https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=i0dwdAMyKdk
I think we decided to focus this conversation around Zach’s most recent essay called COVID-19, A War Broke Out in Heaven. I was really happy to read this because it was so mythopoetic, so mythological and because I’m a sucker for that kind of language. I also thought it was quite brave because nobody’s writing like that. You make the very strong statement that there’s a war in heaven and using this strong eschatological terminology. Am I saying that right? I was thinking about why that was so powerful and I was thinking about Leonard Cohen and I was thinking about Bob Dillon and I was thinking about how they’re always singing about the end of the world. There’s always this flood that’s going to come and there’s a crack in everything and things are going to slide in all directions. All these lines from popular music were coming into my mind which is very biblical in some sense and that’s probably one of the reasons why I really appreciate Zach’s essay and it’s also I think a reason why other people might be quite critical of it because people want a more rational explanation for what’s happening and that kind of thing. Not that your essay was not rational or reasonable but so can we speak about that? Can we speak about why you’re using this kind of language and why it’s important and I think your essay seems to be making the rounds. In other words, it’s affecting people in one way or another. Sure, thank you. I’m actually surprised by the reception of the paper. I’m very happy. I didn’t expect it to be as well received as it was actually because I mostly expected people to be cautious or worried about the mythopoetic angle but I was trying to draw attention as clearly as I could to the interior aspects of the crisis and to specifically have something to say that wasn’t directly about the biology and the geopolitics and all of the dynamics that are within this. Yeah, and some of it was also just in my own experience returning to where I go for solace like as I was looking out at the stuff that’s coming from the spiritual crowd and a lot of it’s terrible and insulting. I think insulting and a retreat to a kind of relativistic pre-tragic spiritual escapism. So can you characterize that? Describe what is so terrible and insulting about let’s say a spiritual reaction to kind of like this? And again, it’s complex because there’s so much in the religious landscape now, right? So you still have the great traditions, the church and the sangha and all these things which still exist from the great traditions. I’m talking mostly about the non-affiliated kind of human potential movement, new age movement crowd at least in America where there’s this strange confluence between postmodernism and Buddhism and in particular where you get this like allegiance between the deconstructing of truth by postmodernism which is something specific and the deconstructing of like experience of self and reality in terms of some discourses in Buddhism, right? And not specifically Buddhism and most of the people I’m talking about really haven’t even like read a Buddhist sutra but what they’re getting is the notion that if you analyze your own experience like of a boss and a meditator, you will realize that most of the things you take to be true are not simply true, right? That there’s some deeper reality beyond the kind of given phenomenology. So emptiness, different than form. Mostly we don’t experience emptiness although even that’s always already there. And then postmodernism is doing something specific in linguistics, right? Taking aim at the modern notion of objectivity and these other things and so you get this confluence where you get a relativistic postmodernism with a particular brand of kind of spiritual criticism of the kind of conventional reality, let’s say. It’s a spiritual criticism and so you end up getting people denying that viruses exist. Right and that we have bodies and things like that. Right, correct. And thanking the virus and writing whole long things where they end up saying that actually I don’t believe any of the things I’m saying. That’s not right. We shouldn’t believe anything. You can’t believe anything. We don’t know anything. But here’s a long list of things I believe but I don’t really believe that. And so there’s a lack of courage and spiritual fortitude on the part of those people who are looking to for that. And so yeah, it’s disconcerting. And of course it’s still going on. That kind of view. So in some sense this was a response to that. I was trying to, as you say, it’s not an unreasonable piece. What I’m saying in the piece is not unreasonable. And so I’m trying to say reasonable things about profound topics. Instead of thinking that saying something unreasonable is profound just because it’s unreasonable or non-reasonable. When me and John were talking the last time with Christopher or Mastro Pietro, in the midst of our conversation I came up with this sort of thing. I said this is like a judgment or something, right? What’s happening? It just came into my mind, right? It was biblical language. And John was always saying, wait a minute, hold on here, be careful. So maybe John you want to speak to your cautionary response to the dangers of using this kind of language. And how can we use this kind of poetic language correctly or rightly or in a way that’s helpful? And I think Zach did a great job of doing that. I did too. So first of all, compliment Zach. I read the article and I thought it was exemplary of how to use what I would call symbolic language in order to make important bridges, symbol on, to connect between the phenomenological and what we might call the ontological. Because I saw that a large part of what the essay was doing was exactly using what you’re calling mythopoetic language to bridge between those two domains for people in a very powerful way. And I think that’s very important. We can talk about that more as we go into our discussion. But I think that how do you craft a language that’s deeply transjective, that deeply resonates with people’s phenomenological experience, and yet also gives them a way of articulating a grasp on reality that is very needed right now. And I thought what Zach was doing was exemplifying that very well. That’s how it landed for me, that that’s how the language was coming up. So the biblical language, I’ve often cautioned people, I think the most appropriate attitude toward the Bible is a deeply reverential ambivalence. The Bible is a terrible book in the sense of its capacity to cause great harm, but also it’s terrific in the sense that it can induce significant power and transformation in people. So the biblical language, my concern is, I share one with Zach, and then one that I think he might have also, I think he’s steered very adroitly between Skilla and Skiribdas there, very nicely, between a fundamentalist return of this language. Because my concern is, and I’ve seen a lot of people talking this way, the virus is very much like an Old Testament deity. It’s abstract, it’s ubiquitous, you don’t know what it will strike, right? It’s demanding purity codes from us, it’s narrowing our world, we feel like we’re under judgment, we feel like we’re being punished, we feel like we have to invoke purity codes. And this is a very ancient way of thinking for us, and it’s very problematic. I think it would be very antithetical to the direction that Zach is pointing to in his paper, in his article, if that kind of thing becomes prevalent. And then the alternative, and I don’t think it’s an exclusive alternative, although the culture pretends that they are, the alternative is the kind of decadent romanticism that Zach put his finger on, that spirituality that lacks integrity, not only courage, Zach, I would say it lacks integrity, in that what it does is it privileges certain kinds of discourse, while of course claiming that no discourse has privilege, it claims a kind of exceptionalism for Buddhism that people like Stephen Batchelor and Evan Thompson have just shown as without merit as an argument. It does a very poor job, opposite, I would say, to what you were trying to do, Zach, and succeeding at bridging between the phenomenology and the metaphor. It doesn’t set up an anagogy, what it does is it just says, oh, everything’s deconstructed in here, everything’s deconstructed out there, and therefore I ultimately get some nebulous conformity between my inner world and my outer world because they’re all equally deconstructed, which is, I think, pernicious and irresponsible in a very powerful way. So I think I saw Zach as, like I say, steering between both of those ways in which we could start using. I agree with Zach fundamentally on this, that when we’re in liminal, and that’s exactly where the phenomenology and the ontology are in this deep, deep talk to each other, when we’re in liminal, we are drawn towards this kind of language. I totally agree. What I’m suggesting is we can be drawn and then we can articulate and appropriate that language in three different ways, at least to my mind. One is the one that Zach is very critical of, and I am too, the sort of decadent romanticism that has that purely negative and, I think, vacuous conformity, and then there’s a kind of fundamentalism