https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FKVEX74LBnw
You say things are going to happen hoping that they don’t happen hoping that by virtue of saying it’s like a spell and then it doesn’t happen. But now it’s happening. Shit. Well, actually, in our first conversation, you said something that gave me the shivers. You said like, you said like, what happens if a million people are, you know, die and we have to watch that? And what would the culture do? You said something like that. And that was like, like a month before this whole business came down. And I remember when you said that I, you know, people say stuff and you don’t, you just, it just washes over you most of the time. But that kind of made me shiver a little bit. I remember that moment. That too. I’m releasing the war in heaven dialogue that three of us had tomorrow on my channel. So cool. Cool. Great. Great. Yeah. Well, maybe we can we can delve in deeper with the subject with the subjects that we’ve already started to discuss. You know, we were talking about, we’ve already started talking. We’ve been talking about COVID and we’ve already started talking about how this is a strange time, a weird time, a bizarre time. And the time actually, time itself is sort of different during this period. And which is the Greek word kairos. That was my first question I had for you guys is, is if you could elaborate on this, this kairos, this idea of critical moment. Sure. Do you mind if I go for a sec? Because I put some thought into that. I put some thought into that before all of this because it was in my series. Because I originally got the notion from Tillich and in the and he talks about it in quite a bit of his work and also connection, you know, to the courage to be, which he’s dealing with the meeting crisis and the effect it’s having on religion and his time. And of course, he gets it. He has the Christian slant on it because he’s a Protestant theologian. But he claims that it was that there was a really interesting sort of Christian spin on the Greek term. One of the original, I guess, not metaphorical, mythological, in the good sense of myth, is the idea of Christ’s advent came in the fullness of time. So the idea is that systems will go along in place and they have a lot of inertia to them. They’re very resistant to change. And then certain sets of conditions will constellate such that an intervention will have a huge, has a huge potential to really steer the course of things. So the idea about a kairos is a fullness of time in which timing matters because it can turn the way in which time unfolds. So there’s sort of many things that were only in potentia have come to a place where actualization and transformation is possible. And so the way I try to take that mythological notion, that mythological existential notion, because you can note that in your own life. You can note like when you’ve been in a relationship with a person and you can come to a point where you feel that the relationship has been stable and then it hits this point, right? It hits this point. And you go, oh, you know, people talk about make or break points in relationships. And so you get a sense that, oh, this could change the whole course of nature of the relationship. So there’s that mythological sense. There’s that personal phenomenological sense. And then I think it, I try to map it onto dynamical systems and the idea of criticality in self-organizing systems. This comes from Purvach. The systems are self-organizing and they’re quite stable. And then they get to a point where the processes, the very processes that made them stable actually start to undermine their structure. The classic example is the column of sand that’s falling and it builds a mound and the mound is stable for long periods. And then when it gets too high, because of its self-organization, it goes critical. It avalanches, its structure breaks down. And that criticality can either lead to the disintegration of the system or it can afford a new base from which something new can emerge and be restructured. And so in my mind, I sort of put those three together when I think about Kairos. And I think we’re getting increasing evidence that we’re in something. I mean, I think a lot of stuff is already Kairotic. And then I think the COVID crisis has just been an accelerant of the Kairos. Totally. I mean, I hold it similarly. I first got it actually from Ofhtob Omar, who was at Meridian University, who was a student of James Hillman’s work and then read Hillman writing about Kairos and relating it to this notion of opportunity in particular and this kind of like penetrable opening within impenetrable fabric of fate or time, that there’s like a nick in time, like in the nick of time in the sense of there’s a chink in the armor of Kronos so that you can get in somehow. And then so there’s something about it too and relating it to complex systems. It’s something that I do instinctively in the realm of like individual development, that if you look at critical periods in the development of any individual, the critical period of adolescent identity formation, for example, like most of adolescents feels Kairotic. It feels so much pregnant opportunity, so much can go right or wrong. And so much is locking in even physiological, the dysregulation and re-regulation of whole parts of identity structure, but also hormones and growth spurts and other things. So similarly in early childhood, when you’ve got these critical, the so-called critical periods which are not set in stone, but you can feel them when they’re happening as an educator or a parent. And they’re kind of written into the way the system develops and grows. So similarly, when you have a system that’s growing, like embryologically, for example, or developmentally, epigenetically within childhood, you’re getting these periods of real disequilibration. Adolescence is a good example where there’s to be expected a kind of identity dysregulation and affective dysregulation. These things are kind of par for the course there because the system’s trying to get up and into some new form of patterning. So crises are usually moments of opportunity. They’re usually these moments of Kairos and identity crises in particular. When you’re thinking about the individual and the kind of phenomenology of Kairos in your own life, like what’s it like? What does it feel like? You can remember those periods in your life when it just you’re in it. And so the question of kind of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, to what extent we can apply that model to the growth of cultures and civilizations, we could say something like, you know, the civilization is in a kind of adolescent identity crisis of erotic import, which is to say, like, this if we become a planetary civilization, this kind of pandemic is something we’re going to have to be able to deal with because of the nature of the trade and the nature of the travel and the nature of the urbanization structures. It’s kind of like this is what it’s like to be a mature species that has planetized, like grow up, we need to figure out how to deal with this. And so that’s this moment of opportunity where either the adolescent deals with reality or the adolescent adapts to misadapts to reality and creates some identity structure and behavior patterns that are actually maladaptive. And then you’ve locked in a kind of a difficult way forward into full maturation. If not, it end up being self-terminating identity construction. So that’s one way I kind of model it. I don’t know if it’s useful to think about it that way. Oh, no, I think it is. Yeah, there are limitations to it, but there’s something powerful to it. You said that just you said that it’s either or either you go into a new higher level of realization or the thing disintegrates. And when I was saying that, I think both kind of happen simultaneously, right? It depends. Isn’t that what’s happening now or what could be happening now? Well, I mean, there’s a degree of the criticality means the previous structure is disintegrating literally to some degree. Yeah. So but there is a tipping point, right, where if you go too far, the disintegration, the entropy overtakes the system and the system collapses. Right. And you might and then it gets stuck into an aberrant pattern, which is kind of like, I think what Zach is talking about with the way can go become maladaptive. Yeah, like a teenager who, you know, gets into crime or something like that. Or something like that. But there’s a way there’s a I want to riff on what Zach said, because so when you look at those that self organizing criticality, you can actually see it in the brain. You can actually see it at work in insight. Like this is the work of Stefan and Dixon. In fact, when people are locked into a frame, and this is why maybe bringing in framing might help, because we could sort of link framing and identity that might give us even a richer metaphor because they get locked into a particular frame. And