Episode #188 ... Achievement Society and the rise of narcissism, depression and anxiety - Byung-Chul Han
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thank you to all the people out there that support the show on Patreon. For an ad-free version of the show, sub at any level at patreon.com slash philosophizethis. So the last couple episodes, we've been talking about the topic of how power operates in the world. Specifically, ways that people's behavior is directed where it's not as obvious or as simple as there just being a gun pointed to your head telling you what to do.

We've talked about a digital panopticon. We've talked about big data and surveillance. And I want to start with a quote from the philosopher we're going to be talking about today.

And for anybody out there who may be newer to philosophy, but you've listened to the last couple episodes of the podcast, I love moments like this, by the way, where you read a quote or you hear a passage from someone's work, and you know that a few weeks ago you may not have known what they were even talking about, but after having done the work, gotten to another level in your thinking, it feels good seeing the difference, knowing what the main character of this episode is talking about when he mentions something like a digital panopticon. Quote, Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon.

Google and social networks, which present themselves as spaces of freedom, are assuming panoptic forms.

Today's surveillance is not occurring as an attack on freedom, as is normally assumed. Instead, people are voluntarily surrendering to the panoptic gaze. They deliberately collaborate in the digital panopticon by denuding and exhibiting themselves. The prisoner of the digital panopticon is a perpetrator and a victim at the same time. Herein lies the dialectic of freedom. Freedom turns out to be a form of control."

Those were the words of Byung-Chul Han, South Korean-born German philosopher. And just for some time period context here, he is alive today. He's kind of like Zizek in that way. He's truly somebody where if you wanted to see what it looks like when a great philosopher is walking down the street eating a hot dog, you could see it with Han. Famous picture of Zizek eating a hot dog. It's pretty great. And like the last couple episodes, Byung-Chul Han is somebody that's doing his work in the wake of Foucault and his analysis on how power functions.

Like Deleuze from last episode, he thinks the ways that people are controlled have undergone several major developments since the disciplinary model of Foucault. And you can see a glimmer of it in the last line of the quote that we just read, where he says that freedom turns out to be a form of control. What does Han mean by that?

Well, Han thinks that in disciplinary societies, like the one Foucault talked about, and most human societies that have ever existed really, the way that people were controlled is through what he calls negative power. Think of negative power as any example of a person's behavior being controlled by prohibition or limitation. Telling people, no, you can't do that. Or no, you shouldn't do that. Negative power is the way people have been controlled for most of human history.

But Hahn says the way that people are controlled in today's modern Western capitalist societies is through positive power. Positive power sounds more like this. You, my friend, you can be whatever it is that you want to be in this world. In fact, if anybody ever tells you what kind of person you should be, don't listen to them. You're in charge. You're in the driver's seat now. You can be anything. And now that we've established that you can be anything, now it's time for you to choose who you want to be.

Are you somebody with no goals or dreams that you want to shoot for? Do you want to be somebody that shoots for your dreams? Or do you want to sit around snorting lines of flaming hot Cheetos for the rest of your life? What kind of person do you want to be? I mean, if you can be anything, wouldn't you want to be one of those people that have a prestigious, powerful, high-paying position so you don't have any limitations in your life? That's how people used to be enslaved, right? Limitations from the outside. But not you. You don't have any of those. Think of all your ancestors that used to be subjugated.

Who are you to turn this opportunity down? As long as you work hard enough, as long as you can put your head down, focus, grind, achieve your short-term goals, set new ones, then achieve those, the only person who's in the way of you being a billionaire one day is you. And now it's time to get to work on all those goals, my friend.

This is positive power. Positive power says can. Negative power says should. And as Hahn says, quote, can is much more effective than the negativity of should. Therefore, the social unconscious switches from should to can, end quote. This is a new, interesting, positive form of control.

We are living in what Han calls an achievement society, not a disciplinary society. Nobody holds a gun to your head and tells you what to do anymore. Again, that's an old-fashioned tactic at this point. All you got to do to control people is tell them all the stuff that they can be doing in theory, if only they make themselves valuable enough. If only they work hard enough to make their minds as efficient and optimized as they possibly can be. What Han calls psychopolitics, an extension of Foucault's biopolitics.

You tell people that, and you don't need a gun to people's heads. Because in the pursuit of endlessly maximizing their abilities, they'll spend the rest of their lives going crazy about never being good enough, never doing enough, never being efficient enough. If there's ever a moment where they're not spending their time being as productive as they possibly could towards making themselves more valuable, they will actually feel bad about it. Han says we're told in these societies to be authentic.

