https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AO7FEkq9cZM
Yeah, so welcome back everybody to the book club. Last week was some interesting stuff. Eugenics, forced child separation, stuff like that. Also we went into categories, how to form categories, what are valid categories and what are invalid categories and in what context. Danny likes to identify with what’s being talked about and I think this part really didn’t lend itself to implementing it in life too much. They’re talking about how it’s like, well, I don’t even dare to suggest this. It’s in some sense the part that’s most removed from reality. So I didn’t get much out of the text in real life, but I did spend a whole lot of time listening to new stuff from the Republic and re-listening to old stuff and today re-reading. There’s a lot of value in that for me. I think I left an intention last week as well. My intention was to connect to the motivation of people, which is actually a thing that I did yesterday in relationship to my father. I’m trying to make people attentive to why they’re driven. In some sense that is connecting to the text. What is making you tell us? What tell us are you adhering to when you make these categories? You’re making a distinction, what is your justification for this distinction and what is the thing that you’re pursuing in the world when you’re doing that? I think I kind of want to keep going on that train. That’s it for me. Ethan? I can’t remember what my intention was. Do you have mine written down too? I can’t do that for now. I can’t remember what it was. Really? Do you want to know what I think it was? I think it was just the same thing as how to be a just person. That’s what I remember. Being attentive to my relationship with justice, I guess it would probably be something like that. What I mean is how in the particular form of life that you have, are you being just or in your day-to-day job, are you being a just person or are you letting something else take over your life? Is there a means by which you practice that? I would probably just say reflecting on my telos. For me it’s pretty simple. Just ahead of the household. When I get upset with things at work, upset with my boss, everybody gets upset with their boss. Let’s take a step back and remember that the reason I’m here is not to do any of these things that are upsetting me. The reason I’m here is to be a good member of my family. That actually really helps and puts things into perspective. That makes things that are a big deal in the moment seem actually trivial when considering that. So you’re capable of manifesting that in the moment? To a degree, I guess, yeah. Do you have a sense of what is the trigger that allows you to step back? Yes, heightened emotion, probably particularly frustration. Frustration as a result of a lack of control or something like that. So you’re building a procedural loop where if I feel like I lack control, I’m going to revisit my fundamental stance? Yeah, pretty much. I’m not sure how explicit that is in my cognition. It kind of happens more naturally, I guess. That is probably what is happening. Analyzing it now, that is probably what’s happening. Well, cool. Do you have an intention that you want to set for this week? Actually, this reading. This reading? Okay, I want to see what Plato is trying to say with these absurd ideas, these extreme things that he’s molding, this polis that he’s molding. They even say, he even says in here, this is completely absurd, but like, unless he’s still saying it, so try to see through the absurdity to the point that he’s trying to make, what we can learn from it. And yeah, I guess I would see it say that. No, you can go next. So I think as far as reflection goes, last week I said something about motivation or hootspa or whatever that is, and I think I’m still interested in that, but I think from this reading, I think we’re a little bit closer to where I’d want to map that as gaining a better understanding of their concept of monotheism. Or whatever they’re grounding things out in. So like, chiefly, I’m interested in similar to you, like, what is the vital force that wakes you up, gets you out of bed in the morning and causes, like you said, what drives people, what motivates people. I’m interested to understand their take more clearly. So, you know, in chapter five, they’re going to talk about a lot about the natures of things. They start off with, I’m not, forgive me, I’m going to do a brief breath first overview of, you know, the natures of men and women. They talk about the unifying principle. What’s the thing that brings us together? What do we have in common? We destroy a bunch of categories, talk about how you cannot actually judge things if you’re stuck in materialist frame and categorizing things in and of themselves. And today they get into like ideals and things, but they can’t do that without, I think, pointing towards what seems to be monotheism to me. So I’m interested in connecting the dots of opposites, contradictions. Last week we talked on contradictions about the difference between like heuristic or dialectic. Like, is this an opinion or is this fact? Like, you know, so given that we’re, you know, on a journey of exploring the nature of justice in an ideal sense and we built this ideal state and then we’re going to talk about reasons why it doesn’t work. I really wonder what, well, again, I guess so I suppose I’m searching for their solution, which probably doesn’t exist. Maybe they probably they probably are not going to propose a solution. So anyway, that’s kind of where I am. I’m looking for a solution to the problem that you can’t judge. You know, yeah, I don’t know. I’m looking for solutions now that they’ve destroyed every lots of ways of thinking and they’ve given us some tools for thinking and perceiving. I want to gain a better understanding of their mind. You are in postmodernism, man. You got deconstructed. Yeah, I got deconstructed. I mean, chaos. It’s really nice. I can’t believe how relevant this stuff is. They’re there at the end of book five, you know, they’re they’re saying, well, how do you basically saying how do you get materialist people to look up and understand that the world is not primarily material? He’s saying that that’s our language, but that’s essentially what they’re saying. It’s really fascinating how the term the dialogue is taking and how relevant it is to us right now. You mentioned the model theism. It reminds me of that. It explicitly reminds me of that Barclay talk that you shared and well, what Mark Barclay was doing, he’s doing the exact same thing. He’s trying to get he’s trying to get people to look up. That’s like to get them to look up, not only look up, but also appreciate the I guess you could say the role or the purpose of God. It sounds similar to where Danny is right now. It’s like where like there has to be some sort of monotheism coming from here that qualifies everything. Where do these where do these where these where do these ideals meet in the non material? Where do they come from, actually? Tracy. What was my intention last week? I think it was to figure out what justice is. I can’t remember exactly, but something like that. And why? Why do I want to know what justice is? To help me solve some ways of relating to other people that I’ve been having trouble with to figure out. To figure out if I know like what a just act or a just relation looks like, I can see in my relationships with other people and with the things around me how to how to have a real and right relationship that looks more like justice. And I think they they sort of get into that in this book with like beauty and love at the end of this book. So I still say try to figure out what justice is and how it relates to me. So do you think that knowing what justice is will allow you to implement it? Because like those. I’m not going to know what justice is, but maybe having a better idea of it will help me implement it. We can say you’re not