https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JpMVZ_ur3yQ
I think we are recording. So hi, my name is Julian. I’m from the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis Discord server. I live in Australia and today we’re going to be having a chat with two central players from the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis Discord, Manuel Post and Mark Lefebvre. Hey, guys. Thank you so much for making the time. It’s late for both of you. So or early. I can’t tell which, Manuel. Yes. Yes, it’s simple enough. And I hope you’re okay with all the riots or whatever is happening in the Netherlands right now. I hope it’s not near you. They made a martial law in my city. So whatever. But nothing bad happened. So I’m good. Just martial law. Okay. Yeah, I’m not sure if that’s the correct word. But whatever. Well, the topic for today is the logos. We are hoping for the logos to come in and be the fourth emergent person in our discussion today is the religion that is not a religion and human nature. So today’s conversation really came out of something Mark was catalyzed to follow up on. After late last year, we had a Q&A with John Verbeke and I had raised my kind of sense of trepidation about his idea that religion is not a religion. And consequent to that, we had a small back and forth and Mark thought that was worth following up on. As Mark and Manuel, as I said, the very central players in the Discord, we thought we’d bring it all together. Mark, is that fair? Fair description? Yeah, yeah, yeah. John comes on once a month onto the Discord server and does Q&A for pretty much whoever’s there, right? And then, yeah, your question, it was so well formed and well thought out. And it looked like you really touched all the issues that we have about the religion that is not a religion and sort of the core discussion. And yeah, we had a very deep follow up after John left. John should probably come in and spy on us because we have such good after discussions, he’d probably really enjoy them actually, at least some of them. So yeah, I thought that was interesting. And Manuel and I took the time to re-listen to that Q&A earlier today so that we were prepared with our own notes and our own thoughts about the formulation of your question as well as John’s answer. And that engendered some insight as well, which is amazing, always relating to things and then they show new potential. Oh, that’s perfect because as you know, I think when you’re asking the questions, like normally if I’m listening to John Verbeke, I’m taking a lot of notes, as you guys do, I know. So when you’re actually hearing the answer, you’re like, I don’t know how to take a note on this. So it’ll be great to hear your feedback. What I’ve done is a presentation because for me, what I’d like to do is a serious play with this idea. As I said, you know, my sense about it was a bit of trepidation in a kind of reactionary way. I don’t think that’s necessarily the good way to go forward. So I think what I’m going to try and do is re-present John’s episode 39, you know, kind of hopefully a coherent way that’s not overwhelming and then re-present my own kind of concern, which was about basically, well, how does human nature respond back to the religion that is not a religion? The presentation shouldn’t be too long, but it does encompass fundamental things about existence. So perhaps what I’ll do is I’ll get half the way through it and get some feedback from you guys before clowing on. Does that sound OK? Yeah. Great. All right, let’s get on with it. It’s a good shirt on you, by the way, Mark. Good color. Yeah. Let me share. Here it is. OK. Let me see if you can get that. Is that coming through, guys? Yes. OK. The religion that is not a religion in human nature. So the first part here is recapping what I took to be John’s argument. And it is an argument. You know, this is tightly, tightly argued piece. So John’s quite specific. He’s saying. What I want to do is address a problem for a group of people who look back at our history as a people and realize that traditional religion is not going to give them their connection to meaning for various historical reasons. But they also look at the reactionary forces, which he calls pseudo religious ideologies like communism, Nazism, and say, well, that’s definitely out. And so these people have become an emerging demographic, which is spiritual, not religious. What’s your religion? None. So he calls them the nuns. I don’t know if that’s his term or general. So John’s proposal is to say for the people who want the functionality of religion without all of the hangups, let’s just put it in shorthand, what would that look like? And I should I think at this stage, I’m taking John very much at face value here when he says, I’m not trying to found a religion. I’m seriously I’m just trying to help. So the target market as it were is for these people, not necessarily for someone who’s got a religion already. And John is not trying to become the leader of some sort of religion. So I think that’s helpful to demarcate. What John’s suggesting was we want to get to religio. And that’s a very technical term for him, for anyone who might be listening. Obviously, the first connotation is religion, religion. But John is trying to create that new cognitive grammar. So you have to take it when he’s saying religio, what he means is sense of connectedness. You might get a religio, a feeling of connectedness out of Star Wars, for example. So it’s good to be clear about that. However, that sense of religio is fundamental to everybody. You can’t get away from it. So how do we get to it? So he’s proposing that. I don’t know who came up with the shorthand, but that’s religion that is not a religion. And he’s saying, well, what’s the functionality of that going to be? How do we use that to get to religio? And I think at this point we have to make the jump to say that religion that is not a religion is essentially communal. That’s the difficult thing. I’m just going to take that as as read. Maybe you guys want to object to it. Hold on. So you want this functional religion to get to religio communally. And in order to do that, John’s introducing another reinventioed word credo. Creed, which is strictly speaking, what you believe. Credo is basically where things go wrong as far as I can read it, which is why he focuses his attention on saying, first of all, because of our history, with the creeds that we have put forward, with our statements and propositions about I believe such and such and we believe such and such, he makes the connection using Arthur Lewis’s work that the propositional nature of creeds leads us to totalitarianism. I suppose a classic example would be if you’re a member of communist institution, you’re a member of the Christian Church, you’re a member of the Christian Church. If you’re a member of communist in Stalin’s Russia, perhaps, you know, there’s a set of propositions you have to adhere to. Otherwise you get it in the neck or something like that. And there are plenty of other examples, not just out of communism with all respect to anyone who wants to be communist. As again, he was saying then that credo is essentially propositional. You cannot avoid the fact that when you’re trying to describe what you believe, you have to use words, you have to use pictures. You can’t get away from it, just like you can’t get away from religio. So without hammering that point on, I’ll just move on. So there are the ingredients. That was my little Tom Cruise reference, by the way. Need for creed. So those are the ingredients for the religion that’s not a religion. You’ve got to have religio. We tend towards it anyway. In order for it to become like a communal thing, there needs to be credo. So how are we going to bridge that gap? And John’s saying, well, being a cognitive scientist, I can propose in a helpful way what the functionality should do. What the functionality is doing. So again, creed kills. I’m not sure if that comes across, but in Australia we have a police billboard that sort of says speed kills to try and warn people off. So creed kills. He’s sort of saying you’ve got to be very careful with this. If you are serious about wanting to have a religion that’s not a religion, you’ve got to take the credo bit seriously. But it’s a problem. It’s a problem. The reason you have to take credo seriously, and I think this is really maximally important, is he’s saying one half of credo. He doesn’t actually say what the second half is, but I’ve got a good guess. He says one half of credo is mythos. So the way I sort of saw it is there’s a kind of a cycle, which is if you’ve got a mythology, if you’ve got a set of stories, which is where maybe you guys want to bring in Parabolic later, if you’ve got a set of stories that engender and inspire religio in you, this sacred sense of connectedness to meaning, that’s going to be part of your credo. And that intertwining cycle is, again, it’s unavoidable. So what he’s suggesting is, since it’s all unavoidable, let’s look at what credo does. Forget about what your creed is. What does it do? Probably universally. So instead of creed kills, let’s look at our creed skills. John’s proposition, and then he goes on to signal detection theory, as I think you guys remember. So this is out of information processing, and he uses the analogy of how does a creature set the criteria for what should I pay attention to versus what should I ignore? And his analogy is that in signal detection theory, if you only pay attention to signals and you disregard ambiguous noises, like for example, I think is it what Bill the Gazelle or something like that, Bill the Gazelle is very jumpy and he’s saying, well, if there’s a noise in the bush, I’m going to pay attention to that as if it was a lion, and that way I’m maximally prepared for any kind of lion. But if you do that too much, you’re losing a lot of energy. There’s a big cost that you’ve got to trade off against that. So then you have Tom, who’s quite conservative, is like, yeah, I’m not going to pay too much attention to ambiguous noises. I’m strictly focused on what I can see and what I can hear as clearly a lion or whatever it was. And then John makes that sort of dramatic statement. Yeah. And that’s all good until a lion kind of jumps out and sinks its teeth into your neck in a death grip. So you’ve got to find a balance. And that balance is how you set the criteria between how much ambiguous noise should I listen for versus how much signal am I going to allow as the trigger point? What John’s argument is, is if that analogy holds for our creed, what we need to do is appropriate the dynamic nature of it in information processing. So I’m just going to come up with a bit of an image where he’s saying, you’ve got to be always adjusting your credo to serve your religio. If your credo isn’t touching religio for you, if there’s some story, if there’s some belief that isn’t putting you in touch with religio, then it’s probably worth ignoring. I think that’s the essential argument. I’m going to go on with another image. I think it’s a bit more like this. He’s saying that’s what a credo is going to be more like in the religion that’s not a religion. And frankly, for other religions too, my own included, I think that’s not a bad idea. You don’t want to be paying attention to stuff which isn’t serving your religio. I might just finish this part up by sort of comparing against what he’s saying. The opposite is if your credo is too strict, if it’s too absolute, if it’s too propositional and not perspectival enough, if it doesn’t take into account the real situations that you find yourself in, I would suppose it’s a bit like this. I mean, your targeting is going to be pretty slow. Yes, you’re going to hit the mark and it’s going to be powerful as long as you like, stay there. But I think the suggestion is that we live in a world more like this nowadays than that. Oh, OK. How’s that sitting with you guys so far? Yeah, I see. I see where you’re going with this. I see a lot of concurrence with what John says in the series, that’s for sure. So, yeah, I’m ready to go on with the rest. I could probably go into this, but I’d like to see the rest of the presentation and see where we can go from there, right? Once we get a good sense. How do you feel, Manuel? Well, I got a lot of comments. I don’t know if they’re relevant for the conversation. Why don’t I round out this half? I am really trying to give John’s argument it’s due. So I’ll just finish off with two more slides and then maybe throw to you guys. How’s that? Is that fair? Sure. OK, good, good. So again, I’m trying to give John his due. And as I said, as a person with my