An Interview With Justin Smith-Ruiu
Philosophy, Psychedelics, Permanent Pandemic
Dear Republic,
Justin Smith-Ruiu is one of the very greatest jewels in the Substack. He is a philosophy professor (currently at Université Paris Cité), a very valued member of the
, and one of the sharpest and most interesting intellects currently functioning. His books include The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is and the forthcoming On Drugs. As you will see, he is slightly mad — but only mad north-northwest.-ROL
1.I first came across you from “Permanent Pandemic,” which you wrote in Harper's in 2022, and I remember standing in a bookstore reading the article and just unable to put it down — I think I went so far as to actually consider buying the magazine issue. That was a real revelation and gave you kind of a permanent status in my hall of fame because it was pretty far out of what respectable people would write at that time. Can you talk about that article, how it came about, and how Harper's let you run it?
The pandemic really broke me in a number of ways, and one is that a moment came where I could not “unsee” experts and authorities for what they really are: fallible mortals, as uncertain of the future as everyone else. It’s very naïve, but up until 2020 I continued to have some childlike faith in the existence of competent grown-ups making reasonable decisions in the broader public interest. It was never that I thought I knew what the right course of action was, or that I had any sympathy with the dogmatic stances taken in opposition to the mainstream or official version of what Covid was and what was to be done about it. It was only that I could no longer stand the pressure to affirm an expert line that was, obviously, still developing, and often contradicting itself from one week to the next. I never wanted to trade one dogma for another —which is the usual move that presents itself within the range of options in our algorithm-driven information ecosystem—, but only to help to ensure the survival of a more critical disposition regarding such complex issues as this one, in the face of ever-intensifying and polarized dogmatism. Covid went away, sort of, but it managed to shift us much more fully into our present woefully dogmatic era; that’s in part what I meant when I called it a “permanent” pandemic.
2.You say a few very interesting things in the article. For one thing, you were one of the first people who seemed to be bothered by QR codes, which were driving me crazy at that time — like why, if I'm in a restaurant, do I need a QR code that connects from my phone to a satellite in outer space, as opposed to the waiter, who's right there, handing me a menu? And it felt like you saw something very consequential in that technological totalization of our lives, while most people saw just a technological upgrade. Can you say more about what you saw that was so consequential?
I think QR codes for menus are one of the few things they tried to impose on us that were sufficiently unpopular to be withdrawn, ultimately. It was indeed for me little things like that, all the new ways they found to make as much of daily life as possible pass through the smartphone, that caused me to feel —not so much to believe, mind you, but just to feel—, that the most important story of that historical moment had less to do with epidemiology than with what I have more recently been calling the “Upgrade”: our great global transition to non-human information technologies as the principal shapers and mediators of our social reality.
3.You discuss the ‘new regime,’ which you describe as “a transition to digitally and algorithmically calculated social credit, and the demise of most forms of community life outside the lens of the state and its corporate subcontractors.” Just say more about that. What is the regime? How is it constituted? What are its guiding ideas? How have your views on that evolved since the peak of the pandemic?
I suppose it’s the same thing as, or not far from, what I’ve started calling the “Upgrade”: the automation, or outsourcing to external prostheses, of key decisions concerning the organization of society.
4.The problem of course in talking about a 'regime' — and the reason nobody else was doing this, at least in a forum like Harper's — is that it immediately makes you sound like a crank or conspiracist. So where are the distinctions? How can you talk critically about something that's awfully close to being a 'new world order' without being a conspiracist about it? Is it a difference between being very philosophical and seeing largely unintended phenomena; as opposed to seeing a coordinated effort by some ultra-powerful cabal? — or is it actually hard to even draw that distinction?
I think I can help draw the arrow of the crank-meter down somewhat here by explaining that when I at least speak of “regimes”, I’ve mostly got Michel Foucault’s voice echoing in my head, with a properly accented régime. Speaking this way came more naturally in the context of French theory, and still does in the French language more generally. In French it’s also the common word for what we would call a “diet”, as in, “I’m on a diet right now”. The idea is that it’s whatever structures our lives, whether as individuals or as an entire society. I don’t mean it as anything close to what, say,
calls the “Cathedral” or calls the “Machine” — both of these seem to suggest that there is some select group of people competently making decisions that favor their own interests, to the detriment of the rest of us. But as I’ve already explained I lean more towards the view that nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing.5.You talk about being a “dissenter,” which is a framing that I love. This technopoly is coming and it’s obviously sweeping the world before it, but it is possible in meaningful ways to ‘dissent,’ or ‘opt-out,’ sort of like if you're in a totalitarian regime, you have to live there, and in some ways you have to adapt to it, but you can also find your own ways to avoid bowing to it, and certainly to avoid taking on its values. Is that a fair summation of your position?
