https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=liAGXRqiohE
Uh, yeah. Am I? Yeah. How am I? How’s that? Is that better? Um, bah. Yeah, there we go. Well, that’s a great entrance to people. Like it is. All right. It’s a roll train kept a roll in all night long as they say. Yeah. Might also be my echoing to YouTube. That’s too fast. Right. Well, make sure you shut off all the other YouTube ease. This is, uh, this is the problem. You don’t want to say, you don’t want your YouTube echo ease to happen. So, uh, welcome everybody. Uh, we kind of starting to settle on a, on a format for the talks. Um, so you were also part of that format. So whenever you want to join in, uh, join in, uh, but, uh, we’ll, we’ll set up with a introduction of, uh, the subject. I guess we’ll first start off with a history, like why this is important. And then we’ll do like a definition. And when we have the definition, then we’ll, we’ll kind of start exploring the implications. So we’ve, we’ve been talking about, uh, a bunch of things. Um, probably the best context is responsibility, right? Like that’s one of the main teams, uh, lately. Uh, how, how do we take responsibility? What does it mean to have responsibility? And obviously that branches out into, uh, many variants. Um, but the, I think the main topic for us is social responsibility. And we ended up getting to the topic of safety, uh, which is obviously related to danger because you are safe from something and I’m still hearing an echo, Mark, um, yeah. If it’s a delayed echo, it’s a YouTube play. It’s not. Anyway, so there is, uh, danger is partially subjective, right? Like it is perceived and, and, uh, safety is in some sense of relief from the danger, right? So I think, I think there’s an inherent connection between, uh, this idea of danger and the absence of danger and the feeling of safety. And then in modern times, we have this idea of safety being well venerated, like it’s lifted up as something that is in some sense of human right, right, like we need to provide places for people to, uh, to have safety. Right. Like we can, we can look at it for refugees, which is a little bit more obvious, right. But then we also have it for college students, uh, in the workplace, like you need to have a good safe work environment. And like, there’s all of these measures that, that we’re implementing in order to guarantee safety. And so, yeah, I think, I think we want to do a big exploration of what is the safety actually, and what are the dangers inherent in safety, because like safety is one of these words is like, Ooh, yeah, nice. Like I want safety in my life. Like that. It’s been weaponized. Right. So we have a cult of safety. Cause safety has been weaponized by people and it’s supposed to be something desirable to you. Right. And so there’s a religion of safety now, right. Where people are holding it up, venerating it as the highest value. And therefore there’s a church of safety because anytime you’re religion, you’re going to have a church. Like that these things are inevitable. And, you know, I talk about it, my three great religions video on navigating patterns, you know, the whole, the idea of safety from a virus, safety from, uh, other people disturbing you safety from bullies safety, right. But that doesn’t, that’s not a natural condition because we’re exposed to things in nature and that includes other people and their bad attitudes and their bad moods and their, their ignorance and their insistence is right. Cause some people are very insistent. And so it’s a big, in some ways it’s a big topic, but really I think you’re right, it boils down to what you talked about in the beginning, which is this idea around responsibility. Your safety is ultimately your responsibility. Now that doesn’t mean that you have total complete control over it, but it is your responsibility to recognize that there’s a limits to safety and that safety from one thing might mean no safety from another, because there are trade-offs involved in this whole equation. And that’s a real problem for people to understand. There’s trade-offs, safety is not free. Um, and you can, you can be safe from external influences, but you can’t be safe from consequences. And this sort of came up with the idea of going to a safe space as a way of repairing yourself or fixing yourself. Right. And the person we were talking to on Discord and basically said, Hey, you know, yeah, that being safe didn’t help me. What helped me was getting an authority that I could look up to and look out at. And that’s when it sort of occurred to us that, yeah, well, that’s because when you’re safe, you don’t, you’re not looking out and you’re not seeing the people pointing at things, right? Because what you’re making yourself safe from by going into a safe space, whatever you can see that to be is precisely the idea of extra signals, right? Of signals in the world, of things to judge, of discernment itself. And so the safety comes at the cost of transformation. So you can make yourself safe, but you can’t change. You can’t get better. You can’t transform. You can’t become more than you are if you’re just safe all the time, which is not to say there’s no room for safety, right? But if your highest value is safety and that’s what you’re after, you’re cutting yourself off from transformation. You’re cutting yourself off from connection with others, right? Because intimacy, you know, relationships with other people that have a quality aren’t all safe and they’re not supposed to be safe because sometimes, sometimes safety is the thing keeping you stuck where you’re at and preventing you from being able to do things. Yeah. So I want to go through some sort of definition of safety first so that we all get a sense of what we’re talking about. So I made a list. So part of safety is closing off like you’re closing yourself off from, well, an externality that that is imposing upon you, right? And you’re creating distance and that distance allows you to be unaffected. Then secondly, I think safety is associated with clarity. You have a clearness around you so that you have awareness and that’s connected to a stability. There’s a perceived stability that you’re having around you. There’s a sense of certainty associated with that, right? Like, you know what’s going to happen. You know what’s not going to happen. You know where you can go, right? Like there’s all these options that you have awareness of and all of that is really attractive to you. Like there’s a sense that there’s an appeal in the safety because it’s a place where you can rest. It’s a place that provides trust. It is in alignment with you, especially if we’re talking about the people that are around you. Like they’re in your camp. There’s a sense of comfort. And in some sense, it’s also a sacred space. It’s a space that is set apart from other places, right? And therefore, it is a space where transformation and recovery can happen. So you can imagine that if you want to sleep, you want to be protected against the elements. You want to be protected against the animals outside, right? Like you want to be protected against loud sounds as well. There’s all of these ways where those things are preparing you to, well, they’re allowing you to inhabit certain states that aren’t possible without those. Or if you are putting yourself into these states where you don’t have these safeties, then you’re in extreme risk. There’s an exacerbation of the risk. Right? So yeah, that’s also connected to a sense of nakedness. Like you can be naked in the safe space because there’s, well, being clothed is a second skin, but the safe space