own religion, I think there’s a lot in this which is completely valid and something I’m learning from. Now, I think John’s argument is something like this. If you’ve got together an ecology of practice, which you guys are very central to on Discord, you’re doing this already. I believe the model is out of that emerges religio. So even without formal setting of credo, just the sense of connectedness that comes out of the ecology spurts out religio, if you will. Because there’s a togetherness in the practice and the emergence of the religio is felt by everybody, the instilling proposition that come out of it, so sort of rising from the participatory up through to the propositional there, which is where he’s saying mythos necessarily has to come, has to start there and then filter back down as you guys know too well, I think. So he’s saying, OK, out of religio, sorry, no, this is my idea, that the mythos would just naturally come as as you said, Mark, just post the conversation with the Q&A. All sorts of discussions are happening, agreements are being made about what holds and what doesn’t hold and so on. And a mythos is emerging. And then you get to the part where it’s like, well, if you are looking to build, and I think this is central, that the religion that’s not a religion is for somebody or some group of people to take a hold of. John’s not saying here it is, laying it down. Not at all. I think he’s saying if you’re looking for something other than a traditional religion and recognise the need for the functionality, you’re going to have to get that credo. My argument was in that Q&A, Mark and Manuel, was that I think in that credo part, we start seeing your problems. So maybe I’ll stop sharing and throw it back to you guys then. I want to keep that slide up. I like that slide. That was a great presentation. Thank you for that. That was obviously well done. So very, very good summary of a lot of what John’s talking about. That’s amazing. I think that’s one of your strengths, by the way, is your encouragement. I know I’ve heard you talk about leadership before, Mark, and your encouragement is one of those aspects. Thank you. Yeah. So I like it as well. And here comes the criticism. So the first thing I want to do on this slide is flip it upside down. I think that what we’ve been doing on the Discord is we’ve been looking at things from the past. We call that historical grounding. We’re building upon aspects of what other people built because we can’t build it ourselves. And then we’re trying to put a structure to that. And I think that’s what we’re relating to is the mythos. We’re relating to the collective human knowledge that has been passed on to us. If that’s modern knowledge from Kogsai or ancient knowledge from religion, it doesn’t really matter. It’s that knowledge that informs us where to aim. Where should we be going? That’s the question. We have a fundamental orientation question in the ecology of practices. And the only way that you know where to go is where have other people gone before you? So what if the religio is emerging from the mythos? What if the mythos gives us a way of sense making of the world that allows us to have an interpretive structure and a way of having connection that we can cohere to? And then we build an ecology of practices in order to support that structure. So that’s the thing that I would, the structure that I would build. And then creed would be something that I would put on the side or something. That would be the thing that you need a group of people, you need to have them cohere about a thing. And the thing that you asked in your question to John is what about charisma? That was a big deal. Charisma. So the creed is a set of propositions, but they might be inspirational. So they might be pointing past themselves. And that would resolve a lot of issues with it being propositional. If it’s a symbolic creed, then you can have a more flexible relationship to it. And then the sense of charisma, right? Like charisma is the thing that people cohere around. That’s the thing that gives people aspiration. What is this thing about? Why do I care about this? Well, that’s called in a way of being that is appealing to people. So those two aspects are things that make a group a group. And make them be of the same religion or whatever. So yeah, that’s kind of like the map that I would lay out in relation to this picture that you showed me. Would you think it would be better then? Do you think it would be more accurate if the arrows went both ways? Definitely. There is some interaction. Yeah, I would actually propose that the right thing to do here is to say that the credo and the mythos are an opponent processing with one another. Because a credo is propositional and a mythos is parabolic. That’s what I would say. And that’s what I think is important. So the credo being propositional is a reciprocal narrowing thing by itself. And so it needs to be put in opponent processing with the mythos, which is opening up, right? Myth, or at least a good myth, doesn’t have one message, right? It doesn’t foreclose on possibility and potential. It shows you potential in all the different ways. And one of the, I think, I want to be careful how I proceed. One of the problems I see in the way we talk about this, and there’s a couple of very deep problems, there’s probably three main problems. But one of the easier problems maybe to agree upon, we’ll say, is that there is no hero myth. All right. There are a bunch of hero myths, right? And they don’t tell the same story, right? Icarus is not the same story as the warrior hero myth, for example, right? They’re not the same. So we bandy these things about like there’s only one because we’re in the scientific reductionist mode, I think. Although I’m prepared to entertain other reasons why we might be reducing things down, maybe just cognitive load, right? We’re just too, it’s too much. And then the other thing is, you know, we always give, especially in this presentation, it’s a wonderful presentation. But when we talk about creed, you know, the implication is singular, but the implementation is not, right? And then you might ask yourself, well, why, what are these creeds? Why would we need all these creeds to match our religion or any group, really, right? Creeds happen in non-religious settings. And then one reason might be, well, we need propositions that are, you know, I’ll invoke Descartes sort of grudgingly here, closer to you so that you can get into the thing, whatever the thing is, right? And then, you know, now you’re in, right? So you need, you need something solid and closed and certain to get in. Like you can’t crawl into a moving thing, right? You don’t jump on a moving train or hopefully you don’t. I mean, you can, but you could also lose your legs doing that. I know people who did. So, you know, that’s no joke. Like you got to be careful. And so a creed is much, much easier to get onto. And you need multiples so that people in different places, at different points in their life, at different understandings of time, you know, in At different cognitive load levels at the time they encounter the message. Like a lot of people will like see the guy preaching on the street sort of thing, right? Hear this story. And then one day they engage with him and bang, right? It all works out, right? Or they hear the message over and over again. And then one day it clicks and it’s like, well, I don’t know what that is. But obviously they changed, right? Like they changed, right? They’re exposed to the same thing, but they are the ones that changed. And so that’s why you maybe that’s why you need a bunch of different creeds. And maybe that’s an opponent processing with the mythos, which gives you options and explains to you, you know, how to operate in the world. Because again, it’s a mythos. That’s plural. That’s good. But again, we we tend to go, oh, well, the mythos is X and people, I don’t think, think that way. Or to the extent that they do, maybe they’re wrong. But that’s a people problem, right? Mythos is plural for a reason, because there’s lots of types of hero myths and there’s lots of hero myths, right? Of the same type even. Right. And so that’s kind of worth thinking about, like, wow, that’s kind of a pattern that repeats. Like there’s all these hero myths. They seem to follow a story structure. They the stories they tell seem to be repeated with different implementations, we’ll say. That’s kind of interesting. Right. And I mean, like Joseph Campbell noticed this, like lots of people noticed this. So this happens. Right. The you know, the the rebirth myth is everywhere. Right. You know, the whole like the Native Americans breathe life into the world sort of a thing. Right. There’s there’s there’s a lot of concurrency throughout the world with these different cultures. And so they must be on to something. Right. They must be viewing some pattern. And then sort of the other problem that we that I think we tend to have is. And I think, you know, we fall into this pretty easily. Language is propositional and procedural. So when we’re talking about things that aren’t propositional or procedural, we confuse the thing for the description of the thing. Right. Because we have to to some extent, like we’re just being bombarded with propositions. But there are things that are not propositions that we can know in the world. And and when John invokes something like two worlds mythology and, you know, I think everyone’s well aware. I’m not a fan of his axiomatic statement that we can’t live in two worlds mythology. You know, it’s occurred to me recently that the two worlds mythology is a scientific construction and that nobody ever lived like that. Right. They didn’t see it. Right. So science is projecting the two worlds mythology and saying we can’t live in this. But all you’re doing there is saying we can’t live in a scientific construction. Boy, do I agree with that. Right. That that sounds right to me. And then if it’s not a dichotomy, as that would imply, if it’s a continuum, as I think with the it’s on our four types of knowing slide, right, where we’re manipulating John’s model a bit for our own ends here. You know, we have it as a continuum, right. From the material to the ephemeral. And then when you’re dealing with mythos, those are not literal stories. They’re not material stories. They’re not stories about material things that happen. That would be a literal interpretation. They are interpretable as parabolic patterns, right, ways of understanding the world, you know, in terms of symbols and metaphor. And those things aren’t propositional because they offer you the opportunity to get inside of them, move around in them and pop out of them. Maybe there’s multiple entry points and multiple exit points. But JP Marceau talked about this with John on one of the voices for Vicky where JP says, oh, you enter the symbol, then you can move through it. Right. And but I propose that maybe there’s multiple entry points and exit points. And then how that relates to religion is that religion has to meet people where they’re at. Well, where are people at? People are at all kinds of places. They’re all over the place. And so, you know, how do you meet them where they’re at? Well, you have different creeds, you have different mythos, you know, you have all these entry points. So that’s what I think in terms of that. If this is OK, because both you and Manuel have, you know, sort of powerful, constant thinking. And I think hearkening back to what you said about cognitive load, it’s OK with you. I’m going to try and come back and summarize what both of you guys are trying to point out. Is that OK? I’m just thinking about anyone listening as well, because both of you are technical, especially knowing a lot of terminology, which isn’t, you know, everyday language. So is that OK? Can I come back? Yes, please. Please do. I’m understanding you as well. It seems to me that both of you just laid out two two kind of principles. Different but important. And from there flowed different points. So starting with Manuel, if I took your proposal rightly, basically you’re saying, OK, what we want to do is, number one, draw from the mythos that we know for ancient wisdom. And number two, we want to understand a second factor, which is maybe a dynamic factor, which is called charisma. Is there a fair little way of putting out a couple of points that you made there? Well, I connected the creed with the charisma, right, as points that bind people together. Right. So that’s a relevant thing to consider in relation to Ritner, because I think in some sense they’re necessary, because how do you get people to cohere around an idea? That doesn’t