Rebel Wisdom has published an interview I did with them on their Substack, which you can read here.
Rebel Wisdom is a really interesting UK-based group, founded by BBC & Channel 4 filmmaker David Fuller and the writer and podcaster Alexander Beiner, which has been putting out great media content for years now. (Many may be familiar with the excellent documentary of Jordan Peterson they produced in 2018, which was one of the first serious looks at the man.) Until now they’ve largely focused on filmmaking and live events, but have recently started their Substack to feature more written content, so be sure to check that out in addition to their main website.
Overall, Rebel Wisdom describes their work as “centred on the conviction we are seeing a civilisational-level crisis of ideas, as the old operating system breaks down” – a notion to which I obviously relate.
In this interview, we discuss this “time of rude awakenings,” with a focus on some of the Ideas of The Reality War, as well as discussing Russia’s war in Ukraine and how China sees it.
The war seems to have quickly become what Scott Alexander calls a “scissor” event – one that splits people apart into totally different polarized realities, where each is incredulous that the other side could possibly believe differently. That is to say that I already know many people will disagree about what I have to say here about Ukraine and China. But, as a reminder, I am unwisely working on an essay of much greater length and nuance on this topic, so please save your insightful critiques and angry emails until then. Just think of this as something of a partial preview.
Anyway, head over to Rebel Wisdom to read the interview in full, along with Alex’s reflections, and check out their other work as well.
Oh, and a final thanks to Alex for the “laudable act of cultural generosity” of keeping my superior American spelling throughout.
Great interview.
As a theoretical physicist, I was most pleased by this remark: "the virtuals do provide many good things – art, for example, or theoretical physics."
I’ve just read the Rebel Wisdom interview very carefully, and it was most illuminating. For me at least the penny finally dropped of where and what N S Lyons is. This quote from Rebel Wisdom was like a great red flag, “N.S isn’t his real name; it’s the pen name of an analyst and writer working in the broader US foreign policy establishment. He’s an expert on China, and writes brilliantly on the deeper sociological and mythic dynamics of Western culture”. It began to solidify all my doubts about N S Lyons. He is indeed a US foreign policy establishment figure – but of course something of an outlier there today, a bit like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are in a Republican Party that they feel has been corrupted by populism, Trumpism, and has veered away from what they believe is the “true spirit’ of the Republican Party. Just so N S Lyons is a traditional, establishment conservative who detests the great wrong turn he feels that establishment has taken towards wokeness, identity politics, climate change fanaticism, and longs for a day in which it can be returned to its true nature and mission – the great imperial mission of globally dominant American conservative capitalism and nationalism. A kind of Reaganism but much, much purer. So like all establishment conservatives what he yearns for most of all is a rapprochement with the current establishment and elite, but one that has abandoned its silly identity politics and wokeness, so that they can both return to the true mission of restoring American greatness. At heart I’m afraid there is just that nasty little core of mean-spirited, triumphalist nationalism and narcissistic intellectualism. And this is why the Ukraine war is so important to N S Lyons – it is the issue he hopes might finally lead to the current establishment coming to its senses, abandoning its crazy woke preoccupations and coming together with the sensible conservatives, like - guess who – N S Lyons.
We are now approaching a great crisis point in modern societies. It is not the woke revolution as N S Lyons suggests. It is what the woke revolution has precipitated, a great struggle between ordinary people represented often very imperfectly by populists (both on the right and the left) and the elites that have ruled since the demise of hunter gatherer societies, most recently in the west with the façade of a fake and corrupt democracy. It is an inchoate, unorganized, and intensely messy struggle and how it will end no one can say. But on which side people like N S Lyons stands I now have no doubt.