Culture - a dialogos style exploration (7UrHK8aVxnY)

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the importance of culture, the relationship of culture to you, the relationship of culture with respect to other people, the relationship of culture with respect to subcultures and with respect to fashion. And so that way we’ve got more layers to deal with. Now we can navigate, right? There’s more stuff to navigate. There’s pits we have to avoid, right? There’s things we have to look up to. We have to conform to those emanations from above, like the sun and the flower or any other plant, right? You’ve got to point at that and that’s what enables you to grow, to grow from the ground upwards to something greater. Yeah, so I’ve been thinking about this idea of culture being an interface between people. What that brought to mind is like a festival, right? So when you’re in a festival there’s all of these areas, right? So these areas allow people with common interests to find each other and gather around a flagpole effectively. And then when you want to meet up with your friends, right, you’re going to use the physicalities of the terrain. For example, we’re going to meet on top of the hill or next to the bar or whatever, right? So there’s all of these points that are created by culture, right? Because it’s a metaphor that you can find connection in. And then you can imagine that when two people meet, right? Like, did you see this band or whatever? So it’s all of these flagpoles where you can now show yourself to the other person, right? Like, you have something inside of you that you can communicate, but you can also get the communication from the other person, right? Like, is that person in alignment with me? All right, I’m back again for another DIAlogos with my good friend Manuel Post. How you doing, Manuel? A little bit hot from the shower. You see it? Ah, yeah. I’m also warming up to the subject. There we go. I like it. That’s good. Yeah, we wanted to do a video here and try to untangle with very little preparation, as is sometimes our habit, this idea of culture and following the culture, because a lot of people seem to be, oh, we’re following the culture. The culture is this. The culture is that. And I find that, A, they’re talking about different things. That’s a good sign that they don’t know what they’re talking about. And B, they’re often talking about something more like fashion than culture itself. And so I want to try to untangle that. And I talked a lot on BOM last night about it because it came up. And so I was like, oh, good, more research. So yeah, we dove pretty deep into the whole idea of what’s the difference between culture and fashion and what else is there. So we’re going to try to define culture. What do you think, Manuel? Yeah, I think we can start off with a definition that was exactly what was in my head. Culture is coming from a cultivate. You’re cultivating a specific thing and then you get a culture. So that’s the thing that’s coming up from a participation with a specific intention. And so if we’re starting off there, then you can really see how anything, and I think Peugeot talked about this, anything where people come together with a specific intent trying to manifest something, it’s going to be a culture. And Peugeot is talking about emanation, where it has to be close to an emanation in order to be able to persist. So when you have a culture, the culture should be in some sense, yeah, is it mirroring or like a puzzle piece hooking into? I don’t know what the right metaphor is yet, but we’ll get there. But yeah, it has to have this connection with the archetypical idea that it’s trying to relate to. And that gives it its sustainability. So the materiality, the instantiation in the moment is a thing an individual can do or a group of individuals can do. But the fact that it can persist means that there’s a value being provided. It’s related to other things around it, because the connectedness is kind of how the value manifests. So when you make a hammer, you want to do things with the hammer, because if you’re not doing things with hammers in your culture, why would you want to have a hammer? Maybe you want to have a club instead. So there’s all of these aspects, and that’s maybe a good place to ground ourselves. Oh yeah, I’m glad you brought up grounding, because I think that is really the important key factor is although you’re cooperating together to manifest something, we’ll say bigger, your culture is the grounding. It is the place that you’re cultivating to do that. And so there’s where your assumptions are built in, your axioms. What are we basing our endeavor on? What is the ground upon which we’re standing as we cultivate whatever it is we’re cultivating? And then yeah, the second, that’s not enough. You can’t just cultivate and expect it to work. Second factor is it has to be close enough to an emanation that’s coming down from above that you have no control over, but maybe you can see, or maybe someone can see. And if it’s close enough to that, if you’re conforming to the emanation and you’re building up in your cultivation, just like the flower goes towards the sun, then you’ll be successful. But if you move away from the sun, you’ll perish. Yes, so I like this. And I want to put into aspects. So we’re cultivating, and Van der Kley has been talking about it, Paul Van der Kley, he’s been talking about what’s natural. So there is a natural aspect that we’re cultivating. It’s like the things that are always there, the perennial problems. So if we’re trying to grow weed, we need to relate to the things that are there. But then there’s another aspect, which is what the humans create. This is what Peterson talks about as father culture. And father culture is also something that’s reliable, it’s stable. He explains it as what we use to make contracts with the future. So we do things, and because culture is stable, we have a piece of paper that says, this is value, and then after a year, you can use the piece of paper to get value from people. So that’s the two aspects I want to bring in. Yeah, and I think one confusion that we have is that we can look at a lot of things and call them culture. But really, they’re subcultures. And that doesn’t mean they’re underneath the culture, that means they’re being held up by the larger culture. And so I think the confusion is, and I’ll just use the biggest example I can find, when Sam Harris makes a claim, a moral and ethical claim, he’s doing so while standing on the ground of a Western Christian theology, whether he likes it or not. It’s unavoidable because it’s how you grew up. It’s why you swim in, period, end of statement. And when Ben Shapiro talked to him, he pointed that out to him. Is it that you came up with your ethics and morals and came to the exact same conclusions I did all by yourself, or is it because we grew up four blocks apart around the same time, because we’re roughly the same age? It’s like, oh, how would you know? So maybe you think that you developed this thing by yourself, but really you’re embedded in Christianity. So the culture still steers that, the overall culture. So every subculture that’s built on top of or within that culture is still reliant. So if you build something that is parasitic upon the thing that’s holding it up, it can poke holes and then things can fail. But then everything fails all at once. We fall into chaos rather quickly. I think that’s part of what we’re seeing is these quote subcultures popping up, but they’re still reliant on the substrate of the overall culture. And then they’re eating into it, and then that’s causing a lot of chaos. And people aren’t understanding that aspect. Yeah. So I think a nice metaphor for that is a tree, right? And then there’s a branch, and then there’s a bird that makes a nest on the tree. And the bird can only make the nest because the tree is there. Without the tree, the bird can’t make the nest, and the bird can flourish as a consequence of the tree. But when there’s too many nests on a branch, the branch can break. And if there’s too many nests on the tree, the tree can fall over. It can catch too much wind or whatever. So there’s an aspect that maybe the bird is contributing to the tree, right? Like maybe the shit that he produces is actually a nutrient that the tree needs and is naturally occurring or whatever, right? So there might be this symbiotic relationship. But again, right? Like if that nutrient is going to be over saturating the soil, then the tree might die. So there’s this delicate balance that we have to navigate where, yes, right? Like the banking system is reliant on people actually working. But now because we have banks, we created a new layer. We created a new level of participation, which allows a whole bunch of new things that weren’t possible without banks. Right, or vines. So I have a lot of vines, unfortunately, because I live down south. There’s vines everywhere, and things grow fast down here because there’s almost no winter. So everything’s growing all the time. And vines will choke out the tree that they need. They’re parasitic upon the tree. They’ll let the tree grow for a while, but then they’ll choke out the tree. And then I have a thing that I lost this year recently, right? Because the vine got on it and pulled it down because that’s what vines do. They pull down the plants. And then the vine dies too, by the way. The vine kills itself. And so there’s a way in which you see this pattern in nature, where things can be parasitic. They can last a long time as parasites. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need to be cut down. There’s a number of vines actually. I’m going to need to change some. I cut one of them down because it’s this thick. But it’s choking out a tree, and I’ll lose the tree if I don’t cut it down. So that’s work that has to be done. That’s part of cultivating the culture. And then I think because we get confused with subcultures, the other confusion that we have is often people say, well, look, I want to meet people where they’re at in the culture. But what they’re following is the fashion. And that’s a big problem. And fashion, we’re not just talking about clothes. It might be the fashion to talk, particularly intellectually, to be important. The fashion of the day might be to sound smart. That’s the fashion of the day, use big words. That happens all the time. And that pops up in places. So Harvard University is a nice example that I can use because I used to hang out there quite a bit in Harvard Square. And yeah, they had a whole culture around using big words and sounding important. And it was very easy to spot them in some sense if you’re really careful with language, which I seem to be able to be. But that was their fashion. The fashion of being at Harvard was these things. And if you want to see an example of that, you can watch the movie Good Will Hunting, which nails it because those guys are from Cambridge. They’re from Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s where they grew up. They nail all of Boston and Cambridge completely. They nail Harvard University pretty well, although I wouldn’t be as nice as they were about it. So if you think they were mean about it, wait till you hear what I get to say about Harvard University. But there’s a way in which that’s parasitic. Harvard University can’t exist without the rest of the culture. And the culture maybe should tolerate Harvard University. I’m not saying burn it all to the ground or anything, but it’s a subculture and it’s somewhat parasitic and it has its own fashion. And if you chase the fashion of intellectualism, which is very much a current fashion, maybe you’re not meeting people where they’re at. Maybe what you’re doing is you’re validating their bad behavior, right? Because at a certain point, that’s what happens. And I think particularly when institutions try to chase the culture, right, companies do this all the time, like, oh, we’re going to go woke because that’s where the culture is at. I don’t think that’s where the culture is at. I think that’s where the fashion is at. It may have formed a subculture around that fashion, but that’s not the culture. And I think this is especially dangerous when church is doing it, because the church is part of the culture. In essence, the church is saying, I’m going to chase myself because I’m part of the culture. It’s like, no, don’t do that. That’s self-referential. That’s bad, right? That can become parasitic really fast. And I think companies are doing the same thing, like, get woke, go broke, right? Oh, I’m going to chase the fashion of the day about LGBTQ, RST, UV, whatever, however many they’ve done this week. Can’t keep track, right? I’m going to chase that, right? Or I’m going to chase the racism narrative, right? These are not part of the culture, right? They may be subcultures, but they’re more likely just fashions that come and go. And the reason why is because they’re not sustainable, right? They’re parasitic. If you’re just telling everybody they’re a racist, that’s just parasitic. I mean, it’s obvious and universal, but you can’t build things on universals. So I think that’s part of the problem. So I want to go back a little bit to the distinction between natural culture and this other thing that is human created. If you look at ancient times, right, like there was people living on the land, right, like that just had to do the things that they had to do to survive, right, which is relating to nature. And then they had effectively royalty in the Friesli class, right? And they were the carriers of, I’m going to put you this, hudkultur, or whatever, like the high culture. And so there’s this idea of fashion also starts tripping in, right? Because what’s what we reference? Well, we reference the king, right? So now, we’re trying to imitate the king as a way of showing how close we are to the king, right? And then the king is also supposed to be a physical representation of the gods. And so there’s also this element of integrating the ideals in the top of the culture. And then that’s emanating back to the people living on the land through a church, for example, that’s being built in the village. So there’s this relationship. And if we don’t fast forward to where we’re at now, right, like how are we receiving our information? Like our information is no longer filtered through this hierarchical process. But the way that we’re receiving information is through bubbles or subcultures, or fashions, right? And I think in university or in philosophy, they’re talking about schools, right? They even had those in the ancient Greek, right? Where they’re focusing on a different aspect or a specific virtue. And even the monasteries, the Christian monasteries actually did that, where they’re trying to highlight one of the virtues or a bunch of values. And so that’s happening now. But now it’s no longer under a roof. Like now it’s just, well, I go to the library and I get this book, right? And like the book exists within a context, within a history, it’s referencing all sorts of ideas. But you have no awareness of what’s going on when you’re reading that book. And in science, they actually try to do that with the notation for, oh, I read this other paper. But like, then yeah, if you want to go three layers deep, you got to read all science. So that’s also not happening, right? So there’s this thing where we’re being disconnected. And I think the disconnectedness is what we want to focus on today. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. Yeah, there’s a way in which that’s not contained, right? You’re taking the information out of where it was embedded, right? And then boom. And so you can see a way in which if you misapprehend the enlightenment, right, which was very, very deeply within rich Christian tradition, you can say, oh, all right, well, the enlightenment caused this and this and that. And like now people can be intellectual where they couldn’t before. And it’s like, that’s not the way it happened, right? It was all embedded with the assumption of the Christian values, right? The assumption of creation and God and it proceeded from that grounding. And so there’s a way in which when we’re, quote, chasing the culture, we’re only ever chasing subcultures or fashions. And maybe they’re related, like maybe they’re the same thing. Maybe a fashion is just a fast moving subculture or something. But we’re not making those deep connections. And the thing that churches should be doing, in my opinion, is drawing people into those deep connections rather than trying to, quote, meet them where they’re at, which is not to say you don’t cater your message, but maybe you also don’t destroy your message in order to cater to their message, right? Yeah. So you brought up something up. So a subculture is something that has a grounding in a community, but a fashion is something that’s like on the surface, right? So it’s like a meme, right? So it’s carrying itself, right? So you could look at Star Wars or whatever, right? So Star Wars has its own fan base, it has its own story, it has its own narrative. And so there’s, or the matrix, right? And it’s like, oh, let’s look at the world like that, right? And it’s not located. It’s not located in a structure. I think that’s the distinction. Oh, yeah. That’s a good distinction. I like it. Yeah, I think you’re right. There’s a way in which the framing matters. And when you’re unframed, right, you get a book from a library without understanding the historical context and who wrote it and those things, you kind of miss the message. And there’s lots of sorts of examples of this. So something like 1984, the book makes a lot more sense if you understand what was going on when it was written, right? It says, oh, I see the dangers, right? And then Ayn Rand is another good example. So when I first read Ayn Rand, I read The Fountainhead. And I was like, wow, there’s something, you know, there’s something here, right? And then I read Atlas Shrugged. And I was really critical. It was a difficult book to read, it says way too many pages. And I realized this should have happened, right? I contextualized the book with the history that I knew from the time period she was writing, should have happened. But what she described didn’t unfold. And then it was years later that I figured out, oh, no, this happens all the time. It just doesn’t happen at the scale she’s talking about. Not that it can’t, can, right? That’s what makes the books plausible. That’s why certain people are attracted to them, because they see the thread of causality through the book, through the stories. And that thread of causality is not wrong. It’s very possible that some of the stuff that’s in there could happen. And in fact, I would argue we’re seeing a lot of that today. And that’s not a good realization, right? But there’s a way in which people who are competent decide to stop playing. And that’s not better for anybody. But why would they do that? Well, they feel taken advantage of. Why? Because they’re not in a framework that’s supporting them sufficiently such that when a loss happens, they have a way to process it, right? In the same way that the post-traumatic stress person, right, that Dr. Jordan Peterson talks about, right, doesn’t have a way to process something. And then you need to give them a framework, and you give them a framework, and bang, that seems to help a lot of the time, right? It’s not perfect or anything. But it seems to be the most reliable way to help is to give them a framework. And that’s very much what culture is. It’s that grounding, that framework that we’re all sort of indicted to and grounded on and standing upon. Yeah. So what you were talking about is, well, the trauma that you were talking about is identifying against an event in your life and then reorganizing your life in order to deal with that one thing. And in some sense, that’s giving up hope. It’s going back to self-reliance, right? Like you can’t trust on the world to have your back. And in some sense, that’s a refusal of culture. And I think we get that phenomenon a lot nowadays, right, with the black pill and like all these people that have a couple insights, like, oh, the narrative, the cultural narrative, or is it the institutional narrative? Like maybe they’re different. Well, oh, this goes back to the king, right? Like with the king, the cultural narrative and the institutional narrative are the same. Right. But if you get diversification, you get separate sources of authority. And I think that’s also