Discussing Generative Anthropology with narmyl-hoctyl

Hello everybody. Uh, this is, uh, William of Applied Virtue. Don't mind the, um, what you might hear, a dog in the background. Don't mind that too much. That's just my dog, uh, messing around. He should be quiet very soon.

But today, I'm going, I'm having on a guest that I've been wanting to talk to for a long while. Uh, Normal Cocktail. Yeah, why don't you introduce yourself?

Yeah, hi. So, um, I, I run a kind of small YouTube channel. I talk about, uh, you know, politics and anthropology and philosophy and the stuff that interests me. And, uh, I'm kind of varied, kind of varied stuff, but a lot of, uh, a lot of my focus is on GA, Generative Anthropology. And that kind of comes up a lot. I've yet to actually do a video covering it, you know, in toto, explaining it from beginning to end. But, you know, this stream, the stream should help kind of explain some, some basic concepts there and show, I guess, how it's relevant to other theories, show connections, stuff like that. Why it's important, stuff like that.

You once described it as trans-disciplinary. You know me. So, this, this is going to have, whatever this is, this is it has, it seems to have a lot of different, uh, applications in various fields, at least according to my reading of it.

Yeah, definitely. And if you look at, um, one of the main GA, or probably the main GA guy who's around right now, Adam Katz, who writes under a pseudonym, Dennis Bouvard. I don't know if I should say that, but, uh, I think he's public with the name Adam Katz. He, uh, has a Substack called, I think, GA Newsletter. And he used to have a blog that was his own website hosted on UCLA servers, gablog.ucla.edu. And if you go there, you'll see a ton of, uh, connections he makes, constantly reading new stuff, integrating it with, you know, economics and certain theology and, you know, lots of stuff. And so that's great. But I'm going to have to, uh, take some of that stuff and link it in the show notes after this live stream. That'll be some interesting material for, uh, the people watching this video.

But yeah, before we dive head first into the, um, the complicated theory that is GA, maybe we could start by, uh, going over some of the, some of the, uh, terminology that the starting terminology that you need to have a background in before you, uh, get you understand in the full theory. Because GA, because GA is primarily, you wouldn't, you describe it as a, um, a theory about the origins of language?

Yeah, and the origins of human society, and how those all connect, and how it ties them.

Yeah. Yeah. So I figured that we, we can start by talking about some of the linguistic terms that, um, a newcomer would need to know in order to understand a bit about, uh, GA. You know, you, you've talked in a lot of your videos about the idea of the ostensive, where you just, where you gesture toward something outside of the discourse. Is there anything else that we need to know before we dive into GA?

Yeah, there's, so there's kind of, in GA, this, this will be a useful bit of terminology to start out with. There's this idea in, you know, because in GA is so terminology-heavy, that by explaining the terminology, you kind of give an overview of the theory writ large. And, yeah, the ostensive, it's part of this larger set of forms of speech. So when we talk, you know, in that example, ostensibly, you are referring to an object with immediate presence that's right there that you can, you know, point to or name, or it's immediately obvious what you're referring to. Um, that's a mode of speaking. There's a social context there and a social purpose that that fulfills, which is different from something like an imperative, which is another one of the forms that they identify. Um, that's more, you know, the name there is more clear-cut. It's an order, it's a command that you give. Um, and that's its own social role. And then GA kind of covers how we move from one state to the next and how we get these, this development out. That whole development from the most primitive to the most advanced speech form, that gets called the linguistic dialectic or the grammatical stack, you could refer to it as too. The, which is the set of, you know, speech forms as we use them practically. Uh, so maybe it'd be worth covering what each of those speech forms are that, you know, kind of from the most basic to the most advanced. The one that we're using right now, it's called the declarative speech form. It's the most, it's the highest developed one. Uh, and yeah, as we cover, there's, there's ostensives. So there's a linguist, Michael Tomasello. He gives this great example in one of his books of, if I'm walking by a library with a friend of mine and I gesture towards a bike that, you know, I know he knows belongs to one of our friends. Um, there's kind of this, what I'm, what I'm signing when I point to the bike, let's say it's by a library that we're passing by, is I'm saying, "Hey, our friend's at the library." So that's an ostensive speech form, and it communicates a lot more information than just the pointing at the object. So that immediate presence, there's a lot of detail there. Um, we could get into that in a moment because there's, there's kind of the ostensive, it has connotations beyond just what's obvious from that mode of speech, from the present indicative mode of speech. By indicative, I mean, like, you're indicating an object's there. Uh, so from the ostensive, eventually, you move into the imperative. I won't explain how right now. There's kind of a philosophy behind how you move from one state to the other. Um, the imperative is issuing commands. The common example that gets used in GA is a doctor saying, "Scalpel," and then the nurse handing them a scalpel and responding, "Scalpel, scalpel," like, "Scalpel, scalpel," um, when they request it and get it handed to them. And, uh, you know, that's the next speech form. Then there's sort of a more ignored one. This one gets left out a lot. Uh, it's the interrogative. So, you know, an imperative, an interrogative is sort of just like a weaker imperative, more hesitant imperative that allows for, you know, the linguistic context around an interrogative. You're asking a question or requesting an object rather than commanding someone to make an object present. That allows for responses that are, you know, themselves linguistic, instead of making the object immediately present. So in that former example, let's say the doctor doesn't say "scalpel" but instead says something like, "Scalpel?" which is, you know, signifying that it's an interrogative. That means that the nurse that would have otherwise handed them it could say, uh, "We don't have it," or, "Will this work?" or, "Could I use this as a substitute?" or, "You know, so-and-so." Now, that probably, in that context, would not, would not be very likely. But, you know, there's, there's obvious use in that interrogative speech form. And then finally, we get to, um, the more less modern form of speech, the declarative. Um, which is, it gets called subject-predicate grammar in linguistics, which means you have an object that's the focus of attention, and then you're describing it. That's the predicate. Basically means the description that you're using, the, the description that you're assigning to that object. You're focusing on. So those are the main four forms of speech: ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative. And, uh, I could discuss how they proceed from one to the other, but that's sort of deeper, deeper into the purpose of GA.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I, I guess my only question would be, why is the declarative the most advanced?

Yeah, there's, uh, that's sort of difficult to answer because, well, I guess the way I would answer it is probably by explaining how one form proceeds to the next. And, but, you know, the main reason is that there's no, the declarative can kind of subsume the other ones. You can use ostensive and imperative and interrogative speech embedded in a declarative context. So if I say, you know, "Give me the pencil," that's not a simple interrogative sentence, or rather, that's not a simple imperative sentence, uh, in that it's not just like, "Pencil," or "Give," or, "You know, come." It's not any of those. It's, it's an imperative verb. It gets called, uh, really what that is is you're embedding an imperative social context into a grammatically declarative sentence. But, uh, so it's able to subsume the other ones. And that's not really the correct way of saying it. The correct way of saying it is that we're able to cleanly move from the imperative to the ostensive to the interrogative to the declarative in our speech as the social context demands. Uh, and it's just that the declarative doesn't demand any further response. It's sort of, there's not, there just isn't really a social context that can't be answered by ostensive, imperative, interrogative, or declarative interactions. Uh, none that has come up, anyway.

I see. Yeah. So, um, I, I guess I can, I can, I can sort of imagine how, how it is. So the declarative is more advanced because it, because, um, as we move up the hierarchy, the higher stages of the higher, of the hierarchy of language can take on the functions of the lower stages while also, um, while also adding their own, their own, um, characteristics to language. They're sort of a psychological character to declarative language, this advanced state of language that typically we associate with natural human speech in general, and that form of of syntax that we, that we had, yeah, sorry, word syntax, that we adopted as a result of declarative language having developed in us, is, uh, can be used to represent non-declarative speech. So it looks like it's a subject-predicate sentence, and in some sense, it is, which, you know, is typically how you characterize declaratives. But it's not a declarative sentence. It's not for describing. It's not for, because principally, the purpose of the declarative is to answer an interrogative, right? It's the form that develops immediately after the interrogative. So the idea is that the interrogative, if it can be fulfilled by making an object present, such as a scalpel, will, you know, that'll be completed. But if it can't be, then it's sufficient, it's socially appropriate to respond with another utterance, which would be declarative in that case, because you're saying, like, "I can't make it present. Here's why." Or maybe you're just saying that I can't make a present, that I, that specific mode of denying an imperative gets called an interdictive. In GA, you might see that. That's a kind of marginal word, kind of marginal speech form, but it's just a negative imperative.

I see. So, uh, it wouldn't, uh, so, uh, wait, let me, let me, uh, just ask one more question on this. So a negative imperative, for clarification's sake, is something the interdictum, the negative declarative, it's, is it describing something that's not there, or it's describing something that is, uh, not the case?

Right. So it could be, you know, in the same way that, you know, in that inter, sorry, phrase, that weird imperative interaction, that's, you know, "Scalpel, scalpel." There's a, what we typically just call the imperative, the speaker, the initiator of the of the interaction, and then we have the response, which we usually would not call imperative. In GA, those are both part of the imperative interaction. And the, the idea with an interdictive is that you have something similar. So you could have a response, an interdictive response, that saying, "The object is not present," "The object will not be made present," "Cannot be made present," or just, "I'm really just the negation of the object being made present," as a, you know, as a speech form itself. Equally, there is a command version, there's a speaker version of it, an active version, which would be something like, "Don't smoke," is the example they typically use in the origin of language. The reason that's a little bit unique is because it has developed a new form of tense at that point. If you think of what an imperative verb sort of implies, it implies a specific timeline, a specific context where the action gets requested and then the object requested is made present. And that's different from an ostensive, which is signing immediate, imminent presence. But the interdictive is an even further extended temporal context. It's a new kind of tense because the word "don't" or the phrase "don't smoke" will prolong foreseeably forever into the future. So, you know, it's, it's developed something different there. And so that's why it's a little bit more advanced, it's a little bit more developed. Uh, but yeah, it is that call and response form, that's, that's not the correct phrasing, but is the active and passive participants on the scene. And for that reason, you can kind of use it in two ways.