then what you have to do is you actually have to enter. You have to throw a lot of noise. You have to destabilize them. You have to introduce entropy into the system. And then that will actually provoke an insight. And what’s interesting is you can see development. I mean, I think you could make a good argument if interpreting Piaget because he sees the stages as bound to systematicity of error. You could see development when you move from one stage to another as systematic insight, not just an insight here or here, but a much more comprehensive set of insights, like so that your entire ways of looking at the world, entire ways of being would be changing. And that’s where you could maybe even see the cognitive change and the change in identity are then start to be woven together. And why that might be helpful to think about it is officially in terms of the textbooks. We’re not supposed to call them critical periods anymore. We’re supposed to because the term had that, you know, if you’re not exposed to language by the time you’re 12, you’ll never get syntax. And it had that sort of. So the terminology doesn’t matter, but it’s felicitous here because we now call them sensitive periods. And so the idea here is just like the noise can sensitize the system and make it possible for insight. And if you look at complex systems, you have sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When you get into these kairos states, actions that normally that would have just been submerged into the system have like they have a tremendous capacity to change the future course of the entire system. And so why I’m bringing that up, sorry, this is a little bit belabored. I’m trying to get the cognitive and the development of identity linked to this notion of a special kind of sensitivity, because what that then brings in that is that there’s a timing issue to this. There’s a timing issue to this that’s really, really crucial. So like an action that would have been impotent four weeks, five weeks ago. Yeah. Right now might make a big difference. And it might also be impotent five weeks from now. Right. We’re in a period where the system is sensitive to our actions. And if we can figure out a systematicity in the air, this is how I’m trying to bring it all together. We can make an intervention that can permeate, promulgate throughout that entire systematicity. So it seems like if I could just jump in that what we do right now is very important. Yeah, it’s what we do right now is very important, but we have to couple that to a deep kind of discernment. We have to try and track out like. Is it in all of the chaos and all of the noise, is there a systematicity of error signal? We’re getting error signals. This went wrong. This went wrong. This went wrong. This went wrong. Think about the kid who’s trapped in conservation errors. They’re making they’re giving us all kinds of error signals. And then something happens in their cognition where their brain figures out, oh, wait, these errors are all related. If I start doing this from now on, I won’t make any of these mistakes again. We could do something analogous. We have to bring in. There has to be like we have to find the systematicity in the error. We have to find where we could do so we can find like a nexus point. Right. So we can we can we can find what’s it sensitive to and where’s the nexus point and where can our actions make the most impact right now? So it’s a timing. It’s a timing. It’s a sensitivity issue. It’s an issue. But trying to find the systematicity in the error. I think the people like we’ve got to we’ve got to shift off of it’s just chaos. We’ve got to shift to OK, yes, there’s lots of noise. There’s lots of entropy. Let’s try and find because if there’s no systematicity of error, we’re screwed. I mean, you know, if there’s no systematicity of error, our interventions won’t make a systematic difference in the system. Everything is going to collapse. Right. And so it’s a timing issue. It’s a sensitivity issue. And most importantly, it’s a discernment issue. We’ve got to do a lot of work to try and figure out what to what what what what gestalt, what constellates all these error signals so that we get some kind of unified sense of how we can make use of the kairos. That’s what I’m trying to argue for. So that makes sense. Did that make sense? I think it did. I’m Zach. Maybe Zach could riff on on on this notion of what we what how we can make use of this kairos, because that seems to be the question. Right. It is. And what John’s speaking to is exactly correct from my perspective of thinking about development and learning. Right. Yeah. Like if you’re in a class and by the end during the entire class, you get through and you’re never confused and you write like a perfect paper at the end. You have not learned anything. Right. You I’ve always tell my students, like, I want you to be very confused at certain points. And that confusion is like a kind of kairos because you thought you understood and now you’ve encountered something and now you don’t understand. So you’ve been what P.J. says, disequilibrated. Right. The ability for you to just like run with it is no longer viable. You have to somehow adjust your operating. And so if you’re in a situation where you’re trying to develop or learn, you need to be comfortable with being disequilibrated, thrown off and put in this kairos confusion. And then as John exactly was saying, within that, you need to then start looking for the invariance because that’s what you’re hunting. That’s what P.J. was always looking for. The the abstraction of invariance from from the environment. And first, you discover the environment with your the invariance with your sensory motor properties and affordances of the body. And then slowly you extract the invariance from the social and the physical into these abstractions and then into principles and paradigms, processes and things. So there’s something here. There’s an opportunity for the social system itself to move into a kind of higher order of abstraction and complexity. And then you’re able to be able to look at what’s actually invariant because when the simulation is going, it’s not clear to tell what’s real and what’s not real. Where’s the invariance? Like it’s all working. So when you’re perfectly equilibrating your class and economics, so it’s making perfect sense. There’s a good opportunity that you’re missing a huge part of economics precisely because it’s working, but there’s something wrong. There’s something missing. It’s working so well that you can’t tell something’s wrong. And so this is what’s been happening with the civilization for a long time. It’s been working so well for the key members of the civilization. Yeah, it can dampen up the error signal. It can absorb it so powerfully. Exactly. So it’s absorbing the error signal. And so now there’s this thing where on that we’re getting a sense of all the possible error signals. And now as John’s saying, we can look at the systematicity of the errors and detect the invariance. And then that’s the opportunity to move to a higher order of abstraction. It’s called reflective abstraction in the Piagetian model. And then you have the grasp of consciousness with the company. So that’s the insight, which is we put it in front of you. The subject becomes object, as Keegan says, and then the grasp of consciousness comes in. There’s insight and then you can consolidate at the higher level, hopefully, because that’s the other thing you can have the insight and then drop back down. And this was Kurt Fisher’s great instance. This movement of this zone of proximal development, the developmental range is such that you can pop up and see it and then drop back down and then pop up and see it again, drop back down. So it’s not just getting the insight. It’s also finding the ways to get the scaffolding in place to secure the insight, kind of moving forward. And that’s the level consolidation. And so then there’s this notion of enduring and transitional structures as part of the developmental process, that there are some structures which are transient. They’re put in place temporarily to get to a structure that’s actually an enduring structure, part of the learning process, like different kind of steps that you can use, even the parts of a web, as Fisher described it. That’s interesting what structures are enduring and what structures are sort of superficial and are just transition structures. Right. And this is the deep question in development. There are some structures you don’t discard, like the principles of mathematics that you got from sensory motor operation. Those are part of your enduring cognitive structures. But lower levels of moral development, often you do kind of discard or at least you put them in a different kind of context. So yeah, there’s many strands here. But I pick up on general. Yeah, please. So one is to let’s so what you just said was very helpful because it helps me try to refine this discernment that