https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ln2JgjNHe74
I’m trying to figure out through the idea of worship, as a matter of fact, because I kept using the metaphor of a North Star, right? And so what that is, it’s a unifying direction. It’s a point for unifying, to aligning people’s focus or whatever. And so worship can be individual, but it can also be this communal project. And in some sense, it’s almost like what we’re talking about by worship is getting people to fixate their gaze in the same direction and to be humble in the same way before the same thing, rather than pointing in all different directions and doing whatever. There’s probably many intelligent things we could throw in here about the Marxist perversion of this exact system as well. What’s important to understand is that in the system, because we talked about different It’s important to understand that this is a fractal thing. And that’s one of the differences between the authoritarian and totalitarian gesture that we see in the 20th century and now again, is that it’s fractal. So we exist as a family by all being oriented together towards our unity as a family, right? That’s our little North Star. And then we exist as a city by having all our orientation in the same direction, recognizing the name, the city and the structures which embody it. So you have this fractal orienting that you mentioned and that that fractal orienting kind of, they all these orientations build up on each other and then create a world in which you can actually live. In the authoritarian system, they understand that too, but they want one thing that binds us all. Like one end. They want a point like they want the state or they want Stalin or they want the leader or they want one thing and that in order for that to work, they have to break down all the intermediary structures. They have to destroy community. They have to destroy churches. They have to destroy all the intermediary points of attention in order to create one single thing that kind of tries to bind all of reality together. That’s the Tower of Babel image as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. Yeah, I think that you’re not wrong in this. You’re not wrong in this intuition that you have this fractal structure as you’re framing it. I’m picturing like the Sierpinski triangle as you’re talking. Actually as a matter of fact. Is that the triangle with triangles inside? Yeah, yeah, it’s a triangle with triangles inside. But you just take the bottom pieces off so it looks like a hierarchy instead. All the bottoms of the triangle are deleted. So now it looks like a tree diagram. I think that’s got a name too. It’s probably Sierpinski’s tree or something like that. It’s named after a guy named Sierpinski as it turns out. But yeah, and so you are correct with the totalitarian impulse. Of course, this is also what Mark says in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the right. This is a famous opium of the masses introduction. The religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. It’s the opium of the masses. A couple paragraphs down, he says that religion is the false son that man puts so that he orbits around it until he realizes that he orbits around the true son of himself. And so you can easily see how that breaks down the entire hierarchy. You’re not orienting yourself toward your family. You’re not orienting yourself toward your network of friends or your community. You’re not orienting yourself toward the city or broader community in which that’s embedded. You’re not orienting that toward maybe the state or nation. You’re not orienting that toward. And I was just thinking while you were talking about it, it’s something as somebody who was very active in the atheist movement stuff a decade ago. And I think back at how it used to bother me to see kind of state officials give glory to God. And now it’s like, no, they’re saying there’s something higher than me that I have to be. Yeah. And I’m like, wait, that’s really comforting. Okay. It’s not necessarily an endorsement of religion. I’m not the king of the universe mentality that’s sort of important here that I’m kind of appreciating at the moment. And so what you see then is everybody’s orienting toward themselves. And so what’s going to happen is some megalomaniac is going to come in and be able to decide he’s the true North Star with the right philosophy that’s going to dictate what North stardom’s might not even be a star. It’s probably the dirt that we’re all going to face. And so I think you are, I really like your framing. It’s hard to respond to because it’s kind of abstract in the moment, but I don’t disagree with what you’ve put out whatsoever. Yeah. But you can see how, like, that’s why I use the word worship. It’s attention. It’s like you were right when you talked about the side of the North Star, but it’s an embodied attention which actually makes the world actually, it’s even more than what I said. It actually makes pretty much everything exist. It’s like all things that have multiplicity are bound through something like a North Star in order for them to exist, even objects and things in the world. But that scales up into us and then we exist together as beings because you’re made a bunch of stuff too. Like you’re also made out of a bunch of multiplicity, but nonetheless, these multiplicity coalesces into one, but only to the extent that you also are bound to others in love and that that continues to build up. And that’s that image that I said about the new heavenly Jerusalem. That’s why there’s this image of the kings render their crowns, their glory up into the new Jerusalem. That is that they all exist as kingdoms, but they are able to understand that there’s something transcend that transcends them and they give that up and it keeps going up until it reaches God basically. So yeah, this opens in the question. So I think we’re largely talking about the same thing in very different ways. And what does it look like in the 21st century where we are all connected by our phones, where our nations mean something because we live there physically and depend upon physical reality to survive in them. But at the same time, our nations that we identify with are primarily digital bands of people who are in some sense like minded, which transcends or crosses all borders. And then we’re kind of in this poisonous moment where literally folkish thought, folkish nationalist thought is being injected into identity categories, which has never worked out real well. You know, it’s almost like there’s this attempt to hammer us into, oh, you’re white, so you’re black, so you’re Hispanic, so this, that and the other thing in each case. And you know, you should identify that. I even just saw a thing today. It was even when you speak about somebody else that you should, unless they’ve explicitly told you, opted out, you should put identity first. So I can’t refer to, say, I met with the congressman, Byron Donalds, the other day, I talked to him. I can’t say, yeah, I talked to Byron Donalds. I