All right, all right. So now that we have a little bit of knowledge about, uh, the sort of linguistic, what exactly is Generative Anthropology? Where do we start if we want to know what, what this thing called Generative Anthropology is?

Yeah, they, the people, there's two main books on GA. There's "The Origin of Language" by Eric Gans and Adam Katz, and then there's "Anthropomorphics" written by Adam Katz under the pseudonym Dennis Bouvard. And they kind of go about this in different ways. But, you know, "Anthropomorphics" is more so a politically focused book. "The Origin of Language" is more, uh, anthropological, more strictly linguistically anthropological, social linguistics, maybe you could call it. That'd be sort of a stretch. But, uh, I like the way that Tool introduces it. He starts out, Eric Gans, with talking about it's kind of talking about the consequences of it first, which might be worthwhile, you know, looking at. So, um, when, when I'm doing, in this context, I feel like it might be better to explain the procession of the speech forms, which is not how Tool starts the book. But there are certain consequences of GA, like, you know, because different cultures correspond to each of these speech forms, you can kind of analyze the development of human culture and different political, ritual, religious, etc., human beings, like modes of human being, that would have developed at different points in time. Because, you know, there's these specific cultures. The culture of the ostensive is the culture of immediate presence, and that is, you know, imminence, which gets associated with religion. For, I mean, on the one hand, the, the reason that it's all about imminence and it's all about mimesis, that might be good to cover too. That's another basis of Generative Anthropology. I'll cover that after this. Um, so it's about resolving violence, principally. The ostensive, for reasons I'll get into in a moment. But also because it's the first sign that's about immediate significance, right? Because it's the first time that there's ever been a sign innovated that corresponds to a signified object. So there's, there's this relationship between significance and security, is what Eric Gans calls it. The sacred nature of it. And really, if you, if you think about it, in GA, as a way of developing this out, sacredness or secretality and significance are kind of one and the same at their highest exponents in their originary format. That the ostensive, you know, the first sign was an ostensive, so it would have that property. So very religious for that reason. And you can kind of analyze the development of human culture through that lens. Uh, that's a good way to introduce it. The more temporal, you know, from point A to point B, step-ladder approach to introducing it, is like I mentioned, mimesis. So Generative Anthropology comes out of another tradition, foundational anthropology, from Rene Girard, who has a theory, a pretty advanced theory, which is different from GA in kind of important ways, of mimesis and what he calls memetic desire. What mimesis means is really just mimicry. In Generative Anthropology, usually when you're using the word mimesis, you're referring to mimicking other human behavior, specifically, as opposed to like, you know, in biology, they'll refer to a chameleon taking on another color as mimesis. But, uh, you know, in humans, it's about human behavior. In GA, and the main interesting thing with mimesis that gets highlighted by Girard and then developed out by generative anthropologists is memetic desire. So really, this is an evolutionary mindset. You can actually retroject GA onto a philosophy that denies evolution as well, but, you know, for now, they phrase stuff in evolutionary terms because GA started as kind of in academia world, although really defrocked within academia in a lot of ways. Uh, so they don't really have desire. The proto-human, pre-human primates that were hypothesized to have come from in this model of human development, they don't have desire, they really only have appetite. Right? Desire is, it's irrational. It's irrational. I don't know what you call it. Willed? Maybe conscious? Well, um, in in mystic philosophy, Saint Thomas distinguishes between appetitive desire and rational desire. The kind of what you refer to as appetite is the result of a sort of animal instinct and animal appetites. You know, a dog sees a bone and, yeah, and then the, um, because he sees the bone, the he instinctually, he instinctively wants the bone, because that's how he, by his nature, responds to bones. Um, and this is contrasted with rational desire, where the, it's not, it's not immediately connected to sense data like the, um, like animal desire is, because it's responding to, [Music] rather than responding to particular goods, it's responded, rational desire responds to, uh, some the goodness as such, being as such. So the intellect, see it is able to conceptualize certain things, and then, and then based on, what it conceptualizes, the will, the cause, it causes the, um, the the will causes the, uh, the human to desire that thing based on what it, what was previously conceptualized. Uh, I, I'm kind of simplifying it, but I, I, what I, I think what, yeah, I think what you're trying to get at is that there's a, there's a real difference between the kind of instinctive desire you see in other animals and the kind of rational desire or free will or that you see in humans.

Yeah, yeah. And you actually get a lot of references to the kind of tripartite division of the soul in, um, in, in especially "The Origin of Language." I think that the preface, which, you know, Adam Katz wrote the preface, the preface, the rest is written by Eric Gans. I think that that makes pretty specific reference to the logisticon, the epitometicon, and the two eddies, I think that's the name of the three souls as Plato puts it, which are obviously different for Aristotle and thus Thomas Aquinas, but it's, it's a similar idea of like the soul that is the immediately conscious cognitive theater, and then the soul that is appetitive but is under the purview to an extent of will, and then the part of the soul that is totally nutritive and outside of that, that control. They refer to that a lot. And there is something nice, there is something kind of clean about the ostensive, imperative, declarative, just happens to be these three stages that correspond really nicely to those three parts of the soul. And, um, in the two significant classical philosophers. So that's really useful. And, uh, yeah, yeah. And the nutritive soul corresponding to the ostensive might not be such a good line to draw, but the appetitive corresponding to the imperative makes a lot of sense because the imperative is about something not present being made immediately present. I mean, it, it stands to reason that appetite only really operates when there's some sort of immediate presence not fulfilled. Even if the object that you desire is right in front of you, the, the appetite that you have, like say for eating or something, is desiring the presence of the act of eating. So you get this language a lot in GA of the presence or the thing being made present being an action or a state of affairs instead of like literally a single object. The way it is hypothetically at the origin of language. There's kind of a specific, but not, I don't know how you'd say this, doctrinal almost, there's not, there's a, a common way of phrasing the origin of language in GA, which, you know, that's a big issue that's basically ignored outright, just totally ignored in linguistics. Actually, Adam Katz did a couple of presentations a couple months ago where he talked about how the, I think French Academy of the Sciences, or maybe the Academy of Paris, or something like that, they illegalized in the late 19th century, I think it was 1886, discussions of the origin of language outright. And if you know what role like French academies played back then, I mean, that's that's kind of significant. It would be like, I know, it'd be like Noam Chomsky and MIT, like, well, no, that's not a good, that's not a good analogy. But it was big. I mean, it's big that people were ignoring this and kind of like resistant to have any scientific, in the Aristotelian sense of that word, analysis of this. Someone people will call GA like strictly non-scientific. I had a guy in my stream last night say that he was like, "I'm a scientist and GA is all syllogism, no science." And, I mean, I use the word science a lot looser than most people, but even if you use it in a strictly a posteriori way, it still has, it's like still based on a lot of sense. Like the language is the, the language we use and the language forms we use, that's not really properly a priori, anyway. That's kind of the, uh, tangent. But yeah, that tripartite division is very useful. You see something similar in, um, a lot of formations of the definition of religion. I've noticed with, um, Rene Guenon, I might have mentioned this, page, I think 115 of his book, what was it called? "Intro to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines," I think that's its name. Uh, he mentions his definition of religion, which is basically a cult in, in the older sense of that word, or a worship practice, a moral law, and a metaphysical worldview, where all three of them concord with a metaphysical worldview. And you'll notice that those three things, moral law, pretty clearly imperative. I mean, they call divine command theory, divine command theory. And obviously, that's not encompassing the entirety of religious, you know, moral law, but the term "command" is in there. So, you know, there's a religious moral law will tend to be of the imperative structure and not the declarative one. Anyway, then you have the, you know, the metaphysics, obviously, is the declarative. Eric Gans makes the, in my opinion, kind of absurd statement in his books that metaphysics is the privileging of the declarative, as if it's primary, or as if it's default, or as if it's the only possible speech form. I think that's like, unless he's saying something that I'm really not tracking with and I just don't understand, it sounds kind of plural. Almost. It's sort of like overly, I don't know. Maybe it's just I hear people like say stuff that sounds quote-unquote anti-metaphysics and I'm like, this person is a, this person doesn't know what they're talking about. But he might, he might be right. I might just not be tracking. Anyway, he says that. And the metaphysical worldview obviously would correspond to the declarative. And then the cult, that's all about immediate presence, that's all about ritual sacrifice, which is tied to the ostensive. I could get into why. Well, I mean, I mean, going back to metaphysics, I, I don't, I'm not really sure how you can, um, I mean, the only way I could see his, um, statement being true is if he, what he means by that is that, you know, metaphysics, a metaphysician would, a metaphysician would say that the only way we can know the foundations of reality is by using the declare, the declarative. And, you know, a metaphysician would say, yeah, yeah, we're, we're basic, that's basically correct. Because, because, you know, they, they wouldn't, no meta would say that ancient man was able to perfectly understand something like Aristotle's theory of act and potency, right? Or Saint, or Saint Thomas's, essence and existence distinction. You know, that that came out of a long-standing tradition that developed over the course of several centuries in a particular time and place.

