The Wes Cecil Podcast

NO HISTORY FOR YOU!
In my second lecture I explore the bizarre and necessary historical amnesia that besets American culture. For the first 200 years of American settlement, the Native American culture was forcibly erased, then actively ignored once the ‘Natives’ problem had been “solved”. Also, the invisibility of the African American presence in much of the US, which represented 40-50% of the population in some states, created a further barrier to American history. Finally, the internal patterns of settlement and mass migration cemented a near total disregard for framing our cultural understanding in any historical sensibility.

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The overriding narrative of revolution features a defined enemy inhabiting a defined space that we can, with courage, suffering and sacrifice, overthrow and inaugurate a new and better world. However, as Kafka and Musil demonstrated we live in a world that is diffuse, multi-layered and without center. These more uncomfortable and less entertaining versions of our world demonstrate the fundamental naivete of the notion of revolution that, functionally, becomes a disabling myth. Rather than revolution or nothing, in which we get nothing because we can’t have the revolution, I argue for the value of resistance, which is both available and immediate.

Books I mention in the lecture:

Kafka The Metamorphosis

Kafka The Castle

Musil The Man Without Qualities

Bradbury Fahrenheit 451

Lem The Invincible

Raymond Aron The Opiate of the Intellectuals

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Taoism posits that the meaninglessness of life is not a basis for Nihilism but for Joy and Liberty. The palpable despair imparted by the advance of science and the increasing awareness of the triviality of humanity on a universal scale disoriented - and perhaps is still disorienting - virtually every culture in the world. Taoism, however, provided an inspiring response to these problems 2,600 years before they appeared.

Join Wes on Patreon for a deeper dive into the ideas we explore on the podcast. It’s a space for lifelong learners — with bonus lectures, course materials, peer discussion, and audio diaries from France. Wes is active in the community and often engages directly with listener questions.

Starting at $2/month: https://www.patreon.com/wescecil

Image credit: Thanato, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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Q & A - WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?
Wes and Jeremy take questions from listeners on Lecture I: "What is an American?" Apologies for the audio quality on this one—it improves as the series moves along.

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2,000 years ago Cicero warned us against the idea that other people are functionally prey from whom we extract the profit. Unfortunately, his arguments have been forgotten and we inhabit a society that insists that the exploitation of others is not only acceptable but necessary and admirable. As Deleuze and Guattari and others have demonstrated, this logic leads to an idea of the self that is entirely devoid of human sympathy. We think we are exploiting others but we are in fact re-conceptualizing ourselves as extraction/consumption machines that have no other values or functions. Within this context, caring for others as valuable and even beautiful is an act of resistance.

Books mentioned:

Cicero De Officiis Book 3 50-57

Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus - Plateau 6

Delueze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus

Koran Al-Mutaffifin and Al-Isra (amongst many other passages)

Deluzism by Ian Buchanan particularly the last chapter.

Join Wes on Patreon for a deeper dive into the ideas we explore on the podcast. It’s a space for lifelong learners — with bonus lectures, course materials, peer discussion, and audio diaries from France. Wes is active in the community and often engages directly with listener questions.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.