Conner Habib, Why You Can’t Just Take the Good and Leave the Bad |467|

Conner Habib, seeks to untangle the good from the bad in order to find what makes us human.

photo by: Skeptiko

[Clip 00:00:00 – 00:00:20]

That’s a clip from the movie I, Robot. It covers territory that’s pretty well-worn at this point. Will consciousness rise up in the robots and take over the world? But I think there’s a deeper and more relevant and certainly more immediate question that comes to mind with what it means to being human, and it’s explored quite beautifully by today’s guest, Conner Habib. 

Conner Habib: [00:00:47] I now use the question rather than what is consciousness, that is important to me, but I think what is the human being is my question that I try to unfurl everything from.

I can’t just do this bullshit thing, which people do all the time, which I find completely objectionable, which is, well, you just take the good and you leave the bad, just move on with the good stuff, because that doesn’t address the foundational thing that you bring up all the time. What I need to do is find out how the good and the bad are entangled and liberate that philosophy from itself. [box]

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Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:20] Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris, and today we welcome Conner Habib back to Skeptiko. 

Conner is the creator of host of Against Everyone with Conner Habib, a fantastically named interview, podcast, video series that explores sexuality, spirituality, science. Oh, and just a whole bunch of other stuff that is always interesting, especially when Conner does it.

He has a new book in the works, or it might even be out, we’ll have to hear about that. It’s titled Hawk Mountain. And he recently pinged me about Why Evil Matters. So we’re going to have to see why he wanted to poke the bear there.

Conner, welcome back to Skeptiko, thanks so much for joining me.

Conner Habib: [00:02:11] Hey Alex, it’s really nice to talk with you again. Hi. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:15] So what is going on? What’s going on with Against Everyone and what’s going on with the new book and what’s going on in Ireland?

Conner Habib: [00:02:22] Yeah, so, since we last talked Against Everyone has pretty much taken off, it’s going really great. And I’ve just sort of been getting deeper and deeper into the conversations and letting myself go a little bit more because the whole point was I wanted big talk, not small talk. And so just letting myself get deeper into topics with thinkers who I respect and kind of abandoning… Also, I’m moving away from LA. I moved out of that, sort of current, you always have to be visible and successful. I kind of moved out of that when I moved to Ireland. I was like, I’m just going to do what I care about, and then surprise, surprise, of course the show blows up after that. Right? 

So there’s that. The novel I wrote, which is called Hawk Mountain, doesn’t come out until next year, but I did sell it, which is great. It’s a very dark, very dark book about repression and love and murder. So it’s a bit of a crime book, and I’m very excited for that. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist my whole life. So that was like one of the unrealized dreams. And now that’s coming out next year.

And Ireland’s great. The last time I was on your show I was just about to move here and now I’m here and it feels exactly right.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:03:50] Perfect, great to hear. And I just popped up, for people who are watching the YouTube, and we were just chatting about, you know, this has always been a podcast, Skeptiko, and it still is primarily a podcast, that’s how it reaches people. But I have this really cool new tool called the Descript, and I was just saying how it allows me to kind of crank out the video at the same time. So I was pulling up the video, if you ever want to watch that on YouTube, of your excellent show Against Everyone. And I’ve listened to a bunch of episodes. I’ve made notes on some of the ones that you sent me that you thought would be particularly relevant to what we might talk about today. But even that might be outdated as this conversation flows and goes on. But I really do like the way that you’re diving deeper and deeper into these topics, even though I disagree with you about 90% of the time. The level of intellectual rigor and the depth that you bring to this, which is really what these conversations should be about. 

So let’s see. Where would you like to start before I give you the whole Skeptiko drill? 

Conner Habib: [00:04:57] I think something that I hear on your show all the time, that I think I would like to start with is something that we do agree on, and I want to disagree that we don’t agree on 90%, but let’s see, is the idea that reality claims are first and foremost, it’s something that I’m coming up against in my academic work a lot. Like I’m reading these anthropology books where someone will say, “I met this indigenous person and he told me that a wolf threw up foam on him and gave him the cure for smallpox.” And then they’ll say, “So what does that tell us about the kinship structure?” And I’m like, “What the fuck, what do you mean, kinship structure?” Like why are we not talking about the vomiting talking wolf? Like that’s very important.

So I’ve been seeing how that’s sort of rife through everything in a real firsthand way, in a place where it’s supposed to be more understood, more accepted in anthropology.

Now, in fairness, in academia, I think anthropologists have gone the farthest or the furthest in investigating reality claims, ontologies, metaphysics, that kind of stuff. And really actually trying to understand, but it’s still not enough as far as I’m concerned.

So I just want to start, I think maybe there, the importance of the reality claims. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:06:27] Well, you know, that is one point to start on and totally we are in sync about that. You’ve kind of heard me go on and on about that, in terms of the book, Why Evil Matters and the claims of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who is in the desert and is summoning the antichrist doing this ritual in order to bring forth the antichrist and the Whore of Babylon and all that stuff. And then the scholar, and I’m not going to mention his name because this poor guy… 

Conner Habib: [00:07:00] You know, I’ll mention his name because I really like Hugh. Hugh Urban wrote a great book called Magia Sexualis about how magic and sexual liberation are tied into certain left-wing causes and social and cultural change. And that’s a really great book.

But I think you’re right to make a point out of that mistake of his, which is to be like, “Well, it matters that they believed in it.” That does matter, but that’s not all that matters. And to stop there is to…

Alex Tsakiris: [00:07:31] Well it’s not to stop there, it’s to start there.