Yeah, definitely. And, uh, that's, uh, that's a good, you know, speaking of Thomas Aquinas, a good benign reading of it. That's, I don't know, a ton about Thomas Aquinas, other than he was, he was very friendly to a lot of the, you know, Saracens and pagans and stuff that he, that he read. And he was like, "I'll read the good in these people." Anyway, um, yeah, a good benign reading of what he wrote. The most benign reading I can, I can kind of muster for that is he's saying the other speech forms don't subsist. So I'm ostensive, it's signing immediate presence. Maybe I should describe the original form of the ostensive, but for now, um, it's signing immediate presence. The temporal context of which obviously ends once the discussion ends. Like that, that claim stops being a, well, it doesn't have factivity because obviously propositions can only be declarative if you're not making a predication, which you can only do in a declarative form, then it can't be a proposition. Um, but the significance, I guess, of the ostensive ends once the ostensive ends, basically, or once the social context that produced it ends. The imperative is prolonged a little bit longer to the retrieval of the event. Than the, uh, interdictive is the first to be prolonged an arbitrarily long amount of time. The interrogative is prolonged basically as long as the imperative, just somewhat different in terms of what's a socially appropriate response. But only the declarative, um, excluding marginal forms of the interdictive, is able to make claims that subsist or implicitly subsist, period. The universal before the thing is implied in the declarative because the declarative is predicating. And, you know, that ties into, I don't have a great grasp of metaphysics, but as far as I understand it's about the subsistence of predication, of which predicates can subsist, um, and continue existing after the discourse has ended, like be true in themselves, or, well, that's not a good way to phrase it, but be true, period. And, yeah, metaphysics, it, I mean, the tradition that I'm a part of sees metaphysics as being the science of being in itself. The way we would phrase it is, well, you have different forms of knowledge talking about different things. You have ethics being a science of morality. You have physics being a science of the, of the physical world, the natural world, or of moving bodies, depending on your definition. Uh, you have the, that you have, uh, biology, which is the science of living things. And, but in all of these things, you, we can, we can say that there is, when we look at the, uh, different, um, modes of science, there is one, one science that encompasses all of them, and this is, uh, metaphysics. Metaphysics is basic because it describes being as such, whereas other forms of science, and I'm using science not in the strict modern form, but in the Aristotelian form, as just a body of knowledge, metaphysics is the science of being, a being itself, being as in existing things.

Yeah, yeah. And then you get, um, no, I'm wrong about that. I was about to say that the categories appear in the metaphysics, but obviously they appear in the categories. Um, but that is like a, is it correct to say that the categories are for people who aren't tracking, the, the ten categories Aristotle lists of possible description, possible terms, I guess you'd say, uh, is it correct to say that, uh, that's metaphysical, or is that something, is that logical? The ten categories. Um, [Music] it's been a while since I read, uh, oh, you mean the, um, oh, you mean, uh, substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, doing, having, being affected. Um, those are the kind of categories that, those kinds of categories are sort of possible kinds of things that can be subject, uh, or the subject or predicate of a proposition. Those are, and, [Music] you know, every, and every object of human understanding, anything that we can understand, falls into one of these ten categories. And so we can, uh, sort of categorize, uh, our experience based on these categories, right? Um, and then would that properly be metaphysics or logic, would you say? I mean, it, it was introdu, I mean, metaphysics is one of those trans-disciplinary, uh, I, it, it covers a w, it has knock-on effects of all kinds of different things. So a lot, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't have application to both and also to things like philosophy of nature, right?

Yeah. And then, you know, the set of things that have, what is it, substance, quality, quantity, vestige, passivity, active, I forget all of them. Um, that would be the set of things that are the set of things that exist. So that would correspond to metaphysics in that way, at least. All right. Yeah, yeah. The, in those, that's, uh, I mean, those are kind of, those are pretty interesting, but I don't think they are necessarily related to what we're talking about with regards to GA. So sort of steer us back on track. You mentioned Rene Girard. I, I recall reading when I started reading about GA, um, I, I read about, uh, I started reading about these three main thinkers, Rene Girard, Eric Gans, and Adam Katz. And I wanted to take a little bit to talk about each of their contributions to, uh, what we, we now call GA. So you mentioned before that Rene Girard, he wasn't the guy who created GA, but he was the one who came up with an idea called memetic desire, which would play a foundational role in GA. So why don't you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, yeah, correct. Um, that's, uh, this whole idea of mimesis is really core to Generative Anthropology, uh, in that language is kind of learned. It can be confusing to people, how come there's this intersection between language and culture and how that's not like just totally ad hoc. Um, but, you know, when you place the origin in mimesis and you see the context of Girard, it starts to make a lot more sense. Girard is looking at, um, I don't know how you'd say it, the fact of imitation and the amount of consequences that you can accept as obvious and, you know, proceeding directly from, uh, motivation. Um, mimicry. And he analyzes fashion, he analyzes religion, and he has a whole anthropology related to memetic crisis. It gets broadly called this category of, you know, memetic desire. Mimicking someone else's desire, as we talked about earlier, is a higher form of desire. It's the first properly human form of desire. Um, it's not appetite. Well, sorry, I'm using kind of hasty language. It's the first properly human version of drive, and it's not appetite, it's desire. And the fact of that being so strong, and furthermore, being socially reinforced. If you have a community of say, 15, 20, 30 hunters in a pack that are surrounding an animal, this is the traditional, by the way, GA explanation of the original ostensive that I was referring to earlier. If you have so and so many proto-human hunters, males, gathered around an animal they've just killed, then there's the appetite for that animal, of course, you know, but there's also memetic desire. We see everybody else have that appetite, and we're able to see their attentionality. This is called joint attentionality. It's another very important concept. The idea is that I see you, kind of a first-order attention, that's being able to see something that's just able to focus. But then the second-order attention, which gets, uh, there's a technical term for it, I forget, but the second-order of attentionality is, "I see you see X." So I can see somebody else in the group who sees, um, the animal, and I can see their desire, and I can represent their desire in my mind. I can project that into my mind. And that second-order desire, now that starts to get interesting because that's representation. That's the kind of representation you get in language. Uh, there's an interesting paper called "What Makes Us Human? Answers from Evolutionary Anthropology" that pulls a bunch of evolutionary anthropologists on what they believe makes us human. And you get a bunch of kind of wacky answers because there's polling very, very broad sample of people. You get like, "Labor grandmothers." One of them answered, "Grandmothers." But I think three of the ten responses he got from the people that he pulled was what makes us uniquely human. They phrase it in different ways, but basically the fact that we have, of all the animals, the strongest. And this is, when I use evolutionary terminology, it's for the practicality of the people that come up with these ideas. It's from, it's because of the people who made it. Um, it's not my preference for them, anyway. Uh, the human has the strongest mimesis of any animal, the strongest memetic faculty. Other animals do have it, and, you know, primates happen to have a more advanced form than basically any other animal except for us. But, uh, we have a very advanced form of that, and we have joint attentionality. We're able to say, "I see you, I see you see something else." And furthermore, this is third-order attentionality, which gets called abstraction. "I see you see me see something." Right? So there's, um, a funny, a funny paper by somebody else that argues this is very much like how modern academia is. They argue the maximum joint attentionality possible is sixth order, which would be like, "I see you see me see you see me see you see something." I don't know. But anyway, it could go arbitrarily advanced after intentionality. But humans are the only animal that's capable of that. Humans are the only animal that's capable of saying, "I'm able to represent your desire for something." Um, so those two things are necessary for language because language is all about signs that are able to stand in for the concepts or the objects that they signify, the presences that they signify. In GA, those signified things for the ostensive, it's called the center. So if I use that terminology, just think the thing that's being referred to, the immediate presence being gestured to. And, uh, yeah, so that was a big tangent. But oh, yeah, we're talking about mimesis, right? And, uh, it ties into culture in this really important way, and GA shows how it connects to language. Rene Girard also explains language through this. He's a lot more human sacrifice focused, but GA is a little bit less, less strict on the human sacrifice part. Uh, there is a kind of sacrifice that gets called the sporagmose, or a fancy word, um, which I could explain that. So that originary event that I was referring to, of all these hunters congregating on that animal, and they have this self-reinforcing desire, the mimesis that constantly cycles into itself and makes everybody desire it more and more and more. The memetic crisis is when that desire becomes untenable, when it's, it's possible to generate violence that would destroy the human community because we value the object more than, um, we value any instinct that prevents us from attacking fellow hunters. So it could break into community-ending violence. Now, obviously, there's this sort of shows what was meant earlier when I said the significance and sexuality are connected here, that they're intertwined. Because if you imagine yourself in that place of somebody who's mimicking everybody else's desire and thus becoming more and more and more hungry for, hungrier, maybe not the right term, but driven towards this this central object, then, you know, you can imagine that there's this idea that, well, now I understand, I would initiate violence for this. Violence could break out at this. And there's a kind of terror, is the term that, uh, Adam Katz uses. Adam Katz says that fear would be an improper term here because this is a very primitive human set of emotions that we could be working with. I mean, you can't just retroject our modern emotions, our modern, you know, anthropology, I don't know what the term is, our, we can't retroject anthropomorphisms onto these proto-humans. So there's, this terror that emanates from that central object towards us because really, that's where that's that's the object of focus here. And that's one sense in which there's an originary ritualness or cult nature or religious nature to the central object, into the ostensive in general, because that central, that that ostensive language form is meant to prevent terrible, massive, you know, hitherto or vither to unknown violence, the community-ending violence that's possible with memetic desire. This is part of why you'll also hear from Eric Gans, "The human is, in one sense, defined as the only animal who poses the greatest threat to itself." And that being a definition, you know, very like, "What? That's not really a definition, that's just a description." But the reason he thinks it's a definition is because of its inextricability from that mimetic nature that we have. Uh, so what's going on here? So first of all, there's an early linguistic form that gets developed here. There's, there's this representation that takes place because if you're imagining this, this possible violence, that terror causes people to step back. Like the, the idea here is that people will feel that terror and just equally instinctively step back. Except that stepping back is more than just instinctual at this point. It's representing the fact that you're not a threat. It's representing to everybody else the fact that, hey, I'm not going to appropriate the food. I don't want to be in this, uh, dangerous, terrible social event. And that stepping back, representing your passivity, is the first sign. Because the sign, the signifier is you stepping back. It's that they call it the aborted gesture of appropriation. Because GA loves fancy language, but the signified, the thing that's referred to by that sign, the first sign of any animal, like no other animal, no matter how much I have a video on this, other animals do not have language. We are the only animal that can do this. I don't really believe that we're animals, but, um, we're the only animal that can have a sign that defers the meaning of the thing referred to. And that deferral here is not just a deferral of meaning from the sign to the thing that you're signing to, the thing that you're representing. It's also a deferral of violence. Uh, there's actually a technical term for that two-fold deferral from from French. It comes from, uh, Jacques Derrida. It's different with a special little accent on it. It's very fancy. It's a very fun French grammar thing that that Eric Gans likes to talk about because Eric Gans is the most French-American man on the planet of all American people. He is maximally French and he loves French studies and is, I think, like all of his papers are on French literature. And that's that's how he got into Girard, as far as I know. Um, anyway, so there's a lot of of stuff going on there. There's religion, there's the first sign, there's, um, deferral of violence being so important there. The initiative index, I'm having trouble with that word. Inextricability of significant, significance, signifying with, uh, security, and the like originary terror, the first really intense human emotion of that variety surrounding the animal, the terror that corresponds to the most extreme desire this or two that ever occurred. And no other animal has that kind of capability. So that's a big exposition about the ostensive. Sorry about that.