I’m trying to put up because part of like, let’s go back to the insight problem solving. And one of the things you do to get people to afford insight is you call what you do the notice invariance heuristic. You get people to pay attention. And this is why humility is really important. You get people to pay attention to failed problem formulations. And then you try to notice what’s invariant across those problem formulations. And then you change that. And that’s exactly how you afford insight. So this brings up a sort of a question in my mind. It’s more of a challenge to discernment, which is how do you have to you have to you have to notice the good invariance that you’re going to track as you’re talking about Zach. But you also have to notice the bad invariance that you have to let go of that you have to abandon in order to get the insight that is needed for the transformation. Does that make there’s sort of part of the wisdom is what’s the so you get the noise, we turn it into systematicity. As you said, we’re looking for the invariance. But I think there’s even something more fine grained. We have to be able to discern the good invariance if you’ll allow me these normative terms from the bad invariance, the bad invariance like that might be, you know, analogous to, you know, the sets of constraints in the child schema, you know, that was actually holding them back. And they have to be relaxed. But as you said, that doesn’t mean you abandon all invariance because that’s a disaster. And so it’s not just it’s sorry, I’m not I’m not trying to be critical of it. I’m trying to build on it. It’s not just sort of finding the invariance. It’s also finding it’s also distinguishing between the two kinds of invariance and getting the right trade off between them, I think is part of what we’re all so what I’m also trying to get to with your help to this notion of discernment that we need to bring in. Does that make sense? It does makes perfect sense. Yeah. And it’s interesting that kind of emotion and cognition are completely interdigitated, and the Pigelean model and so you get, although those works mostly are not translated. So you can see that it’s a cognivus, but it always says that feeling emotion and cognition, they’re related. And so there’s a there’s a the discernment’s not just cognitive, because you’re right, there’s a lot in the there’s a lot of invariance that we don’t hone in on because it’s not relevant, right? Because it’s not part of the of the field of what matters to the developing child. And so this is where again, I think also identity and cognition are related as well, because eventually what matters to me is a is a function of who I take myself to be. And so in that sense, this question of who one is and how one feels, which is to say how one uses emotion as an information system. Those are kind of like more foundational than the cognitive moment, not more foundational, but there’s a very deep interaction between these and you can you cannot remove. And this is what makes AI so dangerous, right? Is that if you’re removing the affective and embodied vector of salience and relevance, let’s say, then you’re unmoored from what actually matters. And this is that difference between the simulation and the reality that civilization is going through is that if you’re if the commodity disguises its relation to the actual biosphere, so you don’t realize that actually this thing is the disembodied idea, but the its actual body is quite dangerous, completely unsustainable, couldn’t be extracted at that rate for another two years, five years, even depending on what the commodity is. And so there’s this way that the cognitive apparatus needs to be within the affective and evaluative and I think embodied container. And that helps get the sense of which invariance am I detecting, right? I agree with that. I mean, in fact, I think that’s fundamental to relevance realization. Montague actually talked about, you know, the difference between us and computers to use your your point, as I is that we have to take care of ourselves, and therefore we have to care about information. And so I’m using care here in a high degree sense, that what we’re talking because relevance realization is ultimately, and I think this will get us back to the affective stuff, even the existential stuff, the, you know, like you’re talking about the level of identity, because relevance realization is also is ultimately a process by which you’re committing. It’s acts of commitment, and they can be micro acts of committing, you know, seconds of attention, seconds of arousal, but it can also be macro acts where you can you’re committing long periods of your very precious and limited attention, cognitive resources, time. So I think that ultimately, and this is what we don’t have to do the AI thing, but this is one of the things holding back AI right now. Because ultimately, relevance realization is never cold calculation. It’s never cold calculation. It’s always an act of commitment. And now I’m going to sound like Heidegger. And commitment is always an act of caring and commitment and caring are always identity forming processes. That’s just the way I mean, the best way to find out who I am is not to do some sort of romantic introspective act. It’s to pay careful attention to what I systematically care about. That’s the that’s the that’s a clearer way of getting at who I am. And what do I commit to? What what can you reliably hold me to committing to? Well, John will John will commit to this. Well, that’s the kind of person John is. And so I think I think that if we could, if we could agree that, you know, this process we’re talking about is deeply one of caring and commitment and cognition, and I think that overlaps with your terms of affect and identity really deeply, then is it possible and I like your point that it’s only that fully embodied process that can get the discernment or at least get good discernment between the bad invariance and the good invariance. What’s the an analog for the culture? Right? Because I think you’re right. If we’re taking a look at individual cognition, we can, you know, there’s relevance realization, it’s never cold calculation. It’s, you know, it’s about trying to zero in on what I should care about what I should commit to what I thereby identify with. Right. And that that whole process is, you know, an insight is just moments where that’s restructuring. And that’s what actually is helping me pull apart the good invariance from the bad invariance within times of development, times of Kairos. So Zach, this is a hard question, but I’m lobbing it over to you. What’s the analog to distributed cognition and collective intelligence? Right. It’s a great question. The first thing that came to mind was that something like a properly functioning religion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was trying my best not to load it in any kind of biased way. So can I throw in one one word here that I got from Nora Bateson, which came to my mind when you were talking, she talked about warm data versus cold data. Is that is that a bit what you’re talking about? Like warm data would be data that’s embodied and. Well, I mean, I got to talk to Nora directly about this. There’s a video on my channel about that conversation, actually, with Tim Adelaine. And I think I mean, Nora means she means she’s not dismissing the affect, but she’s trying to point out that we’re all always, if you’ll allow me this, ethnographically immersed in the problems that really matter to us. They’re not just sort of problems out there. There’s there’s there’s a lot of things that we are a complexity, they’re a complexity and their interactions between them is complex. And so we the warm data is data that is much more contextually sensitive and comprehensive and much more dynamically sensitive and responsive to that reality. That’s how I understood what she meant by warm data. I don’t think the affect part is being excluded, but I think I don’t want to say that that’s what she’s primarily putting her finger on. I think she’s trying to put her finger on. Yeah, look, no, no, there, you know, there’s the kind of data that we are gathering when we’re trying to do the really important decisions, the decisions that involve commitment, existential commitment, and transformation are warm data decisions, they’re never data, we can never get data that is coldly disidentified, coldly abstracted, and coldly separate from us when we’re trying to wrestle with really important decisions. That’s how I understood her to mean that. Okay, well, sorry, maybe I can answer John’s question. I just threw that in. Three seconds. But I think that idea of warm data is exactly the kind of data processing, if you’ll allow me to structure metaphor, that goes on in religion. So I don’t think it’s irrelevant what you said, Andrew. I don’t think it’s irrelevant. Great. Yeah. That’s very interesting. Yeah. I mean, you’ve got Nagel’s The View from Nowhere, right? This is the