https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pGdLBupTKWA
Okay, we are now recording my friend. Yeah, so as I’m mindful actually right now of what I would say is maybe a hope, but certainly a curiosity. We both came into this with apparently some energy. I’m wondering if it’s coordinated. It may not be. They may actually just be completely different. I will, to the degree to which what you’re bringing, a true degree which there’s not a natural harmony, I will orient my attention to what you’re bringing. So the thing that I came in with, I was just on a call with Zach Stein. Brilliant mind. One of the places that we found ourselves in, and this is you and Greg and actually Jordan Peterson came to my mind here, which has to do with the, how do we say it right? So the mental health crisis, as part of the meaning crisis, we have the mental health crisis. But the mental health crisis is now going hyperbolic. Yes. Because the context is breaking us in many, many different ways. Yep. And I would even say just I would assert that from my point of view, the moves, the place we are at is intolerable. Yeah. And there’s really only two moves. One move is to find a way up. The other move is to go down. Yeah, we’re at a bifurcation point, I think. We’re at a bifurcation point, precisely. OK, so practically speaking, one of the primary challenges is the challenge of how do we actually provision a capacity for supporting individual mental health in the upward direction that is adequate, scalably, i.e. scalably adequate to the magnitude of the challenge. So certainly, if we were to do something like let’s enroll every professional mental health practitioner, socialize that and make that available into some triage mechanism. First of all, that’s insane. There’s no way that would ever happen. But even if it did, it’s orders of magnitude below the level of capacity in fine-grained capacity that’s needed. Because the mental health crisis has a… The downward movement has a reciprocal closing dynamic. We’ve got a network effect working against it. So we need a network effect working for us. Yep, I agree. So one of the… I was kind of doing the Hollywood pitch thing where it’s like throwing out combos and triads as almost like design constraints. Like it’s like, you know, the player meets the matrix. So the dynamic was something like Gen Z itself. So targeting Gen Z as a, hey guys, good news and bad news. Bad news is nobody’s coming to help. Good news is you may be able to bootstrap yourself with a little bit of help. With the amount of help that is coming, we may be able to work this out. Right, right. And the triad was something like Ender’s Game, the book Damon and… By Herman Hesse? Pardon? By Herman Hesse, the book Damon? No, no, by Daniel Suarez. It’s like a science fiction, techno thriller. Okay. And then something like what you’re working on with the Alogos, what Zach’s working on with the Academy, which is to say a highly peer-to-peer protocol. It’s fundamentally a protocol where individuals can begin to get into relationships that are generative, i.e. in operating the protocol, the interaction between individuals within pretty wide latitudes will serve to up gradient them as individuals and their capacity to enter into relationship with each other and with others. So it’s an auto-empowering network empowering protocol. Right, so you’re trying to create a virtuous cycle to counteract a potentially vicious cycle. Yes, so for example, I’ll give some articles, artifacts of the protocol. And I think this first piece is crucial. I’ll use the metaphor of an electrical circuit system because I’ve been working on DIY solar power systems. One of the things that shows up often, I think, and I’ll use Jordan Peterson as an archetype, but there’s many others in Gen Z, I think it’s happening all over the place, is individuals end up trying to hold more of their social graphs total need than is in fact right, which is to say more than they can. So they burn, they burn out. And it’s like, if you think about it in terms of building a network, and then you build a circuit graph on top of a circuit, like electrical circuit on top of that, you have to have the right amount of the wire gauge and the right kind of circuit breakers for the amperage that needs to flow through the circuit. Right, right, right. And any particular location that it shorts, I think it’s not grounded, which I love the montanjo of that, will tend to have all the current flow through it and it will blow up. The key message here is as a primary protocol, as an individual, you have to take deep responsibility for neither being more nor less than what you need to be in the context of your network. And if you’re holding, and this is Jordan Peterson, like he did the Daedalus thing, or he did the, his hubris was in fact to endeavor to hold more than was actually his to hold. He was trying to bear more people’s crosses than his own cross solo. And therefore, this may or may not be true, but it’s irrelevant as a metaphor, it’s useful. And therefore, actually more energy, more came to him than he could possibly handle. He actually became a lightning rod and the ambient energy that couldn’t flow where it needed to flow, found him, went through him and just blew him out as a circuit. And anybody who goes in that direction, anybody who tries to do too much will get blown out, which ends up then being a massive category here because now you’re no longer able to provide to your network what you’re supposed to provide. So not only you’re no longer providing more, you’re actually actively providing less, which creates cascade failures. So as a protocol, the protocol is to be very careful to recognize that you are not permitted, you’re sort of are not permitted to carry more than is in fact yours to carry. And a primary virtue is to have very fine grain nuance, like deep sensitivity to that. And noticing that it’s crucial for you to pull away from things when that energy is flowing towards you when you’re reaching your limit. Because if you burn out, that whole network has to get rebooted as an example. I can’t believe how consonant this is with what I wanna talk about. So- Sweet, all right. So that was a good one. I would believe in synchronicity. I made a few notes, but I don’t know about how to get a consultant very much. Okay, so a slight bit of context. As I mentioned, I just finished the play by Albert Camus. Excellent book. And of course, in many, many, many ways, resonantly relevant to what’s going on right now in a profound way. I’m reading it with my friend Dan Schappi. He’s the guy that I’ve done all the work on with the Rovers on Mars and all the technology around that. And we’re both Camus fans. And he told me there’s a character in the book. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book, but there’s a character in the book, you are. So he told me throughout that I was Teru. And he made that identification and he was very confident about it. And then as I went along, I’m more and more acquiesced and I thought, yes, this is Teru. And of course, I won’t say how the book ends around Teru. But towards the end of the book, Teru says something. Now I knew this quote had come from Camus, but the association with Teru was particularly, it really sunk into my heart because of the identification. Teru says, you know, how to be a saint without God is the problem I’m up against today. Okay, so let me try and how does, how, so and then I realized, okay, that’s a really pertinent way. And the fact that he’s saying that within the context of a plague, of course, made it deeply resonant for me. All right, so then I started thinking about this and I started thinking about, well, as I’ve been trying to wrestle with that question, I take it very seriously. It’s in some ways a very accurate self description as well. And so, and notice already, you’ve already been talking about virtue and that sort of brings this up right away. And then I thought about these four figures that I’ve been talking about because the saint actually belongs to, you know, a family. There’s the shaman, there’s the sage, there’s the saint. And I’m trying to work out what the saint is by putting him or her into that family. And then, you know, find the genus, do the rest of the thing, find the genus and then work out the specific differences. But then I said, but there’s a fourth one that doesn’t properly belong, but is often mistakenly put in this category. And that’s the star, that’s the star. Now, how does this connect with what you’re just, I mean, when people become stars, right, celebrities, right? And then I’m thinking, how does this resonate with what you’re saying? Because the shaman, right, and the sage and the saint are all figures that transcend the normal humanity but do not grasp at Godhood. They do exactly what you’re talking about. They find the place to be as much as they can, but they never give in to, at least when they’re behaving as they should. Think of it, the sage that goes too far in their identification with God, because blasphemous. The sage that, sorry, the saint, the sage that thinks they have God-like wisdom has forgotten Socrates completely and utterly. The shaman who can’t return from the soul flight is no help to his community, right, is no help to his community. But the star doesn’t fall into that. The star is expected to just rise and rise and rise. And they’re not allowed to fall at all. In fact, if the star falls, starts to fall at all, they’re immediately attacked and canceled and vilified, right? And I thought, what’s going on? So first of all, what does it mean to be a saint as opposed to just a shaman or a sage? And I’d like to talk to you with that. But then what is it about the saint, the shaman, and the sage that is reliably different from the star? And so one way to think about, at least the myth of Jordan Peterson, whether or not this is an accurate description of his biography, that’s a much more complex and difficult question. I think there’s accuracy to it, but I would not claim that it is completely, that it is complete or coherent. Let’s say the myth is of somebody, and listen to the language of a meteoric rise, right? The stardom, he’s been described as a star and a rock star. But when he tried, but I think initially, Jordan wanted to be the shamanic healer, or he wanted to be the sage advisor, or he wanted to be the saintly exemplification of virtue. But he didn’t stay in those. He got sucked into stardom, and stardom is a place that blows that apart because it mistakes, right? It mistakes optimization with, right, with as maximization of some function. So what’s interesting to me are these people who serve as vectors by which the network can bootstrap it in the way you said we need to give to Generation Z, the shaman’s bootstrapped cognition, the upper Paleolithic transition, the sages bootstrapped the Axial Revolution, the saints bootstrapped the Christian Revolution, but they did it without doing the thing you worried about, what they are worrying about here. Do you see what I’m saying? They don’t, they don’t, I mean, obviously there are individuals who fail. I’m talking about when this archetype is working, when these archetypes are working. I’m trying to get at what’s going on in those individuals, both what is genetically shared and what is specifically different between them, because I proposed to you that we need something beyond the shaman, the sage, and the saint, but not the star. So do you see how this is actually really resonant with what you’re talking about? Yeah, well, yes, and what I’m noticing is like, what did you say? If you were you, you would call it synchronicity. I’m feeling, I don’t know if there’s a word for it. Okay, just hold on. So one of the things that, why is this happening? One of the words I would use to describe the thing that is called synchronicity is a little bit like when you get your lenses into focus. Yeah, yeah. It’s that feeling of insight when a whole bunch of different experiences in the outside, all of which have their own complexity, certain elements of those distinct experiences remind you of the thing that ultimately was the shift in you. And you’re like, oh, the shift in you has integrated wholeness, and then you project back out to those and integrated wholeness that was happening in the outside. But part of that actually is that lensing shift. And I’m feeling in the back of my mind something that wants to go there. It’s an effort to try to bring something into clarity. But the lens is not a camera lens. It’s like thousands of lenses that actually have to get into arrangement so that they have the right, I guess, it to come into resonance. So, and I’m also holding that really interesting metaphor of like the circuit, like the physical groundedness of the circuit. And that notion of ground, that notion of the energy, like literally energy, not metaphorically energy, literally electrical energy that flows into something and when it’s not grounded, it short circuits, right? That’s the fall of the star, right? The collapse of the star is that. And so there’s something like an ungroundedness that is part of that move. And so it’d be an interesting question to say, okay, hold on, that’s cool. So what I had proposed was like the next Buddha is a Sangha. That it’s the thing that we’re challenged with right now is to understand how not to do this thing in the form of individuals. And maybe that’s exactly what the star is. The star is an effort to do as an individual with properly belongs in a network. That’s right. Because you can’t, no given individual human can possibly hold the energy and complexity that is actually looking to flow through that point. But because the energy and complexity does wanna put to that point, if you embody it meaningfully, i.e. if you can’t embody shaman, sage, and saint meaningfully and to begin to integrate them, that energy will flow into you, which will begin to raise you up. But by raising it up, it actually pulls you away from the graph. So you actually get a reciprocal collapse, meaning that precisely the degree to which you have the capacity to actually hold that energy, you’re setting yourself up for real problems. Because if you pull away from your actual communities, from your actual network graph, you will lose the grounding that you need to have to avoid a collapse. So there’s an asymmetry problem there, which is to say the star becomes superhuman, becomes more than human, becomes too godlike, and therefore loses connection with the groundedness of humanity, the groundedness of literally the actual relationships of other people that hold the capacity and support them so the energy can flow through them. So there’s like a humiliation effect that is necessary to maintain the capacity of the individual to stay grounded and enmeshed, but also a recognition of the fact that the next Buddha is the Sangha. Like no one individual that moves too far, if the relationships break, if the relationships can’t hold what’s happening, you’ve missed it. So you have to go back down and say, okay, we can only move if we progress in a fashion where we’re coming together. Okay, one last piece. I remember having this insight many years ago, maybe a decade ago, maybe even 15 years ago. And it was something like, why are you doing what you’re doing? And I said, well, the primary reason why, I’ll say the first part. First part, I have certainly for a very long time been quite a misanthrope. So I don’t really have a very high degree of personal interpersonal like