work. And even if it does, right, like they don’t have the same conception around the idea. Like Mark said, oh, people come from like different places, right. So they’re looking at the elephant and they’re touching different things. And then they’re like, no, like the leg is the thing and no, the ass is the thing. And like they’re going to split up, right. Like we can see this in Protestantism, right. Like they split up all the time. Like there’s no cohesion. So you need to have something that holds things together because else you don’t have a thing. OK, so the cohesive thing is the creed. But am I right in the other half, Manuel, that the mythos is the body of ancient wisdom? Right. Right. Like I think that’s the vessel in which the wisdom is contained. I think it’s funny because actually the way I’ve mapped it out, Mark seems to be saying something similar in a different language. Right. Correct. And if I’m wrong, Mark, but here I go. You’re saying a bit like Manuel, creed versus mythos. And you’re saying, OK, they should be in opponent processing. So in a healthy tension for people who don’t know that kind of technical language, opponent processing rather than adversarial. So friendly wrestling versus I’m going to destroy zero sum my opponent. And for you, you’re saying that credo is propositional, granted, and it needs to be solid. It needs to be closed. It needs to be something I suppose to use Manuel’s language cohesive. And as such, for it to be cohesive, it can’t be a moving target. And on the other hand, you’re saying mythos is parabolic. And I’m just going to say that means having to do with stories, essentially, and narrative. Sorry to simplify something that I know is very, very, you know, involved. Yeah. So again, it seems like both of you are saying the creed needs to be cohesive. Mark seems to be saying that the the aspect of the creed, which is necessary is kind of firmness. Manuel, with charisma, you seem to be saying that’s a little bit more lively. But both of you are saying that with the mythos, it needs to be the well, actually not both of you, but Mark saying that’s the dynamic component. That’s the moving part. And for you, Manuel, you’re saying, well, that’s where we can go a bit deeper into what we know. How does that go? So I hate saying how does that land? You can describe the mythos as like the forest, right? And you can take many walks in a forest and they’re always different, right? And then they’re different because, well, like, let’s say the forest doesn’t change because it’s all written down, at least the things that we relate to right now, right? But the way the path I take in the forest might be different, right? And the things I pay attention to in the forest definitely will be different. And then the connections I’m able to make over my life will be different. Like John talks about this, right? He always goes back to Plato and he reads Plato and then he’s like making connections that he hasn’t seen before. And it never stops, right? Like he always sees more and more and more in the text, right? And we have practices that actually try to engender that relationship with text where there’s an aspirational side, right? Like the mythos is trying to open you up, right? And trying to let you relate to the world in a way that is not there before, right? So when we’re talking about a symbol, right, like I get in at this place and then I can get out of that place, right? And then when I grow my understanding of the symbol and about the space that is or the forest, right, like if I grow my understanding of the forest, like I might know a shortcut, right? Like I might see how when I took the path from the left and how that connects to when I took the path from the right. And then you start drawing a map inside your head of what can be and you start becoming more confident in this navigation of this place which is initially like really scary and dark, right? Like you go into a forest and you don’t know what’s there. That’s a great analogy. That will actually feed into the second half where I’m going to talk about human nature. So I’m going to come back to that. Yeah, so I just want to add a couple of quick things. So, you know, I think that one way to think about this that’s sort of interesting is Credo is the place you can go back to, right? Like Peterson talks about, you know, the kid goes out, comes back and goes out a little further and comes back, right? Credo is the thing you come back to. You go out to the Mythos, right, and then you come back to the Credo because it’s safe and it’s stable and it’s not going anywhere whereas the Mythos has all the qualities that Manuel sort of talked about. And then you used an interesting word with charisma, right, which is enlivened. And I think that’s exactly correct. Right. So a Credo and a Mythos are definitionally dead, right? They both have different utility and different properties and you need them both, right? And they need to be in opponent processing with one another, right? They need to be in tension. Right? And then the Mythos is engendering the parabolic, which is the symbolic, the allegorical ways of relating. And it’s about relating and connectedness. So the Credo is a linear connection and the Mythos is a nonlinear connection, right? It’ll add forward all kinds of more connections, more endpoints we’ll say. And the reason why you need charisma is to enliven, right, to make something relatable to your life as a living thing. Because if you can’t relate to something in your life as a living thing, then you can’t relate to it as strongly as something that is alive. And, you know, I don’t know that that’s true, but I suspect that that’s true and it certainly sounds right, which is a good sign, right? It doesn’t sound wrong immediately. So that gives me some hope that that’s a correct formulation. And that, you know, everyone’s allergic to it, right? And they’re allergic to it with very good reason. But it might not be something that you can sort of just brush off and say, oh, no, no, we can do without that. It might be that the only connections that people can make are with the living thing and with other living things. And so you would need and some kind of embodiment for the religion, right? And then the religion, if you look at religious systems, they all have charismatic people all throughout them, right, at different layers. And sometimes you can engender some form of charisma through, you know, authority. But then authority is the thing everyone’s complaining about, we’ll say, like with the Catholic Church in particular, right? They’re all they’re not upset about the charismatic nature of the pope, even though the popes may not be particularly charismatic, you know, personally, but they are upset about the authoritative nature of the charisma. Right. And so there’s that tension there as well between, you know, the structural authority versus the personal enlivenment of the charisma. There seems to be two aspects to it that are important. So I just wanted to call that out. It’s one of the deep problems that I see with this, you know, anti-charismatic attitude that everybody has towards these things. And I shouldn’t say everybody. I think there are people who are well aware that we have to go down that road in order to fix things sometimes. And where does that lead? You know, it could go badly, but it could also go very well. So I want to add to that, right? Like what if, what if a good way of thinking of charisma is that the ability to make connections for other people? Right. Like what, what if that’s like a highly valued property and other people, right? And like, when it happens to you, right, like you don’t know that it’s happening to you. But like, you’re like, you’re getting this sense of affirmation or, or being in right relation with the world through the presence of this other person, right? Through your relationship with that other person. And maybe they’re like, that’s like a really good definition of charisma. Do you have one, mom? It is. I, I, yeah. I like what Manuel said, right? Like maybe charisma is that property of, as he said, that’s the thing that’s important to me. And I think that’s what Manuel said, right? Like maybe charisma is that property of, as he said, being able to meet somebody where they’re at and connect them to the next step on the path. If we’re going to go with that analogy, which, you know, a lot of people use the bridge analogy and I really don’t like that one. Cause it’s very limiting. It’s point to point. It’s linear, right? And you know, it doesn’t have that quality of. There are multiple paths and we only need to get you. And maybe the paths meet further up. I don’t know, but I think that’s a better analogy is this pathing and this idea that, you know, yeah, somebody who’s charismatic. He’s hooking you into the credo, right? Maybe they’re doing a good sales job, right? But maybe it’s more than that. And that’s, they’re able to show you, no, no, there’s a step here that you can take. And if you take that step. These wonderful things will happen. Right. And, and, and maybe that’s what charisma is. I think, I think that’s, I think that’s, that might be correct. But it does have this quality of, you know, maybe it can be replaced by authority or maybe you need a little authority. Right. Or maybe you don’t have charisma with somebody until they grant you authority, right? The consent. I don’t know. That’s an interesting, interesting question that we haven’t really worked through ourselves. I think. This is great. I feel like. It’s stirring up a lot of the right ideas. Before I go too far into charisma. I wanted to jump back to credo just quickly, because I think it’s germane. Which is one part in this presentation that I didn’t elaborate on was. John’s. In his own words, tentative. Very tentative. Suggestion about what the credo could be. I’m not sure if you guys remember, but I’m, I’m, I’m sure I saw you guys in the chat room. And I’m sure you guys are thinking, well, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do this. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do this. I’m not sure if you guys remember, but I’m, I’m, I’m sure I saw you both implementing it when the discord was starting. Together with Breton, whoever else was at that earlier stage. But he was saying, well, maybe it could be like a Wiki. But the thing about it is. It has to be a, an open ended credo. Which means it’s never closed. John. And. B. Credo always has to be in the service of religio. So almost in a sense, what he was suggesting is the first proposition. Well, the first two propositions of religion that’s not a religion are one. Open ended credo. Two. Credo in service of religio. Can we just. Get feedback on that for a couple of minutes. I wanted to jump on charisma quickly and then move into what. The human nature side. That’s okay. I’m just conscious of. Covering everything. Yeah, I think, I think. I think there’s no such thing as an open ended credo. I think that, you know, I think that what. What people actually are talking about is the credo needs to evolve and change over time. And. Yeah, maybe. Because the language evolves and changes over time. And a credo is stuck to the language. So fair enough. And then. You know, a lot of people take the sort of the Sam Harris argument that religions don’t evolve, which is an absurd statement. Of course they do. Or, you know, the alternative is they’re not evolving quickly enough. And it’s like, well, how are you measuring any of that? I think even if I agree with you. And maybe I do. Why? There’s no solution to that because you don’t have a way to measure how fast they should quote evolve. And you don’t know what evolve means. Right. And then who’s going to make that decision. Right. And then so the Catholics have a solution. Right. Right. They have a big body and, you know, they’ve got an outside. Right. The Spanish Inquisition is still there. I guess they don’t burn people anymore. Which I was disappointed to hear about, but. You know, they, they do still talk about church doctrine and how it might have to change and update. And so they’ve got an internal system and an external system that’s only tangentially related. And that’s how they do it. And, you know, maybe they’re not doing it fast enough. Fair enough. But I don’t know how you’d measure that. So that’s where we get into danger. But I don’t think you can say credo has to be open-ended because you still still have to have a way to change it. So just saying something can change is not saying a thing. Right. You need a reasonable system for making those changes. And maybe if the credos in opponent processing with the mythos and mythos is also, they both