idea that actually, no, it’s not science, it’s scientists, everyone has a body, and has a family, a mother who brought him forth screaming, and they eat dinner, and they go to the bathroom. And so the idea that the scientist is primary, that the science follows from the scientist, and you can take that too far into the postmodern critique, where all science becomes power, and you psychoanalyze away truth into biography. But there is something really profound about this reorientation, which has happened, I think, since maybe the 90s. It’s never been complete, it’s not well distributed, but there’s been an awareness in a lot of scholars that actually we need to take the human element within the knowing system very seriously, and that reduces us down, not reduces us, but it shifts the figure and ground, so that we become aware, we become more aware of the kind of emotional identity positions that we’re in as researchers, and intellectuals, and things of that nature. And yeah, and so in that sense, it’s similar to admitting that there are religious aspects to even science, right? That we are investigating truth together, and that if we do it in an earnest enough manner, that we would end up finding things that we would kind of live by. And that would allow us as a group to then do the kind of discernment you’re talking about, John, like at the cultural level, there would have to be these shared frameworks of value and identity, and for shared frameworks of reality. And so that’s interesting, and we’ve, you know, that cuts both ways, right? We know the bad stories of religion, and we know why modernity decided to try a different way of organizing people, and it was important, huge innovation. That’s a good invariance, right? Right. Zach, like the stuff, it’s not like you’re not, when you brought up, when you brought up the analogy and say, well, what’s that is for the collective intelligence as a well-functioning religion, right? Then, and I want to link it to your previous point, I mean, there’s stuff we shouldn’t unlearn. The fact that you’re, if I can put it this way, you’re not proposing religion in a nostalgic fashion. You’re not saying, I want to give up. This is what I mean. You’re doing it right now. You’re trying to pull apart, right, the invariance that we should hang on to from religion, if you’ll allow me this language, and discern which are the, what are the bad invariance that we need to notice and let go of so we can break through to a new developmental stage. I think you’re doing concretely exactly what I was asking for. Yeah, and this is the idea, and it’s a decentering in PSJA in terms, and so you’re revealing, you’re moving out from the surface to the depth, and yeah, it’s very interesting, that notion of what are the enduring structures that we need to preserve within the traditions, and what’s the form that the enduring structures take as they’re integrated into new structures, emergent structures, and so the moment now, the chirotic moment is when all the structures are kind of coming undone, which means we can gather the best enduring structures together moving forward. Yeah. So that’s an interesting frame. I like these because they’re interesting. I like this because this helps to make beautiful, to use a phrase from Plato’s seventh letter, the idea I was always rendering in a very ugly fashion, I was trying to talk about salvaging from these traditions, right, because the idea of a salvager is it goes in, he tries to find what’s still good within what has been discarded, but I like how we’re talking about it now. I think it’s much more refined and much more interesting. So that has something to do with the living beauty, you mentioned beauty, right, the living beauty, what’s there, rather than whatever is dogmatic or superficial or dangerous. But that’s an excellent segue, Andrew, because, I mean, so if you’ll allow me to talk about a bit, the aesthetics of this are very important because the aesthetics is precisely where we’re bridging between a lot of these things. When you’re experiencing beauty, this is the great Platonic insight, you’re having one of your most profound cognitive insights, but you’re also having an education in the Platonic sense of your sensibility and of what you care about, right, this is why Plato linked the understanding of beauty to the cultivation of virtue. And so think about Hahn’s work on saving beauty and think about the aesthetics. So he talks about, and you see how this is pressing in a lot of ways, before all of this hit, we were in what he calls the aesthetics of the smooth, we like things that are smooth and we like objects that are smooth, and we like data production and communication. We want everything to run smoothly and we want everybody’s face and the smooth is an aesthetic that is the tyranny of the projection of the subjective, right? The world is supposed to be completely conducive to me and in no way rupture or challenge me. And what he actually says, and I think he’s right, is he says, we’ve really, that aesthetic has really lost beauty. That’s a simulacrum of beauty rather than beauty itself, which always has edges to it and and always has depth and even is a little slightly painful and terrifying. Well, it should be careful. And yeah, exactly. Rilke describes the angel. Beauty is a terror that we’re basically barely able and that’s so much, I think, relevant. Right now, because beauty is something that should strike you. That’s the verb that Plato uses repeatedly. You’re struck by it. And the Greek is a very violent striking, right? And the point about the lover and also the phileia, Sophia, the lover of wisdom, is they have they have a capacity to, well, I’ll use a Piagerian term, they can find, they can accommodate to the beauty and they’re not distinguished from each other, right? The ability to accommodate the beauty is precisely what makes it beautiful. If you can’t accommodate, you don’t have awe, you have terror, right? And so this allows me to frame another question. Right? So think about the deep interconnection of the education of sensibility and aesthetics within a religious community that’s functioning well. Here’s what I think of, you know, the work of my friend and colleague, Jonathan Paget, where he goes back and he tries to re-educate people, right, into what all this symbolism was doing, you know, aesthetically in this deeper sense that I’m talking about. Seeing the aesthetics of people’s experience as a fundamental thing. We’ve, okay, I’ll put it in a sentence and I’ll turn it to Zach as a question. Right? I think, you know, children go through this, the liminal with serious play, I’ve made that argument before, you guys are familiar with it, we can bring it up again. But, right, I think, and coupled to that has to be an education that removes aesthetics out of entertainment and puts it back into education. And because that’s part, that’s a part of the religious vision that Zach, I think, is alluding to that we have lost the thread of. We’ve lost the thread of in a powerful way. And so my question to Zach is that, right, do you think that, so this is kind of self-deprecating for all of us, I suppose, do you think that the answer that we’re looking for, and I don’t mean that as a simple answer, you know what I mean, a comprehensive, trustworthy response, is going to come out more from an artistic set of people, people that are at home with the transformative aspects of beauty than us intellectuals. Because I’m getting a lot of emails from artists now that I didn’t get before. A lot, a lot more. And they’re, they seem to be the people that rush into the Kairos better than anybody else, because they, one of the ways they systematize the error is, if you’ll allow me a verb, they beautify it, which isn’t the same thing as resolving it or it in an intellectual fashion, but they beautify it so that people can accommodate it and move into it. I mean, I think what the answer has got to be, of course, of course, it’s going to come from the artists, you know, I think Plato said, though, that often the artist doesn’t know exactly what they’re saying. But they’re saying the truth, the more profound truth than the intellectual could say, but they, they don’t know exactly what they’re saying, because there’s an inspiration, there’s a muse that gives them the insight. And so, can I just agree, maybe what they know is in the future, they have an insight that is unpacked, that hasn’t been unpacked yet. So they have a prophetic, as what I wanted to speak about. It’s prophetic. Yeah, that the artist is prophetic. In a prophetic sense, which you can’t really access through mere intellectualization. Yeah, that the artist is prophetic is, I think it’s actually one of the, it’s kind of one of the unspoken kind of Gospels of modernity, actually, is that the artist is prophetic. The only place where the prophet still lives within the kind of disenchanted nature of modernity is in the artist, they get to be the kind of prophetic voice. And Emerson’s poet comes to mind, right? For Emerson, the poet was much deeper. For Emerson, the poet was like Socrates was the greatest poet. Jesus was the greatest poet. That’s what I wanted to bring up. Right. And so you end up getting this notion that the artist is exactly the person to live to. And the German idealists ended up here too with romanticism and the kind of their attempts to create a kind of uber Christianity with all these symbolisms moved also towards a kind of artist as social reform avant-garde. And then when you look at artistic personality types from a psychological perspective, you also see the sensitives and the people who are aware of the war in heaven, even as the simulation is going and everyone else is tricked that the world’s normal, the artists are usually clued in, which is why I hold artists usually as actually kind of a vulnerable population, which is to say they end up medicated or institutionalized or addicted or unemployed, underemployed, misemployed. So there’s a margin marginalized or systematically marginalized. And modernity writes that into the artists that this is why you have to struggle to be an artist. I justify it, but other societies have revered their profits, although they’ve been persecuted. So yeah, so I think looking to the aesthetic and realizing that although we can see the intellectual synthesis clearly, the way for it to ground in the human heart is going to come from something more like an artistic movement. And when you’re thinking of the move, I think of from entertainment to culture, right? I think of the theater and I think of the disappearance of the theater into the movie, right? Now the potency and the possibility of the movie to do what the theater did for ancient Greece, right? And to show us this complex, cathartic, beautiful thing that allows us to be people in a new way together. Like the film could do that, but I’ve not seen one that’s done that. What I see is mostly an industry, which is capturing attention and et cetera, et cetera. So yes, part of this move out of entertainment and into culture is changing the incentive systems around cultural production. And so that means moving the artist out of marginal into something like supported, right? And through either federal or private reinvestment, there’s a serious thinking now in this time of crisis when a whole bunch of money’s moving around for better and for worse, thinking about what the hell is going to happen to the artists, right? What the hell is going to happen to the young, the people who would give us those symbols and the affective grounding points that we could move around. Yeah, so that’s kind of what’s coming up when I’m thinking about what you said, John. And I’m agreeing with you enough to say, whoa, yeah, we actually need to track that as a priority and figure out in schools and colleges and cities how we can support artists now. It’s an interesting problem. This connects to a lot of the things that I actually wanted to talk to you guys about. Both of you have been talking about stealing the culture. I think that was John’s phrase. Yeah, that’s my phrase. And your phrase, Zach, was in your talk, you talked about being an outlaw, right? And being an outlaw, not in some kind of, let’s say, immature adolescent, rule-breaking sense, but being an outlaw as the person who breaks the rules so that the new rule can emerge or the new culture can emerge. And maybe that’s related somehow to this prophetic artist personality we’re talking about. Socrates was eventually killed by the state. And so I think that’s relevant. And the prophets, no prophet, what did Jesus say? No prophet is honored in his own home. What I’m interested in, maybe in answering that question, are people like Socrates and especially Plato, but also Plotinus, and people like Barfield and Coolidge and the early post-Contians that Zach was alluding to, and Goethe comes to mind as well. Yep. These are the individuals, right? And it was interesting that when Nietzsche pronounced, he gave one clear example that he stood behind as an example of the Ubermensch. And it wasn’t Napoleon, and it wasn’t Hegel, it was Goethe. He was the artist. Oh, it was Goethe. But the thing about Goethe and the thing about Socrates, right, is you, right, let’s do at least Plato, because Plato said that he made Socrates more beautiful. Let’s take Plato, because if you’ll allow me, the artistry and the argumentation are completely interpenetrating. So the artistry and the argumentation and the aspiration are all deeply interwoven together. Like you can’t pull them apart. Like people, you know, Zach probably had this too, maybe you did, Andrew. In my education when they taught me Plato, I was taught a great disservice, because what they would do is they would say, well, you know, I’m going to great disservice, because what they would do is they would extract the arguments out of the drama, remember your reference to theater, Zach, right, and they would not even bring it up. It was marginalized to obscurity, the aspiration. So the artistry and the aspiration were put aside, dismissed, and then all that was held out is the argumentation. But I’m interested in those kinds of people who can do it, because I think they, I think they’re, well, I suspect, I’m trying to be very cautious here, I suspect that they’re more important than just the artists right now. I think the aesthetics are important and the artists are going to be do a lot for us, but I think that those individuals who make great art while also making new forms of thought and new ways of being that sew the three together, I think they’re the individuals. And what’s interesting for me is I’ve been trying to pick up on how do they communicate and how do they think with and through other people, right? The idea that dialectic is always this deeply interpenetration of argumentation, aspiration, and artistry, and the idea that artistry, in which the beauty and the truth seeking, the beauty seeking and the truth seeking, and the transformation seeking are all bound up together. And so I’m kind of looking to see, and so here’s another hard question for you, Zach, because you’ve been doing really well at answering them. I can make it concrete. How do we educate for a good time? Right. Yeah, this is the question of Bildung, which is of course sourced in. Exactly. And that goes back to the work of Thomas Bjorkman. I had a conversation with him recently and he pointed to the whole Bildung movement. And this, so this is important because it’s not utopian. The Bildung movement that was instituted in the secular monastery retreats that network in the Scandinavian countries to turn them from authoritarian or grand societies into some of the best, most advanced and happiest places on the earth. So this is not fantasy. This is not utopia. This is doable. It has been done. There’s a historical case. And Thomas’ book, the Nordicica, lays it out really, really well. Right. Yeah. And Goethe and Humboldt and the, yeah, the immediate post-Kantian milieu, it was that sense of, and you’re right to correct me there, that it’s the, it’s all three. It’s the good, the true, and the beautiful united in some complex symbol, right? And that the, in our society, someone who’s capable of doing that probably looks more like an artist than a scientist as Goethe did, right? But as many people know, Goethe was actually a totally badass scientist. And so Rudolph, Rudolph Steiner’s, a lot of people don’t know this, Rudolph Steiner’s first work was actually in the archives of Goethe looking at his scientific work. And so there’s a richness there. But yeah, so the point being that, yeah, the, what we’re looking for is that complex, truly after modern, right? The differentiation of the value spheres, separating art from science, from morality, right? The idea that they need to be reintegrated in some new form. That’s the, that’s the, in a sense, the holy grail of the, of the West, that the only way out of this is to somehow reintegrate these, these value spheres, and to somehow find forms of expression and communication and interaction that represent a new merger of them. Not a regression back to the medieval system where they refused together, right? Where you couldn’t talk about how many planets there were. Because there’s so many, you can’t talk about the planets because we already know, because there’s so many orifices in this face that there can’t be seven. So like the dogmatic, don’t look through the telescope Galileo, pre-modern, undifferentiated, then the differentiated modernity. And then Weber lays out the problem, right? The technocrats without heart and the aesthetic artists without any sense of ethics and the fragmentation of the unidimensional man. And so always the quest has been this reintegration. And one way to think about the problem is actually also as a, there’s a socioeconomic thing here that in fact, we need to heal certain underlying social structures to allow for those forms of complex identity