https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yoi9GE9e_vM
Welcome to the Stoa. The Stoa is a digital campfire where we cohere in dialogue about what matters most at the knife’s edge of what’s happening now. Alright everyone, welcome to the Stoa. I am Peter Lindberg, the steward of the Stoa. Some of you may know I run a Stoa group in Toronto, Canada, and obviously we can’t meet in person at the moment, so I’ve launched the Stoa. I am seeing the Stoa not only as a place to talk and practice our Stoicism, surely some of that will happen, but I’m viewing it as a digital campfire for us to cohere in dialogue about what matters most at the knife’s edge of this moment. Today my good friend John Vervecky is going to share his latest thoughts on the meaning crisis and how it relates to this unfolding COVID-19 situation. At first I suggested to John we call this meeting the meaning opportunity, then the meeting kairos, mainly because I’ve been hearing a lot of people in the circles, John and I run in, saying that they have a new sense of meaning in this moment. When I mentioned that to John, John prudently suggested that we should be careful in conflating what feels meaningful to what feels urgent, hence the reason for the question mark of today’s title. So in a moment I will hand it over to John and how this session worked today. After he shares his thoughts, I’ll ask him some questions and we’ll open up for the group for questions. If you have a question, write it in the chat box and I will unmute you and then just read your question to John. If you prefer I read your question, then just indicate that when you write it in the chat box. And we’ll go for about 60 minutes if it goes a little bit over, maybe 75 minutes if that’s okay with everyone. So that being said, I will hand it over to John right now. Let’s see, I might have to mute you, John. Hold on. Can you mute yourself right now, John? Unmute yourself. Can you hear me now? Yeah, I can hear you. Great, great. Okay, excellent. We had me both muted. So thank you for inviting me, Peter, and I’m very intrigued by the question that’s coming up for me right now. And so I guess what I want to do is explore what’s happening right now and how it might be intersecting with the meeting crisis. So one thing that comes to mind is that one thing we might expect is that people are experiencing a lot of reciprocal narrowing. Their lives are getting narrowed. Their agency and their flexibility is narrowing. They’re experiencing the kind of domicile in which a lot of the places that they thought of as their home and where they belong and where they worked are getting truncated. And of course, that is happening. I’m talking to people that are experiencing this rather intensely. We might also see people coming to experience this in a really challenging manner in that they’re being sort of thrown back onto their subjectivity in a way that could call the way that subjectivity from Descartes on has been so central to us, has had such normative authority for us. And finding that the subjectivity does not have that much resources to provide them with what they need to confront the radical changes, both the immediate ones and potentially the more abstract long-term ones that they’re facing. So we could see that happening. We could see, as Peter mentioned, people expressing a tremendous amount of meaningfulness coming out. And this could be due to a couple of things. This could be due to just the urgency. We could be dropping down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And we’re actually really not dealing with meaning in life issues. We’re dealing with solving a lot of very concrete problems. And so our problem solving machinery is getting sort of current satisfaction. That could be happening. And that could be part of what I was alluding to when I mentioned to Peter, we might be confusing urgency with meaning. It could be that as people are being crunched downward and they’re losing a lot of the things, and this is more of a Crooked Guardian point, it kept us busy and distracted and enmeshed in things that we thought would give us a sense of meaning and happiness. We’ve discovered perhaps that we can lose a lot of this. And we are forced into the interpersonal relationships, which is what we’re doing right now, as being the locus where we’re trying to satisfy our need for meaning. We’re finding that this is actually a better place to try and find meaning than the other things we were doing before. So we could be experiencing an increase of meaning because of a recovery of the being mode that is actually present in dialogue. We could be recovering meaning because we, and I’ve seen people doing this, we fall into a kind of nostalgia, what I might call a mythological nostalgia. The virus is kind of like a Greek or an Old Testament deity. It’s this pervasive, ubiquitous thing out there, chaotically sort of, it’s like a hyper object, to use Morton’s term, moving through the world and changing and altering things, but in an abstract way and behind the scenes. And it seems to be demanding a purity code from us, a tremendous purity code. It feels a lot like an Old Testament deity. And so that kind of nostalgia, and let’s not forget that this is deeply woven, whether or not we’re religious, is deeply woven into our cultural cognitive grammar. So people might be picking up on that and finding the fact that they’re in this kind of mythological narrative very meaningful to them. People might be finding it meaningful precisely because they think this has provided the final evidence for the need for their particular pseudo-religious ideological utopia, which they are certain is on the horizon, very much like the people that Frankel talked about in the camps who were certain of when they were going to be liberated. And then they, of course, turned out to be the people, once the day had passed, they of course collapsed and often dragged other people down with them. So what I’m saying is, I think it’s more plausible, and this is why I like the term Kairos, that we’re in a situation in which we’re having a very complex set of reactions to what’s happening right now. I think some people are finding an exacerbation of the meeting crisis in ways I’ve articulated. I think people are maybe perhaps confusing meaning and urgency. People might be recovering the meaning of the being mode in the, as things get crunched down to interpersonal dialogue. People might be recovering meaning in a way that I think is dangerous because they are falling into a well-worn and well-understood, although not very explicitly in their consciousness, explicitly aware, mythological narrative of these kinds of mythological, somewhat demonic forces at work in the world. And so I think it’s one of the things we need to do very carefully is question in a penetrative fashion what this, what the various experiences of increase or de-increase in meaningfulness are. And when we come to a better approximation of that complexity, coming to a decision about how we can best interact with the Kairos, because