Dialogos, Enchantment! (Df3AcvtHmRU)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Df3AcvtHmRU

All right, I am back here with Manuel Post, and we’re going to do another DLogos style conversation. And we’re going to talk about enchantment. And part of the reason why we’re doing this is not to enchant you, although I’ll do a video on that at some point. We were talking on the Discord the other day on Bridges of Meaning Discord, and there were a few people in the room, and it was mostly Manuel and I going back and forth, and we have ideas sometimes, unfortunately. They plague us, and we have to take notes on them, and we talk about them. And at some point, there was a lull, and we were like, hey, who else would like to join in the conversation or start a new topic? And one of the people there was like, this is fascinating. I like listening to you guys. Going like, OK. And I think this is linked to the hunger that people have to some extent here. Sense making in progress between people, right, because a lot of people couch some of the problems they’re having today as difficulty in conversation or something. And so to see people having, we’ll say contentious conversations because I’m disagreeable. And I think Manuel is disagreeable and still getting along. No, I’m not disagreeable. But to see them getting along and also making progress and ideas is really important. And so what we wanted to talk to you about today was enchantment. Now, we have notes on enchantment, but we don’t know where we’re going with this. And so that sort of points back to this idea of conversations that can be explanatory, which we can’t do to some extent. I mean, we’ll have to do some explaining versus exploratory. So explanatory versus exploratory. We want to do an exploratory conversation. And there’s a way I think in which geologos can stray into the realm of enchantment. And since enchantment is the topic, this is really what we want to get to, right, because there’s different forms of enchantment, different ways of thinking of enchantment. And we are going to put out a definition that’s going to make absolutely nobody happy. But I think I think that as we define and walk around this issue, that people will get a better sense for what we mean. And maybe if you don’t agree, maybe you at least don’t disagree that enchantment is a thing and is important and has the aspects that we’re talking about. What would you like to add to that intro there, Manuel? I know it’s a little long-winded on my part. Well, yeah, so I think there’s a tension in the disagreeableness, right? And that’s the fire in which things get forged. So I made a note about science looking for confirmation lately, or that seems to be happening instead of looking for disconfirmation. So, yeah, that’s kind of like a way that you can look at it, right? If you want to be sure about something, you can want to have as much resistance as you can get in some way. And obviously, you don’t want to have that interfere with the conversation and where it’s going. But I hope that we can build up some kind of spirit, some sort of energy, some flow, where that gets embodied. I just wanted to riff on that for a second, because I think you really hit it a couple of important things here. And this idea of spirit, maybe the best definition of dialogos is that a spirit arises, a third thing in the conversation that isn’t either of the interlocutors or any of the interlocutors, where the topic that they’re circling around sort of has a form of its own almost and rises up from the discussion to occupy the space. But that means they have to leave a space. It can’t be too contentious, but it can’t not be contentious because there’s no contention, there’s no boundary set. I also like the idea of tension and forging. I think that’s great. Right. You want a tension between the interlocutors. You don’t want one to dominate the conversation, right? Because then the no spirit can emerge and you don’t want them both trying to dominate the conversation because, again, then that no spirit can emerge. And so finding that tension, that balance is really important. And there’s a way in which even if you do all that stuff, enchantment can still arise. So you can see, say, a good dialogo, a good spirit rising up, but that spirit can become possessive of the listeners or watchers or participants even. And that’s the negative enchantment aspect. Right. And I don’t know if that’s the positive version, but the correct way of relating to that spirit is to be in service of it. Right. So there’s something that wants to be put into the world. And what you want to do is you want to facilitate that. Right. So that’s the job. That’s the way that you should conceive of yourself in the conversation. It’s like, OK, how can I bring this thing into being and then not focus on how you personally have investments in certain aspects and also not focus on what you perceive as what science says is right or whatever tradition says is right. No, you have to you have to get there on your own. And if that’s in alignment with what you knew previously, that’s all the better because nobody likes being wrong. Oh, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. And also this idea of the best way to be right is to be challenged. Right. The best type of certainty is the certainty that challenges you and not the type of certainty that you get agreement on. Right. Agreement always makes me nervous, actually, in certain forums. It’s like, what’s disagreeing with me? Does that mean I’ve lost my audience? Right. Because that might be what it means. And we can, you know, we should probably we should probably segue into the definition of enchantment. So I think enchantment is a form of influence, right, which can lead to a form of control. But enchantment is a form of influence that points at the spirit or at the ineffable away from the material. And so there’s lots of implications to that simple and perhaps oversimple definition, right, where what you’re trying to do, say, with Tolkien, right, J.R.R. Tolkien is famous for enchanting, right, roughly speaking. And the way Tolkien did it was he takes this static world, this land, right, which is a material thing. And then he puts elves in it, for example, which are ethereal or magical creatures. And what they do is they make the rope ropeier. So all the good qualities of a rope, the good qualities are are enhanced somehow, not in a way that’s describable by the characters. Right. And he does that all over the place. So he just he creates this world. And it’s that enchantment that Tolkien does that makes world building a possibility and be appealing and see work like his world building doesn’t work without enchantment. Enchantment is the process of building a world. If I just describe a desk to you, it’s no fun. But if I enchant the desk by talking about the future potential of it, by talking about what is embodied by the desk. Right. So, for example, I can say, oh, look, I have I have a roll top desk. It’s pretty boring. But if I say I have a Derby roll top desk, Derby’s a famous, famous name in furniture, at least in in in the New England area, certainly, but probably throughout the U.S. I have a Derby roll top desk from the eighteen hundreds. Right. I’ve just enchanted the desk. It’s like, oh, there’s a there’s a name there. That’s one type of enchantment. Right. There’s a history there. There’s a historical aspect to the enchantment that I did. Right. And there’s a potential of of hearing that story and then there’s a potential of that story continuing into the future. Right. And so there’s a bunch of elements of enchantment that I just sort of brought to bear in a very simple, overly simple, perhaps fashion where I could talk about, oh, it’s a Derby roll top desk. It was originally in a telegraph office. Right. And that telegraph office was once visited by one of the presidents. Right. Like there’s all sorts of little things that tie into that. And they may they may be true. They may be historically verifiable, but to some sense, it doesn’t matter. The significance of the desk isn’t knowable by the fact that it’s a that it’s a roll top desk because there are modern roll top desks and they look terrible, by the way, they made out of inferior wood. I mean, part of the reason why old desks are cool is because they’re made out of, you know, 200 year old trees in many cases that don’t grow anymore. Right. We don’t have any or many. So there’s all these ways in which you can enchant things like that. But I think that’s what enchantment is. Yeah. So I think it’s important to recognize that enchantment is relating to your experience. Right. So so it’s informing the way that you’re you’re experiencing something and. And that is related to your emotions. And so when when we go into all of these ways of enchanting something, what are we trying to do? Well, we’re we’re trying to to to show that that there is. Leverage inside of you that can be manipulated potentially by by making things. Stand out to you in a certain way with or without your knowledge and with or without the knowledge of the other person. And. And it’s it’s also connected to to what meaning things have to us. Right. So, oh, the president was at this desk or whatever like that gives that that gives that that’s some value. There’s a meaning to it. There’s there’s a there’s a dimension being added that. That is valuable, independent of the material manifestation of the desk. And so you can you can also look at look at that in different things. Right. So if if a rope is rope here, then you have a better relationship with the rope. Like it it is. Filling in or fulfilling what you want from it. And so maybe there’s a there’s there’s something in you that that is looking for something and then the puzzle piece is being provided by by the enchantment. And that might be like I think that’s necessary. Right. Like that’s how we get meaning into the world. But I also think it’s dangerous if you’re you’re you’re you’re you’re you’re it’s dangerous if you’re if you’re misattributing. Yeah, this fellow. Yeah, it goes back to connectedness, right. Connect the history to the present. You can connect the name and the history of the name to the object. You can do both. Right. You connect historical events to the object. Right. And all that connectedness is part of the enchantment, the web of enchantment. That’s that’s it’s really a web. Right. And then it’s all those connections that add the potential for interaction for affordance. If you if you want to go go that route with it and affordances allow for different interactions or different levels of interactions. And I think, yeah, that’s really important. Like, what are the different levels of interactions? What are the different ways in which we interact that allow us to? You know, to to be in the enchantment. And then I think, you know, just to loop this back to the logos, I know John Breveke and Jordan Peterson on their talk, they talked about Phyla and Ikea versus Phyla Sophia. And I think the problem with that formulation is that they very much cast it as a binary. And I don’t think it’s a binary at all. You know, I think that. If you’re purely Phyla Sophia and again, it’s two people, so they have to agree and then they have to implement perfectly in order to make this purely Phyla Sophia. The problem you run into if you’re going after this this this this love. You know, of of exploration, roughly speaking, or wisdom is that you’re not necessarily going to get anywhere useful for people, right, because you’re not able to make truth claims, because a truth claim is is this Phyla and Ikea, this this love of victory. But I don’t I don’t think it’s victory the way they’re talking about. That’s why I like explanation versus exploration where you’re making statements. So when you’re making a statement to stand on, you’re stating a perspective or an axiom to approach something with. And you need axioms, you can’t get around axioms. So you got to start somewhere. And so the Phyla and Ikea is not bad, just when it’s all Phyla and Ikea, it’s bad. But I would argue when it’s all Phyla Sophia, it’s bad, too, because then you’re floating in air, you’re not you’re not doing anything. And that’s where you’re prone to enchantment. I think that there’s a way that enchantment relates to objects and then you relate to those objects and the objects relate to other objects. So, you know, maybe the rope is grippier, not to you, but to the objects you’re throwing it around. It’s like, oh, what does that mean? Well, that just means the rope affordance to other objects is greater. So it’s not just the relationship that you have with the object, the relationship the object has with other objects, right, all that connectedness that’s going on. And I think that if you’re in purely Phyla Sophia mode, that you’re not gripping on to anything, right. You’re just connecting things over and over again, but they’re not grounded. So unless you start from Phyla and Ikea, you start from a topic or a container or something where you’re able to talk about things and make statements and find common viewpoints. One of one of the things Phyla and Ikea gives you is, you know, you can say things like if the most important thing in the world were agape, what would that look like? And then you launch into Phyla Sophia, right. So you start with the Ikea. Where you’ve got a statement that that people can either agree or disagree on or find agreement with, that they can walk together in exploration, which which I think is important. But if you don’t do that and you’re just enchanting, enchanting, enchanting, you know, now you’re now you’re it’s not only that you’re not grounded, right, you’ve strayed into the mystical, I think, roughly speaking, the purely mystical. But but also the audience, it sounds nice, right. You sound like you’re say floating in beauty, but the audience has no way of orienting that. But they get a good feeling from it. So it’s very much like like like like the hit of the drug. Right. At that point. Right. So so I made a note today and I added it to it. Finally, yeah. And the Sophia Phyla. Agria. And what I what I would connect that to is looking for for intimacy, right. Like you can have a conversation where you’re where you’re trying to find a connection with someone which just dawned on me is literally trying to find common enchantment or reciprocal enchantment. Or see the same enchantment. Right. And so it’s important to to realize, right, like it’s not only for the SFIA and finally in IKEA, like there’s there’s different modalities that you can have in conversation. And. When when you get modally confused, right, like when you think you’re having one conversation, but you’re actually enacting a different spirit, because maybe that’s the best way to think of it. Right. Like if you’re in an IKEA spirit, you’re you’re in an opposition spirit. If you’re in a Sophia spirit, then you’re in an exploratory spirit. And maybe the intimacy part is a communion of spirit or something where that that is your main intention. And I’m just recognizing that that these things can be there, they can be flipped in the moment, right, like without you being aware, you’re probably evil. We’ll send something right, but you’re not aware of what’s actually going on. But what what what’s happening is there, there, the allegiance of of one or more participants in the conversation changes during the conversation because of something that is brought up in them, maybe because of an association that they made, emotional activation or or they they they see that that what was there is better served to transform into this bigger thing that can hold more more points. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. Yeah. And and imagine to write. I like how you looked in intimacy. We talked about intimacy quite a lot. Right. We talked about it for over a year now and trying to get a handle on on what how that plays into meaning crisis and things like that. And I like what you got what you did there, though, because I see it as there’s also a way in which you’re both sort of proceeding forth in the conversation, talking about the same thing from different perspectives, but never meeting up, like constantly going away from one another without that intimacy. And do you have an intimacy for one another or just one another? Do you have an intimacy with the spirit that you’re evoking in the conversation? And that’s all about, well, what is your connection? And again, without without statements, without axiomatic statements to say, oh, no, no, no, look, we have to start from somewhere. We need an agreement that we’re going to start from these axioms. Then, you know, you have an incorrect relationship with the conversation itself, not just the participants, but also the audience. Or maybe there’s nothing to relate to. Right. Right. Well, that’s the pure mysticism. There’s nothing to relate to. So it sounds nice. It may even be nice. Like it may be good and beautiful and lovely and wonderful. But if you can’t relate to it, that’s a different problem. And that’s a that’s a form of we’ll call it negative enchantment. Right. Where you’re like, that’s the utopian vision. You’re given a right. You’re given something that you cannot relate to. Yeah, that’s all context and no content. Like there’s exactly the health within what’s being provided to you. Right. Right. But if it’s purely contextual or purely perspectival, right. You’re like, oh, imagine a perspective where everyone were nice to everybody else. OK, but that’s that’s not a world you can ever inhabit. Like that’s never going to happen. And there’s lots of very good reasons why. And I won’t go into them all. But you can imagine right away that the person that loves you the most doesn’t always only ever love you in a flawless way. Like even if they always love you, maybe they over love you. Right. The devouring mother. Right. Or or or maybe they snap every once in a while because people sometimes snap. Like that’s people. That’s people. That’s what people do. And so there’s no way to inhabit that space. And there’s no way anybody else can inhabit that space. And and that’s the problem. It sounds beautiful, but it’s devoid of content because it doesn’t have that grounded, realistic aspect that people have as people, you know, where they’re not perfect, oddly enough. I mean, so I’m told. So not sounds like you’re bringing up like an enchantment, whether there’s a lack of recognition of tradeoffs. Yes. And there’s different different aspects in life that need to be maintained. And like some of them have to give in for other things because like we still need to work to to eat. Also, we’d be enslaving people to do that for us. So there’s there’s this thing that that we just can’t avoid. Right. Like we need to fight entropy. And then on that, we can slowly build things that we deem good. I like that. I like that tradeoff. Yeah. The tradeoff for you not having to work is enslaving others. Yeah. I think we’re going to use that future video on tradeoffs because I’ve been looking for tradeoff, really good tradeoffs. That’s a really good tradeoff. Right. Yeah. You can you can choose not to fight entropy, which is roughly speaking work. You can choose that or we’ll say valuable work or meaningful work. Right. Meaningful work is fighting off entropy. It’s not the only way of thinking about meaningful work, but it’s certainly one form. And if you’re not doing that, someone else has to on your behalf. In other words, to their detriment, but your benefit. And that’s one form of tradeoff. I’m not going to work, but somebody else is going to do that work for me. And maybe that’s OK, because maybe you’re paying them, but maybe it’s not OK, because maybe you’re paying them. All right. And that’s your form of of of enslavement. Right. Or in rapture capturing, you know, which, you know, brings it. A lot of people are talking about that. Right. They’re all these corporate enslavers because they’re they’re they’re taunting us with money. And that’s why we want to just give free money out, because then they can’t enslave us anymore with their cash, because the government can give us the cash directly, because the government makes cash out of magic. You know, and so you can see the enchantment like it’s very enchanting idea. And I think you’re right. The negative enchantment of no tradeoffs like, yeah, I’m going to give you a world with no tradeoffs. It’s like, well, it sounds good, but it’s not the real world. Like there’s somebody’s going to pay that price and somebody’s somebody’s got to pay that price because that price has to be paid. And you can never compete with an argument because whatever you’re going to propose on the other side is lesser unless you value meaning. Right. Right. And then there’s an opposing force to. To the enslavement. Yeah. Get into submission. All right. Like willful engagement into a role and accepting your role as part of the bigger body that you’re partaking in. Yeah. Accepting the sacrifice in the body in the larger container. Yeah. Yeah. When you accept the sacrifice, you’re doing proper submission because the sacrifice is there either way. And that’s what people don’t get. Right. That’s what they’re not realizing. Like, oh, you know, to give Sam Harris some some small part of his do. Right. Well, you were born. And so there’s a bunch of obligations in your birth just because of the fact that you are born. And therefore, you’re taking up oxygen and water and food and, you know, all these things that other people in the beginning at least have to provide for you. And so there’s there’s a lot of original sin concept built into that. However, that manifests. But when you don’t see the trade offs, you can end up in making opposite trade offs and thinking you’re fighting a different battle when, in fact, you’re fighting the same battle for the same reason, which is that lack of recognition of trade off, a lack of acceptance of trade off or or maybe a little bit of both. Maybe you recognize some of it, but but not the rest. You’re like, oh, I’m not going to trade my freedom for your tyranny, but I am going to tyrannize in a completely different way. It’s like, wait a minute. That happens a lot. And then you get valid criticisms on both sides. But that the fact that there are valid criticisms on both sides doesn’t mean that that that one side isn’t right and the other side isn’t wrong. And that’s the asymmetry of, we’ll say, trade offs. And so when we’re ignoring trade offs, we’re definitely trying some form of of high level enchantment. And maybe that’s narrative enchantment, right? I think there is a way that we enter into this narrative style of enchantment. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, you got you got sucked into a narrative like like I wanted to take a step back because we kind of got the definition and started sucking ourselves, enchanting ourselves a little bit into a direction. But like maybe it’s it’s good to to look at why people would enchant. Right. Like what is the motivation behind an action of enchantment? Right. So an obvious motivation is because they want to manipulate you. Right. Like when when you see this world, the way that someone else wants to see the world, think of a car salesman. Right. Like, oh, look at this awesome car. And what you could do with it, right, like he’s trying to get you to envision a world in which this car is of value to you. And when you inhabit that world, you’re way more likely to buy that car, even against your own interests sometimes. So so that’s that that’s one motivation. But then then there’s also a different motivation. Maybe people don’t want to manipulate you, but they they want to be liked by you or something like they want you want affirmation of themselves. So they’re trying to get you in a state where where you’re returning or you’re giving them something emotionally, not financially or physically. A validation that that that that they’re they’re craving and probably haven’t gotten because of trauma or whatever. And and that can also be from a place where where they’ve enchanted themselves, right, like they’ve they’ve looked at the world and they say like, like the world should be like this. And and and then they’re they’re trying to construct a way of of understanding the world wherein that can be true for them. And part of that is putting that enchantment on on themselves. And part of that is putting that enchantment on people around them. Right. And especially in modern times, people tend to be really agreeable. So so they get what’s the word enabled in into that space a lot. And I think we’ve been making arguments both of us that that we shouldn’t enable people. You have to have right relationship reality. And and the enchantment can be part of you being in right relationship reality. Because like like, yeah, who wants to go run for now? Some people do. But like the running for an hour isn’t something that that’s inherently valuable. Right. Like you need you need to find reasons for for yourself to do that. Right. Like so you so you’re you’re giving it some meaning in relation to yourself. And that allows you to have the motivation to or the conviction in order to partake in in that activity. But but you can also imagine that like, OK, running is healthy, although you need to put a limit on that at some point. But but you might also imagine that that, for example, drugs, right. Taking drugs is is well, that’s more material enchantment. Right. But but looking at yourself, thinking that you can maintain yourself in the state where you’re taking drugs is is you. Creating a narrative for yourself, where you think it’s OK, right? Like I don’t I don’t want to feel bad, so I’m I’m going to take this drug and then then I can move forward, right? Like not realizing that over time, that’s definitely not a viable solution. Yeah, yeah, I like that. So so, yeah, the the way in which enchantment is about connections, making connections and validating the connections you already have in the world. And then, you know, trying to trying to trying to make them more salient. All right. Or more valid by sucking people in with your enchantment. And then there’s a way in which we enchant ourselves right into these visions. Like, oh, I really want to believe that if we just print more money, if we just print more money and give it to people, then the money will maintain its value and therefore like everybody can buy what they need. And it’s like, you know, I mean, there’s still somebody working at the other end of that dollar, right, to make the thing happen because things have to happen. And so, you know, there’s a way in which you’re you’re not moving the needle at all. And then, of course, they don’t look at history and realize, oh, this has been tried and doesn’t work. And we know why, actually, we know quite well why. It’s been studied many times. And then, you know, you can argue most of the models are clearly wrong or flawed. Fair enough. But there’s a way in which we enchant ourselves into believing something like that, even though we know it doesn’t work or we could know if we just looked at historically when it’s been tried. We don’t want to believe that. Right. We don’t believe counter examples, right, because we’re enchanted. We’ve enchanted ourselves or allowed ourselves to be enchanted. But then there’s also that that aspect of enchantment where, yeah, we’re just looking for some form of connection, intimacy or intimate connection that that we can hang on to. To help us in our meaning quest, because, yeah, I mean, if I go run around the reservoir at one a.m., which I used to do quite a lot when I lived when I lived in Brookline. You know, I come back home like what was the point of that? Right. But of course, you enchant yourself to go run and then you run and you’re enchanted in the running to some extent. Right. And then you’re a better person because heart rates lower. Your resting heart rate goes down, even though your your heart rate went up while you were running. Right. There’s all these connections that happen. And, you know, you enjoy the reservoir more hopefully, or which I always did. Right. You burn off some energy, you get rid of some anxiety. That was my usual tactic. And then you return home where it’s safe and quiet and you make different types of intimate connections that you’re now able to see because you’re not bouncing off the walls with anxiety and energy that you could dissipate before. And so there’s a way in which that is a form of self-enchantment that say positive. And then I think that where enchantment sort of goes wrong is when you’re trying to enchant a person like another person or a group of people. I think it’s possible that enchanting people directly and I know we have to be very careful here. People don’t like my definitions of enchantment, but it’s possible that. When you’re enchanting a person or a group of people, that is always wrong. And dare I say evil, like I think that’s not the right thing to do now. You can get before a group or before a person and enchant a vision. Out there, right? And that’s OK, right? Because then they have to voluntarily buy into it to some extent, right? They have to be able to engage with it. And then you as an enchanter, and I don’t think that’s bad enchantment at all, have to sell that vision. Now, you can argue that, oh, people sell utopian visions that way. Oh, fair enough. Fair enough. That definitely happens. So I’m not trying to solve the problem of, we’ll say, bad enchantment. But I am trying to make a differentiation between, say, bad and merely bad enchantment and evil intent. Right. And the evil is enchanting people directly or a person directly. Whereas bad enchantment may just be a bad utopian vision that you’re or any utopian vision, I would say, is bad, right? A bad vision that you’re giving people that you’re giving to them in an enchanted way, because you kind of have to to some extent. That’s a different thing. Like, you’re just making a mistake there or an error or not understanding. But that also takes two people. And I would argue that when you’re directly enchanting somebody, you’re removing part of their agents. And that won’t work with disagreeable people necessarily. Although I can’t say I’ve never been enchanted by somebody or something. That certainly happened to my detriment. That’s happened. So it’s being disagreeable is in the solution. Right. Might help a lot, but it’s certainly no no panacea, no quick fix, no silver bullet. So I think that’s important to to to tease out is the way in which enchantment can be always bad, the way in which enchantment can be mistaken versus enchantment as such, which could be enchantments, a neutral a neutral force of the world, roughly speaking. Yes. So. The agency, I think, I think what you’re doing is much subverted. That might be a better word. And I also I also think that that goes for intelligibility. Right. So so you what what you’re effectively doing is you’re filling up something for someone else without them having having a direct relationship to it. And and so why it’s bad is is you’re denying that person that relationship. Right. And then if if it’s a faulty relationship, right. Or if that relationship requires something of them. And and and because they’re not in that relationship, but they’re in some sense axiomatically accepting it through the enchantment, then they they end up being in in wrong relationship with reality. And when it gets really bad is if if they start constructing on top of that. Like when when they start building and intelligence in the world from an enchanted position, then basically what they what happened is that they don’t have a fundamental structure that they can rely upon when they they get into an error. I like like. It’s important that when you when you walk into an error, that you have a foundation, a fundamental relationship with reality that can support you during during that well, awful experience because your your sense making is broken. Your your ability to act is broken. And Peterson talks about this, right, like you don’t know where where what level of the stack that problem is. Right. So if you if you have a stack that is really solid, you can rely upon that it’s pretty high upon the stack that problem. But when you’re enchanted, right, like that problem might be at the bottom of the stack. And then you end up in despair. So, so yeah, that’s a case to lay out, like how that can go horribly wrong. So, yeah, so the way that we got into Enchantment and I think we’re going to anecdotes is there was this this a tatak that you watched and yeah, something happened there. Brene Brown. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m going to be doing a video on what we call adverbial only speech. Right. Where I like I like your construction. There’s no content. It’s all context. So you’re just messing with people’s frames. So if you listen to Brene Brown’s Ted talk, and I’m sure you might have more than one. I think it was her first one. She basically says a bunch of words without framing them at all. And then what happens is she enchants the entire audience. So and I can’t quote her directly. I wouldn’t even try it. You know, but basically she’s saying stuff like, well, you know, we can manifest peace in the world if we all just meet each other with with empathy and love and and we all just, you know, look look towards the good. Okay. Now, I didn’t say anything there. I didn’t give you anything actionable or reasonable. I didn’t point to anything in the world or outside of it. But what I did do was I gave you a bunch of things that you could create a narrative out of in your head. And so what happens is when people listen to Brene Brown, they all hear her words. They all interpret absolutely everything she said differently. And they feel in the narrative in the adverbs because they’re just adverbs. So they’re all starting from different points and ending at different points. Like, what does it mean to have peace in the world? Does that mean there’s no more arguments between people? Because that’s I’ve I’ve met people who have that definition of peace. Because peace to them is not just global. It’s also very personal. So yeah, no war. But in order to have no war, we have to have no arguments with other people. It’s like you want no arguments with other people. Like, well, first of all, that sounds like hell to me. So that I would never go there if you said peace. I don’t want that kind of peace at all. It’s no fun. I wouldn’t mind the kind of peace where like no one gets killed sort of thing. You can probably get me on that one. Although I don’t think that’s realistic. But but different people are going to hear that differently. And they’re all starting different points. So the thing is, she posited a world right or posed a question or whatever. Right. This question implicit. Right. And then solved it. And the solution was correct in your head. The problem was that the solution in your head and the solution in the head of the person next to you are completely different solutions. And in fact, the problem formulation may be different. So now you’ve got a bunch of people who feel like they got an answer to something and they all got different answers to the same thing or maybe not the same thing. But they all feel like they have the sense of connectedness and camaraderie because they were all in the same space. They’re all the same person to use the same words on all of them. Right. At the same time. So what are the odds if we all had a good feeling from that, that we’re not we’re not in the same place tracking about the same thing. And then, of course, you go to try to implement this stuff. And it goes crazy immediately because everybody heard something different. Yeah, and nobody knows where to start a war. Yes. Well, that is the way they start wars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you can see this in history. You can look at historical figures like you can. You can talk about how things were interpreted. Well, yeah, interpretation is very important. And enchantment relies on on good interpretation. Right. Or, you know, maybe bad interpretation for bad enchantment, where we have the Brene Brown thing. But like you can always say, oh, well, you know, somebody has a point about invading a country because that country did do something wrong. Oh, fair enough. Right. And, oh, well, you know, they were wronged in the past and therefore fair enough. You know, so you can always start justifying little actions, as was done in World War Two quite a bit, where you had two factions, people and some people were supportive. Right. And you don’t get Time magazine magazine Man of the Year award for for for being an obviously terrible person who did nothing but bad things. Right. And then so you can see a way in which the interpretation actually matters with the enchantment. And if you don’t resist that enchantment, but but I also like what you brought up. Like, there’s this aspect of agency where you can become disenchanted. Right. You get in a cult and then suddenly you discover something. You can look at Nick’s videos on cult. We’ve got them on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube. And Paul Van Du Clay has like a four or five part series with Nick where he talks about the cults and like, oh, yeah, I’m in the cult in there. I’m with these people doing this thing. And then suddenly I realize like that has an insight that this is bad. And then and then he even tries to enchant the cult. Take it over. Right. One case. So it’s just fascinating how this stuff works. And then you can just see enchantment all over the place. Cult use a lot of different types of enchantment. And yeah, I think it’s worth talking about. So so there’s a way in which, you know, the Brene Brown anecdote where she’s using narrative enchantment by deleting the narrative, just removing narrative content, content completely and allowing you to insert your own narrative into a utopian vision, basically. And then everybody’s happy because she seems to get her message across because everyone’s smiling and nodding and feels like they know exactly what she said, even though everybody heard something different. And it doesn’t match what she has in her head. All right. And now everybody’s enchanted, like everybody in the whole space is enchanted entirely. But there’s also other types of enchantment, like magical words. I think this is what you’re seeing with the rise of the intellectual classes. Magical word enchantment, where basically, you know, they’ll use these these terms that are that are a little fancy and kind of think, you know, what they mean. And maybe they give you a reasonable definition of them. Right. And then it’s like, oh, it sounds it sounds good. Like, so like I can use my my favorite, my favorite kickboy, Sam Harris. And he uses this moral landscape. And like, to be totally fair to Sam Harris, I think there is a landscape. It’s not a moral one. It’s an ethical one. Right. And the moral landscape works, too. Like his formulation is not incorrect. It’s just inadequate to do anything with because it’s relativistic. So if you put two items in the moral landscape, you can compare them because it’s a relativistic framework. Yeah. Fair enough. So it sounds it sounds like a magical device. A moral landscape is basically a magical device. But but it doesn’t solve the problem of ethics. It just solves the problem of if you have a choice, you can figure out which choice is better than which other choice, maybe at least for two choices. Maybe it doesn’t work when you scale up to four or six choices. I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. I don’t think Sam has either. And and and having relativistic only choices always becomes combinatorially explosive, which is why you can’t use that as a tool because it doesn’t scale. Relativism doesn’t scale. And so that’s the way in which Sam Harris enchants you. He says, oh, no, no, look, I can do this trick. He uses a simple straw man example of moral landscape working. Right. And he calls it moral landscape, which is just two magical words, effectively, or a magical term or something. And then bang. Right. You’re enchanted by his construction, even though it’s basically self deceptive. I mean, I would just say I think Sam honestly believes the moral landscape is a thing and that people can use it and that it does all the things he claims. I think I think he totally believes that it’s wrong. It’s obviously wrong. But he’s enchanted himself with his own construction. And some people do this more than others. Right. They have their own little words and terms. And look, you need your own little words and terms. But sometimes the intellectuals just make up new words. And that happens a lot. So that’s definitely one one form of enchantment is magical, magical words. Right. And I think we went over this word valid. Right. Like it like his his landscape is real, but it’s not valid because it’s not implementable in reality. Right. Because of the common is already explosive nature. And like you said, like when was the last time you had two options? I didn’t think that time existed. Maybe you told yourself you had two options and maybe you enchanted yourself. But yeah, like that’s that’s not the reality that we live in. I have a maxim. He who shows you two options is hiding it to it. So they. Oh, oh, that’s excellent. Yeah, I have my video on binary thinking, too. Right. It’s like binary thinking is important because that’s like binary framing is almost always bad for him. In fact, it might be always bad framing. There might be a binary somewhere, one or two. But basically, when people frame things in a binary, they’re wrong. They’re just wrong. Right. And then people always, oh, I can only go left or right. I can’t do it. I’m like, yeah, you can always kill yourself. There’s always a third option. It may not be a great option, but there’s always a third option. And we avoid the third option because I think subconsciously we detect the combinatorial explosive. Right. We know that once we once there’s three, there’s four. And once there’s four, there’s 10. And once there’s 10, there’s a thousand. Right. We know that that that chain keeps going. And so we kind of avoid it by reducing things sort of invalidly to your point, to binaries. And so now we’ve got a way to spin a story. So you can you can spin a story about a utopia. That’s narrative enchantment. We’ve got a non narrative enchantment or an anti narrative enchantment, like for a Brown, which is just using, you know, a lot of adverbs and, you know, no content to allow you to insert your own narrative towards towards something that sounds good. Right. And then we’ve got these magical words that that’s form of enchantment. And then there’s total enchantment for sure. Right. Where if I really want you to listen to me, I can get much softer and more monotone and space out my words in a very precise fashion. And that will draw some people in and they’ll feel very comfortable with what I’m saying. Sounds like you’re creating a space of intimacy there. Oh, well, that’s a good spot. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it’s inviting in some sense. Right. It’s inviting in a seductive fashion. And people use that all the time, too. There’s lots of people that do that. And I don’t like them. If you’re timid, right, and you’re looking for safety in your relationships, right, like that’s also really like a hook that can be latched onto. Now, I want to go back to this to this fancy word enchantment, because I don’t think the fancy words have to be not relating to something valid. Like they can relate to something valid. Right. But all that’s necessary is for you not to have a full understanding. And the way that I’m using understanding is is that you can hold the concept. I don’t mean the description of the concept, but the implications of it. Right. Like the structure that’s provided by the concept. You can hold that in your head and then you can hold this other concept that that’s being juxtaposed with it. And then you can find out how they relate to each other. And if you’re incapable of doing that, but you take you’re taking the thing as true because of an authority figure saying it, for example, and you’re not making those connections for yourself. You still end up being enchanted, even though it might be correct. Yes, that’s an excellent point. Yeah. Your interpretation still isn’t correct. So even even if the person in front of you is good willing and correct, then it still can be detrimental to you. Yeah. Yeah. That goes back to your relation and your intimacy. And unearned wisdom is all wrapped up in that. Right. But where unearned wisdom? Why? Because you’ll see affordances that aren’t there or miss the correct affordances. Right. And or both. Right. And then it’s like, oh, well, now you’ve enchanted yourself with something correct in an incorrect fashion. And you kind of see this our good friend Anya on the Discord server, and she talks about this all the time, right, with Steiner. So she’s part of the Steiner group in the past. And her kids went to Steiner schools, Walder schools. Very popular thing. Right. But she said they were corrupting his ideas. Right. And there was a way in which these things get corrupted. So what’s what Steiner did effectively is he develops the structure of the system. And then he tries to run it. And the skill of running something and still creating something are different. And most people don’t have both just because they’re high level skills that seem to be mostly mutually exclusive for most people. So, in other words, most creative people make horrible managers and most managers make horrible creative people just because of nature. Right. You can. Jordan Peterson talks about this and the reasons why that might be true and how conscientiousness and agreeableness sort of conflict in some important ways and might also relate to Enchantment, actually. It might. Yeah, it might. And and I think that’s interesting, right, because what it implies is that you can build something. The thing that you build, that structure that you build, the thing you put out to the world can enchant people. No, it will. Like, let’s just it will enchant people. It will. It will. Like, it’s it’s unavoidable that that happens. And yeah. And yeah, so we were talking about the affordances and wisdom. And I think I think that’s that’s what it’s all about. Like, you don’t want to engage with certain things if you don’t have the affordances to to hold them, because then then they can be bad for you. And. And yeah, so it is it’s like a really tricky situation, like like how how how would you handle that? And in some sense, it’s the personal responsibility of the individual listening. But like, we are making this video so that people can actually take that, because I don’t think it’s obvious, right? Like, I guess we are creating an affordance in you to perceive this happening in the world. And then hopefully you can find a way to become more resistance, right? Because one of the bugaboos that we have is like, well, people get exposed to this idea. And then it’s like, now I’m inoculated. I’ve got my vaccine against enchantment because I watch this awesome video. It’s like, no, like, that’s not how it works. You need to have practices. You need to constantly remind yourself and update yourself, right? Because that’s that’s the line of thinking, which is actually enchantment. Right. Like, that’s the self-enchantment. Yeah. You’re making an assumption about your relationship with reality, which actually might be true in the moment, but it will definitely remain true over time. So, yeah. And then you went it you went into total enchantment. Right. So now we’re we’re more in the in the emotional area with with that aspect. Right. So so I think I think what we went over was more in how how we intelligence it. Although Rene Browning was also kind of appealing to your emotions. So there’s these these two realms in which enchantment can manifest. Well, like one one of them is sucking you in and the other one is. Is superimposing something on on you that that you you’re not aware of. You don’t have a relationship with. Yeah, that’s the imagine a world where. Right. But you’re being superimposed. Right. You’re being told to imagine something. Right. Right. Right. And