Albert Camus' The Fall: Signalling, scrupulosity, and pathological self-awareness

This one starts slow but it ends up being one of my favourite book clubs ever.

Camus' last finished novel was The Fall (1956). It has a lot of personal resonance for Rich and the other boys loved it too.

Loss of innocence: how much of our behaviour comes down to signalling? Is there such a thing as genuine altruism? Is it dangerous to learn about this stuff? Was David Foster Wallace's 'new sincerity' idea doomed from the outset?

Escaping the double bind: Choosing which status games to play, finding solace in sports and other explicit games, why hedonism doesn't work, moving awareness away from the self and towards others, dissolving the problem of a meaningless universe.

Performative castigation: Is Jean-Baptiste's judge-penitent stance actually coherent? The pitfalls of woke ideology, recursive traps of judging people, and why virtue signalling is good, actually.

Religious interpretations: The biblical fall, Jean-Baptiste as antichrist, the death of God, and organised religion as laundering scheme.

 

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) worst opening segue competition
• (00:03:25) Is the pre-fall Jean-Baptiste a virtuous person?
• (00:07:22) Some personal reflections
• 00:17:10) Signalling theory and loss of innocence
• (00:30:19) How to cope with a bottomless pit of suffering
• (00:37:17) David Foster Wallace and the curse of pathological self-awareness
• (00:51:41) Judging the judge-penitent: has Jean-Baptiste really solved his problem?
• (01:02:48) Pro and anti-religious interpretations
• (01:14:24) Free will and (dis)continuity of personal identity
• (01:26:50) Strategies for escaping from the spiral of self-awareness
• (01:32:20) Is the idea of a meaningless universe a reductionist mistake?

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NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky