The Great Humbling S3E8: 'Now...breathe!'
We begin with some listener feedback from last week’s ‘Get on your knees!’ about prayer… Before Dougald introduces our final instruction of the workout… Now Breathe! We talk about the beautiful, simple pleasures of a degree of lockdown emergence, how Build Back Better went from a call for a radical progressive alliance to seize the moment of the pandemic, to a slogan on Boris Johnson's podium, and Sam Conniff saying he fears our generation's greatest regret will be that we failed to seize this moment Ed notes Philip K Dick’s ‘Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’... Dougald talks about ‘escape variants’ and the risk of totalitarianism stemming from this and what weak centres of resistance, what practices, what moves we need to practice, how we attend to those fragile, ‘seemingly weak’ threads of relationship. Ed talks about Bayo Akomolafe asking what if hope isn’t the answer? And more importantly what does not having hope allow us to see? Dougald refers to an article by Caroline Busta, developing the idea of the dark forests of the internet and L.M. Sacasas – ‘Your attention is not a resource’ and ‘Minimum Viable Presence’ on social media Ed talks about cancel culture and being cancelled from your own organisation in his experiences at Futerra Dougald talks about culture wars and the “weak man fallacy” and a piece by Melissa Phruksachart ‘The Literature of White Liberalism’ Ed references Alan Watts’ ‘the backwards law’ - wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience Dougald wraps up series 3 appropriately with a poem Rashani Réa’s ‘The Unbroken’ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegreathumbling.substack.com