https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qag_uAVWdk4
Welcome everybody to another Voices with Ravik. I’m very excited about this because my good friend and long time interlocutor and philosophical partner in crime and all the other wonderful epitaph we might give to each other is back. And we’re going to have a series of discussions about a very important topic and of course I’m talking about Jordan Hall so Jordan it’s so great to be with you here again, and I want you to take some time, you know, and everybody should know we sort of talked about this before off camera we’ve got some ideas about a basic architecture and Jordan’s going to propose that run through it and then we’ll enter into a more of a dialogical format so Jordan, please take it away. Okay. Thank you. I’m just putting this on do not disturb. Okay, so the topic here. I think last time we talked about it we pin the name the Neo Neo cortex. Yeah, or a new form or a new approach to the problem of governance. And when we talked last time, what I, what I noticed was that I’ve been running into this particular territory from a variety of distinct sub groups sub domains, yes, both different areas of kind of intellectual endeavor but also completely different communities that in some sense don’t even consider themselves to have any real relationship with each other. And yet, this, this problem of proper governance in a particularly new fashion ends up being a bit of a Venn diagram, where they’re beginning to converge and I think increasingly self aware. So, let me just list a couple with these domains look like and you’ll notice that they are. And many of them will look at the problem differently. So for example, the OG, the original point that brought us here was actually your own thing, you know the various projects that you’re now bring into the world and the conversations I was having with Ryan correct. Yes. And I think about the particular problem of governance is being central to Ryan Barton. Ryan Barton right yeah how do we how do we give rise to a new form of collaboration around the question of, for example, and bringing embodied wisdom or fully into the world. And how do we do this in a fashion where, you know, many of the things that we know just consistently plague any kind of new institution don’t happen like we’d like to avoid that we’d like to preemptively design something where you know capture or malincentive or becoming centralized in a single individual. Don’t occur. And so, but other places in the in the technical world, the space and it is dowels. Which piece of the kind of the emerging crypto blockchain universe are now very deeply focused on this question of what is proper governance look like now they may think of it as Dow governance but my point is, it’s actually looking at a new form of governance I’ll get into some detail on that in a moment. And another individual named ball ball a G. Srinivasan has I think pretty well put a stake in the rock ground around a thing he’s calling network states, which he specifically positions as being a next step beyond the nation state. And in particularly call for a new form of governance. And then we’ll shift. So if we’re looking at say ordinary politics. We can look at some of the problems that are in the space of the increasing polarization that seems to be happening across the western world, and is many ways, locked in to the actual design, the underlying architecture of how we run government produces invariably polarization has a very hard time dealing with polarization. And so a new form of governance is being called for a looked at in those worlds as well and I mean actually practically. We can also look at the problem of geopolitics, and what looks like the shift of the world, and from a single hegemonic monosuperpower into an increasingly multipolar world, which we don’t really know how to do that, particularly in the context of things like escalating technological capability where we can’t solve interstate conflicts with escalating kinetic military conflict. And in the context of an entirely new form of war called unrestricted warfare, which I’ll just flag for those who understand that. The kind of cutting edge of investigation of both the multipolar geopolitics, and the notion of unrestricted warfare is also looking at what are new forms of governance, they can respond to this category of problem. And then shifting again. In the age of Elon questions around platform social media, in his case in particularly Twitter, we can think about Facebook and Instagram. Sure, federal, where we recognize that the governance principles like free speech aren’t robust enough to respond, for example, just a simple notion that because Twitter is a private company, the kind of the juridical principles of freedom of speech in the United States, have a hard time grasping it and yet clearly it has a very profound role to play in how the thing called free speech plays out in our polity. And in fact, Elon has particularly called or pointed towards the direction of Twitter as a foundation for a new form of collective intelligence. And so, if we can think about how the neo neo cortex and notions like distributed cognition are related, you can see how there’s a groping in that in the direction of a new form of governance. I got two more. The groups of individuals that have been looking at how do we tackle the problem of planetary scale governance. And this includes that whole category of things that we’ve talked about hyper objects, where the kind of nation state on steroids, the international structure like the IMF and the UN, which was the best the mid century could pull off clearly aren’t able to deal with planetary scale governance problems. We again are finding ourselves having to think about what might a new appropriate form of governance look like. And the last one I’ll throw into the mix is the AI alignment problem, which might feel weird. I mean, I don’t mean this necessarily from the point of view of sort of how do we build a department of AI alignment as a kind of a regulatory institution. I actually mean, what might we ever under any circumstances put in place that could actually do that job. And, and we’ll get I’ll get into some detail about how that plays out in a moment. So, that’s an example of the diversity of different domains, and the different kinds of groups, many of whom don’t believe they’re in the same space that I personally am spending time with that this question of what is a novel form of proper governance, both in terms of its potential and sometimes in terms of its necessity. So, so this is an instance of what Arlen calls problem finding. And one way of understanding that one interpretation I’ve given that is, you have a bunch of problems that seem disparate. And then you find a core central problem. And children seem to demonstrate this when they go through developmental stages, you find a core central problem that if you solve that core central problem, all these other problems will be significantly either solved or reformulated in a powerful and insightful manner. You know, I’ve had to do something like that with my work on relevance realization, sort of the found problem underneath all these other what seemed like disparate problems and categorization, etc. So it sounds to me like you’re proposing that kind of thing that like, here’s a bunch of things that seem disparate. But if you write they intersect at this core problem and if this course problem gets addressed, it will systemically and systematically feed out to the other problems and bring about a very comprehensive change. Yes, yes, I think that’s exactly right. And what it would look like from the inside for some of these particular domains would be a kind of a different way of looking at the whole problem that they’re looking at, which would, which would resolve a guardian knot, for example. Yes, yes, yes. And this will take coordination between the groups to exactly exactly quite quite to the point, which many cases might avoid some catastrophes that happen when they’re unconsciously coordinating for example, AI and unrestricted warfare, and this is a situation where they’re implicitly coordinating in a negative way, we’d actually like to invert that relationship. And so, you know, to the point there, something that I think also comes up in this kind of conversation is that, for me at least this and this investigation is not a kind of a question of a progressive effort to just make a better kind of governance. And it’s certainly not a vaguely utopian, in some sense, it’s almost the exact inverse, it’s just more a question of necessity and timing. My sense of things is just we happen to be here. We’re in a moment where there are profound changes that are afoot, and that if existing global institutions and existing forms of governance could in fact provide adequate governance to allow us to navigate these problems that we should just do that. And that’s not only in fact because they don’t, that we’re going to have to take this sort of step. So that’s the dose of practicality that I think is important if you’re going to step into this space. So, what I’d like to do is I’d like to drop two big conceptual frameworks that I personally have talked about in the past but it’s been a while, I don’t think I think it’s worth kind of articulating them in a little bit of detail, both to help frame the nature of the transition or the shift, and also to begin creating the, funny I think of it as a phase space or the vector diagram