Symbols, Poetics and Intimacy! (Ra2oQHV6pIg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ra2oQHV6pIg

I mean, it’s a way of participating, but it’s not good participation, but it’s not intimate. Because intimacy has that, we’re not just subject to you, you’re subject to us. And I think that’s what happens with the objectivist worldview. If you’re an individualist, materialist, objectivist, one of the things you’re going to do is you’re going to try to subject the world to your observations. Restoring that intimacy is the act of re-enchanting. The enchanted space is there, but you have to navigate it. And you navigate through the poetic way of informing the world. It’s that set of information that you’re missing, that you use, and maybe we don’t want to use it anymore, because conflict is bad. We’re talking a lot about, oh yeah, you don’t want to take responsibility or have conflict, right? Like, it’s all this danger mode relationship where there’s something being threatened, right? And the external world needs to be kept out, that even though we’re trying not to be in the mode. And I think maybe that’s the problem. We’re identifying against our shadow, right? And then we’re necessarily in that relationship, right? Like, so the fact that we’re recognizing that relationship and trying not to have it is putting us in it. Because now we’re looking at the world, we’re participating in that world as if that relationship is what’s relevant. Well, welcome back. I have with me again, by popular request, at least I assume by the views, Manuel Post. There he is. And the Dutch Viking himself. And what we’re going to be talking about today is we’re going to sort of do a little more exploration. We’re going to take the poetic way of informing the world. And we’re going to see how this relates to symbolism, how it relates to enchantment, how it relates to intimacy and why that’s sort of the keystone for that whole configuration. So before we begin, Manuel, what do you think of that outline? How are you feeling? Well, I feel like those are big words. So we might want to start with definitions where it’s like, OK, like these are definitely things. And these are happening within a certain realm. So maybe it’s important to contextualize. OK, like what is a symbol? Well, a symbol is something through which you’re making a connection. And it has a set of affordances. The enchantment is more a consequence of the connections that you’re making. So it’s important to see, I guess, like one is coming out of you and the other one is projected onto the screen of reality. And then what was the last one? Intimacy. Well, yeah, intimacy is maybe the thing that’s in between. I guess we’ll figure that out while we go along. But maybe the intimacy is how you have these symbols or these archetypical structures that you use to relate to the world and then how skillful you are in making the connections and how much of that you can hold without breaking. Because one of the things with intimacy is, well, every time that you end up going into a calculating mode or whatever, you’re breaking the connections. Right? Like you’re losing the participation. So there’s a sense of capacity related to intimacy that’s in between the symbols that you’re using and the enchantment that you experience in the world. Oh, yeah, I like that outline. Yeah. So I think for me, the intimacy is that connectedness, that two-way connectedness. And then you’re intimate with yourself. Right? You’re intimate with others. You’re intimate with nature, minimally. It’s at least those three connections. And they are reciprocal. Right? So they’re not just one way. When they’re one way, they’re broken. And then the way we tie this back, in my mind, to the poetic is we say the poetic way of informing the world is the thing that enables the navigation of intimacy as such. And intimacy is all tied up in conflict and tradeoffs. Right? And so the space you do that in is the realm of enchantment, roughly speaking. And so it’s not that it’s not technically for re-enchant the world. The world’s already enchanted. What you’re really doing is you’re connecting with that enchantment. Right? You’re navigating that enchanted realm. That’s what the re-enchantment is. You’re suddenly able to see and navigate that enchanted realm. That’s only through participation. Right? And that leads you through the symbol to whatever the symbol is pointing at. Right? And that’s sort of how I’ve been thinking about that. How does that land for you? Well, yeah, I had an experience of enchantment today in church. So that was fascinating where a word, mercy, which is a really, really rough word, I didn’t have to understand it anymore because now I had a connection with it. Like, I was like, oh, right? Like, I’m saying this. Well, before it was like, well, yeah, what is mercy? Well, like, how does that word God, like, coming down and giving mercy? Like, what are we talking about? Right? And then when there is this participation that you’re able to recall in some sense, because you’ve gathered experience, then you don’t have to go into the intellectual complexity of the relationship. But you have, yeah, I was going to say something more concrete, but I guess the word that I want to use, it’s more real. Right? Like, you’re referencing something that was real to you. Right? And real in a way that’s like, not science has discovered it and written a book about it, but real and like, okay, that was me. And this is how that was for me. And I think from there, right, like, that provides a grounding in my relationship to the meaning of the word. It also provides a way that I can explore. Right? Like, in some sense, that word, which was always alien to me, it becomes something that I now can use in order to explore the world and myself at the same time. So if we’re talking about intimacy, it’s, yeah, like, when we’re looking at a symbol, because a word is a symbol, it’s symbolizing something, it’s symbolizing a relationship. Right? And then that symbol is the thing that allows our connection. Right? So in some sense, you can look at the symbol or real symbols as reliable ways to connect to the world. And yeah, like, that requires you to develop, that requires you to have a relationship with them. And so you cannot expect these things to self-manifest. It’s the thing that you have to cultivate in your life. Yeah. And I think that links back to, you know, particular versus intuitive knowing. Which is in our four types of information and two types of knowing stuff where we’re talking about, you know, you can know things propositionally and, you know, from the proposition of procedure perspective, that’s particular. Right? Or you can know them intuitively, which is about how to participate with them, what the poetics is. And the poetics is the connectedness. That’s how their things are connected through narrative, usually, but also other ways. Music, right? There’s resonance, there’s a resonant way of connecting in the poetic. Right? There’s a way of interacting with the poetic that has to do with rhythm, right? Which is different from resonance. Right? There are ways in which this connectedness happens, and that’s what’s creating the intimacy. And you don’t need to understand the words in a propositional fashion such that you can communicate them to others to participate with them. Right? And this goes back to that idea where, you know, the farmer knows more about farming than the academic who studies farming. Those guys can’t grow anything, typically. This is well documented and well studied. And it’s like that in a lot of domains. So you see that the inventors tend to out-compete the strict engineers. And then past a point that flips. But in the beginning, when the world’s wide open, so for example, with the light bulb in Edison, there were tons of engineers working on the materials and trying to come at it from a certain attitude. And Edison’s like, screw it, we’re just going to try everything. And he did. Until he found the good thing. And then once he found the good thing, then the engineers come back in and say, well, why is this good and that not good? And now all of a sudden, now they’ve got a new structure to play their game with. Right? But then if you want to innovate the light bulb again, you need something like LEDs to come along. Right? So there’s a way in which, you know, in which there’s a back and forth where the engineering takes over, but then the intuitive, you know, participation sort of takes over. And they go sort of back and forth. And I think intimacy is ultimately wrapped up in conflict and trade off and in your participation. And maybe that’s, you know, as I’m thinking about this, maybe something we’ve lost for so far apart from one another. You know, in the old days, you’d have somebody scam somebody out of a bunch of money. Right. And it’d be like, oh, the problem is there’s no system in place to keep these, you know, but it’s that deep intimate connection that allowed them to do the scam. So you break that connection and then you’re like, look, you can just go online and do financial advisor and they can’t steal money from you. But of course, they can steal money from you way easier. So, you know, you end up with this back and forth where one, you know, you’re trying to use one to solve the problem of the other instead of blending two of them will say into a into a nice cohesive way of relating to the world, both through communication, which is all communication is roughly speaking, all verbal communication is propositional and procedural. Right. And then in language kind of skirts the edge on that. But it is primarily propositional procedural. And then the type of communication that really matters is, you know, you go up to your girlfriend and you know, she’s upset and you go behind her and you put your hands on her shoulder sort of thing. Right. That’s participatory in the poetic because you’re noticing how she’s feeling and you’re lending her some of your agency right through your feeling. You’re giving her time and attention. That’s not propositional. It’s not procedural. I can’t tell you when to do that. But, you know, that’s the sort of navigation you need to do in a relationship and vice versa. So, yeah, it’s all sort of tied together in that way. Yeah. So a little bit extension on the relationship. Right. Like if you’re going to try and analyze why did he put hands on my shoulders? No. Right. Like what’s behind it? Right. Then at that point, you break everything. Right. And then the gesture cannot be received. Right. And the intimacy is broke. Right. So it requires you to have a certain participation and also in some sense, it’s an acceptance of the consignors and all of this. Right. Like there’s an element where you just have to accept what you’re getting and using it for good. Right. You’re trying to take it and lift it up into the best it can be. So you can start to be skeptical and corrupt what is or you can participate and enhance it and chant it. Right. Like make it what you need it to be. So, yeah, that’s two ways of going about that. And one of the examples that really amazed me of this process because Mark was like, oh yeah, like we have this technology and then we get a stabilization and then we get like this shift and then we get a new stabilization. But the example that I had is there’s a deer walking and it’s walking and it’s participating in moving around and then it’s looking up. Right. Like it’s taking in the environment. It’s looking for predators. It’s reorienting itself against the surroundings in a different way than it has to when it walks. Right. Because there’s a different process. Right. Like it’s the path finding as opposed to the walking. And it’s alternating between these modes. Right. You can see that with wild animals. They’re alternating between that mode and that one isn’t progressive necessarily. Although it is progressive towards talons because like the animal has a motivation. Right. Like do I want shelter from the wind? Do I prioritize being away from predators? Do I prioritize getting food? Right. So within that expression, there’s still progression towards a goal. But it’s less moving up and more moving forward. So we can see that we have these two aspects. Right. These two ways where we’re in the world. We’re trying to manifest something with our participation and then we withdraw and we’re like, okay, do I have a new appointment? Like do I have to check my email? Right. And then, well, you can already see it. Right. Like if we’re checking our email all the time, if we’re… If we just keep getting dragged out of the participation, then we’re defamiliarizing ourselves with it. Like we become alienated from that participation. And in some sense, right, like you can imagine the deer walking. And it’s constantly looking for predators and food. Right. Like it’s trying to catalog. Like if I go back to the spot next week, I can pick up this, this, this. And you can just see how that would like tear the deer out of its beauty, its emergence