https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pFo0FJ2K6v4
Hello everyone, welcome to Voices with Reveki. I’m joined one more time and probably not the last time by my good friend and colleague Leymann Pascal who has generated so many wonderful dialogues on Voices with Reveki. So welcome back Leymann, it’s good to have you here again. Hi John, lovely to be here. I think last time we’ve sort of been thinking about this as my overarching series with some themed stuff. I’m thinking of the overarching theme as something like post metaphysical spirituality. So last time we delved into beauty and we talked last time at the end about I guess the transposition of optimal grip skills into domains like politics. That’s a tricky one to think out so I think we should spend some time on that. Yeah, I think that’s a good topic. It’s very pertinent. Yeah, we’ll have to go carefully because of course this is a topic that is fraught with reactivity on people’s part and that reactivity I think has been exacerbated by the past few months. So how would you like to begin though? I think if we talk at a high enough level no one will have any idea what we’re saying. I’ve been trying to think about what I mean by politics and I suppose in general I would say it’s the art of embodied distributed intelligence. It’s how we get together to make decisions about how to be and that can be smarter or dumber in a sense and then I would put that in the context of religion which I would think as a super political or meta political approach to recollecting the skills that build social integration and coherent mobilization spirit across the domains of culture in any epoch. So I think I’m on line with you. The problem for me is I have two different conceptions of politics in my mind. The first is very similar to what you said. I have Aristotle’s notion of politics as you know remember Aristotle says that man is inherently a social or a political being, human beings I should say. He was sexist. I’m trying not to be. And I think that broadly is right but I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s humorous and ironic twist on that. Aristotle says in order to live alone one must be either a god or an animal but one can be both a philosopher. So I wonder where that puts us in this discussion. So I think that I tend to reserve that definition of politics. I’m not so happy with a plant although I think you’re right to use it that way. It has a bona fide heritage. I think that the common sense, everyday sense of politics is much more limited than what Aristotle said. I think for most people what politics is about is not something like the systemic management of distributed cognition within something like a meta-meeting system of religion. In fact I would propose that for most people, myself included, nowadays that would be the word culture. And the association to cultivation and to cult is readily apparent. Whereas politics I feel, for many people now when they hear that term, they’re talking about the principles of governance. So for them, the locus of politics is more properly the state as opposed to the culture. That might be something you want to challenge but I’m just bringing that up as I think there’s two senses of the word politics. The one that I think you’re invoking is a bona fide one and like I said it’s clearly found in Aristotle but I don’t think it is what people readily hear when they hear politics today. Because most people, that’s too bold, many people that I’m in discussion with feel that politics is something that they can have nothing to do with. Their life can be basically free from politics and they’re very suspicious of people who have a political agenda. So that obviously means that they’re not thinking of politics in that first definition because the first thing you talk about they can’t escape from. There’s no place where you can get free from distributed cognition. That’s Aristotle’s point or culture. So given that you have these two definitions, do you prefer the ancient one over the more modern one or are you trying to negotiate a relationship between them in your proposal? Looking at people with those two attitudes, let’s say about politics, I’ve got kind of three opinions. I think the first opinion that’s really pertinent to us is people might just not see how the skills that apply to the domains they are interested in also apply to the political domain. You might just not have seen that connection. I do think there’s a lot of people who have this sort of negative affect and distanced relationship to politics as if it was the domain of some other. That’s a political problem in the organization of the culture is that we disown our relationship to the political. We don’t really see it as a viable intelligence that we can cultivate. And that may be one of the reasons we’re not getting very far politically is that most people have opted out emotionally from that domain. But we can say what is politics, but we can also say what should it be? What would we like it to be? Right. Right. In my mind, the goal is something like a wisdom civilization. Right. So I’m going to skew all definitions in that direction, regardless of how viably justified that is by history. I think about that in two ways. And one is, how do we create the supportive conditions in the culture, partly through the organizing principles of governance, in order to allow people to flourish in the direction of wisdom? Right. And also, what can we do at the structural systemic level of society that is analogous to individual wisdom cultivation procedures? Right. Right. So