Ethics and Morals - what is the difference - better models for understanding the world. (YMdzBkYaQS0)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YMdzBkYaQS0

So what I have for you today is a special treat. I had a conversation with my good friend Manuel Post, who is an excellent interlocutor, wonderful person to have dialectic conversations with. We’re talking about ethics and morality and the framework that we both use to understand these things that we think is simple and affords us ways of modeling the world and understanding the world that are very useful. This is the method that I use for morality versus ethics and why it’s important to distinguish the two and what it all means. The nice thing about this talk is, to be clear, Manuel and I have talked before, we talked many times on the Discord server, like every day for many hours in many cases. But when we do these conversations, it’s, hey, why don’t we do a conversation on free will and agency or, that was our first combo, or ethics and morality, and that’s it. There’s no script, there’s no planning. We do know each other very well, so we have good flow, good argumentation. So I hope that comes out in this talk. I think it did. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I enjoyed it. I think both Manuel and I came to just found things that we wouldn’t have found any other way. I know John Vervicki, we call that de logos, right? We got to places we couldn’t have gotten to on our own sort of a thing. And I think that definitely happened here. And I always love talking to Manuel. That’s why I talk to him all the time. And he always brings a richness of perspective that I cannot bring to you by myself. And so I’m always very grateful for that. And he is just absolute giant. And he was on point today. His thought was so clear. It was it was very special to me. And I’m sure that it will be special to you as well. So please enjoy this. I know it’s a little long, but it’s worth every single minute. Thank you for your time and attention. We’re recording. We’re live. Very exciting. And we’re going to talk today about ethics versus morality, or at least the framework we’ve been using. And I’m here with Manuel Post, my excellent interlocutor, who helps me with thinking through all these issues. And Manuel’s agreed to do this. We’ve been sort of teasing out it a bit on the Discord server. And I think now is the time to get it out there. People keep telling me I do better in conversation. So here’s some conversation. And the framework that we use, roughly speaking, is ethics is the ideals. So that would be like platonic forms type stuff. Not that we’re limiting it to that. But we’re saying that’s ideals. And then the morality is the implementation. And that’s where all the messiness occurs. And the reason why we think this is important, and I went over this in the religion that is not a religion video that’s on the playlist for the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel. Worst name ever. And the reason why I think this is important is because you need to be able to forgive people when they transgress accidentally. So if we have the same idea in terms of what a good ethic is, what the good ideal is, but we make a mistake in implementation, we can forgive the other person instead of just writing them off as unethical. Whereas an unethical person, maybe we just shouldn’t deal with them anymore. What do you think of that quick summary, Manuel? Well, that was definitely there. And I’m like, oh, yeah. Like, how do we take it first? And one of the things that’s on my mind is there’s a way to judge things in the result. And then there’s a way to judge things in the action or in the motivation in the action. And I think getting that distinction clear upfront is important because in philosophy, they have obviously systems that are trying to deal with results because results is the thing that you can science. And motivational structures, like, do you really know why you’re doing a thing? And then, well, yeah, where do you ground it? Like, what is correct motivation? How do you understand that for yourself that those problems come up? But I think the distinction that’s made in philosophy is an ethical system as something that you can write down and relate to and understand and communicate, right? Because I think that’s the value that people see in having an ethical system. Like, oh, if I can convince everyone of my system, then everybody is going to do the right thing because my system is obviously right. And then you have virtue ethics, which is, I don’t know, coming from the Greeks, at least in philosophy, that idea is coming from the Greeks. And that’s the best way to say it. It’s like weighing of your action in relation to what Mark said, like ideals. Or maybe it’s, well, obviously, they’re in the realm of ideas. I don’t know if a virtue is properly conceived of as an ideal, but it’s more, I’ve been talking about, it’s like a quality of a relationship more so. So you’re relating, and then it’s defining something about the way that you’re relating to it. So that’s how I would introduce that. Yeah, there’s a lot of cool ideas in there. So one is, you have a choice. You can pick the outcome as the measure, or you can pick the implementation, like how you got to the outcome as the measure. And it doesn’t really matter which one you pick, because neither is perfect. And so I’ll tie that back to your system. Oh, yeah, if you have an ethical system, you can convince people of it because you can convey it. People are expecting that that system leads to some form of perfection, whether it’s in implementation or action. But in fact, there’s just no way to have perfect implementation or action. And in order to have perfection, you would need both, because there’s two aspects. And that, I think, is what scares people. Like, oh, wait, I can’t be perfect. No, you can’t be perfect. You can’t be perfect. In my conception, perfect is the purity of science. So when the religion of science talks about perfect, they’re actually making a purity claim. And that’s where all the trouble comes in. So there are people who claim that they can be perfect. In order to be perfect, you’re going to have to redefine everything in relation to your action. So your action is going to be necessarily good and therefore. And then you need to shift somewhere else. Because how do you change the way that you act? So you have your problem somewhere else. But defining it like that, I don’t know if it’s consistent. And I don’t even want to figure it out because I don’t think it’s useful. Right. No, that’s exactly what I’m getting at, is this idea that, and I talk about this in my video on principles. Principles are important because they provide consistency. So you can’t count on the outcome of a principle. But you can count on the fact that there will be an outcome. And maybe those outcomes are constrained, hopefully. And so that leads you somewhere. It gives you some certainty for some period of time. And then at the end of that, there is an end. And that’s why the principles are important. But it’s also important to have the ideals and to try to embody the ideals. Because you want the right outcomes. It’s just that you don’t have a choice about outcomes and implementations, independent of one another. They’re independent variables. So you can have a bad outcome and a bad implementation at the same time. And one, it does not flow from the other. You could have a bad outcome with a perfect implementation. And you could have a good outcome from an imperfect implementation. It just is what it is. Because there’s so much randomness and time happens. There’s all these opportunities for randomness along the course of time of your implementation. And you never know how those little random bits are gonna interface with your goal until the end. And that’s why it’s more important to be pure of heart than it is to be pure of mind. I think we don’t need a perfect outcome. We need a good enough outcome. Yes. So that’s really important. And then what’s the other thing that’s important? Well, that we can live with the outcome. Like we need to be clear of conscience when things happen. So I think that’s the two things that we value. And like, if we get them confused, like maybe there’s more. But I wanna focus a little bit on the acceptance. So you can imagine that having a value gives you a way to interpret the outcome. But it can also contextualize you. Okay, I stood up for the thing that I believe in and my standing up is more important to me than the result of what happens. And in some sense, I’m gonna use really bad language. You hacked, like you hacked your relationship to the result by preempting it, by framing it in relation to your principle. So like, yeah, that’s a little bit dirty way to talk about it because it’s giving you more agency. But if you do that in an honest and pure way, you can see how you might prevent suffering at your own hand if you have that result for yourself. Or maybe prevent, well, yeah, I like that. Prevent your own suffering, certainly. But maybe also reduce suffering in the world. So we were talking to Jonathan on the Discord the other day, right? And he was talking about this incident where a woman was publicly assaulted. Actually, I believe that the term used was raped in front of a bunch of people who stood and did nothing. And then we were talking about what is bad about that? Like breaking it down and saying, oh, it’s really wrong here. The thing wrong isn’t the rape, right? Because if the rape happens between two people in a dark alley, that damage is there. Like that’s like a baseline damage. But when it happens in public and there are people there, A, they’re all traumatized by seeing it. B, it becomes normalized. That’s bad. Like you don’t wanna live in a world where other people normalize that behavior. But also they’re not standing up for principles. So they have no place to stand. And maybe they had no place to stand and that’s why they didn’t intervene. But by not intervening, they’re actually making the world worse for everybody else, even people who weren’t there. And that’s the real crime, right? It’s like the meta crime. Sure, the rape is a horrific, terrible, awful crime. Like that should never happen, but people and it will happen. And there’s a bunch of stuff around definitions. But if this is happening, if forcible rape is happening in public and people are doing nothing, that’s a much bigger problem than just the incident. Because you can take any incident and put it in that placeholder and realize, well, people aren’t willing to stand up for values, to instantiate principles and to do things, then that’s a problem. And the way it’s ethical, even so if you interfere, you can always make a case. Well, it’s immoral for me to interfere with the will of somebody stronger than me. I can see where that case can be made. I don’t agree with it at all. I can see where the case can be made though. And then where the problem for me comes in, is that even if you make that case, you totally make that case and you act as if, because you can, you have that option. The real problem that comes into play is you’ve betrayed your own ability to fight back against anybody else. Because if you won’t stand up for other people, why do you think you’re worthy to be stood up for yourself? And so you’ve basically subsumed your own agency into the will of any other person. Without realizing, it’s very tricky. If you’re not willing to stand up for somebody else, for someone using force against somebody else, what gives you the moral authority to stand up for somebody using force against you? Well, at that point, the answer is nothing. Whether you think that’s otherwise is a different question. But the answer, the actual answer, the answer your subconscious will always give you is nothing gives you that right to stand up for your own. And I’m not saying you won’t. I’m saying that nothing gives you the moral right. If