even worried about the implementation yet. No. I mean, you can experiment, right? But like. You can already ruin certain. Say there are certain things that do not want to be ruined by just experimenting with them. See if I can figure out a better way of relating. Okay. Yeah, so. I was thinking of I need to get my auto notes as well. Going over things that stood out to me when going over book five again from the start, because that’s what I ended up doing. And I’ll give a summary of last week, hopefully in the process. So they’re talking about the right or wrong management of the city. That’s their framing that they’re starting from. And how does that influence the state? For good or for evil. So they’re talking about right and wrong, at least in my translation in relation to the management. And then in relation to the nature of the state, they’re talking about good and evil, which is really interesting to me. Because like, yeah, when do you talk about what? How do you judge where good and evil are proper, right and wrong are not proper? So in some sense, they go back to the utilitarian framing in the management aspect. And then they make a subsection of guardians, right? So they’re trying to figure out the education of the guardians in the city. Not the other class. I was talking to Danny about this. They keep separating the classes more and more, right? And then they effectively start their eugenics reading program. But the eugenics reading program is in relation to the guardians. It’s not in relation to the other professions. So they’re creating like, oh, you have a bunch of sci-fis, right? Like this alternate human race, like this higher level technocrats. And then there’s this scene where Socrates says, you need to frustrate me when I’m talking to you. Like you need to contradict me because I don’t want to make a mistake among friends. It’s better to make a mistake among enemies. Therefore, you should be harsher on me. And then they’re trying to figure out how to deal with the other class. And then they’re trying to be harsher on me as you are my friends, which is an important message. Then if women are to have the same duty as men, they must have the same nurture, nature and education. Right? The way that I think they define education here is by growing into a telos, right, or fulfilling your nature. And then the question is, well, what is your nature, right? Like how do you recognize your nature or someone else’s nature, right? Like how do you grow them into it? So that’s all kind of like shady, shady stuff. But it’s interesting because it’s not the way that I’m thinking, right? Like the language grow into the telos. That itself implies education. If you don’t want to use that word right now because we’re trying to find it, it imposes an immature to a mature thing. It’s not something that you can just propositionally adopt. It’s something that you have to grow into, you have to learn. You have to adopt it into your, into your, into your person and your being. Right. And in some sense, like now you’re accepting your fate, right? Like you’re in this place, you’re in this position where we’ve whatever means, but your trajectory has been defined. And now, now you have your constraints, right? And now you can optimize within the constraints. But like the thing that we do, right? Like we don’t have the constraint thing. We have it open-ended. It’s like, oh, you’re constrained as a child and then you can go to university, right? And then you can go all the ways, right? Or even if you don’t go to university, you’re going to have to pick among all the professions, right? So instead of working towards something, you get this combinatorially explosive field that you have to deal with. And then like now, now you’re responsible, right? Like you picked the one thing and so you closed off all of these other potential futures, right? And now you’re going to have to deal with feelings of regret. Like, oh, I picked one. That’s something that I witnessed with family members and peers is they would often go to the school and two years in changed the thing they were studying. And I remember thinking how big of a waste of money that was. But it was something, they were suffering from this lack of telos. And they were trying to pick their constraints and their telos at the same time. And it’s just, like you said, it’s combinatorially explosive. People have no direction. They weren’t really educated. They didn’t have that telos that they were cultivated towards or educated on. I mean, even something as simple as, well, people don’t even know anymore. It’s just like you need to make money. It’s like, well, maybe you need to have a family. I mean, that’s a little bit better, but it’s frustrating. We’ve lost our education. Did they offer much commentary on what is a good or a bad telos? I mean, Manuel, you brought up a good versus evil. They haven’t really made many claims, have they? I mean, when they talk about the dogs, they talk about the dogs in terms of function, like the function of the hunting dog, right? When they bring up the men and the women nature thing. So then the question, as you said, is what is the nature of the man? What is the nature of the man or the woman? They don’t offer solutions to that question, do they? Not yet. Well, they have to be philosophers, right? They’re going to describe the philosopher in relation to the philosopher king later on. Because that’s the ideal guardian effect of it. But yeah, it’s difficult to describe good and bad, because then you need to point towards God. You need the source, the author, the authority that allows you to discern one from the other. And so all the tricks that you’re using so far are utilitarian. We have the frame of the social, which is counted in money, effectively. Because money is a pretty good standard of your material success, because you can exchange your matter into money. And then there’s the other one, and that is honor, which is like the standard for the spiritual or the social success. But those two are both… Are they materialists? Well, they are individualists in the sense like I’m trying to lift myself up, right? I’m trying to prove myself, and I’m trying to be better in comparison to the people around me. But they’re not in relation to an abstract good, right? But I do think that they’re necessary for manifesting an abstract good, right? You need those components to commune into the higher thing. I went to a soccer game with this kid yesterday, and he went to visit a D.C. One of the things he liked in D.C. was the unknown soldier ceremony. So in the same way that when the guardian dies and he is bestowed honor, because that’s their argument, is like, oh, well, you know, you live this life that kind of sucks, right? You’re like, you know, but like one of the motivat- like you mentioned, there’s two, like at least two frames. One is the financial, and then the other would be like, oh, honor. And so, you know, is that not grounded out though? I mean, is that not- what’s behind that? The third frame was fear, right? That was at least earlier in the book, because you’re scared to do the wrong thing because the gods will punish you. That was the third frame. Is there not an abs- so I guess the question I have in terms of like, Telauss and the monotheism thing, I’d like to explore, because I don’t know, like, is there not some inherent- I mean, is the societal frame or the social frame, is there- Where’s the- I don’t know. I don’t even know what the question is, but it seems to me like there has to be a boundary between like social- like when I participate in a group, there’s an element of that is, like I said, for maybe my own honor. But then there’s- is there not like some other- do they- is there not some other- I guess they would say unifying principle. And so if we’re here unified in some sense, like we’re not here unified explicitly for our own interests. That’s a part of it, right? But there is inherent in the fact of like participating in a