I've watched every Mary Harrington interview I could find and this was a great one--she's a bold thinker, great writer, and it's really wonderful to know more of her personal story. Unique individual. Thank you for giving us more of your story Mary!

PVK's underappreciated interviewing skills on full display. Excellent, and unlike any of MH's other conversations. She's a gem.

Pastor Paul you and I both know our jobs would be impossible without the help of the "crones". All my Church's volunteers seem quite happy here.

“If I met my 20-something self now I’m not sure we’d have much to say to one another” - very relatable experience. It’s hard to find compassion and patience for the one person you know (from personal experience) to be an absolute idiot 😉

I love that you love big ideas, Paul, and still find room to be the cat that lays on the book/keyboard/phone and says, what's up?

Mary to Glenn: "Nobody is interested in my personal story" PVK: "I am!" My thought exactly, when I listened to that interview!

Mary Harrington, PVK Video, “There is a sense that the nihilistic vision of the post-modern turn is a radically self-defeating project, in a way which I think is incredibly cruel to the people who encounter it, because it not only tells you that you are created entirely by the way you are interpolated by other people, but then it places upon you the sole responsibility for recreating yourself in repudiation and in rejection of it, in wholesale rejection of those ways you are interpolated by other people, and yet it also says that your “self-created-self” will only exist as such when its validated by being interpolated by other people. So, in that sense, it sets everybody who embraces it up to fail, then it blames that failure simultaneously on every individual who fails and also on the indestructible pervasive system of power which keeps it down.” Exactly! Well said.

Amazing, KZfaq managed to pour a dozen ads into this 54 minute broadcast! Paul... I hope KZfaq is paying you!

The rediscovery of feminine virtues is something I notice in myself. I was born 1985, v lib fem, woke in my 20s, and motherhood blew my mind, shook the foundations, everything. There seem to be glimmers of it in the culture (Louise Perry is another). I think Mary is right that it's a split between embodied / relational and disembodied / isolated understandings of self - left / right or traditional / modern just doesn't fit as well as a descriptor. Mary described herself as an eternal political hipster. Reminded me of Akira the Don's 'Wave' - if you're surfing and you're on top of the wave, you don't confuse yourself with the wave. Something is propelling Mary (and Louise etc) forward. Be interesting to see if this wave swells and breaks - we've all seen enough waves to know they don't always break the way you expect

Mary’s analysis of the simulacra trap needs to be clipped for a short video, it is gold. Thanks PVK.

I was wondering how you were going to handle this interview given your previous comments on why you do not usually interview celebrities or authors. This was great. I've listened to many other interviews Mary H has given on youtube and you managed to bring out much more. Thank you both.

Excellent interview. Thank you for giving Mary the time to think and speak. 👏👏👏

Mary is one of the most Brilliant, provocative commentators on the scene. Great job by Paul, helping to discover a more personal side of this extraordinary Woman. Thank you both!!

Queen Mary!

A wonderful conversation. Both her thoughts and your insightful questions Paul were great. Thanks for it a lot.

I’m tickled by your sticking to the randos format even with a celeb!

Wow. I just got introduced to Mary Harrington. I love her clarity and honesty. She is showing us how to be human again in a post modern world.

Awesome questions! What I found redemptive as a guy, along the lines you ask, is anything that gets me out of my head. Breathwork, cold water, meditation, martial arts, sex.

Loved this Paul! Thank you! Btw, here is an old krone who would love to see older women acquire a voice and a space.

Embarking on my third career, excited for the future, but I do not think anything will ever compare with the joy and challenge of raising my four children. Very grateful. Listened to this a second time, added Hags to my kindle list and looking forward to more Mary Harrington Another excellent interview, thank you!

It’s a mystery how you only have 25k subs, Paul. I really enjoyed this one. Mary’s a very fresh and exciting thinker

Great interview Paul... well done!

Literary theory is an add-on to literature at best and parasite at worst. Academia managed to turn a lens into a source of light for itself. Thanks for that conversation, Paul. You’re a magnificent interviewer. You can really get them to confess 😂

YES! Mary is so fascinating. So excited to see her talk with you PVK.

It’s a perfect Monday morning now

Minute 42. My husband really liked a quote (that I forget the attribution to as it was many years ago). Women have a womb in which to nurture life -- men create the similar physical womb of the home. He has a more public facing role in creating it. Man has lost that role. It is the flip-side of the man dominant /domineering force but more on a continuum of the nurturing structure of the home/family. My dad was a "total lad" and incredibly nurturing. YOU CAN BE BOTH. American men really struggle with that.

The definitive Mary Harrington conversation!