you’re not willing to uphold the principles for others, they can’t be upheld for you by others or by you, not under the same grounds, because we’re swimming in the same water at that point. So that’s why the moral implementation. But the other reason why the ethical implementation matters in that case is because if you stand up to the guy and he beats you or kills you even, right? A, maybe the rape doesn’t happen because he runs out of time and the woman’s able to escape. That could be good. Even if the net outcome is quote worse, it’s not, because the net outcome to all the people there, they see somebody stand up for their principles and they go, oh, here’s somebody standing up for their principles and they lost it all. Those principles were more valuable than their life. Maybe I should be like that, right? Or they see what it’s like and then they can make a decision. But if you don’t see it, if you never see that signal, if you never, if no one ever does that, right? In a real way, in real time, in front of you, then you never get that sense. And so as we separate further and further away from these events, they’re just gonna become more common because no one has the moral right to stand up if they won’t stand up for that same principle for others. And that I think is at the key, right? The key of morals versus ethics. The moral outcome may be negative. Somebody may die standing up to make sure somebody else’s rights don’t get violated, but that actually has a positive ripple effect instead of nobody standing up, which has a negative ripple effect. Right, yeah. So you’re classifying it in a way that, that it’s being presented, right? So I wanna point something else out, right? So all of these people are there, right? Like in some sense, right? I’m not gonna do the determinism thing, but like in some sense, it’s already inside of them that they’re not gonna act, or it’s likely that they’re not gonna act. Like just give them a little bit of space. And then the event is embodying that part of themselves, like that’s their shadow, right? Because everybody watches superhero movies and people do the right thing, right? So then that event is making that clear, but it’s not only making it clear for themselves, which is one relationship, it’s also making it clear in relationship to the group, which is like a direct, okay, I’m among these people. And then there’s this ripple effect, like, okay, this is the case in our society, right? Like this actually happened in our society. But the horrible part is like all of those seeds existed before, right? And the only thing that’s happening there is that it gets presented in an undeniable way to these people, right? So we might hope that that can give that shift, like, oh, like, damn, I am that person and I don’t wanna be that person, but yeah, like we need people to be that spark, right? Like to be the bringer of change and like there’s a risk there and like I’m connecting that to foolishness, right? Like in some sense, running into danger, right? Cause like you’re not in danger, right? These people will watch them and they didn’t experience any threat to themselves and putting yourself in potential trap, that is in some sense foolish, right? But yeah, you contextualize it, about like what is the cost if you’re not doing that or better said, if nobody’s doing that, right? And yeah, like damn, you can do the thing like, oh yeah, I don’t have to do it if someone else does it, but it’s like, yeah, like that’s not how the world works. And also, right, I think, I don’t know the research data on this, but I think it’s been proven that like if one person does it then usually they get help. Right. That was Jonathan’s thing, right? There is a herd mentality. It works both ways. Herds can be bad and herds can be good, right? Cause herd mentality exists. And once one person stands up, maybe another person stands up with them. And you know, there doesn’t have to be a conflict once there’s three people because the one person doing the bad thing realizes there’s three people and doesn’t know whether or not they’ll get involved any further. Maybe he can guess and maybe he does, but maybe it’s not worth it, right? And because we get these signals and I like what you pointed out. So what I heard in there is contrast and the importance of contrast as such. So there’s an importance to having a contrast and being able to embody a contrast and see it like exemplified in front of you. There’s nothing like seeing contrast. There’s no substitute for it. And the other one is this concept of this higher good, right? This good that’s sort of above, okay, I may die. That may happen. It’s gonna happen sometime, some of the time. But my death will serve as a form of martyrdom to the principle. And the principle will be upheld by those other people, or at least some of them. And that’s better than none of them. And that’s where it gets tricky. It’s like, yeah, but what if it’s three people that suddenly do it the next time and none of them die? Then you say, now you’ve prevented a rape and three more, right? Just by dying. And then who knows how far out that goes. And that’s why having the ethic is important because the ethic is up here. It’s like, yeah, it’s not about you, right? And that’s very much the problem, I think, in the modern world with ethics is you need to submit to your ethics, otherwise you won’t act morally. You can’t. You can’t act morally in the world. And maybe they’re not your ethics. Maybe you’re outsourcing your ethics, which is probably fine if you do it correctly. Not recommending the satanic Bible as a way to outsource your ethics, but maybe I’m recommending the Bible as a way to outsource your ethics, or even the Quran or even the Bhagavad Gita, right? Or the Tao Te Ching or whatever, right? There’s a bunch of wisdom texts that help you to outsource at least your morality, which is your implementation of ethics, if not the ethics themselves, so that you don’t have to think about, spend hours upon hours thinking about and working through all the scenarios so that you can find the invariant patterns, for example, that we need to navigate these things. Yeah, so I was thinking earlier about this scapegoat phenomena, right? Like, so the scapegoat was an actual goat, right? And there was this embodiment of the relationship in reality, right? And that goes into the contrast. Like, I think, this is exposure versus experience, right? We get exposed to superheroes on TV, and then we’re like, oh, like, that’s how it is. And then we don’t realize how we are in reality, right? Like, how we are falling short, because, yeah, like, we don’t get the integration, we don’t get the participatory element that you get by acting out a ritual, right? Like, oh, like, there’s an actual goat, like, I’m having a relationship to the goat, I’m actually saying whatever, like, bad stuff happened, I’m gonna put that on the thing, and that allows me to get into a cleansing or whatever, right? And so the acting it out is where it gets important. And now I wanna tie that a little bit back to the virtues, right? Like, so when we’re acting it out, right, like Mark mentioned, invariant patterns, right? Like, we need to find a way to express ourselves. And the more attuned that our expression is to the situation, the more capacity we have to be more. Now, so there’s a relationship to the option space that we have in our agency and in our conceptualization. And then there’s also our capacity to embody that option space in the moment, right? Because like you said, well, yeah, you can write it out or whatever, right? It’s like, yeah, or you can think through all of these things, but yeah, like, I thought through a bunch of things, right? Like, oh, when this happens, I should do this. And like, what happens when it happens? Well, I definitely don’t do the thing that I should do. So there’s this tension there, right? So it’s not enough to know what we should do or to be able to think of what we should do. We also should be able to do it. And yeah, like trying to leave that together. Yeah, well, I think you’re pointing out something very important, right? So there’s a way in which we can imagine things in our imagination, right? Or using the imaginal capacity that we have, and this is gonna go into the new model that we haven’t published yet, but we’re gonna get there. There’s a, yeah, we’ll get there. We’ve got it ready, right? We’ve got all the drawings. There’s a way in which there’s the imaginal, right? And then there’s, and that’s where you can be ethical. You’d be perfectly ethical in your imagination because you have no constraints. Create the world that you wanna create. The problem is, to your point, the implementation, the participation. So there’s a way in which you can participate imaginally, and there’s a way in which you can participate materially. And the difference between those, roughly speaking, is the is-ought gap, right? We’re back to Hume’s guillotine. Yeah, look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t know about the is-ought gap or Hume’s guillotine, either one, same stuff. Yeah, yeah, it’s great. It’s important to understand. And there’s no way around that gap. Like this is something like the way we see the world. So you can look through one eye and see the ideal world in your imagination, right? Where it’s usually maybe not static, but fully controlled, or you can look through the other eye where you have no control, right? The world is just flowing around you effectively, and you’re insignificant. But it is one way you’re insignificant, and the other way you’re all that matters. Like you’re the center of everything. And all of these dichotomies are built into us, to some extent. But it’s the dichotomy, right? It’s this, when you look through both lenses, that you see three dimensions. In other words, it’s the combination of this imaginal participation, and participation in the real world, that creates the world, the three-dimensional world, that enchants the world. That’s what enchantment is. It’s the recognition that there are two ways of looking at the world. And when you combine them correctly, and when they’re in right relationship, bang, the world opens up and potential is there. And there’s no material potential without action, right? Even though action constrains material potential. But in imagination, there’s nothing but potential. But now you can’t act. So you can’t act in your imaginal. It doesn’t have any effect on the world. If I imagine a horse, there isn’t a horse in front of me. Right? If I imagine a horse going across the screen, it doesn’t happen, just because I imagine it. But that is the difference between ethics and morality too. Right? There’s that is-ought gap right there. And the ethics is definitely the ought. And the morality is, it’s the implementation. Well, I’m gonna resist a little bit, right? Because something is happening, right? Like if you’re thinking of a horse, you’re not thinking of something else, right? Right. And then you’re also speaking it out loud. So all of these poor people need to listen to me talk about a horse as a consequence of you talking about a horse. Yes. Yeah. So it’s not inconsequential, right? Like I think- Right. When we look at the people on TV, right? Like they’re basically creating a shared imaginal space that they’re trying as hard as they can to make real. So there is some power in the imaginal that can hold us in the air, right? Like floating without being grounded in reality. And I think ethics and morality should consider this, right? Like, and see that as a bad thing, right? Like the only things that are of value are the things that are real, right? They’re grounded in reality. And if we transgress, right? Like if we start imagining things and acting as if they’re real, then we bring chaos in the world, right? Because like maybe the reason that it’s chaos is because other people don’t have the capacity to cohere to the same thing because there’s no corresponding