within the environment. And it’s taking it to a completely different realm where it’s alienated. It’s trying to optimize. It’s trying to exhaust the resources that nature is providing it to it. And yeah, that’s just a totally different way of life. Yeah, I like that. We should do a cartoon of deer head cell phones. But yeah, if you’ve ever watched a deer feed, you can watch them. They carefully pay attention to the foliage in front of them. They grab it in their mouths. And then while they’re chewing, they look up and the ears start doing this. And that’s when they’ll run if they hear something or see something. So it’s hard to catch sometimes, but you can pay attention to it. I like this. So one of the things I talked about in my talk with Andrew with the bangs about the intimacy crisis is this and we’ve talked about before, object, subject, subject. And I think that’s really it. Like either side can object and then you’re not going to get the right intimacy. Intimacy is broken if both sides object or one side objects completely. You’re not going to get the intimacy, but being subject to something and subjecting something to you is participation. Like that’s what it means to participate. It means when you want to participate, participating in a conversation with you, I have to give you time to speak. Otherwise, we’re not quite participating in a conversation. It’s actually just came up on bridges of meaning the other day. Like it was funny because I totally missed it. What happened was somebody came in and they were just asking us questions like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And they weren’t willing to answer those same questions about themselves. And I was like, oh, you would think I would pick up on that. But somebody else picked up on it instead and called him out for it, which is good for them. And he was like, I was getting really aggravated. I was like, I didn’t know you were aggravated that, you know, but you did the right thing. You pointed out to them. You’re having a one way conversation with us. You’re not here and being a subject to us. You just want us to answer you a bunch of questions as though we’re supposed to hand you answers because you’re in titles. That’s not I mean, it’s a way of participating, but it’s not good participation, but it’s not intimate because intimacy has that you’re also subject to us. We’re not just subject to you. You’re subject to us. And I think that’s what happens with the objectivist worldview. If you’re an individualist materialist objectivist, not the Ayn Randian type maybe, but you know, stuck in objective material reality. One of the things you’re going to do is you’re going to try to be you’re going to try to subject the world to your observations. And so you’re going to try to get information out of the world and drag it into your objective material reality. And that’s a loss of intimacy. You’re not engaging. And then the other thing you can do is you can go all the way in and say, well, I just meditate all time until I become nothing. Right. And it’s like, well, then you’re really not participating with any. There’s no intimacy at all. And nobody can be intimate with you either because you’re not here. You’re not here. You’re like actually moving your mind into the nowhere space, into objective material reality, which I suggest doesn’t exist. Right. Where your mind is no longer able to connect with symbols as such. Right. You’re so withdrawn. And I think that’s why it’s important that intimacy is you with yourself. There’s an inner world in your head you can engage with in good meditation, we’ll say. A non objective meditation where you’re not trying to do something in the meditation. You’re just being quiet to see what comes up. Right. And many forms of prayer are like many forms of meditation. Quite a bit of shortcuts. Pay attention to God and you’ll be fine sort of thing. Maybe or pay attention to your immediate proximal goal if you want to go with like voodoo or something. Right. And you’ll be fine. But you know, we’ll say a rich meditative tradition from the East actually has this aspect of, well, it’s not a good thing. It’s just this aspect of, well, sometimes you focus. Sometimes you’re trying to do prajna or something where you’re going in and out, whatever. Right. But sometimes you’re just sitting there listening and becoming acquainted with what’s actually going on inside your head. That’s the intimate connection with yourself. And if you focus on that you won’t have intimacy with nature and with others and then you’ll live in a city and you’ll destroy the world and whatever. So I think it’s restoring that intimacy is the act of re-enchanting. the enchanted space is there, but you have to navigate it. And you navigate through the poetic way of informing the world. It’s that set of information that you’re missing, that you use, and maybe we don’t wanna use it anymore because maybe we’re just, conflict is bad, right? Maybe that’s our whole attitude is just wrong. Conflict is bad and therefore, we mustn’t have conflict anymore. And I think that’s really super unhealthy for us. I think that’s not the right attitude at all. You can’t really live life that way at all, in my opinion. You’ve gotta have a lot more going on. I mean, conflict is necessary. We conflict with our needs in the present versus our needs in the future. We conflict with our needs, with what we can get in nature, our needs with everybody else, our needs with our own wants and desires, right? We’re very, we can get swept up by the passions, if you wanna go with the ancient Greek conception, right? Or we can get swept up by our emotions in the moment or something, right? And yeah, meditation can help with some of that or stoicism or whatever, right? Where you’re creating that space, but that space that you’re creating that, whenever you’re creating space between the binaries, I think that’s when you’re enchanting. That is the area of enchantment itself. Well, yeah, there could be enchantment, right? Because there could also be retreat. Like it’s the space for more. It’s the space of, we’re not reactive. I think that’s maybe important, right? Like the reactivity. Because in some sense, when you’re reactive, right? Like you’re the object, right? Like, you’re, so yeah, like to participate, right? Is to take part. So you’re considering yourself a part of a whole. So now you can identify the whole, which is more than you. And it’s also more than the sum of its parts, right? And so if you look at, like you have a talos, right? You have a goal. You have something you wanna manifest. And if the thing that you wanna manifest is not directly from you, but it’s you joining with something in the world, right? Like it could be your car, right? Like a car, you can join with your car to be this moving object and navigate the road. Then there’s something special happens where the way that you conceive of yourself now includes the car. And then the option space that you’re relating to, right? Or like, what does the world look like when you’re in a car? It looks completely different, right? Because like, no, you can’t go on the sidewalk, right? Like there’s all of these rules, or these stupid slides that you need to pay attention to. There’s other cars. So now in effect, you’ve changed the meaning of the world and you’ve enchanted it for yourself in a profound way, right? Like now it is like all of this meaning is coming out of it. It’s like, oh, like this car coming at this distance means that in the future I will have to, right? Like, so there’s all of this stuff that’s being generated. And when you’re objecting or, yeah, like, yeah, then the world is separate from you, right? So now you’re looking at the world and you’re defining it in relation to you instead of in relation to the goal. And this is really valuable, for example, if you’re in danger or whatever. And we’re talking a lot about, oh yeah, you don’t wanna take responsibility or like you don’t wanna have conflict, right? Like it’s all this danger mode relationship where there’s something being threatened, right? And the external world needs to be kept out. That’s scary to us. But in the other hand, like we’re as modern man navigating from that space, right? Like we are in that mode, even though we’re trying not to be in the mode. And I think maybe that’s the problem, right? Like we’re objectifying or better said, we’re identifying against our shadow, right? And then we’re necessarily in that relationship, right? Like so the fact that we’re recognizing that relationship and trying not to have it is putting us in it. Because now we’re looking at the world, we’re participating in that world as if that relationship is what’s relevant in what’s happening around us. So yeah, that might be a good way to look that back into intimacy. I like that. I have to tell you a quick story now, Manuel. So I was on Clubhouse last night and I was chatting with some peeps I know there who are excellent. I have really good Clubhouse friends. I’m very happy to have curated my Clubhouse signal well to invoke Matthew’s little maxim there. And so we have a new subscriber, Mike. And the example he was using last night was, well, there’s a way in which cars can be objects, but I have a relationship to my object. And he was pointing me at a documentary, which I haven’t seen. And basically this guy had bought Mad Max’s original car from the movies. And he fixed it up when he was young. And then he became rather famous in Hollywood. And then he decided to go to get rid of all that and go back and fix up his car with his buddies. And this car that he’s had since he’s 17 or whatever, now in his 40s or something. And so there’s a way in which he’s restoring intimacy with the car. And the way he was talking about that was objects. It’s funny that you brought up car. These things are very strange, but you’re right. I mean, if you object to the car, if it’s not a part of you or part of your life, then you have a different relationship than if it is. And I like where you went with that. It’s like, well, maybe that is the problem we’re identifying against. And then the thing that came up in my head while you were talking about this was the perspective of me by myself looking out on the world as though I’m the center. So the irony is this is the complaint that the new atheists will say had against the church. No, the earth isn’t the center. It’s like, yeah, you’re not the center either. And these people are treating themselves like they’re the center. But then what does that mean? I think if you’re relating everything to yourself, and I think this is why it actually works to relate- Ego-centrism, that’s really appropriate. Yes, right, right. The church was earth-centric, but you’re egocentric. And that’s worse, right? You’ve just changed the unit of measure. Instead of expanding out, you’ve contracted in, right? There’s the reciprocal narrowing versus reciprocal opening thing right there, right? So I think there’s a way in which when you do that relationship, you start to form linear relationships, discrete linear relationships between you and the things around you. And then you’re relating everything to you, and therefore you need a single identity so that you can relate all of these things. And I think that’s, you’re right, that’s part of the problem. So this goes back to, if you haven’t seen the slides, I’ve got a good one on the four types of information slides. I think that you really might’ve nailed it there, right? That’s what it is. That’s what’s causing me to create the closed world because it looks feasible all of a sudden to do that. And bonus, no conflict, because from your centering perspective, you’re not part of that whole. So you don’t need to worry about the conflicts that come up as trying to be part of that whole, right? You can just go like, oh, well, this is just me and the rest of you are just you and therefore, right? You don’t have to get into it. So I think, yeah, I think that’s something onto that. And then again, you form the closed world, right? And then in a closed world, things like wealth redistribution are correct. It’s just that we don’t live in a closed world. We live in a world where you can create value by having that intimate connection, right? And with the space that is, we’ll say, bigger than us, right? With the space of virtues and values, we can manifest things in the world or co-manifest things in the world. And through that co-creative process, and then what happens is now there’s more stuff in the world. The world is in some place, in some ways, sorry, in some ways bigger. Now we have an enchanted world again, right? Well, we’re seeing the enchantment. And then you can also imagine that people who are stuck in their own egocentric perspective, they’re kind of hanging out there and they’re looking around and seeing people just do things that they don’t understand. Like, well, how are we able to do that, right? It’s because they’re living in the enchanted world and walking around, they can see it in some