https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7sDkqO2on9w
One of the things I’ve been struggling to try and figure out how to cover is around framing and frames and different ways to look at things. And today I think I’ve found a way to do that and I’d like to share that with you. So strap in, we’re going to talk about different ways of seeing the world and what those implications are. So what I figured I’d do is use the American so-called revolution, I call it rebellion, for good reasons. If you want to know more about that, here’s a video that I did with Adam where we talk a little bit more about that. The reason why I want to use this example is because I’ve heard it recently. And it occurred to me that, oh, this is a good way to think about different frames and different framing and why that might matter and how that is important. So one way to look at the American Revolution or Revolutionary War is under a political lens. You could say, okay, well, you know, it’s really a political struggle. There was political oppression by England because of a lack of representation in Parliament. Okay? Now, that frame’s not wrong. There’s nothing wrong with that frame. However, it’s not complete. It’s not even close to complete. It’s not sufficient at all. That might be a necessary thing to understand because it’s a huge piece of the puzzle, but it’s a big puzzle. So let’s take a different lens, a different frame for looking at this skirmish between the 13 colonies and England. You could look at it in terms of economics, in an economic frame, and you could say basically the wealthiest man in the colonies, which I believe was John Hancock at the time, couldn’t make any more money. And all the profits were being funneled through the East India Company, which was a monopoly at the time, contrary to what some historians have recently said because apparently they haven’t read anything. And it was a problem because the colonies were constrained in their trade, which is true by the way. They couldn’t build roads legally and was discouraged by England and they couldn’t own their own ships. They couldn’t do their own trading between the colonies. So all the colonies that had any wealth were on the coast, but all of their trade had to go by ship. This is why the Stamp Act is a big deal. So you can make an argument that the Stamp Act started to affect lawyers and we’ll say the soft professions because it applied to all paperwork, but you have to understand that the Stamp Act meant that every good or service that wasn’t produced locally, as in your village, got an extra tax on it. Everything you bought, everything, wasn’t just about letters. It was about all goods and services that were coming from any other place basically. It’s kind of a big deal, right? And the fact that we couldn’t do our own trade meant that the colonists were constrained in how much total money they could make and that they were always being held down economically by the East India Company in particular, although there might have been other entities engaged. But I believe all of the ship ownership had to go through and shipments had to go through English owners. So that’s another way to look at it. Again, big piece of the puzzle. Why would these men sponsor this hopeless war? It certainly looked hopeless at the time, but they didn’t want, like they wanted to be loyal British citizens. Well, why would they do this? Well, economically, it actually kind of made sense. So now we have two very useful and important lenses, two puzzle pieces. These are insufficient. They’re insufficient. So there’s another frame that you can use to look at this through, which is a religious frame. And you could say, look, these colonies were all made up of religious outcasts who were thrown out of England for their beliefs, or at least it was made very uncomfortable for them to maintain their religious beliefs within England or Great Britain in general, I guess. So, you know, they ended up, for example, the Plymouth colonies ended up in the Netherlands. And then they petitioned the king and the king said, all right, well, I’ll put you over here. You know, where you’ll still be my loyal subjects, right? Well, you won’t be bumping up against the other people on the aisles. You can go live in Massachusetts. So they did. And that’s another lens to look at the rebellion in. You can say, oh, well, yeah, they were fighting for religious freedom to maintain it and make sure it stayed intact because the more government involvement there was, whether that’s in the form of troops or in the form of economic oppression or in the form of political oppression, right? All of that can easily translate into religious oppression because it already did for them. Like this already happened in the UK to them, right? A lot of what was going on in England and around the aisles was about political and religious power being combined and then losing factions. And those losing factions were hurt in their religious beliefs, right? And so that had already played out for them. That’s how they got to the colonies, roughly speaking. You know, it’s kind of a big deal. So that’s another big puzzle piece in what is turning out to be a very complicated story, right? So they were worried about this. They were totally, you know, fearful of this, and rightly so. They had just established the best religious freedom that they could. It wasn’t bloodless. There