thing in reality. Right. Or maybe it’s twofold. Maybe you need the people to correspond and the emanation from above to correspond in order for it to last, which is how I’d couch it, right? And then I like what you’re getting at. The imagination isn’t inconsequential, right? But it doesn’t instantiate without you signaling. And that’s where the news media and TV and radio and the idea, YouTube, the idea of signaling becomes important because the minute you signal that now you’re on the other side of the gap, you’re is because you’ve made a statement. Like I talk about a horse running across the screen. And the minute I did that, I changed it from the imaginal and signaled it into the real world. Now, some people weren’t listening, so they didn’t hear it, but they heard it, right? Like part of you always hears all the signals and you’re filtering. And it may be the filter, filters it out and it didn’t have an effect. Maybe the filter filtered it out and it did have an effect, but it had an effect you didn’t notice, right? And so there’s all these layers going on inside you, but you’re right to point out that the imaginal isn’t incidental. It gives us these starting points. And then it’s taking the starting point as a way to act morally in the world that’s important. And then how do you know if your morals are correct? Well, if you keep doing it, it’s not working. Then whatever your ethical implementation is, is wrong. If you don’t have an ethical implementation, if you don’t have a pure imaginal ideal that you’re trying to act out as a moral action in the world, then you have a different set of problems, right? Now we’re into possession and what happens, and that’s very dangerous. And I think that’s the world to some extent that we’re stuck in at the moment, is this idea that we’re not, we’re trying to act morally without understanding that there’s an ethical framework that anchors that morality above us, right? That we have to submit to. And it’s that submission that we’re not embodying. And now we can’t be moral agents in the world, even if we think we can be ethical agents in the world. Right, so I’m trying to suss this thing out. So I think we wanna have the ability to communicate what we have in our imagination or in our imaginal imaginations. It’s the bad part of the imaginal, I guess. The thing that we have in our imaginal space to someone else, right? And I’m like, yeah, like if, because we’re talking about something that’s not manifest in reality, we’re talking about an ideal, right? But people should be able to cohere to the same ideal structure as you. And then you can get a sense that that is real, right? But then there might be another problem, right? Because like if these people are stuck in the wrong axioms, just as you are, maybe as a consequence of the social environment requiring them to cohere to certain ideas and them not taking the time to double check the source of them, then you still might have a problematic situation where you build a structure upon some floating imaginal space that is shared by people, right? Yeah, I’m now thinking like, like is that necessary that it’s floating? You’re like, I don’t know. Well, this gets into emanation versus emergence, right? And so you can create any kind of emergence you want in the world. But the question is how long will it last? And that’s where things get tricky. Like how long does this emergence last? That’s a good question, I don’t know. Right, what does that mean? I don’t know. I just know that the emergence may not last. Why? Because it’s not near enough in emanation. But again, this requires submission. You have to admit that there are some things that are going to last and some things that are not, no matter how many people get involved with them, right? But if the things that are gonna last, no one gets involved with, they never manifest because it’s still a dance, it’s still a relationship, it’s still a negotiation. And so there’s still some responsibility but not total responsibility. And what are you aiming at? Well, you can’t aim at morality as a goal because it’s imperfect, because it’s implementation and we can’t know it until we implement it. We never know, are we going to be the superhero that stands up and says, no, you’re not doing that, right? Many people aren’t and fair enough. Like I’m not making claims about whether that makes you a good or a bad person. But I will make claims as whether that makes a good or bad society. And that if you don’t stand up, no one stands up, not you. But if no one stands up, then it makes a bad society. And the problem is now we have to jump the gap again because there’s society and then there’s the individual. Well, some individual has to stand up. And if it’s not you, are you sure you’re upholding principles? Are you sure you have values to go after? But those values have to be anchorable in virtues and those virtues have to be ideals. They have to be purely perfect. Because if I go after them and I fail, I need to be able to engender myself grace and grace from others, which is roughly forgiveness, right? And so you need both capacities. That’s why there’s a difference between ethics and morality. That’s why the difference is important. And I don’t like morals as ideals. I think ethics are ideals and morals are implementation because if I do something that seems immoral, I can be forgiven if I did it in my own mind, truly for the right reason, right? For the right ideal, going after the right ideal. And that also enables you to do things like, well, this happened and I had to do something bad to stop it, right? It’s like, because it’s not a thing badness nine versus thing badness five kind of equation. You can’t go, oh, well, polluting the environment is a badness of nine and stopping the pollution by disobeying your boss and maybe causing a bunch of harm to a bunch of people is a badness of five. You can’t make those calculations. It doesn’t work that way, right? You kind of have to implement it and submit to whatever the result is. And you’re still a moral creature because you’ve acted out your ethical values correctly or your ethical ideals correctly. So I’m gonna go back to the, how do you know you have a correct combination because I had some flash of insight and this is connecting it to the ideal. So you can imagine that if you do something, right? The time that it lasts is dependent on its capacity to be valid in different contexts, right? So if you take a thing and you apply to it, a bunch of contexts, then you get something that’s fairly robust, right? And then, well, if you abstract from that, like what would be the thing that allowed you to universalize it across all contexts, then you get into an ideal, right? So that’s maybe a good way to think about it. It’s like, well, how long will this last? Well, like, is this thing able to be universalized? Like if it’s not able to be universalized, then you know that the local context is necessary for it to exist at all because it’s basically, this is where Peugeot goes with his parasitic stuff, right? Like it’s parasitic on the structure that allows it to exist. And because it’s parasitic, it’s gonna take a toll on the structure eventually and therefore the structure will not be able to sustain. Wow, that was great. Yeah, I like that. I like that little exploration. Yeah, that’s a good way to think about it. And in a mistake that we’re making in most cases is that we’re claiming that in order to be an ethic, it must be universal, right? And so we’re saying, no, no, no, no, this universal means that you’re ethical, right? And so that’s the sort of the flipping that Peugeot again talks about, John from Peugeot is so great. He talks about that flipping and his parasitic storytelling video, if you haven’t seen it, you can go watch that, it’s great. But this flipping happens. And then the flipping is important, right? Because what the flipping means is that you’re the one determining what the ethic is. You’re not testing it, like you said, across all the perspectives, right? You’re not seeing if it’s universal. You’re stating that it’s universal, right? So this is something like dogmatism, right? Where you’re treating it dogmatically. Oh, this is a universal, right? And what’s the universal? Oh, that climate is the most important thing, the highest value, that’s universal. And we’re all humans and we all live on the planet. We all submit to the climate to some extent, fair enough. It could be a universal, right? But is applying that universally working because it doesn’t work at the lower levels, right? The people who are harmed most by cleaner climate are poorer people. And so it doesn’t scale down. It scales real well if you’re at the top of the pyramid and it scales terribly as you move down the pyramid and just hurt more and more and more people. And you kind of saw this when the United States switched to burning corn, which is food by the way, in cars, rather than a chemical, which chemical harms the environment more than the corn does, maybe, maybe, maybe not, maybe not, but maybe. We starved 220 million people to do that. Just to clean up the environment a little with some cars that, and I would argue it doesn’t clean up the environment because actually what happened is gas mileage went down immediately. Cause it turns out that the corn stuff, the ethanol they’re burning is actually lowers gas mileage relative to the chemical they were using before, MTBF, I think it’s called. And you can’t use it in small engines. So in states where you can’t get the old gas, you actually destroy your lawnmowers and your other things a lot quicker. And even for cars that are set up for ethanol, they don’t last as long. And so you’ve actually created more junk on the planet by basically planned obsolescence through using what I would call toxic or bad gas, which is what I think we’re using in the US now with ethanol garbage. So these things aren’t clear. But you can see where trying to universalize something like climate who suffers. And in the immediate, interestingly, the immediate people who suffer from that are actually the people with used cars. The people who can afford new cars don’t suffer because they buy a new car every three years anyway. But the poor people do because it turns out that you put ethanol in an engine that’s not set up for it, destroys the engine real quick. So you’re not getting 300,000 miles out of your cars anymore, which may not be a big deal in Europe, but it’s like a really big deal in the United States where everyone drives. So you can’t universalize climate. It doesn’t scale down correctly to your point. It doesn’t, it causes problems. And so you can’t make that even a high value, right? You have to kind of temper that value with other values like value of human life and how many humans do we starve to get a happy planet, whatever that means, if you’re even doing that, which like I said, I don’t think you are. And so these things get very complex very quickly, which is why you need to rely on this higher stuff, which is ethics. And then the moral implementation can be faulty because it has to be faulty because we’re faulty humans and we don’t know the answers, right? We can’t suss out the answers to these ideals, to these ethics. So the thing that you’re talking about there is, okay, there’s a preexisting system and then we have a new system. And because of scaling, like we need to do like massive implementation else it’s not gonna be efficient. And then you have to overturn the old system and there’s gonna be a cost associated to overturning the old system. And like Peterson talks about this, but what is the car? Is the car the construction of suburbs, right? Like how do you look at these things? Like what are the fourth, fifth order effects of the fact that you took an action in the here and now that changed our relationship to a whole bunch of stuff. So this all points at a virtue called humility, right? Like maybe we should recognize that we don’t know what we, most