Why Men Need To Beware Modern Sirens (Decoding The Odyssey)
CChris Williamson
Books & LiteratureMental HealthInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00This is a good time for Homer to come back for that reason, I think.
00:00:04Because I think that this is, um, there is a kind of moral simplicity in a lot of ways to Homer.
00:00:11But he tells the story from multiple perspectives, partly because he's, just like Nolan, you know, he's got a wide audience.
00:00:22Homer is, you know, these epic poets travel from city to city.
00:00:26They're going from Aeolus to Sparta, to wherever, Ithaca.
00:00:31And they have different people of different classes and different tastes everywhere.
00:00:35And, you know, they got to get a story about Odysseus to work for a lot of different people.
00:00:40Some people are going to want to take the side of, uh, of, of, of Odysseus.
00:00:45Or some people are going to see themselves in the suitors.
00:00:47Or, uh, maybe that's not a great example, but, you know, some people are going to say, hey, this is a lying bastard.
00:00:53And other people are going to say, no, he did what he had to do.
00:00:55And that's kind of, that's on you, like to draw out the message is, is not so much the poet's job.
00:01:02I mean, he can have his own opinion, but really his job is to, is to help you get charmed, get disengaged, like Odysseus does for the Phaeacians, like the bards do in the story.
00:01:15And I think also if I could kind of allegorize a little bit, the sirens in particular that we didn't go into too much.
00:01:23I think they're really, it's a timely image because, you know, for me, I, I, I kind of autobiographize Odysseus going to the sirens.
00:01:33All right, the sirens are these divine, they're kind of like bad bards.
00:01:37They're these women who sing whatever they sing and they, they make you just want to go and listen to them.
00:01:45And piled up in front of the sirens island is just rotting bones of people who, who started listening and they could just never leave and they starved and died.
00:01:53And I think the reason that Odysseus wants to hear is because he's this man of great curiosity and, and when they actually speak to him, Homer, no, Odysseus tells them the Phaeacians, he tells what the sirens told him.
00:02:08And the sirens say, we can tell you the story of everything that happened to Troy, all the things that you didn't know.
00:02:18And I'm paraphrasing, but like all the things you didn't know about the backstory, what was going on at Troy?
00:02:23All of the different, you know, perspectives of the generals that you were trying to guess at, but you just couldn't know.
00:02:30Well, we know him, we know everything that happens on earth, we, they can give him infinite knowledge that whether or not they would say the same thing to his crew, that's what they're saying to him.
00:02:41And this is the thing that a man of those kinds of proclivities wants most in life, or at least he knows the power of that insider knowledge, that special insight into the universe.
00:02:53The, the moldy, he's seen how powerful it is to know the secrets of a little plant.
00:02:59What kind of power can you, what if I could find out something interesting that I could apply to my morning routine from the sirens?
00:03:06And it, you know, for me, I think it's also the temptation of being an academic is one of the reasons I left academia because, well, it's one of the reasons I was in it because I had this, I just tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.
00:03:15I want to read more, I want to read more, I want to find out the, the, the end of that story or, oh, geez, five more books I need to read.
00:03:21And, and that can, if you, if you follow that too far, you end up potentially a rotting pile of bones at the feet of the sirens and never getting home and never doing what you need to do.
00:03:35It's this kind of temptation of, of knowledge and, you know, maybe there's a person or two in your audience that can relate to the temptation of the university, but we can all relate to the, the doom scroll.
00:03:48Like, and it's often, it's not just like, it's not stupid humor all the time.
00:03:52A lot of it is you're, you're, you tell yourself, I'm going to get some insight on, you know, what, what the Bitcoin price is going to do from this Iran thing.
00:04:00And, oh, well, how can I ignore that?
00:04:02Blah, blah, blah.
00:04:03And it's, it's, it's all, it all seems actionable.
00:04:06It's, it's, it's constructed.
00:04:07It feels important.
00:04:08It feels important.