I think doing whatever you can to opt out is a noble life project, but it is obviously not the one I have chosen. I’m all over the internet after all, and I pass through multiple two-step security protocols on a typical day. Part of the reason why I have not chosen that form of life is that I do not think it’s fully possible, unless perhaps you are a monk, or living in some other social arrangement, within the context of a total institution, in Erving Goffman’s sense, where someone else is taking care of the online bill-paying and whatever else, while your job is just to tend the turnips and contemplate the greatness of God, or whatever. Otherwise, you get Thoreau-style shortcuts, where we’re supposedly “going it alone” while in fact our mom lives not so far away and continues to do our laundry while we write Walden; the 21st-century version of that is the person who makes a living as a social-media influencer chronicling their purportedly off-the-grid existence. So, in my view, to be a dissenter means to stay, for better or worse, in the mix, to be at least partially worldly, in the old sense of that term that contrasts with “world-renouncing”; to be open about one’s worldliness, but also not to accept that such a form of life automatically translates into a big thumbs-up for the way the world is going.
6.As high as you were in my valuation after “Permanent Pandemic,” you vaulted further after I came across your “The World as a Game” in Liberties, which really takes to task a philosopher named David Chalmers and his discussion of the simulation hypothesis. My take is that you’re not so anti-technology per se, what bothers you most is the adoption of the values of the technologists — with the idea that, because we can imagine characters living in computer simulations that it's somehow more likely than not that we're in one ourselves, being a particularly egregious instance of that. Is that a fair place to draw the line in the sand? Use the gadgets but really try to not be used by them? — and don't buy the philosophical concepts that the tech industry is peddling?
We are not the first society in history to be so impressed with our own cultural artifacts that we declare them to be the principle or clavis that reveals to us the nature of reality as a whole. In the 17th century the universe was envisioned as a clockwork; in the 21st century, at least by a certain species of gamer-philosopher and their like-minded Silicon Valley sponsors, it is envisioned as a pair of virtual-reality goggles — though even that already sounds a bit dated, as AI has, since 2022 or so, surpassed VR in the broader cultural imagination of the ways our technologies are currently transforming us.
7.From a philosophical point of view, I tried to pool together the malignant tech-favorable ideas as 1) the absence of free will (which seems to posit a Skinner-ite behaviorism as the alternative); 2) dataism (of the Yuval Noah Harari model); 3) the simulation hypothesis, and maybe also the notion of an inevitable Singularity. Is that a fair taxonomy of the hydra that humanistic-minded people should be opposing?
I’d never thought of it in quite this tripartite way, but your analysis sounds fair to me!
8.I'm trying to stitch together the Justin Smith-Ruiu back story. I picture you as being kind of a standard-issue analytical philosopher, plodding through grad schools and the professorial trajectory, and listening to insufferable post-modern music, and then sneaking in Baudrillard on the sly. How much of that picture is accurate?
Well, I went to grad school in philosophy mostly because I felt like I hadn’t learned nearly enough as an undergrad. I think by the end of my first semester of grad school I knew that if I ended up staying in academia as a philosopher, it was going to be a rocky relationship at best. Here I am 30 years later, still stuck in my bad marriage.
9.And then something seems to really happen to you. You said, “I felt like I was just on top of the zeitgeist; I was part of it; I was moving along with it the way one rides a wave. Circa 2015 that wave crashed.” What happened? How did the wave crash?
If I’m identifying that line correctly it’s from my conversation with Jon Baskin at The Point, right? I think I was preoccupied at the time with what I was experiencing as the uncanny synchronicity between the arc of my individual life and the arc of history. My hair started turning grey, my testosterone levels started plummeting, I was forced to stop living my life, as I had since the age of 12 or so, under orders from Eros and started grasping my way to an unplanned and unawaited Chapter 2 of my life where the orders come, let us say, from a very different sort of authority; and all of this was happening at exactly the same time, it seemed to me, as the entire order of the world as I had known it was crumbling, over the course of the 2010s. Was I, I began to wonder, seeing the world through such a catastrophizing lens only because my own life was in the course of falling apart as well (or so it seemed to me to be doing at the time)? Would that decade have shown some rosier aspects if I had encountered it at a different age? I don’t know, but anyhow the 2020s are far better for me personally: I’m broken, the world’s broken, but the fact that we both just keep chugging along anyway is its own sort of reassurance.
