https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sp6XvggyPQA
All right, what I’d like to talk about today, and you may notice I’m reusing my visuals now. Ooh, fancy. And a little lazy maybe, but if they work, you’ll see why. But what I’d like to talk about today is what is a church? Like what makes a church? Why is this important? And I have a thesis for you to ponder over, and hopefully this will be a fun adventure for everyone. So I want to propose that the best way to understand a church is that it is that which protects your highest value. So whatever your highest value is, now obviously I have a video on highest value with Sam Harris. It’s not just about Sam Harris. It’s about the concept of highest value. It’s very good. It’s well watched. It’s my most watched video. It’s super important because you get to see three different highest values in the same scenario. Nothing changes, just the value, what you’re looking up at, what your ideal is. And you get to see why church is important, what a church actually is in that video. I think that conversation exemplifies all these ways of understanding quite nicely. And of course, this is related to the modern trend of just ginning up religions. I have another video. It’s great. Three great religions of our time. It’s a little tongue in cheek, obviously, but you’ve got the race people, the climate people, and the safety people, and they’re all following a religious pattern. I didn’t try to be exhaustive in that video. I’m going to try to explain more about religious pattern here, roughly speaking. But that’s what I want to talk about is the church is the thing that protects that value, whether that value is correct or whether or not there’s more to it determines whether or not it’s a cult, for example. It’s cult is sort of like a mini church, right? Or a church that doesn’t quite tell a story that you can participate in fully, we’ll say, or maybe doesn’t tell you a story that has enough participation that you can participate in life fully. Right? So it gives you a piece of life, but not enough of it to sort of make things keep going. Right? I still think evolution is true. So the keep going part’s kind of important. Right? You need something past yourself to keep going. That’s super important. And I think that’s part of the problem. Part of the problem is we don’t recognize a church as the institution that protects the value. But then we need an institution to protect our value because we can’t do it by ourselves. Like, what are we going to do? Fight everybody for our highest value all the time? No. And maybe people are trying that. Maybe that explains a lot of what you see in the world today. Right now, people are trying to individually protect their highest value without an institution. And institutions are handy because for all their flaws, they have leverage that you do not have as an individual. Right? Because there’s more than one person. And there’s a structure there that you can rely on and wield to some extent. Maybe not the way you want. Maybe it doesn’t give you the control you want or the outcomes you want, all the time. Maybe there are unintended consequences. Fair enough. But that structure is the church of your highest value. It’s the way that your highest value gets manifested and protected in the world. And that’s why I think there’s a bunch of little churches. Right? There’s a bunch of religious patterns going on, which is what I talked about in that religious patterns video. And I think you see that all the time. And to some extent, I think this is a result of steal the culture. Oh, we’re postmoderns. We can just gin up new ways of operating in the world. I would argue that’s a good definition of religion, not a complete definition. It’s a good sub definition of religion, ways of operating in the world. We can just invent them and go with them. And for a time that will work. But if they’re incomplete, then time will eat them. Or you’ll run into a situation where they don’t work. And one of the great critiques of Ayn Rand, which I think is an invalid critique, by the way, because it applies to all philosophers, in my opinion, is that her philosophy doesn’t account for children. Fair enough. I would argue neither does anyone else’s. Philosophers don’t talk about children, ever. They don’t account for them, ever. They may sort of mention them like, oh, children are important to people. And therefore, philosophy. OK, but that doesn’t mean it’s encompassed in your philosophy. What do you do about children? They seem to break all the philosophical rules. They’re not rational, logical, or reasonable until we make them. So at some point, they don’t come out that way. So the church is the thing that allows the structure, that allows you to manifest your values, your highest value in particular. And a philosophy doesn’t do that. It may tell you about how you’re participating in the church, whatever church that is. It’s a church you chained up. It’s a church that you belong to because your parents took you, whatever. Philosophy sort of validates and justifies your behaviors within that highest value, your manifestation of it. But it doesn’t replace church. It doesn’t replace your highest value. It doesn’t fully validate your highest value. So you need that structure, that church, in order to do that. And if you want your highest value not to be manifested by or in or with a cult, you have to work at that. You have to work at having a complete enough story that you can participate in, in all aspects of your life, and that allows all aspects of life itself, the larger bucket that you’re part of, to be participated in. So you need a really big story, really encompassing it. Of course, we’re postmoderns, so we don’t believe in grand narrative, although I think grand narrative is inevitable. It’s a better way to think about it. And then if grand narrative is inevitable, that’s important to know. That means we can’t get around it. So we better be careful what kind of grand narrative we’re engaged in. Is it good grand narrative or is there a bad grand narrative? That’s the ethical question. And of course, I have a video on ethics. I have a couple, actually. Great conversation with Manuel and a shorter one that I did. Maybe watch both of them. They’re awesome. All my videos are awesome, at least according to me. And it’s my YouTube channel, so I get to say that, I guess. So there’s a way in which the ethical component is the thing that’s missing. And you get that partially from your church, and it’s validated partially from your highest value. And maybe having one highest value isn’t the best way to go. And you have different values, and maybe they have to compete because the world changes. And I think that’s the best way to think about this. Is it the only way to think about it? No. But it might be the best way to think about it. It’s certainly a different way to think about it. Religion at that point is inevitable, right? It’s the manifestation of the values and the virtues that you act out in your participation in the world, in your participation with yourself, in your participation with nature, right? And with others. So you need a structure to help defend that, whether that’s through distributed cognition, like why should you be a good person? Why should you help your neighbor? Why shouldn’t you beat your children mercilessly, right? A