00:04:09It's designed to feel important because it's risen up in the algorithm.
00:04:13And I think this is really speaks to a profound, uh, inclination that people have, a temptation that people face that leads in, not just to inaction is, you know, but, but to unreflection too.
00:04:28Well, certainly if you're permanently on absorb, you have very little time to do reflect, you know, if the fire hose of new information is bukkaking you in the face, you don't have that much time to think about what you've already ingested.
00:04:42Said Bonnie, and when at wise age, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:04:47The, the philosopher B blue, um, that, that sense of.
00:04:57I'm drowning in information.
00:04:58I don't know what to do about it.
00:05:00This was a line that I had a, a bill Thompson, this, this, uh, old, uh, informations expert from worked at three letter agencies.
00:05:11Uh, uh, uh, like army, he was basically the special forces queue from James Bond and, um, he would help them to get to where they needed to.
00:05:21He would take phones apart, do all this sort of stuff.
00:05:23And I was asking him, my current working theory is not that most of the propaganda and.
00:05:30Most of it, even the information online is trying to make people convinced of any one narrative.
00:05:34It's to drown them in so much information that they become, uh, apathetic and they just sort of give up entirely.
00:05:40Now that might be that at some point in future, the apathy can be, uh, formed into something useful and sort of thrust forward in like some vector.
00:05:50Um, but for the most part, I think when you, when you fire host people with information after long enough, they just go, ah, dude, I'm fucking, I have no idea.
00:06:00Like if you try and go down any rabbit hole, any conspiracy rabbit hole for every one that you find out there is an equal and opposite.
00:06:06It's like the physics of the conspiracy system for every conspiracy, there is an equal and opposite conspiracy, which is even deeper.
00:06:12And then there's an equal and opposite one.
00:06:13The, the iceberg never stops.
00:06:14It just comes out the other side of the planet and that's the tip of the other side of the iceberg.
00:06:19So yeah, this, this endless Ouroboros of just looking at uncertainty and information.
00:06:25And, and, and, uh, yeah, I think I'm certainly feeling, I'm feeling detox.
00:06:31I'm feeling somewhat salved after, after getting in touch with something that's got a bit more firm foundations.
00:06:38So, and this is what you got to think is so appealing to, uh, a person like Alcinous maybe, or a person
00:06:46like Odysseus or like a guy like Julius Caesar about a great story like that, because they've just got
00:06:52information coming in them and decisions to make and all the time. And a long narrative is a way of,
00:06:58is a way of slowing down your brain and reflecting it's, it's, but it's not just entertainment.
00:07:03It's, it has, it has something useful in there, that narrative structure. You're, we're like programs to
00:07:11in ingest and, and process information in that way, much more, um, effectively in long form when it's,
00:07:22when it's put into a story, because we can remember it and we can actually
00:07:26store that framework of here's what happened with Odysseus. And then we can draw lessons out of it
00:07:31years and years later that, that we need because we have that, that archetypal, uh, narrative within
00:07:38us. And I think this is one of the reasons why an oral culture, like the Greeks spent so much time
00:07:44on these kinds of stories that, um, about heroes, about somebody to emulate and mind you, they're not,
00:07:51they're not simplistic. I mean, like the Odyssey doesn't is, you know, he makes a lot of mistakes.
00:07:58Yeah.
00:07:58You can debate about his actions. The Greeks would debate about his actions. I mean,
00:08:02a lot of the later Greeks thought he was a bad guy. He was, he was a liar. He's a cheater.
00:08:07A lot of the later Greeks thought he was the greatest hero. I mean, there's, it admits of debate. And if you
00:08:13brought back real hero stories that didn't always have them having a, a meth addict addiction on the
00:08:20side, or, you know, banging their secretary in secret, you could still have complexity. You don't
00:08:28have to undermine everybody with a kind of secret mob story or a very open mob story. I think we need
00:08:33more of that to get through what we're, what we're facing. A lot of us, at least.
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