of what the kind of the proper solution looks like. So the first one is the, the, I guess the philosophical or the theoretical framework of media studies and particularly McLuhan. So, I think that’s the first one. I would say that we’re currently living in a world that is in many ways a result of literacy of writing, that we are living in the era of literacy. And if we can think about the kinds of shifts that have occurred, and both in terms of kind and rate and It helps us get I think both a sense of where, how we got to where we are, and also what it will look like by necessity, as we’re going to where we’re going. So the first point would be something like, if we wind the clock back to the medieval world, then we drop We go back to ourselves into 1440 and the Gutenberg Press, and then we identify changes that occurred and I’m gonna say, at the level of governance, and this might bring up some questions about what I mean by that term, but things like the Protestant Revolution. Right, yeah. And things like the 30 years war. A fundamental shift of the infrastructure of governance in the eruption of Protestantism, which I, in this case, will propose was at least meaningfully attached to the rise of literacy or the written book. Which then itself presaged but also combined with the implications of literacy in the more political domain. And this gave rise to the 30 years warm, but other domains like the emergence of the Royal Society. Which could only happen when people were literate and people who could write were sharing written works with each other, and could be engaging in the peer to peer collaborative discovery of the nature of reality in a very different fashion. And I would point even more pointedly to the emergence of the shift of the Constitution, and the fact that we now live in a world that is profoundly constitutional from the throughout the 19th century and of course as a result of two major world wars. Most of the world is now living in a form of government government that is founded in a written document a great great constitution, which is a unconsciously, I think in many ways, simply a consequence of thinking that that’s the proper way to do things. One aspect of which, by the way, is the Napoleonic code, and I was looking at some conversations recently coming out of Africa where they were talking about the fact that the efforts of the Napoleonic code which to say governance by proposition. And that they work very well, and that the countries that found themselves subject to that form of governance if not fared as well as those who were able to operate using the common law, which I would say is governance by participatory relationship, and which by the way connected with their indigenous governance methodologies, a point to get back. And just to make sure the space of the scope of we’re talking about is rolled in the notion of corporations and things like the British East India Company which, in many ways both were built on top of and massively innovated the technologies of bureaucracy, and of course is the training people to be literate and then taking those literate people to run a global empire on the basis of what is effectively handwritten letters and accounting systems. And so this is a story that talks about the, the notion of governance in its very shape and scope, and how it rolled out over about 500 years, and then the point is to say, we’re now well into the era of the digital and the digital is different fundamentally, and we’ve now found implications for that same set of scopes. And I would expand, by the way, to include down deep into the basis of how we produce the notion of individual so it’s a psychological question, as well as an institutional question. So one inquiry that we’ll be running into we asked this question of what is the new form of governance, what is the neo neo cortex is what is the new set of literacies, and the new forms of generative grammar, as well as what are the forms of institution, and the new forms of structures, and will be guided by thinking about what are the implications of the essence of the, of the shift of digital, and how that might help us better understand what are the likely kind of laminar flows or the downhill directionality of what is going to be driving us in a certain direction, which may simply by the way the release of some of the consequences of writing or literacy. That’ll help, help us understand better. So I’ll return to that. When we get past the next big conceptual chunk is all that track so well so far. Yeah, I just wanted to ask what else is included. I mean, I get the argument and of course the literacy argument starts in the actual revolution and then you get the introduction of punctuation and then you get the Carolingian script and you get ramps up and it ramps up and it ramps up. And then you say you get the Protestant Reformation and you get the possibility of the scientific revolution, and then of course the 30 years war, and then attended to that. So for me this is part of the emergence of the idea of the, of the, of the self, the self constituting state, the social contracting state that contracts itself into existence through written contract, that’s what a constitution basically is, is dependent on one of the major The other two phases of the 30 years wars, which is the acceleration of secularism the acceleration of the separation of church and state, the making a religion private in a way that cuts us off from all of our previous history in a really profound way. And then there’s a lot of the other ways in which authority, which I take to be the fundamental capacity for governance is is determined so there were many other ways in which authority was determined and then they get reduced, I would say, via secularism to the notion of the social contract And then there’s a lot of the other ways in which authority was determined and then they get reduced, I would say, via secularism to the notion of the social contract. And so you get that, that and the, and the social contract. And those are the, that’s the only basis for any authority there’s no other basis for authority whereas there used to be things reasonably like tradition, religion, kinship systems, all kinds of things that are limited the political economic enterprises that human beings engage in all of those are basically removed. Well, I’m not saying they’re removed completely but they’re they’re denuded they’re diminished they’re demarcated off. Yeah, in fact, let me just move into the next piece because there’s so many different directions. Let me hold this but there’s something about some now going to take a skew of the social contract and then we’re going to move on to the next piece. Absolutely. So, I’ll try to stay a little bit more rigorous for a moment so you know as you know, this is a distinction. In my experience I learned it from, from Dave Snowden, although the spent enough time at the Santa Fe Institute to drink of the well of complexity directly, but the notion the notion that complicated was definitely from him for me. And the distinction I think is very profound I would say in a particular way. It looks like a little bit of the classic map territory distinction, where the territory the complex is fundamental it is just sort of what’s what’s there it’s reality. And the complicated is a thing that humans can do, we can create a model. And we can, and we can, we can control, we can foreground certain aspects of the complex by virtue of creating certain technologies and I’ll get into an example what I mean about that in a moment. And then we can endeavor to do things like optimize for or optimize against exclude aspects of that system. So agriculture is a classic example. So we want a whole lot of wheat. And I’m going to be able to create a control system by virtue of certain technologies like a plow and irrigation and pesticides and just the practice of understanding that wheat seeds produce wheat plants, and therefore have a much larger yield of wheat in a certain territory of land and would happen in a fashion that is how nature would do it. So that’s the kind of the ticket and what’s interesting here in this distinction is that in some sense neither Kuhn nor Tainter use this particular framework. And yet if you use this framework you could say that they’re both, they both looked at this problem in completely different ways right Kuhn was looking at scientific paradigms both in terms of how they manifested in the psychology of scientists, and in how they manifested in the institutions of science but nonetheless, he was investigating or diagnosing how complicated systems paradigms played out, and both in terms of how they developed how they responded to the problematic that the map is never fully the territory and as the territory changes or as the needs of the map change. If you’re stuck with trying to make the map work, you end up with a occlusion problem. And the challenge of actually what happens when psychologies lose the fact that they’re actually using maps and then mistake it for the territory. And then the flip side is that Tainter was looking at it from the point of view of anthropology trying to discover why it was that civilizations collapsed he called them complex societies. I would say that he was properly discussing the collapse of complicated societies, and frankly looked at a lot of the same kinds of dynamics. And so that tells us something that we are sitting in yet another complicated society that has a marriage to a particular set of paradigms