is like a second skin that’s bigger than your clothing. And it can take the role of your clothing in some profound way. And a different way to look at it is that we’re outsourcing the responsibility for certain things, right? So when you have clothing on, you might like have the responsibility for not getting cold or whatever, right? And then when you’re in the safe space, you’re no longer having to navigate that problem because you have your heating on. And the heating is providing a room temperature that is pleasant to you. So yeah, if we go back to this idea, there’s a seductive element, but there’s also a distractive element in the seduction, right? There’s a way in which the safety is redirecting your attention away from the threat that you’re facing, which also means that you’re not dealing with it. Like the threat is still present, but it is not immediate. And that’s where the dangers start seeping in, right? If you live in a space, right? Like, for example, a home and you work from home or whatever, right? There’s this element where the threat starts to fade into the distance because you don’t have this maintained relationships with the threat. And then the last thing I wanted to add is that we’ve been talking about hermeneutics of suspicion, right? I think in the safe space, we have a different hermeneutics. Like in the safe space, there’s rules that don’t apply in the real world because there’s a highly maintained boundary. There’s an element where people are not acting in a normal way because they’re naked. Like, which is what Adam and Eve were in the garden. Yeah, when you don’t have exposure to dangers, you stop thinking about dangers. You stop putting them in your dreams. You stop. And so you may have developed the skill of running away from the tiger and sensing the tiger in the bush, right? But then when you’re too safe for too long, you lose that skill. This is my problem with development models. They always assume that once you achieve something, it’s a plateau and you have it forever. That’s not entirely true. You don’t ride a bike long enough and you’ll forget how to ride a bike and you’ll fall over. You may get it back fairly quickly. You don’t have to learn it from scratch, but you also can’t do it the way you used to do it when you did it every day. And safety is the same thing. If you’re too safe from things for too long, you’re going to lose the ability to discern those threats and to deal with them at all in any form. And so you’re making your world smaller and smaller and smaller. And in some sense, that’s what a safe space is. It’s making your world smaller so that you don’t have to worry about quite so much. You don’t have to feel so anxious, for example. But you can’t do that too much. You do it too much, now you don’t have the skill and you can’t enter the world again. And that’s a big problem. That’s a major whopping problem. And people don’t kind of recognize that. It’s like, no, no, that’s actually bad for you. It’s going to cause you issues later down the road. And you need to be able to interface with the negative signals so that you know what they are and you know what to do about them. And if you’re busy or somebody else is busy making everything safe for you, then that’s not happening. And if that’s not happening, you’re atrophying. Like, the fact that you’re not doing something in the world means the thing that you’re not doing is proceeding without you. And the normal course is entropy. As things get worse, the less you practice piano, the less good you’re going to be at piano. The less you practice spotting tigers in the bush, the harder it will be to spot tigers in the bush. The less you run on a regular basis, the harder it is to run when you need to. All these things are factors. And that’s why, you know, anxiety has an upside. Anxiety tells you something. You don’t want it to get out of control and you need a way to control it. You need a place to know how to control it. It’s not like you can do away with all safety or say spaces are bad. No one’s saying that. But if you’re overprotected, if things are over safe, now you don’t know how to deal with nature as such, with the world as such, with all the things around you that are going to, that are there, even if you temporarily do away with them. Yeah. That atrophy element, I think there’s a different importance there. If you take this idea of acceptation seriously, there is an element in which when you’re maintaining a skill, it is going out. Can you mute, Marcus? It’s still distracting me. Sorry. Didn’t realize it was still an issue. So there’s an element within which, like, if you keep up a skill, it will bleed out in different areas of your life. Right. So in order to gain insights, you use effectively experience in different areas and transform your relationship in something where it’s important. And when you stop using your skills, that meta skill, the skill of having skills and cultivating the skills also atrophies. Right. So there’s an element where in the safety is atrophying a specific relationship, but it’s also atrophying your ability to have relationships. And if you get into that level, then you’re in a big problem. Right. Because that’s how my depression started. I started recognizing that I wasn’t maintaining my capacity to function in certain areas of the world. And then that led me to the realization that I had a problem. Right. And then if we go back to hermeneutics, I started looking at the world as if it was a problem to be resolved. And as a consequence, I found more problems. And that started to affect my capacity to manifest correctly in many arenas until I just had to retreat from all of them into a place of safety. Right. But the safety was from the imposition of the world. Right. But now in that state of safety, there was also a pacification. Right. Like I wasn’t able to do anything anymore. And even worse, I wasn’t able to start doing anything. And I think that’s where we’re going to end up in the conversation today. Right. Like there’s an element where you need to maintain something in order to be able to do new things. If you lose that ability, then yeah, it’s the end of the road. Right. I think one of the conclusions we had is that when you’re stuck in the safety box, there’s no way for you to transform because what safety really is, is getting in a container that’s so small and familiar to you that there’s no opportunity for you to become different or see any way to become different or see any reason to become different. Because again, that pointing is gone because that pointing is part of what’s causing your anxiety. There’s so many things to look out for, so many signals out there. There’s so many people pointing at different things. What do I do? Right. And that whole what do I do question, that is where things get tricky. It’s like, well, I run the safety because I want to learn to discern these signals, to figure out should I try to save the world? Or should I clean my room? Should I go to the grocery store or should I just eat the food that I have? Should I make my own food or should I buy my, there’s so many decisions that we’re making and they’re not real binaries. Right. Any decision you make is choosing one thing and excluding a bunch of other things. It’s not, it just seems like a binary. Right. Do I make food now or do I not? That’s how you reduce it to make it palatable for your brain, we’ll say, to make a decision. But actually there’s a bunch of things you can do if you’re not going to make food. You can do the dishes, you can take a nap, you could, you know, it’s not, it’s not as simple as making