https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=O_6h5qG7XgM
The Stoa is a digital campfire where we cohere in dialogue about what matters most at the knife’s edge of what’s happening now. Wow. This is a lot, which is great. It’s good to be put into a zone of proximal development by this conversation. I suppose where I would start about the energy thing is to point back towards virtue. Virtue originally meant a power. That’s why we still say you do this in virtue of this, and a power is a structure of conditions and constraints. It’s not an action. I think what you can see in biology, even in your own biology, you can see how systems are adaptive, how they’re self-corrective, is they have opponent processing. Your sympathetic nervous system is biased and always interpreting things as you should increase your level of arousal. Your parasympathetic system is biased and saying you should always decrease your level of arousal, and they’re like this. Neither one has the answer, and what they’re doing is by opponent processing, they’re constantly dynamically restructuring your level of arousal in trying to keep in sync with a constantly changing environment. Now I think at the political level, we’ve replaced the idea of democracy as opponent processing where my best chance of self-correcting is for you to challenge me with adversarial zero-sum game. My best chance for winning and getting the power I want is to destroy you, to debunk you, to demolish you, and social media is really pushing that. What I think that what we lose is we’ve lost, I think, one of the most fundamental opponent processing, which is that we’re both individuals and we have individual cognition and we belong to distributed cognition. I like the way Tillich talks about this. He talks about how we’re constantly pulled between individuation and participation, and he kept warning, he kept warning, and he’s the first non-Jewish academic to be turfed out and persecuted by the Nazis. He kept warning anybody who offered you a resolution of that and said, and I mean this term I’m now going to use, here’s the final solution to the individuation participation problem. Here’s how we can finally resolve that. We can either dissolve into the collective will or we can become atomic individualism, and I think all of that is very dangerous bullshit. Now, I think what we need to do to pick up on one of the things Greg said is I think we need to go back and see this opponent processing as where we, and that’s what I think Diologos is. Diologos is where you try to practice the opponent processing between individuation Individual cognition and distributed cognition so we can get the practice and the taste for what virtuous self-correction through and with each other actually is. Now, I think part of that also requires that we pay attention. Yes, we are not like, and I agree with Steve, we’re not just a simple self-organization of a tornado because a tornado will go into conditions that destroys it. We’re autopoetic. We are self-organizing to seek out the conditions that will maintain our existence. And so we do have that. How is it relevant to me? How is it relevant to me? How is it relevant to me? But there’s a difference for us. We are all born and depend on agape. We depend on the fact that we also ask the question and we had parents who took seriously the question, not how is this kid relevant to me, but how am I relevant to this kid? How am I relevant to the conditions that will make this kid turn into a moral agent who can pursue long-term goals of meaning and happiness? And that’s agape. And agape is the thing we need in order to bring back, to counterbalance, help us to get the sense of we need a sacred that both homes us and makes us, oh, a home is how things are relevant to you and you’re safe and you’re secure and you’re well fed. But also to take us to the horizon of the horror. And that’s what Otto argued. The sacred is both the home and the horizon of the horror, because the horizon of the horror is where you have and that’s what beauty is, too. Wilka said beauty is the terror that just doesn’t kill us. Right. The horizon of the horror is when we are really open to this question. And this is the Socratic platonic question. How am I relevant to that? How do I matter to that? And I think that’s what and I would say the virtue that’s missing from us is the virtue of reverence, which is the virtue of how we expose ourselves to awe and open ourselves up and afford real agape. So that’s how I would answer that. I got to say this. John, what you convey is more than just what you say. I talk about that. I know you do. I know you do. And I just say I felt that I think everyone else felt that because it’s coming from such a deep place of of integrity and intention. And then this is so touching. It’s powerful. Thank you, man. Thank you. Thank all of you. Thank you. I mean, I want to thank Greg and Steve. I wouldn’t have gotten to that place without them. I mean, that’s clearly the case. We can feel it. You know. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, man. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. We can feel it, man. So, Peter.