https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WKgQdEMfm_E
We’re in a mythopoetic situation. We’re like, we’re being confronted with an Old Testament deity. It’s invisible and it’s ubiquitous and it’s making us all distrust each other and it’s demanding horrible, horrible, you know, world-shattering purity codes that we have to follow or we’ll get killed. Like, this is like being in the Old Testament, right? And so all of this is being churned up and we have nothing. And it’s deep in our cognitive heritage, in our cultural heritage. And we have nothing to shape that so that all of the self-deceptive machinery can be challenged. It just runs. And so, of course, it feels very meaningful. So, welcome to the Multiversity Project. Today, we’re having John Verbekeon to talk about mythology, time and faith as they relate to the coronavirus and its interaction with the ongoing meaning crisis. So thank you again for coming on our show, John. Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here. I enjoyed my last time, so I’m looking forward to this. Yeah, we’re really psyched that you were able to make it back on. Oh, for sure, for sure. I like what you guys are doing. It’s good work. It’s good work. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so we’re going to start off with a couple introductory questions and then we’ll move on to our first section, which is mythology. So to start off, John, we just wanted to ask, how are you doing with all this on a personal level? Oh, sure, on a personal level. Well, it’s been weird. Like I said, it’s… people are taking… The world is changing in a way that’s suddenly made my work more relevant, apparently. And so I’m more busy in that way. I’m also busy because I decided in order to try and help out, I would start live streaming a meditation course over a 10-week period, which seems to be helping people. And then I’m continuing to do a lot of my work, writing and researching. Chris and Chris Master-Pietro and I are writing multiple things. We’ve got chapters coming out in books and all kinds of stuff like that. So that’s been good. I mean, it’s been hard because I don’t live with my partner. So we decided if we got separated by lockdown, that I would stay with my son in my apartment and she’d stay with her daughter in her house. So I don’t get to see her physically. And it’s been quite a while. You know, of course, we’re FaceTiming a lot. But that’s a bit of a challenge. Yeah, that sounds hard. It is hard. But in some ways, it’s been good, too. I used to talk about how people say you want to see how a relationship’s going, or if it’s going to be a good one, you know, paint a house or go on a trip. But it looks like go through a pandemic together is a really good test, too, because we are discovering… I mean, I always knew this, but it’s been made now very apparent to me. There’s a real significant depth to our relationship. And so, of course, we’re exploring and developing that quite significantly. So that, you know… I mean, of course, I want to see her. So that’s been a challenge. But I mean, compared to a lot of other people, that’s relatively minor. My son, for example, he’s… Like, he was not completely out of work. So it’s OK. He’s living with me, so he’s safe and everything. I mean, I’m in a privileged position that way. I mean, because I was able to move almost all the teaching and research I do online, you know, not that impacted that way. And I know a lot of other people are facing much greater hardships and much greater risk. The one significant thing is it’s been causing my health to suffer. Partially, it’s also the weather here. If you remember, in Canada, April is a very… It’s the cruelest of months, as T.S. Eliot said, right? And the weather is very volatile. So my ear has been very bad. No doubt, both the weather and all the background stress from the pandemic. So that’s about where I’m sitting. How are you guys all doing? Where are you guys? We’re all in Mexico. That’s what I thought. You’re all in Mexico. Yeah. I’d say we’re doing well. Like, we’re trying to take on a lot and produce a lot of extra content during the coronavirus time, as well as a bunch of other personal projects and other projects we’re working on. So it’s weird. It’s hard. It’s good. It’s really tense. There hasn’t been a ton of time for rest. But also, we’re all very lucky and have a good place to be. So we’re good. You guys are relatively safe, though. Is that good? Yeah, we’re safe. It’s been interesting. Like, I just moved to Mexico a few weeks before this happened, so it’s a few transitions at once. But yeah, like Katie said, we’re really lucky. Yeah, speaking of the pandemic, which we’re going to be speaking about this whole time, we were all kind of curious. In some of your interviews that you’ve done recently, you mentioned that you don’t believe this will be the only pandemic. So we’re just wondering if you speak to that. I’m just making a probabilistic causal argument. And the argument goes like this. There were causal factors that probably led to this. They have to do with things like melting the permafrost and cutting down the rainforests and disturbing ocean currents and air currents, globalization of trade, etc. And those factors aren’t going away. They’re not going away. And if anything, they will probably continue to accelerate. And so I think it’s highly likely. I mean, the scientific community has been predicting a pandemic for quite some time. And so the fact that the prediction has come true provides empirical confirmation that those factors do lead to pandemics. And the fact that those factors will continue on means it’s highly probable that there will be other pandemics. Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, one thing I’ve been thinking about is like with antibiotic resistance, like stuff like this might happen more on a bacterial level. Sure. I think it’s going to happen more. The antibiotic resistance is going to happen. But I think we’re also going to see just a lot more viral stuff happening because we’re just unlocking a lot of stuff and we’re distributing a lot of ecosystems and we’re causing a lot of migration of species. It’s you know, and we’re just interacting with each other at a much more intense level to frame this as let’s just endure this. We’ll get over this and then everything will go back to normal for centuries and centuries. I think is I think that’s not a rational framing. One of the concerns I have is like multiple I have multiple concerns about that. We’ll get into them. The ones that I’m sort of concerned with at the socioeconomic level is we can’t keep doing this debt intensification every time we get a pandemic. We’ve got to come up with a way of coordinating the financial aspects of the economy in a much more resilient fashion. So I’m not an expert on that. I can’t comment on it. All I can see is that this pattern can continue. So I don’t know what that means for us. What’s interesting is people are considering things like UBI that were just beyond the pale three months ago. Now it’s like, oh, wait, maybe we need to think about this and stuff like that. Right. So you mentioned just increasing globalization and cutting down the rainforests and stuff. Do you think that maybe maybe these these factors that these causal factors that led to the pandemic could have been avoided somehow? Or do you see it more as like inevitable that that that we’re going to have increasing pandemics and then and that the way the way back to normalcy is just going to be that we sort of we weather the storm in some way and become stronger as a result. So that’s a really good question. I think what I would say about that is that given our cultural framing in which the only unchallenged normative authority for us was the market. And this is an argument that Thomas Björgman made really, really well, I think, in his work and how we got into the medic crisis. I think as long as we have a homogenous, monolithic normativity like that, that is in a sense abstracted from the environment, I think that therefore pandemics are going to be inevitable. If we were to make a change in a deep change in our cultural cognitive grammar and we had normativities other than the market and we had a notion of political economic organization that was deeply embedded in culture and history and especially environment, then it is possible we could make the requisite changes to reduce or at least to mediate those factors significantly so that we could reduce the probability of pandemics. OK, so we’re kind of tying pandemics with capitalism. Not just I mean, not in capitalism in a particular way. The idea that after the postmodern critique, what happens is the market survives as the default normativity, the default authority. So and then what happens to that is that everything else gets bent into this. The market is basically our God, right? It’s the it’s the hyper object that is omnipresent, right? And regulates everything about how we think and see and act and feel. And I don’t know if that’s an inevitable feature of capitalism per se, but it is it is definitely where we have gotten to historically. I mean, there was a time when we had, you know, we had the state as separate from the market and the church as separate from the state of the market. And they were playing off against each other. And that was perhaps a better condition for us. But we we have especially over the last, you know, basically since Thatcher and Reagan, we’ve decided, no, no, let’s let’s destroy everything that in any way resists the market’s freedom of action, because that will somehow bring utopia. And I think that that vision is what I’m criticizing partially. I’m not right. And I think that is what we need to take into consideration. And I think what’s