and both Tainter analysis and a Kuhnian analysis. All the signs point to we’re reaching the end of that. And the inquiry now is what would it look like to try to consciously develop something, which is no longer simply unconsciously instantiating another form of complicated governance system another kind of complicated society on top of it, which we may find ourselves doing willy-nilly, but it would be wise if we could be more careful about it. But is there a way of actually creating a principled return? I’m going to use the word return specifically to the complex. And so I’ll give you an example. And I think you may just point it to it, which makes it collaborative. For a long time, certainly for the past couple hundred years, we’ve been living with a false dichotomy between the state and the market as kind of fundamental grounds of ways that societies can govern choices. We can either be turned the dial way up, be a highly authoritarian totalitarian bureaucratic governance system where there’s an effort or an intent to govern choices to a very fine grained level by virtue of complicated bureaucracies to be very straightforward. And I would propose, by the way, at this moment, a theoretical level that if I take the notion of the virtual or the notion of the capacity at all, like the basic human capacity to do this thing, to create an abstraction, to create a model, to produce something in the realm of the virtual and then a map, and then use that to feed back on to engage in niche construction on nature. So I’m proposing that that’s a thing that we can do and then of course that we do do. But it splits, in some sense, down the middle in a very interesting way. And one side of that split is the state, right, the realm of design, the realm of the model, the realm of cybernetic command and control systems, and to the degree to which we’re investing that with authority and responsibility, we find ourselves in all the various kind of failure conditions that have been explored by those who critique the state as a form. For example, it’s limited capacity and it’s limited bandwidth and therefore it’s, you know, calculation problems, as an example. And here’s the interesting piece for me. I would say that exact same move, that move of abstraction, also gives rise to the other side of the equation, which right now just characterizes the market but broadly what I mean is, and I think this is, I’m just throwing this out there but I think it will prove a very interesting proposition, which is, if I take our indigenous capacities, our ordinary human capacities to engage in governance, unconsciously, the things that we just did for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years but certainly hundreds of thousands of years, which is to say we inject the consequence of technology, whether this is physical technology or psycho technologies, cultural technologies into the mix. What we get is a random walk of our overwhelmed indigenous governance capacities, trying to navigate a landscape of accelerating innovation. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. And so this is the other problem. This is sometimes been talked about as the MOLOC problem but I would say that quite fundamentally it has to do with the fact, the premise, that our existing baseline indigenous governance capacities, which actually do a very fine job of navigating, call it, pre-paleolithic environmental niches, find themselves struggling precisely because their output, the technological consequences of those capacities, change the context that they’re endeavoring to govern in a fashion that overwhelms those governance capacities and this is the problematic of the market. Now the meta problem is that we’ve found ourselves back into the corner of forgetting that these are two versions of the same basic thing. They both are versions of the complicated. And that the effort to govern the failures of the market by means of the state or to govern the failures of the state by the liberations of the market are not going to work, meaning that that actually is the limited error. It’s the false dichotomy that modernity has found itself stuck in, the service of the past 150 or 200 years or so. And the proposition I would make is that it is in fact by virtue of the rediscovery of the third term, which we’ve talked about as just the commons or the return of the commons, return to the complex, but now at a higher tone, with a clear cut mandate to be able to resolve this problem of, in fact, specifically, anthro complexity. Resolve the problem of the fact that humans capacity to feedback on our environment itself is so significant that we have to actually apply that specifically to the problem of governance, so that our governance capacity is now equal to our other technical capacities to change the natural environment. Did that make any sense. Yeah, but I am going to ask some clarification questions. I’m trying to get at kind of get at the, I guess the crucial difference between complexity and complicated, because it seems to me that any proposal for resolving the mismatch or the misalignment between those two, which seems to be shared by both the proposal of the state running things and the market running things, depends on getting very clear on that distinction. Does that follow so far? Yeah, that sounds great. Okay, so now I’m hearing a couple of things that might be candidates, but I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not foisting any of these on you, I want to hear, right, one candidate might be, it might just be the simplistic one and I don’t think you’re saying this, you know, some, you can be saying something very trivial. When you say the map isn’t the territory, you can be saying something trivial like well a representation is never identical to the thing it’s representing. And that’s like, yeah, that’s what makes it a representation because if it was identical, it would be an instance, not a representation. You’re not making, I think, a logically trivial point like that. You’re trying to say something though, though, when I’m talking about, what I hear you saying is when I’m talking about complicated is there can be any, they can be many variables, and there can be many degrees of freedom, but there is no fundamental uncertainty, there may be risk but risk is calculable, and it does not possess genuine uncertainty. This is a lot of the work I’m doing on rationality now. In fact, this system, one of the ways the complex is equivocated into the complicated is by redefining uncertainty as risk, which is precisely not what uncertainty is. So you can have complicated and what you do is you do risk management, whereas the complex says there is actual uncertainty, which are, which are entities process events not captured by your variable, and you’re caught in a very biased variance problem. When you try to track them, if you open up to too much sensitivity, you get overfitting, and if you reduce your sensitivity, you get bias, and there’s no final solution to that, which means the uncertainties will always be generative, there will always be creating emergent things that slam into your complicated system. Is that a way of capturing it well? Yes, that is a very good way of capturing it. I’m laughing because I was preparing myself to try to respond to your question as you kept going, I was like, I think you pretty much nailed it. So yes, very much so. Beautifully put. Thank you. Thank you. Right. And that, and then that, that means, I mean, it means a fundamental shift in from monological management into dialogical risk evolution. This is something you and I have talked about the right what we do is know we’ve got this thing, this monosystem and it manages, and we are, we are, you know, we are like that we are just monological reasoners right and that and we manage and then it’s that that monological management and then it’s like no, if, if complexity is not identical and can never be identified with other complicated, whatever we have over here has to be constantly in a dialogical relationship with that and constantly evolving in that relationship, as opposed to trying to monologically manage reality, it’s in a dialogical responsiveness evolution with reality. Does that also part of what’s following from this? Right. Yes, very much so if you think about this in the context of something like AI, it provides a nice kind of perspective to think about that, right, the, the notion that, you know, no kind of finite state machine is ever actually going to be able to fully exhaust the generative possibility of emergent reality. Yeah, the way I would put this is the complicated tries to pre specify relevance, and it can’t. Relevance is always within relevance realization which is constantly evolving. And I, and I think, and I think the problem with contracts and text and laws and rules is they overestimate our capacity for pre specifying relevance. Exactly. Okay, exactly. And this, and this gets us so for example the distinction between common law and civic civil code or Napoleonic code is precisely that right Napoleonic code in the classic hubris of the French Revolution, right, because they, as you said that that notion of a break like they quite self consciously said we’re making a complete break with all tradition. Yeah, yeah. I would say just made the air is simply, you know, maybe didn’t fully understand that they were making a category error but they made the category error of thinking that they could fully prescribe a comprehensive code of law, and