Episode #172 - Transcript

So in the year 1928, a young student by the name of Simone Weil applied to one of the most prestigious universities in the entire world… it was located IN France, known for its science and philosophy programs. The school was called the École Normale Supérieure… or at least that’s how we say it here in America, at our philosophy hoedowns that we have.  

Anyway if you were a kid and you wanted to be a famous philosopher when you grew up and for some reason you GOT INTO THIS school…you’d FIT right in with the people around you…I mean TONS of famous thinkers went there you got Jean Paul Sarte, Jacque Derrida, Michel Foucault, more names than ANYONE out there really cares to hear right now. 

Point is… it was a pretty competitive school to get into when Simone Weil applied and eventually got accepted. And WHEN she did…she was one of only ELEVEN people that were accepted in her class. OF those eleven people she was the only woman accepted. And upon completion of the certificate in general philosophy and logic…she scored the HIGHEST marks out of ANYONE that was taking the test at the time, taking first place. SECOND place it turns out…went to the only OTHER woman who was going for the certificate at the time. And HER name was Simone De Beauvoir. 

Simone De Beauvoir would later write… YEARS later about a conversation she had one time with Simone Weil, DURING their time at the school.

There was a famine that happened in China in 1928, lasted a couple years. The two of them were obviously well informed about all that was going on…and you can imagine them standing in the halls of this BEAUTIFUL school in France with its archways and its artwork and them having a conversation about what the RESPONSE should be… to this FAMINE… that’s killing MILLIONS of people out there. To which Simone Weil… was COMPLETELY adamant in the conversation saying… that there is one thing that matters that we should all be FOCUSING on here…and that is the revolution that needs to happen… that is going to FEED all of the people around the world that are starving. 

Now, Simone De Beauvoir, THINKING like an existentialist philosopher, you know future author of the second sex and the ethics of ambiguity…SHE hears this and says back to her, well look…the problem is not to make people happy, she said, the problem is to find a REASON for their existence. 

At which point, apparently, Simone Weil takes a step back…looks Simone De Beauvoir up and down head to her feet and says, “it’s easy to see YOU’VE never gone hungry.”

Let this be the first moment in this series that illustrates… an ongoing contrast between two VERY DIFFERENT approaches to WHAT PHILOSOPHY IS.

None of this is to impugn the work of Simone De Beauvoir by the way, many of you out there know shes my favorite… hanging on the wall next to the desk I record every one of these podcast episodes at is a framed picture of simone weil next to a canvas painting of simone de beavoir…mad respect to BOTH of these philosophers…but… Simone Weil, was just a different kind of beast when it comes to LIVING philosophy. 

If you are ANYBODY…that tries to LIVE by values that MATTER to you in this world…if you’re in ANY WAY trying to improve as a person with the time you got left on this planet…I don’t even know if it’s POSSIBLE, for you to read the journals of Simone Weil…and not feel EMBARRASSED at the level that you obviously need to be stepping your game up. 

This is a woman that died at the age of 34 years old, laying in the hospital, sick with complications from tuberculosis, denying most of her meals because she refused to eat more than the rations of the people fighting in the French resistance. This is a person who STARVED to death, with food ALL around her, because she was unwilling to compromise her ethical integrity. Should be said there’s different interpretations of her final days in the hospital, but the point I’m trying to illustrate is that there is a CLEAR difference between philosophers throughout history, who are academics, abstract, theoretical masterminds… they write DOZENS of books and undeniably make TONS of progress when it comes to human thought…and then there’s people throughout history whose very existence just IS their philosophy. 

And even more so than someone like a Diogenes or a Boethius or even Socrates…for me personally…there is no better EXAMPLE of a LIVING philosophy, than Simone Weil. To her it’s like, what’s the point of sitting around…TALKING about philosophy all day, HAVING all these conversations if you’re gonna live a life that doesn’t correspond with ANY of the insights you’ve gained? At a certain point… it just seems like a waste of time. It’s like spending your life studying the absolute PERFECT way to play tennis, to think about tennis every day…THOUSANDS of hours invested into it…but then never playing tennis…or playing tennis and just CHOOSING to be horrible at it for some reason.

And it's because of this mindset she had as well as just the short duration of her life, that a lot of people when TALKING about Simone Weil, will try to describe HER… by telling anecdotes from her early life. They’ll talk about the time she was six years old, and told her mom and dad that she refused to eat sugar or wear socks because she heard about the soldiers on the front line and what they have to go through. Or the time when she was a teenager and taught HERSELF sanskrit so she could read the Bhagavad-Gita in its original language.

