https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3VeUqJJXNiU
So, what I’d like to discuss today are a few topics, mostly wrapped up in this thing I talk about a lot, which is called middle out thinking. Now middle out thinking is one of these things that’s sort of not intuitive to most people right away, but I think it’s an important concept. It’s important to recognize because a lot of people are using this way of thinking and it’s not obvious that it’s wrong because things can be made to look right when they’re very, very wrong. So, that’s what I want to go over today. Today is this middle out thinking, why it’s important. Hopefully I have a reasonable explanation. I’ve tried this a few times, but I think I can do it this time. So let’s proceed with understanding this concept of why people are doing this middle out thinking. There’s three sorts of things that are wrapped up together that seem to collide with middle out thinking. One of them is the individualist worldview, where you’re an individual and you’re maybe self-determined, but like you’re one thing and only one thing and that thing is sort of separate from everything else because it’s one thing, right? It’s like, aha. There’s another concept wrapped up with this, which is the materialist worldview, where it’s like, oh, material, like, aha, a book, right? Like aha, it’s a material, I have it. And that seems to be wrapped up in this individualism, like I’m an individual in a material world and then there’s the objective worldview. And the objective worldview is this space where you are disconnected and the space that you’re in is disconnected from everything else. And so it’s an area to stand to observe all of the things that are going on independent of your existence and independent of the existence of other things, we’ll say. So it’s a way of casting this independence, this disconnectedness, this what I’ve been calling lack of intimacy. See my video on the intimacy crisis that I did with Andrea with the bangs, lovely video. This seems to cause this phenomenon I like to refer to as middle out thinking. Now what is middle out thinking? Middle out thinking is when you’re starting from the middle of the story. So I have a lot of a lot of problems explaining this to people. The middle of the story is a way of not recognizing the origin of what you’re talking about. And so I can start a story about my life and I can say, well, look, you know, one time I was driving my car and another car caught us off and we were almost killed. I swerved at the last minute, still not sure how I missed them. You know, very, very, you know, horrifying event. We all thought we were going to die and we managed not to. So that was good. There’s nothing wrong with that story. There’s nothing wrong. As long as the point of the story is about the event, we were scared, right, about the results of the event. We all gained a new understanding of how precious life is, right. In the moment we were young, you know, we came to understand that, you know, at a moment’s notice you could be gone. You could be in a car accident, not your fault, nothing you could have done about it. That certainly happened on that particular day. But if I’m trying to make a larger point about who I am as a person, that story doesn’t work. Now, the reason why it doesn’t work is because who I am as a person is not wrapped up in a single event or even a single set of events, but it is wrapped up in, we’ll say, the formative events of my life. Now, there’s always a further back, right. So you could say, well, you know, before I could drive there was, you know, no reason to think that I could die as a result of a car accident. Yeah, fair enough. But before that there might have been a reason why I thought I was invincible, right, or thought I might die. So one way I might have thought I was invincible, which didn’t happen for a little while actually, was I was young, we were playing on a porch in the middle of the rain. We were on a covered porch, where did we care? And kids don’t care about rain, like just water falling from the sky, who cares? And what happened was I was going to run and jump off the porch into the rain, because kids, rain, who cares? And I hesitated, I don’t know why I hesitated, and then lightning struck literally right down the side of the porch where I was about to jump, and I went, oh, that’s interesting. But because I had this feeling, and I remember it distinctly, I had this feeling before I jumped that caused me to pause, I was like, oh, someone’s watching out for me, like maybe I’m invincible. But that didn’t last, actually later I was like, hmm, I’m pretty close there, maybe, maybe, I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going on. So that plays into the car incident. So if you want to make a statement about me and formation with respect to that, you can’t start at the incident in the car where we almost, where we got cut off and almost died. So that’s middle out thinking when you try to make the wrong statement with the wrong story or by starting the story in the wrong place. So one way you could start the story in the wrong place is you could think about Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring. This is the example that’s worked the best. I did a talk with Chris Peckow on his channel about this, and he’s like, I finally understand what you’re saying. And this is the example that I used. So I’m going to try it here and see if I can get it clear. So in the Fellowship of the Ring, you know, a hobbit takes this dangerous ring basically to the land of the elves, right? And that’s cool, like that, and that’s his task. Like he’s got one sort of simple sort of job and that’s his task. And then one way to tell what happens next is a fellowship is formed around getting the ring to Mordor and the ring is carried to Mordor. Now the problem with telling the story that way is that it’s missing all the important formative details about the fellowship. So I’m not going to go into, you know, analysis of Tolkien. That’s way too hard. And I don’t know the material that well. But I would like to talk about, you know, the fellowship in particular. So one way you can read this is you can