You know, because authenticity, that's the true measure of someone who's free, right? Someone who's not being told by anybody who they should be when you can be anything you want. But authenticity, he says, is an ad campaign of neoliberalism. It's a self-absorbed nightmare. Because when you tell somebody that it's their job to define themselves through themselves without any sort of help from the outside...

When you make somebody the sole arbiter of creating the standards for themselves and what they're capable of, and then also the person that checks in and determines whether they're doing the best job they can to meet those standards, roles that used to be filled by other things in societies of the past, there's only one direction to go when you're constantly looking inward like that. And to Han, that direction is going to be narcissism.

That's why, I mean, wherever you are right now, if you're inside, go outside, go out into the middle of a courtyard, throw a rock in any direction, and you'll hit someone who's a toxic narcissist in today's world. Practically everybody is not a person anymore. They're their own little personal project. We turn ourselves into a commodity with market value. Everything we learn is not just learning anymore. It's an investment in ourselves.

Everything is about mentally optimizing yourself, working, producing more efficiently with your mind. And it's a beautiful way to go through life, by the way. You know, if somebody calls you out for being a narcissist, you can just call them a loser, right? That's just somebody that's lazy. They're not going for their dreams like I am. You know, they can't possibly understand the level of work that this kind of stuff takes.

If you're in a relationship or a friendship and the other person says you're focusing too much on yourself and your own projects and it's causing problems in the relationship, you can just say, whoa, whoa, being in a relationship, too much drama for me at this point in my life. I don't have room for all that. I got to focus on me and my market value for a while. It really is a beautiful set of excuses to make it seem to you like it's a character deficiency in the other person rather than you focusing entirely on yourself.

And when your head is so far up there, by the way, that you need a miner's helmet to be able to see where you are.

any one of those camping flashlights on your forehead to figure out where anything is. When you're that far up there, it really is a special type of narcissistic delusion. It even starts to resemble religion to Byung-Chul Han. Han says, quote, the infinite work on the ego resembles self-observation and self-examination in the Protestant religion. And they, in turn, represent a technique of subjectivation and domination. Instead of looking for sins, now negative thoughts are the ones to be sought.

The ego struggles with itself as against an enemy, end quote. Even something like credit card debt becomes something that starts to resemble a religious debt to be repaid. You start and rack up a bunch of debt, like with original sin, and then only through your participation in the market-driven achievement narcissism game do you ever get to repay that debt. A narcissist is the moral exemplar of a neoliberal society. And there's that word that Han uses a lot, neoliberal.

A couple important points of context here to understand where he's coming from. You know, there have been plenty of people out there who have made the claim that the world is full of narcissists, right? And they have all sorts of reasons they'll give for making that claim. They'll say, you know, we're raising more kids to be narcissists with the participation trophy generation. They'll say that narcissistic people just raise more narcissistic people and now the whole world is becoming it. But to Byung-Chul Han, that's almost the opposite of what's going on.

The narcissistic individual is not the cause of the world being more narcissistic. The ethos of the world makes narcissism an extremely common lane for people to fall into because they have almost no other options. The same way in former societies it was really common for people to fall into a lane in life like go to school, graduate, go to work, get married, have kids, get a house, white picket fence. Narcissism is the lane that we're funneling people into in a neoliberal society.

At the risk of sounding boring here, it needs to be said, because we haven't talked about it on the show for a while. Don't be misguided here. The liberal part of neoliberalism has nothing to do with what people are talking about when they say liberal or conservative in the modern American political landscape.

Neoliberalism is a strategy that came about in the late 1980s when Western economies were becoming increasingly globalized. Where in an attempt to stay competitive, countries like the United States and the UK thought that if we can get out of the way of businesses, massively deregulate them, lower their taxes, this will pave the way for them to increase production, which will then create more jobs, those jobs will then go to the middle class who will then spin that money back into the economy, and this will lead to economic prosperity for everyone.

David Harvey calls neoliberalism, quote, "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade," end quote. Now, depending on where you sit in the political spectrum in today's world, you could see neoliberalism as being an incredible force for good or the origin of many of the problems that the modern world faces.

As always, it's not really my job to be political here. I could do a whole episode on it. The point is, this is where Byung-Chul Han is coming from. When the ethos of a neoliberal society is about reducing outside regulations on companies to allow for economic growth and innovation, that same ethos gets applied to the individual person that's living in one of these societies.

Again, it gets applied to them through the maxim, be whatever you want to be. Nobody's going to regulate you from the outside anymore. The sky's the limit. You are a commodity and your job is to increase your market value by constantly working on yourself. And again, that self-obsession that people gravitate towards is not because people are birthing more people that have narcissistic brains.

They are the effect of how the world is, not the cause to Byung-Chul Han. Narcissism is like water to a fish living today. It's where people sometimes feel like they need to live in order to survive. And it just needs to be said, narcissism carries with it such a negative connotation. I don't think Han's trying to rub anyone's nose in it like that. I think he's just saying these narcissistic tendencies can get out of hand if you let them. Or

Or they can just encompass all of your personality if you're not even aware of how society funnels people in this direction. Now what happens in this world that emerges, where so many people are focused on themselves above everything else? Again, setting their own standards, feeling guilty about anything they do that isn't making them more efficient or optimized right now. What happens to Han is an increase in levels of depression and anxiety.

If there's a lot of that going on in the world we're living in, this self-focused ethos many people fall into in life could be part of the reason why.

Because think of what life is like. You set goals for yourself. You have a picture of the person that you want to be inside your mind. You work hard, maximizing everything about yourself, only to wake up the next day and try to push yourself even more. Until one day, you break because nobody's supposed to be constantly exerting themselves. And then you often have the added bonus of self-hatred because you're left to deal with the feelings of what seems to you like you lack the motivation to even be you.

I mean, that's a special kind of torture. Remember, at other points in human history, say you were born a peasant in the Middle Ages, you were given a social role to fill.

You worked really hard, no doubt, but you knew exactly who you were. You weren't trying to till the soil, you know, just a little bit better every day so you could be the senior vice peasant. You know, oftentimes in these societies, if you were a peasant and you wanted to improve something about yourself, maybe you would improve things in a spiritual area. And by the way, the work you did in most of these former societies was physical work, where if you're exhausted, usually you just take a day, a week off and your body heals itself.

But in the world of psychopolitics, where you're constantly maximizing your mental capabilities, exhaustion in this area leads to what Byung-Chul Han calls burnout. And just as a problem, that's not as simple as just taking a day off and then everything's fixed. The depression he talks about, people can get stuck in for years. See, to Han, the plight that people face in this society is depression, not repression like in former societies.

When it comes to this area of your mind specifically, nobody is repressing you, holding you down. In many ways, he says, we're encouraged to auto-exploit ourselves.

That's part of what makes freedom such a diabolical strategy that controls people. We're both the master and the slave in our own minds, whipping ourselves to be better, do more, stop complaining. We either don't live up to our own standards, burn out and feel horrible, or we find a way to accomplish the goals, and then with the nature of the human mind to restlessly be striving for goals, get them for a day, and then have some other goal to shoot for.

Even when we accomplish the stuff we set out to do, we just remain anxious, exhausted, and perpetually dissatisfied. But no one's coming to save you. Because anxiety, as he says, leads to production. It's ultimately a good thing for the economic order of things for you to be constantly anxious and producing.

Again, neither of these things, depression or anxiety, are areas that you necessarily have to find yourself in in life. But again, these are common lanes that people fall into, in the same way that in other worlds it was common for people to sign up for the draft after they graduate high school. And the technology that we have around us today makes it even easier to end up in this depression or anxiety.

What Han's eventually going to say, that we'll talk about in detail, is that what has been removed from modern life that makes these outcomes so much more common for people is the presence of the other. And it makes sense. If what this world makes people do is focus way too much on themselves, then if you're a Benton person, what's missing from their life is probably going to be everything else outside of them that has historically brought value to people's lives.

He calls this the other, difference, negativity, the hidden, the imperfect. These words will become practically interchangeable when discussing all the things that are missing from a solely narcissistic worldview. And when you pay attention, he says, everything in this world is slowly being turned into the same.

He says,

One accumulates online friends and followers, yet never encounters another person, end quote. Now, let's break down what he means by all those and how technology makes these easier. But maybe the first thing that needs to be addressed is I'm sure there's some people out there who hear Han say that everybody in the world is turning into the same thing. And they're thinking, what world is this guy living in?

People don't have enough of the other in their life. That's literally the problem with society is that people are turning people into the other when it's not appropriate to. This tribalism that people cling to, you know, they see someone who politically disagrees with them and they don't see another person who all things considered, we agree on more things than we disagree on. No, they turn this person into the enemy in their world.

Then these people talk past each other and they can never really have a good conversation. The problem with this world, someone could say, is that we embrace the concept of the other too much. But what Byung-Chul Han would no doubt say back is, would you call that a genuine interaction with the other?

