https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v07PVlCJwIw
Alright, we’re going live. I talk about consequences. Because things have consequences. Go. I’m gonna go to all the chatty chats. Bingo. Bingo. Wee-haw. So, how do consequences arrive on my radar today? Well, they arrived on my radar yesterday. Ha! Trick question. We’re having a discussion on Clubhouse with a good friend of mine, Jefferson, who’s awesome. And that discussion was sort of, I flat out asked him. I’m like, I’m trying to figure out this church thing, Jefferson, and you’re smart, you figured out. And so we’re having this discussion about his concern about, yeah, he had a story. I can’t retell Jefferson’s stories because his stories are awesome and I’m not that good. Yes, the monocle is back. Glad you noticed. Hope you like the monocle. I like the monocle. So when we were talking about this, he was saying, look, I went out to go fishing at this local fishing hole. Because if you’re in Memphis, Tennessee, it’s a fishing hole, just so you know. And gets in a fishing hole, sees that there’s a small church denomination doing a baptism. And he thinks about it and he goes, wow, I know what that is. I know what they’re doing. Why they’re celebrating, because it is very much a celebration for them. And that’s exciting to him. Oh, good. They’re out there. They’re celebrating. And he realized, well, the problem is if my kids were here, I wouldn’t be able to explain to them what was going on and why it was important and what the significance of it was. And he struggled with that. He was like, well, I’m not sure I’d be able to. They wouldn’t understand it naturally the way he did growing up. And he’s not sure he’d be able to explain it to them in a way that would resonate. And I was like, wow, that’s interesting that that sort of effect would happen. But I think it’s a real effect. I think it’s a real actual problem in the world. So yeah, I asked him at that point, well, what do you think this is, this lack of being able to engage with the churchy things that are going on around you? And so we talked a lot about it. And I’m going to try to remember the gist of everything, because we went over a lot in a very short amount of time, which sometimes on Clubhouse, at least in the rooms that I’m in, we’re able to do. And so it was around this idea that one of the problems we have in the world is not understanding consequences. And it’s hard to understand consequences because they’re not always clear in the moment. So sometimes we do things and those consequences, we don’t see them or they don’t show up right away. And so we can’t see them right away. But we can see them, but just not right away. But sometimes we can never see the consequences of our actions. So if you’re out and you smile at somebody and they were having a bad day and they see you smile, maybe they have a slightly less bad day. And then when they get home, they’re not quite so mean to their spouse or their children, whatever. And then that kind of spreads out. Right? That could happen. I don’t know that it does, but I suspect that it does. And this sort of came up for me. It was one of our members on our awakening from meaning crisis. It wasn’t there very long, which is nice. Came in, got what he needed, went off, did things, got a job, moved country from Florida to over to Colorado. When he was leaving Florida, he was like, oh, I’d love to meet you. But he was already west of me. And so it was hard to get. He was in the panhandle of Florida. So he’s way west of where I am. But he said, well, I have to drive through Georgia anyway. I’m like, all right. Well, I’ll meet you in Athens, Georgia. So we went and met up in Athens at the end of the day. At the end. They had a nice botanical garden there. Beautiful, beautiful botanical garden, actually. Nice indoor botanical garden. And we’re walking around, and he’s telling me all these stories, interesting stories about himself and his journey and where he’s been, how things unfolded. And then he stopped at some point while we were walking around these beautiful flowers. And he said, why did you do this? And I was like, what are you talking about? You just drove three hours, one way, to meet me. And I’m like, well, yeah. And later we’ll have lunch, and it’ll be lovely. And he’s like, but why did you do it? And I’m like, because I don’t know what this is going to do. And he’s like, what do you mean? And I’m like, because I spend my time meeting you and talking to you and hearing your story in person. And then I don’t know how that affects you and your ability to do that for others. And then if you do that for someone, it spreads out. It spreads out. All your experiences spread out in a way that’s not knowable by you and not controllable by you. And so I think that’s actually really significant. And that’s a set of consequences you can’t get your head around. And so one of the things we talked about, too, is tolerance in the context of church, because churches, a lot of churches are about tolerance. And so one of the things I was pointing out was that too much tolerance means we shield people from consequences, at least in the moment, or we tend to. But what if shielding people from the immediate consequences makes those consequences worse later? And I don’t know that that’s going to happen reliably or even often, necessarily. But I also don’t know that it doesn’t happen every time. And so tolerance is a way in which you can make consequences worse, especially as they ripple out through time. And what if we sort of get the impression that we understand consequences, but we really don’t? We really don’t know what they are. So for example, we have this process for divorce. And you kind of know something about the process. You know you can do it. The general idea is to split up the assets or something. And I’m oversimplifying. And then so you think, oh, well, I know what divorce is. And therefore, because I know about divorce, I know what the procedure is, the procedural knowledge of divorce. I know what the propositions are. I no longer want to be with you. That’s the propositional aspect. But then you get divorced. And it turns out that it has all these consequences that you didn’t really understand. Like, first of all, you’re not getting half the estate. The lawyers are getting most of it. And then whatever’s left, you might get half of it. That’s a consequence you didn’t foresee. Because it’s not foreseeable by you. Like you don’t really understand the act of taking an action is costly. And so you can’t measure something where you’re at today, cut it in half, and assume that’s going to happen. Because there’s always transaction fees. Like there’s a cost to changing things. And that cost is not always known to you. And in the case where you involve lawyers, that cost is very high because lawyers happen to be very expensive. So if you have kids, more consequences. And it’s interesting. So one of the guys in the clubhouse room was actually telling us a story about he worked for a law firm. And in that law firm, they would deliberately never give anybody, would never consider anybody for law partner if they got a divorce. And reasoning-wise, because if they’re not loyal to their spouse, what makes you think they’re going to be loyal to their partners? And it’s like, ooh, right. And look, that’s not a, you know, it’s not a, well, this is always going to be true. And therefore, obviously not. But what if that’s more true than not? What if it’s true 70 or 80% of the time? Because that could be the case. Boy, that’s a good rule of thumb if it’s 80% correct or even 