Buddha Didn't Want You to Quit Thinking with W. Tom Pepper

Journey into the often-overlooked intersection of Buddhism and critical theory with Tom Pepper, author of "The Faithful Buddhist" and "Indispensable Goods." Tom challenges conventional Western Buddhist practices by exposing how deeply they're entangled with romantic ideology and capitalist structures.

Pepper argues that Western Buddhism has largely become a way for the alienated modern subject to find emotional compensation without confronting systemic issues. The romantic elements we've imported into Buddhism—prioritizing deep feelings over critical thought, seeking sublime experiences, and focusing on self-development—function as supportive structures for capitalism rather than challenges to it. This explains why popular Western Buddhist practices emphasize mindfulness and emotional regulation while avoiding political engagement and philosophical complexity.

Drawing connections between the historical introduction of Buddhism to the West and our selective interpretation of its teachings, Pepper demonstrates how we've systematically misunderstood concepts like anatman (no-self) and sunyata (emptiness). Our tendency to make ancient philosophies comfortable and compatible with modern thinking robs them of their power to challenge our fundamental assumptions about reality, consciousness, and society.

Perhaps most provocatively, Pepper connects Buddhist practice to political obligation. If Buddhism is genuinely concerned with reducing suffering, it cannot remain apolitical or focused solely on individual practice. The commodification of Buddhism through expensive retreats, books, and membership fees further reveals the contradiction at the heart of Western Buddhist practice.

Whether you're a Buddhist practitioner questioning your tradition, a student of critical theory, or someone interested in how ideologies shape our thinking, this conversation offers profound insights into how we might approach ancient wisdom with fresh eyes—allowing these traditions to genuinely challenge our most basic assumptions about ourselves and our world.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:35 Introduction to Tom Pepper
• 2:58 Defining Speculative Non-Buddhism
• 7:37 Romanticism in Western Buddhism
• 17:37 The Historical Adoption of Buddhism
• 31:43 Emptiness and True Self Misconceptions
• 43:51 Buddhism's Political Avoidance
• 58:22 Ideology in Capitalism
• 1:03:10 The Buddhist Book Industry
• 1:14:34 Critical Thinking in Practice
• 1:22:58 Final Thoughts and Finding Tom's Work

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello and welcome to VarmVlog. And today we are with Tom Pepper and we're covering some topics we don't normally cover here, which is the relationship between Buddhism and general critical theory, as well as some other implications on ontology and things like that and things like that. I am with Tom Pepper today. Tom blogs at the Faithful Buddhist and is the author of two books the Faithful Buddhist and also Indispensable Goods, thoughts on Ideology, agency, the Meaning of Life and other somewhat important questions, and I associate Tom's work with the speculative non-Buddhism movement. I put that in quotations because I lack a better word for what it is. Also, people may be familiar with the work of Glenn Wallace on the topic and you are an independent researcher and writer and that's always fun to kind of clarify. So how did you get involved in speculative non-Buddhism? And for those who are unfamiliar, what even is that? That is often confusing.

W. Tom Pepper: 2:11

Yeah, it's a hard thing to define because we don't there's a other than Glenn is the only sort of consistent center of it, and the other figures that were on his blog and still some of them are don't always agree on just about anything, which I guess is part of what the speculative Buddhism was, part of what the speculative Buddhism was, except that we all were troubled by certain aspects of Western Buddhism and were in some ways critical of it. You know people. He takes the term non from Lara Well's concept of non-philosophy, which is sort of like not anti-philosophy, right, but sort of keeping your distance from philosophy or being self-critical of your own philosophical position, I guess is one way to put it. And so as non-Buddhists, we're sort of keeping a distance or trying to remain critical of the Buddhist practices and discourses that we're involved in. I was particularly. You know, I encountered it sort of by chance. I guess Glenn had written something about mindfulness, which was a thing that I was very bothered by, maybe 15 years ago. The sort of cult of mindfulness was taking over everything, and it was that people often thought that was Buddhism Right, and it was that people often thought that was Buddhism Right, and so I had written some things on his blog about both the number of years, um, and was one of the um, one of the authors of the book that came out of it. Uh, cruel theory, sublime practice. Glenn has written several other books on the topic since, but the rest of us, you know, have kind of I've kind of moved on to doing other kinds of things and haven't been, you know, and eventually stopped contributing on that blog.

W. Tom Pepper: 4:26

Glenn is very Larawellian and I'm not, so I'm not that you know, I'm not a big follower of Larawell, because, because I think, in a sense, and from my position, lara well as kind of, uh, a reinvention of the romantic ideology in, in different terms, and that's what I'm trying to avoid doing. Um, and in my own Buddhist practice and and in all of my writing really, um, I was trained as a romanticist. Uh, and in all of my writing really I was trained as a romanticist. I was an English professor and my PhD is in British romanticism and so I was trained as a romanticist and I've always been sort of critical of that romantic ideology which I think we're all still kind of enmeshed in at this point. So since I see it as my aim to remove that and the question.

W. Tom Pepper: 5:14

I know that Buddhism probably isn't a main topic here, but for a lot of people involved in Buddhism there's been a concern that Buddhism is just overly romanticized, right, that Western romanticism is sort of infiltrated the way we think of what buddha must have meant, right. Um, and so part of my goal in getting involved in speculative non-buddhism was try it was to try to call that into question and call attention to the ways that you know we're mistaking a sort of retelling of of the Western, especially European, romantic ideology in new terms in with just Buddhist terminology stuck on it. You know that's how I got involved in speculative non-Buddhism originally. Much of what I wrote early on was was an attempt to do that.

C. Derick Varn: 6:11

So Well, you know, um, for a while there's been a a a kind of backlash to the romanticism and mindfulness, and specific, I think, of Ronald Purser's book on the topic from 2019, I believe, um, but you were a little bit ahead on the subject, I guess. One thing, just to cover our basis and make sure that we're talking from the same ground what do you see as the key features of Western Romanticism that keep popping back up in a variety of contexts?

W. Tom Pepper: 6:50

Well, one of the major ones that you see in Buddhism is this notion of there being some kind of deep, ineffable truth, and this anti-intellectualism and this emphasis on emotion, that thinking is the cold, calculating reason of the enlightenment and we need to recover, or, you know, save ourselves from the, the, the death of the mind, and feel deeply right. And that's there. There's always that sense, and I, I think a lot of people in meditation practices think that what they're pursuing is some kind of romantic, sublime experience, sort of of like you know, shelly, on Mount Blanc, right, seeing the mountain and feeling, or words were saying, you know, this sense that something far more deeply interfused right Rolls through the world, and I can feel this deeply. So one of the major features is that is that substitution for if we could just feel deeply and escape the trap of thought, we'll somehow be set free of something. It's that narrative of, also of self-development of depth, that I have a deep self right, that I have a deep core self that's separate from all the things I am in the world, kind of thing.

W. Tom Pepper: 8:16

Um, you know, and for me that's primarily where it comes, where it appears in romanticism is that sort of mistaking of? I think it's a mistaking of um experiences of the romantic, sublime or romantic aesthetic experiences for enlightenment, and that's what we're pursuing. But the romantic ideology, right, the movement of romanticism throughout Europe and I'm most familiar with you know, within England and a little bit with Germany is really an ideology of early capitalism. Right, romanticism is an ideology of capitalism and um, to think that we can restore or we can somehow escape all the the flaws or problems or difficulties we face in capitalism by becoming more romantic seems to me to be uh uh, foolish at best but dangerous possibly. You know, um, is that clear enough about what you know? Romanticism? Yeah, it absolutely is clear.