10.One of the very noticeable things that happened with the emergence of Justin E. H. Smith into public consciousness is that you write very differently from how professional philosophers are supposed to write. Was that part of the ‘crash,’ that you wanted to write differently from this kind of extremely linear academic training, or was it that you always wrote in a looser, more expressive way and then had the chance to express it when you were writing for a popular press?
This question connects back up with the one about my history with academic philosophy. If that history is what I have described as a bad marriage, then you might say that all the florid and sentimental and unrigorous and excess-laden writing, all the elements of style that were supposed to have been trained out of me: all of that is my infidelity. That’s how I experienced it for a very long time anyhow, as a difficult-to-manage double life. It’s grown easier in the past few years, but only because I’m out in the open about it, and no longer slinking around in the shadows.
11.To what extent are you at odds with academic philosophy? I sort of get the feeling that what we're seeing is the public side of a split that's going on with the domain of philosophy — that you feel philosophy has become too narrowly analytic and (in the case of somebody like Chalmers) too beholden to tech determinism. Is that intuition right? Is there a major split between you and the rest of the field?
Perhaps my answer to the previous question would have worked for this one as well. I’ll just say here that I don’t think philosophy is growing more analytic; the heyday of analysis was in the mid-20th century, and it yielded up some worthy results. I think in the 21st century philosophy just doesn’t know what it wants to be. I anyhow am unable to find the thread the unites all the different things people today propose to do under the banner of “philosophy”. It may be a consequence of this lack of cohesion or clear definition that the only principle of unity available, if not a shared set of interests or even, at this point, a shared methodology, is a shared habitus, a shared set of verbal tics and shibboleths (e.g., “that doesn’t track”) that in the end amount to little more than a declaration of your membership in a relatively closed community. I have found for myself that the only way to break free from that community, in order not continually to be brought back to it as if by those ball-shaped Rover devices in The Prisoner series, is to change the way I speak and write. You can insist until you’re blue in the face that you need to take your distance, but if you keep on saying “that doesn’t track” and stuff like that, nobody is going to believe you. Philosophy, anyhow, while the meaning of the term has changed over the centuries, has generally been understood to be a rather undignified and ridiculous undertaking. When the agentive term “philosopher” is first used, by Heraclitus, it is intended as an insult. After that, from Lucian of Samosata to Molière and beyond, the philosopher is above all a comic figure — who prides himself, simply in virtue of having memorized a few syllogisms, on having special access to the truth. Its practitioners have to some extent been able, in the era of professionalization, to hide this uncomfortable fact about philosophy’s history, but it will never entirely be overcome.
12.Tell us all about why we should read and fall in love with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Because he gives a fundamentally true account of the nature of reality. To me Leibniz constitutes an exception to what I’ve just said about the philosophers. He’s just an unusually lucid human being — unusually as in, of the sort that comes along once a millennium at most.
13.The one thing everybody knows about Leibniz is ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,’ which seems like kind of an unfortunate idea tbh. Is that idea defensible or was Leibniz having a bad day when he posited that?
Well, be careful there. You’re letting Voltaire’s satirical account of Leibniz, via the personage of Dr. Pangloss in his novella Candide, cloud your vision of what Leibniz really meant. Pangloss is a wonderful literary creation, but Voltaire had no idea what Leibniz was actually doing in calling our world “the best of all possible worlds”. The idea that that that’s what it is is one that Leibniz develops within the context of his theodicy, that is, the task of vindicating God against the ancient accusation that he could have done better than he did in creating this particular world, namely, by declining to allow evil to enter into it. But for Leibniz there are higher considerations that must be brought to bear — we must consider not only individual instances of evil, but how they fit within the world as a whole. It’s true that God could have created a world that consists of nothing more than, say, nine hydrogen atoms, and if he had done so there would indeed have been no possibility of, say, mosquito bites or Holocausts. But most of us agree God would not exactly have been doing his best work with a nine-atom universe. Instead we have to suppose that God was also concerned to enhance, indeed to maximize, the variety of the world, which is again something that requires us to consider how individual instances of evil fit within the whole, rather than simply to isolate individual instances of evil and deplore them. The more variety of different kinds of things you have, necessarily the more range you have in degrees of perfection of all these different things. So in a world that, as Leibniz thinks, was created according to the divine imperative of maximizing compossibilia —that is, ensuring that as many things as possible that can exist in the same world, in fact do exist—, it’s inevitable that, as they say, shit happens, including the “shit” that was the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which Voltaire imagines Leibniz, based on his famously misinterpreted dictum, would have loved.