I do think that there is a real potential here because the Kairos can tempt you towards the good or towards the evil. I think there’s a real opportunity here to see our cultural cognitive grammar shifting in a fundamental way. I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to happen, but I think there is the real potential for this to happen. And I think there’s a real need for this to happen because I think it is highly probable that this is not our last pandemic. All of the factors that have caused this pandemic are still in existence and still growing. This pandemic was predicted. It has been predicted multiple times in the last decade. And the factors upon which that successful prediction were made are still in existence and accelerating. And I think it’s highly likely that we will come into it. And I do not think it will be a merely additive effect, the second pandemic. I think it will be an exponential effect on the way it shakes things up and causes a sort of horrific exposure to the possibility of a fundamental change in our worldview. So that’s my thinking right now. And that’s the kind of thing I’d like to explore with you guys. Great. So I’ll warm John up with some questions. If you have questions, just start writing in the chat box and then I’ll call you out or read it on your behalf. So my first question, John. So John and I have a regular circling practice and I only spoke to you once and our practice kind of is on hold at the moment. So just to get in like a really embodied state, I’m curious how since it started dawning on the collective unconscious that this is going to be this is a big deal. How did it affect you personally and in the embodied sense? So that’s very good. Very good question. So part of the way that became very salient to me was the extra stressor on me. So one part of it is just my own sort of apprehension about what’s going on. Part of it was picking up on the stress it was inducing in the people that I care a lot about because they face real risk in important ways. And part of it was also an existential issue because I was struggling to understand how to be rational in the face of so much uncertainty and so much shifting information. I was keenly aware of the fact that the representative bias and the confirmation bias and the availability heuristic were kicking in and causing me to give wildly inappropriate judgments of the probability of things. And I was also aware of the fact that it was difficult for me to devote the time needed in order to determine the plausibility of some of the information I was given. And I was also aware of the fact that this was not something for which I could merely sort of wait because of the urgency of the risk. My actions could definitely put other people at risk. So my existential issue was sort of in competition with the stressors and also the concern I have for the people that I care about and who are in my care. And what that has resulted personally for me is an elevation of my Meniere’s disease in my left ear, which has been very troubling and trying for me. And so I’ve had to do quite a bit to moderate that. And I’ve also decided the way I can take action is to take all of the reasonable precautions that are being advised to me from people I respect both personally because they have the right of the requisite medical and health training and from the scientific community. And then beyond that, turn to what can I do to make a difference, which is one of the reasons why I’m here right now. It’s one of the reasons why I started teaching my meditation course online for free. I started that on Monday. And it’s phenomenologically what that has meant for me in terms of embodiment is my ability to take action in a way that I’m being told by others is mattering to them and making a difference has significantly reduced my stress. So and then I came to a decision point. This came out in a discussion I had with Andrew Sweeney and Christopher Master Pietro that in the end, my survival, my just raw bare survival, and this is, I guess, a Socratic principle, is not worth sacrificing every other principle for which I live. And so if it comes to a place where I have to expose myself to biological risk because principles that I very much care about are being put at risk, then I’ve decided that that’s in fact what I will do. And you and I, we’ve been texting about this and I know Jordan, you’ve been talking about it, how this could be a moment to ride the liminal, ride the wave of the liminal. Oh, that was so. So that’s again, and that’s something that that’s something maybe I should have brought it up in your previous question, but it maybe belongs here because this whole discussion that I’ve been having with Jordan, it sort of bridges between my personal phenomenology and a broader sort of theoretical interest, which is this idea that Jordan and I have been exploring. Of course, in one sense, it’s connected to the religion that’s not a religion that we’ve already been talking about, but it’s also connected with giving people a formulation for a kind of deeper response to what’s going on here. And this is an idea of trying to reformulate if I’m not quite happy with the next adjective I’m going to use, but it’s the best ones for right now. Try to reformulate a post-religious sense of faith, what I call Socratic faith, and what does that look like? And it’s very much this idea of shifting faith from some sort of closure and conviction instead onto this idea of an ongoing continuity of contact with an ongoing unfolding process within reality, such that one is able to see the truth. One is able to sense, a kairos, one is able to sense the course of events, and one develops a always emerging, always evolving finesse with how to steer one’s way through that. And so we are trying to come up with, because this is of course exemplified in the Socratic dialogues, the way Socrates is always a lover of wisdom and on the course of wisdom, but he never claims any kind of completion or closure upon it. And you can see the way he’s willing to follow the argument wherever it goes. And so that kind of faith, I think, is the kind of faith we need right now. And I’m exploring it precisely because of what we talked about already earlier. I’m concerned about the kinds of faith that might be triggered right now. Obviously, there’s two kinds of nostalgic faith. One is the faith in, like I say, the mythological god, a demonic god out there. Another is a nostalgia for, let’s just get back to normal as fast as we can. Let’s just get back to normal as fast as we can. And also the utopic faith, the person who is convinced they have closure now because they have certainty as to where the future is going and how it’s going to unfold. And I think both of those kinds of faith are potentially very maladaptive. And so part of what I’ve been trying to do is stitch together my own phenomenology in the distress I’ve been facing with those theoretical concerns in the discussions I’ve been having with Jordan. Yeah, that’s really, really good. It seems like in this liminal space and this emerging culture war is happening with those narratives that you just mentioned. Yes, yes. You can already see it happening. One of the things I was worried about, and Chris and I have spoken about this, we’ve already seen the emergence of conspiracy theories that are starting to gain traction as a way of trying to explain this. And I personally had one thrown at me. I did a talk with Greg on REICS, we just posted it. And one person was basically, the invective was that it’s the intellectuals and the scientists and the theorists like me that have actually brought us into this situation right now. And so it’s like, yeah, that’s very, very dangerous that we start getting into this kind of conspiratorial narrative. So I’m going to call out people to read out their questions. Again, we have about 60 people on this chat, so we’re not going to get to all the questions. And if you didn’t indicate that you wanted me to read it out, then just unmute yourself and then ask your question to John. So the first question is, Jordan, you talked about a silver lining. If you can unmute yourself and just ask a question to John. Sure. Hey, so I’m going to quickly find it. So my question is basically, do you think, although this is a bit of a chaotic statement, but do you think there’s somewhat of a silver lining in that the instant immediacy of everything that’s happening relative to the ordinary sorts of concerns that we’re being told to be thinking about all the time through the media and so on. Maybe the silver lining is that it’s somewhat of like a relief to people’s consensus addiction or certainty addiction, which I think is one of the things that really drives people to get attached to these old legacy sense making or like information laundering infrastructures. Right, right, right. I think that’s right. I think the capacity for this to challenge the obviousness of common sense, which is how I would put what you’re saying, and the way that has been often raised to an almost sacred level in our discourse, the way that’s invoked. And it’s often a cover for, as you said, you know, very well established ways of thinking, often also cover for very bias for the operation of bias and trying to protect it from any critical examination. That’s all also at work. I think the virus has the real, I think it is doing this. So it was more than the potential, but it has an ongoing potential that’s being actualized to challenge that potential. And I think that’s the way that we can do that. I think that’s the way that we can do that. I think that’s the way that we can do that. I think that’s the way that we can do that. And that of course is what I’m trying to get at with this Kairos. It opens up possibilities, but it opens up multiple possibilities. So when people get their worldview challenge, one of the things they can do is double down. So you know the evidence of cults, right? So you have a cult and it will prophesy the end of the world. And that prophecy will gain a certain number of adherents. And then the prophecy fails. And what you might expect is, oh, that would cause the cult to bleed away. But what actually happens is the cult doubles down and it expands in size, the doubling down. They say, oh no, we were wrong. And it’s a weird phenomenon that people would think that the failure would be enough to get people to abandon and reject, but instead they double down. And that doubling down gives them a kind of attractive confidence that sucks people in. And so this in fact reliably happens. It usually takes a third or a fourth failure for the movement to fall apart, which is why I’m saying, why I think the next pandemic could be the really crunchy one. Now, I don’t have any foreknowledge of this. It could go the way you’re suggesting. It could be just this wakes people up and they see the silver lining. But like I said, there’s clear evidence for, and I gave you some of it, that people can go the other way. And that’s a concern for me. So Alex S, you had a question about death and Kairos. Yeah, can you guys hear me? Yep. Great. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, John, for your talk. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the meaning of Kairos, and especially in the present moment. And especially as it relates to the notion of death. So currently we’re in the situation where we’re facing, you know, the possibility of death is in view, kind of collectively, also individually. And we know the probabilities, you know, are different for different age groups and so on. But that is kind of in the air. And I think that in the existentialist tradition, which you kind of alluded to earlier, that connection is drawn between, you know, kind of authentic existence. And that… Yes, I agree. I was wondering if you could say maybe more about that, and especially as it relates to, you know, trying to have a more rational, wise approach to the situation, you know, rather than going to… Yep. Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question. And I want to answer that. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting, Visser does this in her book Beyond Fake. And she actually holds out stoicism in connection with this. Because we have this word fatal. And we associate it with death in particular. But what we’ve come to do is it’s like the way we think of mad as being angry, where mad, of course, means losing your sanity. And one of the things that can cause you to lose your sanity is your anger. Fatality originally meant the way reality moves of its own accord, the hands of fate in that sense, not in some magical sense, but in the sense that the universe is unfolding for things beyond our ken. And it will behave the way it’s going to behave for its own reasons, right? And so death was just one very significant instance of the fatality of all things. And Visser talks about the fact that stoicism tried to pull apart that by making a distinction between the things that are largely in the grip of nature. And then the meaning we give them, which has to do with our cognitive processing and our framing and pulling those apart, she said, was one of the deepest ways of trying to get people to be able to accept the fatality of all things. Because the fatality actually points to a deep confusion between the meaning and the event. Now, the interesting thing about that is you see, of course, this being taken up by both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, especially. And the way in which I think we can stitch together this notion of fatality and the themes you brought out around things like authenticity is that there’s a way in which the fatality of all things is present with us always, which is our mortality. And our mortality doesn’t mean the event of our death. It means that like everything else, we are deep, even our own bodies. And you see this in stoicism, right? Even our own bodies are subject to that kind of fatality. That’s what the virus can show. We think we’ve made health into a god and we are the masters of our health. Well, no, we’re not. No, we’re