https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SROApjdWYqc
There’s also ways of providing a pathway forward by making the Foucaultian arguments, let’s say, about power more high resolution. And one of the things that I do in my lectures, in my public lectures, that I think is rather comical, is to take and poke fun in some sense about the idea of power as the fundamental foundation for the hierarchical structures of the West. I think, well, you can think of the West as one large scale, low resolution, totalitarian tyranny, the tyranny of the patriarchy. Or you can decompose that, which in some sense is to transcend the concept. And I think, well, I ask my audiences what they think about the tyranny of plumbers, or the tyranny of massage therapists. Well, because it’s dead relevant. It’s like, let’s say you need a plumber, and you do need a plumber. Everyone agrees that you need a plumber, because there’s hell to pay otherwise. And then the question is, well, how is it that you go about selecting a plumber? And the answer isn’t that there are roving bands of tyrannical plumbers that go door to door, telling housewives that if they don’t use their services, the service of the most tyrannical plumber, that there’ll be mafia-like consequences. What happens instead is that you look for the plumber who is most able in your estimation, and in his reputation as distributed through the community, for being able to fix pipes, and run a business, and engage in an honest transaction with you. And that’s competence. That’s not power. You see, what I see as most corrosive about the postmodern types, especially those who’ve derived themselves from Foucault, let’s say, is that the idea that every hierarchy, or the hierarchy as such, is predicated on power, is actually an assault on the idea of competence itself. And that, in turn, is an assault on the idea that there are real problems that can actually be solved. Well, then if you dispense with all that, and it’s only power, there’s no real problems to be solved, and there’s no noble ways of solving them, even in as concrete a manner as a good plumber would solve them, which is not a trivial thing. And so then you deprive people of that sense of purpose in their life, even at the high resolution levels. You know, I’ve insisted in my lectures that, you know, if you’re the sort of person who runs a small diner, that it’s incumbent on you to run the highest quality small diner that you possibly can, because what you’re doing there is not merely providing people with basic nutrition. There’s way more to the space than meets the eye. And your noble, what would you say, acceptance of your limited responsibility is also simultaneously a way to transcend that. That can be a place where the neighbourhood meets. That can be a place where tired people revivify themselves before they go off to do their difficult work. That can be a place where you can mentor your employees and help them develop their life. Like it’s a rich, it’s an unbelievably rich microcosm. And to take on the care and tending of that microcosm as a responsibility is also a great pathway to meaning. And a necessary, and meaning is something that’s, well, not epiphenomenal and not dispensable, but absolutely central to human thriving in the psychological and practical sense. Yeah, but we do have to try and understand why it is that there is such a charm in the Foucauldian position. Why is it that people want to believe that all the best things, what we think of the best things in human relations, are simply disguised forms of manipulation? You know, that the whole feminist view of the relation between men and women, for instance, which is founded on this deep myth that men exercise power as a gender, to use the fashionable word, over women. And that all study of this is just a way of revealing that power and the capillaries through which it flows. You know, I think there’s a will to believe this. And why? It’s one of the big questions that I think we have to try to understand. Is it that when people lose some kind of transcendental religious faith, that they automatically fall into this great pit of resentment of the Nietzschean kind to try and find the oppressor in every relationship? Or are there truths that they are exploring as well? Are there forms of power or forms of human relation that look like power from one aspect, but perhaps also look like tenderness and dependence from another aspect? And that they just are emphasizing one half of it or something like that. I think there are real questions as to how it is that our culture has got into this position. Yeah, well, that’s the question below the claim of power. And so, I mean, I’ve thought about that to some degree. And here’s three possibilities. I mean, one is the accusation that all there is is power is the justification for use of power. Of course. So that’s handy if that’s what you want to use. So then there’s another problem, and that goes along with the failure, the willful failure to distinguish competence from tyranny and power, let’s say. Because we might think of power as unearned authority, something like that, because we need a definition of power. And I think that there’s a resentment at work there that’s very, very deep. I think it’s deep in the biblical sense, which is that there is a proclivity for those who do not manifest what they could manifest in the world, and thereby fail to watch the success of those who do manifest what they could manifest in the world and succeed, and become embittered by that, tremendously embittered, and then to label that as power, and then to attempt to destroy it, because it’s simpler to do that than to do the radical internal retooling that would be required to set things straight internally. I’m sure that’s right. That’s one explanation of why people are always tempted by the zero-sum vision of relations. His benefit is my cost sort of thing. Right. Oh, I wanted to pick up on that, the very widespread view that things are zero-sum, which is, of course, the language of power. What’s the antidote to that? What is the antidote to that? How does one overturn the ideology of power? How does one transcend that with a non-zero-sum truth or approach to life? I personally would say that the first thing to recognize is that there are positive-sum games. That’s what the real theory of the market tells us, that there are whole realms of human transactions where both parties gain from their shared engagement. That won’t drive away the real source of this difficulty. It has something to do with what Jordan was referring to, that people’s resentment at the success of others when they cannot match it or cannot easily match it. Or will not match it. Or will not match it. Which is even worse. Yes, exactly. Because of the labor of reconceiving your own position in such that you actually have to do something about it. There is something lazy about the zero-sum vision, but it’s not a vision that successful people have. It’s not a vision that they have at any level of reality. You can actually combat that to some degree by making it high resolution again, by making examples. Because very few people actually believe, once they observe, that all the relationships they’ve had with other people have been zero-sum. Now, you might get some very disadvantaged people, and these people do exist, who’ve been taken advantage by virtually everyone they’ve ever encountered in their whole life. That does happen. But most of the time, all you have to do is remind people, it’s like, well, think of someone that you loved. Even briefly, think of a friend that you’ve had. It’s like, well, you successfully negotiated with that friend to do things together, because otherwise it’s not a friendship. And it has to be successful negotiation, which means your friend has to be happy with what you were doing, and you have to be happy. And so, and then, wasn’t it the case that you were both happier doing that than either of you would have been doing something else alone? And isn’t that evidence in your own action and your life for the existence of non-zero-sum games? And they’re dependent on successful negotiation. We can both have more than we would otherwise have if we can come to a consensus about what we’ll both pursue. And it’s very few people, when you make it personal like that and high resolution, again, it’s very few people who are willing to pursue their ideology of zero-sum, of a zero-sum reality so far down that they’ll actually use that to characterize their most intimate relationships. Now, I would say that someone who does that by temperament is literally psychopathic. Because the psychopathic view of the world is absolutely that it’s a zero-sum game.