Conner Habib: [00:07:36] Right.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:07:38] Because the starting point needs to be…, and you know, it’s tough because we can immediately go to inside baseball. Then we just might as well go there since that’s where we’re going to go anyway. Because, you know, the flip side of the reality claim thing is that we really don’t have a handle on what reality is to begin with. So it’s almost like, it’s like this kind of paradoxical, well, aren’t they right, in a way that it only matters what you believe since there isn’t any grounding in reality anyway. And the problem with that, of course, is the same problem that we have with atheism, is that no, if you don’t get the first question right, if you don’t understand the nature of consciousness and that you’re not wrestling with whether consciousness is real or an illusion, well, then you can’t move on to the second part of the question and say none of it is real because we don’t really have a handle on whether we’re in a simulation or whether reality is what we think it is in terms of our five senses or the rest of it. Or extended reality is interfering and their spirit world. All those things could come into play, but we shouldn’t give those guys a pass and let them at the table as if they’ve passed the preliminary exam because they haven’t.

So Hugh Urban probably has, because like you said, he’s exploring sex magic and he’s looking at tantric cultures in India and all the rest of that. But when he makes the conscious decision to leave that behind and play the game of materialistic, atheistic, religious studies, where consciousness is an illusion, then I think he’s given up his right to engage in that dialogue in a real way.

He has to pick and he’s in a forced choice kind of position because he can’t hold his job, he can’t publish, he can’t continue to pick up his paycheck if he abandons the dogma. But at the same time, he can’t really engage in this conversation with you and I if he doesn’t go there. What do you think about that?

Conner Habib: [00:09:50] Yeah. I think that’s great. I mean, I think a way to say it is if you don’t pick the right question, you know, like all the answers to the questions that you pose will be skewed. That doesn’t mean valueless. It just means like you’re going to further obfuscate as you go on. For me, I now use the question rather than what is consciousness, that is important to me, but I think what is the human being is my question that I try to unfurl everything from. That’s, I think, a fundamental question. There aren’t very many fundamental questions that are close to what is the nature of consciousness, but I think that that one’s close and that’s closer, it has a parallel course to it.  

Alex Tsakiris: [00:10:39] Can I pause there and tell us more about what you mean, what that means to you, particularly in the topic areas that people are going to most be associated with your work, in terms of sexuality, social justice issues and those kinds of things. Because there’s an unwrapping that I want to do there, but I’m intrigued by where you’re going with that, because I think maybe you’re going to leapfrog me, and I want to be ready for that. What is a human being?  

Conner Habib: [00:11:14] I mean, I think for me, why I would ask that is because, just, I would say if nothing else, it’s not nothing else, but if nothing else, it brings a sense of warmth to the question of consciousness. You need to ask very cold dissected questions about consciousness, but seeing what is the human being begins to include, I think for me, questions about love, questions about feeling ,about relating, about connectivity, about that kind of stuff in a way that I feel sometimes that even people who are doing this really great work about consciousness can tend to leave things a little bit cold. And then I think, well, that’s not including everything that we need to include here, because there are states of consciousness that lend themselves to warmth, states of consciousness that lead themselves to a sense of separation, to incompleteness, to intensities, all that kind of stuff, to love, to desire.

So I think asking this question, what is the human being, brings in and invites in that angle of it, which I think is very important. 

I’m not say, you know, maybe it’s just a semantic issue or you would identify it as such, but I think you would know what I mean when I say some people doing consciousness exploration are also very cold and clinical in a way that excludes a whole aspect of being human, which I object to.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:12:35] Oh, I think that’s quite brilliant. And I think that’s also part of the… I mean, everything has the potential to be co-opted and I would suggest that you’ve really put your finger on a way that consciousness is, and certainly will be co-opted. And that is in this kind of scientific technocratic. What is the quantum level understanding of consciousness? And that needs to be the base of our understanding of it as if we would even understand what quantum level stuff is. I think your warmth thing is beautiful.

Conner Habib: [00:13:13] Thanks. Yeah. I mean the backdoor materialism happens everywhere and it’s infuriating when you spot it in people that are otherwise doing good work, because you’re like, come on, you’re going down the right path, but there’s a gravity because materialism is dense. There’s a gravity to it and that pulls you back into it. Or maybe it’s like, you have to constantly surface from materialism, like a seal coming through like a hole in the ice to see the rest of the world. 

So I think you’re right, and yeah, I’m glad you like it. Good, we’re off to a nice start so far.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:13:52] We’re off to a nice start. So let’s crush it into the [unclear 00:13:58].

So related to this, I think is the issue of who is doing that social engineering that we’re talking about, because I think we can easily kind of blow past that and say they’re co-opting and then some say, “Well, who is co-opting?” Or we’re saying, “Oh, poor Hugh Urban, he can’t keep his job and he can’t publish if he doesn’t toe the party line.” Who is maintaining the party line? Who is imposing the sanctions on that kind of talk? 

And then I would switch over to the topic and the subject area where you’ve kind of made a lot of noise, and a lot of positive noise, and raised a lot of consciousness about issues that are real and are troubling to people who do care about true social justice. And I’m talking about sexuality and LGBTQ and now they have… 

Conner Habib: [00:15:00] There’s the whole alphabet in there Alex.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:15:03] And we joke. We joke about that, but there’s a realness to that. There are real social issues there. But the part that I wanted to explore is it’s also clearly, in my opinion, it’s a psyop, right? It’s partially a psyop and do we have to care? Do we have to deconstruct to the extent to which we’re now being pushed towards a transgender agenda that may have some real issues in it, but also seems to have issues that resonate with a very weird AI, techno, Orwellian craziness?

Tell you what, to cap off that little intro there. I recently did an interview with David Icke, who I think is just… Do you know David Icke?