that I think, especially when we’re enacting purity codes, is a very real danger, and the attendant things upon it, conspiracy theory, scapegoating, these are all things we have to be very, very careful of. And so I thought that what Zach did was, and perhaps Zach, this is one of the reasons why it’s getting such a great reception. I think you, in addition to the content, which I think was valuable, I think you exemplified a way of appropriating this language that, as I, again, I agree with you, is what is going to emerge as the response to the attempt to symbol on, to connect the phenomenological and ontological, and you steered it between the two things that I’m most concerned of. Well, I have three, but two I’ve articulated. One is the fundamentalism. The other is, you know, like you say, the completely decadent romantic magical thinking bullshit, I would put it. I’m using that term technically, right? And then the third one I have a fear of, which you also didn’t do, you took great care of, which is a kind of pretentious utopian certainty. Well, you know, this clearly indicates that the revolution should come and this is blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And that kind of thing too. And then there’s a danger, of course, around apocalyptic thinking to fall into that kind of utopic pseudo-certainty. And I think you steered between all three of those really, really well. So that’s what I- Sorry to interrupt. Maybe there’s also a danger of sort of, with this eschatology, is life-hating or something. It’s like you want the apocalypse to happen. Well, that overlaps a lot with the fundamentalism. Yeah. Fundamentalism tends to, you know, you know, the emphasis is on the destructive nature of God’s wrath. And that’s usually bound up with the kind of conspiratorial, there’s all the evil ones out there that I resent and hate and I’m afraid of, and this will finally get rid of them. And those of us who are pure will be set free to people over the earth, that kind of thing. And the fundamentalist view and the, let’s call it the New Age view, are actually isomorphic in their structure. Like there’s a basically kind of a structural narcissism and a tendency to project and basically a stance of like mind or faith only, which ends up being a, you create your reality kind of thing, or basically you get what you deserve. And so that’s, yeah, that’s just there. And as a cognitive developmental psychologist, it’s easy to see the places in people’s personalities where they can actually retreat to lower forms of meaning making and self-regulation. So, yeah. And you allowed it to that very clearly when you talked about the possibility of losing the world’s soul and falling into this, I just wanted to unpack that a little bit because I thought that you were implying. And just to add to that, also tragic, you talked about the tragic and maybe that’s a remedy to this New Age thinking is for us to really contemplate the tragic. Right. Yeah. I think of, John, as you were speaking, I was thinking of this phrase by Habermas. It was something like, cause you know, he wrote his dissertation on Schelling and the problem of free will. And then later in his life, Habermas returned to Kierkegaard and began to consider religion again, very seriously. And in this later work, he talked about the untapped semantic potentials of religious language. They’re lay within religious language and symbol, untapped semantic potentials specifically, and this is the thing for protecting vulnerable forms of community life and experience. So the idea being that the the meaning that lies hidden within these symbolic ways of speaking, it has to do with the basis of choice-making and relationship and ethics, right? Which is also another difference between, I think, what I was trying to do and what is usually happening under the spiritual kind of rhetoric, which is that we need to inform the basis of ethics and choice, not the basis of emotional self-regulation and the feeling of safety, basically, and self-esteem gratifications. Right. So those are distinct and the mind wants to do both. Like you want to create a sense of meaning and a worldview that makes you feel safe and makes you feel valuable and important and in control. But you also want to create one that allows you to live in relationship to reality, and specifically the reality of other people. And so, yeah, I was trying to really bring home something like an ethos and a sense of, you know, for lack of a better word, morality, which is relevant now, which is why I was concerned about what we’re able to say on a hospital ward in New York City, right? Like what are the things that can be said in these places and how important that must be, right? To be able to say the right things to people who are actually suffering, not people who are afraid of suffering and trying to reconcile themselves and the columnar limbic system after looking at Facebook for an hour and a half, people who are in the midst of it, and where the cultural resources we can use and the languages that are available and the symbols that are shared between us where we can be with one another in the intensity of this and say something. So that’s kind of where it came from. And then I ended up returning to my roots in Emerson and other places where I was looking for this kind of language. So, and also just to my background in music, you know, I think often about this triplicate I got from Forrest Landry, which is song, text, and code being different forms of expression, and that all of them are important. Code is about what you do. So let it be written, so let it be done like a legal code, right? And text is about this intersubjective clarity of semantic, basically precision. Song is different. Song is rooted in the subjective, and this is where symbol and image lives so much. And so connecting song with text is what I was trying to do. I’m not right about the facts and legal code and the quarantine and how they keep yourself. I wasn’t good doing that. I was just trying to connect with the song that I was trying to sing and finding a way to bring that up into some space of reason. What you’re talking about is poetry, you know. Correct. Right? And the need for that, right? But the problem with just invoking poetry, again, is in poetry because of, you know, several generations of education has been relegated to a certain status and function within our culture that I think is not, I’m not attributing this to you, Andrew, but I’m saying how most people, when most people hear the word poetry, they don’t hear what Zach was doing. Yeah, that’s true. Right? They don’t. And that’s why there’s the huge educational thrust towards the end of Zach’s article. But I wanted to pick up on something first before, I do want to turn to the educational stuff because I think it’s really important. So the first point you were saying about that, Zach, is the two. This goes to where Chris and I have been doing about trying to remember that when we invoke the language, the sacred has both the homing and the horror aspects to it. The point of the sacred, yes, is it’s supposed to shelter us, but it’s also supposed to expose us to a reality that is beyond us. That’s the numinous side of things. And I think the really difficult thing that we have to do right now with this symbolic language is, because it’s ultimately sacred language, is to craft it in such a way that those two things are being done at the same time, that we’re giving people a sense of how they can get grounded and centered, but also challenge them to face the transformative demands that reality is placing upon us. And I think that’s, and so another concern I have is a polarization of the language of the sacred, either into the, oh, it’s all wonderful, we’re all snuggly and warm and we all love each other, or which is also becoming the horrific nihilism, with this, we’re all just doomed and sort of glorying in a way that reality is overwhelming. Because I can see some people finally finding, but in a deeply shadow twisted way, you know, well, finally, I’m finally connected back to reality, right? At least there’s this horrific thing that’s destroying, you know, all the offices and institutions of power, and yes, you know, that kind of fist shaking salute towards the flames. And so part of the difficulty I think we face here is to craft language that can bring those two sides of the sacred together again. One of my favorite versions of this book was for children, so it has an educational impact on it. It’s in the Narnia Chronicles and the kids are talking, and they’re talking to some of the talking animals, and they say, well, is Aslan tame? And the kids go, and the animals go, oh no, no, he’s not tame, but he’s good, right? And there was this, right, and there was a, Louis is trying to get this other place, right? Again, you can see the sacred as not the tame, you know, I will be what I will be, you know, God’s self-naming, right? But also the fact that this is ultimately something that affords transformation and transcendence in a powerful way. And so you’ll give me one more minute, guys, I know I’m talking a lot. This brings me to this ongoing discussion I’ve been having with Jordan Hall and Chris Master Pietro and Guy Sandstock and with you, and is this whole