write it down, and then all your only job is to sort of look up on the lookup table. Oh, this is an example of that and here’s the result right and, you know, the point is, that’s actually not a valid approach. I would emphasize that what happens is these things like constitutions function, because of implicit constraints of embeddedness that have not come into the explicit prescription. For example, and Madison was very clear about this, the American Constitution the size of the country and the speed at which communication could work in order to it be effectively a counteract the Constitution to effectively counteract mob. Right. And so, the size of the country and the slowness of communication were actually presupposed in the functioning of the Constitution And so those preconditions have now completely dissolved. And yet, right, that doesn’t mean the Constitution has been in any important way updated to take that loss of the preconditions, which are important, enabling constraints into account. Right, and to kind of push that for example, a difference between literacy writing and digital is the speed of computation. Yes. That notion of speed that we in the in the movement from 1776 to say 1976 cars and airplanes and telephones radically increased the speed of communication, but infinitesimally compared to what happened post computation. Yes, yes. That’s it. It’s a sort of does it a difference that makes a difference that makes a difference that’s landing now, and the split or the drift between the fittedness of the enumeration of power the enumeration institution that was valid in 1776 is, you know, increasingly, no longer valid, because of this kind of a difference. I just want to take one historical lesson. And I think it’s your date 1776 is really wonderful, because I see Vietnam, the war in Vietnam, as the, the, the sort of realization isn’t quite the right word but the, the coming into the foreground of the fact that the country could be reached almost simultaneously through television, and therefore the political system and the political system almost breaks under the and then you have you have the, you have the, you know, you have the attempt of the government to then do various ways of controlling and centralizing the press, and then that gets blown apart again by the internet and cable and all that stuff. So, I think we should give some concrete instances so people can track the kind of thing we’re talking about here. Yep, yeah we can. It’s, it’s useful, I would say maybe worth doing the explication of these two different frameworks the notion of the implications of the media on the possibility landscape of human choice and therefore the the construct of psychology and instrument or institution necessary to to enable that choice to be flowing in a coherent fashion, i.e. governance. So, we’re in the second category, this nation this distinction between the complicated and the complex. But let me move for a moment into something like, please, some practical, some practical propositions so given these frameworks. What are some things that we might think about that are likely going to be part of the neo neo cortex, you know, for example, what are what are the new literacies. What are the new, what might be the minimum viable capacities embodied in humans individual humans in any form of new model of governance. I would just put a little bullet point on one which is to say we’re going to have to figure out the role the proper role of technology. I think it’s relatively obvious at this point that simply allowing technology to be an unconscious producer of novelty governed by market and state, poorly in both cases, is no longer adequate, we actually really have to think that one of the primary questions that the neo neo cortex needs to address is the proper role of technology. And I’d like to point out a few interesting qualities here that I’m not sure are sort of fully considered or fully considered in most discourse. One of the consequences of the era of literacy was one of the negative consequences of the era of literacy was that it had this consequence of converting humans into mediocre machines. And most of the infrastructure of education, frankly, has been precisely to do that, to, to embed in humans, the sort of algorithmic capacity to run the complicated bureaucracies that allow governance to occur, and the sort of the easiest best example of that was the use of the computer, right, which are sort of the calculator, the calculator, which is, you know, was originally a human job, particular people. So it was the word computer, the word computer was also originally applied to human beings, human beings, there we go. So individual human beings were trained to be unreasonably or more than usual, good at rapid and high fidelity calculation. And we use them to do that. And that enabled a whole big increase in bureaucratic capacity. It has the enormous dehumanizing characteristic of vastly up regulating certain capacities out of out of all proportion to a whole human. And of course, completely ignoring all the rest of them. And so if your job was to be a calculator, you go to work and you would sort of flex a particular muscle to hypertrophy. And the institution that you were part of really didn’t care at all about the rest of you. In fact, to the best of its ability tried not to. The Kafkaesque nightmare. Yes, yeah, to the point. And so I would say this is actually a consequence, first and foremost of complicatedness, but in particular, one of the results of the institutional structures of the year of literacy. Now what happened, of course, is that the calculator properly or the technical calculator emerged, which liberated humans from that particular role. And I mean that both earnestly, meaning it freed people from the odium of being poor machines. But I also mean it ironically, meaning it caused them to no longer have that job. And we’ll get to that point in a moment. But the, the, the era that we’re entering into, particularly AI era, but also the robotics here and others portends a tremendously larger liberation humans from the odium of being mediocre machines and I mean this being accountants and being lawyers and frankly in many cases, we doctors, including and up to all the other kinds of things that people do. And this begs an interesting question, which is one. How do we avoid the the inverse of that which to say how do we avoid the catastrophe of everybody being unemployed. And then to at the limit. What does that mean, like what role do human beings play in a world where so many things that human beings used to do are now being held vastly more effectively by machines. And so the role of technology. Those are some of the most fundamental questions. And any new form of governance needs to address, particularly those two questions. Well, let’s just say three. The three primary questions which is, how do we navigate the problem that our existing institutional structure is premised around people only being able to meet their physical material needs by virtue of doing certain kinds of work that are going to become obsolete, relatively too rapidly to try to do this retraining thing effectively. That’s one I called I’ve called that the coming great economic transition to how do we do so in a fashion which ennobles the human spirit. You know something like a, we’re all on the on the dole of the UBI was called the UBI nightmare or the negative form of that. Where everybody is sort of wandering around in the soul destroying swamp that destroys people when they win the lottery is a is a is a fail fail condition in a catastrophic way. And so we have to figure out that as well. Like how do we simultaneously migrate people to where they are properly liberated from the odium of being poor machines but actually liberated into a proper human role in the world. What does that look like what is that, I would say by the way that it’s making effective choices that that’s our most fundamental thing. And that to become virtuous is directly related to that but we’ll get to that in a moment. Okay, so let me let me then I’ve got two more bullet points that I think are useful to put it into the question about those first two because I think there’s a. There’s been there’s been analogs to this. They’re not the same. So that’s why I’m using the word analog. Right. So you get the displacement of the farmer in ancient in the Roman Republic and in the empire by the slave. And then you get the drift into the city and you get the permanently unemployed living on the dole of the government. Right. And then what you have is you have the problem of the mob. Which is I think is very analogous to what you’re proposing. And then the solution of course was the bread and circuses solution and and and then the pageantry of the god king in order to distract people. And my concern is that it’s not just a problem of prescience you’re pointing to but there’s also a problem of competition that all of these other factors of entertainment bread and circuses and god kings is also already being adopted as a prevalent and pervasive strategy for dealing with what you’re pointing to So it’s not just that there’s something coming of which we are not prepared. It seems to me it’s already occurring and noxious elements that will thwart any real solution already have significant power and influence. So I’m just trying to amplify what you’re saying. Yeah, I don’t. The way that you speak does not allow the the kind of aesthetics of firebrand to be forced upon you. But