one of the problems that’s being identified, right? Like that the universities, which should be the source of our authority, don’t have that authority anymore, partially because they’re corrupted, but also partially because other sources of authority have been competing. And then it goes into, well, yeah, like what is being competed for? Because we’ve been talking about this idea, right? Like science is in competition with church, right? And I think this is actually where the competition lies, right? Like who has final authority? And there, the answer should be, well, like we’re playing in different realms, and we should just stay out of each other’s way, which is true for most things, like most things can coexist, but there’s this tendency to subsume everything under one banner, which is maybe trying to get back to one culture. So maybe that’s a primeval drive within the corporation. Yeah. Well, I mean, you certainly, I mean, one of the things people aren’t talking about is the extent to which we do need to cooperate. Right. And they’re doing that as a way to avoid conflict, roughly speaking, right? They’re saying, all right, look, what we can do is we can just get everybody to agree and act as if, because that’s what religions do. But I don’t think that’s what religions do at all. I think that’s not correct. I mean, there’s a deep underlying truth there and truth in the sense of Plato’s forms, right? A true form there that they are tuned into, right? They’re in concert with some emanation from above, some telos that’s able to allow us to cohere in a way that maybe a man made telos cannot. Right. And we’re very much playing the game with science because science was born from the church, right? It was born within the church and it can’t necessarily just take over when it feels like, right? Because that may not be possible. Science is trying to take over that narrative, right? To be the authority, as you put it, right? Without taking the responsibility. And the thing about proper authority, at least as laid out in the Christian story, is that proper authority also yields to that which it is authorized over, right? It’s not just writing the story by itself, right? It’s not the author of everything aside. And again, authors talk about this. I had a character in mind, I started writing character and the character started writing itself. Well, that’s weird. I thought you were the author, which would make you the authority. And yet your characters have a mind of their own by your own admission. Authors regularly report this. Well, that’s weird. So what is authority in that case? Well, authority is a form of cooperation, which you have a locus of influence and responsibility and agreement, right? So you agree to the authority and it has to be agreed on. The minute people stop agreeing to the authority, the authority vanishes because authority is the whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. But without the parts, it doesn’t exist. Yeah. And going back to the form, right? Like the form is where you draw the authority from, right? It’s the thing that you can reference outside of yourself. That can be agreed upon, which is harder than it might seem. But yeah, you can have that agreement. And yeah, that reminds me, like those forms, they’re not actualized, right? So they’re fuzzy, right? So the agreement isn’t on the level of implementation, right? Like the agreement is on the level of aspiration, like where are we looking at? Like where are we going? So yeah, like, so is that necessary in culture that, well, I wouldn’t say aspiration, but telos maybe, right? Like that it’s organized always around the telos or a point of emanation. And that’s how we can identify it. Yeah. I think that’s a good point, right? It’s not the, the authority can’t begin and end at the leader, right? It can’t begin and end at the figurehead. It can’t begin and end at the institution. It has to point higher. It has to point out to the realm of forms, right? It has to be there. And then that has to come down. And if it comes down incorrectly, or if it doesn’t go up correctly, it’s corrupt. And that’s the fundamental problem with the idea of authority in, we’ll say, the postmodern idea of power, right? Oh, the power is in the authority and we just need to change the authority. And then the power changes. That’s not how anything works. It’s very obviously too, it’s sort of puzzling to me that people don’t see this because that model, it just doesn’t map to anything in reality for very long. Seems to, it’s a good explanation. It’s a nice simple explanation, but it’s not, it’s not correct. And maybe you have the authority. You don’t, you need not just the agreement, but the point to the thing. And maybe you can’t get the agreement unless you point to the thing. And if you do have agreement on the person, maybe that’s automatically corrupt and will always end in, in a cult instead of a culture, right? And we need those authorities to drive the culture, to keep revivifying and cultivating the ground upon which we stand, right? In a very real way, whether it’s an individual or an institution or a set of individuals and institutions, it doesn’t matter. They all need to be contributing to the culture in a positive fashion. And when you take something and bend it, like a corporation or a church and bend it to follow the culture, you cannot do that. You cannot do that. That would be parasitic or self-referential or maybe both, it would be bad. So instead of trying to do that, you’re fooling yourself. You’re trying to follow the fashion or you’re trying to embrace a subculture or something. Instead of doing that, you need to look up to the ideals, right? Not down to what you’re standing on. You need to look up because that’s your goal. And when you’re properly oriented towards your goal and aligned with it, then you’ll draw people in, right? So you don’t necessarily not want to meet people, quote, where they’re at. You can do that with your communication, but you shouldn’t do that with your institution. So your language can change your propositions. Sure, absolutely. Maybe some of the imagery you use to get people in the door. Absolutely, right? What are you signaling at a corporation when you’re saying, oh, look, we really care about safety. So we’re going to make sure everybody has a shot or we really care about race. So we’re going to make sure everybody takes this racial bias training, right? You think you’re trying to meet the culture where it’s at, but A, that’s not the culture, right? And B, you shouldn’t do that. I don’t want to work at your company so that I can be safe or not embrace racism or any one of a dozen religious sounding movements. I want to be there for some other reason. I want to manifest something bigger, bigger than I am, right? And bigger than everybody in the corporation is together. The institution should be pointing higher because that’s what I’m there to manifest. I’m not there to manifest something lower. That’s no fun. Manifesting something lower is easy. It’s already lower than me. And my racism is contained entirely within me or my ability to be safe is contained entirely within me. I don’t need an institution’s help for that. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I think it’s self-corrupting. And that’s why when people are saying they’re chasing the culture as an excuse to make a bunch of changes that maybe are corrupting, I get very suspicious. I’m like, no, you’re not chasing the culture. That’s not what you’re doing. And you’re not meeting people where they’re at. You’re modifying your higher goal to point down. And that is damaging. That’s no good. Yeah. So I’ve actually been thinking about this idea of control and I’m connecting it with attention. So you can attend to your finger and then your attention dissipates. So you exert control and then stuff happens. But now I put up my finger and you look at it and I look at it at the same time. And now the way that your attention is going away from it is different from the way that my attention is going away from it. So in order for us to stay on the same page, I need to keep putting up my finger, go back to paying attention. And what am I doing? Well, now I’m micromanaging. So now I’m literally completely informing the way that you pay attention. And you can see that when it’s in a relationship. And it’s better to think of three people. So one person is doing the controlling and the other people, how are they supposed to be on the same page? They can’t. And because the person is controlling, you send out a competitive environment where who’s mirroring the proposed ideal the best. So now you’re creating this structure that’s really, really, really toxic. And it’s also fragile, right? Because if the flashing light is taken away by disease or whatever, it will just completely collapse because there’s no internal reference in the individuals. And I like that you brought up this training thing, right? Because what’s the training doing? Well, the training is effectively trying to program the individual in such a way that they can be the locus of this personal expression. But now it’s reliant on the willing cooperation of the person being trained and also the capacity of the trainer, right? But let’s just assume perfect training, right? Like now the person still has to have the motivation to participate in that structure and maybe the cultural grounding can still relate to the perfect training and see different aspects. So you’re still misaligned in the structure because you’re trying to impose it. And the imposition has the capacity to work upon a certain level until you start crossing boundaries with people and you corrupt their goodwill. Yeah, wow, there’s a lot wrapped up in there. So one of the things I was thinking of is with your finger, you’re moving it to create contrast, right? And that’s contrast allows you to see, right? And seeing get you to attention and the attention point. So I think that’s interesting. But also there’s again a way in which you’re bringing it down, right? You’re bringing the institution down. You’re trying to quote, meet the person. It’s like, no, the person should strive up into the institution, whether that’s a company or a government, or a group or a church, right? You want to pull