C. Derick Varn: 9:28

One thing I would ask you, then, is um, absolutely, is clear. One thing I would ask you, then, is I agree with you that romanticism is an ideology of early capitalism, but I don't know that that is immediately clear to most people. What, what do you see as the salient features of capitalism that shows up in this romantic effect?

W. Tom Pepper: 9:51

features of capitalism that shows up in this romantic effect. Well, I wouldn't as saying it's an ideology of capitalism. I wouldn't say that, say the features of capitalism show up in it, other than to the extent of saying something. Like you know, I mean capitalism always struggles with the same aesthetic problem right, that balance between use value and exchange value. Right, where we privilege alternately one or the other or think that exchange value even exists, the difficulty of abstraction, the subject-object split.

W. Tom Pepper: 10:27

The way I would say that romanticism works, right and this is the way it works, at least in Britain from the beginning is people are alienated and displaced from their land. I mean very literally. Right, with the enclosures in England, people are displaced from their land, moved into cities, moved into jobs where they're expected to work long hours at monotonous tasks and in very unfamiliar situations. Right, living in urban settings, for the romantic right, for Wordsworth as the sort of paradigmatic romantic right. You give people these deep emotional experiences and that's supposed to compensate for all of that right. So if you give them a good poem, good poem, good literature, good poems will produce the right kind of moral sense, the right kind of values, but also compensate for the daily misery of their lives and make it livable. I think a lot of people look for that in Buddhism as well. I think a lot of people look for that in Buddhism as well. Right, when they turn to Buddhism it's like you know, I have this sort of alienated life where I don't have any real friendships, my job is empty and meaningless, and so I'm looking in meditation to get this deep, profound emotional experience that will somehow compensate for all of that and allow me to go on with it. Right?

W. Tom Pepper: 11:50

So I see romanticism in a number of ways as as fundamentally a capitalist ideology. One is just that that emotions will compensate for all the other alienations in our life. But the other is there's always a narrative in in um romanticism of needing to discipline yourself and develop into a better person, right, right, to become deeper and better, right, and this need for right, self-development, progress and searching for our depths and stuff. This is very fundamentally right part of the capitalist ideology Endless, endless progress, right, whenever you reach an impasse, you have to move further on. You have to somehow, you know, go deeper and move further on and become a better, a better person.

W. Tom Pepper: 12:43

Um, so the you know, I've always seen it as say, not that it's you know, this is one of my, another one of my, my concerns throughout everything I wrote on speculative non-Buddhism. But everything I've written since is you know, the concept of ideology as being. It doesn't describe or mirror the world. It's supposed to give us a practice or ways of living that enable us to live in the world. It's our way of getting through the day, right, our way of understanding what we're supposed to do or what we have to do to survive um.

W. Tom Pepper: 13:22

So the romantic ideology is is just fundamentally one of one component of the ideology of early capitalism, right? So, just right, at the moment I just happened to be reading Dickens hard times, right? And you see that contradict that conflict between the sort of utilitarian and empiricist notion of um that you get from, like you know, john Stuart Miller, or you know the, or the utilitarian movement and the romantic ideology, right, and these are two parts, two sides of the same coin. Right, you have to have the one. You have to have that utilitarian, capitalist notion of everything has to have maximum use value, maximum profitability, but you need, at the same time, the romanticism to compensate for that of the sort of depth of feeling that some characters have and other characters don't have. If you don't have the depth of feeling, you're going to suffer. So you know I mean, for me that's fundamental. You're right.

W. Tom Pepper: 14:30

I think most people don't see the romantic ideology. They see the romantic ideology primarily. At least I've seen this among students in the past. A lot of students today don't even know what I'm talking about. They've never heard of wordsworth. But um, that they would see the romantic ideology as sort of being anti-capitalist right, as a critique of capitalism instead of a support of capitalism. And so it takes some work to convince people of that first step, that the romantic ideology as a critique of capitalism instead of a support of capitalism.

C. Derick Varn: 14:57

And so it takes some work to convince people of that first step, that the Romantic ideology is a capitalist ideology fundamentally, so I guess one of the questions that immediately comes to mind is how much of Western Buddhism being tied into romantic ideological conceptions has to do with the timing of when Buddhism was introduced to Western culture as a coherent concept.

C. Derick Varn: 15:34

We know that historically there was flirtations with, with, uh, various forms of buddha dharma in the west, going a long way back, but like it does seem somewhat significant that, um, you know, basically the, the first people writing about bud, writing about Buddhism in the West, are either influenced by Hegel or they're influenced by the romantics, like, explicitly, are there influenced by pragmatist, for pragmatist romantics, which I think is something that's going to strike people as a contradiction. But I I'm specifically thinking about everyone who's been influenced by William James, as you know, really transforming the notion of what buddhism is, um, or even like the concept of buddhism itself, which is actually somewhat foreign to buddhism. It's something we impose on it to have it fit into, you know, um 18th and 19th century religious categories, um, so like, uh, what? What do you see? Like, do you? Do you agree that it's historical? Do you think there's more there about how it got intermeshed with romantic ideological notions?

W. Tom Pepper: 16:51

Well, I think from the earliest contact I'm familiar with is maybe Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer and again, I know a lot of philosophers would object to this but to my mind Schopenhauer is the great romantic ideologue, right, he's sort of systematizing the romantic ideology in a quite troubling way for a lot of people and he just took Buddhism to be agreeing with everything he thought right. So his reading of Buddhism is that it's Romantic ideology. So that's why he liked it. But the growth, I think, of Buddhism in America in the 20th century, yeah, I think it has a lot to do with the, the fact that it was introduced, I think, largely by the sixties counterculture and that it was seen as right, the romantic, the way most people see romanticism as this, this critique or critical response to capitalism, and a lot of them do just read into Buddhism the romanticism they grew up learning. So what's his name? The guy who writes the Heart of Meditation book, thera, nanapola, Thera, I guess. I think that's his name. I mean he was a student of phenomenology who then turns to Buddhism and reads in Buddhism everything he's learning from his German phenomenology and says, oh, they're just saying the same thing, the early introduction in the 20th century of Buddhism. You can see it every place, no matter what school. I've read dozens of books that well, buddhism was really saying the same thing as Hume. Buddhism was saying the same thing as Kant. Buddhism was saying the same thing as the phenomenologists. Whoever you happen to be right Now, they all see it as Buddhism, as being what are so many books saying? Buddha was a cognitive scientist. Buddha was really teaching CBT thousands of years in advance.

W. Tom Pepper: 19:04

Whatever the new thing is, it just gets picked up and misrepresented as if there's one thing, like you said, as if there's one thing called Buddhism, right, which is? Which is ridiculous. I mean the number of different Buddhisms there are. You know, my one of my positions is I take a very hard position on the anatman, the no self. I don't really like the no self translation, but the anatman concept and people will always say well, you can find early texts that don't agree with that and you can right, from the very earliest buddhist texts. There are multiple positions that don't agree with each other. So you can't, you can't make it into. This is buddhism, this is.

W. Tom Pepper: 19:47

This one thing is buddhism, but a lot of people do want to do that. They want it to be romanticism, right, they want it to be that countercultural ideology of the 60s and 70s, you know, or nowadays. I think it's transformed. I don't think it is what it used to be 40, 50 years ago.

