https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=M7nGGJ8LNqo
John has this word called reinventio, which is this idea of reinventing and discovering perennial things. And then I wrote this article a while ago called we need a renaissance not a revolution. So I wonder if you guys could perhaps riff on this idea of what do you think of my idea that renaissance is more appropriate to the time than revolution? And that’s what we need to be doing for the future. And then maybe we can talk a bit more about the religion that is not a religion, John’s idea, and maybe your idea of concrete utopia. Maybe we can go deeper into the ideas of education and that sort of thing. That sounds good. I mean the term is actually from Kerry, his book on Augustine. And he says he wants to use it. It comes out in English and he’s unhappy with the English translations. It’s Augustine’s invention of the inner self. And he said the word he wanted was Latin, but the publishers wouldn’t want to use it. The word is inventio, which means both. It means both to invent and to discover. I’m very interested in that as a replacement term for the term that I was always unhappy with. The idea of sort of salvaging from the past. Can I say one more thing before you continue? The reason I thought this concept was important is because I asked myself the question what do we need to reinventio? It’s hard to say that. Yeah I like that. And it occurs to me everything. We need to reinvent practically everything. I mean in terms of institutions, but at the same time we want to salvage, to use your word again, what matters or what the perennial is. And Zach talks about neo-perennialism. I mean I like in fact what you’re doing with that idea, Andrew. How you’re taking it up as let’s go through some central normative constructs and see if reinventio is required and then what that looks like. I’m very interested in that project. We’ve been doing it, you and Chris and I, and I’d like to continue that. And I’m also interested in the thing you propose. I’ve been contrasting the axial revolution with the French Revolution and some of the things I’ve been talking about. And then what we need is something more like the axial revolution than the French Revolution. And that sounds like it could at least be put into constructive dialogue with your idea of Renaissance versus Revolution. Yeah and the other thing that I thought that we could reinventio, I have a really hard time saying that, reinventio, because it’s such a concern of Zach’s is how we think about social justice and that kind of thing. I thought that might be an interesting way to go. I’d like to talk about that, who can bring care or concern to it. Because it seems to me right now that the discourse around social justice is becoming very oversimplified and it’s either being what’s currently happening. I think the fact that some people even take this as an insult is kind of telling. I think what’s happening right now with the social justice movement is we’re actually seeing it’s a religion, much more than it’s just a political movement because it’s serving a lot of functions that religion serves. And I’d like to talk about what Zach, I guess, about what that might mean. What does it mean in terms of the broader idea that we’ve been already talking about? Well the reinventio of education and the deeper connections between education and enculturation and between education and virtue. We’ve talked also about the connections between education and the mythopoetic discourse, both between people and within people. I think the pursuit of justice without the pursuit of sophism is a grave mistake. And so it seems to me that one of the places that we’re supposed to mediate and moderate between those two is education. And so there’s a lot I’d like to talk about. Can you remind me what sophism is, what that term means? Sophism is the untranslatable, one of the four cardinal Greek virtues. And like wisdom, you could make a good case that sophism is actually more of a meta-virtue than a virtue, but it’s often paired with justice. Plato famously does it in the Republic where he talks about justice in the city and it’s reflected in terms of this state within the psyche, a kind of inner justice and sophism. It’s kind of a culture of the psyche so that it is reliably self-organizing to pursue what is good and what is true and what is beautiful. Totally. And that’s why the paideia or the basic educational structure of the paideia is so primary. You could set up on the books just system, let’s say, basic income and universal healthcare and all my social miracles, let’s say, but you end up not fixing the problem with digital media ecology and not fixing the problem with education. And you get this kind of total fragmentation of awareness and removal from the grounding of, like I won’t even be able to say the word, but of wisdom basically within the individual person. And that’s where it’s all off and that’s where the issue with the discussion of justice and education comes together, which was the theme of my first book. But a lot of what we’re seeing with kind of uprising and the so-called social justice warriors, most of this has to do with the context of socialization and especially the informational technologies in which individuals are socialized and regulate self-esteem more than it has to do with concepts of justice. Like if we could get into Rawlsian justice and Plotinus’s notions of justice, and then you can look at justice even in Buddhism and other discourses that don’t use that term, but there are ways of thinking about it. Those are very different from the kind of personality complexes and character structures that are being formed in these socialization environments of informational, like digital informational ecologies. And yeah, well, I was going to say like part of what I mean by it being a religious phenomenon is one of the things religions do is they tend to generate normative claims. They tend to generate new virtues often, right? Like Christianity makes love and faith into virtues and they worked before. We now take it for granted, but Thomas Aquinas has to write a large piece on it, try and explain why love is a virtue and etc. And so I think we’re very close, and it’s a way that’s concerning to me, to outrage becoming a virtue. And this ties into what you’re saying, Zach, because we know, I mean, sorry, I don’t mean to, I’m generally not conspiratorial at all, but we know the algorithms on social media polarize people and drive them to outrage and to extreme statements and to flip reasoning, because that promotes, right, connection and advertising and viewing, etc. etc. And people, I think this is what you’re alluding to with social media, people are being, you know, they’re being educated in a very profound way into a way of being in which outrage seems like a virtuous thing. And I’m not clear that outrage is, should ever be considered a candidate virtue. This is completely independent about what the issue the outrage is directed at. I think there’s relevant issues, important issues. I’m not denying that at all. That’s not what I’m talking about. I want to make that really clear. I’m talking about the promotion within sort of a religious framework of outrage as a virtue. Like, the people will often say to me in conversations, and they’ll say it sort of critically, aren’t you outraged about this? And I’ll say, well, I have arguments against it. And I think, you know, but they’re upset with me, because I’m not outraged. And that’s the phenomenon I’m putting my finger on right now. I just have a thought here, just to give another perspective, because I was listening to the Jewish Rabbi, and he was talking and he was saying, all these people are out on the street looting and stuff, destroying things, you know, because of their outrage. Why wouldn’t they do that if they don’t have a proper basic religious education? That’s what the Rabbi was saying. You know, why wouldn’t they do that if they didn’t have any idea of any refined idea of what is, you know, what is virtue? So that’s just, I agree with what you’re saying. I just, that other, that this is tying into Zach’s idea that, you know, that we need to bring sort of, not religio back into education, both of you guys idea, I think. Right. I mean, and it’s, I would say something more like the, you know, social media is hijacking the power of religion, essentially, that they, you know, religion is the ultimate Psyop, right? It’s the ultimate limbic system, neocortical integration, like capture. Yeah. And it’s always promoted violence to some extent. So there needs to be, and I think what, what, you know, Facebook and other outlets have done is basically found a way to get, you know, as far as I can tell, like, almost randomly generated