I take it to mean then that the vehicle of these facilitations will not exclusively be the state, that there are other institutions or subsystems of the culture that you also think will be invoked in this kind of political change that you’re proposing. Is that correct? Yeah, I think we need to generalize the meaning. And there are ways in which everyone already has done that. Right. Everyone knows about office politics. That’s not the state. Right. So wherever there’s negotiations between people about how we get things done, that becomes political because you have to figure out a principle of collective decision making and then enact it. That’s politics. So for you, politics is therefore basically germane to the collective decision making that gives some kind of government or regulation to the problem solving of distributed cognition. Is that a fair way of saying it? I think that’s very fair, yes. So that would mean that even two people having a conversation about where they’re going to have dinner would in that sense be political. Yes, I think that’s a I mean, if that’s an outlier in terms of most people’s feelings about the subject, but I think it’s a viable part of that. And I think it’s important to view it that way, because the more you can see the opportunities for how interpersonal decisions can be made better, the more insight you have into how that can be deployed at scale. So therefore, is there a continuum between the continuum in the sense of a continuity of principles, you know, design principles between the small scale interactions, like say, like we’re doing right now, and the large scale processes of the state? Do you see those on a continuum? So that the Absolutely, yeah. Oh, I see. The simplest and most commonly pointed out aspect of that continuum is the parallel between political views and domestic organization. Right, everybody from Wilhelm Reich to George Lakoff has pointed out how the way the kids are raised in the household sets up the metaphorical structure of how they think the system should be laid out nationally. And so some of those layouts are smarter than others. Some are more flexible than others. Yeah, there’s that and there’s some interesting empirical data on that. Trying to determine sort of people’s political allegiance, if you ask them directly, that’s not a good mark. But if you ask them about their attitudes to parenting, those are often a very good predictor of their sort of true political leanings. So that, so there’s, what I’m saying is there’s, that metaphor is not just sort of a cultural ornament or a pass on the parlay. It seems to point to something of a predictive relationship and that would tend to support your proposal of a continuum. So the reason why I’m asking all of this is, you know, is I generally, I generally try not to get involved with the debates between right and left because I think there are deep problems on both sides that it’s similar to the thing I view with between the realist and the anti-realist or between the theists and the atheists. I tend to find that there’s shared problematic presuppositions on both sides that I want to challenge. Now, part of my understanding is that metamodernism also wants to challenge those shared presuppositions. So that’s fine. And I often use, and Zach Stein used the same term, often talk about, you know, that I’m sort of concerned with the meta political. I’m concerned with what are the conditions of possibility for the kinds of collective problem solving that we need in order to bring about, as you said, a wisdom culture. So I think that now that you have specified and stipulated how you’re using the word political, I’m fine with that because it aligns with, I mean, you can have whatever opinion you want. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is I think we have common ground where we can have this discussion. Yeah, I mean, instinctively, I would call myself something like a meta progressive, but I think a meta frame is necessary no matter what. And there’s a couple of different ways to approach that. You know, in the integral theory, there’s a necessity to unpack stages or developmental levels as well as a left-right polarization. And then to think of left and right as something operating at various nested epistemic levels. So that’s one thing. And then the meta perspective, I think one of the things meta modern brings in is a much more nuanced critique of the underlying metaphysical assumptions of modernity, which include our standard political spectrum of left and right. Yes. It’s posed to us like it’s two fundamental options, but really that’s part of the polarized operating procedure of the standard model of the last few centuries. Well, that’s exactly it. The way, I think you said it very well, the shared implicit epistemology and metaphysics of the so-called left and right. I think, and you’re right, they are both born out of modernity, clearly and deeply and continuously dependent on that. And therefore, there are important shared presuppositions that need to be challenged there. I think that’s central. I think also a particular recent turn that has exacerbated by social media that has now become at least de facto, probably not de jour, but a de facto shared presupposition, which is that we have forgot that the left right was supposed to be a form of opponent processing, a way to facilitate self-correction within distributed cognition and that our ultimate allegiance was to the distributed cognition’s functionality, to the process. But that has degenerated into a cultural cognitive grammar of a zero