Oh, well, I was, I wanted to say a little bit of something about, um, memetic desire because I did a video, video a while back about, um, the kind of anti-SJW Gamergate crowd. And one of their talking points is, "Oh, well, what you see on television doesn't actually affect you." So we can just, we can just, uh, we can just, uh, have anything go, it kind of anything goes libertine style. In these social justice warriors who are trying to put politics into everything, they're just kind of an annoyance, you know, because this stuff doesn't actually affect us. You know, video games, they don't actually cause violence. The science says so. Well, I mean, and they have, they, they try to prove this by showing that, well, you know, they have some scientific paper showing, well, watching more video games doesn't actually make you go out and cause more violence. No, but it does make you desensitized. Does desensitize you to violence. That's that is something that happens. And, more to the point, there are so many different studies out there that show that, um, what media and in our design media affects our perception of what is normal. And this causes us to act in a way that, that reflects that. So even if we know what we're watching is fictional, it will still affect what we, it will still affect what we, uh, perceive to in reality. To give an extreme example, um, [Music] I, I pointed to a few studies that talked about how, uh, Western television shows being shown in India and East Germany had a significant, had a significant effect on, um, the family sizes in those countries. Because once people in those countries saw the size of families on the television show, they they started thinking, "Oh, that's that's a normal size family. That that is, uh, that is a normal-sized family." And then they acted accordingly. And this is, and maybe they didn't consciously think that, but they had those, that they, but they had that kind of desire. They sort of got it. The, um, the common culture calls this getting your information through osmosis, a sort of way of putting it. And I explained this through, by referencing Girard's, uh, first chapter of "I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning," which is the coolest name of any book ever, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Girard basically, basically shows that this is one of the reasons why we had moral prohibitions. Because in his mind, if we didn't have these kinds of moral prohibitions, then like you said, our neighbors would be, our neighbors being the models of our desires, we would just start fighting each other over whatever was we happen to have in common as our shared desire. And you, you can see this in a mic, in a microcosm. When you see two kids, and I used in my example, you know, two kids, and both of them are my nephews, both of them are my niece and my nephew. Whenever my nephew plays with the ball, my niece immediately wants to play with that particular ball, even though she didn't want to play with it just five seconds ago. Because she saw my, a my nephew playing with it, she wants to play with it. And that's, and that's sort of the kind, that's just how human psychology works. And if you can use say, media propaganda to instead get people to instead of fighting over a single object, instead, you can get them to follow certain social norms that are beneficial to the authorities that are producing these images, then you can, that's how you have a coherent society.

Yeah, yeah. It's totally, yeah. You can. And that's also related to this other point you get in GA. You're talking about a, uh, libertinism and these people that are like trying to be the most good, the most obedient classical liberals, you know, Rawls, that's not classical liberalism, but they're trying to be the most liberal liberals. And, um, something interesting there. There's this, there's this term in GA, originary thinking. It's thinking about origins. It's making explicit that the moment of causation, that's not really the right way to phrase it, that there's a microcosm of the formal cause of the event of language in the origin of it. So that's a really tortured sentence, but what it basically means is that for the ostensive, think about mimesis and joint intentionality and secretality and all these complex concepts, all these really important concepts for language. Those in that origin, that's a microcosm of the whole of language. It's kind of like, uh, Goethe, if you know his sort of his sort of, what's the word, called the morphological method, where he talks about how a seed is really just every plant is just contracted leaves or expanded leaves or reorganized leaves. And a seed is just the most contracted form of leaves and a very high potential, low actuality state. And then as it grows, it's just the leaves change. You know, if you open an orange up, for example, he'd say you're just looking at a set of these tiny prime ideas of the plan, belief being, um, manipulated and protracted throughout. And the way that's connected is that like, there's the same idea with all of the efficient causes of, oh, that might be very hasty language, but all the, no, I think sure, the efficient cause of the origin of language ties into the formal cause, it ties into what language is, what form it takes. And, you know, in the actual linguistic literature, sorry, I should, in the Chomsky and linguistic literature, they call that E-language, the external language that exists as the universe, ali amanta, around the universal. That

You know, kind of is just out there. And, uh, you know, in GA, there's this idea that that's not, you can't, you can't pull that apart from the origin. Now, what's the opposite of that kind of original thinking? It's victimary thinking, they call it. And victimary thinking is, you know, Eric Gontz still kind of is, in a lot of ways, very liberal. Um, but, and that's part of why Adam Katz's GA can be distinguished from from Eric Gontz's. But even he identifies this, what he calls victimary thinking, this, uh, focusing on a single element of the originary scene, the egalitarianism, the legality, the equality of the original setup. Because, you know, if you think about it, all these early humans gathering around the ritual animal, that's, they're all in more or less the same peripheral position compared to the, the center, which is the animal. And, uh, in, in his mind, what's happening with these victimary thinkers, which categorizes all liberalism in one way or another, uh, is the, the focus on that originally peripheral equality. And that's one way that he diagnoses, uh, uh, liberalism and this, this high, this high egalitarianism that we're seeing today. And, uh, that's fun. I mean, there's scathing critiques of liberalism throughout GA. And if GA doesn't seem relevant, just crack it open. You'll see two, three, four, five really serious critiques of liberalism in the first maybe ten pages of *The Origin of Language*. Um, and then *Anthropomorphics* is just an absolute scathing approach of everything in liberalism through and through, from beginning to end. The, the book *Anthropomorphics* by Denis Bouvard. Um, yeah. And so that victimary thinking is really, really disliked here. And it kind of ties in. You're talking about like these, these liberals and the, uh, how do I phrase this? The trying to be the best liberal, saying that like, no, I can't be the sociality, it can't be the, the community or the, the, the human element is fundamental. It has to be that money is fundamental. Or if you're a Marxist, the real productive material faculties are fundamental. Marxists being one dialect of liberalism. I think that, I think that a lot of these classical liberal types, they would, uh, try to say that, uh, something like freedom is fundamental, or the individual is fundamental. The individual, this kind of, um, this kind of pre-societal thing that, uh, contracts into that, forms a con, irrational contract with society, with other individuals to form society. Yeah. It's just totally. And if you, this is, this is an interesting intersection with Giorgio Agamben, actually. Another thing about my channel is that I really have a big focus on the philosopher Jason Reza Giorgiani, who is contentious to say the least. But, uh, and, and, you know, but anyway, uh, he has in his book *Prometheus and Atlas*, he talks about how, uh, well, he mentions Marquis de Sade first of all. Marquis de Sade, that the guy who, the nate, the term sadism is named after him. And how really, if you look at the origins of liberalism, of the early revolutionary liberalism, I would kind of split liberalism into four stages: like proto-liberalism in the 14th century, theoretic liberalism, then revolutionary liberalism, and then modern, uh, mass democratic liberalism. But, if you look at that, that third stage, the, the early revolutionary liberalism, especially with the French Revolution, you get a bunch of people like, uh, La Mettrie, one of the guys. And even someone like Robespierre is in there, even though he was, in some sense, actually a reactionary perspective to that movement. Um, but Marquis de Sade, in, in Giorgiani's worldview, is the only coherent, the most coherent, uh, liberal there ever was. So if you want to be the most coherent liberal, do what Sade did. And, uh, just talk about the, all the ultra-ethical virtues of like, basically just being like, like it's basically Frankism. It's basically like, try to be as evil as possible because that's, that's very good. Um, so that's kind of the natural conclusion there. And, yeah, it's, it's GA is definitely opposed to that. So, and it's the best critique of it I've really ever seen, uh, of liberalism, because it critiques it at the roots, literally. It's, it's about origins. But, uh, it also, like, de, it is really, Eric Gontz calls it a radical work of deconstructionism. Which it doesn't seem like it's, I mean, a naive pomo person, postmodernist, could pretty easily say, oh, this is essentialism, you're saying that the language forms subsist, or something like that. Um, you know, the imperative of, etc. But, you know, what he means by the radical deconstruction here is that, uh, these, I don't know, the things that are sacred to liberalism are sort of put in context because liberalism can't explain its own origin. Not, I mean, Marxism can't, but as a dialect of liberalism. But it, it's obviously not, it's coherent, but it doesn't correspond to reality. And then liberalism, per se, parochial liberalism, doesn't even really make an attempt at that. So GA can explain the origin of liberalism. And in doing so, it destructures and makes de-sacred, unsacred, the things that liberals implicitly hold sacred, like equality. And like the original victim mentality, by which I mean the focus on egality and selecting people out and difference being harmful. I see. So, so, um, I, I would like to, uh, talk a little bit more about what exactly did Eric Gontz, uh, contribute to Rene Girard, and how did, and, and how did Adam Katz, uh, contribute to, uh, Eric Gontz? Could you go over that really quick, or will that be a bit longer?