religious fervor and scapegoating dynamics in particular. It’s random, right? That’s the thing. It’s, well, it’s not entirely random. And again, I’m with John where I’m like, I can talk just social justice all day. Like I’m actually very sincerely concerned about society, not because it’s about the self-terminate in terms of existential and ecological collapse, but because of the injustices that have been perpetrated, especially in the past 20 or 15 years. So there’s a long conversation to have there. So it’s a distraction from actual social justice. Yes, it’s a distraction. It’s like a smoke screen. I think it’s a smoke screen being run in between us. It’s like a simulacrum of social justice or something or simulacrum of religion or, or, or. Yeah. Well, and it was like Michael White, who was one of the organizers of the Occupy movement, wrote a book, The End of Protest. I talk about a lot because it’s brilliant. And he was like, listen, at a certain point, the thing, Occupy became, it started to function for its own representation in the social media field, right? Which is to say like, you weren’t doing it to do it. You were doing it to represent, re-represent it into the social media field as a, as a signal, you know? And, and so that’s part of the dynamic here is that there’s, yeah, the simulations layered on top of the actual reality and often makes the actual reality less, less real, less important. So people are like abandoning sanity for the sake of signaling allegiance to, you know, meta narratives propagated through the social media field. Which, which sort of is a Gerardian phenomenon, right? It’s like, it’s like these, these moths develop and they look for a scapegoat, you know, and the scapegoat is sort of random and, you know, and they prop the scapegoat up and, you know, sacrifice them and then make them into a God of some, some kind. Yeah. And so the, I mean, the general takeaway is like, you know, the first move has to be something about that. Like the first move actually has to be reclaiming the basic foundations that allow us to communicate, right? Which is to say, kind of rolling back the colon, the colonization of the life world, to roll back the colonization of the life world and create actual sane and fair containers for socialization and intergenerational transmission. Because the social justice thing, social justice warriors, quote unquote, it’s also generational. Understand that, you know, you’re looking at young people, you’re looking at young people who are being used strategically. And yeah, so it’s, it’s a disconcerting situation. And I agree, there’s a sense of religiosity and religious kind of fervor to it, which I attribute to the kind of exquisite advertising and algorithmical capacity of the social media platforms. Because they’ve, they know the right, as advertisers do, they know exactly the right set of words, right? The simple abstract mappings, a couple abstract concepts next to one another with a certain word sound power that just is on a poster. And it just, who started that? Good question. Like, where do these things begin? And how do they propagate through the social media field and become attachable to the self, brought up into the self-esteem regulation, self-understanding? And now you’re running a kind of modus operandi for your life where your representation of yourself in social media is the actual basis of your self-esteem. And your immediate, and your immediate lived environment is not the basis where you’re getting your self-esteem. And that’s the total capture of the self-system by the kind of attention harvesting information capitalism or surveillance capitalism. That’s the most egregious because it’s not just that over stimulation and capture of like through hyper-stimulized Olympic system. It’s also capture of the self-esteem regulation mechanism and identity formation mechanism through that signaling and pseudo attachment or pseudo recognition system that the social media puts up as a mirror. So anyway, I kind of kept going there, but I think I wanted to get this. That’s good. It was good, Zach. It was good. I mean, the part you ended on, it circles back to the concern I have, right? That when you sever the virtues from each other, you tend to get one of the things you get is you get the confusion of having a self-representation with actually being in the process of self-knowledge. And we have to remember that people getting trained in these patterns of behavior and that are ultimately manipulated outside of their self-knowledge, they can be directed other ways, right? This machine, the fact that it might be directed towards causes that you and I believe in right now, doesn’t mean that this machine can’t be equally directed towards causes that we think are wrong. That’s my concern. I have no faith in corporate capitalism to keep my best interests at heart. I have no faith in that whatsoever. That’s what I mean. I’m concerned about the fact that the powers that be are just sort of, you know, there’s the uncritical sort of, this is just a wonderful thing that’s happening. And it’s like, I don’t know. I’m very concerned about what we’re teaching people about how to try and bring about change. Because I always worry about, especially when I see the corporate capitalist people just jumping on board this and loving it and saying it’s good. And like that also makes me like, why are you doing this? You’re not doing this for any moral argument. You’re benefiting from this in some way. And so, again, I generally have a heuristic of not going anywhere towards conspiracy theories. But I think the idea that this has layers of causation below it that the demonstrators are not aware of, and that those layers can be put to other ends that could turn out to be what I would regard as seriously immoral. That’s a very deep concern I have. It’s a bit what Daniel Schmackenberg always talks about is something true becomes weaponized, right? Something is something that is maybe a beautiful expression becomes a corporate logo or, you know. It’s that and it’s my overall concern, right, that the thing that one of the most powerful biases that keeps us from being rational is to find the products of our cognition super salient and not be concerned with, attend to, or value the processes by which we try to achieve our goals. I mean, that’s both, that’s an argument that comes out of sort of deep philosophical tradition and, you know, overwhelming, I think, empirical, recent empirical work and experimental work. And that, so I have a concern that, that, as I said, we’re not paying attention to how are we, like, what is going on such that we’re doing these things that we’re doing. It’s a very saccadic concern. And it’s a difficult thing to bring up because I do think it’s clear there’s police brutality. It’s clear that police have to be demilitarized. I mean, and Zach and I have been talking about this before and I’ve been talking about it for a long time. He’s, of course, talked about it more eloquently. Our culture as a whole should be shifting its resources into education in ways we haven’t been doing. I think these are important in things that have to be pursued. And the problem I have is I try to talk to people about it’s an important part of problem solving is to make sure you have formulated the problem well. And I’m not sure the problem has been formulated well. And I’m even afraid to bring that criticism up. I could, you know, I’d say, look, I think your goals are right. But the way you’re formulating trying to achieve those goals is exactly thwarting you from achieving them. And so that’s the concern. But these people actually become beyond criticism because they are, they are in a serious state of religious fanaticism. You know, so you can’t go into an in-depth analysis because it’s an article of faith, isn’t it, when people talk about these things? Well, I mean, I don’t know about all the people that are involved. I don’t know how to, I don’t know. There’s no data and I don’t want to pronounce on all of them. I’m only talking about sort of, what I think what Zach and I are talking about, the way in which, what’s sort of the, what do I want to say? I want to see the media presence, what like the, the, the implicit thing that’s going on between the media and some of the demonstrators and some of the speakers on behalf of the movement. That’s what I’m talking about. I imagine there’s large numbers of people there that are there, you know, at a genuine motive and are trying, I don’t want to, I don’t want to. I wasn’t really pronouncing on the demonstrators or the issues. I was more pronouncing on a certain kind of fanaticism that doesn’t, doesn’t allow for, for any kind of, you know, mistake or, of speech or, you know, or wrong view or, you know, so we can’t have a