These are supposed to be stories… where people say AFTER THE FACT, wow…we sure saw the writing on the wall with THIS one early on didn’t we? hmm!…but to me… this sort of naturalizes Simone Weil in a way that isn’t really fair to her. It suggests… that she was just BORN someone, with a genetic predisposition to LIVE in the way she did…BORN to be a person some religious people refer to as an actual modern day saint. BORN to be what Albert Camus called the only great spirit of our time. To be the person Simone De Beauvoir envied for having “a heart that could beat right across the world, she said.” No, if we want to understand the incredibly rare exception to humanity that WAS Simone Weil…we have to understand how her life was lived… and ALL of the beautiful changes that go on when you are someone as TRULY open, to what the universe has to offer, as SHE was. And NO ONE…is simply BORN… with the genius that SHE developed. 

This is going to be a SERIES, on the life and work of Simone Weil. And I find myself in a rough spot at the BEGINNING of all this as someone that does a thirty minute podcast for you to listen to. There is SO MUCH to talk about between stories from her life and the philosophy that came OUT of those stories…that I think it’s impossible to do any semblance of justice with any single episode. But I also think that’s potentially a strength. Because again To BE someone that does a 30 minute podcast… I’m not relegated to a curriculum here…I’m not trying to cover a comprehensive HISTORY of philosophy with this podcast…I’m trying to do what I ALWAYS do… which the way I always think of it is that I’m trying to talk to you listening right now… like I’m trying to talk to a friend about something from philosophy that’s inspired thinking in me…that’s all I EVER try to do here is give other people the most COOL stuff I can. And WITH that in mind at a certain point…I’ve accepted that I have to just come to a level of peace with this first 30 minute installment, WHATEVER it ends up being, knowing that there are OTHER installments yet to come. 

My hope here today is that throughout this episode we can at least START thinking about the way that Simone Weil lived her life…and to START THINKING in the direction her philosophy is eventually going to take us as we cover deeper and deeper levels of DETAIL. 

And to get us going in that direction…one philosophical THEME, that we’re gonna be returning back to throughout this series in varying degrees of detail…is the IDEA of attention. Attention was, for Simone Weil, an absolutely CRUCIAL skill to develop if you were going to live life in a way that wasn’t at the mercy of other FORCES in the world around you. 

See, just learning the proper way to DIRECT your ATTENTION…not only can it change YOUR life… it can change the lives of the people around you, and then WITH that it can go on to change the world and then the course of HUMAN HISTORY along with it…consider for a second just how IMPORTANT…the way we pay ATTENTION, really is…NOT ONLY does the quality of the ATTENTION that you have dictate, every experience THAT you ever have…but even more important than that, your attention ALSO dictates…which experiences…are even POSSIBLE for you to experience. 

Now this point…is going to be critical when understanding how important ATTENTION is at practically every level of our existence…we’ll see it applied in her epistemology, her cosmology, ontology, we’ll talk about all the logies eventually. Don’t worry, uh. But I think a helpful place to start making the case for an ethics of attention…again just to get us started THINKING in this direction that Simone Weil is headed…I think it might be useful to talk about the IMPORTANCE of attention, at MAYBE the most basic, every day level you possibly could. 

EVERYBODY listening to this knows, that throughout your day to day existence…the way that you ORIENT yourself towards the things that are going on in your world… can have a DRASTIC impact on the EXPERIENCE, that you end up HAVING of the thing that’s going on. For example.

Someone invites you out to a get together with some friends. A social meetup let’s call it. Now most of the people going to this meetup you’re cool with… but then there’s the one guy that going…and he’s a guy that…well, now that you think about it… may be top 2 top 3… dumbest people that you’ve ever laid eyes upon. He’s the worst. You REALLY don’t wanna go to this thing, but your friend asked you to go so you go anyway…and WHEN you do…almost like magic…THAT person is horrible, AS USUAL… and YOU… end up having the negative experience that you were EXPECTING to have going into it. 

Now CONTRAST this situation with some other day of the week, totally different meetup, different people…and this one…at the start of it you KNOW is going to be boring…again, you don’t WANT to go, but THIS time you decide you’re gonna channel a little Nietzsche, little Amor Fati, accept that which is necessary…this time you’re gonna GO to the meet up and you’re gonna just be OPEN to the experience… WHATEVER happens. 

