https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PM28qQZdGSU
Hello there. Good to see you. What I’d like to talk about today is what is the problem? What is the problem that we’re having in the world today? Now, this is a pretty big topic to tackle. It could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but fundamentally, I just want to propose that the big issue that we’re having in the world today is basically one of having fewer and fewer things in common with one another. And this is really due to the fact that we have more things than ever to attend to. And it matters what we attend to, what we pay attention to. And when we try to pay attention to too many things, we split our attention. A lot of people talk about this in terms of multitasking. And they say things like, well, you can’t multitask. And other people say, no, I multitask all the time. Well, really, you’re just doing one thing and switching. Is that really multitasking? I mean, at some point, that’s how computers multitask. So, yes, certainly our brains seem to be able to think of multiple things at the same time in parallel. If you want to use sort of more computing terms. But this problem of sort of having more things to attend to and splitting as a result is a lot deeper and also a lot higher than you think. I mean, it’s not just groups that are splitting, it’s people. And it’s not just people and groups that are splitting, but its entire cultures, entire institutions, entire methods of thinking about the world. Politics seems to be splitting up as well. And the real irony here is that our attention, the things we attend to, is actually quite misplaced. We shouldn’t pay attention to things at all. That’s technically idolatry. You know, when people talk about idolatry, they kind of have a point. But then you might say, well, what should we pay attention to? And I say, that’s a very good question. But it’s also a very easy question. We should pay attention to relationships, to patterns, to persons. So you’re a person, persons are not things, persons cannot be reduced to things, not usefully. I mean, you can, you’ll just destroy your conception of the world and your conception of yourself along with it, because you’re a person too. So if you reduce other persons to things, you’ll reduce yourself to a thing. This goes back into trying to get single identity, the crisis of identity, so-called politics. Identity politics is a very apt name because politics has two buckets, left and right. Conservative and liberal, Democrat and Republican, that’s it. It’s just two buckets. Identity politics is very much shrinking your identity down to one thing. So it’s a very apt way to think about it. It’s also bad. So when we pay attention to things, we reduce the world. That’s the materialism. You’re paying attention to the material aspect of the world. And look, there’s a material aspect to the world and you can’t ignore it. But how much attention should you pay to it? Not most of it, because relationships are more important. Relationships are not material. They have qualities. They’re hard to quantify. I would say impossible to quantify. And that’s the problem. When you’re trying to quantify an unquantifiable thing or put it into a proposition, let’s say we’re trying to talk about love, I mean, you can try. You’re always going to reduce it. You’re always going to flatten it. You’re always going to lose the flavor of it. And the more you try to talk about love, the less you’re going to find you have in common with other people who are in love or feeling love or think about love or have been in love. That’s that splitting again, because it’s hard to describe. There’s so many aspects to something like love or something like a relationship, like a friendship or a familial relationship. Describe your brother or your sister or your parents. They’re not things. That the relationship is what matters. And describing that relationship just turns out to be really, really hard. Probably impossible with words. And there’s a deep trade-off in our attention between paying attention to things, which is reductive, and paying attention to relationships, because relationships change and they move quite a bit quicker and quite a bit more than things do. Things are subject to decay. Entropy still applies. I still believe that entropy is true and real. I observe entropy all the time. But things like relationships, which really aren’t things, but we’re sort of running into words, relationships seem to be able to defy entropy. If they’re not attended to, they don’t sort of fade away, but that’s true of material things. If you don’t attend to your house, it rots. If you don’t attend to your garden, it gets overgrown by weeds. If you don’t attend to your car, change the oil, things like that, it stops functioning. Our relationships are the same way. And if we’re busy paying too much attention to the material stuff, the relationships will suffer, because we have a limited amount of attention. And the deep secret here, and I don’t think it’s a secret, is our misapplication of the word power. And of course, I have a video on power. I’ve talked about this before. And the best way to understand our power as people is just our time, our energy and our attention. When we spread that out, not just our attention, but all three of those things, we’re in deep trouble. When we split our attention away from relationships and towards material or physicality, we’re in deep trouble. Because things, objects in the world, are reciprocally narrowing. Whereas our relationships are reciprocally opening. Addiction, you can