When a person does that, would you call that the person really encountering ideas that they disagree with, truly considering those ideas, and then sitting with them? Or is that whole process just a poorly hidden attempt to confirm their own bias so they don't have to really get to know the person and how they feel? In other words, is this in reality just another version of narcissistic self-affirmation?

Tell me, if you've ever found yourself on one side or another of a political issue, and you write a comment on the internet and someone from the other side claps back at you, do you ever feel like that person truly understands where you're coming from? Does it even feel like they care about knowing where you're coming from? No, there's nothing about them that truly wants to encounter difference or the other. What they want is for everybody to have pretty much the same thoughts that they do. Everything needs to be the same to this person.

Because truly listening to another person, setting your ego aside, feeling another person's perspective, that can be incredibly uncomfortable. It forces you to think of them as they are, something totally different than you, not just how they benefit you in some transactional way. The people trapped in this achievement society will often have zero deep close relationships in their entire life.

And the people they do have as friends end up just being transactional. You know, they increase their market value in some sort of way. They support the image they have of themselves. Their friends are good contacts to have in a networking sense. The narcissist loves to have friends that are all the same as them and agree with them on everything. Tell them everything they're doing is just fine. And this extends to the way they act when they come across new, potentially perspective-shifting ideas.

Yes, in the political sphere, but also documentaries, videos, podcasts, anything. They're never looking to entertain anything that's too far outside their field of view. They just want to see new ideas that are mostly kind of already corresponding with what they think they know now. This is another way that the narcissist denies the other in their life, further isolating themselves just a little bit more. Now, none of this is actually trying to engage with true difference, just an illusion of it.

In reality, Han says, the other is incomparable. Meaning, even looking at the other and trying to understand that person or those ideas by comparing them to predefined categories, even that obscures the true difference of the other because it's just viewing them through your own individual set of terms that are important to you. It reduces the true beauty of the other, he says, into mere diversity.

What this leads to is a crisis of connection and a crisis of love for people in the modern world. People want everything and everyone to be the same. You know, another example of this is when someone takes a selfie, Han says, and then puts a filter on it to smooth out all the edges and the imperfections, and this turns them into some standard of beauty that isn't them.

And then Hahn says, "When you remove the otherness from somebody, you can't ever really love that person. All you can do is consume them. When you remove the otherness from an idea, it can't ever really affect you fully. All you can do is consume it." And think of all the ways people are turned into things to consume when it comes to romance on the internet. Anyway, true interaction with and true consideration of the other, this is what is missing for a lot of people in today's world.

And it makes it even easier to fall into this place, Hahn says, because the technology that pretty much everybody uses enables further isolation, almost like it's an addiction. When you're on the internet, for example, if you ever encounter anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, like you truly have to put your ego aside for a second and try to understand it from the eyes of someone else, you can just click off the page. You can just swipe to the next video. And the algorithm will happily go along with it for you, because its job is just to keep you on the app.

It doesn't really care what kind of narcissistic game you're playing. In a sense, Han says, we propagandize ourselves. Most examples of people being dominated throughout history have had some sort of symbol that people carry around with them that represents their domination. Think of slaves being branded. Think of a scarlet letter. Well, to Han, the smartphone is that to us. And more than that, actually, because it strengthens our form of domination.

He compares a smartphone to a rosary and beads, you know, something that people who are under the control of a religion carry around with them and hold up at the opportune time. It's not only a surveillance device for us, it's also a digital confessional. And Facebook is the church, he says. A like is a digital amen. And instead of asking for forgiveness, we call out for attention. In fact, almost everything about the smartphone, he says, is utterly incompatible with true thinking and freedom.

To understand where he's coming from with this point, we have to make a distinction between what he thinks is true thinking and what often passes as thinking for people. Consider what it's like to be on TikTok, or most of the internet for that matter. TikTok's just a very obvious version of it. You're scrolling around from video to video, you're getting tons of information, but there's no contemplation that's going on about it.

In fact, that's the appeal of watching any of these channels that hack your attention span. You don't have to put in any thought. Nothing you're watching has to connect to some deeper picture of the world that you have. It's all self-referential. Like when you watch one of these videos, it really is just some narcissist dancing in the mirror. You know, making little cutesy faces, because that's what you do when you're dancing.

