Paul VanderKlay's Podcast Our Current Wobble Back towards a Renewed Sacred Social Order
Mar 18, 2026
A wide-ranging look at how sacred and secular social orders have shifted over time. Discussion of confessional enforcement, censorship, and how religion shaped law, education, calendars, and public life. Exploration of story, ritual, and participatory practices as engines of social cohesion. Consideration of modern re-enchantment and the institutional roots needed for intellectual change.
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Enlightenment Ideas Needed Institutions To Change Society
- The eighteenth-century West remained dominated by a Christian sacred social order despite Enlightenment thinkers appearing in elite circles.
- Paul Vanderklay cites Kevin Flatt: ideas needed institutional rooting to shift society, not just elite salons or treatises.
SCP Novel Used As Modern Demon Analogy
- Paul recounts a recommendation from his local estuary for the novel There Is No Antimemetic Division as an example of demon-like ideas.
- He summarizes the SCP premise where awareness of SCP-3125 invites cognitive attack and forgetting.
Outlawing Ideas Often Makes Them More Powerful
- Ideas act like memetic entities that gain power when outlawed or pushed to the fringe, becoming quasi-sacred.
- Vanderklay compares anti-memes in fiction to real-world forbidden ideas that attract worship and attention.