happening is people are realizing, wait, a lot of that service that I did for the market, it really didn’t add up to anything. I’m now here. I’m alone in my home. And what did all that? What was all that for? And what’s the market doing for me now? In fact, the market doesn’t seem to be helping this problem at all. It seems to be floundering around like a decapitated child. And it’s OK. And so what do we do? Well, we try and gather together the remaining machinery of culture and what’s left of the state. And we try. Oh, can we come up with a solution? Yeah, that’s right. And so I think we’re maybe we’re coming to a point where we’re realizing the market isn’t a god and we shouldn’t treat it that way. Now, that doesn’t make me a communist. It doesn’t make me an anarchist. In fact, I think because all of those are still all pitched around just different, either completely worshipping or completely demonizing the market. And that is the foreground and exactly the way I want to call into question. I want to say we need to rethink about we used to have normativities of culture and history. That’s what tradition used to mean. And we used to have normativities around spirituality. That’s what religion meant and meaning making. And we used to have normativities around reflection and the cultivation of wisdom. There were cultures in which wisdom schools were flourishing and were given high value within that culture and cultures other than our own. Our culture is not any kind of necessity. We have many examples of alternatives. So I’m hoping that when people are people are now in the place where they can maybe consider those alternatives more seriously. Interesting. Yeah, it’s definitely requiring us to rethink how we do things for sure. Well, we’re not going back. I mean, the great danger here is a kind of naive nostalgia where everybody is holding their breath until we get back to the way it used to be. It’s not going back. It’s not going back the way it didn’t go back after the Black Plague. It’s not going back the way it didn’t go back after the Great Depression or World War II. It’s not going back. It’s not going back. OK, so you think this event is sort of on the same level as one of those like the Great Depression or the Black Plague or something like that? Well, what was the last event that was worldwide? World War II. Yeah, I guess so. In terms of degree, it doesn’t seem to have gotten that bad yet, but I guess it could get there. And that’s pretty scary. I know it’s going to be pretty bad. I mean, they’re projecting deaths in the United States that will be greater than the deaths for World War I and might approach the deaths the Americans suffered in World War II. So it could even get there possibly in degree. Oh, wow. Yeah, this might be a good segue onto mythology. Do you want to take it, Katie? Well, yeah, one of the things you’ve kind of laid the groundwork there, one of the things that you’ve mentioned is that many people right now that you’ve spoken with seem to be experiencing like more meaning during this time, as opposed to like this kind of sense of not knowing what the purpose and meaning is in life. And one potential explanation of many that you brought up for that was that the coronavirus crisis harkens back to almost mythological times or even biblical times. Or like that that kind of a context might be coming up in our minds and making us feel like we we have more meaning in our lives right now. Could you expand on that connection? Yeah, thanks, Katie. So let me let me try and let’s unpack because I’ve been putting a lot of thought and discussion into this over the last couple of weeks with a lot of people. A lot of I just did a really had a really great discussion with David Fuller from Rebel Wisdom on just all this sort of stuff, because he’s doing a thing on sort of conspiracy theories around covid. So what I want to do is because I want to unpack the phenomenology because I think it’s quite complex. So people, I think, are actually having this very complex relationship to meaning right now. Part of it is what you said, Katie, but I want to try and expand it out because I think, you know, I’m continually sort of revising how I’m thinking about this and how I’m approaching it. And I definitely want to get into the mythopoetic and biblical aspects of this. But so as I’ve been talking to more people and more discussion and getting what news I can and the news is all weirdly, you know, one of my criticisms is the news keeps just sort of focusing on, you know, the biological and economic aspects. And what we’re not paying attention to is we’re building up sort of a mental health crisis that’s going to be quite significant. And we and we need to we need to start thinking about that and putting in machinery to try and ameliorate that as soon as we can. Why? Well, think about it. You know, in some of the work I did with Chris and Chris and I have been working a lot on this together, Chris, Master Pietro, we’re going through domicide. And we talked about how the meeting crisis in the book that we wrote with Philip Misovic, right. And how we also had something like this in the Hellenistic period. Domicide is losing a sense of home. And so a lot of people are losing a sense of home or at least they’re experiencing an incredible contraction in the sense of home and where they feel safe and where they feel at home. They don’t feel at home going outside. It’s almost like agoraphobic. A lot of people now and, you know, they’re losing a lot of their other homes. People can’t go to their workplace, which is a significant contributor to people’s identity in a lot of way. So you’re getting a significant domicide. You’re getting a reciprocal narrowing. The world, the options in the world are suddenly collapsing. And who and what you can be is narrowing. So you’re getting that happening. Connections, a lot of connections are being lost. So something that people aren’t talking about yet publicly, although it’s coming up in a lot of discussions I’m having, there’s a lot of relationships are fracturing right now. A lot of relationships are fracturing and a lot of relationships are being strained. I would, you know, I would mention that it’s not strained in the sense that I think it’s at risk. But, you know, there’s a strain on that relationship I have with my partner because we can’t physically live with each other right now. Right. So you’re getting a loss of connection. And then this is again, I’m seeing this a lot and a lot of different groups of people I’m talking to. And it’s not, again, getting into sort of the official mainstream medias. It’s not catching the eye. But many people and I think Katie was even sort of alluding to this. Many people are describing their sense of the connectedness to the world being fundamentally changed. So an adjective that I’m hearing a lot to try and get this complex shift is surreal. Everything feels surreal. And, you know, you guys are now nodding yes. That’s a great word. Right. And so that’s, you know, and that’s again, and notice that that has mental health dangers associated with it. Right. If you put people in a long term environment where they’re constantly feeling surreal, they’re losing options, the world is narrowing, they’re losing a sense of home, they’re losing their relationships. This is really, really deleterious. Now, so that’s all happening. Now, on the other hand, there are there are people who get sort of a salience intensity out of the virus. It’s a very salient thing and it’s very intense and it keeps their attention. And for right now, as long as the novelty is going, that will give them a sense of sort of meaning. The thing we have to remember about that is we’re not in a sprint, we’re in a marathon and that’s going to fade. And then people are going to face a kind of eroding endurance that they have to go through. Then there’s another aspect to it, which is people, people are falling back on the meaning making machinery because it’s what’s left. It’s what’s left. Right. And they’re realizing that that’s actually where most of the mattering comes from, is the meaning making machinery. And so they’re because of that, they might be experiencing an intensification of meaning precisely because they’re now much more invested in the meaning making machinery. But there’s also an intended danger there. Notice how I keep sort of giving and taking. Because the intended danger there is that people are being thrown back onto their subjectivity and right. Meaning making machinery and they’re finding that their culture hasn’t really afforded them a lot of depth and resources and resiliency around all of that machinery. So when you talk about the meaning making machinery, are you referring to like societal sort of collective meaning making or are you talking about like individual meaning making? Well, both. And that’s the point. They’re inseparably bound together. OK, I see. Even let’s use the prosaic example. You want to think on your own. You’re going to think in English, but you didn’t come up with English. You didn’t make it. OK. English is not part really of your subjectivity, although you treat it as if it is right. This goes to deeper points that Wittgenstein and Heidegger made about language. I’m just using sort of a concrete version of their argument to point out something. Right. Makes sense. So the I’m talking about what the meaning in life literature shows. I’m working on a paper right now with some colleagues and RAs of mine. The things that really make meaning in life are mattering to other people, being a sense of caring for others, being cared for others, connecting to oneself, to others, to all the connection machinery, the connection and coherence machinery. So when you’re saying people are falling back on meaning making