Letting Felt Experience Guide Our Behavior

A Team Human conversation with John Oakes about the philosophy and promise of fasting

I had the honor of being invited to serve as interlocutor for my good friend John Oakes at his book launch event last month at the Strand in New York City. We’ve known each other since attending Princeton together 40 years ago, as counterculturalists among Young Republicans of the Reagan 80’s. Since then, he became publisher of the Evergreen Review, and a co-founder and editor-at-large of OR/Books, which published my own Program or Be Programmed back in 2010, as well as many notable and even revolutionary titles by people from Julian Assange to Yoko Ono.

His own book, The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without, challenges a lot of our assumptions about abstinence, and made for a particularly interesting Team Human discussion. After all, the Team Human podcast is about human intervention in the machines of capitalism, technology, and the unconscious automation of an industrial society. And the simplest form of…