yay, in interacting with other people or with people in general. Although examples of what people have done are amazing, but broadly speaking, and certainly 15 years ago, not a big fan of people. And so a question is like, well, why are you doing what you’re doing? And the answer is in fact, I thought through the problem and I reached the conclusion that the only way that we can actually solve this thing is that we have to solve it in a fashion which encompasses effectively everybody. Yeah. There is no way to save me. There’s no way to save my family. There’s no way to save my tribe. There’s no way to save my nation. There’s no way to save that subset of the total humanity that I care about the most without in fact also effectively saving everybody. There’s an up and there’s a down and the up is big and the down is big. Well, this is what I’m saying here is that same thing. The magnitude of the energy and information that needs to flow through the system and the system here is humans in relationship with each other and probably technology is enormous. It’s just incomprehensible how big it is and no given individual or a subset of the whole could possibly hold it. And so the challenge is to say, okay, how do we progressively allow that generative capacity to flow in through the individuals who are sensitive to it? Don’t blow your circuit, right? Use that to build more capacity in the network that is around you. That now becomes effectively a node in some sense, right? That can’t blow its circuit. It becomes a kind of a fractal network graph but is able to flow that energy to increase its own interior capacity at each individual node in its relationships. Basically you’re adding stronger gauge wire and better circuit breaker. And then builds its connectivity to the exterior, right? It has to be a generative process where, hey, person over there who I don’t know, I have right now an intrinsic interest in your betterment, in your wellbeing and your being made more what you are capable of being. For you to achieve your highest in yourself and for who you are. Because at the end of the day, my network needs you. And it’s a very simple, like very simple equation at the end of the day. And the only question is really a matter of like right relationship and right timing. Yeah. I can’t, I currently don’t have the capacity to support you beyond this level now, for whatever reason. And your needs are X, Y, and Z’s. We just need to sort of constantly find what is our right relationship in this moment and how does it upgrade it so that we’re continually increasing the quality of our individual collective capacity to support each other in that reciprocal opening. Wow, Jordan. That was both eloquent and revealing of you as a person. So, that’s a, sorry, I mean this seriously. That’s a noble transformation that had gone through, right? To go on from being misanthropic to something that to my mind is phylaic or perhaps even agapic in its orientation. Yeah. So, you can say I love my kids quite dearly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the experience, I mean this is the Christian metaphor. The experience of the agapic love of your children is supposed to be a metaphor that you exact outwards towards all people. Yeah, nice. The fact that that happened for you makes a lot of sense. Okay, so that’s great. But I’m still up against Tarrou’s problem. And he says the problem I’m up against because I was thinking, you know, the shaman in different ways, the shaman and the sage and the saint, but especially the saint, Tarrou’s, Tarrou aspires to, right? They do epitomize that virtue you’re talking about. The virtue, there’s two virtues here. There’s the virtue of humility and then the related virtue of something like, you know, phileo or charitas, the sense of belonging to the ecclesia if you’re a saint, belonging to the school if you’re a sage, and of course belonging to the tribe if you’re a shaman. And those two things are paired together, right? But Tarrou’s problem is the thing that did that, that kept people, that put a ceiling on Icarus and kept people bound together was the divine, God. That’s why he’s in the problem he’s in. How do you, it’s like, how are you to be a saint without a God? I mean, one of the ways of thinking why we have stars is because we have the death of God. We fling people into the heavens because we find the heavens empty, but they can’t stay there like Icarus, they fall back down. Right, right, right. Right, and so. Yeah, yeah, it’s a bivariable problem. So I’m seeing like two images. One image is the story that you’re telling right now which is precisely the notion of, and it’s funny, it’s like the helpful, the helpful wrathful God, when he sees Daedalus going too high, like whacks him on the head and says, stay there. Which is, I don’t know, treat the metaphor. This is the kind of the bad father parenting style, right? Instead of inculcating in Daedalus the wisdom to make effective choices, creates an extrinsic kind of enforcement regime that ensures that Daedalus stays within effective operating parameters without becoming responsible himself. Right, so that’s the problem of God, right? So you’ve got a bad God gets good results through bad methods that effectively make people weak. Okay, that’s one side of this equation. The other side of the equation is I’m seeing, what is it called? Let’s go with like a evangelical, it’s almost like a black church which is giving it up to Jesus. How do you maintain the capacity to stay grounded, to stay wholesome in a world that is tragic and unjust? Because the key insight here is not, how do I say it right? Oh, I’m gonna do the same thing, bad God, good God. So the key insight is look, more or less all of us, and some of us all the time, but not all of us all the time, are faced with that problem. And faced with more than we could possibly hope to bear. Now, if we can’t offload that, if we don’t have a place to put that, where we have faith that it’s going to be taken care of, if we try to take responsibility for it, then we’ll just be crushed. And that’s not gonna work. So it can be very practical. And there’s a psychological move here that’s crucial. At a psychological level, you have to have some way of offloading that which you perceive as being important and needful and necessary to address at some point, by somewhere, by somebody, but it’s more than what you can handle individually. Psychologically, if you can’t get that move, then you’ll just be crushed. And this is like, a simple example is the notion of being overwhelmed by a task. I think about a task, like just practically, I think about the task of what it’s gonna take for me to rewire my RV to build my solar system. Oh my God, it’s way too much. Now I’m overwhelmed. And one classical psychological approach is say, okay, we’ll just focus on the bite that’s in front of you. Right. Is there a piece that you can take that’s not overwhelming and get you moving forward? Yes, okay. Now you can be practically affected. Don’t try to take the whole mountain at once, just take the step ahead of you. So that psychological move of being able to offload something that is, again, perceived as needful. It has to be taken care of. Somebody somewhere, sometime has to take care of this because it’s a real issue. But I personally can’t take care of it right now. I think we’re gonna offload that in faith, which is to say to trust that it will be, that I’m not, how do I say this? Just stepping away from responsibility. That I’m not being irresponsible, but rather this is a higher responsibility. I know that I can only take what I can handle and I’m trying to take that fully. That’s a move. So the bad God version of that is precisely the move that I actually become irresponsible. Now I hate