasn't just technology in the sense of like the things he made but also the bureaucracy that you know that involved But the point is that should be a response to the famine We live in a world in which famine is the presumption What I mean is the storing of grain and I'm being quite literal here when it comes to industrial farming methods

Is something that we should constantly be doing so? Can I back it up once more because this gets hard We live in a world that's structured by liberalism. What does that mean? Liberalism is an ideology invented by an elite a little while back. You can kind of argue where to throw the dart. Most people hit the Reformation at some point, but you know. dart most people hit the Reformation at some point. And what it can be historically described as is the intentional destruction of the social order of Christendom, the removal of the genuine power of the Catholic Church from the world

by people that benefited from the church not telling them what to do. This is a deliberately big stroke that I just want to start with. But it comes in a lot of forms and it has a lot of thinking doctrines and Revolution French Revolution. You've got like the English sort of liberals like John Locke. You've got you know contemporary liberalism like I don't know something like Rawls or Really? Everybody's a contemporary liberal and you get down to it, but But I want to talk about What some of the first liberal thinkers did to the book of

Genesis because I think it can frame this idea of a permanent permanent ization. I don't know if that's a word, but if it is of the conditions of scarcity of the idea that technology isn't a limited response to a limited evil But is in fact a response of human nature to a naturally scarce universe This is actually what was posited by a guy named mouth use. He probably know mouth is because he had his You know the population bomb this theory this is a mouth is okay vision theory that like, you know, eventually You know within a population of people Too many people are born For the resources of the place to handle and so there's so there's a crisis

but he began he was a Some Protestant minister I forget exactly probably Anglican, I presume, given the time. But he described Genesis as having lack in it at the beginning. So the pre-Lapsarian world was full of lack, hardship. The thorns and thistles weren't a curse,

they were somehow already present. Ma'am was already at this, already had this need for techne in the fear-based sense. And he said that this was actually how human beings develop is through facing hardship. It's like what, and he had this idea that rest... so he had no idea of the perfection of nature as a vocation. So for him, if there was no lack, everyone would just sleep all the time. I'm

thinking of Time Traveler by Wells where he comes across that civilization that there's no hardship and so the people would just become terribly soft and stupid. Yeah, so this is well and Wells is I mean This is like a prototypical Liberal way of thinking like okay. Well if there's no Sin and struggle and fear then it must be bad. I mean, I know that sounds trite, but I think about what that must mean to the Catholic like to say that Think about what that must mean to the Catholic like to say that

That sin had a necessary place in the universe that fear that lack that that insufficiency scarcity Were necessary for the creation of the perfected being I mean That's another story of evolution Essentially, I mean Yes, hundred percent that we evolved precisely through Yeah, if you just eat the whole Darwinian line of like somehow somehow that produces intellect, which is insane then and in fact Malthus had a kind of a

Maybe a very like psychological maybe a very like psychological anticipation of that Darwinian idea because for him it wasn't just like the struggle of the species eventually produces a being that just happens by random mutation to be better able to deal with a lack. For him it was actually the particular individual by running against lack is able to deal with a lac for him it was actually the particular individual by running against lac is able to develop his mind gotcha that he would literally be a beast sorry that he would quite literally be a beast if if it wasn't for sin if it wasn't for absence if it wasn't for striving i mean i can see the i can see the logic i think i mean it it's like a gym like a working out logic. Yeah, but also with children. Like if a child gets everything we say he's spoiled. He doesn't actually develop when he lives a soft cushy existence and isn't told what to do and isn't disciplined and things like that.

Whereas a child who grows up under hardship may end up being a more virtuous person. Yeah totally but I think what what's missing in that kind of either or is the idea that there could be a work that is not fear-based. That there can be a keeping and a tilling and a making and a striving that is not because you are threatened by death. Gotcha.

And this is the only way they can imagine it because the first thing you have to do when you depart ways, when you part ways with the Catholic Church is to attack its optimism in some ways, right? Like, the Church is the one who boldly proclaims that there's a happy ending to this story. And the liberals are the one who begin by claiming that, well, we say there's a happy ending and a happy beginning So the liberals retained for a little while the the idea of a happy ending heaven but they lost the happy beginning and now they have neither right because

Liberal societies largely have become atheistic societies And you can kind of see why when you go back to people like mouth is that the the ordered presumption of like the universe being a very good creation in which to rejoice and In which human nature is perfected was under suspicion Okay Why am I talking about this I remember That wasn't a rhetorical question you were asking yeah So now Malthus says that these these conditions of scarcity are are to be presumed

rather than some kind of Blip, right? They are they are the creation as God made it a feature not a bug a feature not a bug Yeah, whereas the Catholic would always say, even now, even in the worst day everyone's it's World War III, would still say this is a blip. This is not the thing. That sin is a lack. It is a privation of the very good order.

And that God was not a liar when he looked at what he created and said it is very good right that it is by sin and ignorance the twofold darkness that Aquinas speaks of that We can even create the possibility of suspecting that God's creation wasn't wasn't very good You know, we're really looking at our own works when we when we do that And maybe I should point out that this isn't just The liberals the thinkers like this are actually repeating basically the logic of paganism What I mean is um

You can't really find a story about creation where it was very good until you get to Genesis Yeah, so I'm thinking about the ancient Babylonian myths. Enuma Elish. That's right. There the beginning is always scarcity. Yeah. Conflict. Chaos. Yeah. Violence. Yeah. Yeah and humanity is usually born in some way out of Not a good relationship with the gods But out of the bad relationships. I think that the Greeks right like the beginning is a golden age Insofar as man is not really man. I mean women don't exist. It's their immortals, right? so the creation of humanity as we know it is a It's their immortals, right? So the creation of humanity as we know it is a fall, right?

They actually fight with the gods over the sacrificial meal. Like who's gonna get the fat? Who's gonna get the bones? This is where Prometheus comes in, humanity's hero. Well, this is simply to say that the idea of the original creation that man created as not a God, not immortal by nature, this is important, the church does not teach that Adam was immortal by nature but he was immortal by a gift,

continuously given gift of God. So he's not immortal, he's not a God, he has no divinity, he is something little less than a god and that this is precisely his glory This is foreign right because every other story is well man supposed to be a god and something and it wasn't he's supposed to be Divine he wasn't often. He's supposed to be androgynous just a male, but then something happened and now we have to deal with women I was gonna say I get that but I don't really. So the liberals in some way are repeating paganism which is the endpoint of leaving the Catholic Church. Like eventually you get there. So sum that up for me liberals are repeating paganism how? By developing a theology or maybe just having the thought that in the

beginning it was not very good okay yeah and that and it won't end well well extinction and heat death well that yeah so utopia so make heaven on earth yeah I mean that's where it that's where it ends up and obviously I'm not that would be drastically simplifying but I think that that question of who were we and where are we going in the end is gonna form what we do right now yeah and if where we come from was bad and where we're going is uncertain then we're certainly gonna try and build heaven on earth I forget who said it I think I'm quoting it correctly this is the horror of modern man because he comes from

nothing and ends in nothing he is nothing that was me yeah no that is the horror of modern man and so life becomes a desperate scrabble to play God for a little while until the final curtain falls and it's evident that you're not. So you're saying then that the appropriate way to sort of respond to the world through technology is in response to the legitimate threat. Yeah. But the inappropriate one is to live as if everything is a threat when it's not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the reason I went back to Malthus is to

say, to kind of expose this as an idea in relation to Genesis. But obviously what I'm not saying is that most people who develop technology have a particular reading of Genesis or a particular theory of, I mean, they might have an implicit theory of human nature, right? But I'll put it this way, maybe in a more syllogistic form. If Ratzinger's right that all technology is a response to man's need for security, then what do we make of a technological age where the development of technology, first of all, is the lifeblood of our societies itself And I mean this literally if we did not keep making crap our

Economies would fail we literally like when there's a recession. What do they tell you to do go buy things? Right. What do you want to buy? Who knows? It doesn't matter. You just have to you have to consume Yeah, so so we've built up worlds that require Constant technological development even if it's not clear that it's making us happy or good. We have to or else economies fail. And this is bad for all the people that rule economies. We're jumping ahead. What I'm saying is

what am I saying. This happens all the time. It was giving a syllogism. Benedict says. Right. So so so what what you would I think it's a Reasonable presumption then to say okay, so if if it's true that man develops technology as a response to security and we have an age in which the development of technology is constant presumed ever present never, in which history itself is

redefined as technological development. It's like how do we know that they were older than us? Well because they... I mean you see this with kids right? Like what it means to be young now is the devices that you used. So like oh I'm a 90s kid, I had a Gameboy, you know what I mean? It's like devices themselves start to become our history. We don't have... we don't mark ourselves by major events we mark ourselves by technology as it permutates. Okay I think it's a reasonable reasonable presumption then to say that the only way you can have such an age such a world is if man's need for security is considered constant. That there is no rest, there is

no peace, there is no notion or reality of a good life that is attainable and in part actually attained. And that all is posited as a restless striving for more against a death that we don't know how to deal with. Maybe another way of putting the same thing is like who gets over technology? Well, it's really, you really get down to it. It's the people that aren't afraid to die anymore. Yeah, what would be, what would that look like? Monasticism. I mean, of course there's corruption in the monasteries.

I'm sure the iPads proliferate among the clerics. Wow, you're blowing my mind. This is really cool. This does come back, this reminds me of the basis of leisure by Piper, Piper, yeah. Our boy, yeah. Yeah, Yeah, cuz it's like the We work to rest. We don't rest to work. Yeah, totally and I would even maybe this isn't going farther Because I think he said this that there's such a thing as restful work. Yeah

I feel like I'm doing it now, right? Yeah. Yeah And I think any mastery of a craft involves this, right? Like when... Well, maybe we should talk about that. Because... As I've laid it out and I'm just so grateful that there is a something like what you're doing where it's reasonable to go back to the beginning of time and then move forward Most people don't give me that time. It's like I hold up. I need to go back to the Big Bang and then we'll keep moving So I really appreciate that. Thank you

So The presumption of scarcity the permanentization of lack The fear of death is the simplest way to put it. That drives technological development in an unhinged manner. And I don't think this is like in the realm of ideas. I think this is historically true. We have this very silly notion that technology has a kind of life, like evolved or whatever. It's not really true. If you look at the Middle Ages, now there were technological advancements in the sense that there were needs that were met, there were machines, there were things built that were new, right?

But because this was always in response to a lack, and I admit I'm maybe gilding the Middle Ages, but generally it seems true that it was always considered a response to a lack. I mean you're not gonna find any medieval writer saying something like to a lack. I mean you're not gonna find any medieval writer saying something like, what's the next technology that's gonna come out and change our world? I mean that didn't really happen. That would have been kind of psychopathic actually. People would have just burned you as a witch. If you look at

the actual life of about a thousand years of... I mean, if you just basically take from the fall of Rome to say high middle ages before the Reformation, life didn't change much. I mean, most people lived like their fathers and their grandfathers and their great grandfathers. It's not to say that there weren't new devices and seismic shifts when there was a famine or a war. You just look at how your grandparents lived compared to how you lived. My granddad was a cobbler, my dad worked in a factory, and I run a podcast. Yeah, but if you took your grandfather, the cobbler, and take him back each year, it's gonna be very similar. That's right. It's generation will be very similar. That's right. Yeah. And actually that

it's the factory I think that in some ways makes the difference, right? Because a factory for mass production is simply the principle I'm talking about in Karnit. We need to constantly produce a thing, principle I'm talking about incarnate we need to constantly produce a thing the necessity of which is not clear in the sense that it's not like a we're gonna solve this lacked it's like we're gonna make everyone think they need soap everyone's got to have soap we're gonna make advertisements that say your children are unclean you didn't even know it we'll get there but I'm saying the manufacturing of scarcity is as much a part of technology like the making people feel like their human nature lacks Which is what the devil did in the beginning is what the devil does now thought about this for

Thousands more hours than I had so forgive me if this is very simple. So every advertisement is telling you that you lack something Yeah, yeah be scared. I mean, that's why I think people are so afraid is because they live under regime Forgive me for interrupting you even this light phone here that I have, which is a dumb phone that I've talked about on the podcast, even those advertisements in order to be helpful have to make you afraid that your smartphone is killing you. Yes. Now that's a legitimate fear. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it still has to tell you that. It has to promise you something that you don't yet have. Yeah. And it's, I just think very rare that the fear is legitimate, you know? Yes. Like, and sometimes it's just like, it's so absurd. Like you look at a beer commercial and it's like,

you can, you know, you're watching it and it's sort of like, okay, I guess they're selling me beer, but if you actually lay out the method that they're using, it's like, you don't have sex, and when you do, it's not fun. Beer, that'll help. Yeah. It's like you don't have sex and when you do it's not fun. Beer! That'll help. It's like will it? Will it? See I think like Coca-Cola commercials are very interesting. There's always like a very beautiful freckled girl in the sunshine. She really does have freckles.

She usually has freckles. Man, weird. Freckles are great. But yeah, what is that saying to me? Yeah, you're not happy and young and free. Yeah. Coke. Coke, man. Which is true about cocaine, but yeah. But not at all, which is why they don't need to advertise in the way that Coca-Cola does. No, the advertisements for cocaine are simpler and more personal and direct. Exactly. I appreciate it. Yeah.

Anyway, sorry about that. The the fear don't be this is great so this is this is great I mean this should change the way we encounter every commercial that we'll see today which will be billions not billions yeah I mean they can you can't construct a technological age without constructing the mechanism by which people can be constantly made afraid and told that they lack If you don't have that then you don't have the totalitarianism of technology. You just have some like piddling influence I mean if you look at the history of ads, it's really funny I mean ads used to like be long descriptions that were really like look

This is the best icebox and I was just reading I was in the we have an antique market yeah and I was I was looking some old ads and magazines they had written a 17 stanza poem on the merits of the icebox in comparison to the others and then someone else came along and there was a woman in a bikini holding it and that was what sold. That's what I mean it's like there even the history of advertising has an its age of innocence, where it said like, well, there are needs and we're gonna inform people

that this product can meet the need. We're not about the business of creating a need that doesn't exist. We're about the business of figuring out what the need is and then providing the solution. That's the age of innocence because you are still doing at least in theory, if not in fact, something Edenic. Right, you're looking at, well.