sum game and adversarial processing and winners and losers and destroying the other side. So the whole idea of like the idea of Dewey, that you’ve got a deep interconnection between the self-correcting processes of science and the self-correcting processes of democracy has been lost. The idea that your commitment is always to the country or at least to the process of democracy and science within distributed cognition. So that’s a modernist thing to say. I get that. What I’m saying is even that modernist presupposition is now, I think, been largely discarded. And we are now into no self-correction within distributed cognition is not what this is about. This is about me winning and you losing because there’s a zero sum game and I need to try and hold on to whatever power and privilege access to the state gives me. Yeah, there’s two ways in which a trans modern critique or trans modern politics is necessary. One of them is to say there are inherent problems within the logic of the modern apparatus, the modern way of organizing, and that that homeostatically ensures its ongoing survival through opponent processing when it’s working well. It keeps itself from changing by having two apparent directions to the process. And I think that’s not just left and right politics. That’s the prosecutor and the defender and it’s the X, Y axis of the Cartesian grid, right down the line with this polarized new version. The other side is, like you say, even by its own metrics, modernity is failing to be that and therefore also requires a trans modern politics to correct its collapse. Thank you, Leland. Thank you, Leland. You put those two together and said that very well. That was very succinct and very clear. Thank you for that. So that means we now have a proper philosophical problem we can tackle, which is, well, what are those two trans modern moves or, I mean, or what are the two kinds? Maybe they each form a set of things, two kinds of trans modern political moves you want to see happen. Yeah, it’s interesting to look at it from those two angles, because on the in terms of modernity’s corruption, let’s say, of the subsystems of the modern civilization vying with each other and destabilizing and therefore opening up the regressive move back to pre-modern cultural trends. Yeah, that’s come about in the form of several crises. You know, you might even argue, as some people have, that every couple of decades, modernity self-sabotages requires some kind of progressive political band-aid, like in the New Deal, for example, right? Modernity fails on its own terms and then has to have a pseudo socialist facelift. Right, right, right. So there’s that sense in which people might even argue that, right, that Bernie Sanders is the real savior of capitalism, because if you made those European style upgrades to the social safety net, you’d have a much more flourishing modern capitalist economy. Right, right. On the other hand, that’s going to have inherent limitations. And those inherent limitations are, you know, well critiqued by people for the last 200 years. Right. They mainly take the form of marginalization or every kind of excluded externality. There’s whole population groups we’re not looking at. There’s ecological background conditions we’re not looking at. There’s huge factors in which the GDP does not indicate how well the economy is doing. Exactly, exactly. The trans-modern politics in that sense would be an attempt to fold in what’s currently external to the modern metrics. Right. So the part of that that I have some understanding of, the parts are, like you said, the way modernity has us disembedded from history and ecology. And people say, but public is all about history. No, it’s not about history again, in the sense of understanding what Heidegger talks about, an understanding of the cultural cognitive grammar and how it’s been evolving. Modernity suffers from the end of history myth that it is the culmination of creating a way of understanding everything, and therefore it doesn’t need to pay attention to previous ways of understanding and therefore look for new ways. So I think I agree with you. That’s what I mean by how it’s disembedded from its history. It’s obviously deeply disembedded from the ecology that shows up in multiple ways. And then what you said about GDP and wealth and money being very poor metrics for trying to understand human well-being. And so the implicit assumption is that they are the metrics that constitute the algorithm of the normativity by which we judge whether or not we’re doing well or not. Yeah, I think that’s also something that needs to be seriously thought of the question. So how? Sorry, I don’t mean to back you into a corner like now, Lehmann, solve the world. But I mean, how though? Yeah, I think it’s got a couple of different sides. I think one thing is what we’re doing right now, because the question would be this from like the religious angle that I try to bring into it, is why are we missing the we that could adequately address the meta crisis in late modernity? And so a collective spirit is missing, a nation spirit is missing in the nations and a more general spirit is missing more generally. So how do you get that we in order to make some of these changes? Because that seems to have to come first. You could propose all kinds of intelligent systemic upgrades. Well, we need a new voting system. Right. Plurality voting in a non-proportional sense is not really expressing the will of the people at all. And you’re not going to get anywhere unless you have a smarter voting system. OK, but how are we going