machinery. We’re doing it right now, right? Right. So is that increasing the pressure on the meaning making machinery and perhaps exposing the cracks? Yeah. So I think what I’m saying is, remember when we talked and I talked about how we last time I was with you guys, how we did this to romantic relationships because romantic relationships involve the attachment to machinery and the connection machinery and mattering to someone other than yourself and caring of them beyond your egocentric concerns. We then tried to load everything into our romantic relationships and we put a tremendous burden on it. So we intensify their value. They’re so important, but we also put them under terrific strain. And I think what we’re doing is because we have not culturally pursued a deep education for people into the meaning making machinery and its attendant powers and perils, we’re doing something very similar to what we did with our romantic relationships. We’re putting a terrific strain on it. And that’s going to be telling. Now, I think it’s also the fact. So you look at Witson’s work, for example, 2008, right? When people sense a loss of control, they immediately start looking for patterns. So the brain, the brain’s solution to and by the way, she was able to empirically show this is distinct from threat. So it’s not that you’re under threat that’s doing this. It’s that the loss of control. So if you’re under threat and you don’t feel like you’re losing control, none of what I’m going to talk about happens. But if you perceived loss of control, then what the brain starts immediately doing is looking for patterns. And that’s that’s a meaning making thing to do. That’s intelligibility. But what her work shows really powerfully, and this is what she was specifically looking for, is you are much more likely to to perceive illusory patterns, to pick up patterns that aren’t really there. And especially to believe in conspiracy theories, because these are you think the illusory pattern is a narrative pattern, a story that makes sense of this and gives you a role and something you can do. And so so people will be experiencing, again, a surge of meaning because they’re doing all this meaning making. But it’s very maladaptive, right? They’re using the right. They’re think about the right hemisphere. What did it evolve for? It evolved for when we’re under predation, right? The left hemisphere is, you know, you know, fine detailed certainty step by step. Right. Right. The right. The left hemisphere is no, no. What do you do when there’s a predator coming? Well, you don’t look for the details. You don’t. Well, I’m not certain if it’s a hawk or an eagle. Like, you don’t care. You go for the gestalt and you tolerate ambiguity and you look for and you grab for patterns, right, that allow you to interact and intervene. Interesting. So so the so the right hemisphere is sort of activating when we lose control. Of course it is. The right hemisphere is activating very much. And this is the hemisphere that is much more oriented towards sort of mythopoetic ways of thinking, mythopoetic ways of action. This is adaptive. Your your your agency detecting machinery that’s always looking for agency. It’s adaptive because it misfires a lot. Oh, you see you see faces in the clouds and faces in the trees. And right. And it misfires a lot. But it doesn’t cost you much if you’re back in, you know, the environment in which we evolve. But if you miss an agent, you’re going to miss food or you’re going to become somebody’s food. Are you going to miss an enemy? Are you going to miss an ally? So all of this adaptive machinery, it’s kicking in and it’s finding patterns. And and that feels like a lot of meaning being made because it’s the adaptive machinery that gives us a lot of our interactional intelligibility. But precisely because we are, if you’ll allow me this, I’m happy to unpack it because I’m saying it would be provocative. But because so many of us are sapientially and religiously illiterate, when all of this mythopoetic machinery comes up, we have nothing through which we can reflectively monitor, manage and shape it so that it is more rationally disposed towards ourselves, each other in the world. So it just comes out and it comes out feeling so right because it’s so adaptive and so compelling and is turning that nebulous, anxiety producing chaos into a workable narrative with a workable villain. Right. And think about how this is exacerbated by the very situation. We’re in a mythopoetic situation. Zach Stein is completely right about this. We’re like in the old, we’re like we’re being confronted with an Old Testament deity. It’s invisible and it’s ubiquitous and it’s making us all distrust each other. And it’s demanding horrible, horrible, you know, world shattering purity codes that we have to follow or we or we’ll get killed. This is like being in the Old Testament. Right. And so all of this is being churned up and we have nothing. And it’s deep in our cognitive heritage, in our cognitive heritage, in our cultural heritage. And we have nothing to shape that so that all of the self deceptive machinery can be challenged. It just runs. And so, of course, it feels very meaningful. But it’s, in a sense, also something that is going to be long term, very destructive of meaning. Go ahead. Just like what you’re describing now, combined with some of the mental health factors you were discussing before, like it’s sounding a lot like psychosis to me. Yes, yes, yes. That’s exactly so Crispi and Braddock actually argued that in their behavioral and brain science article that you can put people on a continuum for salience landscaping. They called it the autism. You take these with like this, okay, autism and psychosis. There are people who are very futurely oriented. That probably have a left hemispheric dominance, right? They’re futurely oriented. They need to do things very algorithmically. They work under standards of certainty. Right. And you can see why that helps to explain a lot of features of some of them, some populations of autism. That’s why I think they chose that term. And then psychotic people are the opposite. Right. They tend to find connections and patterns. They’re super gush salty where there are none. And what we’ve lost is we’ve lost what we need, right, are the combination of the training of our aesthetic sensibility. So we can and, you know, sort of what we need is like the artist phage. So the mythopoetic stuff is appropriately being shaped in concert with, you know, the training of wisdom. We’ve lost that. We don’t have that, which is unfortunate for us. Now, such a thing is possible. You know, I hold out, you know, Socrates and the Platonic dialogue, the Platonic dialogues. You can’t separate the argumentation from the artistry. And you’re not just presenting alternative arguments. You’re presenting alternative ways of life, ways of being. And let’s remember Socrates is doing his shtick when Athens is literally under siege by Sparta. There has literally been a plague in Athens and it has literally killed the leadership of Pericles. And yet he’s doing all of that right there and then. So I’m not talking about some utopic fantasy. I’m talking about a reality that actually happened, but we are not doing it. We don’t have it now. Oh, wow. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Ariel. Maybe we can move things into like how we hope things can go or how things can maybe go in a more positive way with this artist sage kind of figure. Like you mentioned in your conversation with Christopher Mastro Pietro and Andrew Sweeney about how you think that myth is going to come to the fore during these times. Yeah. What do you think that’s going to look like? And in particular, like what kind of myths do you see emerging? Well, I mean, some of the myths are their throwbacks. I mean, I think, you know, conspiracy theories are a kind of mythology. They are. People are seeing patterns that they think give a narrative explanation. And so conspiracy theories are now blossoming and they’re taking off and they’re going to be dangerous. Apparently, they are burning. Some people are burning the towers for 5G network in England because there’s a conspiracy theory that the 5G network is actually emanating the virus in some fashion. And the fact that they’re burning towers, can you feel how medieval that is? Can you just feel it? Yeah, towers burning. Yeah. Yeah. Very medieval image for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And so we’re enacting mythology. And I think other mythological ways of thinking are going to come to the fore in connection with that, you know, that kind of iron age mythology or even a Bronze Age, maybe in a pre-axial where the gods are sort of the invisible, ubiquitous, chaotic figures that slam into our life, willy-nilly and demand really, you know, stringent purity codes from us. So apparently, you know, various versions of fundamentalist Christianity are now trumpeting that we need to repent and we need, you know, and that’s going to be the solution. Wasn’t the solution for all the previous plagues. So I don’t know why they think it’ll be a solution this time. But that’s definitely going to happen. So I think that’s there. But part of what, you know, especially the conversation that I just had, there’s a couple of conversations I’ve had one yesterday, one that’s coming out of my channel today, was Zach Stein and Andrew Sweeney. Because Zach wrote this amazing, I recommend it highly, the essay, A War in Heaven Broke Out, where he talks about how people are being thrown into sort of mythopoetic ways of thinking because we’re falling back on sort of our most comprehensively adaptive pattern-detecting machinery. That’s how I would put it. I don’t think Zach would disagree with