70% correct. I’ll take a bet 70% right every time. Like that’s fine by me. And I don’t know that it is. I’m not making a claim. I’m just saying it’s worth considering. So it’s possible that that’s the case. And understanding the connectedness of things is all wrapped up in consequences. It’s not just that there should be consequences for actions outside of the sphere that you’re in, like, oh, your personal life is nothing to do with your work life, but it does because it speaks, because you are the common denominator. You’re a factor. So if you’re not able to stick to it in your marriage, you’re probably also not able to stick to it in your other agreements. That’s generally likely true. Not 100%, right? But it’s generally likely true. Because if nothing else connects those things, and I think a lot of things probably do, you are the connecting factor, or the person in the law firm that’s connecting factor. And so what if we need something like shame to understand immediate consequences for things that would otherwise have worse consequences in the future? And shame prevents us from making bad decisions, like maybe we move out of the house to avoid a divorce, and then people are shaming us, and then we’re like, all right, well, I really got to figure out a way to deal with the shame and figure out how to get back in the house. And it’s possible that that’s actually useful. It’s possible that’s actually required, because the consequences for staying out of the house too long are that you end up getting a divorce, and then there’s all kinds of other consequences. And I remember my aunt got a divorce, and she remarried. And then she told me many times, actually, or more than once at least, had she known what that divorce was going to do to the children, she wouldn’t have done it. That’s pretty powerful. I think that’s important to know. And what if we need, say, a communal space, a space where we can do what John Brevicki would call serious play, but what any sane person would just call play, right? So a space to have an imaginal participation with others, right? Where we can understand, appreciate, and just contemplate, right? You know, maybe once or twice a week, that there are long-range, long-term, time-bound consequences in the world. Like if we had a space where we could all get together, right? And we could say, we could put our eyes on a future that we can scarcely even imagine. And maybe that gives us, or lays the groundwork for us having a better relationship with the consequences in the immediate term and in the far term, the consequences that we can’t know. And what if that communal space also helps us to prepare or clean our house, right? Why should you clean your house? Manuel and I did a stream on that recently, right? Well, that’s why, right? Because that cleaning of house leaves you prepared for long-term consequences and allows you to contemplate them. Like the purpose of cleaning is to think about the future. That’s why you clean. You don’t clean for today. You clean for the storm that’s coming. Because when the storm hits, you’re screwed, right? If your house isn’t clean. So let’s suppose you’ve got a messy house and you keep your house messy, and then somebody in the family dies. And now all of a sudden, you have to have family members over in and out of your house. Maybe somebody has to sleep on your couch. Well, now you have a problem because now you’re going to clean your house before any of that happens, which you’re already grieving. That’s no good. That’s why you have to keep your house clean, right? Or one of the reasons, right? And so having a shared space where you can contemplate consequences in the long term, even if you can’t understand them. See, and that’s actually really important. You’re not going to understand the consequences. But you have to be in a position, hopefully with others, where you’re contemplating consequences in the future that you may never understand or see. So the idea of having unknown unknowns, if you will, or having consequences that you’ll never see or encounter. Maybe that idea is important, right? Maybe it’s important to imagine that, to have an imaginal space to do that, right? Especially with other people. And we keep our spiritual houses in order, right? And then that helps us to contemplate while we’re doing that, contemplate these consequences, these long-range consequences to our actions. And that also gives us a way to appreciate the connectedness, right? The fact that we will all do things that impact other folks we may never meet, right? For good or for ill, it doesn’t really matter. The fact of the matter, both of those are going to happen. And so we also need a shared space for feeling consequences, for feeling shame, for redemption, right? For forgiveness, right? A way to know compassion and celebrate the fact that things could go worse but didn’t. There’s always a worse. There isn’t always a better, but there’s always a worse. And that’s one of the things that Sam Harris gets wrong. See my video on navigating patterns about Sam Harris and his flaw in his alleged logic, which is illogical because it’s not very bright. I think that’s important. The ability to have that celebration, the ability to have the contemplation of consequences because we’re all connected, the ability to get redemption, beg for forgiveness, right? Feel that compassion, right? Appreciate all the impacts that we have on people without even realizing it because we can’t pay attention to all that stuff. It’s too big, right? And I think also we’re suffering from this scientific worldview and postmodern ethos that tell us we can cut things at random intervals and deal with them as parts when in fact everything’s actually connected. I think that’s kind of important to engage with. Everything is actually connected and maybe not in ways that you can understand, maybe not in ways that anyone can understand, maybe only in ways that a large distributed cognition can give you a glimpse into, right? And because we think we can cut things apart scientifically and just sort of deal with this and then that, which is not to say there’s no merit to doing that, but because we think that’s all that there is, we don’t know why we need church because church is giving us the opposite of that. It’s giving us a way to reconnect or re-enchant the world. It’s giving us a space to have an imaginal experience with unforeseeable consequences, consequences you cannot understand ever, ever, right? Consequences of forgiveness, redemption, compassion, celebration for the fact that no matter how bad things may be, they could be worse. And that I think is what church or some of what church provides, right? But the most important things. And we also need this common place. And I’ve talked about this before. Jonathan Pigeot, a while back, probably a year ago, maybe a little bit more, did a Q&A on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis server, which you can find in the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel. Yes, there is such a thing. And there’s only one Q&A with Pigeot. And Brett opened it up and asked about practices. And what he said was, the problem with practices is that they’re too individualistic and too personal. And effectively, you need church because you need to go do something that maybe on any given day, you really don’t feel like doing with people that you don’t want to be around, right? You need to cultivate the skill set of doing things you don’t want to do with people you don’t want to be around, right? With people maybe you’d rather never be around, in fact. That’s a skill. That