was plenty of fighting between the colonies on religious grounds. That happened. Protestants tend to do that. I don’t know what to tell you. They aren’t the only ones. Like religious wars are there, but that doesn’t resolve. So sort of a thing that happens. But when you look at that, you say, OK, well, that’s a huge piece, too. And it is. It’s absolutely a huge piece. So now we’ve got another frame, another lens to look at this in. None of these lenses are wrong. They’re all they’re all correct. That’s the problem. And I don’t think you can get to the point of the American rebellion for this actual war with England without all of this being a factor. You need real reasons to do this. And why would this be a big deal? Well, look, these guys were subjects to the king and they wanted to be subjects of the king. They wanted that. They wanted to be a part of that. A lot of the argument, as you look into the history, is them petitioning the king for relief from the parliament, the newly formed and newly minted parliament. And there’ll be a video out by now with Adam about this very issue of monarchy and the whole collapse of the monarchy in England and what it meant and things like that. So I’ll link that here. So there’s this big reason for them not to want to go away. They just wanted to change. Parliament’s doing what they consider to be unfair things. We can argue about how unfair, whether or not they’re unfair. They’re significantly unfair by any standard, even by the standard of the day, which is why they had supporters. They didn’t have any representation in parliament, and yet they had supporters in parliament who didn’t agree with them religiously, didn’t agree with them about the power of the king, but still saw the unfairness to the point when they were willing to stick up for the colonies, in some cases they had never been to. It’s kind of a big deal. And there’s another frame to look at this fight for the colonies’ freedom in, and that is enlightenment values. You could say, oh, they are the enactors of enlightenment values. And that’s an important frame, but it’s mostly a philosophical frame. And it boils down to virtues and values. And so the cause of liberty and freedom is a philosophical frame, and it’s very much based on a religious frame, because it’s virtues and values, which is religious. Philosophy doesn’t really deal with virtues and values. It mentions them, but it never really, you know, isn’t, and it isn’t designed to fix them. Like it’s not designed to discuss them. It’s designed to say they’re there and therefore what do we do? It doesn’t tell you to prioritize them. It doesn’t tell you when to swap them out. It doesn’t tell you any of that. It’s good to know. So it’s sort of the same frame with different wording. Say, oh, the religious freedoms, right, or the freedoms to be virtuous in the way that they saw fit, right, the freedom to be represented by the government that was ruling over them, right, falling on deaf ears with the king. You can argue the king didn’t have any power. That seems unlikely. The king seemed to have power to wage war over the colonies and not power to free them from the constraints of parliament. Maybe, but that’s kind of weird. He certainly did have some power over them if he could keep the war going, which he most certainly did. And, you know, he should have fought for his people, just he did it the wrong way. That’s a, it’s kind of a religious frame. And there are other ways to look at this, right? You can look at it as a small skirmish in a large war. There’s a war going on between England, French, and Portugal, roughly speaking, and there’s a fight over resources, including all 26 colonies that England had at the time, not just the 13 that actually managed to escape, as it were. And interestingly, of course, you know, after the treaty was all signed and England gave up and said, all right, guys, you can have what you want. They give us very generous terms in the US, the newly invented 13 free colonies in the United States because a strong colony that was still actually loyal to English interests and remains that way for reasons which annoy me and maybe shouldn’t exist anymore was good for them. And it’s worked out very well for them since then, including in World War I and World War II, by the way. Why do you think those conflicts went the way they went and why do you think we got involved? And you can argue the War of 1812 is one of these little niggly things, but also the War of 1812 happens because of the tight relations that we maintained with England despite France trying to get their grubby hands on the colonies the whole time and failing, and failing for important reasons. And again, I went over this in a talk with Adam, which will already be posted by the time this video gets released. So I wanted to point that out. So it’s a good way to see because we’re using this in the modern times now, or recent times. People are using economic frames to understand things and it just doesn’t work. It’s not rich enough. It’s not explanatory enough. It’s not descriptive enough. People are using political or politics as power sorts of frames to understand the world. But again, it doesn’t seem to match. It doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t allow any prediction. It looks like a good descriptive frame for hindsight, but then lots of things work in hindsight to describe things. You