https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9pyeDvxeXkg
I was asking about how we aim for the best and how do we define the best such that we don’t fall into a sort of subjectivism trap where the best is just whatever I feel like is the best for me or or the best for the universe but in my own particular viewpoint. Is there such a thing as an objective best that we’re all searching for? There’s a transpersonal best. I don’t know if it’s objective. I think we need a third category, which is something like transpersonal subjective. So it’s the same across people, but it still manifests itself in the subjective domain. There’s a technical problem with being selfish because you might say, well, it’s myself against others and I could just do what was good for me. There’s a technical problem with that, which I outlined in both books, but in particular and Beyond Order said, well, if it’s let’s say you’re only acting in accordance with what’s good for you. Well, which you do you mean exactly? Do you mean you in the next five minutes or the next 10 minutes or the next day or the next week or month or year or five years, etc. You get you get the picture. There’s the you that extends at multiple levels of temporal resolution. And that’s a group that you I mean, you’re an old person. Not yet, but you will be. And so. You could say that if you were enlightened, selfish, you’d act in a manner now that is best for your 80 year old self. And so if you take yourself seriously as an entity that exists collectively across time, then you’re faced with the problem of the collective instantly, even if you’re highly selfish. So I don’t think that there is a selfishness that’s logically juxtaposed against the interest of the collective. And I do think that there are emergent ethics that are inevitable. I think you see them cross species, even to some degree. There are playable and non playable games. That’s a good way of looking at it, because a game is an iterated iterated series of interactions and out of iterated series of interactions, ethics emerges and it emerges with a structure. And we recognize the structure. One way we recognize it, I believe, and this is also assuming that your eyes are open and you’re not lying to yourself to too great a degree, you’ll be struck with admiration for certain people that grips you. Well, why? Well, that’s the manifestation of the instinct to imitate that grips you with admiration. It’s the same sense of meaning. And it’s because that person is doing something that signals to you the place that you should advance to. And our cognitive architecture is predicated on imitation to a degree that’s almost impossible to overstate. And that sense of awe, which is an elevation of the sense of meaning, is manifested when the admirable makes itself present. And that’s not really cognitive. It’s not something you think through. It’s something that grabs you. Now, you can make it explicit. You can decompose it. You can take it apart. The idea of worship, when the idea of worship is taken seriously, it’s the injunction to imitate, is to find the highest thing you can possibly find to admire. And then to imitate that. And that grip is that’s the worship. That’s the awe. And that’s an instinct. And it’s related to the fact that we live in social hierarchies and that we admire those who have progressed in the hierarchy in the direction of the goals that we are striving to attain. It’s all built unbelievably deeply into our biology to a degree that hasn’t been appreciated yet or taken sufficiently seriously. That religious instinct is real. It’s real. It’s more real than anything else. So, Jordan, one of the things that you talk about, and this is what so many people have, I think, honed in on, and I think a lot of people find it threatening, is the fact that one of your main messages in all of this is that the way that you’re going to find meaning and the people who you’re going to want to imitate are the people who take on the most responsibility. And in a society that focuses a lot on rights and very, very little on duties, that is a super countercultural message. And the fact that it’s resonating with young people has to scare the living hell out of a lot of people because the simple fact is that so much of our society is predicated on the idea that it is actually in some ways antisocial to take on responsibility. That taking on responsibility defeats the purpose of the infrastructures that we’ve created to relieve you of the responsibility. So if you say, no, I don’t want your help. I feel that your help is enervating me. And my job in life is to shy away from that supposedly helping hand that actually is crippling my ability to care for myself and my family. That scares a lot of folks who are invested in these systems. But you really preach responsibility. And I think that’s right. I mean, I can’t think of a single person that I admire who is a person who shirks. In fact, I find it hard to believe that there’s anybody who people admire, who whose main goal in life is to shirk responsibility and engage in personal pleasure. As much as people may talk about that, it’s just not something people naturally admire. You can see that admiration sometimes. So you can think about the film Rebel Without a Cause, for example, there’s the romantic rebel who shirks duty because but the real reason is he’s standing up for a higher responsibility and refusing like blind pathological conformity. And so you can you can get around the responsibility problem that way and and admire, you know, creative rebellion, something like that. But but those few exceptions apart, I ask my readers just to think for themselves about that. It’s like, well, who do you admire? And when do you admire yourself? When do you have some self-respect? And when does your conscience bother you? Do you have self-respect when you’re shouldering your responsibilities or when you’re abdicating them? You might say, well, I don’t have any responsibilities. It’s like, well, do you have any goals? Well, I don’t have any goals. Well, then you don’t have a life. It’s like you can’t even act. You have to have goals. That just doesn’t work. That that that isn’t that isn’t a statement that works in the world. If you have goals, you have responsibility. The responsibility is to progress towards the goals. You can even change the goals if you want, but you can’t get rid of the fact that you have a responsibility to move towards your goals. And you can say, well, I’ll just dispense with goals. It’s like, well, unless you’re like the Buddha, good luck with that. And even in the Buddhist case, I mean, he had Nirvana at his fingertips, but rejected it to go back to redeem the world. So the only instance we know of essentially mythologically or otherwise where there was a detachment from goals and Nirvana attained as a consequence, the consequence of that still was the adoption of responsibility, the rejection of Nirvana as a solitary pursuit. So and then you think about your own life and the life of your parents. Well, where do you find your meaning? Well, in your intimate relationship is the responsibility there? Well, there is if you’re if it’s a relationship that’s based on trust and love and fidelity, your children, your parents, people who depend on you, you’re not going to have that. Well, that’s a responsibility. And and it wouldn’t be something if that’s where the meaning was. Well, it is. And this is my experience. I’ve really been thinking about this lately, about where the deepest meaning is. I was talking to this guy, Chris Williams, in a while back, and he’s got this new kind of new podcast in the UK. And I was really struck when he interviewed me because he spoke when he asked me questions. He he had no speech errors, no ums, likes, you knows, no pauses in attention, nothing. And I asked him about that. He said he had been practicing being precise in his speech for six years and had really mastered that. In any case, he before he started his podcast, which is called Modern Wisdom, he he was a successful young man in in the sort of quasi celebrity way that the culture might offer as a icon for admiration. He worked in nightlife and he’s an attractive guy and he had money and he had women and he had material success. He and good for him. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a lot better than failure. But he started to pursue something that was deeper. And the podcast came out of that and he started attending to what he was saying. I talked to him about the deep sense of satisfaction, meaning that I have when people tell me that they’ve done something positive in their life and that I had some influence on that or something I said had some influence on that. It’s overwhelmingly significant. And he said he had exactly the same experience. It’s like, what if what if it was the case? What if it wasn’t all cynicism defeated with this proposition that there isn’t anything that would actually make you feel more engaged in your life than. Taking the opportunity to take the best in someone else and encourage that development. What if that is what we’re actually like? I think that is what we’re like. I believe that. And I see it. I see it happening all over. And so that’s not power. That if our hierarchies are actually based on that most fundamentally and the best people I’ve seen who are very successful in their hierarchies are people who take their mentoring, for example, not only with dead seriousness, but take tremendous pleasure in it. Well, what if that’s the operative principle? What if the postmodern critique of hierarchy is so wrong that it’s actually the opposite? Now, that doesn’t mean it can’t be corrupted. Institutions get corrupted by deceit and by power all the time, but that doesn’t mean that that’s their central essence. So I tell young people, you know, maybe responsibility. That’s where you’ll find what you need, what you desperately need. And I don’t say that because I’m shaking a stick at them. I’m saying that because that looks to me like it might be the case.