skill is the skill of accepting conflict or, you know, now I’m going to go into intimacy crisis, see my video on intimacy crisis. I’ve got two, one on Andrea with the Battings Channel and one on my channel, Navigating Paths. Maybe that’s important, right? Maybe it’s important to cultivate that skill, that skill of being able to engender being uncomfortable with uncomfortable things around uncomfortable people. Because if you never do it like any other skill, it will atrophy. So even if you could do it or had done it in the past, that doesn’t mean that you can still do it now. And so that’s like really important. And I think that’s part of what church is giving us, right? And those skills you can only get through participation. You can only get them by doing things in the world. Like you can only get them by attending church every Sunday. You can only get them by going through these rituals, right, of appreciation and gratitude and practicing compassion, right? Practicing brotherhood, practicing feeling shame, seeing redemption, being redeemed, right? Understanding these things through that communal experience with that distributed cognition that the community actually provides. And I think that’s what’s really important. And that’s why to some extent you need church, right? I mean, I’m not trying to give you an exhaustive list, but consequences are really important. And again, tolerance means we shield people from their own consequences. And the thing is, when you shield people from something, you are denying them valuable information. You’re preventing a signal from getting through. And that signal would provide them with valuable feedback that they need to survive better in life. And so you don’t want to do that. Too much tolerance is a bad idea. I’m not going to go super far like my friend Ethan does and say, all tolerance is bad. But certainly tolerance can be bad, especially when it’s overapplied. I think too much tolerance cuts people off from grace. It cuts people off from the possibility of redemption. It cuts people off from a bunch of things. And I think that’s not good for them. I don’t think that that is how things should be in the world. And so I think it’s good and important to know all that. And I need to take a drink. So I’m going to be right back. I’m not really going to go anywhere, but I got to have some of this tea because my goodness. Also, it is cinnamon spice tea. And if you’ve never had cinnamon spice tea, especially on a super cold day like it freaking is here in South Carolina for some reason, then you do not understand anything about life as such. I’m just saying not to overstate it because I would never be hyperbolic and overstate anything ever. In fact, I wouldn’t even think of being hyperbolic and overstating things. Yeah, if you haven’t had cinnamon spice tea, then yeah, you probably know nothing about the world. I’m just saying. So yeah, I mean, the consequence of not having cinnamon spice tea is you don’t understand how delicious it is, and therefore you do not know the full extent of joy in life. The importance of allowing people to experience consequences for their actions cannot be overstated. And I think when you get an affluent enough society, you get the ability to shield people from consequences. And you want to do that naturally because you don’t want them to go through the pain that you went through. But the thing is that pain that you went through taught you something. And so you’re denying them the opportunity to learn what you learn. Now, sometimes this is a great idea. Sometimes this is not a great idea. So the problem is not do we force consequences on people or not, or do we force shame on people or not. The problem is how much? Because zero is the wrong number. Zero consequences is bad. Nothing but consequences is bad. Zero shame is bad. But nothing but shame is also bad. So it sets up this cooperative processing that you have to do between how much of this and how much of its opposite, roughly speaking. Or maybe they’re not really opposites, but they overlap or something. And that’s something that you have to actually think about and work on. And this is where I think ethics comes in handy. Because ethics seems to be, aside from something that has to encompass everybody, at least in my definition, ethics seems to be wrapped up in these where’s the line questions. It’s not what’s the answer. All ethical questions seem to be where’s the line? Where should I draw that line? None of the ethical questions that I know about are wrapped up in what’s the right answer. Some of them might be wrapped up in what’s the right answer under this specific set of circumstances given all of these other factors. Yeah, sure enough. But that’s rare. And we don’t do these calculations in the moment anyway. We know this. Calculations we do in the moment are much more fluid. They’re much more participatory. They’re much more poetic. They’re not really procedural and propositional. If there was a trolley, and yeah, Sally Jo tells this funny story. So she’s in art class. They come up to her and they give her the dreaded trolley problem. And they say, would you pull the trolley switch or not? How many people would you kill? And she goes, who came up with this test? It’s stupid. And they’re like, what? It’s like, well, yeah, if you make stupid propositions, you get stupid propositional problems. But the key to that is you don’t have to make that problem. It’s like, wait a minute, I don’t have to make that problem. No, you don’t. And likewise, you don’t have to play a game. I have a video on games too. You don’t have to play a game either. Oh, somebody’s playing this stupid game called politics. You don’t have to play that game. You can tell them to f off and die twice. Really, you can. It’s not required for you to engage in that game at all. It’s not a thing that you have to do. And if you don’t know that, you can get caught up thinking like, oh, wow, I have to play this game. It’s like, yeah, but you don’t. You actually do not have to play that game. And that’s good to know, at least in my opinion. So it’s good to understand these things. It’s good to be able to engage with them in an intelligent fashion and say, oh, I see. There’s a way in which this engagement is not, I don’t want to say important, but is not required. And that’s it. There’s a way in which some of these things are not required. You really do not have to do those things because engaging in those games has consequences. And you don’t necessarily know what the consequences are. Because you can say, what are the consequences of being on your school board? And that may seem like a relatively easy question to answer. Oh, yeah, I know what the consequences are of being on my school board. That’s really easy. But in fact, you don’t. Because you don’t know how it’s going to affect your life. And you don’t know how it’s going to affect the lives of others. You really have no idea. And that’s a significant problem. A significant problem to have to deal with. What are the consequences for things? What actions should I be paying attention to? And which actions should I be ignoring? And I’m not saying I have easy answers for any of these things. I certainly don’t. But it’s good to know that there are ways to answer these things. And that those ways are probably best dealt with or processed in a church. I think that’s the purpose of church, actually. Is to give us an imaginal space that we can, through distributed cognition, experience these things together. These ideas around consequence and shame and redemption, celebration that things aren’t a lot