of the things that are gonna happen because we just can’t predict that. And yeah, right. So there’s, how can we look at virtues, right? Like you could say it, see there’s like dimensions of your relationship to a thing, right? So there’s justice, which means that there needs to be, you need to be at a place on a line in your action. Like you gotta be at the right place. You can’t be at the wrong place. And then there’s the humility, right? Which is in relation to your agency. And you can start thinking of, okay, like there’s all of these things going on. And whenever I do a thing in the world, like I can’t do that calculation. So I need to have an intuitive sense of like, oh, like there’s all of these things that are going on. And like, maybe some of those are not important right now, but like this one is definitely the case. So I’m just gonna need to pay extra attention to that part. Yeah, yeah, I like the way you frame that. And it sort of points out this, when you don’t have ethics or an ethical way of navigation, you run into the problem of not being able to understand universalism correctly, right? Understand all of the different levels at which these things operate. One little thing, like change the gasoline in all the cars pretty quickly, because to your point, you have to, you don’t really have a choice. There’s all these immediate effects, but then there’s all these knock-on effects over time. Like, oh, well, used cars are gonna be more expensive and less available because cars aren’t gonna last as long. And all these other things, like gas mileage is gonna go down, not up. And that’s not good. And then all of these problems crop up because we’re not humble. We think we have a solution. Oh, the solution is cleaner gas and we’re gonna save some fish, maybe. But maybe you’ll kill more fish with crappier gas because there’s more fumes in the air. I don’t know. But yeah, there’s no place to submit to, to have that humility. There’s no space to say, oh, I’m an ethical agent in the world and therefore I’m going to make mistakes because I’m an agent in the world and my morals, my moral implementation is imperfect. And so I need a space where I’m doing my best and that’s good enough, right? Because perfection isn’t available to us as much as people like me would like to believe otherwise. Perfection’s not attainable. And we need that framework, that ethical framework. Say, oh, I’m an ethical person even when I fail. Or especially when you fail. Right? Like if things go right, it’s not important in some sense, right? Like, because you’re just riding the wave and you get the contrast when there’s a hiccup. Yeah, that’s a good point. Nassim Taleb talks about this, right? Like some number of the people who are, quote, successful or billionaires or whatever measure you want to use for success, you want to use for success. Some number of those people in any domain are only lucky. They’re not talented. They’re just lucky. And that’s hard to realize because maybe you did an act and it was the wrong thing and for the wrong aim, but it worked out well, right? And you get the impression that you’re, oh, look, I have ethics because one time one thing happened and the right outcome happened. But maybe that was just a coincidence and we don’t take that condition seriously when we’re interfacing with the world. So we talked about the ideal, right? And then there’s this sieve of ethics and then maybe we should talk a little bit about morality. So I think that’s a good point. So we get some frame, I think, like maybe ethics is the thing that creates the frame for you. And then you still can move around in the frame and you can react to changes in the moment. So where my mind goes is, that requires a level of mindfulness, right? Like you have to be aware, have an awareness in the moment of that you’re an actor in the world and that there’s a certain set of responsibilities related to your actions, right? Like those responsibilities are not only in relation to your goal, right? Like when we do things, like they might affect other people, even though we are not relating to those people directly. And maybe the first rule is take responsibility for what you do, right? Like even if you haven’t intended to do that, like it’s irrelevant, you were the source of it, like live up to it. You’re like the rider on the elephant, right? Like your elephant is gonna make a mess, like that’s gonna happen. But the only way that you can get some sort of control of that elephant is by you actually taking responsibility for what the elephant is doing and trying to change it. And then we have to have the realization, right? Like elephants need to learn, right? So we can’t do the, okay, now there’s a change thing, like that’s not how the world works. We need to find a structure that allows us to change our behavior. And now we get into the practices that we talked about in the videos. Religion, that’s not a religion. So yeah, like we need a way to constantly remind us of the things that we do. And then we need a way to facilitate ourselves in the moment to recognize that there’s a space for a different action and also the capacity to articulate that action as well. Yeah, I like that. I like what you want with that. Yeah, there’s a lot there in some sense. Yeah, we have to be able to take the appropriate amount of responsibility for the things that happen as a result of our existence. And then this is where we can give Sam Harris a little bit of credit, right? Yeah, there are some things you don’t have control over. Maybe one of them was having been born, although you can’t prove that. So maybe not, but we don’t have control over who, what our parents do to us while we’re growing up and what things are sort of pre-programmed, that first draft that Paul Van de Klay likes to talk about, that first draft that’s given to us. We don’t have a lot of control over the culture we grow up in, right? And, but we still have to take responsibility for our actions as a result of that. And most of this is about submission and ambiguity. Those are the things we have the most problem with is ambiguity as such and the idea of submission. If you wanna take the deterministic approach seriously, there is an element of determinism in your life. Absolutely, there is, there has to be, because you gotta start somewhere and you start with your birth, right? And you start with however you grew up. And maybe that was in foster homes, maybe it was with abusive parents, or maybe it was with perfectly good parents who didn’t teach you anything useful in the world, because that happens too, right? You’re the product of that to some extent, to an extent which you yourself can’t see by yourself. That’s scary. Oh, I can’t see where my biases are by myself very well. And some of them not at all, because it’s the water I swim in and I don’t have a choice. And that’s why you need other people, right? We outsource our sanity because we can only look out in some sense. We can’t really look in or when we look in, we can’t look in at everything we can’t look in well. We don’t know how our behavior is doing. And that’s why we signal and people signal back to us. And that’s where we need to have a framework to be able to take right responsibility. And taking right responsibility is an ethical question, right? And a moral implementation. And that is super important because otherwise you’re running around in the world causing damage that you don’t even understand. And people are gonna get upset at you about that and they’re gonna call you a hypocrite and they’ll be right. Now, I think the solution to hypocrisy is to say, nope, I made a choice, right? Hypocrisy is when you do it sort of without making that choice. You do it despite yourself or despite your wishes, but it’s not hypocrisy if you made the choice. You say, nope, I’m gonna violate my principle, this principle here on purpose because I think it’s the right thing to do for this reason. Now it’s not hypocrisy. It may still be wrong, but it’s not wrong because it’s hypocrisy. And I think that’s important. That’s taking right responsibility for your actions because there’s gonna be times when hypocrisy is inevitable. It’s just, you’re gonna cross over that line of one of your principles in order to hold up a higher principle, right? Or one of your values to hold up a higher value or a value that should be higher in the moment given some special set of circumstances. And you can say, oh, you should never kill a person all day long, but there are certainly conditions where you have to kill a person, right? Because you need to scale it out to, the death is gonna happen. Do you want the person to die who’s going to kill others or do you want to kill the person who’s going to kill others? Either way, there’s a death, right? The question is which death is better? And you can measure that. You can measure that. Not perfectly, because you can’t know the future, but you can certainly take responsibility for that and say, oh, I’m gonna cross the trick, do not kill, you know, ethical line and make a moral decision that this is better. And maybe it is. So, yeah, like, so you started talking about submission and I think there’s a two-way problem with submission, right? So there’s one way that people talk and they say, like, I am submitted to this thing in the world, right? Like whether it’s emotions, right? Like, oh, when I’m angry, my anger is making me do things or like the news media is making me do things or whatever, right? Like technology is making me, right? So there’s an element of submission there, right? Like it’s imposing upon me and I don’t have the capacity to transcend that. But that’s obviously complete nonsense because you can just not engage and that is a way to transcend it. So first step there would be the acknowledgement, okay? Like I’m in a relationship with my emotion or something in the external world and that relationship has certain demands upon me and I’m prepared to pay whatever, right? Like in order to relieve the feeling of anger, I’m allowed to curse, whatever, right? Like I ideally wouldn’t curse, but like maybe that’s necessary for me in order to get a better relationship with that anger. So that’s one aspect. And then the other aspect is, well, like if you’re not submitting to technology, right? Like you’re submitting to having not technology, right? So you’re still relating to a constraint in the world only knows one of your choice. And like, you’re gonna have to do that. Like you’re gonna have to relate to constraints and you can either have a conscious relationship where you pick the constraint or you get the constraint imposed upon you. So that is really important and I think I lost the other aspect. No, I like where you went there. There’s this dual aspect to submission because you do pick what you submit to and you do act as if you’re submitted. And so you can say things like, and this was very much a discussion on Bridges of Meaning Discord just before we jumped under this call. They were saying, oh, cities cause all these bad things. It’s like, no, it’s the aim of the people in the cities that cause all the bad things. And then you can make the argument that, oh, all the people with similar aims are gonna leave the cities and go somewhere else. Yeah, probably. But that’s not a function of city or not city. That’s a function of the aim of the people. So they don’t wanna be submitted to the cities so they just leave. And they make other trade-offs for that potentially but it’s cause it’s trade-offs all the way down. So yeah, the other thing is what I wanted to talk about is responsibility because you went in there as well. So there’s a couple of things, right? We know that there’s things going on, like we act things out and we didn’t choose them, right? But it’s still us as a system that is manifesting these things, right? And then you can have a couple of relationships. You can have a relationship of denial, right? Like that wasn’t me. Like I’m not the person