Conner Habib: [00:15:56] Yeah, of course.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:15:57] With David Icke, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Conner Habib: [00:16:00] Lizard people.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:16:01] Exactly, love it. The lizard guy, right? The reptilian guy, right? Which is a wonderful way that we pigeonhole people, we limit people’s ability to speak. Although now they’ve gone the next level with David, of course, and he’s been banned from YouTube and from Facebook, which we now are comfortable with the idea that people can be banned. You know, David is an advocate, very much a nonviolent advocate of kind of love your enemy, don’t engage at the same energetic level of the people who are about hate. And he’s been like that for the longest time. This is of course a voice that we don’t want to hear, right? 

And the whole idea, and I think it’s interesting just for all of us to all look in the mirror and say, five years ago even certainly, 10 years ago, but even five years ago, if someone told you that we would ban people from one of the primary communication platforms, larger than any of the television network platforms, that people would be banned for advocating free speech, free thought, and open thinking, we would have thought that was impossible. And now we accept it in the same way as we just put on that mask to go outside. 

So here’s David Icke, I think it touches on a lot of the things we’re talking about, and I think it’ll maybe springboard is into discussion about evil.

David Icke: [00:17:39] Consciousness, you know you are an infinite expression of consciousness and that will never allow itself to be subjugated and intimidated into submission by the said psychopaths and idiots.

If you can isolate five-sense mind in this symbolic bubble, and then within the bubble feed that isolated mind a sense of reality by controlling the education system, all the way through the formative years, by controlling the mainstream media, the Silicon Valley media and so on, then you can first of all isolate mind from expanded consciousness and then you can program that isolated mind with a sense of reality. Which is all about little me, it’s all about self-identification with labels, what I call I am/are, I am/are man, I am/are woman, I am/are black, I am/are white, I am this sexuality, I am/are that sexuality.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:18:42] Okay, we’ll stop there, and I’ll edit that down a little bit, but I wanted you to get the full flavor of lizard guy. He’s just the lizard guy, he talks about aliens and reptilians. I didn’t mention it in that clip, but that’s who he is, he’s the reptilian guy. 

So what did you think, anything popped to mind there? 

Conner Habib: [00:19:04] Yeah. Okay. So a few things. So first I want to say about David Icke. I don’t know that much about him, other than my general impression. And I watched that documentary about him, which he made with his family I think. And I’m going to get to the clip in a second, but which I thought was actually a tremendous disappointment and disservice because he self-censored. Like, there was nothing about lizard people in that documentary and I thought, the lizard people thing, I know that that’s real. So why wasn’t there any of this? And it was all about consciousness this, consciousness that, in a way that I actually thought with due respect to him, even though I don’t know if he deserves it, because I don’t really know him that well, that I thought was rather actually basic. I think that those kinds of thoughts about consciousness, yeah sure, they’re interesting. I mean, they’re the things that pop out about Silicone Valley and, how we deal with identities and all that. But I don’t find anything that, like, wow, we need to like turn to David Icke for answers here. It seems actually rather simplistic. For me, I am definitely interested in how identities become…

I said years ago that I thought that there were becoming new nationalisms, that as our faith in relationship to the State started to erode, we started building what we considered to be new states and those are identities. And we can tell that we treat them like states because when someone gets the language wrong, we banish them, and we exile them from the state if they don’t say the right words.

Now, I also think we’re getting something from it. It’s informing us, it’s educating us, all that kind of stuff. I don’t want to just say, oh, it’s purely bad, I think we get something from it. But then I’ve also, you know, recently on my show, talked to political philosopher, Michael Hardt, and you know, he and his writing partner, Antonio Negri designate these identities as instances of extensions of private property. And I find that very interesting too. And those things do overlap with some of what David’s saying in that clip, which I find, you know, that’s  provocative, that actually we’re being told to sort of densify our sense of I am this, I am that, but in terms of property, in terms of nationalism, and in ways that create walls between us that become almost or seemingly insurmountable. 

In fact, very many of the same people who say that they are against walls, against borders and all that kind of stuff, are creating infinitely dense borders by turning aspects of their consciousness into bound up, walled communities.

So I would agree with him there. But I did think I needed to add that caveat because I get a little frustrated turning to him, in the sense that there are lots of people working on this problem and very interesting, and I think in more complicated ways. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:02] So I listened to a bunch of those shows that you sent me and I don’t see where we’re really getting at some of the issues that were, that you’re talking about in this deeper way, because I think fundamental to what Ike is saying there, what I want you to respond to.

Is that fundamentally? No, no, that’s okay. Cause I like everything that you said I love. 

Conner Habib: [00:22:25] No, no. I said, okay. Cause I want to hear what you you’re 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:28] cool with that. 

Conner Habib: [00:22:30] No, I just want to hear okay. What 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:32] was it? Okay. What do you have? Okay, what do you have? Bring it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I’m just saying, I’m sorry. I got it right away, but I really appreciate, and I don’t want people to know this.

I really appreciate the level of it. And from the beginning, you know, we’ve known each other for a long 

Conner Habib: [00:22:47] time. Yeah. Yeah. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:48] And you reached out to me years ago and I was like, this guy’s brilliant. Let’s get it brilliant. You know, he’s on all this stuff. And then the last time we talked and, Oh, you know, you’ve always had the Rudolph Steiner stuff, which I never quite understood and unpack.

And I still remember the quote. I use it all the time, you know, well about, about riddle Steinle Steiner in evil. And you’re kind of where we’re having these. Conversation. I love where we kind of get frustrated with each other and you reach a point and you go look, here’s what Snyder said. You can be the biggest creep in the world, the biggest evildoer in the world, and then you die and you have to deal with the consequences that, and then you come back and you can do it again and again, again, and starter says, here’s the ultimate consequence.

