https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vn5pwTNPJx4
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to do today is talk about using an I answer to a we question. And this is going to be a little confusing at first and probably a little bit different because here we’re talking about a trick that people use to seem smart, a way that they get you to think that they’ve given you an answer to something that you can use in the world when in fact they haven’t done that. So as always, these are my definitions. And if you think my definitions are good, feel free. That’s why they’re here. If you don’t like them, you can throw them out or you can modify them for your own use. So what is this concept of using an I answer in response to a we question? So this happens a lot lately. People are being asked things like, how do we have better conversations? And then the answer they give is, well, what I try to do is, now this isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it doesn’t solve a we problem. It solves an I problem. How do I have better conversations? I do this. Absolutely. But the impression it gives you when it’s framed as a we problem is that there’s an answer to the we problem. Now, there may be an answer to the we problem, but it doesn’t involve the thing that you do. In order for we to do something, it has to be something that we do, not something that I do or that you do. It has to be kind of all of us. And this is where we get sort of confused about structural solutions versus personal solutions. Some things don’t have structural solutions at all. There’s no structure that can fix this problem. A lot of people are going to find that sort of jarring, like, oh, what do you mean? The problem of communicating with my relatives is perfectly well solved by Facebook. It’s like, not really. And there’s other solutions, and some of them may be better. There’s always the quality issue, too. The side effects of this, though, are that you think you have an answer to something, but that answer is not appropriate to the problem you’re trying to solve. So, sure, doing something about being mindful in your conversation, about your own state of mind and what you’re trying to accomplish, will let you have better conversations, but it doesn’t work for anybody else. Literally doesn’t work for anybody else. It might work for them if they were able to do it. But this is one of the problems, is that, are they able to do it? Are they willing to do it? Do they even know about it? Like, if they know about it and they implement it, how will they know they’re being successful? Like, there’s all these pieces involved, and we’ve sort of gone over this before with pieces. A lot of things have a lot more pieces than you think. And you can’t convince people to do things, even if they say they want to. That doesn’t mean that they can. It doesn’t mean that they will. It doesn’t even mean that they really want to. Sometimes people just tell you things to shut you up, or to make you happy, or to seem like they’re part of the group so they don’t get attacked, or whatever they’re feeling about it. So, again, this is important because we don’t want to be fooled by things that sound smart but don’t help. And then here I’ll just invoke pragmatism. You don’t be a pragmatic individual. You don’t want people to feel like they’ve given you an answer that you can’t do anything with. And again, it’s not to say that it doesn’t address the problem, but it doesn’t address the problem that you asked about, or the problem that’s important. So, it’s difficult for us to tease out when this happens, because we’re so hungry for an answer. We’ll take any answer. And if the answer sounds right, and again, it’s not a wrong answer per se, it’s just the answer to the wrong question, then we’ll just go with it. So, there are other sort of constructions around this. But the problem is force. Ultimately, you can’t make everybody be mindful in their conversations of when they have an agenda. You’re just ignoring psychology. You’re ignoring all the research. People can’t do that. Most people can’t do that, even if they wanted to. Maybe they couldn’t even engender it. At least evolutionarily, there’s no reason to assume we can all do the same things. That seems to go counter to evolutionary theory. And since we can’t use force, that would be politics. That’s the us versus others thing, or me versus the world, or whatever, then we have to find ways to solve these things pragmatically. And we problems are not usually solvable in a straightforward, easy-to-answer manner. And so, in some sense, you could argue the we question is false framing, or it’s unfair, or it’s impractical. All of that, or some of that, may be true. But it’s up to the person answering to say, I don’t know. If they don’t know how to solve, how to have better conversations, they should say, I have no idea. So there’s culpability on both sides, as there often is with these sorts of things. And there’s a danger to all of this. When we’re given an answer that we feel is viable, but then we can’t implement that. There’s no, how do we make people be mindful in conversation? How do we make people all just get along? Or how do we make people more compassionate? You can’t do those things. And so you get disappointed. And disappointment opens the door to resentment. And you don’t want to open that door. And it’s even worse, because if you feel like, whether you are or not, but if you feel like you’re doing, I’m being compassionate, I’m being mindful in conversations, why isn’t everybody else? Again, this leads to resentment. You feel like you’re doing your best work, and you may not be, and the problem is still there. Like, wow. And you don’t know why, because you have an answer. This is the answer. But you were given something that wasn’t actually an answer, and you didn’t notice. It’s sort of like slipping it in under the door. I get you an answer, but didn’t really. But now you feel good, because you have an answer. I feel smart, because I gave you the answer. And it makes everything worse. It literally makes everything worse. And it doesn’t have the potential to make everything better. Like, that potential is not even there. So at best, it’ll have no effect. But you still fooled yourself. There’s still fraud involved. There’s still this sense of something that isn’t real, isn’t intelligible. And we really