You DO this and, then again, magically…sometimes in a spot like this, you end up surprising yourself, you end up GETTING something SURPRISINGLY useful out of a situation you otherwise thought you’d hate. Simone Weil might want to ask at this point: what was DIFFERENT about these two approaches, these different ORIENTATIONS, towards each of the MEETUPS that you went to? 

And before ANY of you out there… in your open toed sandals start talking about the power of positive thinking…you know, the second time you just recognized how blessed we were to be alive man. Uh, no. No, nobody WILLED themselves into being positive in the second meetup. If anything, Simone Weil would say, you did LESS the second time around…you just decided to REMOVE some of the BAGGAGE that you were bringing to the FIRST get together. 

No, the big difference REALLY when you think about it was that at the second meetup…you were just more OPEN…to a DIFFERENT KIND, of EXPERIENCE being available to you. In other words…your ATTENTION… was different…in the second meetup you were FAR more prepared to be RECEPTIVE to an entirely different READ on the situation. 

Kind of embarrassing because of how BASIC it may seem, but this was a concept that hit me pretty hard when I first read Simone Weil years ago. The idea that a different experience of EVERYTHING you do is available to you…right now…ALL AROUND YOU. Almost like a radio station that’s CONSTANTLY broadcasting a show that you’re not CURRENTLY tuning into…and that at ANY MOMENT…you can tune into that station…you can just CHOOSE to be OPEN to a DIFFERENT kind of experience. That’s a real possibility.

On the other hand though you can ALSO choose…to just NEVER be open to ANY experience, that you’re not arriving at by DEFAULT…and then you can SPEND the rest of your life ONLY HAVING your DEFAULT perception of things and the first thing that bubbles up into your head. That’s a real possibility too! 

There’s a sense in which, THAT experience…where you got something profound out of something that otherwise could have been boring…that experience was ALWAYS possible for you to have…but UNLESS if you were willing to tune into that specific frequency…for all intents and purposes that experience, doesn’t exist in your world…and here’s the really important part at the deeper levels of her philosophy: that experience… was IMPOSSIBLE… for you to EVER receive, until you were OPEN to receiving it. 

Think about someone that lives in the most beautiful place in the world… but they never stop anymore to look around them and appreciate the beauty of the place that they live in…stuff around them… just becomes some blurry set and setting, a song playing in the background as they drive from place to place… running errands. Think of the experience of the person that’s possible when RUNNING those kinds of errands…someone so focused on the menial tasks they gotta get done to maintain their life, oh god I gotta pay the electric bill today…they’re so focused on the electric bill that they don’t remain open to the moments they’re living in right now and what lessons the universe may be disclosing, that they’re just not paying attention to. Like the person sitting in the lobby of a restaurant, waiting for their to go order, staring down at their phone, paying attention to a screen, only to glance up every so often at the world, lamenting about how they don’t have a meaningful connection to anything.

ALL of this… has to do with the way that we PAY ATTENTION to the things going on around us. 

And Simone Weil was totally aware of all this. More than that, she was AWARE of the fact that most people seem to fall into a sort of DEFAULT state of attention, given to them PARTIALLY by their biology, but MOSTLY from things GROUND INTO THEIR HEADS from the time they’re babies. 

Which HAS to beg the question: where exactly do we GET this default state of attention? How much thought and effort do ANY of us really put in…to the way we ORIENT ourselves to reality? 

And no doubt there’s tons of people that meditate or pray whose hands are starting to chafe from patting themselves on the back so much right about now…I know EXACTLY… what Simone Weil’s talking about. And no doubt what you’re doing is a good start, not trying to hate. I’m just saying let’s be sure to respect the work of Simone Weil as well. 

Because the kind of attention that SHE writes about in her journals… the kind of attention that can offer sacrament to the world…that is something incredibly rare, something that spans across multiple different landscapes of our thinking…not just something you can get from an app that for ten bucks a month will tell you to pay attention to your shoulders, AND…whenever you’re ready…come back to the sound of my voice and return to your life of misery.

No, we LEARN how to pay attention in HORRIBLE ways from the world we live in…and let’s TALK about one of the FIRST places we LEARN to pay attention horribly: the way we were educated in school. Which also, conveniently, happens to be the next section in the story of Simone Weil’s life. So CONVENIENT how that lined up. 