If you do a 13 times in a row, then your soul is destroyed. I think that’s, I think that’s kind of. Absurd in a way. And it’s a strange kind of backdoor materialism in a, in a kind of way. But at the same time, it gets at something that is probably a core truth that I think you were pointing to. And that’s that let’s not get too hung up on.

The evil that you may be subjecting your soul to because you will deal with the consequences of that. And you will leave the havoc behind with the other people, all that you encounter. And that’s a horrible thing. And you should definitely try and avoid doing that. But from a societal cultural level, Let’s not get too worked up about that.

That has with you and your life review, buddy. You can handle the karma have at it. So I think where I appreciate what Ike is saying, and I think that it really is deep in its simplicity in a way that I don’t think you really responded to. So I’d go back to your comment winded all the way back to the beginning, and I’d say.

You know, in his, in his movie or whatever. And I haven’t seen the movie you’re referring to, he doesn’t talk about lizard people. You know, it didn’t talk about lizard people with me either. Cause we got, we had a million other things to kind of talk, but I would say that that is also an unfair criticism of anyone who’s been in the public arena, you know?

And has. Talked about a lot of things. I mean, if every time you came on a show, you had to talk about porn, you know, I mean, you’re, you could be comfortable doing that cause you’ve covered that topic. But after a while, you’d be kind of like, I don’t need to cover that territory every time. You know, I think about a lot of different things and I’ve investigated a lot of different things and, you know, for you to kind of.

Pigeon hole. It is part of the process too, but that’s kind of an aside, but that addresses that first point. But the second point that I think is really central to this that I wanted you to respond to. Is that a lot of these social issues? That you seem to care about and you seem to put a lot of energy into, to me they’ve faced the same dilemma that we’re facing with the huge urban dilemma.

And that is we have to get to the bottom of whether or not there is an element of social engineering control behind it. So. Is the transgender movement, transgender rights in particular. That’s one that particularly jumps out to me as being kind of a carrier virus for a larger agenda that we seem to be that seems to be cropping up again and again.

So I think it’s totally fine for somebody to go. That is absurdly crazy. Conspiracy nonsense. That’s an appropriate response to that. But the counter to that would be to say, is there any element of truth to it? And if there is then how would that change? How we think about that as a social issue. Right.

Conner Habib: [00:26:39] Okay. So yeah, I have plenty to say on that. so I don’t, so I’ve had trans and non binary people on my show, who I love, I don’t think that, I don’t think that it is a particular or particularly, or singled out or singular issue as far as any kind of op or social control code. Right. I think that.

There are 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:27:09] not a singular. Just, just to keep it on track. Not a single, no, not at all. Okay. 

Conner Habib: [00:27:14] Okay. So, so, but I think that that’s important, right? I think you’re right. All social issues in some way are part of some op and part of social control, a hundred percent. I mean, this is something that you, and now I am going to talk about porn, but it’s something that you learn when you do sex work right away, because.

You have people attacking you instantly and saying, well, yeah, you said you consent to that, but actually you’re just part of the patriarchy and you’ve been brainwashed. And then you have to be like, how do you know you haven’t been brainwashed? And so you have a lot of people sort of pointing fingers at each other being like, no, you’re right.

The one of the social control, you’re the one in the social control. But the fact is we all are to varying degrees and we’re all experiencing that and that unfurls into our causes. So you’re absolutely right to identify the fact that when we start at any level beyond. What I think the fundamental question is, which is what is the human being, the unfurling of the issues becomes completely distorted in a way that makes it more susceptible to social control that can sometimes even turn it into social engineering and social control that can, rip it away from its sort of earlier warmer.

You know, I don’t know that, you know, person human being based context, it’s consciousness context and, and distort it and make it terrible. So I think you’re absolutely right. I just am, I’m just pushing back on the trans thing, because I don’t think that that’s any different than any other issue.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:28:41] let’s say it’s not different than any other issue. I do. I want them. Push a little bit further on this, because I think you’re kind of pulling up right at the point where it becomes interesting. It’s kind of like the Huber urban thing. Well, it, it, it, yeah, it doesn’t matter. It only matters what people believe.

Well, it only matters it. Yes. It could be a, an element kind of social control. Don’t we have to do a full stop. Don’t you have to do a reboot don’t we have to completely deconstruct and re-examine everything we thought we knew. I think we do. Let me play a little clip clip again. Cause I think the, the feminism movement and I just had an interview with it yesterday with this wonderful, wonderful person dr.

Gayle Kimball. And she was, she actually founded the women’s studies program. At, Cal state Chico and a professor merit. I written some fantastic books, but I, you know, I was hitting her up about the Gloria Steinem thing, Gloria Steinem outed as a lifetime player. And what you said that I think relates to this interview, we’re having here.

She says it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to me because she did a lot of good. And that’s what I hear. So many people who are interested in social issues, talk about it doesn’t matter and stop right there. I think it may not matter. I think that’s a potentially valid point. It may not matter, but it may matter.

Conner Habib: [00:30:12] I agree with, yeah, I agree with you and I play this clip 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:14] and that’s 

Conner Habib: [00:30:16] okay.

 Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:17] Well, one of the things they told me was that, He brought, he was at the house one night and, we told him he would talk and he started laughing. So, Aaron, what do you think women’s liberation was about? And, I said, I pretty conventional thinking about it at that point. They said things about women having the right to work, getting equal pay with men, just like they won the right to vote, you know?