formation. Back to the question of education, which is where you’re moving this. Because the caricature of the artist right now is some wounded degenerate type who’s kind of an egomaniac and doesn’t get along with the rest of society and is narcissistic and- And the scientists- And the scientist is the- He’s buttoned up and he’s got no emotions and he might as well be a robot, right? And the politician is cutthroat and the businessman has no morals or aesthetics. And so that sense that there’s each person is this fragmented- So can I say that maybe the artist is actually the total person, right? It’s not being an artist as a specialized activity. In a sense, being an artist is what we’re all sort of the total person meant to be on some level, right? Whether it was actual art or not. If we’re using artists in that sense that we weren’t, where the artist is the one who finds a way to make a life that reunites the fragmented value spheres of modernity, right? Like I said, the Emersonian poet who integrates the good, the true, and the beautiful. If that’s the artist you’re talking about, then yes. But again, the artist of modernity, right? The mad genius-like, derelict, marginalized artist is as much of a kind of caricature as the modern businessman or the modern politician has also stopped from having aesthetic sense or an ethical sense. And so it’s just that sense of the whole person where you can essentially not be fragmented at such a root level along such deep clefts of identity as the good, the true, and the beautiful. I get the sense that when we were talking the other day, I mentioned poetry and John kind of jumped and said, no, because of the way people think of a poet today, there’s this contempt for poetry, right? And then maybe this event that’s happening right now when people are stuck in their houses, et cetera, et cetera, maybe they will start to see a little bit like the value of that, of the poetic poetry. Oh, I agree. I think that crisis, it does two things and they play off against each other. It creates domicide, it cuts people’s connection, it brings on loneliness, it puts them into this weird, threatening, almost demonic worldview. And so in many ways, and we’re already seeing this, it exacerbates the meaning crisis. I predict we’re going to see a mental health crisis shortly on the heels of this that is going to also be titanic and cause suffering and death. But precisely because of that, people are also turning to seeing how important meaning making is, not semantic meaning, talking about meaning and life meaning making, that connectedness. But I want to bring up, so I think you’re right that that’s part of the kairos, Andrew, but I want to say that I think the kairos in our discussion is leading me to a deeper question. So Zach keeps giving me these great answers and then they afford me going deeper. And this maybe cycles back to Tillich and maybe cycles back to the good invariance and the bad invariance. Because what I wanted to say, think about how we got here. So I’m using Habermas here. Think about how Kant separated those three faculties into three critiques, the three particular reason, judgment, pride and practice. He separates them, right? He separates them. And then Habermas’s argument is part of what drives that fragmentation is a normativity of autonomy. Reason is autonomous, and therefore it cannot and should not be integrated or reduced. It’s in a sense even incommensurable from morality, which is then also autonomous. The right is autonomous, and that’s autonomous from taste. So the normativity of autonomy is foregrounded. And that is, if you’ll allow me a bit of a little bit of a That’s an autonomy, and maybe Heidegger and my colleague, Johannes Niedehausen, that’s a normativity ultimately of subjectivity, self-governing, autonomous, right? It’s ultimately a Cartesian normativity. I am ultimately an isolated thing and self, and the only normativity upon me is my autonomy. And all of these things, you see what I’m trying to get at? There’s a normativity of autonomy. Now Tillich in his work tried to break out of that. He tried to say there’s three possible kinds of normativity. He tried to say there’s three possible kinds of normativity. He tried to say there’s three He tried to say there’s three possible kinds of normativity. There’s of course the normativity of autonomy, and that is pervasive in the cognitive grammar of modernity. And then he said that there’s also of course a normativity, he called it heteronomy, in which somebody is imposing on us. And this is an authoritarian of one form or another. And he was brilliant enough to see how the Nazis were playing those two off against each other. I don’t want to bring up the Nazis, but this analysis afforded him insight. And then he proposed, and you’ll see where I’m going with this, he opposed those two. He said what we really need, because the first emphasizes subjectivity, right, autonomy. The second localizes everything in objectivity, right? But he said there’s a third, which is theonomy. And this is being God governed, right? And this brings us back again to the well-functioning religion. The idea is there are certain forms, because when people feel called by God, they don’t feel that they’re being demonically possessed, but they don’t feel like they’re acting autonomously. They feel simultaneously that they are being moved by something beyond themselves, but they’re also being moved by something that is helping them to realize themselves in an important way. And so I think part, I think there’s a deep reason by, Andrew, why you brought this up. And I think it’s even a deep, I’m just seriously to you too, Zach, why you circled back on well-functioning religion. If we’re going to break out of the fragmentation, we have to challenge the normativity that drives the fragmentation, which is the absolute valorization of autonomy as the final way in which all normativity is generated. No, that’s not to give into heteronomy and say, oh, well, what we need is the strong man and the authoritarian structure. And Tillich was really playing with the idea that what Christianity was trying to offer people was theonymous normativity and it would break us out and help to reunite us as an entire person. Now that’s very abstract. So I think that’s exactly what Zach was talking about when you talk about the unique self-symphony I have it written down here. Yeah, totally. And the mystical body of Christ, it’s breaking out of this modern idea of self, right? Our modern idea of self into something else. You call that sovereign self. I’m not quite sure I understand why it’s sovereign. Exactly what I want to riff on. I think that’s exactly Zach’s concept. And he also said that’s the mystical body of Christ, right? Yes. That’s not the most conventional way in, but yes, it eventually is in one sense, the mystical body of Christ. And what’s interesting here is that we can go back to the developmental theory because that stack you just ran from heteronomous to autonomous to, what was it, theo? Theonymous. Theonymous, right? Which you could also think of. Like Plato’s theosis becoming more godlike. Yeah. And so that stacks very closely to the pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional way of thinking about moral development, which is of course inspired by Kant through Kohlberg and picked up by Habermas as part of Habermas’ moral and political theory. And when you look at Habermas’ theory of democracy, he’s actually trying to overcome the autonomously based rationality of the subject of modernity and get in its place, not a Christianity-based notion of post-conventionality, but post-conventionality nonetheless. So you end up having a way of thinking about moral development, where at the higher reaches you get a transcending of the modern autonomous kind of like subject and a relinquishing into community and also into transcendence. People don’t realize Kohlberg had a famous seventh level. He had a sixth stage model for his whole career, but he ended up in an essay writing about this seventh stage. And the seventh stage, the exemplars were like Spinoza and Socrates and Theliar Deschardin and Marcus Aurelius and people who got all the way up to the post-conventional autonomy that one would expect and then also gave over the self and kind of Abraham Maslow’s self-transcending, kind of giving over the self on the altar of the ideal. And so that’s a different form of identity, which allows for a different kind of politics and a different kind of art and science and everything. But the task demands of that are quite steep and this is like one of the flaws in Habermas’s theory of democracy, Between Facts and Norms, is this big thick book. And the issue there is that he’s expecting all citizens to be able to be post-conventional in their moral judgment and cognition. And this is very, I mean this is where, and you know Dewey comes in right, that education and democracy are like this, that if you’re going to have a kind of decentralized