where I actually just push off into the ether into sort of an unconstrained hope things and then basically enter into spiritual bypass. I’m not gonna take my own responsibility. That’s right. I’m gonna use this mechanism to exit that, right? That’s right. So what we could say in some sense, it’s interesting, I think there’s a way to do this, but the saint’s problem is that we no longer have access to bad God, which means that we have access, we no longer have access to the mechanisms that work, the effective mechanisms that work in the context of that framing of divinity. That leaves us in trouble. And we have not yet found a way to get what I’m characterizing as good God. Now, which is this approach that doesn’t put us in context where we are either only able to achieve effective operating parameters by virtue of an extrinsic authority structure within everything else, and also where we don’t have a tendency to defer our personal responsibility into blind faith or into spiritual bypass. So that complex, the complex of how do we maintain effective operating parameters from something that comes from our interior, something that comes from an ethos as opposed to morality, to use the way that I describe those two differences, which also very practically allows us to have this quality of trust or faith, which is really just a practical awareness of, I gotta take what I can take and can’t take anymore. And with any luck, other people will tend to carry the other stuff, right? And so it’s a practical call, right? A call to say, hey, how do we do this? And I like the practicality of it. I don’t know if you’ve ever carried a heavy tree, lifted a log and carried it on your shoulders. I think there’s that sense of, what’s the other, like three or four of us, let’s make it four, four of us were kind of lifting the tree. And there’s a fifth person and they look at it and they see like, ah, yeah, that’s too heavy for them. You can kind of see that the strain is too high and they feel a calling of, okay, hey, let me help you out. That sense of like help and awareness, that’s the very, it’s very simple, like very practical. You know, we’re gonna lift this tree and we’re gonna test and see, and then there’s a hope that the right resources will arrive to lift it. If you’ve got a good team, that hope is based in experience, right? So it’s a good term for that. It’s like a, hmm, anyway, it’s a good hope. Like it’s a very reasonable hope. It’s like the hope that the, you know, when you’re watching a basketball team, when suddenly one of the players just starts sprinting down the court and when they jump in the air, the ball magically lands in their hands for all of you, like that’s it, right? You just kind of hope that the signal that you just got that tells you that the thing’s gonna happen the way it’s gonna happen without you necessarily having certainty that the thing over here is going to do what it’s gonna do, and yet it does. Like becoming a skillful network like that allows us to have practical hope that we can only focus on what is ours to focus on and expect that the network itself will begin to hold more and more of it. So there’s a closure on that previous topology that I was describing, which is that. So I think that maybe that’s the move, right? To say, okay, I’m gonna make a distinction between, and bad God, I don’t mean evil God, I just mean like an older version method of this set of techniques that had effectiveness within certain constraints, but has a whole bunch of failure conditions, stuff at least which is reciprocal closing as an endpoint. Yeah, right, right. And this new thing, which is just the higher version that frees it from its sort of more iron age, we’re all gonna die anyway, we kind of just need to make it to the next generation and we’re gonna have to make a point and say, no, no, we really need to get this really clean and actually be a much clearer version, say, of the divine. That was really good, that was very helpful. So let me try and pick up on some points that resonate. I like, for example, the parental metaphor. So good parenting is generally between permissive and punitive. The idea is you use the minimal amount of force to bring about the compliance that is beyond the child on its own, but that the child is capable of managing with your help, the zonal proximal development. So Timmy doesn’t wanna do acts. You don’t punish Timmy just in punish that punitive. You don’t just allow Timmy to do whatever Timmy wants. Sorry, this is not meant to be condescending, I’m just using your parental analogy. But what you do is you have to finesse the minimal amount of force to get Timmy to try something that doesn’t make sense to Timmy right now, but with you present, co-present with Timmy, it will make sense to Timmy once Timmy has taken the developmental leap. And so that’s sort of parental links. So that’s why cultivation metaphors are used. If you try to make the plant grow, you’ll kill it. You just leave the plant alone, it dies or it grows wild, right? The cultivation, and there’s deep connections between cultivation, cultists and culture. And so that’s there resonating. So I’m thinking about that, and I think that’s really good, but I wanna sort of try and analogize that and try to explicate and draw out your analogy even more. So let’s call, let’s, I forget, I think the name is authoritative, that which falls between permissive and punitive. And that brings up just exactly the point I wanna make. So we have this idea that, well, look at the word, authority. And what makes people trust, and what makes people not go too far, but also not avoid responsibility is a sense of authority. Now I agree with you that we’ve gotta get an authority that is between permissiveness and punitive. And then the problem that has been sort of perennially pointed to, I’ll use the biblical notion, but there are, I think, analogous notions in Taoism, in Buddhism, is idolatry. That people, it give too much authority to the, to the wrong thing, right? They get too much authority, right? That’s the problem. And so I’ve been thinking about that, and of course we are struggling with that. And I think there’s a correlation between giving somebody too much authority and then becoming a star and the idolatry, and that idolatry burns them out, okay? Ooh, nice, yeah. Yeah, oh, how cool is that? Okay, so, okay, let’s see. So idolatry, and it has to do with the notion of formal identity. And what happens is you give authority, and this is like, we have this classic kind of good bad. Zach calls it, has a concept, he calls it teacherly authority. Teacherly authority has to do with the ordinary up gradient of prestige that human beings are oriented to. That particular person over there knows what the fuck they’re about, and they’re honestly trying to share it with quality. I will pay attention, right? That’s teacherly authority, okay? Very much. Then you have this idolatrous move, which is the replacement of the real human with the formal identity that is now a teacher. Right. So now instead of teacherly authority being embedded in the actual complex lived imminent reality of the human being’s real relationship, you have the formal role of teacher, and the expectation that once you’re in relationship with some random dude, because he has the title teacher attached to his identity is what we call bad authority. Now he has assumed authority that he has not in fact, even made big yearn. Now you’ve got your core, the concepts of the star. I think that’s exactly, I think you’re nailing it there. Which is what happens with the stars, the star becomes reified. And now the formal identity, so Jordan Peterson is no longer the actual living embodied, fully imminent human being Jordan Peterson, he is the identity structure. The