Remember I said that if you wanted to be a famous philosopher…a good idea would be to GO to the really nice school that Simone Weil went to? Well here’s ANOTHER important thing that you should understand about Simone Weil…she didn’t CARE, WHATSOEVER about BECOMING a famous philosopher. She certainly WASN’T famous when she was alive…quite frankly…she was FAR TOO BUSY LIVING LIFE, to ever PAUSE enough in this world to become a FAMOUS person. 

She graduates from the fancy school, she shuffles around for a bit and then eventually decides that the best place to apply herself right out of school…is to get a job TEACHING the next generation of students.

And IT IS CLEAR, that, EVEN AT this super early stage in her life…she ALREADY KNEW that there was a BIG problem with the way that students were being educated and TAUGHT how to pay attention to the world around them in a narrow way. 

Because when you read the stories from the students that were in her classes…Simone Weil…wasn’t like other teachers at the time. She didn’t give grades like other teachers. She didn’t give tests like other teachers. There’s a story from a student that talks about her teaching Geometry one day where all they did was, they WENT outside, they gathered together under a tree, and the student described what they did that day as they just sat there and sort of “sought out, NEW PROBLEMS, in Geometry”. 

Meaning this wasn’t like a typical classroom…Simone Weil didn’t hand out a bunch of geometrical puzzles that the students were supposed to find the ANSWERS to before the end of the class. No, they just sat under a tree… and thought, as openly as they possibly could, about the PROBLEMS of geometry… not really LOOKING for an answer necessarily, but trying to remain as open as they could to WHATEVER it was…that came out of their process of thinking. Maybe it was a new line of thought ABOUT the problems. Maybe it was a connection between similar kinds of problems…maybe it was just the discovery of NEW UNSOLVED problems. ALL of that, was GREAT to Simone Weil. 

Now WHY…would ANY TEACHER…think it was a good idea to educate students IN THIS WAY? Is Simone Weil like one of those super progressive teachers that doesn’t give grades anymore…she gives the kids like a red kangaroo for all the effort they put in today? Nice work! No it wasn’t about that…it was much MORE… about teaching in a way that doesn’t inherently limit…the way the students ORIENT themselves towards problems in general…in other words it was about not DESTROYING the student’s ability to think openly… by FIXATING them to an agenda where they are always SEARCHING for an ANSWER to the problem. This was a needless limitation for Simone Weil. 

Because that’s how it typically IS in school, right? You’re given problems to solve. You search for the answer to the problem. You memorize the answers and then you’re TESTED at the end of the week to see how many answers you’ve memorized. What could possibly be wrong with that strategy? 

This is what we do in schools right, we TRAIN kids, who then grow up to be the adults of the world, and we tell them that when you come across a situation in your life that you’re confused about…that there MUST be, some distinct ANSWER, to that question that you have that’s out there just waiting to be found. The obvious job then…for ANY PERSON that’s confused about the world in ANY WAY…is to go out SEARCHING, FOR those answers. You SEARCH long enough…you’re probably GOING TO FIND the answer. 

And this is GREAT when it comes to questions like 1+1=2. But what happens when questions start to get a little more complicated than that later ON in life? What happens when there ISN’T a single, correct answer to be found? Questions like what’s the right way to govern a society? Or what’s the best way to live life…POLITICAL questions like what’s the best way to provide healthcare to people, what’s the best way to regulate the economy? 

Well, what HAPPENS Simone Weil thinks…is people go out in SEARCH of these answers to their difficult questions…and they end up SETTLING… on incomplete answers. They end up adhering their thinking to a false idol. They’ve been SO CONDITIONED to SEARCH for the ANSWER to whatever problem they have…that anything that even SEEMS to them like an answer…well… looks like I’ve FOUND the answer. That there folks is the end of my education on the matter. Now my life becomes about DEFENDING, MY ANSWER, which at THIS point now has just become, MY POSITION… and I’m going to vehemently DEFEND my position against all the WRONG answers and DUMB positions that are out there. 

The very PROCESS, of SETTING OUT, SEARCHING for answers…bringing that expectation, orienting your attention in THAT way to WHATEVER it is you’re trying to learn about…just like the person that FINDS the negative experience with the annoying person at the meetup…people FIND incomplete answers that limit their ability to receive deeper levels of understanding. 

The hardest job of TEACHING Simone Weil thought…is to shake people OUT of this collectivist way of thinking…where, they’ve already DECIDED what their positions are, and now it’s not about THINKING so much anymore…NOW it’s about reciting pre-determined, collectively approved positions that they’ve memorized. 