not. Right. I mean, we can make we can move things around and we can shift probabilities. But whatever narrative we have for ourselves and our bodies, the universe is going to unfold in our bodies independently of that narrative. So we can we can deal with one of the first and primary ways we have to deal with the fatality of all things is we have to deal with it insofar as our own bodies, our own fame, our own status, which is our mortality, which is different than just the event of our death. And I think one of the things that the virus can potentially do for us is make us step back and become mortals again, which is a very different project than what we have tried to be for a long time through the way we manipulate media and the image, which is we behave and act as if we’re immortal. And then when it becomes clear that we are, in fact, mortal, we are we are disenfranchised, packaged away, removed from media, you know, etc, etc. And I think instead, if we could come to a place where we can re-embrace our mortality, I think that would be a good way for extending the notion of authenticity off of just being true to oneself, which I think is a very poor framing of authenticity and getting it back to living. With the fatality of all things in as rational a manner as possible. That’s how I would answer that question. Can I jump in with just a quick follow up? Please, please. So I’m wondering that would you align the existential tradition more or less with Stoicism? I know Nietzsche is sometimes called a Stoic. Yeah, well, yes and no. Because, you know, Nietzsche is deeply influenced by Stoicism and, you know, Kierkegaard writes his PhD dissertation on Socrates. So there’s obviously at least a deep Socratic influence in Kierkegaard. So both of the, you know, the godfathers of existentialism, I think, are deeply influenced by this current. However, I would not identify Stoicism with existentialism because existentialism, I think, and I, sorry, I mean the post-Sartrian sense of existentialism, not what’s going on in Heidegger, because Heidegger is a different thing. Heidegger is, you know, we are the beings whose being is in question. That’s a different thing. But the strand that comes out later, at least one strand of existentialism that sort of became more prominent, was the idea, you know, that our existence precedes our essence because we are the creatures who completely decide our essence. So there’s a shift from Heidegger, from us being the beings whose being is in question, to us being the self-defining beings. And Stoicism, I think, is much more careful about that. We’re not completely self-defining beings. There’s a lot about us over which we do not have control, as Epictetus famously pointed out. Whereas self-definition becomes quite significant, maybe even inflated, in certain Sartrian-like strands of existentialism, and you lose that we’re inherently in question, I think Stoicism has much more of, you know, It’s not that we’re completely self-defining. It’s more that we can aspire to a kind of universal logos, a universal rationality that is the proper response for our confrontation with fatality. So that’s how we pull them apart. Okay. So I’m going to read this question on behalf of Isaias. You mentioned conspiracies, but I’m wondering how we can, as regular people, relate to the elites at a moment like this. It’s becoming clear that those more fortunate have quicker access to testing for the virus, E.G. Prince Charles, NBA players, Hollywood actors. Yep. Yep. So this is always the trick around this. Sorry, I didn’t mean trick in the sense of deception. I meant in the sense of, you know, the thing that requires finesse. So how do you identify, how do you distinguish identifying bona fide socio-economic, let’s use that as a broad, socio-political, socio-economic injustices, unfairnesses? How do you distinguish them from conspiratorial thinking? And I guess the idea, well, this is what I do. My heptaheuristic is that I don’t believe in conspiracy theories until I get, you know, evidence of them that’s as good as any scientific theory or at least moves in that direction. So if you get, you know, if you get undisputed evidence that people have this kind of access, which I think is happening, no one’s calling it into question. There’s no plausible alternative explanation for the purportedness. It doesn’t invoke any initially implausible entities in their own right. It belongs to an already plausible history of the wealthy and the rich manipulating things to their own purpose. Then I think that’s how you sort of make the decision. So maybe what I’m proposing is we reserve the term conspiracy theory or something that gains its acceptance primarily just because it proposes a conspiracy that makes sense of what is otherwise chaotic. Whereas coming to a conclusion from a lot of evidence and argumentation that’s convergent, highly plausible, rationally access, rationally criticized and rationally accessible that certain groups of people are behaving unjustly and appropriately. I don’t think we should call that a conspiracy theory at all. I think we should say, you know, we should say what it is. We have good evidence that people are acting unjustly and that they should be criticized. And then we should criticize the structures that have made it so easily doable for them to engage in such unfairness and manipulation. That’s what I would say to that. So I’m going to read this on behalf of Nicholas. You talk a lot about people maybe waking up. What actions can we take to help more people wake up, propagate good information, step into dialogue, anything else? Well, yeah, I mean, so not only just, I mean, yeah, obviously propagate good information. And that’s what I try to do with the video series and try to do with a lot of videos, but also propagate the skills. I mean, that’s why Peter and I are working so hard on trying to come up with, you know, a pedagogical program of putting up various these psychotechnologies into an optimal sequence for transitioning people without them having to make huge investments in a philosophical education or into a particular ideology or metaphysics, moving them, however, nevertheless, from, you know, oppositional bad faith, confrontational argumentation all the way through to, you know, a more kind of philosophia, not philosophy, but a kind of Socratic dialogue in which they feel fluent and capable of participating that can afford them gaining access to the power of collective intelligence and hopefully participating in transforming it into collective rationality or perhaps even collective wisdom. I think trying to reverse engineer the psychotechnologies, the meta psychotechnologies, enact and exemplify them and try to teach them to others. That’s why I’m also teaching the meditation course for free. We need to get not just the information in the sense of, I mean, you didn’t mean just that. So forgive me if I’m imposing on you, but we need to get more than just the ideas out is what I’m trying to say. We need to actually teach people a broad set of skills, the