W. Tom Pepper: 20:06

I think now people turn to Buddhism and really think that they're seeing in it this cognitive reductivism right, buddha's brain and books like that like Buddha was really a neuroscientist, he was talking about neuroplasticity and cognitive training, and to me, the only interesting thing about reading things like Buddhism it's the same thing I would say if you read like, say, greek philosophy or you know anything from pre-capitalist eras is to not try and find how it's saying exactly what we already think, but how it's saying things that we can't possibly understand or we don't think that way, or we don't think that way it's trying to communicate to. It's trying to produce an ideology or a way of envisioning the world that's so alien to us that it takes real work to try and figure out what they were thinking. That's hard and that's hard to do, and you often can't even do it right, because all we have is these texts that are left over.

C. Derick Varn: 21:24

But some of them can be quite cryptic of the frankly religious implications of I mean, religion is its own problematic word and all these things.

C. Derick Varn: 21:35

But from the way that we think of categories of philosophy, you're deliberately demystifying Plato, demystifying Aristotle, demystifying the Stoics, et cetera, reducing them either to doctrines that are about rationality, are doctrines that are about ethics and ethical behavior. And you know, as I like to tell people and ironically it was also my study of Buddhism that led me to realize this in ancient philosophy but that the people who actually practice this, you're not doing the same thing of them as a modern Stoic, because you do not have their ontological assumptions and you can't have their ontological assumptions, you do not believe that the universe is literally made up of Zeus or anything like that, anything like that, and that in some ways even biblical creationists are a little bit closer to what the Stoics are talking about, even though it seems supremely rational when you remove those elements in translation, or you don't focus on them, or you only pick the texts that are ethical and don't deal with any of the metaphysical parts of the equation. And with Plato that's easy to do because also all the metaphysical doctrines are kind of hidden.

W. Tom Pepper: 22:55

But Sometimes they can be fairly explicit, right, sometimes in the dialogues they can be fairly explicit. And Socrates is, you know, plato's Socrates is making very overt claims that you know, our soul is reincarnated over and over again and that's how we have knowledge and things like that. And you just, yeah, you know our soul is reincarnated over and over again and that's how we have knowledge and things like that. And you just, yeah, you cut that part out because you know I want to be Socratic, but not if I have to include that part, right?

C. Derick Varn: 23:20

So yeah, I remember reading the Timaeus in college and then realizing that, like, it implied reincarnation and also all knowledge already exists and we're not learning anything, that all and also all knowledge already exists and we're not learning anything, we are unlearning blockages. And I was like this is radically different than what you're presenting, like you know, like you're presenting me this doctrine of the forms, it's just, it's just a rational proposition based on geometry and there's a whole metaphysical construct here. Um, and I even pointed out that my professor basically was like let's move on. And I was just like you know, this seems important actually, when you're trying to understand this.

W. Tom Pepper: 24:02

And I think we struggle with the same thing with Buddhism that we do with the ancient philosophy. We don't want that part of it. If you do read it like you know, I tend to read more Aristotle than I do Plato or Plato but, um, when you try and really make sense of Aristotle, you really have to think in ways that we don't normally think was just confused or didn't make a lot of sense or didn't. Because they can't. They can't comprehend that he's not thinking in our very modern capitalist ideological terms. Um, he doesn't. He doesn't live in a world that's anything like ours. Um, but to be able to think that and to understand that, I think is is the value of reading these things. It's the interest to me in reading early Buddhist texts.

W. Tom Pepper: 24:55

Reading Nagarjuna's fundamental verses on the middle way is difficult because he's addressing questions that aren't like ours and coming up with answers that are not the concrete, reductive, scientific answers that we would want. That would make us comfortable. So it is hard to read it, but to me that's the only interesting reason to read it. It's not to read it to be—and most people I mean most Buddhists would never read Nagarjuna because they would say Nagarjuna is doing what Buddhists shouldn't do. He's thinking Right, which is problematic, and therefore he's not really a Buddhist. For thousands of years he was actually called the second Buddha. He was considered one of the great Buddhist thinkers in many schools of Buddhismdhism. Um, but not, but not in america.

C. Derick Varn: 25:53

So do you think that's why, like zogchen and zen are so popular as schools? I mean, we see this in other schools of buddhism in america too. Like I, I talk about my experience of theravada in america versus my experience of theravada when I lived in Asia, which is radically different, so much so that they seem barely related to each other. But it does seem like the schools that tend to be popular in the US are schools that, thinking about an ottoman and I'm going to become boodiological nerdy for a second but like that doctrine is, even though emptiness is supposedly a big part of Zen, buddhism, like an Atman isn't really in most of it and it's not really addressed. Because there's this avoidance of systemic philosophy and a lot of Western practitioners to point out that like, um, you know, like, if you push to, I don't know, say, the nirvana sutra, where there is, uh, essential sephana and basically and I, not men becomes back to ottman again and you're just like. This is being missed by people practicing these things and chanting these things today, because they don't have the philosophical concepts in the first place. They're trying to go into this directly experiential, like true self notion. That seems very romantic to me, but I'm always like, but there is no. You know, I, I guess in my own practices of Buddhism I'm actually similarly so, yeah, sunyata and and Iotman oriented, where I'm like there is no true self though like, like it's, it's not. What do you think's experiencing anything? Um, and I find that super frustrating because you do get a lot of peons of people talking about emptiness, but in this hyper mystified, mystical way this still doesn't deal with its original context, like at all. Um, and yeah, I also take that with nargajuna. Like nargajuna is super important to mahayana buddhism, even may be kind of important to other Nikya Buddhisms, and yet people will flirt with it.

C. Derick Varn: 28:18

But I remember reading Stephen Batchelor approaching Nargajuna and it just felt like being made safe and modern in a way that that text really isn't, and also people in a way that that text really isn't.

C. Derick Varn: 28:38

Um, um, and also people have a hard time when they do study the philosophy, like say, let's say you do treat buddhism as philosophy, right then you. Then you also see them like not dealing with the other metaphysical implications are like, you know, uh, the whole thing about nagas and it's just like, yeah, there's literal snake people involved in this. Um, that's all avoided to make this seem all very, very modern. Um, how do you approach, like trying to get people to to treat these texts as fundamentally strange? I mean, the Buddhist texts are obvious ones, but I even also think about, like Greek philosophy, as just like you have to approach it as weirder and take it a lot more literally at first, I think, than people are willing to do, because a lot of times it seems like they're fixing and I'm putting that in quotation marks for people who are listening things in their head to make it seem more compatible with modern thought.

W. Tom Pepper: 29:42

Yeah, I think that's a tendency that everybody has initially, when you come up with something really new, to try to explain it, to say, well, it's really saying the same thing as this something I'm familiar with right To make it less confusing to. And that's always the first step in trying to get to something. And then you have to go beyond that and say, all right, well, where doesn't it really say the same thing as what I? You know, you read all these books saying you know, well, you know, buddha's really saying the same thing as Hume. Well, he's not. And so you can start from there. And then you have to look at the text and say, well, where does he say something different from Hume? Where is he not saying what Hume would say? You know, and people do want the comforting part of it. They like the true self idea, they want to hear that. You know, underneath it all, I have a deep down, true, eternal self right, this uncreated mind that is pure and not soiled by ideologies and politics and things. And so you know, it's a way, I think, for a lot of Western Buddhists, it's a way to avoid being politically engaged. That's one thing that gets buddhists in the west very angry if you start to talk politics and buddhism at the same time, which on the speculative non-buddhism blog we often did and got furious responses. I mean, if you were, if you used to read there, I'm sure you saw some of the oh yeah, absolutely hostility and anger. I mean, I literally got death threats from Zen Buddhists telling me they were going to come to my house and kill me because I was suggesting that Buddhism was political, that there was a political component to believing these things. Because I think anything you believe there's a political implication to it, that we have political obligations in the world.

