https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=H6xfZZ5T0Lk
Okay, we’re now recording Jordan. Just talking about the notion of a certain relationship between universal basic income, the meaning crisis, and then dot dot dot. Right. And I think this is also germane to our discussions about the religion that’s not a religion, because we’ve tried to say about central, the religion, we try to make these, the non-negotiables that the religion that’s not a religion has to address, or we failed in the design. But I was talking to- I would say, by the way, I would not to break, I would actually say something like, so if we take UBI as a pointer to a category- Universal basic income. That category, the sine qua non of its design characteristics includes the religion that’s not a religion. Yes, yes. Oh, yes, I like that. Yes. I think that’s a combination. I think that’s good. So I think this fits in even better now that you’ve made that bridge, that you’ve made it a reciprocal reconstruction and integration. So I was talking to O’Shaun, and he, I was trying to point out that, because he was actually asking about, okay, how do we take the stuff about the meaning crisis, and how do we ratchet it up to the social structural level? Right? Sort of our socio-cultural, political, economic organizations. And the first thing I said was, well, I don’t have expertise at that, so I want to be very cautious. But one of the things we talked about was we talked about how our culture has tended to conflate the pursuit of subjective wellbeing with the pursuit of meaning in life, that those are actually not the same thing, and they should be distinguished. And our culture has also thought that the correlation between resolving socio-economic distress and subjective wellbeing is a perfectly linear one, and of course it’s not. The relationship, so socio-economic distress, when you’re in poverty, huge impact on subjective wellbeing, but once you get out of poverty, as you know from the research, the graph, it really starts to flatten, and it becomes irrational to pursue these things, because you have to put in, you need a huge increase in wealth, for example, if you’ll allow me that word, to make very small differences in people’s subjective wellbeing, because very quickly you get into powerful diminishing returns. So the relationship is not a linear correlation, and then also subjective wellbeing and meaning in life are very different things, right? And the classic example I use, you might have heard me use this before, is having a child. When you have a child, many of the measures that the Enlightenment talked about go down, like your finances get really hit, you’re not sleeping, you’re getting sick, your health is degenerating, your work is impaired, your longevity is actually jeopardized, so your subjective wellbeing crashes when you have a child. You know what I’m talking about, because you’ve had one fairly recently, but why do people do it then, if there’s all this diminishment, reliable diminishment of subjective wellbeing? Well, because meaning in life goes up. Because why? Well, what’s happening is, if, let’s talk about people who are trying to become good parents, right, and they want to be parents. So I’m talking about parenting in a sense much beyond biological offspring, right? So what happens is, I mean, it’s one of the most profound things to take you out of your egocentrism, right? Because you now, the child is now the center. And this is one of the factors that’s so contributory of meaning in life, it’s called mattering. I want to matter, I want to be highly relevant to something that is outside my egocentric set of preferences and desires and goals, right? And that mattering, that transformation from egocentrism to other-centrism or even auto-centrism is one of the things that is constitutive of, you know, an enhanced meaning in life. As Susan Will said, you’re connected to something bigger than yourself, something that has a value independent of you just liking it or preferring it, because we think persons have inherent value to them, right? And you’re engaged in the agapic project of making the person. And so I think part of, he was asking me to respond to people like Steven Pinker and like, well, you know, look at my graphs, look at my graphs. And I was saying, well, again, I think the Enlightenment made a couple of confusions and that they’ve got locked into our socioeconomic political grammar or code, to use your language, in that we’ve made a mistake, we’ve conflated and confused meaning in life with subjective well-being. That’s a big mistake. And then we thought the relationship between socioeconomic improvement and subjective well-being was a linear one, and it’s not. It’s curvilinear, right, in an important way. And that’s why you can see, you know, areas of huge affluence like Silicon Valley also being places in which the meaning crisis is being experienced in a very intense manner. So I think that’s important to sort of bring in here. And I think, therefore, that what you just did a minute ago is completely apropos of that, that what’s going on is, yeah, just as I think, and I like this metaphor, just dumping money on people isn’t going to be enough precisely because that dumping, right, is still caught up within this grammar that I’m saying is deeply mistaken in these two kind of profound ways. And that’s why the universal basic income and the religion that’s not a religion have to be powerfully integrated if we really want to try and have a good shot at improving people’s lives. Yeah. Sorry, that was a bit of a speech, but I thought that was an important argument to get on the table for the two of us. Yeah, I think all the pieces fit together quite nicely. You’re right. I think it was the size of the piece. That was that all the pieces had to be there to actually have the whole thing. Right. I was actually wondering, by the way, I’m wondering if there’s a connection that moves back between socioeconomics and meaning. Oh, I think I think so. Well, being well being to socioeconomics, I think there’s a triangle or some sort of Yeah. Yeah. And I was talking to O’Shaun about that, too. I mentioned our work, your work, Greg and I, to him a lot on this issue. And I was saying, well, what I can talk about is, you know, the how that those confusions we were just talking about are bound up with a confusion that comes from sort of from the socioeconomic down, if you’ll allow me that that language that you’re asking about. And that’s where I point to, you know, from idea of the way capitalism tends to promote modal confusion in powerful ways, because what you get right is you get a certain socioeconomic organization in which the being needs are always pursued in a misstably confused and mistaken fashion within the having mode. Now, that actually makes capitalism sort of work in the in the abstract sense of there’s more buying and selling going on now, but it makes it deeply dysfunctional in the sense that people are experiencing this was from point in the modal confusion. They’re experiencing a kind of profound existential frustration and futility because they’re consuming more and more and yet not alleviating their hunger. It’s kind of like, you know, like junk food kind of consumption. And so I think that’s I’m not claiming this is exhaustive or exclusive by any means, but I think that’s one way in which the socioeconomic then feeds back down into the meaning system. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. The construct actually works quite nicely. One of the things that we’ve run into people like Daniel and forced nice that there’s a I think we’ve been talking about this notion of the triadic modalities of the right transcendent, the eminent and the omniscient. There’s something about their relationship that there’s three. So they can kind of go one way or the other way. Yes. Yes. You can either go from transcendent to imminent omniscient to transcendent. It kind of flows clockwise in my visual field. Or you can go the other way. It’s going to go transcendent omniscient, imminent transcendent, which will counter clockwise. Right. And it seems like many, many, many times that if you actually notice something that seems to be wrong, broken, it’s because it’s flowing in the wrong direction. So what happens is that you way of saying what you just said in this language, we just say that sort of meaningfulness would map to the transcendent and that the simulacrum of meaningfulness is this modal confusion, precisely a modal confusion. That instead of actually experiencing the transcendent, instead of experiencing and being in relationship with mystery, instead of being feeling a deep, profound sense of meaningfulness, we simulate that at the level of socioeconomic. Right. Right. Right. And then what happens is that we this brings us the other directions we actually bring from the trend of the omniscient and then down into the imminent, which is that we now collapse the just more and more. Therefore, if meaningfulness is is. A commodity that we can produce for the socioeconomic, then subjective well-being must in fact be always best satisfied by an increase in the socioeconomic domain. And by the way, we now actually occlude that we lose track of the fact that the subjective well-being and meaningfulness aren’t aren’t the same thing. We actually end up with this weird construction. If you what we’re talking about is reversing that flow, right? I think it’s a OK. That’s kind of a large. That was brilliant. That was really good. Oh, you’re always out in Quebec. Oh, that was brilliant. What you just did. I thought that was really good. That sounds to me like at sort of the collective level, something deeply analogous to what Mark Lewis talks about on the individual level of addiction, reciprocal narrowing, and you’re getting a reciprocal narrowing. It sounds to me like if you’re going one way, that that whole that triad that you just pointed to can do reciprocal opening or it can do reciprocal narrowing. And you can get locked into something that’s very analogous to addiction. And O’Shaughn was talking about this, about how people are what there’s there’s no alternative to what we have. There is no option of we’re at the end of history because there’s nothing. This is the only way we can be. And this is the only kind of world we can have. You hear lots of arguments of that effect. And that’s exactly the state that the addict is in. I can’t be other than who I am. And this is the only world that is available to me. There’s no other options in the world. There’s no other options for my agency. And that’s exactly the addict. That’s what the addict is. Reciprocally narrowed down to that stuckness and frozenness. And it seems to me you’re describing something analogous to that, but at the macro level rather than that at the individual level. Is that is that fair? Yeah, very fair. Very fair. And you can actually sort of what I noticed is you’re saying that, OK, if you flip it like this notion, the place, the proper place for imagination, the proper place for innovation, the proper place for truly entering, exiting, transcending, right? Transgressing. The thing that you’re stuck in is that that transcendent mode, like the mode in which meaningfulness is anchored in the way that I’m talking about right now. And so precisely if you’re going in this direction, which in my visual field is the wrong direction. Anti-clockwise to use, I think, the more poetic British construction. Yeah, that would make sense. You would actually have a reciprocal narrowing and an increasing incapacity to transcend because you’ve actually become you’re actually losing access to that mode altogether. It’s actually by going back and say, oh, this is the mode. Geez, if I feel stuck, I actually need to figure out how to settle back into and release myself from that that cycle, that trap and figure out how to go to reciprocal opening, which is going to say, OK, getting, you know, yeah, there’s a movement there. So this sounds to me like, again, another design feature for the religion. That’s not a religion. Right. In addition that in addition to that, it has to be coupled to ameliorating right the meta crisis. It should be one that’s doing this macro reciprocal opening that we should be able to articulate and say, no, no, this is here’s a clear narrative to as people are oriented toward. Here’s a clear narrative of how we’re cycling through this as reciprocal opening rather than cycling through this and reciprocal narrowing. Would you say that’s also an important design feature then? Yeah, yeah, it feels to me like that’s that is it for sure. I guess a anchor nail it. Good. I’ll circle around. Now, how that really shows up in reality, I think is really interesting. Yeah, it feels to me like actually dropping to that level of concretion, like doing a concrete example of that. I think it’s good. Let’s do that. Let’s do that. Yeah. And I like the idea of maybe trying to explore it through the metaphor of the attic. Yes. Yes. Because we’ve seen this like the 12 step program did that. That’s what it does. Think about the 12 step program. The program is a program that slows down the cycle. Right. It actually forces you. It requires that you open back up to the transcendent as when you get to the bottom of the cycle, you have to open back up to the transcendent. And you have to connect with something that is greater to yourself. And you have to surrender. Like, I can’t solve this problem. So I surrender completely, which is in some sense, like you’ve got this cycle that’s sort of wound like this and you’re slowing it down, slowing it down, slowing it down. Theory you has this notion of the bottom of the you. A little bit like that, like it’s a way of getting back down to the bottom of you and doing this sort of a hard reboot. And then you begin again from the bottom of the you. But now, but now cycling in the right direction. And trying to find a way to stay in that right directionality and building it slowly from that place. Right. And so that would so I’m linking the notion that you just mentioned of surrender to a notion of faith that doesn’t see faith in terms of belief, but like the auth that you’ve got a sense that you are like immersed in, that there’s a course that’s unfolding as things are opening up. Because we know, I mean, nobody’s nobody’s sort of worries about the epistemic status of knowing when they’re spiraling downward and getting stuck. So that I mean, I brought this up with market. If we have that sense, we also have the other sense. We have the platonic, anagogic sense, at least late in the nuts. We know what it’s like to become unstuck and to be opening up. And my my dot off my faith is that sense, you know, reliably, not perfectly. You know, my gosh, that’s so good. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. It’s great. Like you can even have. Yes. Faith. Faith is very well grounded in that sense. That sense of am I spiraling down or am I at least in the process of beginning to spiral off? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And that really that really picks up again on the older and I think better meaning of metanoia, which is the term that’s often translated as conversion, like converting into a religion. But metanoia actually meant, you know, a fundamental change. Noya to notice noesis. Right. It’s your salience landscaping meta. It’s a fundamental turning and transformation of like of your sort of enacted sense making. And that’s what the dot off is picking up on rather than the acquisition of conviction of particular propositional beliefs. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Again, that’s that that’s that modal reversal. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Call faith conviction of certain propositional beliefs to go in the wrong direction. I think so. I think that’s I think that’s exactly right. And you could see why if you’re if you’re if you have the off right, this is why you have the taste metaphors in the Bible or in other in other sacred literature, because if when I’m spiraling downward, I’m getting the reciprocal narrowing in the modal confusion. I’m hungry in a way that I can’t even articulate. But when I when I’m spiraling up, I’m starting to be less hungry and less frustrated. And I’m starting to also be able to articulate why I’m no longer hungry and how I precisely how and why I was hungry before. And you get but you can only do that while you’re in the stream. You can’t like this is not something that can be known without transformation. That’s that’s the important part. Yeah. I mean, you just the lyrics to Amazing Grace. Yes. Yes. I was lost, but now I’m found. And yes, my cup overflow. That’s that characteristic of the beginning of the capacity to express. Again, as you say, if you have not experienced grace, you’ve not experienced faith, particularly if you’re locked in a modal obligate propositional epistemology. But you’re having propositions rather than being faithful. Right. Yes. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, what I like about this is there’s something about if you can get down to the right characteristics, it gets very simple. I think so. Not easy, but simple. No, no, I understand that distinction. And I think it’s important. This goes towards the scalability issue. You know, Paul Van der Kley talks about it’s got to it’s got to appeal to the homeless person and to the philosopher. It just is a sense in which it’s very simple in one again, not easy, but it’s simple in the sense that it can be enacted and embodied by human beings right at the depths of the bottoming out, as you just said. But that’s presumably what he means by the homeless person. But it can also reach up into the upper echelons of the philosopher trying to come up with a, you know, a culturally transformative way of talking and thinking at a highly abstract level. What I think what we’re talking about here is exactly that. And I think that’s the test. That’s another test, the test for the scalability. OK. Yeah. Scalability. Something like process or dynamics. Ah, OK, there we go. Great. I love it when you do that, by the way. I really know. No, I mean, I really enjoy it just as an experience to belong to and be part of. So I thank you for that. I really like it a lot. So there’s this thing scalability where we have it’s kind of like. I’ve got so many different metaphors, but there’s a way of thinking about scalability that is coming from a place that is like. Like copy, you can copy it a lot. You can copy it a lot with decreasing loss. If I get the other part in it, it’ll land better. And then there’s something where the scalability is actually generative, where it actually the more people who are participating in it, the more capacity that it has to be for everyone who’s participating. So it’s my distinction between the rival and the anti-rival. And the continuum of the rival is we have on the left hand term, scarcity, like privation. But on the right hand term, we have something that we call plenitude. I’m just going to find that. So if you use like food, rice on the left hand term in the domain, in the continuum of rivalry, I’ve got a bowl with a single grain of rice, almost nothing on the right hand in term. I’ve got a warehouse pile with rice that I’m sitting on top of, which is just a bunch of shit. Who cares? At a certain point, as you start moving around that continuum, if you stand the continuum of fundamental rivalrousness, you start moving from having enough to having a superfluidity of enough. It’s very similar to our socio-political law. Right. Diminishing returns thing. If you flip it, if you’re on this other continuum, this other continuum is the anti-rivalrous. It’s anti-rivalrous. It’s not non-rivalrous. And the other thing, the anti-rivalrous, what happens is, is that when you’re on the far left side, you’re in the part of the anti-rivalrous that shows up as being in like privation, which you have as something like, like non-scalability, difficulty in scalability. Like what’s happening right now, what I’m doing right now is on that left-hand side. Like it’s hard for me to express that. I’m not expressing it well. We haven’t yet developed a capacity to share well. Hard to share, poorly shared. I see, I see. As you get to the middle term, you start getting to something that is shareable, easily shareable, like, mp3, so I can copy music, I can share it very well. You can replicate it really easily. You can replicate it, and the energetic cost per unit replication is small and diminishing. It’s the zero marginal cost society, RIPP can think of the middle term. Then you got the far right term, and that’s where things get very interesting. This is the sweet spot with the, I think it’s the, with the insight life. At the far right side of the anti-rivalrous is where, and this is like network effects, where every sharing, the act of sharing, the act of adding somebody increasingly into the thing actually generates more of the thing, increases more capacity. So if you think about that in the context of what Paul was saying, these would be the homeless guy. If I’m thinking about the anti-rivalrous kind of in that middle zone, because he’s calling for that middle zone, saying, Hey, it needs to be shareable. It needs to be really well shared. Do we do the thing we can share to the homeless guy? Oh, I see where you’re going. Keep going. I’m saying, no, no, no, we actually take it all the way to the right. Where to have shared it at all with anyone intrinsically increases the capacity to share it with everyone. Ah, so it recursively, it sort of evolves its capacity for sharing. It’s not just, it doesn’t just replicate, it evolves in that sense. Right. Right. Right. Right. That’s the key, right? That’s the insight that makes it possible. Oh yeah. It’s not scalable in the sense that you can share it broadly. It’s scalable in the sense that once it gets past a certain critical point, it becomes inevitable because capacity to bring more people in is so high and every person that brings in increases its capacity. So it goes from being just so actually, it goes from being self perpetuating to self promoting in a fashion. It’s sort of like ultimate to auto poetic. Right. That’s what I was going to lead to. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, that’s Jordan. That’s brilliant. That’s that’s fantastic. I think that’s an important point. I think that’s another major point to bring in here that what, what, what we need is right, is an ecology of practice that has exactly that kind of that sense of scalability. This should be a second term for this. Is there, is it like, if what, if what Paul is talking about is standardly called scalability, what’s this kind of evolving scalability? What’s it called? The only language that I’ve heard of is network effects and it’s not, that’s not a very strong term. No, it’s not intuitively, you know, elucidating that term. It doesn’t really, it doesn’t really. I’m Gen X. Our generation lacks the culture of the millennials. Millennials are great. I don’t have a good term. I’ll have a shitty term like hyper-division or something. I’m even older than you. But I think the, I think the phenomena you’re pointing to, I think that’s right. I think that’s a, I think that’s a, that’s a, a respectful, but also very like thoughtful and insightful response to Paul. It’s like, no, actually we don’t want that. That’s, that’s an old sort of, you know, hierarchical way of thinking of this. We need something that’s much more like a dynamical system where, where, where stability isn’t understood in terms of, you know, mechanical solidarity. Stability is understood, understood in terms of dynamical self correction. Right. There’s a, there’s a way in which what you’re saying here, it’s ultimately correcting itself because it’s actually qualitatively improving its functionality as it’s being shared. And think about you just used the word evolving and that’s exactly the point. Right. And this has that notion of the reopening of the triadic modalities. Exactly. Truly innovate to truly literally go from zero to one in response to actually changing conditions must be part of it. But if you can’t do that, then it’s doomed immediately. It will die for sure. Yeah. It just a matter of time. And that’s the, that’s the problem. Like everything we’ve done in the context of that called game a has that characteristic is that it, it, and it’s funny. I really liked this when you’re talking about the, uh, this cycle, this dynamic cycle, we have the axial age, right? We’ve got the bronze age collapse, shit goes crazy. And everybody’s kind of forced to go back to, well, we’ve got to figure out some new shit. This is really not working. And then we figure out some new shit and then we build with it like crazy, right? For a long time. Good stuff. But we kind of shifted that mode of like, stop figuring out new shit. Let’s just kind of build this, this building. And we, and we, and we invert the cycle. We start losing track. Oh, that’s good. Of the, of the, of the right relationship. It’s funny. It seems like it actually happens. I think about this. I’ve cut the heaven back around in mind, this phrase, like there’s a reason why Buddhist Socrates and Jesus didn’t write shit down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it is this very interesting characteristic. I remember watching this documentary of Buddhism and there’s a camera and it’s just kind of right on the tree. You know, the Buddhist Bodhi tree, right? And it’s perfect. Cause you just see the tree and you see kind of, so in my mind’s eye, it’s like, oh, this tree is in a forest. Right. And then it starts zooming out and it gets to a certain point. You begin to see this sort of riot of color and a cacophony of like stalls. And you know, basically it’s Disney world, Buddhist Disney world on the outside, mall of America, whatever crazy. Oh, that’s what happens. Right. What happens is there’s a moment of generativity where the modes are in the right orientation, building in the right direction. But for some reason, it’s so that that super salient, the movement to super salient is such an easy transition that we get this flip. And what the flip does is the flip just kind of, it converts to propositional. It converts to, right. Right. Right. Right. I scale in the, in the middle term, not scale on the right-hand term. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That I think is, it’s probably an activation energy. I thought about this as well that I get the feeling that we probably couldn’t have pulled this off until sometime in the late seventies, but there’s something about just the underlying socio-technical capacity and the underlying, right? So literal like wellbeing and level of education and literacy and emotional development, ideological development that, and what the wideness, like the globalization of it, the general spreading of it, that had to already be in place. The pushing that was too hard for these auto catalytic, auto poetic systems. So they eventually kind of ran out of steam. The default mechanism was the practical, well, it just goes super salient lock it in the top down hierarchy that is able to get shit done and do stuff, which did, right? Churches developed in the old sort of religion that is a religion modality and, and, and things moved. But the proposition, the hypothesis, the hope is that the context is now super saturated. The fluid is super saturated. And so the possibility of one of something that is coming in the right modality actually generating, getting through the phase transition and leaping over the transition to being truly auto poetic is available. Like it’s a real possibility. Right. Right. My generation, no, no, my generation talked about, I don’t know if people still use this, but you know, from physics, the critical mass idea that you, you, like, I think it sounded like, like only, only in the seventies did we have sort of enough that it could start becoming, you know, auto catalytic and self organizing in a powerful way. Yeah. And probably, as I say, it probably like in the seventies we began to have enough, like we were beginning to get the pieces that are necessary, like the underlying components, like, you know, that homeless guy. So this is why the way I, the, the idea came up for me is that on the one hand, yes, there needs to be some sort of field effect or some sort of characteristic of the way of being in relationship with religion, it’s not a religion, but actually work at the individual level. So there’s a way for them to sense in their body, a upgrade, yet a movement away from downward spiral towards upward spiral. Yeah. All this notion of faith to be felt. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. There has to be a conversion for them. And exactly. And also though, think about what happens when they’re beginning to notice this in the context of some community, you’re actually noticing in the context of other people. And the homeless person is maybe more challenging, but so, but zoom back to 800 AD, 800 AD village. And I’m actually not, I’m not even a village in like remote hinterlands of Northwest China. It’s in Tuscany. So I’m kind of like in a place that has some people in it. At the end of the day, the likelihood that I’m going to encounter another person who’s really heard the word and is feeling this thing richly and deeply is actually kind of low. Yeah. Just not that many people around who don’t, you know, travel is very limited. You know, communications, people, if I’m not lucky enough, I might get up and kind of head to a CC because I’ve heard this and shit going down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of hundred years later. But that’s kind of it, right? There’s, there’s like a critical mass. The neutron density is preventing the fission from actually popping over the top. But now it’s there right now. I can just kind of pop into a location if the possibility of actually having not so many cadmium rods, like sucking the energy out of the system. That’s one part we have all the time, but just having enough sort of, you’ve got the feeling for what this, uh, this space feels like, right? You can actually come out in this other direction and you’re beginning to notice what other people who have that feel like and speak like then, and you can find them like we can have this, you and I can have this conversation and we can share this conversation. And for a lot of people, this is either going to be confusing or annoying or whatever happens to be, but for some people it will land in a useful way. Yes. Generous, right? Yeah. Yeah. Generousivity will increase for them the capacity to have their version of this conversation. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Right. If continue, we’ll continue doing that kind of thing. Something like that. No, I think that’s excellent. Um, so yes, I don’t want to lose one thread. It’s sort of, I liked it. You also pointed to this, there’s a threat also. So that, that you for the last few minutes, you’ve been talking about sort of the positive affordance, but earlier you pointed to a threat, which is people go from sensing the upward spiral, the anagogic spiral, uh, in terms of how that connects them to the generativity to more being like you said, what they stopped trying to innovate and instead they, let’s just keep building more. I think he said building more shit on the basis of, well, you know, the grammar that we’ve already worked out. So it shifts from being, uh, it shifts from an evolving sense to a hoarding sense of, if you’ll allow me that way, uh, we’re putting it to invoke something in the domain of the sacred. This gentleman Clayton Christian died recently and he wrote the book, the innovators, Larry’s the perfect story. Jordan, you’re breaking up for a sec. You broke up for a second. Am I back? Yeah, you’re back. I didn’t get the author or the book. Clayton Christiansen. Right. And the book is called the innovators dilemma. Oh, I see. So we’re talking about somebody who by the way was a Mormon who went on a mission, um, was a successful entrepreneur quit to become a, uh, an academic at Harvard business school. So this is a very different domain, beautiful sacred text because he’s not even trying to be a sacred text. He’s trying to be a way to, to instruct business leaders on why this hoarding thing happens because it happens all over everywhere. So you can really look at it in this milk, micro case. Oh, now we pointed out the innovators dilemma. We have a real thing. Like we can study this very closely in, um, in mostly like tech companies. It’s easy to see. So you’ll have a situation where something like, let’s say, let’s go with Google. There’s a period of axial age generativity, right? Where the context of the people, their relationships, their openness, their willingness to experiment, their willingness to fail, the, the things that the, the stake they have, like at the beginning it’s, you know, a bunch of grad students more or less. Right. Um, and some people who have put money in who are saying, you know what, it’s okay if it fails. Like we, we understand that’s how this thing works. And it invents, it innovates, it innovates, it innovates, it innovates. There’s a lot of generativity to it, but there’s an S curve. And there’s a point at which the organizational dynamic has this characteristic of optimization. They have some, some desire to begin to, to, no longer continue to innovate, but actually to optimize for the potential that was stored in the innovations that already happened. Right. Right. And it’s always this sort of weird unconscious frustration because there’s a belief that you can have your cake and eat it too. There’s a belief that as an organization, and for God’s sakes, we’ve got 50,000 people in this organization. Surely we can have the scope works. Like surely we can have like these, in the, what they call it, intrapreneurship. We can have these empowered mechanisms, 20% time, Google play to do, where you can enable the innovative capacity to continue to stay vital and rich and fecund while also milking the cash cow. Like, isn’t that right? I’ve got billions of dollars to spend. If I don’t milk the cash cow, I can’t, I can’t fund my awesome project. That’s the right thing. But Pritchett points out that it turns out, no, there’s some characteristic of what happens is that when the, there’s a percolation effect, almost like a critical mass in the inverse direction where the organizational culture, just enough pieces of the fundamental organizational culture begins to include a certain kind of psychology or typology of person. And a structure, like literally the organizational structure has a weight process and a protocol that is biased towards optimization. Right, right, right. And the thing about optimization is that it’s salient. I can, I can make it. I can put a, I can put a bunch of metrics together. I have a big sort of board that says, you know, what’s my cost per customer acquisition and Bobby, whatever happens to be in my, I curve you in the right direction. So it’s well defined problem. It’s a well defined problem. It’s a well defined problem. Innovation is a very ill defined problem. So the people, and the organization in general, that’s the thing. It’s like this, the diaphanous, new or not newness, ineffable character, the culture in general loses its capacity to make space for innovation, even when it intends to do so. Like even when it consciously fucking weights it down, forever, right? It still dies. And so that’s like, that’s a place where you could take a really good examination of that kind of thing. And then of course we see this sort of thing also happen in like art communes, places where artists get together. And that goes a different direction that goes in this direction of almost like evaporation, like a fire that runs out of fuel. Right, right, right. So let’s do this then. This is good. There’s a taxonomy. So the first taxonomy is the, you know, the innovation dilemma. I think that’s important. The second one is the artistic evaporation, right? It runs out of fuel, right? There’s something going wrong there. Then there’s, is there potentially a third one? Cause people talk about this in general system collapse, right? The idea that the system is complexifying and then what happens, it complexifies to deal with the complexities of the environment. And then the system itself becomes so complex that it becomes as problematic as anything it’s trying to address in the environment. And then it eventually, it can’t solve any problems because it’s so consumed with itself. You see that at the end of the Western Roman empire, like it’s like, no matter what we do, it’s just making things worse. And the empire becomes the problem as opposed to being the thing that you’re trying to use to solve a whole bunch of problems. Right. And so that strikes me as another way in which like, so the system could be complexifying, but it could come to a point where you might be hitting something like general system collapse that you get this. Oh, this is who? Okay. Oh yes. The collapse of complex societies. Right. Right. And it’s precisely that. I have his book, but I haven’t read it. But that’s right. We talked about it a couple of times, but that’s it. Like that’s the, that’s the, well, at least I would, I would point that insight to him. I think there’s other domains, like different people from different, exploring different domains have noticed the same thing happens in lots of different places. Yeah. He does it. He does a very good job of describing exactly that. So, so part, part of, part of what’s sounding like, I was going to say, Oh, go ahead. There should be someone that kind of just, so what happens on that curve, right. And I’m not sure if Tantra writes about this, have been kind of so up in the eyeballs and they’re stuck for such a long time that I have a hard time now distinguishing exactly who. So I’m on the Tantra curve. Right. So the system is becoming more complex. And there’s like a couple of inflection points and it has to do with funny. You can actually take a look at the shape of the shape of the curve. So I’ve got something like maybe jerk acceleration and velocity. So there’s the jerk, right? So the jerk is the rate of change of acceleration, acceleration is rate of change of velocity and velocity of change of position. So if I’m looking at the curve, the first inflection point happens when I actually go into zero jerk and less. So, so what happens is, is that for a period of time, the innovative capacity of the, of the thing that is being developed actually is accelerating the rate, the acceleration is accelerating. And there’s a curve that looks on acceleration itself. And there’s a point at which that stops happening. Right. And if I look at this, if I can zoom out and look at the mathematical domain, you actually start to begin seeing that this, this is the point at which the accelerating returns begins to turn into, not diminishing returns, but not as rapidly accelerating returns. I can see the space is beginning to be filled. Is that what people shift to optimization to then? Well, if that’s, that’s where you actually generally speaking have a choice, which as far as I know, everybody always fails, which is you can choose at that point to step away from optimization or you can choose to step towards optimization. And because what happens is, is that you’re at that point, you’re beginning to, the low hanging fruit have been picked. Right. Right. All right. So it’s not as easy to get the easy stuff. Now here’s the thing, here’s the problem. This is the meta thing that I think is so very difficult to hold onto. You can double down. You can get better at the thing. Let’s do it. Let’s go with oil, like oil. Yep. Yep. I remember you talking to me about this. Yeah. You know, I, it’s the first iteration, some very simple basic technology and not too many geographic regions that I’m getting like just gushers for like literally can dig it out of the, out of the dirt with a shovel. Yeah. Yeah. And then something happens with a low hanging fruit have been, have been picked. What do I do? Well, either, I can go to the market and I can buy a bunch of these, what do I do? Well, either I can say, I need to keep my fluidity open and not become too addicted to this particular complex system, to oil and the petroleum refining and all that oil infrastructure. You can say, how could I, I’m actually pretty good innovation. I’m going to double down on optimizing my oil construction. Like I’ll build a rig, like I’ll actually figure out how to drill deeper or whatever happens to be. Oh, so you get much more local in where you’re innovating rather than global innovation. You’re moving to, yes. Right. Right. You go, you, you, you bind innovation into a domain, right? That works. Right. Really well. Right. Because now you’re, you’re kind of know what I’m looking for. It’s gone from mystery to puzzle. That’s kind of the key thing. Familiar defined to well-defined problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now I’m, now I get, now, but oh, boom. Like now I have a boom. Shit gets really, really good for a while. I have a golden age. And that’s the really weird trick because you feel like, well, shit’s really good. So obviously I must be, it must be winning. I must be doing. Which you’re actually the same time. It’s bullshit because you’re making the wrong thing. Salient, right? It’s bullshit. You’re making the wrong thing. You’re bullshitting yourself and it’s so hard. So then the next thing, of course, is then when we start going into zero acceleration, right? Where my, my accelerating returns is now shifted to diminishing returns. The velocity continues, but now the cost per unit velocity is going up, which by the way is happening all over the place right now in the context of where we are. Now I’ve got a real trouble. Now I’m, now I’m, now I’m actually an addict. Now I kind of, I can feel it. Now I can sense it. Like this is the thesedies. The oil shocks get all over the place. And the response at that point is really, really better kick, dude. This is a better, you’ve just got a, your first real moment of clarity. Now’s the time to get off the juice. But what do people do? Right? It’s hard like that. Now you’ve, now you’ve got to build an entire addiction. Like think about back to oil. I’ve got cars, man. How can I really get around if I don’t have cars? I’ve got built the interstate highway system. Shit, it’s only 20 years old. It still is functional. You have that built in suburbs. I’ve got, if I don’t have cars, suburbs don’t even work. I can build this massive infrastructural commitment to a lifestyle premised on this particular capacity, this complex or complicated structure. So now in some sense I have to blind, I have to go actually to, I have to commit to bullshit. I have to become actually delusional. So the eighties in America, at least. Is there a way in which, sorry for a direct, but I just want to explore this thought with you quickly. Like, is there a way in which our culture is in that sense? I, I, sorry, I do this very cautiously and I don’t want to be dismissive or insulting. Okay. So let’s really, I’m announcing that. Is there a way in which our culture is addicted to Christianity because it has been so interwoven with our moral and legal, like think of it not economically, although it is, but it’s so deeply interwoven into our moral and legal and spiritual and existential and therapeutic, you know, infrastructure that we don’t, we’re sort of addicted to it. So even though a lot of people sort of reject it propositionally, there’s still something analogous to what was happening with oil and the infrastructure, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I like this. The thing that I like about it is that if you say that what I, what I noticed is something like everybody who can, who really truly feels from the participatory level up, what I might call the essence, not the proposition or the dogma of Christianity should be agreeing with you. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. To recognize that is the good news. Yes. Because it’s a simulation at the end of the day. It’s a formalism. It’s a performance where we’re addicted to a performance of the the rites and rituals of Christianity and we’re constrained by them. That’s what the addiction means all the way down to the propositional level. So we’re again, we’re, we’re simulating, we’re living through it. And yeah, that feels right to me. As you’re saying, I was like trying to like heal the growing up as a, you know, not as a, not as a Christian in the West. So I have a really deep like, Hmm, okay. What are these things? Like watching them from the outside and interacting with Christians. No. Okay. So there’s something about that. I think is, I think you’re pointing to something that’s right. But it takes, I get it. I get why you have to actually be very careful there. Yeah. Well, because I, I, like, I don’t want to, I’m not trying to dismiss the argument made by like Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland and others about how many, how many things in our culture that even the atheists or the secular people espouse and how it’s ultimately, you know, derived and presupposes Christianity in important ways. Right. And, and, and so I want to acknowledge, you know, the light side of the force. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I, I don’t want to say that that’s false, but what I’m trying to expand the awareness of is that there’s the dark side of the force to that. It’s like the way we’ve become addicted to oil. We’ve built it because, because it has been so successfully woven into the infrastructure of our cultural, you know, cognitive grammar. There’s a sense in which we’re also reciprocally narrowed and addicted to it. And we don’t know, it’s sort of unthinkable for us, even when we claim propositionally to be atheists about how to break out of it. And I think this was Nietzsche’s, when this is part of Nietzsche’s concern is like people really don’t get what they’re talking about when they’re trying to say God is dead or there is no God and stuff like that. I just wanted to sort of, I just wanted to counterbalance these arguments made by, you know, well, you know, all these good things that you like, they’re dependent on Christianity. Well, you know, all these good things that I like are dependent on oil, right? But you know, that dependency can go from being, you know, a positive thing that I celebrate to being exactly what you say. There can come a point where, oh no, oh no, I’m, I know, I’m so reciprocally narrowed because of the dependency that I have like an addictive dependency, like, you know, substance dependence. Yeah. Yeah. So, so editors note, to the extent that this gets shared more broadly, I think it’s very important to bracket the last five minutes of conversation that this is, one must be very careful to listen very closely to what it is that John is saying. Yes. Thank you for that. Thank you for that, Jordan. It’s, it is, this is a rule of mega space for me. Right. Right. Right. This is a very, very subtle thing that you’re actually pointing at. Yes. And if somebody is reacting to it, what I would suggest and hope is to step away and recognize that Johnny V is operating in good faith. Yes, I am. I am. Let us try to work with that to find out what is being pointed out here because it’s real, it’s rich and there’s something really good and meaningful there. Right. Editor’s note and bracket. No, thank you for saying that, Jordan. That’s why I tried to caveat it by saying, look, I’m explicitly acknowledging that there is a, you know, like I said, the light side of the force. I was using that metaphor, right? You know, that there’s all of this. I’m not denying any of that, but I’m trying to say like, if we like what you and I are engaged in, but there has to be, we have to broaden the framing or we’re, we’re not going to get out of how we’re stuck. And that’s all I was trying to do. But thank you for your editor’s note because it’s much appreciated because I was hesitant. As you know, I was hesitant to say this and I was trying to be very careful. And so you acknowledging that explicitly was also very helpful. I think there’s some shared context or shared terms that I can think things, again, back to kind of being a little simpler, which is the meaning of this notion is at least as far as I understand it as the religion is not a religion, right? Is in some sense endeavoring to find a way to put things in the back in their proper place. It’s to get them going the right way. It’s to get them, get them going the right way. And so for example, if you are living truly living Christianity moment to moment, from the inside out in relationships with life, real life, like actual life, like the tragedies of your existence and you’re making meaning, you’re truly making meaning out of that. Then you’re fine. Totally. And again, I say this repeatedly. I, I know because I’ve met people and I’m in discussion with them, that there are many people who can individually turn to Christianity and spiral up to use our language. I see that. I see that in other religions too. I don’t think that’s an exclusive property of Christianity. Okay. I see that. I acknowledge that. I also acknowledge that the things we are, the argument we’re making here is not a foreclosure argument. It’s not saying it’s impossible. Here’s the deductive proof that Christianity can’t structurally figure out how to do this. We just find it improbable. That’s right. That’s not the same thing. I actually, I actually threw something out that I’ve run into recently and we just talked about a little bit, which is to say, Hey, here’s the, here’s the proposition. Yeah. I think we can finally at long last get away from selling out our religions. Right. Right. That’s the thing we’re putting out there. Like I think, I would like to suggest, Oh, I like this. Is that anyone who truly truly lives their religion, wherever it happens to be, knows that what is being said here is the case. There’s a selling out, a practical conversion of the true in exchange for the salient, in exchange for the shareable, in exchange for something that works some, sometimes most of the time it works. But that exchange comes with a modal confusion. Right. It’s the modal confusion. And the proposition is we can’t at long last, no longer make that compromise. That’s right. We cannot long last truly teach the good news and it will in fact be shared. Yes. Without a compromise. That’s, that’s the proposition. That’s the, that’s the thing we’re trying to, to, to bring into the light. Like the sense thing that I have, this is possible. This could happen. You’ve got this totally right. And that’s, that’s exactly, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. I’m completely concurrent with the way you’ve just articulated that. I really haven’t any idea how to do it. I’ve got all kinds of concepts and notions and I’ve tried all kinds of sorts of things, but this conversation really helps a lot. Like this is definitely the right zone. I mean, I don’t know how to engineer the whole thing. I’m having lots of conversations. I’m having conversations with people who like Rafe Kelly and others who are building communities, you know, Daniel Flores and people like that. I’m doing all of that. I’m trying, I’m trying to, you know, in a really comprehensive manner, reverse engineer a meta-psycho technology for exactly the reasons that you articulated so long ago. And that’s the, I’m trying to, you know, do the project of dialectic or, or, you know, dialectic 2.0 or something, that is going to do that role for us. Other than that, I don’t know what to do like you, but I keep wanting to have these conversations. I keep wanting to try and reverse engineer as much as I can. Cause you know, we both agree that we’re in an urgent situation. We don’t have, we don’t have the luxury of a lot of time. So I mean, what I do have Jordan is I have Doth. I have the sense that, you know, what’s happening is there’s the, it does, there’s, it’s starting to become self-organizing. It feels like it has the potential to be autopoetic and it definitely feels like it’s a reciprocal opening, spiraling up. And so that’s where I’ve gone from being bleak to being hopeful, not cheerful because the world is still a dark place in a lot of ways for a lot of people. But being hopeful is definitely now something. You know, St. Paul talked about, you know, faith is the, you know, the evidence of things unseen or the hope. And if you make that propositional, it’s just a loopy thing to prescribe. But if it’s like this, what we’re talking about, about now, the sense of the a, you’re right. And the sense that you, oh wait, I, there’s, there, it’s, it’s jelling. It’s right. It’s becoming, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it, it, it presages that it could be autopoetic in a way that I can taste. Right. And that gives me, that gives me a directed hope. Then I sort of can give a new meaning to his phrase and his understanding. And so, and that’s why I like to emphasize the adjective rather than the noun, not faith, but faithfulness, that sense of, you know, because when you’re faithful to your wife, it’s not like just, well, I believe these things about her and I will always believe them. That’s not what it means. It means that you have to, ah, that you are, you know, you, you sense an autopoetic thing growing between you and her that is valuable to both of you in an evolving, spiraling upward way. God damn. That is so, like so real. That’s the reality that is so important. Yes. Yeah. That’s actually such a powerful thing of grasping it. I wonder if that, that lands for people. So just to say it back to you. Sure. Let’s go with model one. Right. And model one in this case is going to be propositional. So model one is something like I’ve said some words in front of a, in front of a group of people, let’s say a priest. Right. And I’ve been trained that I need to keep my word. Right. And so I keep my word just to say, I’ve got a whole bunch of commitments that I’ve made and I’m going to keep those commitments come hell or high water. This is also very similar to the notion of responsibility. Right. Right. Right. Right. Good. Yeah. And model one has this really bizarre characteristic, the pairings, the relationships that are bound by that kind of a, a binding may or may not sort of last until the two partners have died. Right. Right. But rarely are deeply joyful. That’s right. Over time. That’s right. That’s right. By contrast. And by the way, there’s a valley of death in between these two. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On the other side, model B or model two, I can’t remember what I started with is that what you just described is that it’s alive. It’s a living thing. The relationship is well watered and has sun and nutrition that it’s healthy. It’s vital that being in this thing is actually good for me. It’s good for her. And there’s an us that is also growing. It is an auto poetic living being. That’s right. Full list is my willingness and capacity to continue to commit to the caring and feeding and nurturing of that thing. And then it’s supporting me in that. When I get weak or I get strong or I stumble or I fall, there’s something that helps me and supports me and understands me as me, brings me back in and it’s real. Like it’s alive. It’s like a tornado that is actually turning. This is like the difference between and crackly and soft person. It’s like the difference between, you know, making yourself do something and being sort of like, so you’re sort of pushing for yourself as opposed to being drawn, right? You’re soft person. You’re tempted by the good, right? And you’re, you’re faithful to your partner because it’s like, well, not being faithful strikes you as unthinkable, not because I’m going to hold myself in. It’s like, no, no, no, I’m constantly being drawn into this and drawn beyond myself. And what, why would I want anything other than that? Right. And this is just to loop back in terms of that, that thing, that construct of universal basic income, right? The transition between those two. And if there’s a transition between work and the thing. Oh, that’s beautiful. Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, excellent. Excellent. I should go soon, my friend. Cause I’m on a pretty tight shift. But we, that was actually a nice closure. We circled all the way back around. What do you think about, uploading this conversation? Are you still feeling that you don’t need to be in the public space? This feels pretty good. Okay. I may be wrong, but I guess my, my capacity, like I’ve had that experience that I think Zach Stein was telling me is how you actually grow wisdom, which is, he calls it the blackening, like, like a deepening depression in relationship with trauma. But then I’ve been metabolizing that. And I think my capacity to be in relationship with the, the infinite darkness that is the nature of this part of reality, like the infinite light and the infinite darkness has increased. So I expect, there will be a decent amount of shit that comes out of anybody who watches this, but I also expect this it’s worth putting it out there. So if you feel that way, so I would hope that people would be charitable to the good faith spirit that we brought to this discussion. I mean, we, we stepped back a couple of times and said, like, like, this is what, this is what we’re clearly trying to do, right? And we’re not trying to do X, Y, or Z. I, you know, we, one can hope that at least the fact that we’ve tried to make that clear, what our attitude and what our project is, that that would help call from some reciprocal responses from people that they, that they would respond in good faith as much as possible. I would hope so as well. Okay. Thank you, my friend. Hopefully we’ll speak in a couple of weeks. That’s right. Well, good luck. Okay. Take care. Bye bye.