that does these things because my ethics say that I’m not that person and I wouldn’t do anything that conflicts with my ethics, obviously. Or you can have a relationship of justification, right? Like, oh yeah, like I really felt that I needed to eat that chocolate cake. So I just did it. But like how’s that gonna end up when you’re like, oh, I really feel like I wanna kill that person, right? Like, are you gonna do that as well? So like that is not an option that’s available to you, right? And the way that you can resolve it is, well, in the moment, right? It’s like, I know the chocolate cake is bad, like it’s not quite sad, but I’m still gonna do it because if I don’t do it, then I have all of these other problems to deal with, which is a whole greater mess for me. So like that’s enough justification for me right now. And obviously you wanna do that in a framework where you know that you’re gonna change your relationship with that cake eventually so that you can get out of that conundrum because else you’re just enabling your addiction. Yeah, yeah, I like that. Yeah, there’s always this element of submission and choice in that submission. And this goes back to the earlier talk that we had on free will versus agency as well. And if you haven’t seen that, that’s a great talk. There is an element of choice with the submission. It’s not that you can choose not to be submitted and you don’t, but it’s also not that you can choose any submission that you want, right? So that’s the fundamental issue right there. Is that there’s all this ambiguity sitting in the middle of these issues around ethics and morality and around what I would call free choice, right? Agency, free will, responsibility. There’s a lot of ambiguity and we have to stay true to something, right? To principles, hopefully, and act them out even when they behave badly for us, even when the outcome is not good for us because it’s not about, like, and I probably should have mentioned this upfront, the fundamental problem with ethics and talking about ethics and other people have rejected this thesis. But my thesis is that ethics doesn’t exist as a concept without other people. And so ethics has at once very little to do with you and everything to do with you at the same time because if you were the only thing on the planet, ethics isn’t an issue. Ethics is the thing that’s resolving or the method of resolving the landscape that’s created by interactions of multiple beings, right? And so it gets most complicated when there’s more than one human, right? Because there’s an ethic that you have in relation to nature, there’s an ethic that you have in relation to other creatures, and then there’s a whole expansive set of ethical concerns when you’re in relation to other people because all of the issues that I just mentioned happen for each person in addition. And so that ethical landscape gets combinatorially explosive very quickly. That’s why we need the navigation tools for ethics so dearly. Well, yeah, I’m gonna have to disappoint you, but there’s one person that you cannot escape and that’s yourself and yourself into the future, right? Because that’s also a different person than you with different needs. So there’s also some complexity that gets stacked from just projecting in relation to the future. So yeah, right? Like I think we’re at the point, it’s like, okay, so great, all this ethical stuff, but like ethical system, like how do we get an ethical system? And it’s like, well, you don’t know, right? Like we talked about, you don’t know yourself, but you also don’t know the world. So like, how are you gonna make your own ethical systems? Like that is just not viable, right? And so yeah, you’re gonna have to rely on something external to at least guide you in that process. But probably it’s better to get something to actually inform you instead. And you have to remember, right? Like when you get informed, like you don’t lose agency, you’re there all the way, you can make adjustments in the moment and all that stuff, right? So making a commitment to a system is in some sense binding, but it’s not removing you from the equation. Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah, I like that idea that yeah, you can’t escape yourself. And that’s why ethics is all about you because you can’t escape yourself. And you can’t escape the fact, again, give Sam Harris’s do as much as I dislike doing that. You can’t escape the fact that you’re on this planet with nature and other people and animals. Like you can’t escape any of that. And you can’t escape the fact of your future self to your excellent point. Yeah, you can’t escape any of that. And so what does that mean? Well, that means that you’re kind of stuck, right? You’re kind of stuck dealing with ethics. And if you don’t, I mean, it’ll happen, right? Because you are bumping up against other people just by breathing and polluting the water by drinking it. Once you drink water, you’ve polluted it. It comes back out again, eventually, all right? It’s just not clean anymore. And so all these things, right? It just goes on and on and on. Like you have an impact on the world, whether you like it or not. And the world has an impact on you to your point about informing, but you don’t have to stay stuck. And yeah, when you get informed by something, a religious belief and ideology, whatever it is, just information that’s coming into you, it changes you. And it constrains you, or it can constrain you, but you also have the capacity to transcend it. And that’s why transcendence is important, right? It’s an important theme for John Vervicki, and it’s an important theme for a lot of people talking about drug use. It’s an important theme for people in general, right? Yeah, yeah. And they’re right about that, but then you get into the question of transformation. Well, if you’re gonna transform without having an ethic that you understand or that you believe in, or that even if it’s outsourced, it doesn’t have to be your own, right? Stop with the individualism, it’s a little too much. If you have an ethic that you can help to embody or grasp onto or whatever, then transformation is much safer, right? Because you can have a direction for your transformation. You can have a measure, a contrasting for your transformation to figure out if it’s good or bad. And I really liked John’s framework when he talks about Fromm, he steals from Fromm with the having mode versus being mode. But when you’re talking about transcendence, I think that you’re talking about the becoming mode. That’s a different mode. And different things are happening because you have to break free of the constraints of your being mode, because being mode is a constraint. And when you do that, you have to have some way to do that, right? You have to have some way to do that. And some way to know that when you’re done, it’s correct or it’s better at least. And that’s very much about having a community around you, having the ability, right? Having right relationships with the things around you, intimate relationships that can support you while you have no support. Because while you’re breaking through, while you’re stopping your old being mode and recreating it, you’re not standing anywhere, right? You’re trying to stand on the rubble that you’ve just created by tearing down the systems that were constraining you so that you have a different set of affordances and different constraints. That the number of constraints probably stays the same and the type and level of constraint probably stay the same, but you’re trading them off. You’re trading off different ones. And yeah, maybe the number and type don’t stay the same, but maybe they do like they could, it wouldn’t matter. Well, yeah, sorry. Affordances is what matters. Yeah, well, like, yes. So there’s a set of affordances that’s really important, right? So that those affordances are in relation to your agency and the potential manifestation that you can have. And if you increase the set of affordances that increases your capacity to relate to the world. But I think part of the transcendence is also the ability to see, right? So you can imagine where like, oh, you have this complex world and you’re relating to five variables and now you add the six variable. And then you have to deal with this new variable, but that variable is also in relationship to all the other variables, right? So there’s this whole thing going through. And like, well, like this is maybe manageable, but like if you’re at 30 variables and you’re at the 30 first, like then we’re like, yeah, I can’t hold that in my mind. Like that’s too big. And you can imagine, right? Like that, especially if you don’t have right relationship to this new variable, that might be a burden on the public. Right? Like when you see a thing in the world and you’re like, oh my God, like I have to do something with it or like it’s bordering me. Like I see people do a bunch of things all the time. And like that actually borders me. Like, why are you doing this? Like, so to see these things is in some sense liberating because it allows you to transcend it for yourself. But in another sense, it’s imposition because now that’s part of your reality and you’re gonna have to deal with that. Right, right. Yeah, I like what you’re pointing out here. There’s, you know, we’re back at combinatorial explosion. Right, John’s combinatorial explosion is right there. It suddenly has too many variables because it’s not adding one variable. Every variable interacts with every other variable. So you’re adding, you know, factorial and connections or sorry, and factorial connections. And that’s combinatorial explosion. That’s what it is. It’s all about that, you know, that logarithmic or that exponential or that factorial relationship that happens sometimes combinations of those that happens as you start adding variables. And then, so maybe the difference between the profound experience, and I’ve talked about this before a couple of times. I don’t know if it’s on video. It might be in the written R videos. The difference between the profound experience and the transformative experience is what is the participatory change in a material world. Right, and so the profound experience happens strictly in your imaginal world. So you drop some acid and you have, you know, oh, you see God and this happens all the time. Like I know many people that have gone, many people that have gone through this, right? But you know what? They talk about it and it’s, oh yeah, definitely. No, there’s more out there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They don’t pick up the Bible. They don’t start going to church. And they’re the same jerk they were yesterday. Like, wait a minute. You say you had this profound experience, but you’re not participating in the world any differently. It’s like, what’s that? You didn’t transform. That’s what happened. Your imagination got upgraded. You got the imaginal upgrade. You’ve got the affordances are there. You have the extra variables, but you’re refusing to use them. You’re not participating with them. And it’s that lack of participation that hinders transformation. And that’s what’s causing all the, so, you know, I love John, but John talks about transformation. He doesn’t talk about all the issues with transformation. Is it a good transformation? How long does it last? And define it, right? Cause I think I’ve got a pretty good definition. You know, if you’re not participating, it’s not a transformation. It’s just a profound experience. And you’re going to have those all day long in your imagination without drugs. So why are you taking the drugs? What is it exactly that you’re giving yourself? And drugs could be alcohol. That’s a drug too. Maybe the alcohol gives you these profound insights because alcoholics, if you hang out with them, and I’ve unfortunately hang out with many alcoholic, they have profound insights all the time. But, you know, they don’t remember them in many cases. And when they do