W. Tom Pepper: 31:43

Buddhists like to talk a lot about suffering and reducing suffering, but they're not that interested in reducing the suffering of other humans They'll talk a lot about. You know, we should all be vegetarians so that animals don't suffer. But when you want them to talk about, well, what are we going to do about the poor people? We're not going to do anything about that. They don't want to get that political. They look for that comforting thing and I've always thought that a lot of people go to Buddhism for and I didn't know this at first, I guess, when I first got involved in Buddhism but they go to Buddhism because they reached a point where whatever it is they do or whatever it is they think has become troubling, has threatened them with this suggestion that you're going to have to get political right.

W. Tom Pepper: 32:27

Your Christianity is starting to demand something of you. Your philosophical position is starting to demand ethical action. You're looking to escape the obligation to actually act in the world, and in the West we think escaping the world is what Buddhism helps us do. You can avoid the need to actually take any political or social action. Take any political or social action. So you know, my big part of my contribution to the Speculative Non-Ludism blog was encouraging people to say, look, we have to have this political component to it, because if you're going to reduce suffering, first of all you can't do it individually right, you can't reduce your own suffering at the expense of someone else and secondly, this is just the only possible path is to get politically engaged.

W. Tom Pepper: 33:28

People would get very angry about that kind of conversation. But when I was critical of something like you know, critical of fields like psychotherapy, people get very hostile about that or something. Or critical of the mindfulness industry, because they go to those things just exactly to retreat from whatever the implications are. You know. I mean I would see a lot of people when I used to be involved in a Buddhist group. There were a lot of people there who were lawyers and therapists and college professors and they see the troubling implications of what they're doing and they just don't want to have to think about it and they think, well, I'll shift over to Buddhism, and then just don't want to have to think about it and they think, well, I'll shift over to Buddhism and then I don't have to do that political stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 34:17

Well, I mean, this actually is an interesting thing. One of the reasons I got interested in speculative non-Buddhism many years ago is I was hitting some similar problems in my own reconciliation of, you know, having grown up in mostly theravada and buddhist community uh, actually, of sinhalese and lao uh extraction, even though I'm neither of those identities, obviously um, but um, and then dealing with for me it was a political buddhism and then also engaged buddhism, which always seemed to end up reflecting whatever the popular left liberalism was of the time and that used to confound me because I was like there's no way that you read these texts and go well, that's just what liberals believe today. Let's do that, which I was going to ask you like how much of that is interpolation and how much of that is like will for ignorance? I mean, what do you think is going on? Because I would agree with you, most Buddhists are apolitical. But when Buddhists become political, it's not unique to Buddhism, it just looks like standard left liberalism.

W. Tom Pepper: 35:44

Yeah, I mean, some people have asked me this because, being a Marxist myself, people say so you take Buddha to have been a sort of communist, right. And I say, well, he can't be a communist because there's no capitalism at that time. And I said, right, because you can't say, let's go off and form an intentional community in deer park, right, and I'll attract people to come and, you know, do sitting, meditation and do our, our daily talks and stuff. That's not a response to the world that we could, that we could have today. So you know, to a certain extent I can see that whatever engagement you're going to have, you're going to have, is going to be an engagement with today's world. It can't be an engagement with Buddha's world, so we can't. He can only teach us. You know, these texts can only teach us so much about how to engage in the world. Our world would have been unthinkable to them. They couldn't have imagined the situation that we're in.

W. Tom Pepper: 37:13

But you know, a lot of times, yeah, I mean when you start to say, well, this particular response that I'm forming here is the right Buddhist response. Well, it could be informed by Buddhist ideas to a certain extent, but it can't be informed just by them. Buddhist ideas alone aren't going to give you a political direction, right, because they can't tell you anything about what's wrong with capitalism or how to fix it. Right, maybe a little bit more when you get to say more contemporary Buddhist ideas, right, to say more contemporary buddhist ideas, right? Um, there are buddhist scholars in some countries. I know right, in japan there are still. You know, that's still an academic discipline. Being a buddhist, a shin buddhist scholar, is still a thing you can do, and some of them do take a specific position.

W. Tom Pepper: 37:57

But the ancient buddhist texts aren't telling us anything about how to respond to capitalism. We have to bring other things in, other sources of knowledge that were not available to them. So, yeah, I think a lot of it is. You know, like I said, we were, we were all interpolated very thoroughly into what I would say is this romantic ideology?

W. Tom Pepper: 38:18

I know our, our Western capitalist ideology, and it's very hard to get a distance from it and see that that's what it is, that it is art, in fact, not some deep, profound truth that you can find all the way back in in plato or buddha or jesus or whatever, that this is a modern conception of the world. That's a hard thing to do. It's one of the things that I think reading ancient texts can help you do if you read them in the right way, if you're willing to take them very seriously. But it's not something most people want to do. Generally, we want to read our modern ideology into those texts. There are other ways to do it. I guess there are other, you know, sort of critical practices that we can undertake to help distantiate our ideology to some extent. But again, those are often things people also try to kind of avoid.

C. Derick Varn: 39:25

I find myself sometimes struggling with this because sometimes, for example, I try to like make historical materialism and then pile up with like a dependent colorizing or or or something that you actually written about. I, you know, I'll take like the two truths, doctrine and social construction, and try to make that work. But I've I've gotten very self-critical of doing that because it does feel like I'm actually papering over like deep, epistemic differences between the worldview that we're talking about in ancient Buddhism in particular, and, you know, modern critical theory or modern Marxism or whatever. I'm also a Marxist, so it's. There might be some ways in which there are real analogous moves, like how you like might move through different ideologies.

C. Derick Varn: 40:20

But you know, when I read, you know and I do have some of the sutras that are like political advice to kings, um, like it's like, yeah, no one's picking that up and trying to make engaged buddhism based off of like letters to, you know, letters to whatever king are like the biographies of Ahsoka and any of that stuff, it's just hardly ever even commented on, possibly because people wouldn't like the implications of some of it. But I do find it difficult to deal with, and it's not just with Buddhism, I also find it difficult to deal with, and it's not just with Buddhism, Like I also find it difficult to deal with any ancient philosophy. So how, how would you go about trying to make those texts strange to move away from? You know, auto, inter, auto, interpolating them, making them automatically fit because it is natural? I mean, we're, we're. It's basically like a cognitive scaffolding thing we're doing.

W. Tom Pepper: 41:23

Right, yeah, so we try to fit it into what we already know, because otherwise we feel lost in it. Right, and it makes sense. And then you know, the more you get to get immersed in it, the more you realize that you can't do that. It just doesn't really work or doesn't fit. You know, and I, you know, I don't have a problem with bringing things, taking things out of Aristotle and just manipulating them and distorting them to say, all right, because for my reading, when I read Aristotle, it's not so much all right, I want to figure out what would be the best Greek city state we could design, given that you know, know, pig herding is our mode of production. Right, because that's absurd.

W. Tom Pepper: 42:05

But so I always look at it and say, in terms of like, when I read aristotle, what kind of things does it enable me to think, how does it enable me to understand the world differently? And that's what I particularly like, like the concept of an Atman, the concept of the two truths as ways to think about our world differently than we normally do think about them. Right, there is a tendency, I think, in our world to collapse ontologically everything into one mode of being. Everything is one thing, right, everything into one mode of being. Everything is one thing, right, so that the mind is either just the brain, or it's the, or it's some kind of spiritual essence, right, um, we don't like the idea that, right, there are sort of mind independent things that are true whether we know it or not, but there are also things that are true and real, but only because we believe in them. Right, that's very, just this unsettling to people and that's a that's a very buddhist concept, that notion of the two truths. It's very unsettling to when you try and convince people that you know, if you know, um, if quantum theory is true and there are such things as you know, flavored quarks or whatever, that has to be true whether we know it or not, right.