conversation when, when it’s, it’s just, it’s so. Yeah, totally. You can’t have a conversation and that, but that’s true across the board. It’s not just, yeah, it’s not true for those people who are protesting. It’s true for the, the whole spectrum of people. Right. And so that’s, again, I think back to the kind of social media, digital kind of informational landscape, you know, it’s, it’s running interference on our ability to be together and to stay in the space of reasons as opposed to retreat to strategic relationship to one another. And so yeah, words are kind of the first possible weapons and justice is of course, one of those beautiful words, which is now like sometimes used pejoratively, like the social justice word is pejorative, you know, like, and justice itself, as I said, is a philosophical concept, huge moment of truth, a massive, important world historical moment of truth in the elaboration and sophistication of reasoning about the nature of justice. This is just the case and moral development, PJ Colberg, when you look at the nature of socialization and perspective taking capacity and the insights into the, into the kind of the deep structure of the social world, ideas of fairness and things of that nature, all true. Right. And as you’re saying, Schmockenberger hit it on the head that it’s exactly because it’s true. There’s a moment of truth nestled in there that you can layer all of this other stuff on, which ends up turning that truth into something that’s weaponizable in the sense of that you can create scapegoating dynamics around it and multipolar traps and social media fields. Which is counterproductive. Again, I’ve been thinking about this word counterproductive is also relates to the autogenic plague or, you know, counterproductive medicine, counterproductive social justice, counterproductive school, counterproductive. So many things have become counterproductive in our institutions and. Yeah. And again, Michael White and it’s, it was demonstrated back with the big, you know, world trade organization protests like Quebec and the battle in Seattle and those things like the medium of protest itself has largely been captured through intelligence upgrades within police and military operations and other sectors. And so, and. Non-competitive advertising. So it’s a kind of advertisement, right? Isn’t it? Well, it’s not just that it’s a kind of advertising. It’s that there’s, we just know, for example, that one of the ways Occupy Wall Street was taken down was just by putting undercover cops in there who disrupted consensus-based processing. Right. So a group of hippies trying to get together, save the world, they’re going to run the whole thing on consensus-based processing and you put one undercover cop in there and he just doesn’t agree to anything and nothing moves. Right. You can’t decide where to march. Cause this guy. So that’s a benign example of other activities that we know have basically captured. And then money being routed in from all sides to keep certain movements alive and to specifically empower certain organizers as opposed to other organizers. And this is well documented as a part of what protest culture has become. I don’t want to talk too political here, but I remember something about in Russia that Putin was, he was funding both sides, the sides that was against him and, and the side that was for him. And he was funding them both because he knew that by getting people all worked up, they would just become distracted. And that way he could keep power. Right. You know, and large foreign governments wouldn’t structure that’s keeping existing protest movements and civil distress going in the United States is naive. Like we know China, for example, there’s amazing unconventional warfare. So, so it’s just this question of looking past the surface running the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is part of the social justice thing is running a hermeneutics of suspicion, run the hermeneutics of suspicion on your own shit and start looking more deeply into the many layers of what’s actually unfolding as opposed to what might be unfolding. And again, I’m arguing not that the injustice doesn’t exist. I’m arguing that the media spectacle is actually running a screen between us and the actual injustices and the ways to get in and start to do things about them. And it begins with having civil conversations and engaging in collective inquiry about our shared reality, which means finding the space of reason again. And, you know, moving back from that retreat into pure strategic action. And the worst place we’re seeing the strategic action is in the intergenerational transmission, right. And this I’ve spoken about this before, but like the difference between raising children and designing children and what advertising does is design children. Facebook is designing children, it’s not raising them. Raising a child is a non-strategic relationship of communicative action, mutual understanding. Designing a child is strategic intervention. They require words in the sense of even trying to establish mutual understanding. And so that’s part of what we’re seeing here is actually for a certain threshold of generational transmission, there was this much higher incidence of purely strategic interaction as the main event during childhood development and socialization, right. And that’s terrible. You know, that kind of disables the capacity for non-strategic interaction and would actually make one deeply suspicious of anyone who wasn’t acting strategically because you’d think it was just some higher level strategy. And so. That’s so interesting. I think I’ve lost you’re cutting out a bit, Zach. Are you experiencing Zach cutting out a bit or is that just me, John? No, he’s also cutting out for me. You’re cutting out just a little bit. So maybe you could just repeat the last thing you said, because it was very interesting. I was basically saying that I believe, and this is a hypothesis, but give me some years and we’ll see what’s happening. But I believe that there’s been a situation such that at a certain point in time, maybe 2016, maybe 2010, the predominant communication on context in which socialization was occurring in the United States became more strategic than not, which is to say that the main experience I’m having of other people is that they’re relating to me strategically. Including my own family, teachers, and especially the screen that I’m looking at all day. And it becomes so normal that you don’t realize that there’s a space of non-strategic communication, right? Where the unforced force of the better argument, where mutual agreement and mutual understanding are primary and content is sometimes secondary and a whole bunch of other factors, which make for healthy socialization environment where you can regulate self-esteem in a way that’s mediated through the embodied experiences of people around you and things of that nature. And so, yeah, the idea that when social media started to tip towards one of the main effects of socialization and identity formation, you also got a tipping towards the main environment of identity formation being one that’s strategic, an environment of design, as opposed to an environment in which one’s being raised. So that means beyond a certain threshold, generational threshold, there’s a massive kind of like opening in the character structure for something like infection or manipulation by complex social media fields. And it’s a strange hypothesis, but it’s one of the only ways that I can explain what’s happening. And the more you look at the nature of social media and realize engineered environment it is, like just how complex the psychometric micro-targeting becomes. And just how- How easily it captures you. Just how dedicated they were to figuring out how to capture you. Not like people like you, you. You realize it’s a deeply, deeply kind of, it’s what Deepa’s on the right word. It’s profoundly unprecedented context of socialization for humans because it’s usually not the case. Like usually the most of the modality you’re having in communication is non-strategic, right? It’s trust-based and relational and embodied with family members or members of your community. Now in rare situations like warfare or serious abuse, or maybe you’re in like a really bad orphanage, I mean, there’s definitely scenarios where it would be different. You feel like everyone’s strategically relating to you and manipulating you. But to have, you know, so I’m just, it’s one of the things that takes me back and makes me worry when I see the kind of degradation of discourse and the weaponization of language and the kind of like use of almost advertising grade communicative tricks by young people in social media fields to get a point, to get across like complex