https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BpFoKODpy0g
I’m trying to tie a bunch of things together here. So bear with me. We’re going to talk about, oddly enough, the non-linearity in the concept of one, two, and three. So why am I going on about one, two, and three? It’s pretty linear progression and one way of thinking about mathematics. But really, I want to liken this to the problem of the chimps. And I’m also going to tie into Plato’s Republic, because you can. And I’m going to show you how one, two, and three are not a symmetrical linear progression at all. And that’s where things get interesting. So Jordan Peterson talks about the work of Franz de Waal with chimps, and the tyrannical chimps don’t last. They emerge, right? They happen. It’s not that there are no tyrannical chimps. It’s that they don’t tend to last very long. They don’t last very long because they don’t care for the chim community, right? They don’t cooperate with the other chimps. That’s what tyrants do. They’re parasitic, right? They’re not cooperative. They’re not nurturing. They’re not generative, right? All concepts I’ve talked about before. And this relates to one, two, and three because our impression about tyranny is very much based on what I call a flat model of the world, or a reduced model of the world, right? A very simple model of the world where you can kind of think of the world as, and look, I have slides on this. They’re early videos. Maybe the quality is not there, but the content is good. The early model videos. You have your perspective, and from your perspective, the world is just outside of you. That’s one, right? And then you’re looking out, and then you see others, and that’s just two to you, right? Because it’s everything that’s not you. This is wrapped up in identifying against. I talked about that in a previous video. That’s two. You and everything that’s not you. It’s a reasonable frame. It’s a very simple frame. It’s a reduced frame. It’s a flattening of the world. But if you acknowledge three, in other words, there’s more things outside of yourself that are of equal weight, we’ll say, and that complicates the set of relationships. Because when you’re talking about a one-to-one relationship, there’s just one relationship. Now it can be one-sided or tyrannical, right? That’s typically what they talk about. Things like codependency would be, you both need each other for something, and so you put up with each other’s garbage, basically. But then there’s definitely tyrannical relationships where the man pushes a woman around or whatever, or vice versa. Because that happens too. But once you start seeing outside of that, it’s like, oh, wait a minute. What if there’s three people? And this is where the chimps come in. What’s the problem with the chimps? If you think about the chimps as one chimp at the top and all the rest of the chimps at the bottom, that’s really only two. There’s two in the set, right? There’s tyrannical chimp at the top, and then there’s the rest. And it’s not that they’re all equal. It’s that they’re all actually one thing in your mind. And so you think, well, of course, the tyrannical chimp cannot get overthrown because every individual below him is weaker than him by definition. That’s how he got to be at the top. Now, that’s wrong. That’s not how leaders get to be at the top. It’s not how heads are formed at all. Not that that can’t happen, but it’s not clear that that’s why it happens. But it is clear that that certainly isn’t the way it happens most of the time. The reason why that doesn’t last is because, as Peterson points out, two chimps will tear apart that third chimp at the top. Right. So if you think about that, the strength of two of the not-tyrants is actually greater than the single tyrant. And maybe it need to make it three or four. But once you get to three elements, the scaling is different because the number of relationships between, say, one thing and everything that isn’t or one thing and two things is different. Right. When you get to three things, the number of connections grows exponentially. It’s a curve. It’s a big curve up. So you can look at one, two, and three. And so it’s a simple linear progression. But actually, if you count the number of possible relationships between one things, two things, and three things, it’s an exponential curve. A lot of people don’t know that. And so that kind of changes the world. Now, you may say, Mark, you mentioned Plato’s Republic. You fool. There’s no math in there. And fair enough, there’s almost no math in there. There’s certainly no equations so far. And I’m not quite done with it. But, you know, pretty close here. Only got two quote books left. One of the cases that’s driving the fundamental ethos of the book is the idea that obviously justice makes no sense if it’s just one person. There’s no such thing as justice in a world of one. But if you’re on a desert island, justice doesn’t apply. The concept isn’t required and not necessary. But the mistake that people make, and this is in book two of the Republic, I believe, or it might be book one, is when they start talking about justice, they talk about it as if it’s a relation between one person and one other person. And that doesn’t bring out the full complexity of justice, all right? Because it turns out there’s more than two people in the world. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, might want to look around. There’s way more than two people in the world. And because of that, justice doesn’t affect a one-to-one relationship alone. It does, but that’s not all it’s doing. So thinking about justice in terms of your relationship to somebody else’s actions is insufficient. And Plato goes further, right? He sort of expends this to say, well, you have to think of it in terms of the city. And then they kind of expand the cities and keep iterating over the cities. And they expand that to, well, there’s different classes inside the city. That’s actually what the parable of the cave is about, by the way. The fact that classes are inevitable. I’ll do a video on that. Believe me. So now you’ve got not just a relationship of persons, but the relationship of classes and their need for mixing, right? Like the philosophers, the true philosophers, not the sophists, have to come down to the lowest points of the city to give their perspective. Why? Because they can’t stay at the top and pursue the good alone. They have to come down to the lowest points of the city to give their perspective. Why? Because they can’t stay at the top and pursue the good alone. Even though that’s good for them, it’s not good for the city. So the relationship isn’t between even the class of philosophers and one lowly person. It’s the class of philosophers and the class of the people who are stuck at the bottom. Whatever that bottom, it doesn’t matter how you define the bottom. There’s a stratification within the city. This