Joe Rogan’s podcast is one of my favourite things on the internet because it’s intelligent without being academic, and it’s masculinist in contrast to the feminism with which I feel surrounded in the left liberal circles where I mostly live and work.

In this edition Rogan and Joey Diaz discuss America’s opioid crisis before moving on to the topic of Adderall, a widely prescribed drug that is used to treat attention deficit disorder. Rogan says he knows many people who take Adderall, and they tend to relate to each other through the commodities they own. By owning and wearing brand name goods, and having them noticed by others, they get a superficial feeling of success. Rogan calls this an ‘anti-human’ way of being in the world, and suggests that those who are oriented towards objects in this way are likely to neglect family relationships, and to be incapable of deep thought.

In calling it anti-human I think he’s pointing to the fact that brand-name commodities get their value not from their usefulness, but from our perception that other people value them. This involves a loss of personal sovereignty because, to the extent that we identify with our goods, our own value is conferred by others and doesn’t emerge from within the self. In spite of its dependence on others he says this way of being is anti-communitarian, perhaps because the system in which such commodities circulate creates winners and losers, perpetuates itself by promoting envy, and has no real center of gravity.

The most commonly proposed alternatives to it today tend to come directly or indirectly from Marxism, which would replace consumerist individualism with collectivism. However, these alternatives are also materialist and they share with neoliberalism an indifference towards the metaphysical question of why matter exists in the first place. Addictive love for objects can flourish in societies based on materialism, and people can be objectified in these societies, but love that depends on having an inner life and with it an orientation towards the divine can’t really be comprehended within their philosophies.

If this latter kind of love continues to exist anyway that might be because it’s fundamental to what it means to be human, and it can’t be eliminated by cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It can only be repressed. Why we’re engaged in the materialist repression of our fundamental nature, and how we might stop doing this, is the most important question there is right now.