ideas that they haven’t actually thought through that they’re signaling allegiance to a meta-narrative to, you know, signal group membership. But they’re running very sophisticated media tropes, which they are just second nature to them because of the context of their socialization where you’re not reasoning, you’re advertising constantly. Like, you know, you’re not relating, you’re strategizing. So what’s the way out of the matrix? Like, you know, I brought up this idea of a renaissance and you talked about stepping back. We have to step back on some level, right? We have to rediscover our neighborhood and like repurpose, you know, all this garbage we create and then. Some things I think, I mean, part of part, a piece I would first of all add to what Zach was saying, the reason why I was silent is because I was in complete agreement with that and thought it was very elegantly expressed. I think there’s added dimensions. I mean, so, Sloan’s work on the knowledge illusion, I think it’s like, I think it’s put on amphetamines by social media. So the knowledge illusion is people regularly confuse access to knowledge with possession of knowledge. They deeply confuse it. They think they know when they don’t and it’s actually kind of a shocking thing to do with people. Like you ask people, you know how a bicycle works and they’re, oh yeah, of course they do, very confidently. And then you say, okay, well, draw a picture of a bicycle that will explain to me how it works. And they start doing it and they realize they have no idea how a bicycle works or a toilet. And what’s interesting is when you translate this over into social interaction, when you ask people to state their values on an issue, they polarize. But when you ask them to explain the mechanisms of the issue that is at work, they actually move towards agreeing with each other and understanding each other. So, right, if I ask, you know, what’s the Republican take on this or the Democratic take, people will go on this. But if you actually ask people, but what are the causes of poverty? Don’t, I don’t, you know, not what you think we should do about it, but what are the causes of it? What are the processes? And then what happens is people realize that their ignorance is much more shared than, and they move towards, right, actually coming to have an empathetic understanding of other people. But the problem with social media is it takes the knowledge illusion and explodes it because people are being educated, right, to believe that their access to the internet is the same thing as having knowledge. And that seems so innocent because we’re thinking, oh, but it’s like, it’s just like an electronic library. But no, it’s not. It’s not, right. It’s overwhelmingly not. It really puts, because in a library, you have to go and search, you have to gather things together, you have to put a lot of thought in, you have to talk to other people. The internet, it’s got everything organized for you. It’s got algorithms. You’re invaded by algorithms, right? Right. And so you see what I’m saying? It magnifies the knowledge illusion. And this is again, and if you take that, and you put that with what Zach’s saying about how people are basically, I would call it a modal confusion, that they’re into manipulating each other rather than the deep recognition that we become persons through each other, a kind of agapic notion that has been lost. When you put those two together, when people think they know when they don’t, and they think they don’t meet people when they do, I mean, then you’re into a very, very dangerous situation because people will then make, they will have, it’s like the line from Yates, right, about, you know, the passionate intensity for things that are actually very, very questionable. And so I guess what I’m trying to get at is, I think that, well, I propose that we need to get back to a way of thinking about discourse that integrates self-knowledge, the creation of personhood, and the exploration of deep understanding back together. And that’s what I’m trying to do with the whole Dialectic Diologos project. That’s why I think this project is central, because teaching people that speech can be a place in which human being personhood, and also selfhood, right, I mean, this is the Socratic idea that you’re knowing yourself, if you think, if you’re prejudiced to believe, because I think it’s the kind of prejudice that we’ve been culturated, that self-knowledge is basically an act that’s achieved through introspection, or as Zach says, through self-representation. Whereas the Socratic thing is, no, no, self-knowledge is revealed only in discourse with others, because it’s only there where it becomes clear what you are committed to, and what you actually know. And so I’m trying to argue for, that’s why this project that I’ve been pursuing so deeply, and this is why I think I want to put it into dialogue with what Zach’s proposing about education. I think of the attempt to reverse engineer reinventio via Logos is central to everything we’re talking about here, because we have taken all of these functions, and we’ve pulled them apart, and then we’ve made ourselves prey to manipulation, and to knowledge illusion, and to modal confusion, and to confusing self-representation with self-knowledge and self-transformation. And so I think that with reintegrating speech, communitas, transformation, aspiration, that’s why I think this is central, and I think this is a project very different from the projects that are usually labeled political in our current discourse. Yeah, I mean, I’m good. Sorry, that was a bit of a speech. How can we even be political? I have a hard time being political myself. Zach, I guess, you said you were radicalized because of circumstances, and you got into it, but I almost feel like an irresponsible person, because I don’t know where to put my foot in the political world. I mean, I speak about metapolitics, and what John’s describing with the dialogue with this project is absolutely metapolitical. It is political, maybe, in a sense. It’s not superficial politics, but it’s deep politics. It’s changing what could be even possible in the realm of politics. Exactly. Okay, that’s great. Prior to politics, it’s kind of like politics, quote, unquote, is the space where we hash out things according to certain rules. The metapolitical is where we are enabling ourselves to change the nature of those rules that we call political. So right now, political action is entirely strategic action, and sociopaths rise through the ranks, as do you get in business. And so the question would be like, if that’s politics, then we need to change the nature of politics, but you can’t do that using politics. As usual, you have to go metapolitical, which is why every time there’s a kind of civilizational turnover, there’s a tremendous amount of work at the level of personhood, education, and dialogue. That’s why I think we’re not in a revolutionary time. We’re in a time of renaissance of kind of, we need to rediscover our humanity on some level, because we’ve been so damaged by the state of things. That’s why I’ve been proposing the model of the, and if you guys know my work, I’m not being anachronistic. I’m not trying to get back to it, but I’m proposing that we should be thinking about something like the Axial Revolution, rather than the French Revolution as the model we should be considering. Because what happens in the Axial Revolution through the permeation of all of the new psychotechnologies is entirely, the cultural cognitive grammar has changed, so new ways of human being, and new ways of human religion, and new ways of human wisdom, and new ways of human spirituality become possible for us. That’s where I think we need to go right now, because I think the issues we’re facing are, I think they’re even more profound than what was going on. I know what you’re trying to say, Andrew, about the renaissance, but I think the issues we’re facing are, it’s a much more significant transition we might be going through right now. Even more than the renaissance, a greater transition. Well, I mean, the renaissance is wrestling with a lot of things. It’s wrestling with, you know, it’s wrestling with the, you know, the corruption and decline of the Catholic Church. It’s wrestling with the rediscovery of Aristotelian science. It’s wrestling with the rediscovery of neoplatonic magic, which by the way, eventually gets taken up into advertising. So that’s a weird history of its own. So there’s a lot of things going on here. But I think- I guess I’m more thinking of the essence of the word renaissance, like rebirth, rather than rather than the specific moment. I guess that’s what I’m, because I’m not, you know, I’m not a historian and, but- I think, I guess what I want to