food or not making food. And that skill of dealing with all the signals that are inherent in the world is a skill you have to practice. You have to keep practicing that skill over and over again. Otherwise it becomes a problem. And that I think is where the issue is. It is a problem and it’s not easy to solve. Right. And I think what Mark was pointing out with the seeing is, is that there’s also apart from the atrophy, there’s also in hermeneutics that is associated with being in a certain state, right? Like when you’re in love, you’re privileging certain aspects of the world. When you’re afraid, you’re privileging certain aspects in the world. When you’re safe, you’re privileging certain aspects in the world. Right. So there’s a discernment level in a safe space which might privilege more specific tasks. Right. Like, so if I need to concentrate, right, I need to turn away my attention from my environment in order to get lost in my head. And by being in my head, I can manifest something that I wouldn’t be able to do without that. And then I want to also take that to fantasy can also be, the sense of safety can also be found in fantasy. Right. So there’s also getting lost in your head, which is disconnected from the physical environment where you can go to a place of safety and all the fairy tales, there’s this idea, right? Like if you eat, right, or if you partake from what is happening in the fairy tale, then you get sucked in. There’s an element where it takes control of you, like it takes you over. And so I think it’s important to realize that there’s these two aspects. Right. Like there’s this captive element, but there’s also this enabling element. Right. And it’s really difficult to see what are you enabling, how are you enabling it. Right. And this goes back to responsibility. Right. So there needs to be a way to take responsibility in the place of safety, right? Where you use it for an actualization of something, you use it for the purpose of recovery, you use it for the purpose of transformation, as opposed to a spiritual bypass, right? Like thinking that you need it or because it’s plasma. Or it’s an end. Yeah, it can’t be an end unto itself. I want to go back to what you said about the fairy tales and, you know, eating the fruit or whatever, right? When you’re talking about a fairy tale and you’re engaging in it as though it is something you can participate in. So you eat the fruit or you, you know, whatever, right? That’s when the transgression happens. Right. That’s where the problem is. You’ve tried to participate in something that should be purely for entertainment. Because I’m not against entertainment, right? But if all you’re doing is entertainment, it’s a problem. And if all you’re doing is what’s inside your hat, right? So you’re safe in here, you’re engaging in a fantasy in your hat, then you’re, you know, like with all safety, you’re narrowing the field of potential to what’s in your subjective experience. And then if you’re not taking responsibility for that discernment, for judgment, that can become your whole world. And if that’s your whole world, you’ve cut yourself off from the potential of being more than you are today, right? Of becoming greater. There’s no more exploration, right? You’ve cut off the possibility of exploration, right? And you can say, oh, the exploration is still there, but not you because you’re in the safe area, right? You’re partaking of the fruit inside the fantasy. You’re engaging in the entertainment as though it’s not mere entertainment. Mere entertainment. Because entertainment should be an escape, but it shouldn’t, you know, you can’t make it too permanent. The reference becomes a problem. Right. And so you can have an exploration in the entertainment, right? And that exploration can actually go back to your life, right? But there’s also an exploration in entertainment where it points back at the entertainment, right? How do I better participate in the entertainment? And then, well, you can imagine, like, oh, you know all the actors of this, and then you know the backstory of that, right? Like, you open up this whole world, and it’s like, well, why? Like, why did you do that? Like, you’re participating in a world that isn’t real, right? You can’t participate in. And, well, I know why. Because there’s other people that do it, and there’s a sharedness in there, right? And there’s a semblance of expertise. There’s a semblance of knowing it all, right? Like, there’s all of these elements that can seem fulfilling, right? But the fulfillment is not pointing back towards contributing to something higher. That is a problem, right? And there’s always a way in which that can somewhat be redeemed, right? But now we have to go back to this idea of a trade-off, right? Like, okay, you can redeem all this energy into something in your life, right? Like, the example is, well, I was this leader in World of Warcraft, and now I have leadership skills. I was like, yeah, great, right? But maybe there’s a different way that you could have gotten those skills, right? And maybe that would have been better, right? So the trade-off there doesn’t make it right. Like, the fact that you can make it right doesn’t make the action right. That doesn’t make it right. And that’s assuming that’s true. Like, just because you know how to lead a Warcraft troop doesn’t mean you know how to lead people in real life. And that’s one of the problems is that a lot of these things, they provide us with the illusion of something rather than the thing itself. And that’s the spiritual bypass, right? You have an illusion of having something that you don’t have. Like, this is why visions are spoken about carefully in religious traditions, right? Because people get the sense that they realize that it’s easy to be fooled by your brain into thinking that you’ve had a genuine connection with the high-most, right? The ineffable or whatever, when in fact you haven’t. And so that’s the spiritual bypass, right? Is that worry that you’ll get the impression that you had it and that it continues when you didn’t have it and it’s not continuing. And that’s the problem with safety and solipsism. Like, safetyism leads to solipsism. It puts you in that space and you fold in on yourself. You collapse the world into what you know, into your subjective experience. And now again, there’s no room for transformation. There’s no room for exploration. There’s no room for engaging with things outside yourself, which is not to say that if your only option is World of Warcraft and it’s how you have to learn to become a leader, that you don’t want to be a general in World of Warcraft. That can be helpful, but it’s not the whole story. At some point, you’re a good enough general in World of Warcraft that you now need to cultivate those skills in real life. And the problem with cultivating those skills in real life is that when you’re in real life with somebody, the number of signals goes up. And now you’re back into getting overwhelmed and wanting that safety. So that’s why online is safe because you can control the number of signals are already limited and you can control the signals you get by muting people, by shutting off the online system, right? There’s a dozen different ways that you can control that environment. But you need to be in an environment where you have less and less control over time. So you can exact out those control skills to coping mechanisms because as the world gets bigger for you, as you see more of the world, you need more coping mechanisms and fewer control mechanisms because you have less control. It’s one of the advantages of Stoicism. Stoicism