Name: Did The World Lose Its Sense of Community?
Uploaded: 2024-01-29T18:25:34.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Did The World Lose Its Sense of Community?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Did The World Lose Its Sense of Community?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-29. Transcript available.

Where did we start to lose that? I mean, obviously, religion was something that
was big, that kept people in like a common practice, right?
And that was bigger in the past centuries, I feel like, than it has been here
in America.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that provided a place where you would go together.
There were certain practices that you guys did each week, and there were
religious get-togethers and people thinking about their God and thinking with
their God.
And singing together?
Yeah, singing together, stuff like that's powerful, man.
I've been in a church where people will start, even in an audience with a band
sometimes, but specifically at a church sometimes, people start singing.
It's like, it'll open up, you know, it'll make you feel connected, you know?
Your feelings will just start crying, just start emoting, you know, or feeling
something.
So there's something about that, doing something as a community and feeling as
a group.
Yeah, and also there's the horizontal, and like in some of the practices that
we do, there's the horizontal, like you and I reciprocally open to each other,
but there's also the vertical.
You and I sort of, we're not only opening this way, we're opening vertically as
well.
And it's really interesting when you do some of these Socratic practices,
dialectic into dialogos, philosophical fellowship, things like that.
People who are often not religious at all, secular, they'll get into this and
they'll start to feel that collective flow state and that sense of reciprocally
opening to each other.
And then they all start talking about like the third, the we space, like the
collective intelligence that's not coming just from you or from me, but it's
being co-created and emerging and taking on a life of its own.
Yeah.
Right.
And then they start to talk about this in religious language and we lost that.
I mean, so that feels like as close as we can get to God a lot of times.
I feel like there's the best people start saying things like that it might be
God for them.
And I want to be really careful here.
I'm very respectful of people's religious adherence.
I'm not anti-religious by any means.
No, neither.
But people, well, what happens is, right?
And this is a platonic point, a neoplatonic point.
So what happens is initially when they're doing these, they get an intimacy
with each other, that reciprocal opening.
They fall in love.
It's philia love.
But that's in the word philosophy.
It's fellowship love of wisdom, right?
They get that.
And then they start to feel intimate with this, the geist, the spirit.
We call it the logos, this emerging collective intelligence that is making
everything more intelligible.
And people start to reciprocally open with it, right?
And then they start to reciprocally open through each other and through that
logos to the depths of reality.
Yeah.
And then they start to feel like they're in relationship to what is ultimate.
And some people think about that as God.
And some people think about God personally.
Some people think about God impersonally.
Some people think about it more like the ground of being or ultimate reality.
But what everybody starts, well, all the people that talk this way, what they're
doing is they're trying to express a connection to something that's profoundly,
transformatively real and meaningful.
And we have a word for that.
It's sacred to them.
And there's a deep connection between having a sacred canopy and the
cultivation of wisdom.
So another thing I'll ask my students, where do you go for information?
Without thinking, they hold up their smartphones because we're all cyborgs now,
right?
And I say, where do you go for knowledge?
And they'll sort of like, oh, well, science, the university, but they're-
Grandpa.
Well, yeah, something, right?
But then I'll say, and this is where it's really interesting.
Where do you go for wisdom?
And there's an anxious silence.
Now, if you'd ask people that 200 years ago, they'd say, oh, my church, my
temple, my mosque, my, right, right, right, right, my sangha.
Those answers don't come out.
Occasionally, very rarely, somebody will say, like, my church, but sometimes
they'll say it kind of like, but not really.
And what's happened is, so the largest growing demographic are the nuns, the N-O-N-E-Ss.
They have no official religious identity.
Now, that doesn't mean they're overwhelmingly atheist.
Most of them are spiritual, but not religious or seekers, or they have weird
supernatural beliefs.
But what's happened is most people are abandoning religion, not primarily
because they've come to some deep conclusion,
that it's false, although religion has a problem.
The religions generally have a problem with the scientific worldview, at least
some versions of them.
But it's much more, it's a little bit of a truth issue, Theo, but it's much
more a relevance issue.
Most people feel that these institutions are no longer, like, relevant to them.
They're not vibrant.
They're not vital.
They don't speak to them.
They don't call them to their better selves.
They don't call them into, like, these experiences.
In fact, the ecology of practices has generally withered.
And we've tended to emphasize, like, giving each other propositions and reciting
them to each other,
as opposed to this complex set of rituals and ecologies of practices.
So, yeah, as we lost, and I'm not, and I'm not, you can put this on my tombstone,
neither nostalgia nor utopia.
I'm not nostalgia.
I'm not saying we need to go back.
Right, right, right.
No, we're just looking at it.
Right, we're looking at it.
But when we lost that sacred canopy, we lost a lot.
You know, Nietzsche said it really well.
He said he runs into the marketplace, the madman, and he doesn't confront
Christians.
He confronts the atheists who are all sort of tittering about the death of God.
And he said, you don't know what—and Nietzsche's the guy who pronounces the
death of God,
so he's not there to argue against them as atheists.
He said, you don't realize what you've done.
You've taken a sponge and you've wiped out the sky, right?
You've unchained us like we're forever falling.
We have to become worthy of this.
We—like, killing God, we have not—like, to put it in affective terms, we
have not grieved to the depths we need to and in a healthy way in order to be
worthy of that.
That's what he's basically saying.
Well, yeah, it's like if you—when you take that type of thing away, right, I
mean, and then you take away the religion of the family, right?
Like, a lot of families have evolved, you see a lot of single-parent families,
both parents have to work, you know, the kids are being raised by, you know, by
their smartphones and by whatever, the first thing it can get to them.
And then you take away also, you know, there was a time, like, in the 90s where,
like, everything kind of, like—and this is a smaller version, but everything
is, like, you can watch or consume whatever you want when you want it.
There used to be, like, shared experiences, right?
They were called networks for a reason, right?
We would have networked together.
We would all watch a show and then we would go out in the street and, like,
impersonate the characters from it.
We would—like, you were excited as soon as the show was over, especially in
the summer because it was still light outside.
We'd go outside and, like, impersonate our favorite acts from it.
We'd all laugh and have, like, a shared experience, whereas now everybody—
It's fragmented.
Yeah, everybody's just, like, watching whatever when they want.
It's all separate.
You don't really feel a connection.
I think that's profoundly right.
That's what I meant earlier about how popular culture used to have a religious
function—religio, to bind together.
It used to do that, and now we've even lost that dimension.