I should be able to go over that in fewer than five minutes. Um, the, the idea where it really breaks off is the moment where language originates. So there's an agreement on mimesis, there's an agreement on more or less mimetic desire, and to a lesser extent, mimetic crisis. But then the disagreement is how you get from that state of mimetic crisis to language. As far as I know, and I don't know Girard perfectly, the idea is that you have this moment of human sacrifice where one human is scapegoated for the mimetic crisis, the possibility of violence, and the primitive but ultra-advanced terror that occurs. You single out one person and you sacrifice them. And in doing so, they stand in for the resolution of mimetic crisis. And then they are the first sign. That's, I think, how Rene Girard's theory works. And then Gontz's critique of that is more or less, this doesn't actually explain why that would be significant, why that would get inscribed into the community's mind. First of all, it's not particularly, like, reproducible the way that the original event is. It's not like you can move cleanly from, like, killing people to not killing people. I guess killing an effigy or something, which would itself require advanced language and the ability to use those special reasoning faculties. More or less, the difference though is that in *The Origin of Language*, the account of the origin is with the center being the object in the middle. It's the object you refer to. Now, this, and that is the origin of the mimetic crisis. It's not scapegoated on anybody. It really is like the object that, that is the origin of the terror. And that's kind of where you get this correspondence to the human sacrifice I was talking about. So on the one hand, you have that aborted gesture of appropriation, you have stepping back, uh, which resolves the mimetic crisis. And in resolving it, allows for people to engage more passively, more peacefully, hopefully, in a way that doesn't destroy the community, with that central object. And, you know, in the case of an animal, which is a common example, a likely sounding example throughout GA, um, that's eating the animal, you know, tearing off his flesh and eating it. Um, so that gets called the sparagmos, is the term for it, which I think is just Greek for like pulling apart or, you know, like ripping apart in all directions. That's the equivalent of sacrifice. So the sacrifice is put onto another creature. And then that's something that could be pretty easily reconstructed at different points in time for other contexts because there are lots of centers, there are lots of possible mimetic crises. Um, and that would be inscribed into the community because instead of sacrificing one person who somehow stands in as a sign but also remains present in the community, it's everybody stepping back. It's this intentional act that everybody engages in. Intentional might be a little bit caught before the horse here, but linguistic act, at least primitive linguistic act, that people all engage in. And then that could obviously inscribe itself into the community because if you step back, you know what stepping back is, now, especially if you've seen other people do it.

Yeah, I would say that, um, it's a sort of proto-rational, rational act, right?

Yeah. You know, because, uh, Thomas would see animals as having, um, an intentionality of sorts in the fact that they're, they're, they have these kinds of appetites that point to something outside of themselves. They have memory and, uh, imagination. You know, dogs can dream about something else. But they, but what they don't have is rationality. And according to Thomism, the distinguishing feature that shows for certain that, and that a creature has rationality is if they are capable of language. Because language is, is certain because, you know, rationality is sort of an inward, it's sort of an inward thing. It's, so it's not like you can definitely see, oh my gosh, this person is rational. But you can tell a creature is rational based on, uh, how, based because rational creatures have certain, exhibit certain behaviors that non-rational creatures do not. And, uh, it all revolves around language, right?

Yeah. And then there's, I mean, there's, there's kind of this connect. I'm reading Saint Gregory and this is catechism right now. And there's sort of this connection where people in ancient times, it almost feels like hastily switched between the word for reason and the word for language, which are, I mean, it's one word, it's logos, when they're discussing stuff. But, yeah, it's, uh, there's definitely that, like, yeah, almost like language is to reason as like works are to faith. It's not really, if someone was reason, rational and had no language competency, no language performance, that would be a little bit like confusing. That wouldn't really check out. I mean, I mean, uh, they would say to think is to think in a particular language. Right? You can't, you can't actually have a thought that isn't in, in one language or another. That's just not how humans work. We can talk about, and now, granted, Thomas can talk about angelic intellects. But angelic intellects are not, they're something very different from human intellects because human intellects are embodied. They have, uh, they use, they, uh, they're physical. They're, they interact with the real world in a direct way. Whereas, uh, angelic intellects, uh, they, the way they acquire their knowledge is very different. The way they interact with the physical world is very different. Um, and they're just a, they're just a very different type of creature or being. You can't really call angels creatures, than a human, if that makes sense. Um, so it's not, it, I mean, if you're, if you're talking about this from a purely non-religious perspective, angelic intellects are sort of a, um, a counterfactual of, well, what would it be like for a, to have a rational thinking thing that did not, was not somehow embodied? What would that, uh, what would that, how would that thing interact with the world and such and such and such?

Yeah. Yeah. And then that's, uh, thing you mentioned about language and how, like, the necessity of language for thought. It's actually very prominent in Orthodox linguistics and Chomsky linguistics to the point that if you look up the, this is one of the most famous debates in my opinion. It's probably the only famous debate that really deserves it that I've listened to, is the Noam Chomsky-Foucault debate. Now, both of these people are cringe and based in their own ways. But the debate is all about like, how language relates to sociality or to what extent it exists per se, to what extent subsists. And it's really interesting that because Noam Chomsky is not a philosopher, but he did formulate something that basically proves that there is an innate list, an innateness to language. It's called the poverty of the stimulus argument. You can find out about it there. If you watch that debate, it's, but, and GA kind of radically bridges the gap between those two philosophies by saying, hey, you know, the human constructs the center, and the center constructs the human, because these proto-humans, couldn't really call them humans. So, yeah, thinking in a language, very big concept. And then embodiedness, yeah, it ties in there. It almost, the, the GA tendency to say that the human is constructed by the center, and the center is constructed by the human, because, you know, paradoxicality is kind of the name of the game with a lot of GA stuff. In fact, he says that in, I think chapter one of *The Origin of Language*, or maybe it's the introduction, that's very similar, at least it feels similar to me, having never read Averroes, the sort of the isogesis into Aristotle of the idea that like, we all participate in the divine mind. Which, I, you can correct me if this is wrong, but I think was pretty much just an innovation by Averroes. And I think that Aquinas rejected that.

Yeah. It was. Except, I mean, St. Thomas didn't acquire, didn't, um, know about it directly from Averroes. He knew about it from Averroes's followers in Russia, in the Christian, in the Western Christian world. Hold on. Yeah, in the Western Christian world, they, they called them the Latin Averroists, right? Um, and he, and, uh, yeah, he rejected that as, say, by saying, well, you don't really need to. This is kind of ridiculous because it sort of gets rid of individuality as a thing. Yeah, it's sort of, it sort of collapses the, it just, because we all have a nature, share a human nature, does not mean that each particular human is just, uh, is just a part of this grand instantiation of, of human nature. That's a, that's something that St. Thomas had to, uh, point out. I, I haven't read that, his argument against the Averroes. I, I really need to read that though.

That was it. But anyway, so what would you say is the main difference between Adam Katz and Eric Gontz? Because you mentioned earlier that Katz takes generative anthropology into a more, um, reactionary zone, whereas Eric Gontz is still liberal.

Yeah. So I'll be honest here. Eric Gontz's GA, so generative anthropology, is for not being very well known outside of like, really ultra, you know, niche people in academia, it is super deep. And there's, there's a blog that Eric Gontz runs, *Chronicles of Love and Resentment*, that is so long. There's so much stuff there. There's, if you were to make it a book, probably four or five thousand pages of stuff at least. So that thing is darn long. And he has a lot of ideas there. Unfortunately, Eric Gontz's books are mostly out of print. So they can only be bought as like, 500 hard copies used on Amazon. But there's two exceptions to that, I think. Anyway, um, and there's only two that exist in ebook form as far as I know. So, and one of them, you need like a really, not well-known mega link that maybe I should not, I can't share that. But anyway, there's this, it's, it's really hard to get into Eric Gontz's stuff. So I'm coming from a position of limited ignorance. Mostly what I know is that he has a concept called omnicentrism. The idea that at a point in time, every human can function as the center. Which again, as far as I understand it, Adam Katz's critique is that that's sort of hasty and lets you just be a liberal with GA. It just lets you say, GA, but not so, I'll just be a liberal now, with omnicentrism. And, yeah, I, I tend to agree. I, I obviously don't understand Gontz deeply enough to say, you know, why he believes that or why we disagree, or if he would disagree. But that, so that, that's the main concept. The other thing is that there's this idea of a cultural correspondence to each language form. And Adam Katz's GA, so there's an ostensive culture, properly religious or cult-like. There's an imperative culture, properly political. You can see that coming. And then there's declarative culture, which is sort of up there with victimary thinking as one of the negative aspects of liberalism or liberal existence being in a liberal polity. Um, and, you know, declarative culture is basically the culture of, you give me a command and I don't do it, and I'll say, why are you doing this? This isn't, this isn't fair. Well, that's kind of an oversimplification, but you get the idea. There's a proper culture to each of these forms. And so that, that concept is there in Eric Gontz, but it's not as developed out. And Adam Katz also syncretizes the GA theory of, especially politics, but also religion, and also, um, declarative culture. He syncretizes that with more modern anthropology, Michael Tomasello, for the origin of language. He looks at a lot of stuff there. He looks at David Graeber. Ooh, very interesting. David Graeber has many based books. He's, he's left-wing, but, you know, like James White says about left-wing people, I'm not a big James White fan, but I just like this quote, there could be a lot of smart ones, and all you got to do is disregard their conclusions. Um, and David Graeber is one of them. That's, that's actually pretty, yeah, that's actually been, um, my approach with a lot of left-wing thinkers. Um, um, I, I've, for instance, I've read quite a few of the original, uh, postmodernists and the, and people like the Frankfurt School, and some of what they have to say is actually pretty, pretty good. But then they just go into, uh, bizarro land. And it gets, and it gets kind of, okay. And it gets kind of weird. They start saying, okay, so all right, Herbert Marcuse, I get it. I get how, um, you know, capitalism is basically turning us all into these kinds of one-dimensional men that can't resist the system. But why, why the heck do you think the solution is, um, polyamory? Yeah, sure. Yeah, you know, and, and the reason he thinks it's polyamory is because of some kind of Marxian read of Freudianism that he has going on, which, which is as hilarious as it sounds, right? Um, I mean, but I, I get, I get into that. That is sort of, and it's kind of funny because that's sort of what St. Thomas does to a lot of, a lot of the thinkers he, he syncretizes into his work. He, he takes a look at their points and, you know, he sort of disregards their conclusions. And he always gives a good reason for why he's disregarding those conclusions. Um, uh, but, yeah, it's sort of the thing that you have to do if you want to be a good philosopher. You have to read a lot of people you disagree with and then disregard their conclusions and come, and come to the correct ones.