church can help you answer that because it’s a group of people. It’s distributed cognition, right? Hopefully over time, if you’re using an older religion, which I suggest you do, you know, so that’s important to realize. That’s what church is. It’s that which protects your highest value. And you may not understand what your highest value actually is. And again, you know, as I pointed out, my Sam Harris video, the second one that I did on highest value, you can see this plainly, what his highest value is and what Constantine Kissin’s highest value is, right? And I put out what the highest value maybe should be, at least according to my ethics. And that’s important. Otherwise, you’ll manifest bad things, right? If your highest value is knowledge, you’re going to stray for short. If your highest value is politics, you’re going to stray. And some people’s highest value is knowledge. Some people’s highest value is politics. Some people’s highest value is economics, right? That would be greed, roughly speaking. And some people’s highest value is just their family to the exclusion of all others, right? You could look at something like the mafia extension or really care about the people in the family, right? And, you know, it’s a bit of a trope, but it’s not wrong. And look, it’s fairly useful. But, you know, they kill people. So maybe not, maybe unethical. And so these are things to account for. What is your highest value? Do you really know? What are you manifesting? How are you acting it out? That’ll tell you, right? And then when you’re acting it out, what does that mean? Like, what are you justifying your actions with? Because Tony Soprano has a justification for his actions. I don’t find it compelling. I think it’s like not good, but he has one. So we need a way to evaluate these things. First, we need to know what they are, what’s your highest value. Then we need to know, like, well, what does that mean? And what’s protecting your highest value? Is it the university? Is it the political system you’re embedded in? Is it the king? Right? What is it? Is it other people? Is it is it a nebulous idea or definition around a word like safety? I don’t know, right? But you should know. And that allows you to be an ethical agent or a moral agent, sorry, in the world, right? It allows you to take your ethics, turn them into actions, moral actions in the world as an agent, because you are an agent, you are able to be an agent. So I think it’s important to think about this. What is a church? What church am I actually signed or church as? Am I actually signed up for? And you may say, well, Mark, there’s only one highest value. Yeah, maybe, maybe we have to juggle values. Like, maybe that’s part of having multiple identities, which I’ve covered before. Maybe I’ll do an identity video sometime in the future. And maybe I’ll link it here if I remember. And I might, who knows? Probably not. And maybe that’s important. Like, oh, we can’t be one thing all the time in all situations. And therefore, we can’t have one value all the time in all situations. Or at least to the extent that we can, it’s an abstract. It’s not a, you know, it’s not something concrete like knowledge. It might be something like be nice to your neighbor, which is less concrete. Right. And I’m not, I’m just using those as quick examples. I’m not suggesting anything here. And maybe having a church that has a big enough story that can accommodate different values when they need to rise to the top is really important. And maybe you can’t just gin that up tomorrow with a group of your smartest friends, because maybe that requires the distributed cognition through hundreds or maybe thousands of years to figure out. And maybe that’s where the religions came from. Because the fact that we have any religions at all is a statistical anomaly. And that’s kind of important to know. Like, why Christianity? Why not any dozens of postmodern ideas, for example, well, which are failing right before our very eyes? Well, because there’s something about Christianity. Maybe I don’t know what it is or Islam or Buddhism or, you know, insert your favorite long lasting religion here. Maybe there’s something about it that distributed cognition figured out that we can’t replicate in our limited lifetimes with our limited brains, as smart as we think we are. Maybe the ancients weren’t so dumb. And maybe that distributed cognition is carried on and we’re beholden to it. And we should take care of it. Maybe be a little cautious with it, a little careful. Maybe it’s delicate and can be shattered easily when we put it in our mere meager human hands, because it was developed over time. So maybe maybe it’s worthy of some reverence. And perhaps that’s where you get the sense of the sacred. Oh, this is evolutionarily survived over thousands of years as a concept. Maybe it’s important. And I think that’s the best way to think about church and highest value. And it’s not perfect. And I know we want perfection. Well, I know I want perfection, but we can’t have it. And that’s okay. A good religion gives us a way to accept the fact that we can’t have the perfection that we want. There’s a conflict there, which goes back to intimacy. And I’m hoping to have more on intimacy soon. Stay tuned. Stay tuned to this channel for more intimacy crisis work. So I think that’s worth thinking about. What is your church? What is your highest value? What are the churches that you’re part of? Right. Because maybe we’re part of more than one. Maybe we’re going to quote church and we’re also worshipping the university as an important thing. Even though I would argue as somebody who didn’t go to university, it’s not that important. And I would make that argument. I’ve made it many times. These are important things to think through. I’m not trying to tell you what to do or how to think, just giving you food for thought. Think about these things. You don’t have to ruminate on them just in your own head. Discuss them with people. That’s just derivative cognition. And also, I’m not trying to criticize you personally as the viewer or the listener. I’m trying to say, you can look at this in other people. That’s what I did in my Sam Harris Highest Value video. You can look and see how they behave, what their participation is, to use Peterson’s sort of rubric. What do they act out? Acting out as participation. What are they acting out in the world? What are they participating in? That tells you more about what they believe than what they say. Because I can say anything. In fact, I do say lots of things, unfortunately, and many of them are wrong. Because I say lots of things. The more things you say, the more wrong you’ll be. But I’m okay with that because I think you learn more that way. But you can see what their highest value is. And maybe that gives you insight into what your highest value or values tend to be. What churches you’re worshiping at. What structures and institutions you’re using to protect your values in the moment. And I think that’s important to know. I’m not saying you have to change it, but it’s good to be aware of. And one of the things that I value the most, the thing that I’m thinking about the most when I’m making these videos, is basically the value that I place, which is very, very high indeed, on the thing that you’re giving me by watching or listening, which is your time and attention.