me. And that we need to properly remember, because we have deeply forgotten, that education has to be much more broad than a narrow training of a very small part of productive rationality so that we can become good producers, consumers. We have to again remember, like you see in Plato, that you have to educate all aspects of the psyche in a highly coordinated fashion so that the mythopoetic aspects of the psyche and the rational parts of the psyche and the interpersonal parts of the psyche are in much better conversation with each other. And so we have to develop the conversation within and the conversation without in a coordinated fashion much better. So there’s all those negative mythologies coming up, but Zach’s point is there’s also crisis, right? Critical period. He plays on that beautifully as like in development, you know, critical periods in development, the sensitive periods. And he says, we’re in such a critical period. And he also, and I know this because I talked to him directly about this, he means like a criticality within a self-organizing system. We’re in a, I call it, we’re in a meaning kairos. We’re in a situation where this mythopoetic stuff is coming up. But, you know, like I said, we don’t have the proper literacy or set of psychotechnologies for appropriating it appropriately. And he’s recommending that we have the opportunity to reappropriate this mythopoetic stuff and integrate it through a more comprehensive educational strategy with our reasoning capacities so that we, like Socrates, we can start to seriously play with new ways of being. Remember, Socrates brings the axial revolution into Greece and it permeates out. That’s a new way of being, a fundamentally new way of being. We, and Zach’s point is that mythopoetic stuff coming up is readily good diagnostic that we are in a liminal period where if we were to do the right kind of educational program, we could open up new ways of being. What does that mean exactly? Like what, is he talking about public education and education in schools? Is he talking about like the types of conversations that you and others and we’ve been having online? No, that’s excellent. And what I think, I mean, I need to know more. I need to read his book. And so I’ve only had a few conversations with him and I’ve only read the essay. But what I can gather from those conversations, and Zach, if I misrepresent you, I apologize. I invite you to correct me. He’s such a, he’s such a sweet. My gosh, it’s wonderful to talk to him. He’s, oh my gosh, his conversational presence is, it’s like, it’s, it’s, oh, I love talking with him. But anyways, I think, Katie, what he’s recommending is a, is a, is a reconceptualization as fundamental as like what Socrates is doing with the Axis Revolution, where all of those boundaries and distinctions you just mentioned are, are, are challenged. That that sort of structure of intelligibility is undermined in some significant way. So he talks about the fact that we are already, we are not de jure, but de facto, we are already decentralizing education massively right now. And the lines between, you know, government sanctioned education and, you know, entertainment stuff that people are doing, that’s all massively blurring. Like what’s going on at Rebel Wisdom, for example, you have this huge thing and all these people talking. And there’s, there’s scientists and intellectuals, like, is that education? Well, yes, but, but it’s not like, it’s not right. Right. And so he’s talking that that’s what he means. He said, we’re already doing it. But instead of just letting it unfold, we have an opportunity here to say, wait, let’s not give up this. Let’s institute it in some way. And remember, people did that after, you know, the Depression and World War II, the stuff they put in place, the changes they made. Right. Some of those people said, no, no, we’re not going back to what it was like before this. We’re going to keep these changes in place. Now, there were, there were also countervailing things because it was also a huge nostalgic thing. And so there was a battle. So, you know, the whole thing in the fifties about trying to get women back into the home. Right. Precisely because why did they have to do and clamping down on movies like kept clapping, clamping down on film noir. Right. Because there was, there was, there was an attempt to, well, that’s that’s permeate these changes and make them the new way. And they, they partially succeeded, but there was resistance and they partially failed. And I think what Zach is saying is we’re facing a similar situation with respect to education. We need to, we need to, we see education in light of enculturation rather than just in the light of facilitating market, market functionality. Yeah, I completely agree with that, that education needs to be revolutionized and decentralized, as you mentioned. Actually, that was kind of my original vision for this channel. We originally called it higher dimensional education. As you, as you said, like it, you know, just, just having conversations with, with knowledgeable people can, can be very educational. And a lot of times the way that I, that I envisioned the decentralization happening is, well, instead of having this top down thing where, you know, there’s this source of all knowledge and then there’s, there’s the kind of elders and then there’s the people that, and the information and the knowledge flow in one direction generally. And, and the way that I see it working in the future is that the teacher, everybody’s a teacher, basically, like you, you, you learn something from somebody who’s knowledgeable and then you immediately go and teach that to somebody else. Well, let me play with it a little bit more, if you don’t mind, because notice what you’re doing. You’re saying, okay, so the iron age hierarchical model, we need to put that aside. So, but let’s, let’s, let’s pay attention to what’s actually already happening. So think about how the internet is organized. It’s not organized hierarchically. And one of the things that’s happening is the attempts to start that have now been sort of fractured. Yeah, exactly. It has given us that, which is sort of a silver lining, I suppose. So how is the internet organized? It’s organized as a massively recursive, dynamical, small world network. It’s a small world networks, a small world networks, dynamically recursive, exactly the same kind of adaptive structure that your brain has. Yeah. We could, we could, instead of just the medium is actually like our brains are in deep conformity with how we could be using this medium for educational purposes. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. As, as the closer that we can get the internet to model what our brains are already doing, the smarter, hopefully the internet can become. Well, that’s, that’s definitely the case. But also the fact that we like we always we’re cyborgs, we always have the capacity to also conform ourselves to our emergent technologies. Now, this is a hyper object, to use Morton’s term, technology. It has almost like a godlike status. Right. And so our relationship to it is going to be very profound and comprehensive if we, as we try to conform to it. But as I’m saying, what if, what if we realized, hey, things actually can work and they don’t have to belong to Iron Age hierarchies in order to work? What if we really realized that it’s already happening and it’s way our brain is already set up and ready to work. And it would love to be moving around right in dynamically recursive small world network because that’s what it likes. That’s how it works. So what if, what if we really opened that up as a way of life rather than just something that’s technologically happening in the background? What if we said, wait, wait, we really don’t have to have hierarchical organizations to make things work well. Well, yeah, I mean, I would say something like the internet, I do still see hierarchies. It’s just that the hierarchies are, are flexible and there’s like feedback loops within the hierarchies, like you’re saying. Like it’s, I mean, if you’re, if you’re looking at a forum or something like that, there’s not much of a hierarchy. But if you’re talking about like YouTube channels, there’s a person or people who are kind of leading a conversation, but then what they’re doing is influenced by their commenters and is influenced by the guests who have their own kind of. Nodes that are influenced by their commenters. Yes, influenced by their guests, but there’s still, there’s all these minute mini hierarchies going on all the time. I would say it’s not really like getting rid of hierarchy, but more just like forcing the hierarchies to constantly adapt and re justify themselves. Otherwise they disappear. But are they? I want to push back on you because I mean, a small world network is an amorphous. You have centralized hubs, right? So you have things that are larger in the network because they’re hubs. And that’s what, but it’s that there are multiple hubs and they shift around and the hubs are dependent on their right. So a small world network has, it’s not, you know, it’s not an equity structure in which everything is getting equal input and output. That’s not what a small world network is. That’s not what your brain is either. So you think about even the YouTube superstars, right? They’re always, they’re always in that. Even those hubs are dependent on how they’re connected to other hubs that are connected to other networks. And it’s constantly shifting around. That’s a lot different. You know, so let’s take a classic example of hierarchy, like, like a feudalism, right? Right. The whole point of that structure is status. The whole point is, you know, conserving because you’re in a scarcity situation, right? You’re