doesn’t make you safe by making the world safer. Stoicism makes you safe by giving you coping mechanisms so that the world doesn’t have to be safer for you to be in it. And that’s a different attitude about, you know, it’s a different approach. So safety is, you know, you need some safety. There’s no question about it. You need total safe time to sleep and stuff like that. But too much safety makes you weak. And it puts, it gives your body and your mind the false impression about what it needs to know to be in the world successfully. And so that’s the danger of safety. It’s not a, you know, it’s not a pure good, right? It’s also not a pure bad. But there’s definitely a component there where it’s a way of discerning. But if it’s the only way of discerning, you get this reciprocal narrowing that John Vervicki talks about, right? The world gets smaller. That’s the world you become fitted to, right? And so you’re overfit to a safe world, but that means you’re unfit for the real world because the real world is never going to be safe. Yeah. So I wanted to talk a little bit about safe spaces. So there’s created safe spaces versus natural safe space, right? So you’re talking about the internet and one of the things that I realized about the internet, especially Discord, right? Like there’s the disconnect button, right? So there’s this immediacy of, yeah, putting a wall. Like there’s literally a wall between the reality that you’re participating in and your personal environment. And so you can cut yourself off from being affected by the reality, right? So people say the internet isn’t real and that’s completely ridiculous. It is real. The only distinction is that it’s not imposing in the same way as the rest of reality because you have the disconnect button, right? You have to voluntarily step into this space and whenever you don’t feel like it, you can disconnect from it. And that’s one of the weak points from the internet, right? Because it’s not pushing you to build certain relationship. It’s not pushing you to the dependency, right? And then in order to have a tight-knit community, right, like you have to voluntarily enter into the dependent relationship and entering into a dependent relationship is a thing that’s not safe, right? Like exactly the opposite of why people are on the internet. And therefore, like it’s really hard to do for people, right? So in the medium, there’s an inherent safety there, right? But there’s also an unsafe aspect in the medium of the internet, right? Because you’re exposed to a lot of different actors, right? And they all have a bunch of motivations and some of them you don’t know, right? So this is where all this control stuff comes from, right? There’s motivations driving you that you don’t know. But it’s worse than that, right? Because at the end of the day, the real problem is you can’t do without dependence. You’re not smart enough to know enough of the world to not have to depend on others for something. You need distributed cognition. You know you need distributed cognition. You rely on it all the time. You say, what do we do about the problem with experts? Why are experts a problem if you don’t need distributed cognition? If you’re not outsourcing your cognition to an expert, why would it be a problem? Because you have to do it. And so you think by going on the internet, having all this control, that you’re not going to be dependent. And to be fair, you’ve been told you are an independent individual and that you don’t need this stuff and that you can know things about the world that you clearly can’t actually know. And it’s not that you can’t know them. It’s that you can’t know them and the things you know. You can’t know all the things. You can’t know enough of the things that the dream that you’ve been sold is correct. So it might be that you can know enough about computers to be an excellent programmer. But it might be that you can’t also know enough about farming to be an excellent programmer and a good farmer. I’m not saying that’s true, but it could be true. At a certain point, it’s definitely true. And we don’t know what that is. And that number is different for everybody. But we’ve told everybody that they can know enough as an individual not to have to depend on experts, not to have to be able to write software, to be able to farm, to be able to be a good cook, to be it, right? And on and on and on. And that’s not true. So what happens is, and I think this is where the anger of the internet comes from, the internet seems to promise us things that it’s not delivering on. We can do this and we can do that. And we can definitely enable this. And once we have the internet and the metaverse, we’ll be able to be individuals free at last from everything. And then everything we want will work the way we expect in our heads because really we have control over the internet. And that’s not entirely true, of course. And then people are recognizing, wait a minute, if Facebook builds the metaverse, then it’ll be Facebook that has control over the things in our head because we’ll be embedded in their system. It’s like, yeah, exactly. And then they realize, oh no, we don’t want that. Well, what’s your alternative? And it just keeps getting worse because eventually you kind of figure out, well, then what we really want is we don’t want to cooperate because then somebody will have control of it. So we just need distributed everything everywhere all the time and then you get cryptocurrency, which also doesn’t work for similar reasons. Because now nobody has control and there is no controlling agent, but there’s also no way to control it. So you still need to cooperate with people, but now you’re cooperating with them one-on-one instead of having an agency overseeing whether or not they’re following the rules. And there’s no way to have rules without having authorities and political structures and governments. So it’s a tough dichotomy in one sense. And that’s what people are realizing. These promises we’ve been made are false. They’re not attainable. And what do we do about it? We’re kind of relearning that lesson. Yeah, so it’s interesting with this agency overseeing because now you’re taking a step further. I want to go through a bunch more natural spaces. One is your mother. That’s the child that explores the world and then goes back to their mother. And I think there’s a distinct feminine quality to the creation of safe spaces. In some sense, the enabling factor for a bunch of other things, which is the exploration or the subjugation of the world. And then you have the house or the home. The home is a safe space. And then from there on, we get to somewhat less natural safe spaces. You have the community. And now we’re getting into government. Responsibility, the outsourcing of things to others in a way. And now we’re getting created safe spaces. One of those would be like a castle, for example, or a walled city, where we’re now explicitly saying we’re designating this area for this purpose. And that brings along a bunch of things. So now a walled city now has to monitor the weapons coming in. It has to have a relationship to the environment. It has to scout the environment for incoming enemies. It has to have people who are specialized in providing the safety. And then it has to have other people support the people that are specialized. And now you get these hierarchies. So now you’re getting created safe spaces. And then the question is, well, and a temple is another one. So a temple is set apart from these other spaces so that you can be among people who are wise, that can provide you with the right