emphasize the difference is, although there was a lot of stuff sort of maybe falling apart, you know, on the cusp of the renaissance, I think we’re under much more threat of a much more comprehensive kind of disaster and collapse. And so that’s why I think of, you know, the way people sort of come out of the Bronze Age collapse in the Axial Revolution, it might be more helpful. I don’t know. It’s hard to know. Zach is right. This is, what we’re in is very historically unprecedented. And so we have to take these historical models very carefully. We shouldn’t be really attached to them. Really, I’ve been trying to think of a few, because there’s the renaissance and then that circuitous route through the Enlightenment and the Thirty Years’ War in that period, which was the overthrow of the ancient regime and the birth of capitalism, nation-state, all that stuff. And then there were hegemonic turnovers within the history of capitalism, right? From the Dutch, well, first from the Jewonese or the Italians to the Dutch, then the British, then the United States to this point. So, well, is it like the lead up to World War I when it went from the British to the United States and this capitalist hegemon? It’s bigger than that. Is it as big as the turnover of the ancient regime into the end of the feudal period, beginning of the capitalist period? That one seems pretty resonant, but now you’re saying, well, maybe it’s like the collapse of the Bronze Age, right? And the beginning of the Axial Revolution, which is an even deeper thing. And then you could even ask the question, well, is it actually as significant as when humans first began to use language? Right. Is it that deep or is it as significant as the emergence of, you know, multi-cellular organisms from single-cellular? Just saying like, what kind of evolutionary transition are we actually in? And the digital is pretty weird. And we’ve gone completely planetary, right? And high technology probably is even higher than we know because of all the, you know, dark money and, you know, multiple ongoing Manhattan projects have been going on for the past 20 years. So like, the chance that we’re actually at a much more profound evolutionary mode, as opposed to like historical mode, sometimes is one of the things that resonates with me. And then I go kind of religious transhumanist and begin to reflect on the radical, radical possibilities of personhood that may end up having to be actualized during this time. Because- Do you want to go into that a little bit? You were talking a little bit, you were talking about that with Jim Brett, you were talking about, you know- Well, I mean, it’s- What’s the expression you use? Transhuman? I say religious transhumanism, just because- Religious transhumanism. Much of the transhumanist discussions like Kurzweil and others, you know, that there’s actually an eschatological religious flavor to what they’re talking about anyway, the nature of the artificial intelligence overlords or whatever they are. And then, you know, moving our consciousness into silicon mainframes and these kinds of things, or even the radical kind of, kind of biohacking life extension, achieve physical immortality, these, you know, getting beyond the human ending. But that’s all sort of a perversion, isn’t it? I mean, that’s all- This is what I’m saying. I’m saying let’s put our religious cards actually on the table. And if we’re going to speculate about, you know, futures for the species that actually involve the self-transformation of the species into a new species, right? Christ was talking about that. Right? A lot of religious figures were talking about in some way that there’s a person hidden within our person that’s greater than any person that we’ve ever known. There’s a spiritual quantum leap. Right. A spiritual quantum leap. That’s good. I think about the television show, Quantum Leap, but it is a good phrase. That’s the idea that there’s like an acute evolutionary possibility. And that, you know, Thileard and Norbindo would say things like, you know, that the great religious figures have been evolutionary outliers, messengers from the future, as it were, showing what’s possible at the root of the human personhood. And so, yeah, Barbara Marx Hubbard and others, you know, that merger of high technology, complete planetization, and radical existential risk. That’s a pretty rich cocktail for, you know, being kind of, you know, it’s a request from evolution for the human to potentially radically, radically change. And in that sense, then we’re in a situation now that we don’t actually understand what exactly our situation is. That you can read it on historical analogies, but we’re actually in the middle of something so big that we couldn’t know. Like it’s, it’s, it’s, and that doesn’t mean we can’t act. We actually can. And there’s a whole thing to say about that, how to act, even though you don’t have total clarity. But in a sense, I think there’s a certain recognition we have to have that, yeah, we don’t know. And we actually can’t, we can’t know. Okay. So where, how do we act from that place of, of unknowing? I mean, I think it has to do with care, I think. Like it has to do with moving back down to where actual certainty exists. You know, like, my love for my wife, I’m pretty certain of this. Like, you know, whether or not we’re in some major evolutionary transformation into a, you know, I’m not certain of that in any way. Like, but the certainty for love for my wife, right? In concrete situations, I can be certain about what the right thing to do is. In abstract conversation, it’s hard to be certain. And there are definitely moral dilemmas where it’s not clear what the right thing to do is. But there’s plenty of cases where you, where you know, where you, where there’s a, there’s a kind of a base certainty at the level of the life world that’s given. So long as we’re in the space of reason and not strategically acting, then it’s muddy. So in a sense, when you’re wandering in the wilderness ontologically, in terms of the meta narratives that makes sense for orienting, you can, you can move back to the local, to the, you can return to the local, which isn’t a turn to the particular or the relative, because the universal is actually hidden in, in these local, remember I’ve used that phrase, anthro ontological common sense, right? That there’s a, that there’s a deep seated capacity to orient together around things that are true and to treat one another in certain ways in light of that. So those things, I think we’re still in that realm of certainty. You know, disingenuous scientific arguments that try to diffuse that certainty with like arguments about neurological determinism and nihilistic materialism, trying to undercut what we know from anthropological, excuse me, anthro ontological common sense, trying to undercut that. But those are, those are not good arguments. There’s, because science relies on, on the ability to actually be in the space of reason and not strategically relate to one another if you’re actually doing science. So the snake eats its tail and we’re given the life world in which we can care for one another. And from that we can create tremendous knowledge and do remarkable inquiry. But I’m not going to override that in order to signal some allegiance to some metanarrative. You know, I’m going to ground in that and then explore metanarrative from a basis of, of care, this temple that I can bring with me everywhere. A friend of mine is writing a book, and he calls it The Wealth of Neighborhoods. Instead of The Wealth of Nations, it’s like, and the idea is there’s, there’s so much in your neighborhood, like just in your local neighborhood, there’s so much, for example, garbage that could be repurposed or, I don’t know, there’s so much, there’s so much you could do with your intimate near world. I don’t know if I’m oversimplifying your argument here, but. I would like to, I think I have a slightly different take on this. I think it’s ultimately convergent, but I think, because I think, I think we are in a situation like where it’s plausible that we, yeah, that we’re facing something more like an evolutionary change, because of complexity, because of the emergence of AI, these two things, and they’re synergistically operating together, they’re going to put a demand on us to change our conception of human design, what that fundamentally means. So, my recommendation for this, and I don’t think this is in competition for what Zach is proposing, but I propose that we put a lot more emphasis on our capacity of adaptivity, that we get a deeper understanding of what that actually is. That’s what a lot of my work around relevance realization has been about. What is our capacity for adapting and evolving? Get a deeper, so, I mean, this is, this