I think that’s you know, that’s part of the danger of enchantment is, yeah, you need to you need to engage with, first of all, the fact of enchantment like it’s happening. There’s no avoiding it. And to some extent, you have to be enchanted. Otherwise, the world becomes closed and dull and boring and you fall into nihilism for sure. And I think people are looking for enchantment all over the place. Right. Because enchantment is part of the intimacy crisis, roughly speaking. And you need to be able to be properly intimate. And I think that’s where the adjustment is. If you’re not properly intimate, you’ll become enchanted without realizing it or without being proper, have a proper engagement with the enchantment. You need to be enchanted because. Being enchanted is part of outsourcing your cognition. Like it or not, it’s part of outsourcing your cognition. You have to outsource a bunch of your cognition. You don’t have a choice about that. There’s no other option. The world is too big a place. Yeah, I think also it’s relating to dogmatism in a sense, right? It’s like it’s taking the dogmatism out of its dogmatic shape and putting it onto the world in some sense. So that becomes participatory. Well, it gives a dogma a space to expand into. Because dogma and we’ve talked about this before on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel in the Ritnar playlist, the religion that is not a religion playlist. Dogma is part of the way in. Dogma and credo are ways in. There are doors. There are points that you can go to to start. And then once you get there, you need the enchantment. You need that intimacy to open them up so that you can inhabit the space behind them. That’s so they’re an idol. Dogma is an idol. And then turn it into an icon. That’s your relationship with it. The idol versus icon is nothing to do with objects or endpoints or starting points. It has everything to do with transforming it into a gateway from a door to an opening. And then once you engage in that way, that’s what the enchantment is. It’s on the other side. So if you’re unable to engage with proper intimacy or proper enchantment, or I’m sorry, if you’re unable to engage with proper intimacy, you can’t properly enchant. And so it’s the navigation of the intimacy that’s important in that process of enchantment. And so you have to pay attention to that. What things am I enchanted by? So, for example, I’m enchanted by technology. It’s no question about I’m so ridiculously enchanted by technology. You have no idea. And I run afoul of that all the time, because to some extent, and I’ve joked about this for my whole life, basically, I’ve said, look, as far as I’m concerned, proper software engineering is a religion to me. And there’s a pure right way to do it. And I am extremely dogmatic about that in some sense. This is the wrong way to code this. Period. End of statement. Full stop. And I’m not like, oh, well, you always code it this way. But I think I actually have formulas that work and that can be applied and that work within frameworks. Like, oh, do you need to scale? Is it cloud? Is it desktop? Like, is it phone? All that stuff matters. So I’m not saying, oh, there’s only one right way. But I think I do have a methodology that tells me right away where to go. Now, that kills me. I go to do new projects, new programming languages, they don’t work correctly at all, according to my conception. And so it’s like the idea of coding in JavaScript to me is just abhorrent because, well, A, it’s a horrible language. But B, it’s just different. Like, it’s a different way of approaching problems. So you need to change your whole problem solving method to become enchanted by the coolness of JavaScript, which I’m not enchanted by at all. But I am enchanted by technology as such and the technology that I sort of started learning first, even though I didn’t grow up with most of it. I mean, I grew up with it in one sense, but it was already old by the time I engaged with it. C, programming is really old. It’s way older than I am. So if you learn stuff, you know, and in a certain way, and you didn’t want to change or didn’t see the need to change, or you saw changes bad, all of which I would argue in my case is changes bad, then you won’t engage with the new stuff or be able to engage with new stuff correctly. And maybe that’s a plus. Like, I’m not demonizing it. But you have to know that that’s what you’re doing. Like, I very much understand that I’m not adopting new programming languages and certain types of new technologies on purpose because I’ve seen a lot of technology cycles. They burn out largely speaking, and that there are certain trends, I think, that will last forever. Roughly speaking, they may change, but they’re not really going anywhere. And then you can kind of tell when they’ve compressed back down to something fundamental as opposed to expand it back out. But that’s still enchantment, right? It’s just I have my technological enchantment, and I’m OK with it. And I engage with it, and I challenge it every once in a while to make sure that I’m not missing a new thing that’s important. And that’s the trick to enchant, to some extent, is to make sure you’re not missing the new thing that is important amongst all the noise that isn’t important and is just trapping you in their little enchanted realm. Right. So what is the check? Checking is binding it back to reality, right? Binding it back to what is real. Or like if you have a collective enchantment, right? You’re interfacing with the group, whether you’re still on the same wavelength as them. And that brings me into one. I’m not peeking at notes, but it’s resonant and rhythmic enchantment. And we were figuring out whether these were the same or whether they were different. But I’m fairly certain that resonance, right? Like so a way to perceive resonance is mirroring, right? Like, oh, like you’re enacting the same behavior, right? I’m assuming that you’re somewhat acting out what you think should be acted out, because that’s probably necessary for that enchantment. Right. When that’s mirror to you, you’re getting positive signals, right? So then, but you’re not getting positive signals because they’re really there. You’re getting the positive signals because a person is actively providing them for you to see. And that’s, yeah, like that’s where that gets bad. And then the rhythmic enchantment is in, it’s kind of like tonal, but it’s in how the message gets provided to you, right? So it can lull you into a mode. Yeah, yeah, I guess it provides safety. Yeah, like predictability, right? Gives you that predictability. Right. And you can imagine that when you’re in a rhythm, right? Like there’s a thing that gets accented and then there’s the lull, right? And you can imagine that you can hide things in the lull and lift things up in the peaks. So that can be used as well into, well, maybe I’m doing it right now. Maybe. Well, I think you’re right. I think another aspect of resonance is there’s a way in which the resonance is positive and cooperative and destructive. And so I think we’ve outlined three things. A positive resonance, which makes something greater than the sum of the parts. A negative one that destroys something. And a mirroring, where there’s a neutral aspect to it, where you’re just mirroring things for the sake of mirroring them. And then the rhythm, yeah, I think now we’re in cyclicality. What does this mean with the cyclicality? It’s giving you a safety and predictability, right? Because there’s a little bit. Right. But the predictability is not in the content. Right. Right. It’s in the structure. Yeah. And that goes back to this idea of the structures can enchant by themselves effectively. I mean, not totally by themselves because structures can’t do, they’re not agents. They’re not agents. But once a structure is running and people are putting power into it, which is roughly time, energy, and attention. If they’re putting time, energy, and attention, see my video on power, if you don’t know what power is, right? Into the principality, see my video on principality, if you don’t understand that concept. Once they put the power into the principality, now there’s that motion behind it. And then it could be resonance, it could be rhythm, right? There could be magical words associated with structure. All structures have like, it’s famous and they go to different industries. They have acronyms and the acronyms are the same because acronyms are compressions. And what one acronym means in computers, it means something entirely different in some kind of manufacturing. Right. And then different manufacturing types have similar acronyms that mean different things. And then those things have different meanings. Right. So there’s all this enchantment going on even at the level of an industry or a corporation or a type of science. And this is famous. A lot of people don’t know this. Mathematicians and physicists don’t do the same math. What? Yeah, they don’t. It’s rather shocking. It’s getting better, but they actually use different symbols for the same concepts. But it’s just, it’s funny. I mean, I don’t know. I’m not saying it’s bad, just saying they do. And so it’s hard for mathematicians to become physicists and vice versa just because the language that they use, the symbolic language that they use is actually different. And the way they go about problem solving is different too, it turns out, even though they’re solving the same equations in many cases. And that’s why it’s useful for them to work together in some sense, because if they can translate between one another, they get a greater whole. But that is all about enchantment. Having a discipline like physics or mathematics that has its own symbolic or symbology, right? Its own symbolic set of communication. And also having a different goal, right? Math is all about purity and discovering things that are out there or relationships that are useful in the universe. Whereas physics is more about trying to control them, roughly speaking, or trying to get enough information to control them. Mathematicians are not about control. They’re about discovery and wonder, whereas physicists are all about control and they could care less about discovery. And as long as they can manipulate the universe, they’re perfectly happy. So, yeah, you can see these forms of enchantment, because there are these resonances, which have three aspects. These rhythms, which have this aspect of safety through predictability of the process. So there’s a process predictability is really important. We need it. Like, it’s not a bad thing. But you can watch for all these components. And yeah, when I finally do my video, maybe I’ll try to do it here while I’m up in New England on vacation. But when I finally do my video on enchantment, I intend to exemplify these things in, we’ll say, greater detail in a more compressed format. But I can’t do that until I do this video and figure out what the hell is going on, which I think is great. Like, we’ve made a lot of progress. We do have a bunch of notes, but we’ve never, we’ve never. Yeah, we came up with rhythm and resonance the other day and we’re both like, are those different? I don’t know. And now we’ve decided. Yeah, it certainly seems like they are. So I have some grievance that I need to err. Like I was studying chemistry. Big surprise. Anyway, so yeah. And then I had like three different classes where they were using the same symbol, different ways. Like every time I need to look at a formula, I always like have to translate the formula into something that’s intelligible to me. Because the formula definitely isn’t. So yeah, when you have three people using the same letter for different things, it’s just like, I can’t deal with this for like people. Like, get your stuff in order. So and I had a good example of like rhythmic or enchantment and it’s like songs, right? Yes. How often have you listened to a song and then you’re like singing along or whatever and then you’re like, what am I actually saying? What is this song about? And then you’re thinking like, should I really be singing this? So yeah, there’s this element where it’s like, okay, like the participation is inherently valuable. And then the content of it is devalued in relation to the participation. And then you’re like, oh, but like, what am I putting out into the world? Like, what am I aligning to? Like, is that actually good? Like, is this a message that I can stand behind? Right. That goes actually into an idea of poetic enchantment. I don’t know how much Mark has been talking about the poetic on this channel. No, he hasn’t. No. Well, hold on, Manuel. Let me stop you right there just for a second because I want to give something that just occurred to me. So when you’re dealing with music, you’re dealing with multiple layers of rhythmic and resonant enchantment. Right. Because there’s a rhythm to the song. Obviously, you know, songs rhythm. That shouldn’t be controversial, hopefully. And there’s also resonance because you’re resonating with it in your head. And if you’re singing it, you’re resonating with it in your voice. There’s also resonance within the song because there’s a way in which the words match the music. And there’s a way in which the instruments match each other. Right. And so there’s all kinds of resonances going on in the song. And that is radiating through you. And if you’re listening to it, you’re giving it tacit approval. Right. And so I don’t know what that does to your psyche. Like, I’m not going to make any comments. I can make weird statements about, you know, well, I’m disagreeable. And so I don’t think that has as much of an effect on me as it does on others. And, you know, I’m a big fan of heavy metal music. And I do mean heavy metal music, not this wissy metal music that people call metal. That’s like nothing. Like a Metallica tool. Like these are my peeps. Right. I like that stuff. You know, and I drive down the street listening to it. Or at least I used to quite a bit, you know, on the same token, I really enjoy Beethoven’s sixth, especially with a nice hot bath and some salt. So, you know, I’m weird that way. And I like everything in between. We were listening last night at my friend’s birthday party. So we had a limo and we’re listening to 80s music. I really like some of the 80s songs. And then we’re also listening to some modern pop, more modern pop. And I like all that stuff. I like all that. I like good music. I don’t care what genre it is, roughly speaking. But you can see the different layers in the music in which resonant rhythm enchantment happen. And then there’s a way in which there’s these magical words that people use. Right. Like, are you down with OPP? Right. Like OPP is a magical word. It’s like even though it’s not technically a word, right, it’s a phrase, other people’s property. But there’s all sorts of things that they do in music for different types of enchantment, including tonal enchantment. Although it’s not that common. It does happen. And there’s all these other things. And we get entrained on voices and we entrain the music to the words. And sometimes those words are very bad and we don’t realize it. Or they’re good. Narrative enchantment that is being facilitated by the enchantment of the music. That would be the great manifestation of this. Right. Like this should be our relationship to it. But we need to be conscious of all of these aspects. Right. If we’re not conscious, if we’re not having that relationship to it, it will have a relationship to us instead. Right. And we’re subjected to whatever’s out there. Well, and those are those signals too, right? There’s a signal there in the words, whether you’re unconsciously engaging with it or not. And then I don’t know what effect that has. Again, I’m not going to make a claim. But you can also see, like, I’m not saying don’t engage in enchantment, especially not musical enchantment. I love music. Engage with music. Just be careful about it. Right. So we have to. Like, you can’t live without music. What do you do? A human being, what do you become if you weren’t listening to any music at all? Like, that would be crazy. Oh, you listen to some music. Come on. Well, no, I’ve had years without effectively listening to music. Oh, goodness. No. There’s lots of music in my head, fortunately. So I don’t need to actively figure out how to use all this funky new music stuff. It doesn’t work very well. But yeah, I mean, I think you need music to some extent. You need some of that, or at least you need some of that rhythmic quality in the drums and the bass and things like that. But yeah, I just I wanted to call that out. So that was a good way to exemplify what we’re talking about with enchantments everywhere. It’s not bad necessarily. Most of it’s probably neutral or good. But some of it can get into you and you don’t even realize the next thing you know, you’re talking about burning people down and engaging in orgies all the time or whatever crazy stuff is in music. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and we do we get obsessed by the spirits of those songs, right? I think that’s what Jonathan Peugeot was talking about when he talked about Little Nas. Maybe I’ll put a little card in for the Little Nas video that he did because I thought it was brilliant. Yeah, there’s definitely those aspects in there where you can become enchanted by these things. And then start to embody them over time without realizing not instant, right? But you can embody them over time. So now you’re bringing in a different type of enchantment because what’s happening there, right? Like your focus is being directed to somewhere in the world. And then you start acting out what you’re focused on, right? So if I provide to you a structure that is focusing you towards something, right? So I can provide you a bunch of words, right? Which is like circus and gray and big and ivory, right? Like I can direct your attention towards something and I just set four random words. Right, right. And a lot of enchantment is misdirection of attention or direction of attention. It might not be misdirection, right? It might be directing your attention towards a certain aspect of the world or certain perspective on the world, a certain way of engaging with an icon, right? Or an idol that makes it an icon, for example, right? A certain way of inflating something very flat, like four words, into something very big, like a day at the circus, right? Which is a very big thing. I love circuses, by the way. I haven’t been in years, but I do love them. And that’s a magical thing. I’m having a day and listening to music and going to the French festival La Caramelle, up in Bideford, Maine, was always big for me. And they had animals there, but mostly it was French Quebecois music, because we’re Quebecois, largely, or at least 50% of me. That wasn’t a word. I know, it’s not. That’s a magical word. It’s relatively recent, too, from what I understand. I might be wrong about that, but it’s certainly widespread usage. Nobody called themselves Quebecois in Bideford before a certain time. I’ll tell you that much. So who knows, right? But there’s certainly a spirit behind it that was there, that’s much older than the word, so fair enough. But you go there, and there’s games you can play. And I know, so in my recent videos, I have a dragon on my door. I got that at La Caramelle. I don’t know how long ago, because I’ve had it in my possession forever, along with a bunch of other things I could hang up, but never do. And you win those when you’re playing games. It’s very fun, right? And you see modern bands and things like that at some of these events. I saw John Cafferty, the Beaver Brown Band, years ago at La Caramelle. It’s freaking amazing, by the way. It’s like, wow, this is great. These guys are awesome. It’s one of the best stage shows I’ve ever seen, and it’s in a tent outside in the middle of Biddeford, Maine. So yeah, it was, you know, you invoked all that with those words in my head, right? So you enchanted all of these memories that I had and all this anticipation. I don’t think they’re doing La Caramelle anymore if they are. I haven’t been in ages. Even if they were doing it, COVID probably killed it, right? So that way of enchanting is gone. Yes. Yes. So, but I do, I didn’t want to derail too much from the poetic. So yeah, why don’t we get into that poetic enchantment idea and see where we can go? Because we definitely didn’t settle any of that because the poetic is hard enough for us to talk about as it is. And at some point, I’ll do the models. I’ll do the model videos. I’ll put them here and link them up. I haven’t gotten there yet. I need three or four other concept videos just to get there, I think. And then I can go into poetic. But we can talk about poetic enchantment independent of that. And I think it’ll have enough of an effect to be useful. Yeah, I want to sidestep that one actually. We got a bunch of others. You open that box and now you want to close it? That’s fine. I don’t blame you. It’s good. We’re going to put a teaser on that for your channel. Like that’s a big box. That box is… I don’t know how big that is. That might contain the world. That box. So no, it’s actually properly teased. Yeah, that’s definitely Dragon of Apocalypse material for sure from our perspective. Yeah, so that’s why I was a little bit confused about the dragon that you have on your door. Like what are you doing? What are you doing to yourself? Invoking those dragons. But yeah, this one is a bug of mine and it’s sequence. I was like, oh, right? Like what is a sequence? Well, A follows B follows C. And when you mess up those letters, like you might provide the same intelligibility in some sense, right? Like if you’re not paying attention. But the associative structure that you build around it is going to be completely different. Like you’re going to draw conclusions. You’re going to build models. Oh yeah, and about the models, right? Yeah, that’s way back. But there’s this idea of the map, of using the map for the territory. Right? When you don’t have enough awareness of a subject, right? Like where you have the fancy word, you’re relating to a map. You’re not relating to the territory. So when you start combining these maps, then you need a cybernetic system to interface between the maps. And yeah, like no, like just do the hard work, please. Thank you. And so yeah, to go back to the sequence thing. Well, yeah, like maybe that also relates to the map idea, right? Like maps don’t have the sequence, right? Maps just have things that are in relation to each other. And like they don’t define necessarily the sequential relationships. Or they’re two-dimensional, right? And the sequence is going into a third dimension and then popping back up into the map at the different point. And then you’re thinking like A is connected to B. But then there’s this other point that is necessary for the sequence that you’re not accounting for. Yeah. That’s a terrain map. So a map of the terrain is different from a regular map. Why? Because it tells you whether or not you go straight towards something. In other words, whether or not direction is sufficient. So if you’re trying to walk towards the mountain and there’s a valley in the middle and that valley is sheer cliff, you can see that on a terrain map, by the way, or at least generally speaking. So that’ll tell you that direction is insufficient. So you can have a map and a direction, and that’s not going to help you. You can have a map and direction starting point. That’s not going to help you. You can have a direction starting point and ending point, and that’s not going to help you. Because maybe there’s a terrain, there’s that three-dimensional aspect, that Z axis that you mentioned. And now you need to orient. Well, orientation is a whole different thing. I talk about it a lot on the channel. It’s this idea of orientation. And that’s really where it is. We want direction because it’s easy. We want our direction. Just give me a direction. Because a direction is an answer or at least a way to get to an answer. Yeah, whatever it is, north, south, east, west, whatever. Go in this direction. What you really need to do is just walk up to women and start talking to them. Yeah, well, that’s a direction. Sure. OK. But actually talking to them is an orientation. And it requires a bunch of understanding of intimacy, for example. And then you need to know after you start talking to them where to take it. You’ve been given one direction without a final destination. How do I get to the next point? How do I get her number? Or how do I get her to engage with me even so that I can get her number? All of those are little directions that you need after that. So they give you one step in what looks like a sequence. But it’s not. It’s not a sequence. And sequence might be insufficient to your point. Or maybe there’s hidden elements of the sequence. So you can make this sequence using this mapping. But it’s not the real set of events. Or it doesn’t encompass the real set of events completely enough with enough detail. And maybe you don’t want to get her number. Maybe you want her to get your number. That’s also a possibility. Yeah, yeah. There’s a right. That totally changes the game in some sense. Right. And it’s important to realize that you might enter into a narrative where you’re thinking, like, OK, I’m going to go up to her. It’s like, I have the sequence. But then that sequence is connected to this thing out there, like getting married or whatever. And maybe you shouldn’t do ABCD when you want to get married. Maybe that’s a good way to get laid or whatever. You don’t want to do that when you get married. That’s important. So what did I do? I just zoomed out. It was like, OK, there’s a local game that you’re engaged with. But there’s also your goals in life that have, in some sense, a superseding interest over the game that you’re in, else you’re addicted. So it’s important to have that contextualization. And at that point, you can have the right narrative structure, but also the sequential structure in order to get there. Because then you can say, well, these things are important for this and this reason. Well, in the local game, those importances are going to be different. And the sequence is going to be different because you’re engaged in something different. Yeah, there’s a way in which the narrative informs the sequence. The sequence constrains the narrative. And that relationship is really important. There’s a tension there, for sure. And yeah, I think it’s worth sort of circling back and talking about narrative and sequence and enchantment as ways of understanding what’s happening to you in the world. And again, enchantment is not bad. We just need to be aware of it. We need to sort of look at it. We need to understand how our narrative is informing what’s enchanting us and what isn’t. Because you’re limited. You’re limited. So you can’t be enchanted in every way by everything. Otherwise, you’re mystical. You’re just floating in the mystical space with nowhere to go and nothing to live in and no valid way to interact. It’s very lacking in intimacy because you can’t be intimate with things that are purely mystical. They feel good, just like some cocaine. Mm-hmm. So what you’re talking about, the way that I envision it, it’s like you have a bunch of lighthouses that you place in the world around you. And these lighthouses allow you to orient and contextualize yourself in the situation that you’re in. That’s the enchantment. This house is important because it was my parents’ house. And therefore, now I’m going to rearrange my life so that I’m going to maintain my relationship with the house. That is a way that you can perceive yourself in the moment. If you don’t have that, you’re suddenly like, okay, but I could buy a house on the other side of the world. And now that’s a valid option. So it gives you a set of constraints. But it also infuses you with… Well, it holds you when you’re in relation to it. So John Verwege talks about domicile. And I think domicile could be considered not having an enchanted world. Yes. Yeah. No, I saw probably where you were going. I was like, yeah, there’s a way of which, in order to relate to the world, you can’t relate to just the material aspect of it. And whether you realize that or not is not relevant because you are going to relate to the non-material aspect. And so if the enchantment has you without your knowledge or understanding, then you’re in trouble because you’re possessed effectively by that enchantment. But if we realize that what enchantment is, it’s opening up the potential within the materiality of the world. What’s the potential for science? What’s the potential for my house? What’s the potential for living? What’s the potential for a relationship? What else could be there? That’s enchantment. Being able to imagine and then therefore try to engage with, what else could be there? Because just engaging with somebody, and you mentioned you brought a little confusion in, right? And John Vervick, he does talk about that quite a bit. He’s getting that from Frome, that having versus being. And we’re adding sort of becoming, which is a transformative aspect, which is different. But if it’s a woman and it’s just a physical body to you, then you’re going to engage in having mode. You’re going to try to have something, not necessarily her, right? But something about her, maybe the sex, right? A service. A service, right, right. From her, maybe it’s just a massage, right? Who knows, right? You just buy a massage. That’s one way of engaging with somebody and sort of getting some shallow version of intimacy, right? But you can’t get real intimacy from that, right? Because it’s not enchanted. And it’s not enchanted because it doesn’t have any future potential. You go to the massage parlor, you’re just going to get a massage, and you’re going to leave. And that’s it. And you come back and get it one again, maybe from the same person. Or maybe it’ll be just a scroter better. I don’t know. But that’s the only mode of engagement you have in that scenario. And you’ve limited it down to that. So yeah, in some ways, it’s a nice certain type of intimacy where you’re getting something exactly what you want, exactly when you want it. Absolutely. But that’s not enchantment. Getting exactly what you want, exactly when you want it, is the opposite of enchantment, right? Now you’re in the vending machine mode. Yeah. And maybe you’re enchanting yourself by making a story in your mind that you are having a relationship that isn’t manifest in the world, right? That’s only your perception or your projection on that relationship. Right. And people do that all the time. And most of them become serial killers. Right? That’s not good. So yeah, I mean, it’s not good. You’ve enchanted yourself with a fantasy, basically. But also, look, I mean, yeah, you can have things the way you want them, or you can have a world full of potential. You can’t have both. And you need potential. You need potential to have aspiration, to have motivation. You need potential to have proper intimacy. You can’t divide intimacy up scientifically or mathematically and say, aha, let me get my massages from here and my sex from these women and my cooking and cleaning from these women. Because you can buy all that stuff. You can buy all of it. But you can’t buy the wonder and enjoyment and heartbreak, because that’s going to happen, too, of being in a relationship with somebody. Like, you can’t purchase that. No matter how hard you try, it seems like you can. But that seems to go horribly wrong for most people. And maybe it doesn’t matter to you. And fair enough, but telling you how to live your life. But it probably does. And you probably don’t realize it. And that’s where it gets sort of tricky, right? Because there’s all this downside. And when we try to get rid of all the downside, we’re not in proper relationship trade-off anymore. And then we’re trying to disenchant or de-enchant the world. And we’re constantly fighting with that, because we need some level of certainty. But we can’t have the high level of certainty that we want, or that we’re told we can have, which I think is a bigger deal. We’ve been told we can have a lot more certainty about the world than we could possibly have. And I think it’s also like, you could say, I can buy a level of intimacy, right? But at a certain point, the financial transaction becomes meaningless, right? Like, at a certain point, there has to be a voluntary aspect on the other person and then the financial transaction becomes secondary, or that other person, which is more likely, isn’t willing to go there because they’re having their job and they need to maintain their job. So that’s where you can see where even though potential is always there in the world, there’s these constraints on potential. If you’re not correctly understanding what you’re doing, you’ll get stuck. Maybe we should add modal stockness into that list as well. So yeah, and then what I was getting at with that is the being mode, right? So there is a way that you’re in relationship with the other. So there is a way that you’re in relationship with the other. And now when you’re in relationship with the other, the degree of connectedness is measured in intimacy. That’s at least the way that I can say that. Yes, I think that’s right. And so yeah, it’s important that this connectedness, right? You also have to integrate the potential again, right? And then you go into the becoming mode, right? When there is a commitment in that connectedness, then they start to interact and make something new, right? Like they flower into the future, into the potential. And that is again a different dimension of relating to a person, right? Like that is a different space that you’re both relating to. And that’s different rules and thereby the intimacy of inhabiting that space is also different, which is now really interesting. So we have three domains of intimacy. Okay. Well, I think a short-form definition of intimacy might be the measure of a quality of a connection, right? And then like, yeah, well, that solves a bunch of problems anyway that we don’t have yet, but we’re going to. So there’s a dragon of the apocalypse slain in the future for us. Yeah, I think in order to do the becoming, because you can get stuck in having and being both, right? This is why I think the coming modes actually a third thing and really important, but way more important, right? Like if you want to use development models, which I find completely reprehensible outside of say, childhood development. If you want to use a development model, you need a way to transition between development modes or sections or whatever they’re called, right? And that has to be a becoming. But in order to do that, you have to break down the things that you have. And when you do that, you need scaffolding outside yourself. Not everybody, but maybe not the Buddha, but are you the Buddha really? Are you Jesus really? Are you right? Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. My parents thought so. There you go. Your parents thought so. You’re all set. The rest of us on the other hand, think about the rest of us, Manuel. Think about the rest of us. Right, but that’s the problem is that, yeah, probably you can’t do that by yourself. You probably need not just a community, but also a higher aim, a larger container, and we’ll do a talk on containers too. Later to explain that to people. But yeah, I mean, there’s a way in which you need a reason to do that. And you need to imagine what that would look like. Like, in other words, the enchantment itself is the idea that you can relate differently to the world than you are relating today. Having or being doesn’t matter, right? And so you have to be able to not just imagine, say, the container, but imagine your relationship, your intimacy in that container and with the things in that container, because that container is hopefully bigger than the container you’re in. And that’s why you need becoming, because you need to grow big enough. You need to grow in affordances. You need to change in your relationships to get into that larger container. What does that take? Well, that takes enchantment. Enchantment is the thing that draws you there and gives you the confidence to go make the move. So I think that’s really, really important. And that’s going to revolutionize in some sense our understanding. Because now some of these ideas are coming together in a really big way. And this is all going to eventually collapse into the poetic, hopefully, unless we’re horribly wrong about something. So far, it’s not proven to be the case. That’s going to collapse into the poetic way of informing the world. And all of this is going to come together from the top and the bottom simultaneously, because we don’t talk about joining heaven and earth or top and bottom. We actually do the work. Show your work. Very important. And I think that intimacy is the connection of those things. Again, it’s the quality of those connections. But intimacy is the process of the connection of the higher thing and the lower thing. Right? And that’s how that’s going to play into that, for sure. And enchantment is the aspirational aspect. It’s the reason to do it. And it’s the way in which you do it. It’s the engagement that you have with it. It’s that recognition of the space and the new affordances that could be yours if only you would change. And I think that’s another way to recognize bad enchantment. If you’re being told that you can interface with a larger world without changing something about yourself, yeah, you’re being manipulated. For sure. That’s for sure negative manipulation. I would classify that as evil, I think. I think I can go that far. Right. And even if you say change something about yourself and they don’t give you means or whatever, right? That’s different because that could be an error. That could be an error. Okay, fair enough. So I think one of the importance about becoming mode is like… Becoming mode is tasting, not tasting, feeling into the dark. You’re relating to something that isn’t there for you right now because else you didn’t need to transform to have that relationship, right? So if we take the metaphor of the lighthouses, right? Like if we start building this space, right? Because, oh yeah, it’s also important. It’s not related to the material world. You can’t touch it, right? Right. That’s partially why it’s dark. You have also material manifestations that are somewhat dark. But the important part of what it means to be dark is you don’t have a way of navigating this new space, right? Like it’s ineffable to you. And then what do you do with those enchantments? You have points of reference that allow you to triangulate your position somewhat, right? Like you still have a sense of what you are or where you are, which is really interesting confusion that I made. But I think it’s correct. I think where you are is what you are. That’s a real big box. But then you can be in that space and you can have exploration without being untangled, which would be falling into horror. Like that would be you not being able to sense make at all. And then what your experience is going to be is going to be negative because, like, yeah, what’s going on? You’re in this space where you don’t have sense made, literally. So, yeah, so the next point in the list that I wanted to get into is, and we mentioned kind of a little bit is, people mention things, right? And for example, the example of not giving a path to a place, right? So it’s like, well, you need to transform, but the environment needs to look like this. And then we go into describing the environment for 10 minutes. And then it’s like, yeah, but what about the transformation that I need to undergo to relate to that environment, right? So there’s an acknowledgement of a necessity up front, but it’s not getting dealt with. And what are you presented with? Well, you’re presented with a picture of a transformative experience, right? Like that is possible, but you’re not presented with a way of manifesting that transformative experience in the world. So that’s not valid. Like that’s not a valid explanation of that transformative process. Yeah, yeah, I like that. Yeah, that gets into things like game A, game B, right? I’m not sure that they’re wrong. Like I’m not sure that game A, game B theory, as stated, is wrong, but I am sure that you can’t do anything about it. Like there’s literally nothing you can do about it, right? All of these theories about, oh, we just have to change the way we approach something. It’s like, have you read a psychology book ever? Like that’s that people don’t do that, right? You’re trying to rationalize them. And we know from science people aren’t rational. They just aren’t. It’s not going to happen. Most people are incapable of rationality whatsoever. That’s according to the science. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and you see it all the time. So I have this one trick that I do all the time. You can do this to yourself. If you’re working on a problem or you’re looking at a situation or you’re looking at game A, game B, one of the things you can do is you can ask, how’s that working out for you? I ask people that all the time. How’s this beautiful utopian vision working out for you? And then it stops them dead and neutral. You can do it to yourself. Say, how’s my approach to dating working out for me? How’s Tinder working out for you? Oh, wait a minute. My results are terrible. This is working at all. Because then you break out of the frame. This is the framing that you’re using having the impact that you thought. Because if you predicted that going on Tinder was going to get you dates and it’s not getting you dates, and maybe it is, like I’m not making any statements here, right? But if it’s not, and it’s worth asking yourself the question, is this actually getting me dates? Or better yet, is this actually getting me what I want? Because maybe what you want is not dates. You just thought it was dates or that was the closest approximation. Then you can go, oh, I’m enchanted by this narrative that going on Tinder is going to make me married or something. Or maybe what you want is wanting to be enchanted. I want to be having the feeling that I’m doing something instead of actually doing something. Let’s be fair. You do. I mean, the big problem with enchantment is that, and I went over this in my iWe video. I went over this very clearly in the iWe video. The problem is not bad actors. That’s not the problem. The problem is self-deception on the part of both parties because we are humans and we people all over the place for no apparent reason. Peopling constantly. Right. Damn people. You need to de-people the population. Yeah, we need an anti-people. We need an anti-people pill. But what happens is we want an answer. We ask the question. We want an answer. The other person wants to get along with us. They want an intimate connection. And they’re being asked an answer as though they’re supposed to have one and they give one. Right. Like fair enough. Like, oh, the answer. What’s the answer to dating? Or what’s the answer to finding an intimate relationship? Wow, no, the answer is Tinder or Bumble or OkCupid or Match or whatever. I don’t know. You need to stop. That was fine. So, you know, and it’s not wrong. It’s not wrong. It’s an answer. But how good of an answer is it? And is it an answer for you? That’s why I asked how’s that working out for you? Like, oh, I want to be Elon Musk. Okay. Do everything Elon Musk does and see how that works for you. Because it may be that you can be Elon Musk or be like Elon Musk, but you can’t do any of the things he does to be Elon Musk. Because that happens all the time. Right. Let’s even just like I’ll give you your damn objective material reality. Let’s assume there’s an objective material definition of Elon Musk and how to be Elon Musk, what it would mean to be Elon Musk. I’ll give it to you. Look at the news. I’ll hand it to you. Right. Maybe being Elon Musk can be done different ways for different people. And maybe some of those ways aren’t accessible to you. That’s why it’s important to ask yourself and other people. How’s that working out for you? Right. Because that’s how we break enchantment. That’s one of the ways we can break enchantment for sure. Is to find out if we’re getting the results that we’re expecting out of things. Because maybe if we’re not, it’s a bad narrative or it’s a narrative that doesn’t work for us. Like not all narratives that don’t work for you are bad narratives. They might just be bad for you. Right. Like if you’re not a particularly conscientious person and you can’t get to work on time, the work hard thing might not work for you. It might work better for you to co-op and do the kind of work that’s not 9 to 5. And most people who do the kind of work that’s not 9 to 5, by the way, do rather well for themselves financially, just on average. But you can’t have no conscientiousness because then that won’t work for you, by the way. But then it’s possible nothing will work for you until you become more conscientious. So just throwing that out there. But there’s a lot of ways to engage. And that’s the problem is that just because something works for someone else doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. And you have to know how it’s working out for you. And it’s worth asking that question of yourself and of others. Yeah. So the next one on the list is hypocrisy. I think we just touched on that. Right. It’s like, okay, like is your conception, right? Your presentation of yourself the same way as you’re acting in the world. Right. And we’re touching on this part of the shadow part of yourself. Like, what is the thing that you’re not giving light? Like, what is this thing in your life that you don’t want to look at? Because if you look at that, you’ll feel bad and you have to fix it. Like, that’s two negative things. And then, right, like maybe I want to be on Tinder because then I don’t have to look at my shadow and I don’t have to fix that I’m an asshole that people don’t want to talk to. Which is not true. But, wow, Mark has a disagreement with here. Let’s go into the Faliono IKEA. Yeah. So yeah, it’s important to realize that, yes, like we’re hiding things from ourselves. Other people are hiding things from themselves. And then they’re acting in the world as if they’re people that they’re not in order to maintain a self-image that prevents them from having to confront certain parts of themselves. So, and if you go along, maybe because you don’t know them, right, or maybe you want to see the best in the person and you’re just accepting the truth, then again, you start building onto a foundation that isn’t there and then things are going to crumble into the future. Right. And that’s important to highlight too. Yeah, there’s an aspect of this where people are not fooling you. They’re fooling themselves and that’s fooling you. And so it’s not malicious. It’s not even intentional. It’s not even something they necessarily know they’re doing. I’m not saying there aren’t liars and cheats and people who deliberately do that, but they’re rare. Most people are fooling you as a way of fooling themselves. And they couldn’t care less about the aspect there. And that’s kind of common, actually, where people are doing things that they don’t necessarily understand to keep hiding themselves, hiding their own shadow, for example. Yeah, so I think we’re getting close to the end of the list that we made. Oh, good. Charisma, which would go into the mimicking aspect, but it also goes into having a level of authenticity and a certainty related to the authenticity. When someone’s presenting themselves with confidence, then that is conveying that if you believe that that person is in right relationship with reality, what they’re going to be saying is true. And again, this can go back into the hypocrisy. Maybe they are in right relationship with reality, but these little pieces, they zoom over that and you’re just not picking it up between all the good signal. Right. So, but charisma in general should be positive in general, right? Because people get reality checked, right? Like they can’t be confident and delusional for a significant amount of time. Right. Well, and there’s this whole idea. I was listening on Clubhouse the other day and somebody made a fascinating observation. They said this guy, Breyer is his name, a very smart guy, very interesting. He said, look, charismatic leaders aren’t, we have some charismatic leaders. You may not have agreed with their politics, but recently we had a very charismatic leader, which I thought was fascinating because I thought in the US, we had Trump who was very charismatic to some, but not to others. And then previously we had a charismatic leader in Obama who was very charismatic to some, but not to others. Right. It’s like, oh, that’s how charisma works. It’s not universal. No, probably not. And there’s aspects to charisma, like lyrical speech, right? There’s all the other aspects we’ve talked about earlier. But I think the problem is people avoid charisma because they see it as a corrupting influence. They’re like, oh, they’re using the postmodern narrative, which is wrong, by the way. The old postmodern framework is wrong. Just drop it. Just drop it from your anything that looks postmodern. Just drop it. Just drop it by default, right? That, oh, you know, power corrupts. It’s like, no, power isn’t a thing and it doesn’t corrupt, or at least power doesn’t work the way you think it does. See my video. Power is totally different from the way people use it. Or control corrupts would be what they’re actually saying, but I don’t think it does. I don’t think the degree of control you have is even the degree of control you have. Charisma is related to influence. And the problem is without influence, you can’t do anything anyway. So postulating a world where the charisma is not around corrupting things is irrelevant because charisma happens and it’s going to happen and it has to happen because without it, things won’t happen in the world. You can only do things alone without it. Yeah. And I also think you highlighted the interpretation of charisma, right? And I don’t think it’s necessarily the interpretation of charisma, but there’s an implication of the certainty, right? Yes. So when a charismatic person is stating something, right? Like either a charismatic person might have an incomplete picture of the world or it’s going to disrupt your worldview. Like you can’t have your worldview disrupted by this charismatic person, especially if you don’t have a stable worldview. Right. Right. You don’t have a reliable base, right? Like if you have a big shadow, right? Like if you’re hiding a lot of yourself in compartments, right? Like when you get destabilized, that stuff comes to the surface. And like that’s some ugly demons that you have to deal with. Like it’s better to disqualify and even demonize the other person that is being charismatic in order to maintain the sanctity of whatever container that you’re living in. Right. Right. And but it’s in some ways, it’s this unwillingness to be charismatic that causes the corruption. Because now you’ve built a structure out there potentially, and people can engage with it. And a charismatic person is going to come along because there are charismatic people. There’s no way around that. And then what they do with that structure is partly on you for not taking responsibility for that structure and making sure that corruption didn’t happen. This is very much what I think happened to Steiner, by the way. I think that from what Ann tells me, and I’m not an expert by any means, that’s what happened. Like he just couldn’t maintain the structure by himself correctly. And it corrupted because the people around him corrupted it. And he wasn’t able to prevent that. I’m not digging the guy or anything like that. It’s wonderful stuff coming out of Steiner schools. I seem to agree with most of the stuff he came up with actually. But it didn’t take hold or hasn’t taken proper hold because it got corrupted in the early days. And things tend to corrupt sometimes when they’re not being managed properly. And proper management is hard, and it requires a certain amount of charisma. And then charisma has different aspects. Like there’s a charisma in confidence. There’s a charisma in watching people do something. If I’m doing something, that’s charismatic. We’re moving forward. There’s a charisma in lyrical speech. There’s a charisma in natonal speech. There’s aspects of charisma that have to do with resonance. Whether you’re resonating with a story, with a narrative or not. There’s all these ways in which charisma manifests. And it’s important. And it’s out there. You’re not avoiding charisma. So you need a way to orient. And maybe the way to orient is what we were talking about earlier with. Is the charismatic person enchanting you with a vision of utopia? Are they trying to talk to you or a person? Or are they giving you a method of interacting in the existing world that you can use, but for a transformation which they’re at least pointing to? It’s unfair to say, oh, they’re telling you how to transform. Because unless it’s a one-on-one relationship, there’s no way that’s even possible. I don’t know 50 people and a group well enough to tell them, oh, this is what you need to do to transform. Because it’s going to be 50 different answers potentially. And maybe it’s 100 answers because I need to give them options. Because maybe one transformation is easier than the other, but they both lead to the same place. I have no idea. I’m just saying the world’s a big place. And there’s a lot I don’t know. And those are things you might not know. We tend to make these one-to-one linear relationships. And they’re not there. So the way that you’re describing charisma is, well, someone who’s naturally enchanted. Charismatic people will come into your structure. Right? And they might not even corrupt it. But they’ll take the spotlight from you. That will definitely happen. Yes. Yeah. Well, and that’s not necessarily bad. But look, there’s a way in which the wise… And people think it is. Right. They think it is. But there’s a way in which the wise person is charismatic. Wisdom is a draw for people. Wisdom’s not a way out of any of these problems. And you see that in the movements in the 60s and 70s, if you read a little bit of history in 80s and 90s, for that matter, where these charismatic Hindu leaders or whatever were doing fine. And then something happened. I don’t know what. Maybe no one knows what. And then the movement went horribly wrong and turned into a cult. That happens all the time. Do we get rid of charisma? We can’t. And do we get rid of wisdom? Do we say, oh, wisdom people are bad. You can’t, don’t be listening to those wise people. That sounds insane to me. But there’s a way in which, again, we enchant ourselves. And we have to watch out for that enchantment by charisma when it’s corrupt. And the way to do that partially is, are they aimed at the thing or are they aimed at the ideal? Now, if all they’re talking about is the ideal, that’s mysticism. That’s mystical. Don’t go with that. That’s probably Gnostic or something in some sense as well. But it’s definitely mysticism. But if all they’re talking about is implementation, then they’re just telling you what to do and how to do it. That’s no good. And so there’s this way in which you need a bit of both to have a good charismatic leader who’s not telling you what to do, but also telling you that you have to do something to yourself in relation to something else. And it’s the relations that matter. And that’s where all the magic happens. And look, that’s not a foolproof system. I’m not trying to give you a foolproof system because I can’t. I’m not smart enough. I don’t think anyone else is either, though. So if they tell you they are, I would be very suspicious. Maybe they are, but I don’t think so. I just got a feeling about this one. But there are good people out there who will help you and help you to their own detriment. They will make a personal sacrifice of their time, energy, and attention to make you a better person. And I think you and I, Manuel, do that quite a bit with people on the Discord. We’ll say we try to help people as much as we can without telling them what to do, even though sometimes they beg us to, what do I do? I don’t know what the hell you do. I can give you a bunch of advice that may or may not be useful, but I don’t know if it’s useful to you. You don’t know if it’s useful to you until you try it. That’s the only way you know. It’s that validity test. What’s validity? Validity is participation in something that works. If it’s working for you while you’re participating with it, then it’s valid. So, as you all said to Peterson, you need community, not friends. Yes. And one of the functions of community would be dragging you down to it, right? Yes. Like grounding you in the situation. And I think that might have been the thing that’s happening with the gurus, right? Like if you’re surrounded by fans, fans are having more relationship with you. Well, I think there’s a difference, though, right? What’s the difference between a fan and a community? You can interact with a fan, but that’s not intimate. Right. Where you participate with a community and participation is intimate. So, it’s the same way in which like a peck on the cheek is different from, we’ll say, a little bit deeper kiss, right? Or different from touching, right? And then there’s a way in which sex is different based on the relationship there, right? And those are all functions of intimacy. And so an interaction has a low amount of intimacy or low level of intimacy, a low quality of intimacy. Whereas a community, in order for it to be a proper community, has a high level of participation and intimacy, right? And the thing that Peterson said a lot was, oh, there’s all of these people and they all know me, right? So, what is he getting? Well, he’s getting the perception of intimacy. Right. People don’t know him because they don’t have a structure for feedback because they don’t know how he is outside of specific tailored moments where he’s publicly presented. Exactly. No, that’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. I like that. That’s really good. Yeah, and yeah, so he’s casting intimacy where there is none. And also this one-way relationship, right? He’s the presenter. He’s the controller. He’s in full control of what his fans see from him and the interaction between him and his fans. In a community, you’re not in control necessarily, right? People see you, whether you want them to or not, breaking down or having a hard time or they see you be angry. Snapping at that person, right? Right. Snapping at that person, right? Failing to live up to your promises, whatever failures you have. They see all of that. And I think that’s super important is that that’s what’s going on in some sense. And yeah, it’s an interaction. How can you have expectations of a person when you don’t have a frame of reference to expect from him? Right, and you can’t be intimate with that with thousands of people, we’ll say. Right? You can’t. But you’re right. He cast intimacy where there was none. He sort of created intimacy out of nothing. And there’s a difference between an interface and an intimate connection. And he’s got an interface with them, but he doesn’t have a connection with them. Those are different things. An interface is a controlled version of a connection that’s not real because you’re controlling it. Well, yeah, you cast it in a role, right? So you’re acting out your role as opposed to… It’s what an interface is, right? And then when you cast things that way, you disenchant them, right? So you say, well, how do I interface with women in a date situation? You’re disenchanting, you’re de-enchanting the date, right? Because you’re trying to control it by making it an interface. It’s literally what we do in programming, by the way. That’s what an interface is. It’s the control of the interaction, of the connection between two things. Yeah, or a different way of saying that is you’re proceduralizing it. Yes, right. You’re stuck in the procedural. And that goes back to this idea of… The other thing that’s highlighted in there is this idea that it’s not so much propositional tyranny. John Verbecky talks about propositional tyranny. I think that… I don’t think that’s wrong. I think that’s an interesting way to look at it, and it’s certainly not wrong. So I don’t want to imply that John’s wrong about that at all, because I don’t think he is. But it’s actually a tyranny of quantity. Right. Because saying propositional tyranny means propositions are tyrannical. Propositions aren’t tyrannical. But what is tyrannical is when propositions point to quantity and not quality. And so when you’re talking about I have thousands of fans or tens of thousands of fans or hundreds of thousands of fans that give me feedback, what you’re really saying is I have an interface that I control, where people feedback to me. And the reason why it works is because I have a lot of feedback. It’s like, well, but if the feedback is controlled by you, even if you allow, we’ll say, negative feedback, perfectly valid, that doesn’t mean you’re getting all the negative feedback or all the good negative feedback or all the useful feedback, because you’re controlling it. And it’s also being controlled by your fans, because fans will not give you negative feedback. Fans won’t even respond on comment on your damn videos, because I’ve been trying that. I knew that already. Right. But yeah, you look at the number of views on a video to the number of comments on a video. You tell me what’s wrong there. Most of your fans aren’t giving you feedback at all. Oh, they’re not participating. Are you claiming that there’s people not participating in this awesome conversation, guys? Not our conversation. Of course, they’re going to comment on this. Right. On our previous videos, like we did one on morality and ethics, right? Right. That was a big video. We didn’t get a lot of comments. We always like comments. I’m just going to assume that we’re right at that point. Like, if you can’t have a comment, like, she… If we’re not getting the interface, negative feedback that we want through our interface, then obviously we’re just going to self-corrupt into ego. So yeah, it’s on the audience here to participate. You’re right. But that is the control participation, that interface. That’s really the problem is that Peterson is confusing the fact that he has a large quantity of potential feedback people for the quality of the feedback. And the quality of feedback tends to be positive for him for whatever reason, at least a direct feedback. And then, yeah, there’s videos. Yeah, there’s Hans George Mueller. Who looks at his stuff on philosophy and the history of philosophy is awesome. His critiques of Peterson are all complete and utter garbage made by somebody who doesn’t understand what’s going on. Very clearly doesn’t understand what’s going on. I keep toying with doing a video where I rip apart some of his critiques of Peterson because they’re just garbage. But, you know, that sort of feedback doesn’t necessarily get to Peterson. It’s very expensive. And those aren’t his fans. Those are obviously not his fans. And I would say Hans George Mueller, as much as I do like some of his stuff is great, some of his stuff is fantastic. I think that he’s using Peterson and critiquing Peterson to get views. And I don’t think he’s doing that consciously. Like I’m not describing malintent to the guy because I actually do really like him in some sense. I just think his critiques of Peterson are complete and utter garbage. And he’s totally missing the point of certain things. But I think he’s subconsciously that’s what he’s doing. It’s very deliberate. Oh, warning in the front of the videos. You’re being manipulated. It’s like, no, that’s not bad. It’s not necessarily bad. We manipulate each other by virtue of being here. The question is, does he enchant my world? And in the case of his stuff on Kant, for example, it was very enchanting to my world because it opened me up to this all new way of understanding what was going on in modern times. So in that way, that was enchantment. Is that a new form of enchantment? It’s