What does that word mean? I said Edenic, but now I'm actually gonna walk it back so we don't even, like unto Eden. But what I really mean is something virtuous in the sense of you're responding to a real lack that exists. So it's not Edenic actually, but it is a virtuous post Eden kind of living. But then of course with ads it's like that gets dropped like a hot potato and then you

know within the next couple years you're just lying. You're just saying like you're not cool. You're not fit. You're not beautiful. You're not smart. You need this. You need that. You need this.

You need that. People think of this as somehow extrinsic to the fact that we're buying Technology all the time as if you had like ads and technology, but it's like again. Look at the Middle Ages thousand years of Fathers doing what their fathers did with what their fathers did Okay, you might hate it Right, you might like the thrill of the ride of the technological age Okay, but you have to admit that This ride is not necessary

Right that it has to be produced in people that people left alone Like things that are very different than our age likes they like peace Constancy the assurance that today will be like yesterday and that tomorrow will be the same They like I mean think about the way we actually liked Age I mean respect of elders is not just some like extrinsic thing that we did and then for some reason We just seem to put our old people in nursing homes. It's like no we define Who we are technologically we are the people that are using devices like

that they're not. Our history is one of division. Like the way we go through history is by saying out with all that old stuff we are the new generation. We are the new generation. We're just like constantly rebelling. Before I had somebody else run my social media I was using Instagram and then somebody else run my social media. I was using Instagram and then somebody else took it over. And then I made a transition, somebody else was gonna come in and run it. So for a day or two, I downloaded the app and I had no idea how to use it.

It had advanced in just those two years and I felt like, yeah, a dullard. And then there's two kinds of people in the world, right? There's the people that feel like dullards, so they buy the device. And there's people that say, maybe the world is a dullard. Yeah. For making all these stupid devices.

Interesting. Okay, but we do need to, I do need to backtrack because I'm trying to be careful. Okay. Because I think that You know Critiques of technology are usually so bad. They're so knee-jerk. They're so like Well, I don't like this thing and it makes me miserable So technology is bad or something and then you know people get stumped by obvious questions like well, what about the wheel or?

You say the whole technology? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I want to be careful because I don't like those gaps in the argument that allow people who are obviously addicted to the consumption of technological devices to walk away without converting, to walk away without Christ in their hearts because, I mean, it just saddens me that we have a church that teaches what it teaches and that people ostensibly listening to the church are like that's great check out this and then you know whatever we just consume devices and are somehow still the same as the historic church in its in its virtue and its holy militancy I don't believe it I think we're corrupt so what

I'd like to do if you're okay with it yeah please is I want to kind of jump I want to go back but I want to jump ahead a little bit and I want to I want to actually criticize the smartphone I want to criticize social media I want to suggest to people that their life could be better without it so I want to to kind of, without making the argument and while knowing that someone will say, oh, here he goes again, like disparaging technology, but I bet he has a car and he has a dumb phone and he's got a YouTube channel. Get all that. But my life got significantly better.

I don't know, I haven't told you about this, but like I had August off of the internet, right? Bought a dumb phone. I will never go back. My life has become significantly better because of it. Yeah, I had to fly to Colorado Springs on the weekend. I never want to travel again either. That's a different topic.

Well, I can still. Yeah, I love it, man. I'm so, so happy to get back. But while I had two flights, got me to Colorado Springs and two flights, got me back again. And that was at least You know while waiting at the airport getting on two planes and getting off six to seven hour process I didn't have a smartphone. I was fine. I loved it so much. I read a book called Confederacy of Dunces Yeah

But if you had have tried to make me do that in August, I would have died inside. I wouldn't have known how to function because it's taking me like, but I will never go back. I know that much and I'm so excited about it. And just from kind of sharing that story, I've had so many people reach out to me and say they've destroyed their smartphone. I even had some guy show up at your place with a sledgehammer and he brought his smartphone with him to that conference I held, the Guinness conference, and he destroyed it.

And I bought him a wise phone. That was the gift if he were destroyed. And his life is getting better. But right now, someone will say you're glorifying the past. But give me a critique, would would you of either social media or Smartphones or both sure and be ruthless I Think

smartphones and social media are devices to sap Christianity of power of real power and ownership and To replace every relationship we have with a relationship that we have to rent from the wealthy billionaire atheists of this world. And that while I understand a justified use of a smartphone in this or that instance, I think the reality is it's just the way that the church is destroyed. So that's good. Let me defend it though. Yeah, that's the conclusion.

Now defend it especially to the person listening who's like, all right, you make a good argument. I am legitimately open to getting rid of this stuff. Okay, yeah, I'll try my best. Well, let's talk about a smartphone. There it is. And when I touch the smartphone, when I begin to operate it, something is happening. Now already we're in new territory, right?

Because Catholics have this weird thing where we're like okay with deep investigations and critiques of some things but not others. It's like we talk about sex and it's like, yeah, we can analyze precisely our motivations, our passions and find out what's wrong. We're not like the world, we don't just, you know. But then with technology we are. So for some reason.

That's a really good point. Even the critique of say natural family planning. like we do a deep dive into the investigation of our own motives And why is it that I'm abstaining and we're very comfortable with that and we insist that our liberal Catholic friends get on board with This and accept the church's teaching on contraception But yeah technology well, it's fascinating because in human a view today one of the things That Paul the six says is that we should not give up our personal responsibility for technical means

So there's a critique of technology That's general of which the critique of contraception is a specification And I don't think we've taken that to heart as a culture we think that like well This is some bad thing and then everything else is the good thing. But he's saying actually taking human personal responsibility and replacing it with this technical mode is bad. And by the way, contraception is one of the things that does, you know, it does that. Okay. But we have the smartphone and what it does is something really fascinating. And I would say new really in the history of technology. Because if you think about,

if you think about like three ages of tools, because you'll hear that the smartphone's just a tool, right, it's all in how you use it. Okay, sure. Well, you got tools like shovels Now shovels are really cool. I like a good shovel and What they do is they extend to the powers of my body

right so that the shovel and I become a unity as it were and In my use of the shovel like my use of the saw like my use of anything we might call like a primitive technology but I wouldn't even say primitive I would say even like the you know power drill but In my use of them I'm on a path of mastery so the first time a kid tries to use a hammer for instance He's missing the nail, he's

hitting his thumb, it feels awkward, right? It feels like toil, right? He's having an out of the garden moment where he's trying to create something, make the world some, you know, but he's failing to in some way. But he gets better. He learns, it becomes more integrated with his body. As he does more work, he becomes better until that wonderful moment that we call mastery, in which there's a seamlessness between the tool and the body. And the hammer really does feel like an extension of the

hand. And it does, in fact, extend the powers of the hand into the world. And that mastery is also a moment of rest. Now what I mean is there's a joy, there's a delight in craftsmanship and the use of the tools. There's a thoughtlessness that's only possible to the master, right? If the master is not the one who's like, all right, I'm gonna aim it at the nail, BAM! Got it. No. He's the one that can think about the glory of God and his creation while he's framing out a house or something, right? That's what tools are. Extensions of the body. A glorious thing that tend us towards the perfection of our natures in and through their use and the perfection of creation and in through our operations upon it

Isn't that cool? Yes. Okay. That's what tools are. Yeah Yeah, I know it's three ages of tools so I don't want to jump ahead because second age Yeah, so the second age of the tool then I would jump pretty far ahead is The machine okay now machines are interesting because they don't quite extend the power of the body rather the human body and really the human person become has a different mode of

relationship to it he activates it okay what's it gives an example of a machine mmm do you mean something where the man has to be present it's like a drill not Okay, what's it give us an example of a machine? Do you mean something where the man has to be present it's like a drill not even necessary all I mean is that he is no longer Extending the motions of his body into the tool rather he is Serving as the thing that starts a process that goes on without him. A coffee machine. Coffee machine, an electric toothbrush. I push the button, right? Some ways I'm necessary to it, right? I had to push the button, I have to-

Hold it, direct it. Yeah, right. But what the fundamental work of the machine is going on without me, it's a pre-arranged system. Okay, I am the activator of a pre-arranged system. Now already you can see that this is different, right? Because you would hardly say that there's a master activator. Right?

Like this man can really push that button. Really knows how to work a toothbrush that's electric. Right, right. I mean, now within machine use, there might be moments of mastery, but it's always precisely when the machine involves tool use, right? Like, so you can imagine someone operating like a,

you know, like operating like a backhoe, which is not easy, right? But the places in which he can become a master in which he's part of that, that sort of movement of perfectioning his nature is in the extension of his body into the levers and to his knowledge of the capacities of the machine that he's, you know, So I might know how to use an electric toothbrush better than my son that's precisely in how I'm using it it's not an attack of a first yeah like I mean yeah yeah okay so that's the second age and we have you know some easy markers of the distinction like the button the button is something that belongs to the machine.

Because it activates systems that operate apart from us. And what's very important here is that we don't need to know what they are. We don't need to know how they work. We don't need to know even how to fix them if they break. It's a beginning of what people will call an alienation in the sense of I am alien other yes to the process by which I achieve the result so I say start a

mystery happens now can you know yes I mean think of a mechanic yeah mechanic when he's driving the car is an activator right but he knows what he's doing so there is an opportunity for a kind of I don't want to say mastery in the same sense as the tool Which is we've been defined as the extension of the body but in the set and the more generic sense of control He can fix it if it breaks, right? Yeah, it's interesting when the Locomotive the car Automobile first came out you would buy it and you would also get along with it a kit how to fix it. I'm not sure if you've seen these things. Now that seems absurd. I don't know how to bloody fix it. What do you mean fix it?

Well, and they're designed to be basically like large phones with wheels that are only fixable by being shipped back to their makers. Exactly. Which is, which gets us back to the smartphone. So what do you think, Matt, a smartphone is? A tool or a machine? Oh, okay. Well, uh, let me think about that. I mean, immediately I want to say machine because it's a series of buttons that do mystery magical things that I don't understand.

It projects my voice so it uses the power of, I'm using my power in some sense. If I call my wife in France like I did a couple of weeks ago, it's extending my power in some sense. If I if I call my wife in France, like I did a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, it's extending my power in that sense. It is. Yeah. But I don't feel like a master talking.

Yeah. What is it? I think it is a machine designed to feel like a tool. OK. Think about the what's a machine that's not designed to feel like a tool wherever the process that goes on is distinct from the activity that we call activation so I

push button a And then process B is a big mechanical arm comes down and fills a tube of toothpaste with with paste Okay. Yeah, the relationship is clear right I am activating a system designed by other men now you might critique it and say well this is slavish he's you know but you know it's also okay to activate systems designed by other men that's fine it's not like intrinsically bad it does come with a lot of worries and dangers and alienations, sure. But that's what I would say defines in some way the subjective experience of

machine use. Now I agree the phone is a machine, obviously. It's a weird multi-purpose machine that can do indefinitely anything or so the claim is. But think about its design and its basic use. So when I put my finger on a screen and there's like an unlock sliding, so the very first thing I do with a phone. Now, when I move that little unlock thing from the left to the right, okay,

there is a divorce between what's actually happening and what I feel is happening. Now. There is a divorce between what's actually happening and what I feel is happening. Yes. Now, what is actually happening? Well, I won't go too far into the technicality of it, but basically, uh, your phone is, it has a, a sort of

open electric circuit that's going on. And when you, when your finger touches the screen, it completes the circuit, right? Which gives the sense for, I shouldn't say sense. Now, now that is a coded signal that then goes to a pixel grid, which is several, I mean, it depends on the quality of the screen, but several thousand little lights that can change color, liquid crystal display, right? So that when I put my finger here and then move it slightly to the right, the signal is sent and a subsequent rearrangement of the pixels,

and not even rearrangement, it's not a rearrangement, it's that new colors are shown, right? And it looks different now. Okay, that is to describe machine use, right? I am putting an input that has an effect that is not directly related to the input, right? Like, it's not like me pushing it is the extension of my body in such a way that I can understand why 1000 pixels change their color. Okay, like this is distinction in the same way that we're talking about. You push the button, the toothpaste tube is filled or whatever, right? That divorce of the actual activity of the human body and then the result.

But that's not how it feels. Is it? Because when I take my finger and I move that thing to the right I feel like I'm moving a thing to the right. Yes. All right like I feel like I'm pushing a paperclip across a table. Yeah. Right or something like that. Yeah. Or something when you swipe to the next screen. You're pulling it over. Yes exactly. Oh mighty finger yeah. So this is touchscreen technology. I'm not trying to be mystical about it and I hope no one takes this sort of breakdown as like a

He thinks you know touch screens itself is evil again. I'm not saying this I just want to be clear on what I would call the third age of the tool is and what maybe we can just say it I would say smart technology Broadly tries to encapsulate what is happening here and And what's smart about it is the device. Because what's dumb about it is you. Because you are operating a button that feels like a tool. You are in the second age, but you feel like you are in the first. Why?

Because you feel within the swiping, the shrinking, the growth, you know, the spreading out, the tapping into, the pulling down and pulling up, you feel like you are extending the powers of your body into the given world and having an effect. You think you are a second cause in the universe. What's hidden? The mechanism. What's hidden is that you are in fact still operating the systems designed by other men and maintained by other men. Not only do you not know how to fix it, which of course you don't, but you don't even need to know

that you are in a relationship of dependence. And I wanna get right down to the very first moment of the use of the smartphone because the moment you swipe to the right and don't think about it and believe in what you're doing, you are in a relationship in which your experience of the real is in fact merely the activations of systems designed by other men who continue to hold it in in being and allow for you to use it But it feels like you're a master It feels like you're like you are I would say a human being but in some ways a god because you're doing incredible things on your phone Well, I mean even right now someone's probably in a bus somewhere watching us have a conversation like that's remarkable

Oh, I'm a Thomas Aquinas someone's probably in a bus somewhere watching us have a conversation like that's remarkable. Try to explain that to Thomas Aquinas. Buses let alone what a smartphone is. Okay, so the first age is a tool an extension of your body. The second is a machine. One of the dead giveaways is the button you engage in it activate it and then it does a process that you probably don't fully understand. What's the third age smart is some that the age of smart technology, the age of technology, which what it is essentially a dissimulation. What I mean is it is it can be defined as making the second age feel like the first. Okay, well, a light switch would be like that,

wouldn't it? No, no, how come? Because the distinction between the like I said would be yeah that would be it sorry say that again the distinction between the activating motion and then the result it's a machine yeah I do X I get Y now in a smart home I don't know I don't know exactly how like I'm not saying things can't move from one category to another so let's think a little bit more about the smartphone to get an idea of what I mean. I communicate broadly to the phone. There's a seamlessness to this communication and so in some ways I think you can see this in the phone prior to the smartphone in some ways. So I don't want to make like clear boundaries between the ages and say like the moment they made the iPhone that was it started.