14.I have this fantasy that the kind of ‘dissent’ you're articulating, and the distance you've put between yourself and the discipline of philosophy, is somehow a mirror to disputes that Leibniz had in his time — maybe some distancing that Leibniz had from a Cartesian orthodoxy? Am I just making that up?
Leibniz wasn’t so much a dissenter as an eirenist,1 or, as is sometimes said, a conciliatory eclectic. I try to follow him in that, but I am perhaps not yet as big-hearted as he naturally was. As a thoroughgoing rationalist, he was deeply committed to the view that there can in fact be no rational disagreement between two people or camps, and every time it looks as if they disagree this is just because they have not yet sufficiently clarified their terms. So, he claimed for example that, properly understood, Aristotle and Descartes are perfectly compatible, and he had similar conciliatory hopes in his work as a diplomat, and even in his efforts towards an eventual reconciliation of the Protestant and Catholic churches. There’s only one truth, the idea was, and as rational creatures we all come pre-stocked with that truth in us. This is an extreme view of course, and it can even be annoying, to the extent that he refuses to acknowledge even the possibility of deep and incommensurable disagreement. But it’s also, of course, optimistic, just like the theodicy that Voltaire misunderstood.
15.I had some trouble, to be honest, with The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. I think what you were getting at in the book was to try to take the internet away from the tech overlords, to make it part of ideas of networking that long precede the emergence of the microchip and probably go all the way back to Fantastic Fungi. And that as a result the humanists can reclaim the internet from the techies. Is that what you were saying?
Oh man, I have trouble remembering what I was thinking when I wrote that book. I do think, still, it’s important to try as hard as we can to see our technologies as the outgrowths or excrescences of a particular biological species, and thus to take seriously the idea that even such advanced technologies as satellite communication and so on are not fundamentally discontinuous with, say, hominid bifaces or beaver dams. This is not so much a humanist view, since humanists tend to wish to hold onto the conceit of a fundamental rift between what we’re up to and what the rest of the living world is up to. I’ve long held to a strange blend of humanism and anti-anthropocentrism. I don’t know whether these two commitments are in fact in tension or not, but I do spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out how to harmonize them in my own thinking.
16.If you lost any points for me with The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, you regained them all with your Wired essay, “This Is a Philosopher on Drugs.” How did psychedelics come into your life?
I grew up in a California pagan milieu, characterized by extreme parental laxity, and as a result I witnessed more debauchery before my eighteenth birthday than in all the years since. Drug-fueled teenage sex parties, at the homes of classmates whose divorced parents were out of town with their new romantic partners, were a frequent occurrence. I was almost always just a bemused spectator in such settings, but it would have been impossible to steer entirely clear of LSD — it was, so to speak, in the punch bowl. I didn’t have the language even to try to express the experience of it back then; none of those dumb kids did, and so we all just made practically pre-verbal exclamations like “This is so weird!” Some years later, in my twenties, in Europe, I took a somewhat more eggheaded and properly experimental approach to psilocybin. Then another couple of decades went by without any further experiences at all, except for alcohol, which is really such a waste. Then when I was almost 50 I rediscovered psilocybin, and by that time I was so fully transformed into an egghead that I could not fail to start writing about it.
17.How did psychedelics change you?
It’s hard to say what causes what. My personality has changed dramatically over the past five years, and here it’s relevant to note that this change involved a series of proper mental collapses. But it would be getting the chronology wrong to suggest that the psychedelics precipitated these breakdowns and the transformations that subsequently emerged out of them. The onset of the mental crises came first, and were not unconnected to the total loss that I have already described, during or shortly after the pandemic, of faith in basically everything I had previously taken for granted. The decision to do some psychedelics came after that, not before. But whatever the sequence of events, it’s clear that I’m different now, and psychedelics clearly had something to do with this. One significant change is that I really, truly, just say whatever I want now. I turned into a true parrhesiast,2 and I now sincerely believe that a life of watching what you say, in the expectation that this will help you win social approval and perhaps eventually literary prizes or knighthoods or whatever, is utterly ridiculous and pathetic. As Thomas Bernhard said, in his acceptance speech for some award or other, “Wenn man an den Tod denkt, alles ist lächerlich.”3 Psychedelics fundamentally restructure one’s relationship with death. They make it more important, more present in life, not however in a morbid way, but in a liberating way.