Right? You switch to another video. I'm going to bake the world's largest coconut cream pie and then live inside of it for 40 days. And that's it. That's truly all the video is. And there's something beautiful about that. It's part of the appeal. But there's no depth to that experience. There's nothing meaningful about reality that those things are connecting to with people. You're having a surface level interaction with reality. And then some people wonder why it seems like most of the stuff they consume is meaningless.

This is what he meant, by the way, from that quote from earlier, where he talked about the terror of the same affecting all areas of life. You travel everywhere, but don't experience anything. You see everything, but have zero insight. You consume information, but gain zero knowledge. Lust after adventures and stimulation, but stay the same. Get online friends and followers, but never encounter another person. He says because the pace of the world is speeding up in modern times...

Because you can just pull up a screen and float from video to video that gives you a shallow experience of the world.

you can bring that shallow level of understanding to every experience that you have if you want. See, to Byung-Chul Han, meaning, knowledge, truth, these things only come when you contemplate how the present moment connects to the past and the future. But there's never any time to contemplate when you're just scrolling from one distraction in life to the next. It takes someone actively making the choice to slow down and take an inventory of how this stuff actually impacts you.

Think of the person that speed reads through a book, you know, just consuming all that information, but then never remembers any of it after they're done reading. If you don't take the time to contemplate how that information connects to the existing order of things, all that's just going to stay raw information, nothing more. And again, to the person trapped in that shallow narcissism, never really considering the other, that shallowness becomes the depth you're capable of having in every experience you encounter.

See, that's one of the costs of blindly living in this achievement society. And I guess also the first example in this episode of something we can do to not be at the mercy of it. One thing I personally love about Han's work in particular is that it feels empowering in comparison to some of the other people we've been talking about.

Because God, do I hate at this point in my philosophical journey, people that go and say, is it freedom or is it security? I don't know. Maybe somewhere in the middle, I guess. What are we going to do? Or even worse, someone that prescribes some doomsday scenario about the world we're living in, but then offers nothing that can be done about it. Byung-Chul Han is different because he writes shorter books, because he's less ambitious than other philosophers that try to write these sweeping encapsulations of how all aspects of society work together. This

This gives him the ability to comment on how someone might improve their situation if they find themselves in one of these lanes in life. And the general strategy that's going to apply to many different areas of life, just putting it up on a billboard here at the beginning, is that we need to find a way to reintroduce that negativity or that otherness into our lives. A lot of different ways we can do that.

Because look, if we're living in a society where people often get funneled into these lanes where they have surface level, thoughtless anniversaries of burnout, anxiety, and depression, and then part, those are because they're overly focused on themselves as personal projects.

Well, then to put it in as practical a way as I can, if you notice that people in these societies, as they mature, oftentimes learn to do things like put their ego aside, listen more, truly entertain outside ideas, they slow down, they move towards a more deep understanding of the world they're in. If these are things that often come with age, then to Byung-Chul Han, that is not a coincidence because each and every one of those things shows a person that's aware of how important the other is for living a good life.

And it goes beyond just these things. You know, that's what's so empowering about his view of society in particular. You may be trapped inside of a digital panopticon.

But if you're aware of that fact, you can make space for the other in your life. Whereas he says you can develop a sense for the other. And if this sounds familiar to you, many of these ideas are going to be in reference to Eastern concepts that we touched on in the series we just did on Simone Weil. You'll see a lot of parallels as we go through this. Hahn talks about finding moments where you can truly listen to someone else as they are.

That is an important thing that you have to integrate into your life if you're not already. You have to listen to someone else, and not just in terms of how they benefit you, not just comparing them to yourself, but slowing down and truly listening, emptying the self, getting your own ego out of the way. As he says, becoming a resonance chamber for the other person to quote, speak themselves free, end quote. I mean, that sounds like Simone Weil was reanimated from the grave, broke into his house and wrote that in his journal.

But we got to do more than just listen to Han. Another thing you got to do to fight this narcissistic urge to always need to be efficient and productive all the time. You know, you're out with people that you should be hanging out with and you can't stop feeling bad that you're not being more efficient with this time you're spending. Han says you got to try to make space in your life for things where you're doing them and it's not because they're improving you in some way. It's not because they're making you money. Find space to do things that are purely for the sake of joy. That's it.

Because that balance, establishing clear boundaries between work and leisure, leaving room for both, valuing things like rest as well, that's important. These are parts of life that can be easy to forget with as fast paced as things can be.

But just like with the person who only watches TikTok videos, if you don't balance productivity and this other dimension of life of moral reflection, you'll just never reach deeper levels of understanding about life and people. And again, you'll bring that shallowness to potentially every experience that you end up having.