have a problem understanding that just because a solution, any solution, even a we solution, sounds like it’ll work, doesn’t mean it will. Right? And clever sounding solutions can cause us undue enthusiasm. Right? Like, aha, the answer. Oh, it’s right here. And then it’s not. And because the world is complicated. It’s way more complicated. And, you know, another thing to consider is, and I know I invoked evolution before, but you can’t really make people do the same things. Like, you can’t get a group of people together and say, oh, we’re all going to do this this way. You break evolution. We’re not supposed to be doing all things the same way. We’re supposed to be experimenting with different ways. And we’re supposed to have the ability to deal with that, to deal with conflict. And to resolve situations where we’re not behaving the same way. We’re not supposed to behave the same way. No one knows. No one can tell. They’ll tell you otherwise, but they can’t tell what the right answer is. Because the right answer changes all the time. Comment hits the earth. All the rules of civilization go out the window immediately. Immediately. Immediately. Right? Economic system collapses. What happens? All the rules go out. Boom. Like, they didn’t have the right answer. Right? And in that case, the right answer is don’t have an economic collapse. Thanks, Captain Obvious. Not very helpful. Right? Because maybe those things are unavoidable. Like, maybe the conditions for that were set up years ago or decades ago. Right? Who knows? Or maybe just look, we deplete the earth. No question about it. I have a lot of compassion for the idea that we use resources. And those resources take away from other things. And I don’t live in a city. That’s part of the reason why I don’t have a lawn. Because lawns are bad for the environment. I’m doing my best to have a low footprint on the environment. We use resources. Maybe when you use the end of a resource in your country, for example, you have an economic collapse. That seems likely. Economic collapse has happened. The rules get thrown out. What is the right answer? It’s not clear to me. It’s not clear that that is inevitable. And then what’s the right answer to something that’s inevitable? I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. And I think when people pretend to know, they’re lying to you. And, you know, maybe they think they know. Fair enough. But they probably don’t know. Probably nobody knows. And there’s a lot of things that nobody knows. And that’s why you need to understand the larger picture. The larger patterns that are out there, that are playing out. Right? So that you know how to deal with these situations. Because ultimately the patterns are more important than the answers. The patterns contain this way of intelligizing the world, of understanding the world, of being able to predict the world. Such that you aren’t out there trying to implement answers or solutions that maybe worked in the past, but don’t work anymore. Because we run into these situations all the time. And this is the deep confusion. The deep self-bullshitting that we do. And I mean that in the technical term. Right? This deep deception that we have against ourselves. That we can have an answer. We can implement an answer. And that answer will have the intended effect. That’s three things. Forget about how many things are in the implementation of any given answer. There’s a lot there. This stuff is hard. The world is hard. The world is way more complex than you think. Not complicated. Complex. Right? Complicated and complex are different things. And it’s important to realize that. And to make sure that you’re not fooling yourself. Or fooling others. By pretending as though there are answers like this. By formulating questions that are unfair. By being comfortable with a simple solution. Whenever anybody gives me a simple solution I always get nervous. I’m like hmm. Right? Because what it means is either I miss something simple. I don’t like that idea. It happens. I don’t like it. Or it’s wrong. It’s really only two options. And more often than not those things are wrong. The simple solutions have been found and implemented. And that’s the other thing. If something’s simple and it’s easy to implement it’s probably been implemented. In which case either it didn’t work or it worked and the problem you’re talking about doesn’t exist. That happens too. Sometimes people talk about problems that aren’t actual problems. People just make stuff up. They reframe things. All these ways in which people fool us. And we fool ourselves by asking poor questions. Accepting poor answers. Not recognizing when people slip something in that doesn’t belong there. And it’s hard to work on. But we have to work on it. Right? And we have to humble ourselves to the fact that the world is complex. It’s not just complicated. It’s also complex. And that the issues that we have are not always complicated. But they’re also sometimes complex. And therefore these answers are never as straightforward as we’d like to think. Or as we’d like to have. We really want to have simple answers. But a lot of these things, the simple answers have already been applied. And maybe they worked once even. But they don’t work again. And that’s what we have to watch out for. And part of doing this is part of what I’ve been thanking you about this whole time. Right? And I really want you to think about this if you can. The way around being fooled by these situations. And this is absolutely everywhere. This is I answer to a we question. This sort of formulation is around everywhere. The answer is to listen carefully to things. To think about them carefully. And to give them your time and attention. And we’re so anxious for the end. That sometimes we don’t look at how things are unfolding. And we miss the pattern. Because when people are going to deceive you or deceive themselves, to be fair, it’s not all about you. People lie to themselves more often than they lie to others. In fact, people lie to others because they’re actually trying to lie to themselves. Trying to convince you of something, to convince themselves of something. These patterns are evident. And so before someone’s done giving an answer, I know whether or not they’re giving a real answer. And not every time, but fairly reliably. And you can too. You can see these patterns unfold. And that’ll help you.