guidance where you can have a transformation. And so these things are somewhat natural. You would go to the wise person naturally to have a talk with them, but then they also become institutional. And that’s where the complications arise. Yeah, and it is that struggle. I mean, we’re talking about a Van de Klay livestream on Friday. That’s that struggle again. Between we need structure, but structures can become corrupt when corrupt people inhabit them. Because we’re not calling people out anymore, we’re not calling out evil and doing it poorly. We’re not able to discern. We don’t want to blame people because, oh, people, poor people, people. But then we can’t fix the structure anymore. We can deny the structure, but we can say, oh, the structure is bad because corruption happens. But corruption happens irrespective of structure. Again, decentralization of currency doesn’t lead to less fraud. It does lead to more fraud, though. So decentralization is not a fix to that problem. And that is where you get in trouble. Is this how much interface, how much structure, how much trust do we outsource to people? And that is an issue because in order to get safety, we somewhat have to take it from some thing, some other people or some other things. Safety is not free. If you want to be safe when you sleep, you at least have to build a lean to and probably a fire in the woods. And that doesn’t make you safe from everything, but it goes a long way to its safety. But you had to take that from nature. It wasn’t free. It wasn’t free. You didn’t snap your fingers and just have it. And we’re also not appreciating that relationship. So we have to be mindful of these things. Is it there are tradeoffs, there are decisions being made whether you want to believe that or not. And those decisions are actually super important to your life because what you do throughout your day, even though you don’t realize it, is make a bunch of tradeoffs about, I’m going to feed myself now because there’s a McDonald’s nearby instead of waiting till I get home and saving money and eating better. These things happen and we’re so thrown, we’re so moved, we’re so manipulated by our own emotional state. And we rationalize things after the fact that we don’t really know why we did what we did. And then sometimes we look back and we’re like, wait a minute, why did I eat at McDonald’s? I have no idea. I was 10 minutes from the house and I had plenty of food and it would have been better for me and it wouldn’t cost me as much. And yet I ate at McDonald’s. Oh, well, it was convenient. Oh, well, it was only $7 for a hamburger, fries, or whatever it is. And it’s easy to rationalize it away. But I don’t think it’s fair to us to rationalize it away because really we don’t know what we’re up to. And so we’re making these decisions without realizing it. And then we’re blaming, when things go wrong, we’re blaming structures, we’re blaming random corruption, we’re blaming all kinds of things that probably aren’t to blame. And that’s not good for us to be fooling ourselves into thinking that things are happening in some way that they’re not, especially because again, safety leads to solipsism. It leads to us believing our own subjective experience over any other interaction in the world. Yeah, I think it’s important to point out there that it’s independent of intent, the corruption. The corruption sneaks in independent of intent. So and part of how it sneaks in is we get overly fixated on something. We get distracted. And maybe we want to add in the promise of safety. A lot of people do a lot of things out of the promise of safety. If we vaccinate everybody, damn. If, damn. And then the damn thing is not as certain as people hope. It’s not as certain as they assume it to be. So then we start enacting things in the world out of the right motivation. But the implementation is iffy because we get seduced by this element of safety. Oh, yeah. If we’re in control of what’s happening, if we’re taking action, it’s better than not taking action, right? Because now we’re actually like if I wouldn’t have taken action and the bad things happen, now I’m definitely responsible. It’s just like, no, that’s not necessarily true. And so there’s true safety and then there’s imagined safety. Right. But I want to stop you there and point out something important. So where does the corruption actually come from? The corruption comes from the sense of safety removing our diligence. And it’s like, oh, well, I know what that politician’s going to do now that I’ve elected them. And therefore, I don’t pay attention to that anymore because I’m safe because I’ve done my voting. I made my decision. My decision got enacted. The world agreed with me. And that politician got into power. And now I know what they’re going to do. That’s when the corruption happens. Right. It’s the presumption. Right. When you make somebody emperor for life, it’s the presumption that they’re always going to do the thing you imagined in your head when you voted for them to be emperor in the first place. That’s the error. The error happens all the way back there. And then you feel safe. And you’re like, you know what? I’m not going to pay any attention to this anymore. That’s why safety is dangerous because it forces you not to pay attention to things that still need paying attention to. So it reduces the field of things you need to pay attention to. But it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t still poke at the walls and make sure that the safety bucket or room isn’t the same size as it was before. So yeah, I just wanted to interject that. So it’s really important. The thing that causes corruption is feeling too safe, is being too safe. Safety causes corruption, for sure. Right. It’s not the only factor. But it is the thing that allows corruption to spread, if nothing else. Yeah. What you’re effectively saying there is a finalizing. The finalization, like the imagination that there is a state that is reachable where the problem doesn’t occur anymore. And when you listen to Vivek, he has this idea of perennial problems, these problems that reoccur, reoccur, reoccur. And then you might solve the problem on one level, but then that doesn’t mean that it’s gone. Like it might occur in a different iteration at a different complexity. Right. So you could say, well, I can solve something in my family, but can I solve that same problem in my community? Like, no. Right. And even if you could, right, like what if a new community member answers? Right. Like now then you’re going to have to deal with that community as well. And so I think having this idea of corruption, and I want to connect it to true and imagined responsibility, right. Because not responsibility, safety. But in some sense, it is connected to responsibility necessarily. Right. There’s a way when you’re truly safe, right, like you might say, well, like there’s a wall here and that will stop this animal or whatever. Right. But then you need a hole in the wall. Right. And then the animal can still come through the hole in the wall because if you can’t, the animal can come in, you can’t go out. Right. Like so there’s that aspect, this new ones on true safety, but then there’s imagined safety, right. Like, okay, like I have a wall on the one side, but do I have a wall behind me? Right. Like I can be looking at the wall in front of me and think, oh, I’m safe, but it’s not actually safe. Right. And then we can also have imagined danger. Right. So when someone is anxious, right, or like in a highly emotional state, their hermeneutics is off, right. Like they’re going to see into the world’s