them in and up. You don’t want to you don’t want to not be able to message to them. But when you message to them, the message that you want to send them is come in and up with us, not we’ll keep you safe, or we’ll come down to you and cater to your needs in the moment. Like that’s following fashion. That’s not following culture. And maybe trying to embrace a subculture, which is trying to emerge is also a negative, right? It’s a way in which that’s a negative affect. And it has a damaging effect, or could have a damaging effect on a bunch of things, because we don’t know what it is, right? And we’re bringing down the highest in an inappropriate way to try to meet somebody where it’s too low. And we’re not appreciating the difference between sort of catching somebody’s attention, getting them engaged, and then keeping them engaged in spite of the struggle, because the struggles where all the value is, roughly speaking. And I think that’s problematic. And then when we cast the world into the postmodern power narrative, where you can just rewrite whatever you want. And postmodernism is a power narrative, narrative, narrative, right? It is pretend like there’s no narrative there, but there is, right? Then you misapprehend, oh, well, the power is in the authority, or the power is in the institution, the power is not there. All right, see my video on power. The power is time, energy, and attention. They’re drawing it from you. And then there’s also the other thing that came up for me was this equality doctrine, right? Like, yeah, let’s assume everyone’s the same. And therefore, we can just train them the same, and then they’ll become the same. That sounds terrible. It sounds like everyone’s an Android or a robot or something. No thanks. Thankfully, it’s not true, which is not to say large groups of people won’t go along with something. But why are they going along? Are they going along because they have the knowledge and understanding the way you think they do? Or are they going along because going along is a mode of being that people can inhabit out of faith, or out of belief, without any knowledge, right? Epistemology may not factor into that at all. And that would be frightening if you’re an intellectual, although I find it quite comforting somehow. Yeah, which would make the training also superfluous, right? Because why are you training people if they just get along? And I think that getting along mode is also conflict-avoidable mode, which is necessary, right? Because you can’t live in conflict. And I think, well, yeah, it can be hijacked, but in general, it is healthy, right? It is the thing that allows the culture to be. It’s also a way in which collective sense-making can occur because effectively, what means going along? Well, that means that effectively, I trust that this other person is seeing the Platonic form better than I, and I’ll just do what this other person is doing. And I think that’s correct, right? Because if you have a room of 10 people, one person is going to see it the best. And so often that should be the leader, unless there’s someone who has good leadership qualities that supersede the vision. But there’s this tension, right? And then what is culture? Well, the culture is effectively a spirit, right? That all of these people are adopting effectively, right? They submit themselves to a style of participation, partially because everybody is doing it, partially because there’s actually value in there, right? And there’s a tension there. Yeah. So I like what you were saying there, Manuel. A lot of that, for me, goes back to intimacy, right? So we’re talking about conflict and connections, right? And yeah, I mean, if you haven’t seen the intimacy crisis video, highly recommend go into this further with object, subject, subject, right? And what we’re really trying to do is accept conflict. And when you can accept conflict, the inevitability of conflict, then you can really form intimate connections with yourself, with other people, and with nature. And I think that’s really important. And that’s part of culture is cultivating that ground, that environment. And when you’re trying to meet people where they’re at, so to speak, that can be problematic. Because if I’m meeting you, and like, this is the empathy doctrine, roughly speaking, right? If I’m empathizing with you, I’m meeting you where you’re at, right? I’m feeling the emotions that you’re feeling, roughly speaking, right? But if you’re in a pit, now we’re both in a pit, and I can’t help you. And I think that’s part of the mistake is when we do this equality doctrine stuff, when we start thinking about empathy, right? As a way of resolving conflict, right? Because look, if you’re in a pit, and I want to get you out, there’s a conflict there. Like, it’s hard to get out of a pit, whether there’s a pit of depression, or a physical pit doesn’t matter, right? Like, I have to pull you up, you have to do some work. When you get out of the pit, now you can fall in a pit again. At least when you’re in the pit, you can’t fall further into the pit, right? Of course, you can, that’s a different problem, right? When you’re there, you’re like, oh, at least I’m in the pit, I got a nice small area, right? And culture is supposed to provide you the grounding to A, know when you’re in a pit, B, know how to get out of the pit, right? Like, know that there is an out of the pit, that you can avoid the pit, that people will help you if you’re in the pit, and they’ll help you to stay out of the pit. Like, there’s all of these connections that culture provides you, all of these affordances that are available to you, right? As the result of the culture. And that’s why we need to be careful with parasitic storytelling, Jonathan Pujod talked about, right? Maybe I’ll link that here. That’s really important to understand, is that the parasitic nature is not good. Like, we have to avoid that, because the culture is something that we rely on to stand upon to grow bigger than we are today, right? And to build stuff together, you can’t build stuff together well without an underlying culture, and then subcultures. Like, all of that is required. But you have to avoid this fashion, you have to avoid this, because fashion is non-conflict. Like, well, we’re all going to wear the same color this year. Like, we’re all going to wear the same style of shirts, or whatever it is, right? And you see that in, obviously, in clothing, in garments of skin, right? But you will see that everywhere, like, oh, we’re all going to pay attention to our own racism, or we’re all going to take a shot to be safe, or, you know, whatever it is, these are all fashions. And we shouldn’t be meeting the fashions, not to say we can’t communicate with people using them, but that’s a different story. You’re not jumping in the pit, you’re saying, ah, I see you’re in a pit, tell me about the pit, I can relate to the pit, let me tell you how I got out of the pit, and let me help you get out of the pit. That’s a whole different thing from jumping in the pit with empathy, right? Or jumping in the pit as meeting the culture where it’s at. If the culture’s in a pit, I don’t want the institutions meeting the culture where it’s at. Like, no, I don’t think that’s good, right? And so I think that’s part of the problem. We misapprehend these things. And so part of this particular video is to re-enchant the idea of culture, the importance of culture, the relationship of culture to you, the relationship of culture with respect to other people, the relationship of culture with respect to subcultures and with respect to fashion. And so that way we’ve got more layers to deal with. Now we can navigate, right? There’s more stuff to navigate. There’s pits we have to avoid, right? There’s things we have to look up to. We have to conform to those emanations from above, like the sun and the flower or any other plant, right? You’ve got to point at that. And that’s what enables you to grow, to grow from the ground upwards to something greater. Yeah, so I’ve been thinking about this idea of culture being sort of an interface between people. What that brought to mind is like a festival, right? So when you’re in a festival, there’s all of these areas, right? So these areas allow people with common interests to find each other and gather around a flagpole effectively. And then when you want to meet up with your friends, right, you’re going to use the physicalities of the terrain. For example, we’re going to meet on top of the hill or next to the bar or whatever, right? So there’s all of these points that are created by culture, right? Because it’s a metaphor that you can find connection in. And then you can imagine that when two people meet, right? Like, did you see this band or whatever? So it’s all of these flagpoles where you can now show yourself to the other person, right? Like, you have something inside of you that you can communicate, but you can also get the communication from the other person, right? Like, is that person in alignment with me? And you can go back to the festival, right? So in the conversation, you can walk through all of these areas and then you can say, oh, do we have commonality or don’t we? And then you can start making decisions around value, right? Like, is this conversation valuable to me? Is this relationship of value to me, right? Like we were talking about pits, right? Like, do I get the sense that this person has information about my pit? So now what we’re doing, and most of this is projection, right? But we’re mapping out a set of expectations as a consequence of the shared cultural frame, right? Because if you like the matrix, that tells me a couple things about you. I don’t know which things that tells me about you. If I think about it, I’d probably find out, but I don’t know and I don’t need to know, but I can still use it to navigate, right? Like, I can still use it to inform what I’m going to say without actually knowing what the nature of the cultural reference point is. Oh, I like that. Yeah, there’s a lot there too, right? Because I like this idea of flag poles or touch points, right? Where we have commonality and then it’s in those touch points, those flag poles, where we can find our intimacy, right? With other people. It’s not conflict free. Intimacy