Legendary guest

I really appreciate this woman. She and I are not far off in age. I’m 41 and also experienced a lot of what she did during that time but I majored in STEM instead and so never saw critical theory until it reared it’s head in the public sphere. Like her I was a huge tomboy nerd and grew up in a very misogynistic culture (my parents are Korean) except it was my mother who was extremely misogynistic, not my father. I also wanted to be a boy at some point but realized I felt dysphoric trying to be one so I stopped and felt the most comfortable being a tomboy. I never fell into the feminist trap because I loved my father and was born again in my early teens. I did believe that God was a major Father figure in my life but I left the church in my late teens bc 90s Christianity was dogmatic and very theologically puritanical. It was EXTREMELY difficult to navigate in a non-traditional world in which I was very traditional but also extremely intelligent and nerdy for being a woman. A trad world meant that I was supposed to be looked down on as unable to participate in meaningful intellectual conversation with people which really annoyed me and I felt I had to prove something. Whereas, deep down in my heart I knew (from a very young age) that all I wanted to do was be a mom and a wife. The conflict was difficult. Through a successful career having reached working at the highest firm in my field, I realized I did not want it at all. It was minimum 65 hour workweeks sometimes up to 100 hrs a week. I was miserable, terribly anxious and stressed, and have huge gaps in my memory of that time because all I did was work. I knew that it was not for me, especially, because all the women at the highest levels in the firm were not mothers. It took me ages to convince my husband (we got married relatively early - 25 and 27 years old) to have kids. He only finally relented when I was 35. I was so depressed at the situation in my life that I had married a man who didn’t want children that I decided if I couldn’t have kids with him, I’d rather just die. It was only through the grace of God that my husband would force me to eat dinner once a day when he got home because otherwise I would have just allowed myself to starve to death. So even if you are traditionally minded in this world, it is extremely difficult to find other like-minded ppl that understand the importance of having a traditional life - marriage, family, God, meaning. Many people my age, younger, and older (I’m looking at you Boomers) seem so caught up in the materialism of the neoliberal enlightenment era. I almost look forward to a reset/collapse because maybe we can finally stop grasping onto things that give us no meaning and finally get back to how things were prior to the Industrial era. The importance of family, community, grandparents, children, duty, dignity, honor, etc. We have forgotten all these important things in modernity. And to be fair to the post-modernists, I think many ppl used a lot of those virtues as cages to hinder ppl. Evil intentioned ppl will use whatever modes of power at the time to control and they used a lot of those things to make ppl feel helpless just as ppl feel helpless with how much “freedom” (aka lack of structure) that exists now. The one universal that seems to never get stale seems to be gratitude. Gratitude underlies a level of humility and those two concepts no matter what situation one is in and what era, seem to always be a constant in keeping oneself grounded. I’m always reminded that it could always be worse and I am grateful for what I have and what I am capable of accomplishing. Even if you believe in God or not, being grateful and humble are very important tools to have a healthy outlook on life. The post-modernists aren’t wrong about perception shaping our own reality. In that way, it goes back to a very traditionally theological view on the world.

What a brilliant conversation and I'm so glad you shared all that formative stuff.

3 secs in, liked already 🙈 excited to see this uploaded 😊

Fascinating interview!

This should be great. Good morning Paul.

Thank you for doing this. 26:05 this explained a lot to me.

This was excellent! Thanks Paul.

Thx Paul, great conversation :)

One of the best interviews I’ve ever heard ❤

Can’t wait!

You're such a great interviewer... fantastic questions, thank you!

Wonderful, looking forward to listening a second time! Thank you both.

Wonderful interview, thanks Paul!

What a great interview I got alot out of it. Thankyou both

I'm thrilled to listen to this!

Phenomenally good!

Well, from a proudly self-identified crone, thank you both for a wonderful, thought-provoking conversation!

This is so good.

"I don't think it's for me to speak on men's behalf" You're welcome to share observations and suggestions. If nothing else, you'd be showing how a woman thinks about these things, which can be useful for men to understand how women think.

What a breathtaking conversation often at warp speech. Thank you both!

Marvelous Mary

Love this start! Steiner/Waldorf. You win the award Paul of interesting questioning.

You can tell she's a writer because that's the first time I've heard the turn of the century referred to as the 'early noughties'

Thanks.

Patriarchal turtles all the way down! My coconut water exploded from my nose all over my screen. Gold!

Great conversation. Around 24:00, very insightful about the antithetical aspects of postmodernism.

Thanks Paul and Mary H for this. I'll be thinking of it as I read her book. I appreciate the challenge to reintegrate these ideas while reviving Western culture. By the way, the book is currently available on UK Amazon with a much nicer dust cover design.