larger body. How would they establish whether that larger body is good or bad? Like, it seems to me that they would have to reference to monotheism or the gods in some way. But I don’t know that there was anything in Chapter 5 that would- that, you know, said like, how do you see the body of it, the telos of a body? Because we’re moving from the individual to the state here, as we have done before. Again, I’m getting way ahead now. Well, so I think the argument that they do have made so far is in order for the state to be healthy, right? Which would mean that it would uphold like the four virtues, right? That is a prerequisite for the state itself being good, right? So that- you could talk about the prerequisites for good and evil, right? Like, okay, you should not have a shadow, for example, or you should have a way to deal with your shadow. Because if you don’t, you cannot be a good person, right? Like, then you’re just like caught up in into whatever spirit is manifesting from your shadow. And then you’re its puppet, right? So you can make claims about what you need to do in order to be good. Now, the question is, if you have means of dealing with your shadow, are you good? And my answer would be no. And I don’t know how to answer that question, right? Like, now you have to have divine revelation effectively, right? Like, oh, God revealed me that this is correct, this is not correct. And I’m just going to accept that revelation as true because I have no means to judge. And the means to judge is a purpose. So, for example, they would argue, say, it is bad to be licentious because it undermines the interests of the state, right? In the model of the state. But if you wanted to accept from that, it’s like, OK, well, what would be their answer? I don’t even know what the questions are. Is the question is, what is the unifying principle that unites two homo sapiens? Like, I don’t even know how they break out of the utilitarian frame into some other frame. You’re going to get pretty heavily into this in the next few books, aren’t they? Are they? Yeah, the nature of what? Well, I was just going to say, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, but as Manuel pointed out, I think that what, Chapter 8 is, I think, where the allegory of the cave is, which is… No, no, that’s the next one. Six. OK, six? Oh, that’s in seven. So he gives three analogies of the good. There’s the divided line. There’s first, I can’t remember if it’s the divided line first or the sun. Then it’s the allegory of the cave. So there’s three analogies that he’ll give in three different books, I believe, starting in book six. Right. Right, but yeah, but OK, but OK, so what he’s describing is that we don’t experience the good, right? So like he’s using the sun as the metaphor, right? And then the sun is the thing that brings discernment to the world, right? So the good is the thing that allows us to distinguish between good and evil, right? That’s like, OK, thank you, I guess. And then he’s saying it’s analogous to the sun, right? But it’s spiritual, right? And I give you some conception of, OK, like there is something in my mind that is affording for this discernment. And I like like Eaton did, right? It’s like, OK, I get triggered, right? Like I get triggered into an emotional state, right? And then you can say, well, when I’m in this emotional state, a certain discernment gets frustrated. And then I need to rationally start to correct for it. Right. So I need to take off the autopilot or whatever thing was an autopilot. And I need to take intentional control over it because I can no longer trust it. Like it’s pushing me in ways that are not good. And like the question is, do we have more or even if we do have more, like isn’t that hard enough? Should we just not strive to have these things in fix? So again, revelation, right? Like when you experience the world like that, you start seeing the world differently and then maybe you get new means. So is what you’re struggling with is what the good actually is? Any? Well, I mean, like a lot of the times, yeah, I mean, they sort of they state they’ll reference like the daemon. And then they’ll move on. Right. And they’re like, so my like, yeah, but you’re like, you know, you’re like the conscience or something like, well, I mean, like when you participate with other people, other people can help you to figure out if you’ve that’s been hijacked or corrupted. Right. So like, you know, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re, Or like it’s dangerous out there, you know, as you know, other people may mess you up. They can help you. That’s what I want to know what they have to say out like commentary that they have on that. I’m not seeing much in my reading so far. I mean, I don’t think there’s going to be much because they can’t. That’s not really something. It’s something that’s something that you either can’t or is very difficult to put into text and Plato’s already masterfully putting things into text that you can’t really do. It’s I think like what Manuel is saying, it’s going to require some sort of revelation. If you think about the story in Exodus, they were suffering from the same thing. There was a gap between them and God and the commandments were a revelation. They were a what would you say? I don’t know if I would say compromise, but it’s some sort of intermediary thing that allows them to connect to something that they were so far separated from. And the commandments were a revelation. They were a gift given to them from God. Well, it’s interesting to put that into context with Jesus. Right. So basically what Moses did was somewhat utilitarian. Right. Like Peterson talks about design, doing judgment. Right. I’m doing law. And there’s this revelation of these principles that I’m participating in. Right. And if you adhere to the principles, I won’t have to judge effectively. Right. Like you’re internalizing God if you internalize the law. Right. And if we’re talking about Jesus, right, like Jesus says, well, you don’t really need to have the law. You need to have the spirit of the law and then the spirit will guide you into right action. Right. But the spirit is like. So you first need to have the law, which is like the dogma. Right. Which allows you to see that the world you do not have to be a dogma. Right. So you first need to have the law, which is like the dogma. Right. Which allows you to see that the world you do relevance realization on the world effectively. Right. And as a consequence of having right relevance realization, your daemon is programmed effectively. Right. Like it’s functioning correct. And I guess I want to read this piece from this chapter actually. Right. But let me ask you once more. Shall they be a family in name only or shall they in all their actions be true to the name? For example, in the use of the word father, would the care of a father be implied and the filial reverence and duty and obedience to him? With the law, which the law commands and is the filial later of these duties to be regarded as impious and unrighteous person who is not likely to receive much good either at the hands of God or man? Are these not to be? Are these to be or not to be the strains in which children will hear repeated in their ears by all the citizens about those who are in intimidated, imitated to them, to their parents and the rest of the kids. In our city, the language of harmony and concord will be more often heard than any other. When any of one is well or ill, the universal word will be with me, it is well or it is ill. Right. It is ill. Right. So what they’re talking about is this concept of family is being expanded towards the level of the city. And in some sense, they are part of the body of the city. Right. And then so like their identity, but their well-being is bound by the faring of the city. It’s really explicitly there. So. I mean, like, isn’t that hard enough? Right. And well, I guess the point would be, right, like at that point, the