to make that change? We have to share a common ethos to make that change first. And you get that common ethos on the one hand through a small nucleus of people who are trying to figure out for themselves through sense making engagements what that new ethos is like. The problem is those people, it’s too slow to expect that that will spread to everyone in time. So those people have to at some point start to converge on a minimum set of policy demands that would raise the bottom of the floor of the society in a way that can piggyback on spontaneous mass mobilizations of people around certain issues and themes. That’s where the meta progressive argument would come in. It’s not that we agree with, you know, everything that’s going on in the streets in the United States, for example, but we have to be looking at what’s going on in the mass of the people that we could link into in a way that the better sensemakers can validate as a minimum set of changes that would depressurize, stabilize and enhance the overall system so that on top of that, a much more sophisticated politics might be able to evolve. OK, so that’s very interesting. Maybe at some point we could talk about that in connection with the proposal I have about stealing the culture. But I’m interested in perhaps if you could give a concrete example of what one of these minimally necessary proposals would look like and sort of how does it because what I see what I see those needing to do is they need to almost be symbolic in the sense of they need to they need to have they need to have a meaning for our current frame in order for them to catch. But they also need to have they also need to have a meaning to the emerging sensemaking frame. And so do you maybe you don’t. No shame if you don’t. But do you have a concrete example that we might discuss in detail? Well, we could think about something like the the two different types of progressive economic well-being proposals that have gone on in the states and around the world. So federal jobs guarantee or universal basic income. Right. Right. Those are a little bit in tandem. Some people lean one way. Some people in the other way. A lot of people would like to see some mix of those two. The purpose of both of those things is to create more economic flow through in a distributed way in the culture and more economic security as human beings, which has turned out to be extremely necessary because inevitable system shocks are coming. Yeah. People do have to be able to at least temporarily fall out of their profession and still have a livelihood in order for there to be a decrease of anxiety and tension and in order for them to still be able to spend into the economy and have enough unstressed time to work on their development practices. So that’s the general picture of depressurizing and stabilizing and in preparation for inevitable instabilities that are coming. But then the way you would key into the meta element of it is to frame it in something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thing. You don’t need everyone to have the same amount of money. In fact, we know that there’s an initial amount of financial stability that does most of the well-being work. Totally. Totally. It’s up for grabs. Right. You don’t need everyone to have a million dollars. You need everyone in general. Basic stability to make them able to move to the next level of meaning making. So yeah. So that’s what I was going to say. So what what what what I see you be I think is doing is say, look, we when people are in scarcity mentality, their problem solving abilities go down. Their cognitive flexibility goes down. Their ability to pursue long term goals goes down. In fact, people like Margaret Thatcher had the causation the wrong way around. They blamed the poor for being impulsive, etc. So no, we have overwhelming evidence that scarcity mentality and it’s not just financial scarcity, scarcity of other things, scarcity of relationship, scarcity of social contact, scarcity of healthcare. It’s also scarcity of healthcare, etc. So all kinds of scarcities basically put people into a very tight reciprocal narrowing, which really limits their ability to cultivate wisdom. But what so how so this is a there’s a point that comes up when in discussion with Zach, it seems to me that we need to pair these kinds of socioeconomic proposals with something like sort of pedagogical proposals of some kind. Because here’s the concern might be that, like. You want to get people out of scarcity, but you want you want to do you don’t want to mandate, I get that, but you want to do something to afford people then using up that liver that liberated cognitive ability. At least part of the part of it should be for exactly what we’re proposing here, which is the cultivation of wisdom. So how do you how do you get that? So that strikes me where some of the stuff we’ve been talking about earlier comes to mind, which is a project that, you know, the religion, the side religion, the version you’ve talked about in previous conversations. It seems like that that is needed to go along. And then here’s the concern I have. It sounds to me like that project. Has to be also paired and minimally afforded with socioeconomic policies. But I’m very wary of giving the state access to the emerging. But just let me use my term for now, please. The emerging religion that’s not a religion. So that’s my concern. So let me just simplify that. I’ll summarize. I think that the socioeconomic proposals need to be prepared, need to be paired with, broadly speaking, spiritual religious proposals. I’m