is, to my mind, a kind of scientific take on the Socratic idea of self-knowledge, which is not autobiographical knowledge. It’s about knowing your capacities. It’s knowing, you know, how you actually fundamentally operate. It’s not your autobiography. It’s your operation manual. And one of the interesting things we could, we have the potential to do, and it’s part of what does happen, is to take the advent of AI and the way networks work in the internet, and they have all these deleterious consequences we’ve been talking about, but they actually also afford us with some powerful ways of understanding our capacity for adapting and evolving, and potentially making that the focus. So this is what I’ve been trying to do with the reinventio of notions like faith and trust. Try to re-understand them in terms of ways in which we are accessing and accentuating our capacity for relevance realization and adaptivity, because I think trying to come to a conclusion, or as Zach says, trying to identify or align with a meta-narrative that is attempting some kind of closure, I think is massively presumptuous, precisely because not only are we ignorant, the rate at which we are ignorant about all of this is accelerating. And I think, I don’t know if this is convergent with what you’re saying, Zach, it feels like it is, because it feels like we get a good understanding, one of the places where we get our best understanding of how we zero in on what’s relevant, how we adapt, how we undergo that constant evolution of our ability to cognitively fit to the world. It is in our phenomenological interaction, I get that, I think that’s one of the core moves in 4-E cognitive science. But I feel like we’re not saying exactly the same thing, and we need to do something to get them to be closer together. I see the, like I say, this is generally what I guess in broad strokes mean by getting people to try and cultivate wisdom, is how can we reliably, with high plausibility, and with new tools, how can we use this to really enhance people’s capacity to complexify in a way that gives them an ongoing fitted response to the ongoing complexity of the world. That’s where I think we should be sort of devoting our resources in this situation of ultimately not knowing what the hell we are in. So can I just try to say that both, try to see if I can compress what you two guys are saying in my own dumb language. So what I hear Zach saying is a kind of return to the life world in some kind of a way, and the basic realities of life. And what I hear John saying is that we have to become more like dancers, we have to become more flexible to uncertainty. And so I feel there’s a movement towards perennialism in Zach and a movement towards futurism in John. And then maybe those are the two things that have to come together. But if I’m radically, if I’ve got that completely wrong, please let me know. Well, I like everything except that I wouldn’t want futurism. I would say it’s maybe it’s, I don’t know what ism it is, in fact. It’s just, it made it’s the closest thing to stoicism is perhaps the ism that would come closest. You know, that when you realize that the empires come so complex, you try to enhance your capacity to adapt so that you can as reliably as possible act in a virtuous manner. Yeah, and I think the way they would come together is I’ve, I think I’m leading with the space where those adaptations need to take place, like the materials and complexities that get that adaptive muscle going, are other people, more so, or at least as much as, you know, the objective world and complex problems in the objective world of adapting my physical body to it and things of that nature. And so I guess, and it may be implicit in what you’re saying, but I’m saying that the place where that adaptive capacity, it’s us, we are adapting, not me adapting and you adapting, we are adapting. And so I think that’s what I’m saying is that it’s, you know, that yes, return in a sense to the ability to always be learning and growing and like focusing on that. But in fact, that is always involving other people. And something like that, I think would be the way to bring them together. Because I’m agreeing, it’s not, in a sense, I’m not saying return to some traditional form of life. It’s actually the opposite. I’m saying return to one another so we can figure out how to evolve together, as opposed to staying stuck as isolated individuals, all independently of like, kind of in strategic evolutionary relationship. I’m saying that’s a weird model and fiction. That in fact, the reality is of deeply embedded relationality, and that we are adapting. And then if I adapt in a way that makes it so that you can’t adapt well, that sucks, right? So we need to code that. I agree with that. I think that’s where it comes together. I think our most significant, I mean, I think this is, it shouldn’t be in any way questionable. Our most significant adaptivity is exactly our ability to engage sophisticated distributed cognition. That’s our main way of adapting to the world. I mean, our biggest advantage is culture, that we generate culture, which is a way in which we basically network brains together to make something way more synergistically powerful than they’re individually capable on their own. So if that’s what you’re talking about, and that’s again why I think it’s so important to try and replace the monological model of reason with the dialogical model of reason, that we reason best in distributed cognition. And that’s again where the cognitive science is pointing. It’s pointing that we reason much better in groups than we ever do individually. And I’ve tried to make that a phenomenologically salient thing for people, that when you get into genuine dialogos with people, both people can come to places that they couldn’t get to on their own. And that has an aesthetic to it. There’s something beautiful. There’s something lovely in the sense of lovable about that. And it’s tremendously motivating for people. And this is what I mean about trying to steal the culture. If we can get people oriented towards these things, so they experience reliably the motivation to want to enter into that, we can do something like what the Christians did to the Roman Empire. We can build an alternative culture underneath this horribly oppressive regime that eventually can actually undermine it without what you might call a political revolution or burning things in the street. That’s what I’m really, really interested in because there have been those moves where people, you know, that’s what I mean by that slogan I have. Actually, this has come out right now at the care of the dawn. It’s done the meaning wave with steal the culture. That’s what I mean by steal the culture. If we can get people into directly tasting and savouring what it’s like to experience that overflow of rationality, and I mean that term very broadly, that is possible in distributed cognition, the way it enhances our activity, but like with the same kind of motivational presence as the flow state does for individuals. I think that is a way of, you know, weaning people off the addiction to the toxic aspects of social media. You talked about beauty too, which seems to be a very important part of it, right? Being able to reconnect to beauty, right? And that’s coming back to our last discussion with and you so that is the ugliness is in the transactional relationship, right? Very much. I mean, there’s a sense in which, what, like if we can get people to see, I’m struggling for that. It’s apprehend, it’s participated, the fact that there is a way of being, like Socratic dialogue is not just a presentation of arguments. It is the seduction to a way of life. It is offering a direct experience of a way of being that’s an inactive symbol for how we can be fundamentally aroused differently, care differently than we do now that can wean us off an addiction to, you know, that’s what Plato’s project was, an addiction to right, really disastrous social political organizations. I mean, that’s why he saw what was happening to Athens and he wanted to create an alternative. Beautiful. I mean, I completely agree. And this is why we get along because it’s such a richly educative vision. I mean, it’s really about putting true, sincere inquiry, collective inquiry, and engagement at the heart, near the heart of culture, like right in the heart of culture. Yes. And yeah, that is, and then what you end up doing is you’ve kind of, if you want to use kind of Gerardian terms, you kind of flip the direction of mimetic desire and turn it towards the good so that now what becomes sexy and what people want to do and what gets their endorphins going and makes them excited ends up being something that is, that actually is net beneficial to their participation in