city is God. Right. Like the city is the highest value. Right. At the top of the city, you have the philosopher king. Right. And the philosopher king is the one who has responsibility to relate to God effectively. Right. To navigate the body towards goodness and away from evil. Right. And in some sense, as a body part, like you can’t go there because you’re not the philosopher king. And you shouldn’t. And so aren’t they saying that philosopher kings can be made through education? So like in the same way that if you have the spirit of Jesus or you have the spirit of Christianity, you have an overflow of grace. So you’re told you’ve sinned, fallen short of the law. Right. You’re the model. You missed the mark. And then, you know, like you mentioned, if you instill the spirit of something into people, then they can have due proper relevance realization. Aren’t they just saying that you do that with education? Or is there something else? Hey, Adam, how’s it going? Maybe it requires a nature, though, certain stock, I think they’ll say, because if we could just do it with education, then we’re back to equality and everybody’s exactly the same. And I think this one on one maps on Christianity, right? Because the argument that they’re making about Christ is that he has two natures, right? Like a divine nature, right? Which is literally what Eden said. It depends on what nature the person has. Christ has been defined as having a divine nature. And now he’s the example, right? Now he’s he is the philosopher king. Right. And he’s he’s not raining on Earth. Right. Like he’s he’s raining in heaven, which solves two problems. Right. Because, like, it’s the temper on nature. But it’s also like his his reign is perfect. Like, because, like, there is like there’s no way to judge the heavenly rain. Right. Like, it’s it’s all amination. And and you could argue, right? Like, yes, the Christian story is that Christ will return, although I’m not really educated on that part of the story. And and right. So his nature will be re embodied by by someone. So but yes, like that that’s going to require education. And like Jesus got educated as well. So like, yeah, yeah, his ministry doesn’t start till like 20s, 20s to 30s, 20 something to 30 years into his life. And, you know, he’s quoting scripture and stuff like that. Awesome. Why are you at the new? Well, I mean, I was I don’t know. I mean, I was thinking I was just thinking about I don’t know where to go with this, but I was thinking about when Ethan mentioned the Ten Commandments as being kind of a starting point. I was trying to map that onto let’s try to find the analog in this world for their right. So that’s kind of like in the Christian story, you have to start with the Ten Commandments and then you have to get to Jesus where Jesus says, hey, we’re doing we’re going to know. You start with Genesis, right? You start with you start with that there is and what is is good. And then we get the problem formulation in Adam and Eve. Right. Oh, we have original sin. We have to find a means to deal with that. And then just just like like the Republic, they start building. Right. Like, I don’t know how to parse Genesis in the building, but they’re still doing problem formulation in some sense. Right. If you read much as visual language of creation, right, like he’s basically saying, well, the floor is this right. And that’s that’s just a problem with intelligibility. Right. You make a category and then at a certain point, that category doesn’t function right like it doesn’t hold. So then you get a flood. And then the things that were defined by the category, they become back into chaos and you need to redefine them in order to have correct sense making again. Right. And you, yeah, you have Jacob’s ladder. Right. Which is why you’re up this path. But like you keep you keep slipping down like you can’t get to heaven. Like it’s not a linear progression. So all of all of these things are problem formulations. Right. And then in in Exodus, it’s it’s it’s doing the upgrade. Right. It’s it’s in some sense doing the same as the Republic. It’s like, oh, yeah, we’re we’re we’re going to make the city. But instead of making the city, they’re going to make the people. It’s like, OK, like, what do the people need to do? Well, first, the people are subject to a pharaoh. Right. So they don’t have to do anything. They just have to listen to the pharaoh. And then they get they get out. Right. And then they have this promise. Right. So it is like, OK, like we have certainty. And we have this optionality, but then we have to suffer in between. And then we get doubt and we get rebellion and we get different levels of rebellion and all that stuff. Yeah, that’s actually just good. Sorry. Good. Go ahead. You go after that. Well, I was just going to say it’s an interesting that I mean, it’s kind of obvious, but you don’t need the problem of intelligibility is simpler when you’re at a level. Like when there’s no society. But if before you get to Exodus, you know, it’s pretty much just like don’t eat one tree. You know, it’s like everything else is like, OK, we don’t have you know, it’s very simple, you know. But then you get to the point where you have to say, oh, well, you doubt shall not covet thy neighbor’s ox donkey or anything else that belongs to him. But the thing is, as as was done in the Republic, you know, you can you can ding it and say, oh, what about the corner case? What’s the difference? What about a good example? What you know, what about like, oh, is that not coveting? You know, like what if what if my neighbor is in good shape? Is that not a or you know, what if my neighbor like what imitation is when we get to the category of the cave? Right. So it’s like, well, you know, you have to imitate people. And so you have to, you know, it’s like it’s like anything like you can you can you can blur the boundaries between these concepts. They’re not really categories, but when we when we use language to say things like, you know, I’m just so that’s what I’m curious. I don’t see how they’re able to break out of the own every all the problems that they keep on destroying. So if you I mean, so if you just say, yeah, roll back to Genesis and start with being as good. It’s like, well, I don’t know. I mean, even if you do that, it’s like you still have problems moving forward, you know. And so when if you have a model in the Christian world, you have the model of Christ. Right. It’s like I’d add again, that’s what I’m looking for. Their analog. I don’t see it yet. If they have an analog, I don’t see it. Well, the analog of Christ is the philosopher that goes back into the cave. Really? You think it’s the philosopher king? Oh, yes. Huh? That’s well, see, because when they introduce the idea of the philosopher king, it seems like they’re very insistent, like it doesn’t work. In fact, I think I have it in my notes where they introduce it until philosophers are kings or kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy. And my notes are messed up. Something about greatness and wisdom meet in one. And those my notes are messed up. Those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside. Cities will never have rest from their evils, nor the human race, as I believe. And then only will this my notes are messed up state have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. That’s that’s from my that’s straight out of the Republic from my translation. So when they when they introduce this philosopher king, they say we need the philosopher kings to free us from evil. Basically, like we’ve got all these. This is a mess. It’s a complete mess. By Chapter five, we can’t even define the Guardian Clubs, which, as you mentioned, is like a completely alien group of people. It’s like their desires are completely different. They can’t commune with the normal people who are the flat people making money. It’s like it’s like they’ve got nothing in common with these these like and then and then it blows