worse. Figuring out how much tolerance is correct and how much is too much. And that’s the space to do it. Because we need a space to do it. We need a space to appreciate that our actions are going to have consequences we’ll never understand. And I think ultimately what church is really about, and the reason why people resist it more often than not, is because church gives you, forces you, at least in proper church life, to submit. It forces you to be humble. It forces you into a position where you have to appreciate things that are beyond you, that are bigger than just you. And without that, we get too big in our heads. We get too big as ourselves. We increase in our ego. We get caught in our own bubble. Hey, everybody talks about the bubbles that they’re in. What about the bubble you’re in as a result of your large ego? What about that bubble? Because it’s a good question. Like, what about the solipsism that you’re inevitably going to fall into when the only person you’re talking to about a subject is yourself? It’s a cute joke. You know, I wanted somebody intelligent to talk to, so I started talking to myself. Oh, ho, ho. You know, fair enough, and that’s funny. And look, the futility and having it dialectic with yourself, for sure. So when you’re only doing that, that’s what you focus in on, because the world is a tension, as Jonathan Pigeot says. And if that’s all you’re doing, that’s bad, because you’re only going to get worse and worse and worse. You’re going to get more solipsistic, more egoic, more hubristic, less aware of things outside of yourself, less aware of consequences, less appreciative of consequences you can’t see, less gracious, less gratitude, less grace for others and yourself. Because why do you need grace? If you’re in your bubble, if you’re comfortably in your bubble by yourself, maybe that bubble is connected to other bubbles that reinforce your self bubble. Maybe that’s what’s really going on. It’s not so much the bubble. It’s not so much the outside bubble, but it’s how the outside bubble affects your inside bubble and makes it worse. We need a space and a time to be forced to contemplate consequences of our actions, our connectedness. We need to be able to appreciate our connectedness. How are we related to the people around us? How does what we do affect them? All of these things, I think, are important, and that’s why you need church, or at least again, maybe not making an exclusivity argument, saying this is one reason why, or one set of reasons why you need church. Yeah, I mean, where do you go to have the wisdom to realize how small you are? Because I think part of wisdom, roughly speaking, is knowing what little you know and knowing how little that is. Because once you have an appreciation of what you actually do know, but also that that is a small, tiny, insignificant piece of all the things you could know, I think that’s a good step for wisdom, right? Because it’s coming face to face with humility, right? It’s coming face to face with the consequences of the fact that you are not the most consequential thing in the universe, right? And that your leverage for the consequences of your action is very limited. And so, you know, I want to lay that out as sort of methods of thinking about these problems. And church in general. I joked with Paul Van with the Armjaken stream the other day that I figured out church. Well, this is part of it. And of course, I’ve been funny. Maybe I’m just funny looking. Whatever. I’ll take whatever I can get. Yeah, the funny looking thing, by the way, is that comes from my mother. So she used to say, of course you’re funny, dear, but looks aren’t everything. Because she was like that. Very amusing. Yeah, so I mean, I think, you know, you can talk about specific consequences for specific actions sort of all day, right? And that’s sort of hard to get your head around because there’s just too many actions and there’s too many potential consequences and there’s too many actual consequences. There’s too many consequences that, again, you’ll never see. If you cut down the last tree in a forest, I mean, you may know some of the immediate consequences to that. But do you really understand how that’s going to affect people after you’re gone? No. No. And I’m not saying it’s bad. It may be good. But you don’t know either. And it’s good to know that there are things that you don’t know. And it’s even better to know that there are things that you cannot know. Ever. Those things are not available to you. Which is not to say you can’t guess at them. It’s not to say you shouldn’t try. But maybe you shouldn’t try because maybe you can’t. And maybe it’s not relevant because once the thing is done, it’s done. Or maybe it’s not relevant because you can’t know, but you still have to act. That’s another reason not to kind of get into analysis, part analysis and try to analyze before you take an action and end up taking no action. All of these things are important ways of sort of interfacing with and understanding the world. And we don’t appreciate that. And again, I think the reason why we don’t appreciate that is because we’re not seeing the church. We’re not engaging in these churchy things. And so we’re really stuck in our day to day. It’s me. I’ve got my goals. I’m moving towards my goals. Other people are moving towards their goals, but they’re not me and they’re for. And oh, by the way, I can separate my job from my marriage, from my life with my siblings, right? From my friendships, from my video gaming, right? So I used to do World of Warcraft ages and ages ago. I was never very good at it, so whatever. And I used to do it basically to hang out with one of my friends who lived close enough to visit but didn’t like to leave his house. But he really liked to game, so I would game with him occasionally. And I never had like a level 50 character or anything crazy. I don’t know how far I got, maybe 35 or something. I would never, I never spent tons and tons of time in gaming. But there was a couple on there and they would game with us quite a bit. And they were in a different time zone. But you know, literally sometimes you could hear the kids in the background whining about wanting to eat or whatever. And then we knew mommy was upstairs on the computer, daddy was downstairs on the computer. And you could hear the kids in the background. And it’s like, hmm, this isn’t, they got a divorce, by the way. Shock ending. And maybe there were consequences. Where and how you spend your time has consequences. And if you’re not taking one day a week in an environment specifically designed for contemplation, maybe you’re not appreciating all the consequences of your actions because you’re caught up in this day to day rat race thing where you’re like, what do I have to do next? What’s my goal? What are these other people’s goals? How do I, you know, either stymie their goal or help them forward their goal? Like, what am I doing next? And we’re never really stepping back and saying, all right, what did I do? And what consequence did that have? And were those consequences, can I understand those consequences? And what about the consequences I can’t understand? Do I need forgiveness? Should I be more tolerant or should I be less tolerant? Of myself even. Like, you tolerate all your own behavior? Hmm, there’s a good question to ask. Do I tolerate all my own behavior? Sometimes. Sometimes not. And again, this does go back to ethics in my mind because ethics seems to be all the ethical questions that I’m aware of that are sort of generic face value ethical questions are tied up in that line of where is the