okay with the state over here with the socioeconomic policy, you know, enforcement, generation and enforcement. I’m not happy with the state over here because we got that. That’s we’ve got a very good history. And one of the things that I thought modernity got right was, no, no, the state and that and whatever it is religion, let’s not get those really tightly bound together. But maybe maybe you want to criticize that notion. Well, I think it is important to think about those as two zones of inquiry, right? I have the whether it’s the lower left and lower right on the integral grid or something like a participatory of procedural approaches, right? Because there you’ve got to build spirit for the we and you’ve got to have correlated procedures to implement that and those reinforce each other rather than destructively interfere with each other. Yes, yes. However, I think there’s a critique we could bring to the standard modern notion of the separation of church and state. Please say that what they’re doing is separating the pre-modern notions of church and state, right? When they’re doing that Habermasian separation of the value spheres, right? Actually setting up a bigger picture in which a comparable integration could take place. It looks totalizing and totalitarian in the pre-modern sense, but that’s because that’s a smaller sense. So we’re going to widen out the space between those. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t end up on the same page, because if we think about some of the great modern figures, if you think about like a Benjamin Franklin, who’s almost a civic saint in the sense of Socrates or Kierkegaard or Goethe or those guys, right? He seems to bring a religiousness to his political affairs and to the orchestration of the saint. It seems to be sort of harmonized and smoothed out in that embodiment. I think there are modern figures and there are modern moments in which that tends to occur. And that’s sort of the idealized version of how modernity could operate. The opposite of modernity subsystems all disagreeing with each other would be modernity subsystems orchestrated together to create the kind of surplus harmony I keep talking about. And that could happen with modernity. We’d like it to happen with a trans modern system, but that system’s just in the process of booting up. I think it’s not so much that the church and state get separated. It’s that lower versions of church and state get separated so that something religion-like can flourish at the next level. But we might not call that religion. We might just call it a generalized spirit of, you know, shared culture and coherence or something like that. Stephen Batcha calls it a culture of awakening, which I think is a good way of putting it. I treat the word Renaissance and the word religionization as kind of convergent when they’re happening correctly or healthily in my terms. Yeah. So, I mean, this means that, I mean, this I think points towards sort of a meta-modern understanding of what religion would be like, that it’s going to be inherently pluralistic, not relativistic, but it’s going to be sort of inherently pluralistic at one level, perhaps at the propositional level, while being, while also tied to more universal processes by which people access and accentuate religion. And I sort of see that as part of what I want, what I’m trying to talk about when I’m talking about an ecology of practice. And I keep reminding people, even in the sangha that I lead, it’s like, you’re not, the idea is not that we all do all the same practices, it’s that we get an idea about what are areas, what are types of practices, right, and what are principles or how types of practices can be linked and layered and put into opponent processing, complementarity, and all of that. And then, but people would still be, I mean, they should be free to choose, like maybe my practices are going to come primarily from Christianity, or perhaps are going to come from, you know, aspects of Christianity and Buddhism, or et cetera, et cetera. Does that sort of line up with what you’re proposing? Well, absolutely. I mean, if you try to imagine, if you try to extrapolate what a trans modern system looks like, it’s got roughly all the benefits of modernity, but it’s much more multifarious. It’s much more holistic. It’s also much more ecological. So the term ecology of practices is good, not just because it speaks to a shared pool from which we intentionally or instinctively draw the practices that we’re using at any given time, but also because I think we can guess that the ecosystem is going to be a much bigger part of that new religionization than it has been in the past, at least since the archaic era. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. So then the idea would be that, I mean, that would bring us closer to Aristotle’s notion and even perhaps Plato’s notion. I’m not talking about a specific political proposals like the Philosopher Kings, although Marcus Aurelius does come to mind as a clear success. But the idea that sort of analogous to how philosophy, the cultivation of wisdom and the practice of politics were supposed to be wed together, you’re seeing something like sort of wise religiosity, sorry, right, and political practice being wed together. Absolutely. I think, you know, where you’ve seen really bold historical examples of religion, whether it’s Islamic or Tibetan Buddhism or the Catholic Church, you see that they exert a kind of supra political influence. Yeah, well, they’re civilization builders. Yeah. Well, they’re in their flourishing moments as