I listenned to several very interesting podcasts this week. One of the themes that came up several times is slavery. It's an on-going conversation that our societies are having now, and have been in one way or another for a very long time.

Historian Gregory Aldrete, who specialises in the Roman period, was on the Lex Fridman podcast. Elon Musk recommended the conversation on Twitter, and I think he was right, it’s not normally a period in history I’m particularly interested in, but there were a lot of very interesting takes.

For example the Christians were the first to say everyone is created equal in the eyes of God. That’s pretty cool! Apparently it really got up the Romans noses though. It’s now the basis of many democracies around the world! [2:35:51].

Noah Harare was on both the Bankless podcast talking about AI and democracy and the NYT’s Hard Fork podcast talking about AI Fears. He tells a fascinating yet somewhat different story, namely that the Bible’s 10th commandment appears to endorse or at least allow slavery. So that seems like a bit of a contradiction. How can you have everyone is created equal but also slavery? Hold that thought.

The other very interesting thing Noah talks about is institutions in general and how their changeability, their updatability varies enormously. And this is a good thing. Newer institutions tend to be easier to update. Older ones not so much.

The US constitution is difficult but not impossible to update. There are quite a few amendments that have been made to the original document. The bible on the other hand is pretty much impossible to update, but also it’s context is some rather crazy stories so it’s kind of clear much of it is not meant to be taken literally. But it’s written to last thousands of years, and has lasted that long, no easy feat, through civilisation collapses and renaisances too.

Anyway I‘d been thinking about the apparent contradiction all week and one thing that had occurred to me, is similar to a point I’d made recently about the importance of giving things a name so you can actually talk about them. The fact that slavery is mentioned at all is significant, and the specifics might not actually be all that important. Remember 2000 years ago things were very very different.

Matt Walsh on Rogan [14:05] makes some really interesting points about the realities of how our societies view racism and slavery:

Of course the issue is that everybody who lived on earth prior to about...certainly prior to about 100 years ago, was racist by our standards today. Every single one. There was no one on earth that lived 100 years ago who we would not consider racist. Of any race.

If you go back 200 years or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back 500 years, and there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally. They might have had issues with how slaves were treated in some contexts. But it took like 1000s of years for it to ever even occur to a single human on Earth that slavery is actually fundamentally wrong, which is a crazy thing [...]

Why is that? It’s so obvious to us, but some of the greatest minds of history, they never thought of it. But we can’t talk about that, we have to talk about slavery and racism as if they are an exclusively white western phenomena.

It’s mindboggling that it took 1000s of years to make this discovery. And it is a discovery, an enormous one. It’s humanity as a whole discovering about itself. That’s the pace of the big questions in humanity. It’s imperfect, but we are making progress. The insututions are layered ontop of each other. Yes sometimes there are contradictions, but seen in context as a massive living document of all of our societies this patch work is pretty amazing.

I’ll leave you with those 3 thoughts, because the world has become very blocky, prickley with red anger goading, as I wrote most of those last few paragraphs.

Perhaps I’ll write more about this at a later stage.

I’m finding it’s so unbelievably difficult to think and write about anything of substance these days. It’s like two opposing forces are constantly at odds with each other in the literal world that surrounds me, and I’m always caught in the cross fire.

Really enjoyed listening to the Rogan - Matt Walsh episode. Lots of interesting topics including racism, social media, US politics & the strange world of professional cuddlers.

Also literally the best moon landings are fake discussion I’ve listenned to. I wish conversations between two people with opposite views were always this respectful.

Here’s a great quote from Matt about social media:

If you’re a human being on Twitter saying something, that’s real life, it’s not fake, it’s not happening in some kind of dream world. But then people think that well okay if I just say this on Twitter, I put a YouTube comment section, and this heinous awful thing, it doesn’t count, it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person because it’s not real life. That’s like writing on loose leaf paper, calling someone a piece of shit, and handing it to them, and then they get mad at you, and you say ‘hey man, it’s the paper, it’s not real life, it just happened on the paper’. It’s a method for communicating [...] it turns people into sociopaths after a while I think.

I find this sort of behavior is seeping into real life too. Not sure how I feel about that. Sometmes it can be funny, but other times not at all.

Some people mostly women but also some men are like sparrows, it’s like if there was an algorithm that controls sparrows, that algorithm has been connected up to them. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. They spiritually are always like right up in your face fluttering their wings, pecking at you like you are a small mound of sesame seeds.

Depending on how you look at it, it can seem like different things, but to be honest often it’s phasers-on-its-okay extreme. And even suggesting that is met with, metaphorically speaking, the entire world nuclear arsenal aimed directly at you, while casually laughing like it’s a light hearted joke. It’s almost as if they weaponise their anxiety and yours, and, in a way, it’s ingenious, even if it is manipulation infiniti.

For the record I think sparrows are amazing. No problem at all with sparrows, but I do at times find sparrow people quite challenging.

Update: Please world don’t psycho bully me with dead sparrows, thank you.