is the acceptance of conflict, right? In order to get better, because that’s how we get better. We get better by struggle. We get better by accepting trade-offs, right? By submitting and being submitted to, right? At the same time, that’s what a marriage is, right? You’re submitting to her, she’s submitting to you, sort of a thing in different ways, in different ways, because it’s more efficient. If you like efficiency and you like science, then you should be okay with that. That should be a good thing. Here’s one of the things that’s put under the umbrella of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary is not a theory, by the way, but it is a collection of theories. One of them is the theory of specialization, right? And specialization goes right down to manner, specialized things. Women specialize for other things. And it’s the submission in being around somebody who has a different specialization, therefore a different way of seeing the world, and therefore, right? So one of the things that I do is I go on Bridges of Meaning Discord server, right? And I hear these perspectives that I find very trying to my soul sometimes, right? And there’s lots of different perspectives. There’s not one Christian perspective, for example, on that server, that’s for sure. And sometimes it’s like, your framing is so bothering me right now, but it’s not wrong. They’re not wrong, right? It’s a different way of looking at the same thing. And maybe that’s important for them. And maybe I can’t go there with them, but I’m okay with like, I resolved that by accepting, oh, with respect to their perspective, I’m an idiot. Like, I’m just, I can’t go there. I can never see what they see the way they see it, in some cases, not in all cases. And I have to accept that about myself and that engenders humility and gratitude, gratitude for the opportunity to learn from them, gratitude for their perspective. Like, that’s a valuable perspective in the world to have, not that all perspectives are valuable, but maybe that one is, right? And also in doing that, because if you only have your own perspective and you only prefer your own perspective, the problem is, how will you know a bad perspective when it comes? How will you know that if you’re all wrapped up in yours, the only things you can do is say, no, my perspective is always better, right? Or you can get sucked into any random perspective and it may not be better. And that’s a big problem. Like if you get sucked into Sam Harris’s perspective, you’re going to have a problem. And that problem is going to be that maybe his perspective is bad, not just bad for you, but maybe it’s bad for almost everybody, including him. Like, I don’t know. So to connect perspective back to culture, I think a culture is a perspective or maybe a set of perspective, depending on the size of it. Maybe affordances for multiple perspectives. Yeah. So these ideas, like, okay, like maybe you shouldn’t want to adopt someone else’s perspective, like, because it might break you. So there’s a bunch of things there. So presuming, like, even if the perspective is good, like the fact that it might break you, like might still make it bad for you. There’s a distinction there that you have to make. And then, well, like, why do you care about someone’s perspective? Like, do you care about being able to cooperate with them? Like, is their perspective important for that? Because what we’ve been talking about, right, like, you can cooperate through the values. And in some sense, the perspective is irrelevant, unless it’s inhibiting them to connect to the value correct. To make that judgment, that’s a really, really, really tough judgment to make. And then the fact that they’re articulating a perspective doesn’t mean that they’re living in it. So that’s also… Right. So there’s a bunch of things going on. And I… So I’m going back to culture being these reference points. And so you can look at your position, right? And then you can… And we’ve been doing this in this conversation with metaphors, right? Like, we’re pointing at different things, right? And then if I point at something and you see the same thing and I point at something else, and we both see the same thing, and I point at a third thing and a fourth thing, now we’ve done a triangulation, right? And the chance that you and I are not on the same place, or maybe we’re like close, but the fact that the closeness is probably not going to be relevant if I chose my reference points correctly, right? So this is a way that is highly effective if you actually have the capacity developed correctly to to get in alignment with people, like literal alignment. And so in some sense, right? Like, if I just did that, I can rely upon you within that context, right? And that’s the important part. Like, I can only rely on you within that context because I haven’t checked outside of that context. And then you can imagine, right? So we were talking about high, which is where the virtues and the values are, and then you have the culture, which is still above the person in some sense, right? So you’re still looking up in a strange way. But if you do the same reference points to the virtues and values, right? Like, now you can build a relationship that’s lasting, right? Like that’s durable across different situations, right? Like, because there’s a stability in the way that you’re looking at the world that’s independent of the specific manifestation. Yeah, I don’t like the culture in the middle. I think we’re embedded in the culture, so we can’t, we’re standing on it. It’s definitely grounding, right? And it’s a thing we cultivate. So we have to be standing on it and looking through it, right? And that’s sort of the postmodern critique, to some extent, right? Or the Kantian critique more correctly. I think that’s problematic. I want to defend the metaphor because I think I can, right? So if we cultivate a tree, we can still look up to the tree, right? But not where everything is above. Right, right. Well, it’s still water you swim in. So it’s not above you. You’re embedded in it, right? Which is how I… You’re co-creating it. That’s right. Right. But it’s also the thing you’re standing on. This thing you’re standing on, it’s also some things that are higher than you, right? But you can’t dispense with it. And I think that’s the problem with relying on the formula of, oh, well, triangulation, right? Because that’s very much the scientific endeavor, is to rely on triangulation as such. Say, oh, we can just triangulate this thing. And then that’s fine. Like it’s all processed. It’s all processed without any grounding. And I think that’s equally dangerous. No, you need the grounding of the culture or the process doesn’t make any sense, even if it leads to the same quote result. Because if you try to orient without taking into account where you’re standing, you cannot orient correctly. You might get lucky, but you’re getting lucky. And then people don’t understand that. Yeah, outliers are dangerous because sometimes it’s meaningful to be an outlier. They actually found a secret and sometimes they just got lucky. And Taleb talks about this in his books. It’s brilliant. Right. He talks about, oh, luck is a big factor. Sometimes people invest and they get lucky. They have no idea what they’re talking about. He gives a great example in at least a couple of his books, where he talks about this guy who was a trader on the stock market or the commodities market or something. And he was trading in green lumber. And the guy actually thought that green lumber was lumber that was painted green, which it is not. By the way, it is uncured lumber. It’s what comes out of the mill before it’s been put in a kiln and dried, basically. So yeah, effectively, he didn’t know what he was talking about. In other words, the epistemology, the knowledge, doesn’t matter to his success. Why? Because he has the pattern and the grounding. The grounding is, well, I know what lumber is and I know there’s a special type of lumber called green lumber. And then you figure out all the connections of that green lumber. The nature of the green lumber is not relevant to those connections, but the grounding is. The culture is. The cultivation is important because you’re cultivating that pattern is cultivated based on the culture, right? Based on the grounding and outside of that grounding, it makes no sense. And I think the current scientific endeavor is to do exactly that, to remove it from the culture entirely. Say, look, we don’t need this culture stuff. We can just triangulate and all we need is triangulation. And so it’s a flip in some sense from primarily material, which is what I mean when I talk about materiality, primarily material, not that you only believe in material, but you believe that’s the thing that’s the prime mover of the world or something or of a situation. And science is moving away from that to primarily pattern, right? Which is what Peugeot talks about a lot. And I think the pattern is important, but the pattern doesn’t work without the grounding. So you can’t dispense with the culture, right? In the same way, you can’t, sometimes you can, but you can’t necessarily go into a subculture, figure out what they’re doing and take those patterns and apply them in another subculture. It may or may not work, right? It depends on the grounding and the subculture is part of the grounding and the culture is part of the grounding that allows the subculture to exist. Yeah, so when you’re talking about grounding, I’m looking also at this idea of the natural culture, right? So we were talking about needs and wants, right? And I think nature is connected to the needs, right? Like there’s the prerequisites and those are contextual, right? And they’re dynamic across seasons, but also maybe across years. Like if you have a mine, it might get depleted and then everything changes, like they can tell you in many mining times. So there’s that aspect and then there’s this higher layer, which is more related to the wants, right? Like what fashion do I want to have? Like do I want to paint my house green or do I want to paint my house brown? And then when you start having that implementation, you now start having a reference point, right? Like if a lot of people do that, brown starts to take on a certain meaning and that meaning doesn’t exist outside of that place because they don’t have that practice or that custom, that’s the word. And so there’s two aspects, right? So I can tell you, well, like they live in brown houses, then you can kind of imagine, well, like, okay, like if it’s brown and it’s darker, right? Like so she can make some sense, but it’s different when you actually live in it, right? Like the points of reference that you’re connecting with are different from the ones that you will imagine when I try, I want you to invoke the image. And so this grounding aspect and the transportability of these things are highly connected to the way that people are participating. And you can see this thing where people are living on the land or they live in the city and the culture in the city is completely different than the culture in the land because it has to be more organized. There’s less nature involved, which is also more organized effectively. There’s more people, so the value of interaction and the value of a relationship changes. So there’s all of these presumptions that you usually don’t think about that feed into the culture and get referenced implicitly. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Yeah, I think one of the things that sort of occurred to me while you were going on there is a lot of this gets back to participation. So there’s needs, which are the natural things, and then there’s wants, which are things that maybe you think nature could provide in addition to the needs. And that’s part of what you’re trying to nurture or cultivate, right? You’ve got to nurture the needs and cultivate the wants. And maybe some wants you can’t have, right? Because they conflict with the needs or they conflict with other wants. That means there’s a decision in there, right? There’s some conflict. There’s some conflict. How do you resolve conflict intimacy, right? So there’s that. And then there’s this whole aspect of, well, the real thing that’s the key to, like, I was talking about science, looking at just the pattern, right? Like, oh, we’ve got this triangulation capability. That triangulation doesn’t work without grounding and participation. So you can participate, but without the grounding, you can’t participate correctly. Or again, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to. And that’s where it all falls down, is that people think, oh, no, I’ve got the pattern. Now I’ve got the essence, right? It’s like, no, no, that’s not it. Because in order to participate, it has to be grounded. So this goes back to the game A, game B complaint that I have, right? I’m not sure their formulation is wrong, but I can’t participate in it. And I don’t think anyone else can either, which means what they’re talking about in the way that they’re talking about it is not fixable. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no levers there that can be pulled or no knobs to be turned, right? You’re just not at a land that you can inhabit. So even though the pattern’s correct, it’s only pattern. And so you can’t interface with it. It doesn’t constrain you, which is good, but you also can’t cultivate it. And so it can’t be part of your culture to switch from game A to game B. It’s just not an option that’s available to you. Yeah, so that brings up for me this idea of revivification, right? Or embodying it. So you have the pattern, right? And now you need a way to embody it. And so when you try and embody something, you need a set of affordances, right? Pre-cultivated capabilities that you can accept, change into something that’s similar to support the participation in the pattern. So now I’m making a description of what it’s like to undergo a transformation, because that’s effectively what you’re doing. You’re transforming yourself in such a way that you can participate with the pattern and be a member of a culture as a consequence of that participation. And that’s hard, right? That’s not a given. It’s not obvious. And I think we haven’t talked about second-order effects for a long time, but the way that these things come to be are a consequence of a second-order effect. And the second-order effect is something like I start working a lot, and now maybe I can climb walls better as a consequence of the muscles that I’ve developed, right? But I didn’t train to climb walls, but it’s a second-order effect. And this goes back to control, right? I cannot have a direct control over my capacity to climb walls with my walking, but I do have an influence. And so when we’re cultivating, in some sense what we are doing is retraining the walking with the assumption that there’s all of these other things that I be getting better at. And then we’re having this process of acceptation, right? So I’m using the same muscle to climb as I am to walk. So now I can use the pre-existing structure that I cultivated and start using that muscle in a different way. And now what I’m doing is I’m specialized, right? I’m fine-tuning to a different aspect. And that’s what the embodiment is, right? The embodiment is the fine-tuning to manifest something. And then we also have to have the relationships to the form of our body, right? Where we’re allowing our body to partake in different types of fine-tuning. Yeah, I like that second-order effect. I mean, transformation is always tricky, right? What is transformation? How does it work? What’s the importance, right? And I think the culture is part of what allows you to transform to be able to interface with the culture better, right? There’s different ways of interfacing with the culture. There’s different trees to look up to and different ground to cultivate. Are you gardening for flowers? Are you gardening for food? Are you gardening for both? Are you raising goats? What are you doing? What are you cultivating? And there’s lots of things to cultivate in the culture. And you can’t cultivate all of them, right? Which is why it’s a culture, because you need other people to participate. And then that creates the conflict again, right? So transformation, for me, is all about breaking down the things that you have to get something greater. You have to break it down. And so you need support to do that, right? You need a Lend agency. You need time. You need distributed cognition to make sure the transformation you want to undergo is good. And then once you make it, that it’s in the right direction, right? That it’s going to the right thing. Were you successful? I don’t know. It’s bigger than me, so I can’t just rely on me to do it. That doesn’t make any sense. Not that that can’t happen. You could get lucky or you could be the Buddha. I don’t think you’re the Buddha, right? So maybe not. Maybe don’t rely on that. Maybe rely more on other people. And maybe the Buddha got lucky. And maybe the Buddha got lucky. Right. Yeah, you never know. That’s the problem. And I think that that’s when we don’t appreciate the affordances of the culture. What is culture doing for us other than just providing us a place to stand? What’s giving us things to cultivate into wants, right? It’s giving us things to want. Oh, well, that’s interesting. Right. And maybe it’s not you. Maybe somebody else is creating. That’s what product creation comes from. Right. It’s not generated from pure black hearted capitalism. Capitalism is an enabler. It’s not a driver. The driver is still the person creating the thing. And look, people make mistakes all the time. Maybe they create something stupid or maybe they create something bad. Maybe they create something corrupting. All of those things are going to happen for sure. Right. But you have to have an interaction. Right. You have to participate. You have to have a way to participate. That’s what culture is. Right. And so it’s not perfect. Well, no, because it’s full of these people and they keep peopling and they appear not to be perfect. But you have to submit to that. And that’s the return of intimacy. Right. And it’s also, that’s where the enchantment has gone in some sense. Right. When you can’t see the enchanted world, it’s because you’re denying intimacy. You’re treating things as objects, that which objects to you or that to which you object. And that’s disenchantment. Right. It’s disenchanting the world or de-enchanting the world. It’s taking the connections away because you’re not willing to accept some degree of conflict and submission in order to get something bigger than you. Right. You’re very narcissistic. Right. You’re very egoic. You’re tied up in your own worldview. And then if somebody tries to meet you there, they’re going to tend towards that too. That’s not good. You don’t want to meet people in narcissism. That’s not a thing to do. And if the culture, if the collective unconscious, if you want to go a Jungian and psychological about it, is in that place where it’s very self-referential, super individualistic, super narcissistic and egoic, you don’t want to meet the culture where it’s at. No, you don’t want to do that. Right. You want to cultivate the ground higher. You don’t want to go down to that level. Not to say you can’t give a message at that level. I think that’s, you know, some of the darker video games do that. I know Pastor Paul just did a recent video where we talked about the Elden Ring, I think is the name of the game and how popular it was. And for me, as much as I love Pastor Paul, he kind of missed part of the point. And we sort of tried to straighten that out on a live stream later, right? Where it’s like the darkness is the thing that’s attracting them and keeping them in the struggle. Because you can struggle at Minecraft, as Josh brought up earlier in the meditation hall today, that you can struggle in other ways. Right. And then you pointed out, oh, this is Minecraft. Yeah. There’s lots of different ways to struggle. Why is the darkness and these dark monsters, these smoke monsters and all this bleakness and these dark colors, why is that struggle so appealing and having transformative effects while the other struggles are not? Right. It’s like, well, that’s interesting. You know, that’s the messaging part. You’re not meeting somebody in hell or, you know, in the darkness where they’re at. You’re not meeting them there. You don’t want to do that. You want to see them there and offer them