Samsara Media is a studio dedicated to exploring and practicing human freedom.
Today we live in a corpse-world birthed by the brutal alliance between global financial capital and the biopolitical state — capital (M-C-M’) continuously accelerates its own reproduction, converting humans into its zealous servants and machinic components along the way, all while the biopolitical state gradually tightens its tender loving embrace in response to our increasingly hysterical demands to be cared for — to be loved.
Any living and vital response to our contemporary situation must include a critique of both prongs, maintaining an awareness that Daddy Capital and Mommy State are constantly playing us against each other (even while they’re doing it behind the scenes). Daddy demands more work, while Mommy demands more of you. At the end of the day, you’re expected to trust the experts and get back to work. There will be punishments for any back talk.
The contemporary Left has fallen into a trap of its own success by becoming entrenched in powerful institutions. They sought to capture the halls of power in order to change things, but it was those very halls which captured them instead. Addicted to material comfort and psychological rewards, they have accepted a largely performative role which grows increasingly disconnected from the reality of most middle and lower class folks.
However, while the contemporary Right’s outsider status has given it immense power and perspective to call out the contradictions and hypocrisy which operate insidiously within our current uniparty system, the actual organs of organized Rightist politics have already been captured by shadow money, social media shysters, and an aching nostalgia for a fantastical past.
In this situation, I turn to a lineage of oddball thinkers who don’t fit on the Left or the Right. Theorists like Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, James Burnham, David Graeber, and others are critical of the technology of bureaucracy and its core fantasies, but they also use imagination and experimentation to devise new forms of concrete human freedom.
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My recent book about liberation, Christianity, and Tokugawa Japan exemplifies the type of analysis I carry out here at Samsara Media. Check out Ideology and Christian Freedom: A Theo-Political Reading of Shusaku Endo’s Silence (paperback or ebook) for a ride through the unification of Japan under Tokugawa Ieyasu, the political history of Japanese Buddhism, an in-depth analysis of Shusaku Endo’s challenging novel Silence, a smattering of Nietzsche and Žižek, and all wrapped up with some applications to the subjective traps we experience everyday as people living under a global capitalist system.
I do all of this in my spare time because I love it, but it does take away time from my family. I’d appreciate if you’d be willing to support me by signing up for a premium subscription, buying my book, or sending me a one-time tip. Thank you so much!
Samsara Diagnostics forms the core of my intellectual practice, consisting of an email newsletter where I write weekly (sort of) about religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. You could say that the work I do at Samsara Diagnostics provides much of the subjective and theoretical background for my more concrete work in the realm of political theory. Subscribe to receive a free pieces in your email inbox.
Also, I invite you to join us at Samsara Study Groups (it’s free!) to go deeper with your religious practice and academic research. We’re currently reading through the works of the Kyoto School, and we also host feedback circles where we give and receive feedback on our work from others in the community.