problems, right, or dangers. Peterson has this example where when you put your hand into the dark room, you will imagine things being in that room that could affect your hand. Right. And so at that point, you rationally know that you’re completely safe, but your imagined sense of safety is off the chart, right. Like, no, like I’m not safe. I’m not safe. And now when we have this imagined lack of safety, then we can start acting irrational. Right. Like we can ask our environment, we can demand from our environment to provide things to us that we can’t provide because I cannot protect you against the dangers in the dark room that you’re imagining in your head. Like that’s not an option for me. And then the other way around exists as well. Right. Like there’s a sense in which you are in danger, but you’re imagining that you’re safe. Right. Escapism is like, oh, I’m just going to go into this fantasy and I’m going to la, la, la, la, la, la. And then I’m just not in relationship to reality anymore in order to create that sense of safety in myself. Right. But also I think we know we can’t be safe because we’re constantly looking to explore, right. There’s still the call of adventure, right. We still want to be bigger than we are. We want to transform. We want to come into our own, right. We want to break the boundaries, right. And go move past where we’re at. And so the safety doesn’t really make us content. So the fact that you’re safe doesn’t mean that you’re content. Safety can give you a feeling of contentment for a while, but that doesn’t last. And that’s really where the problem is, is that that doesn’t actually last. And that’s okay. But what are you going to do if you’re overprotected or if you overprotect yourself or if you keep seeking the safety as we’ll say a distraction. That’s not such an easy question. Like what should we do? What is it that’s important to do and what is not important to do? And that’s where things become a little bit more tricky. Like what we need safety, sure. But where’s the over safety? I think that’s another, you know, these perennial problems that John Ravichy likes to talk about, right. It’s a problem that’s not going away. You have to deal with how much safety, when you need safety, and when you need to explore, when you need to engage with the college to adventure. All of that stuff is a factor. And I’ll be right back, Manuel, so you can hold down the floor for a second. Okay. So yeah, there is a sense, well, yeah, if the safety doesn’t provide us contentedness, right, like that is effectively in some sense the call to adventure. Like it’s, oh, like I’m in this safe position and it doesn’t feel right. Like that’s, in some sense, it’s getting stir crazy, right. Like there’s this force that drives you to action. Like that’s a good thing. That’s a generative thing, right. There’s this problem with that force or the potential problem with this force is that it can, if you don’t have a good way to participate in the world, right, because you’ve been stuck away in your safety bubble for too long, then it’s difficult to discern right action, right. Like so you might over commit to certain things, right. Like you might get in manic states where you’re living out the excitement, but you’re not proportioning it correctly. And in the consequence, you’re also irresponsible in the way that you’re acting because you don’t have the right participatory skills. And then you have to retreat back into your safety, right. So now you get into this vicious cycle. And then there’s also seeking your safety as a distraction, right. So you could see that there’s a layering, right. Like so when I lay in bed and I’m, it’s cold outside and like I’m nicely warm from the cold, there’s a sense of comfort, right. There’s a womb-like element to it. And I might retreat to that as when I’m in a fight with someone, right. Like there’s a high level of stress that is associated with the fight. And then I can find this different type of safety, provide me with the sense of safety in relation to something that isn’t connected to that issue. And then we start avoiding things, right. There’s an element where that safety is going to provide us alleviation from places in our lives that it’s not connected to. And then it becomes an avoidant pattern where we’re not taking responsibility in different aspects of our lives. And then, well, where’s the oversafety, right. Like if you’re sick, your requirements of safety are way high because your capacity to handle the world is changed. The things that you can handle and the things that you can’t handle and the ability that you can rely on your agency, right. Like if you’re a marathon runner and you’re sick, the thing that you’re good at, you’re not going to be able to manifest it. Well, if you’re peeling potatoes or whatever for a job, then maybe you can do that when you’re sick, right. Like maybe you’re not that inhibited in performing a routine simple task. And so there’s a dynamic nature in our agency, right. And then there’s a dynamic nature in our will, like the ability to apply our agency in some sense. And those determine the need for safety. And then there’s also these realms, right. Like so if I have a running injury, then I might be able to perfectly well play computer games or code a program. Like that inhibition of the agency in one realm is not necessarily affecting my performance in a different realm. So there’s ways in which we like sitting behind a computer is a relatively safe position. But I might still participate in things in a relatively safe position that are challenging to me, right. So I’m still taking responsibility in different aspects of my life, right. But then you can also take it too far in some sense, right. Like you can say, well, I’m taking responsibility for my life because I got an online job. I got an online community. And like I don’t need to go outside. I don’t need to meet people in the real world. I don’t have to go into the cold because like that’s just extra effort. And I’m challenging myself. I’m putting myself in unsafe positions, but I’m also only doing this in this limited arena, right. And then you’re still walking into the same problem, right. There’s this small box, which is pretty big still, right. Because you’re taking responsibility within that box. But then there’s this other box outside, right. Like the bigger world that you’re not properly engaging with. And therefore you’re still overusing safety in a way. So yeah, like I think it’s important that we realize that there is a perennial problem in getting sucked into these safety holes, right. Like there’s a sense of familiarization that is safety. And then there’s a call to adventure. And I think in order to get right discernment around this, we need to start realizing what our capacities are, right. We need to get a sense of what am I able to do? Like how much of a cross am I able to carry today? What type of cross, right. Like am I going outside today because I have a lot of physical energy? Or is my physical energy constrained? But do I have a lot of mental energy? Am I feel in an extraverted moon, right. Like is what I’m supposed to be engaging in. Social relationships or am I in an introverted mood? But I should be going for a walk, right. I still go outside, but I’m not engaging in high signal and high signal environment, like a social environment. So, yeah, and I think making a list of the things that attract us in safety and recognizing in a reflection upon our behavior that we get sucked into specific patterns of safety and actively trying to combat those, right. Recognizing that there’s a lack