line, right? They’re not tied up in the what should I do? They’re not answers, right? They’re just what’s the set of compromises I can most live with, right? Because, you know, there’s a lot of conflicts in the world with our identities because, you know, you’re a son or a daughter, right? You could be a father or a mother, right? You could be a sister or a brother, plus or whoever you are at work or whoever you are with your different friends, right? You might be, you know, somebody at a club, right? You might be somebody at a church. All of these things conflict because there’s only one you and so you have to put your time, energy and attention into one of them at a time, roughly speaking, right? And especially if you want quality, you know, you have to really dig into quality to get there. And so how do you resolve all that? Well, that’s ethics. I mean, that’s part of ethics. But again, if ethics doesn’t encompass other people in the world, a significant number of other people in the world, at different stages of development, so babies and children and teenagers and adults and older people, then maybe it’s not an ethic. Like maybe you’re not in the realm of ethics anymore or you’re talking about something else. But then again, where do we go to think about things at that level? At the level of what are the consequences I can’t see? How do I get forgiveness for the fact that no matter what I’m doing, something bad is coming from it? I’m breathing oxygen. That’s oxygen. Somebody else could breathe. I’m taking in water. That’s water. Somebody else could drink, right? Like there’s no pure upside conditions. So how do we deal with these trade-offs, with these compromises that we’ve made, with the consequences from the compromises that we’ve made? And some of this to some extent is wrapped up in the other topic that came up in Clubhouse room briefly, which was leadership, right? And part of leadership is being scapegoat for the things that go horribly wrong as a result of making a decision. Because when you make a decision, you’re going to disadvantage some people over other people. That’s going to happen. And you just want to make it the right sets of people, roughly speaking, even though somebody’s definitely losing, right? There’s no way around that. And so what is the proper role for things like leadership? And that’s like, what are the consequences for being a leader? Do you really have to be a scapegoat? Because I think you do. So yeah, I mean, all these things are wrapped up together very tightly, I would say. And again, it gets into how tolerant can I be? How tolerant should I be? When at what point should I ask for forgiveness? At what point should I forgive people, right? And what should I do after I do these things? Like what should I, after I forgive somebody, should I just go back to the way things were and pretend like none of it ever happened? Because I don’t think that’s a good idea in most cases, right? Or should I reset? Is the purpose of forgiveness for the person that you’re forgiving? Or is the purpose of forgiveness so that you can reset your attitude of the world, so you don’t auger in and get stuck in a negativity loop, in reciprocal narrowing and negativity? Because I think that’s more what it is. You forgive other people so that when you encounter new people, you don’t go, that last person did me wrong. That means the next person is going to do me wrong, right? You need a way to get out of that loop. And maybe that’s what forgiveness is for. It’s not so much that you can go back and have the relationship you had before with the person that you’re forgiving. Maybe that, maybe, maybe that too. Maybe that sometimes, but certainly not all the time. And so we have to have a way to contemplate these things and work them out. And we can’t do it by ourselves because we’re stupid. As individuals, we’re just dumb. Don’t think for yourself. Jacob says that. It’s a very good video on propaganda. Check it out. We need that distributed cognition. We need that extra cognitive help in order to be able to understand these things and deal with them. And so that’s really what it’s all about for me. And that’s why you need a church or something like it. You need a community that can support you. You need to have a place to contemplate consequences. You need to go somewhere that maybe you don’t want to go to do something that maybe in the moment you don’t want to do with people you don’t want to be with. You need that skill set. You need to practice those skills in an imaginal space so that your bad ideas or your bad proclivities or your, say, your worst impulses and emotions don’t get carried away because you have a space to practice them in. Like, oh, I’m here in church. This is a sacred space. And so I’m not going to just yell at somebody for being a jerk. I’m just going to calm down. Right. And so there’s a way in which some of the things that I really like about stoicism are engendered by the church experience. And I think that’s really important because church is sort of a replacement for, or maybe an overlap, with the idea of stoicism that can, you know, I love stoicism. I think it’s very helpful. Certainly, if you’re suffering from a meaning crisis, stoicism is a good first step. It’ll give you a bunch of hows. It won’t give you any whys, but it’ll give you a bunch of hows. But being able to engage in a way where you can mitigate the emotions in the moment, right? Mitigate those feelings that just come up and overwhelm you, right? Control your practice, controlling your passions in a space where it matters to control your passions. Why does it matter to control your passions in that space? Well, it matters to control your passions in that space because you need practice controlling your passions. And here’s a good space to do it because you have a container, the church, right? Where you can celebrate where other people are there, where it’s not about you. And most of your life is about you. And you are stuck in your own perspective. And church is a way to get out of your own perspective, to consider these unknown unknowns, these impacts that we have to get that redemption, right? All of that is built in to understand tolerance, to understand these difficult ethical concepts. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that’s really at least what I wanted to start with. And hopefully somebody wants to jump in or make a suggestion on some other pattern we can navigate. This tea is really good. I do love my cinnamon spicy tea. Rule of thumb, cinnamon mixed with anything makes everything better and improves life in general for everybody on the planet. Can confirm. So, yeah, I mean, there’s so much richness in the idea of the re-enchanted world, roughly speaking, right, where we start to gain an appreciation for how connected we are and how the important things in life, you know, see the intimacy crisis videos, which I posted, how the important things in life are wrapped up in relationship and not an object and not an action, right? Object, proposition, action, procedure. They’re not wrapped up in propositions and procedures. They’re wrapped up in participation, right? And they’re wrapped up in the poetic connection, which is, you know, the sort of fuller connection to things. And, you know, that having an appreciation for, we’ll say, how enchanted the world can be once you get to see that, I think is super important. And we, you know, we don’t have that. And, you know, just for people who haven’t seen it, the knowledge model is really what I’m talking about. The knowledge model is really what I’m, you know, what I’m segueing into. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, Manuel and I used to, you know, like to say. And the reason why it’s the gift that keeps on giving is because the more we sort of explore some of these topics, especially with the crazy Christians who have all kinds of crazy ideas, the better sense we get for how useful that model is. Like, we just try to fit things into it and things just fit. And really, I got to sit down and do slides on the rest of these models because we’ve got a few more that tie into this, including cognition stages, which actually is tied directly into that model. And there’s a whole realm of the imaginal that we have a map for. We’ve actually done this in the whiteboard. I just have to make slides. If I could just sit down and focus for any amount of time, that would be helpful. And we’ve got other stuff, too, right? We’ve got a line on relevance realization that John Ravege talks about. And that’s tied up in some of the perspectival modeling that we have. What is perspectival? Because I don’t think it’s the type of knowing. That’ll become clear if you watch that video on the knowledge engine model. And so that thread of looking at things like tolerance and consequences and shame and all these other topics weaves right into that model mysteriously. And just good indication that the model is pretty powerful and correct. And really, it has explanatory power, but also a power beyond mere explanatory power. Beyond mere descriptive, it’s also prescriptive and predictive. So you can sort of predict things with it. You can predict outcomes and what you might expect to happen in a fairly accurate and reasonable way. Now, of course, it only works on a couple of levels, but it does work on a couple of different levels. I mean, it may work fractally if you apply it correctly, but it at least works at the individual level and the zeitgeist level for sure. So you can kind of see the way in which when you remove enough of the poetic and participatory knowledge from the world, or information is a better way to say it if you’re following the model strictly, you end up in this propositional and practical model. You end up in this propositional and procedural hell or stuckness, which in this case are the same thing in my opinion. And then you have a problem, right? And the problem is you can’t understand the connectedness of the world. In other words, you can’t understand consequences. You can’t have an appreciation for the consequences that are going to arise as a result of your decision. You can’t understand that shame is required because it prevents you from making bad decisions with consequences you can’t possibly understand because you’re a muffin. Now, what the hell do you know? And maybe you don’t have experience. You don’t have any experience with death. And so what do you know about it? Nothing. That’s what you know. Nothing. You’re Jon Snow. You know nothing, Jon Snow. A lot of times, you know, again, we have this belief that we understand the consequences. When we clearly do not, cannot, cannot, you know, what are the consequences of quitting my job? You don’t know because you don’t know what’s going to happen yet. Hasn’t unfolded. And we get very confused with hindsight bias. You’re very confused with how things happened versus how they look to have happened later. We don’t know those aren’t the same thing. When things unfold in real time, the decisions that you make are based on the information that you have. But after they’ve unfolded, you have more information. And so you kind of look backwards through timing and you seem a lot smarter than you are. And that’s inevitable. Like hindsight bias is a real problem. But there’s hindsight bias and you’re just a Muppet. Stop falling for hindsight bias. Realize that when you analyze something that’s already unfolded, you have access to information that wasn’t available to the actors at the time. And so you may think you’re smarter than them at that point, but you’re really not. Honest. And that’s another point. Intelligence doesn’t play into it. Because if the information isn’t available, the fact that you have the intelligence to process it is irrelevant. It’s unimportant. Hindsight bias fools us into thinking we’re way smarter than we actually are. And so communal spaces for distributed cognition. Areas where we can get together as a community and go through this imaginal identification through ritual enactment through the liturgy, right? And understand the concepts of shame. Make a space to be connected, to be forgiven, to be redeemed, to be forgiven for the consequences which we’ll never understand. To interact with compassion and celebrate all the things that didn’t go horribly wrong or as wrong as they could have. We need a space for contemplation. And we need a space to contemplate things that are bigger than us, that are beyond us. All of these things are just required. And it goes back to Peterson’s, you know, our ideas die so we don’t have to. But also just making that space where you’re small and you realize that you’re small. But you may be small but you’re a very important component in a much larger web. Because then you can think about that. And the more you think about that, say once a week or twice a week, the more you can think about that in your daily life, right? That’s exaptation. That’s how training works. You do this and then over time it kind of permeates through the rest of your time. And so having that space to contemplate your smallness in the world is actually helpful because again it keeps you out of that solipsism. And it keeps you out of that self bubble that you create, right? It keeps your ego in check. It does so much for you. And also gives you a place to connect with other people to enact service, right? To be of service to others. How do you know who needs service? Well, a church can help you with that. And these are just some of the, like I said before, I’m not doing an exhaustive list. These are just some of the ways in which going to church can help you. I think. And also re-enchant the world, right? You’re practicing making connections between you and things indefinitely in the future. You and things bigger than you. You and the community around you in the moment, right? And so you’re practicing, instead of scientifically carving everything up into a problem to be solved, you’re practicing relating everything back together, back into a whole. And if you look at the neoplatonic tradition, such as it exists, I mean there’s a lot of missing material I would argue, it’s very much about the ascent to the one, right? And then the breaking back down into component parts. And then the ascent back to the whites. It’s part of that process. And projme meditation, for example, is like that, right? It’s like, well, you zoom in and then you zoom out, and then you zoom in and then you zoom out. What are you learning? Well, you’re learning to zoom in further and zoom out further, but you’re also learning to do that quicker and more often in the moment. Those are all good things, right? So projme, yay for projme meditation. Love John Brevicki’s meditation series. I think it’s excellent. It’s by far the best meditation sort of process that I’ve ever even heard of, much less seen. Church gives you that too, right? Church gives you some of these acceptable skills. You’re a small component in a larger community, but you’re important, right? But you don’t get off the hook, right? You’re held to account. And you’re thinking about things in this larger frame and reconnecting the world, right? Reconnecting your everyday actions to