have to say I talked to the black man, Byron Donalds. I have to put his identity first to recognize the importance of the identity. And so it’s almost like I met with the Chinese national so-and-so. I met with the British so-and-so. You know, this Fulcash nationalism is being hammered on us in this kind of most disgusting way. So this is a challenge we’re up against. What does this fractal orientation, if we will, this kind of fractal hierarchy of worship look like in a world that is no longer that your community is necessarily the physical community that you’re surrounded with by virtue of happening to have been born or moved to a certain locale? Even with family, you’re born into your family, but you’re living on your smartphone, which is connected to the world everywhere. Fun times with being married, sitting on opposite ends of the couch as we do talking to our people and our phones. You know, barely looking at each other sometimes. I think that the solution to that is reorienting of attention. And I think that it is… I mean, I’m not saying that… I mean, we’re trying. And this is something that we’re trying to do here as well, which is to reconnect to our feet that are on the ground. And so it’s not that we’re going to necessarily completely not use the phone or decry the phone, but you know, you go to church. That’s why I tell people on my channel, go to church. And what I mean by go to church is I mean physically go to places where people gather together. You know, I say the same thing. Real life is what happens when you get offline. And I’ve had this whole conversation yesterday about with my friend, John Wood Jr., I’m supposed to say, black man, we have to identify. And we were having a conversation yesterday and we were talking about the difference between Zoom calls and conferences and getting together in person and the difference in connection that it makes. And how I… A year and a half ago when COVID finally let me go to my first conference and I just thought, I sat there in the lobby of this hotel after I talked with several people who wandered off for other commitments at the conference. And I kind of got left with nothing to do for a minute. And I sat there and thought about it. It’s like, you know, this is magic. I feel closer to these people in a different way than I would if we would have spent all this time by Zoom where I’m just going to push the red button on my screen in a minute. And we’re all back in our own worlds. You know, we had to travel together. So there’s a commitment to getting there. We came together. We’re physically present with one another. If I start to drift, you can slap me on the side of the head or the shoulder or wherever you get my attention, tap me on the shoulder, arm around me. You know, so there are these attention-orienting things that bring that community together. So I agree. Yeah. Go to church where church can be construed broadly or narrowly or both. Yeah. I mean, that’s the way that we’ve been trying to do it. And also, I mean, basically, I don’t know if you know Rod Dreher. He wrote… Yeah. So his kind of Benedict option and now his recent book has been a way of thinking, you know, the way we’re setting things up here. And so like the parish, but the online world is useful. So I can tell you what’s happening around me right now. So my parish, basically, you have the situation where a bunch of people start going to an Orthodox church because they watch my videos online. Not just that, but partly that. So they end up in this parish, but then the people there want to have a more real community and more real encounter. And so we actually start working on that, creating alternative even networks for food, alternative networks for, you know, an understanding that we have to be in the same place. We have to get together and eat together and sing together and do these things physically and work towards basically creating alternative, even alternative economic systems, like looking at the Mennonites as a kind of example of what’s possible in terms of creating alternative systems in every sphere of reality. Because without that, we’re fried, like we are. No, I totally agree. And it has to happen very pretty fast because things are going super fast. Yeah, we’ve got to anchor ourselves onto the analog. In fact, the physical, in addition to figuring out how to make use of the digital, while dealing with the fact that these things are dopamine pumps above almost anything else, and that the law of convenience dictates, it’s just easier. And therefore, you know, you have to go through all that trouble to go to a conference, you have to get on a plane, you have to stay in a hotel, you have to pack your bag, you have to go through trouble to drive to the church or even to walk to the church and to be at the church. And that’s what you could be doing. And it’s at a certain time if you want people to get together. Turns out punctuality is not white supremacy culture. It’s a thing that is required for people to get together intentionally. Yeah, and there’s the messiness of saying something in front of someone that you don’t get on Twitter, that you don’t get on Facebook. You know, you say something standing in front of someone and then you see the way they look at you and you get it, you know, you can sense, that’s why you can understand why the online world creates such dysfunctional behavior, because usually the physical world is there to remind you that that joke was a little was off key. Like that was too much. You know, that statement just came out of nowhere. You get it by the subtle. You just block them. Exactly. And this was a thing for me. So this is a spiritual moment. I was in a conversation publicly one time where it turned out to get kind of contentious across and I had the the urge. This was like a red warning siren that went off in my head when I realized to block them. I wish I could block this person, like push a button and they just disappear. I can’t hear from them anymore. And I was like, holy shit, I have left the path of wisdom. I have to come back. You know, and so I agree with you completely about this. And I also agree if we don’t do this fairly quickly, we’re fried because the architects of digital tyranny are are well ahead of where people think they might be. They’ve been seeing these opportunities and gaming for them for a while. Yeah, that’s what it feels like. I mean, it’s like we’re late to the game and understanding how this has this has been building up towards, you know, like the relationship between digital currency, metaverse, digital identity, all these things, all of a sudden these puzzles that are appearing in front of us. And you think, well, for these puzzle for these puzzle pieces to appear so close to each other at this moment, it’s not like this hasn’t been going on for a while. Like these these pieces have been put into place for a while. So, like you said, there’s a we have we have we have a disadvantage at the moment in terms of we need to catch up to make sure that we’re not completely swallowed.