it and is much more in their control than they are in their own. That’s the other thing you remember is that you’re actually, you know, all of the mechanisms by which communication happens on social media are captured and commodified, but conversation is different and to remove it from the realm of commodification and return it to the completely non-strategic. To the real. The real, yeah. And that’s, and I think there’s, you know, I think there is, there’s a potency to it, you know, like there, and there’s a need for it actually as well. Yeah. When you think about the kind of hierarchies of needs models, you know, that need for self transcendence and for self actualization can only be achieved in those kinds of interpersonal contexts, dialogical context. You can’t really actually achieve self transcendence and self actualization in, in the media, in asynchronous text-based interaction. It’s just not going to happen. You can signal that you’re, that you’re post-conventional or whatever, but to actually be so richly steeped in these types of exchanges that you see the fluidity of your own identity with those of others and the possibilities, the overflow of reason. I really like that because that’s, there’s an excess of, you know, the, the, the, the of reason. I really like that because that’s, there’s an excess of reasonability and goodness right there. And yeah, that’s what you find in those precious contexts of the life or like the mother-child relationship, right? Or the, the legitimate teacherly authority student-teacher relationship. Like there are, there are places where it just becomes so clear that this is a species specific trait, like this, this way of interacting and using language and the memetic seduction to a different way of life, as you’re saying. Like, so it’s there. You mean like a positive kind of imitation? So you, you, you imitate your, your, your, your, your, if you’re a child, you imitate your mother. If you’re a student, you imitate the teacher, but not copy him. You just, you get this transmission from him, which raises the level of your own perceptions and it’s a basic psychological construct. The Gerard got it from the French psychologist Tardet, who also influenced James Mark Baldwin, who influenced PGA. And you know, Baldwin’s whole model and Tardes was based on the imitations, the basic driver of personality and cognitive development. And Gerard, yeah, yeah, Gerard kind of plugged right into that and then noted just that violence is one of those things that is particularly imitatable and prone to be like attractive for imitation. So, so the notion of memetic violence and memetic desire, kind of a psychological lineage of thinking about imitation as a basic mechanism, but you don’t have to attach imitation to violence. Like it will imitate across the board, across a whole range of things. And so, yeah. But is there, is there a space beyond imitation or is it just always what we’re doing? That’s what I was talking about, Andrew. You know, what Zach says, flipping, you know, Gerard’s notion of flipping the direction of the desire, that’s the virtue of softerson. Softerson is basically the education of your salience landscaping. So you’re tempted to the good. That’s what it means. That’s what’s in contrast to infatia, right? Yeah, I like that. You’re naturally tempted towards the good. So it’s making desire, it’s making desire a positive and passion and, you know, all the emotions, a positive force rather than something that has turned against you and that you enact unconsciously to destroy yourself and others, right? That’s one of the things Socrates claimed to know. He claimed to know tarotica, which is what means he had softerson in the sense, he knew what to care about and how to care about it well. That’s education again. Oh, that’s really amazing, actually. I mean, that seems to be the purpose of education, knowing what to care about and how to care about it well. I mean, would you agree with that, Zach? Or? I mean, it should be. That’s what you say. You say your primary concern is care. And also your primary concern is education. And it just occurred to me that, you know, that’s what education is about on the most fundamental level or should be about, right? It should be. And it comes down to something that was said earlier about, you know, you have to be trying to solve the right problem, or it’s not worth solving. And so so much of education, they give you the problem and you’re just supposed to solve it. And you’re just supposed to solve it. But the figuring out how to know what problem is a good problem to even be working on, right? Problem formulation. Right. And the cultivation and clarification of desire is another way to say that. And so, you know, if education gives you what you want, that’s like advertising, right? Again, that’s design. It’s not a degree or something. You mean? Yeah. Yeah. So but the raising of someone isn’t giving them, telling them or forcing them to solve a problem they may or may not want to solve. It’s getting them equipped to think about the kind of life that they want to pursue, right? To frame the problem of their of their own development. And so I really like this idea of tipping the balance within oneself so that you’re seduced towards the good. And that’s what it is. We’re not going to tell you. You’re seduced towards, let’s say, growth as well. Yeah. And I can’t tell you what’s growing up like a continual growth process rather than, you know, you arrive somewhere. It’s not like enlightenment. It’s just continual growth. It may be. It may be in many areas, just continuous growth, you know, and there’s an important difference in terms of like values education. You know, it’s not our place to actually tell you what’s good for you. It’s to equip you to figure out what’s good for you. And this is so much of what some of the justice conversation hinges around. You know, it hinges around the way we are able to care for one another in ways that don’t slide into paternalism, right? And design. And that’s so it’s a critical educational issue. And it’s one of the reasons that we’ve so problematized teacherly authority in general is that we haven’t disentangled it from paternalism. And so much education is paternalistic, you know? We just throw out the role models completely. Right. You throw out the role models. I talk to my students and I say, like, do you have any heroes or is there anybody you look up to or that you, you know, you aspire to be like? And some of them say, no, you know, it’s like they don’t want to have role models. They don’t want to have models. They just want to be themselves. But that’s a dead end. We need this mimetic process of imitating. And the role models. Who are greater than and wiser than and more, you know, than we are. Who we can imitate. Yeah, who we can imitate. Right. Exactly. And yeah, that’s part of that disruption of intergenerational transmission is that diffusing of the potency of potential role models just across the board. And the retreat to the self and the screen as the locus of ideal, the formation of ideals. And, you know, because if you’re starting to aspire to, if you’re getting your messages of what you’re supposed to imitate, not from your screen, then they’ve lost and you’ve won. So they’re going to try to diffuse all the possibilities of you finding a way to shape your identity outside of that context of strategic design. So yeah, so there’s a dire need. I completely agree with John to, you know, to return to these spaces of dialogue and to rekindle actual teacherly authority, you know, to rekindle these contexts of real socialization and, you know, deep reciprocal identity shaping. Yep. That would be, that’s, I would say it’s even, you were saying it’s maybe it’s deeper than the political. It’s way deeper. I mean, this is an existential risk thing. Like if we can’t figure out how to do this, then pretty much everything’s lost because eventually it’ll just the inability to have real sincere, earnest collective inquiry will go all the way up into all echelons of institutions. And then the, you know, that one outcome is war, right? Another outcome is- War of all against all or whatever. Right. And another outcome is just the degradation of actual physical and technical infrastructures. Because remember, science runs on these, this kind of process. It has to. If, if scientists start lying to one another and everyone thinks everyone’s lying to everybody, then science is actually not getting done. If science is everyone’s strategic against everyone else and buying for funds and then it’s not, it’s not actually science. It’s science requires actual earnest collective inquiry. And so when that’s when it starts to break down the realm of science, that’s like, oh, is that nuclear reactor actually