sense. So they can walk around the enchanted world and do things that aren’t possible in the linear discrete world that the egocentrist has in their head. So yeah, and so it’s more about getting them out of their head, out of their heliocentric, I mean, out of their earth-centric view and the heliocentric view, right? So that they can engage with and really participate in the enchanted world. Yeah, so I made another connection. It’s like, what’s the grounding you get, right? Like when you go to school or you watch modern media, it’s loose tits bits of information and there’s no cohesion between the narratives and all of that stuff. And so when you’re living in that world, you don’t have grounded, right? So what is the thing that you ground things on? Well, that’s you. You’re the only stable factor in everything. So if you can’t find the stability in the outside world in a system that allows you to perceive consistency across time, right? Which will require you to see the values and how they manifest, right? Like this is again, intuitive complex relationship between virtues and values and your participation in that. And if you don’t have that vision, there’s no permanence to ground them. And then what you have to ground on is, well, the salient bits in the moment, like the things that have either a relationship to you for a long time, right? Like career, right? Like that would be one way to look at yourself or the creation of an identity, right? Where instead of identifying you against something that’s gonna be important like work, you’re identifying yourself against what you think is an ideal but it’s more a fantasy, right? Because you’ve not fully developed the capacity to relate to the true ideal. So you’re taking a flat-on version or a stereotype instead of the archetype. And then you end up being misguided in what you’re navigating, right? So this all goes back to the egocentrism. Like I’m calling it narcissism because I don’t think it’s distinguishable. So I’m not saying that when you’re in this mode, you’re maliciously motivated, right? But the behavior that you exhibit necessarily because it’s grounding in you, it’s always gonna have this narcissistic quality because you’re the measure of all things. And if you’re the measure of all things, all things are gonna point back to you instead of to something higher, right? Like to the thing that you’re taking part of. Wow, that was great, Manuel. Yeah, I really, so there’s the individualism, right? That’s what pops out of is the need to ground. And what are you grounding on through time? Well, you’re grounding on the thing that you think you can see even though you can’t see yourself clearly, right? And that’s why you wanna force everybody to see you the way I’m gonna force you to use pronouns, right? Because I’m an individual and I can. It’s like, I don’t use pronouns when you’re around, but I get to control your speech when I’m not here so that my identity remains intact when you’re not here. It’s like, oh, wow, that’s a scary way to look at things. But yeah, I like this. So we brought back our concept of historical grounding, right? Which is, yeah, you need a historical grounding. You need a place to stand. You need a place to stand to make your statements. You need a place to stand to shoot your arrow in the future, right? You need a place to stand so that you know what you’re looking up to and then you can orient. Maybe you can’t go directly to it, right? Even an archery, I mean, yeah, modern bows aside. You can’t fire straight. You’ve got to fire in a curve, in the right curve for the right distance, right? For all the other factors. And maybe you have to take a few steps, right? You know, maybe you need a different bow, right? Maybe you need a better arrow, whatever it is. But there’s also a way in which, you know, you’re moving and there’s an orientation. And orientation is, well, I can’t go straight. So I have to calculate how to go around an obstacle and how to get back on track towards my goal. And that’s why near direction is not enough. But if you look at sort of what’s manifesting the world now, right, we’ve got the three great religions, roughly speaking, which I talk about religious patterns. That’s the video where I talk about that safety, climate and race. And there’s others, but those are my cheeky three, big three. What they’re doing is they’re saying, we have a highest value, right? And it’s this, and this is the direction you use to go there. And that’s all you need. So it’s you, the direction and the goal. That’s it, that’s all you need. But you need orientation, right? Because direction can get corrupted pretty easily because the minute you can’t just go straight towards the goal, you run into an obstacle like, oh, well, not everybody of one race is the same, or oh, safety, different people feel safe in different ways. And therefore the definition of safety changes based on who you are. That means that person has to walk a different path or in a different direction. They’ve come up against something. There’s no way for them to reorient because they only have a direction. You haven’t given them a clear goal with a set of instructions on how to navigate. And navigation is all about the conflicts that you run into. So I sail, or at least I used to, I haven’t been in a boat in a while, not a sailboat anyway. When you’re in the water and you need to go into the wind, you can do that, but the direction you take has to change. You do what’s called tacking, right? You go this way and then you go that way and then you go this way and then you go that. And eventually you’re going this way, ultimately. So that’s part of orienting yourself because you have to know how far and in relation to the wind versus relation to the boat because the sail moves. So there’s a way in which the hull and the sail and the wind and the goal are all related. And there’s conflicts there because if the wind’s too strong, maybe you can’t go as fast as you want. And there’s also constraints. Like you don’t wanna go too far one way or too far the other way because you’ve got to go back that equal distance, right? And so there’s a time component. So all of these things are conflicting with one another with your goal of going this way in the direction you wanna go in. So direction and where you are and what constrains you is all conflict. And you have to resolve that. So tacking is not a, like if I say you have to tack to get there, right? That’s not a set of specific instructions about what to do. It’s a symbol of a methodology of how to do it. And then the implementation is up to a whole bunch of things that aren’t implied when I say you have to tack, right? They’re not, there’s no data there that tells you how far should I go left and how far should I go right relative to the goal and where should the boat, the hull of the boat be versus the sail? Cause the sail moves in relation to the boat, right? And then how long should I keep this up for, right? So there’s all sorts of things you have to navigate in order to do that. And then the speed of the wind amount, like all this stuff that comes into that equation. Now, I don’t do that math in my head. I can’t do math anyway, but I certainly couldn’t do that math even if I could do some math, which I can’t do any math. So I intuitively know how to do this. Like I can just get in a sailboat and do the thing, right? It’s not that hard for me. It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time. I learned it by participating. If you take courses in sailing or archery or any number of things that martial arts is great for this, you really learned participation with the conflict, right? You learn, for example, I tell this story often, like you start out in karate and they tell you how to stand. They give you basic, knees roughly below the shoulders sort of thing and whatever. And then they stop talking to you and they start pushing you over and you get pushed over and you’re like, what? And then, or they’ll have you try to push them over. And you’re like, it doesn’t work. And you’re like, what’s going on? And they’re like, no, no, no, use both hands. And you use both hands and you can finally maybe get the instructor to fall over. And you’re like, but he comes up to me and uses one finger and I fall over immediately. What’s that? Like that’s magic, right? And really in the moment, it kind of it’s like, what is going on? And then eventually when he pushes you over enough or knocks your feet around, because occasionally they’ll just knock your feet apart and then you’ll still stand, but like your body goes like this and you’ve got to reorient your balance, right? And then they try to knock you over and they can’t. And you’re like, oh, he’s the exact same amount of pressure but something’s different. And then you have to get intimate with yourself and figure out what your body did and go, oh, right? That’s the self intimacy, looping you back in to all these conflicts with your balance and with your stability and with the instructions you were given from participation, because maybe it’s not quite shoulder width apart or maybe shoulder width doesn’t mean much. Do you mean the edge of my shoulder? Do you mean the middle of my shoulder? There’s all this ambiguity that gets resolved in the participation. Yeah, so I’m going back to the archery example. Archery, I’m not including fantasy games a little bit, but when you have these enchanted arrows, is your bow good to shoot these arrows? There’s a joining of ammunition and weapon that if you’re grounded, and the reason that I’m saying this is because we were talking about traditions and what you grounded it. If you’re taking a practice from one tradition and you’re divorcing it from the tradition and you’re trying to implement it in a different tradition, like you might end up shooting arrows with a crossbow, and crossbows, they shoot bolts or even worse, you can have a gun and you try to shoot arrows or you can have a rocket launcher and try to shoot arrows. So the relationship between the structure that you’re using to be an agent, that’s a good one, yeah, the structure that you’re using to be an agent in the world and the local expression that you’re trying to give, there’s a set of dependencies and those dependencies, or maybe you could talk about the structure has a set of affordances that you’re partaking in. They’re hidden, right? In order for you to be aware of all of these things that require you to be so observant, you’re gonna miss that, right? And so when, and I think this is drawing the baby out, with the bad water where things have dependencies and it’s important to realize that we don’t know and maybe we can’t know these dependencies, but they’re there because people enacted the structure through participation, right? So the dependencies have been experienced and they hopefully have been somewhat optimized for and when we’re divorcing these things, then we get into big trouble. And yeah, I got the sense like this pushing over, it’s also bringing you out of balance, right? Like it’s, I guess it’s the chaos of the crisis that you’re in, right? Like it allows you to look at yourself. It gives you a contrast and then what is stability, right? Like stability is in some sense, the capacity to have fast identification of problems and relate to them appropriately, right? So if you’re getting pushed and you have all the small muscle memory that you can relate to the specific impression into you, then what’s happening is your body is becoming a cushion, right? Like it’s a union that is in relation to the single point of impact as opposed to that, the point of impact is just like directly translated to your spine and there’s no relationship to it. So when you were talking about that, I’m thinking about the yoga poses and where I’m now at, like, okay, so like there’s a way that in my hip joint, my leg is entering. So there’s an angle there and that there’s pressures there and like, if I go out first and then draw back, then I’m pushing in a certain angle, right? And then if I’m in that angle, then I can bend in a certain way because now there’s, the tendons are free or whatever. Like I don’t even know what’s happening there, but I know it’s true and like I can feel the distinction and I can participate in that process and over time that becomes better and better, right? And it’s like, I didn’t know that was even possible before. Right, like if you’d asked me, can you do that? Like, yeah, maybe some people can do that, but that’s magic, right? Like those are crazy people that can do that. But no, it’s a consequence of a relationship that you’re building, right? And now like, what does it mean? Well, like now I can stand in church, right? And then I can align my posture and I have the capacity to have that sensitivity in my hip joint, have correct support for my back. So now there’s all of this other stuff that’s emerging and it’s allowing me to have a participation in a place that is not related to my yoga at all. And now if we’re going back to the