But it's a extension of my powers for sure. Like you said my voice is extended. Now again what's actually happening. is extended. Now, again, what's actually happening? Well, microphone technology, the beaming up of data on the basis of that to a satellite, right? And I'm actually guessing here, but I'm pretty sure this is what happens.

This is your point that we don't really know. Right, right. Because you don't need to. And again, but then go to your experience of talking on the phone. Now, are you saying, all right, let me just be my voice up to the satellite here and it's coming in clear It's like no, of course not because the whole design of the phone is seamless. The whole design of the phone is to say That

the the fact that you are activating pre-existing system designed and maintained by other men men is What is hidden in smart technology? so man men is what is hidden in smart technology so this I think is the difficulty of the age that that we're living in because what I want to argue is that this in itself again is not an evil I'm not saying that somehow You know Touch technology is is evil. Mm-hmm. Although I think it's telling that if other ages saw it they would probably I Don't know they might think it was evil, right? But what is evil is that this relationship of man to the makers of his technology is being abused, becoming the

dominant and even the only way in which we get through our days. And it is actually moving real power and wealth from the hands of those who use devices to the ones who make it. And in some ways you can see why this would be the case, because maybe this is on a spiritual level or something, but if the nature of smart technology is to hide the fact that what you're really doing is activating the systems of other men there's a power right in those other men

how am I not activating the powers of other men when I turn the coffee machine on is it because they're no longer necessary uh-huh it's it's well it's twofold again the machine in machine age, I am saying you're activating the powers of the other men, but I'm also saying you know it and you feel it. So your subjective, phenomenological, first-person experience is one of going, boop, hey, getting coffee. I don't know how that happens.

I mean, you kind of do a little bit, but not much. But what I'm saying is the design of smart technology, of asking Siri a question and getting an answer, of being told where to go by a phone and following it or, you know, the touchscreen as we talked about is to not feel like that's the relationship. And I think it's sometimes hard for people to,

especially older people, even of my age, to grasp this as somehow like a big distinction. And it's because we all remember what smart technology replaced. So what I mean is like, like people that drove cars they could fix might then get a car that is a sort of a seamless experience might even get a self-driving car say,

and understand themselves in this relationship of activation still. You know, they might think it's kind of cool that they can speak to the thing and it speaks back or that they can sit back and it drives itself or whatever. But they understand the relationship. Now I don't recommend talking to like a 13 year old, but if you have to, take note that this is not

the experience of the generation rising up. Over the generation rising up, these devices are not modifications of other devices. I mean, who in their right mind, like I still remember when and And I'm not I'm not that old, but I still remember when email could be understood as Mail like a letter right like well We have this physical reality where the person is using tools that are extensions of his body in order to create something That's really his and to communicate through this through this means. Okay, that is what is being...

Okay, now I'm operating a system, yes, designed by other men, and I'm activating various things, but I know what is being replaced. But the idea that like the person on TikTok is somehow relating their efforts of communication, like feeling it as a sort of mode, right, relating their efforts of communication like Feeling it as a sort of mode right of of tool use I think is ridiculous I mean, they're really getting this as the universe the world is what I'm thinking of when you talked about the email is how

We used to have those floppy disks that you push into your computer and you would save things on it And now that has become the symbol for saving Yeah, still even though nobody knows what a floppy disk is in here All right precisely like the the relation of the digital to the real is increasingly only Available in like fossils like that and for those who are not archaeologists, they'll never know Okay And for those who are not archaeologists, they'll never know Okay Let's back it up because you asked me to give a critique right of the smartphone Well, you I mean I did but it doesn't feel too much like a critique. It's not yeah, this is a far preliminary description

Which is I feel like I'm disappointed me because every time no you were made for long-form discussions my friend. This is good Well, I mean, I think it's because this is this is really helpful To go this slowly honestly. Well, I think it's unfortunately necessary man I would love just to have a knock it out of the park thing but you know we can do it like you're addicted Every time you use a smartphone you're increasing the total need of all of society use a smartphone Which is an obvious near occasion of sin to pornography. So stop doing it and decrease the overall temptation towards an irrigation or towards pornography.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I see what you mean. Maybe we can do a bunch of those towards the end. Yeah, sure. I mean, I want those, but I don't think, I think- Even go to the airport. Like there was a fear in me that now I don't have a smartphone, will I be able to get on a plane?

Right, right, right. I can print that thing out. Okay, good. But will there come a day when I can't print the thing out? I presume there will. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. People that want to reject smartphones right now should be honest about what they're doing

in the sense that the end game has to be building a new kind of society. There's no, you cannot live in a world that is idolatrous and subsists on the production of technological devices Say no and still have your world This is why I think it's it's a I'm not trying to be like overly radical or anything. This isn't theoretical at all. I'm just saying that yeah Everything will be swept out from under your feet. So the question is it it's not a matter of select look at

first you do these things for self-preservation. Man I'm addicted. Yeah. I'm distracted. I haven't gotten real work done because I care so much about like things that are being shoved into my life through this phone. I can't sleep because things are buzzing or dinging like my leg vibrates when there's no phone there. These are personal. Like screw that. I don't want to be a slave. Like you can say these things and you can act, but if our actions don't then build up the requisite power, property, places, and persons. Wow, those really were all peas.

If they don't do that, then we're simply cutting off a leg without putting anything in its place. Gotcha. Or I suppose removing an artificial leg without regrowing a natural one would be more to the point, but more confusing. Well, I mean, just in my own personal life I'm finding that the fact that I live in

Steubenville has allowed me and is allowing me to make some of these choices. Like when I lived north of Atlanta the idea of not having a car one day would be insane. Now the idea of let's keep a car in the garage in case of an emergency But I guess I could walk to work. Yes, isn't as insane right because we're not individuals We're social creatures. You can't make decisions. I mean you can but The point of a critique of technology Becomes solipsistic and vain when it's just like,

here I am in this, you know, technological world and I, I have a dumb phone. I am more effective. I'm more able to make more money because of how effective, you know, you start. I think that's where I'm at. Well, that's a good place to start. Not the money thing so much.

I don't think it's the money thing so much, but yeah, I think that is, it is a solipsistic thing maybe because I am fully concerned about what it's doing to me and don't want it's the money thing so much. But yeah, I think that is, it is a solipsistic thing maybe because I am fully concerned about what it's doing to me and don't want it to do that thing. But I'm also interested in helping other people not do... Yeah, what I'm asking for, I suppose, is to... I want this to be a criticism because I wanna see how I could grow in this

and for this to be more of a healthy thing. I love that you've... Yeah, I'm only at that level. I'm only at the level of seeing it as it's fragmenting my inner life. Right. And I would like to be able to read a book without feeling the need to check a text message. Love it. That's where I'm at.

Well, think about it. I might be on that, but I'm not sure. And I don't, I think that's good. I think we need to take things personally you know we need to be hurt in order to make changes because guess what we are kind of selfish and we are motivated by love of self. Love of self is real it's even a good all right it's just often disordered and so if something is hurting us then we should get rid of it. I mean, some of the things Christ comes to tell us, like in the scriptures,

have this kind of real basic sense, like, don't be anxious. You don't like it. And it's like, oh, geez, it's like kind of hard to not be anxious and blah, blah, blah. And he's like, no, don't be afraid. You know what I mean? Like he just tells us to do things that we know we should and the first gesture is not, the first gesture towards conversion always has to be one of dissatisfaction with the world. I mean, you can't just sit and then see Jesus Christ

and say, you know what? This seems even better than this lovely thing I have right now because Jesus Christ is a destroyer. I mean he comes in you read the gospel of Mark. It's like page two He's banishing demons and just going to go into work, you know, and it's true today I mean Jesus Christ destroys structures of sin destroys the demons that that plague us And that are more able to plague us because of our technology which we should probably talk about Okay but this dare, I call it a tangent began because I was

You were actually being very kind about The long-form argument Because you asked me to critique a phone and I started no I'm talking about the three ages This is really helpful to me This is really like this is this is you're saying things that have laid half asleep in my brain for a while now Okay, well, that's good. They're waking up. That's good. Yeah. I mean, that's the first thing you have to think and then act The primacy of the speculative is a goofy thing that people say but it's true. I mean that you don't You don't just change that's that's a myth

That's like a technological thinking that we're all gonna sort of change the thinking the next version The people that really change are the people that stop Because then they can choose And we live in a world where we are no longer able to stop we don't have that luxury I mean, yeah when your phone breaks and you buy a new one, what are you choosing exactly? You know what I mean? Yeah. Anyways Okay, so I I think that one of the ways That the critique can be narrowed in on Is to look at what our devices are doing to us and understand it socially and not just individually because there is no man as an island

there is no psychological effect that is not a response to what surrounds us. One of the best definitions of anxiety is just that the world is off. And you don't know why. And we're more anxious than ever. And we're more medicated for anxiety than ever. But we always go towards the answer of like medication as opposed to saying the world needs to change, right? And right now, I think you're right, man.

I mean, when I first got a dumb phone, it was medication. I remember the day when I got rid of my smartphone and it wasn't thought out. Tell me about this. How long did you have a smartphone for and why and when did you get rid of it? I guess it must've been since high school. I mean, it wasn't, and this is important

because people don't really remember when they first get something when they're in the stream of technology. Do you know what I mean? So what I'm trying to say is I was just like that. I didn't choose. It's just like what was promoted, what was advertised, what was given like what was promoted what was advertised what was

given what was you know swallow the world but I have the misfortune of being Catholic and it's like this parrot on your back that's just like don't just swallow the world don't just swallow the world. I Mean quite literally in the Catholic critique of consumerism that the Pope's have well anyway, so I'm I'm not Addressing the problem of the phone. I'm not like okay. I'm gonna think this through I am growing increasingly sick How old are you at this point? I'm in college, undergrad, so I must have been like sophomore year. My friends would know.

Other people always keep better tabs on us, right, than we do. I find. We're not our best historians. Well, it's a growing unnamed loathing. I'm asking for a personal anecdote here. So when you say it's a growing unnamed loathing I'm asking for a personal anecdote here So when you say it's a growing unnamed loathing you're referring to what you were going through or are you talking more generally again? I am talking What I was going through. Okay. I'm saying that I found myself

Distracted I found myself Disliking disliking how much time I was spending on the phone, but it wasn't really the phone as such that was like the target of my loathing as much as I was the target of my loathing. I was like, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And I don't know, everyone's different. I know people that a phone for them is like, like they're detached, like they pick it up. They use it for the one thing that it's for.

And I think that's probably two percent of all. Yeah. Well, maybe it's, maybe I think 90% of humans think they're that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, I think I was, my conversion here is the growing realization that I, that I was not. And, and just an honesty the other thing is is the Like I struggle with pornography Which is of course every

As far as I can tell it's pretty much like the only coming-of-age moment that we have left in this culture is the decision to not watch pornography But the phone made that so hard, right? I mean now it's really funny on... I get texts to my dumb phone from like malicious spam bots with links to pornography. Yeah, but I can't, I can't follow. I'm the wrong demographic, technologically speaking, because the phone doesn't work like that. Okay.

So these things are sort of stewing in me, but vaguely. And I just remember the day when I blamed my phone. And that might sound cowardly, right? Like, shouldn't you blame yourself? Isn't it you and your own stupid sins and your inadequacies and pinning it all on the phone is like Some kind of way of shirking your real responsibility and in some ways. Yes in some ways. Yes Because of course it was me of course It's not like the phone made me do it the phone makes me distracted

It's like well, then you let the phone distract you But what moron would say that the phone isn't the means? I mean, it's just so funny. Like people know that the phone is designed deliberately to get you on it, to get you using it, to get you going from one thing to another and not putting it down. That every social media platform is designed for an infinite scrolling that you always can consume more. It's designed to take you away from life. It's designed to keep you away

so that you're continuing to look at ads in some form or another. But then, knowing this, we say things like, it's just a tool. It's like, yeah, okay, it's a malicious tool. Owned by somebody else working on you. Right, and who updates the tool so that it'll be more effective in keeping you on it.

I mean, as far as I know, shovels haven't gotten there yet. Okay. Anyways, I was sitting on a porch in Steubenville, the land of my longing, and I, actually now that I think about it, so you make me remember things that I forgot that this isn't actually the first time I did it so I was actually sitting on a porch in Virginia where my family lives and I took my phone I threw it and I didn't think about throwing it I just suddenly

did it it It was like. It's the only way I can imagine that when Christ says to cut off your right hand, it's probably the, if you ever did cut off your right hand, it's probably the speed at which you would have to do it in order to get it done. So I threw it at a tree and it broke. Nice. Yeah. But then, you know what? I, and I had forgotten this.

I got a new one. Yeah. I regretted it. I went back to it. I forgot about that. Yeah. Yeah, but then you know what I had forgotten this I got a new one. Yeah, I regretted it Forgot about that. Yeah. Yeah now that was maybe high school and then in college. I Was on a porch in Steubenville something about porches is important here. I like the Freudians. Sorry. Did I work this one out? And did the same thing through the tree? I just threw it I threw it I think into the street from the front porch to break Oak Grove. Yeah, bro These things are pretty solid these days. Yeah, I never had like a case I

think it it helps that I've never had like an attachment to material things in the sense of like Like I'm careless. It's not a virtue. I just mean no I know I'm like that too. So so there's no virtue there. So someone who actually like considers, you know, with respect to the fact that they paid money for something and yes, I'm not, I'm exactly like that. Yeah. So I don't mean this. I'm wasteful. Right. Exactly. And I think this is, I mean, this is, I think this is somehow how the Holy spirit works. I mean, look at history.