a hand up. That’s what you want to do. You want to lift them up, up into a better way of seeing the world. Right. And that requires intimacy. Right. It’s going to require this conflict and this submission on both parties. Like, you know, not that you have to submit to their darkness necessarily, but you have to submit to the fact that maybe they see darkness where you do not see it. And I’m not making a claim about what’s there and what’s not. I don’t care. Right. But I do care that you don’t jump into the pit with them, right. That you don’t try to meet them there. Instead, you try to show them a better way using the symbols that they can see. Because maybe if you only have eyes to see darkness, negativity, narcissism, individualism, right. Maybe if you just see yourself standing above the fog, right. Then I have to give you a message about that, about your individualism, about your agency and your empowerment. I think that’s one of the clever things that Jordan Peterson was able to do. You know, how consciously I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past him to know exactly what he’s doing. I also wouldn’t put it past him to just get lucky, right. Because we all get lucky sometimes. So he’s messaging to people, oh, you could be an agent in the world, not just an individual who’s beset upon by outside forces. You could pick up your cross and bear it. You can start by cleaning your room. That’s good evidence that you have some control over the world, right. Limited though it may be. And that that control that you do have influences the people around you, right. You clean up your room and maybe people get angry because your room’s clean and theirs isn’t. And that exemplifies to them that they could do better, right. There’s a conflict, right. He talks about that conflict. Or maybe the opposite happens. They go, oh, I could clean my room too. Like they get to this contest, this positive context. So you can see where there’s a positive and negative affect, right. To one action. I clean my room. Somebody goes, oh, what are you doing cleaning your room? Right. And somebody else goes, oh, cool. I can clean my room too. Like now I see the beauty of a clean room, right. Or the agency in the fact that there can be a clean room that I create. Yeah, that’s kind of a big deal. And then that just spirals up, right. And as there’s a reciprocal opening versus the reciprocal narrowing, it’s all in your what you see, what you attend to. And you’re not getting sucked in in that case. You’re not saying, you know what, I’m just going to not clean my room and make it messier because everybody around me is making their rooms messier. So he’s met them with a message they can understand. You’re an individual with agency. You can use that agency to make the world a better place to cultivate your environment. And that’s where he’s giving a positive message to the culture. Whereas other people give you a negative message to the culture. Oh, the wealthy people are hoarding all the money, right. Or keeping you from being successful. Businesses just want you to do what they want you to do because they want the profits. They get the Lamborghinis while you get, you know, $4.50 an hour or whatever ridiculousness these people spout. That’s the world they see. We have to be able to message them there, but not meet them there. Yeah. So I like this idea that you brought up where culture is enabling connections. And in some sense, that’s relating to the outsourcing. And what that brought up to me is like evolution is effectively a container of things that survived evolution. Right. So there’s a bunch of people contributing and only the things that are close to a nomination survive and get adopted. So in some sense, it’s a pre-selection of reality that you can interface with it. But there’s a negative aspect to that because now what are you interfacing with? Well, you’re interfacing with the end result, right. Like you can look at the car, for example, right. Like that’s been in the making for like how long do you want to go back? Right. So what’s in front of you? What’s in front of you is the result of like a whole bunch of decisions of people that you don’t have any relationship to. And you get this product, this end product, right. And we’re talking about grounding again, right. Like so the product is grounded in the culture, but is your relationship to the product also grounded in culture? Right. Like where, how do you gain the intimacy, right, the right intimacy with the thing that you’re interfacing? Because you’re presented with the end result and the end result doesn’t inform you about right participation. And it has denied you the journey to get to that insight yourself. So now you’re having a problem because how are you getting that insight, right. Like so now you need to be educated, right. Like you get driving lessons or whatever, right. Like there’s all of these ways that we’re trying to hack ourselves into participation. But what’s our metric for the participation? Well, like driving lessons are you don’t crash into other people. That’s basically what it’s intended to do, right. So the purpose isn’t to get you in right relationship. The purpose is to provide a service to society, right. Like it’s fulfilling a telos that’s separate from the telos that you’re fulfilling when you’re in participation with the car. And so now, especially if my relationship with something is sporadic, right. Like for example, my heater or whatever, right. Like what’s my relationship with my heater? Well, like I get heat from it and sometimes some person comes to fix it or whatever, right. But where’s my relationship? And so that’s problematic, right. I can look at it and say, well maybe I want to change it, right. Like maybe with the gas going crazy in Russia and stuff, like I want to swap over to electricity or whatever. But I have to establish that relationship. And like what’s the frame, right. Like what’s the telos that I’m using to establish that relationship? Like so in some sense, like what’s the heater? Well, the heater is one of the many things that I use in the world to make my life easy. And am I ever going to get right relationship with all of these things? No, right. So now I’m going to have to privilege the things that I do want to have right relationship and I am going to have to have to discernment what the way is to have the right relationship to them. So that’s also a problem. And then, well, maybe we have a person in our, among our friends that’s working with heating mechanisms and we can just ask them. And then because they have right relationship, they can transfer that to us. But yeah, so I was trying to highlight this complexity, right. Like where the more things that you’re interfacing with and the less source you are of the thing, right. Like the less that you co-created it, the more the loss of intimacy. And I think also a sense of domicile, right. Because like if the guy isn’t coming back to fix it, like how am I going to act when something goes wrong? Like I’m at a complete loss. Yeah. And I think that brings us back to, you know, what fights the individualism, right. What is the counterbalance to that? I think it’s culture because to your point, we can’t have the relationship with everything. That’s not possible. So we’re outsourcing that relationship to some extent, right. We’re outsourcing to distributed cognition, right. We’re outsourcing to collective intelligence, right. And somebody’s a heating specialist somewhere, right. And somebody knows how the internet works or the piece of the internet that’s broken that needs to be fixed or maintained, right. But not me, or maybe me, but that’s different, right. Or maybe somebody knows this stuff that I don’t, right. So the culture is bigger than you and it’s the thing you stand on. And then maybe you need to have gratitude for that and figure out that to the extent that you are a thing in and of itself, you are still dependent upon, connected to, intimately involved with the culture. And you have to be grateful for not just the culture as such, the ground that you’re standing on, but also all of the other things that are afforded by the culture, which is your ability to talk to other people because you have similar language, similar framing, right. Similar perspectives, right. You have those flag poles that we were talking about earlier, those points that you can connect with, right. Or connect at, if you use those as little rallying points to find other people to make more intimate connections, you can be grateful for the intimate connections. Like, oh, there’s this whole field of affordances in the culture that are allow me to be connected to other people that have relationships with other people, whether they’re friendships or their coupling relationships, right. Relationships with children, right. Relationships with family. There’s all kinds of relationships. That’s why the Greeks had multiple words for love, right. Different types of love. And they were really talking about different qualities of intimacy, right. Oh, the way you’re intimate with your family is different from the way you’re intimate with your friend, your best friend, for example, right. Which is different from the way you’re intimate with your lover, right. So there’s all these different ways they’re talking about the qualities of those relationships. And I think that’s, again, to the extent that you’re an individual, I don’t think you’re an individual. I think you’re a person, right. I like Jonathan Peugeot’s definition better. And a person is connected to other people. Like, you’re not apart. You’re not standing apart above the fog looking over. That’s not who and what you are. It’s not that you can’t ever do that. But that’s not who you are through time in totality or something, right. You can’t stay there. You can’t live there. You can’t participate only there. You can participate with that occasionally. You got to come back down into the culture and eat food that was grown for you, right. And put in the grocery store for you, right. And was checked out for you, right. That you then take home, that you then prepare for your meal, hopefully, right. Or worse yet, you know, you’re beholden to the pizza guy to bring you pizza or the Uber guy to bring you