look at addiction from any number of perspectives. Video game addiction is a good sort of recent addiction that people are talking about. You’re focused in on a created closed world of a limited size. It may be a big size, but it’s a limited size, very specific procedural rules that allow you to be able to make you the illusion of control. Now you may say within the game, I have a great deal of control because I play well. You didn’t create the game. It’s not your game. So you don’t control it. You might control things within it. And we get fooled by this. It’s very easy to get addicted to the material, the physicality, the apparent control, which is basically something that only functions on the level of physicality or materiality. When you start talking about relationships, you’re talking about two agents, usually. You don’t control the other person. You have influence over them. The relationship gives you influence, for sure. But you don’t control them, not in the way you control a video game. There’s no procedure for going on a date. There’s no procedure for being in love. There’s no procedure for having a happy marriage. That doesn’t make any sense. We just have to attend to, continuously, relationships. Primarily, not only. You can’t cut out the thingness. You can’t cut out the object. You can’t cut out the material. And the thing is, the perennial patterns of life, the relationships that can be fed, again, they defy entropy. They resist entropy. They reverse entropy because they’re reciprocally opening. The entropy is reciprocally narrowing. Physicality, materiality, thingness, narrowing. And you can feed relationships. You can feed the quality of your relationships. You can feed qualities and enhance them and grow them and build them up. They’re generative. And you can feed relationships. You can feed the quality of your relationships. That’s really what the problem is. We’re so focused on materiality. What is a political frame? It is a reduction of a complex set of relationships, vertical relationships, between, we’ll say, the small number of people that we, or maybe we didn’t as a group, but as a larger group, have in positions of authority and leadership. That relationship to what’s below them, i.e. the voters, in the case of a Democratic Republic, such as in the U.S., is reduced to a bunch of words and a bunch of procedures. That’s what politics is. It’s a reduction of a complex relationship between the higher things and the lower things. And you can say, look, those higher things are corrupt. I’m not going to disagree with you. But what is your relationship to that corruption? Because you’re still stuck in the system. You’re still participating. Even if you’re not voting, you’re participating. And you can say, well, I don’t want to participate. Well, leave. Move to another country that has a different—you’re not going to get out of the hierarchy. You’re going to get into a different one. And look, maybe there’s a better hierarchy that maybe isn’t even Democratic, but the people at the top are better people. That can happen. And maybe their relationship with the people below is better. That can happen. The type of government doesn’t guarantee better or worse people. And what is economics? Economics is a reduction of a complex set of relationships between people, most of which are non-monetary. By the way, interesting. I have a video on that too, because I have videos on things. You should know that by now. Those relationships have been reduced or flattened, right? Down to economic procedures, economic rules, economic systems, economic ways of understanding the world. Unfortunately, they’re all wrong. Nassim Taleb talks about this. Read all his books, really. Ignore his Twitter feed. Read his books, though. Quite good. He talks about this, like economists are frauds. He makes a very good case. He used to say all. He has since softened his position on that. He’s found a few good economists. The Freakonomics series of books. I also recommend their economists, or at least there’s an economist there. Those are very good books to understand the world. That’s a reduction. So you can see that we’re creating reductions. We’re creating materiality. We’re creating reductions. We’re creating material frames for the world, trying to fit the world into them, and we’re trying to operate as if the world operates that way. Most of the economy is non-monetary. Economists can’t measure it. That’s why daycare is BS. No one needs daycare. You have a family, you have friends, you don’t need daycare. Maybe you’re working too much. Maybe you can’t work 40 hour weeks and raise a child at the same time. That’s possible too. Maybe you have to give up a few things. Feeding the quality of the relationship, giving up a few things, a few things, material, physical things, allows you to feed the quality of the relationship with your child. And maybe that’s more important than having six presents at Christmas, or a house that’s already too big for the people in it. Uh, I don’t know. And maybe having a big house spreads out your attention, so you’re not forced to contend with your family that you should be living with. That could have something to do with it too. So you can see the problem of today is having fewer things in common. Well, if I have my room and you have your room, and there’s other rooms and we don’t bump into each other, we don’t have to deal with each other. We have less in common because we’re not bumping into each other as often. And I have joked many times, and I think I’ve said it in some of these videos, that maybe one solution to the problem is