like inverse enchantment where you’re being so stupid. No, no, no, no, that was the smart stuff. His stupid stuff is his critique of Peterson. But there is a way. And look, I’m not necessarily saying bad critiques shouldn’t be out there. Bad critique is good because it’s more contrast. And I’m a big fan of contrast. I like high contrast. So it’s good to engage with these things. It’s good to consider that maybe I’m right when I say, and I haven’t listened to all of his critiques of Peterson. When I say his critiques of Peterson are terrible, that might be good to go listen to them and see if you see what I see. Because maybe if you don’t, I’m wrong. But maybe if you don’t, you’re missing something. I don’t know which of those two is true, by the way. I’m not making any claims. But there’s something there. There’s something there in the difference that we can engage with. And that’s what, again, Peterson’s basically under the tyranny of quantity because he’s a science guy. And fair enough, he’s an excellent science guy, by the way. He’s one of the few excellent science people. I would say some of his colleagues are not quite as good at the sciencey thing by any measure. They just don’t measure up. And that’s the problem is that he’s under the tyranny of quantity and not the tyranny of quality. And they both can tyrannize us, maybe. And maybe we need a balance between quantity and quality. And maybe they’re straight trade-offs. I don’t know. But they certainly sound that way to me. And when you try to get more, you give up intimacy. You give up quality. Like, you have to strip the quality away to get more. Because a quality connection is, say, high bandwidth. And you only have a limited amount of bandwidth. You can only take in a limited amount of feedback. But the question is, what’s the depth of that feedback? And that’s how it goes into enchantment. Because we can enchant ourselves by focusing on the quantity, as Peterson did in that Peugeot talk. And say, oh, I have lots of fans. And therefore, I have good quality feedback. It’s like, no. No, you don’t. You have an interface for that. And it’s filtered. Because people aren’t going to hear your most controversial things in a good light if they’re not fans. And if they are fans, they’re going to hear the good side of it and not give you the critical feedback that you might need. Now, I’m a big fan of Peterson. And insofar as I have critiques of Peterson, I think my own critiques of Peterson are stupid and lame because Peterson’s helping people. And I don’t know the degree to which he’s doing things deliberately. Because I’m a big fan of doing things deliberately, even if they’re, say, incorrect or at least not as complete as they should be. Because should is a quality distinction that I find it hard to make. Right? I mean, I could give critiques of Peterson that are very compelling. But I’m not sure they’re relevant. And so it’s a tough thing. But you can see that enchantment there. And like I’m enchanted by Peterson. I’m enchanted by the fact that he helps so many people. And I think critiquing him is dumb. Because why are you critiquing somebody who helps so many people? Right? And so that’s why I kind of avoid it myself. But you could do better. Like, what are you talking about? He’s in Jesus. No. Well, no critique is invalid. Right? So you can’t not critique somebody. So the thing that you brought up is there’s a confusion between quantity and quality. And I added that to the notes. Because I think that that is a type of enchantment where you’re mistaking the quantity aspect of something for qualitative information. And you’re swapping them out. Yeah. A good way to understand quantity is the quantity is somewhat inherent in a thing. Right? So it is reliably observable. Yes. That’s maybe a good way to articulate that. It’s measurable. That’s the problem. That’s why science likes it. Science encourages the tyranny of quantity. Right. And so when it’s reliably observable, then it becomes salient because it’s a good signal in some sense. Right? But the problem with the signal is that it doesn’t allow for navigation. Right. It only allows for orientation, I think. No. It only allows for direction. Well, yeah. Is there a distinction? There is. Knit picking are not relevant right now. But the quality aspect is relating to the value of the thing. Right? So it’s allowing you to bring context to a thing. And that’s where the enchantment lies. Right? So if you want to see what’s good enchantment versus what’s not, well, not good, but proper enchantment versus improper enchantment is the enchantment leads to lie in the quality aspect. Yes. It should lie in the relationship. It should not lie in an aspect of the world because it’s inherent. Right? Like you don’t need to enchant it because it’s already there. Right. Well, aspects of the world are material. And proper enchantment needs to look at the ethereal. Right? It can point towards the material, but it needs to ultimately point towards the ethereal. It needs to move past the material, past the dogma, past the idol into the realm of the ethereal, that realm or the spiritual realm. Right? It needs to go all the way through. And so there’s a way just to sort of, you know, start to land the plane. There’s a way that we’re pointing at certain things. Right? So one of the things we’re pointing at is there’s different types of enchantment. I’m not going to assign good and bad to the types of enchantment. Right? If you don’t want to be like, I don’t like total enchantment, total enchantment driving. Absolutely nuts. But that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. Like people who are using total enchantment aren’t always bad people or doing something wrong or enchanting things incorrectly. Right? Only in my room. But also there’s a way in which enchantment can be understood in what it can do for you. For you. Right? Because maybe the person’s right and what they’re enchanting is correct, but you can’t participate because you have some limitation or you’re not there yet or you need to go through more transformations. And then another way to recognize good enchantment versus bad enchantment is what is it asking of you for change? If it’s not asking of anything from you to change, then it’s not good. Like if it’s not, you have to give up your friends so that you’re no longer addicted to alcohol or something or drugs or whatever it is, then like they’re just spinning you a story where you’re the same person. And that’s enchantment. You know, that’s bad enchantment. That’s not good. There’s also a way in. So that’s back to that question. Like, you know, how’s that working out for you? How’s that working out for you? And so we can evaluate the enchantment we’re already in. And the enchantment is that story about what the potential of the narrative is or what the potential of the motor operation is. Like, oh, if everybody starts being a game B player instead of a game A player, what’s that potential there? Right? It’s like, oh, it’s a good question. But then how do you do it? And then if you’re the only one doing it, does it still work? Because maybe if you’re the only one doing it, right, it doesn’t work. And maybe you can’t make other people do it, in which case it’s invalid because— Or you can make them do it by enchanting them, but then after a month or two, three— Well, that nature of enchantment might be bad, right? Like, I mean, we can point to certain dictators in the past century there that did bad pointing. And we know they did bad pointing, right? But we have to have that way of understanding what’s good and what’s bad. And that’s where it all breaks down. Science isn’t going to tell you good from bad. It can’t make quality statements. It can only make quantity statements. That’s back to the tyranny of quantity. And so where are the appeals in the enchantment, right? Are they appeals of quantity or are they appeals of quality? So maybe in game A, game B, it’s a quantity game. Like, oh, we need enough people to play game B to make it work. Oh, that’s not a good look, guys. Right. So you’re trying to change the quality of the game by changing the quantity of people playing? I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think that’s a valid way to deal with the world. I could be wrong about that, but I got a bad feeling about that one, right? And, you know, how do we understand what things are pointing at? If they’re pointing at material things, things in the real world or real relationships in the world that you can already see, maybe that’s not good forms of enchantment. Like, maybe you’re not actually enchanting the world unless you’re pointing to pure potential. Well, yeah, or pointing or affording it. Right. Right. And maybe their job is to not just point to the pure potential, but also give you affordances to the pure potential and tell you how you have to change to have those affordances. And maybe it’s that three things. Right. So you can’t just point to the thing like Brene Brown. Oh, world peace, blah, happiness, empathy, blah. Like, that’s no good. Right. Flowers. Oh, yeah. And unicorns. Yeah. I forget a lot of things. Right. That’s the unicorns and rainbows comment. That’s what it means. It means you’re being mystical or purely mystical or something. Right. Like you’re just talking about things that can’t manifest. You also need an affordance. Like, how do we do that? And not just me, me and other people. Because if you can’t make other people do it, or if you can’t appeal to other people to do it, it’s no good. Potentially. Maybe it’s good anyway. You’re invoking people again. You can’t keep doing it. I know. I know. I know. Because they just people all over the place, and that ruins everything. Yeah. That’s my problem. And then what’s the transformation that I need to make to get the affordance to get to the thing? Right. If it doesn’t have those three components, it’s probably not useful or valid. And yeah, I think that’s the key to understanding what good enchantment is, or what makes a good enchantment. And the easy thing is, how’s that working out for you? Like, is that work? Is it giving you what you expected out of it? It doesn’t have the expect. And just because it’s not giving you what is expected doesn’t mean you throw it out. But you have to understand it differently. Because maybe the enchantment you have is a piece of a larger set of enchantments that you could have that would manifest everything. Like, maybe you have a good short-term relationship. You have a good way to get into short-term relationships, but not long-term relationships. Doesn’t mean you throw out the good way of getting into short-term relationships. You just say, oh, this form of enchantment doesn’t give me what I want. I need a different enchantment for that. And hopefully they’re compatible. And that’s a good sign if they are. Like, the way you get into a relationship and the way you keep a relationship alive should have some relation to each other, right? And to be stable and consistent through time and reliable through time. That’s not a bad idea. That’s the idea of, oh, we should still go on dates when we’re married. We’ll have a date night. Which I think is a little suspect because it’s a little too forced, maybe. But that same attitude and excitement you had during dating, that would be nice to maintain once you’re married. Even though the pressure’s not there, we’ll say. But maybe there’s a different pressure you can bring to bear, for example. So yeah, you can see how maybe that’s the formula. What do you have to add for noticing good versus bad enchantment, Manuel? What did I miss? Well, I just have a question for the listeners. Like, is your rope here? All right. Like, is your food tastier? Like, maybe those are good measures, right? Like, oh, like now my engagement with the world is more. Just more. And just the moreness is inherently a good thing because now that ties into the motivation and all of these aspects. So I guess this is a pattern inside of me, but I want to point to the positive aspects when we’re walking out the door. Like, yes, this is good. It’s necessary, especially when we’re talking about transformation. There’s an aspect of enchantment that is allowing you to have fate or navigating your fate. And you can also call in the hope there, right? Like, what is hope? Well, hope is also an enchantment about what could be, right? So it’s important to have right relationship, but it’s a necessary relationship. And maybe sometimes go a little bit overboard, right? As long as you keep track of it so that you don’t do too much damage, right? You need to experiment in order to manifest the good. And yeah, and I wanted to close down with the point before that, which was like the dialogos. Yeah, like, or yeah, this conversational structure, there’s, I think the tension was there. I tried to get some more Nikiya there. But I think we weren’t on, Vicki talks about the edge of intelligibility, right? Like, that’s where the dragons live. And that’s where the tension becomes real, because yeah, like, then you’re dealing with, well, with the forms, right? With the concepts that you can’t completely hold, and especially not completely hold in relationship to each other, right? And like, if you’re exploring there, you’re going to stumble, you’re going to fall, you’re going to have to retreat. Yeah, we did that a few times. So I think that went really well, actually. Yeah, no, I thought that was great. I thought that was great. Do you have any closing statements before we close this down? Well, yeah, maybe an appeal, right? Like, don’t try to systematize this stuff, right? Like, you’re in relationship with it. Be aware that it’s there. And let yourself in the moment be informed around it. Familiarize yourself with these things. And be open to that it’s happening. And that’s the way that you go forward. Like, don’t go and write everything down and make a table next to your screen so that you can every time watch when you’re listening to a YouTube video. Like, that’s not how you get there. That’s great. I really like that. I’ll just put another teaser out there. I know we’ve had several in this video. Yeah, there’s a way in which we can systematize things. And sort of the better way to interface with certain things in the world is intuitizing them, right? Being intuitive about them. And that’s really what you want to do, which is not to say don’t take notes. We take notes all the time. I put nice, meaty comments on the Paul Van der Klee videos for a reason because I take notes. I take notes when I do my talks with Karen Wong on the meaning code on some of the talks that we go over. So taking notes is good, but over-systemization is a problem. You really want to be intuitive about these things. And yeah, Manuel, I think Gia Lugo’s accomplished. I think there was a real spirit there. I learned a lot. So thank you, as always. I learned a lot talking to you. And I hope that everybody else learned a lot. And I hope you got through the video. And if you did, congratulations. Give yourself a Achievement Unlocked badge of some kind. Yeah. And if you didn’t learn a lot, I want to hear from you. If you did learn a lot, I want to hear from you as well. And maybe post an experience that you have. I noticed enchantment here where I didn’t before. That would be great feedback. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Or a connection you made, how it relates to your life. Any of that stuff would be fantastic. Because the more feedback we get from people, even though it’s an interface and it’s limited, the better. And the more narrative it has, the better for us so that we can see the poetic aspect of that. I know we’re going to tease the poetic all over the place. Boy, I got a lot of videos to make to get to that. Hopefully, I can pull that off. But I just wanted to thank everybody for watching and for giving us the most valuable part of what you have to offer, which is your time and attention. OK. Yeah. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed yourself also a little bit. It was a little bit entertaining as well. And I’ll see you next time. Bye.