say, look, a group of people got to the land of the elves, they were summoned there. That certainly happened. Fair enough. And then as a result of recognizing the great danger to, you know, their way of life, right, to their world, literally in this case, they got together and decided to help each other to get the ring to where it needed to be to be destroyed. The problem with that is that this leaves out all of the important formative details around fellowship. So it very much gives you the impression that you can take a higher goal that is common to all the participants, get them in a single place, get them to agree, and then they’ll do something very dangerous, you know, risking their lives, you know, and losing their lives in some cases, you know, to make that goal happen. That certainly seems like in some cases what happened. Unfortunately, it’s not what happened in the fellowship of the rings. Now you can you can argue that the outline I just gave you is a possible outline and I will tell you you are probably wrong. I can’t say for sure. Pretty sure, though. So what actually happens in the books and in the movies, I think the movies actually did a brilliant job of this, is that when the people get together, they’re there grudgingly. They do not like being summoned to a meeting by the elves. Why? Well, it turns out that every single race represented there, that, you know, there’s elves, there’s dwarves, right? There’s men, men, and there’s two different types of men. There’s the men of the north and there’s men of Gondor, right? And they all have arguments with each other. They’re all pissed. They all have grievances. Every single one. And they’ve been summoned. They don’t like to be summoned. And they all have grievances with each other. All of them. Except, arguably, the hobbits. I don’t think the hobbits care about anything. They’re like, yeah, whatever. We’ve been hanging out smoking, smoking our weed. There are our pipes. So we’re good. Leaf. That’s what it is. They smoke in leaf. So you know, they’re unobtrusive little tiny creatures anyway. Barely interesting in the story to this point, to some extent. But everyone’s arguing with everyone else very loudly and they’re all upset. And the funny thing about the argument is every single person or race there has a grievance. A valid grievance. Not an invalid grievance. They’re not bitching about things that didn’t happen. They’re bitching about things that did happen and shouldn’t have happened. Oaths that were broken. Treaties that were clearly, clearly violated. There are problems. Now the interesting thing, the other interesting thing is, in the midst of all this argumentation, it becomes clear that the offenders know that they have some culpability and that the anger towards them is justified. Now everyone’s got grievances against everyone else. Pretty much. So that’s interesting. So it’s not just like, well, the elves hate the dwarves, but the dwarves are buddies with the man. No. Everyone’s got grievances. And again, they’re legitimate grievances. And all sides know this. So at some point, even the call of here’s an existential threat, a ring, there’s an existential threat to your entire existence. There’s not going to be any grievances. There’s not going to be any races. There’s not going to be any creatures. We’re just all going to get wiped out. This is not enough to form the fellowship. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. The grievances have to be aired and acknowledged. And what really happens is a sign of courage, fearlessness, and determination is given to all of the races and people there that are stronger and more capable and more experienced by what is ostensibly an innocent hobbit, right? Where he takes up the mantle of something that’s way too big for him, obviously, and says, I’m going to do this thing for you guys and do my best at it. And maybe I won’t succeed, but I’m going to try. So while you’re busy here arguing about this, I’m going to try. And that is what forms the fellowship. It is the pointing at the value. It’s the pointing at the virtue of goodness and purity, in this case. It’s the pointing at the task at hand, right, by somebody who has ostensibly the least to lose. The hobbits are in the furthest part of the land. They are going to be affected either not at all or last. Everyone else is going to get wiped out first because they’re going to be able to resist and the hobbits are not. And the hobbits are far away and they don’t really produce anything that anybody really cares that much about. Eventually forces of evil will overwhelm them, no doubt. But you know, it might be a generation away from the hobbits. These other races, they’re going to get attacked first, for sure. So the person with the least to lose, the least capability, the least experience, the least physical presence, holds up the highest set of values that are common to all of these groups and says, I will take on this burden that is too great for me and do my best. That’s what forms the fellowship. Earing of grievances, acknowledgement of grievances, and a pointing at something greater. Now that’s your call, the first version of the story. A bunch of people are summoned to the elves. They get together. They recognize an existential threat, right? And then they form a fellowship to deal with that threat. That isn’t what happened. Sorry. Those events seem to have occurred, but that’s not the important part of the story. The important part of the story is all around the grievances that happened in the past. And those have to be resolved in order for the story to move forward. And they’re resolved by pointing at virtues and values. And those virtues and values being manifested in the moment by the hobbit. When you tell the story the other way, you get the impression that you can get people together. People who had disagreements, right? Because we know they had disagreements. There’s a lot of talk about, well, maybe the dwarves won’t come. Maybe the men won’t come. Maybe these guys won’t show up. We summoned them. Maybe they’re not going to show up because they have good reasons not to show up, or they think they do. Doesn’t really matter if they’re good, right? Like, if