to mandate that all houses with four bedrooms or less only have one bathroom, and that people have to contend for that bathroom because it forces people into conflict to learn how to resolve conflict. That’s very much part of the problem that we have. And it is because we’re spread out, we don’t need to conflict as much when you spread out. And so we’re not attending to the right things. When we’re forced to attend to conflict, we don’t know how. We have no idea how. And so conflict becomes outright war or at least tribalism. And tribalism and war are pretty well related. Social media is an attention grabbing machine. It’s what it is. And what are you attending to? You’re not attending to the day-to-day lives of your friends. They’re not showing you when they’re struggling to cook or how they’re struggling raising their children or how they’re struggling at work. They’re showing you when they’re on vacation. They’re showing you when they’re happy. They’re showing you when their lives are going their best. Not all the time, but most of the time. And so you get this weird impression of their life and your life because most of your life isn’t like that. Most of their life isn’t like that. But that’s what you see of them when you have this filter of technology. And now all of a sudden, you don’t have anything in common with them because you’re not on vacation, but they are. We have less in common, fewer and fewer things in common. We have more things to attend to. Look at all the people that are on vacation while I’m not. Look at all the people that are having wonderful lives while I’m depressed. And it’s stuck around these reductive frames, around physicality, materiality. All of that is stuff we’re attending to incorrectly. Your relationship to money should not be a primary concern. Do you need money? You need some. You probably don’t need as much as you have. You can get by on a lot less and still be okay. And will that cause strife? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe not as much as you think. Maybe if you’re busy worrying about your family and your friends and your community, maybe you won’t have time to feel strife. Maybe it makes the struggle worthwhile. And again, we’re busy reducing things. We’re just continually compressing things. We’re compressing people’s behavior and people’s way of relating to us down to their actions in the world, right? And then relating that to psychology. Oh, well, that person had a scowl on their face when they said something. So they must not like me. That’s not possible that they were thinking poorly about something else while they were talking to you, huh? Oh, this person did this. And so what’s going on in their head is this, because I know what personality type they are. You don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head. And we fall into these traps. We fall into these traps all the time. And that’s part of the flattening of the world, the reduction. That’s part of the problem. We’re reducing the world. We’re reducing the world. We’re reducing the world. We’re reducing the world. We’re reducing the world. We’re reducing the world. And spreading it out. And then what happens, we don’t know what to pay attention to. And we’re spreading out from one another. And so my likes and dislikes have nothing to do with yours because there’s too many things to like and dislike. So just statistically, we’re just further apart. We have less and less in common. And in order to build a proper world, you need more in common. You need relationships with people that are rich and full of various different qualities. Now, not all relationships should be the same. And all of them should be of the same depth or the same set of qualities. I’m not an equality doctrine guy. I don’t like the equality doctrine at all. I actually believe in evolution. Equality kills evolution. I’m still an evolution fan. You want to pay attention to relationships and give them your time and energy. Because that’s your power. And the power in the world is in each individual person. Maybe that’s not the only place it is, but that’s the primary place that it is. And then we lend that power through cooperation to others, to structures, to institutions. We form companies with it. Those structures allow our time, energy, and attention to manifest towards a common goal. That’s what a corporation is. Common set of goals, basically. And a bunch of people operating within a structure towards those goals. It’s not good or bad. It can be either. It’s just a tool. It depends on the people in it. And if there’s one bad person in it, can that ruin it? Maybe. But also, you can kick out one bad person. That happens, too. Is there a formula to make sure the one bad person gets kicked out? Nah, probably not. That sucks. But look, that’s the world we’re in. We got to deal with that. And we have to recognize the things we have in common to make positive change in the world. We have to figure out how to cooperate. You can’t cooperate without common virtues and values. It’ll never work. And that’s tied up in something I’ll probably do in a future video, which is vertical causality. And I think on that note, I’ll just leave you with the mystery of vertical causality. I’ve mentioned it before on a few of the live streams. If you haven’t checked out the live stream, you might like this one. So I’ll link it here. I think it’s good. I think they’re all good. The later ones we’re getting trying new things. And I’ll just leave it here. And thank you for the thing that I think is the most valuable that you’re giving me, which is your time and attention.