identity structure is now conferred a very large amount of both good and bad attention. Yeah, yeah. Which gives access, so you wanna ride that power suit. You wanna ride that wave like, oh my God, now being this new, this identity gives me access to capacity to do great good in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it comes with a terrible price, which is that it also will be attached to all kinds of other things will be attached to it. But most important terrible price is it ain’t you. It never was you, right? It’s actually a formal, it’s that, it’s an idolatrous. You’ve become, you yourself have become idolatrous. Yes. You’ve become an idol, right? Yes. Therein lies the problem. Yes, yes. So. Sacred cows get sacrificed. Yes. So now I wanna make another move. I like, did you see what I’m trying to do here? I did this with Andrew and I think Chris, I was trying to say, how do you bring in sort of a sequence of proposals that are like argumentation into the dialogical process? I’m trying to also exemplify something here. Because I had, right? So I schematize an argument, but I am leaving. Sorry, I hope this sounds cooperative. I’m trying to leave space to afford so that you can bring something into it that’s unanticipated by my argument so that my argument has to shift and adapt. Yeah, yeah. I hope you feel that’s happening. So the move I wanna make now is to, and it is to pick up on the next Buddha is the Sangha. Okay, so, and you’re right. The problem with stars is the individualization of authority. That’s part of the problematic, right? It’s not all of the problematic, but that’s part of it. So I came back to this notion of authority and how it’s grounded ultimately in the narrative metaphor of the author, the author who writes a story, right? That’s where we get the notion of authority from. And then I was thinking, and I thought back to Kimu and I’m thinking about through the plague. And the point about the plague, right, is the breakdown of narrative, right? Human beings keep trying all these narratives on the plague and the plague keeps basically giving them the finger, right? And saying, so try that narrative if you want, look what I can do. Oh, try that narrative if you want, look what I can do. And then you get the two figures of Rui and Peru who slowly stop, they abandon the narrative projection. They abandon the narrative projection. And then it occurred to me. And again, I’m thinking also, you know, your game B stuff about trying to break the fundamental grammar in a deep way. So I wanna tread very carefully here and I’m saying this cautiously and I’m not fully committed to it because the language isn’t completely adequate but it’s the only language I have right now. I think our notion of God, the mythological notion is a narrative notion, right? And what we’re seeing right now is not the breakdown of a narrative, we’re seeing the breakdown of narrativity. That’s the death of God, okay? But I’ve been thinking about this because I think about this in terms of a debate I had with, not a debate, a dialogos, better, because it was wonderful with Paul Van der Kley and Jonathan Pagio. But I was trying to argue that we should shift the sacred from narrative to dialogos. And part of the proposal went like this. Let’s go back to the parenting metaphor, okay? Children are not naturally narrative. We have to do the narrative practice hypothesis. They’re not naturally metaphorical. We have to teach them this. We have to practice it. But what are they naturally? What is it that they naturally have that affords us being able to teach them narrative and metaphor? They are naturally dialogical. That’s all of the work of Thomas Sallow and all the work that’s coming up. Kids come ready, like joint attention, they take turns, they’re mimetic, right? So dialogos is more primordial and more grounding. And I’m part of your argument about we need to drop to the deepest levels to access what is most perennially powerful right now. So we have to drop below the narrative level. We have to drop below the narrative level of authority. And we have to drop into seeing, no, no. What it ultimately is grounded in is dialogos. And dialogos is not a finite story. It’s an infinite game, right? No, I mean, I was literally, I was about to drop your brother, Carson, right in the middle of it. So you just pulled it out, which is great. So I don’t even have to talk anymore. Like we’re actually on so much sync that it’s just the words will come from whatever mouth happens to be open. Great, yes, so much yes, that’s it. Like narrative is all about being right. It’s a finite game. The trick is, can I get the right narrative? Can I get everybody else to adopt my narrative? Dialogos is intrinsically the inverse of that or the converse maybe, it’s the opening, right? It’s a playful relationship. The move is not a move of me saying your narrative is wrong. The move is to say, okay, how do I extend this? How do I build more? How do I make, it’s a generative grammar, right? It’s intrinsically a creative invitation to continuing to play more and more awesomely. See, narratives build heroes. Dialogos builds networks. Yes, oh, another great one. Yes, absolutely. Narratives build heroes. Narratives create that formal context, right? You become the, and narrative is actually, narrative is the idolatry. Narrative is the thing that creates that movement away from being who you are in place to playing a role in a narrative. That’s right. Narratives really has that notion of currency, right? Narratives create, ah, yeah, hold on. Let me rewind back here. Yes, narrative. We are in the process of recognizing that any narrative that can be produced by this particular grammar is the problem. There is no narrative that solves the problem. The problem is the grammar produces these things, these things are the problem. The answer is to change the grammar, and then to change the, what Deloitte would call the abstract machine, which is the playing out of the grammar in context. That move is the same move that I described in the game A, game B distinction, but now we’re finally actually getting some real clothing on it. So, yes, yes, yes. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s what I’m trying to do. Yes, yes, yes. So, Tereau’s problem is, right, is to, being a saint without God, is to break the narrativity that binds the saint as the religious hero to God as the ultimate authority of a story. Yeah. And that’s what, he has to break both sides, right? He has to break out of it. And that’s what Camus is, of course, trying to do throughout in his work, right? He’s trying to feel, what’s that like? And what are the virtues that will be disclosed when we open up the agent and the arena in this trans-narrative fashion? Because here’s one thing that Camus is aware of, and this came out in my discussion with Paul and Jonathan. Narrative is indispensable for getting us to adulthood. There’s no, there’s nothing, right? Dialogos comes first, but if you don’t get narrative, you don’t become a temporally extended self, right? You don’t get capacities for non-logical identity. What we’re largely practicing, right, Dialogos gives us our first taste of non-logical identity, but narrative exacts it and extends it, right? Ontologically and temporally. We become temporally and modally extended selves through narrative. But the point is, right, like everything else, that has fallen into an idolatry. We have to break out of that. We have to see something that is theological, but not pre-narrative, but post-narrative dialogic. Post-narrative dialogic is what we, what I’m arguing is what we need if we’re going to learn how to be saints without God. Because that’s what we need right now. So I’m seeing two things. Let me do the second