can describe the fall of the Soviet Union, and I’ve seen this done by the way, as a function of blue jeans and the Beatles. And that argument’s been made. It’s quite a good argument. Actually, I don’t disagree with it. It’s just stupid. You can also realize that the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, was due to an economic factor. Ronald Reagan very deliberately performs a Psi-op on the Russians and convinces them that we have this crazy Star Wars program and we can shoot things from space, shoot space things out of orbit and shoot beams from space, which is all a big hoax, by the way. And you can make the argument, and I think that was a three-part series or something on PBS or someplace that I saw that it was purely economic. You can make that argument, and it’s not wrong, but you can make the argument that people just get tired of the political repression in the Soviet Union. Sure, all three of these are factors, though. Using any one of them is insufficient. It just doesn’t explain what happened to make the wall fall. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t function. And that’s the problem. Nowadays, we see this. People are trying to fit things in political frames. They’re trying to fit things in economic frames. They’re trying to fit things in religious frames. The religious people will talk about there’s a religious war going on and the Protestants are doing this and the Catholics are doing that and the Orthodox are doing this. You can see this play out in Ukraine with the Orthodox Church splitting over whether Russia’s the bad guy or Ukraine’s the bad guy and sure, whatever. You can do all these different frames, but when you’re doing just one of these frames, you’re missing the story. You’re missing the picture. Your predictive power is very low, probably zero. If you’re picking one frame because none of these frames are sufficient, you’re not understanding the world. And that’s very confusing because we want nice, simple, clean, easy to understand answers that we ourselves with our limited cognition can grasp. That’s never going to happen. There are some people that, mostly we call them prophets, roughly speaking, they can predict things. You can look at the work of Nassim Taleb. Read all his books. His books are great. Ignore his Twitter thread. But read all his books. They’re fantastic. Quite prophetic. Lots of things he said came true exactly in the way he said. You can look at Jordan Peterson. He talked about Canada. Everything he said about Canada has happened. Everything. And in a very short amount of time. He missed a few things, in fact. But he was right when he talked about Bill C-16 and stuff. He was dead right. All of that unfolded exactly the way he said it would. There are prophets out there. And they are there. And they see the world in a way that probably you can’t. And that’s okay. Because we’re all different and unique. But the fact that we’re unique means you’re not them. And so you should expect to be able to do what they can do. And that includes understanding the world in these crazy frames. These frames are not useless. They’re just not sufficient to do what you want to do. And you’re probably not smart enough to use four, five, six frames to understand things. And that’s okay. So hopefully this video was useful in outlining that. And then you can see these patterns of people using political power as a frame. Economics as a frame. Or religion as a frame. And how insufficient those frames are. And zooming out and using, we’ll say, inappropriate frames. Like if you understand the United States as empire, then all these other things make sense. No, no they don’t. No they don’t. You have to be very careful with how frames unfold. The economic frame doesn’t affect an individual’s decisions. It’s more talking about how individual decisions coalesce at a higher layer. But it’s not appropriate to use economics to explain individual decisions. Because individuals don’t make decisions economically. I’m not saying that’s not a factor. Certainly influences their decisions. But it doesn’t control them. And it doesn’t have much influence at all. So hopefully you can see this pattern. And I’ve laid it out as clearly as I can. I’ve been struggling with it literally for two years. Hopefully I’ve done a reasonable job. And if you have questions or you want to know more, you know what to do. Leave some comments. It’s lovely to have all these new users. I hope you’ll engage more. I need more engagement so I can get you better videos. It’s a cooperation here. I can’t really do this alone. I have a lot of help. And I want more help from everybody to give me feedback and comments. So that I can do a better job of getting this information out to you. Watch some of my early videos. I know some people have been running through the early model videos. I think they’re super important. I’ve recently been exposed to some clips. And I really like my clips. Some of them are quite clever, I think. And hopefully feedback on that. Because I’ll redo videos if there’s concepts that you need help with. So just let me know. Let me know in the comments. Give likes. Tell your friends. Try to get the channel a little bit more viewed and watch. Because it’s a very exciting time. And thank you all for your engagement. And most of all, I just want to take this time to thank you. As I hopefully always do. For your time and attention.