have to move with the language anyway. Right. We have no choice. You know, maybe, maybe that’s the best we can do is to say that those two things in opponent processing with, with each other are also moving with the language as best they can. And that’s as close as we can get. And maybe it’s glacial change, but maybe that’s the right answer. It’s not clear to me that the Catholic church didn’t change too fast. Like that’s not clear to me either. So I’m going to have a couple of objections to Mark. Right. Cause there’s, there’s a fatalistic element in the language is changing. Right. Like where’s the language coming from? Right. Like what if part of the, the purpose of a religion is to inform people’s relationship with the world and therefore inform the language that they use and, and, and the concepts that they use to create a language. And then you can, you can see like the slowest moving structures known to man, I think is probably religion. Right. Like that’s. They’re, they’re, they’re the most stable. Right. And then, and then you can, you can even see that religions try to exert power in, in order to resist progress. Right. And if, if you, if you take the perspective of the religion, and what they were doing that, and assume that what they were doing in the moment was right. Then they definitely were correct in resisting the progress because now it’s become a mess. Right. Like you can get, get John’s argument. From the meaning crisis, right. Like, like there’s, there’s this escalation and, and there’s this building of, of. Of changes in the language. Right. And so. Like, There’s this, there’s this building of, of. Of. Changes that that we did not respond to. In a, in a correct way. And now all the religions have, have lost. The ability to react in any way that that, that will resolve this. Right. So, so in that sense, like we need to have some, some bottom up way to, to, to fix this. fix this because I don’t think the institutions have the capability anymore. So I think the religions failed because they had a dictation, well they controlled how societies function and they lost that position in society, right, and me and Mark are working on the assumption that religions inform your ethical system, right, so if the ethical system that’s being expressed by the political system is not in aligned with the religion, then the religion ceases able to propagate itself properly. That last part again? When the political system is not expressing itself through the ethical system of the religion, right, like there’s a decoherence within the society, right, and that will impede the power of the religion in people’s life and then you get decoherence, right, and then you get people like the nonce, right, they’re like, oh I can’t be in that system anymore because there’s conflicting signals and those conflicting signals are so significant to me that I can’t submit myself to the religion. I see, okay, yeah, it’s sort of like that deeper primordial religion which kind of suffuses ethics then politics is not bubbling up in a way that actually cuts through. Is that a okay way to say it? Well that’s what’s happening now, yes, like it’s not bubbling up good enough well enough yet. Well that’s interesting, I wanted to try and tie that back to charisma quickly. I know you took leave from Mark on the question of language so I took what Mark was saying to be that, well, credo needs to necessarily be stable, the only dynamic element might be, you know, keeping up with language. I suppose a classic example would be in Christianity moving from from Latin to English, for example. And it brought to my mind Socrates actually, John’s hero, and I remember hearing John saying something like Socrates laid out very few propositions and I’m just getting to the charisma part. You know, clearly, I mean, again, John Beveke calls Socrates a tithos. I suppose that’s another way for describing someone who’s charismatic. You know, I’ve got my own kind of thing about charisma being not necessarily a personal thing as such, but I won’t bring that in for the moment. But Socrates as a person who embodies some inspiration, shall we say, and John making the point that he’s made very few absolute kind of propositions and why don’t we say if there’s a religion of Socrates, then there’s very few propositions to go from. Maybe you have to draw something out of his example more. But going back to the language thing, the other thing it made me think of is there was one of Plato’s dialogues. I was talking to my dad about it the other day. Dad loves words, he loves language, all those things, and I was just reminded that in one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates is talking to someone about the dangers of writing things down. I think it might be the dialogue called Lachez or something. I could be wrong about that. But the point is he’s saying, well, the thing about this technology of writing is it actually engenders a forgetting in people. Once you start kind of offloading your things into writings and what have you, then you don’t need to remember anymore. You don’t need to hold on to those things. The irony of it is, and this is where I think Credo comes in, we only know that story because Plato wrote it down, but it’s not a story that’s going to be remembered. So because Plato wrote it down, put it into language for us to go, yeah, well, that’s interesting. Socrates as a charismatic person not proposing too many propositions and then also against too much propositional, maybe even doctrinal content as you might find in Credes. Any thoughts? Yeah, I think that’s right. So look, if you are a charismatic person, maybe you don’t need to rely on too many propositions, but it doesn’t sound like it’s zero either, which is also interesting to note. Fewer propositions is probably better. And then, yeah, it’s sort of interesting. So this idea about writing stuff down, and it occurred to me while you were saying that maybe the problem with writing stuff down isn’t just, oh, we’re outsourcing some cognitive load. We’re saying, oh, well, outsource some cognition here, and you can say, oh, it’s distribute and distributable cognition. Yes, but when we talk about distributed cognition, I think we make a grave error. You’re not just distributing your cognition. Distribution sounds good, right? Distributionism is good. You’re outsourcing, right? And so you’re not in control of that cognition anymore. And so when you write something down, even for yourself, you’re not wrestling with that idea, right? And so this goes back somewhat to the Peterson idea, right? Do people have ideas or do ideas have people? And then one of the things that John taught us in the wisdom of Hypatia, from the wisdom of Hypatia course that he did, right? That one’s called Cultivating Wisdom, if my memory serves. And in there, he’s got a practice maximization, right? And maximization is, look, you don’t read the maxims, right? You don’t just go, oh, maxim, blah, and then repeat them as a mantra. You play with them. You play with them. I think John would go into his serious play. I don’t buy the serious play. I know why he does it. I don’t buy it. Right? I just play. It’s good enough, right? Playing is good. I think John would go into his serious play. It’s good enough, right? Playing is good. You play with that until you own it, right? Until you’ve struggled with it enough that the essence of it, the idos of it, is part of you, and it has changed you, and you change it, right? You write it down in different ways. You put it in different contexts. So you really own it. You can’t do that as easily with things that are just written down. And then if you’re doing the cognitive outsourcing thing, it’s like, oh, well, look, I read the wisdom of Hypatia, so I’m good. I’m done. I’ve absorbed it all into my brain. And this is sort of this idea I’ve been playing with recently, exposure versus experience, right? You were exposed to the book. But if you didn’t do the practices in the book or go along and actually go out and engage with and seriously question the author, because I think the author makes some mistakes, because everybody makes mistakes. So if you’re seeing an author and not seeing mistakes, you’ve outsourced a little too much, I think, right? You’ve got to be very careful. And everyone’s necessarily wrong from some perspective. And maybe your perspective is different than the author’s perspective, probably, right? And so when we outsource our cognition, we have to be very careful. But if we don’t know we’re doing it, if we just take it for granted, or if we just assume that exposure equals experience, you know, oh, I know that, so I’m not going to fall prey to it. People do this with cognitive biases all the time. I know about that cognitive bias. So obviously, I’m immune to it. And that’s not how cognitive bias works. So that’s worth considering, I think. Great point. So I’m going to move on to my concern that I raised with John, because it ties into everything we’re just discussing, particularly Emmanuel, your point about charisma, that you started off with, but you wanted to say something. Well, yeah, like to respond to this circus thing, right? Like he read books, right? Like he educated himself before he made the statement not to read books, right? So that’s a little hypocritical, right? And then, and it’s also like, okay, that guy was a genius, right? Like that guy was shoulders, had shoulders, like above everybody. And like, maybe he can do that. And like, maybe John can do that. And hopefully I can do that. But like, not everybody can do that. So maybe don’t make a religion out of that, right? Like maybe you need like to help people where they’re at. And like, maybe some people need a different way of interaction than being the massive genius that can like absorb the whole world without having to lift a finger. Our history, roundly disagree with that suggestion that he made. Sorry to jump on you. Take the point. Sorry, Manuel, please keep going. Well, yeah, well, like to make that point more salient, right? Like it’s really important, right? To understand that people cannot interact with things that the way that you interact with them, right? Like we all assume that, oh, like, I know this thing. So that when I tell that to this person, like, they also know that thing. And I was like, I do that all the time. I tell things to people, right? And then I tell it like, eight different ways. And they still don’t get it. And it’s like, like, hello, like, I told you this in eight different ways. And then it’s like, well, like, how do I make the connection for you? Like, I can’t, right? Like, the relevant structures that you need to plug this puzzle piece that I give you in are nonexistent, or they’re blocked by some psychological issue. And having that understanding and like, like, having the humility that, that the way that you’re relating with the world is maybe so alien to people that it’s, it’s unattainable. That changes your perspective, and also changes changes what the functionality of religion is, right? And I think one of the functionalities of the religion is, is actually to form the cohesive structure that you do have the ability to understand each other, right? Like, what is wrong with the world today? Well, we’re all using different ways of sense making. So if there’s no coherence in the sense making, well, maybe we don’t make the same sense. And that sounds awfully a lot like what’s happening. When you were talking, the word that came up to me was transmission. Well, yeah, that’s, that’s a one way thing, right? Transmission is, is, is, there’s no participation there. How do you trans, well, the problem being like, you know, how do you transmit, like you’re talking about having eight ways of saying something. It seems to me that the credo question revolves around transmission. No, that’s not transmission, right? No, he’s saying transmission. It’s not transmission, right? No, he’s saying I transmitted it eight times in eight different languages and you heard it, but you didn’t integrate it. That’s what’s happening. And then why didn’t you integrate? Because again, it goes back to this writing things down because you didn’t participate with it. Right. And then, you know, one thing that strikes me about John’s dialogos, right, is that, especially the formal practice that he talks about is you’re supposed to restate what the person said. Like that’s a big deal, right? Because that’s, that’s not, I heard the words that you said, that’s, I understood the words you said. That’s a totally different thing. Like this is one thing that people get wrong all the time. Well, I told him X and he did it anyway. Well, yeah, but maybe when you