up. And then there’s like, oh, well, we need the philosopher king to say save us. And like, I think right after they introduce the idea, like, you know, it’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know where they’re going. You know, it’s. Well, you could you could frame it this way, right? Like, I think the first chapter, the first six chapters are emergence. All right. They’re making an emergence argument. And I think they’re going to make a combination argument from Chapter six on all. So what are the concepts? Could we unpack those? Because that’s emination and emergence. I mean, I think a lot of people have a lot of confusion around those ideas. Can we elaborate on those a little bit? Well, so like, where did we start? We started with Glaucon, right? Glaucon was like, oh, I want to have the things that I want and I want them now. Right. Which is like the first state of nature. Right. That is the state of nature. Right. And then from there, like society emerges and it’s like, well, we have rational people. Right. Using our rationality, like maybe we should cooperate and not do what makes right. Right. So that’s where you get the honor over money from. Right. And the honor over money is like not so much an emanation, but it’s like an adaptation to something that obviously doesn’t work. Right. But you can’t argue it. Right. Like it’s in a different frame. Right. Like you can’t convince someone in the one frame rationally that they should be in the other frame because like it’s not a rational problem. And so that’s the way that they build things up. Right. And then they end with fear of the gods. That’s the three frames. And at the other part, like the other side, that’s emergence. Right. Like so you’re coming from nothing and you’re trying to build something from nothing. And the other side is like, okay, there’s this good. Right. And this good has this nature. Right. And then we have this philosopher king and he can walk out the cave. And when he’s outside of the cave, he can learn and while they go into it, like how he does that, but he can learn about what it’s like to be outside of the cave. I agree. And so then he has learned what is outside and then he goes back inside and he has to relearn. Right. So he has to learn to speak two languages, like a language of the ideals and a language of materiality. Right. So the spiritual language and the material language. Yeah. They just start that here at the very end. They talk about the lover of sites versus the lover of, I can’t remember what they call it. Those two things. There’s the nature or the spiritual aspect. And then there’s the appearance or the sites, the sensory things of those material ideals. There’s two of them. Yeah. That’s the going back and forth at the cave. It’s the realm of appearance and the realm of ideals, I guess. The realm of ideals is primary and it’s the uncreated. Right. And if you look back to Genesis, that’s actually, it’s so funny how well this tracks over. Like with Genesis, man is literally tasked with as being a gardener and taking the created, I can’t remember the specific language, but the way that it’s worded is taking a created, uncreated potential and planting it in the ground and cultivating it. So like you have the stuff outside of the cave and then you take it into the cave. And there’s these two things. You’re expressing the potential or the uncreated into the world and manifesting it. I guess you could say the same thing with telos. So for me, my telos, I give my attention to the telos and then I bring that into the world through my actions and stuff like that. But that’s that ascension and condescension back and forth, back and forth. You want to look at it that way. I think that’s what he’s doing with this ascension and descension into the cave. But we’re up ahead a little bit. So what, in emergence, emergence, I’m sorry, Ethan here. It’s leaking a little bit, Ethan. So emergence in my mind is very simple to understand. Everyone should be able to understand emergence because it’s how we’re trained to think at a young age. That’s evolution. Yeah, evolution. In the beginning was the primordial soup where you write a computer simulation. You add the variable of time. Let’s let it run and just see what comes out. OK, now, emergence emanations. Winding up the clock. Yeah. Winding up the clock. That’s all God did is just wind up a clock and then to get it to certain points. We don’t even, anyways. Yeah, exactly. That’s how we’re taught. I think emanation could use more clarity. What is this? Yeah, like you’re leaking still, Ethan. So like, yeah, if you say I’m going to plant a tree and like kind or like one thing will flow, one thing of one kind, well, you know, the thing that’s downstream from it will flow from that. There goes Ethan. Should we wait? No, that’s fine. Yeah. So what’s the key? What’s the key? What’s the key distinction between? I guess it’s a tell-all. I guess it’s the fact that you’re able to discern. So you’ve built this, let’s say you have this capacity to discern what you’ve programmed. A daemon spirit or whatever, you know, or, you know, you’re unconscious. You have a conscience. Is it that the difference between emergence and emanation is that emanation you’re able to add into your map of how it got there? So it wasn’t just. No, I don’t. Okay. Like you’re able to attach it to the tell-all that pre-existed. So in the same way that like if you’re talking about like Christo-centrism as a thread in the Bible, that people say like, okay, well, why do you believe this book and the stuff that it says? They’d say like, well, you know, is it just because there was a council of people that voted? And then they, you know, like, oh, well, they would say like, well, there has to be like a set of evidence, prophecy. And then they would say, as you read the book, there’s a thread of Christo-centrism that you can trace. Is that? That is not. That’s not like the capacity to see like a thread of Christo-centrism, for example, is not the product of emergence. It can’t be. That doesn’t make any sense. So what is the emanation thing? You know, what is. So we have. They haven’t quite got into it yet. That’s how they end. Well, if we go into the four causes, right, like there’s a material cause. And that is all the prerequisites. Right. So if I want to build a boat, right, like Noah’s Ark, I need to have the wood. I need to have the animals. Right. Like I like any. And then there’s the efficient cause. Which they describe as the source. Of the object’s principle of change or stability. Right. So I need I need to know the blueprint of the Ark. Right. Or whatever, like the ideal, the idea of an Ark. And in only if I have that, I can build an Ark. Right. So in some sense, that’s two things going together. Right. Like it’s it’s it’s the earthly, the materials and the idea of the Ark. Right. So you have the emergence and the emanation and they combine to manifest the Ark. And without the material wouldn’t happen. But without the idea of the Ark, it also wouldn’t happen. An emanation is an embodiment of an abstraction. Is that a fair definition or is that? Abstraction comes from below. Depends on how you use the word. If you’re just taking the if you’re if you’re taking the sum of a bunch of things that you a bunch of appearances will say, is actually what they’re talking about right here at the end. The lovers of sites and crafts as opposed to someone that loves beautiful things but cannot see beauty itself. Now, if you’re if you’re deriving beauty from just a sum of beautiful things, you’re doing it the wrong way. You’re kind of you’re building it from the ground up. Beauty is something that comes from the top down and condescends. They’re actually saying it’s very difficult here to see this. You don’t see you don’t see beauty itself with the same the same way that you see beautiful things. What I mean, what if the what if the person who has opinion but knowledge is angry with us and disputes the truth of what