It's like, he didn't, he didn't like, he like takes our mistakes. He takes our sins and then uses that to convert us, you know Okay. Anyway, so it's I threw my phone and broke and this time I didn't go back and What I think is important. Maybe this is important. Maybe it's not but Is that this was not a rational? There all the rationale come back afterwards. I've been trying to explain why I threw my phone for like eight years now. It wasn't there. What I felt was that something that I was supposed to control was controlling me. Something that was supposed to extend me into the world was extending itself into my body. I felt sick to feel my body vibrate as if I was getting a text message, even though there's no phone in my pocket. You know what

I mean? Yeah. Like the control of the body was apparent. And I don't know, maybe it's just a, maybe it's just like a libertarian streak or something, but I just hate I Hate being controlled like that Because the people that are doing it aren't just Like if you're gonna tell me what to do at least love me You know if love me enough to know what's good for me and then tell me what to do right invade my life with your presence Okay What's good for me and then tell me what to do right invade my life with your presence. Okay All right. Now. I hope that I'm on a path to be able to achieve good freely, right?

where I don't I don't need you in this sort of lacking sense, but but love me right and More I think about it man. I Don't think they love us. I Think Zuckerberg hates us. Hmm Yeah, I think this is a act of contempt against the human race. Oh interesting. As opposed to say just not even considering you I mean, I would think that would be my first thing. Have you ever been not considered? Have I ever been? Have you ever been actively not considered? I guess I wouldn't know Well, it's a crappy experience and I think it is hate. Oh, I see. Yeah gotcha

Yeah Yeah, it would be like we could describe it right? Oh, he's just you know found a way to make money Yeah, he's doing it. He's not interested in you. Yeah, he's not trying to hurt you. He's not trying to love you Mm-hmm. That's what hatred is he? Like if anyone that I knew in my presence was like I don't care about you I'm just trying to use you to make money. That's not a neutral experience. Yes, right If you meant it I'd punch you Yeah, probably you're joking that I would laugh because it would be inhuman to say something like that

But that's my point. Yeah, what we're dealing with is an inhuman kind of hatred Right like like the kind of hatred that you expect from humans has the dignity of looking you in the face and hating you, right? I don't care about you You know and this is different to the shovel how because a man who say makes a shovel or some other tool Isn't aware of you. Yeah, it's gone. It's it's abandoned. It's like the book. I see it's given up. It's given up Okay, so he makes the cell phone is maintained like the first cause maintains all contingent things. Absolutely that's why they're gods and I do think they're they're gods lower G in the sense of the world

Increasingly it is only accessible to Those who operate their devices which they hold in being I mean the whole metaverse thing with Zuckerberg is just going on with that I don't care man. I love it. Love it. Yeah No, and it's true. I mean even When I got rid of my phone which was an iPhone and I got this Mac device But they make it increasingly hard for worlds to communicate with each other. The worlds of the gods, so the worlds of Google and the worlds of Mac.

Back in the day it used to be that you couldn't delete your map app, even though Google Maps was superior to the Apple Mac app. Maybe that's still the case, I don't know. Well I mean it's, let's put it this way, There's just less and less people that really own it all, you know So the diversification is increasingly becoming part of the illusion Yes, using Facebook or Instagram doesn't matter they own both Yeah, and we're so surprised. Oh, that was Gilded Age stuff monopolies. We would never do that again. We know better We've just we've just called them the the lion's share of the world's wealth into the hands of seven pockets

Into the hands of seven pockets pockets don't even have hands. You see how much this stresses me out You mind if we calm down Are you not calm? I just get I get riled up. Do you you didn't come across that way at all? Oh, man, you should see me when I get riled up. I Terrify you. This is why you thought my wife was a powerhouse because you thought you were just riled up Your wife is awesome. She is awesome. Yeah Yeah, let's take a break you can take breaks on this yeah, we'll come back I'm in control. I can do what I want.

All right, I wanna say thank you to Ethos Logos Investments for supporting this show, elinvestments.net slash pints. I guess when I was a bit younger, I thought that investing was something that only rich people did, or old people did, or rich old people did. I didn't realise it was something that I should be looking into as well. And when I began looking into it I realised I don't want to invest in companies that are doing immoral things.

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elinvestments.net slash pints. There's a link in the description below. elinvestments.net slash pints. For employers they offer socially responsible and Catholic 401k and 403b options as well. So yeah go check them out elinvestments.net slash pints. Securities offered through Securities America Inc member Finra Sipic. Ethos Logos Investments and Securities America are separate entities. Advisory services offered through Securities America Advisors Incorporated. Yes! The second group I want to thank is Halo. Halo is a fantastic app that will help you to pray and meditate. It's not like new age mindfulness apps that lead into wrong ways of thinking, this is a hundred percent

catholic and it's super sophisticated. If you go to hello.com slash mattfrad and sign up there, you'll get a few months for free before deciding if you want to pay a minimal amount every month to have access to their entire app. Now you can download the app right now and you'll get access to certain things for free, So be sure to check that out if you just wanna play around with it and see what they have to offer. But if you want access to everything that they have like sleep stories and Bible studies

and all sorts of beautiful things like that, you have to pay a certain amount every month to get access to that. If you want access to everything for a few months, just go to hello.com slash Matt Fradd, hello.com slash Matt Fradd hello.com slash Matt Fradd and sign up there thanks howdy hi no I I tell you what I it so much. I think part of the reason you talked about

being kind of solipsistic in our desire to free ourselves from that which binds us and solipsistic if we aren't then considering the communities in which we live and the society in which we wish to build. I think part of the reason I don't consider that is I don't feel like I have the power to do that. I feel impotent in the face of that. And that might be true in one sense. I have the power to change my own life to a large degree. I have the power to influence others. But the idea of building a different society while the Zuckerbergs and whoever else is in charge of shaping the

world just seems like not even possible. So how do I do that? Or is it not that I should feel responsible for doing it, just that I should be hopeful that it happens? Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I mean, become Catholic there's no way to resist the powers of this earth except for the power of Christ what the

Catholic Church is is the active building of the kingdom here on earth okay so insofar as We actually live our Catholicism We have resistance to tyranny Which is just sort of how I consider the the data lords of today. Yeah I'm sure they disagree but I doubt they'll watch this Again their whole goal speaking to what you spoke about before, is a YouTube video is rewarded if it is clicked on quickly and watched a great deal. So to your point about it's just about getting you in

and keeping you there, I'm part of that. That's part of why I want an interesting guest on the show. But I don't know if I'm like that I I I want to talk actually feel like I just want to people I like talking to yeah I'm less interested in doing that then look what the Pope did again Which sometimes I think needs to be discussed but yeah, I could make a whole career on that and I'd be Set to jet, you know, like I know how to no I know I know what to talk about I'm physically restraining naming names. Oh that do this because that seems uncharitable set to jet, you know? Like I know how to, I know what to talk about.

I'm physically restraining naming names of people that do this because that seems uncharitable. Sure. But they do, don't they? And they make bank doing it. It seems that way, but it might be naive of me to say, I don't know if it's a consequence of what they intend as good. Yeah. Because it's a consequence of what they intend as good.

Because it's a confusing day and age and confusing things need to be talked about. Because when they're not, I feel really isolated. Like, this is crazy, right? Like even like things like transgender stuff, you know? Like I just looked up transgender surgeries and how to make yourself a penis and how they do that. And that was like really weird.

And sometimes you sit in the world and be like, this is insane, right? And it's nice to have someone be like, yes, and here's why. And there's a ton of videos on that and they tend to make you feel less alone. So in that sense, videos about corruption and videos about things like that, I don't know if I'm appreciative for them or not. And I can't tell whether they're merely shills or what's the word grifters or I can't tell if that's What they are because I don't I don't know their heart. Yeah, I don't know if that's me being charitable or me being naive sure

I mean, I think This side of the last judgment Everything's a little bit mixed and hazy. Yeah, and Everything's a little bit mixed and hazy. Yeah, and People are after things they desire and they know to be good because people are not corrupt. We are good You're not like depraved So I shouldn't say we aren't corrupt we're sometimes corrupt but we're not depraved I'm totally depraved

but when you are also pursuing money, then it's easy to utilize the good for the sake of the money. And of course, we'll never know when that's occurring because that is in some ways an intention of the heart that only Christ can know, but he does. And there are some fruits to it that I think are apparent in the sense that I think when When you start to realize what will make you money through the use of the internet and its various organs. Mm-hmm

You are in a near occasion of sin you're tempted because it will always make more money to be less thoughtful and the same way that it's always gonna make more money to like have a screenshot of like a, you know, a naked woman or something as, or you know, partly naked, fitting within the law of YouTube and such. Yeah. That will always make more money than not. So the- As one priest said to me on a podcast humility rarely goes viral

Yeah, all right, and it rarely I mean we've been told this right like that in the world you will have struggles Maybe fear not. Yeah, and I think some reason we've just been like Yeah, but it's really hard to struggle in the world. So I would prefer not to have the struggles. I Wonder I want to know how I? Got real excited when I got the dumb phone, you know, and I'm excited about what else I can do It's like superpowers like I'm looking forward to getting rid of my dumb phone. Yeah now totally this is what I meant at the beginning And we still have a lot to talk about like with technology

So I don't want to I don't just assume that everyone's like, okay, you're on board now Let's just talk about the practical things, you know, yeah, but this is what I meant sort of by giving yourself a timeline because it is an exit strategy right like like How are trying to get out of the matrix how do we not be a battery powering but if you've seen the movie it takes a few steps yeah it's not just a one thing that's not even true it can be with technology I mean this is something that my my dear friend Andrew Jones points out is that seems like the powers of the earth have kind of put all their eggs on

one basket in some ways by doing this online thing because now conversion is as easy as throwing away your phone like in some ways It's as hard as throwing away your phone. But in other ways, it's like dude just look away You know what I mean? Like like we are increasingly building a digital infrastructure to keep people enslaved Which on the one hand is super scary because it's very totalitarian But on the other hand, it's super funny because it's like bro that's not even real you know well my now that I'm not even Dwight Schrute you guys you think this guy's gonna be screwed when this whole internet fad is over well what are they doing though what's Bill Gates doing I don't know buying up all America's farmland easy yeah I mean the

people that are actually maintaining the devices that we use are not they're buying real things and they're amassing real money. They're sending their children to schools without technology. Yeah as Bezos is you know known for his love of Montessori. See. Incredible. Can you believe it? They don't actually practice what they preach. I don't actually practice what they reach. I don't actually know about Bezos. I don't know anything about these people. I know they're rich. Let's talk about them for a second.

All right. All right. Not personally so much as in what's going on here. So I do want to make a social argument about technology. because I think that technology, smart technology, its primary motivation is a transfer of power and wealth and you could probably lump it all under power but and that can appear difficult because first off, because it is technology, it always has to serve some kind of human need,

even if it's inventing a human need, right? Like even if no, you don't need to post pictures of yourself, you just don't need to, that's invented. The fact that you feel it is wrong. But it appears as a solution to a problem, however that problem was developed, right? So it's never I mean, this is how tyranny works tyranny always has to mask itself, right? That's it would if if the devil revealed himself as devil we would be repulsed

So he reveals himself as an angel of light This is why he's called the father of lies and those then that do his work imitate imitate the master here well all I mean here is that it's easy to be confused because you can point to the obvious ends of a particular technological device as good, which they are, right? Because it is good, I have to emphasize this, to fulfill a lack, right? When it's real. And say, okay is this is doing that but

The way tyranny operates is precisely by providing goods like it can't do it. Otherwise, I mean right ridiculous even imagine Yeah, right Like they're not providing any goods and we're all addicted to this thing Well, that doesn't make sense like it has to latch on the good because evils of privation I mean, that's what's so beautiful about this universe is even if you really want to be evil You've got to maintain enough goodness in order to be evil. Yeah jokes on the devil man. Well the So what I mean is that they have that the apparent intention is not the whole intention in the device and you know this right like

Mark Zuckerberg had briefly doesn't talk about anymore because it's a little embarrassing, a plan for universal internet. He called it internet.org. And the way he was gonna give everyone internet, you know, going to the third world and give everyone a phone, that was his dream. But the phone would have a certain number of pre-arranged apps, one of which was... Facebook. Facebook, yeah. And he had these interviews where he's like, it's just the right thing to do. I mean, you know, you think about, you know, a kid that's in India and doesn't have a phone.

Well, if you give him a phone, he could potentially go on the internet and learn all of math. This was a quote, all of math. That's what he said. It's like, yeah, Zuck, is that the only thing going on right like that's that's what this is a humanitarian gesture so that you know can learn math on a less on a sorry on a lesser scale that's why I get upset when I get on an airplane they say our top priority is your safety no it's not it's not your top priority You want to make money and that's okay, but just be honest about Yeah, because it would be a there'd be an interesting world in which someone began with the motivation of safety

What do we want safety? How are we gonna get an airplane? Exactly, okay, so Zucks out there promoting universal internet, you know, Google does the same thing. They want to use Drone air balloons to basically provide Wi-Fi over the entire earth and then they have the gall to pretend like somehow this won't profit them Zuckerberg in an interview said something like I don't know how we're gonna receive returns on this But I believe that if you do the right thing like you will be rewarded It's like what are you talking about? This is the model for how you make money applied to other places Using Facebook. They don't don't lie to our faces. I mean, I mean, yeah, you don't care about our faces. We've established that but Facebook is crazy ironic. Well, that's why they have to rename. Yeah

Meta right have you learned about this Neil metaverse of you. It's happening. This is the thing what's happening? relish No, like technology behind that specifically. Yeah, sure. It's like a sci-fi fantasy. Relish the moments in which the operations of capital and power look silly and goofy. Metaphors? Yeah, just relish it because it doesn't last. Eventually they do change the culture, change the world, make it seamless, and then it doesn't feel goofy and silly anymore. Relish the floppy disk while you have it.