in a scarcity situation. And that’s what hierarchies make sense in scarcity situations because they’re very conservative, right? And that’s what you need in scarcity. But we’re no longer in a information scarcity situation. That’s in fact what we’re discovering. We’re discovering that, wait, while we’re facing all this economic loss, we actually have, we’re not in information scarcity. That’s not where we are at all. So I don’t know. I don’t see, like, even think about even like Joe Rogan. I don’t like Joe Rogan, but I’m just using an example. You know, he was just doing his thing and his entertainment. And then he got called to task for when he had a, I can’t remember who was, had somebody on his David Poole was talking about this. He had somebody on his show and he didn’t he didn’t properly grill him. And all the people, all of his network, all the people said, what are you doing? Oh, the CEO of Twitter, I think it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was like, no, no. And he then he then had to adopt a new role. And it was not only that, is that, you know, other other other other of the, you know, of the central hubs in the small world network were also sort of started repositioning. It’s I think it’s very different. Yeah, I agree with you. It’s very different. I think it could kind of be seen in both ways. Maybe what you just clarified for me was like, I was imagining when you were describing the network, I was imagining something flatter that didn’t have these like peaks. No, yeah. So small world networks are like, if you if you look at them topographically, like they have hubs, right. And like that. So you have you have areas that are tightly clustered together. Right. And then and then and then and then they have looser connections to other clusters and then they’re constantly shifting around. Interestingly, when I was talking to Nora Bateson, she’s she she. OK, let me talk about her, because it’s an example of exactly what I’m trying to talk about how we can change the education. OK, so and I’m hoping that she and I get to talk again. We really hit it off. She’s actually the daughter of Gregory Bateson. I don’t know if you guys know he’s one of the founding figures of complexity thinking and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. His son, Eric of Atikiosis Bateson actually designed my program at UBC. He was an amazing professor. Yeah, so she has a thing that she calls warm data labs. And I’m really interested in it because of the project I’m doing on dialectic and dialogous. But think about it, Katie, this I’ll show you what I mean. So what you do is you we have a whole assembly and then, you know, a few people speak or else we have sort of a here’s the speaker. That’s a hierarchical. Now, what you do is you break everybody up into groups, small groups, and each group goes and talks about health. Right. And but what happens is individuals from group, if I’m in this group, at some point I might get up and go all the way over to that group and then join that group. So I’m this disruptive figure. I come in and I disrupt that group and then they reconfigure. And so what you’ve got is you’ve actually got a small world network that’s constantly dynamically reconfiguring itself. And what’s really cool about that is you get like a distributed Socrates. There’s no one person that’s taking the role of Socrates, but the system is set up to constantly provoke itself and disturb itself and disrupt itself. And you get this dynamical small world network. And when people come back to the group discussion, they’ve got sort of this deep understanding of the topic. That sounds like the correct way to design a really good party. I’m really bad at parties, so I don’t know about that. But she’s getting a lot of success with it. What she means by one data, by the way, is many of the issues we’re facing are dynamically complex and we are immersed in them. And so we can’t rely on sort of cold data, abstract. We have to rely on warm data, data that’s in process within the complexity. And so she’s trying to and you can see what, like I said, why I’m so interested in this, because this is a way, I think, of trying to get a virtual distributed Socrates into these into these situations without somebody necessarily having to be the complete figure of Socrates. And that’s what I mean by a dynamically recursive small world network. Okay, yeah, I like that. I see. I see where you’re going now. So I’m just slightly unclear on the definition of warm data. Yep. What is what does that mean exactly? So I guess the inspiration, I think this is right. You think about like ethnographic data, like what the anthropologists do. So the idea is you can’t study a culture from the outside, you have to go there and you have to go through the difficult process of enculturation. Because a culture is something that you can only know what I would say in a perspectival and participatory fashion, you have to be immersed in its dynamics, immersed in its ongoing complexity in order to fully understand what a culture is. And her point is that many of the phenomena, cultures is a hyper object, right? And so many of the things we face, many of the problems we face are also hyper objective like that. And so we can only understand and we only can understand them in so far as we are immersed and participating within their dynamic complexity. I see. So it’s kind of like you’re going around and trying different perspectives on and you’re able to look at the data from different points of view. And in that way, the data is kind of alive or warm or something like that. And so you’re doing something much more like the platonic dialogue rather than the Aristotelian monologue. You’re not trying to say, oh, what I can do is get to the view from above. That’s the view from nowhere, you know, in Naples sense. You’re not going to get you can’t abstract, abstract yourself out of it. You’ll in fact lose it, the phenomena. And so you have to always be looking for warm data, data that you are aspectively right. And I would say also salience like bound to in order to get into the right relationship with the phenomena in order to be able to intervene in it and modify it as wisely as possible. That’s what I think she means. That’s interesting. And that kind of also connects to something we wanted to talk about in our in our time section relating to time. Like listening to you talking to Christopher and Andrew, you guys were kind of taught you and Christopher kind of talking a bit about like how this is changing people’s understanding of time or experience of time. And it got me thinking a little bit like, are you familiar with Walter Benjamin’s concept of Messianic time? Oh, I have a meta memory. I know I have come across this before, but I could not speak to it at all. So once you start talking, I’ll probably go, oh, yeah. OK, I’ll just get like a brief summary. It’s basically the idea is like, like we have a mainstream concept of time, which is very like view from above. According to Benjamin, like we tend to be time is being kind of empty and linear. And it’s just time is just like the homogenous in that way. Whereas he he proposes like an alternative view of time, which he calls Messianic time, where like the past is kind of illuminated by the present. Like certain moments of the past are like charged by whatever’s happening in the present. So we end up with like a constellation of events like connecting the past to the present. And it just even like listening to you now, it really makes me think of it because you’re invoking like, you know, World War One, World War Two, the Hellenistic Domicide and like all these events. And I’m just sort of wondering, like. In that conception, like, how is our past? No, no, that’s good. That’s really good. So, I mean, I was using more Tillich here and put the connection to Messianic is appropriate because the the tillic is a Protestant theologian, right? He’s sort of post Christian in some important ways. He was the guy who talked about the God beyond God, the God beyond the God of theism. But he it’s from him that I learned this notion of Kairos within Kairos means the fullness of time rather than an empty time. And so what it means is most and there’s a sense in which most most of the time reality, the unfolding of time has this kind of inertia to it. It just is just unfolding and we are just sort of swept along it and we can’t do very much. But the idea is there there are points in the course of time when you think of it like a river where. The conditions that have been generated by time actually destabilize. And what you have is you have a bunch of conditions that emerge such that it is possible for things for the course of that river to suddenly change its directions. And the idea in the Gospels was in I think also in Paul that Jesus Christ comes in the fullness of time. He comes at just that moment where if he had come somewhere else and at some other time, then things wouldn’t have shifted in terms of the kingdom of God wouldn’t have invented the way it did. And so you can think about it. Kairos carries with it this, you know, the Paschal sense of finesse. Right. So our previous time is like like the spirit of geometry. We just calculated and it’s geometrical and we can just calculate it and move through it. It has that inertial inevitability to it. But when we get to Kairos, we now move into finesse where, you know, a really, you know, acute and sensitivity to timing and placement now become crucial. And you can see this in dynamical systems when they go into a state of criticality, you have sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When they’re in criticality, things that would have not like very small effects that would have largely just been absorbed by the