notion of what you were pointing to in your major point a minute ago, Andrew, sorry, Zach, it was that, right, that you’re trying to link this language to being able to say the right thing, do the right, it’s ultimately you’re trying to link it to wisdom in my language. And then this fear, you know, and care, right? That’s a big part. The rationality of caring is what Socrates was primarily about above and beyond any rationality of argumentation. He makes that very clear. The one thing he knew was taught erotica, he knew how to properly care and what to care about and how to care. But that, but the invoking Socrates brings up this whole thing I’ve been trying to talk about this notion of faith, Socratic faith, because the relationship to symbols is not one of conviction in the sense and the way in which the argument convicts you. Neither should it be, and Zach is critical of this, just kind of an emotional, affective response. That’s an inappropriate response to symbols. I mean, so my tutor here is Tillich, that the appropriate response to symbol is faith, but faith completely re-understood, not as this magical projection and willful assertion or passive acceptance of some fatalistic demon. But more again, this ability to what Zach is again, I think exemplifying in his paper, which is to sense the kairos, sense the course of things, and become deeply coupled and involved with them. And I think that is something that needs to be talked about. And it’s also something that we can offer people now as an alternative to either magical faith or merely assertional faith. And I think that’s also something that needs to be brought into this discussion. And I think, again, and I don’t think this is foreign to your article, Zach, I think you’re clearly exemplifying it in what you’re talking about and the way you’re invoking the symbolic language almost in a prophetic fashion. I just want to repeat what you said about the importance maybe of joining those two worlds together, right? The horror and the sublime. And if we’re just in the sublime, blissful world of imagination, it’s nice, but we never come down to the earth. And if we’re just in this sort of materialistic horror, you don’t have any vision. So it’s bringing these two worlds together, I think. Yes. And what I’m saying is that act of bringing them together is, of course, inherently symbolic. I keep saying, symbol on is to join together across the liminal, right? And that because you’re confronting the liminal, you’re confronting those both the prospect and the refuge. And I think what gives you that, I think, is this kind of faith that I’m talking about now. And it’s a faith that, in my opinion, and I argue it’s more than my opinion, who cares about my opinion? My arguments are that that notion of faith is deeply interwoven with this more extended Socratic notion of rationality and the wisdom project that I think Zach is invoking in the pedagogical part of his article. Beautiful, guys. I mean, there’s so many directions to go now. Like, I’m wondering what, Andrew, what did you have in mind? What comes to mind for me is this notion of the post tragic. I was thinking of the future. I was thinking of the prophetic and the future and how we use symbols because we can’t really understand what’s going on in the immediacy of what’s happening. So we use symbols as kind of a vehicle to take us towards the future. Does that ring true in any kind of a way? It does. It does. I mean, that’s, you know, the word that came to mind now is a word that Ken Wilbercoined, which is Mondalic thinking, which he was talking about when the eye of mind contemplates spirit, right? When the eye of spirit contemplates spirit, you just have spirit. But when the eye of mind contemplates spirit, you get this strange language, which is a kind of symbolic language, the Mondalic language. Twilight language. Where you’re working with image and symbol in a very intense way. I talk about the thoughts of the heart in the paper and this notion of the thoughts of the heart comes from James Hillman. And this is the language I was trying to use, the language that is, which is the language of care, right? Which is Socrates’ language. When he has that confidence that he could show up with any inner locutor and be able to use his words to express and kind of create the thoughts of the heart between them. You know, this is a true sense of philosophy, I think. Working with the thoughts of the heart, essentially. And it’s not science, technically, right? And it’s not logic and argument in a strict sense, but it’s also not illogical and irrational or based on just phenomenal experience or ecstatic experience or those kinds of things. So it’s this hybrid language, like you’re saying, which brings the two together. That it can take the best of science and does not contradict that. And it can take the best of the mystical and the purely prophetic and those things and bring them together. And the thoughts of the heart are the most universal thoughts and forms of language. And so they are a kind of common sense, if I can use that way of speaking. But they do sometimes end up being cloaked in things that look like traditional religious forms of language. And so that’s, I find, the biggest trick now when I’m working with these modalities is to not basically offend the scientists, right? That’s one issue. And then the other issue is not to make it complex enough that you don’t get it confused as just being new age. So you don’t want to offend the scientists who dismiss you as being fundamentalists or something. And then you also don’t want to attract a bunch of people who are actually looking for something much simpler just to gratify their ego needs for safety and control, which is to say, new age market goers. And so that’s the dance. And yeah, I’m just kind of overwhelmed actually, getting the the praise for the paper. I wasn’t expecting it. But yeah, so that’s one of the things that came to mind there. And then as I was saying, this notion of that the sacred includes the kind of terrifying. And that is also with this notion of the post tragic being extremely important, something I’ve talked about in a few podcasts. And the idea being that when tragedy is there, it must be lived through. It can’t be avoided. And dealing with it actually doesn’t mean fixing it or making the tragic disappear. Dealing with it actually means finding a way to have it and and more. And I talk about what is within illness and what is within death that unravel it from the inside, which is to say, as hospice workers now and healthcare workers now, and I’ve been I’ve been a caregiver for many years in my life and I’ve been that there is what’s the right way to say it? You know? Yeah, so I’ll use symbolic language, right? Which is that God will catch you. It’s something like that. It’s that you there’s nowhere you can fall where you fall outside of God. Right? Something like that. And that includes all of the horror that God is within that darkness. And so, yeah, so again, it’s not about being stuck in the tragedy and saying, oh, it’s just horror. Right? It’s like, no, it is horror. But humans can withstand horror. And humans are made in the midst of tragedy. So much of history has been humans making personhood in the midst of tragedy. And so, again, the untapped semantic potential of religious languages for protecting vulnerable forms of human life. These are the things we’ve done to be together with glad hearts in the midst of tragedy. And that’s where the Bible is interesting because it is so political, so political, slavery, and freedom and injustice. There’s all of these stories of people in intense and plagues, of course, people in intense, intense interconnectedness. And so, so it’s not abstract in many cases, the Bible is just there. And so, yeah, there’s that encoding in human experience of making meaning and personhood in the midst of tragedy. And so that’s just, I’m saying when we’re bringing these languages together, you know, to what end? It’s because part of that need to create the new religion, right? This new form of religiosity. It’s coming at us again now at a higher register, that demand from the world. It’s saying, look at the suffering and the pain that’s unfolding, and how do we come together in the midst of this? And it’s about what we’re trying to do here, in a sense, with the creation of a new resources of symbol and language for meaning making. Because maybe the guy in the hospital in New York doesn’t have time for figuring things out in a very reductive way. He just wants the truth, and the truth has to be deep, right? It can’t be superficial or, and I guess the kind of God you’re speaking of, you know, that contains both the darkness and the light, or both the horror and the beauty. So it’s like, you don’t want to split those two. If you’re on your deathbed, I imagine, I’ve never been on my deathbed, but you would want things to be as close to the bone and as true as possible. And often religious language, maybe the English language, is not as true as possible. And often religious language may be the only way to express that. I don’t know. Or the heart spoken as directly as possible. But the thing is, it has to take. Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing worse than these words are being spoken, and they don’t take for the person. Right. Indeed. That’s what I’m trying to get at with this notion of faith, where it’s again, not willful assertion, not magical thinking, not claiming to know things that you don’t actually have any claim to know. It’s not a pretense of certainty. It’s not all the things that we sort of pretend faith is. No, it’s rather the sense there’s a beauty, and I don’t mean a pleasure, because beauty can be terrifying. Rilke reminds us of that repeatedly. But there’s a beauty to these symbols for people. They have a receptivity. That’s what I’m trying to get at. So that they take, the symbols take, they catch, they join the worlds together, they afford aspiration, they call the person to the depths that you’re putting your finger on, Andrew. And I’m really interested in that. And by the way, I want to point out, when Socrates was doing his thing, Athens was literally under siege from without, and there had literally been a devastating plague in the city. So Socrates is also not a figure that is somehow abstract in the ivory tower, while we’re in the midst of pestilence and feeling besieged. That’s where all of everything, well, many of the dialogues are actually even historically set in that time period. So Socrates is completely apropos for the situation we’re in. But what I’m interested in is, I invoked him, because he seemed to be able to do that. He seemed to be able, like Zach said, he could adjust himself to the interlocutor. He had the faith of being able to show up. And he had the faith that he could say things that would take, that people would, you know, that would tempt them towards the good, that would call them to their depths. And what’s interesting to me, what’s the difference? And I think this is ultimately what I want to really get to with Zach’s stuff, was what’s the educational background that makes people capable of appropriately being called by these symbols so that they take, and they’re aspirationally viable to them? And people who where it falls dead on their chest, it’s just empty words, or they get all of the stuff we’re critical of, all of, you know, the willful assertion, magical thinking, senses of how to misappropriate the symbols. That’s for me, where this is the knife-edge question that’s coming down. How do we, what do we give to people? How do we adduce? How do we draw forth from them this capacity for this kind of faith? Well, what I mean by faith is to be caught up in the terrible beauty of this symbol, so that one is called to one’s depth, and one is drawn out aspirationally into the depths of the world, so that one can confront the deepest things with the deepest resources at one’s disposal. That for me is the central question that I think, well, that’s, forgive me, Zach, that’s what I saw the paper as really driving towards at the end. No, no, that’s such a good question, such a good set of questions, right? Because it’s, because this is what, what’s the term, like, pearls before swine, right? Yeah, it’s like, and this is a classic educational problem, which is that there’s a depth to like, you know, an ancient text, which, you know, you wonder the level of maturity of the reader that’s needed to actually perceive the depth. And so, yeah, what are the prerequisites in personality and character structure and cognition and other things to be able to receive the symbol that’s there and to, yeah, it’s a, that’s the, well, there’s two things that instantly come to mind, you know, one is experiences, formative experiences, where the same symbol or comparable symbols or modalities of expression were terrible for you, right? So, many of the people I know who find it hard to be receptive to the language in an article like the one I wrote, you know, had, and I think you mentioned this last time we spoke, John, they had bad experiences in their, in their youth. Oh, right. A different kind of bullshit. Yeah, that happened to use this kind of symbol thing. And so, so that’s one major important element there, which is that like, this stuff’s been given a bad name, you know, and there’s a way that it’s like the well’s been poisoned. And so, how do we make it clear that we’re drawing from a clear spring, that it’s a different source. And so, that’s why many people leave there, they go to the East, right? Or they go from the East to the West, depending on where you’re, where you’re from. So, that’s, I think, one component. So, there’s a part of it, which means it’s something about like, either making that explicit and working it through, right? Or finding a novelty, a real novelty in the way the things are expressed. So, that’s, that’s the issue there. And then the other, the other component that came to mind has to do with element of practice and modeling. Yeah. Which is like, have you ever seen someone in your actual presence do that thing? Right? Have you experienced an elder or a teacher truly being inspired by ideas? And I think, John, this is why your work is so magnetic, right? Because you’re modeling for people what it’s like to do what you’re asking them to do. You’re showing them like, this is what it’s like to be taken into the matrix of the symbol and live in it and work with it, the power that comes from that. And faith in the life of ideas and that kind of thing. So, another thing that is clear that when people see it, when they actually see it, they, it is magnetic and people move towards it. This is a question at which points in their lives and especially formative phases of adolescent identity formation and adult, like these key phases, who are the different spokespeople there for these things? And are they getting it at the right times such that when they need it, they’ll be able to turn to it for solace? And, and the final one, I think is related to this notion of practice, just a little bit deeper, is that it takes sustained attention to reap the rewards of this kind of emotion and identity configuration. So, to the degree that we are becoming as a culture, systematically fragmented in our attention, it’s going to be hard for us to actually sustain the focus to have a complex enough relationship to the symbol and the accompanying kind of like semantic web to get, to get drawn in and to get empowered by it. So, that’s key. And that’s not just about meditation. It’s about long form books and other things that defragment the attention and allow you to, whoa, you just read for two hours almost straight. Now you’re so deep in the language that when it starts to move with symbolism, you can actually get the full range of connotations that are implied instead of the sound bite like tweet version, right? And anything that’s a sound bite tweet of anything, that’s not going to end up having the symbolic depth and richness that is necessary. So, so that’s another component, I think, in terms of the kind of pedagogical look at just how can we do this and make people more susceptible to these resources that they become available. – Basically. Just one thing I’d like to sort of add to that. It seems to me that in the present crisis that we’re going through, and also just to bring it back to the crisis, our reaction to the crisis sort of depends on how deeply we’ve studied these things or how deeply we’ve studied life. And if we’ve studied them deeply, we know that there’s a crisis all the time, right? This is not, this is an exceptional crisis in one sense, but the fact that we’re all going to die is like, that’s like the first thing you learn, right? If you study any kind of religious tradition, it’s to contemplate the fact that there’s a crisis going on all the time just by virtue of the fact that we have bodies that are disintegrating and we have to live that tragedy. – Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I think it was when I was talking with Peter Lindbergh and his online Stoa about, and I want to connect this to Zach’s point about long-form attention, because I think DIA Logos and what we’re doing here is also a great exemplification of that long form attention that is deeply enmeshed with trying to draw forth a new fount of intelligibility from all of these hidden semantic and conceptual resources. So I think that’s why DIA Logos is actually crucial. And DIA Logos is not just the presentation of ideas. DIA Logos is an exemplification, as Zach said, of a way of life and how it is actually viable for people, being enacted right here, right now. I think what I wanted to say about the point you made, Andrew, is connected to this long-form practice. So Stoicism, one way, Visser does this in Beyond Faith, that our word fatal, which we now equate with causing death, that’s not its origin. Its origin is having to do with fate, which is the way in which reality acts beyond all of our egocentric projects and concerns, in the way in which we can be struck by absurdity or tragedy. There’s many different ways in which reality hits us in the face and says, aha, you have all your projects and all your narcissistic narrative, but look, here I am. And so why the association became so strong is, of course, the event of death is the most, in that sense, fatal. It’s the one that makes us most aware of how reality is above and beyond us. But then the point is not, and I think this is what you’re saying, Andrew, the point is