going to work or not? Like, will the electrical grid actually stay up or won’t it? As things get more complicated, we actually need to preserve the space of reason to actually solve the problems to keep our basic systems running. And so, yeah, it’s a, it’s a very serious issue. It’s top, top of the list and one of the hardest to work on precisely because it seems not as complicated and technical as some fancy scientific problem. It’s just about finding ways to get people together. And so, yeah, the question of how to propagate out through the field, these kinds of practices that you’re recommending, John, I think is, is essential. How to create pockets in culture where that emerges as an attractor, right? Where that becomes something to imitate is, is very important. And then it doesn’t become, it doesn’t lose its power or something if things get too big. You know, if something becomes a movement, sometimes it loses its power. So there seems to be a size, there seems to be a size of how that can work. There has to be an intimate relationship between each person and the problem that’s trying to be solved. Otherwise, it becomes abstract. Am I making sense here or am I? I think you are, but I don’t think it’s just a size issue because, you know, we’ve got evidence about metastable systems. Systems can be stable at different orders of complexity. I think it’s more important to look at certain features. I’m, you know, what’s coming to mind right now is Dewey’s argument about the way democracy is a self-correcting process and science is a self-correcting process. And therefore, they need each other dramatically. But what Dewey didn’t really understand enough, or maybe he did, I don’t want to be But one way you can turn this into an issue to reflect on is what Dewey is presupposing is people’s ability to commit to and value a process of self-correction for its own sake. Because when you have systems like democracy and science in which the process within distributed cognition of self-correction is considered what is valued most rather than any particular product or result, and the systems can act, especially if you have two of those coordinated together, then the structure can actually become quite large and complex without you sort of generating into the kind of thing you’re worrying about. And the systems are capable of metastability. Right. So they need to be like… Think it’d be scaled like the Catholic Church, a billion people or… I don’t know. Sorry to use a more… What were you going to say, Zach? I was going to say you’re correct, but you have to like, almost at the level of the fractal, infuse the thing with the proper weightings of what is valued, as you’re saying. Yeah, exactly. It’s a very, very kind of complex, actually, cognitive value to value process over product, right? Which is what you’re saying that like the people within democracy need to value democratic process more than they value some particular outcome. Exactly. Same with science, right? People within science need to value the scientific process. And so that’s Dewey’s underlying insight is that, and he took it up from Charles Sanders Peirce, who was about the ethics of inquiry, that in fact, science depends upon things like honesty, cooperation and selflessness. Because if you’re really part of science, then you know when you’re dead, science will change and that you’re contributing to something that’s larger than even your lifetime and you’re kind of making a self-transcendent move to put your life on the altar of science, basically. It was Peirce’s idea. So yeah, Dewey’s point is deep, but it is also, as you’re saying, demanding and it’s not with a demand Habermas, who was massively influenced by Dewey as a youth, actually. You know, just after World War II, some of the only reading materials in Germany were like these John Dewey books that the United States military brought to indoctrinate the Germans and it really worked on Habermas. And his political theory between facts and values, between facts and norms, rather, he makes the same move, you know, both self-regulating, autocorrecting systems, science and democratic process, you know, in the space of reasons, but he doesn’t specify just how demanding it is cognitively to participate in those. And in terms of the commitment, and so there’s a kind of what I’ve called the cognitive maturity fallacy, which ends up plaguing a lot of philosophy, which is the assumption that high level cognitive capacities are given whether or not they’re actually an educational achievement, which may or may not be that. So I think Dewey’s modeling of democracy and Habermas’s basically assumes a very well functioning educational system. And, you know, Dewey saw that equation and Habermas sees that equation. But I think, yeah, some of what you’re describing, it’s the condition for the dialogue, the condition for the possibility of both science and democracy. Yeah. Zach, you put a term to the thing I was sort of trying to articulate about that, yeah, what would be presupposed? What was the cognitive maturity fallacy? The cognitive maturity fallacy, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. I like that. That’s very tasty. That could be like IQ or something. And you find it all throughout epistemology, like when you read especially analytical philosophy, things like that, they’re talking about like, you know, the mind as if they’ve never met a little kid. Whereas Piaget is like, whoa, that whole formal logic thing doesn’t kick into really late, if ever, by the way, that people can do hypothetical deductive reasoning for real. So there’s this, yeah, as a developmentalist, I was basically saying, the most interesting, this is a paper that I wrote, which will be out soon. I was basically saying the most, one of the most interesting things about Piaget and Kam Wilbert to some extent is that they don’t commit to cognitive maturities fallacy, that they actually model epistemology at multiple levels. And then the other factor of the cognitive maturity fallacy is that you have achieved maturity. One is that you assume maturity, the other is that there’s not levels beyond your epistemology is also part of the cognitive maturity fallacy. So it’s an interesting concept, but you’ve seen it in political theorizing and in other places as well, where there’s just an assumption that the baseline of human capacity is actually far more sophisticated and that what they’re doing there, what they should actually do is, well, maybe everything’s a nail when I’ve got this hammer, what they should actually do is characterize the issue as in part also an educational issue. And in fact, thinking about structures of science and law and governance also requires thinking about the educational systems that produce scientists and lawyers and politicians. And if you place the bar pretty high, no pun intended with the legal thing, if you place the bar really high and the education systems don’t get people there, then you failed to reproduce the society. And that’s one of the situations we’re in. So yeah, so there’s a kind of a massive need for psycho-emotional cognitive triage to be run across the whole bunch of areas. And the things you’re rolling out, John, seem to be some of the best stuff going. Thank you. I should get going, gentlemen. But as always, this has been wonderful. I really enjoyed, Zach, some of the extended, I don’t know what to call them, they’re not speeches because that’s the wrong way, but the extended presentations you make, because I got to see some of the depths of your thinking and to really appreciate it. So I wanted to thank you for that. That was really quite wonderful at times. Thank you, John. Likewise, there’s an opportunity here when we speak again to say things I wouldn’t, I was like, and I think probably the same for you, you end up saying things you wouldn’t say if you were speaking to somebody else. So there’s a real unique relationship. That’s the marker of D.A. Logos. That’s really the marker of it. And I’m honored to be sandwiched in between you two guys. And I feel like there was one point where I just lost the thread. But I almost had the thread and then right towards the end, I was losing the thread a little bit because you were going into realms which I don’t particularly understand. But no, no, no problem at all. That’s not a complaint. That’s just like you guys are blowing my mind as always. And that was great. Yes, as always. All right, gentlemen. I’m happy to do this again. Every time I’ve done this, I’ve found it fruitful and Zach, you seem to find it also. So whenever you want to do this again, consider me in. I’ll get a haircut next time. I’ll be looking less like the Unibomber. No, that’s perfect. I really got to jump guys. Good night. See you. Thanks so much. Bye bye.