somebody thinks they have a good reason, they won’t or will do something. So that’s important. You get the impression that the magic is just in getting people together and showing them an existential threat. And then, bang, fellowship happens. That’s not how fellowship happens. That’s why mental out-thinking is dangerous, because it gives us an impression of the world that we can’t enact. It doesn’t work. It looks that way. Some of those components are there for sure, but we really don’t understand what’s going on. We’re missing all the important detail. That’s why you have to start with the beginning of whatever it is you’re talking about. Now, I’m not saying that you can’t start telling a story and say, well, see, there’s a hammer, right? Because we all know what a hammer is. It’s a good reference. But if the story’s about the hammer and why the hammer was not being used as a hammer, you can’t start at a hammer. That’s not sufficient. You have to tell why the hammer was made and what makes it a hammer, right? And then if it’s not used as a hammer, you’ll know something about why that’s significant. And a lot of people make this mistake. Another way to think about this is John Vervecky talks a lot about stealing the culture. And he says, well, Augustine stole the culture. And how did you steal the culture? Well, there were all these people in their houses practicing this Christianity thing, and they managed to basically steal the culture, at least for a time. Fair enough. But that’s not what happened. The problem with that is that it makes it seem like you in your house or groups of people in their houses can just magically start to steal the culture without any pointers or direction. The way the culture got stolen, in this case by Christianity, was there was a death and a resurrection, which is kind of important to the story because the people that were off in their houses, individually, not cooperating with one another, not communicating with one another, all had the same aim and the same goal and the same set of values. And so those values, through this process of individual home churches, roughly speaking, spread throughout the culture. And it’s that common set of values that took over the culture, not having people in their homes thinking about things that weren’t the same. They were thinking about the same things. They were embodying the same values. They were representing one thing. And it just spread because it’s one thing spread out over a large area. That’s what stealing culture actually was. But you have to start at the commonality. And the commonality is born from the story of the death and resurrection. Otherwise, that story doesn’t make any sense. And you know what? That doesn’t work. And I can tell you the problem we have today is a problem with stealing culture. A bunch of people, small groups of people, go, oh, I know what to do. We can get people to believe what we want them to believe by telling them what’s important. Maybe it’s race. Maybe it’s climate. Maybe it’s safety. Three great religions. Tongue in cheek, of course. And then they’ll come along with us. Now, the problem is that’s three groups. There’s many more. Everyone’s doing that right now. Everyone’s coming up with, well, you need to participate in crypto. And well, not that crypto, though. You need to participate in my crypto or in this crypto or in that crypto. Like, and it’s just, and I talked about crypto before, too, right? This just multiplies out. It’s all over the place. Like, that can’t steal anything because now you’ve got groups of people going in different directions with different values. You’re not going to steal the culture. You’re going to bring it to chaos. And that’s what we see around us. We see this chaos. And that’s the fault of middle-out thinking, where you’re not considering how these things unfolded in time from the beginning. In other words, the starting point is really, really, really important. Depending upon where you start, you get different stories. So you can start with, well, there the United States as a nation wasn’t a nation until after the Revolutionary War. That’s a fair thing to say. And you could say, well, yeah, but there were people here before. They were, but the Iroquois nation was only one nation. It wasn’t the United States, by the way. There were other nations. So those were different nations. And explicitly so. They treated each other as different. They fought with each other. They had trading contracts. But they fought with each other. And that’s part of the problem, is that there wasn’t a single nation in North America until after the Revolution. And it was probably long after the Revolution, if you want to count all of North America, because obviously we only had 13 colonies to begin with. Starting in the middle of the story gives you a different impression. So you can say, well, you know, it was really this after the Civil War. Well, yeah, but the formation of the country, the reason why the Civil War happened, that’s actually really important. The story of how we were a nation after the Civil War, because there’s a framework in place before that. And the fact of the matter is there were people here before that, but they couldn’t form a nation. They didn’t form a nation before the cultures that emigrated here from the United States. The United Kingdom via the Netherlands, roughly speaking. And I use the United Kingdom because it was in England. There’s a lot of Scots-Irish, for example, in the South. So there’s a way in which the immigration of the European Western tradition, or more likely the English Western tradition, because the European traditions are slightly different from the English one, which is slightly different from the American one, is the thing that formed the nation. And you can have arguments over whether or not it’s one nation or 50 or seven or whatever. And those are fair arguments. But largely speaking, we have a unified country now, and there wasn’t a unified country in North America before the Revolutionary War. The Revolutionary War was the start of the unification of the country as an independent entity through a common binding culture. If you tell the story any other way, you come up with