W. Tom Pepper: 43:28

But on the other hand, the United States is real and exists. It only exists because enough people believe in it. If nobody thought there was such a thing as the United States, it would stop existing. Right, it's a thing, it's real, it would stop existing. Right, it's, it's a thing, it's real, though it's real and has causal power. That I found, I found many, many times over the years.

W. Tom Pepper: 43:49

To me that seems like an obvious truism, but I'm always surprised to find how disconcerting that is to people and how angry it makes them to suggest that. How angry it makes them to suggest that that you could say something like the legal system of the United States is a real thing, not just a mere illusion, right? Or you know? Or that there are things, or, on the other hand, many people will argue with me that you know that quantum theory proves that our consciousness creates the world and it is whatever we think it is.

W. Tom Pepper: 44:27

I don't think that's what quantum theory says at all, but you have to be able to accept there are things about the way things are that are true, whether we know them or not, and how we think about them won't change them. That are true, whether we know them or not, and how we think about them won't change them. These are things that are fundamental to certain kinds of Buddhist philosophical texts that are very unsettling and difficult for people to think of today. So you know I used to write much more about Alan Bidjio than I do now. I mean, what's his latest book? The third in the sort of being an event series? It's something about the imminence of truth or something I forget the title.

W. Tom Pepper: 45:10

I haven't read it yet. I started reading it and then got distracted so I only got like 50 pages into it. But you know, his argument in this book and at least in the beginning part that I was reading is that you know that there are truths that are both universal, but they can only appear in a world, and so your truth is always part of your world or your ideological framework, and yet it can also be a truth that's always true. That is a concept, I think, for a lot of people that's very disconcerting and unsettling, and I still get that response to people all the time. If you know, either it's a universal truth or it's a truth that you know from within your ideology, but it can't be both. So I would agree with Vedju's argument there that yes, it can be both and it has to always be both. Things like that you can just I think you can just bring this in right.

W. Tom Pepper: 46:10

When I read something, um, you know, if I read Hegel I, you know I'm I'm not so concerned about making sure I get all of Hegel right. I don't think anybody's, ever anybody's foolish enough to believe they can do that. I'm just thinking what can I get out of um, reading hegel, how can it allow me to think differently about the situation we are in right now? Right, one thing that, right, certain kinds of buddhists, right, are obsessed with the idea, for instance, of figuring out what the five aggregates are. Right, the, the scandals, and they're very interested in. Well, there's, like you know, there's what, what matter? Sensation, perception, volition, consciousness, whatever that, or however you translate the terms, we have to figure out what they meant by them. And you know, and I, and I really say what the, the whole aim of Buddhism here, what Buddha's trying to say is that, look at these things, this is a sort of ideology of the subject that they have at the time. It's false, it's wrong, it doesn't make sense. We have to be able to think critically about it. Instead of getting, the way I would bring a Buddhist text into today is to look at that text and say, look what he's doing. It doesn't really matter that. We can't think in those terms. In fact, that's the point. We can't even think, we can't even figure out how to translate those terms, what the scandals are, because that was the way, their sort of dominant ideology of the subject. It's so alien to ours we don't even have words for it, right.

W. Tom Pepper: 47:43

The goal here, though, is to take those terms that we do believe this is how the subject is and put them to question, the same way that, in these Buddhist texts, they would have questioned their fundamental assumptions about what a person is. So he looks at each one of these things and says that's not a real thing, that's not the self. When you look at Socrates, right, we don't have to agree with Socrates that all knowledge is reborn in the soul, but one of the things Socrates does that drives everyone crazy is to always ask them well, what do you mean by that? You keep saying justice. Well, tell me what you mean by the word justice.

W. Tom Pepper: 48:33

We can learn that practice and say well, here's a word we always use. We always use this word cognitive. What do we mean by that? Is a word we always use. We always use this word cognitive. What do we mean by that? We're talking a lot about lately, about, um, attention, right, having deficits of attention, or having our attention captured. What do we mean by attention? You know, what does that term even mean? All these terms that we think are central to our subjectivity, consciousness, attention, anxiety now is the big one, um, we don't even know what they mean. All right, so we may not be questioning the same things that the buddhists were questioning or that socrates is questioning, but we can take that practice of that they take, of saying can we, can we look critically at the terms we we use, so often that we don't even realize we don't have a meaning for them?

C. Derick Varn: 49:23

Well, this brings me to something from your most recent collection of essays, or book Indispensable Goods, where you do that with emotion, which is something that I feel is weirdly of all the things we talk about like people will problematize reason. Weirdly of all the things we talk about like people will problematize reason. But I've not heard a lot of people problematize emotion.

W. Tom Pepper: 49:50

Why do you think that is that emotion is part of? I mean, it's fundamental to the romantic ideology, right? You read things from the 18th century and you never see that word. I think Hume was one of the first people to use it consistently. It very rarely shows up and then you get to say words worth preface to lyrical ballads, and I can't even count how many times the word shows up. He's talking about emotions constantly. It's just by that point becomes so natural, because it's so fundamental to romantic ideology, that our emotions are the most important part of us. But we don't know what they are. We don't know what that word means. I think people don't question it just because it's a term. They've heard all their lives and they know when to use it. They know when to use the word, but they're not aware that they don't have a concept for it, that they don't know what they're talking about, when they're talking about emotions.

W. Tom Pepper: 50:50

You know, you know I talked, I think, in that section of indispensable goods I mentioned, you know, martha Nussbaum's book, where she, she talks. She talks about the, her sort of neo-stoic theory of emotion and she's, she's sort of critical of this idea, that our general idea of emotion, she says is that there are these sort of ghostly entities that push us around and force us to do things against our will. Right, that, these magical entities, um, you know, and so she sees, she comes up with her sort of, uh, neo-stoical definition. Right, that has something to do with like emotions, or like, um, when emotions arise, when we, um, have a belief that something's very important to our life, but we don't necessarily have control of it, right, um, that that's the point where an emotion arises. Most people don't want to think that. Right, it's a disturbing thing to think that.

W. Tom Pepper: 51:41

That's when we use the word emotion, that we don't really have emotions, what we have. There is sort of an inadequacy of thought, and it's hard to convince people to stop and think of what emotions are, because what they've been taught to do is that. What are we taught all the time? Like men don't express their emotions enough, or children have to learn how to.

W. Tom Pepper: 52:02

You know, I remember when my kids were little, you get, you know, all these children's books, would say you know, identify your emotions. Right, they'd have these little children's picture books of here's what someone's when someone's sad, here's when someone's angry, here's when because you want to identify your emotions, you want to, and it becomes so much part of our language we don't, we don't question it. I think that is one of those things that to begin that that process of thinking is to be able to question a term like that and to realize that most of the time we, you know, we use words like that. We don't know what it means. Right, we can analyze when we use it and what function it serves, but we generally don't and we generally don't want to. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 52:53

Emotion, in particular, has always felt to me like one of those signs where the signifier is actually everything that it is not, but nothing that it is. You know, it's like okay, so it's not rational thought, it's not, it's, you know, and people go oh, I know what you know. I know what you know emotions are, I feel them and I'm like but are you feeling a thing? I think like, like um, or am I just using linguistic prowess to take complicated events in my body and um and in my lack of of, uh, linguistic aptitude on this particular element of what I'm feeling and conjuring up a thing and then making it real by naming it? You know, know which is uh, which I do think we should take more seriously than we do, and it's what? Um? Interestingly, I don't know how you feel about this. This is one of my.