not to be considerate, just considerate of the fact that our existence will terminate. It’s that right here, right now, we are meshed in fatality and the mortality of all things, because always, always, everything is threatening us in the way that it is always beyond our narrative and our narcissistic narrative. And we’ve had a, we’re getting into a culture that is doubling down and trying to sort of, no, no, no, no, I can just make it so, I can just make it so by speaking it more loudly and getting other people to shout it with me. And so I think that gives us, brings us back again, and I’m not trying to like dragoon something, but I think that’s again, the sense of sacredness. I think part of sacredness is to be at home with, right, at home with your mortality and the fatality of all things, while never denying its real horror. The fact that it can always, it’s always, every moment capable of showing you in absurdity or in horror or in what’s happening, you know, in terror or in all kinds of things, that reality is something that is always, always, always, and you know, not always just in the long term, but always, always here and now beyond us in very, very powerful ways. And so the Stoicism was a lot about trying to reorient, right, and I take Stoicism as a clear example, comes out of the Socratic tradition very clearly, in which people were trying to wed Socratic rationality with this kind of faith. Stoicism has been called a religion, and I think not unfairly, because of the way in which it tried to get people, right, a new sense of the sacred that allowed them, right, to deal with the moment-by-moment fatality of all things. I think Buddhism is going to do something very similar, which is why there’s often comparisons drawn between Stoicism and Buddhism, by the way. So I think it’s really, really important what Andrew just said and to connect it to what Zach said, and I think what connects them is this whole thing we’ve been talking about, this sense, this lived, viable, aspirational sense of the sacred, right here, right now. Great, and just maybe after we’ve said all that, we’ve talked about this as being the state that we’re in all the time. Maybe we could move to speak about what you called the great un-pattering, or this transition, or what’s actually happening now. I don’t mean about the virus in any literal sense. I mean, yes, literal, because it is a literal thing, but maybe what’s going on now, what’s going on in time? Because you talk about historicity, I think, Zach, and the importance of that and the importance of time. Is my question clear? It is. Yeah, I mean, fate is unfolding. And we’re in the kind of sacred kairos, right? Where reality is appearing again, as it were, because of the deep simulations that were produced by the civilization as it was moving through, where we thought that we didn’t need to have massive supplies backloaded in hospitals just in case there was the off-campus pandemic. We didn’t think that through, right? Because we were deep in a simulation that everything was fine. And so now, yeah, we are confronting reality. And so the question is, yeah, will we pull together like stoics and love fate and end up embracing it and moving with our identities to become one with the tragic situation and transform it somehow from the inside in response to it? And so that’s, I see mostly what’s unfolding now. And that’s why I talked about a war in heaven is it’s choice. It’s about the basis of choice and who are we choosing to be? And so that’s this conflict between these ideals we have of ourselves, right? Are we stepping into that? So what is the war of heaven between who and who? Is it between the nihilist and, let’s say, the the life-hater and the life-giver? What is the war? What is the… It’s massively complicated, right? You remember last time we spoke, it was this sense of the divine double. And then we kind of brought him in the room and was like, no, it’s actually there’s many of those potential selves that are in your archetypal imagination to move towards as like personal ideals. And so what’s happened now with the great un-patterning is that everyone’s sitting at home with a lot of time or an absence of time, so a fragmentation of kind of, either way, you’re hanging out with many, many of yourselves who usually don’t get a lot of airtime, right? So there’s many of these archetypal personalities and possibilities for yourself are now flooding the imagination into this opening from being un-patterned. And so it happens when you travel, it happens other times in your day-to-day life when something like if you went for an appointment and it didn’t happen and now you’ve got like an hour to just sit there and you don’t have your phone or something like what happened? Your imagination goes unless you’re an annotator, right? So the war in heaven is that. It’s this war… Universal version of that, of like being in the doctor’s office, you know, waiting for the appointment and then what happens, right? Right. And what happens and then the doctor did, we’re waiting for the appointment in the doctor’s office, we’re nervous, there’s no good magazines, we’re sitting there. And there’s all of these different possible cells that we’re thinking about. And because the way the world will be on the other side of this is also unclear, it means that we’re getting in touch with all of ourselves, the full range, right? Shadow and light, if I can use that kind of polarization. So it’s not a war between two forces, it’s a war between the many potent possibilities of ourselves that we’re going to actualize through really unique moments of choice in the coming months, right? And so it’s about that. So who do we choose to be when we make a choice? And and so again, it means we have the opportunity to become incredible people, right? That’s one possibility. We have the possibility to be integrous and to act with character and integrity and to know the principles that we want to live by and to live by them more so now than ever, because, you know, rehearsals over. These are the important choices. So we have that possibility, which is rare, actually, to be in a moment of historical gravitas, where you have the chance to be doing really the right thing. So but we also have the opportunity to descend into chaos, and through fragmentation of choice and being many different people and not holding together with integrity and catering to those voices that are most selfish and most fear driven, etc. So that’s that battle. It’s that battle in our personalities, basically, as we’re faced with decisions we never thought we’d have to make in choices, choices that we never even kind of thought were on the table, are now on the table. So that’s kind of how, you know, it’s kind of how I’m feeling it. So the title of Tillich’s book, The Courage to Be sort of comes to mind when you say that. Exactly. Tillich was very clear about, is that required a transformation, right, in faith and a transformation in the notion of God, and you had to get to the God beyond the God of theism. We had to let the symbol change, which is part of what I wanted to bring up. You know, ultimately, part of what this means is a participatory stance, not a, not neither, you know, a sort of passive stance or an assertive stance. It’s a participatory stance. We have to participate in this because we have to be willing to let the symbols change, too. I think that was a very clear message. And faith isn’t the holding on to the existing symbol, for Tillich, and it’s not any premature closure, right? Oh, now I have it, right? It’s instead, like the aaf, the Hebrew word, right? It’s like the way you have, the way you’re faithful to your partner is not to hold her, I’m straight, so I’m just using myself as an example, not to hold her. Now, you always have to be this way, or, you know, this, here’s a particular symbol I’ve created for a relationship, and, you know, it’s not up for negotiation, but it’s not up for negotiation. So, you know, it’s not up for negotiation, but it’s not up for negotiation. So, you know, it’s not up for negotiation. It’s like, no, that’s not what it means. It means you have to be willing to be involved and let yourself change as the symbol changes so that you may maintain a continuity of contact about it. And that brings me up to a concern with what, not with what Zach said, because I quote what he said, but I think there’s an extra dimension to the war in heaven. And, you know, Chris and I are thinking about this, and this also goes to work that Johannes is talking about, Niedhäuser. The fact that many people, and Han talks about this too, right, when people are thrown into this empty time, right, they have, and I’m trying not to be insulting here, but this is sort of a way of getting the gist of it, they have a kind of shallowness in imagination. If you’ll allow me to use Corban’s idea, they have a merely imaginary sense of the imagination, not an imaginal. They have a purely subjective sense of the imagination, not a transjective one, and therefore it cuts them off in the very way they have been encultured to deal with their imagination, right. It cuts them off from the aspirational project that we’re talking about here. And so my concern is that they, you know, are sort of Cartesian subjectivity is being