Yep. And, uh, I think Anthony, yeah, that's what I mean when I say Anthony Kenny talks about Thomas Aquinas doing lots of benign readings. Yeah, that's definitely there. Definitely a lot of good stuff. It's, it's almost like it's, it's like the argument is sound except it's just not valid. All right, so it would be sound if, if it were valid. It's like the opposite of how stuff often is. It's like, oh, you promised these are all right, like nice, but it doesn't reach your conclusion. Uh, yeah, I mean, he, he talks about how, you know, a lot of the build-up and the premises to, um, certain things and even might be, might be correct, but then it's always the kind of positive, the, you know, solutions that these people come up to, because invariably, with a lot of left-wing people, you, you get the impression that, uh, they, they all think that the conclusion is some form of communism. And that's, and it, that's never, and it just kind of makes you want to go, no, wha, why are you, what you had such, you had a good thing going here, why, why did you suddenly start, uh, larping as a French communist or something?

Yeah. There's this section I remember in *On Kings*, which is one of the David Graeber books, that's very based. Unfortunately, the poor fix was written before a recent new based book by by David Graeber that was released, I think *The Dawn of Everything*. It's called. I want to read both and do some, well, I've read *On Kings*, but I want to reread it and, you know, make a video on that. And then I want to ring the dot of read *The Dawn of Everything*, which I have not done. Um, and the, there's a funny moment in *On Kings* where it's basically an analysis of modern politics by doing, it's, it's originally thinking, it's just not general anthropology, looking at the origins of kingship and how it develops and how those developments and origins are kind of a microcosm of the politics that's still alive today. And at one point, he basically says outright, I'm an anarchist. And a lot of the conclusions I just talked about make it really hard to be an anarchist, but I still have belief. I still have hope for something like that. It was like, very, I don't know, I don't have a reason to believe this in the light of at least relegated to these conclusions, but I still do. I still have hope. Um, I mean, it gets to the point where you think that maybe this is kind of a cultural thing, you know, these people are in academia and they're coming up with ideas that could undermine the conclusions of academic, of, uh, the conclusions that academia wants them to think. And then they're just holding on for, because they want to be part of the trendy club. Um, I mean, yeah, that ties a lot to the, to GA's like declaratives. The rational discourse is always a contingency on imperative political discourse. Which, you know, that's very similar to in my, my most recent video when I talk about with Foucault and paradigms and stuff. There's this idea that all our paradigms, all of our ostensibly scientific knowledge is grounded on these worldviews that ideologically stem from what are going to be political or institutional affiliations. So, yeah, that's sort of inevitable.

So, um, the, so, uh, you, you've talked a lot about, um, how, speaking of the politics, you talked a lot about how GA is just, even in Eric Gontz, is just one refutation of liberalism after another. Could you, so, could you give one of the, um, one of the, uh, more cogent refutations of liberalism that you, you think is the most impressive? Because I, I actually have used my nieces against, you know, those kinds of classical liberal types before to argue against their concept that, oh, we can just have this libertine social order where everybody just does whatever, and then we have free speech and free everything.

Yeah, that's very declarative culture. Z, like, you can't have any hierarchy. That's the, the most critique that would stand out to me the most is the one that's probably the biggest. Which is, it's not the most obvious, but it is the big, or sorry, it's not, it's not the most transferable to other worldviews, but it is the most significant in GA. It would be, well, if you want things to not be hi, it comes back to hierarchy. It's just like a version of how hierarchy is natural, man. It's, but it's true. Let's, of all the things Jordan Peterson says, I can stand that one. Um, there is no human without the form of language we have. And there is no form of language we have without the imperative. And there's no way to turn the imperative into anything other than someone who is commanding, someone who's issuing something, and one or several, you know, interlocutors who are retrieving and engaging in response, but are performatively subservient to the person who's issuing the command. And, you know, there's, yeah, even in the ostensive scene, there's the idea that there's kind of, there's this sense of the ostensive contains within it the imperative and the declarative. And the imperative contains within it a primitive version of the declarative. Like, it, everything is potentially there. It's just not actually there. And, um, even within the ostensive, there's this hierarchy where you defer to the center. Even having a center is not appropriate for these people, because again, when you think of victimary thinking, the idea is the focus on the equality around the periphery, around the center, but there is no consideration of the center, which is superior in that context, and that everybody's congregating around it. So, uh, the most scathing critique would probably just be the necessity of imperatives. And the fact that declarative culture, which is the only way to diffuse the necessity of imperatives, therefore hierarchy, is using a speech form in direct opposition to the actual purpose of that speech form, which is to answer the most appropriate imperatives. Your imperatives are there when ostensives aren't sufficient. And your declaratives are there when, I forget what it is. There's like the, the declaratives are there when you can't fulfill imperatives. There's that's, that's the summation of that grammatical stack I was talking about earlier. Um, oh, here's the quote. It's your declaratives answer the most precise questions that emerge from the most urgent imperatives that were generated by the most anomalous ostensives. So that's a quote from, I think, uh, I think it's *Anthropomorphics* by Denis Bouvard. Adam Katz. So, you know, that's, that's the main thing that GA has that, or it's not the main thing, it's just like a really big thing that human nature just has that in it. It's not a biological thing. It's not, it's a lobster's man. It's not that, it's not our nervous system. It's not the limbic system. It's sociality. It's the thing that divides us from apes. No other animal has that form of, they call it centered ordinality, hierarchy from one person to another to another to another. And there's no human without that either. He has a quote in chapter three of *Anthropomorphics*, which is basically these, this person Gertrude Stein, I believe, an anarchist. I think that she's a Jewish anarchist, talking about how there's the centers. And she is kind of okay understanding of centers. Centers aren't a unique concept to GA. And she talks about de-centering and trying to get rid of all the centers so that we can have equality and stuff like that. And he says, Adam Katz, in response, well, you want to get rid of centers. So what you're going to do is consider which centers to get rid of, and how you consider something a center, and how you should best get rid of them, and watch in what order. And then that thing, that procedural, those, uh, rules of engagement, I guess you could say, are the new center. So there's no real way to de-center, and there's no real way to de-hierarchalize, specifically talking in terms of the imperative. But of course, you know, you could argue that that imperative form is inevitable from mimesis. That's something that would be easier to phrase in terms people are more comfortable with that aren't maybe from GA, they don't have background there.

I see. I see. So, uh, I mean, to put it in layman's terms, what you're saying is the very structure of our language is it presumes a hierarchy with somebody at the top giving commands and everybody else following those commands?

Yeah. And they're being, in the most originary form, some center that's the origin of everything that has all the possible content of every speech form in it and every advanced human desire. And that's very against the sort of victimary egalitarian thinking that the opposite side would prefer.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I mean, I mean, one last thing, you talk about, we, we've talked a lot about, uh, um, politics, but, uh, you, you personally have defended, or rather, you've shown that you are sympathetic to, uh, Nicholas Fuentes' America First movement. So, no, why is it that you support, uh, Nick Fuentes? Does generative anthropology play a role in your decision to be America First?

That's more so a practical thing. I think he's probably the best. You know, if you're thinking in terms of like, what your goals are politically and what the next steps are, uh, I, I think it's, I'm sort of developing in this as I read some of the, uh, the, the books on, you know, the big foundations and that kind of thing, *Interjecte Parmar*, and stuff. There's, you know, there's a lot of people there, the, the kind of Jay Dyer, Kantbot intersection reading list. But, uh, it's the most practical next option. In that, all of the other steps are either not immediately political, they're not imminently political, they're primarily theoretical, or they are really only using foundations that already exist as a way to subvert the goals that those foundations currently support. But it's just happenstance that nowadays neoliberalism affirms a kind of leftism that's, you know, terrible. In the past, they affirmed a kind of non-leftism that was also terrible. That's people call it neoconservatism, but really neoconservatism is broader, and this neoliberalism is more particular. Which, by the way, now it'd be more proper to call neoliberalism globalism. You'll hear a lot of communists call these these new leftists neoliberals, where the term that's correct is globalist, because that term is scary and mean, globalist. Uh, but that's what they are. And, um, he's the only institute, or he's the only force I could see politically forming institutions that themselves are non-current foundations, but have that foundational power and that power to secure political succession and institutionalize the power.

I see. I see. So you see him as someone who is, yeah.

I, I personally, um, I do have, my brother is actually a huge fan of the Fuentes. Uh, myself, I'm sort of on the fence about him. Because although I might be sympathetic to a lot of his, uh, political views, I, I'm not, I'm not really certain about the, uh, the man himself. And I'm actually kind of black-pilled on things like electoral politics. Yeah. So, you know, it, it kind of, it, so, um, I, I'm not, that said, I'm not going to get in the way of someone like Nick Fuentes. Um, I, I'm just not going to be very gung-ho about him. But I, I will, but, um, if he, it, but I will try, you know, in the future, I will try to, uh, write up, uh, papers defending, uh, certain, certain things that, uh, that Fuentes might be doing. And playing the role as of the intellectual. But that's not really, you know, the politic, the politics of it is not really what I, I, I personally am interested in, you know.