grounding, right? Okay, so now what have I developed? Well, I have something that I’ve developed that’s universally accessible. It’s important because you still have to access it, right? Like, as if I don’t pay attention and I don’t look at the world that way, it’s not gonna happen. But I can always access that, right? And now I can have a place of confidence to return to and to act from. And it allows me to look at the world in a certain way, because like when I’m standing in a certain way, that gives me a sense of a relationship to the world. Like Peter said, stand up straight with your shoulders back. Like the fact that you’re standing that way means that the way the world is revealing itself to you and maybe more important, right? Like how other people see you and how they relate to you. Like Peter also talks about this way, relate to someone as if they’re potential. So if you’re standing there with your shoulders back, what is the potential or the enchantment that people perceive in you? And how does it change your world if people approach you in a way where they’re inviting this aspect of you that was previously ignored because people didn’t have faith that you would be able to manifest them. Yeah, wow, there’s a lot there. I like that. Yeah, I think, I know we’ve sort of talked about this before, right? There’s a way in which Eastern Buddhism and Western Buddhism are not the same Buddhism, right? There’s a fundamental difference between them in their attitude. And maybe it is the grounding, right? Maybe the cultural grounding, the thing you grew up with before the age of 12 or something, right? Means that when you start engaging with these practices later, even if it is later, you’re not brought up in any of these meditative traditions or strict Buddhist traditions, that maybe there’s a difference if it’s developing while you’re developing because that changes the core, the base arena that you’re operating from, right? The affordances that you have available from the core of your being, from your birth, basically. And so there’s a way in which if you kind of get into that too late, it doesn’t work, right? It doesn’t work the same way. It has a different aspect to it. I wanna introduce the term normal, right? As the thing being the norm. So when you grow up in a culture, like what is the culture? Well, the culture determines what the norm is, right? It is your frame of reference, right? So that also speaks to the potential. Like what can you do, right? Like, so there’s the slave mentality, right? Where you’re like effectively fatalist, right? Like you’re accepting your place, right? And then if you’re accepting your place, the way that you express your agency becomes completely different than when you get the story well, told that you could be the king, right? Like, or you could be president. Like there’s a fundamentally different way of interpreting information in these two friends. Yeah, back to you. No, that’s good. That’s good explanation. Yeah, that’s the middle out story component, right? Where you right now could or should be king. It’s like, well, is that true? Like, do you have what it takes? Maybe not, right? Maybe you can’t for a reason. And it is that base that we sort of grow up with that sets these affordances, these base level affordances, right? To your point, the frameworks that you already have available to interact with the world. And that’s what you’re building on top of and building on top of and building on top of, right? And that’s like really important. Like, well, what does that look like? Can you just engage with yoga and yoga meditation, right? To put the two back together where they belong. Maybe, will that keep it the same affordance as it would somebody who grew up in India? Probably not. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe not. But maybe it’s also not the right solution for you. Like there’s lots of ways, there’s lots of paths. And so maybe that’s not the right one for you, for your circumstance in the same way that, you can’t necessarily be successful the way Elon Musk is successful, right? There’s all sorts of ways of interacting that aren’t compatible with how you grew up. And that’s important because your orientation is gonna be different. Cause your set of affordances is different and your starting point is different. And all of that matters. And yeah, if you start in the middle and say, well, this guy when he was 30 became king, right? You’re like, well, I’m 25. So I should be able to become king. It’s like, I don’t know about that. And maybe you have all the same skills or it seems like you do, but maybe there’s a set of skills you’re not seeing even. And that’s the pernicious part. I think of self-deception in general. A lot of self-deception is lie by omission. It’s the stuff you don’t see. Like you don’t see how you’re different from Elon Musk. Like, are you gonna sleep on the factory floor for like a few weeks while things get straightened out? Cause I don’t think you will. Like you’re bitching about overtime. You know, like, I don’t know. Are you willing to do what it takes? Cause maybe it takes more than you’re willing to do. And you just don’t, cause you’ve never had to try. You’ve never struggled. You’ve never had that conflict. You don’t know how to resolve it. Cause there are a lot of people who won’t, you know, like, okay, I got a wife and a kid at home. I can’t stay late. I’m fair enough. But that decision limits you. And then the conflict is, well, do I spend less time with my wife and kid and risk a bunch of stuff? I mean, maybe the kid won’t grow up right. Maybe she’ll cheat on me. Like, maybe she’ll leave me cause I’m never there. Maybe, maybe, right. But maybe you need to succeed at your job more so that you can take care of them better. I don’t know. I’m not making a judgment. I’m just saying these are conflicts. This is the realm of intimacy. How intimate are you with work and in what way versus how intimate are you with your family and in what way? And that’s all about engagement. So maybe you can’t make the kids baseball games. And maybe if you try to split the baby and you, you know, you’re like, well, I’m going to work while I’m at the game. Then you’re not paying attention to the kid. Maybe the kid grows resentful. Oh yeah, you were there, but you weren’t really there. Fair enough. Cause the intimacy has changed. Cause you’re hanging out with your phone, much like the deer who’s going to get slaughtered in our little cartoon because he’s got a cell phone. Yeah. So it’s interesting, right? There’s the, this idea that, oh, I can go home, but what are you going to do at home? Right? Like, do you have the skills to, to participate in those, those extra hours? Or is there a reason that you’re sleeping at the factory floor? Right? Like maybe, maybe that’s the best place for you to be right now. And then, then the question also becomes, well, like, like, can I create new affordances? Right? Like, can I, can I gain that relationship? Well, yeah, probably. Right. But like, it will require a bigger change than you just taking the effort to spend time. Right? Like you need, you need to have the affordances that will allow you to generate that intimacy. And, and to, to go back to, to this story, right? Where, where I see this word and it has meaning to it. Right? Like, so, so what does it mean? Well, it, it means that the complexity of the world that, that I can participate across situations is increased. And, and you can just look at it this way, right? Like when, when you have two ways of relating, right? Like now you’re in, in like a binary. If you have three, now you can have like six connections. Right? Because, because now, and so, so it’s it’s growing exponentially, the, the, the affordances of, of, of the types of relationships. Right? So, so if you, if you don’t have the base the structure from, from which, which you participate in yeah, like I’m, I’m still looking at what that would be. Like maybe those affordances would be the virtues or something, right? But, but then, yeah, so you see, and then you have the Christian three, right? Faith, hope and love, right? Which, which are oriented towards the future and potential. And, and it, and turned away from, from direct results. There’s, yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s this complexity, right? And especially with those, those three, because because they’re open-ended, right? Like they’re not specific. There’s, there’s this, this realm of, of, of participation where the symbol is, is pointing outward. And it has, it has a dynamic and of nature that, that you can re collapse it to the specific situation. And I think, I think that’s, that’s the skill that we need. Like that’s, that’s where the intimacy comes from. And when, when was it Peugeot, like, like, or for Vegas says, love is a way of being, right? Like, I think, I think what he’s, what he’s saying, it’s, it’s a way of looking at the world more, more so. It’s, it’s a way of, of how do, how do I perceive what is relevant, right? Like, and the relevance is, is, is in, in some sense, privileging the generative nature of making a whole as best as you see possible, right? Like, so, so what are the affordances that you can participate with to, to have this generative capacity. And then, then that requires the fate, right? Because you’re participating in the generative nature as opposed to in, in manifesting a specific goal, right? So now you need, need to have, have a level of faith where that, that action is still justifiable in, in, in yourself. It’s like, I’m doing this because it’s the right thing. And not because any other reason. Well, or worse yet, the risk is justified because I think it might be the right thing, right? I think it might be better. It might also go horribly wrong, but it might be better, right? And that’s where people don’t like that ambiguity. And I just wanted to take a, take it in the opposite direction real quickly. So what, what does it look like when the world is de-enchanted or disenchanted, right? When you’re flattening things out, because that’s, that’s very much modernity, right? That the world we’re living in, roughly speaking, I don’t really like the modernity frame, but we’ll use it. It’s common enough to everybody that they kind of get it. That you’re, you’re, you’re removing the potential and you’re bringing everything into the present. Like, oh, you know, the, the whole thing like, go be present in the moment. It’s like, no, no, engage with the potential of the future. Right? And then understand the world from that, as you pointed out, like that’s how, take the risk, take the risk that the future is uncertain, but there’s a way in which you can make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. If you engage in the future and you don’t try to engage in the present, because that flattens the world, it takes all the enchantment out, right? It takes the intimacy out because, you know, you pay money, you get object, right? Or you, you take object and you create something with it. Right? And then that thing manifests in the world in the moment. Right? You’re not really looking at, well, do I plant a tree whose shade I’ll never get to sit in? Right? And enjoy, right? Cause that’s potential. Like, who knows? You can say, look, there’s no point. Someone’s going to cut it down. Well, eventually, but how many people are going to enjoy the shade of the tree in the meantime? Right? How many animals are going to be fed by it? How many, you know, whatever, there’s all kinds of ways in which engaging in, in, in, in an activity like that is different, but what we’re doing is we’re squishing the world where we have been, right? And then people are looking for that enchantment. And then, you know, they can’t find it, but they want, they want something more direct, right? More scientific, more discrete and linear, more propositional and procedural. If you’re, if you’re using the four Ps of information and those are linear, discrete relationships. I say a word, I get a thing. I make a statement about my identity. You treat me a certain way. I, I, I come up with a theory about how to fix the world. And then if I can get people to implement it, it’ll, it’ll happen the way I want, right? It’s a very discrete linear way of engaging with the world. But what you want to do is you want to use participation in the poetic information to engage with the potential, right? Intuitively. This isn’t, this isn’t discrete. So it’s not particular knowledge. It’s intuitive knowledge. I have an intuition that there’s a possibility that if we can get this to work, it’ll be great. It’ll be wonderful. It’ll embody the transcendentals, right? It’ll embody hope and faith and love, right? In the future for everybody else, right? And, you know, maybe I won’t participate, but maybe, maybe I participate in building it. Other people take, take it from there and run with it, right? They take it further. And I think that is the attitude. And what you’re seeing now is just as flattening where people aren’t