And he started to laugh and said, you’re an idiot. And I said, why am I an idiot? He said, you want me, let me tell you what that was about. We, the Rockefellers funded that. We funded women’s lib, you know, and we’re the ones who got all over the newspapers and television, the Rockefeller foundation, he says, and you want a wine?

He says there were two primary reasons. And they were one reason was we couldn’t tax half the population before women’s lib. And the second reason was now we get the kids in school at an early age, we can indoctrinate the kids had a think, it breaks up the family. The kids start looking at the state as the family, as a school, as the officials, as their family, not as the parents teaching them.

And so those are the two primary, primary reasons for women’s level, which I put up to that point was a noble thing. You know, when I saw their intentions behind it, where they were coming from when they created it, the thought of it. I, so I saw the evil behind what I thought was an oval, the venture. 

Conner Habib: [00:31:44] so lots of things to pull apart there. So one. It does absolutely matter that Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA, because what we see there is a complete compromise in the, the ethical and moral framework in which she presented as having.

So we understand that she’s a liar and a phony, and that she’s just a posturing figure head. So. We will get back to something deeper than that, but that on its own should matter to us. Right? So even if you want to not accept any ideas that the women’s liberation movement was created by the Rockefellers or whatever, that should matter to people.

But the other thing I want to say is. Here’s where we run into some, some, complication, you know, my friend Mona Alto. Oh, we, you know, she writes a lot about female genital mutilation, in, well, in many, in many different countries. Yeah. Including the U S and it happens to young girls and it, it is, I mean, truly horrific.

Right. And part of the resistance to, the. What I think is rightly called a ritual abuse of young girls. part of the opposition to that comes from the sort of knock on effect from this. You know, women’s liberation movement, which I think in, in some ways was as your guest points out funded and run by, institutions of power in other ways, not so much because there are lots of women liberation women’s liberation movements that predate that one that have their roots in spiritual.

You know, practice that have the roots in other kinds of, you know, traditions, you know, the, the spiritualist movement for instance, was a great, you know, entanglement with, female sexual and political liberation in the 19th century. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:33:37] So 

Conner Habib: [00:33:38] there are all these other sort of precursors, and then there are also these knock on effects where.

A lot of people in certain countries feel empowered to fight against FGM, to fight against their husbands, literally owning them because of certain feminist texts that they’ve gotten. So I do think on the one hand, it matters. And on the other hand it does doesn’t matter. So we have a much more complicated picture than being able to say one or the other.

Well, you know what, actually, I’m going to roll that back. It always matters. It always matters, but that doesn’t mean that we, you can still say complicated things about the good that came out of it. So I guess I would actually revise my statement, but how it matters to us and the kinds of. Because what I worry about Alex, and I think you’ve seen this before is that people will hear something like that interview and be like what?

It was all just a great conspiracy. I mean, when is liberation, it’s just, you know, Rockefeller, you know, whatever or planned up. And it’s like, well, okay. But. That’s not giving us a fuller picture. And by the way, I don’t know about that information quite so much. I know about the Gloria Steinem, CIA connection, and some of the other feminists who, you know, try to, you know, insight war and support, the Israeli government and all that kind of stuff.

But I don’t know. And certainly all the anti-sex work worker feminists. but I don’t exactly know about. That exact thing that Andrew says talking about Aaron Risa was the, 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:35:04] yeah. Yeah. So you bring up a number of interesting points and there is no substitute for deep. Yeah. Again, that’s what I love about.

What’d you do with your guests and people can see that from this interview is you have the ability to kind of pro ball the different sides of the issue. I don’t, I don’t apologize for kind of pushing you because that’s where this stuff gets interesting. Right. I think it’s also where. Where we have to go, because if you are so easily manipulated by this, it’s like the trigger alert or a trigger warning.

And you know, I love Gordon Gordon, white, who was, I was on Bruin soup. And that’s what originally brought you back to me. But it’s like, he just frustrates me to no end like interviewed because this trigger warning. Oh, this is a trigger warning. We might say some things that might trigger you. How in condescending, can you be, you know, what, if I trigger you then, you know, then that is on you.

But it’s on you to investigate why you’re being triggered. I am triggered all the time by so many things. It is my spiritual path to become less triggered, to figure out why I’m triggered and to reintegrate my triggering, but not to, not to, you know, create. Further perpetuate this big daddy is here to protect you kind of thing.

None of it’s in a podcast form that I have to warn you, that you might be triggered. Don’t be triggered. There you go. Don’t be triggered. Don’t allow it to happen. So, and then I want to kind of add that back into the discussion we’re having, because you’re so right. About the knock on effects, but I would suggest that that is really the power of the co op.

If you co-op a nonissue, then you have no power. If you co-op a real injustice, then it has power. My mother I’m old enough that I can tell you, my mother was completely oppressed. She wasn’t particularly a good person, had a problem with drug and alcohol abuse, but still I can have tremendous empathy for the fact that she had zero opportunity other than to get married.

She had zero opportunity to express herself as an artist. Without being labeled and all the rest of these things. Those were the very rigid structural elements of our society that she lived in. So for her, women’s liberation was the real thing. And I get where someone would say, I don’t care because they look at how they’ve been oppressed and how their group has been oppressed.

And they say, I don’t understand how the whole thing works, but I understand we’re on the low we’re on the short end of the stick here. And we need to change that. I certainly understand that. I don’t know what your background was like, but growing up gay Arab in the Midwest, right? Pennsylvania. 

Conner Habib: [00:38:24] Yeah. Hey man.

Not so easy, 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:38:27] not so great. You were babbling against the social construct, social prejudices that shouldn’t be there. They’re not a good thing. So I, I can totally understand someone coming back and saying, Hey, I’m not against everyone. You’ve chosen to be. Everyone is against me. So my counter is to say, okay, I accept that.