system. Very small events can have huge consequences. They can suddenly massively ramify it throughout the system. So Kairos is that kind of criticality. And what Tillich was talking about was that you have this relationship to time. And I’m using that. He doesn’t use this language, but I think it’s fair to him. Where you shift from the spirit of geometry to the spirit of finesse in your experience in time. And that’s really important because given what, you know, given some of Hans’ criticisms, brilliant criticisms in the sense of time, where we had sort of atomized the time, the time in no way unfolded, right? It was just atomized, these discrete moments that are disconnected and just buzz and don’t matter in any way. When we come into Kairos, that whole geometric spatialization and atomization of our experience of time collapses and we get into the spirit of finesse for time. Interesting. Actually, that kind of, as you were saying that, that time had become atomized. It reminded me of how, like, physically and psychologically, we’ve become atomized. And I was thinking about how you were saying, you know, we should form ourselves into small mode networks. And then I was thinking, does time form itself into small world networks? That I don’t know. Time is one of the great mysteries. I mean, we try to get into the ontology of time. You’re moving beyond my ken. I’m talking more just about the phenomenology of it, whatever it is that we’re ascending to in our phenomenology. Go ahead. Oh, I was going to say it’s kind of implicit in the concept of Messianic time, too. And it’s really interesting because you’re almost saying that, like, in Kairos, we are more inhabiting Messianic time than other times. Yes. Yeah, it’s like part of the idea is that, like, instead of viewing time as like a series of atomized events, like when something happens in the present that, like, charges certain moments of the past, we’re in a way like fulfilling those moments. Yes. We’re like the Messiah of those moments. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it reminds me of the warm data thing that you were just talking about, where if we happen to be at the right place at the right time, then we get connected with a network of other connected events in the past. And so we get this. Yeah, we can kind of… I hadn’t thought about that. Yeah, that’s also a shift between a cold data view of time and a warm data view of time. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, and the idea of charge, I like that. I like that, Ariel. It’s like, yeah, that captures the fullness of time that’s in Kairos, that somehow the what’s happening in the present discloses the potentiality of past events that was buried under the inertial inevitability. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s really good. I didn’t come up with that, but… Well, but it’s still good. It’s still apropos. And you can see why we would then be thrown back on mythopoetic ways of thinking, because we’re moving out of geometrical time into finesse time, into Kairotic time. Yeah. Yeah. And so we’re going to look for these sort of deep perennial narrative patterns to try and get the fullness of time. I hadn’t thought about that, but those two belong together very deeply, I think. You said something when you were talking about how you felt like this might not be or this probably won’t be the only pandemic. And I’m referring to when you were on the meeting Kairos conversation, you said something like culture doesn’t usually change. Things don’t usually change the first time around. It’s the second, third, fourth time around. So that’s kind of reminding me of what you’re saying. Like, in these moments, we think about what happened in the past that fits this pattern and so that we can hopefully seize it this time to fulfill, like, the transition into the new pattern that maybe that past moment was calling for, but didn’t push us towards hard enough. I think that’s right. And even that language, again, and this is not a criticism of you, Katie, the sense of being called is, again, hearkening. This is a religious sensibility in an important sense. And you’re bringing up, I think, the appropriate sense of prophecy. The prophet is not somebody who foretells the future, but picks up on the Kairos right now by appropriately picking up, I’ll use your language that you gave to me, picking up on the future. You’re picking up on the charge from the past, the charge. And remember what that initially meant. It meant, you know, a call given to you, a demand placed on you, right? You’re charged with something. And so I think we are coming into, in that sense, and I hope people do not misunderstand me, but in that sense that I’ve tried to articulate very carefully, I think we are coming into a prophetic time. Cool. Jordan Hall talks about something, I’m not sure if I’m going to use his language exactly right, but he talks about something like attractors. Like, there’s a system that’s kind of revolving around and like working with a certain attractor, but there’s always new attractors springing up all the time. And like sometimes a crisis happens. And in those moments, patterns that are being revolving around the new attractor are revealed. So like, I’m imagining like that attractor could be something like the call. Very much. It’s a hyper object that is exerting, calling us to a new way of being. And but our relationship to it is one of finesse and of warm data participation. We can’t sort of calculate our way into it. It’s not going to happen. And I guess that brings up a lot of stuff that I was talking with Jordan about. Because Jordan thinks we fall back on mythopoetic thinking because it’s they are our deepest pattern. Well, like I was arguing, they are our deepest pattern making machinery. They are the ones that have survived the most cross contextual change in our biological and cultural heritage. And so they are the ones that have the most likely the best possible chance of being transfer appropriate. But precisely because they are so transfer appropriate. They have to be so they have to be very symbolic because if they were very precise, they wouldn’t transfer well. Right. Right. That’s exactly. So you have this very powerful it’s it’s it’s survived. It’s wired into us. It transfers well. But it’s also like it’s vague and symbolic and associational. And so, again, he talks about, you know, needing to bring in a kind of integrity. And he he would very much like because I know because we’ve had a couple of conversations about this, this sense of finesse, because he and I have been trying to work out a bit of this normativity, this aesthetic, spiritual, religious normativity that we are needed in this time. And we’ve been doing that by trying to. And this goes with the discussion we just had about the prophetic time, trying to reformulate the notion of faith and get it to be something other than the willful assertion of propositions. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do. And we’ve been trying to do that in the face of countervailing evidence, which is what it has come to mean. Instead, coming up with this idea of faith as that person, the whole person. You know, so it’s an existential thing, not just a skill. It’s an existential mode that gets you into a finesse. So you have a continuity of contact with that course of events that is moving to the new attractor to a right relationship with it. That’s the notion of faith that we’re trying to bring back. I call it Socratic faith because I think it is exemplified in somebody like Socrates, who was very unwilling to assert very many propositions, but nevertheless was willing to go to his death. So there’s a kind of a different sense of faith there that I think we need to try and bring back. And it’s a sense of faith that’s interwoven with reason and wisdom and artistry, as opposed to opposed to it and dogmatically trying to impose itself. Another way of thinking about this, sorry for going on, but this is an important point to go back to Tillich. I was talking to this with Andrew Sweeney and Zach Stein. You know, Habermas made this excellent point that what Kant did, right, is he takes the Cartesian subjectivity and then he turns it into a normativity. And when you turn subjectivity into normativity, you get autonomy. And so what you get are the three autonomous things, the Kant’s free critique. You get the autonomy of reason, you get the autonomy of aesthetics, and you get the autonomy of morality. And we have the three spheres that are incommensurable with each other, right, you know, like science and art and morality. And they’re all autonomous. And then Tillich has this criticism, you know, he says, well, the advantage of autonomy is it gets you out of heteronomy. Heteronomy is when some foreign authority tries to impose itself on you. Tillich uses the biblical image of like demonic possession. You’re controlled and possessed and manipulated. And so we brought up a defense of autonomy. The problem with our normativity of subjective autonomy is that it has led to disconnection, fragmentation, the meeting crisis, etc., etc. And Tillich is responding to that in The Courage to Be, which is another way of talking about the faith that I’m talking about, the courage to be, that he proposed in his work, he proposes in especially in the systematic theology, he opposes he proposes that beyond heteronomy and autonomy is what he calls theonomy, which, you know, the normativity of God. But of course, he means the God beyond all possible gods. He doesn’t mean like traditional religious authority. What he means is exactly what I’m talking about. And I see it when I’m doing when I’m in the circling practices with people. What in that dynamically recursive small world network, dynamical