https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ekmG0vhvg-c
But I thought too, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way education teaches us to deal in abstractions. And kind of from early childhood, we are taught to think in abstract terms. I’ve been reading this, are you familiar with this book, Cognitive Development? Nope. Or how about this is the predecessor for many people, Orality and Literacy by Walter Ahn. This is interesting because it’s the results of the work of a neuropsychologist, communist, Soviet neuropsychologist in the 1930s. So I was like, whoo! But he went to these little towns in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and he interviewed people who were, it was like a spectrum. Some of them had begun to become literate, and most had not. Some were high in the social status, some were low. He just interviewed a lot of people and asked them questions. And when he said, I was going to ask them, he showed them abstract images, just a circle, a square, a triangle, asked what they were. And those who had a little bit of education would say, that’s a circle, that’s a square, that’s a triangle. The people who were illiterate would say, that’s a mirror, that’s a house, moon, that’s a stirrup. They recognized them as friends, innocents, as things they already knew, as things that were part of the story of their lives, that they are participating in a story with all these other people. And they are enmeshed in all these touchable, tangible things around them. It seemed to me, it did not seem that way to the author, A.L. Rulia, it did not seem to him that this was a good thing. You know, we have to train them so they’ll think logically and abstractly. It intrigued me how he missed that they were capable of using abstract category of thinking. He would show them in four images, there’s a saw, a hatchet, a hammer, and a log. And he’d say, which one doesn’t belong? And of course, the right answer is, the log doesn’t belong. Nobody would say that. They would all say, you have to have the log, or there’s nothing for the saw and the hammer and the hatchet to work on. That’s hilarious. The log is part of the story. And we’d say, you know, a house and a wheelbarrow and a tree and a bird, you know, well, the bird is the only one that’s a living animal. They say, no, you need the bird. The bird will make a nest in the tree and it will be next to the house. Look, it’s next to the house. And he will sing and people in the house will be happy. They just really resisted reducing things to abstraction. And I think maybe that’s the sickness that we have. And one more thing, as he gets further along, he has like nine stages. He takes them through. One of the last things he does is he says, tell me about yourself. What are you like? What kind of a person? Some people are angry. Some people are happy. What kind of a person are you? And they would resist that. And they would say, you have to ask the people who know me, how can I know my own heart? But they know they can tell you what I’m like. I think the sense of being enmeshed in a story, in a world where there are people who know you better than you know yourself, you don’t define yourself. You don’t make up your own profile. It is the circle of others around you who really know you. I think this is what people are hungry for, but they don’t know it. And we are so heavily conditioned to think in terms of abstractions. One of them was a spectacle, a drinking glass, a water pitcher. And what was the last one? I don’t remember. But there were one of them that just didn’t fit. Then the man said, you can buy them all in a shop. So, you know, he was capable of thinking in abstract terms. But yeah, but it was real life that mattered. Yeah, they didn’t. They were they tended when presented with a series of things. They tended rather than try to find the excluded one, try to try to web to weave them together into a story. They actually tried to see how they communed with each other rather than the opposite, which is which is one of the diseases of the modern world. Like we we understand health through disease. We understand things through their exceptions, things through that we try to we almost have like an upside down way of understanding the world where we look at. We look at we look at things that don’t work in order to understand things that work. And that’s how we kind of we tend to we tend to analyze reality. And in terms of this idea of self naming, this is if there’s any disease that we have, it’s self naming the whole individual idea of, you know, and we kind of have a caricature of the will to power right now in our society where people can just declare themselves to be whatever they fancy themselves to be and not understand that your identity is actually, like you said, is supposed to be enmeshed within a, you know, a network of human relations. And if it’s not, then whatever identity you kind of self proclaim, it’s going to make you miserable no matter what it is, because we’re meant for communion. We’re not meant to be these splendid individuals in isolation and kind of declaring our our identity to others. You know, the temptation of autonomy. And it’s really that’s the sin. It’s like that’s the sin of Satan. It’s the sin of Adam. It’s the sin. It’s the main sin is the sin of trying to be autonomous and to kind of be on top of things and not know it’s the it’s actually that’s the that’s the first sin. And then the other sins kind of come after, you know, all the what we tend to think as sins.