So that’s a beautiful thing. But I would suggest that that is right out of the playbook. Of course, that’s what they’re going to co-op is real issues. And I, and I kind of wrap up the brand here, but pointing out like a tiny mistake you made with Gloria Steinem. Which is really the whole mistake. And it’s the whole mistake with the transgender guy, the Muslim transgender.

I mean, they have all these kind of mixed kind of things where it just sends your head spinning and it’s really just a sigh out kind of thing, but it’s not that Gloria Steinem was a bigger head. Gloria Steinem was a lifetime player. She was, she was recruited. Yeah. To go to the social, to go to the student movement things.

And she came back at her CIA opposite. She’s dynamite. She’s a whiz kid, 

Conner Habib: [00:39:44] Stein of mine. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:39:47] We have an, we have a job to do here, buddy, and she gets the job done. So it’s not that she was a figure head for feminism. That’s really irrelevant. What’s important is how she played into this social engineering machine.

And I would come back again and say, I’m too. We’re really. Until we’re willing to address that straight on, then I don’t think we can get there. That’s why. Yes. So like, and respect David Ike. And even though he has a million crazy ideas that don’t stand up to scrutiny. And even though sometimes he’s weak on the science, as I pointed out to him in our interview, He is fundamentally putting his finger on the issue that there is an organized effort, a conspiracy, if you will, to, to, to.

Mold you into thinking that what he calls your five sense, mind your biological for robot in a meaningless universe meme, that that is who you are and that you are meaningless. You are helpless, you are powerless. And that is part of this agenda in terms of identifying people. Sexually, which is such a bizarre and absurd notion to begin with because anyone with half a sensibility says, what business do I have?

How is it even a concern? It’s some kind of crazy cult thing that’s associated with religion that even gave us the notion that we have any business that even have an opinion on someone’s sexuality. 

Conner Habib: [00:41:24] Okay. So there are so there’s so much. So let me just try to go on my own rant here. Let’s see if I can pull it off.

Sor first of all to say, that some of the best people examining those issues are trans people, right? So when you have people that are in the fray of the deepening of their sense of identity around gender and gender expression, a lot of times they’re the ones going so deep into that, that they’re able to experience a different kind of revelation about it. That’s certainly true about Sex Work and Me, you know, this philosopher that I like, Felix Guattari, they call it line of flight. It’s like you do it so much that suddenly you take off and you can see things from a different vantage point that nobody else can see. And then you can bring real questions. You can bring real questions.

But why is this important in regards to evil? So, as you said before using the thing I said that Rudolf Steiner said, which is on the one hand absurd and on the other hand completely true. When we do evil in our own lives, we, through our own freedom and effort and incarnations, we work that out, right? We take it on, and we redeem it in ourselves through karma and process. There is evil located and lodged in so many different social issues, which relate to social engineering in one way or the other. We can see this in a very easy way. If we look at someone like Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who ended up being a Nazi, but we can see that there’s value in some of the things that he says as a philosopher, we can see it in Nietzsche, we can see it in all these people, right.

So when I look at philosophers like that, I need to look at, I can’t just do this bullshit thing, which people do all the time, which I find completely objectionable, which is, well, you just take the good and you leave the bad, just move on with the good stuff, because that doesn’t address the foundational thing that you bring up all the time. What I need to do is find out how the good and the bad are entangled and liberate that philosophy from itself. So it becomes redeemed because evil, almost always, not always, but almost always wants to actually be redeemed and saved by us and by our fruitful action. 

So when I look at these social movements, whatever they are, and the ways that they are either created or entangled in social engineering, my job is not to be like, well, you know, there’s good stuff that came out of it, so just ignore the bad, or, it’s all bad so condemn it. My work is to go deep into that and transform it by seeing those connections and liberate it from itself. And that’s what we do in the task of evil all the time in ourselves through our karma, but we also need to do it socially and in these issues.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:44:26] I think that’s wonderful. And I think that you’re talking about something very spiritual there in terms of your spiritual journey and your personal spiritual journey and about transformation. 

But I am going to kind of persist on this other issue because I think it gets us back to the evil question in a larger sense. Because I’m totally down with what you’re saying about from a personal evil thing and a personal evil thing in a lot of ways is so easy because we all confront our personal evil all the time and we identify with it, and we are struggling with it in a way that we usually have to come to grips with sooner or later. The collective evil, I think is a little bit harder. And what I notice and what I’m calling out is a certain avoidance of wanting to look at that collective evil. And I’d return to my buddy David Icke again, because I think, I think what he’s saying is quite profound. If there is an overall agenda aimed at consciousness to intentionally separate you from your connection to higher consciousness, and part of that agenda is to reinforce your connection to technology, to materialism, to biological robot in a meaningless universe, then I think we need to understand if that’s real, if that’s in play, and I think we need to take action accordingly. And we could talk about what that action is. 

Do you get why I’m persisting on that? Do you think we’ve nailed that or no? 

Conner Habib: [00:46:12] Yeah. I’m a little confused because I think what I said sort of addresses what you’re talking about. So 100% I agree with you, and I, by the way, agree with David Icke’s assessment, at least in the terms that you framed it in, that there is a technocratic control project underway, and it is linked to definitive evil. Not just, hurt people hurting people, or people being confused or whatever, but there is actually an agenda.

Now there’s a deeper question as to whether or not that agenda is actually set by the spiritual world or if it’s set by individuals, or individuals influenced by the spiritual realm in a specific way or acting it out. So I think there are all these questions that we have to sweat through as well, but that seems very clear to me, I agree with you there. 