colleges of practices. We need to start doing it right now. And that’s what I’m trying to do. And we need to reverse engineers. We need to reverse engineering. We need to reverse engineer missing psychotechnologies, precisely like dialectic. It seems like an interesting opportunity now that a lot of people are on Zoom and having these conversations to practice it. Yes, very much. Very much. Samir, you had a question about the urgency effect. Yeah, I’ll try to rephrase it with what has been said. To get back on the meaningness and the kairos. I have the, you know, like I don’t really understand this kairos concept. I have the impression it’s a kind of Christian. The way we are seeing it, I’m seeing like it’s a kind of Christian time of apocalypse, of the rapture, you know, the moment where everything is like changing. But for me, the kairos is more a subjective reality where it is in a chain of salience, of meaning, of synchronicity, where someone has it as a changing moment. Do you follow me? Not completely. I’m not. First of all, a kairos doesn’t limit you to the apocalypse. The apocalypse is just a culminating kairos. It is a notion that comes out of the sort of Platonic Christian heritage. It’s about sensing any important turn, right? Being able to sense where that turn is and participate in the turning of events. Yeah, but I have the impression that at least, I mean, for our society, it is a decisive moment, not by itself, not because, as you said, it’s just a pandemic. We can say it’s a small one. There are going to be many others. But we are now in a synchronicity of so many crises that we have been kicking the can down the road that this is like the drop that is filling the jar, you know? And also, I would say that the urgency thing is that it’s too fast to build wisdom at this time for two reasons. First, it’s because we’re living it in life, like with so many information, and it goes so quick. So you have this reciprocal narrowing where you’re just going time from time and you don’t take the step back to see the big picture of the metacrisis. And also, so yeah, I’ll just leave it there and I’ll let you comment because I see it as a kairos at least for our time and my generation. So thank you for explaining it because I have a better understanding. Yeah, I don’t think the I agree with you. And if I presented it as otherwise, I apologize because I might have been misleading. I agree with you that I think there’s a synchronicity, to use your term, between this particular biological crisis and the already existing metacrisis. I think you’re right. And I think it’s in that sense, it’s a kairos in the sense of also being a tipping point. And here I’m talking about like in dynamical systems where you can perturb a system for a very long time and it can adaptively restructure. But when the perturbations get too great, it goes critical and it starts to break. And then that criticality is a real opportunity in a sense because it can go one of two ways. The system can collapse or that criticality actually breaks the structure up enough that a new structure can emerge out of it. And so I agree that I think the virus is in that sense, it’s sort of a, it’s the proverbial straw that’s breaking the already overburdened camel’s back. The idea about the urgency, because it’s very hard to cultivate wisdom right now. I understand, yeah, it’s very difficult for people to engage in the practices and therefore giving into kind of urgent short-term scarcity thinking is going to come very naturally. And so I think it’s going to be a very significant challenge, as you said, to get people to step back and see the bigger picture. Here’s where a lot of practices, a lot of psychotechnological practices are really important. A way to do this without having to argue at great length with people, and we already have independent evidence from this construal level theory, is to get them practicing things like the stoic view from above. That transformational perspectival knowing really does have a huge impact on people’s propositional and inferential thinking. And it also opens them up to a kind of reciprocal opening. It opens them up to a kind of wonder in which they’re willing to call their worldview and their sense of identity into question precisely because of the way the practice alters what is normally an unchallenged salience landscape in which their own particular urgent narrative is super salient and blinding them to the bigger picture. Now, you understand I’m not prophesying that this is going to spread throughout the culture or anything like that. But what I’m saying is there are things we can offer people even in their urgency that are designed to work right now in the urgency and can ultimately be made conducive to and coherent with much more long-term rational processes. Thank you. Thank you. That was an excellent question. And thank you for explaining it to me better. You clarified it very well. Sorry for my confusion also, but I love your work. I love your framework. I’m using it all the time. Really psychoactive and powerful. Thank you for your work. Well, thank you. And thank you for your question. I appreciate a lot. Aaron Rogerson, you had something about a digital church. Aaron, would you like me to read it out? Can you hear me now? Yep. Okay. The pandemic is prompting a lot of us to come together online. And I’ve been able to skip around to different philosophy meetup groups really easily that have been forced to move online very suddenly. And make a lot of really interesting connections in a very short time. People seem unusually open, vulnerable, willing to connect right now. And the technology like Zoom is keeping up with this pretty well and seems like it will only get better. So I’m wondering if the religion that is not a religion is something that will gain traction. Might it be something that is primarily an online phenomenon? Almost like a digital church or something. I’ve seen that now. Sorry. I just was apologizing and I continued to interrupt you as I apologized. I’m sorry. I apologize for my apology. No problem. That’s an excellent question. And I think that’s right. And Jordan has been talking about that. Jordan Hall. And he’s perhaps the person to talk a little bit more about. He’s talking about not only the way that the virtual world can afford this. He’s also talking about the fact that we might be able to get it to integrate with some machine learning. To really optimize the way in which we’re connecting. And the way some of the connections can be made outside of individual cognition. And so I think there’s a tremendous potential for the technology. I would like to point out something that is also connected to your question. And strengthens your point. And this came up with somebody who was talking. I was just doing an online wisdom lecture for Web of Wisdom. And this came up, sort of this issue, about that this technology does something. It brings with it a phenomenological difference that is actually really important. And here’s a couple of the phenomenological features that