When it comes to specific ways that Byung-Chul Han lives his life, he's famously known for gardening, for finding ways to work with his hands, and for sitting in silence. Those are three, all right? It's just a few ideas, but obviously you can do whatever works for you. And by the way, he says for anyone out there who may want to use their brain to challenge the existing order of things and try to make the world a better place, whether you're a musician coming up with a new song, or you're a musician coming up with a new song,

or a dancer coming up with a new dance move, or a philosopher coming up with a new way of thinking. All of those require people to do actual contemplative thinking. He says thinking, you know, actually contemplating things at a deeper level is

That's something that differentiates us from other animals. The surface level, rapid fire, multitasking of attention that typically goes on in an achievement society, that's something you can see in animal behavior, he says. What we can do uniquely though, is we can challenge the way we're currently thinking about things and really sit with something truly different than what we currently believe in. And that is what the world needs to haunt if you really want to be someone that's moving it forward.

Now, as you can imagine, there's some responses to what Han has been saying in this episode. You know, you can imagine someone who's young, they're ambitious, they're living in one of these achievement societies, and they hear what Byung-Chul Han is speaking on and they say, wow, wow, I have never heard anybody give such a great handbook for justifying toxic levels of mediocrity in their life.

This person might say, look, you can call what I'm doing narcissistic if you want, because I'm working on myself, because I want to be the best person I can be to provide for my family. But look, I call what you're doing, you know, gardening and sitting in silence, I call that just a waste of time. Every second you spend taking a rest day, doing things simply for the sake of joy, for every one of those seconds, there's somebody else out there grinding, working hard to take everything that you have. I'm trying to get a Bugatti, this person might say.

And I'll be sure to wave at you from it when you're on the side of the road with all your leisure time. And I get leaving time for moral reflection about my place in the world and all. But look, you don't got to be Socrates to understand the basics of how to treat people in the world. Don't be a jerk. Take care of your responsibilities. These aren't mysteries of the universe. There's a baseline of moral understanding that once you hit it, the biggest obstacles you're going to face in life are solved by improving your market value. That's how society works. And that's what I'm going to do.

Coming from the perspective of Byung-Chul Han though, somebody may say back to this person, "Okay, I get it. You apply yourself at the highest level that you can." Nobody's saying anything about not applying yourself for being lazy. They're simply saying that there is more to life than productivity and efficiency, and that it's very possible to live life where most of your field of view is in this narcissistic self-optimization

And then to feel the negative impacts of ignoring these other parts of life. And then to blame the way you feel on things that are just unavoidable about the modern world. Oh, I don't have any friends because it's just hard to make friends in today's world. I don't have a partner because I just have to focus on myself and my career. I crash and burn and go off on people on the internet because there's just a lot of stupid people in the world today. It's not a coincidence that that person in the Bugatti may have a lot of surface level relationships in their life.

It's not a coincidence they may have a lot of shallow ways that they think about treating other people. It's not a coincidence that they don't have a very deep understanding of anything about how the world works. Somebody might say back to that guy, look, you can wave at me in your Bugatti when I'm out there in the garden, but I'll be sure to wave back at you as you're alone in your Bugatti, spouting off some conspiratorial nonsense that in your eyes actually passes as a worldview. As you talk about treating people in ways that are so toxic, you sound like you're a junior in high school.

You're right. You don't have to be Socrates and reflect on morality all day to be able to live a good life. But the fact is, that person doesn't even miss the levels of depth to everything that's available to someone if they just spent a little less time talking and a little more time actually thinking. Byung-Chul Han can be seen as the first member of this philosophical roundtable for how to navigate the panopticon.

The more I tried to fit everything in that episode into a single episode, the more I realized it was doomed to fail as just one episode. I'd just be oversimplifying the problem. My question for you today, if you've listened this far, is who's next? There's quite a bit more to cover in Byung-Chul Han's work. So next episode is either going to be more of Han or the first episode on Zizek or someone else on the roundtable.

If you listen to this more than 24 hours after it's posted, don't waste your time coming to social media. But if you're one of the first ones to listen, I'm going to wait 24 hours before I start the next episode and see what people request the most. Morhan, start Zizek, someone else. That will be the next release that comes out on September 17th.

Hope you all have a great rest of your week. Please be well. Patreon shoutouts this week. Stefan Hurd, Ashton Simmons, Lonnie D. Marshall II, Alex Nolenberg, and Ricardo Sequeira. Thanks for making this show possible for so many months, years. It's exciting times for this podcast right now. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.