Yeah. Okay. But I was trying to make an argument. This is, I am thankful and, and tempted at the same time by the long form conversation. Um... What our technological age does is it exchanges ownership for rent. Yeah, how so? What does that mean? Well,

It's pretty simple. Let's just take an example. GPS is a good one. Everyone loves it. And again, it should be clear that in no critique of technologies, am I saying one is inherently bad or something like that? Yeah, yeah. Okay. But what GPS does is it exchanges an owned skill or a skill that can be owned for a skill that can be rented. So what I mean is fairly obvious, right? Like you can own the skill of map reading. And when I say own the skill, I'm really relying on the Catholic tradition of habits here. John Paul II says that

skill and know-how are more properly the property of today rather than like oil or land. It's what is being... it's what we have for ourselves, right? Because no one has land. But you have a skill of map reading, okay? It involves tools, obviously, the map. But we've already discussed this distinction, right? That the creators of the map are no longer present they abandon it to you and your uses there is no Omnipresent cartographer right in the physical map And you learn how to get around it's not just maps though, right? It's like the skill of asking someone for directions or conversely socially the skill of being able to give directions

I mean, this is funny in a world in which knowing you can can everyone's looking at Their phones. So it's funny is to ask someone how to get some yes Like they have to like alright with Sun rises and you know Yeah, okay. I'm jumping ahead though. So what? What Google Maps does is it exchange something that's possible to have as a habit of our soul? Yeah of our being right like call it the skill of navigation. Right? This is something that you can have, maybe a master of. Do they need to blare that horn as much as they blare it here in Steubenville? We're listening to a train by the way, everyone listening. All

throughout the day I've almost I've almost come to love it and not hear it but it's like. It's every you know uh, crossing they have to by law. Cool. Anyways, I like where you're going with this. Yeah. Yeah. I could have the skill of navigation, but instead I choose to become dependent upon a thing. Now this is an exchange of ownership. Now why isn't an exchange of ownership for rent? Well, because you think about rent,

I mean, I think people think, I think most immediately is of houses, right? So you have, you could own a house, in which case you have the terrifying prospect of being responsible for the house. But you are also free with the house, right? You can do wild things with it, or at least things considered wild

or you cannot. Whereas with a rental property you are paying someone to maintain, to offer up, and to continuously maintain the shelter for you. Which is why I think, by the way, rent is always a remedial work that no one should be satisfied with, either landlord or renter, that there should be. And the popes have taught this, that all our labor should tend towards ownership of productive property, something often forgotten. That the Catholic Church is the defender of ownership. They want us to have things. And right now they're the great defenders of having things in terms of skill, which is in some ways scary that it's come down to this. Like, what do we have? Something in us, our very bodies and minds are what we're trying to defend here.

But the Church is the defender of it. And this is almost more relevant right now than like defending private property considered as land, um, which they still do, which is awesome. Okay. This is, yeah, this is great. So when I use Google maps, I exchange a skill of navigation, which is achieved the way all habits are achieved by repeated activity right and which creates in me a particular character for a rented commodity right which I operate not knowing how it works in the mode of dependence I need it to be given to me and if anyone doubts this just let the GPS fail and you will find that you are in

fact dependent And in a way that you almost want to say does not produce character Let's back this up because we have to Habits produce character character. It's a Greek word. It means stamp. It means that you're shaped into a particular kind of person. Okay, what makes a farmer kind of farmer-like? Well, the fact that he farms, right? He does the thing, his hands get tough. He gets sort of pessimistic and ironic about weather.

You know, he becomes a kind of person. And then what's great about this fact is then you meet him and you can know him in his body, in his acts, in his language I mean he gives himself to you this is what it means to say someone has a character this is why it's one of the greatest insults in the world to say someone lacks character because what you're saying is actually like they don't have a definite shape like yeah I ran into someone very amorphous today and

didn't really leave an impression because no impression was left on them yeah unfortunately we're creating these kinds of beings but the way we're creating it is by no longer having habits of soul, right, but instead renting commodities that give us the same results. So what I mean is if you consider navigation, because that's what we are in fact considering, knowledge of place, of where to go, right, is not a dry encyclopedic kind of knowledge. It forms a kind of person and you know this if you've ever met a student of a local, right, who not only knows how to get where you want to go but knows which building was there before the old one was not or you know, which building was there back then the ability to

Navigate a town right Creates you into a kind of person who does certain kinds of things right who knows the fastest way but also knows the slowest way Right who can who can enjoy a certain? right? Who can enjoy a certain comprehension of place, right? That simply isn't present in the one that's driving through it with no knowledge, right? You're becoming someone particular and it's that particular person that's ultimately judged and saved. With the renting of a commodity, you do still do something that creates a habit, but it is the habit of activating the device. Okay, so what kind of person do you become by using Google Maps? Well, you become the kind in respect to that use, you become like the other person that uses Google Maps because the mechanism is unchanging.

When we talk about habits, we talk about activities in the world, your knowledge of place is not my knowledge of place. Your capacity for navigation is not my capacity for navigation. It communicates, right? We can communicate to each other. It's related because we are related in brotherhood by virtue of our common nature and even more so by virtue of belonging to the church. Our navigation should become holy

navigation ultimately but for the use of for the use of Phones, that's not really it's not really the case. Like could you and I have a discussion on them? You know everything we've learned from Google Maps or something like that, I mean it's a ridiculous scenario, okay So in the exchange of an own skill for a rented commodity, what's lost is the particular character that's developed in having the particular acts that

develop the habits of things like navigation. And what's replaced is not someone without habits and without character, but a particular kind of person whose habit is activation of device, whose character is formed through becoming accustomed to get from point A to point B in obedience to directions given to him by renting it from Google. Now, again, as hard as this is to say, Directions given to him by renting it from Google now Again as hard as this is to say I'm not actually saying that one is

Worse than the other. I mean, I think objectively I Would prefer owning the skill of navigation everyone would but I'm not saying that there's something like Intrinsically evil about renting a commodity where you don't have the skill Okay, that that needs to that needs to be said now there might be something of just straight laziness like But two things need to be noted before we get to the real crux of this One is that We tend to think of this as an individual choice I could either

learn and grow in the habit of navigation, become familiar with my town without the mediation of technology, and thereby become this particular person, or I can, you know, rent from Google or whatever. But as more and more people make the same kinds of choice and become the same kind of character, it becomes harder and harder for anyone to develop an own skill, because we live and die as a body Not as not as individuals, right? There's no member apart from the body So what I mean is simple. I had this experience in in in Oxford Because I didn't have a smartphone and I was also in a new place

I didn't have a habit of navigation that was related to Oxford So I'd asked for directions But if you asked for directions from someone under the age of like 30, you were toast. Because they even even as locals didn't necessarily know their locale because they were habituated to following directions from Google. So I'd literally would go up and say, Hey, how do I get here? They'd say, Oh, just Google it. I have I'll look up the address for you. And I'd say something like, you know, I just, and I would be lying at this point. I would things like my phone it broke I just don't want to be weird

yeah now I shove it down the throat so I don't have a phone I don't really that's yeah well they didn't have the culture of navigation to give to me and I didn't have the capacity to receive it from them. Right? And you can think of this even like in kind of crass market terms. Like is there a market for physical maps outside of like tourist areas? No. So is the design... so you push this to its extreme, okay? There's no real... there's a shrinking market for physical maps. There's a shrinking need for navigation, and there is a shrinking memory of how to navigate. Do you think that a person is going to be able

to own the skill of navigation with ease in 30 years? No. No, it's gonna be extremely hard, right? And I use GPS because it doesn't really concern me much in the sense of like, I'm trying to use a very boring example so that we can talk about everything. But what I wanna show is that, A, the exchange of ownership for rent

is also the exchange of the particular character one becomes for a repetition of the technological man who is characterized by his activation of devices, right? At least in so far as that's what you do. And then, and then, that this is a social reality that tends towards the necessity of the thing that was once a luxury. Enough people using a luxury becomes a necessity. Yes. This is like cars are the

obvious example of this. You brought up this quote, right? Where I said, the man with a car in a world designed for feet is a god. And it's because you have an awesome device, a machine that can make you go 80 miles per hour. This is really cool. Everyone should be impressed by this and they are. I mean, some are furious by it,

but the point is that you kind of excelled as a human. But then what we did is we all wanted the car. So we all got the car. Are we all gods now? Well, maybe for a little bit, but then we took it one step farther because we're social beings. We built the world for the car Okay, so it used to be that You know, you could pretty much presume you'd have a grocery store and a uh bar within walking distance

Which totally eliminated the problem of drunk driving as well as drunk shopping. Wait, no, I didn't do that Well now you can't you can't presume that at all, right? In fact, in Steubenville, the downtown here is, you know, it's a technical term, a food desert, which means that if you do not have a car, you cannot get fresh produce. You know, people they mock the poor here. I mean, everywhere they mock the poor because they're mockable and they don't bite back that they're unhealthy. They love Mountain Dew, right? This is an American trope here, right?

Yeah. It's like, yeah, that's all they can buy because they don't have a car. So they go to the gas station. That's where they get lunch and dinner. Okay, getting a little personal here, but it does frustrate me. Yeah, me too, yeah.

So in a world built for feet, we're gods, in a world built for car, we start spreading everything out because we now can. The car makes it accessible. But once the world spread out, you spend the same amount of time in the car to get to the places that you otherwise could have gotten on feet.

Hey, it's a 10 minute walk, now it's a 10 minute drive. And we think of the world as being close to us because it's within a 10 minute drive So the world's actually spread out And in its spreading out has shifted power into the hands of people that can operate spread out utilities and machines and stores and devices right like like utilities and machines and stores and devices, right? Like, like, the reason Walmart can't be in like a city center is because it's very operation, I mean, it can, like with difficulty. But the point is that it's made profitable by virtue of a car world, of a world in which anyone from anywhere can drive to one place not and have the same

experience, right? So America is really I mean you probably noticed this that when you drive in America unless you get off the highways It's just one big place. Everything's the same I'm getting into other aggravations ahead. I want to hear all of them well, I mean it involves the car involves the homogenization of culture because once place is Conceived once closeness is conceived of falsely By which when we say closeness what we mean is

Through giving some people money for oil and gas and giving other people money to maintain This car I can now go to a giving other people money to maintain this car, I can now go to a place 10 minutes away which would previously have taken you know an hour an hour and a half of walking say. And so what happens is the world begins to cater to someone that has no particular place but who is always accessing places, which by virtue of that become no longer particular. I mean, the world caters to what we make.

And this is a process of seeking profits in some ways, but it's also just a process of we get the world we build the world we build yeah this is this is also I mean I'm thinking of all these different examples all of them are quite simple but I mean even little things like back in the 90s we might have watched a show like friends or something you know which was a self-contained episode you didn't necessarily need to know what happened the episode before although there are there are some sort of running narratives Whereas now that we've created Netflix. There's a demand for constant

long form Stories which again isn't necessarily bad. I suppose one of the better results anyways, I think yeah Yeah, I mean, I'm not like it sounds like a critique. Well with the card is a critique. I I Think a more pedestrian world is probably what Jesus wants. Yeah, well this is difficult, right? Because the car, like the phone, like every other piece of technology, is now necessary for survival in a sense. Like unless I choose to need a lot less than I think I do, I'm going to have to continue using this thing. And this goes right back to the beginning. And it's a luxury to throw the thing away. That's the other thing.

Like, oh, good for you, mate. You can throw out your bloody phone. But I can't do that. It's not a luxury I have. Totally. Same thing with the car. Absolutely. Yeah, no, that's what I mean by the food desert.

I'm not saying, like, it is necessary to get a car. I mean, if you want goods like health for instance, yeah Yeah, I I So how the heck then do I change how I live? I mean it has to start locally doesn't it? I suppose yeah, I mean this goes right back to the beginning of our discussion that The problem is not the device the problem is when the device is no longer a response to a particular need but becomes its own justification in the sense of positing a universal and constant lack to human nature. And this is achieved through advertising, this is achieved through simply pursuing profits

as a company, it's achieved through addiction. It's cheap to a lot of mechanism, but but the point is that If you needed to get somewhere, you know hundred miles away very quickly Then a car could fulfill that need But once you posit this as a fundamental lack in human nature aka everyone should have a car because human nature itself needs a vehicle, then you have permanentized and absolutized what was in fact a limited condition of scarcity. And what's weird about doing that is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates the very conditions that it pretends it's driving against, right?

Yes. I mean, think about it. Once you develop a car world and you take commerce and you move it all outside of your city so that people are driving to where they need to buy things like food, you create the actual conditions by which the car is necessary, namely the closure of all local markets walkable by foot. So you create an ostracized class of pedestrians who now need to do by necessity what once they were supposed to simply do by luxury. And the irony of it all is then the device loses all

Retention to divinity and becomes as humdrum as any other necessity now you need a car like you need socks So the car is about as exciting as socks Me think about how fun it must have been to be the Wright brothers. Mm-hmm. They wanted to fly That is so cool. Now we fall asleep on airplanes. Yeah, we shut the visor. Boop, because the sun's in our eyes. Like what, when you alter the world by extending that particular limit, maybe there was a need to fly somewhere far away. I buy it. But when we say that human nature is limited and all the world must be accessible by plane, we get what we deserve.

All the world is accessible by plane so all the world is as boring as a world that was accessible by cars. How do I rebel against this world? I mean I think it is, I think you are calling us to do it. I mean you've said a number of times you're not critiquing these things, we're calling them intrinsically evil and I agree but in a way I think you're kind of alluding to the fact that well, what's evil is that we have Joined the particular creation of a technology to meet a particular lack with an indefinite Striving for profits in which in which you cannot but I think about this If you want to fly

Then you work to make a plane and when you make a plane and you're flying, you're like, this is rad. I just made a plane. You go home and you sleep the best night's sleep you've ever slept because, you know, damn it, you can fly. Okay, so that's a motivation. That's a great motivation. I bet Adam had that motivation in the garden. Now imagine your motivation is profits and you have a plane. Or maybe you're the one that made the garden. Now imagine your motivation is profits, and you have a plane, or maybe you're the one that made the plane. Now, have you achieved the goal of profit when you produced the plane?

Probably not, probably you've achieved debt, first of all. But even if you have, profit doesn't have an endpoint. I mean, it's literally infinite. Have you made enough profit today? I don't know. What do you mean by profit? Do we mean more than I need? Yeah money Okay. Yeah money Beyond the necessities of your life and vocation So you need money in a certain amount right you need for your family

Yeah, you need it because you are in service to the poor. They're called your children and in service to a community you have a certain role here and you are obligated by God and neighbor to live that role well and some of that involves use of money. But that's a limited amount. The degree to which you know yourself is the degree to which you can say how much money you need. Oh, that's good. This is what Aquinas says.

He says that it is unjustified to have any amount beyond the needs of your vocation. Office, he says office. But I think vocation is a fair. That's a really, I love that line you just threw out there. To the degree in which a person knows himself, he should be able to say how much he needs. And that's going to be relative.

Totally. Because I really want to go to Florida in February with my wife to get away from the grayness of Steubenville. I don't need to Totally. Because I really want to go to Florida in February with my wife to get away from the greatness of Steubenville. Yeah. I don't need to. I really, really want to. Yeah.