sense making as a way of running it, if you really want to do that, then you need to get everyone up through the educational system to a very, very high level of complexity and identity formation. So we’re at this notion that there’s pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional, that the challenging the basis of the the root of the modern form of normativity, basically is what we’re looking at. And it has to do also challenging the root of the modern identity. So the new form of normativity and new form of self co-emerge. Robert Brandem, who’s one of the great philosophers of our time, University of Pittsburgh, incredible work on the nature of normativity and actually rehearsing Hegel in a profound way. He has this great section heading for his, when one of his big book making explicitly, it says, we’ve met the norms and they are ours. And this is just to say that, you know, one of the things that makes the post-conventional identity post-conventional is that they’re norming the norms, that the practice is not disobeying the norms, or not even understanding the norms, but understanding the norms and then getting above them and being able to norm the norms, but norm the norms in by virtue of what? And now we’re back to the discernment in the Kairos, right? Which is that you, if you go post-conventional, there’s this delicate moment in Colbert research, which is that you’ve critiqued the norms of society, but you haven’t established a principle view of your own. So now you’re supervening on the norms of society, critiquing everything, turning into a relativist and the hedonist, which is what happened a lot in these transitions. And you haven’t got found a discourse community of other post-conventional people that will allow you to equilibrate in a principled way and have a sovereign notion or way forward. And so, yeah, so that’s one of the educational challenges. So you can only be a heretic if you found other heretics or people. Yeah, and this is the dialogos. You’re developing another trends, your trends, you’re transcending the norms and bringing it to a higher level. Yeah, and moving between communication communities. So moving between identity structures is often involves moving between communication communities and expanding your communication community, often to include the mighty dead, right? Like that if you don’t have a local community where you can talk the way you need to talk to be who you are, you need to expand and have conversations with more and more. And one of the ways to ground post-conventional morality, which is to say, I’m not appealing to my community about what’s right and wrong. Rather, I’m appealing to what George Herbert Mead called an ideal communication community. Right? I came in this as back to the Elohim, right? That there’s a community in which I am a part of, which is not spatiotemporally located by which I judge my behavior. So it’s not you guys local community to which I’m beholden, although I am because you’re my immediate neighbors, but I’m beholden to this ideal communication community, which could be all sentient beings if you wanted it to be. So there’s something there too about the how to create context where post-conventional identities can be formed through conversation and linked into the ideal communication communities beyond the local to have that sense of courage and ancestry and all the things that constitute identity, which are hard to come by if you’re trapped in a local conventional community that won’t allow for your identity formation. So much possibility of identity formation has been opened up with the move out of modernity into post-modernity and the digital, but we still haven’t solidified the dialogue of actual identity construction at the post-conventional level. We’re mostly critiquing and outside of the norms without having any way to norm the norms with systematic conversation. So we’re back at post-conventional religion again or? We’re back at post-conventional religion, but we’re also, and I think we’re also into circling back to Piaget, I think we’re into post-formal thought where we don’t just think within an axiomatic system, we learn how to think between axiomatic systems and that’s important. Wow, yeah. I think each one of these normativities sees itself as an axiomatic system, but we have to remember we’ve got a really profound truth that undermines that, which is no system is simultaneously complete and consistent, the godel. Every system has to have a doorway out of it and you can’t infer a stronger logic from a weaker logic, etc. All these things that have told us that if our claims to autonomy are ultimately not viable because that autonomy can never have a complete normativity because it will always trade between consistency and completeness. If it tries to pursue completeness, it will start to give up in its consistency and then that destabilizes it or if it tries to remain consistent, it then freezes. These systems are always, always hovering between destabilization and fixation and so that for me gives me great hope. I like the invocation of the logos, the way of the logos. The logo says that thing that’s norming the norms. I like the way you put that, Zach. What I want to bring in, and this comes from Tillich but it is ultimately due to Heidegger, is and it goes to both Maslow’s and Kohlberg’s self-transcendence. The thing about the logos is it has the life of its own. It’s not abstractly independent from us, but it doesn’t belong to us. We belong to it. It takes on a life of its own. Here’s the thing. It is not only connected to us, it’s also connected to the way intelligibility and even reality are unfolding. That’s ultimately why we belong to it rather than it belonging to us. Part of what I think the Sage artist can do is invoke the logos and invoke that as the sort of trans-systemic thing that allows us to bridge between the normativities in an important way. I want to throw in that one of the things that has supported the autonomy and the subjectivity model and then we have this thing called authenticity, which isn’t Heidegger’s sense. It just basically means celebrating your autonomy. One of the things that I’m trying to get at is this idea that in the dialogue and in the dialectic, we have access to a way of… When you read the dialogues, it’s not just argumentation that’s in competition. Ways of life are being brought into competition, but not just in an arbitrary fashion. They’re being regulated by the logos. Everybody has to be willing to follow the logos, which doesn’t mean just drifting subjectively. It means answering the call, being responsive to the way it’s taken on a life of its own. Its polarity is not grounded in us. It’s grounded between us and each other and our culture of intelligibility and ultimately the world in which that culture is embedded. The logos exemplifies the normativity of our embeddedness and enacts it for us. I think that is a way in which linked with post-conventional thinking, it can help us to get the kind of theonomous normativity that I’m trying to talk about. We talked about this and Zach has used this. There’s something sacred or perhaps even divine about the logos. That’s what I’m trying to get it to take the role, the theonomous role that Tillich was pointing towards. Did that make sense? I was struggling there. It did. It’s a beautiful notion. Essentially what I’m hearing is that this artist, we’ve been talking about this like Gertian artist who integrates the value spheres. What they’re creating, it’s like they’re inviting us actually to something, into some kind of ritual, some kind of ritual of interaction and communication where the logos is revealed between us. The artist needs to create a performance. That’s why theater is so interesting and a theater that would break down that fourth wall and engage the audience. There are always hints in postmodern art that there was something trying to emerge that would actually embrace the audience and blur the line between the art and non-art and essentially re-sacralize all of life by casting the veil of art across all things. That notion that the artist is looking for someone who invites us into a new ritual and way of being. We’re through it. We can’t help but be swept into the logos essentially. That’s beautiful. Yeah. And then we’re going full circle into the logos mysticism of the Western tradition rooted in the neoplatonic stuff. That sense that there’s a way to create a human civilization. I’m thinking of Platinus here in particular. He almost built a city. Yeah, he was in this kind of civilizational design mindset from a deeply meta-philosophical neoplatonic view. My sense is that in such a society, there would be some kind of, and again, when you think of properly functioning religion, it’s not just like the books and stuff, right? It’s like there’s a building and we all get there and we’re in it together and we do something. What that something is, is a ritual that would be tremendously beautiful. The