thinking about timelines at all. I think that’s why you’re getting the stuff around, well, what is the right age for consent? And, you know, crazy talk like that, because it’s like, no, we had all this settled. Why are we, why are we changing the settlement here? Because it was, it was settled. And that’s the strange, we’ll call it strange engagement that we have in modern times with the now, instead of engaging with the, with the sort of the future, the what if. Yeah, so it’s interesting that if, if we relate to the, to the world in this way where we’re, we’re trying to get something from it, then we end up making these, these things where, where you have this pre-arranged vacation. And then they’re setting up all of these, these aspects, right, like, and they’re using stereotypes. And I think, I think in some sense, what, what they’re doing is, is they’re trusting in the enchantment of modern media, that, that you’re, you’re, you’re gonna be willingly trying to participate in, in this romantic this, or this romantic that trying to recreate the ideal that that’s been presented to you. And that you’ll be successful in that, right? And then, yeah, because, because it’s so specific, there’s, what they’re doing is, is in some sense, they’re relying on, on, on a, a sort of a universal affordance within people. Like they’re like, oh, like everybody can go on the road at sundown and have a romantic thing. And it’s like, well, no, not everybody can do that. And, and I guess, right, like if you can do that, you will do that. You don’t need the vacation in order to do that. Cause, cause you’re, you’re just gonna look for it because that’s the thing that, that seems appropriate to do. So, so there’s, there’s this, this tension where, where we’re, we’re trying to, to fabricate situations while not understanding the complexity of the, of the participation. Feveki talks about this idea, oh, you can learn to appreciate classical music. And it’s like, well, maybe, right? But, but the fact that that’s a lesson, that’s a course, right? Like that, that, that is an acknowledgement of, okay, like this, this stuff isn’t easy, right? Like you got to work for it. And you got to, you got to adopt this structure that we’re providing for you in the curriculum. And there’s, there’s all of these, these subscales that we’re gonna require of you, right? Like for example, to sit still and listen to music, which some people cannot do. And, and so, so yeah, we, we get, we have created this, this, this really strange way of interaction where, where the, the presumptions that we’re making are just too big. And this is invoking a sense of the lack of humility. It’s, it’s like, it’s, it’s going to the place of where we’re taking too many things for granted. And that, that’s connecting for me to, to this equality doctrine, right? Like, oh, we take everything for granted for everyone. And therefore, and, and yeah, Mark will like this, that, that’s middle-out thinking, right? Like there’s a, oh, we’re starting at, at like, what a reduced ideal. And we’re now putting everybody in the cookie cutter form that, that they can participate in, in that ideal. And, and what, what is that about? Well, that’s again, right? It’s, it’s a symptom of a lack of grounding in, in people. Like it’s like, oh, like you, you can’t do it for yourself. You can’t have the discernment. So you’re gonna have other people do the discernment and you’re gonna trust them because you’re paying a lot of money. That, that’s, that’s where we’re ending up. It’s like, yeah, it’s real dark stuff. Yeah, I like that. So, I mean, I think what you’re bringing into this now is that I did have been talking about quite a bit, which is quantity versus quality, right? And then, so we’ve got the X axis of quantity where you can measure everything. It’s like, yeah. And then there’s a corresponding X axis of quality, but it’s not the same. They’re not, they can’t quite be swapped, but quality has a Y axis too, right? And then one of the things that I really liked is Jonathan Bichaud was talking to Berm Power on his channel and on the Anadromist. And they talked about texture. I was like, oh, that’s a juicy, intimate word. Texture is the thing you get intimate with. Like when you get intimate with something, what are you, what are you, what are you really getting into with the texture? So paints have a texture, right? They can be glossy, they can be matte, can be somewhere in the middle. They can be flat, right? Those are different textures. And what that texture does in paint, among other things, right, you can feel the texture to some extent, if you’re sensitive enough. It changes the relationship of the paint and the wall to the light, which alters the relationship to the color. So in other words, the same color, with the same color values, with the same mix of pigments and the same reflective values, you change that texture of that. You can do this with a brush too, or a matted roller or something. You change texture just that way, but there’s other things you can do to add to the paint or subtract from the paint to change the texture. And then once you’ve done that, once you’ve engaged with that, what happens is the light has a different effect on the color. So the black has a different aspect to it based on the texture, or the blue has a different aspect based on the texture. So you take the same color, different texture, and the color looks different, even though materially it’s not different. And this is the quality. What is the quality? What is the quality of your relationship? The quality of your relationships is all about engaging with your intimate connection in the relationship. That’s really what it’s all about. So that is where intimacy comes in. It’s like intimacy is a measure of quality, not quantity. You can’t trade it. I said this in one of my videos in my economy video about daycare. Daycare is garbage. It’s a horrific consumerist idea that isn’t necessary, shouldn’t be necessary if we just change the way we live slightly. You can’t pay somebody to have a quality caring relationship with your child. And that’s what you need to grow up correctly is a quality caring relationship. We know this, we know this experimentally. There was a woman who, you know, kids in orphanages would just die and record numbers like 70% of them. And then she started touching them and carrying them around. It turns out if you’re touched when you’re a child, you thrive or you’re more likely to thrive or something. So it’s that quality, that intimacy, in this case, somewhat physical intimacy that you get that helps you to thrive. And so we can connect intimacy to quality to thriving. And that is the poetic navigation of the world. So you need that poetic information, the poetic way of informing the world in order to navigate correctly. Let’s say you won’t fall into it accidentally because it is still where you live. But if you can’t see it, you can’t navigate appropriately. Now you might get lucky. You might get lucky your whole life. Some people certainly do, someone has to. There’s a lot of people. But you really wanna be able to have control over these things or at least have an awareness of them so that you can see maybe when they’re going horribly wrong and try to steer away, even if horribly right, we’ll say, or excellently right, doesn’t work out all the time. At least you’re moving towards the potential good instead of floundering in the sea of lots more bad. Yeah, so when you were talking about texture, what that brought up in me is persona. It’s the way that the world is being perceived. It’s like a mutation, right? So what is a persona? Well, persona is the mask that the Greeks wore during their plays to convey an emotion. Like there was a direct communication in the mask that was related to the play, but in some sense separate. It was an intentional thing that invited the audience into a specific type of participation, which is enchantment. What it does, it is highlighting a set of affordances or possible relationships that you can make to that character. And when we go back to stand up straight, your shoulders back, what you’re doing is you’re providing other people with access points to you. The way that they can understand you, the way that they can appeal to you, you’re easing or you’re lowering the activation energy for certain types of interactions. It’s really interesting if you start looking at it that way, right? It’s not that you can make people do it, but you can produce a spirit, right? And if other people are sensitive to the spirit, then things can manifest without any kind of interaction. It’s not being spoken. So I was in church and it was at the end and a bunch of people were sitting down and there was this closing down taking place. And I was at this point that I was like, ah, this is not okay, I should stand up. And then what was happening at the same moment is like, can everybody stand up? Let’s all stand when we close down the mask. So there was the spirit that I was perceiving that was also perceived by someone else. And it was like, what was that? There was an expectation that was from somewhere and certain behavior deemed appropriate. And I was participating in the same thing as the other person without having had any communication. The only communication that we had is that we were participating in the same spirit during the whole service. And so there’s an intelligibility that manifested as a consequence of the pattern that we were all in that required something of us. And we had to give heed to that. We had to respond appropriately with reverence. So yeah, to take that back. Like in some sense, intimacy is having enough self control not to fall into skepticism, to disenchant yourself. Cause I just think that’s the biggest bit. And then whether you’re participating in 10% or 80% of the spirit is less relevant. It will happen. You will gain the intelligibility as a consequence of your participation. And what is required of you is creating that space like that sensitivity that you can actually do that. Cause if you’re never looking, it will never happen. Yeah, and that goes back to the world is attention, right? And it reminds me that, yeah, we have two types of knowing. Those are two methods of intelligizing the world. One is not superior to the other, you need them both. And hearkening back to the masks example, I really like that. So you put on the mask to express an emotion, right? That maybe can’t be expressed because in the amphitheater, you’re basically yelling, right, you’re projecting. Maybe can’t be well expressed through the quality of your voice. So you’re substituting the quality of your voice for the quality of the mask, right? And that actually changes a bunch of things, right? It’s not even a bad thing necessarily to lose that or to move that detail, to move it. But I think one of the problems we run into and the reason why we run into the skepticism or the hermeneutics of suspicion is as John Vervick likes to talk about is because we know as postmoderns, we’ve tried to critique and we’re critiquing things that are much older and much larger than us that involve the distributed intelligence through time that we can’t as individuals compete with. Like we’re just not smart enough to understand the depth of the knowledge in the Bible or in the Bhagavad Gita or in the Torah, right? We’re just, as an individual, you have no hope of understanding that sufficiently. Maybe you can use it to live, maybe you can use it to participate through just engaging with it, but who are you to critique and who are you to deconstruct? But we have deconstructed, right? We’ve said, we’re just gonna draw lines on a map and create a country, we know how to use government, so we’re just gonna set up the government this way and then we understand how the government works. And then I think all these things fail and we get these hermeneutics of suspicion because we’ve used propositions of procedures to understand the world, but we need to use participation in poetics to understand the world, which was wrapped up in narrative. Poetics is part of narrative. And so we’re very suspicious all of a sudden because we’ve chopped up the world and we’re missing something. We don’t know what it is, but the something in many cases is an intimate connection or the idea of connection as such. And so we’ve moved the local small conflicts of, well, I really want this and you really want that and I’m not gonna budge because I’m the center of the world and I’m egocentric. And so we’ve moved that out. So 10 years from now, all those little conflicts that never got properly resolved, I mean, maybe they got the resolved in your favor or in the other person’s favor, but they never got properly resolved. They never got resolved through an intimate connection. Boom, the next thing you know, you’re divorced. The next thing you know, you’ve been abandoned by your family or the next thing you know, you’ve had to abandon your family. Like who, you don’t know because these things are not getting