everything because it’s connected to everything. You’re just not thinking about it. And the less you think about it, the more you lose the skill to do that, the more solipsistic and egoistic you become, the more hubristic you get, the more arrogant you are, and it’s funny. So there’s this example that I’ve been trying playing with lately because a lot of people seem to be confused about what arrogance is, right? So they confuse arrogance and confidence quite a bit. So they hear somebody who sounds confident and say, wow, he sounds arrogant. It’s like, hey, you’re only arrogant if you’re making a claim about something that you don’t know anything about, but you’re claiming as though you do. You can make claims about things you don’t know anything about by saying, well, I don’t know anything about this, but I think it works this way. Fair enough, that’s your opinion. That’s cool. But if you go and read a bunch of physics books on your own and then you go up to the head of the physics department of MIT and start having a conversation with him and you say, wow, you seem to know almost as much physics as I do. That’s arrogant. Or, wow, you know slightly more physics than I do. That’s arrogance. There’s no way around that. That’s arrogance because it’s not confidence, right? You’re making a claim to the physics department head at MIT about your knowledge relative to his. And you can’t know that. You’re insane. That’s just ego speaking. And I see people are confused. Oh, you sound confident. Therefore, you’re an arrogant prick. Only if I’m not right, all right? Only if my confidence is unfounded. Only if I’m making a claim that I can’t back up. Right? If I’m making a claim I can back up, then I’m not arrogant. I’m just confident. Right? And not understanding the difference has consequences. And we’re having a lot of problems like that in the language, right? Where people are confusing other things. So one of the confusions I sort of figured out recently was there’s a deep confusion between telling people what to do and pointing out that they’ve done something that has consequences. Right? So if you say, look at somebody like Jordan Peterson and you say, look, Jordan, you moved to Daily Wire Plus. And that has, you know, that has the potential to make people who previously supported you think that you’re a far right person. A far right extremist. Right? Or maybe it cuts you off from your previous audience. Or maybe because you’ve done this move, now a bunch of people will end up paying a bunch of money to an outfit that, you know, who their politics are terrible. You can tell them all three of those things or just one of them or any two of them. Doesn’t matter. Right? Or many more things. You haven’t told them what to do. You’ve just given them a set of observations that are true. Right? That’s not telling somebody what to do. That’s, you know, now if they draw the conclusion that, oh, wow, this means I shouldn’t move to Daily Wire or whatever. That’s them. That’s not you. You didn’t do that to them. You merely pointed out that actions have consequences. That’s not a judgment. Sometimes it can be framed as a judgment. If somebody judges you, fair enough. But that’s just because they made a statement about you did a thing and that has consequences. Doesn’t mean you’re judging them and it doesn’t mean you’re telling them what to do. It can mean neither of those things. It can mean that you’re making an observation and that observation might be useful to them because maybe you’re giving them a context they didn’t have before. So we need to be able to do that without people thinking you’re a bad actor because you’re judging them. Like maybe you’re just helping them out or trying to help them out. And we try to help people out sometimes and it’s not always helpful, but it’s useful to know that. So people get confused about these things. They get confused between judgment, telling people what to do, and mere observation. But that’s the whole don’t shoot the messenger thing. Somebody tells you something you don’t want to hear. You don’t shoot them. That’s not cool. They’re just telling you something. Like the thing’s not going away because you got rid of the person that pointed it out. That’s not how reality works. Which is not to say you shouldn’t shoot some messengers because maybe they’re not good people, but that’s a different problem that would be framed a different way. So it’s sort of important to keep track of these things because we’re really like abusing the language terribly lately. Pardon me while I enjoy more excellent cinnamon tea. Pointing out consequences and getting people in a situation because you pointed out the consequences where they feel judged is not a bad thing. You’ve got to be able to give people framing and perspectives that they may not have. Like it’s very useful to them. It’s very useful to you. It’s good practice. So, you know, it’s a good thing. You know, it’s a good thing. You know, don’t think of it as a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing. And yeah, I mean, I wanted to highlight that because I think that’s important. We’re very confused about how language works lately. And it’s getting worse due to the postmodern ridiculousness. And I do have a video on postmodernism, but maybe I should do a navigating kind of live stream on postmodern. Would you like to see that, you know, in the comments? All right. So those are the patterns I wanted to navigate live today before Christmas. If anyone has anything they want to send forth or if they want to join the stream, that would be great. Otherwise, I will wind it down and just sort of summarize my consequences plus church thesis and let you stew on that. And man, I should take more notes because there’s so much there. I wish I could have taken more notes when I was in Clubhouse, but I sort of in the flow. Yeah, I don’t see anybody speaking up. So look, consequences are important. Too much tolerance, we shield people from their consequences. Not having immediate consequences maybe causes worse consequences in the future pretty reliably. I don’t know, but it’s possible. We should think about that. We often make poor decisions because we believe we understand consequences when we clearly don’t. We understand some small set of consequences, but that doesn’t mean we understand them all. And maybe we need a communal space, communal, imaginal space where we can be shamed and also be freed of our shame through redemption and forgiveness. And shame is important because maybe it prevents us from doing things that have really bad consequences that we couldn’t possibly understand because we’re all muppets. And you don’t understand things until you go through them sometimes, through most things. Just for knowledge, as Zwervecki would say. But maybe we need a communal space where we can have these imaginal interaction with something bigger than us, where we can keep our spiritual house in order so that we can be free of our shame. We can keep our spiritual house in order. See why keep your house clean, which Manuel and I did recently. We need to imagine how connected we are and that we’ll all do things that will impact other people that we’ll never meet and people that we don’t know. We need a space for redemption, for forgiveness, to know compassion, to celebrate things that we’ve done. We need a space to contemplate things like consequences, to contemplate grace and gratitude and humility. And that’s the problem. The scientific worldview tells us we can carve up the world and deal with it one problem at a time, but the world’s too connected for that. So how could we