But this ISN’T the only way to learn about stuff…CONTRAST that with ANOTHER possible way of paying attention, that’s more OPEN…where you acknowledge at the start of any conversation…that WHATEVER POSITION you’re currently holding on something…is at BEST, a PARTIAL truth, an understanding that exists on a spectrum, where there is always MORE to LEARN that the world can DISCLOSE to you through experiences, but you’re not APPROACHING those new experiences with any sort of AGENDA…EXCITED to find an endpoint. 

What would HAPPEN Simone Weil wonders if more people embodied an attitude… that is more detached from expectations, more open, more receptive…but at the SAME TIME, it DOESN’T IGNORE the KNOWLEDGE that you’ve already GAINED in a particular area, it just doesn’t makes sure you’re not CHAINED to that knowledge unable to move. She gives a great metaphor in her journals she says:

“Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain, who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”

This is a TOTALLY different method of PAYING ATTENTION to the EXPERIENCES that you’re having…and it’s gonna have clear parallels in the world of eastern philosophy. Something we talked about all the way back in 2013 on this podcast, it’s the idea of passive activity. The basic question at the core of this is… how EXACTLY should you be engaging with your day to day reality? Like, how much effort should you be puttin IN to that process? 

Because there are a few different common answers to this question. Some people put in close to ZERO effort…some people spend almost every second of their life trying to WILL their reality into existence. The problem with BOTH these approaches when it comes to learning more about the world around you is that if you put in ZERO effort…you only learn at the rate that things CIRCUMSTANTIALLY ARISE in your life. It’s lazy and you ultimately have no control over it. But to spend every second trying to WILL SOLUTIONS into existence through TONS of effort…well that doesn’t work EITHER to Simone Weil…you end up just projecting YOURSELF onto reality in such a way that it distorts what you end up learning from the world.

But then there’s a third approach, a middle path…that instead of no activity or over-aggressive activity…what Simone Weil calls a sort of NEGATIVE activity…where it’s not sitting around doing nothing, it’s not trying to FORCE things…when you walk this middle path you’re definitely PUTTING in effort…but it’s a different KIND of EFFORT…it’s an effort where you REMOVE something from your experience, you REMOVE BAGGAGE, you REMOVE your own personal prejudices that you’re bringing to things…she describes it at one point as: 

"the effort which brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or listening."

In other words it’s not SEARCHING…it’s more like WAITING. It’s not REASONING for hours coming to an abstract CONCLUSION about something….it’s more being open and, detached from your own selfishness long enough, to RECEIVE something, that the universe has YET to disclose to you. 

One of my FAVORITE quotes from her that just EMBODIES the spirit she brought to every day of her life: “The great human error is to reason in place of finding out .”

And let this be another MOMENT in this series where we can see by the CHOICES Simone Weil actually made in her life…two VERY different methods of conducting philosophy. 

I mean just put yourself in her shoes…think about what it would be like to BE Simone Weil at THIS point in her life…she’s young, she has a WORLD CLASS, philosophical education… comfy job teaching the NEXT generation of students…how easy would it have BEEN for Simone Weil to just, stay in her safe, comfortable, classroom, going to events… rubbing elbows with famous friends, reading statistics at her desk… and then to spend the rest of her life criticizing the world from far away, writing books and just drinking champagne accepting awards? How many people out there would make the choice to DO just that, with their life? 

But THAT wasn’t GOOD enough for Simone Weil. It wasn’t enough to just READ about what was going on in the world… she wasn’t the kind of person that was just going to sit around and REASON to conclusions about HOW THINGS ARE out there, she was going to go out, and FIND OUT about it first hand, for example: in 1936 she hears about the Spanish civil war that was going on…the legendary fight at this point between the Spanish republic and the fascists that were in power…and just CONSIDER for a second what kind of a person we’re TALKING about here, she didnt just…you know, write an open letter to the fascists…tellin everyone how UPSET she was with them. She didn’t go down to the parking lot of a burger king in the suburbs somewhere and scream at a building for three hours…no she TRIED pacifism, it wasn’t going to work…and this is a person that LITERALLY went into the trenches…she, joins the FRONT of the Spanish Civil War and FIGHTS ALONGSIDE the people defending the Spanish Republic. 