within ourselves, an addictive quality that we have to take responsibility for. Yeah, so maybe someone has a question that I can take. So, yeah, I think when we’re looking at society and how to deal with safety, well, part of the way that we provide safety in an environment like society is that in society, we have to make rules. And these rules are stating things that are appropriate and stating things that are inappropriate. And these rules take effect in things like implicit cultural social norms, and they also take effect in laws. And these laws are like agreements that set boundaries upon the behavior of people. And, well, what is appropriate to ensure safety and what is inappropriate to ensure safety is something that’s been coming up a lot lately, right. So the thing like freedom of speech and also the vaccination issues have been really contentious because they’re relating to the interests of the common, right, like the group as such and then the interest of the individual. And there’s a way in which when you impose the interest of the group too much, then the binding of the individual towards the group will last because it’s not beneficial for the participant of the group to stay within the group because the group is not providing safety or maybe better set freedom, right, like the right not to be imposed upon effectively. And therefore, being part of the group becomes a negative. And so there’s an element where the authority has to have a relationship to the whole, to the whole of the body, and it has to have a relationship with the individual in the sense that it’s giving someone something back for being part of the group. And when we start relating safe spaces to authority, and this was how it came up earlier today, right, like just having a safe space isn’t enough. Having an authority within the safe space is providing an emanation, right, like the safe space is in some sense the place where transformation can happen, right, like I like to, well, we named it as nakedness, but there’s also a sense of the affordance of drunkenness, right, the ability to lose control, to lose cohesion of your thoughts so that they can reshuffle a little bit. And when we have less control over ourselves, what we need is an external authority to reconfigure our thinking. Our thinking, because if we don’t restructure our thinking, we cannot establish a control over the danger. Like the thing that we are hiding from in the safe space or we’re sheltering from in the safe space needs to be overcome in a way, right, and there’s a pathway there, and then there’s just the hiding, and the hiding is a pattern of chaos, right, like it’s not erecting a structure that is able to contend with the problem, but instead it’s just being in the retreat and being in the emotion, in the fleeing, effectively. And so what an authority then can provide is, well, what is an authority, right, like an authority is something that states a truth, right, like it has a justification for existing and a justification for what needs to happen, and then you can conform to what needs to happen, right, like so that allows you to to have trust in the transformation that you’re going to have to take, right, because in some sense you need to retreat to safety because you can’t handle what you need to handle. So if what is in front of you can be described or at least your relationship to it can be presented to you in example, most hopefully, but also in a description by an authority, then that will grand on the means, right, or at least an ideal, right, like we can have an aspiration to the person that we’re going to have to be in order to deal with what’s in front of us. And that sense, that is empowering, like the sense that we know where we need to get to and we have an action that we can take and at that point we can start getting intentional in what we’re doing because if you’re missing this vision then this danger is so big for you, right, like there’s no way to start to contain it, right, and then and in some sense that will overwhelm you or that is the definition of being overwhelmed and then the process of intentional relationship, right, like hopefully in small steps so that you don’t have to face the whole thing at once, right, like this is the child that goes out into the world and then comes back and hides at its mom’s skirt, that being in that movement but being intentional in the movement, right, like the child has a specific goal, like once it is attracted to something in the world and that attraction in the world is in some sense drawing the child out till its maximum capability before it flees back into the arms of the mother. And so when we’re talking about safe spaces this is the type of space that we want to provide people, right, like so in some sense it is supposed to be a sanctuary where we can get rest but it also is supposed to be a place where we can re-engage with the world from in a way that we weren’t capable for before and so you can see how the temple, right, like if we look at the ancient Greeks for example and they had these temples that were dedicated to specific modalities of being in the world, right, like love or anger or wisdom, right, and that engaging with that modality re-identifying, putting yourself in the frame of that modality, this relationary modality would allow you means of overcoming the problem in your life. Yeah and I think if we start looking at safe spaces as a place away from from the danger, away from contention, away from being challenged then we remove this necessity to go back in, right, like I think a lot of safe spaces that we’re seeing lately become echo chambers, they become places where we get validated, like our position gets validated, our emotional state gets validated and then from that position we are right to be in the safe space, like we like the thing that we’re doing is correct, our reaction is correct and that will cut off, like even if we do have already have the agency, right, like it will it will not provide us with the impulse to actually act out that agency because we are right in the place that we are, so why would we go out and do the unpleasant thing with the unpleasant people? People and then there’s this other sense that comes with that, right, it’s like well if things can be like they are in the safe space, why aren’t they like this everywhere else, like why aren’t they in the world like in the safe space? Because it is possible because I know and then we get people who start having expectations that are invalid, right, like they’re not realistic, the people within the safe space act towards you in that way because they are in the safe space in the safe space and you can’t expect that behavior from other people because maybe they don’t have the social skills but more likely they have different values and they’re just not going to act in the same way as the other people, so yeah I was hoping that people were going to get in with some questions. Let me see if I can get some other things in there. Well so we can go into the element of exploration a little. It is important to explore the world, to engage with new potential ways of being. So the place of safety is providing a way a place of rest or respite from the exploration, right, but in some sense you can call that a more active relationship towards the safety, right, like where you’re seeking the safety out not because you require it in a sense that you’re dependent upon it but because it is a tool that you can use in in your exploration, right, so you could call prayer or meditation in some sense these these moments of safety in your life, these ways where