Yeah, and I'm not that hype on politics either. It's like, um, unpredictable, not that fruitful, very long term. It's not very great, man. Like, there's not typically a lot of single drivers. I mean, there's, there's definitely stuff there, but it's, yeah, my focus is more on the philosophy, or not the philosophy, but the, the models that I'm building, the science, the science, exactly.

So, um, there's actually, uh, there was a question that was posed to me in, uh, one of my, one of the Discord servers I'm a part of. And, uh, the per, the person in particular asked me about your thoughts on theological language in light of GA. What do you, what do you think about, in particular, the, because some of the more ancient views of religion and the gods? Oh, oh, the, okay, so like the numinous, many god, like how it connects to paganism, maybe?

Well, it was more of, I mean, the person I was talking to claimed that, uh, all ancient people, there were no ancient atheists. Everybody believed, er, of course not. Well, in the sense of no gods, none of the, there's a difference between like the numinous and anarchy, like the principal originary force behind creation. So there were definitely anarchists in that sense of the word, people who believed in anarchia. Um, but I doubt there was a single person who didn't believe in the numinous, the word belief is incorrect, but didn't have the numinous impress themselves upon them. I, I mean, I, I mean, uh, what, what do you think about someone like, uh, the Buddhists, for example?

Man, the, I, I really just, Buddhism for me, I, I said this earlier in Jay Dyer's Discord, I said it's like the worst parts of Nietzsche, the worst parts of atheism, and then the worst parts of stoicism is how it feels. I don't know a lot about it. All I, because like my, when it comes to Eastern thought, the only background I really have is like Renegade. But I mean, I mean, what they were, I mean, what Buddhism tries to say is that, um, you'll come across the claim that there is that existence, there is no, there is nothing that exists. And what they mean by that is, there's nothing eternal, that everything is transient and passes away. The, uh, the Buddha actually says that, you know, uh, the gods are irrelevant because even the, um, even the, um, the Hindu version of capital G God, it goes through, goes through the cycles of reincarnation, according to that. And so they say that, you know, just ignore the gods, focus on obtaining Nirvana through the enlightened path, or something like that, you know. They, and then they also, they also claim that it was impossible for God to have created the world because, uh, because of his, you know, they, because they reject the, um, anything being eternal, that that's a he, that's a, and they would claim that, you know, in order for some, uh, in order for, uh, they would say that, uh, an eternal God would have to create an eternal world, and they don't believe the world is eternal. Therefore, whatever created the world can't be eternal either. It's pretty silly to me. I, it feels like, I mean, I've been, maybe it's just, it's on the brain because I've been looking at a lot of time theory, philosophy of time stuff, but it just feels like, well, if I'm a temporal bee theorist, if I believe that time isn't something God is subject to, then what's wrong with saying that like God creates a manifold of time that he then instantiates reality into, and then he's eternal respective to the time we understand? I'll have to, I'll have to read more of about Buddhism to, uh, really give the steel man answer to that. Right. But the sort of the, uh, I, I would like to hear some, I do, to get back onto GA, I would like to hear some of your thoughts on, you know, religion and theological language and how that interacts with, uh, how GA sees those things.

Yeah, I was just recently, I mean, I was thinking a lot about, um, about apophatic theology and GA, and how, um, there's, I'm like, pull that up. So there's kind of, there's this idea of unnamed things in, in this, this primitive human community that has just recently innovated the ostensive. Unnamed things kind of having the memetic terror at the mimetic crisis infused onto them because once you've gone through that abortive gesture of appropriation, the first sign, um, I mean, it just stands to reason that naming things is a way of controlling them or making their potentially destructive force a little bit more passive. And if things are unnamed, they have the possibility to threaten the community. So there's this instinct to name things. Um, now, and that would be possible because that form of grammar would then be, uh, crafted onto the community. The way that relates to apophatic theology is sort of, well, there's this relationship between the center and God in GA, as you hear me talk about the center, like I mentioned earlier, the root of all anthropomorphism, the root of all meaning, the thing that's this, that subsists, right? This, a lot of the language that you get out of GA sounds like Christianity, sounds like, uh, a theism, monarchia. And to the extent that Joel Davis, who's a guy who's sort of halfway in, halfway out of GA, he's a great political guy, said in this matter most surfer, he, I think his words were, the GA is Christianity light. So there's a lot of relationships there. And it ties into apophatic theology in, in one of two ways. I could see on the one hand, there's no way to represent the center entirely. It's the source of representation on the one hand. But on the other hand, it's kind of resistant to predication in this early form. Now, furthermore, though, those unnamed things that have that memetic terror are kind of similar to apophatic theology. There's kind of like this unnameability associated with a lot of the aspects of God and the, you know, linguistic terror and the secrecy and the sacredness there. So that's related to apophatic theology. Um, it almost feels like, you know, the, the unnamable ritual centers, the unnamable possible ritual centers, and the, uh, sort of spectral reality as you, as you look out to things that aren't representable, that they have this kind of numinous, spectral feeling to them. That's related. And then what else is there? There's another relationship that it has, but my main idea was mostly with apophatic theology and how it sounds pretty similar, the, the sort of perennial terror around God, like the fear of God for his infinity and, you know, stuff like that, being related to the fear of the unnamed because of the potential, the mimetic infinite potential that you have there. Because, I mean, all the, we'll sort of project that mimetic crisis and the violence that ensues from it onto unnamed things after we've named someone and after we've innovated the first sign. But that is the flaw of kind of reifying Christianity. And that's why GA is kind of embracing a paradox. They call it, it's, it's like, for example, the center creates man, and man creates the center. Well, that's trying as hard as it can not to reify the relationship that you would have to that center. You could do the same with the unnamed things that are holy in one sense of the word. I mean, the, um, the, I mean, we can think about,

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Sort of, it sounds like a kind of chicken or the egg scenario where, which came first, the center or the, uh, or the human?

Yeah. And then I, if you were to, if you were to really be forced to give an answer, I think GA would give the center as an answer. But it really makes more sense from a GA perspective to say,

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They paradoxically both create the other. And there's some, maybe there's some kind of eternal presence with mimesis in general, say that. But no, I don't really see a good way out of that that paradoxicality at the root of it, except for, I wouldn't be strictly incorrect to say the center creates humanity before humanity creates the center. But I mean, humanity really does create the center.

I, I mean, the, I wonder if, um, you know, I, I actually recently finished reading, uh, John Haldane. He's a Thomist thinker. He wrote this, he wrote in his, in the second edition of *Atheism and Theism*, he wrote about, uh, the Prime Thinker. And he, he talked about how, uh, got, uh, about God being the, uh, being an important part of the origin of language. And how, uh, human rationality requires, it requires language in order to, uh, function as a, as human rationality, because otherwise it's just a kind of proto, irrationality or rationality and potential. Um, I wonder if that, uh, I wonder if there isn't a kind of, uh, I wonder if there isn't a kind of, uh, synthesis that could be, that could be, uh, brought together by the, uh, by that idea. Maybe I could, maybe I could make a, uh, maybe I could make a video sometime and about this, and where I just, just sort of read out the idea and in a coherent way, or maybe I could write a paper on it and have you get your thoughts on it.

Yeah, the idea that I think that came into my mind there is that what it means to say that the human constructs the center and the center constructs the human is that the center is initiated or made central by us, but we don't decide its central properties. Its central properties exist in it. We don't decide it. We don't really control it, other than I guess by naming. But there's this kind of like construction and then bootstrapping. We construct the existence of the center that the, the fact that maybe that ritual animal at the center of the human congregation is a capital C center. But we don't construct the fact that it has its sacral or ritual or mimetic enhancement. So you could make a pretty interesting argument that the fact that it's just there is, there's this idea that it kind of has to subsist. Then the secretary of the center, the non-constructed elements of the center, if you represent it like I just did as, um, bootstrapped, like we created and then it creates itself afterwards, and then we create ourselves in response to its self-projection. Well, the, it creating itself would necessitate something else that exists independently. That's kind of how I see the Prime Thinker fitting in. There has to be something to be able to bootstrap it.

Yeah. John Haldane, in particular, when he made that argument, he was talking about how we need it, how,

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We need some kind of supernatural explanation for the jump between, uh, non-conceptual life and conceptual life, between, uh, and more lower animals and animals like us, who are more in some ways more than animals, right? There's this, there's this thing in GA that's really, people have the instinct to say that we evolved language as if it was a set of biological processions through biological means that just brought us in modern language. And that's really silly. I mean, first of all, we didn't start with declarative language. So how do you get from one state to the next? And second of all, he mentions this in his book, and I think chapter four, Adam Katz, how do you get, what is a language? There's a set of signs that are agreed upon by the community. There's a syntax that's agreed upon by the community. Okay, if you don't have a syntax and you don't have a way of representing things, how do you agree on stuff with people? Well, there's kind of an issue there. GA is resolving that issue, saying that we just evolved it. It's not resolving that issue.

So, uh, yeah. Um, yeah, I think he actually, the Haldane actually, uh, go, uses something very similar. I mean, he more references Wittgenstein and the idea of a linguistic communitarian, a, a view of language. Wittgenstein believed that, we, we gained our ability to reason from a linguistic community. You know, you would have a small, you would have a small child, and you would have a child, and the child would be taught language by, say, her older brother, and that would, and that would actualize her ability to rash, to think rationally. That, that's, there's a, people, people took that really. There was a guy, kind of, there was a big revolution of linguistics in the 20th century. There were sort of two of them. And in the, the former half, there's this one French guy who believed that all thought is literally us speaking. Like it's literally subconscious, barely detectable movements of the vocal organs, the larynx, the tongue, and such, that are enough to be us speaking to ourselves. Like, he, people went crazy with that stuff. And nowadays, it's cooled off. But linguists will still say there is an extra. Chomsky says linguistics, psychology, and the, and the philosophy of, I forget what it is, but linguistics and psychology and something else are really just modalities of one another. They're modalities of the same fundamental study.