is clear in the book, by the way. If anybody doesn’t mention that to you, shame on them. They’re being intellectually dishonest, probably with themselves. Maybe they have low reading comprehension. Don’t know, don’t care. It’s a very stratified society they set up. There’s the guardians and the philosophers and the craftsmen, right? These are all different classes. This doesn’t work. Like in the beginning of the book, they try it and it doesn’t work to talk about something like justice in terms of this person’s vision of that person’s interaction. That’s a one-to-one sort of one-and-two relationship. Again, once you get to three and then you kind of add on to that, thing about that is when we’re being simplistic, when we’re cognitively overloaded, when there’s just too much information for us to process, we flatten the world. We squish it down. We reduce things. We compress everything. And then we get these very simplified models of the world which help us understand one or two things about it. It doesn’t give us a very accurate picture of what’s going on. We tend to get down towards oneness. Ultimately, you may see this neoplatonic problem of the one and the many is a problem, whatever. I think that’s a little mis-framing and unhelpful. The way to view this is that it’s a pyramid, oddly. It’s important to recognize the increase in complexity, the exponential increase in complexity as you go up and down the pyramid, the number of relationships. First, there’s two directions, up and down. And second, once you get to three, there’s a bunch of connections you can make between one, two, and three that you can’t make between one and two. It’s a big deal. As you expand that out, and Plato does this in the Republic with classes in the cities, that’s book seven, the so-called Platonic cave, there are classes in the cities, those relationships are complex, too. The complexity just keeps building and building and building. We reduce it down to understand something because you’ve got to understand something. You can’t spend your whole day understanding every last detail of everything. You probably can’t do it anyway. But if you could, it would take an infinite amount of time. And it turns out we all die. We don’t actually have an infinite amount of time. You’ve got to compress. When you compress too much, though, you get into this left versus right dichotomy, false dichotomy. You get into binary thinking. I probably have a video on that because I have a video on everything. You get stuck in these frames where it’s not helpful. That’s why you have to have a sense for the difference between one, two, and three, and that when you add relationships to those numbers, it’s no longer this interesting, easy, simple linear progression. It’s suddenly this number of connections that can be made. And that number of connections is large. And it gets larger as you add numbers. So plus one is not just plus one. It’s plus n relationships. And that’s the problem. Or actually, I think technically it’s factorial relationships. Anyway, the math isn’t important. What’s important is re-enchanting the world, understanding how complex it is. That’s why you can’t say, oh, all conservatives vote against abortion. That’s actually not true. All Republican voters are gun lovers. That’s just not true. You only vote that way because you believe in this one thing. Not true. Only gun owners vote Republican. Not true. There’s a bunch of ways in which we fool ourselves into thinking it’s just one and two, when in fact, it’s not. It’s a complex relationship because it has an exponential number of possible connections in the world because there just happened to be this huge number of people and things to connect to. And that’s sort of what I mean by one, two, and three. The three is important because it’s fundamentally different. When you get to three, it changes the game of mathematics itself. And look, this isn’t something I made up. I read all this stuff. Go look this stuff up. It’s not that hard. You can think about it for a little while. And it doesn’t actually take long to see. When you start drawing things out with different numbers of things and start drawing the relationships, lines between them, and the number of combinations of those lines, you start to see, oh. And then you add four and five and six because it turns out there’s just lots of people in the world, something like eight billion, I don’t know, whatever. It can be a problem. And as time goes on, things change. Just because every Democrat yesterday voted for free speech and civil rights doesn’t mean they’re still doing that. And we don’t take that into account either. That’s more of the complexification. And so one, two, and three is really about the idea of complexification, not complication, but complexification of the world as those numbers grow bigger and how we tend to reduce to what we’re doing. So that we can understand the world better. And obviously, in a world of one and two, the tyrannical chimp wins and is the tyrant forever until he dies. But we don’t live in that world. Thank goodness. Let’s be grateful, a little gratitude for not living in the world where the tyrannical chimp stays alive forever and is able to tyrannize everybody forever because two tramps of lesser strength can form one chimp of sufficient strength. In fact, anybody who fights or learns anything about fighting knows this. Two weaker opponents who’s by any measure strength does not equal the other person can take down another person. As it just turns out, it’s really hard to fight two people at once. It’s not impossible. I learned how in karate. I learned how in martial arts. I learned how in martial arts. It’s not impossible. I learned how in karate. But it’s hard. And if you’re not prepared for that, and chances are, if you’re busy being tyrannical, you’re probably spending too much time opposing in opposition of managing your tyranny. And the management cost is real. And when you have a management cost because you can’t cooperate, it’s much higher than a management cost from assumed cooperation. So assumed framing matters. So I just wanted to exemplify this idea of one, two, and three. And yeah, go back and look at those early model videos because I have this laid out in the relationships and the problem of the world today, like how people are seeing the world and how they need to be seeing the world. And that probably includes you. And don’t stop it at slide one, video one with the first set of slides. Keep going. Keep going. I got, I think, five in that series. And it’s a wonderful series. So, and hopefully that helps to sort of bolster this idea. And this idea helps to bolster that idea of this complexification of the world. This re-enchantment is another way to think about it. So I wanted to thank you for re-enchanting my world by watching my videos and giving them the thing that I value the most, which is your time and attention.