conception of it would be, as you’re describing, John, it would be not us all looking at one thing like some medieval ritual, but in fact, this moving between us of the Holy Spirit and of the dialogos where the evidence is clear just by the fact that we’re here together looking one another’s eyes. That’s what can happen sometimes. That’s why AA works and that’s why circling works and a bunch of other things work because you just, it descends, it’s there, you’re looking between the eyes. There’s a self-evident value in the experience of personhood and co-relating. It’s funny, it’s like they always say you’re selling water by the well or selling water by the river or something like that. This is one of those sayings, that it’s right there. I like the idea that the logos is building something. Like you said, building a city or a Plutonus is building a city. That strikes me as that’s the thing that is building the city of God is the logos or if we can speak in a metaphorical terms. There’s two mythological identifications. Christ is identified with the body of the church, but Christ is also identified with the logos of God. It’s precisely because he mediates between them and he creates ways of being. The followers of Christianity, the followers of Jesus were originally not called Christians. That was an insult. They originally called themselves followers of the way. Followers of the way. Yeah, this way of being. It’s exemplified, rendered beautiful to us, attracts us, it’s prolactic, it inspires us to aspire, it affords appreciation, it allows us to be post-formal, allows us to be post-conventional. It’s famous Augustine, learn how to love God and then do whatever you want. The two are always bound together. That’s faith again. That’s something to do with faith, isn’t it? Because following the logos, you’re following faith in a way. You’re not following a kind of, you don’t have a model. You don’t have this clear model of how to build the thing. You’re following a third element or another element. You are, but it depends on your definition of faith. Circling or an AA meeting or even these conversations here. I came into the conversation with a certain faith that it was going to be a good conversation. I had no idea exactly how it was going to go, but I knew given the nature of reality in my experience with all you guys, that there was a sense that it was going to work. I don’t know exactly how. This is like a micro example. It’s not like a deep faith, but there’s a sense that reality holds together. Similarly, when you’re with people in one of these situations where the logos emerges. That’s what I mean by faith, reality holding together or something. Reality holds together. That we’re intimate with reality, that it’s not absent from our perception. The faith in the reality of other people, for example, is what emerges when you’re in a dialogue. It’s that if we trust the conversation and trust reason in our better lights and the care we have for one another, that we’ll find a solution. It’s a faith in humanity to a certain extent and that I can extend different things. That everything’s going to work out and be fine, different from the faith that one would go to heaven. And it requires time too. It requires an unfolding of time. It can’t just be rushed or constructed. I wanted to say, I think here’s again what we’re asserting. We’re pulling apart two notions of faith. There’s one that was grounded in the emergence of subjectivity, which is the assertion, right? The willful assertion against evidence, which has become a predominant model. Whereas the kind of faith that Zach is talking about and I’m talking about too, especially some of the conversations I’m having with Jordan Hall, is this sense of continuity of contact. You’re not trying to come to closure. What you’re trying to do is always educate right relationship. Right relationship isn’t a goal state. Keeks does great work on this. He says, don’t confuse goals with ideals. And we even misused the word ideal. He said, he compared, there’s a goal state. I’m hungry and I don’t want to be hungry. So I can get to a state that realizes and then I can rest there. Ideals are not states of completion and finality in which you rest satisfied. Ideals are constant. Well, they’re more, they’re constraints on the manner of how you do it. So honesty isn’t a place I’m trying to get to where I can now say, okay, I’m done with honesty. I don’t need honesty. I’m not finished. I’m complete. Honesty isn’t, instead it’s an ideal. It’s a way of being in right relationship with yourself and other people in an ongoing fashion. Yeah. So there’s incompleteness too, right? It’s never completed, right? You know, like, sorry, this just comes to my mind, like Moses never gets to the, the promised land and John the Baptist has to die before, you know, it’s like, we’re all sort of like, we’re doing something on faith because it will never realize that final construction or that final perfection. That’s right. Right. That’s right. And also we’re, we’re, we’re trying, the faith is always affording the emergence precisely because it’s only in the logos of emergence that we move into post-conventionality, that we can be post-formal, that we can find the resources to respond to Kairos. It’s also that, that the, the, you can’t, right? You can’t make it a goal. Okay. You know, 20 minutes in logos is going to appear in the conversation. That’s not going to happen. That’s not going to happen. In fact, taking that stance will kill it, right? Will kill it completely. It won’t show up. It won’t show up. Sorry, Zach, you wanted to say something? No, I mean, I’m really vibing on it. And I’m thinking with the ideal notion, I’m thinking of Tillich too, and his notion of idolatry, right? That you invest something with infinite worth, it’s not actually infinite. And the proper ideal would be infinite, that you precisely couldn’t achieve it in this life. And that’s why you’ve adopted it as your ideal. And some of the most compelling religious ideals have that quality, like Buddhahood, for example, like, which contains a whole bunch of qualities that you’re unlikely to achieve in this lifetime, but which you would strive for. Right? Even the love of wisdom, Phileo Sophia, you were always in love with wisdom because you would never be a God. You would never be perfectly wise. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so that it is infinitely pursuable, like asymptotically throughout life, basically, is the notion of the ideal, which is very different from other ways of having motivation. And so the question of how the post-conventional identity is ideal driven, whereas many forms of conventional identity are goal driven, is an important distinction. And as we know from much of the happiness research, actually, when you meet your goal, watch out, because that’s when the depression sets in. Often, people winning gold medals and Super Bowls and then getting suicidal afterwards because they actually did it. Whereas the ideal is actually infinitely renewable like resource of identity construction. Yeah. Right. Infinite finite image. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Carces and that follows up on his previous book, The Religious Case Against Belief, and playing a finite game versus playing an infinite game. And I think that the ideal logo says playing in the sense of serious play an infinite game. Like playing a musical instrument rather than- Jazz. Pulling around or yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or jazz where you, jazz is a post-formal, post-conventional thing. You can’t do jazz unless you’ve done, you have to go through that whole developmental education or you can’t do it. Same thing with Tai Chi. You’ve just spent a lot of time getting the form before you actually start to get the Chi. Right. Which is post-formal, which is beyond the form. Yeah. I’m going to have to go soon guys. We started late and I’ve already delayed another meeting a bit. But I think I like where we got to and I’d like to continue on with it. But we were doing a lot of this and we were exemplifying what I was, the discernment. We were trying to get out separating the good invariance from the bad invariance, the wheat from the chaff. Right. And then how do we educate for that? I think this is a question I’d like to return to with the two of you guys again, please. Yeah. I always feel this is very unfinished. Every time we do this, I feel like it’s because it just keeps going and going and going. And there’s just like, I’ve asked, I’ve only asked about two of the 10 questions that I was thinking of. Yeah, no, I’m asking you guys. So I’d be thrilled to keep it going. Well, I propose we try to pick up the threads here and we also try and answer more of your questions, Andrew, because I think they will afford more good discussion. Okay. I agree. Thanks. Thanks so much. Thank you, gentlemen. It’s always good. Someday we’ll meet in person. That would be really wonderful. That would be great.