that was a very firebrandy thing you just said. Right. Which with which I agree profoundly. So I’ll put it in a slightly different way. I think. And by the way, if I’m putting in a way that is not harmonious with what you just said, you can obviously put the blame for that on me. The poor experts, I’m going to make a distinction between expertise and competence. The poor experts who have been given, and in some sense taken authority and responsibility for governance, the technocracy. When faced with the contemporary version of the Roman problematic that you just described, seem to have no other recourse than to implement a contemporary version of the same tools implemented. So perhaps instead of of lions and gladiators, we’re currently using Netflix and are exploring how we might use VR in the metaverse. But it’s the same thing. And so, and the point I would make when I say the, the poor experts is that they never had a chance that the notion of expertise is one of the things that is, I would say, part of the notion of complicatedness. Yes. And isn’t the right kind of thing. Yeah, expertise is a domain specific term, not a domain general term. Yeah. And, and, and interestingly enough, is the kind of thing that machines will be very much better at, you know, yes, already, in many ways, many ways and increasingly. And this other category, or other thing that I’ll simply call competence is what will replace it. And by the way, yes, and I will sort of define competence as awareness sensitivity to the whole context that is under investigation. So, as an example of what this new governance model looks like. It is composed of holes that are deeply contextually governed. And so instead of W H O L E, by the way, W H O L E. By the way, yes. Rather than a disciplinary structure that endeavors to analytically break worlds into discrete domains, which then one can produce expertise in, and then endeavor to govern in a complicated fashion, using some form of bureaucratic institution. And so in the new form of governance, which, by the way, is the same as the old form of governance, but now, hopefully more robust. We actually are aware of the fact that context matters that all parts are parts of holes and deeply subtle, and oftentimes very difficult to notice fashions, and that the new competence involves a capacity to be in relationship with the sort of the intrinsics of a well integrated system, which is called, let’s say, for example, a river system, which fully implicates all of the other things, both in terms of nested holes like the river system is part of both a water system and a air system, for example, and a biological system, the presence of beavers significantly changes the And the new, the competence, I’m defining as a new sort of literacy or a new capacity in governance is both awareness what I just, the fact that I just pointed out, I, that it is a hole, and also the fact that all holes implicate a variety of other kinds of holes in highly subtle context sensitive ways, which is radically different from the kind of thing a that expertise could ever do, and therefore be that even extremely sophisticated AI systems could ever do. I fundamentally agree. In fact, I’m. It’s always amazing to me how much our projects resonantly converge. I mean, though, though. The whole project. One of the main thrusts of the platonic dialogues with Socrates is to get to get people to make this move to move them off authority or intuition to expertise, and then say but nevertheless expertise is not wisdom and you do this sort of double move, and you’re trying to get people be like you’ve got trying to get them post expertise in the understanding of what wisdom is. And then of course you have in that the platonic tonus, the stereoscopic commitment to we are always finite, we’re always in the finitary predicament, but we are always oriented towards transcendence, we are oriented towards the whole, right, synoptic integration. And if we lose either one of these we fall into tyranny or servitude and we have to hold the two together, and that that is a domain general thing and it’s not an extra, it’s not something for which there can be an expertise. And ultimately we can only properly love it we can never possess it, because we think we possess it that we’ve converted it back into expertise, etc, etc. All of this is so I mean, and that’s of course what I’m trying to tease out and turn into practice with the after Socrates project is exactly. Exactly that what you’re calling competence that that but to me, that is the ancient ancient platonic call to the love of wisdom. Mm hmm. Well let’s let’s double click on that so what I’d like to do is I’d also now like to officially, they claim to the meaning of the term sovereignty. Okay. I feel that it has been. I’m a squatter, it’s been it’s been left under occupied. And by force majeure I’m claiming it. Okay, let me define what I mean by it, please. So, I’m going to kind of walk around a little bit because I feel like I want to poke a few things. One of the things I’ve noticed about the American constitutional frame that I believe is a fundamental flaw is that it, it largely defines itself by virtue of a negative space in relationship to the monarchy with which he was struggling. So the nation of liberty represents the degree to which an aristocracy has right to limit the power of monarchy. This conception of liberty therefore intrinsically implies a tyranny that is resistance against. Yeah, it’s a freedom from the Berlin talks about. Exactly. And unfortunately, therefore, as your various institutions that are endeavoring to propose or hold liberty degrade as institutions are want to do. Interestingly enough, the tyranny that was held at the shadow, but nonetheless held in the story will raise its ugly face. And I think that’s one way that I’m putting that out there because the notion of sovereignty that we have received is equivalent, meaning, it is largely described as a negative freedom. And I would say that both the concept of the sovereign state, and in a meaningful sense the sovereign individual and I’ll describe what I mean by that in a moment are in fact nonsense that a state cannot be sovereign per se. And that is because the conception of sovereignty that is endeavored to be used is not coherent. And that the sovereign individual which is understood as the next step of the breaking down of the kind of sovereignty that is described when we talk about the state as sovereign. And I think the concept of sovereignty that we’re using when we think of the sovereign state, and we simply replace the word state with the word individual. So we say sovereign in that sense. This is also incoherent. Okay. So, what do I think is a coherent meaning for the concept of sovereignty. What is this? Do you mean incoherent because it’s largely negatively defined and it doesn’t have any internal coherency holding it together? Is that what you mean? Exactly. It exists only by virtue of describing something that it is in resistance against. Like the way in the Cold War freedom became freedom from communism and then when communism sort of ends, the notion of freedom becomes sort of unmoored and people realize that it’s incoherent. So there’s many different equivocal meanings floating around something like that just by an analogy. By a very nice analogy. Okay. So from the inverse from the center out. And this is something I talked about a decent amount like five years ago but I haven’t brought it up recently. The notion of sovereignty means the capacity to make effective choices in a given context. We can explicate what I mean by effective choice but for the moment I’ll just leave that. But the point there is twofold. And by the way, the notion of sovereignty therefore resonates very strongly with the broader notion of virtue, which is to say that a being that has sovereignty is a being that also has a deep embodiment of a diverse number of virtues in particular in relationship to a given context. And so, one cannot be sovereign in essence unless you’re speaking about perhaps the notion of God as you discussed with Bishop Maximus which I will not get into this moment. But finite beings are sovereign in the context of an actual context and that could be as trivial as sovereign in the context of making wood burn into a fire, or as fundamental as sovereign in the context of say parenting, or in the context of stewarding a community in relationship with multi generations and the nature that they live in and on. But the point is very simple, and it connects very nice, nicely with the notion of competence, meaning. I have a set of capacities, which include appropriate perception and sensitivities heuristics and tools, which can operate at the appropriate rate to perceive the relevant aspects of the context, talking about robust relevance realization and actuation, perceive the relevant aspects of the context that I find myself in. And then I have the, the capacities to select appropriate choices that, and then to actuate them elegantly, meaning using the constraints of energy and the actual constraints of the environment that I’m in. All that kind of stuff. Yes. All that kind of stuff. To further my capacity to make choices in the next moment that I find myself in. So the, the metaphor that I often use is surfing, meaning, if I am sovereign in the context of surfing what that means is that I have a surfboard, and I know how to surf. And in this particular wave I have the physical acumen to be able to paddle into it and drop into it