C. Derick Varn: 53:50

I don't have a whole lot of critiques of Marxism, but this is one that I have that like there's a that, that um. The problem, the problematizing of mind in Marxism is implicit and not explicit because of a lot of 19th century assumptions that we maybe shouldn't always take for granted. It's not super important to the Marxist theory, because Marxist theory is not about individual minds. It's about mode of productions, relations of productions, et cetera, and specifically about how they emerge, you know, with the emergence of capitalism in Europe and spreading throughout the world. But it it does lead to some, you know, I think about people just throwing around that Jameson quote that Mark Fisher made famous about, like it's easier to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And I've actually thought, like that gets thrown around, I'm reflectively a lot, um, because it has an emotive valiance, but I don't know exactly what what we actually mean by that. Like, when I really think about it. I don't know what fisher meant by it and I even knew him. So, like it's this kind of romantic aesthetic, even in die hard, fairly rigorous anti-capitalist, seems to keep coming back up.

C. Derick Varn: 55:11

Um, and you know, I do wonder, like, is that because it's kind of implicit in things that are not just I like well, they are ideological, but it's kind of implicit in things that are not just like well, they are ideological, but it's implicit in, like material ways. I mean to use a kind of alt-Eustachian term there uh, uh, that that the ideological has a material basis, that we're not seeing that that's what. And because we're not seeing it, um, because we're not calling it to awareness, it, uh, can seem a lot more naturalized than it is, and thus we we can't we can't actually parse what all we're doing there, and because it's part of the alienation we feel in this particular mode of production that even if you're aware of that, that is still going to continually do it, and so it's like almost a constant practice to be to come weird, to become re-aware of that problem. Does that make sense? That's really broad, but yeah, no I, I would agree.

W. Tom Pepper: 56:13

I think one of the my interest in altasera is always when I think that, for one thing, yeah, the earlier, earlier Marxist texts don't adequately theorize what a mind is and how the mind arises, and it arises in an ideological practice, and that's what Althusser is trying to explain, I think, on the reproduction of capitalism, on the reproduction of capitalism, um, but, yeah, um, it's hard to to consistently see these things, I think, because, no matter what, um, what we think, to get through our day, we have to continue to participate in capitalist ideologies, right, right, the, the definition of ideology is right. The practices in which we reproduce the relations of production, well, we're participating in capitalism every day or we couldn't survive, right. You have to believe in the value of money, right, and the necessity of accumulating it and using it for things. You have to believe in private property. You have to, even if you think these things are wrong, right, you know, it's like Althusser quotes Pascal, right, kneel and pray, and then you believe in God, right, as long as you do it, you still believe in it, even if you think it's wrong.

W. Tom Pepper: 57:34

It's hard to imagine the getting outside of capitalism while we're still, on a daily basis, being good practicing capitalists, right. And how do you not do that? Right? How do you get, how do you escape being a good capitalist, a good practicing capitalist, and still have a roof over your head and food to eat and clothes to wear in america? You can't do that. I I mean, I suppose probably 100 years ago there were still places you could go to get outside the circuit of capital, but there are none left. That doesn't exist anymore. Right? Capitalism has infiltrated every single corner of the globe, so you can't live without participating in capitalist ideology. I think there's always going to be a conflict there, and the only solution for me, the only solution I can see and this is what I try to suggest at the end of Indispensable Goods the only solution I can see is to be engaged in an anti-capitalist practice.

W. Tom Pepper: 58:39

You may have to go to work and be a good capitalist at work, but then you have to also be engaged in some kind of practice that's working to resist capitalism, right? Even if it's just something at the level of um, your entertainments, right. Finding entertainments that aren't part of the commercial media industry, right. You know and I've said this to people well, make your own music, don't go to Taylor Swift concerts, right, read and write literature that isn't published by the two big publishing houses. Find some other way to entertain yourself.

W. Tom Pepper: 59:19

Or also just engage in thought. Engage in thought and discussion with other people so that you develop the kind of mind that's capable of questioning these things, which you're taught not to do. Right, like you said when you were in college, right, and you raised this question about Socrates, the professor says let's not talk about that. Right, we're going to move on because we have the official. We have to get the official version of Socrates down for our exam. Right, you're very much taught not to think critically about these things. So engage in practices where you do think critically about these things. It's hard to find those kind of anti-capitalist or resistance practices, but I think that's our only option at this point is to gradually produce practices that are not capitalist and that can help us resist capitalism and help us become the not thoroughly capitalist subjects. We can't imagine, right, the end of capitalism, because to imagine the end of capitalism would be, we wouldn't be there, right.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:00:27

Right, the self I am, who is thoroughly capitalist because I have to be, would have to stop existing for capitalism to end, um, so I you know I think I know that I don't really, um, I don't know Mark Fisher, uh, mark Fisher stuff, well, or you know, I had only one sort of indirect exchange with him years ago. I wrote a. I didn't uh, I had written a critique of the hunger games, which apparently he was a big fan of. Somebody had, um, somebody had sent him my critique of the hunger games and his response to this person who forwarded it to me was that, uh, he's a lunatic um, and that was it. That was the only interaction I ever had with mark fisher was he decided, after reading my my critique of hunger, the hunger game said I'm a lunatic um, and I never had any other engagement with him. But you know those kind of things like something like that for me, right, if you love the Hunger Games, you're a good capitalist. It's not teaching you to be critical.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:01:28

I remember when I was still teaching years ago, everybody was teaching that book in their college classes because Hunger Games was going to make all our students into politically active radical feminists, and so they made them all read it. My kids both had her. My kids had to read it. My daughter had to read it when she was in seventh grade, I think, for her junior high school summer book reading or something. And I said, look so you fast forward now 15 years and how many of those kids now that read hunger games are are the politically active radical feminists we thought they were going to be? They became exactly what Hunger Games wants them to become good capitalist subjects. We have to find some other form of entertainment that's not, you know, part of the capitalist ideological state apparatus, just if we're going to become a different kind of subject.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:20

Well, I mean, I happen to agree with you about that. I've actually always been a little bit skeptical of capitalist forms of anti-capitalism. By that I mean, like the soft critique and I'm not accusing Susan Collins of even thinking this out in any like systemic way and like deliberately being a capitalist. That's not my point, um, it's more just like this is an auto critique that doesn't really get you out of the situation. And also, I mean, the other thing is like, um, the dystopia of the hunger gains, if I take it at purely faith value, actually isn't talking about capitalism at all. It's talking about some other weird form of political economy. That's not. It's actually kind of vague.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:03:10

And Because that's not really what the novel is about.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:03:16

So, it's really about, you know, sort of the psychosexual stage of development that adolescents go through, right, you know that sort of. It's a very sort of Freudian thing. It's not really about economics at all, but the auto critique is, I mean, that's part of the romantic ideology, right, that's what Wordsworth is doing, that's what Shelley's doing, right? Right, they're producing capitalist ideology by saying, by being critical of certain aspects of capitalism, um, well, wordsworth, of course. Then by say later, by byron or something related, people who was labeled as a reactionary because he in fact was right, was not anti-capitalist, he was. He thought of himself as a good capitalist, right, he didn't think he was being critical of capitalism, he was just being critical of certain components of it that he thought were troubling and that he thought he could cure with his poems I mean, you know, and to me this leads to like the most obvious forms of of, uh, critique, of, like western budd Buddhism.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:21