challenged really dramatically here. But I’m concerned that people, in order to let the symbol, in order to grow with the symbol as it grows, you have to have an imaginal sense of the symbol, not a merely imaginary sense of it, right. The symbol and the image doesn’t, it’s not in your head space. That’s not where it fundamentally between you and the world. It’s a joining of you to something deeply other than you, and that means you only know your joint to it when it’s actually transforming you and changing you, and that means transforming how it appears and shines into you. And I think, so my concern, to put it in a phrase, is, right, do we have the proper, you know, training in the imaginal that will afford us, you know, appropriating this kairos in the right way? That’s, sorry, I keep circling back to this, because this, I mean, this is sort of my Socratic concern. It’s like, we’re trying to get people to be, we’re trying to act as midwives, but I think there’s just tremendous difficulties in the grammar of our thought and discourse that prevent us from tapping those semantic resources that Habermas and I think Tillich were trying to put their finger on. And that’s why Zach’s idea of a total revolution of education is so important. I think that’s, I think that’s, that has, I’m trying to strengthen the case for that point. That unless, unless, like, any purely individualistic, you know, you know, within my own home, I’m not, like, of course people have to do that. I’m not, you know, but if, if there’s any sense in which that’s going to be sufficient for grieving our way and aspiring our way through this kairos, that has to be really challenged. And I think I’m trying to, I’m trying to put an argument in here that actually strengthens Zach’s point about radical, right, a transformation is needed to our educational system, where, you know, it’s, it’s the line between education and enculturation is completely being blurred, it seems to me, and what Zach is proposing. And we’ve got to get back to that in a powerful way. Yeah. Just before Zach, you respond, I was thinking about the fact that when you paint that picture, John, it looks very, very grim. But at the same time, at the same time, it is grim, and it is a grim picture. At the same time, maybe a few individuals doing this properly can go a long way, right? So I think of, again, I think of the biblical arc story or like building an arc or just, you know, building the thing, doing the thing properly, just a few people can save, save the world if I can be as cheesy as that. Right? Yeah. No, it’s not. It’s not cheesy. I never understood the etymology of that insult. I love cheese. I’m from France. Okay. I mean, I live in France. And he’s the godfly for the entire place. Right? And, you know, and all these movements start up around him and all the Socratic logi, you know, all that, it’s like, you know, it’s like, yeah, it’s the Leonard Cohen. It’s like he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone, although he was seeking Jesus, but all the ripples just spread out. And that was deeply, and eventually it leads to stoicism and Marcus Aurelius. Right? Yes, I do want to, I, sorry, Zach, I’m preventing you from speaking, but I just want to pick up on, although I’m painting a grim picture, I keep holding out these exemplary figures and how in situations very, very similar to ours, they were able to enact and afford that kind of educational, inculturational reform that Zach is pointing to. So this is not an inevitable grimness of doom or a grimness of inevitable doom. That’s not what I’m arguing for at all. I’m arguing for taking it very seriously, but pointing out there’s real historical examples of ways in which this can be seen through. Right. Thank you, John. I mean, I completely agree, of course, that at the root here is something like education extremely broadly construed or the word paideia, which is the word I use in my book, which is a word that basically roughly means like the intergenerational transmission that keeps apolity together. And that is sorely lacking thanks to like the exhaustion of the modern school systems. And now those school systems have been shut off basically all around the world and all of the kids are at home. And so it’s really an unprecedented situation educationally. And the question of in what ways after this could we change education so that a situation like this doesn’t occur again is the question that I’m asking. Because so much of the situation with kind of breakdown of anything like a public sphere and the kind of polarization and the post-truth culture and much of this also rooted in the educational crisis broadly construed. So yeah, and enculturation and schooling were basically separated. And then we forgot to work on enculturation anymore. And we taught kids a bunch of technical skills to try to prepare them for jobs. Early in modernity, that was okay, because the churches were still going and communities were still going. And the system hadn’t basically colonized the life world to the extent that the dinner table wasn’t a place of enculturation anymore. But separating those, having schooling going strong, getting lots of really technically capacitated people through a school system up into some extensive meritocracy, right? And then alongside that lack of rich character building enculturation processes, right? Instead something like popular culture and consumerism being the main modality of enculturation. And so that’s a nightmare. And that’s produced the generations now that are in power and aspiring to power. So yeah, there are all of these cascades systematically from educational failures and not just failures of schooling. Like TV could have been different. If you read the early literature in the history of education, when TV was coming out, people were talking about it the way we were talking about the internet in like 1995 or 2000. This is the thing that will save democracy. Television will do that. And like, didn’t pan out that way for a number of reasons. So we failed across the board in using the infrastructures and technologies we had to make the paideia strong enough to support the polity. And so the polity is in crisis and we’re realizing the paucity of the paideia, which means we’re realizing that fourfold educational crisis I broke down last time is unfolding. So my sense is that if we move quickly, we could in a generation start to change things, but it would require some of the social miracles I lay out in my book, which are on the table now, things like basic income guarantees and adult education, right? Where we could get a whole group of people, actually a whole generation of like food service workers, basically, who may or may not have jobs to return to, we could get them in a position to become more like teachers or community guides working in a decentralized educational system as opposed to returning them to their jobs, right? But if we just try to reboot the schools as we knew them and kind of go back to the way it was, I think that’s actually a recipe for deepening the mental health crisis. I think we’re going to have to basically address what’s happening with the immediate reforms of schooling on the other side of it, similar to what you’d have to do after a war transpired. Like you’d have to find a way to help the generations make sense of it together and figure out a shared vision for what it’s like moving forward. And that’s an educational challenge. It’s one of the more profound ones we’ve faced. So we’re looking at something like as different from the schools we’ve had as the schools we have are as different from the ones we had before the first world wars, right? And that difference in America, at least, is profound. Like you’re looking at almost like one room schoolhouse stuff for most of the country in 1900. And then in 1950, you’ve got these huge high schools that were basically massive innovations. So I’m suggesting similarly now, we’re going to need that much thinking about the educational and psychological and cultural dimensions of this as we are thinking about, you know, biometric infrastructures and economic stimulus packages and geopolitical security and those things are important. But if we just pretend that the culture will take care of itself and education will be fine the way it was, then we’ll repeat the mistake. It may not be exactly identical, but there will be a breakdown because of the failure of intergenerational transmission. So I’m getting the massive paradigm shift change in education needs to happen on one hand. And then the other hand, the image you use is the kitchen table. So I like that. I think getting back to the table and you know, my daughter is home studying and she’s sitting around the table doing her school and it’s wonderful. It’s like she’s not corralled into this sort of alienating classroom kind of thing. And she’s much more relaxed and just as a personal example. I think you’re trying to say the local, there needs to be a universal change and a local change simultaneously. Yeah, those are related. And you know, you’re lucky like to have a table to sit around. I know there are a lot of kids in the United States for whom not being able to go to school is sucks. Yeah, parents are abusive. There’s not enough room in the house. The