said it, they didn’t engage with the words at all. Like maybe it was, and sometimes parents do this, right? What did I just say? Right. And they make the kids say it. Why would they do that? Because the transmission is insufficient. It doesn’t cause the transmission, doesn’t cause transformation. And it’s the purpose of the transmission is for transformation. And to Manuel’s point, if we’re stuck in a world where, and this is where sense making comes in, a lot of sense making is, is interpretation. And if we’re stuck in a world where we each interpret the same signals differently, then even if we lived in an objective reality, we’re screwed because we can’t agree on that objective reality, right? So if you see a video and it shows something clearly, and I see the same video and it shows the same thing, and we agree that it shows the same thing, but we interpret the actions differently, it doesn’t matter that objectively we saw the same video. It doesn’t make any difference, because our interpretation is different. And then after interpretation, so even if you fix the language problem and the transmission problem, and even if you fix the interpretation problem, there’s still the what to do about it problem. Because you may think, oh, well, the right thing to do is X, and I may think it’s the opposite of X. So there’s all these problems stacked up in all of these ideas. And we do, we get caught up with, well, that’s simply a transmission problem. No, it’s definitely not a transmission problem, right? It really is an understanding and absorption problem, right? And this idea that interpretation is important. So there’s transmission absorption interpretation. There’s a lot of things going on there. It’s not one simple thing. We tend to scientifically reduce it, but it’s really not. So if I pick that up, right, like what if the person who can do these things is charismatic, right? Like, what like, we’re back at that place again, right? Like, what if people have an insatiable need to cohere to the world, and the person that can provide that to them, right? Like, whatever moral framework that person is operating on is irrelevant, as long as the person provides that to them, they will cohere to that person, right? And I’m now going to the sheep analogy, right? Like the lost sheep or whatever, right? Like, we want to feel safe. We want to feel protected. We want to be in a group, right? And like, like all of these things, they come together, right? Like when people gather around one person, right? Like they’re looking at the same thing, but they’re looking with some other people who have kind of the same perspective to the same thing. So they’re related to those people immediately as well, right? Like, so there’s this whole structure that gets built in that dynamic. And I think, I think in some sense that that is necessary, right? Like, like, John talks about this, right? Like, we don’t, we don’t need everybody to be wise. We need just enough wise people so that people have someone to look up to and to imitate. And like, that’s what charisma is. Like, I think that’s John is talking about charisma, and not even realizing it in some sense, that, that, that is necessarily a part of, of the solution. Like it has to be. I think I’ve heard you clearly. Yeah, definitely. That the reason that you’re indispensable use John’s language. Let me, let me press on. I hope I, I hope you’re feeling heard, by the way. I don’t want to feel like it’s a bit hard on Zoom to give feedback and not sound like you’re interrupting. So apologies if that came across. That was really good. I think I can take what we’ve elaborated and press that into the rest. I’m going to quickly explicate what my question to John was, saying, well, look, if, if we took the religion that is not a religion as a serious thing, you know, my thinking was, well, wouldn’t you, for example, in the style of Aristotle, Aristotle, when he wrote politics, I think he got his students to go around and they collected all of the extant political constitutions in the Greek, Greek states, there are, I think there was 150 of them. And he took from that sort of large collection and probably deduced the principles. So my thinking was something similar. Like if you’re going to, what’s our most recent experience of a religion that’s not a religion? Which was around about 1850s. You had the emergence of, sort of on the tail end of his life, he didn’t die. I think it was 1847, he died actually. But anyway, Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, who founded also a religion, which to me was the closest thing. I think other people like Paul van der Kleij have raised this point. I think it was drew and brought it up. So Auguste Comte, basically his theory was, okay, we do transition as a society, because I study society in the method of physics. He wanted to call it social physics, but that name was taken. So he had to coin sociology. But he’s saying we go through the three stages. I can’t remember the first one, but it was, you go from, maybe it was the theological to the metaphysical to the positivist stage. Something like that. So roughly maybe you go from magical to religious to scientific, roughly speaking. And he’s saying out of those positivist ways of looking at the world, we can make a religion. And going back to what you guys have been talking about with charisma, I think it’s as far as I understand it, the root word for charisma is the Greek hadis, which means love. Could be wrong about that. Happy to be fact checked. But assuming that’s true, it’s only relevant in the fact that Auguste Comte’s guiding principle for his religion was altruism. You just you want to guide the religion by saying everything should be, you know, a good-natured altruism for humanity. And his religion called the religion of humanity did really well. It did so well, there’s our timeline, that if you look at the flag of Brazil, that is his slogan on the flag of Brazil. The religion of humanity took off in a big way in Brazil up until like in the early part of the 20th century. It did really well. People were into it. And even influential people like John Stuart Mill were friends with Comte. John Stuart Mill had his criticisms of the religion of humanity. And so I was bringing that up with John, is that ultimately the religion of humanity now virtually doesn’t exist. I think there’s like the church with its roof kind of broken there in Brazil somewhere and there’s about, I don’t know, 20 people or something. It kind of just died out. And his response, I think you probably heard, was, well, that’s because it was all centered around this one charismatic guy, who, by the way, he was the pope in that religion. So, fair call. The other objection I had was probably a little bit more personal in some respects, which was communism, which is explicitly not a religion. It’s explicitly against God. It’s saying, okay, sorry, I am connoting religion with God by saying that, definitely. But it’s an atheistic ideology and it’s materialistic in terms of its ontology that reality is something that you can scientifically analyze as stuff. So you’ve got that happening out of the 1850s too and we all know what happened. And that’s a personal story for me because my mother grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. And in the sense that I got from her, she had a difficult childhood, to be sure, regardless, but that the society was a sense of sort of foreboding oppression, not the sense of joy, I guess, that you would want out of a system. And I think John’s response to that one was, well, again, that was credo being too propositional. Religion that’s not a religion is explicitly going to have credo getting out of the way. Now, my driver for all of those points was essentially, even though I didn’t say it, was about human nature. And that is my real concern. Oh, can you see that? I just, again, it’s worth mentioning that when I was sort of researching a bit of the religion of humanity, that the response of the Catholic Church was really interesting. As I understood it, that massive Jesus statue that you have, I think it’s called Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. The thing about it that’s not, sorry, it’s not immediately obvious. Is there a red circle? I can’t see, sorry. But basically, there’s the sacred heart on the chest of Jesus there. And the Roman Catholic Church’s response to, I think, how the religion of humanity did so well there was to say, we’re going to have this element of Catholicism called the sacred heart movement. And from what I understood is that you’ve got like four sacred heart churches in the same street as the Church of the Religion of Humanity. You’ve got this giant Jesus thing happening on the hill. Sorry, you know, the statue is very impressive, but it’s the sacred heart beat. And again, it makes me think of love, again, charity, chadis, charisma, love. Yeah, so to butt in, we looked up the etymology of charisma earlier today. So that’s synchronicity there. But yeah, it’s favor or divine gift, right? So charisma is the bestowance upon you, the thing that is in accordance with divine nature. Is there any, like I know charity comes from the same root. Is there any correlation to love? I’m not sure where I’ve gotten that. Right. So charis is where it comes from, right, originally, which is grace, beauty and kindness. So that’s close, but not fully there. And that’s related to Aphrodite, right? Charis is one of the three attendants to Aphrodite. So maybe Aphrodite is the goddess of love. So it’s an aspect probably. Okay, well, that’s okay. That’s aligning my thing. Again, sorry, Alexander Solzhenitsyn there. What I raised to John was, you know, Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the Gulag, as you know, and wrote all about it. And it’s thanks to him and the proliferation of his writings that people who in the West were unsure about whether communism was evil or not. Sorry, communist, but let’s say Stalinism at the very least. When his work sort of got around, people realized, well, hang on, this isn’t just ideological. It’s not just you think this and I think that. There’s something more profoundly wrong going on with it because millions of people are getting killed, for example, et cetera, et cetera. And the prison camps on and on and on. Anyway, the point I made to John very simplistically was that Solzhenitsyn was invited, I think it was in 1980, might have been earlier, to give an address at Harvard University in your old hometown, Mark, Boston. And he had kind of summarized in a simplistic way. Obviously, he had spilled a lot of ink, to use the cliche, describing all sorts of dimensions of it. But he said, if I was going to make it simple, I would kind of refer back to this conversation I heard between these two babushkas when they were lamenting the state of their nation and so on and saying, well, the problem is we forgot about God. And I found that to be really powerful. If Solzhenitsyn is saying, well, that’s a nice way to tie that all up, that’s problematic. What all that points to for me is with the kind of the heat death of communism, such as it was, and with the petering out of the religion of humanity. So what would the difference be with religion that’s not a religion? And for me, the particular problem is what’s been known as human nature. And to me, this is a massive topic, right? So if it’s okay with you, I’m just going to flick through the history of that, guys, and bring it back to you after that. Thank you. Oh, sorry, there I am circling the sacred heart. So the mythos side, this also alludes to what you said earlier about a forest, I think, Manuel. What struck me about our mythos in the West is that in order for us to talk about human nature, the most successful myths that we have told involve us in the state of nature, us and nature. And I’m just going to do a little timeline of that because I found that really interesting way to follow. This also goes to your first point, Manuel, about drawing from the mythos of ancient wisdom. But also tying it into John’s hope, which is that the religion, well, I don’t know if hope is a fair word, but his outline, which is that the religion that’s not a religion would be post-narrative, it would not involve, I suppose, these things. I might be overreaching by saying that. Garden of Eden, humans in the state of nature, the classic description, myth of human nature. We’ve got a tendency to be driven, if kind of left unchecked, to selfishly go for things for ourselves. Here you can roam around the entire garden, it’s made for you, it’s all good. Here are two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don’t eat of the fruit of the tree of