we are saying. There’s some way we can console him and persuade him gently while hiding from him that he isn’t in the right mind. There must be considered then what we will say to him. Won’t we question him like this? First, we’ll tell him nobody begrudges him. That’s a little bit far ahead. You’re talking about there. In fact, very, very few people would be able to reach the beautiful itself and see it by itself. Is that so? Certainly. What about someone who believes in beautiful things but doesn’t believe in beautiful the beautiful itself and isn’t able to follow anyone that could lead him the knowledge of it? But you think he’s living in a dream rather than awake, awake and state isn’t isn’t this dreaming with a sleeper awake? You think that a likeness is not a likeness, but rather a thing itself that it is like. Anyway, so yeah, this is the thing that they just barely start wrestling with at the end of this book. Actually, it seems like they kind of just keep going on. They go into the distinction when they make the distinction between knowing the truth and having an idea or fantasy. I don’t know what the word is that they’re using. That’s a little bit before here. I wanted to get into that too, which I thought was very interesting. I’ll finish the four causes because I think it’s important. Right. So you have you have the two things that combine that allow the object to exist. Right. The arc. And then you have the essence of the arc. Right. So the arc is that which can preserve. What is on the arc from the flood. Right. And so. In order for the blueprint of the arc to make any sense. Right. It has to have the essence, right. Like it has to have the capacity to fulfill a job. Right. So that’s another cause. Right. Like the fact that it can hold that which needs to be protected is is necessary. Right. Like and that’s the form of of the object that which is manifest. Now you have the final cause. Right. Which is in me. Right. So what what do I want to use the essence for. Right. Like because because that the arc can protect something is useless if I don’t want to protect something. Right. So in order for something to manifest like it needs me to say OK I want to protect the animals because God is going to be really upset. Right. And I’m going to have to have the arc. Right. So all of these four things they need to combine. Right. And then the formal cause. I’m sorry. No camera issues. Carrie. Well so the final cause is is an ammunition from me. Right. Like I’m saying that this is good that this is important. Right. So I’m reaching. To have an effect of being saying OK this is what needs to have happen. Right. Like this is good. And in order to do the good thing I need an arc. And in order for the arc to exist all of these other things need to be met. Would you say the formal cause would be the arc itself. Formal cause would be the plan of the arc. No. I think that’s the efficient cause. No the efficient cause with a sculptor. So the efficient cause is the tools and the man actually who’s building the arc. So the equivalent would be for a sculpture for instance would be the same would be the efficient cause is the artisan who’s making it. And bringing the materials together and all of that. And then the formal cause is the design to which the statue is being sculpted or the arc is being built. Right. Well I would say that I think it’s both. It’s the formal is the plans and the arc itself. You have your tell your your fight. This is the way I’m looking at it. If your final cause which be never to commune with God or to save save your seed or whatever. Then you have the environment that you’re in. You know you live in a forest right. That’s going to be your material cause. And the formal cause it seems like the way that I’ve been looking at it is that some some kind of like the. It’s some intermediary thing between your final and your your material cause. Yeah. And that that is the form of that. That is the arc. So granted your constraints which is going to be. Right. A forest and you’re wanting to preserve the seed for the good ends up being an arc. The middle of a giant boat. That’s the way that I’ve been looking at it. Of course the efficient causes the agent. You know what. Doing all of these things. But well I’m. Well I would say that efficient causes the transformation. Right. So. And then why I like the reason that I read it differently is because I I think that which transforms is also the blueprint. OK. Like it sounds like you’re collapsing causes which fair enough. No no it’s not. It’s not collapsing because because the the the carpenter is using a blueprint. All right. So. Yeah. So so. Blueprint in his head. Right. And and and and so if the form the form is informed into the blueprint. Right. And it has to have the qualities of the blueprint to connect the matter into the form expression into the final course. Right. But yeah I’ve always struggled with these work causes. The the formal causes if you look at it two ways it exists partially in the ethereal realm and partially in the material realm. So the the plan exists in the ethereal realm and the actual. Incarnation of it exists in the material realm so the form is both of those things acting together. That’s why I kind of look at it as tell us is purely uncreated in the ethereal. Material material is purely in the material obviously the formal is kind of somewhere there in the middle. That’s actually what we’re wrestling with right here. The very beginning to start to get into this form that this this form here Plato’s forms. With beauty beautiful the beautiful and beautiful things and the difference between those two barely here at the end of the book. But I think I think the formal is a theory. Like it’s completely in the real and the ammunition from the formal is in the efficient. Right. So the carpenter is bringing what you want to use the blueprints but like the blueprints is a materialistic thing. And the plan in his head what he’s actually right. Right. That the sculpture because there’s no sculptures if you want to put it that way don’t have a plan. The sculptor just sculpts and then brings the image out of it. Or the format of it. There are tricky things. Where does where does the plan come from? You know it’s like that’s something that emanates right. It’s come it’s coming coming down from somewhere. That’s why there’s two there’s two spiritual things right. Like one is is the leading thing and one is the affording thing. Right. So there’s an affordance that needs to connect be connected to the leading in order to have a vision. I think I like that. Right. And then there’s the things that you can build with right. Like the resources in relation to the industry. Right. If we scale it up. Right. OK. So we have a country and we want to make an army. Right. So we’re going to have metal aluminium all these things. And then we have people who can make jet fighters. We have people who can make tanks. We can have people who can make battleships. Well how do we put these things together in order to manifest the final goals. Right. And because it’s not one answer. Right. Like it’s not one statue that’s in the stone material. The material definitely informs the plan. The blueprint. Absolutely. There’s an inter there’s an interaction there. There’s a there’s a there’s definitely some sort of. I think that Plato would call it love. Anyways we’re getting really deep into this. This is where my thoughts start to break down. But the point the point being because we were trying to exemplify emerges and emanation. Right. So there’s these these these things that come from above that impose themselves. And direct the way that matter needs to be organized and the way that people gather to organize the matter. Right. That’s the emanation part. And that can be embodied by a king for example. Right. Like the king says we need to have a fleet. Can I ask. OK. So I think an embodiment of an abstraction I think is wrong because there needs to be a telos