resolved because we’re moving away from conflict. I think a lot of this, even though I don’t like development models, I think if you think of it in terms of development models, if we didn’t develop the skills of navigating poetic information, of looking for and paying attention to intuitive intelligibility, then what can happen is we’re not having these intimate relationships. And then we have no choice, but to be sensitive when things don’t go our way, we get angry and resentful among other things or sad and upset and depressed. And also to try and force the world to be the way we want it because we’ve always had it the way we want it. We don’t know how to compromise anymore. We don’t know how to make trade-offs. We don’t know how to be intimate with ourselves, with our own internal feelings and with others. When we’re not intimate with our own internal feelings, we can just go into the middle of the street and scream. I don’t know why we would do that. And I like this idea that you put in place when you’re creating an affordance for somebody, whether you’re doing it through a persona, we’ll say the modern psychological concept rather than the mask, or you’re doing it through a clay cup arena, it doesn’t matter. Yeah, Dr. Scourge is one of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That limits the options that you have so that you’re not appropriate, you’re not trying to engage inappropriately in the moment. You’re able to engage in a way that makes sense and that works for everybody so that it’s generative of something bigger. Because if you go to the doctor and you just scream, they can’t help you. And you’ve used up their valuable time helping somebody that they maybe could help. So there’s a lot of trade-off there that you don’t understand. Your involvement, you’re calling away the doctor’s attention because time and attention is valuable and energy. These are valuable things. Means that somebody else suffers. And nobody wants to hear that, especially not an egocentric person, but it does mean that. And so you have to be careful how you engage and where you engage. And if you’re not willing to engage with the systems as they are in place, because you think you can improve them, what if you’re wrong? What if your improvements don’t work? What if the way you understand the world is insufficient or is missing key pieces? And it’s always missing key pieces, right? And therefore you think you have a better system, but in fact you don’t. And then you might implement something like, I don’t know, HMOs in the United States healthcare system and that’s a disaster. So they re-implement it again and it’s still a disaster, only worse, right? And you can see the way in which we think we know how these systems work. And we have this, oh, look, one person’s managing all your care, it’ll be great, right? And then it’s not, because that doesn’t work. And it’s like, well, the old system was better, right? Maybe it was more expensive or required more sacrifice from the doctor, right? So maybe you could get less throughput person to person, but maybe when you have fewer patients, you can treat them better because you have a more intimate connection with them, you know them better. Maybe if your doctor’s really local, they can provide better care than if they’re sort of far away, but at a prestigious hospital. Like maybe prestige, maybe authority, maybe those qualities of prestige, authority, leadership, competence, maybe those qualities aren’t easy to sort of wrangle or understand, say even through an academic system. And so we get confused, we flatten the world into quantity. Well, how many years of school did you do? And what things did you learn in school? That tells me how educated you are, right? I can assure you it does not. I’ve worked with many a PhD and their ideas are stupid and they don’t know this because they’ve never tried them. And like fair enough, like there’s lots of things that I’ve tried that are stupid, they didn’t work. I thought they were great at the time and then you go to do them and it just turns out they don’t work. And that’s your participation, that’s your intimate participation, but you have to be willing to have the conflict between your idea and how it works in the world because that’s gonna conflict. Your idea is never gonna come out the way you think at the other end, never. That’s never gonna happen. So you need to get used to that failure. You need to get used to that conflict. You need to get used to making adjustments to your own ideas instead of owning them and trying to keep them yours forever. And it is those affordances with others, the white lab coat, the classroom, that’s Peterson’s example, the stadium, that’s another example. There’s all these ways in which we’re already participating in these things. Some might call them liturgies even, where there’s a liturgical aspect to your interface, where you know through ritual and tradition, even though you wouldn’t say, oh, conscious, it’s not a ritual or a tradition, it’s like, well, I don’t know about that, it seems to meet all the criteria, right? Or going to work. Yeah, there’s some ritual and tradition there for sure. And oh, we’re trying to break out of that and work from home, yeah. And then companies are a mess because people won’t work from home because they get distracted, right? Because the world is a tension. So yeah, you can see how all of this sort of, you cut these bounds. Like, well, you don’t need to go to work to be working. Well, maybe most people do. Maybe some people don’t, but maybe most people do, right? And that’s in the research. Like if you have an office that you keep for office work only, you’re much more productive working from home than if you don’t. And you can’t do other things in that office either, by the way, it interferes. So there’s ways in which we know this, like science kind of shows, oh, there is a connection between these things that we’ve sort of divorced. And that’s why you’re suspicious because you know the connections are missing. You intuitively know, even if you’re not aware at a conscious level, you say unconsciously aware that this is happening. And then that, you know, you know it’s there. You’re skeptical. Now you’re skeptical of all the systems you’ve set up that have these discrete linear propositional procedural relationships that don’t include the participation in the poetics. And if you can’t participate in something, maybe it’s not for you, right? Maybe game A and game B is not for you because there’s no way to participate in it. Maybe it’s a good idea, but you can’t do it. Cause there’s lots of good ideas you can’t do. Like I have a good idea about teleportation, but I can’t do it. So it, you know, I got a good idea on warp drive too, but I can’t do it. That’s the picture in the back. Teleportation picture. No. It’s distributed cognition. Okay. That’s why there’s different people. Teleportation of ideas. Teleportation of ideas. That’s fair. That’s fair. That’s how you resolve that one Mark. Done. Conflict over. So yeah, I wanted to grasp back to these institutions, right? Like I think when you’re making an institution in a society that’s based upon virtues and values, then there’s a certain expectation and there’s a reliance, right? And the way that you’d organize your institution is organic because there’s a reliance upon the transcendent ideal to manifest a self-organization within the structure. And also the part of that is conflict resolution. But to defend the institution, right? Like what if the quality of the worker just has come down so much that the concern about corruption be raised over a threshold? So now you need to be legalistic in order to have the security that was provided by integrity before, right? So what I’m actually saying is there’s a disintegration of the cohesion between the structures and that’s a laws of intimacy or alienation between the people and the company, more importantly, between the people in the company. And now like when you’ve made that switch, like how do you get back? I don’t think you can. Like what you can do is you can have new environments, you can create new environments like a startup, right? Where the right spirit is there and people get raised into the being. And Plato talked about this, right? Like he was talking about the first generation, right? Which is the creator, they’re qualified, right? They’re the philosopher, they’re inspired, right? Like they’re making it manifest. And then the second generation is the oligarch, right? Like the person who’s trying to establish the empire still has awareness of what it was before, right? Like where, so there’s an intimacy in the humility, I think, right? Where it gives you a way of participation through gratitude, right? Like it’s still holding onto the values because it’s recognizing the importance of the values, right? And then the third generation, which he called the democratic generation is disconnected. Like their grounding is different. Like they’re grounded in affluence. They’re grounded in a different relationship to their passion. Because the lacks that they have to engage with were different and the relationship to those lacks is therefore one that’s completely dependent on their self-control. And if they don’t have a structure that gives them that self-control relationship, their passions are gonna take over. And this is the generation that brings in room into this society. Because now the empire that was set up by the two previous generations is a cow to milk for fueling the passions. Yeah. So yeah. That’s that parasitic relationship, right? Where you’ve now got the thing built up and you’re just resting on the laurels and not looking to the future. And I think maybe that’s what corruption is. It’s an imbalance between the intuitive, right? And the particular. And not that all should be in balance or perfect balance, but there’s a correct balance for each institution. And once that becomes unbalanced, how do you get it back? I think the top has to meet the bottom. You need a good leader and you need the good leader to inspire the people at the bottom to revivify the virtues and values of the institution. So the institution is no longer corrupted. So one example of this might be, there used to be in the US, there used to be a federal bureau that basically took complaints on the banks, right? So they oversaw the banks at a federal level. Each of the states also has a banking commission, although they typically don’t do anything, they’re just paid. And then they go, oh, well, we got a federal charter. There’s nothing we can do. They’re not a local bank, right? So they have to be a local only bank to the state typically or headquartered in the state or something. So if you appeal to the, or if you, in the past days, if you appeal to that federal agency, and I actually did this once, so I know this, I participated, they will look into things and they will get you satisfaction. And I actually get a check out of them because bank did something wrong. And then I appealed to them later and it turns out they had been replaced. And the thing that had been replaced by the mission of that particular thing was to give you an answer, not to resolve a problem, not to look for fraud, not to do an investigation, it was to get an answer from the bank. As though getting an answer from a bank is somehow a magical thing that resolves, I don’t know, their illegal behavior in my case, they broke like six federal laws. I don’t care what their answer to breaking six federal laws is, I want somebody to investigate and take an action. I don’t want them to say, you need to send him a letter explaining why you broke six federal laws. That’s not helpful. I don’t care why you broke, it makes no difference to me. You did what you did and it needs to be dealt with. And I’m not passing judgment on what needs to be done, but law breaking is actually fairly clear. I don’t know why courts take forever. Usually these things are like 10 minutes. Did you have the paperwork? Did you do the thing? Do you have evidence? No, then problem solved. And they take forever and it’s thousands of pieces of paperwork and why? Because they’re looking at procedures and seeing where the violations are and then weighing through quantity the violations. Instead of looking at the quality, saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. This law is intended to do X. Did X happen? No, well then there was a violation of the law. It’s really not that hard, but you have to be able to look at it. Like you have to be able to see that. And that’s a problem. It’s a big problem. I mean, I remember working at a Fortune 500 company ages ago and they broke something in their network and it took me about a week to figure out what was broken. And meanwhile, they had a ticket, they had a ticketing system, right? The customer showed a ticketing system, stacks of complaints about this speed problem they were having. And it was holding up the release. Like it’s a software company, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. We