Uber Eats, right. Like that’s worse, right. And not that it’s bad, right. But you need to be grateful for all of that. And I mean, I think you see this in a lot of the sayings, right. To say, you can know a man by how he treats somebody who can do nothing for him, right. And maybe it’s not nothing. How you treat somebody who does something that maybe isn’t as, you know, as important as it may seem, right. And a lot of that is what we place. Yeah, right. Well, a lot of that is what we place our importance on. So we’re placing our importance on propositions on how well somebody speaks, how articulate they are, what fancy words they use. Maybe that steers our subculture in a bad direction. And maybe that’s parasitic on the culture, right. Because those people need to eat. So they’re reliant on the farmers, right. And those farmers need to get the food to the people that need to buy it. So they’re reliant on the truckers, right. And then, you know, and then maybe you also need to refine the food. So they’re, you know, and it’s just a huge chain of causality, right. And the causality begins with the need to cultivate farming. And it ends, right, or is drawn from the beginning to the end by the finality of us being able to eat. And I think we’ve lost that enchantment, the enchantment of what it actually takes to be in a culture, what culture actually means, why fashion and subcultures aren’t the important thing, but culture and the ability to cultivate by standing on the ground of and growing things that are bigger than us is the important part. And, you know, institutions are part of that. The church is part of that, right. Your engagement in your platform is part of that, right. So Twitter doesn’t have to be a dumpster fire. My Twitter feed is actually quite lovely. Thank you very much. There’s almost no, well, there’s no political arguments on my Twitter feed, right. So what I’m cultivating on Twitter is different from what other people are cultivating on Twitter, because there is that disconnection in what you see, and that points you in a direction to what you grow, in essence. And so that’s really important. It’s not the platform’s not moving me. I’m moving the platform. I can’t move the platform for everybody, right. But I can point them in a direction and maybe they follow along. And that would be lovely because again, my Twitter feed is awesome. So there’s a way in which we need to be grateful for culture. We need to understand what it’s giving us, how much stuff it’s allowing us to do. It’s freeing us up to be more intellectual, right. It’s freeing us up to learn big words. It’s freeing us up to be more articulate, because if I’m farming all day, I’m probably not too concerned with how my words sound to other people, because I’m not with other people. I’m farming all day. And farming is an all day experience. Not that there aren’t farmers who are articulate, that they are there, but it’s a little harder for sure, because most of their time is being used up farming and creating things of value to other people that they can create more value from. That great chain of value is the thing that culture is all about, is creating that chain of value, that connectedness and installing that narrative framework that we can build a good narrative from or a bad narrative. We better make sure we’re building a good narrative. Yeah, I like that. So effectively what you’re describing is we have a relationship to culture as such, and we should have awareness that we have that relationship. We should be intentional with that relationship, right. And we talked about the historical grounding, right. Like the the thing, the way that things are grounded in history is part of the relationship that we have to culture, right, in order to properly understand why culture is the way it is, what role it is fulfilling. And yeah, the gratitude is important. And I also want to bring back this idea, right, like culture is what allows us to build a relationship to the future, right. Like the fact that there’s a reliance on this food chain, not only this year but next year as well, allows me to have a certain type of planning. I would have a different planning if that food chain wasn’t there, because my priorities would shift completely. And maybe that’s the right frame to relate back to what Mark was saying, right. Like, okay, so the things that I’m doing, right, and the priorities that I’m having, they’re conditional, right. And I need to have awareness of the condition, and I need to have some awareness of the fallback position, right, that you’re going to inhabit. And when you have a sense, and this is what the preppers do, but when you have a sense of the fallback position, right, like now you have contrast, right, it’s like, oh, so that, like, I’d be living, like, cooking beans on a wooden fire, whatever, in a forest somewhere, like, damn, if I contrast that with my life, I can now see, like, yeah, that shitty cleaning of my, whatever, microwave isn’t that bad, right. And having that contrast allows you to see things differently, but I also think it allows you to change your participation, right. And I was talking about understanding, right, relationship with all of these things, right. And maybe the right relationship is as a consequence of the approaching from a place of gratitude, right, like a place of recognition of what something is fulfilling for you. And that allows us to not get the essence of the thing, but get the essence for us, right. And now we can start participating, and when we participate, we get better discernment, and we can start implementing the ideals or the values or the virtues that we deem necessary. And that goes back, right, like, to, we have this all-purpose capacity that we are, right, and then we can start accepting in the specific circumstance the tools that we need in order to be a right relationship to that. So yeah, there’s another appeal to cultivate these baseline ways of relating effectively. Yeah, I know, I like that summary. And I think, yeah, culture is the thing that gives you the contrast to do all the things you need and want to do, but you have to have eyes to see it and appreciate that aspect. And I would add that I think that you’re always grounded in the culture. By definition, you can’t get around, it’s the water you swim in, right. But then it matters what virtues and values you’re trying to enact in the world. And the thing that is pointing at the virtues and values is effectively your religion, at least definition post-1530. That’s your religion. That’s what you’re doing. It’s not that you’re driving or controlling the religion, it’s controlling you. The way it’s controlling you is by pointing at the things that you’re cultivating on top of the culture, right, as part of interacting with the culture. And if that’s highly individualistic or it’s highly monofocal on just one thing, for example, then maybe it’s corrupting. And maybe it’s parasitic to the culture. And maybe ultimately, it’s removing your ability to see because you’re only looking in one direction ever, one thing ever, one value ever. Maybe you can’t see the whole picture, you can’t have that contrast, you can’t have that gratitude. And maybe that’s a problem. So yeah, what do you think Manuel? You feeling complete or…? Well, I was going to bring up the story that when you’re in a dreamland, right, like don’t eat, right, so there’s this sense of when we’re relating to these things, these aspirations, these values, these virtues, right, like when we make them real, right, like when we connect ourselves to them and identify with them, then we get sucked in. So yeah, like I think religion properly should allow you to have the taste, right, and not the consumption of these things. And then you get into that dynamic process. And and that controls you, right, like that’s the thing that’s drawing you forward. But you have a responsibility to it as well. Because if you don’t pay attention in the right way, if you don’t cultivate these things correctly, you’re being drawn in the wrong direction. So yeah, that’s a good way to end for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, just to cap it off, yeah, there’s a way in which you need to have the right religion, right, the right values that you’re trying to enact. And then you have to do that in right relationship, right, with the proper level of intimacy, that quality of connectedness, where you understand that you’re not just taking something out of the thing you’re engaged in, whether it’s a fashion, a subculture, a culture or religion, you’re also adding to it. And what you add to it matters. And that’s the right relationship and the quality that we need to capture in order to have a good, safe, positive, conflicting, right, still struggling, right journey through whatever it is we’re trying to manifest. And that that won’t be the same thing all the time, maybe. But, you know, ultimately, there’s some there’s some ultimate T loss there that we’re definitely trying to manifest as a people’s right as as humans, as persons together. And that’s really, to me, what the what the right understanding of culture is. It’s not fashion. It’s not subculture. It’s not about, you know, meeting people where they’re at, it might be messaging where they’re at, but that’s a different thing. It’s it is about this right relationship, understanding what’s drawing you forward. And whether or not that forward progress is good. Right. And also understanding what your responsibilities are, because if you’re not actively managing your responsibility towards something, maybe that responsibility is being used without your knowledge or understanding. Yeah, I want to correct a little bit. I don’t think we’re trying to manifest the T loss. I think we’re working towards right. Oh, yeah. There’s a distinction there where it’s it’s what’s dragging us forward. It’s not a thing that we actually achieve. Yes, that’s true. It’s not a it’s not a final cause, because we can’t achieve it in some sense. But it is a final cause in that it’s dragging us forward. Right. So yeah, that’s a good that’s a good example. Are you are you feeling complete now? Did we wrap it up? All right, let’s let’s until next time. I hope everybody enjoys this and I appreciate your time and attention.