and then moment to moment I can make the micro movements of my body and relationship with the unfolding reality of the complexity of the wave, which of course I find myself a deeply complex relationship with the energy of the wave the winds, and the subsurface subsurface topography of the ocean. So as to continue to find myself and that unique location of wave, such that my board is still locked into the pocket and I continue to surf. And I can expand that out. I want to stop there because I want to probe on this because I want to make sure. Well, I’ll propose something and what I think I might be hearing. So, it sounds to me like sovereignty, the sovereign, I’ll just, I’m going to use the word individual in a very generic sense the sovereign individual, because I don’t necessarily mean a human person. The sovereign individual is a species of a cognitive agent. So everything behaves, but agents are different from behaviors and that agents can determine the consequences of their behavior and alter the behavior in order to bring about desired consequences and they have desired consequences, because they are autonomous auto poetic entities their self making entity. And so a paramecium is properly very properly an agent. Now, I’m wondering if you would extend the notion of sovereignty to a paramecium, and if not just let me finish. But then when I’m when I’m hearing when you invoke things like virtue because I don’t know we could talk about the virtue of paramecium. I think we’re moving into the idea almost an Aristotelian idea, and that’s not that’s meant to be a compliment. I think you might that a sovereign is an agent that has has reflectively appropriated its agency in order to further enhance its agency by to some degree, explicating and reflecting upon the machinery of its agency and recursively intervening in its agency in order to enhance its agentic capacity, not just to achieve this goal or that goal, but to enhance its overall capacity to achieve goals per se. Does that work as a proposal. Yes, this works very nicely now in my own sort of kludgy vocabulary I make the distinction between lowercase s and capital S. Right. And so I would say that a paramecium is lowercase s sovereign. And that the the human journey and its relationship with the theological journey is the capital S. And here I’m very much inspired by the conversations that you have with Jonathan Pagio in relationship with things like symbolism. Yes, yes. It’s a vector right when we cannot ever achieve in this world, capital S sovereignty as a finished state, as you said, but rather it is a relationship with life and relationship with self that has a directionality to it, a very, very, very precise directionality. But it is unfolding in continuity, and that’s part of the nature of the journey that we’re on as humans. So, we find ourselves in a very interesting point, I would say that there’s a lowercase sovereignty that goes down to the limits of agency. Right. So I’m not going to be opining around the kind of the place where Stuart Kaufman spent so much time, you know, is it autocatalytic chemistry sovereign. Maybe, but there’s a limit. Where paramecium and most specifically in my example something like say heart cell is lowercase s. And what we find is that in particular these lower level holes or elements achieve a level of sovereignty in relationship with other elements around things that are properly well integrated holes, what I mean is for example an organ, like a heart or a liver is a So, we’re carrying together of lower scale lowercase s sovereigns in a fashion that delivers a higher scale. Sovereignty over a more complex domain. Yeah, this is john john Stewart’s idea about although there’s no teleology and evolution. There is a gradient shift towards what he calls increasing and education, in which you get previously autonomous things And so, he’s proposing that we need, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the conversations I’ve had with him, but he’s proposing that we need to really ramp up the identification of distributed cognition into something that we can really clearly see as having a designated role in governance to Yes, yes. In fact, I recently did a conversation with a young man in, I think he’s German, very young man, but he has rolled out a proposal that I would say is precisely this kind of thing like an identification of distributed cognition with a lot of very nice thoughts. So, a lot of the embodiment a lot of the actual, he calls it incarnation, which I quite like of this new form of governance, I think is largely about that. So let me give you a concrete example in a different view. So, a lot of the embodiment a lot of the actual, he calls it incarnation, which I quite like of this new form of governance, I think is largely about that. So let me give you a concrete example in a different view. Something that you and I have been doing a lot of and this notion of D logos. So, we have two distinct elements to it. And actually, I’ll add a third, which is always going to be there. One is we have the notion of something like lowercase sovereignty between communicating agents in relationship with the capacity to engage in creating a communications channel. All right. And let me just kind of step back a bit. So the problem we’re dealing with is that the problem of distributed cognition, the problem of communication between two humans, let’s make it simple at that point. In the past, say for the past 250 years, has been governed by something like paradigmatic structures, where we have things like well defined terms. And we have things like shared disciplinary knowledge. And what happens is that we sort of have a dictionary of well defined terms. You can feel like the resonance of complicatedness here. And the game is actually pretty simple. Either I understand the term, or I have to learn the term. So I join a discipline, I become a doctor, and I learn what some esoteric medical term happens to mean. Once I have achieved a level of expertise in that particular language, I can then communicate with other members of that community. Yes, now, that’s how we have solved this problem in paradigmatic space. And the problem of digital is that we now have something like 8 billion distinct humans all operating in a vast space of developing novel relationships with novel increasingly novel realities, and all paradigmatic dictionaries. And we now kind of fail, meaning the interaction I have with somebody on Twitter, the ability for us to diagnose whether or not we’re actually part of a pre existing institutional structure and are actually using the same code book to define certain terms. Things are happening too rapidly. And by the way, the meaning of terms is changing too rapidly for that paradigmatic model to work. So, we need a new program. I’m guilty of this mistake as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely a problem. We actually need a new fundamental protocol, which assumes that we don’t know what we’re talking about that assumes more or less that we actually don’t have a shared vocabulary. That’s so Socratic through and through it. Yeah, it is. Okay, so think about the Socratic. So, what’s the implication right there’s really three elements. One element is, we need to have something like a protocol, like how do we actually do this, and I’m, by the way, music or protocol both because it’s something that indigenous communities have used for a long time in terms of how to distinct groups who don’t know each other, go through the process of actually coming into relationship with each other which is exactly we’re talking about. It’s the upper Paleolithic it’s the original upper Paleolithic problem, right. So, the symbolism and shamanism were plausibly part of the solution to that original version of the problem. I just want to throw that into into the mix keep going, I have a very very poor historical theory that I operate with and exactly how that works but I won’t throw that out there now because it’s super non rigorous but you know I like it. But in any event, we need a protocol and the other side of protocol that in the technical world we use of course is technical protocol like the internet protocol like IP. And if we think about that I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember remember the old dial up modem and the way that it worked. Yeah, yeah. You know if you think about every single sound that it made actually was a physical instantiation of a certain stage of the protocol that actually builds up the process of moving from. Are we able to communicate at all, are we both the kinds of things that have the potential to communicate up through a series of things that they call handshakes so saying, okay well great you’re the kind of thing that communicates neat. So we can take a proposal of how we might communicate oh you agree cool. Now we’re going to use that to bootstrap the next level, the next level until eventually, you know I can transmit a well over a 56 K connection on top of twisted copper telephone wires which is a profound thing. We’re talking about the same kind of thing right every time to individual humans connect via social media. We’re actually implicitly engaging in that kind of action poorly. So the new form of governance is going to have to actually do that properly, and we’ll have a process whereby we can actually identify where are we in some kind of well defined stack of relationality, and then have a process a protocol for establishing a communications channel through which