came up in the discussion I was having with this person. Notice how close your face is in terms of the size it fills on my visual field. And yet, normally if I was that close to you and you and I just met, that would be like, oh, but it’s okay in this medium. It’s part of the grammar. And so there’s this kind of phenomenological intimacy. Notice that also we’re sort of equidistant from each other. Because we’re not actually spatially oriented. We’re in this digital space where everybody sort of has equal access. And that’s a really, really interesting phenomena. Because it also removes a lot of the typical ways in which people are marking identity and status by their spatial positioning. That’s sort of removed and it’s put into the background in a deep way. Now, I was talking about this in the way this really enhances this technology. It’s not only what I’m trying to say, it’s not only the way the technology furthers the communication and gives us access. It’s also transformative. It’s also transforming our phenomenological experience in a profound way. And I think I suggested to her, and it’s only a suggestion I’m making to you, but I think it’s the only thing that’s analogous to us. And people are also, we’re also doing this before the crisis. In our heritage is people sitting around a campfire. Because when people are circling around a campfire, they sort of have that circular distance from each other. And because of the way campfires, their faces tend to be very well lit. And they all are oriented. And Matt Rossano actually talks about that in Supernatural Selection, how that really probably drove our cognitive evolution a very powerful way. Because we’ve had fire across several species and it drove working memory. It drove our orientation. He said we probably gained the ability to meditate from sort of sharing the focus of the fire and then looking up in this intimate fashion to people’s faces. So I think we’re doing virtual camp firing or something like it right here right now. And so it’s not just sort of the increased power of communication and connection. I think the medium also has the potential, if properly used artistically and dialogically, to really tap in to that phenomenological difference and that primordial association. And greatly empower what you’re suggesting, the ability for people to find something more like a church. Because I think before there were ever any churches, there was the religio around the campfire for several species and for hundreds of thousands of years. Thank you. I just want to add something I noticed with I have a meetup group and we meet every two weeks. And going to Zoom has actually greatly improved our ability to have a meeting in a way that surprised me. Because I would have thought the opposite. I was like, Zoom’s not going to work. But everything seems much easier. It flows this better way. We’re kind of jamming in this better way. I think it’s the campfire effect. Yeah, I think I really do. I’m sort of trying to sort of coin that, the virtual campfire effect. And what’s interesting is the contrast to online teaching, where that’s normally met like online lecturing. So pretty clearly, the evidence shows that if you go to like an online university, you don’t get as good an education as if you do it in person. So I don’t have anything to say about that. I just want us to note that because I agree with you, when we’re doing this dialogic thing, we seem to find this virtual stuff enhances the process. But when we’re into sort of the dissemination, the traditional dissemination of information in sort of a propositional, largely propositional format, you seem to find a significant degradation in what people get from it. Okay. Thank you, John. You’re a hero. Keep it up. Thank you for your encouragement. So, Dan Feldman, you had a question? Yes, I had a question. First, first, Professor Verbecky, I really enjoyed your series and it’s kind of inspired me to create my own series that I’m thinking about doing. Call me John. Please call me John. You, John. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, basically just transition away from the system from systemic inertia. Right. Is something. So my question is, what I’m an American. So what can we do, and other people in similar situations, what can we do to ensure that the ideas and practices that are selected in response to this Kairos, move into a wise and regenerative direction of reciprocal opening. Yeah. And not into an ignorant and extractive direction of reciprocal narrowing in light of the fact that the techno managerial elites and power are coming forward with a doubling down a further privatization and austerity. Yeah, yeah. And because there’s a there’s a bailing out they’re moving to a bailing out of the corporations and not to some kind of UBI or or or to helping out the spreading precariat and small businesses and such. Yeah. Sorry, I’m just I’m just, I’m just like, yes, everything you’re saying. Yeah, I, this, a similar thing came up in the rebel wisdom thing. It came up in a really interesting way, because I was posed a question. And it was an honest question. It wasn’t somebody being manipulative or anything. And they basically said, Well, you know, who’s approached you. I mean, I mean, I’ve approached many of the, you know, the power holders. About any of that, you know. And I thought about it, my thought, no, not a single one. I’ve not been approached by any of the people that will power. I’m not saying that the Prime Minister should call me I mean me or the people I’m talking with. That’s been a pro now are lots of other people approach. Well, here we are. Here’s your answer. Like I am busier now than I was when I was, you know, going into work at the university, more and more people are reaching out more and more people like so the bottom up is Titanic overwhelming. And the fact, and this is why I’m worried about the Kairos right and why I’m worried about the doubling down on this pandemic. And the fact that the powers that be seem to be completely oblivious to this whole dimension and even to the dimension of meaning in well being. Right. It’s just That that is something that causes me to be that’s when I think the Kairos is going to steer very negative in that we’re going to get a doubling down. And we’re going to get let’s get everybody back. Let’s get everybody back to work. Let’s get everybody you know let’s get let’s get things back to normal as fast as possible, because that’s the way we’re going to know right that’s that’s the way we’re going to do what deal with this. And so I share your concern. So what I’m going to answer now is an answer in terms of it’s a moral answer, which is different from a probabilistic answer. I think the moral thing for me to do is doing what I’m doing, which is reaching out offering trying to get skills trying to get people talking giving people resources. Educating them right getting people to seriously challenge the obviousness of common sense seriously challenge. You know the status quo cultural cognitive grammar. I think that is the right