one. Why? Why do I need to number them? You don’t know what they are. So I’m with my daughter at the beach and my wife is talking to me about a notion that she’s come into contact with in parenting, which I immediately, as she says, I’m like, yeah, for sure. Begin adopting that as a method. And it has to do with the being very conscious of the language we’re using, being very conscious of the degree to which you are creating a narrative, an obligate narrative primary mind. And it works this way. Your daughter is sitting there in the sand and she sees some object, maybe it’s a crab, and you point at it and you say, that’s a crab. And then you tell a story, be careful, crabs can pinch. Which is useful. In fact, I think for almost all parents, that in particular in our contemporary environment, that’s kind of parenting, right? Your job is to weave together a sense-making fabric through narrative instruction that loads on a construct in the mind that can effectively pattern match from sensorium to identity, and then has a whole bunch of adjectives and affordances attached to that identity so you’ve got good behavior. That’s all moral, right? That’s all morality in the sense that I was using. It’s all bad God in the top-down authoritative constraint. The alternative, which is what I’d say is the solve to this problem, is to be conscious of actually orienting in the direction of wonder. So, and just like the simple question, I wonder what would happen if, I wonder what might happen here, I wonder how that, right, to have as a primary mode of interpersonal pedagogy, an invitation to wonder. And what’s interesting is, notice the difference. There’s no third-person omniscient that is, right? God pointing and telling you, loading that is, it’s actually very first-person, I wonder, which is a really interesting invitation because she may not give a fuck if she’s two years old. She may be like, I don’t wonder that, I’m gonna go do this. It’s an invitation to, are you also interested in this wondering? If so, then we can wonder together. And if not, you don’t really feel, it’s an invitation that doesn’t have constraint. And that’s dialogue, right? That’s an invitation into something where we begin to co-create a, what would you call a wonderful, like a world of intrigue and playing with the mystery as opposed to trying to box it up with pre-framed knowings of what it is. Okay, so two riffing responses to that right away. So Ellen Langer, one of the first people to bring mindfulness into the Western academic frame, she talks about soft vigilance versus hard focus, but she also talks about conditional versus absolute learning. And what she did is she went into textbooks and textbooks are almost always all absolute learning. So absolute learning is it is an X. Conditional learning is one way of thinking about this is that it is an X, right? So the framing around the proposition that you wanna pass on is one of radical identification versus conditional identification. And what she found, and this comes to no surprise, that if you give people absolute learning, they are not as good at learning, they’re very good at storing the proposition, but they’re not good learners using the proposition, using the knowledge, they don’t have the understanding, right, the grasping the significance, but which is afforded by doing conditional language. So that’s one piece. So conditional versus absolute. The second, right, is Dweck’s notion of fixed versus malleable mindset. So if I praise you and say, you’re bright, you will think of yourself as having a fixed trait, and then what you do is you get into image management because you don’t want that trait to be lost. Yep. But if I praise you for the process, I say, wow, that was a very good skill you just used, or that was a great sequence you went through. I love that learning process. If so, if you praise the process, then what happens is people will actually improve their performance and they will expose themselves to risk because they’re not trying to manage a fixed trait, they’re trying to grow a malleable trait. Now, what’s really interesting about that, by the way, is getting people to shift the focus from the product to the process, it’s also central to making them more rational. So people tend to over fixate on the products of their cognition and not enough on the process, and that’s what makes them subject to self-deception. So here’s the thing, what if, you know, if you had the conditional representation of the arena, that’s your wonder, hey, I wonder what this is. Here’s one way of thinking about it, here’s another way of thinking about it, and then also a malleable agency. Hey, what you just did there was a really good process, it’s a really great virtue, that’s a really impressive skill, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, this is exactly right. And I think that if I kind of, I’m gonna pop it up, and if you don’t mind, I’d also like to bring in something over here that kind of keeps showing up, and I think it might be really interesting. So let me pop this up. So there’s this, a big move that’s happened, that’s funny, I thought about it, I’ll use Nietzsche right now. Nietzsche makes the distinction between the warrior and the soldier. Yeah. Manuel de Landa points out the whole history of the Taylorization, the Fordization move of people in general, right? Foucault, disciplinary power, which is to say that move, you’re just going right there, and the trade-off or what happens if I optimize for the, what was the kind of learning that was just direct? Direct learning? There’s absolute versus conditional, right, and then there’s fixed traits versus malleable traits. So basically if I optimize for absolute learning in a particular strategic landscape, I can achieve local optima. Yes. Right, I can beat you to that thing. If I know what the thing is, and I’m Frederick the Great, and I train all my soldiers to be this clockwork army and everybody does exactly this thing, I get this, it turns out to be a short-term advantage, Yeah. over somebody who puts a longer-term investment in capacity. Right, right. This constant trade-off between a game that is iterating by a series of short-term local optima at the expense of games that are focusing on global optima is like a fundamental conundrum, right? It’s a game theoretic dynamic that describes a lot of the big problems. Yeah, I think we’ve got the core of relevance realization. That’s why I put it into the relevance realization machinery. Exactly, so the, was it a, our previous conversation with Greg, maybe it was, but that notion of being able to say, look, there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too. There’s a way to have the moments you’re in be kind of as good as it gets at the local level and also be directly connected in continuity to the best possible long-term strategy. And there’s something about like when the niche is changing fast enough, that local optima just keep falling, they keep evaporating. Yeah. But the only valid strategy is something that’s actually taking this bigger approach. It’s I think a big part of the current moment, why the pivot from game A to game B is both relevant and salient right now. All right, so let me do the second move though. Yeah, okay, please, please. The second move is maybe a little bit of like an invitation for, I guess it’s Paul and Jonathan. So my uncle, who was only 16 years older than me, he passed away about, I gotta think like two years ago, not long ago, maybe even a year ago. Yeah, a year and a half ago. And he was a deacon in the Catholic church. Right. So it was just, you know, it takes a significant amount of dedication and energy. And one of the things that he and I did in the last, he had cancer, so he sort of took a period of time. In the