school is actually the safe place for them. So I’m not like wanting to return it to the family or even to the local community per se because there’s a parochialism that can happen there. There was something innovative about the universal. So it’s a hybrid. And again, I express it in my book. But yeah, right now for many people, they’re realizing, holy crap, like education was taken out of the house. Like education was taken from us. My kids are taken from me every day. Like they’re kind of realizing when it’s going well and you’re lucky and the table can be a place where love happens and those things. There may be a realization in some quarters that, you know, wow, many of those patterns that have been in place that we take for granted, almost like they’re a part of nature are in fact not. They have been constructed and are now changing rapidly. So I do see on the horizon, pretty radical changes in the educational possibilities. So I would like to speak to that, John. Yeah, I do. Because one place where Zach’s notion of the education crisis and my idea of the meeting crisis came together, of course, was in when I talked about what happens after the Protestant Reformation. You have the separation of the knowledge institution from the wisdom institution. Universities get separated from the monasteries. And I was going to say, Andrew, it’s not just that education is taken out of the the kitchens, it’s also taken out of the church. I was young enough that I actually went to Sunday School. It was actually called that, Sunday School. And the problem with that is Sunday School was a very degenerate version of what the monasteries once were. It was basically a indoctrination, right? And once you got the child sort of to memorize the doctrines. But even there, you saw that for some people, it was something more. And I’m thinking what the monasteries have been and how they are in other cultures. The Buddhist monastery is not separate in the way that it was separated from the knowledge institution to the degree it is, for example, in the West or something like that. So what I’m trying to get at again is this idea that we not only need to change, but I think this is part of what Zach is saying too. So I don’t want to sound like I’m saying something original here. It’s not just that we’ll be more decentralized and we’ll be more at home, right? But it’s also that we have to be educating not just for knowledge, we have to be educating for wisdom. And those two have to be talking to each other and mesh up together. A lot of educational theory, actually the good educational theory, because there’s a lot of crap in educational theory. It’s untethered from good cognitive science, good psychology. It’s overly politicized. It’s ideologically driven. There’s all kinds of stuff. So where I can see viable stuff is this kind of core notion. It’s sort of simple to say, if you begin the early age project of helping to educate character and wisdom, kids will then be able to go take in deep kinds of complex knowledge. But if you just try to give them the knowledge without feeding that human need for character development and for wisdom, you’re going to find many people find that very educationally challenging and they ultimately develop a hostile attitude towards their education and their educational background. So not only do I think we need to do it culturally, we need to bring back the education of wisdom with the education of knowledge. I think for good pedagogical reasons, we need to give that some very deep thinking. But I don’t want that to be the state version of Sunday school where we just indoctrinate people in whatever political ideology seems to be in fashion right now. So the difficulty I suppose I’m trying to bring out because I want to hear what Zach has to say is because this points towards another important point. All of my questions are probative because Zach talks about this convergence, right? And to me, the convergence is I think the beginning of a response, a deep response to the question I’m going to ask. How do we bring back the education of wisdom within a pluralistic framework? Exactly, because it’s the world now. It’s not a bunch of countries. It’s not Christian Europe or Buddhist Asia. It’s a whole world now. I saw Zach pointing towards that when he was flagging the necessity of a convergence between these various traditions, which is not assimilating one to any master like Christianity conquering the other ones, but some kind of like a deologos. So a convergence is possible. And I’m wondering if that struck me as here’s how we could get back to the cultivation of wisdom within a pluralistic framework. Yeah, and he wrote about that in your essay. He wrote about a symbolic convergence between wisdom lineages and that kind of thing. That’s exactly why I’m bringing this question up. Yeah, no, it’s a very good question. And it’s really one of the more kind of exciting things that I think will be coming through education in the coming decade. I think it has to or else we’ll come apart at the seams because of the meeting crisis being like the thorn in the side of the whole civilization is this lack of wisdom starting like seven years old. And so yeah, there’s, as I mentioned in the paper, a trans lineage and symbol convergence across religious traditions. And we spoke about last time, something like a neo-perennialism, like a distilling of some not essential conclusions that they all supposedly have in common, but a form of dialogue or like you’re saying, an ecology of practice, which is to say like a classroom where we can put this stuff in it and be sure that no matter what the unique way this kid interacts with these materials and this teacher that they will come for themselves to create a kind of wisdom synthesis, let’s say by the age of 18. Right. And so that’s not indoctrination. It’s actually you know, more like a Piagetian metaphor of like a gardening, like you make the resources available with the container available and then allow them to grow into the wisdom that’s unique to them. And there will be huge pockets of overlap, although it just be people like, hey, I’m signing up for that Buddhism thing. That was pretty awesome. I haven’t really found one that’s better. Or there will be people who say, I’m not really actually buying any of this. I get why it’s important. But I’m actually much more interested in the specific kind of scientific problem. But I have a rich humanistic understanding now of my scientific identity. Right. So we want that possibility as well. So yeah, that’s very, it’s very- We want to create a renaissance person, not a person who is locked in their field. Correct. And someone who’s used to working with this language and with this symbol and just working with the idea that part of being human is having a kind of like historically and ontologically positioned notion of self, something like that. Right. That it’s like, that that’s part of, if you don’t, if you’re lacking that, it gets, it’s very uncomfortable. It’s very, it’s the, you’re in the meeting crisis and that’ll cascade into legitimacy crises and capability crises, et cetera. And so yeah, so this is the root of it. Even if we laid down the perfect bureaucratic technological, digital, decentralized classroom thing, it was all great. And we didn’t put this kind of content in it. We could end up with something way worse. We’re more efficiently educating people away from wisdom and into technocratic conformity. Right. Whereas what we need to do is suffuse the digital architecture with these forms of wisdom. And it doesn’t mean giving them wisdom. It means making the ecosystem in which when they step into it, all of a sudden they’re, unless they’re like, you know, bad actors, they will just buy through participation. They will become wiser or at least appreciative of this wisdom discussion. So yeah, so thank you, John, for pointing that. Oh, you’re welcome. That’s going to mean we have to, I mean, Thomas Björgman makes this point, you know, that for, we’ve sort of, we sort of defaulted to that our only authority is the market. And what we’re doing means we have to, because I think the point you made earlier, you know, education has begun, has become how to train people for, you know, appropriate service to the one God that we still all serve, which is the market. I’m not raving Marxists and I’m not trying to propose the overthrow of capitalism or anything like that. But what I am talking about is the idea that we have to have, and I think part of what this can afford us, it’s affording it in individuals I talked to, is a realization of, oh, wait, there’s a lot of things that really matter to me that aren’t, you know, aren’t coming from or aren’t in the governance of the market. And so there’s normativity that makes a call on me that isn’t just the call of the market to produce and consume. Again, I’m not denying that we need to produce or consume. I’m not saying that. But what I’m saying is the tyranny of the market and the religious idealization of it, I think it’s something that’s going to have to be challenged in conjunction with this kind of educational reform that Zach is proposing. Yeah. And maybe that’s why this notion of the digital campfire or whatever is kind of coming up. Even though I’m not sure if I’m