And will. Yeah. God willing. Yeah. So at what point do you realize you're just being hoarding money? I mean, even like we could debate your vacation vacation to Florida But the point is that it's specific You might be wrong or right, but you have determined that it is what the thing that you want and

I would hope being Catholic you actually want it because you think that in some way it will serve not simply like your base desires, even though it might do that too, but serve not simply like your base desires, even though it might do that too, but The good of your family. Yeah, you know if it's for others if it's just for you. It's it's a little bit suspicious, right? No, that's good. Okay, but the point is that profits aren't like that Profits are not Florida profits are not even a castle Right. Those are limits, right? The human person is only nothing assigned to nothing assigned to it. Is that the point? That it's just sort of this... Yes, there's nothing assigned to it precisely. Yeah. I mean people posit this profit motive, like that we have this desire for an indefinite more.

I think this is false. I think you have to produce that in people and it's called greed. But to get back to the question of technology we asked well why is it that we are so unable to limit the production of technology to particular ends right like why does everyone have to have a phone why does everyone have to have a car why does everything presented as a development become a necessity in an increasingly or a decreasingly short amount of time.

Because the world changes. Because the world changes, but it changes because when it's a drive for profit, it's also got to be a drive to get that device to an indefinite number of people and an indefinite amount. We can barely even imagine what it would be like to say, I mean, because in some ways it is unimaginable

because we create devices from the beginning with this in mind. So of course it's ridiculous to say like a limited smartphone that only some people need to solve a particular problem. Because the whole point of the design of the smartphone is it was profits, which goes back to what we're saying, that there is an ulterior motive in These technologies that are never quite abandoned

To our use and that is the profit of a few wealthy men We're gonna bring it back one more time Matt you gotta you had a hang with me here so the the The, uh, I hear a car reversing and that's appropriate because I'm, I'm reversing. Uh huh. Yes, it was good. Now it's accelerating code. Okay. So back to navigation. The, the thing that I'm claiming is that the reason we live in the world we live in is in some

ways because people are just greedy. And it's as simple as that. Because all of the discussion we have of systems or designs or capitalism or socialism or a technological age, they mask the fairly obvious question that we're either doing good things or bad things. We're either sinners or saints, evil or good, virtuous, vicious, pointing towards heaven, pointing towards hell, city of man, city of God. This is the reality and everything else is a mask. So that's why I want to say simply that the reason technological devices tend towards

an infinity of use, which subsequently changes the world into their image and renders them boring and ready for the next change is because of greed. Because people are greedy. And we have found it extremely profitable to Create the permanent conditions of lack and then sell the devices that claim to solve that lack That produces profits. What does not produce profits is to create Devices that solve a limited lack and then have no further use is that a fair like clear kind of I think so Look because sometimes you can get the idea that like the device itself proliferates Just promulgates itself throughout the society because it's it's just so good

Aquinas makes this distinction when he's talking about how wealth can't make us happy right? He makes artificial wealth. Yeah, and he said the infinite for which is Infinite, I think he says yeah, obviously you have uh Uh, whatever the opposite of artificial wealth like dwellings and cars and the like yeah you don't have an infinite desire for infinite doughnuts or infinite houses now you'd get sick yep or as the book of Isaiah says woke to him who built house upon house until he is alone in the land oh eventually you get lonely by buying up all the all the houses.

Now the last thing I want to talk about to finish the discussion on navigation because it will help be the we can use it as a sort of template for discussing other attributes of the phone, a smartphone, which by now I hope it's clear is not limited to the smartphone, but yes, it's sort of the container as aware of these things Is rent yeah rent rent rent Most technology developed now Is a different way of exchanging ownership for rent? now what we need to remember with rent is that it is defined in its aspect of the continued presence of the real owner, right? And that ownership is

replaced with access. Okay, so I don't own Google Maps in any way, I don't own the habit of navigation, I access it from another. But there's another part of rent that's really obvious and that's payment. Payment is the point. The movement from ownership to rent is not just because like rent has been found to be more convenient or better for society. The movement from ownership of rent is that

it is the movement from people not continuously paying money to a thing, to continuously paying money to a thing, to continuously paying money for a thing. And if we could just back up and take the macro vision here. We live in a world in which the most wealth in human history has been accrued in the hands of the fewest number of people. Now, the idea that this is somehow unrelated

to the fact that most ownership is exchanged for relationships of rent is insane. Right? It's just to deny the obvious. But let's go into it a little bit because you might say, I'm not renting Google Maps. I've made no subscription payment. The landlord has not knocked on my door etc and I think that's correct to feel that way because it behooves the owners of Google Maps to hide the fact that you are

renting from them why well it doesn't behoove a landlord to hide the fact that you're renting his house because you need the house right so him at your door it could be a threat it could be good because he's coming to fix the dryer or something but the point is that you need shelter and He is providing it. His presence is acknowledged. It is there. He's both responsible Capable of vice capable of virtue, but ultimately he can be held responsible for being like a bad landlord, right? Not so much with our devices because because we don't need them. So when there's something you don't need,

then you start to ask yourself, why am I paying for this? No, it's a good old American response. I don't know if they have this on Australia. What am I really paying for here? Yeah. Probably they do. No, I think so, yeah. Australians are rednecks, that's the secret.

Yeah. Well, we won't get into what Australia is doing right now, but okay. Yeah Why am I paying for this is a question many people ask themselves when they realize they don't need the thing that they're expending money on Absolutely, and so there's there's one of two answers one is you make the thing necessary in which case you then can appear as the Landlord of rights. Yes, or you hide the fact that the rent is happening and that's what they're doing So the way Google Maps makes money, it's really interesting. They map out the world

and then they assign symbols to locations. Hotel H, say. Or restaurant R, I mean probably a little thing with pizza or something. Now if you're a corporation you have enough money you pay Google and they put your image Instead of the generic one that they use. Hmm So they get money that way Now that does that feel like rent? No, it doesn't feel like rent at all But it is why because the reason it's profitable for those business to give Google money is because they know that you

Will be more likely to choose them. Yeah by virtue of the familiarity you have with their logos That you're gonna choose Marriott that you're gonna choose McDonald's that you're gonna choose over The unknown of the real I say the real world the local world anyways You see I'm saying so there is an exchange of money happening. It's just mediated through a third party Which is usually another big corporation. Yeah, I mean I think a more another example would be you've never paid to use Instagram I Forget who said it if you're not paying for it. It's because you're the product product. Yeah. Yeah

I mean, it's just ads as far as I can tell Like it's a lot of ads. And Facebook's brilliant in this way because they used to have advertisements. That was how you paid your rent, right? And they're on the side. But then because they have increasing, they have it continued control. They can do what they want with Facebook and they do. They then move that into the newsfeed. So they deliberately created a lack of distinction between what your friends say and what your corporations say fitting for an age

which we have a lot of corporations and people have less friends than they've ever had you know this yeah what I know this in 1985 they did a study and most the average person had ten close friends And now it's like two. Anyways, not the point. Point is that- Same thing is on Twitter. I remember it was several years ago when Twitter started advertising in your feed back in 2013 or 14 or something like that.

I remember hearing that and somebody said, this isn't gonna last. Like they'll, no one will use it anymore. But I mean, I don't use Twitter, but I presume you're scrolling through and seeing what some people are saying and what as you say corporations are saying. So you're the product and that should bother you. Well, what's really amazing, I mean I don't use Twitter but I presume you're scrolling through and seeing what some people are saying and what as you say corporations are saying So you're the you're the product and that should bother you. Well, what's really amazing?

I mean, look, there's two ways to look at this. One is the naive pursuit of wealth says Well, we made this device and people aren't clicking on the ads. What else can we do? The other is to say yeah They knew that no one was gonna click on ads when they had content they actually wanted so they got you Habituated to receive from a newsfeed and then they added the ads to it once you weren't gonna look away. I Don't know which happened. Jesus knows and he will condemn But I don't know it just seems I guess awful convenient that every single

Social media device begins with a free period essentially in which ads are either non-existent or extrinsic and Then once people are addicted, okay, and this addiction is not hyperbole I mean they are we know this right like it's it's the dopamine hit of new information of The your need for love being satisfied in Notifications that your friends are communicating with you indeed in a world that's increasingly actually alienated and so these become You know, it's a self-fulfilling thing again Okay, then they introduce the ads You've been habituated to receive love and friendship and now you're getting it from

Arby's I don't know In order to change the way things are in our communities, we need to first change. So I think that's right. Well, let's look at, yeah. In the sense of detaching myself from the matrix and then in order, it's kind of like the, put your mask on first and then save the person next to you, the mask and the airplane.

Yeah, yeah. So I think I see what you mean, that our motivation has to go beyond, I don't wanna live a distracted life, therefore I'm getting rid of my iPhone and getting rid of social media like it well I'd say even I'm gonna say this much like like you have to make a social act you have to to build an alternative society to a pagan slave state because because of the very things we're talking about like it's not

a choice to have a car, it's a necessity. And you might, for whatever reason, chance, wealth, be lucky enough not to be free of that necessity, right? But my point is, even if we wanted just goods for ourselves, we have to create societies in which those goods are possible. That's what I meant by the example of navigation. It's like...

That gets back to my point though about feeling impotent to do that. How do I create a society that's different to this thing that's run by the powerful? Let's think of a list here of what we're renting instead of owning. Okay, we used to have a skill of sexual arousal, an owned habit, okay? And it could be used obviously badly. Now increasingly we rent it from pornography companies. So the way this is described is, oh, pornography seems to be associated

with male impotence, right? Or erectile dysfunction, which is just a specific way of saying you need the thing. Right. So instead of an own skill, right, which you develop in relationship to people, one hopes your lawfully wedded wife, right. Or husband. You now pay a little bit of money through add time, through your attention span,

through actual, I mean, I don't know spending money That still happens You know give a little money to the owners of this earth in order to get your sexual arousal, okay So you rent that yep, you're at navigation. That's obviously obviously true. You rent communication, right? That's the the basic you know, social media format. Not fully. Like your words are your own. Gets a little dubious once you get to hashtags, whether the words are your own, but you know, you're still writing, but you are renting the means by which you hear from others. Entertainment, obviously we rent from wealthy corporations, largely in California, New York city. Um, and in all of these cases, what there's, there's an owned community, like a community of ownership that's destroyed in

order to get the community of rent, the relationship of rent, right? So a actual, um, ability of communities to entertain themselves, especially in the arts, theater, music, the live show. I mean, COVID has just accelerated a lot of the stuff, but it was already there. We had already literally destroyed the theaters of most small towns in America. Literally destroyed most of the concert halls. Like literally disbanded musical groups like symphonies and such. I I mean they're there in big cities

This is the point right and it becomes a luxury that some people can afford but the overall Trajectory is that we exchanged an owned relation an owned reality of entertainment like a community owned I don't mean individual for earplugs and an iPhone for rent right so pay a little money We get the same thing the difference is Within an owned community that money that that is used the labor that's used builds that community up In a relationship of rent it builds up the landlord Right, so we entertain ourselves without developing a society of entertainment because we don't own things. We don't have theaters We don't have we lose the skills quite literally. But we pay for it. So then that... those folks

get richer. And that's in fact what they've done. I mean, they... I can't stress this enough. I mean, they own most of the world. And I'm being literal. Bill Gates owns most American farmland. I mean, farming is a really good example of all this. You know, in the sense that we, stripped our communities of the, I mean, literal, we stripped our communities of the ownership of farmland and of the skill of farming. We don't know how to do it on a small scale.

Broadly speaking, that is a lost skill that is being revived by people who are sick of it, right? Especially around here in Steubenville, a lot of people doing this stuff. It's great Okay, but what do we do? Well, we we rent eating I Mean it gross like the the big grocery store the the agribusiness Model of a few people who own the farmland will produce corn and Soybeans make that into money. We will use that money to buy crops from elsewhere Ship them in and that's what we'll buy at the grocery store. Okay, fine. That's a system

But it's a system that takes the actual power and wealth of a particular people gives it to others who don't care about them at all, right and then eats the scraps. And usually they're unhealthy scraps. So how, I mean, I feel like one of the reasons I- Do you want me to name more things that we're renting? No, I mean, we can go there. We can go there. This is one of the reasons I do love being in Steubenville.

I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, man. I'm happy you're here. Thank you. It feels like people really care about the town. We have people putting on Shakespeare in the park and Rob McNamara Dr. Rob McNamara had the jeweler shop playing down the road

I love that I guess that was a movie theater at one point up there. I love that doesn't seem to work. That's great We're restoring it, but is it gonna be a movie theater or are we gonna do something more interesting? Theater for sure. This is nice. I love that what new polity is doing where y'all are working with local farmers around Steubenville So that people can buy their products and then every Saturday they come to the new polity building and people get to buy instead of from Bloody Kroger People that they know yeah Literally, which is also care about and what to flourish. And people that you can yell at. Actually, I had a great conversation with Dave Matthews.

A legend. A legend of the community. The man, the myth. Because I asked him about, I wanna get some cigars, you know, and he buys from this one bloke, you know? And so I buy from this bloke a couple of times. And then my question, in all seriousness to Dave,

was is this like any cheaper going through this guy? Like what, should I just get him online? Like why shouldn't I just get him online and go through this guy? And he looked at me and went, cause it's more human. And I was totally put in my place. That's awesome.

That's a beautiful thing. It is beautiful. To pay a person who I know who lives in my community to do this thing, benefiting him, as opposed to online. And can I make an argument that it's not just an extrinsic thing, like Dave's right, it is more human. But what being more human does

is get gets us more goods, not less. So sometimes we have a very sacrificial mindset, like, okay, here's all the goods, now just, you know, beat your breast, put on your sackcloth and die to the world as you become Ground under the foot of the large corporations who you've rejected out of spite in principle It's not really like that. It's not that bad. I mean Well hat what actually? What actually happens is again, you just need to take a step back

Okay What do you want? You want good things? What are those good things? Again, you just need to take a step back. Okay. What do you want? You want good things. What are those good things? Family. Peace, love, leisure, joy. Beautiful countryside.

Whiskey on the porch. Yeah. A good book. Stimulating conversation. Contemplation of the truth. That's the point. That's why we're living. So when the question becomes...