All right, so I, I think we've covered quite a bit of ground for, uh, in this, uh, talk. We start, we started with something very basic and moved on to some very, uh, advanced stuff. And I think that you can, I think we can see that, uh, this truly is a transdisciplinary, um, a theory. Because you can, you could apply GA to aesthetics, to theories about religion, to theories about politics and ethics, all, all over the place. And it all started with a theory of how did we form languages? And it, it just grew from there. It, it's really incredible, actually. But I, I suppose that's the, it's, it's really something that, um, one last question I might have is, why isn't this getting as much attention as, uh, as you think it, as I think you and I would think it deserves?

Yeah, that's actually a really big topic of discussion in the forward to *The Origin*.

of language which comes after the preface. I don't know if that's normal authorship, but it feels weird to me. Um, where the chapter is basically dedicated to answering that question. And he mentions a couple things. Maybe he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. But the larger thing he identifies is victimary thinking. That the name of the game in academia, because the name of the game in elite circles in general, is this, uh, is victimary thinking. You can't think of origins. You can't do what we were doing, where, like you said, this is a tiny kernel of an idea, but like Goethe's morphology, it's a contracted version of the things that are like always around us everywhere. And by analyzing that little contracted form, you kind of get a microcosm of that macrocosm that we, you know, experience more imminently. So that thinking, that originary thinking, totally unacceptable. And that's, you know, as Adam Katz mentions, they banned discussion of that in the French Academy of Sciences because that victimary thinking just cannot coexist with originary thinking. Um, it has to be about who gets what, why people are missing out on this. There can be no discussion of the original purpose of that or the, the nature of that in itself, right? It's just not popular. And I can, it, you can't have that kind of thinking. It's not. There are some people who are on the margins who think like that, and most of them are like biological determinists, right? They're not like the closest you get to serious original thinking is physicalist. Serious original thinking on the one hand, people like JFG. On the other hand, people like, um, I guess Karl Marx, who says that everything is rooted in real productive material faculties. And that's the closest you can get to an original theory. It's just their aversion to that. It's, there's something spiritual, maybe about it. There's something, something really deeply ingrained in their minds that absolutely precludes considering efficient and formal causes linked in the origin of language, at the origin of humanity. I don't know why. It's just, I think, I think, um, in general, uh, if I, [Music] it seems like a common theme is that, uh, Thomism seems to comp nicely complement Goethe. Uh, a lot of mystic, uh, modern Thomists will point to the, the fundamental trend in modernity is the rejection of a final and efficient and a final and formal causation. Exactly. Uh, final causation being talking about purposes of things, and formal causation being about, uh, I guess you could call it a kind of the nature of a thing. So, for example, the, the formal cause of a statue would be, uh, would be the, uh, would be sort of the person that the statue is supposed to represent. And we would call, we would call that exemplar causation because that's, uh, because, uh, you have, you have the artist has in his mind the, uh, a person, a, um, a kind of idea, and then he materializes the idea by engraving the stat, making the statue of the person he has in his mind. That, that is formal causation. And those two, and all of modern philosophy from Descartes, go, Descartes onward has been dedicated to basically pretending like those things don't exist or don't matter. But you'll notice, and this is what Eric, this is what Edward Feser points out, that's really funny. You know, you'll notice in a lot of philosophy of science in the 20th, especially in the 20th century, the philosophy of science, these people are starting to sneak these, uh, ideas back in into their writing, but they're just calling it different names. Like, you'll have people talking about physical intentionality. Uh, and then, you know, it is sort of physical intentionality. What they're really talking, what they mean by that is, well, when you shatter glass, it tends to break. It tends to have break in this way rather than that way. And, uh, it points to certain, the, um, the glass, it's sort of the action, sort of the glass by its nature tends to shatter in one way rather than another. And since it has a tendency outside itself, you could say that it has intentionality, physical intentionality. And, uh, what that, and also, I mean, the other thing that jumps to mind there is like the way sociologists talk about racism a lot of the time, and even the way some Marxists talk about material productive faculties. It's like that's a lot of respectively formal and final cause talking you're doing. That's not efficient. That's obviously not material, even if they want to reduce it down to that. Yeah, I mean, the, uh, I mean, Karl Marx in particular, it was, uh, you could, you could give a very, uh, Aristotelian reading of Karl Marx. If he, uh, a lot of Marxism, actually, a lot of Karl Marx's writings about, uh, about capitalism and economic determinism actually make more sense if you give it an essentialist irregularity. You know, because he, because although he, and this is, um, this is sort of a running theme in academia and to this day, and, uh, apparently these people, they just, you notice that they, they also go on about how essentialism is bad, you know, essentialism is, is the root of all evil. Um, and what is a set, what is essentialism? Essentialism is just the theory that there is a thing in itself that we can know, which, um, that's, uh, that's sort of, uh, that, that's originary thinking. That is a large part of originary thinking. So, um, I, I guess that I think that plays into why academe might be prejudiced against the, this kind of theory. Yeah, that's definitely the formal and final cause thing is definitely true. They, yeah, they're totally averse. It's like a Masonic ritual, like it's all, it's like that. I would have my throat slit, tongue cut out, like that thing that Masons do. It's almost like you have to do that with like implicitly with formal and final cause or any embodied description of an event or causation, um, to be able to like enter the temple of academe. Um, there's that. And that, that's part of the reason why it's almost like a dark ages of philosophy in a lot of ways, outside of logic. Um, you know, a lot, there's always strides in logic over the past 1, 200 years, but other than that, it's a lot like philosophy between like the first century BC and the first century AD, where stuff is kind of in stasis. Um, yeah, nice. Yeah, that is unfortunate. Um, but I, I, I, I would like to, um, wrap it up with one final question. Oh, one final question. Say I'm a, someone watching this stream and I really, and I really want to learn more, where should, where do you think I should start? Yeah, I mean, for most people, I would, I would probably recommend Anthropomorphics actually first. Typically, you'd read that after. The reason why is because The Origin of Language uses a lot of really entrenched linguistic vocabulary that can be confusing. Where Anthropomorphics makes it more directly political and Anthropomorphics cites a lot of sources you might want to read in there that are nice for developing that out. If you are comfortable looking at some linguistic terms throughout and maybe spending a little bit more time, I do The Origin of Language. Um, you know, there's none of them are really beginner-friendly, unfortunately. Uh, I read The Origin of Language first because my back before philosophy, I was studying linguistics and not studying like looking at it having fun with it, but, um, the, it can be a little bit, I, I could understand someone who does not have a linguistic background having some issues tracking there. Uh, Anthropomorphics, the warning there is not about complicated terminology, it's that he introduces concepts sort of in reverse order. He'll use the concept and then define it. Could be a little bit jarring, maybe, maybe it's not too jarring, but, you know, see how that treats you. If you want something that's, if this is like, if this seems ultra esoteric to you, I'd recommend Chris Bond's book still, um, as a preliminary to GA. Chris Bond's book is called, uh, why is it not coming to mind? No, this is Nemesis. Thank you. Um, Nemesis. It introduces GA in a really overview manner, but more so it introduces the concepts that I'm recruiting here. I would say read the first three chapters of that because that's the book is funny. It's like three chapters of content and then the rest is case studies. Um, so first couple chapters of that, if you like, and then I would recommend Anthropomorphics. If you're fine going a little bit more in depth, The Origin of Language by Eric Gans. Both of which are accessible as ebooks. Many other GA books exist but are not. Um, Nemesis is also accessible as an ebook. Anthropomorphics and Nemesis are both free as epub ebooks on Imperium Press's website at, uh, imperiumpress.org. So I'm putting it down into the description of this video. Excellent. Yep, you can get those books there freely. Nemesis and Anthropomorphics. The Origin of Language, it's on Libgen, but if you want to buy it, the author is still alive, so proceeds go to them. The authors, plural. Uh, yeah, that's what I recommend those books. And I might make some videos on it in the future. There are like seriously no videos on it right now, other this, like this will be the most in-depth video on YouTube, I'm pretty sure. Uh, this stream, once it ends, on Generative Anthropology. All right. And I'm also going to add this, uh, glossary, glossary of, uh, Generative Anthro, Generative Anthropology that I, that I found while we were having this conversation. That is totally invaluable. That is the best. Yeah. And then finally, I'm going to leave a link to what you mentioned, the Substack. Oh, yeah. It's GA Newsletter, written by, probably Dennis Bouvard. He might be using his real name, but, uh, GA News. I actually have it. Yeah, yeah. Let me, let me just put this. GA Newsletter, yes, by Dennis Bouvard. And, uh, Love Chronicles of Love and Resentment, which is Eric Gans's, uh, uh, uh, blog. Yeah. Uh, and then there's another blog that has older, much, much less organized content, but it's also by Adam Katz. gablog.cdh.ucla.edu. I posted that. Okay, well, let me, let me just get, get that out. Um, [Music] GA blogs. Okay, yeah, I got it. I got it. Basically, the GA blog became the Substack. So, all right, yeah, yeah. Um, GA Newsletter, GA blogs. Uh, yeah, and it can be, this can be a sort of, you can think, I guess you can think of this as a sort of a, I'm going to, um, title this to, uh, to help, help, help learn. I can title this, Learn GA. Here. And then, yeah, just give, give a link. And then save changes. Excellent. So now it's all in, it's all in the description. If you want to, uh, check these out, it's all in the description. And it'll be available after this live stream is done. Uh, thank you so much, Normal, for coming on. I hope, I hope to have many more conversations. I have a few friends who might be interested in some of the ideas that you share, and I hope, I hope that, uh, we can find a way to network with all of them. Totally. Yeah, that'd be great. Love talking about, love talking about ideas. Love hashing stuff out. It's been a pleasure. All right. All right. So, uh, this is William of Applied Virtue, and I hope to see you all in the future. Thank you, everybody, and, uh, take care. Yeah.