It's a damn industry, it really is. Several publishing houses, all kinds of retreat economies, empowerment economies, that all exist perfectly fine in a capitalist world. I don't expect them not to. They couldn't survive if they were totally outside of that. But like it does seem like we have to acknowledge that. That's like driving some of what we're seeing here and I have actually thought a lot about like what would it? You know, what would retreat teachers do if they weren't? You know, in this kind of to use two problematic phrases attention, economy or whatever, that also is very much a real economy of services, because it does seem like certain things would not be the focus, as that was the case, even comparing it to other. You know, all religions have these kind of economies.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:32

I don't want to like come down specifically on Western Buddhism, but it does seem like it's way more. The way most people encounter Buddhism is actually probably at the bookshop um, which is neither good nor bad, but it is a thing and then at some uh sangha that they need to join and pay membership for, etc. And again, I'm not critiquing that in and of itself. You have to, you exist in this world, you have to, you have to function in this world to do that. But it is a lot of what is driving Western Buddhism as an experience and as an industry, and I think it really makes people uncomfortable to point out that at a basic level it is an industry or a service industry at least. At a basic level it is an industry, or a service industry at least.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:49

And the idea of you know a quote religious experience as a pristine way out of politics, but also at a capital, seems to be contradicted by how you even engage in in the practice at all. I mean, you know, um, teachers charge fees or expect standard donations, um, there's all kinds of books you have to buy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, um, and on that most basic level that's not really often addressed. I used to think about the socioeconomic, you know background of the average Buddhist in America and it's just like, well, it's kind of middle-class cause you kind of have to be to be able to buy in. And buying in is a word I use advisedly in this case. It's not an accident that I'm saying that, right retreats are expensive.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:07:32

Very buddhist buddhist books um aren't exactly cheap either, and it's not, you know. There are some buddhist teachers not many them who will make all their books available for free, but most of them that's how they make their living. The things that I write that are explicitly Buddhist I usually either post on my blog so anybody can read them for free or, like you know, I did collect them in that, that book. I think you mentioned earlier about the faithful buddhist book, which is an older collection of essays, you know, and I don't make any money on that, you know it's pretty cheap.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:08:19

Amazon makes money on it, but I don't make any money and they don't make a whole lot of money on it either. So you know, it's just making it available in a digital format so that people could read them. When I took them off the blog, you know, and you know there are ways. I think you could do that with buddhism, like I, I would tell people if you want to talk about buddhism with me. You know I'm not a teacher. I'm not going to charge you fees, we don't, you know. You know just, you know, meet me at the coffee shop and we'll talk about it. Or you know, you want to go down to the, down to the park here. We'll go for a hike and talk about it. You know it doesn't have to cost any money. It doesn't have to. You know, you don't have to buy any equipment or have a specific book or something. I think Buddhism could be like, that could be promoted in that way. It's not generally, and the people who do, who would be willing to do it that way, aren't going to become the celebrity Buddhists that you're going to see on the cover of the Buddhist glossy magazines. Or you know, nobody's going to know who they are because they they're not promoting retreats and they're not making money. So, yeah, there is.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:09:30

Whenever you get like that, though, there's always going to be that tendency that I've seen with many people who I think should know better that say things that are troubling, because they're going to tell their audience what the audience wants to hear. They're going to tell their audience what the audience wants to hear. If you need that audience to keep your you know that's where your income comes from Then you're not going to tell them the troubling thing that's going to piss them off or going to make them uncomfortable. You're going to tell them whatever they want to hear, cause you want the biggest possible audience. And I've seen many teachers over the years do that like retreat from what I think. Certain things they say early on they'll retreat from them if they find that the audience doesn't like it. They'll back off of that anatman stuff and start to say, oh, you do have an eternal soul, or you have this consciousness that will exist, um, after you're dead, or something like that, and it's because that that's what people want to hear. They don't want to hear the opposite. And they hear that an ottman means you know once you're, once you're. The conditions for your existence are gone. You're just gone. You, you know, when you, when you die, there's nothing left. You're just. You know you may create an effect in the world that will move forward, but you're gone. That version of an Atman is is disturbing to people. You know, I've always thought that we need to get that concept down, because you know this. Look at the world that we're in. That concept down because you know this. Look at the world that we're in. You know, if people are willing to accept that it doesn't matter because I'll live in bliss when I die, then they're not going to that motivated to be happier right now. We need to do something about our world right now and we need to learn to think more.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:11:23

I I think, which is, for me, the biggest difficulty, the difficulty of having real conversations with people about something like global warming. I can't tell you how many people I know who don't believe in global warming, because I haven't. Where I live in, connecticut, is a town that used to bill itself as the Tea Party capital of New England. That used to bill itself as the Tea Party capital of New England. We are the most right-wing, most pro-Trump town in the state of Connecticut. Trump obviously didn't win Connecticut in the election, but he definitely won our town.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:12:00

The people I know don't believe in the people I live around. They don't believe in global warming. They don't even know what the word capitalism means or what the word communism means. These are just sort of meaningless terms One is good and one is bad. They have no concept behind them.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:12:19

And to try and encourage people to actually think, you always get that same response. The same response I used to get from my students the last few years of teaching is that you know, thinking is right a bad thing. They'd rather not think right. Their hope is to get out of, to avoid thinking right. So for me I think that this is part of my interest as a Buddhist, but also as a Marxist is that you need to encourage people to be willing to think critically about their lives and about the world we live in, without just giving the automatic common sense answer that comes easily. Because until we get more people willing to think, we're not going to solve these problems, we're not going to get out of this trap. I worry about it all the time because, you know, I don't think I'll live long enough to see the environmental collapse, but my children will. Why aren't people more worried about it? But they're not. I just don't believe that it's even true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:24

But one of the most disturbing things that I started actually following it and it actually is a how do I? It actually is a challenge to my belief in, like the general wisdom of crowds, which I definitely try to have as a Marxist but is the number of people who disbelieve in climate change goes up. The more active evidence for climate change you have and there's actually pretty hard numbers on this, and it does. It does kind of strike me that, not not just in a like interpolation way, but even, mike, in a cognitive bias sort of way, that when you that there is a tendency of a lot of people to double down to stabilize their identity and even if they don't even know what they're doubling down on, I mean, like you know, like it's not like these, you know, I mean, I know this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:28

Uh, what I'm about to say is philosophically problematic, but, like so much of what we, what we talk about politically, has become basically non-cognitive. Like when you ask people, like what is capitalism? They'll be like markets, and then you're like, okay, but what about this non-capitalist society have markets? And they, they can't. They just like stare at you blankly as if, well then, capitalism has always existed and I'm like, well then, but no, you know, um, and so well, how do you explain change in the world? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, um. And I've really thought about that. And I guess this leads me to a kind of a final question like how did? Because the one thing I will say is a lot of people who would tell you they just believe in climate change will tell you they're also critical thinkers. Right, that you know, they're doing their own research. They're they're. They're deciding for themselves. They're being critical, deciding for themselves, they're being critical. What do you think critical thinking is? And this is just my last question, because I think it is crucial to everything we talked- about today.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:15:36

What do I think critical thinking is?