18.What are the psychedelics you became familiar with?
Years ago, LSD; more recently, psylocibin. But that’s quite enough to get the idea. In principle I think it would be possible, like that nun who wrote a sex-advice book, to write about the philosophy of psychedelics even if one were entirely abstinent from them. Like sex, the force that psychedelics tap into is one we carry inside us whether in practice we abstain from acting on it or not.
19.I find it very interesting to think about psychedelics from the perspective of the history of philosophy. I think they made me a kind of Berkeley-ian Idealist — although not to the extent of reading more than about three pages of Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Do you have a perspective on this? Do psychedelics make you, for instance, more anti-empiricist?
Indeed, they made me more Leibnizian, especially as concerns the idea that all knowledge is a priori, and the idea that we all contain within us, if only dimly, all the truths of the universe. Leibniz seems to have arrived at these conclusions without any botanical or fungal supplements, but I’m not as naturally perspicacious as he is.
20.You said something incredibly interesting — “the world has indeed come to appear ‘glitchy’ to me, in just the way the simulationists expect that it should.” Can you say more about this? This sounds to me like you saw the ‘machine elves’ on DMT, but maybe that's not exactly it?
As I relate in On Drugs, recent psychedelic experience has indeed made me better able to grasp the intuitive appeal of simulationism. But unlike Terence McKenna with his DMT-induced encounters with little elves, and unlike Nick Bostrom or Dave Chalmers with their video games, I know better than to jump from pure phenomenology to ontological commitment. It is a significant fact about our minds that we can alter them so as to experience the world as inhabited by little elves, or by six-dimensional demons, or to see it as a glitch-prone digital projection. But these experiences in themselves prove nothing at all, beyond the fact that, as in some sense we knew all along, the mind is an incredible thing.
21.Can you talk about
and your relationship to Substack?Our managing editor, Hélène Le Goff, has instructed us to be very circumspect in the way we talk about The Hinternet in public. I’ll just say that it is an online review of arts, culture, politics, and history, and at the same time, at another level, it is a work of experimental literature, deploying metafiction, pseudonymy, and studio-as-instrument techniques to make its deeper aims the sort of thing a reader can only discern through diligent hermeneutical effort. There’s method to the madness however, and the deeper aims are real.
22.What can you tell us about the composition of the editorial board of The Hinternet?
They’re great folks, all very talented. That said, we’ve had some trouble getting some of them to fill out all the required paperwork, giving their social security numbers and so on. We’ve also had trouble organizing meetings where everyone shows up in the same room at the same time. It’s kind of strange, but all in all we work together pretty well.
23.You wrote last year, “To be blunt, The Hinternet, and whatever might evolve out of it, is what ‘I want to do with my life.’” Can you say more about what you mean?
To go back to an earlier distinction I made, I suppose I realized at some point that I was more interested in working in the vein of Molière rather than of Descartes, or of Lucian rather than of Aristotle. I’m after the truth, but I want to get there not so much through rational argument —though I still reserve the right to draw on that too—, as rather through self-reflection, confession, humor, style, self-contradiction, and everything else what we’re now calling the “creatives” get to do, but that is generally off-limits for sworn members of the guild of the philosophers. Somewhere Steve Martin wrote of his early studies of philosophy and of why he abandoned them for comedy: the latter is vastly, nay infinitely, more capacious, to the extent that you can say literally anything in its name. And similarly for The Hinternet: there are no limits to what I can do there.
24.I'm very intrigued by this idea of the plurality of the self. It's something that I've certainly thought about, and various psychedelic epiphanies point in that direction, but without really making use of that. Can you talk about what plurality of the self means to you (or all of youse)?