remember them, they go, oh, yeah, but it’s too hard, right? And they don’t act any differently. They don’t participate differently as the result of the experience. So even the basis of drugs can give us profound experiences very easily, but we’re not carrying them forward, right? And that’s the problem. Well, why? And I think the why is cause we don’t have an intimate connection that will afford us a space for transformation. It can’t be just one other person. And I’m not saying one other person isn’t required, but it can’t be only one. But you need a community. You need a larger structure that can support you and contrast your ethics with your transformation with their ethics. Yeah, I’m gonna hold that last thing because I didn’t fully fold that into my thinking. So I call two things. So one is there’s a change happening and what happens is you get an imaginal structure that’s not connected to reality, right? So we talked about this before, right? Like, okay, so like God is in everything, right? Okay, whatever, right? Like I have seen God in everything or whatever. Like, let’s just say that happened. And then, okay, like what does that mean? Right? Like I can make the category, I’ve seen God in everything and I can make another category. I’m an individual who has seen God in everything and I can go and role play that individual in the world. Right? Like that’s all possible. But like, what does it mean for me drinking a cup that I’ve had that experience, right? Like that’s not obvious. And like, so that’s one part. And then the other part is, well, okay. Like I’ve seen how I can be an asshole. Like sometimes like I have this capacity to be a complete asshole and I shouldn’t be that asshole. But yeah, now I need to change him. Yeah. That sounds like a whole lot of work. Yeah. So I’m gonna pretend that I’m doing that work or I’m just not gonna do it because it’s too much or I don’t see the way to do it. Right? Like that’s also. And it’s hard for you to know when you’re being an asshole. Right? That’s the other problem is that you know it’s true but you don’t know where that line is. You don’t know when you’ll cross that line because it could be you being an asshole or it could be the other person being a jerk. Or maybe they’re the asshole. And, or maybe they evoke the asshole because we had somebody try that the other day. Deliberately, explicitly, right? Tried to engender a specific, probably angry emotional response to prove a point. And now it doesn’t work on me for lots of reasons other than just my extreme level of disagreeability. But it was amazing to me. Like, so you actually wanted to invoke anger. And like, first of all, let me be clear. Nobody wants to see me actually angry. No one, almost no one’s ever seen me actually angry. You don’t wanna see me angry. It’s like the Hulk. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry, right? I create wreckage. Right? You know, I create real psychological wreckage in people very easily when I’m actually angry. Which is why I try to never be angry anymore. Like, this is bad. The people around me will just be wrecked on the shores. It’s not good. So, I mean, he wouldn’t have succeeded in making me angry by what he was doing, but he was trying to, which is very interesting, right? So it’s like, well, who, you know, and all of his accusations, right? Where you guys are doing this and you guys are doing that. And we were like, I don’t think so. Maybe, but I don’t think so. Like, can you give me an example? And the examples weren’t forthcoming, right? The examples were not forthcoming because I think he was projecting. He was the one who was being a jerk and being a real asshole. And we weren’t for once, maybe for the first time ever. Who knows? But because, yeah, we’re all capable and we don’t wanna take that responsibility. We don’t wanna be culpable for our actions, right? Because it’s hard. And if we’re not in a community, if we don’t have that level of intimacy that allows us you know, to be forgiven, to have the grace extended to us and we haven’t learned to extend grace to ourselves, then maybe we run into problems. And those problems are roughly speaking, an inability to embody the ethics, which we claim. And the problem with that is that if you do that, you’re corrupting yourself, right? This is Peterson’s, do not lie, right? Or always tell the truth or at least do not lie. It’s like, yeah, it’s very important. And it’s transformed, that one piece of advice is transformative, right? Many of what we know people like Sally Jo adopted that whole life change and then a miracle. And I mean, like, I don’t know, man, like house of your dreams, right? Like that’s pretty weird. And it’s miraculous. And why? Because the affordance of the world opened up to you as a result of your honest approach to the world and to the people in it. Right, so that we can go about lying. There’s a couple of ways that you can lie, right? Like, so we talked about a bunch of the murder where you’re not taking correct responsibility for your actions. But I also do think that you can lie in half-assetness. And like there’s a couple of ways of being half-assed, like there’s to actually being half-assed, but there’s also like paying attention to half the side of the problem, right? Like, for example, it doesn’t matter if I lie to myself, because I’m me and I relate to me, but it matters if I lie to people, right? And then you’re just half-assing this principle where, no, no, no, no, the reason that you don’t lie is not because lying is bad, although lying is bad, no, it’s the corruption, right? Like when you start lying, you start disconnecting from what’s real, what’s actually there. And you’re creating this buffered zone where there’s this ambiguity that just builds up. And at a certain point, you’re just unsure of where you are anymore, right? Like how do you know whether the thing that you did was really good motivated when you lost connection to the reason that you’re doing things because you’re lying to yourself. Oh yeah, I like that, I like that. And this goes back, I think, to intimacy, right? If you don’t have intimate connections that you, right, intimate connections or deep connections that you can trust, if you don’t have those with other people, then you have no way of orienting in your honesty. So you can’t be an honest actor in some sense. I mean, maybe not entirely, but there’s a risk that you won’t be able to be honest with yourself and about yourself, right? Because you have no relationship to rest upon, to test your ethics with. You have no relationships, deep relationships, that can handle you making a huge mistake, right? And still being able to extend your grace, either because you built it up from actions you’ve embodied in the past or for other reasons. And I think that’s very much to the point. Like that’s where things get real. I wanna flip that one as well, right? Like if you don’t have an intimate relationship, you don’t have something to lose, right? And then there’s this, well, like, what am I doing it for element, right? Like there’s no, yeah, that’s probably the grounding, right? Like there’s a thing like, oh yeah, like there’s real consequences to my actions. And like, if you have this loose transactional relationship thing, then you can just replace the thing that you have with the other thing, because, well, there isn’t any difference, right? Like the functional difference, it’s like literally doesn’t exist because you haven’t created it. Wow, that’s excellent. Yeah, that goes back to Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game, great book, right? These people without skin in the game can afford to make bad decisions and really bad decisions because they’re transactional. I like the way you put that. They’re totally transactional. And so they can just literally divorce themselves from the results of their actions and that makes them dangerous, not because they’re malicious, right? But because they have nothing to lose and they’re not gonna be affected by the result of their decision. And, you know, as Taleb goes into this in that book in Skin in the Game, he talks about, you know, well, look, at the end of the day, the Romans used to make the engineers sleep under the bridge with their families. And then if the bridge falls down, they’re gonna be like, well, you know, right? And so they have an incentive. They have a real incentive and maybe that’s an extreme incentive, but maybe not. Maybe that’s a reason. Well, yeah, and decimation. We talked about it the other day, right? Like, well, if one in 10 is gonna be held responsible, like you’re gonna keep the other nine in line and they’re gonna keep you in line because their lives depend on it, literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that element of risk. It’s not everybody. It doesn’t have to be everybody. And that’s what we should learn from decimation, from the process of decimation. If you’re not familiar with it, you should look it up. It’s very interesting. But that’s what we should learn from it is it doesn’t have to be everyone, guys. Things can work without being universal. Things can work really well when they’re not universal. And that’s a really good lesson. Like, you don’t have to go all the way. You don’t have to be perfect. There is a level of ambiguity past which things still happen, right? And without needing to go any further. And that’s great. Too much ambiguity, you’re on the wrong side of that line and that line moves. And I think that’s the other problem with ethics is that people tend to think of ethics as a system. Whereas I tend to think of ethics as a landscape and ever changing landscape. And so, again, to give Sam Harris’s due, it’s not a moral landscape, Sam. It’s an ethical landscape. Morality is not a landscape. Morality is the result of the navigation of the ethical landscape. That’s a much better way to think about it. It’s a little bit more dangerous because where are you getting your ideals from? Fair enough, that’s a problem. But I don’t think it’s a big problem. We have solutions to that. They’re roughly speaking religion. Or what we would call religion that the ancients didn’t have this conception. That was just life and it was gonna happen. You didn’t have to label the things that were gonna happen because they were givens. And that’s the important part is that if ethics is an ever changing landscape, then you need to adjust your values based on your virtues and make all the trade-offs from the present to the future, right? And with other people and with nature and with animals, right? And with your own internal relationship to you, right? Because there’s the ego and the self minimally, right? It is an unconscious component. There’s a shadow component there. All of those things have to be taken into account. And so I would say there’s no perfect answer to that, which is why it’s a landscape and why it changes because with time, you change, right? So the answer of whether or not I take a particular risk to help somebody changes when you have a family to take care of as opposed to when you’re an individual by yourself with no other attachments or few other attachments. It’s the nature of those attachments that changes you. Right, so I was thinking about this destination thing again. It was like, why didn’t they pick one in a hundred, right? Because I don’t think that would have worked. I don’t think that’s close enough to you to have that impact, right? Not someone you know. Right, yeah, I don’t think your social circle is- You’re running up against Dunbar’s number, right? Exactly. So you can look at in your life as well as like, okay, so I have a bunch of rituals, right? And the purpose of these rituals is to make these things real to you, right? Like to make it close, right? So you can imagine that you have a relationship to a ritual, which is one in a hundred instead of one in 10. And then it’s not fulfilling the right role. Like I’m connecting this to gratitude, right? Like having