I thought I would try something new: I will do weekly videos responding to questions that Subscribers have on any topic whatsoever, if I feel I have useful or interesting ideas on the subject. Please let me know what you think of this video in the comments, and please ask me questions on any aspect of my work or beyond, and I will seek to answer in future videos. Below is a transcript for those who prefer to read it.
Hey, everybody.
Today I thought I would try something new. I've been exploring these new Substack video features, and I think it could be very interesting to play with them more.
And what I think I'm going to do is suggest that people ask me questions. They can either send me an email, Daniel.Pinchbeck at gmail.com or they can respond to the email from the newsletter or they can leave it in the comments if they want. And then maybe once a week I will just riff and respond to some of the comments that people send.
And today I thought I would talk about a question that came up in the comments to my last piece, which was a kind of long dive into kind of pop culture, mind control, Monarch programming. Yeah, went into a number of different deep areas, some of them quite dark. But I guess in the course of the piece,I was talking about how pop culture — this idea of cultural hegemony from Gramsci, that the ruling elite not only have to control the political and economic system, but they also have to control the narrative system. And they often do that through pop culture stories and narratives and so on.
Among the ways they can contain consciousness in a kind of narrow bandwidth, there's different aspects of that. But one of the aspects is ideas about status, consumerism, what everyone needs to buy, how they need to look to fit in or whatever.
But then also this ideal of romantic love and the nuclear family.
Some people were asking in the comments, what were my issues around romantic love, since I just mentioned that briefly. I thought I would talk about that a little bit more intensively here.
And this is just an effort, an exploration, an investigation. I'm not being definitive. I think there are, you know, many beautiful things about romantic love. I mean, it's an incredibly euphoric state. It's a super high.
Unfortunately, it's quite — it tends to be quite transitory and the highs are often, kind of like end up with a lot of lows also when that romantic state crashes.
I think when you're young, you might have a romantic relationship where that romantic love stage maybe lasts a year, year and a half, two years max. And then, you know, some of this is pheromonal. I think that we get used to another person. We're not getting the chemical highs anymore.
It moves more into a steady state which is not a bad thing of course but the problem is that a lot of our culture is focused on this ideal of romantic love, and then also that leading to kind of finding “The One”, creating the nuclear family and that being the sort of icon of happiness. I do know some people who as far as i can see that has been their journey towards contentment and as much happiness as we can get in this fragile human life with all of its complexities and so on.
But many other people don't end up finding “The One” like that.
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