The Wes Cecil Podcast

In 2 weeks we will begin a new series exploring the Bhagavad Gita as a means of orienting oneself within the vast and fascinating literature and thought of classical Hindu thought. An extraordinary and central text that works on a number of important levels within the larger epic of the Mahabharata while also representing an inflection point in the development of Hindu thought. I wanted to share t...

A reflection on the power of biography to inspire and help guide us in our pursuit of beauty. These two examples are, at least for me, immensely helpful in shaking off the cultural assumptions and outlooks that try to shape our goals and, hence, decision making. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community  to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon) Plus, gain acc...

With Health, Beauty has historically been considered an intrinsic value. However, our contemporary society does not just undervalue beauty, it actively works to prevent beauty from being perceived either as a value or, even more insidiously, as an active evil. By taking a moment and reflecting on our own perception of beauty and looking to cultivate in our environment we can use a sense of persona...

Not a rhetorical ploy, but an actual question. The strange form of American ‘Democracy’ today raises the very real idea that at some point a lack of competition in elections, the duopoly of the hold on power and the control exerted over the process of elections by un-elected officials produces a system that is functionally no longer really a democracy. Further, and I forgot to mention this in the...

Often discussed as an ‘implicit’ good, health is nonetheless a relatively low priority in many modern societies. We have both a poor understanding of what constitutes health as well as a strong cultural resistance to pursuing health as a key value in our lives. Any attempt to prioritize health will generally provide a powerful education in the underlying cultural values that shape our lives and, m...

A reflection on our capacity to overwhelm our actual experience of the world with abstract concepts that somehow is often more powerful than even our immediate physical surroundings. I was prompted to these thoughts by recent experiences mowing my lawn and spending time in some very different kitchens. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community  to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes...

A brief introduction to the field of values and why they matter as a subject of reflection. Fundamentally, we understand the world through our values so reflecting on our values and potentially even changing them gives us the opportunity to dramatically alter our experience of the world.  Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community  to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very a...

A brief argument in favor of reading biographies as a warmup for a new series that will be coming very soon! Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community  to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very active on Patreon) Plus, gain access to bonus lectures, peer discussions, additional course materials, and audio diaries from France. Only $2 / month.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

A long footnote to the Late Capitalism series in which I discuss the, at least to me, very important difference between these two concepts. While commodification is still going on, it is really the advent of this new financial world that has come to dominate our world in many quite dangerous ways. Perhaps a long discourse that interests only me. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community  to ge...

An invitation to explore the power of being wrong. In a culture that emphasizes the importance of rightness over a whole range of other possible values like harmony, beauty, health, fabulousness, inspiration, and so on, being wrong can be a liberating and enlightening experience. Once one begins being wrong, it lifts a burden of outlook and opens up a whole range of different experiences and orien...

While our particular brand of history is unique, people have been living history for a long time. By looking back to some earlier patterns of living that were more health-giving and joy-supporting than the form of life relentlessly promoted to us today, we can gain a few clues as to how we can adapt in the face of our challenges. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community  to get your questions...

Nietzsche is not just presenting a series of arguments, he is modelling a very different approach to thinking and understanding our world than we usually encounter. To conclude our read-along, I reflect on the structure of his arguments and how they are as, or even more, important than the actual content. In the end, like a poem, Nietzsche invites us to participate in the creation of our own under...

A reflection on the global structure of Late Capitalism encapsulated in Cheerios as an example that can help us understand the nature of the world we inhabit. I also cover the unanswerable question, “Why has 70 years of efficiency and progress made Cheerios so expensive” and the unspeakable word - “Deflation”. Hopefully having these small examples in our minds will help us to address the complexit...

The final section finds Nietzsche in usual form attacking the notion of ‘levelling’ and ‘universal good’ and ‘Equality’. HIs driving force, following on Will to Power, is the pursuit of individual ideas that suit individuals and hence refute the drive towards universality or assumptions of ‘good’ or ‘true’.  Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community  to get your questions answered by Wes!...

Okay, I couldn’t help myself. Keurig is such a perfect example of how this entire orientation towards the world is destructive of more or less all the greatness and joy in life that I pause here to reflect in greater detail on the specifics of the Keurig case. I also think the example of FitBit and similar devices renting to us the capacity to connect with our bodies - and hence of course alienati...

As long as we keep the values of Late Capitalism we will be trapped within and reproduce the problems associated with our current system. To reorient ourselves within our world we need to articulate for ourselves a new set of values. Two key elements is to resist the notion of money as a necessary arbiter of all things and to reevaluate our desire for haste. It is in large part our addiction to sp...

I pause for a moment to review the central concept for Nietzsche - the Will to Power - how it differs from the concept of will deployed by Schopenhauer and how it utterly reframes the debate around free-will and determinism (though most people don’t seem to notice). Hopefully, this provides a little more clarity and also suggests why it is both a crucial insight and pretty confusing all the same t...

Following on from the Unaskable Question, is the notion of how our health is intimately linked with our physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing. However, the logic of Late Capitalism, which we have been examining largely from the direction of money and economics, functions in precisely the same way when we look at our health. Unfortunately, but predictably, isolating people in stressful en...

Nietzsche reminds us that pain does not, in fact, correlate with truth. And while these chapters are a little confusing, he repeats his observation that all philosophy is derived from the philosopher’s autobiography - and in this case it is clearly Nietzsche expressing his sense of the world. Sign-up for Wes’s PATREON community  to get your questions answered by Wes! (Yes, Wes is very ac...

Musk's decision to absorb his failed Twitter company into his failing AI company which he is now folding into his cash positive satellite launch company is such a perfect example of Late Capitalism I couldn’t help but comment. Bizarrely, Musk denies he has a car company, or a telecommunications company, or a rocket building company. Why would a successful 19th century industrialist systematically...

We know money answereth all things and that as long as we get money, keep money, and have more money then everything will be fine . . . of course this is completely and demonstrably wrong, and yet, the power of the Late Capitalist ethos reinforces this idea relentlessly as it prevents any other value from intervening in the process. However, if actually stop and ask - what is the source of my weal...

We arrive at perhaps the central theme Nietzsche has been building towards - the Will to Power. That life is not trying to survive but rather to thrive is the key argument he makes. He sees this as an extra-moral condition of existence because it is present in all living things - hence Beyond Good and Evil. That life force is motivating and shaping in every moment fundamentally alters the notion o...

Unsurprisingly, Late Capitalist outlooks have largely colonized our interactions with jobs. Both the structure of employment and the way we think about jobs has shifted dramatically over the last 40 years. Worse, our general cynicism about our current employment environment is itself a sign of how pervasive late capitalist outlooks have impacted even how we imagine our lives might be. Sign-up for&...

Here Nietzsche critiques the whole notion that we ‘live in a simulation’ or that we live in a ‘hologram’ roughly 150 years before those concepts come into existence. In fact, however, he is really working against the Platonic tradition of perfect forms that haunted, and continues to haunt, the western concept of both the world and how we should, as ethical beings, respond to it. Sign-up for W...

The structure of our contemporary societies promotes an increasingly powerful focus on isolated individuals as not just a model, but the model of a quality and ‘successful’ life. As isolated individuals we increasingly struggle to meet our basic needs by interacting with globalized and financialized systems that exploit us. The increase in loneliness, anxiety, suicide, and other mental health prob...