good and evil and we’re all okay. What do we do? Well, okay. And on and on it goes. The point being that this is in the allegory to use something that Mark mentioned earlier in Parabolic. Augustine, I think, was the one who really took this and threaded it into our story most powerfully. So the original sin myth. I find this compelling. I’ve got to be honest. To me, this is a very informative allegory. I see the tendency of human nature to be selfish. Although I don’t say explicitly this is how it all happened, et cetera, et cetera, it’s incredibly useful to me to keep a check on myself. Thomas Cole did that painting. And there’s the result of what happens if human nature is left unchecked, Cain and Abel. Rubens painted that one. Jumping forward several millennia. This human nature in the state of nature kind of idea, excuse my text up the top, but that got revived, I think, in the enlightenment with Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes was the one who introduced social contract theory to the best of my understanding. And his picture of the state of nature was the war of all against war. Or, sorry, excuse me, the war of all against all. That, again, if left unchecked, we’re just going to animalistically be self-seeking. Egoism, I think, was the philosophy that entrained this idea. So we’re going to need big daddy. We’re going to need a Leviathan. We’re going to need to empower one person who, by the way, is just as equal as the rest of us. This is the enlightenment. But there’s going to have to be the empowerment of an authoritarian leader. He’s got all the rights, I’m just going to say he, to make decisions to prevent this impulse in us to destroy one another. Contemporary John Locke saying, well, state of nature isn’t quite as bad as you think, Thomas. Actually, we’re all just interested in getting along with our local tribe. Local tribe. We know inherently that we want to look after our lives and we want to follow the natural law, as you called it. And our only need for a government or an organizing principle or credo, shall we say, is that the fact is that other tribes may not follow the natural law like we do and care about life, liberty and property. So we’re going to need to empower in a limited way a cohesion of us to prevent intrusions on those natural rights. Painting by Borton. By the way, there are so many attendant things that come out of John Locke’s philosophy. Obviously, he’s central to your country. Mark and Thomas Jefferson absolutely loved him and took him into the Constitution. This picture I’m painting here is Pennsylvania, which seems to have been one of the ways that the application of Locke’s view of human nature actually went fairly well. Where Penn, I can’t remember his first name, might have been Jonathan Penn or something like that. William Penn. Thank you. Wealthy man in his own right. Basically traded off with the King of England to say, give me that stretch of land. And instead of kind of doing it in a harsh way, he negotiated with the locals. There are stories in your history, Mark, obviously, which don’t go so well. But that’s just one application of that view of the state of nature. Rousseau’s view of the state of nature is that actually where these noble people who, you know, do so well when we’re left uninhibited, there’s the same, the noble sage. It’s probably not very correct to say that. But the idea being that if we’re left to our own devices, actually, we’re pretty happy and we’re looking after ourselves. And it’s just an unfortunate necessity that we have to interact with other people. But when we do, everybody gets an equal say. French Revolution. So, yeah, Rousseau’s ideas were underpinning a lot of the understandable, by the way, understandable drive to say, look, you’ve got these aristocrats, you’ve got everything and we’ve got nothing. If everyone’s free and equal, why does it look like this? What’s the gap? So, as much as people disagree with Rousseau, it’s expressing something about our nature as people and our desire for freedom that will never go away. Darwin. What I’m trying to do here is point to that nature and humans in the state of nature and how it’s closing. Darwin actually goes into nature and brings nature closer into us, that we’re a part of nature. It’s not just a an idea. It’s not just an idea that someone writes down in his couch, like Descartes or someone like that. Just look out there. What it’s telling us is that we’re intrinsically a part of nature. That’s a shattering idea. And sorry, the consequence of that was obviously science advanced, but so did things like social Darwinism. And what I’m trying to point to here is that these pictures of human nature, these myths that come from nature, the state of nature argument and so on, there’s a lot of credo mythos overlap. With Darwin, that gap gets kind of thinner. But does it change human nature? We still get social Darwinism and the atrocities of eugenics and those sorts of things, as well as the advance in our understanding. Why is that? I would argue human nature is drive to be selfish. Later on in the 20th century, the description of human nature finds itself in literature more. Heart of Darkness, which I think is one of John’s favourite books, from which we get the movie Apocalypse Now, by the way, details the story of the captain of a ship who goes into some place in Africa. Conrad, by the way, was the captain of a ship in the Belgian Congo. And he’s talking about the atrocities that he witnessed in the African continent. He witnessed under the reign of King Leopold of Belgium, where Africa was kind of a blank slate. And we’re just going to go in there and all sorts of horrible things happened consequent to that. What he’s saying in the book was the boat ends up in the Thames River in London at the height of empire. And that’s the point where they look into the Heart of Darkness. The point being, and the same thing happened in the movie, if you remember, the horror, the horror. They’re seeing what’s inside themselves. William Golding wrote that book Lord of the Flies, again, putting us in the state of nature. Piggy, the beast, that if left to our own devices, we will become self-seeking and warlike. Powerful, powerful stories. George Orwell, animal farm, again, using nature. So all of this is to sort of say, oh, and Heidegger, by the way, we use nature as standing reserve. Look, we’ve got to get things out of the earth. I totally get that. That image isn’t supposed to say one thing or the other. It’s only sort of to say that Heidegger’s saying that in our relationship to nature is just something that we have on tap. We actually get disconnected from ourselves in the process. We become existentially lost. This is more John’s vision of the state of nature. As I understand it, the 4E cognitive science where we’re integrated with nature. So the state of nature and the state of human nature are incredibly close together. This is his theory, I think, of embodiment, inactivism, exactation. These are inherently cognitive processes where nature and we are coupled together and so on. So that’s, okay, that should be the end of that. Do you want me to keep the slides up or put it back? I’ll put it back to our combat. What do you think, guys? Well, thank you for making this awesome presentation. So the thing I started bugging me is like, and it was especially with Darwin, is like, Darwin is a reaction, not an action. Right? Like Darwin is a reaction to his time, the scientific way of thinking, and having to integrate this thing that wasn’t inside the system into the system. And I think a lot of those philosophers are also portraying similar things. And I feel like there’s a disservice being done to religion that these concepts and these being with nature and stuff like that weren’t part of the tradition, even like maybe it’s part of the oral tradition or whatever. And so there has been a steady moving away from that. And we have a whole theory about what made those things happen. But when we get to the end, with the idea that we can disconnect from nature, that’s literally what I’m saying. There’s a disconnection and people notice the disconnection and the effort to reintegrate. But then the analysis is one or limited dimensional. And therefore, it doesn’t work. Right? And like, yeah, like maybe the problem is not the problem that you’re trying to solve. Right? Like maybe it’s not, like maybe structures emerge. Right? Like, and yes, right? Like maybe the noble savage is a thing. But maybe if you put the noble savage in a group, he’s another thing. And maybe, right, like contextualization, which is a word that I wrote down in the start. Right? Like when we were talking about signals, right? Like the thing that makes a signal relevant is what is the context in which the signal is expressed. Right? Like the thing which makes the human relevant is what is the context in which the human is expressing itself. So I think that seems to be a thing that people are missing, or at least when I receive the information secondhand, because I don’t like reading too much philosophy, that is being left out. Okay. Yeah, I think I want to echo some of that. Right? So Manuel talks about context, right? Very, very eloquently. And those things all have something in common people. Right? And then they have something else in common nature. And then they go the relationship between people and nature is X. And they go, no, no, no, it’s the opposite. Okay, but we’re never going to resolve anything. Right? So the problem with that is that the right thing, in my opinion, to do, this is something I want to do a YouTube video on in sense making is to say, all right, we’re relating to those two things incorrectly, because we can have completely opposite conclusions and clear, right? So that just means you’re looking at the thing the wrong way. If you have a paradox, definitionally, you’re not resolving it. So when you have a paradox, you’re just looking at it the wrong way. And I think that’s what really manuals kind of getting at. And then, you know, just to just to stamp that home. But then I want to draw back a little bit. And I want to say that, you know, this is a beautiful presentation. Again, I really like the second half was was interesting, too. And I like the switch in the presentation style and what you did with that. I think that what you’re actually talking about here, and, you know, obviously, I don’t know what exactly what you’re getting at, right? We’re trying to work that out. So forgive me if I if I transgress, but I think what you’re getting at, and John talked about this in one of the written our videos that that I think the last can had everybody watch at one point is problem formulation, right? Nobody knows what problem we’re trying to solve. But they don’t have a good problem formulation. They don’t have a tight problem definition of what is it that religion gives us that we can’t get any other way? Right? What you know, and then you can, you know, very nicely pointed out, Marxism is roughly a religion, right? And the way you implement it is by killing all the other religions, or at least you weaken them. And then you replace them with something else. And that’s what happened, right? That’s what Hitler did. That’s what Stalin did. Right? They both did that. Right? In I actually know somebody who’s a he was a refusenik in Russia. He was a refusenik. Wonderful guy, Russian Jew, very excellent person. One of my favorite people always ends every conversation with be well. It’s so beautiful. I really missed interacting with him on a daily basis. I used to work with him. And he says he was he was outside of Moscow. He lived in Moscow. And he was outside Moscow visiting a friend. And his friend was that way. And the KGB comes and they searched the house. And his friend comes back and he says, Well, you know, what happened? What? Why were they here? And he says, Well, you know, they were looking for they were looking for contraband. And his friend said, Well, did they did they go into the attic? And he said, Well, I don’t think so. And the guy goes up the attic. Nope, everything’s still there. The thing that was there were copies of the Torah. It wasn’t that you weren’t allowed to have a copy of the Torah in Soviet Russia. It was that you weren’t allowed to have too many of them. Which is a really weird thing. We don’t care if you practice your religion, but we don’t want you spreading it around. Right? As long as you keep repressed and keep quiet, you can do what you want, but you’re going to keep quiet. Why would they do that? Well, because if the religion’s there, the totalitarianism dies. That’s what I think happens. Right. And so this goes back to sort of the original point. I do want to make a point of clarification. I don’t think there’s such a thing as an ethical system. I think that’s a really like, how did you get their idea to me? Like, no, there’s no such thing as an ethical system. I think ethics is, you know, to give Sam Harris’s due, ethics is a landscape. And then your morality is the implementation within the landscape. But the ethics would be the landscape and your ability to understand it is something like, you know, your parabolic navigation of it, we’ll say. Right? How you make the connections, how you move around the space. That’s what gives you the flavor for what to do. And maybe religion is that domain. Right. It’s, it speaks to the ethical domain. And maybe the ethical domain has to take priority over all other domains, because one theme that’s sort of running through this sort of silently, at least for me, and maybe it’s not silent. And maybe, maybe I’m just pessimistic about what people see sometimes, is this idea of hierarchy, like hierarchy happens, right? To Peterson’s point, it’s older than trees. Like, it’s a thing. First of all, you know, the irony is people talk about aspiration, and then they want to destroy hierarchy. Well, that’s an interesting contradiction to live in. Like, I don’t, that’s cognitive dissonance. Like, you can’t aspire to be better if there isn’t a better. And if it’s, if there is a better, there’s a hierarchy. So you’re not getting around hierarchy. Right. So you just have to live with it. You have to find better ways to deal with it. But, you know, I really see this presentation as, you know, the first half was what are the components we’re dealing with? Right. And the second half was what is the problem we’re trying to solve? And like, how does that land with you? Does that sound roughly correct? Yeah, I really appreciate you bringing it back to that, actually, Mark. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was sort of pushed into that direction about the state of nature and human nature. So I’m grateful for the chance to kind of flesh it out. I think my point about that is that the fundamental problem of getting along with other people, in my experience, is that there is this, to use your language, this kind of silent theme, underneath getting along with people, which is you never know at what point you’re going to be able to get along with people. Which is you never know at what point yourself or any other person who you trust is going to succumb to a weakness or a temptation if given the right circumstances. The lab talks about that, I think you know that. That you don’t really see people per se until a situation emerges where it’s like that. I don’t want to be too dark about this, can I just make the point? But I also think that disregarding it in total is a problem, is a big problem. I’m probably revealing a little bit about my own position. One thing, for example, that I love about the United States and the constitution is that that whole idea is built here. We’ve got a president and he can make some executive orders, but he’s checked all along the way. Or she is, you know, etc. You know what I’m trying to get at, okay? Does that make me conservative? I don’t really care if people think that or don’t think that, I’m not going to say. My simple point is that keeping it in mind is, to go to your point Mark, part of what the mythos helps us to do. Now I don’t walk around going, that guy’s going to knife me, or you know, just wait until that person turns into a nasty this or that. Quite the opposite. Religiously, I go, I see all that stuff in me. I need a way to keep a good distance from that. That’s what I was trying to point out in that. And I was implicitly saying, in that. And I was implicitly asking the question, how does written idea with that? Just getting more. Right. No, that’s good. I like that. I like that. So here’s what I would say about that. I would say that, yes, now you’re pointing at the problem, part of the problem definition, right? To John’s point, you’re pointing at part of the problem definition, right? People can react and respond differently sort of randomly. And then what do we use to mitigate that? And then one thing, since you invoke to lab and you know, I love to live, so I’m going to run with that baby. Right. One thing is how are we anti fragile when participating with others and how are, how do we know that they’re anti fragile? Right. Do you use to lab’s terminology, which I think is perfect here. And then what I would say is, well, that’s what religious belief is all about. Right. And then it’s very strange. You know, you, you invoke the constitution and rightly so, and the founding fathers were explicit, doesn’t work without God. The American experiment doesn’t work without God. Now they don’t say a particular religion, right? But they do explicitly say God. And I think they mean big G God. Now I could be wrong about that, but, but yeah, you know, and, and you know, it’s also interesting too, you know, you bring up William Penn, he was the friends, that’s what they were called. Right. And yeah. Right. And then that was a particular religious movement, right. That went to a particular part of my country. But the friendly relations with the natives happened right from the beginning. Right. So it’s interesting, right. Because the, the idea that we have about that relationship is very, very wrong. If you, if you ever get a chance to read actually by, by, by a percentage, the, the worst human war in, in North America, in terms of the, in terms of the colonies was the first Indian war. And nobody knows about it. Fascinating subject. You’ll, you’ll figure out where the roots of all the, all the Native American problems happen. But that, you know, it’s interesting that, that, you know, a lot of the things we sort of blame for that, like, oh, they didn’t like the natives. No, they love the natives. The natives kept them alive. That’s what Thanksgiving is about the United States. Right. Just to jump on that. You do realize that that picture I showed was reinforcing that point about Panty. Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. But, but yeah, you know, people go back and forth about this, right. They go back and forth about, right. But, but they’re, they’re, again, they’re comparing things that are paradoxical and all that. I think all that tells you from a sense-making perspective is that you’re looking at the wrong thing. I think paradoxes definitionally shouldn’t exist. Therefore, if you’re taking human and nature, you’re not going to get an answer to anything. You’re just going to get a bunch of paradoxes you can’t resolve. The higher thing is the reason why they had respect for the Native Americans was they knew that the Native Americans had a sense for a higher power. They just didn’t agree on what it was. But that was the experiment was, can we get a bunch of people with different religions to live together? That was the American experiment. That’s it. It wasn’t any more difficult than that. Now there were a lot of problems implementing it and that’s another area where we get crazy, right. We can imagine a lot of things and the number of things we can implement seems to be several orders of magnitude smaller than the things we can imagine and we often get confused, right. We say, oh, well, I can imagine doing things this way and how they would work out. Yeah, but when you go to implement things, they don’t work out, right. That’s just nature. But the problem is we need to participate with others because we’re insufficient, alone. And you can extend that. That scales all the way out, right. You can be alone in the woods, sure, but then you’re going to die and probably it’s going to suck, right, because most deaths suck. And you’re more vulnerable, you’re more likely to die if you’re on your own. And then, of course, if you want to be sort of civilized, to use the Peterson term, right, women’s civilized men. So obviously, you know, just on that level, you probably want to have a woman around and then, but then that’s additional burden on you, right. So, I mean, these things interplay very closely and then that scales all the way up, like the larger group you have, the better housing you can build, right, the more you can specialize, all of this, you know, works better. So we have a deep need to participate. We have a deep need to participate. And then how do you be anti-fragile about participation? Because to your point, people snap, people snap all the time, things happen to them. And, you know, they’re not obvious. We like to, oh, it’s definitely this. That’s not how things work. Things aren’t singly causal, right. Oh, it was, you know, the culmination of a whole bunch of things, right. And then maybe, but there’s usually an event that triggers it, right. So you got both sides again, right. So that’s probably the wrong way to look at things. You are going to transgress I’m going to transgress against you. These things are going to happen. They are inevitable in participation, which I just established we need. How do we resolve that? Well, the whole thing from my perspective about resolving that is ethics. That’s what ethics is about. How do we resolve the fact that transgressions are going to happen, that we make mistakes, we’re going to continue to make mistakes, not only in dealing, participating with one another, but also with nature. Like, we’re going to cut down one too many trees sometimes because we don’t know how many trees, because we can’t, because, you know, the time changes, the number changes all the time. Right. Because if you’re not having, if you’re, if you just had a one in a hundred year storm, you could probably cut down all the trees and they’ll regrow before the next one in a hundred year storm and everything will be fine. But you don’t know that like that’s ridiculous. Right. And so that’s ethics is how do we deal with ourselves in relation to one another and each other and nature. Right. And for that matter, and the more important one, how do we deal with the participation with ourselves? Because in this individualistic selfish society, we don’t have a sense that we have to do that, but we do, we need to struggle with ourselves. This is one of the things I think that meditation, John’s meditation in particular really gives you a handle on, right. Really gives you the ability to see, oh, there’s something going on that I don’t really know, right. To go all Petersonian on it. You don’t know what you’re up to. You don’t know, right. Like sometimes you’re up to things and you have no idea that you’re up to them. That happens to me all the time. I go, oh, why did I do that? That wasn’t, yeah. Why did I, what’s going on there? What was present for me in that moment? I don’t know. That happens all the time. And ethics, if it’s the art, we’ll say, because it’s definitely not a science. If it’s the art of dealing with transgression with others, with ourselves and with nature, then that makes sense. But then also it has to be the highest order of the day, right. It has to be the thing that you defer all other principalities to. And then what manages, how do you have access to ethics? What manages your access to that landscape? How do you do that? Well, that I think is religio, right. Is this, right. And, you know, at first I was really resistant to John. You brilliantly brought up John’s short form definition of religio was connectedness. And I really didn’t like that. I was like, oh, I don’t like that at all. Right. It really upset me in a good way, right. It was really challenging my ideas, but I kind of like came around. It took about a month, I think. I kind of came around and said, oh, I see what he’s talking about. Right. But what’s tied up in connectedness? What’s tied up in connectedness is connectedness is participation. That’s what it is to be connected to something truly connected to something is to participate in it. And it is also participating in you. And then how much of you should you impart to it and how much of it should be imparted to you. That’s ethics, right. That’s so religio is tied up in ethics. That’s how I would argue that. And then that’s really important. So what is the problem definition? The problem definition for me, and this is probably not complete, right. But it’s something like we need a way to navigate the ethical landscape in order to participate with one another, to lead maximally evolutionarily fitted lives. Right. And then that needs to be the highest principle for our actions in most cases. And then you could say, well, that’s all great, Mark. But you know, you didn’t tie this back to religion and to that to that anti-fragile sense. But if you think about