thing to do. And I think it’s the right thing to do for some of the arguments you’ve already heard me give Is there an opportunity here that heightens the chance that that will get gain some traction and succeed. I think there is. Do I predict that it’s going to succeed. No, I don’t. I suspect. I hope one way, but I suspect that we’re going to get as much as we can to clamp this all down and try and strangle it off. And what we all have to do is keep these campfires burning And keep things going. Because as I said, this is not the last time we’re going to confront this and the next time things. Sorry, I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but I think the next time things are going to fall apart more. And so getting people getting create more of a bottom up resiliency in the system. I think is going to be needed. Sorry, that was a somewhat pessimistic answer, but I was trying to give you as honest and realistic an answer as I can. Well, at the same time, trying to indicate what I think the moral responses. I appreciate that. If I could, if I could just add in, I’m quite active in working together on participatory democracy movements around the world with Extinction Rebellion. Working with some groups with Extinction Rebellion and trying to internationalize, you know, people’s assemblies, citizen assemblies, building up that hollow democracy. We essentially have representative oligarchies. Yes, yes, yes. We have to, we have to build that democratic movement. But I don’t want to take the floor. That’s an important point. That’s an important point. No, no. First of all, keep doing that. And, you know, and I think that’s important. And there’s a there’s there’s a way in which my work and your work converge because as I’ve been trying to create both the language and the example of shifting from adversarial processing, the winner take all destroy the opposition back to a shared commitment to the opponent processing right of the process that above being a Republican or a Democrat, I’m committed to democracy and the process of democracy. That’s where I think my work and your work actually converge in an important way. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah, I’d love to follow up on this on another forum, if possible. Sure. So, Joe, you had a question that was similar about game A and game B. If you still want to ask it, just go off mute. Sure, let me scroll up and find it. I wrote on another screen. I wrote in the eyes of regular people who aren’t excuse me in the eyes of regular people, those who are in positions of strategic strategic leverage, the heads of industry, government, education, things like that, they seem to be locked into a sort of game A fundamentalism. It had been for many decades. This is the sort of blue church idea. And my question to you is, does the game be crowd to what you know about have any concrete plan from going simply from nudging these people’s decisions to actually transforming their framework? Because obviously we’ve heard individually upgrading our sovereignty, being able to be more effective agents individually. But I don’t know if maybe behind the scenes, there have been talks on how to scale that up, if it’s at all possible. There have been. And I mean, I’m going to I mean, I’m talking with the person who gave us the game A, game B, blue church, Jordan Hall. And part of that is this idea, which is the religion that’s not a religion and coming trying to come up with a post religious faith, because here’s the idea. This is probably the in some ways, my most radical idea. I want to do what like Augustine did. As the Roman Empire is falling. He laid the foundations not single handedly. And I’m not saying I’m Augustine. So please, I’m just using this as an analogy. Okay. But what they did is they laid the they laid the cultural cognitive grammar for an entirely different culture, and they stole the culture bottom up from the imperial system. Now, again, the imperial system at some point then clamped down again. But nevertheless, we shifted to the middle. We shifted out of antiquity, we shifted to a different world. And so I want to try and do that. I want to try and create The systems of meaning, the religion that’s not a religion, the ecologies of practices, The communities, the networks of communities, all of this is already happening. Really empower it, both in terms of its grammar, give it the best scientific tools for engineering the practices and the ecology of practices. I basically want to steal the culture from the people who have been abusing us for such a very long time. And I usually don’t speak politically. I usually don’t speak politically. You because I think that political framing is often a deep misrepresentation of the issue. At least the way in which political discourse has been, as you said, it’s sort of been ossified. And I think this also I think Dan was pointing out that to the way it’s been ossified in ways that make choice no longer It’s no longer sort of really relevant. So this is my sort of most radical thing. I guess I’m going to say it’s I want. Yeah, I want to help steal the culture away, steal it away and do everything I can. And you know Christianity stole The culture away from the elites of its time. Now new elites form. They always will. But the culture changed and it changed in an important way. And that’s what I’m trying to do right now. And that’s, that’s what I see myself doing with a lot of these other people. That’s very noble. And you certainly have a lot of people who aren’t in those positions. I mean, if you’re my age, you’ve sort of grown up in the world sort of looks like it’s running backwards. So it’s hard to even imagine that it’s been that way for decades prior, but This decade certainly feels like it’s going to there’s going to be some Collision between the sort of frustrated emerging game be types and the sort of entrenched game a leaders. The whole point about the whole point about the metaphor is we can’t we can’t win by playing the game. That’s right. And so my way of trying to understand what it is to not play their game and to shift over to in a totally different game. It’s to steal the culture. And the way you do that, the way we like the only thing I can get from history that’s been able to do that our religion, but for reasons that I’ve articulated. I don’t want Not personally. I mean, in terms of the functionality. I don’t think the standard model, the actual age model of religion is going to do what we need in order to steal the culture as deeply as we need to steal it. John, do you have time for one more question. Yes, I do. Taylor Hawk. Would you like to read your question. Yeah, thanks. I can do that. Yeah, john, I wanted to check with you. I remember you talking about in some different contexts about like the urgency of the game. Thanks, I can do that. Yeah, john, I wanted to check with you. I remember you talking about in some different contexts about like the urgency of us sort of coming into contact with our meaning and How I’ve seen is like growing up and I’m