present. So for emanation to happen. Right. So is that is it an emanation just an embodiment of the telos or an implementation of a telos. So like emergent like so like emergence is very we’re trying to think. No no no no no no you’re confused. Directional. It’s very simple. I think that the eminence means that it’s coming from it’s a directional thing. It’s coming from up to down and merge as emanation emergence is coming from bottom up. And as I think is what we’re talking about is we’re doing both of these things. Yeah. When you say love being the thing like that that to me like makes way more sense because like in vervecchi would say like structural a thing is the thing because of its structural functional. A computer programmer will have no problem understanding that. Computer code is data structure and algorithms. But all of that sits on computational theory. So you start with sequence selection repetition and you can roll this back all the way and see understand why there’s problems with it. And the same thing with math. Simulation is limited. You can only it’s the same thing like if we’re going to say that this is an emanation if I understand that oh that’s just a it’s like if that’s just an implementation of a purpose. If I have I need a simpler way to think about it. Like so we’re not even talking about good and bad. We’re just emerging. I think it’s very good. Well, OK, so bad can emanate to. Right. Like demons are above you. They they can control you or possess you or whatever. Right. So first of all, the king is an emanation for the kingdom. Right. But the king, when he makes a decision, right, should be looking up to the gods. Right. So the gods emanate to the king and then the king manifest the emanation, making it real. Right. To the people. Now, is that like what what God is he praying to? Right. Like is he is he praying to Moloch or like whatever demon or is he actually praying to to something that has has a well to an angel. Right. Like which would be a subset of the good. Right. Or something at least can manifest good, but it can also fall. Right. Like angels are not inherently good. Like depends on your relationship with them. Right. And so. So the point is that he has to pick an emanation. Right. And that means that he has to have a certain discernment towards the emanation. And that’s a cultivation of a relationship. Right. Like that. That isn’t a thing that you you can justify. Right. That just is because it’s above. Like that’s the whole point of an emanation. Like you’re below. One thing that I think about often I don’t know if this helps. I’ll be really quick is when I think of I think of the act of a piece of music coming into being like if if Beethoven’s going to write a cello sonata or if he’s going to write a violin sonata or whatever. Different constraints because a violin is a different instrument than a cello. So the constraints will emanate up to this spirit that he is imposing as the composer. He’s he’s there’s a communion between the material and the spirit. The idea that he has in his head wants to get into music and they kind of have a rational we could we could either call it a rationality or a rational dialogue with some sort of dialogue between the two or love interaction. And the result is you know they’re both doing this according to a telos right. The interaction of those two things the result is a piano sonata or a cello sonata. And the difference there would be assuming that the telos is the same which is never it’s never the same. But they’re going to both sound differently because they have different differences. I don’t know if that helps at all or not. There’s you can actually go find pieces that were like that there is a violin concerto that he wrote and he transposed it to a piano concerto. It’s the same concerto but it sounds different because the material constraints are different. Oh that is actually a really interesting example. I’m really glad you said that. I’m going to think about that for like a week now. I can find that I can find I don’t know if I don’t know if there’s very many recordings of the piano concerto form of the violin concerto but if there is I’ll send it to you and you can listen to both of them. Well you can you can look at Amination and Emergence this way right. So I’m going to go to the piano concerto form of the violin concerto. So you’re behind the piano right. And now you’re going to like look at like how am I going to get the piano to to do the thing that that that is on the paper right. So you’re just going to like impose the piano on the paper like that’s an emergency right. Now you can do the opposite right. Like how can I get like I’m going to make the piano conform to to what’s on the paper right. So you’re just like going to smash the buttons and you’re going to get frustrated that the piano isn’t manifesting the thing that you want right. And that’s the Amination you’re just going to like you’re going to get frustrated that the piano isn’t manifesting the thing that you want right. And that’s the Amination you’re just going to like force the Amination. And then love right. Like the way I look at love is that you you find a communion right. Like you find a way for the Amination and the Emergence to come together in harmony so that they can rightly manifest the spirit that that is being possessed in the piece of music. I’ve got a ton of time. But again right. I’m sorry. What it’s presupposing the music again right. So you’re not solving the problem whether the music is good or bad. Like that’s the problem. That’s the problem. You cannot justify the thing that’s above like you can’t. Yeah. There’s some interesting things here where they’re getting in with. I don’t know if it was a disclaimer or another disclaimer or what but they’re talking about like well hey this is incredibly idealistic is it even worth talking about if we don’t think that will ever actually happen. I can’t remember where it’s at. Maybe you can help me find it. But they’re saying well it is useful because someone that is even if we can’t even if the perfect just man will never exist. There can be you can be more more like him you are the better. So like reminded of when Mark talks about when he talks to people about truth and truth is not a quantitative thing it’s a qualitative thing through it. You’re closer and further away from the target. There’s not like not it’s not on or off for a binary thing. There’s you’re more true or less true. The more true you are the it is better. So it is worth talking about. Talking about that seems that that’s what they agreed upon here. But if any of you remember that we can look into it further and see if there’s any insight we can get from it or if it was just simply him cautioning the reader that hey this is what we’re doing and we’re we’re just going to justify it so we can talk about it further. I still have tons of notes and they might be actually about stuff that we’re talking about. But I’m not even back to where we were last last week in my notes at least. So. So let me let me. Okay, but one experience showed that to let all things be uncovered was far better than to cover them up. The ludicrous effect of the outward eye vanished for the better principle which reason asserted. Then the man was perceived to be a fool for the direct strife of his ridicule and any other side of folly and vice seriously inclined to weigh the beauty for by any other standard than of the good. So this is I put this out of the context where they’re laughing about naked women. So, so there’s a couple of implications and what he’s saying there. So he’s saying that, well, naked woman is obviously ridiculous right like everybody agrees that that is ridiculous and and that’s what laughing and then there’s this this progressive element that true reason. We, we know that there’s a purpose for these women to be naked with us. And if we know the purpose and we can see the thing through its purpose, then our discernment about it will