And that presses a question upon us of tactics and strategy, but I think what I’m talking about is actually part of it, which is, we need to have a certain approach to evil when we see it. Which is, one, knowing that it wants to be liberated from itself, that it wants to be redeemed. And we can see that in our own anatomy and experience. If we accept to the principle of reincarnation, which I’m not going to go into whether or not we should, you’ve done a lot of shows on it. I think it’s pretty definitive that that’s a thing. 

So we know from our own spiritual anatomy that that’s happening and we need to bring that intentionally to the way that we approach evil in the world, which is what matters is how I greet you evil, what matters is how I greet you, because that’s the only way it’s like a Chinese finger trap. The more I struggle in the wrong way, the tighter it gets, but I need to find the right way to let it relax, so I can remove myself, so I can approach in the proper way. 

So after that, there still are some tactical problems. Like, what the fuck do we do about the fact without even going into 5G, what do we do about the fact that our media, including this that we’re on right now, is carried by microwaves that are divided like a flip book to carry certain amounts of information, and suddenly lo and behold, people have a hard time paying attention to things. Things come to us in sound bites, things come in little blips and sort of bizarro like, you know, two second things. It’s because the actual medium of transfer of information is affecting how we receive and reflect on the world in general.

So how do we deal with the fact that the actual media, like the actual transfer of information is having a disruptive effect on our consciousness? Do we tear down cell phones towers? Do we take material action? Do we find the culprit and punish them? Do we create counter devices? Do we engage in occult technologies? Do we practice magic? Do we pray? Those questions all rise to the surface when we look around and we find ourselves in a pool of evil, in a pool of a problem. And so we have tactical questions ahead of us that aren’t just, well, I’ll just be a good person, right?

Now, you can do that, and everything will be all right. Sure. But the question is, do we want a thousand years of suffering before everything’s all right, or do we want like 20 years of, like difficulty and then we get it right? I think that that’s a real question and maybe that sounds materialistic, but I also don’t like suffering. So I’m just going to go with my own likes and desires there, and I don’t think other people do either, and I think it’s part of my spiritual responsibility to help people with that and not just leave the earth in my thinking and be like, well, everything’s going to be okay. Who cares? 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:50:14] What are your thoughts on right action? Because I think this is something that we all wrestle with, and that is the being versus doing question and is working on myself, working to not be triggered, working to find the warmth and humanity, as you talked about in the beginning, is that enough? Does God need our help?

Conner Habib: [00:50:44] The gods need our help, but God does not. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:50:48] The gods, if you’re serious about that, you would have to break that down. 

Conner Habib: [00:50:53] Well, you know, we still have 20 minutes, or more, maybe half an hour before I have to go. So let me just lay it on you. Yes. I wouldn’t call it a hierarchy of consciousness, I would call it a hierarchy of evolving states of consciousness that appear as entities from the vantage point that we’re at, when actually it’s just more sort of topological. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:51:21] So kind of typology.

Conner Habib: [00:51:24] Yeah. So, let me get back to the original statement, which is the gods need our help, but God does not. I mean, first of all, God is so far beyond what most of us understand that I’m not going to even… It’s hard for me to apprehend that from my standpoint and from my vantage point, but okay, if you want to say some sort of totality or whatever, the totality of the consciousness state. 

But as far as the other beings go, we even see this weird turning point in mythology, you know, with Theseus and the Minotaur and all this kind of stuff, where the gods are suddenly asking for humans to help them complete their tasks. And before that you see the gods sort of… I’m not using this as a reality claim, I’m just using it as a metaphor. Where you see the gods sort of positioning people as pawns and moving them around and all that kind of stuff, and then certainly as consciousness begins to change and evolve, the gods are like, “Hey, could you help me with this thing?”

So we see in our own lives the way that consciousness evolves to reflect a certain kind of freedom, a certain kind of free will, a certain kind of a difference from the kind of deterministic ways that we might’ve lived in before. Then we have different duties and different responsibilities and with those come different dangers.

So yes, there are, I’ll just state outright, there are angelic beings, archangels that want us to align with them for this battle against evil. And from their vantage point, the battle against evil looks very different than from ours. But they can’t do it on their own because we have free will, because we’re not biological robots. That invites in the possibility… Well, we talked about this last time I was on the show, but that invites in the possibility of us doing evil. So we actually have to get right with them. And that includes a lot of different things, that includes study, contemplation, prayer. It also includes the very basic guiding principles for us, which are freedom and compassion. I mean, that’s really it, like if you can just drill down, but that sounds easy, but it’s not easy. And that sounds simple, but it’s not simple. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:53:52] I appreciate you laying all that out and just being so direct about it. I am not sure that I agree, and I really want to get out there an alternative perspective. I mean, I may agree, a lot of people are saying what you’re saying, and they make a good case for it and there’s certainly a lot of human experience that would back up what you’re saying in terms of… I love angel stories, I love angel accounts. I’m not inclined to dismiss them because they have a lot of connection.

But here is the kind of yogic, nondual perspective, however, it gets cast, but I think is important and I’m particularly drawn to Western interpretations of that nondual perspective. And one is kind of an Eastern and the guy’s a creep. But the TM guy, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, you know, who is a creep, and is a cult kind of founder, but at the same time, I’ve talked to enough of his people. He had some spiritual energy, some pure spiritual power and some spiritual insights that we shouldn’t ignore, and I love the way that you talk about liberating the truths from the falsehoods in a way that it kind of empowers us to transform.