it and you walk with me a little bit further, I will tie it back. If I see a cross around your neck, maybe I don’t know what denomination of Christian you are. But I know at least that you’re aware of the need for participation, your original sin, and the fact that being aware of those things means that you are more likely than somebody who doesn’t have a cross to act in a manner that is ethically acceptable to me. Right. It doesn’t right. There’s no certainty there because the world is not a certain place. That’s a scientific worldview. Right. The non-scientific worldview, which I think is more closer to the world we actually participate in because we’re not perfect creatures, is that, well, I just need better odds. And this is something Taleb talks about. Right. He talks about you don’t need to win every time. Right. He didn’t win every time. Right. He was up 1% down 1% up 1% down 1% up 1% down 1% and 8,000%. Right. Like, whoa, that’s what I want. I want the optionality, to use Taleb’s terminology, of having the big windfall. And the big windfall is when I interact with more people that have crosses around their neck than not, I am more likely to get somebody who’s going to treat me fairly. Right. Or who’s going to treat me better than I deserve even because a lot of Christians, in my experience, treat me better than I deserve at times. And I’m grateful. Right. And so I think that’s the utility in the religion is that it allows us to have some anti-fragile sense of what other people are up to and what we’re up to. Because hopefully we’re participating in this process of I’m a flawed creature. I will transgress. I need to deal with that. Right. Those are the three things. I think that’s, you know, that’s roughly part of the hard problem of defining what RITNAR needs to solve, for lack of a better terminology. Well, and to build up on that, right? Like, what’s the way that you increase your odds is to make the people around you wear this symbolical cross. Right. Like, if you get people to cohere to the same ethical system that you cohere to, Peterson made this point in Maps of Meaning, right? Like, we have expectations of people. And when they cohere to these expectations, we feel safe. And when they don’t, we register a threat. Right. So how do you get people to cohere to your expectations? Well, if they’re looking at the same thing as you, and they’re perceiving the same thing as you, then they will respond the same way as you, and you’ll be safe. Like, you have a rule that you can navigate that is predictable, that is relatable. And here I’m going to go with my pragmatism. It doesn’t matter. Right. Like, at a certain point, that is more important than other stuff. Right. That’s more important than having a complete scientific understanding of whatever you want to understand. Like, at a certain point, you’ve got to just, like, go all in into the game. Right. And this is another point. Like, Peterson says, you don’t get to play some games unless you’re all in. And I think religion is one of those games. Right. You need to be all in because you need to reconfigure yourself. And then you need to get people to do that. Right. Like, that’s surrender. Right. Like, that’s submitting to, well, TNFable because you don’t know what’s on the other side. So, if we’re talking about problem formulation, well, how do you get people there? Can I try and summarize what you just said? Sure. I want to make sure I understood you right. I’m summarizing it like you’re saying the fact of the matter is religion is an all in game. And the starting point is that everybody has to play by the same ethical rules. Am I wrong in that take? Well, not the same. Close enough. Right. Like, you’re not going to be the same. Right. Like, that’s impossible. But you have to see the same ethical landscape, maybe. And maybe seeing the same ethical landscape gives you a better possibility for your moral implementation because that’s what I think morals are to be something that I will find acceptable. Right. And maybe I’m even on the wrong side of that equation, but now I have the affordance. Right. I can say, oh, you know what? You did this to me and it was bad, but you meant well. Right. Because you’re a Christian, for example, or because you’re a Muslim or because you’re a Jew. Right. Like, right. And I can make assumptions like that when I know what your religious affiliation is. Right. Or at least roughly whether or not you have one. If you don’t have a religious affiliation, I have no way of understanding your ethical makeup. I don’t know what ethical landscape you see. And therefore, I can’t determine what moral standard you’re going to apply to your own behavior or to mine. Because there’s another problem, which is why did this thing and you think it’s wrong and maybe it’s objectively not wrong, but you think it’s wrong because your moral compass is off because your understanding of the ethical landscape is different from mine. And so that doesn’t allow us to participate. Right. So it goes both ways. Like there’s problems all around when we don’t have a cohesive view of the ethical landscape and a cohesive navigation tool for it. Right. Because it’s very easy to fall into the self-deception, right. This cognitive bias stuff and say, oh, well, you know, I didn’t do that because I’m selfish. I did that because of X, Y, and Z. And I had to. Right. That happens to me all the time. Right. I hopefully I catch myself. Right. I go, oh, no, no, you’re doing that because you’re being an egotistical son of a bitch today because you’re in a bad mood or something. Right. Because that happens. And that’s one of the perennial problems that John talks about. So I think that written R not only has to address or give people methods of addressing the perennial problems, but also address this. We need it. We need to see the ethical landscape, you know, in roughly the same way and trust that the moral implementation is done in good faith. Otherwise, we have a problem. And that’s not an anti-fragile way to be. That’s a fragile way to be because you do get into one of those two states, that paradoxical states. Like, you know, you don’t have a religion. Are you one of these nature guys or are you one of these, you know, other guys? Right. Like, I don’t know. What’s your relationship? I don’t know what your relationship to nature is if you don’t have a religious tradition. Right. I don’t know anything about your ethical stance if you don’t have a religious tradition. And I want to bind this back to one of the things that you started with, which is like, how do we deal with the hierarchy and with problems there? And it’s like, well, if we do have at least like, we’re going to go with the outside cognition part, but like, if we have a group of people that have this ethical system and their relationship to it, their participation in it correctly attuned, then they will naturally, emergently take action against transgressions. And that’s the solution. And it has to be the solution. Yeah. Or at least it’s the best solution available. Right. That’s the other thing that Taleb likes to stress, right, is that, yeah, you’re not getting a 100% kit. That’s not happening. Right. And so once you deal with that, and I like to say I’m a pragmatist, I calculate casualties first. Right. Once you deal with the fact that you’re not perfect, because you’re not perfect, and you’re not going to be perfect. So, right, then you can say, all right, well, what about scale? Right. Because I think this is where it goes wrong. Right. And people talk about this. Peterson talks about this in particular. Right. Like, you know, once you kill your first five million people, what’s five million more? Nothing. Right. So the problem is that it’s like, well, if you’re aiming for perfection, then you’re aiming for zero people killed. And then once you have to kill your first person, because you have to kill somebody, somebody’s going to disagree somehow, and they may manifest by coming after you. But, you know, look, the ideology must live on. Right. The government is important. Or, you know, my mission is important, whatever it is. So I had to kill him. But once it’s won, and you have no way, but you didn’t think, oh, well, how many is too many? Like, how many tells me I’ve gone off the rails? Right. Because not everyone’s going to try to kill me. Or maybe if everyone tries to kill me, I have gone off the rails. Right. Like, you have to be able to think that way. If you’re stuck in the binary mode of, you know, oh, we can’t kill anybody. Once you kill your first person, you’re going to kill a hundred million more. Guaranteed. Right. Because you haven’t dealt with the fact that the measure is not perfection. The measure is how many is too many. And that’s why pragmatists, you know, good pragmatists, in my opinion, calculate casualties first. We’re not going to save everybody. But what’s the right determination to know the right people to save? Because it’s not just numbers. Right. It might be women and children first, for example. Right. Because, you know, uh, uh, just evolution. Right. So, so there’s lots of ways that to make that calculation, that if you’re not looking at it, you’ll get blindsided by the results of trying to be perfect and falling short because we all fall short. Uh, I’m going to have to go soon, guys. Um, so I’m just going to foreshadow that. I feel like we’re getting to the heart of the matter, so to speak. Uh, with, with, with what Manuel said about having like a set of close enough, agreeable, uh, ethical norms. I hope that’s okay to say. And what you’re also saying quite similarly, I think Mark, which is if you’ve got, if you’ve got a, an affiliation with a known set of norms, I then know how better to participate with you. Am I, is that okay? Yeah. Yeah. You have an expectation that at least I’m aware of the fact of an ethical space, like an atheist, I don’t know if they’re aware that there’s an ethical landscape. I don’t know how they view it. And so I don’t know how they’re going to interpret it. Well, perhaps this is, uh, I’m sorry, maybe you all did. No, I was fine. Well, yeah, perhaps this is the right way to, to finish up because all of the, um, arguments and debates around this meaningful stuff, I think revolve around the various questions that have emerged in our conversation. Uh, things like how do you deal with paradox? Uh, are ethical rules imposed or not? Do you judge other people by the symbols they portray or not? Um, does mythos necessarily have to deal with the question that’s commonly known as human nature? Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good, that’s a good summary. I would say that the way to continue the conversation past this, if you’re, if you’re ready, willing and able, or when you’re ready, willing and able, um, is to continue down the problem definition road, right? And carefully consider, as I know I’ll be carefully considering, because this is, this is, uh, uh, excellent, right? And within an excellent direction, uh, from my perspective, really challenged right, right at the edge of our thinking, I think, uh, I don’t want to speak for Manuel, certainly challenge the edge of my thinking, um, about these issues. And, uh, yeah, the continuing the problem definition might be a really fruitful thing for the written R in general. Right. I think this format is actually more fruitful than having a discussion on discord. Um, and I like, I like ending on a bunch of questions. Uh, that’s great. Oh, fantastic. I’ve loved it guys. I mean, this, this, uh, this topic is near and dear to me. I care about it. I’m so grateful to have friends to talk about it with in a community that, uh, you know, is open to flushing it out and not kind of locking it down. Uh, and I’m really grateful to both of you for your time, given the hour as well. I really thoroughly enjoyed it. Yeah. Thank you for setting this up. This is a lovely presentation and a really fruitful conversation in my opinion. And, uh, yeah, you know, I hope that I hope that, uh, you know, we can get through to people that participation is the key and John stuff is based on participation. And, you know, we do the meditation every day on the SIR on the discord server for a reason. Right. And some of these other practices, like we’ve got the group, like Deo Divina, right. We’ve got philosophical fellowship. We’ve got a bunch of other stuff we’re working on. Right. So, and I think that is the key, just noticing this landscape and that it exists and dealing with ourselves as, as other people, right. Because we transgress. Yes. Amen. That might be proposition number three for a written R. Okay, guys. Uh, awesome to talk to you and I’ll stop the recording. And.