we can then engage in building a context of relationality. Okay, so let me make sure I’m hearing you right. So one of the central tasks of the new government, new governance, not new government that was a slip. New governance is to replace poor product protocol with proper protocol. Yes. Okay. Yes. And in a second to bring back one of the primary components of proper protocol but for right now I’m going to say the second kind of capacity is competence in implementing that protocol, so to be software in relationship with communication. And you know you you’ve actually put tremendous amount of effort to that sort of thing in the context of things like, what does a human being have to have as sort of basic human capabilities to engage in dialogous. Right. Yeah, you know simple example is one that I’ve taken from my friend, Benita Roy, she taught me was the notion of mapping error, or the one that you call that often often which has to do with disambiguation or noticing what there is. What’s the word that you used to describe it when a meaning is not clear, like equivocal, equivocal, exactly. You know, a new literacy is to have a psychological awareness of the fact that terms can be equivocal. And that quite often, if you are communicating with somebody, and their use of a term doesn’t make any sense to you. You were likely dealing with an equivocation, or perhaps even distinct linguistic histories where they’re using that word to mean something completely differently because it is embodied in a very different lineage context. And having for example an emotional response of curiosity, and the ability to activate a disambiguation protocol, as opposed to an emotional response of wanting to punch them in the face or cancel them, for example. Right, you know in the current environment because we’re operating using very broken indigenous, you know, human tribal familial capacities to engage in this random walk through innovation space, we find ourselves in the unspeakably novel context of And the unspeakably novel context and endeavoring to communicate with human beings that we’ve never met, or are currently interacting with in embodied fashion via principally just small amounts of text, and therefore oftentimes make mistakes like we get really angry when they say something that doesn’t sound right to us. And then you get the reverse error that people try to communicate the wrong kind of thing in a medium they try to communicate a philosophical argument on Twitter, which is a disaster. Which is a disaster. Exactly. By the way, it’s, it’s a goes all the way down, like my wife and I have been very nerdy have many times had the conversation of to me, darling. That particular question that you’re asking is not appropriately asked while you’re driving in the car using text. Yeah, we should wait, like, you know, until we have an interpersonal face to face to have that conversation because that’s the appropriate communications context to have that particular kind of relationality so in the loop back to the notion of what a proper protocol ultimately unfolds into a proper protocol creates the appropriate communications context to then begin the embodiment of the proper relational context that has the right sort of richness and sensitivity and nuance to instantiate a wholeness that is that we can build then a relational competence that can hold, whatever it is we’re actually going to be dealing with. I see what you mean now I mean the the the workshops where we take people through meditation contemplation the circling practices into the philosophical fellowship, and then we do all of that to build up that protocol. Right, and then, and then we, the people are introduced to dialectic into DL logos. Exactly. And let me let me tell you, my, my study of this tells me that just getting that part right will resolve 80% of the problems we’re currently doing with. It is it is profound what happens if we just get the combination of a proper protocol which has this very specific element of understanding that communication context that develops proper relationality and humans who are sovereign in the context of those two pieces, and we get that element together, multiplied by the fact that we actually do have a billion, a gentic minds that are just sort of radically being underutilized lots of good stuff happens lots of bad stuff goes away. Okay, so that’s one example of what this new neo neo cortex looks like. Let me give you a different example and then I think we may have actually been kind of running out of time which is nice it feels like we’ve done some really good stuff. Well, I think we’ve laid the foundations for the series very well. Yeah, yeah so some. Yeah, so let me lay this other one down. Because I feel like it’s potent and I noticed that it confuses actually Schmackenberger when I talked with him about about it, about a year and a half ago. It didn’t land, then and I’m not sure if it ever really did. So if you think about an old fashioned notion of government, and I’ll just use the American way of doing it. We ended up dividing it into three distinct domains, the executive the legislative and the theoretical. Here’s my proposition. My proposition is that the move into the digital is as a primary element, a radical releasing of energies that say that have been unduly bound into this location of being a false machine. In other words, the civic code. We made a mistake of binding too much into algorithms and binding too much into humans running bureaucracies and things like that. And then the move into the digital liberates that tremendously. We talked about that a moment ago in terms of liberating human energy that we no longer have to be calculators. But I mean the same thing in the context of these higher order abstractions of governance and specifically what I mean is the notion of the function of the legislative, of which, by the way, the regulatory is a subsidiary. Is radically displaced in the new form of governance that the era of literacy was the crowning of the legislative and that’s no longer either needed or proper. That the era of the digital involves a radical reduction of the legislative function and a restoration of the juridical function, which by the way completely changes the location of the executive function, but I don’t think we have time to get there. And what I discovered when I was thinking about this is a really beautiful notion of revival. And I think you may have actually been the one who put it in my head. Or maybe Bishop Maximus, because I’m thinking about Exodus. And I think Moses. I’m thinking about topology. So, in the story of Moses, who played a very interesting role, Moses played the role of governance in the context of the, the Jews traveling across the desert as the direct interface to God. But he played the role of judge. Right. Not the role of king. And he was deferred, there were many judges there’s a whole book of the Bible. But that transition is the key. Right. That tells me that to the to the story of the Torah, the Old Testament, that this the notion of judges more fundamental. It is the, the proper location of where the kind of the heart of governance is meaning. It’s how you steward the commons and think about how commons law works. This very interesting. The radical, right. Commons law to radical. What does that mean what that means is wisdom. We use wisdom to resolve disputes, right, as opposed to endeavoring to codify choice create constraints in bureaucracies to govern choice. I think that’s a very important point to recognize that sovereign human beings and I mean this both in both senses of the term now are making choices locally at the lowest level on the ground, but the highest degree of perception of what’s really happening is that they need to ultimately express their values into world at the by themselves like and in small self organizing groups, and that the biggest challenge, the most fundamental challenge of governance, beyond by the way communication which we just covered is resolving the issue of the world, right where these these groups of individuals and groups of individuals find themselves noticing that their sovereignty is not adequate to the scope of the wholeness that they are in relationship with. Therefore, we need to have individuals who are notably wise and are arranged in such a way. Remember, when Moses was was counseled to subsidiarity a principal and grant juridical authority to a constellation of judges besides himself. It was done frantically fractally right at different levels of scale, all the way down, I believe, 10, which is really neat, think about that granularly. But the two rules were that the individuals were wise and they were not corruptible, and they were not likely to be bought off, meaning that their interests were aligned with both the individuals that they’re interacting with personally, and with the larger whole, and they had a competence they had a sovereignty that was adequate to the responsibility that they were holding. Well, that’s that. And so this is there’s two moves here. One move is the removal of the legislative as the center or the more fundamental notion of governance, which is the same thing as the removal of the bureaucratic or the algorithmic. And the second is the restoration of a subsidiarity or a fractal wisdom based Commons law that is principally around developing highly context aware remember the, the notion of the legislature has to do with the abstraction of trying to create general rules that are, you know, as relevant