you’re disconnecting from the world, right, but you’re doing this in order to charge, right, like you’re intentional about it. There’s an element where it’s in service to the thing outside it, to your exploration, your life and hopefully in that also being a good person. And so when we’re retreated to safety we make the world smaller, right, but because it’s a restriction, it’s the closing off from the world, but then that exploration aspect is also the means by which we make the world larger, so it’s important, an important factor in our development to have the safety to return to. There’s a way in which, yeah, like it’s affording both ways of transformation and it is up to us which way we are going to transform. And yeah, so when we’re talking about how can we institutionalize the safety for people, right, so if we’re getting a good sense of the function of safety then we can say, well, okay, we want to provide these services, right, so we want to provide in the safe place a path out into the world, we want to provide a way of reframing the danger, and we want to provide a way to self-sufficiency, right, because what we ideally would want is we would want people to be able to provide their own safety to themselves, they need to get, well, adult enough in some sense to start taking steps towards manifesting this for themselves and being a place of safety for others. So we want to create a structure that can provide these elements to people and that structure will require people to relate to people in different ways, right, so there’s an element where you have an intake, right, where people come out of the danger, they need to calm down, they need to reorient, they need to settle in, need to get a different experience of what’s going on, right, like they need emotional settlement, and then there needs to be a process that people go through, right, and then there’s the going out back into the world back into the world where there’s an engagement with the world in an intentional way, right, with the promise of safety behind them, that will allow them to re-engage in new ways and slowly go through the transformative process into a person that is no longer affected by the danger in the same way, like they can kind of conquer the dragon that they’re facing. So I think I’m running out of steam to talk by myself, so yeah, that’s also important to realize that when you talk or when you go through something, to have the thing that the other that you can be informed by, to have to have the dialogical process, because now I need to look at my notes instead of have someone talk to me and have that inspire me in different ways to go in my exploration, which is difficult because exploration is different than an actual pre-taught-out talk. And yeah, so the dynamic nature is a tension that is maybe what provides people with the skills to deal with safety, and I got a question here, so I’ll take that one. Have you gone through Peterson’s maps of meaning? You have some group, yeah, so I have not gone through the book maps of meaning, but I have gone through the lecture series. We had a watch party on the Forfakie server where, yeah, we kind of went to half an hour of watching and then some talking about it. We’ll have a watch party, I guess, in January when Forfakie series will be released as well, so we’ll go have talks around that, and I think every Saturday we’re actually doing an episode from the new Peterson series on Exodus. So yeah, the points are one thing, it’s really nice to have a couple of good points, but it’s the next step. What are you going to do with the points? So, yeah, I think that’s one thing. I think that’s one thing, and I think that’s another thing, it’s the next step. What are you going to do with the points? The best thing is go to an existing structure in the world, like a church or a university or a community center or whatever, and start using these lenses. From this conversation you get a way to interpret the world. You can start seeing things, seeing relationships, seeing needs that are met and needs that are not being met, and you can start becoming intentional about them, right? So the easiest thing is to relate to an existing structure and optimize that for something that they’re already implicitly providing. And when we’re getting into the more difficult part, it’s like how do you provide that on the internet, right? Because that’s one of my goals. It’s providing these spaces to people that are lost, right? Like not fixed to a location. We were talking about this earlier where the internet has this fundamental problem, right? Because people are not imposed upon to participate. When you’re living in a house with a bunch of people, you need to participate with them. You need to cooperate, you need to find ways, you need to put yourself through struggles. But on the internet you don’t have to do that, right? You can just move house every 10 seconds if you don’t like it, because there’s no commitment to the community. And even if you do commit, right, like there might be an imposition in the real world that will cut you off from your participation. It’s less stable and it requires more emotional maturity for people to have a commitment to participation on the internet. So yeah, like the way I deal with thinking, is I try to go from first principles in all my thinking, which is kind of why I like Peterson, because Peterson also tries to do that. He tries to relate to the underlying presuppositions that people have, right, like to the motivating drives that are behind the behavior. And it comes out clearly when he says, I care about how you act, not about how you say you act or what you believe, right? So there’s an element where there’s a deeper truth that gets expressed, but now there’s a problem, right, because there’s an indirect line between the expression and that which originates the expression. And then you get into a level of uncertainty when you’re acting things out, right? And so in some sense, when we’re talking about safety, the safety is allowing us to tinker on these aspects which are fundamental, right? Like when you assume a different way of walking, you don’t want to start off with your normal activities, right? You want to go back into the world slowly so that you can cultivate that skill. And that process of re-engaging with the world basically handicapped compared to what you could do before because you had to like reconsider some aspects of your relationship, right? You were believing that you were safe in ways that you weren’t safe, right, and now you have to account for the danger. That will just set you back, that will just put you on your ass. Then you have to find a way to start functioning again. And that process, that is what safety is for, right? And that’s what growing up is like. Growing up is falling on your ass and finding out what works and what doesn’t work and slowly adjusting it to a functional system. So yeah, I guess I’m going to close this down. I think it is important to realize this danger aspect in the safety and the ways that it can manifest. Yeah, the safety will allow us for different hermeneutics, right? Like a different way of relating to the same thing. And I think that is the main function of safety apart from providing us a place to rest, right? This different way of engaging with things that seem to be dangerous to us will allow us to change who we are and to become a better person. So yeah, everybody, thanks for watching and I will be doing this as a series. And hopefully next time I’m not alone in my exploration. And I hope I did all of this fine. I’ll see you guys next time.