last six months a year is we read the Bible together remotely. Like I would read portions of it and then we would talk about it. And I was really reminded of the conversation around the book of Acts and what we were just talking about. And what I mean by that is, and I was just curious, I wonder if the movement from, so the fulfillment of the book, right, and the line of the crucifixion, the resurrection, followed by the Holy Spirit, right? And the continuity or the continuation of the church is the Holy Spirit’s presence in the church, which is to say in the people themselves, right? And it feels to me like that’s a very interesting relationship to what we were just talking about, right? The movement from a Old Testament God that lives outside as a separate entity that provides wrath to enforce obligate behavior and this transition to the Holy Spirit, which is actually imminent in the people and the whole of the church who are now fully responsible for interrelating with each other and becoming capable as individuals of feeling and living with the Spirit, but then also living through it, right? Living it into the world as the good, right? The thing that I was describing is the good guide and it contains, I think everything we’re describing, like all the words that we’re using and all the transitions all talk about what that is like on that other side. So that came to me as well. Well, I think that’s relevant. I mean, Chris and I talk about the third factor that emerges in the dialectic, like when dialectic affords the emergence of dialogos, we talk about the third factor as the Geist because we wanted to determine this, the German term because it stands between mind and spirit, right? It’s the intelligence and consciousness. And so that’s something that we’re sort of working out in the whole, the cognitive science of dialectic and dialogo. So let’s keep that as one of the balls. I’m gonna try and juggle here, but I’m thinking of a couple of things about the Holy Spirit. First of all, it’s the logos becoming dialogos. Jesus is the logos, but what does he say? Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also. And there’s a connection there between the Holy Spirit, right? Coming into dialogos. And then you get the recommendation to not try to plan what you’re gonna say when you come before the emperor, the powers of the principalities. Don’t rehearse a narrative or a story because you will be clamping down on the possibility of the spirit speaking to you. The third, right, is the idea that when we’re praying, the Holy Spirit is actually from the deepest level praying through us and affording our prayer. And so there is, I know this is heretical, but maybe this is the time of all heresies, right? There’s a way of reinterpreting the Holy Spirit, especially as it’s portrayed functionally, I guess is the way I’m trying to use it, and phenomenologically in the New Testament, especially in the Book of Acts, it’s consonant with it being a dialogical entity that is trying to be post-narrative or trans-narrative in some really important fashion. So I think that’s deeply, deeply right. Ha, funny. I mean, I guess I’m listening with particular ears, but I didn’t hear anything heretical in what you just said. And you were using a certain set of words, but if I understand what you mean by, Jesus was the Logos, but then the commandment, the requirement was to move to Dea Logos, right? And that must be two or three gatherings in the coming. I don’t know. For some reason, that felt like that was a way of saying it, that if I listened clearly, the Spirit was speaking, perhaps as a way of putting it. And maybe I’m wrong. I’m sure that we will have comments that will give us more information on that. But that feels right. And let me just put another piece in there. One of the, a conversation I had with someone was about, how do I say it? I had a big concern about separation from their lived experience in the church, the Catholic church in this case. And as I listened, what I diagnosed was precisely the replacement of narrative for Dea Logos, the replacement of narrative for the actual spirit. And this is super commonplace, right? To pray, my wife, she was raised Catholic, it kind of blew her mind when she said, well, what kind of, what narrative are you engaging in when you’re praying? And I was like, none. Seems like that would totally get in the way. Yes, yeah. And then she’s like, wait, oh wow. So the idea of like, hey guys, this is a set of words that you kind of, if you repeat it, practically speaking, maybe, right? Practically speaking, it’s like a mantra. Practically speaking, it will help you get into the place that we will call prayer, right, over here. But then the mistake of, oh no, this is prayer in and of itself. Even if you don’t get to the place, and then this is in fact so much prayer that you don’t never, you can’t even get to the place you forget it exists, right? So that kind of, that movement. I would say that’s heresy. And I would say, even if it comes from a really nice medieval sensibility, right? Which is, hey, you know, it’s really hard. This is hard, living is hard. We’ve got barbarians all the time, plagues all the time, like it’s a mess. And so we kind of gotta get some psychotechnologists in place that have like their, you know, water wheels and cranks that successfully grind the wheat. So we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna put these techniques in place that have some degree of efficacy. But then of course, right, the idolatry of the technique is just as bad as the idolatry of the person. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s all. I thought that was the water flowed through and now I’m done, empty. No, I like that disjunct. And I think I can circle back to the point you made about people remaining grounded and not losing their humanity. This came up in the discussion with Paul and Jonathan. Wonderful discussion, I highly recommend it. A real deal logos, very powerful. But I was pointing out Jesus’ use of parable and the work of Sally McFag, who worked on metaphorical theology and a book speaking in parables. And also related work, I forget by whom, on the parabolic stories that the Sufis use. And what McFag points out is that parables look like narratives, but they’re not, right? So I was using the one that’s always meant a great deal to me. And I remember reading Carol Shields updated version of the parable of the product of the sun. And the point is that this looks like a story and you’re reading through it and then here’s all the archetypal roles, one son, another, the servant, the father. Oh, and you can see people wanting to allegorize it. Well, there’s Bob the father and all. But it doesn’t work. And the whole point of the parable is exactly that. The whole point of the parable is if you try to resolve it, if you try and say, no, no, justice always prompts compassion. No, no, compassion always prompts justice. You lose it. Our humanity is in the tonos that cannot be captured by a narrative. It can only be captured dialogically, right? It can only be captured dialectically. And the point about a parable, it’s what I call it a narrative prime ball. It looks like a narrative, you take it in and assimilate it as a narrative and then it blows the holes out of your narrative and opens you up to a trans narrative accommodation. And so I think, right, if the Holy Spirit is the spirit of the logos, wow, I can’t believe I’m doing this. And the logos is the logos most properly taught in that parenting style that we’re talking about, the wonderful parenting style by using parable. And I think we could actually say this is consonant with, you know, I don’t know what to call it, which I think it’s a heretical interpretation of Christianity that