And people didn’t want to let her at first…but she was SO determined to GET to the front lines where the fighting is going on…that she LIES and says that she’s a journalist so that she can infiltrate a militia connected to the NLC. And keep in mind a few things about Simone Weil in particular here…she gets to the front, and she was INCREDIBLY, farsighted. Which…I’m not saying she was Nostradamus farsighted…she was actually, her VISION was super blurry. She, makes a joke to one of her friends in a letter that her vision is so bad that no one in the war really needs to worry…cause there’s no risk of her KILLING anyone even if she’s AIMING at them.

This is a woman heading into a WARZONE…with zero combat experience, not even being able to SEE very well…this is an act of courage based on a moral conviction that’s…honestly got to be HARD for most people alive to even relate to. I mean I have a hard time sticking to a diet if there’s bad food in the house…I gotta just not bring the devil into my house…THIS is a woman that was TRULY ready to DIE… in SERVICE of this conviction… that you needed to actually be there, present, detached, OPEN to what the universe has to disclose to you, and that we should consider the source, of any purely academic speculation going on from the sidelines. 

You know there’s ANOTHER story of her time in the war… where the officers were looking for people to carry out some sort of covert mission that was behind enemy lines where you would have to be able to speak spanish and blend in with the enemy. Simone Weil INSTANTLY volunteered herself…at which point they kind of looked at her…well you don’t SPEAK spanish and you don’t even really look Spanish…they’re going to SPOT you in a second this would be the equivalent of SACRIFICING yourself. To which she APPARENTLY said back, I do have the right to SACRIFICE myself for a cause don’t I? This is kind of person she was. 

Now after some time on the front… she has a bit of an accident one day… she’s walking around the camp…and she steps into a pot or a vat of boiling oil that was sitting on the ground…and you can blame her eyesight for this if you want, many people do including her… but for ME I blame other philosophers, I blame the people taking their SWEET time doing work in ANOTHER important area of philosophy at the time…people examining the problematic nature of…BOILING OIL in a place where someone can step into it…I mean who does that, honestly?

But anyway she gets scalded multiple places across her body, long story short, it ENDS her time fighting on the front lines and she ends up going back home. As it turns out…the UNIT that she was fighting with… was SLAUGHTERED in a battle shortly after she gets sent home and she DEFINITELY would have been one of them. You know it SHOULD be said: her TIME in the Spanish Civil War is definitely an INTENSE example of her willingness to IMMERSE herself into a situation in an effort to not REASON about…but to FIND OUT about the world…but this was far from the first TIME she ever did something like this, and even FURTHER from being the most life CHANGING time she ever did something like this. 

Because before she EVER went and fought in the war…as a philosophy student and as a teacher right out of school…she was SUPER WELL educated in the Marxist critiques of the capitalist means of production. She was WELL AWARE of the arguments surrounding the alienation of the worker from their labor, reification, how politically disenfranchised and VOICELESS the worker is…she would’ve READ the testimony of people on the front LINES of this factory work.

And again, how EASY would it have been at this point to just sit around and WRITE about that like a lot of OTHER Marxist philosophers and academics she criticized…how easy would it have been to buy a custom beret from amazon with your initials on it…and just to SCREAM about revolution for the rest of your life. But NO, for Simone Weil, that was not enough. So she quits her job as a teacher and actually goes and WORKS, doing PHYSICAL LABOR…IN AN AUTO FACTORY…FOR MONTHS. She was going to TRULY understand what it was LIKE to be a worker. 

So…her first day on the job, she shows up to this factory… and it doesn’t take her long to realize that something was very wrong about WORKING in one of these places, and anyone who’s ever worked in a JOB like this, even if it was at a lesser degree than a factory in the early 20th century…you will INSTANTLY know the kind of situation she’s talking about. 

One of the first things she notices is that WHEN you’re working in a place like this, there is a CLEAR hierarchy of what the priorities, REALLY are around here. There’s the TOP of the priority list…which is whatever the QUOTA is…the work or the PACE of work that needs to get done. 

And THEN…there’s everything ELSE… that falls beneath that priority…whether that’s how people FEEL about the work they’re doing, whether that’s people’s health and safety, whether that’s people’s HUMAN DIGNITY. The QUOTA…is ULTIMATELY…what matters most at a place like this. And SOMETHING ELSE she notices is that what INVARIABLY HAS TO happen in a work situation where the QUOTA matters more than the people…is that THINKING is the first thing you have to give up. 

What she means is that…THINKING, is antithetical to this entire process that’s going on. To be a worker that SURVIVES in these conditions…you HAVE to stop thinking. ANY THOUGHT that you ever have ABOUT the work you’re doing…the purpose it serves in the world around you, your position in society AS a factory worker…ANY THINKING…JUST GETS in the way of your ability to MEET the WORK quota. 

