https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rpjk9eMK1-E
Now here we are for another video and this time I want to talk about the lie of what we call autonomy. Autonomy is wrapped up with this individualism and this idea that individualism exists. And I push back on this rather heavily and say you’re not an individual. You’ve never been an individual. You’re never going to be an individual. The concept itself is absurd. And people use this lie of autonomy to convince you of things like determinism and that you have no free will, which is really weird. But the way it works is that choice is an illusion created by constraint. In other words, without constraint you don’t have choice. Everything’s the same. Even if you could pick one sameness from the other sameness, you wouldn’t have anything different. And is that really a choice? I don’t think so. Freedom is not some bottom-up idea. It doesn’t just emerge from the force of your will or the absence of things around you or the presence of things around you. You were born into a place at a time. That happened to you. You can get all, I think it’s Heideggerian and say, throne-ness. Oh, you were created. Thanks. That’s great that you came up with a new word that means the same thing. Freedom was never an option. Now, you can say we didn’t have any choice about how and when we were born, but mysteriously, that’s not necessarily true. You don’t remember being given a choice before you were born, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I don’t mean to get all woo on you, but scientifically, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But freedom was never an option for you. You were a baby. You had no anything. Your agency doesn’t work when you’re a baby. You kind of around and you know, you kind of make noises and you hope somebody sort of does something that corresponds to your noise and some parents are very good at this. Some mothers in particular will kind of figure out, oh, no, that’s a feeding cry and that’s an uncomfortable cry. Maybe the diaper needs to be changed. That’s a nap cry. And maybe some babies have this and some babies don’t. I don’t know. Maybe some mothers have the ability to discern it and some don’t. I don’t know. But at one point, you, you, dear viewer, you were a baby. All of the agency that you have is due to your parents lending you agency as a baby. Do you know what happens if you don’t lend a baby’s agency? They die. They die. That’s what happens. They die. It’s not hard. You’re here. You had lent agency from your parents, something to be grateful for maybe. Did they screw you up later on? Undoubtedly, they did. You’re here. You had lent agency from your parents. Something to be grateful for maybe. Did they screw you up later on? Undoubtedly, they probably made mistakes. Humans do that. People make mistakes. It’s sort of inevitable. You make mistakes. Maybe you could kind of account for that. So you never had autonomy. You’re never going to have autonomy. Almost everything you do requires other people. Did you build the house you’re living in? Do you build the house you’re living in? Do you create the electricity? Are the things that created that electricity made by your hand and your hand alone? If not, it’s not autonomy. I’m not saying you don’t have some degree of free will. I believe in free will. Free will is real. But freedom doesn’t make any sense without constraint, just like choice. Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? People use this autonomy idea, this individualism idea, to fool you and manipulate you and force you to do things that aren’t in your best interest. That’s what I’m concerned about. That’s why I’m doing this video. This isn’t some clickbait lie of autonomy title that’s meant to get you to watch. This is serious stuff. Beware of people who seem to empower you without giving you any help. If they provide no structure for you, no instruction for you, no help to you, they’re not lending their agency to you. Maybe they’re giving you words of advice. I would argue that’s not exactly agency or it’s not enough agency. Maybe you should beware of them. People will use your outcome bias, your conclusion bias, to manipulate you into putting your time, energy, and attention, that’s your power, into things that cannot work. Meantime, they either make money with it, they sit back and watch you burn up and destroy yourself, or they hijack your efforts for their own ends. This happens all the time. People that tell you that you are key to saving the climate and they give you something to do around talking to other people, maybe they don’t have your best interest at heart. You want to save the climate? Do you want to be autonomous in saving the climate? You can do that. I hope you don’t have a lawn. That’s very destructive to the climate. Don’t drive. That could be destructive to the climate. Don’t work in a building. Don’t live in a city. Cities are remarkably climate destroying. Cities are remarkably climate destroying. I live in the woods. I don’t even mow and I should. I need to. I don’t have any grass. That’s actually why, incidentally, I actually do care about the climate. I’m just not going to try to make other people care about the climate. That’s stupid. I’m not a tyrant, which, you know, obviously I have a video on that. These are tricks. Oh, you’re autonomous. You can do this thing. Can you though? Can you? Can you do anything alone? You’re not sufficient