have Benjamin Franklin? I still don’t think that’s his real name. What do I think about Sam Harris’s moral landscape? Well, I did a video kind of on that. My first Sam Harris video, I think has more on that. Look, Sam Harris’s moral landscape is really easy. It is a relativistic frame. So in any relativistic frame of any type at all ever, and there are lots of them, they have these interesting qualities. Because they’re relativistic frames, you cannot make claims from them that are not about the things in them. So you can’t put Islam in a relativistic frame by itself and come to any conclusions, because relativistic frames, by definition, all of them have to work the following way. You need to compare two or more things. So you can put Islam and Christianity in the relativistic frame and come to some conclusions about their differences. But you know what you can’t do, even in a relativistic frame, is judge one is better than the other. Relativistic frames cannot give you information about better, because the standard of better has to exist outside of the relativistic frame. Then you can compare and contrast the two things relative to the third thing. That’s orientation, not direction. Sam Harris is very stuck on direction. He actually says this, right? So he goes into his stupid thesis, and it is stupid. I’m sorry. It’s just like, this is how third graders talk, or three-year-olds, rather. And it really is. If you’ve been around enough three-year-olds, you’ll recognize Sam Harris’ solipsistic ridiculous foolish logic right away, because any three-year-old can do it better, or at least as well. Probably better, though. We can find the worst possible evil or bad and move away from it. That’s dumb. It’s all wrong, first of all. No, you can’t. I can make anything worse than whatever you can imagine. And you can play that game infinitely. We know this. It’s not hard to figure out. You can always make it worse. It’s not hard. It’s not hard to make things worse. You can always add on pain or suffering or malevolence. You can add more of that on, add infinitum. So things like moral landscape don’t work, because they’re directional. And he’s playing a trick, because he’s pitting Christianity versus Islam in cage match moral landscape. But he’s comparing them to a standard he hasn’t stated. So it’s a trick. And look, I like tricks. I play tricks all the time. They’re wonderful. But they don’t work. It’s a trick. In one way, I like the idea of the moral landscape, which is the place of participation in the world. Depends how you define morals. I define morals, ethics are the ideals. Morals are the implementation of those ideals. That’s actually a really important formula, I would argue. So yeah, I mean, it doesn’t work. You know what it doesn’t give you? It doesn’t give you consequences. It doesn’t talk about that, because consequences would require that third thing to judge against. So relativistic frameworks are useful to compare and contrast two things relative to a third thing. And that third thing can’t move. 100% agree is assuming it’s standard C level. The trick to all of these people, including Jordan Peterson, who I love, but certainly John Verbecky and certainly people like Sam Harris and all the new atheists, they’re playing a very simple trick. They are assuming that there is a thing called objective material reality, and that that is a neutral space. And that you, you, you as an individual, which you cannot be, by the way, can occupy that space and then make judgments. In other words, you can play God. Okay, but no to all of that. All of those assumptions are provably false, observably incorrect, bad stuff. So that’s important to know. That’s the trick that they’re all relying on. This is the trick of science. Science is this neutral space. It has no moral valence. It doesn’t have any ethical, you know, relationship. It’s just sort of apart from all of that. And therefore, when we do science, we’re doing some pure sort of a thing, which with no valence, right? And Peterson’s brilliant at this. He says, is it a valid science to cross anthrax with Ebola? Because he’s curious. Like, do you think it is? Right. And I would argue it cannot be ethical to do that. Whether or not it’s a science, like I don’t care if it’s a science. I think science, you know, everyone’s overweighing science, right? What matters is can it manifest the good? And the answer is no. No good can come from that. And the formulation, no good can come from that is actually really important. I use that formulation all the time when I’m thinking about things. All the time. As a pragmatist, you use formulas like no good can come from this, and therefore, I won’t embark. Right? And it prevents you, in a very simple way, without having to do rationalizations and calculations and moral whatever’s and let’s grab Aristotle and Plato and, you know, cage match and you can do any of that. You can just ask things like, can any good come from this? And if the answer is no, and you might be wrong, but if the answer is no, you’re better off not doing it, pragmatism to the rescue. Is that going to be 100% correct? No, because you’re a muppet. You’re not going to get anything 100% correct. Get over it. You’re just flawed. Like, original sin and therefore, whatever. However you want to couch it. Right. So yeah, I mean, that’s my thoughts on moral landscape and ethics in general and pragmatism, which I can touch on, you know, because it matters if something’s for the good or not. Or if it has no goodness in it, don’t pursue it. It’s that simple. Man, that tea is good. I do love my teas. You got anything else? Anyone want to hop in and keep me company while I ponder all these patterns, these live patterns? Live. Now, only $19.95. If you order now, you also get dead patterns. Free. Just pay shipping. All right, then. Well, I think we talked about consequences enough and we touched on tolerance, which, you know, is a tricky thing. We touched on the moral landscape, which is always a pleasure, but I do have videos on navigating patterns in Sam Harris and highest value is a better video. But interestingly, if you look at the first video first and look at the date, and then you can watch that video, then you can watch highest value and see the profit at work. Because I predicted what was going to happen to Sam Harris. To be fair, I predicted eight years ago, but these things do take time to unfold. But eventually, he was going to blow up. And yeah, maybe next time we talk about Bret Weinstein and blowing up with Robert Wright, which is just horrific to watch. It’s very painful. I really like Bret Weinstein, but wow, what a mess he is. So all right, everybody. Well, look, Merry Christmas. I hope everybody has a wonderful time. I got some Christmas gifts already and probably the best gifts I’ve gotten in years, honestly. And I got some baked goods. I’m going to go eat some late dinner and have some cookies because they’re awesome. Oh my God, holy macaron. Those are good cookies. And yeah, I hope everybody has a wonderful Christmas. And I hope to see everybody maybe next week, but certainly in the new year. I’m probably going to be launching more stuff and get my website up here and fix all that. And I got my stuff mirrored on Odyssey and or most of it is mirrored on Odyssey and Rumble. The Rumble mirror is running. So if you want to check me out there, you can check me out there. Someday I’ll get back to fixing the bit chute situation. That’s kind of a pain in the ass. But yeah, Merry Christmas. Enjoy. Navigate those patterns live in your life. And hopefully I will see you after Christmas.