opposed to their decay moments. Yeah. They’re stepping across the normal genres of business and they’re stepping across the business and politics and orchestrating together people in a shared symbol language, a shared spirit, a shared sense of a transcendent something on behalf of which they could be mobilized to make changes that meet their current moment. One of the things we face now is everyone agrees there’s a crisis. There’s actually a lot of agreement on what the solutions might look like. But mobilizing individuals and mobilizing systems to do anything about that seems to be a real problem. We lack the sense of energy and clarity and coherence and that we could actually accomplish something. That part, in a way, the religious part, the spirit is missing. I agree with you on that. So here’s some distance between you and I, though. And I’m pretty sure we have to close the distance. I tend to be more pessimistic and therefore more radical. And this is why I have the proposal of Steal the Culture. And I often say I don’t want the French Revolution. I want something like the Axis Revolution. I want what Christianity did. Right. It basically underneath and even under oppression, like it built a new culture, a new way of being that then permeated up and then stole the Roman Empire from the existing power structures and basically built the grammar for the new civilization, the medieval world. And that’s what I mean by stealing the culture, that kind of thing. Because I was just at the movement summit a week ago yesterday and just the number of communities of practice in which people are not just talking, they’re doing all these transformative practices, movement practices, mindfulness practices, discourse practices, and they’re integrating these ecologies and it’s all happening. And they’re all getting started to get together and network and talk. And so I want to facilitate that as much as possible. And where I think I might be more pessimistic to you, but I respect you. So I want to hear. I’m open to be persuaded by you. I mean, I come from sort of a Chomskyian view that the game is so badly rigged now. The game is so badly rated. Jordan Hall has had an influence on me on this, too. The game is so badly rigged. And even the social media, it’s so badly rigged to perpetuate, and you alluded to this earlier, to perpetuate a very decadent modernity, meaning crisis, oppositional, vicious in the sense of vice and also cruel form of capitalism that I don’t know if we can work within the game enough to bring about the changes. Well, I think that that’s one of the areas where we have to work. And we need to think of an ongoing struggle that never has an end and is constantly applied in multiple silos, let’s say. Right. That you’ve got to work within the system. You’ve always got to be building counter institutions to the system. You’ve always got to be building up the spirit of the base. You’ve always got to be looking for top down leverage points that will facilitate all of those things. So it’s a multi front battle, so to speak, if we’re, you know, can tolerate the battle metaphor. And there are I mean, it is very exciting to be among people and see the flourishing of new communities of practice and inquiry. There are some limitations on that. One is, can that spread fast enough to meet the impending crises? Another one is, does that spirit translate into protocols that are as or more effective than the current protocols and can outcompete them? And the third one is, what if you got 95 percent of people in the new category and the remaining five percent was a tiny little self-sustaining loop that still exerted all the military and technological and media control? Right. Right. Right. So that you’ve got to get in there. And we know from, for example, the covid thing, the different response patterns of different countries at the state level have made a huge difference in their well-being state. So you’ve got to get into that top down structure as well as build alternative institutions, as well as steal the culture and grassroots uprising. Well, that was well said. And I think that I intend honestly to take it very seriously. But I guess it comes to a question about. I mean, the urgency of this, we both share a sense of the urgency of the situation. In fact, you’re you’re you’re you’re you’re taking that as a as a given premise upon which you’re making many of your arguments. And and I think the urgency and this is an idea I get from Jordan, right. The urgency is even more urgent than we realize, because the rate of change is itself changing. Right. Things are getting complex even faster. Right. So it’s going up in a nonlinear aggression. And so I have serious questions about let me give you a concrete example of what I mean. Yeah. Madison and the other founding fathers of the United States depended on the fact that the country was physically large. That was that was they they were relying on that as a background constraint to prevent kind of mass hysteria and mob politics because they were very worried. They knew enough from the ancient world, Athens, etc. that democracy can degenerate very fast into something like that. So they were very dependent on that. And then they framed the institutions around that. Right. And the checks and balances. The problem is that that is now from it’s gone from being a governing variable to being completely irrelevant because of social media, largely irrelevant. And then the checks and balances that were supposed to work within a certain timing of events that was constrained by the physical space of the country no longer work. And then you get gridlock and you get adversarial processing. So. I don’t know if the machinery is set up to the kind of environment that we’re in right now. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And I think the solutions to that are to try to create alternative machinery, but also to look for any openings to hack the system in the right direction. Right. And also, there’s the fundamental human existential position the whole time, which is you don’t know if it’s going to work out or not. You’ve got to live right in the moment and think that that creates change because you honestly don’t know at a certain level what creates change, how you got to where you are, how any of the systems got to where they are. So you have to work on being present with your being more intensely and hope that that contributes to the future. That’s the very basic level. But at the same time, we are going to be involved socially all the time as social beings. Yes. Yes. It’s setting up new practices, setting up new spirit, but also trying to intervene wherever we see intervention possibilities within the existing structure, given that it absolutely is built to prevent change from happening. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean it’s not hackable. Right. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he did this amazing thing, which is he hacked the media incentive structure. Yeah. They are in general opposed to him. Most of the mainstream media people, but they couldn’t resist showing a train wreck on the television every time he said something. Right. And that ended up with billions of dollars of free political propaganda that he didn’t have to cover or pay for at all. Right. He almost became anti-fragile against the media system by causing one of its incentives to fight the other incentive. There may be all kinds of ways to do that that people just haven’t really found yet because they haven’t been looking for them. Well, I mean, yeah. And I think that’s right. And I mean, to buttress your argument, when a system is very destabilized, then you get you get an emergence of the increased power of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Small perturbations that otherwise would be dampened down by the inertia of the system now actually have a viable chance of having a larger causal impact. We’re at 99 degrees. It doesn’t take much to bump it to boil or be fluid. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So I get that. But then so sorry, this is not meant to be sort of a Machiavellian argument. Point is, I sort of have this argument that goes something like this. If we’re at a place where the individual actions might make a difference, that is where the system is very significantly destabilized. And then a real possibility of that is that the system is actually going to is actually going to collapse. So. How can we tell? I mean, I get your point. Your point is, you know, all the historical analogies are sort of off because we’re actually ignorant because of the situation we’re in. But how do we know we’re not sort of at the equivalent of Rome, you know, 376? You know, or even at the time of diatolation, right? He he he does he does these huge, you know, attempts to reform the empire. And all they do is after he dies, they just generate civil war that further weakens the empire. And basically, the Western Empire is just then doomed. Right. So. Well, I think in a lot of ways, it doesn’t matter. Right. Because, you know, the struggle to make things better is an endless struggle. And it doesn’t matter what moment you’re in. There’s always possibilities until there’s no possibilities. We can’t go well. I guess we shouldn’t really try because we might be at a moment where it won’t work. Yeah. So that’s a morally self-sabotaging argument. So what we need is the moral character as the great moral leaders have had throughout history to go forward with the fight, regardless of the analysis of the moment to some degree. And there’s always, I think, leverage points. Right. The the time of the so-called five good emperors. Right. Rome was on decline until one of the guys didn’t have kids and decided the new process would be I hire and train an apprentice. Yeah, exactly. The fortunes of the empire started going up again because you weren’t just handing it off to your kid and assuming he’d be a good emperor. And that was just that was one procedural change. But it turned what could have been the empire’s collapse into the empire’s resurgence. Yeah. And it culminates in Marcus Aurelius, who unfortunately was straight and that had covetous. I agree with you. I mean, I have come to the same conclusion. I am very unsure about the causal efficacy of what I’m trying to do. But so and then I and then I have the same sort of moral argument than you do. There is no alternative. We have to try. We have to try our best. But I also I also say that even if there’s a way in which those two arguments can come together, even if I fail causally. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be a complete failure. That’s where I think of people like Augustine and others that they they gather enough of the candles of culture and civilization and a new way of being in a new religion together so that something survives throughout the collapse and it actually affords a new civilization being born. So I think we the reason why I want a little bit more than just the moral argument is I personally found that and I consider myself somebody who’s often very strongly motivated by moral arguments. I found that that has often not affectively been sufficient for me because it has it is the right thing to do. But the sense that even if we don’t stave off some kind and I don’t want it because you know it means millions of people die. That’s that’s horrible. But even if we can’t forestall that possibility, perhaps then at least we can lay the seeds of something that will be grown out of it. And so that also keeps me going personally. Yeah. I mean, like I was saying, it’s a multi front battle, so to speak. Right. Individually, we’re at different places. One place is we don’t know. Maybe it will fail, but maybe we can lay the seeds for ourselves or for something else in the future. Do that deep spiritual work that is independent of the historical moment and hope that that contributes to the betterment of the future. Yeah. At the same time, we can, you know, engage in all kinds of social experiments and practices, not knowing if they will succeed, but having a pretty good idea of which ones will work better and that we’re not in a situation. Here’s where I think we often make a mistake is we think we’re in a single system and that system’s either going to improve or fail. Right. But really, we’re in multiple interactive systems in the meta modern sense. Right. There’s more primitive operating systems at work in society and there’s more advanced operating systems at work. They’re interpenetrating and any one of them could gain the upper hand or, you know, get a 10 percent boost under any given conditions. And those conditions involve doing practices and gaining clarity personally and interpersonally about which specific clear things might make a huge improvement. Yeah. And also having the classic song how relationship of the the intersubjective community of people who are working on their being. I think that’s very well said. So I like the way this goes. But what I was proposing to you is, I guess, to bring it back to the practicalities that it might. I like the idea of, you know, we choose specific policies that are basically wisdom according both individually and collectively. And some of those might be socioeconomic like UBI. Some of them would be a little bit different, like trying to get people to recommit to an opponent processing model of distributed cognition rather than an adversarial one. And you might need those two together. And I think all of that is good. But I’m also wondering if we need to also decide that we need to have a repertoire of policy policy choices between ones that I’m proposing a mixture of them, ones that might bring about the change now and also ones that will have a kind of longevity to them that would see the future if things ultimately don’t succeed. Yeah, I think we need to think in the meta sense. We need to think about multiple timescales, but also about these layered multiple epistemic approaches and get really clear about what are the principles that operate at the different timescales and at the different social operating systems. Yes. Yes. From my point of view, one of the biggest difficulties in meta modern and integral thinking is we over identify the epistemic cultural operating systems with the stated values of the people who identify with those systems and not the deeper analysis of how those systems actually behave. Right. That’s very well said. That comes back to what I was saying. How do you figure out the optimal grip? Are we using the right categories of analysis to understand what the political situation is? Right. So this would cash out then for it sounds to me like this would cash out to people having kind of a fluid political in the narrower sense that we excluded at the beginning of our conversation, having a very fluid political allegiance because it sounds to me like people would be voting much more in terms of policies than they necessarily would in terms of a particular party or a particular personality. Well, we’ve definitely got to get off the celebrity and team sports models. Yeah. That’s so ancient in us. It’ll always be there to some degree. Yes. But we do have to develop a critique of that that’s strong enough to emotionally free us to think differently about our political allegiances. And I think you’re right. They’re going to have to be more nuanced and more flexible going forward. And the more clear you are on the underlying principles, the more leeway you have to look for where those are showing up at the moment. That’s very good. I like that. I like that. That’s very good. Unfortunately, we have a shorter time today. And but that’s it. Let’s let’s continue. We’ll take it up next time. Yeah. But I want to cycle back next time more into because, you know, Paul Bandigli has this wonderful statement. And it brings out the these different senses of the word politics that we’ve been talking about here. He says politics is about the here and now, whereas religion is about the always. And maybe we could talk a little bit more because obviously you’re also shifting the meaning of politics out of that comparison. But, you know, we keep we keep talking about the relationship between these two. And I’d like to pick that up and talk to you more about that. Yeah, I think the the meta political skill set that is recollected by religious affordances in the culture does tell us a lot. It tells us about that other time scale. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Let’s pick that up next time. Well, that’s great. Thank you very much, Laman. This has been wonderful. I look forward to our next conversation. Absolutely. It’s always a pleasure, John. Yeah. Take good care of my friend.