to particular context as they specify, specify. Yes, I get it. Context aware. Yeah. Whereas a fine grained common law is precisely context where right it is a conflict between two real situated humans in a real actual environment that has real actual consequences for all the other people in the nature with which they’re in relationship, and a proper judge has proper responsibility for addressing the whole thing. Right. I mean, be that x is the right thing to do instead of y and that’s the judges job and then we want to do is we want to build the right kind of meta context, such that the judges are correct that the judges are there that there was in by wise I actually mean both that they actually have real sovereignty in relationship to the context they have responsibility for but also that they’re actually embedded, meaning that they’re legitimate in the Habermas in sense. Does that make sense. Yeah, so far it does. So, I mean, two questions emerge. One is, why did the Israel I mean I’m going to use, I’m going to use the mythological language, I’m asking a general question but why did the Israelites want to replace the judges with kings, because that seems to be a question that needs to be answered and I think there’s a There’s a related question which is, how do we deal with the Promethean spirit which regards tradition as something to be overcome because we emphasize the progress into the new. And how do we keep that distinct from the openness to emergence that for me is a pressing problem right now. Right, I know, right, you want to you want to be beholding to the tradition, but you don’t want to fall into being a traditionalist you want to be somebody who is open to emergence without pronouncing death on the committed to the flames of the tradition. And then, thirdly, you have Plato’s problem. Who’s going to guard the guardians, the philosopher kings are very much Plato’s attempt to give something like the judges. And of course it did happen we had Marcus Aurelius. But the thing that’s interesting there is it took it took non constitutional constraints, a bunch of gay emperors that adopted their errors, a bunch of errors from which they then chose the most competent in really in your In order for it to work. And of course Plato didn’t have a solution to that problem and he kept wrestling with it. And many people in fact argue that the Republic is, and I agree with this is a profound critique of any utopic proposals. So that would be the three questions and maybe those can be the questions we could we could pursue next time. Yeah, can I can I just address a little bit of the first, just kind of put a hook, and then I think it’s exactly right for us to do the rest next time because it feels to me like that’s a, what I’d like to do is invoke and open a proper space of dialogous on that question. Yes, yes, totally. It goes without saying that’s a quite a potent question. Right. So the first I will put this out here, and I think it creates some pretty good hooks and the question, the original question the first question was, why did the Israelites go from judges to kings. Here’s why. I think I will I will say it with some assertiveness. The executive function, which is fundamentally the king. So for example in medieval Europe, the king played both the role of judge like juridical functions grounded in the king, and the judges who traveled around and implemented common law were direct reports to the king, and also played the military function. Here’s the thing. The executive function which is to say, enforcement of the law. So, in a well constituted community is an intrinsic of the juridical function only make that explicit. So let’s say we have a group of 10 people. And they all know each other, like they’re all in real relationship, and they’ve all identified a given individual as wise, which is to say that individual has high legitimacy. They all trust this person is wise and well intentioned with regard to both each individual and to the larger group as a whole. Okay. So I properly created community. And then the conflict emerges between members of that community, and eventually become something that is subject to juridical evaluation. The wise elder will opine on it will speak with wisdom and clarity. And they’ve done well, if they actually have done a proper job that itself enforcing, meaning that the one person, for example, or perhaps the two people in conflict, who may or may not be super awesome happy with the results of the judgment have eight other people in the community that they’re in very deep complex relationship with, who are all sort of looking at them and saying, Look, this is how we do it here. And wisdom has spoken and honestly it sounds pretty fucking wise. So I don’t know what problem you’ve got with it, but get in line itself enforcing because the community actually has proper scale, meaning there’s not too many people involved, and it has proper verticality that the wisdom is legitimate. Okay, now we have two problems that emerge. One is when you’re dealing with with war, when you’re actually dealing with problems where many of your disputes. Don’t have a shared sense of wisdom. And when I have a dispute with a neighboring tribe, let’s say the Philistines, and I don’t have any shared elder where we can resolve those disputes in the fashion I just described, we resolve this disputes using war and war is king, not judge. And what happened to the ancient Israelites is that they, the day they left the desert and they entered the land of milk and honey they immediately entered into war, and therefore left in realm of judge quad judge and entered the realm of King quarking. And we have been living in that world ever since, both historically in some sense and also within the mythological sense and so one of the reasons why our current governance system is so jacked is it’s in fact designed to constantly be fighting war, and therefore the elevation of the executive. The other side of it is when you are entered into a place that has the muscular legislature, and no longer is grounded in a commons. Then, there aren’t any any truly integrated holes that have both horizontal and vertical. Right. When I have a judge in the American political system. When I evaluate the laws that are written by a legislature. I have no particular sense that any of those guys are either a non corrupt or be wise or see have my interest in mind at all. It is imposed upon me as if it’s at war. And so therefore, I then again have to be and have a relationship of King. The only way to enforce the laws in a society where everyone is fundamentally separated from proper real relationality is the implementation of the king style, the executive at the top. And when we have moved into this new form of governance this neo neo cortex. Remember I mentioned planetary scale is one of the problematics that we’re dealing with all humans will be in fact in a relationship of context relationship And that’s a fully integrated proper whole with verticality and horizontality, which means that we are no longer in a position of intrinsically at war, but rather in a space where the juridical can and therefore, and should play the proper role as the base of governance, which is very nice. And so, I think that’s that the default state of everybody being in a relationship of sort of default war, meaning social relationships relationships that are not real not rich will also no longer be the case. Conflict can in fact be mitigated by a properly constructed juridical constellation. So, I’ll put that as a provisional answer to the first question and propose that it also creates a tremendous amount of hooks into the nature of how we might respond to the second question. Well, I’m going to give you an initial thing about the second question that since you did an initial for the first, which is Moses isn’t just a judge he’s also a prophet and all of the judges were also prophets in fact the terms are used and then after the institution of the king the prophet becomes distinct. And then of course the ideas Christ brings back the pre reintegrates the priest the king and the prophet, but here’s the thing about the emergence issue right. I think we shouldn’t judge people, sorry, we shouldn’t, people should not ascend to the role or if that’s even the right verb but whatever, ascend to the role of judge just because of their retrospective capacity to deal with appropriating and applying the tradition. We also have a prophetic capacity to disclose what is pertinent and perennial in a way that shakes people up to what is emerging. Oh, man. That is so sweet. Yes. That is beautiful. Good Lord. It’s feel like illuminated manuscript in words. Thank you. Yeah. So let’s play with those two ideas. When we come back and pick this up. And, as always, I’m going to give my guest, which is you, the opportunity for last word, doesn’t that be summative or cumulative it could just be inspirational aspirational or provocative. It could be enigmatic but how what parting where do you want to leave. Let’s call it an invocation. You know we entered into this stage of our relationship our dialogue with a sense of timeliness, meaning that it appears that we are now at a time where it’s proper necessary and possible for this new form of governance to finally begin the process of happening. And so the invocation is that perhaps this conversation will begin that in earnest, and that perhaps we’re kicking off something deeply new in the human story. I hope so too. Thank you so much, my dear friend. Wow.