If you’re referring to the practice of pseudonym that I’ve been deploying at The Hinternet, you might think of it as a sort of “managed multiple-personality disorder”, where you let your different personae come out in writing under different names. The truth is we all have different personae —we’re different characters, for example, when we interact with our loved ones than when we interact with our colleagues. The difference is that in our culture, for complicated reasons, we remain committed to a belief in an underlying singular self who moves back and forth between these different roles. But we could have managed this basic fact of human experience differently, making more room, say, for the use of different names under different circumstances or in our different roles, even perhaps enshrining these different names into law. When I’m writing as Hélène Le Goff, for example, I really don’t feel like I’m lying about who I am. I’m Hélène Le Goff. Other writers have done this, sometimes in an even more kaleidoscopic way than I’m doing — Pessoa, for example, or Kierkegaard. The latter’s case is very inspiring for me, obviously, because his self-fracturing was directly connected to his rejection of at least a certain species of, let’s say, high-mandarin academic philosophy as propagated by the haughty Herr Professors of Germany.
25.How's ex-pat life?
I’ve always insisted that “expat” is an inherently political designation, and I think of myself more as an immigrant. I do know plenty of American expats in Paris, that is, people who identify as such. They usually arrive here with trust funds and with the crazy idea that simply by having installed themselves in this city, they are ipso facto going to turn into creative and interesting people — writers, usually, but sometimes also in other creative domains. Many of them seem to spend their whole lives here waiting for the “Paris effect” to kick in! As for me, I find the distance from my home culture to be a powerful engine of reflection. For one thing, I see America differently than I ever could have if I had stayed in the belly of the beast. So that’s good, I suppose. But do I enjoy it, in general? I would say no, not really. There’s a daily psychological toll that comes with living in a society of which you can never really be a true member. Many or most immigrants experience this. I suppose that’s why so many Americans prefer to think of themselves as expats: it keeps one surrounded in a protective ideological layer, from inside of which being a foreigner can appear to have the quality of a leisure activity.
26.You've been very open about some mental health issues you've had. Can you share whatever you feel like sharing on these — and how they inform your work and sense of self?
I don’t know, it’s hard to say. I have been open about my mental-health issues perhaps in part strategically. I’ve felt at times over the past few years that the only way to move into a different mode of productivity, of the sort I’ve already described, has been to make a little explosion in my life, and a powerful way to do that has been to declare, publicly: “This life of mine, as I’ve been leading it, has made me crazy”. The truth is I do not think psychiatric diagnoses have much ontological robustness to them. I mean, the world itself is objectively crazy, and to that extent a crazy mind is really just an accurate mirror of the world. I can say the same thing less audaciously simply by noting that in my view psychiatric difficulties are irreducibly social in nature, in addition of course to whatever genetics and early-childhood development and so on bring to the picture. Otherwise I suppose it’s just part of the parrhesia. Why not be open about it? I’m not much of an activist, to say the least, but given that I am in a position to speak publicly about my own mental-health issues without suffering immediate social and economic harms as a result, I suppose part of what makes me speak openly is a growing sympathy for such social movements as what in the UK is called “Mad Pride”. It’s hardly a matter of courage, however. The truth is nothing boosts my paid-subscription rates at The Hinternet like a confessional essay about my visits to the psychiatrist.
27.I find it impossible to predict what your intellectual projects are going to be. Can you say much about what you're working on and/or what intellectual directions you're going on at the moment?
Right now it’s all about institution-building. I’m in the course of setting up something called The Hinternet Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is “to steward human creativity into a machine-dominated future”. I’m sincere about this, but also calculating: I want to be part of an institution that will truly let me do everything I want to do, creatively and intellectually. But no such institution exists, so I have to make my own.
A philosophical approach emphasizing peace
One who speaks candidly and freely
“When one thinks of death everything is ridiculous.”
 | A guest post by
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I think a lot about Voltaire in this context: whether his Pangloss was a failure of satire, to have so bungled the involved themes as to have displaced them; it's probably a ludicrous standard, but I don't think satire should actually obscure truths (or persons), and if it does so, it seems lower, closer to humor predicated on slander. But whatever: Voltaire is fine, I'm sure, I just resent what he's done to Leibniz's reputation. Leibniz was, in my view, correct about theodicy. Only a willful misrepresentation suggests that means he thought catastrophes were "good."
Outstanding interview with one of my absolute favorites!!!
I almost didn't read this because my interest in psychedelics is not high, but it's a fantastic interview. QR codes in hell, so many good words and so much clarity about Leibniz, death as master satirist--wonderful stuff.