Then & Now: Philosophy, History & Politics

A look at the darker side of MrBeast’s philanthropy and the wider philanthrocapitalist model it's a part of. Looking specifically at #teamseas and a partnership with Jennie-O, I attempt to untangle how corporations and conglomerates like Coca-Cola, chemical and oil companies, and big meat monopolies all have a vested interest in financing certain ‘philanthropic’ projects while side-lining others. This is a story that takes some surprising twists and turns, from whitewashing, greenwashing & ‘funwashing’ sponsorships, to illegal price-fixing, an endemic of farmer suicides, and leaked corporate emails to influence charities. Examining the roots and consequences of ‘philanthrocapitalism’ tells us a lot about how lobbying works under modern capitalism. This is a long video, but it’ll be worth it to tell this story properly.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Let's think difference.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anger, rage, fury: it seems like everywhere we look right now, we see rising temperatures, smoldering resentment, blood boiling, floods of emotion. From Trump to Brexit, Hindu Nationalism to Black Lives Matter, from Hollywood me too to Pandemic Protestors, ISIS to white nationalists, Ukraine to Fox News, to my ongoing conflict with my unreasonably slow computer, it seems, as the historian Pankaj Mishra has argued, like we’re living in an age of anger.I look at the history and philosophy of anger. What is it? What triggers it? Is it ever good? I look at the Stoics – including Epictetus and Seneca – Aristotle, Christianity, Enlightenment figures like Rousseau, Hume, and Adam Smith, through to modern day anger management psychology. I make some surprising findings about the usefulness of a misunderstood emotion.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robotics, automation, and the information age are going in a strange direction. We look at extended selves, farming drones, Tesla sensors, Facebook and Twitter feeds, Amazon, Tinder, and Deleuze and Guattari's bodies without organs.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you’ve ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern philosophy to go by, a lens through which to understand a complex world, a foundation, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is as good as you'll find. He asked questions like: why are we so dogmatic? What makes us irrational? Why do we live as slaves to our emotions and others opinions.He was one of the first Enlightenment advocates for real democracy, and was the first to really criticise the bible as just a text. He was vilified for his perceived atheism and excommunicated from the Jewish community where he lived.I look at Spinoza’s most influential text, The Ethics, look at what his ideas about god were and why he was a Pantheist, ask what substances, modes, and attributes are, and why he argues that the ‘many is one’. We look at the affects, the idea of conatus, the ‘free person’, rationalism, his stocism, and ideas of morality and benevolence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why Hasn't the Internet Fixed Democracy? How can we fix it? I use the latest 'drama' with Ethan Klein, Joe Rogan, Tom Pool, Vaush etc to see if we can find out...Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The nature-nurture debates inform almost every area of human life – from biology and botany to economics, literature, and history.To simplify, thinkers on the nature side have, in varying ways, argued that at least parts of your body and mind are behind an impenetrable skin, cannot be gotten to by upbringing, education, politics, or culture. Imagine a one-way street. For example, you have an innate eye color or a creativity that comes out of your DNA – nothing gets to it, its just in you. On the other hand we have empiricists. They believe in a two way street instead of a one way street.This video looks at some complicated sounding things: DNA, genetics, epigenetics, methylation, phenotypes, stress, twin studies, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, and early intervention programs. But I want to avoid being technical, as much as possible, because most fundamentally, most simply, this box is about a fundamentally philosophical idea: freedom.The idea that we have a nature has been approached in countless ways – philosophically, psychologically, theologically – but the most persuasive, through the 19th and 20th centuries, the best place to start, is biology: the study of DNA and our genes.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does 'meta' really mean? What can we make of Facebook's change to 'Meta'? Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote about the decline of metanarratives in 1979's 'The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge'. Can we learn anything about Zuckerberg's aspirations from this classic postmodern text?Lyotard was prescient. He noticed in the 70s that quote ‘the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited.’ He also that ‘Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mary Douglas wrote that:‘There is no such thing as absolute dirt; it exists in the eye of the beholder. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment. In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying, we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea.’Dirt is a human concept. There is no such thing as dirt in nature. The natural world is neither pure nor dirty. It just is. Everything is simply where it happens to be. Until litter is dropped and houses are built to exclude and chemicals are spilled and smog rises the idea that anything could be in the wrong place is absurd. And being human, dirt is a moral concept. Something that is right or wrong. Organized correctly or not. What can it tell us about ourselves? About order-making, about right and wrong, about 'dirty' people, about racism, and creativity?Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There were several reasons lynch mobs in Jim Crow America and soldiers and police officers in Nazi Germany were motivated to kill African-Americans and Jews. Historical forces like a sense of victimhood – both having lost wars – cultural forces and propaganda that depicted the victims stereotypically as inferior, greedy, or a threat, and economic forces – ‘the frustration of basic needs’ as social psychologist Ervin Staub puts it.They were motivated, in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America, by a moral culture made up of stereotypes, adverts, scientific literature, societal standards, norms, and sensibilities that all pushed the perpetrators towards killing.In both cases, the perpetrators had rationales, justifications, reasons for what they were doing, even if, with historical hindsight, we can see these to be incorrect.This begs an important question: how is resistance possible? How does one know when they’re being pushed by historical forces to do something that in retrospect we see as wholly immoral? How does one escape from under the hand of history – if culture, society, and the economy are all moving you towards acting in a particular way. Do we retain a moral sense?The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, for example, has asked whether there can be a ‘moral responsibility for resisting socialization.’Often, what makes people like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther notable, is not that they are shaped by historical forces, but that that the very same forces are felt by them as coercion and that they stand up to them, counter them, resist them.Can we find morality and ethics in history? I look at empathy and moral sentimentalism to find out.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.