may actually again, answer to lose problem of how to be a saint without God. Yeah, it does, I think. So this way of, right? This way of, because you know, and I think of the other great existentialists, you mentioned Nietzsche, but you think of Krugedorf. See, Nietzsche does something where he undermines narrative by being multi-vocal. You don’t know what Nietzsche is actually saying or what the story is because he gives you, he writes like the Bible. There are many conflicting stories and perspectives and they all continually undermine each other. And so he’s trying to destabilizes anything, right? And that’s powerful. And a lot of people don’t get that when they read Nietzsche. They pay too much attention to the content of what Nietzsche says and not enough to the manner of the process. They idolize Nietzsche rather than emulating him, which is a big mistake. But I’m thinking of the other one, Kierkegaard, right? And Kierkegaard writes in parables. He even writes things that are called, like that are explicitly parables. Many of his novels have parabolic structure to them, in which like the Diary of the Seducer, he gives you this narrative, but then he undermines it from within, right? Because he’s constantly, and although I have deep problems with this part of his thinking, what I’ve been thinking about recently and what I’m sharing with you is, right, and I don’t like even his terminology, but I think this is what he was trying to get at with the teleological suspension of the ethical. And I’m gonna use ethical the way you use morality. The point of the teleological is meaning, ethics is bound into narrative personhood. And there is something that is supposed to be beyond that, that is transpersonal and trans-narrative, which human beings are ultimately called to. This is why you get the thing that within the narrative is horrific. And notice what it’s doing. It’s a request from God to sacrifice a person, right? And narratives are all about persons and their valuation. And that story always bothered me and it bothered Kierkegaard. And there’s ways of interpreting that story that I think are evil and pernicious. But I’m playing with the idea, well, maybe that story is exactly, right, what we’re talking about here. It’s just a story of, well, ultimately, narrative personhood and the ethic, right, isn’t ultimate, that it actually, right, the dialogical relationship to that which transcends the narrative is what is ultimate. Yeah. And there’s a parabolic structure in it. There’s a story that actually undermines all stories. So let’s pivot to a conversation you and I had, I think, two times ago, which uses another language of paradigm. Yes. And we talked about the notion of the context of acceleration. Yep, yep. Accelerating change, the change in the underlying reality or the context that you’re in and then mismatch. So paradigm’s breaking apart faster because a paradigm is a narrative, right? Yep. And like, okay, I get it. So if I have a, you know, things more or less don’t change a lot for 500 years. Right. We write a narrative, we kind of dial it in, it’s a solid narrative and we run it. And we kind of lose track of it. You know, 300 years later, we sort of lost track of the fact that somebody at some point created a narrative. But when things are changing rapidly enough that you actually are seeing narratives emerge, break down, emerge and break down in like, you know, months. Yeah. It becomes rather obvious that that tool, right? That grammar, right? The narrative grammar, the grammar that produces paradigms is no longer an effective way of being an adaptive relationship with the real reality that you happen to find yourself in. I hadn’t seen that. Oh my gosh. The connection between being trans narrative and being, you know, trans paradigmatic. I hadn’t, oh my gosh, thank you. That’s bad. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Huh. I had, yes. Yes, very much. Oh, that’s beautiful, Jordan. That’s beautiful. So what that means then is, right? We’re looking, I mean, and you know, Anichi was trying to get this with Beyond Good and Evil. We’re trying to get, you know, post paradigmatic, post moral, I’ll use your distinction, and post narrative in some core and kind of, right, post authority, right? I’m trying to think of the parenting styles. I’m trying to bring them all together. We’re trying to get that. And that’s the way in which the next Buddha can be the same. And that’s the way, and there’s a way of being within that, that’s a sainthood without God. Yep. Which is to say that it’s the move from the logos to the deologues. Yes, yes. And what’s funny about it is that, in many ways, I find it also to be quite simple. Like you talked about, like what does a kid come with like straight up? Yeah, yeah. A deologues machinery is what we’ve got. And then we build other stuff on top of it. And it is a, what do they call it? There’s a archaic revival. There’s like a little bit of an archaic revival. It’s like, okay, let’s go to the deep stuff. Let’s find the deep, deep, deep stuff that’s, you know, billions of years or hundreds of millions of years of adaptive capacity and bring that back up. But, you know, we’re not going back to, we’re bringing it back up and then we’re resurfacing it in a whole new context, particularly with an enormous amount of what I would call consciousness, meaning a way of being aware of what we’re talking about now and actually having a process, a capacity to improve the process, to name the process as being good and then to improve the process along the vector of its goodness. Yeah, I would call that both consciousness and rationality in the way in which I’ve tried to expand the notion of rationality. So that to me, right, I mean, I haven’t read a lot of Wilbur’s work, but he makes, he notes that, and maybe this is relevant to Jordan Peterson in some fashion, Wilbur says that one of the problems with Jung is what he calls the pre-trans fallacy. That Jung does not adequately distinguish between pre-egoic and trans-egoic. That they can be deeply confused together and that can really mess people up. So in an analogous fashion, I want to distinguish between the pre-narrative and the trans-narrative versions of theologos and that what we’re trying to do with conscious rationality is not regress to pre-narrative dialogic, but to try and progress to trans-narrative dialogic, theologos. Yes, absolutely. And just to be careful also, since we’ve got cool Greek prefixes, let’s distinguish between trans-narrative and meta-narrative. Yes, yes. Meta-narrative is just a bigger narrative. Yes, yes. Trans-narrative is a different kind of thing altogether. Exactly, that’s very well said too. That’s very well said. That’s excellent. Well, I think that was most of what I wanted to talk about. Did I give you also a place for you to develop some of what you brought, some of your energy that you brought into? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In a very sort of, very secret way. I think it’s exactly right. There was a moment, I just wanna call this out as a gem, that meant a lot to me. I mean, there was a lot that was meaningful and provocative and insightful, but when you said that what we were doing was sort of putting clothes onto some of your ideas or putting flesh on it, I can’t remember this, that really touched me very deeply. Oh, yeah. Gives me hope, man. Gives me hope. Okay, so I propose that we end it here. Yeah, sounds good. It’s a good play. But this is not an ending in the narrative sense. It’s like Sartre said, you never complete anything, you only abandon it. Oh. All right, see you later, man. Okay, take good care. Let me know if you want me to share this with you. No, please do, yeah, please do. Okay, well done. Take good care, my friend. Bye-bye.