wondering, like, Good to see you, by the way. See you too. And yeah, given the like the situation and how quickly it sort of seemed to come up on us. Obviously, lots of people are raising the flags, but it came on us quickly. And given your I think valid suspicion that this is not the last time it’s going to happen. I’m wondering, how are we going to develop or grow up even more quickly like it seems even more urgent so that we don’t we can mitigate this chance of descending into chaos if you know we have a second wave of this short term. We just, we need to, we need to well sort of it does deals with the previous question. We need to accelerate the all the bottom up and top down ways in which we’re trying to steal the culture. I mean, and you know, Well, I mean, the work you’re doing both the circling work you’re doing and the attempts to innovate it in ways that you know that I’m deeply in concert with about trying to bring back something like Dialectic and the logos. We It’s sorry I don’t want to look like some sort of Marxist linen this poster or something, but we, we just need to do more right we get we need we we just we got it we got to do more we got to speed up. We have the virtual campfire effect and we have what’s happening here and we have the many more people are willing to call into question the previously unquestioned authority of common sense and well that’s the way we’ve always done it kind of thing. And so I mean there is a Kairos here. Like I said, I’m not that optimistic about it turning You know now, but Nevertheless, I do think it’s going to erode things things are going to be reassembled, but they’re going to be on much shakier ground and that shake that that shaking up at the foundations creates more Interest is more spaces through which we can weave This alternative culture that we need to do. So I mean, I don’t want to sound like boxer in Animal Farm. I mean, I don’t want to sound like boxer in Animal Farm, but you know, there’s a sense of which we just right now. We’ve got to do more of what we’re doing and make use of the best of the of the emerging properties of of the of the psycho technologies and the cyber technologies to try and be force multipliers for this. I’m sorry, I can’t say anything too profound to your question. It’s a really good question, but that’s, that’s, that’s all I can see to say right now. Yeah, keep on trucking. More accelerate. I mean, so I mean, and that’s why Jordan Jordan and I are talking about this sense of faith that’s about leaning into the acceleration of change. You know, surfing the wave of uncertainty to use Andy Clark’s term, although he’s there for slightly different purposes. Right. But, you know, I use the example from Conrad of the captain Allerton, who’s the ship is been right. The ship has been swamped and there all the sailors are clinging to the side of the ship and Allerton stands and he watches and he waits and he’s He’s watching and he’s sensing the unfolding of the wind and the wave and then he goes now and he gives three orders and they do this stuff and they write the ship. That’s the kind of faith I’m talking about. I feel touched hearing that. Thanks, John. Thank you, Taylor. Also, again, really good to see you. Missed you. So I’ll close in a moment. But John, is there any closing thoughts that you would like to have for this digital campfire that we’re in right now? I hope that my pessimism is only will only induce realism and not any kind of defeatism in people. I hope that’s clear because that was my intent. And I do think that it’s a very important point. That we try as much as possible to not just talk about this, but exemplify a new way of being to people that these are that the function of being is to be a new way of being. I think that it’s important that we try as much as possible to not just talk about this, but exemplify a new way of being to people that these are that the function of these, especially because of the virtuality of it is not just what’s happening here now. But we write and we are also exemplifying a new way of being a new kind of, as I said, culture, a culture of awakening. And we have to pay attention to and take seriously that responsibility and rule our manner. Of discourse is just as important as the matter of our discourse. That’s the final thing I would want to say about them. That’s beautiful. So in a moment, I’ll make some announcements of what’s coming up in the stoia. But first, John, my friend, thank you so much for coming in delivering this talking question answer. Thank you. Greatly appreciated. Thank you so much, everybody. I really enjoyed this. And I really enjoyed the discussion. And just, I can’t address you all individually because there’s been so many of you. But I just want to say, so many of you gave a lot of thought to this. So many of you gave me so much encouragement. And that really matters to me. And I don’t mean just in an eco inflationary way. No, let’s put that aside. This is often very challenging for me for a lot of reasons. I’m naturally socially phobic. I have Meniere’s disease. There’s all kinds of things that could hold me back. My partner was sort of joking with me today. She said, you know, you’re such an introvert, but you really act like an extrovert. There’s this problem. You lash out there and you do all these connections. And so what I’m saying is, you got the encouragement really helps me. It helps me overcome my introversion, my social phobia, deal with my, you know, the challenges of Meniere’s. And so I’m very appreciative of the encouragement. So I want to thank everybody very much for that. And I imagine we’ll have another session at the Stoa with you, John, so we can have a round two with this. So tomorrow we have two events noteworthy at the Stoa. Jordan Hall is going to do a situational assessment at 12pm Eastern Time. I’ll send you the way to RSVP to everything in the chat box. And we also have an existential dance party at 7pm. Colin Morris from the Zion 2.0 podcast. He’s a dancer, so he’s going to have like a group and body dance, which is quite fun. And to, yeah, we have about 11 events lined up. So just go on the website, sign up for the mailing list to get updates and to lean on the digital church and then the digital basket that we pass around. I’m viewing the Stoa as a gift to the world right now that everyone can freely use. And if you’re inspired to give a gift in return, it could be in any form, an idea, support. Just go to the website and go gift economy at the bottom and you can provide it there. Thanks everyone for coming out today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for putting this all together and doing this. And wow, what time is Jordan speaking tomorrow? It’s at 12pm Eastern Time. And it’ll be recorded if you can’t make it and I’ll post it on there. Yeah, I might be able to make it. I’ll have to see. Things are very much in flux for me day by day. Cool. I’ll text you the link. Thanks Peter. And thanks again for inviting me and putting this together. Much appreciated. Thanks again everybody. Take care. Bye bye.