Alright, you got ground beef from, say Kroger, costs $4.00. And you've got ground beef from, dang, who's making the beef? A-C-C Farms, friends. Beautiful. $5.00. Now, on the one hand, you could pretend

that the wisdom of the world is true and say, as a consumer, I have to pick the cheaper option. This is the way the market works and the market must be free and I must be a market consumer. So I will buy the $4 beef. It's not that I think that's wrong. I think it's unrealistic because you just said what you wanted out of the world and it wasn't cheap beef but what it was was family, was friends, was community, was beautiful countryside but that is achieved only by making it possible for families and friends to live near and around you and that's only achieved by buying their beef. You see what I'm saying? Like that dollar is not a dollar

that's like disinterested. It's not charity dollars. Catholics are obligated to do everything they do for the common good, but it is not the case that you are not a part of the common good. You're the most familiar part of it. Right? Like you know yourself and you want goods for you in community because there's no divorce here. Like we belong to each other, we're members of a body. I mean if Jesus told us anything it was that. So what I'm saying is the... When we look away from relationships of rent and towards relationships of ownership, I think it's unhelpful to describe this in self-sacrificial terms.

Yes. Because I don't think it's true. I think there's initial sacrifices that have to be made, obviously, because nothing good happens without sacrifice. But the point is that nothing good happens without sacrifice. Yes. Sacrifice for its own sake is this weirdo myth. It's not true.

It's not... Catholics get this way. I think it's because we're kind of French in some way. We have this like, sacrifice itself thing. It's a thing. It's like buddy. You're not sacrificing in heaven. Sorry. It's not the goal Right. Yeah goal is the good. It's the goods and it's specifically the enjoyment when I To bring this to a personal level when I was off the internet in August I got to play volleyball a couple of times a week at 6.30 in the morning with a few guys much younger and more talented than me and then we'd come down to Leo's and have a coffee and come up to my office and chat for a bit and

there was even one time where we kind of recited the different poems some of us had memorized. That was that wasn't a sacrifice. That was that was the most beautiful part of my year. Yeah, sacrifices are like by definition for something. If they're not then you are actually making sacrifice not sacr a sacrificial if you want it then it's not sacrifice Yeah, so what I'm saying is we can get pessimistic and say look You know, we got a rent we got a got to get these goods But what I'm trying to say is that the kind of world that I think we honestly want is better achievable by communal ownership of our world, our habits, our skills, our property,

our wealth, our land. Okay, now when you're saying that, that's going to make people nervous. When you say communal ownership, people are thinking you mean several families own a house and that it's wrong for them to own their own property. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Of course. I mean the sense that we're an interdependent whole. Yes.

Like my joys and enjoyment of this life is possible through your existence. And so when I have a skill or when I have a bit of wealth or I have property, it is proper for it to be used for your good, for a common good, which means that you in some sense have it. This is, it gets confusing, right? Because we talk about, the church has an awesome defense of private property. But if you have your head in, you know, the American status quo, you can Make a libertarian sort of interpretation of this and be like well then the church means

Says that I can do what I want with my property because I got it. It doesn't say that at all I mean it says that the private ownership of goods is justified by there being or them being ordained for the common good Catholics are different than pagans by them being ordained for the common good. Catholics are different than pagans. When we fence a little part of the world, right, and call it ours, we're only justified because what we produce in that fence is serves others better than if we hadn't fenced it off. We say the beauty and privacy of the home,

but the justification of the private ownership of the home is precisely the raising of saints for the whole body. Private property is a real good, but it's not a divorced good, and it's not in competition with the common good. It is the common good. It's the way that we get the common good is by privately owning things so you can never divorce the two and this is important I think in relationship to the question of of our technological habits because

Because when we enter into modes of rent We tend to fall into what the popes have criticized as consumerism. So the good that we receive ends with our consumption of it. Why? Well, in some ways that's built into rent because you have to have that relationship of ongoing payment, which means that things have to be

sort of destroyed and then brought back, right? The next episode. But when you're when you're working for the common good, it's it's not like that. Like you do consume, but the point is you consume for others. It's it's a radical different way of thinking about the world. Like why am I eating breakfast? Now for the pagan you're eating breakfast to preserve yourself and being because that's good. But Christianity does something new. It says you're eating your breakfast for your neighbor because he needs you to preserve and being because you're both on your way to God. And he needs a hand.

You are your brother's keeper. That's absolutely right. Yeah. And I think this is true of our technological devices, right? Like maybe it's maybe it's not as motivating as the really obvious rejection of the evils that various devices inflict on us, but it just seems to me like When we do reject technology we're more powerful as communities and we're more able to serve each other.

For sure. For sure. Like, I mean, you just think about, I mean, sheer time, like we're just calculating the time, you know, like they, they, they did a study for what it's worth. They did a study. They said it takes about 25 minutes if you switch tasks when you're working with computers to To you like get back to the original tasks that much time for the human mind to get out of the mode of like Browsing and switching and distraction into the thing. Mm-hmm Okay, I'd say that's true. I mean it sounds true to me if feels right. Yeah, me too

Just about how I evaluate studies these days Well, that is 25 minutes of life And it's what we do with our lives that's supposed to get us to heaven. Mm-hmm So what if we just got rid of those Those periods by getting rid of say in your particular vacation as possible for you to get rid of technology and the thing that you get is your 25 minutes of task back, say. I wonder if we're at the point though if people want to forsake these technological things that they're renting from and build a new society as it were. I wonder if

realistically their only option is to find a community of Catholic people to do life with and be within walking distance of Like if I'm living in downtown Atlanta, that's not really walking distance to much Yeah, totally. It's it feels like I'm gonna have to If I can which again is a luxury move and being community with people. Yeah. Well, it's not yeah, you're right Obviously there's things you can do move and be in community with people. Yeah, well it's not, yeah you're right. Obviously there's things you can do to improve it, but we shouldn't be naive about the degree to which the world has been bought and paid for, and not by communities but by corporations.

So there's some ways in which I'm saying like, rebel against the industrial revolution and its effects. It's like, great man. Yeah, I'll go do that. Sweet, thanks for the help. I do think there's a lot you can do, but I also think that it needs to be, and we can talk about this practically, because I think it's more hopeful than people imagine

But I think that it also needs to be done in the light of the fact that this earth is not our home I Mean I love student bill and you're right about soon. Well, but it is not anywhere near like a Pedestrian paradise if anything there's places where it's more horrifically car-ridden than anywhere in the world I mean Did you make a choice to get rid of a cut? Do you have a car? I do yeah But when did you make the choice to not use it regularly or have you made that choice? Um Yeah, no I have I mean I try to Part of the reason that I moved to where I am in Steubenville was because it's an eminently bikeable

I love it route so I can besides groceries. So I am in the food desert. Yeah, but now with the Grocery box is what we call it and it's sort of getting easier. Yeah thing you mentioned about Is this where you guys basically shop you and more? No, I wouldn't say basically I'd say so you mentioned about like is this where you guys basically shop you and more no I wouldn't say basically I'd so yeah I think of it as like a it's like a graph I've never actually done this but it's like on the left my left is the amount of money I consider terms of money it's easy that I spend like leaves my community and on the right is the amount that stays in the community so it money, I consider in terms of money, cause it's easy that I spend like leaves my community.

And on the right is the amount that stays in the community. So it contributes to a friend who then I get to hang out with because their livelihood is, uh, you know, more assured by the fact that I'm buying this way versus another way. And I think of one of the goals in my life is simply to move that bar. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's really good and realistic Yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be able to do it. I mean I am I tried to blow up the highway, but I got

Arrested before we got super I know it's like honking their horns and I love that a lot so so what I mean is this I Get that there are So what I mean is this I Get that there are positions in which you are quite literally trapped in the world and The reason that I believe this is simply because that's obviously the design of the world is to trap you That's what it means to make technological devices with exchange ownership for rent necessary

rather than a luxury. It means that you can't do otherwise. This is what the Pope means when he says that there are structures of sin that must be destroyed. What makes it a structure versus a personal sin is that people that want to do good can't but participate in it. Like, were cars a net gain for humanity?

Are we holier? No. No, can we do without them? We could, but maybe depending. Probably not. I can't tell if these are rhetorical questions or not. I'm sorry. My point is it's like, obviously the American highway system is a structure of sin. Yeah. It's not that it's a personal sin, right? I can't point to the guy. Yeah. Like curse ye and your sins. Point to a couple guys maybe. But the highway system was built to move armies. And this you'll find with liberalism as it one of the ways it permanentizes scarcity is by permanentizing

war. And so often what we think is like Consumer devices is actually military devices that we then continually operate in a citizen mode the internet's like this You know that was a military invention. Do you know how the internet took off from being a military invention? Photography. Yeah, that's what really expanded. It was the ability to like streaming videos So now so so we operate military devices So when I talk about the permanentization of fear, I'm being very literal. Our road system, our internet system is quite literally a thing built

in response to the fear of national annihilation now permanentized into a culture that we no longer need to reference the war when we're chatting on the internet, but that's where it came from. For people that care where things came from, that's all I'm saying. I want to wrap up this part and then I want to take some questions. Sure, yeah. So how do you feel about giving some of us a pep talk here?

Because this was- I'm sorry, I get bleak. No, no, I'm far bleaker. This was really helpful. But there are people who wanna live in community. They don't like the fact that they're addicted to their phones. Or that they're interested in when the next bloody stupid Marvel movie is coming out.

They wanna live differently. You know, they're terrified about starting a little farm because they know they'll be there for three months and then regret it and go back into a neighborhood. What advice do you have? Yeah, and you're reminding me, as I said, that the whole reason that I started this bleak, like sometimes you're really trapped,

was to say that sometimes you're really not. And you're saying you're trapped because you're comfortable. Yeah. Because that's how I've lived, so I know it must be true of other people too. It's been interesting to see how angry some comments have been when I've told people

to maybe think about getting their smartphone and smashing it. Yeah. Like, really kind smashing it. Yeah, like Like really kind of vicious like you absolute hypocrite you run a YouTube channels like maybe I'm a hypocrite and I'm right Maybe that maybe that's true Yeah, I mean, that's another thing like people have excuses for not getting off this stuff And again, those excuses might be valid because they're trapped and I love that you've made that point but And again, those excuses might be valid because they're trapped and I love that you've made that point. But it's not like it was easy. Like I don't, I have a YouTube channel. That's what I do apparently now.

Yeah, I didn't mean to. It just sort of happened. But if I can do it, like I go home at night and I don't have a computer I can access. Yeah, yeah. I mean, pornography is literally not even possible at my house because I don't have any Technology that could access that's rad. That's rad. It's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I think I Think two things one is one is One is to simply say that

It is a process. So I think there can be a hypocrisy, but I think that because we have all been given in some ways a pre-existing dependency on the digital structures that make our world, then you have to be somewhat merciful to people. I'm not saying endlessly. I mean, there has to be somewhat merciful to people. I'm not saying endlessly. I mean there has to be calling people to tasks at what stage They're at You see what I'm saying? Yes

So like like they need to yeah The end point is that you need to develop communities in which this stuff isn't necessary because power is distributed throughout the land Okay, we're not there. So there's ways in which that necessities are real, and then there's ways in which people are pretending they're real because they like them. I'm not gonna judge you and where you're at. I know for me, there's a lot of ways that those necessities are false, right? And in that is true hypocrisy.

Well, it's a little different than true hypocrisy, but it's certainly hypocritical. I think of the Pharisees when I hear anything hypocritical. So that's all. But you asked me to give a peptide. That's not a peptide. That's self-justifying sort of stuff. Yeah, I mean my advice would be to people to, if they can, find a community of people who love Jesus Christ and want to be saints.

And insert yourself into that community and don't leave it. Yeah, totally. Yeah, my friend, he runs this website, Tratist Stay has this, Tratist Stay, I don't know if I'm saying that right, he has a phrase, the move to end all moves. I really liked that because he said, you know, kind of responds to this reality that you don't necessarily plan where you live or where you end up. But for Christians, it seems like the answer should be, well, what is the move that can end the moving?

He's talking about getting over our sense of placeness and being totally victim to market forces putting us wherever we are in the world. So yeah, I do think that's right to choose a place. Obviously not available to everyone, but if you can do it I think that I Think there's so many things you can do where you take back ownership I think can I ask you what something you've done recently? That in which you've taken back ownership because you said right you're trying to like move that lever, trying to get better at.

Well one, and this is embarrassing, is that I'm finally learning how to fix my car. Cool. Yeah. That's not embarrassing at all, it's really neat. Yeah, it's just been a long time coming. Like, it's a 1990 Ford Ranger. And how are you learning to fix it?

My neighbor. My neighbor is a genius with most Things that involve your hands. Mm-hmm, but but he is He's a Christian And out of the goodness of his heart, he's taking me kind of step by step through so that's something that's great and Yeah, moving to somewhere that that was pedestrian-able was obviously a luxury.