right appreciation for the things, right? Like placing them, right? I’m going to justice, I guess, right? Placing them in right relationship to other things in our lives. And yeah, like that’s a thing that we need to put work in. Like that’s not automatic. To vague a direction about the salience landscape, right? Like things have a place in our salience landscape when we look at the world and the things that we take for granted, they get discounted in our salience landscape because they’re stable, right? Like they’re relatively invariant patterns that we can choose to ignore because ignoring them doesn’t affect us in the moment, right? And then because entropy, like we need to revivify these things for ourselves so that we can maintain a relationship with them as opposed to let them wither in the noise of sight. Oh yeah, I like that. I like that. And then yeah, the real problem is there’s still this constant tension between the present and the future, right? Because some of the things we do in the present, like look, you can make the decision to drink your life away. People do that, alcoholics, right? Or shoot up the opiates or snort the cocaine or whatever, right? But you’re sacrificing the present for, you know, or the future and the present actually, right? For the experience. And like sometimes that’s appropriate, but if it’s too strong an experience or it’s too painful or you know, you get a hangover or, you know, and people don’t realize, like a lot of drunks don’t realize all drunks are black-oat trunks. And the black-oat part, they don’t know. The number of drunks that have said, I didn’t know I told you that, to me is amazing. It’s just amazing. It’s like, and the thing is they say that and it doesn’t dawn on them that that means that you’re doing and saying things when you’re drunk that you have no conscious recollection of. Don’t you think that’s bad? And they can’t make the leap, right? And it’s the same with drugs. People do things on drugs that they wouldn’t do otherwise and that’s why they take them, including alcohol. But those are violations of your ethics in some sense. You’re just violating your own ethical framework with an excuse and that excuse is that external thing. You know, and I’m not saying you should never do that. I’m just saying that, are you sure you understand that that’s what you’re doing when you’re taking the drugs or drinking the beer or whatever it is, right? Because maybe that’s, you know, maybe that’s not, that’s not actually what’s going on, right? What’s actually going on is you’re possessed by your own desires in the moment to the detriment of your future. And like, look, I mean, that’s your personal decision. I’m not gonna make a call on that. I’m just pointing out that, you know, maybe you wanna pay attention to that because otherwise, and I’ve made this argument many times in many places, you can’t be an ethical actor. Like if you’re under the influence of an addiction, you can’t act ethically. I don’t mean ever, right? But ultimately you can’t act ethically. Like people who drink lie about their drinking. The number of drunks I know who have told me, oh, I’m a social drinker. I only drink with other people. And within an hour or so of talking to them, tell me about the last time they drank alone is amazing. It’s amazing. It stuns me every time it happens because I’m just like, how is it possible I live in this world? They all do it, as near as I can tell, all the ones I’ve met, they all say they only drink socially. None of them only drink socially. They drink alone for a couple of reasons. One is isolation to get rid of their trauma, basically. They’re trying to process trauma. It’s a very bad tactic. It doesn’t work, by the way. They’re trying to process their trauma. But the other one is they’re trying to force themselves to do something they wouldn’t normally do. So they’ll be the only person drinking, and then things happen. And that happens all the time. Or they’ll be the most drunk person when everybody else is drinking. Well, they’re doing that because they want an outcome that they don’t wanna take responsibility for. And they look back and they blame the alcohol if something goes wrong. It’s a way to take a chance without taking a responsibility. And all of these are tied up in your ethical landscape. So I would argue that people who are addicts, who are under the influence of these things, whether they think they’re addicted or not, it’s not really relevant. If you’re under the influence of it, it’s taking you over, it’s possessing you. They can’t be ethical actors. There’s certain ethical things they can’t do. They can’t be good people. They can try to do good things, and that’s good. Always do good things, even if you’re addicted or whatever. Do as many good things as you can. But ultimately, there’s a bunch of things you don’t have access to. You’ve cut off your affordance, your ability to interact with goodness because of this addiction. So that brings up a couple of things in me. When you’re drinking, for example, like you’re in an altered state. So first of all, I would argue that you should treat that as sacred. Sacred means set apart. So you’re making it a special occasion. That means that there’s intentionality around it. There’s a ritualistic structure that informs the way that you’re acting, or at least you’re held within a social structure in a specific way or whatever. Like that affords the, well, it’s a transformative experience in some sense. Because you’re literally stepping out of your perspective and you’re adopting a new perspective. And that new perspective has the potential for transformation, right? Like you say, well, I dare to like to talk to that girl, for example, right? Like that can lead to a physical transformation where you change your relationship with them. And like at that point, you don’t need the alcohol anymore because there’s a literal transformation that happened. But you can also look at it as an internal transformation, where like, oh, like Mark talked about the trauma that people try to deal with. Well, like, okay, like maybe I dare to relive more of my memory, right? Or whatever, right? That might be true. And the fact that you have that new capacity is only valuable in so far as you can translate it back into your everyday life, right? Like if it’s just a thing that’s being held in the drunken state. And for example, when you’re undrunk, you’re looking at your relationship to the thing and the trauma is still so intense that you can relate to your new relationship, for example, then that remains inaccessible, right? So that’s a couple of ways of, like this doesn’t have to relate to intoxication as well. You can make the same case for meditation or yoga or prayer or whatever. Right, right. And I think that gets into spiritual bypassing, right? Which is just rampant with spiritual bypassing, whether it’s people who left the church or people who are using meditation as an excuse to say, well, I meditate, so I must be okay. Or if it’s people who are engaged in a deliberate attempt to, we’ll say, pretend as though they’re moral when they’re not, right? Or I listen to Sam Harris and I’m a humanist, right? Okay, so you’re a humanist. And when Sam Harris or Dan Dennett or any of those guys says something like, oh, well, those other people, they’re stupid because they’re following religion and you laugh, you’re not a humanist. You’re a bad person. Just to let you know, you’re just not a good person. If your humanism doesn’t include everybody, it’s a failure as humanism. It’s definitionally self-destructive. And so that’s where we get into this bypassing idea. And we very much use drugs and alcohol in particular to bypass a bunch of stuff within ourselves spiritually. And maybe that’s all drug use and drug addiction is, is spiritual bypass. That’s an interesting idea. Because you don’t wanna deal with the complexity and the difficulty of, I don’t have full control over myself. I have the most control over myself, but I don’t have full control over myself. And so how do I embody the ideals that I wanna embody that I need in order to take action in the world? Because if you’re not moving towards an ideal, you’re probably not just not acting in the world. You’re probably sitting at home playing video games, although then you’re doing something. You’re embodying the ideal of the perfect video gamer. Yeah, but I’d argue, right? Like when that behavior is taking the form of addiction, right? Like I do think that necessitate the bypassing element. Right? Like the addiction is the thing, right? Like it’s the escape from something else, right? Like that’s the reason that there’s a necessity in the behavior. Like if the escape isn’t there, then why would there be a necessity in the game, right? Like then you could just put the game down and say, well, today I’m not gonna play the game. Right? Like that wouldn’t be a problem. Like the reason that it is a problem is because it’s covering up something else and you’re using it as a way to avoid it. I’m like, I was just thinking about, well, like that’s in some sense what, what I don’t wanna use the word entertainment, but relaxation is, right? Relaxation is us turning away from the imposition of the world in some sense. And maybe in order to, to gain a new relationship to the world so that we can be engaged in a more positive manner. Thank you, Brian. Yeah. Yeah, relaxation is contrast, right? It’s contrast from something. And I like what you did there. That was very good. Yeah, I think that that’s important is relaxation is contrast and it is trying to get that contrast. I mean, a lot of addiction is trying to get contrast, but also trying to override sort of the angels of your better nature will say, like there’s no circumstances that I’ve ever found where people are actually actively sort of genuinely and authentically trying to make themselves better by taking substances. They seem to be trying to manipulate themselves around something to spiritually bypass by default. And maybe there is a way in which those encounters are always spiritual bypass. And we need an ethical system so that we can understand that we’re not living up to the ideals that we hold true, right? So we need to know what those ideals are. So that’s where the ethics comes in. That’s why it’s important that it’s different from morality. And then that’s where you get into sort of trouble, right? Is you say, okay, well, I want to embody my ethical systems, right? But, you know, there’s alcohol, so I don’t really have to. So it’s always bypassing. But if you don’t have those systems to begin with, if they weren’t well developed or you didn’t outsource them to a religion or something, then the problem you run into is that you’re always being possessed without realizing it. You can’t realize your possession. You can’t realize you’re addicted to something unless you have an ideal that points out that you’re addicted because ideals don’t say never relax and ideals don’t say never take any kind of drug ever, right? They don’t say things like that. But they do say things like right relationship, right? They point to the right relationship you need to have with the things. And our heavy focus nowadays on things over relationships is part of the problem. That’s why I’m excited about Jonathan Pigeot and the symbolic world and what he’s doing with that, right? Because he’s pointing out, no, no, no, the relationships are more important than the objects. And as much as science has to deal with objects and not relationships, I know complexity science. I know better than most people. I’ve read most of the material. I get it, but you can’t science that stuff. It’s not gonna work and it doesn’t work. And it’s new, like science is very much focused still on objects and physicality and materiality. And the relationships of those objects are not really well considered within science because changing relationships is antithetical to the scientific method. Scientific method says, as