in love with this term yet, because it still seems that it’s a disembodied experience on some level. It’s not a real campfire. But I also like the idea that people would want to work on this communal activity together, and that might be just something that people would want to do, right? That is so different than the alienation of the market. Well, that’s what I’m hoping. I’m talking about, when I was at the store, I was talking about stealing the culture the way Augustine and the Cougsons stole the culture from the militaristic imperialism of antique paganism, right? And then you’ve got Paul Van de Klan and other people have been talking about how we have not forgotten, because it’s become second nature to us, how much of a cultural transformation that was. And so, there is this medium outside. It’s not completely independent, but it’s largely outside of the movement of the market. And that this is a place with the virtual camp firing, where people are finding that the meaning making and the connection making and this let’s call it, chirodic educational interaction is deeply, deeply important to them, independent of the things that they had previously filled their days with. And that’s a reawakening, I think, of a real potential for us, because that’s what originally happened. You had people meeting in small groups, and they started talking to each other, and then the small groups started talking to each other. And you’ve got this huge bottom-up thing. And I don’t think it’ll go smoothly like some kind of a wonderful hallmark card. It can’t be made into a product, right? It can’t be made into a product. And I fully expect that the way the Roman Empire resisted in powerful ways, this upswelling of a countercultural movement, we might get the same sort of resistance, especially by the people who want everything to go back to normal. Yeah. Well, they might try to make it into a product, right? But- No, not only that, they might try to clamp down on it. They might try to ridicule it. They might try to undermine it. They might try to sloganize it and market the slogans as a replacement or some sort of ergot, or a sort of get for actually undertaking the transformation. There’s all these kinds of things that I can see. I don’t know what to call it, our socioeconomic system doing, our socioeconomic political system doing. But I do think that one of the positive things that’s happening right now is that people are discovering, this sounds so trite, they’re discovering how really important culture is, right? How really important culture is and how it’s different from popular culture, which is the part of culture that gets commodified and marketed, right? And how really important- Remember that the center of culture is cultus, that which is sacred, right? Rediscovering how important culture is, the cognitive cultural grammar is for us. And I think that gives us the potential that we could steal the culture in the way that we need to steal it in order to get the kind of- I can’t see how you would do what Zach is proposing without doing what I’m proposing at the same time, I’m saying. What do you think about that, Zach? I love it. I mean, yeah, a few things come to mind. One of them is, yeah, when the world kind of slips away as it has, then you’re left with the baseline values and needs. And then you realize, as you’re saying, talking to people, long form conversation around a campfire, holy crap, you know? And the confrontation with death is part of the realization because it’s not just that the normal work routines are disrupted and you can’t do your normal schedule and those kinds of things. It’s also that everyone’s worried about death. And so on your deathbed, usually you don’t say stuff like, I wish I had worked more overtime. Usually you say stuff like, I wish I had had more family dinners. Spend more time around the campfire. Right, spend more time on the campfire. Exactly. Yeah. And the campfire, the notion of the fire, the hearth, right? Yeah, the hearth. Hestia, I think that’s how you say it, or Hestia, the Greek goddess of hearth and basically the goddess of inwardness and composure and focus. And so yeah, there is that returning to the uncommodifiable and realizing that it’s still there. And to the degree to which we get used to that, it’s ironic a little bit, right? That we’re supposed to be isolating, but in my experience, I’ve been having more calls and more conversations with a wider range of people than I usually do. And so, and most of them have not been kind of work calls. I don’t really consider this even like work, like what we’re doing here. It’s actually, yeah, culture. Serious play of culture, the serious play of culture. Yeah, the serious play of culture, right. Which is fundamentally uncommodifiable. And fundamentally. And always will be, even if you just happen to make some money from it. It’s available to everyone. It’s not high culture. It’s not like, because we’re doing PhD level discourse, that’s the thing that makes it culture. In fact, the seriousness of any conversation that’s being had right now and the ways that we’re grappling and kind of like moving through the the ordeal of it together with language, with commitment, with unspoken agreements and all of those dimensions, that’s culture. It’s not the artifacts, books and all of them, the podcast. That’s not the culture. The culture is the living substance that binds us together. And you have to work at it, to practice, to build culture, family cultures, right? How strong is it? How resilient is it? All those things are coming to life. And that’s also what illness does, you know, and what death does, it will disrupt the routine and basically force you into being with what’s most real and most important. And often what’s most real and most important isn’t the funnest stuff. It’s not the stuff like that’s entertaining and the source of ecstasy. But it is the longest lasting, most meaningful stuff you’re going to be grappling with. And there’s interesting studies on happiness where it’s like, it’s kind of a little bit counterintuitive where it’s like, you know, your everyday experience won’t be happy. Like you’re not going to be happy every day if you make certain commitments, right? But over the long run, you have this different form of contemplatively reassured, kind of like disciplined wellbeing, which ends up being not a trite joy or happiness, which is actually kind of inappropriate right now, but an emotion that’s the result of being integrist and authentic and having real relationships, like being fully in souls, the way I would say it, down and in your life. Yeah. Which is not a denial of suffering, I think. It’s in fact a result of it. It’s in fact a result of it. It’s like, you think about some of the most, like Hillman wrote this beautiful essay on war, and he was just like, we love war. We love war. And we love war because it makes us love one another. Right? And when you’re in the foxhole, right? You’re in the platoon or you’re waiting for the soldiers to return at home and keeping, like there’s an intensity to that. That’s what’s happening now. That’s what’s happening. Yeah. And so more people than kind of like quote unquote, like embrace the intensity of it, the more that we can find the substance that these kinds of situations give us is the substance of real connections that matter. Where like, do I trust you, bro? You can trust me. Like that bond now, today, means so much more. Then it’s like on an every old suburban day, you trust me, bro. I trust your vote, but it’s the suburbs. Who cares? Like, do we really trust one another? Like, it doesn’t really matter. But now it’s like, you really care. Can I really trust this person? Right? So the is of love that come from the kind of the ecstatic ordeal of the tragic. And yeah, so we’re finding that. And so if we simmer in that for long enough, it’s going to be intense, but there’s going to be no going back because of what we’ve tasted now. And. A static ordeal. That’s quite a phrase. Yeah. Well, gentlemen, I need to get going. I had a slaughter from 12 to 130. I really wanted to, first of all, thank Andrew for bringing us together again. And I will hope you’ll send me the file so I can upload this on my channel as well. Because I think this is so I’ve been releasing some of our videos together and do on my channel. Yeah, I saw that. Thank you. Great. I want to especially thank Zach for his eloquently thought provoking article and how it afforded this deal logos. And I’m glad I got to be a part of it. So thank you very much, guys. Yeah. I have appreciation, massive appreciation and kind of, um, yeah, just gratitude for you guys. And Andrew for the stage and John, yeah, for your time and attention. I just appreciate it. It’s been wonderful. Yeah. Oh, for me, you know, this is where I would like to be. You know, it’s like, this is just where I would like to be the most right at this, in this very moment. So the way of life. That’s what I see. That’s fantastic. And the more intent because because this conversation has been very intense. And that kind of intensity is is transformative. I think it’s transformative for me. And maybe people who watch it will get a little taste of that. And, and, and, you know, and just a little taste seems to be very valuable. Yes.