funny things. So you can start telling the story from the perspective of the natives that were here. And if you skip certain facts, like the trade caused smallpox to run through here long before settlers came, then you kind of miss some of the point, because when the settlers first got here, the Indians welcomed them. And because they had a dwindling population, and because they got wiped out by smallpox, in the North through trading, and in the South through invasion. But that was mostly the Spanish, not the English. So these little details matter in the story, because you get a very different impression of the story when you’re starting in the middle and not recognizing the pieces you’re leaving out, which is the beginning. Now, again, it’s fair enough to say, well, you need to start here. Do you though? Sometimes you don’t need to start so far back, and sometimes you need to start further back. And that very much depends on what you’re trying to convey. It’s not fair to convey the history of the United States by going back to when people may have crossed the Bering Land Bridge. That’s not helpful, because those people and the waves that came after them, because there could have been two waves after that, and there could have been people here before that. We don’t really know, actually. There’s evidence both ways. Those people didn’t form nations, or didn’t form a single nation, I should say. They formed many nations, and those nations had different qualities and different values, and they fought, and they warred with each other. And they didn’t have any resistance to diseases like smallpox, which wiped them out when they started trading with us. And, you know, look, the Revolutionary War in many ways was a small skirmish in a much larger war between England and France. And if you don’t know that, you might think it was some conspiracy by England to take over the continent. No, it really wasn’t. And you might see the later skirmishes with the Indians as bad faith, treaty breaking. The people that violated the first Indian settler treaties were Indians. This is actually well documented. It’s King Philip’s War. There’s a lot of arguments about this, but actually the scholarship’s pretty good. If you read the original scholarship, the Indians broke the treaty mainly because France riled them up, because France was using the colonists as a way to fight England indirectly. Because this is a big war. It’s a big war between England and France. It has nothing to do with these stupid little colonies with a handful of people in them, roughly speaking. There’s these big nations running about, and we just slipped into the middle of the cracks. So if you don’t understand that, the story that you tell gives you a bad impression of how the world works or worked in the past. And history is very important because if you don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past, you better know what they are. So all of this goes back to middle out thinking. You have to be careful where you’re starting the story. If you start the story in the middle, you’ll get the wrong impression about how the world works. If because in the middle leaves out important details and it’s those details that seem to do things. So you can always tell a story that’s based in pure materiality, but pure materiality doesn’t move the world. It’s moved by the world. It’s moved by the spirit. And that’s really important. So hopefully I’ve given you a flavor for the different ways in which you can fool yourself with middle out thinking, or you can be fooled by others by middle out thinking. Middle out thinking is everywhere. It’s basically bad framing. It’s people trying to justify their theories by telling a story that leaves out important facts of where things started. The story of the United States starts with a bunch of settlers. The first couple of settlements were wiped out by the natives, by the way. And it doesn’t start before that, right? Because those cultures, basically, some of them still exist, but most of them got wiped out. And most of them were wiped out before there were settlers here, by the way. So it wasn’t the settlers that wiped them out. It was other cultures that were here or came here. So that’s important to know. That’s important to know where that story begins. If you want to say the story of the North American continent, yeah, that begins whenever people came over, but we don’t know that story. So somebody telling you that story, they don’t know what they’re talking about because nobody has the information. We have some information, but we don’t really know. We don’t even know when the Vikings got here. We have no idea. So it’s good to know that. It’s good to know that maybe the Chinese landed on the West Coast. Maybe the Polynesians made it over here from Hawaii. Who knows? We don’t know. There’s lots of ways in which people fool you with that. And tell you they know things that they don’t because they can tell a good sounding coherent story. So at some point, I’ll have to cover how to tell a good narrative from a bad narrative. But for now, this has just been a lot of thinking and something to watch out for. Are they starting the middle of the story? Are they starting with assumptions like, oh, well, there’s a nation or there’s a country and that country is sovereign. And were they ever sovereign? Are you sure? Were they just drawn on a map? Were they before they were a country? Were they one people? Are they made up of different groups? Do they have different languages? Were there people there before? All valid questions to ask. So that’s the best I can do for middle out thinking for now. Hopefully that’s clear. If it’s not, leave me some comments. I’ll try to address them. Maybe I can give more modern examples or more pressure on the question. If you need to know if something’s middle out thinking, you can ask me. Maybe I can tell you off the top of my head. It sort of figures what point are they trying to make? Where did they end the story? Did it end on a bad note? Are you sure it’s a bad story that’s supposed to end on a bad note? These are all things to look out for. So hopefully that helps. And I want to thank you for your time and attention.