system, this third factor appears. People start feeling that there is something above and beyond them individually. And they start to. It’s funny, I was talking to Ted about this yesterday, the guy who does the authentic relating in Toronto, all these secular people start using religious and spiritual language to talk about this. All of them. And they but they don’t talk about it like a demonic force that has come in. And I’ve been using the term the logos like in the logos. It comes up, but you feel an affinity to it. It’s beyond you. It’s beyond any of us. But you feel an affinity to it and you’re drawn to it. So although it’s not part of your autonomy, because it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s demanding, it’s calling you to aspire and affording you to do so. It’s also not something that is imperious and heteronimous, by sort of tearing you apart and destroying your agency. It’s it’s the it’s the kind of normativity that is inseparably bound up with the affordance of aspiration. Yeah. And aspiration cannot come out of my autonomy. That’s you know, that’s that’s Callard’s argument, Ali Paul’s argument. Right. You can’t get it. You can’t get it. Doesn’t make any sense. And so I think that aspirational normativity is exactly what we need to be able to become sensitive to again. But again, it can’t be separable from rationality. It can’t be right. Something that is proceeding without a concern for our proclivities to self-deception. Yeah, I was going to say one of the pitfalls that you’ve mentioned about like trying about faith, because you talked about this faith, which is just like a blind, I know it’s going to be OK. And that’s a maladaptive. You also talked about like nostalgic faith maladaptive. But one of the ones that that was most interesting to me that you were concerned about was this like utopian. Yes. Form of faith. And I think like, especially when we’re in this conversation right now where we’re talking about like maybe there’s a new attractor emerging or like a new calling. We need to shift towards a different kind of future. Like, how do we make sure that we’re avoiding that pitfall of having some kind of utopian faith? Like we feel like like we know what what needs to happen. Yeah. Don’t say, you know, that’s what it is. I mean, so part of it is to don’t say, you know, what the utopia is, instead say that you know how to belong to the course of its emergence. You take a theonomous approach to it. You you can at you at most participate warm data finesse in its emergence. You are not the author of it, nor are you the revolutionary who knows how it should be and who should be killed in order so that we get there. You it does not belong to you. You belong to it. That’s the difference. Do you do you feel like an important part of like knowing how to be part of it and flowing with it is identifying it? Or do you think that identifying what I think trying to identify? No. Here, here, here, here. Let me let me try it a different way. Utopia is so many cases distinction between a goal and an ideal. A goal is an end is an end state that you’re trying to get to that will be the resolution of your problem. Right. It’s very much a having mode thing. And we have to have goals. You guys know that, of course, all of us. I talk about that. OK. But Keeks talks about he’s trying to shift the use of this word, too. He talks about an ideal like honesty. Honesty isn’t the goal state you’re trying to get to. You don’t get to you don’t ever get to say, well, you know what? It’s May 4th, 2020. I finally achieved honesty. I’ve now achieved that state. I don’t need honesty anymore. I’m done with it. I’ve moved beyond it. There’s no right. I’ve satisfied it. That’s not what honesty is. Honesty isn’t a state you get to. It is adverbial. It is adverbial. It is a comprehensive modification of how you are always developing, always developing wisdom is like that, too. If you ever say, well, I’m wise now. I’m done. You’ve totally misunderstood what wisdom is. And so the faith I’m talking about is not utopic because utopias say, here’s the description of the goal state. And then here is the algorithmic method that gets us to that goal state that will be somehow the accumulation, the resting point, the final solution. And I use that deliberately to all of our problems. That’s not what I’m talking about at all. And Jordan doesn’t mean that by the attractor. He doesn’t mean that he’s talking about meta stability. He’s talking about the way the system can constantly adaptively reconfigure itself to a constantly complexifying and shifting reality. And it will need to shift again and it will need to shift again and it will need to shift again, just like relevance realization. I’m talking about a faith of relevance realization, not propositional assertion. There were multiple things that hit me on that. It seems like the problem might be actually propositional assertion and that the low if you can inhabit the lower layers, then you might be kind of a little bit more on the right track than if you try to necessarily put it into words. And the other thing that hit me is that it reminds me of like a platonic ideal or even like a like a yoga posture, right? Like there’s this idea of something perfect that we’re heading towards, but we we know we’re never going to get there. We’re just going to become closer and closer and closer to it. Does that does that land? Well, I like the first thing I want to push back on the second. The first one is really good. I think another reason so it’s circling back and which we are drawn to mythopoetic language is it’s to use Corbin’s term. It’s inherently imaginal. It’s gestural and it’s so it’s enacted symbolism. And and why that’s important is gestural, imaginal thinking bridges between propositional and non propositional cognition. Part of the reason why we turn to mythopoetic ways of thinking is because we can simultaneously engage propositional and sub propositional or non propositional, I prefer to say, forms of knowing and being. And so that’s why that comes up. So I think, yeah, I think that that is that’s right. Now, the problem with with a problem we’ve had with our history with mythopoetic discourse is we literalize it and and fundamentalize it. And then we remove it from actually being embedded in all the non propositional stuff. And we actually lose that the the religion, the connectedness and our faith just becomes the assertion of proposition. So I agree with the first one. I’m not so sure I agree with the second one, because I don’t even like the idea of like, well, I know what it looks like. I just admit I’ll never get there. You see, because think about think about Phileas Sophia, what Socrates offered. He’s he claimed that we could never be gods. We can never write and we could never be gods. So we could never be wise because only the gods are wise. What we can do as human beings is we can love wisdom, which is a very different thing. And this is relevant to because, you know, the mythopoetic stuff, we start talking about gods and things like that. The proper relationship. Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe I’m going to say this sentence. The proper relationship with the gods is right is to be is to always be realizing that we can’t be them. But in a way that liberates us to be more than what we currently are. Yeah, John, this kind of makes me think of something that we were all kind of wondering, listening to some of your recent interviews, you’ve said a couple of times that if if push came to shove, your principles are more important than your own survival. Yeah. And that you would choose your principles over your survival. So we were kind of wondering, like, which principles you had in mind or how you might see them coming into conflict, conflict. I won’t live a life of fear. So there’s this is another there’s, you know, you have some cost and arguments that on more themselves from plausibility, which is like, you know, I take precautions. I’m doing everything that I’m being asked to do right now, because I think that’s socially responsible. But, you know, it’s like, well, if it gets to well, I just can’t, you know, because if you do this, then you might get sick and then you might die. And death is like, you know, just the infinite negative. And therefore, even if all that chain of events is so improbable, you know, there must nevertheless. Right. I’m just not going to live a life of fear like that at some point. Right. If it’s going to be if it’s going to be well, that in order to survive, I have to dehumanize myself to a significant degree and live in constant fear because of this nebulous threat and an increasingly potentially authoritarian state trying to deal with it. At some point, it’s like, no, I just don’t want to live that way. That’s just not I don’t want to live a life of fear. I don’t want to live a life. And at some point, I mean, I’m older than you guys. So that matters. You’re younger. I get it. So I get that. OK. But at some point, my survival doesn’t mean as much to me as the kind of life I want to live. And so that’s so the principles that make a life of just fear a life. I don’t want to be a coward. I don’t want to just coward a life in which the capacity for doing philosophy for examining the unexamined life is not worth living. We get to a place where we’re getting to that. I don’t think we’re there. But I made a deliberate effort when I saw especially how many people are spinning off into a kind of historic hysterical kind of fear. I sat down and I thought, you know, where would how far are you? How far would you go towards ignoring a threat is, of course, irrational. That’s irrational, irresponsible. How far would you go, though? How far would you go? And so I sort of made in my mind, I came to a decision. No, any of those things that would rob me of the Socratic way of life and dehumanize me into being a coward and being bound to just the having mode and maintaining my survival. I don’t want that. I don’t want that. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I definitely resonate with that. That’s really interesting. And it actually kind of sparked a bit of an insight for me about some of the social isolation. Like we had a lot of debate with our friends about whether to socially isolate at all and stuff like that. And it makes me think like maybe think of what we were talking about in your class, where you were saying talking about like the golden mean when it came to virtues. And it’s not just being in the middle, but it’s like being at the right point at the right time. Yes, exactly, exactly. And Jordan Hall and I talked about that. The faith is about that finesse about, you know, because we’re constructing virtual engines on the fly here because we’re trying to find the right set of conditions that will get us on course. Right. And he talked about both panic and anti panic and how we have to steer between the skill and cryptos of panic and anti panic. And that’s very much like, you know, some of the other points we’re talking about, like Frank was notion about the people who who lose the connection to the logos. He called his therapy logo therapy for a reason. You know, the people who just give up and despair and lose the connection to the logos or the people who just utopically assert we will be rescued on this day. And I know it for sure. We have to we have to we have to steer between panic and anti panic. Yeah, it reminds me of like the discussion on flow states where, you know, you have like to you have like kind of boredom and you have anxiety and you have to kind of like exactly follow this channel. And maybe maybe that’s the correct way to do faith. Yes. This makes me want to bring up another potential for myth to when we’re talking about faith, because you said, like, maybe people go back to these myths because they’ve survived many transit transitions. So maybe they’re most likely to survive. But also, I was thinking that a lot of like really powerful myths, like I’m thinking of Jesus in particular, maybe it’s bold to call it a myth, but like a lot of these myths are about a moment where somebody finessed and rode that wave into the new tractor. And it’s almost like a story that in a way could show us a model for how to do they do they do. And I mean, I don’t think this is a bad term. I don’t regard it as a pejorative terminology. And I mean, and Plato in the seventh letter makes it clear that he’s mythologized Socrates. He says, I’ve made him more beautiful. And he doesn’t think he’s doing anything duplicitous or dishonest in doing that. He thinks that what he’s doing is putting Socrates in the form that will allow him to become mythic, in the sense we’re talking about here, transferable to multiple situations and multiple contexts. And so I think I think that’s exactly right. And this is what I mean. The fact that we many people are think about we just went through Easter. And our culture, we’re very illiterate about a lot of these myths. We’re illiterate about them. That’s what I mean when I said we’re sort of religiously. And I don’t mean just the Christian myths. We’re illiterate about a lot of the myths, other Axial Age myths. Not many people know all the mythology around Siddhartha, Gautama or Socrates. And I got into a great discussion about Rafe Kelly with this about how we need to reintegrate the hero with the sage in our mythology. We need to look for the sage hero myths rather than just the hero myths. The problem with the hero myth is, and this is why I’m critical of, you know, some of Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson and then Rafe sort of pushed back on me. But then he acknowledged that I was kind of right. So it was a really good giving back and forth between us. It’s on his channel is that, you know, the hero myth has become very much in our culture, has become very much reduced to the warrior myth. And the hero is all yang and no yin. And so the mythologies, and we forget that the, take a look at the Greek myths. For every hero myth, there’s a hubris myth. For every thesius, there is an Icarus, right, telling us, wait, wait. You can’t conquer everything and don’t try to conquer the domain of the gods because then you’re going to fall to earth or like Phaedon, you’re going to be struck down by Zeus or like Arachne Athena, the goddess of wisdom is going to turn you into a spider. So I think we’ve forgotten all the hubris myths. We’ve isolated the hero myths and then we’ve identified the hero with the warrior. So I’m kind of very hesitant around all the hero mythology. And I think if we go back to we integrating the hero with the sage, the heroic sage, like Jesus, like Siddhartha, like Socrates, I think that’s a much better choice for us going forward. But that’s what I mean about you have to reflect on this stuff. You have to get educated in it. Just because a myth comes up doesn’t mean it’s the best. So I think we have maybe about six minutes left. Should we do one more question or should we just do like closing remarks? Why don’t you ask your question, Chris? We have time for one more. OK, so, John, I’ve heard a lot of talk about digital campfires recently and how Zoom is kind of reviving the campfire. I guess I started that. I think Brett Weinstein did too. Brett sort of talked about it. Jordan mentioned it to me that I was so it’s sort of it’s been a distributed thing that sort of generated. Right. Yeah. I definitely remember that you had discussed it. I was just wondering, so what is special about campfires? And is it the telling of stories? Is it the dia logos? And do you think that we might see a revival of collective consciousness due to us all doing this digital campfire thing? No, that’s good. So notice that how Guy Stenstock named his practice, he called it circling. We circle around the logos and the logos is like a fire. Right. And that’s the metaphor that’s being used. And Guy’s actually explicitly uses that at times. And what we used to have in a campfire is we used to circle. And that’s really important. Notice that we are in a platonic circle here. What I mean by that is it’s an abstract circle. We’re not actually located in space with respect to each other. So we can’t use space to mark out status. We can’t. We’re like in a campfire. We’re circled and we’re all glowing. And the centre shifts because the zoom will shift, right, who’s on screen. Right. And so it’s like a campfire. And so we’re focused on each other, but we’re also focused on this shared space that’s constantly like a fire changing and it’s literally glowing because it’s lighted. And notice how our faces are to each other. If your face was this large on my visual, on my retina, you’d be very close to me in person in a way that was socially uncomfortable. But it doesn’t matter in this medium. The grammar is different. We’re allowed to have this proximity to each other without trespassing on all kinds of social niceties. So we have these lit faces. And then most of the person is actually occluded from our vision. Like when we’re sitting around a campfire and the people have their lit face. But most of us is in darkness. And we’re like it’s very much like the that feeling of, you know, intimacy that campfires give us. And that’s, of course, because they also were, you know, central to our survival across several species. They had a very central feature for us. Matt Rossano argues, I think this is a plausible hypothesis, that it think about when you’re sitting in a campfire. So, first of all, you’re in connection. You’re intimate. And notice, you know, people talk and you zoom out to the face and then you zoom in to yourself. But on this meditating object, the campfire, then you zoom out and you zoom in. You zoom out and you zoom in. And he said that probably really helped to train working memory and cognitive flexibility. And so I’m suggesting that this, it’s a provocative suggestion, I hope. Earlier, I suggested that this medium was this new hyper object and technology dynamically recursive small world network. And it has tremendous potential. And it does. And but at the same time, symbol on, symbol on is to join two things that were previously unjoined together, symbol, symbol on. At the same time as it being this, you know, cutting edge technology that could cyborg our cognition in powerful new ways, it also throws us back to the primordiality of the campfire. That’s what I mean by the digital campfire. Wow. So maybe this is a positive sort of a silver lining to this coronavirus crisis that we’re all learning how to campfire again. And maybe this will, you know, lead, it will cause a dialogos, you know, to. Yes. To bring us somewhere new. I think we have an inactive symbol of dialogos. We’re in, we are, we are. So not only are we exemplifying it in our conversation, we are also, we have an enacted symbol, a shared symbol between us in the physicality of the medium itself. It’s awesome. I think that’s a good place to end off. And on a positive note is always nice. All right. Well, thanks again, John, so much for coming on. This was an awesome conversation. And if you’re watching, please like, subscribe, leave us a comment and we’ll see you next time. It’s great. Thanks, guys. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining us on the Multiversity Project. We hope you found this episode both mind-bending and enjoyable. We can be found all over the social media space and at MultiversityProject.co If you like this content, give us a like, comment, follow, share or support us on Patreon. Catch you on the flip side.