can’t get the software out because it’s taking forever to transfer the files. So I finally got enough, triggered enough information out of them to figure out, oh no, it’s this device, this interface and here’s the problem. So I already diagnosed the problem, right? A month later, I finally got them on the phone and I had put the troubleshooting steps. Here’s the steps I did with all the results, right? I did this and then I did this and then I did this. And if you triangulate that, that means it’s here. So I get them on the phone. I’m talking to them after hours because they were in California and I was on the East coast for like 45 minutes. Before one of the checks finally, cause I had already told them like, no, I ran this test and these are the results. And they were arguing with me about all the ways that those results weren’t wrong. And I’m like, no, those results are definitely wrong. And they were just being legalistic, right? Because they didn’t realize that you could just look at a map, run a test and figure out which device in the system was broken. Like they had no idea. They were good network engineers. Like they weren’t bad network engineers. They just didn’t believe that I could do that. Of course I could and I did. And the minute the guy ran the test and took me seriously, he asked one guy a question. I think the guy’s name was Stu. And then Stu went, oh, I messed with that router and blah date, which happened to be the date when the ticket was opened, right? So it was later that day or the next day or whatever, that the ticket was open for the speed problem. And then they went in and fixed the device right then and there, it took them all 30 seconds. This went on for a month before anybody found the problem. And I found the problem not working with the equipment, not having any access, but they didn’t engage that way because they were being legalistic. They were being, oh, procedures and policies and propositions and there’s no way somebody without access to the equipment could know this. It’s like, well, no, there is a way. You’re just not aware of it, right? You don’t understand the quality because this was a quality, it was a speed issue, right? The network is slow. Network isn’t down because that’s easy to find. The network is slow. There’s a texture to the speed at which the network runs. There’s a quality of the network that is somehow broken but you can troubleshoot these things. You can figure that out and fix it, but you have to be able to see. You have to have eyes to see, oh yes, oh yes. These tests will tell you something. This engagement tells you this is broken. The law’s intent is X and X didn’t happen. Therefore there was a violation of the law, right? There’s a way to understand these in a very simple way where we’re not getting caught up in propositions and procedures and legalism and trying to use that to resolve a quality issue. Cause that’s all quantity. That’s this X axis. And then quality has a different X axis, but it also has that Y axis. Very important. That’s where texture lives, right? That’s where rhythm and rhyme and resonance and harmony and all of those things exist is along that Y axis. Yeah, so that reminded me of the complaint that I had. And like we just sat like this went wrong, this went wrong. And it was granted from all points. And then what was like, okay, so now we’re gonna have the people on that department get re-educated in this way and we’re gonna do some reorganization, blah, blah, blah. It was like, okay, great. And what does it mean for me? I’m the one with the problem, right? Like there’s a reason I make this point. I went through this tedious process and they’re like, yeah, we can’t do anything for you. So it’s like they recognize the problem, right? And they’re fixing it cause like they’re doing all of this stuff, but they don’t have the capacity to fix their relationship with me. So like, what are they fixing, right? Right. And that’s really sad, right? So where was that oriented? Well, we’re supposed to protect the integrity of the institution and your case is a blemish on the integrity to know we need to reestablish the integrity, but the fact that we are supposed to provide you a service and we’re not able to generate that for you. Like that’s, yeah, like that’s just how it is and like we’re not gonna fix that. And that’s really the sad part. It’s like when you’re trying to engage in that, when I went to university, this was one of the problems. Like there wasn’t something that I could hook into, right? Like there wasn’t something that I could participate in. There was something that I could consume, but what is learning, right? Like learning is building a relationship to information effect and if that is not the focus of the education, the building of the relationship, but people are privileging themselves lecturing, for example, right? Which is focused on transmission, right? Not focused on the reception of the message, then you get it into crazy situations. Cause like, are you supposed to mind read the person that’s gonna take your test and figure out like what they’re gonna ask of you? Or do you just relate to the information that’s in front of you with integrity and you’re trying to understand it as best as you can, right? I went for the option, well, I just try and understand what’s in front of me, but that’s not always what they require. So there’s this tension, right? And it’s also like, okay, so what is relevant with within this course for me, right? Like is what’s relevant for me the same that’s what’s relevant for the educator? Well, yeah, probably not if I have different values. Like if I don’t aim to be a researcher, but I aim to be educated, then what I’m gonna value in what they’re presenting to me is not go orient in the same way that they are. And we’ll just end up being on a different wavelength. And so, yeah, I guess this is an appeal to like, when you’re trying to teach people things, right? Like try to attune to their value structure, or like try to make the connections that they can have for them. And that’s the best way to have that participation. And again, this goes back to intimacy, right? Like you need to have the intimacy to feel what is gonna land, right? Like what is gonna grasp this person? Like what is gonna hold on to their texture, right? Yeah, right. So, yeah. And the enchantment, right? Like if you look at education from the perspective of enchantment, it’s like, okay, like can you create a world for me that I can participate? Like, cause that’s what you need to do if you’re a good teacher, right? Like you’re giving the world where someone can participate in, and then you’re granting them agency within the learning process, right? Like, or differently, right? Like you’re literally providing them the grounding in which they can inform the information that they’re receiving. Right, right. Form the information. Yeah, yeah. Form the signals. Yeah, yeah. I think that goes back to sort of the model, right? The model is propositions and procedures on the left side will say, right, although we’re not looking in there physically, that’s discrete and linear sort of connections. And then the participation should be connected with poetic information, right? And that’s the way you navigate. But if you’re in an institution and you try to navigate your participation with procedures, right, or you’re aimed at the wrong thing, oh, well, our job is to make sure that things get fixed. It’s like, okay, but fixing things doesn’t necessarily help people. So if your job is to help people, maybe you do something differently to fix the things, right? Because your aim is to help the people. Well, the people need to participate with you using poetic information, right, and navigation, navigating the poetic, right? Or navigating through the poetic. Not through a proposition and a procedure. Proposition, customer’s unhappy. Procedure, give them a free thing so that they go away, right? Like that’s, you know, you really wanna have that intimate connection and it is the texture. When you’re trying to draw somebody out from wherever they are to maybe educate them, right, to your point, you need to grab onto them and feel that texture and use that texture to draw them out. You need to resonate with them. You need a rhythm that you can get into with them, right? You need a rhyme when you communicate. You need some harmonization in your participation with them and you have to participate with them. You can’t participate with the problem, with the thing, with the building, with the court, right? You can’t participate with paperwork. You can’t participate with propositions and procedures. That doesn’t work. You know, it produces a result. It’s just that result isn’t enchanted. It’s a disenchanted, right? It’s an unenchanted result. And you wanna create that space and I think the space you’re opening up in the enchanted world, or at least opening people up to engage with, it’s always there, right? You just have to, they have to see it. You have to see it, right? Is that space where you can be intimate, where you can participate appropriately. So not to say you can’t participate using propositions and procedures. That’s what games are to some extent, right? But it is to say that you’re losing the quality of texture. You’re losing the quality of closeness. You’re losing the quality of connection, right? You’re losing those qualities around intimacy, around conflict and the ability not to resolve conflict because I don’t think you can actually resolve conflict. We did a Clubhouse room on that. That’s on the Clubhouse Replace. It’s on the Clubhouse website. We’ve got links to it on the Discord servers, on Mark of Wisdom, which is my Discord server in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and on Bridges of Meaning Discord servers. They all have the links. I think that, and I’ll put the link in the description, I guess, too. I can do that now that I think about it. Get intimate, not my participation with the viewers. But I think that that’s part of the problem is that we’re not recognizing that special type of participation in the intimate connections that we make with or that we can make with other people. And we’re just substituting them for, oh, when I wave, you say hello, right? And that’s the procedure. It’s like, no, I mean, sometimes when I haven’t seen somebody in a while, I wanna give them a hug, right? Or whatever, right? There’s all kinds of ways you might wanna interact with somebody that you haven’t talked to in a while or interact with somebody that you’ve made a transgression with, but all of that is wrapped up in conflict. And you’re conflicting, you’re sacrificing. How do I know how much to sacrifice for what I’m getting? You can’t measure these things easily. Like what’s daycare worth? What is the appropriate response to having your relative watch your kid for you for a few hours while you go off and do something that you need to do or want to do? I think the appropriate response is to cook them a meal, right? Or maybe to take them out somewhere and get everybody go somewhere, right? It’s not to pay them $250 an hour, whatever the hell daycare costs nowadays. That’s not appropriate, maybe appropriate for daycare, cause it’s a business, but it’s not appropriate interaction. It’s not an intimate interaction with a relative or a friend that somebody doing you a favor, right? Somebody who’s willing to spend their time, energy and attention on a deal logos with you, right? I mean, I’m not gonna repay you by sending you a check. I think- Oh, okay, I’m out. You know, and you might try to get something out of it by cracking a joke, which is an intimate connection that we have, right? Cause we understand each other’s humor, right? There’s a texture to your humor and to my humor where you know I’m gonna laugh at certain jokes that you make and hopefully you know by now that some of your terrible puns are just awful and I’m not gonna laugh at them no matter what. Yeah, like you just run out the room and then you laugh in the hallway. So anyway, so what this texture idea gave me, I wanna combine it with the idea of a container, right? And shared reality, cause that’s what a container is. So if we can apply a texture on what we are participating with, now we have a common frame of reference, right? Like a shared container, a shared set of values, a shared set of sense making, right? Like there’s all of this alignment. A shared grip. Right, a shared grip, right? In the container texture, the texture and the shared grip. Yeah. Right, or the potential for the grip, yeah. And what does this allow, right? So now the intimacy between us can extend into reality cause now I can make anticipations about your sense make. And so the example that I wanna introduce here is being in a kitchen, right? Where there’s this dance movement where people need to pass each other. So you need to have an awareness. Like that person is gonna go and need to go by me in five seconds. So like when I’m cutting this, like