Louise Perry's YT channel is Maiden Mother Matriarch

Thanks for this conversation, Paul. I was able to learn more about Mary through your manner of engaging her. Please consider having Nina Power on.

Fantastic Paul! Mary's journey really does map on to my own in so many ways. Interesting what you say about how women will be set free by childbearing as stated in Timothy, even though it's often the hardest thing, it is also the most meaningful. It's been true for me.

It's the subtle ways in which Paul shows his quality. Well done sir

Absolutely loved this conversation - or rather Mary speaking ! Thought it was great that you just let her talk and rarely interjected. She's a wonderful speaker and fascinating to listen to. I've been reading her articles on Unherd and on her own website for a while now. She's a really intriguing thinker with quite a unique take on things, which is always welcome in these days of forced consensus. Cheers for this !

This is great. I never expected the first 10 minutes to be a discussion of one of my heroes, Rudolf Steiner.

This is the best, most insightful, most generative Mary Harrington interview by miles!

First time listener to you but not to Mary. Your interview was refreshing. I certainly empathized with being the girl helping with the dishes, whilst your brother watched TV in the living room with Dad. But on a more positive note, it was great preparation for being a wife and mother.

I'll just echo so many of the comments here. One of the best MH interviews I've seen as she's been making the rounds the last few weeks in support of her book. One thing I've noticed. The few moments when she realizes something about herself and laughs, it's as though a very inside joke is exploding in her mind. Sheer mischievous joy and beauty overtakes her face. A voice to be heard from going forward.

Being in embodied relationship sounds like the opposite of alone, left with your own devices

Most people would have been destroyed by the challenges she faced and surmounted

My kids were in Steiner for a while and everything was made of felt!

A fascinating conversation but it felt like the beginning of something. I wonder where you would go next. Your shared riff on that text from 2 Timothy was fascinating. I think that I have heard Mary Harrington say that gestation forms a mother just as much as it does a child. The story of Dorothy Day and her conversion through the joy of bearing a child with the almost miraculous spiritual insight of a Catholic priest guiding her to faith through the baptism of her daughter even though she was a single mother in a culture that regarded this as simply sinful also comes to mind here.

“The ideal for a man is to have one career…” Me in my mid 30s on my like 12th job after college 😬 (Comes with the territory of my initial career path towards news writing and written form journalism and many a career switch - great interview!)

And in regards to words and narrative, don Miguel Ruiz's book Voice of Knowledge is great. Really his books all work on helping us to create a story that empowers each of us and makes each of us the hero of our own story.

💚✨

Wow - watched quite a few of your videos and hadn’t quite connected the dots but pretty sure we studied together. Clearly you were operating in a slightly different stratosphere - ‘air’ ref unintended - but it’s made my day. Anyway, I’m about to become a father to a girl for the first time and you’ve really motivated me to find some literature on the feminine/female journey.…’hags’ sounds very interesting but perhaps a bit advanced (for me and the upcoming baby). You should write another book.

You know you're listening to a good one when you're listening at 2x and the eloquence of the discussion convinces you to slow down

Steiner people have made their presence felt in this little corner. Lots of Steiner smuggling going on.

I would like to see PVK's Consciousness Congress scrambling to vote on which question to ask in the small windows of opportunity he had

24:14 Song recommendation: The Wee Kirkcudbight Centipede!

Ohh I was hoping you will comment on this one *grabs popcorn*

33:02 Define power, Mary.

Im not sure if she knows its but ive listened to her and what shes experienced is a spiritual illumination. Shes an enlightened being .

Thanks Paul and Mrs Harrington for this interview. The besetting sin of modernity is hubris. But post modernity seems to double-down on that sin.

Great conversation, far too short! One problem, people being unwilling to talk about their family experience, now everyone thinks their perfectly normal relationship with their family is unique and horrific, because the only model they have is some TV fantasy family that resembles too little of any actual real family to be of much use. This connection to Reagan Thatcher individualism over to post modernism is something only someone across the pond could imagine. I'd love to hear that explained further because wow, that is the exact opposite of how things played out in the US for sure. Family values and the importance of family was stronger then, not weaker, I'm open to that being the beginning of the end, but I'd place all the bad stuff in the 60's and the 80's revival as a bullwork against that bad stuff, not the other way around.

Great interview, but I had way more advertisements than normal. Anyone else?

❤In Maddness lies Sanity 44:00

The Maiden, The Matriarch, The Cron 49:08

A clinic in listening and limited inquisition.

You both have a Steiner connection . I think of him as " seeing different colored auras around people + rythm mumbo " type stuff

Noticed some Zizek sniffs there.