few free variables as possible, please, get them down to one and just change the one variable if you can. Well, now you’ve devalued all of the other relationships in order to buy the science. That’s the cost of science is devaluing all the other relationships, devaluing the connectedness. And connectedness is John’s short form definition for religio, right? But science literally devalues connectedness and tries to reduce it to a single connection to understand that one connection as a way of understanding the whole. And that’s where its limitations lie is that can work for a tiny number of things in the world that are only material. Fair enough, but that means that science can’t have anything outside of that. So can’t have most of the material world because everything is connected and it can’t have anything outside of the material world, including our imaginal realm. Like you can’t science your way to imagination. You can talk about where the imagination is in the brain, although I think that’s foolish, or what it is in the brain or how it works. Those are all valid realms of science, but you can’t explain it away and you can’t use science to manipulate imagination. Maybe you can influence it. Maybe you have some control, but you can’t science your imagination. It’s not gonna work. And that’s why ethics drives science. By the way, you shouldn’t. It’s also because you shouldn’t. Yeah, like I can’t control my imagination. I’ve been trying sitting on a pillow, but no. Yeah. That’s not on the menu. At least not yet. So I think one thing that stood out to me is the concept of original sin is really, really important. We’re creatures that are gonna make mistakes and we’re gonna fail to live up to stuff. And that’s necessary. I think that’s also the process of growth. Like we talked a bunch about getting new perspectives on things. When you fail, that is a new perspective because you know you don’t have the right perspective. So that’s one thing. But you also see the thing that’s supposed to be working from a way where it’s not working. And it gives you more information about how it’s working. So yeah, so this concept of original sin, which is highly resisted by people I know. And I think a lot of people, like I think if we’re talking about the big issues in religion to accept, I’m gonna say that second to God probably. I think people have easier time with the resurrection, for example, than with original sin in some sense. Because the resurrection doesn’t directly have consequences for them. That’s just something abstract in the past. But like original sin claims something about the nature of their being. Oh, I like that. Yeah, and so there’s two issues that that brought up for me, right? So when you’re talking about, I think you’re absolutely right in what you said. Like original sin’s probably the only other thing that’s harder to admit to from the atheist perspective is God and the resurrection. So you can imagine it, right? There’s the hierarchy, it pops up everywhere, right? Because hierarchy is older than trees, to quote Jordan Peterson. The resurrection has nothing to do with you. It may have implications to you if it were real, but it really doesn’t involve you. Original sin involves you entirely. Like that’s just, that’s you, you, right? Like that’s everything. But the problem with God is that you have to go through those other two things to get the right relationship there. And in order to have a transcendent, you have to believe in your own imperfection. Otherwise there’s no reason to transcend. And so you can have a profound experience and not transcend because you’re arrogant. Because you think, oh, this is nothing for me to get better at. And hey, you copped to it. I’m not gonna. Ha ha ha. But this is the problem of being smart, right? Like when you’re smart, you’re creating this world for yourself. And you’re like, well, like you mumbled out there, like you can’t articulate the inconsistency in my world. So I’m right, right? And the problem with that is like, like maybe you are right, right? Maybe you’re at the wrong starting point, right? And like who’s gonna notice it and then also have the capacity to tell you why you do have the wrong starting point. Like I can do that now. I would have liked to figure that out like 14 years ago. That would be great. Right, that goes back to Alistair’s insanity and community and intimacy, having those connections. But also the other thing I was gonna say about Original Sin is, right, aside from the transcend issue, the move that people seem to be making is, well, there are no ideals. I’m not after ideals and therefore it’s okay, right? Then I can’t sin because I’m not comparing myself to anything, right? And it’s the reason why Original Sin’s a problem is because of judgment. I have to judge myself negatively to recognize, to acknowledge Original Sin. And the reason why God’s problematic is because now you have, what for some people is an embodied way of understanding the judge as such. And that’s the same problem with the resurrection. It’s like, well, if this guy can rise from the dead, why can’t I, even though I know I probably can’t? It’s like, oh, right, so there’s more judgment there. But it is detached, but the judgment of God is not detached, right? That’s very directed at you in some sense, not just you, but it is very directed at you. And that’s why people have so much trouble with it. And so the Christians are out there fighting the battle of the resurrection, not realizing, first, you’re fighting from the perspective of God exists and Original Sin, and therefore we need the resurrection. Fair enough, that’s true. But the other people aren’t in that line, right? They’re coming at it this way. And so you’re not talking to them. You don’t have a way to talk to them in some sense. They’re too far away from you. They’re not with your core assumptions. And when you make your core assumptions, as though they’re axiomatic and obvious, which I agree they are, that’s a different problem, that you can’t, they can’t hear that. They can’t listen to that. They can’t engage with that because they’ve constructed something that relies on that not being true. Because the minute you don’t have a judge, the minute you’re not going towards an ideal, now Original Sin vanishes instantly. It’s gone. It’s no longer a problem. You don’t have to worry about it. It’s way too big. But the problem is you can’t take action in the world without having an ideal. So that means you have one. And if you don’t know what it is, it has possessed you. Well, they kind of fixed that one as well because there’s a middle position there and that’s the secret, sacred cell, right? So there isn’t an ideal, like there’s your ideal and it’s conforming to you because it’s a product of you and your relationship with the world. So that, I just realized that that’s like a fix for that, right, like where there’s this maintaining a personal autonomy in self-expression, even though we’re like, where’s that sacred cell coming from? Like did I just make that statue while I was sleeping and then I woke up and I like, oh yeah, that, yeah, like anyway, the sleeping me is not me. I’m not taking responsibility. Right, well, and also, it doesn’t solve the problem, right? It makes the problem worse, right? So what happens is you’ve got this ideal inside yourself called the secret, sacred cell and then you try to embody it. And then, Paul went over that and in his critique video of Grimm’s critique video of his talk, I love that, so confusing. Yeah, it’s all inception. It’s going in inception land in YouTube now with VanderKlai. VanderKlai has entered inception, but you know- Inception. Well, that too. But it’s interesting because what it points to, and then Grimm of course embodies this perfectly in my opinion, I love Grimm, he’s great. You should watch all of Grimm’s videos. He’s got a wonderful YouTube channel, it’s great. He has this secret, sacred cell, we all do, right? To Paul’s point. And then we’re trying to manifest that in the world, but it’s judging us when we fail because we’re gonna fail, right? And then we don’t realize that, we’re suppressing all this in our subconscious. And then the problem with that becomes, oh, well, we’re suppressing all this in our subconscious and now what? Well, now it’s popping back up. We know we’re failing. So what’s causing us to fail? Well, obviously it’s capitalism or it’s cities or it’s the political system or it’s- You, you didn’t. This other person. It’s not me, I’m not failing. I’m my secret, sacred self and that’s an ideal and that’s perfect. So it must be capitalism is the reason why I’m not meeting with the success that my secret, sacred self could obviously obtain if it were unconstrained in the world, right? And so it all pops back up again. And now you’re submitting, but you’re submitting to capitalism or your conception of capitalism, not actual capitalism. You’re submitting to the city or the society that you live in or the politics that’s in charge in the time or the fact of other people. Social media. Social media, right. Amazon. Conception. Right, right, right, right. But Amazon, right? Remember the whole thing with Amazon? I grabbed my LX and I throw it rather dramatically. So I’m not dramatic. Yeah, you know, Bezos has no power over me. I just don’t engage, problem solved. Not that I don’t buy from Amazon, but- And I don’t know what relationship these other people have with Amazon, but Amazon is submitting to me. It’s literally a submission machine to your will. You click. You get to tell it what to do and it does it. Yeah, it’s so backwards, but it’s backwards because you’re right. They think they’ve solved the problem with secret, sacred self or whatever mechanism by not having an external ideal. They’ve internalized the ideal, but they can’t live up to the internal ideal either. And so the things that are causing them not to do that must be external, fair enough. But now you’ve created a bigger problem because you have no control over the climate. You have no control over capitalism. You have no control over the business you work for. You have no control over the jobs available. You have no control over Amazon. You have no control over these things. So once they’re controlling you- But we have politics work. Huh? We have politics to do that. Right, right, right, right. Well, they try to exert control over politics and then that doesn’t work because politicians will tell you anything. And once they have your vote, they’ll do whatever they want. And that won’t be what they said they would do. And it won’t be what you want. And even if they did what you wanted, what you wanted won’t have the result you think it has. And it gets humility all the way down for you, buddy. And that’s why I think Vervik was very wise in this, right? He did the first Q&A of the year on the Awakening from Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel. He’s mentioned, don’t be thinking that just because your political party may have gotten in control that the world’s gonna be a better place, buddy. That it’s gonna solve any of the problems you think it’s gonna solve. I thought that was very smart of him. It’s the most political he’s gotten. And I thought it was a very smart way to get political is to just state, yeah, politics is bad framing and not a solution to anything. And you’re gonna pay for that. And that’s what I go over on this channel, right? Is politics is bad framing, don’t use it, problem solved. We have better models for the world. And what generates the models? Ethics. Yeah, I like that. I like that. That’s probably a good note for us to end on. And so, yeah, ultimately that’s why you need the ethics, right? You need that to help you to generate good models that lead to goodness in the world. Under the assumption that being is good. Well, I have to start a little more. You’ll get there, Manuel. Anyway, this is great. Thanks, I’m gonna end the recording here and we’ll try, we’ll do this again. See you.