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:37

Yep.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:15:39

Yeah, to me, what I always aim for is that ability that we've talked about earlier to be able to question your own assumptions and even to recognize the emptiness of so many of the terms you use.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:15:56

So, like you just said, when you ask people what capitalism is, they can't really answer you. They think they can answer you when they say something like, well, it's a free market and that's not really an answer right. And then to be able to think critically is to be able to push beyond that and to say, all right, yeah, I really don't have an answer. Um, I don't know what I mean by that right. And when somebody raises if you raise the question with them as well well, actually, there has never been such a thing as a free market. That's never existed, so that means there's never been capitalism. And then they have to really rethink what they mean by capitalism or terms like emotion or terms like attention.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:16:48

To me, that's what I think is crucial is to be able to develop the capacity to question your own assumptions and your own intentions. Right, we have commitments to ways we want to live in the world. Right, often we don't even know that we made that commitment. Right, we don't know what it is. We just think that's just natural, everybody wants to live like that or that's just inevitable. We have to live like that and we have assumptions about the way the world is that we don't even question. We don have to live like that, um, and we have assumptions about the way the world is that we don't even question, we don't examine, like we assume. We all have emotions, but we don't even know what an emotion is and we don't know. You know? And when you begin to question things like that, like say well, all right, what about the fact that up until about 200 years ago, that word didn't even exist? A couple hundred years ago, nobody was talking about emotions? You have to be able to think about that and think critically about your own, the concepts you believe you're thinking in when you're not thinking, and what your assumptions are. Assumptions are, um, for much of like that middle section of indispensable goods. What I'm trying to do there is to try and encourage critical thinking by just saying all right, we think we know what emotions are, we think we know what love is, we think we know what the mind is, we think we know what language is, and so I take all these concepts that are concepts we think in all the time but we've never thought about and we don't know what they mean. And to say, let's examine them and see if we know what we mean by them and generally we don't we have to rethink them and we have to rethink how we're using them.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:18:18

That's challenging for most people because they've really been taught. This is how our school system works. They've been taught not to do that kind of thinking, right? That kind of thinking gets you a bad grade in your high school gov class or your high school literature class, right? You're taught not to do that, right? So when you ask those kind of questions, you learn those aren't questions to ask. I shouldn't be asking these kind of questions. So it's hard to get people to break that habit and to start actually thinking about the terms they use, right?

W. Tom Pepper: 1:18:58

You know, critical thinking was a big buzzword years ago when I was getting my graduate degree, and then for years afterwards, everybody was always saying we have to teach critical thinking, but nobody could ever tell you what they meant by it. Right? And you know, I would always suggest that. Well, this is what I mean by it is that we need to be able to become aware of our own assumptions. Right, critical thinking isn't hunting for evidence to prove what I think. Right, that's the opposite of critical thinking. Right, it's what students are taught to do when they write a paper, right, first you come up with your conclusion. Then you go surf the internet until you find enough evidence for your conclusion and that's your paper. That's critical thinking.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:19:46

But I'm trying to get them to do the opposite of that and to think you know, do I even know what the question that I'm asking means? If I am asking this question, I'm using terms in it. Do I even know what these terms mean? Right? And why am I asking this question? Like, what's the, what's the implicit assumption? What's the intention, what's the motivation behind it? Um, that's not something our educational system is good at teaching people, right? Um, I think, if we for me, I think if you're willing to sort of take things from buddhist, traditional buddhist philosophical thought, things from you know, uh, greek, you know ancient greek philosophical thought from all different places, if you're willing to read some Marx and read Freud before you dismiss him, you know, read what these things actually say it can help you learn to think critically about your own world. Right, to think critically about your own world, right? You don't have to buy everything. Everybody. Everyone says it can teach you how to think, though to think through these things rigorously.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:21:00

My concern right now in the world is that, you know, I don't know that I can get people, you know, and other people have said this too I don't know if I can get people to put their phone down long enough to do that. Absolutely. How do you, in the middle of a conversation with somebody, they're picking up their phone because they just heard it buzz and they got to check that text, and now they have no idea what you just said because it went right out of their head, right, and so your conversation comes to an end. You know, how do you get people to put away the phones, put away these things, and say do something like read a whole book or even just think through your, your own assumptions, without you know, looking for that distraction of the phone or whatever's on the phone. I don't really know what's on what's on people's phones, but they seem very attached to them. So I don't really know what's on people's phones, but they seem very attached to them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:47

So I don't know Absolutely, I mean literally. Sometimes my students will have the symptoms of an anxiety attack the moment you start making them separate themselves from their phone. But not going to go off on that, I talk about that enough. Where can people find your work, Tom?

W. Tom Pepper: 1:22:11

Well, my blog is still active, although I've been going slowly lately. Right now I'm in the middle of critiquing Hume's second inquiry, one section at a time, trying to do exactly that kind of critical thing You're thinking about. What are all the assumptions in here that we take for granted? Hume seems obvious to us because he assumes the same things we assume, because this is where they come from, right, and it's hard to question these things, right? So my blog is still active and you know, I'm still working on, um, doing some more writing.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:22:50

I've written, uh, a few books. I that the collection that's a digital book. Um is, uh, the faithful Buddhist, which is a bunch of older essays that I wrote. Um. But, like you said, the more recent thing is the indispensable goods, where I'm trying to discuss that nature of ideology and how we have to set aside, in order to really understand what ideology is and how we can produce ideology, we have to set aside a lot of our basic, fundamental assumptions. We have to think critically about them. Um. So these, you know, that book, um, like a lot of my stuff, is, you know it's available on amazon. Um, I don't make much money on it, but amazon does but um, which I guess disturbs people. Um, it's part of that being a good capitalist, whether you want to or not. Right, how do you get the book circulated? Otherwise, the earlier essay that I wrote from speculative, that part of the speculative non-Buddhism book, cruel Theory and Sublime Practice it's a longer essay where I talk about a lot of these things about Bajie and ideology and Buddhism and the relation to a kind of Marxist practice. It's, it is in the book, cruel theory, sublime practice. But I also do have a PDF of it available on my blog. There's a sort of PDF page and you can just download the PDF if you want to read the essay. So, cause the book is you want to read the essay? So, um, cause the book is not that easy to get anymore. Um, so, um, and you know, I would appreciate anybody, if anybody wants to, uh, join in on the blog and I always appreciate comments.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:24:42

Um, I would say one other thing. There was a blog that I write with um Kyan Wigder who writes who used to the failed buddhist, but he hasn't been writing that anymore. Um, called interventions. It's called interventions and thought there's a link to it on the faithful buddhist um, which is a blog where we take where we make sort of very short critiques of beliefs, assumptions or practices in our everyday world, and we've had some contributors, but I'm always looking for more people to contribute to that.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:25:23

The aim of that blog is hopefully to eventually get more people to contribute these interventions, these questions where we try to make people examine what they take to be common sense, I guess. So we've had some people contribute a few to them. Mostly it's been Kaim and myself writing them. So I would encourage people, if you can, if, take a look at that and see if anybody I always would appreciate any anything. You know, if you're reading something in the newspaper or you see something on tv that you feel a strong reaction to, you know, write an intervention and send it. Send it to us and we can post it there. That's a site where we try and look for we try, try to look for a lot more interaction. It's been hard to get people to contribute there because people will read it but they really don't want to write for it. You know, yeah, it's a challenge, I guess, to do that kind of thinking.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:22

Yeah, put it mildly. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I'll put links to the Faithful Buddhist into the show notes so people can find your work and maybe also find the interventions and thought and engage. I've actually been reading. I didn't bring it up, but I've been reading your stuff on Hume. Since I was reminded about that blog. I was like, oh, you're still writing there. Cool, You're one of the few people still using WordPress blog. I'm going to read that. So I would tell people to check that out.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:26:57

It's almost retro.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:58

Now, right To to still use a blog and write things down, Right, but you know yeah, well, to use a blog that is not on substack, which is just a blog that also uses google. Uh, excuse me, uh, yahoo error email technology, but figured out how to monetize it. But anyway, I, I, uh. The absurdities of our current tech environment are a whole different rant, but thank you so much for coming on all right.

W. Tom Pepper: 1:27:23

Thanks for having me, derek. Good, good to talk to you. Good talk to you as well, okay.