We need more grannies. Grannies rule.

Being exposed to Freemasonry in my youth, I can see where she is coming from. I was also a nerd. My self study in Buddhism led me recently to read about the various outgrowths of early New Age (gnostic) which goes back to the early 20th century and even the late 19th century. It didn't start with Alan Watts.

12:15 Ms. Harrington states, about discovering sex-role expectations around the home " That's the moment I became ......conscious." The African -American woman who first used the term "woke" explained nearly identically that when she .........had the realization..........that politics effect her life specifically.........she became "conscious" or "woke" .....or "woke up"........to the fact that one IS involved in politics, and one must be a participant at the table or be an item on the menu. Syntactically, grammatically, the language communicates the exact same idea. An epiphany that one is involved in these social issues , and one can be either clueless and obtuse and a victim or one can be involved with insight, agency, and a thoughtful "spirit of finesse" ( thanks Vervaeke ). How the word "woke" gets transformed in a few short years to signify everything from Marxism to transgender issues, to free milk in schools, to career women with no babies, to protesters wreaking havoc in the streets, to all things deemed "non-traditional" seems to be a function of the internets power for babble and Babel. Woke seems to be the new n'word.....no one seems to know the why and wherefore of it's prominence , yet it's heard always and everywhere. Not unlike a banner waved in a pandemonium or mosh-pit of meaning-seeking. Why can people use "woke" on the daily with no practical definition while acting horrified that others want to be called "they" rather than "he" or "she"? On one hand JBP spoke of not wishing to cede the linguistic territory, but he and many others embrace brand new internet niche words like hypergamy, woke, NPC, beta, sigma, Chad, lapping, etc. often originating with teen-aged boys; not exactly the staff of Webster's Dictionary or some fount of linguistic wisdom.

Thanks Paul😊 Have you thought to interview your wife here?

Another Steiner kid! Ha we're everywhere! Ironically I'm not sure he would have been too impressed with the internet though. We weren't even allowed to use a calculator until practising for exams and computers were verboten. Still glad I got taught how to play the lyre and dance around the St John's fire to Wicker Man songs.

I didn't know Paul had such capacity to make someone feel uncomfortable, especially the question, "Are you still nuts?"😉

This was INCREDIBLY short.... How dare you end it in less than an hour?

44:00 re being Nuts: a passage from the Red book where Jung's soul lectures him on being nuts: "“Words, words, do not make too many words. Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”

+1 Mary H

Critical Theory, literary criticism, textual criticism raise a few thoughts. Lots , if not most, supposed advance in Biblical Studies lean heavily on textual criticism, for multiple camps. Also, we don't want to hastily throw away Ecclesiastes and " vanity, vanity, all is vanity." ...simply because it's a hard text. Or Shakespeare's observation that Mankind is a great motor of "sound and fury signifying nothing." On Shakespeare I'm glad to be call a trad. These are questions of Man's destiny and purpose. Grand Narratives, I believe is the term people are using. JBP, the Weinsteins, Elon, and others point to technical, scientific progress and Man's ability to know the Good based on self-evidence. Self-evidence, I would say works on the individual scale; one has a talent for music. one pursues music, and ends with a career in music, maybe even in a Church, who knows? It's a different story when the issues are the destiny of Man. Saying we seek tradition is not the same as saying we are seeking the Kingdom of God. And some have been claiming just that. Didn't the Apostle Paul say the Kingdom of God also was a question of power? Only God and the Spirit are not players in our social games. Religion is about placing faith ( trust, confidence ) in God over and above earthly powers and objects of faith. The words trust and faith seem to be used mostly when talking about the banking systems. Today, many in these talky-thinly spaces are , in practice, placing their trust and faith in politicians and online thinkers. Perhaps the Bible agrees with Critical Theory in one question: where can civilizations and individuals look in trust and power to reach a future where the Good, True, and the Beautiful reign? Nowhere where man is the author. So, which grand narratives are from Man and which from God? Is their one grand unified Christian narrative? So many denominations. Can people look to religion for answers? Well, how closely do we adhere to God? The institutions all fall short and are prone to corruption. Yet, if we emphasize the local and community level isn't it ob virus there at least there we can find a foothold against nihilism or extremism to some political wave, religious or not? But churches have some cults among them, no different than the internet...buyer beware!

Remember Embody 36:14

A comment for Mary: I had my second daughter when I was 46. You’re not too old.

I have always had difficulty understanding how people introduced to the concepts in the various branches of postmodernism haven't been humbled by the revelation of underlying unseen imperatives that conspire to warp our perception of the world. For me post modernism ideas are a lesson in humility, not a cause for hubris.