I mean a luxury. It's just something that I was capable of, that not everyone's capable of. I shouldn't say it's a luxury. Because we were also moving from... It was the first home that we ever had. Everything else was rent before that. So when we decided to own a home, which I guess that counts too It was also a decision to go somewhere where at least cars would be Like there'd be more freedom in whether to use them or not. Yeah, not absolutely freedom. I still have to drive a lot You know, what's a sign that we live in this sort of fluid in a negative sense society is people have said to us

you know you're never gonna get the money you just put into your house back right? I'm like why do I care? I'm trying to make something lovely for my children and my wife. It's impossible, it's all, well I shouldn't say impossible, that's despairing. It's very hard to get people not to think of everything in terms of money. I know. You gotta stop counting costs. Yeah. All right, this has really been a delight. I don't know if you felt that you've been boring me. You've alluded to that, but I've been enthralled. I'm glad. This has been terrific. I feel like I am. I feel like out on a limb in some ways though. Maybe the questions will help, because I feel out on a limb in the sense of like I feel and maybe the questions will help because I feel out on a limb in the

sense of like I feel like I've unveiled something but I but it was like an elephant and I and I maybe just like Okay, I don't even have the consciousness of what is missing. So maybe the questions will help. Yeah, sure. Yeah, Neil. Do you mind if we Yeah A lot of them are just kind of along the gist of, I need it for my job, I need it for school, this is helpful to me. So it's kind of, I guess, in their objective to the incendiary age, or the idea of, you shouldn't have a smartphone. Which is an article title of yours. So I agree that you're not telling people that the particular thing is intrinsically evil, but I mean, I am kind of encouraging people

to get rid of their first smartphones. Well, I don't mean to like hedge, but I think it's true that Christians shouldn't have smartphones. And because they're fueling this system that we don't want to live in or? They are the primary current. I'm not saying it couldn't change, but they're currently the primary tactic by which all ownership is exchanged for rent and the wealthy are enriched at the expense of the church. And all power cruise into few at the expense of the many and we grow continually

isolated lonely suicidal anxious and afraid um i don't think christians should have those at all do i think that there's a conceivable situations in which you have to yeah but that's not what i'm saying i'm saying you shouldn't and if you do have to have one, then I think you're undergoing an injustice. And then your response is to offer up your sufferings with the cross of Christ. Because even in suffering injustice, the Christian is not powerless, is not impotent, is in fact in that very suffering made most powerful because God is our help. And we can unite our sufferings to the cross and make it efficacious for the salvation of the world. A salvation which includes the destruction

of these structures of sin. Do people think like this? I don't think so. I think when people say I need it for work or I need it for X, Y, Z, I don't know that they are speaking about suffering and injustice Hmm if they are I commend them and I ask for their prayers because by offering it up

They are offering it for the body the church of which I am a member like they are suffering evil They're offering it up for the church In which case not only do I praise them them but I consider their position superior in the order of grace to mine right in which I do enjoy the capacity to not use a smartphone and so have no suffering in that regard to offer up for the church but it's been my experience personally that when I say things like I need this, I don't mean it. Me and Jacob when I come up with a list of things to just gradually become cooler. So I'm gonna get rid of the phone, done that, what's next? And just gradually detach and live in more intentional community. Gradually detach and live in more relation intentional community. Yeah

It's far less intellectual sounding than how you just put it, but I just I want to I want to keep going I want to Break the TV. I don't know why Christians don't see this as Being the call from the beginning. I mean after we destroyed the Roman Empire, that was us, we did that because it was evil. And gave the world the gift of the Dark Ages that followed, that great time of penitence. Then we started to build. And when we built, we built differently. There were no empire. There was no empire. I mean it was wild. We did things

as a medieval church that are unthinkable both in paganism and today and for the reason that they're the same thing so for instance We would And there's a significant portion of human history in which europe had no standing armies Right like to have an army was to muster a force That didn't exist prior to the need and then to disband it upon the need being met That's that's the Christian vision of technology the army is peak technology

I mean in some ways all technology is just a way of behaving like you're in the army That's the Christian vision of technology. The army is peak technology. I mean, in some ways all technology is just a way of behaving like you're in the army, I guess. But I mean, if I'm only gathering an army together when I need them, they won't be trained, will they? So isn't there something to be said of keeping soldiers fit for battle? Should we need to engage in it? Well, yeah, absolutely. But I think that the presumption of Christian culture is that anything that can be used remedially in defense of something or because there's some evil that needs to be rectified should already be operative at the smallest levels of society so that it is present

Is this still true now that we're fighting with drones and such I don't know but the point is these are that's what a world of standing armies does So what I mean to say is simple that like force policing You know the ability to wield a sword, say, and I don't get particularly romantic about this, it's just that I think it was already present. You got to think about the Middle Ages because we talked about the Crusades and the fact that an army was of immense size, was mustered when the Pope said

that we should go fight this crusade. Mm-hmm Where do you think they came from? Do you think they're like, oh well better go to boot camp to learn how to be a powerful person Because prior I was an impotent Christian with no habits or skills It's like no the point of Christianity is that well, it's not the point maybe it's a point of Christianity is that the life of Perfection well it's not the point, maybe it's a point of Christianity, is that the life of perfection goes all the way down to the family. Like you are being built in habits where you are a gift to your brethren from the beginning because

you're growing in virtue. And virtue isn't airy or abstract, it involves habits, skills, the ability to do things, the ability to defend, to fight, to build, to make the world a pleasing offering to God and to protect it from from evil. I mean I don't know. But my point in all that was simply to say that the church is not... that the church is not... the church builds a particular city, a particular civilization. It does not merely suffer as a resident of a pagan civilization. It does that as well, but not merely. And the difficulty I have in some of the despair of today is that we're very willing to talk about

the church suffering this foreign regime that had deprived it of power, which I would root in liberalism, but that's just me. That was a liberal move to say it's just me. Or... Or we can say that that positive, Edenic vision of building the world, perfecting the natures as they are given to us, it remains present. And so we are obliged in some way to build Christian communities. Yeah, you have more power than you think you have. Well, that you're admitting that you have maybe is what you're trying to say, huh? Mm-hmm.

Any kind of different kind of questions or? We have a two part super chat from Kyle Whittington. Not really a question. He says, I got Kyle Huber, all of us to agree to smash his smartphone. I'm shipping a watch from Hawaii today. Do you want him to send the video of the phone destruction? Huber offers to agree to smash his smartphone Nice Yes, I do want that

Good for him the best decision I've made in recent memory this one is a little good point I mean just briefly comment on that you know you a lot of the tech guys don't don't use the phones a lot really yeah who's Twitter guy Jack something like that. Jack Selman Dorsis. Yeah. Dorsi. Yeah, he's not a big phone guy. This one is from a patron on the Patreon and thanks to all the patrons for their comments that they left as well. But this one's from David Bates. It says firstly is that bad Catholic Mark Barnes? Anyway, my two objections are as follows as follows smartphones are not intrinsically evil

therefore encouraging people to forsake the goods of a smartphone is unnecessary and then part two is on a personal level I have several people in my life who are all or nothing types and so they get rid of their phones because they can't, you know, use the moderation from the outside. It looks like they're, you know, just... It seems like they really develop much of the crucial virtue of intemperance is how David phrases it. Yeah, these are two good points. To the first, To the first... I... Can you read exactly how it read? Because the structure of the sentence. I'll read it word for word. Smartphones are not intrinsically evil.

Not intrinsically evil. Absis non tolit usum, I don't know what that means in Latin. Therefore you are encouraging people to forsake the goods of a smartphone unnecessary No, I think that's false that the good Okay Trying to think of an analogy, but it's hard almost everything has goods Associated with it. No, it even those things that harm us can have goods associated with it Only harm us because they have goods associated with it. Even those things that harm us can have goods associated with it. They can only harm us because they have goods associated with

them. Like to say that there's something good about something is not to surprise this criticism, right? It's to describe any possible object. There is nothing that does not share in the goodness of being. So the point about what evil is is that it is the use of the created order, the good, the very good world for disordered ends. It is when we say it's a privation, it means that it relies on the good because a privation, you gotta, you gotta private something and that something has to be good because God made no evil. So if the argument is, I'm trying to imagine what this would be like if like Christian morality somehow involved only getting rid of those things that were evil in themselves.

What would that be? What would I get rid of? I can't think of an object. Right, because even pornography contains a good? Yeah. I don't get rid of pornography because it's an evil in itself. That's wild. That's a wild claim. That's claiming that there are that

Like to say that there is nothing good about it. Mm-hmm. It is like I mean if there was nothing good about it You wouldn't be attracted to it. Is there nothing good about the capacity to perceive an image Which elevates man above the beasts? Because a beast cannot consider a thing as image, but only as directly affecting its environment and its drives. Okay, so the question, and I'm not saying, this is how the question rings, and I want to admit that maybe that's not exactly the intention. But the offense at the smartphone is precisely because of the goods it offers. Okay? That's what I'm saying. I'm saying that it does offer the good of navigation. And it's because it offers the good of navigation that it is able to transfer it from an

own skill of a community to a rented commodity unto the glorification of man over others. Like, the good is what's being presumed. Is that fair? And then the second part, then to say that you should smash your smartphone is to unnecessarily deprive people of the goods that it can offer. It doesn't follow. It just doesn't follow. I mean like, yeah, maybe it does deprive someone of the goods that it offers in the mode that it offers it. And maybe there are some goods that become because of the way society is ordered literally unattainable without the smartphone.

And those have to be suffered, I think. Even if we take it from a more kind of simple level and that is to say the iPhone benefits you and it also aggravates you. It's both the cause and the relief of my anxiety. I stand in an elevator with an individual. I feel anxious because I don't like small talk. I look at my phone. It relieves me of that anxiety.

But as I look upon it and become addicted to certain elements of it, it's both the cause and the relief. So I think people will have to decide for themselves, is this becoming more of a problem than a blessing? And if you decide that it's not, then obviously you won't get rid of it. But if you decide that it is, then that's a good reason to forsake the goods it does give you because you believe that the evils it's producing in you outweigh those goods. Yeah, I agree. I just add to that the evils of the social order that it supports should also be. Yeah, okay, cool.

Part of the Christian decision because we don't act for ourselves. Just for ourselves. Yeah, we're good. All right, man. This is great. That's it? I think so. Oh, I was expecting a whole host of- Alright man, this is great. That's it? I think so. Oh, I was expecting a whole host of it.

How long are we going for? We've been going for three hours and 17 minutes. Nice job, Mark. Well, there is the part two of that question. He says, what about just the idea that you're advocating for kind of, to never have to interface with temperance? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a good point.

Yeah, so can I, yeah, fair enough. I tend to be someone who's more of an all or nothing person, but it's not as if temperance isn't required of me in other domains in life. It's not as if if it were not for the phone, I couldn't become a temperate person. I think it says a lot about a person's self-knowledge if they realize that they aren't good enough at this point in their life to use a phone

responsibly, that it's taking over their life and that hey they've tried coming up with rules, they make the phone black and white, they charge it downstairs so it's not in their bedroom and that's great. But I think for a lot of people they're realizing that the phone is smarter than them in the sense that It hacks them and they just can't there's always a good reason to check email There's always always a reason to go back to it. And so for that reason Recognizing themselves as intemperate they get rid of that thing that is causing them this Causing them this problem, but maybe in part because of their intemperance, but it's not as if

there aren't other opportunities to be temperate. What would you say? Yeah, and I can think of many occasions when the act of temperance is to get rid of the object of temptation. When Aquinas was locked up by his brother, she didn't want him to become a Dominican. Story goes, I presume it's true. I think it is true. That his family put a prostitute in his room and that he chased her out with a like a burning log. Yes, that's right, burning brand from the fire. Yeah, and it wasn't because he was intemperate, you couldn't figure out how to live with her just to hang out. Right, right. I mean, there's like, temperance involves these kinds of evaluat- well, prudence and then temperance involves evaluations like avoiding the near

occasion of sin. And again, I'm not saying that there isn't a way of treating the phone for some people in some situations that isn't for them not a near occasion of sin. I'm conceiving that. I'm conceiving that as possible. I don't think it's usual, but I think it's possible. But that fact in no way excuses us for whom it is a temptation to an occasion of sin at the expense of our world from getting rid of it. One more time, people want to go check out Newpolity. We can put that up there, Neil. Hey, newpolity.com slash technology is where they can find all of your articles that you've been writing or at least some of them on technology.

What else do you want to point people to before we wrap up? I wrote an album about a haunted house. Did you? My band Dear Other. When did you write this? Oh, it's been like two years in the making. Cool.

We recorded it on cassette. Nice. So that's the only in that I have for the promotion. When will it be released? Relating it. It is available on Bandcamp but the big release I think I think it'll be available to

purchase as cassette or download or CD on Black Friday which is the Friday after Thanksgiving not because to be clear there's any particular promotion or something going on that's just the day. You and your wife are very talented. Oh, thanks man. I was sitting in, where's Notre Dame in Indiana? What's that town? I forget. South Bend.

South Bend, that's right. Sitting down, having a cigar, and he's like, have you heard Mark Barnes? And I'm like, no, I know he plays guitar, I'm sure he's, let's play him. I'm like, I don't wanna play Mark Barnes, I'm listening to my other band that I like, and I'm sure he's good, but he can't be as good and he's done playing it and you and your wife are just as good, man.

Fantastic. How could people look that up if they wanted to support the villainous organization that is Spotify? Oh, Spotify. I think we're Dear Other, as in like writing a letter to Other is the name of the band. The one I saw was, I was told your, Moira's parents after they got married perhaps was on the front album? That was really good.

It's funny because I love to write songs, but as you might imagine, it sometimes feels that I'm singing an essay to you. So it does have that quality. So it's not for everyone in the sense of like sometimes I'm very didactic in my lyric writing. What about you Matt? What do you want to plug? Oh, this is nothing. This has been a joy. This has been so fun. This Thursday I have a bloke by the name of Sean Fitzpatrick coming in who's a teacher at Gregory the Great Academy

Yeah, we took about classical education took about Father Christmas I think he's a proponent of the Father Christmas story and telling our children I struggle with that Yeah, but I want to be disavowed of that scrupulosity. I'd love to hear it So we'll talk about that we'll do about ghost stories and things like that. I'm writing some horror stories I do that for fun. You know that what yeah, I love it. Oh, yeah got another one that I'm in the Really? Yeah. Yeah, my sister and I write them together Emma yeah cool yeah she'll be here in December oh good we're gonna find a place for her to play yeah I do a concert yeah maybe up in Leo's or something she's very good oh amazing yeah people see her and they're like I didn't know a

girl could play like that and I like that sexist, but fair enough All right. Well, yeah. Yeah, it's been it's been a real pleasure and and I and I think That we're all gonna make it through. I really do I think the very fact that these discussions are animating us is the presence of the Holy Spirit. And I'm not claiming the validating stamp of God on any of these ideas at all. Very open to being wrong on any particular point. But can't you feel in the church today this movement towards the the

restoration of like real human goods and community as like an urgent urgent desire of the church I can sense moving here yeah yeah man I maybe maybe I'm getting like maybe I'm like in well you're working my own matrix you're working for new polity and you're doing that sort of work. Well, we just get like inundated with people who are Just done well, I think people got done too after Trump I think I think they had a lot of hope when Trump came to office And and maybe they think that he was great or less than great but better than Biden or whatever. But there's just this disillusionment. And I think we don't want to believe that a Catholic is somebody who goes to, who watches hours and hours of Ben

Shapiro and also loves Jesus and goes to Mass on Sunday. It's like, that doesn't seem right. So I think there's this openness to a new way or new voices. With that in mind, if people have been enjoying what you've had to say today and what Jacob's had to say, I want to encourage them to get and subscribe to the New Polity Journal. How would they do that? Well, just go to newpolity.com and then click the button that I believe says magazine and It is where we work to provide the kind of theological and philosophical lifting for some of these ideas

so that they don't fall on shifting foundations, but have a hopefully a Defense that goes back to first principles of reason and biblical doctrine. Yeah it's cool I'm really open to what y'all have to say well you'll have to have me back to speak on gender because actually it's funny after all this technology isn't even that's your dog that's your dissertation right yeah yeah I will have to do that I'd love that yeah all right

thanks a lot I'm appreciate it