And again ANYBODY who has ever worked a job like this HAS to come to accept that fact eventually…some of you know MY experience of this is that I worked eight years of my life doing physical labor at a warehouse, just stacking heavy boxes onto pallets all day…what Simone Weil is saying here is TRUE, thinking about stuff in this kind of environment just ISN’T possible…you THINK about stuff while you’re working, you fall below the PRODUCTION standard and you get fired, that’s the nature of the JOB. 

And this DOESN’T just have to be physical labor…there’s probably a LOT OF PEOPLE listening out there that can relate to this general ACCEPTANCE of the fact that the QUOTA of the work you’re doing matters more… than YOU do. 

Working at a job like this…try THINKING for a minute. Try going up to the managers or to your fellow coworkers talking about oh you know what I realized? I never get to see where all these heavy boxes go where they live out their lives and BRIGHTEN people’s days…Speaking of which… have you ever thought about our relative socio-economic position within the greater whoa whoa whoa they’d say let me stop you there, buddy. Why are you wasting my time right now? Why are you wasting YOUR time? Get back to work. This isn’t a COLLEGE seminar…this is WORK. You wanna talk about economics go talk to a professor, but as long as we’re HERE let’s just get the job done and we can all go home how about that? 

The funny thing is…THAT PERSON IS RIGHT…about the MINDSET you have to adopt to survive. 

THINKING is the first thing to go. THEN there’s the tacit acceptance that YOU matter LESS than the quota that needs to be fulfilled. And THEN there’s the acceptance on top of that… that you should be GRATEFUL to even HAVE a job like this.

Simone Weil says the fear of unemployment TERRORIZES people into accepting this degraded status, where you start to see yourself a just a MEANS to an end, for some OTHER, DISTANT person’s economic goals for the quarter. 

You are backed into a corner of acceptance and learned helplessness. You are made into essentially a modern day slave or a robot…and if that SEEMS dramatic, what’s the DIFFERENCE she would ask? You are working, killing yourself, sacrificing your mental and physical health…and then having zero connection to or possession of the stuff it is that you’re producing. 

And Simone Weil doesn’t QUIT her first day on the job…she goes back to this job at the factory every, single day for months…and she writes about how this FEELING of BEING a means to an end slowly creeps in and embeds itself into her psyche. And she concludes that…while these factories produce a LOT of things…they produce cars in her case, groceries in my case, whatever you’re producing at YOUR job…the BIGGEST thing these factories are producing to Simone Weil is what she calls Affliction. A state of spiritual malaise and hopelessness that people come to ACCEPT they have to live in every day, and that there is no way out of it. That they are AT BEST a means to someone else’s economic end…not ENDS in themselves as people. 

So coming to this conclusion…if you’re Simone Weil around this time in her life we’ve been talking about…and you’re LOOKING at the world around you and trying to diagnose what the problems are that maybe we can improve upon…this psychological and spiritual CRISIS that she calls Affliction… this is going to be at the top of her list. 

This dehumanized state of learned helplessness, has infected millions and millions of people around the globe…which is ALSO to say…that you don’t just FIND Affliction in FACTORY workers that are being treated like a means to some ECONOMIC end. Or in soldiers on the front line being treated as a means to a POLITICAL end. You will find affliction, Simone Weil says, where ever you find people being transformed from human beings into things…and then those THINGS being grouped into COLLECTIVES that are easier to control…and then through VARIOUS different strategies those people are rendered INCAPABLE of THINKING their way out of the stuck place that they EXIST in. And ALL of this… mediated… by a sort of organizing principle of human POLITICAL movement, that Simone Weil is going to refer to throughout her writing as Force. Now what is Force? It’s hard to sum up in a simple explanation without leaving important things out.  

The way I saw it put in a NEW book released last year by Robert Zaretsky was that a way to think of Simone Weil's concept of force, is to say that force is to the human events in the world…as gravity is to the physical events in the world. Meaning: you want to understand why materials move the way they do, how they move in relation to the things around them? Study gravity. You wanna understand HUMAN events and how they move? Study force. 

We’re going to talk about force in detail next episode, but just know that force is not the same thing as POWER to Simone Weil. Power itself is not the problem. Hierarchies THEMSELVES are not the problem…the REAL problem is CLOSER to the PURSUIT of power.