I need to be doing, like maybe I’m reorganizing the things on the things or that I’m using the knife so that I can make the movement so that the other person can go around, right? So now we’re in this level of complexity and a level of intimacy where, where because I have access to the same intelligibility as you, I can anticipate your needs and I can act upon them before you even realize that you have that need. And what does it mean where like Peterson talks about like, what could be possible, right? Like what does it mean that if you’re in an environment where your needs are always anticipated and acted upon? Like how does that world look like? That has to be amazing. And the extension that will provide to your agency and the freeing of the cognitive load, right? Because now you don’t have to worry about all of this stuff that you would have had to, but it’s not even there because you’re solving a problem that hasn’t manifested yet in a profound way. So yeah, it creates this whole different way of being in the world that, yeah, I’m just gonna go to the word freedom, right? Like there’s a freedom and also, well, who are you at that point, right? Like what’s your identity and how do you experience yourself at that point, right? It’s literally going downhill. You have the wind in your back. That’s the best analogy that I can come up with. If you ever done some bicycling, right? Like going uphill or going downhill, big difference. Wind also a big difference. So yeah, like the experience of the struggle against the wind, which is analogous to how a lot of people feel living their life, is one way of being in the world, right? And then going downhill with the wind in your back, that’s a completely different way of being. And yeah, like what does a problem mean when you’re in that relationship? Like a problem is something completely different than when you’re like struggling to make like a little bit of gain against the wind. And it’s like, oh, now I need to go around this, but that means that my relationship to the wind will change, right? Like now my balance is off. Like you just get this complete cascade of complexity that you have to engage with in order to resolve a little hiccup. Yeah, that’s that combinatorial explosion, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I wanna relate, I think we’re gonna have to wrap up soon because it’s been a while. We’ve been going for a while, but I did wanna relate some of this intimacy crisis stuff to and the loss of the access to the poetic information or poetic way of informing the world back to domicile because I think that’s really what domicile is really getting at, right? So you create intimate relationship with the world, you know your world, you know how to interface with the people around you, you know the vendors, you know the possibilities, you know what things are available to you. And then boom, a large scale change at the top end happens, new trade routes are opened up or maybe you have to move from the city because there’s no police or whatever happens, right? Some bad thing happens. And so there’s a big change. There’s a big, huge change as a result of that in affect, we’ll say. And so that change is significant and important, right? But when you don’t have a good way to navigate intimacy, you’ve lost a bunch of intimate connections. Now you should rebuild them. That’s domicile, right? You have to rebuild, maybe not all your intimate connections, but a bunch of intimate connections, your intimate connections with far away friends, your intimate connections with the government, right? Potentially, or the authorities, the local authorities in some sense, right? Or your intimate connections with how you do business because suddenly the market’s been flooded by something that you had the exclusive rights to before or something, right? These happen. This is the disruption and the disruptive strategy game that people, right? So they cast it as disruption and they say, oh, you gotta be disruptive to start a good business. You’re coming in disrupting industry. And it’s like, I don’t know. You’re causing a bunch of domicile for a bunch of people potentially. And is that better? I mean, maybe you make out, but maybe everybody else doesn’t, right? So, and that’s a loss of intimacy. Like I’m just gonna come into this industry and totally change it overnight. It’s like, really? First of all, is that possible? And second of all, when that happens, is it you or is it a bunch of forces, right? But that causes a bunch of domicile. The world changes. And then how you relate to the world has to change. And this is very hard for us. I think one of the problems we run into is when we get used to the world being a certain way and then this domicile happens, right? Big change happens. Now we don’t know how to relate to the world because it’s not that certain way that we were used to with the procedures and the propositions. All the propositions have changed, right? You can kind of, you can see this. So you can say, well, look, we knew what Russia was up to in the Cold War. We understood their goals. We understood their values. We understood why they were making moves they were making. After the Cold War, did we ever understand what they’re good? Because their goals changed, right? It all changed. Everything changed. And so it’s like, oh, well, that’s kind of a form of domicile. And then if you’re in the government still treating Russia like it had the same goals that it had back then, you’re making a mistake. Like Russia does not have those same goals because it’s not even the same place, right? Soviet Union was one thing and maybe it was run by Russia, maybe it was an empire. And now Russia is its own country again, right? And it can’t even get back. It’s satellite states, we’ll call them, or satellite nations or something, right? It can’t reform the Soviet empire. So maybe it just has a different set of goals. Now, and maybe its goals are defensive and not offensive. Whereas before during Cold War, they were offensive goals. Now maybe they’re defensive goals. And so trying to treat them like they have those other goals doesn’t work. It’s domicile and you don’t realize you’re in it. You don’t realize the world has changed around you. And those relationships aren’t the same because you’ve lost intimacy. You’ve lost the connection with the thing. You replaced it with procedures. You’ve got all these procedures. Oh, I deal with Russia this way because they know what their goals are. Those procedures don’t work anymore. You need to go back into the intuitive, back into the participating with the poetic, right? In order to regain the texture of what is going on with Russia now that it’s not the Cold War. And this applies in all kinds of ways. Well, what’s going on with the government when the parties change, right? Because the goals change, the values change potentially. What’s going on with the world when we go from a world of signaling virtue through action to a world of signaling virtue through words, right? So if you’re doing a poetic and participatory signaling, you’re just doing the right thing all the time. And when it’s not going well, when you think things are wrong, you call them up, right? And now if you’re no longer calling them out because people are saying, no, this is me. This is the way it should be. This is the virtue. This is the climate. This is the whatever. And you’re not speaking up and you’re being silenced. You have domicide, your relation to the world is wrong. And that’s a problem, right? When we lose all that signaling information, right? Or we get too much of it and then we lose all the good signals, we’ll say, right? When you lose good signals, either through silence or through too much noise, you can’t filter them out anymore. You fall into domicide. You’re in a world you live in and then it’s safer to hide. Yeah, so I’m thinking now about Germany in the First World War. And what was happening, right? Like they had an identity and they were losing because technological change and access to resources. They had an identity and then, well, like they’re anticipating domicide. It’s like, what is your reaction to domicide in your country? Is that a good enough reason to go to war? Because it might be, right? That might actually be the right solution. There’s gonna be a collapse, right? Better collapse outward instead of inward, right? Especially if there’s no solution to the collapsing inward. If the collapsing inward will lead to a regression and also to devastation, then yeah, like maybe the only way is to point out. And then the question is, like, who? Like, how are you intuiting on that level, right? Like there’s a level of sense-making required and like what are the, well, I was gonna say metrics, but the measures, right? Like what are the values that you’re measuring by? Because yeah, like, because I feel like Russia is in that position in some sense, right? Where they just have a fundamental threat to their identity if they keep going and they seem to be acting out as a consequence from that threat. And then there’s a whole bunch of people saying, well, like Russia isn’t Putin and he’s elite, but yeah, but like somebody needs to make that decision and somebody needs to see what’s valuable or not. And like, what’s the identity of Russia? Well, it’s definitely not the identity that the West wants it to have. So, and like, how do you do that? Like that’s a big question. Maybe you think that we should pick up next time. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I think there’s different levels of intimacy that we have with different things and we can only handle so much. Like we keep thinking like we can contain the world, but we can’t contain the world. So we have to pay attention to the most important things first, right? And get those in order, right? Get your house in order, right? As Peterson would say, get your room in order first. And then, yeah, there’s a way in which we have this deep egocentricity to us where we’re just thinking we can consume too much. And intimacy is capped. We have a limited supply of time, energy and attention we can put towards intimacy. And it requires a lot of effort to be intimate. It requires a lot of conflict. And it’s not, again, it’s not so much conflict resolution that you’re going for. It’s the idea that conflict needs to be made acceptable. You need to find an acceptable level of trade-off. You need to find an area where I am willing to sacrifice this to get that. And that may be in the future, right? It may be sacrifice this today to get that in the future. Maybe sacrifice this right now to get that right now. And it may not be clear. And sometimes you may need to be on the losing end of that conflict, right? For the greater good, you know? Like there’s all sorts of ways in which that could be true. And suffering now so that you don’t suffer later, you know, there’s lots of parables about that. And I think that’s part of it. You need to get all that straight first. You need to know how to navigate that locally before you can start navigating at a larger level, at the community level or at the church level or at the city level, the state level, the federal level, the world level, like all of those are harder and different types of intimacy that we can have. So yeah, I think that’s what we need to consider is the cognitive burden of intimacy as such. And maybe that would be a better measure for IQ in terms of success. I think the successful people can probably navigate intimacy using the participation with poetic navigation, those ways of informing the world, rather than the measure that we use, which is a quantity measure, not a quality measure, right, of IQ. So what do you think, Manuel? I think you’re right. Maybe next time we can talk more about what’s the right answer in terms of these higher levels of intimacy at the country level. Yeah, yeah, right. So the thing that I wanna add is, well, what are you doing if you’re leading? Like you’re outsourcing, right? Like talking about the left hand and the right hand, right? So what does that mean? Well, that’s an extension of agency, right? So what do you need in order to correctly extend agency? Well, intimacy, right? But it’s a different type of intimacy, right? Because now you have to, you have a body, right? Like a body that’s bigger than you as an individual. And now you need to navigate that body in an imaginary space. Like, cause you’re relating to things not on your level, right? Like you can intuit them, right? You can get a grasp. If the market is going this way and the mood of the people is this way and the prices are like this, then maybe I should make an investment here, right? And I’m gonna have this person handle that because they have this type of intimacy. And like, I just go all the way to them. Right, right. Yeah, no, that’s good. All right, yeah, I think that’s a good place to end it for now. And I hope everybody enjoyed watching this and I appreciate everybody watching and giving us their time and attention.