to enact your dreams by yourself. As an individual, you’ll need help. You’ll need help either from the past, which is the structures that are built up around you. I have a great video on that. I feel like I have help here right now, not just in the moment, not just in coming up with these concepts and figuring out how to articulate them. I’ve talked about that numerous times. I talk about it on my live streams all the time. Check out my live streams. Some of them are pretty good. I’ll link one here for you. But look, I’ve got this wonderful microphone. I’ve got these lights. I didn’t build any of this. I have these monitors all over the place. I got this laptop. I didn’t build that. People in the past did a lot of work. And people in the present do a lot of work so that those things from the past can be brought to me. I could actually go into maybe 90% of all the stuff that goes into my laptop for real. But I don’t want to bore you. B, I don’t want to do that just to show off because at that point it’s showing off. Should be able to figure out there’s an awful lot of chips in there that were invented by an awful lot of people. Actually, I think my great uncle actually came up with the first design for the one megabyte memory module. That’s what I heard. I don’t know. I looked it up once. It seems to be true. That design was obviously used and then later improved. That’s part of his legacy. And there’s dozens, hundreds, thousands of such designs in electronics and computers. And in software concepts too. A lot of the noise reduction for the microphone, a lot of the game controls, the software I’m using, OBS, which is wonderful. OBS Studio is wonderful. These are all things that I didn’t build. I’m not autonomous in doing videos. I didn’t build Google. I didn’t build Google. Maybe I could have, but I didn’t. I couldn’t have by myself. Most of those things you didn’t build either. You’re always getting help from others, from a structure like a family structure, the structure of your friend’s network, the structures they’re attached to, like everyone linked in or even Facebook. They’re the ones connecting you with other people who might be interested. That’s part of the structure around you. So you get help all the time. Businesses get you help. Non-profit businesses, charities get people help. The government, which is a structure, gets you help. Maybe it does more harm than good. Fair enough. That could be. And look, direction is important, but it’s a binary frame. Orientation needs to come first. And part of, I would say, wisdom is knowing the difference between mere direction, because any leader can provide direction in a structure, but orientation. And wisdom is knowing the difference between those and also be able to orient. If you can orient in the world and not merely go in a direction, sometimes a direction is helpful. Something needs to give you a direction. Maybe it even just needs to be an arbitrary direction. And that’s helpful to get you to the next step. But wisdom is having orientation, the ability to orient and not just to direct. And you need that. And you need other people to show you where you’re going wrong. We outsource our sanity. It’s one of the wonderful things that Paul VanderKlay says all the time. We outsource our sanity. That’s why if you put somebody in solitary confinement, they go nuts, actually, by all measures that we have. It’s not unambiguous. It’s not really open to interpretation. It’s just observable. So we outsource our sanity. That’s because even our sanity, our ability to cohere to the world at all, requires other people. You’re not autonomous. The people that are telling you you’re autonomous are either ignorant or using you. Most of them are using you. Some of them are doing so unconsciously and should be forgiven. Some of them are bad people. Dare I say evil? You have power, which is your time, energy and attention. People want that for their structure, for their project, for their goal, for their dream, for their ideal. They’ll take it from you if you let them. You want to be autonomous? Don’t let them. Figure out what is good to participate in and how your participation in it can be good. And if both those conditions are true, and they are separate conditions, then participate. If they are not true, don’t participate. There are lots of projects that I look at and I say, that’s a good project. But there’s no good in my participation because either I displace somebody or I just don’t have the right skill set because most things I don’t have the right skill set for. I’m just useless at a bunch of things. It just is what it is. I’m almost halfway decent at making videos, but clearly I can’t draw. If that isn’t clear to you by now, it will never be clear to you. It’s clear to me. It’s been clear to me my whole life. I also can’t play musical instruments. I can do a little piano scales. That’s about it. Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff I’m not good at. I’m not going to list it off. We’d be here for hours. It’s endless. There’s probably a bunch of stuff you’re not good at either that you don’t even know about, which is fine. But you’re not autonomous. It’s okay. No one else is either. You don’t have to be better. You can be just like everybody else in that aspect. And to the extent that you have power, which is time, energy, and attention, I really appreciate you putting that power towards my videos. I hope to see you next time.