It’s this thing that doesn’t seem to ever stop in our world…it’s the absolute guarantee, that with the systemic design of our society, that people will be turned by others into THINGS instead of people. And that when they’re turned INTO these things…those things will be USED… as a resource to carry out some ego driven, consumptive project in the pursuit of power…and yes, that’s soldiers on a battlefield that’s workers in a factory but that’s EVEN down to YOU, and the way that YOU act in your everyday life. 

Yeah, here’s where it takes a TURN from a distant POLITICAL critique of nameless faceless people we don’t ever have to LOOK at…to people like YOU AND ME…the transactional discourse between seemingly good individuals that are just making decisions trying to maintain their lives… the salesman that sees you as a commission, the businesswoman that sees you as a client. Any time that YOU…PROJECT yourself and your own personal projects onto the people around you and see them merely in terms of what they can do for YOU and your own PERSONAL bottom line. 

Point is you and I are FAR FROM INNOCENT in this whole process. So again if you’re Simone Weil and you’re trying to find a way forward through this pandemic of affliction that’s going on…seems CLEAR, at least at THIS point in her life…that she was considering TWO different possible paths forward…and we’ll talk about both of these next time, but I’ll leave you with the elevator pitch here and try to think about which of these may be a better strategy moving forward. Maybe its a combination of both…but anyway TWO paths forward…

There was a way to move forward by bringing about POLITICAL change…and there was a way to move forward by bringing about SPIRITUAL change. 

The POLITICAL way forward… might start by saying that FORGET any FANTASIES you have about inciting a religious or a SPIRITUAL revolution in people…RELIGION is the opiate of the masses. What we need is a TOTALLY secular, political REVOLUTION rebuilding the WAY we structure our societies. Here’s where we’ve gone wrong. Human beings have needs like FOOD, WATER, and SHELTER. Great societies RECOGNIZE it doesn’t help ANYONE to have a population where these needs are not being met, NO MATTER the reasons. But are THESE the ONLY needs that people have? Or are there OTHER needs that are JUST as essential for a person to live that are not BODILY needs…but as Simone Weil calls them: NEEDS… of the soul. And IS there a political path forward where we can change the way we structure society where MEETING these needs of the soul is one of our highest priorities? 

That’s the POLITICAL elevator pitch, certainly interesting to think about. But then there’s the potential SPIRITUAL path forward, and this is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT way to see the potential of progress. Because IF we accept the fact that HAVE a LOT of these people LIVING around us in various states of, AFFLICTION as Simone Weil calls it…people going through hard stuff in their life, people that feel sort of trapped and disconnected…the kind of person all of us may know or SEE every day, IF we accept that just THINK about your ROLE in that process. 

She uses a metaphor of a person laying in a ditch…imagine someone laying in a ditch clearly going through a tough spot in their life…most people, SEE the person laying there and they just walk by, DON’T even pay attention. Some people are so distracted by their own lives and the screens they watch that they don’t even SEE the person suffering…then there’s SOME people who DO see the person next to them suffering, but they don’t DO anything about it, and again, metaphorically, a few minutes later they forget what they even saw. 

But all it takes is ONE PERSON she says to stop and pay ATTENTION to this person, to POTENTIALLY change their life. To change the ENTIRE way that they SEE themselves and their possibilities in life. How ELSE does it ever happen? But hold on…Simone Weil says this doesn’t just come from ANY kind of attention…this comes ONLY from the RIGHT kind of attention that we can direct to the people that need it if we PRACTICE it…the same kind of OPENNESS, detached from expectations that allows people to learn and see the world in a NEW way, have NEW TRUTHS be revealed to them…the same kind of receptivity that allows you to be OPEN to the profound experience at a meetup that you otherwise thought you’d hate…when you TRULY pay ATTENTION to someone and you’re not just PROJECTING YOURSELF onto THEIR experience…

Thinking what I would do if I was in THEIR spot…or what can this person do for ME and what I want…when you SUSPEND your OWN personal AGENDA for a second and try to just SEE that person AS THEY ARE. Simone Weil believes this can BE the equivalent of a religious BAPTISM for someone…your actions can effectively serve the SAME function as a priest giving sacrament…for this person to be effectively, REBORN into a NEW BODY with a different attitude. When considering the possibility of a spiritual path forward for humanity…

I think she’d want us all to ask the question:

Is religion TRULY the opiate of the masses, as Karl Marx would say? Or as Simone Weil might say back to someone like Karl Marx…has REVOLUTION become the NEW opiate of the masses?

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.