MTS Podcast - Ep. #2: Living in a World of Illusions
Disinformation, Nostalgia, and Plato's Cave
Ladies and gentlemen, a new episode of Monitoring the Situation dropped this afternoon, and I’m happy to share it with you here.
From the video description:
In this episode, Kale and Steve explore the overwhelming nature of information in today's digital age, discussing the implications of disinformation, the role of AI, and the philosophical underpinnings of reality versus illusion. They delve into the recent Epstein document dump as a case study in information overload, the challenges of navigating a landscape filled with both organic and disinformation, and the historical context of these issues. The discussion also looks at Plato's cave and the Matrix as metaphors for understanding our perceptions of reality.
For the audio-only version, go here (links to all podcast distribution) or you can just listen using the handy Spotify player right here:
You're one interesting dude, Steve. I've been really behind in my substack reading, but catching up with you is always worth it. Thanks!
Finally finished watching episode two. Good conversation. A few thoughts:
I agree that something became culturally arrested in the 1980s. Progress, in some real and meaningful ways, came to a halt. I almost feel like the internet was finally rolled out in the 1990s to provide the illusion of continued progress. But the internet had been developed as part of a department of defense project in the 1960s, so it didn’t represent much in the way of progress, except in its distribution to the masses.
I think Eric Weinstein’s conversation from 2020 about the Distributed Information Suppression Complex (DISC) is relevant, and worth returning to:
https://youtu.be/QxnkGymKuuI?si=68EJZFm6o74CvmJk
The hour seems liminal, for certain. Many things are being turned over and upset.
While it’s true of this particular cultural moment, it’s also a perennial interior situation of those of us traveling between Genesis and the apocalypse.
We are being invited out of the comfort zone of our origins, into a great adventure. Most seem unwilling to make that journey. Like Samwise, we hesitate on the threshold of this journey: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3YvBnxvd1sw&si=xU63DIz96JXUK5Qc
I talked about it to an RCIA class once in the context of introducing them to The Last Things:
https://open.substack.com/pub/doxaweb/p/advent-and-the-last-things
Our life after the Fall is a life lived upside down, and when Christ arrives to turn things upside right, most of us resist because we experience it as an upset.
Saint John of the Cross is the best cartographer of the landscape of Middle Earth that I know. He notes how many of us, like Samwise, want to linger at the edge of the Shire. In terms of the spiritual life, that looks like staying in modes of discursive meditation and never voyaging very deeply into the world that mental prayer draws us toward… the horizons of contemplative prayer, with its night of the senses and night of the spirit.
https://doxaweb.com/blog/2025/12/14/juan-de-la-cruz/
I recommend Father Thomas Dubay’s book entitled Fire Within.
https://doxaweb.com/blog/2022/11/08/a-question-of-relevance/
It’s a summary of the Carmelite teaching of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila on prayer. A friend introduced me to this shortly after I graduated from Steubenville and it was invaluable in helping navigate that first very rocky decade after leaving the hilltop campus. It’s a difficult road between Tabor and Calvary, and no one makes it very far along the way without a guide. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross are a worthwhile investment in this regard.
I really think the only way through the insanity we’re racing toward is a dedicated contemplative life.
Also, in listening to you guys speak about nostalgia and sense-making, I think I understand better why T.S. Eliot is so insistent on the concept of the still point in the turning world. Without that locus of meaning, life will quickly become too dizzying to be intelligible.
I think that the Mass is the hermeneutical key to human life, and very much why Jesus left it as a perpetual memorial until the end of time. In the Eucharist, we find the still point in the turning world. Look up the concept of anamnesis. It’s the particular kind of remembering that we engage in during the liturgy… a remembering that makes the Paschal mystery of history present and propels us forward to the eschaton.
Regarding puppet masters: I wonder if the algorithms might actually be the thing holding the strings, rather than an intelligible being. It would make sense, because the inversion of the loving Father as the ordering principle of the universe would be an indifferent machine.