Anyways, a long way around the barn of saying, it’s all in the middle is the essence of that. If you want to play that game with demons and angels, have at it, but you are ultimately trying to transcend all of that. So if your transcendence of that is to engage, well, that may be good, or it may not be good. But what some of those folks are advising us, and it seems to make sense to me, is that you don’t need to engage because your ultimate goal is to transcend that as well, and get it down to the core essence of your connection to that higher consciousness without the need for the intermediary realm.

And you know, what’s consistent, what I’ve heard about that is that most of this evil we’re talking about is not very powerful in the bigger scheme of things. And we often engage in empowering it by engaging with it. And that can go in a million different directions that we don’t have time to go. So we have to talk really fast because you only have 20 minutes left.

Conner Habib: [00:56:19] Okay. So, first of all, that’s to me an op, so I want to address that as an op in and of itself. Why? Because the idea of transcendence is… This is what people who do like Advaita Vedanta, like all is energy, it’s all well, everything’s perfect, all that. I think that that’s true on a certain level, but pretending that you’re accessing that when there are people suffering, and those people are a part of you, and you have a deep connection to them through consciousness, and through what it means to be human is a dereliction of duty to yourself, to heaven or whatever you want to call it, to the cosmos. And I think that, you know, this idea of transcendence… 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:57:07] Hold on though, people are going to get tired of the same old Skeptiko stories, and I think I even shared this with you on the last one we did, but you got the Amma example that I always go to, right?

So Amma, the hugging saint, fully engaged in life, working with people tirelessly. She’s an old lady. I don’t know how she does it, 18 hours a day of hugging people. The ultimate gift of connection or digging trenches with the Untouchables in India. What a contradiction that is that we have this gift of a jewel of spirituality of India. I mean, the Untouchables, it’s another way that evil manifests itself.

So you have a person who is totally engaged in the act of loving and giving and engagement in warmth and humanity. But when pressed for why she does that, when the whole thing is supposed to be transcended, she says, “World? What world?” She is not even in this world on her spiritual level, but she realizes that the paradox, that in her actions she can be totally engaged. She can be the guy who will jump in front of the bullet to save someone else. Who will save Anneke Lucas from ritual sexual abuse and murder and will ultimately die because of it. 

So there’s many acts, great and small of kindness from people who are committed to transcendence. 

Conner Habib: [00:58:39] Yeah, so, okay. You’re right. I’m not typifying the entire idea of, I live at least partially in the spiritual realm because I’ve transcended. I’m talking about the idea of transcendence, like the idea of leaving the kind of responsibility of materiality behind. Here’s the reason, and this goes back to the reality claim. The being that is causing the trouble right now… and lots of people like to use this term arcon, I’m not a fan of it, but for people to understand, the arcon or whatever. The being that’s causing all the trouble right now is a being whose anatomy is composed of materialism. When we decide to transcend this plane, we’re actually leaving that being behind. So we might be doing all the kinds of work that we’re supposed to be doing for each other and all that, but the spiritual realm is being neglected because that being, out of its own essence, has no choice but to draw us all towards materialistic existence. 

And so we think we’re being so great because we… with all due respect to Amma who seems pretty great, we think we’re doing so great because we are transcending and hugging people and saying, “Well, what world is there?” and all that kind of stuff. But as long as we, even if we just did all that and every other human being was perfect, we’re leaving the spiritual beings behind and we have a responsibility to them as well.

Now I don’t think that’s all that’s happening there, but I just want to bring that up as one point, that evil waits to be redeemed by us through love, and when we don’t do that, because we just live in the spiritual realm, we’re actually giving up on suffering that needs to be transformed. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:00:34] You’re awesomeness continues to shine Conner. What’s going on with Against Everyone, and you said the book is next year. What other projects are you working on there in Ireland? What’s going on?

Conner Habib: [01:00:46] I’m trying to take in as much of Ireland as possible. I’d like to know the land and the spiritual beings here better. I’d like to understand a lot. So I’m trying to learn the language, learn music, all that kind of stuff. Just take it all in.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:01:05] Give us a little bit of a language. 

Conner Habib: [01:01:07] No, not yet, I’m terrible at it. The Irish language is a very complicated. Well, all languages are complicated for me because I’m a total dummy about them, except English. So, don’t ask me to do that. That’s the most challenging Skeptiko question so far. 

But yeah, and Against Everyone, it continues to grow. Not that anybody’s asking this, but I think, like you as an exemplar for me, and some other podcasters, but there aren’t a lot of them who just decide, you know, I want to have this conversation because it’s important for me to have this conversation, but it’s also important for this conversation to radiate and to go out there. And, if you don’t have a podcast yourself, the idea behind my show is that, and I think yours too in a way, is like, maybe these conversations will happen in people’s lives, if I just display the ones that I’m having, you know, because that’s really important because these questions are important. So I’m just going to keep following that. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:02:22] Right on to that. Against Everyone with conner Habib, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Conner, thanks again, it was awesome. You never disappoint my friend, you never disappoint. So thanks so much for coming on.

Conner Habib: [01:02:36] Yeah. Thanks Alex. I love talking with you. 

Thanks again to Conner Habib for joining me today on Skeptiko. The one question I’d have to tee up from this interview has to do with what I think is his excellent point about, just take the good and leave the bad. I think he’s really onto something about, it’s more complicated than that. And I think we all have misgivings about the bad that we have to swallow with what we’re told is good. So what do you think about that? 

Let me know, pop on over to the Skeptiko Forum, drop a note, or send me an email or however else you would like to connect. Please do so, it’s so wonderful to find out who’s out there and to find out what’s going on in this little community that we have. 

So I have some interesting stuff coming up on Skeptiko, please stay with me for all of that. Until next time, take care, and bye for now.   

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