change. Right. And it’s interesting because seriously inclined to weigh the beautiful by any other standard, but that of the good. Right. So they’re implying that they’re connecting the goodness through reason, and then that we instantiate which what you feel as beauty to the inverse. Right. So, so the thing that was totally ludicrous at one time, you find beautiful now because it’s partaking in the good. Everything you say makes sense. I just don’t really understand how they formulated or derive it. So, yeah, I mean, it just, I don’t know, I mean, Well, they say right like the argument that they’re making about the nakedness is it’s necessary for the women to be naked in order to receive the same education as men. Right. And so what I’m saying is that is a standard right like it’s a rationally derived standard and participation in that is necessary for participation in the good city. Right. So that activity itself is good. And therefore, we start to see it as beautiful. Right. And sensible at the same time. Right. Instead of as a ridiculous thing. And so he’s stating that we can reprogram our understanding of what is beautiful as a consequence of justifying it. Like it’s just because I don’t I don’t think it has to point towards the good. You just have to think that it’s pointing towards the good. Right. This is this is a very slip like maybe I say for us moderns probably for them back then the reading this too. It’s a very slippery slope. Once we get to this point to a very place where you can very easily slip into postmodernism. It’s like, oh, we can just change whatever the ethic is and whatever we want, you know, and then just create the world in our own image, you know, and sneak whatever we want in there. But I think the point that they’re making here, it doesn’t matter what the absurd thing is, it could be anything. But when seen through the actual they were talking about beauty. Once you actually have the capacity to see beauty, you will under it’ll change the realm of appearance to use was something that seemed not something that seemed unsightly. Probably not the right word to regard naked. Whatever. But something that seemed uncomfortable or whatever or not good will seem good because you can see this the emanation of where it is coming from. You need to see beauty and good. And after this, right, like not much after they start into what is reason and then they’re going to start talking about the problem of discernment. Right. Like to reason you have to define and divide. Like that’s that’s what reasoning is. And then they’re talking about, oh, yeah, but people can’t really do that correctly. And I don’t know the way that they phrase it, but they’re basically stuck in in their whatever rabbit hole, which is a false distinction. Right. Like it’s a false category that doesn’t describe reality. Right. And here we go back to the Talos. Right. So. So what what what is what is the discernment that allows us to make a judgment about these women being naked? Well, like, is it participating in the city? Right. Like in the good of the city. If it is, then that is also good. And that’s an emanation as well. Right. Like, so now the goodness of the city emanates to the practice of of wrestling naked. Yeah, it’s just getting us into this mindset that the emanation first principle is primary to the appearance and the effect of the first principle. And we have to be careful not to get caught up in the realm of appearances and not talk about the people that go around the festivals just consuming everything, consuming all of the beautiful plays and poetry and whatnot. So those people are concerned with the appearance of beauty, but they do not they cannot understand what beauty is. And that’s right. They’re never going to accept it. They’re never going to accept a naked woman because the naked woman is an aberration. They shouldn’t be naked. Right. And if you say, well, that is beautiful because of the city, then you’re a fool. Like, why would you say that? That doesn’t make any sense. Yeah. And if it makes you feel any better. I did have part of this paragraph underlined. I must try it then, especially since you agreed to be so such a so great an ally. If we’re to escape from the people you mentioned, I think we need to define for them who the philosophers are. We dare to say must rule. And once that’s clear, we should be able to defend ourselves by showing that the people we mean are fitted by nature, both to engage in philosophy and to rule in the city, rule in the city. The rest are naturally fitted to leave philosophy alone and follow their leaders. When they like you were saying earlier, Danny, when they when Socrates brought up, he was almost embarrassed when he brought up the notion of the philosopher king. When he brought up the women fighting in the common marriages and families and they pushed back and they said, you know, there’s lots of people that hearing you say that would fight you. This idea of imposing a philosopher king, you know, one guy at the top, they do say, you know, it’s a very it’s a very touchy thing because most people are not suited. While the rest are naturally fitted to leave philosophy alone and follow their leader, that’s most people. So this this ability to see these, I mean, it’s almost like you’re supposed to put like most it’s very difficult to see these things not removed from their appearance. And I think even later on, Socrates claims that he’s like, I’m not one of these people. I don’t put me as the philosopher king. It’s. Anyway, so just it means it’s very difficult, you know, something you struggle with, probably why this book has been around for so long. It’s not like they’re going to propositionally give to you how you you just got to go down to the shop and buy a certain type of glasses, put them on. Now you can see the beautiful. It’s you don’t see it with the same eyes that you see the effects of the beautiful or the good. You don’t really make the distinction between beautiful and good. I think that beautiful I think from what I understand, your beauty is a is a subordination of the good. It’s below the good. It participates in the good. I think that’s how least the way that I see it is it’s it’s goodness first, right, which is Dallas, which is organizing the organizing principles. Goodness. And then beauty is what you discern. Right. And then truth is like connecting it to emergence. Right. Like to reality. Right. So you have you have the ideal and then you have an intuitive way in which the world is conforming to the ideal. Right. Which is expressed in beauty. And the truth is in how can you act that out in the world without being misguided or misimplementing or stuff like that? Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, I guess I guess I guess maybe another way to think about is like, why do they not end up at postmodernism? So, you know, so I we went through the causes, men went to the causes when I said I’m trying to understand this emanation thing. And what’s this book called? Language of Creation. Right. So like you have lots of lots of diagrams of microcosms and macrocosms. Usually this camera is really good at, you know, but you have heaven and earth and Adam was this transformative mediating process between heaven and earth. We talk about this kind of thing all the time. Here’s here’s here’s a little picture on the next page of material being put towards the telos. So in heaven, you have patterns and the temples in the middle there terms of material. So we can we can participate in arranging the material world to conform to a pattern. Right. In the Republic, we’re destroyed like we’re basically on the material plane. We’re affording ourselves the ability to kind of with with some of the we destroy like any kind of way that we can arrange categories of things, unifying principles. So we were talking about, OK, well, you have to start with. Yeah. When you start with the unifying principles, you can you can go places. Right. But what’s what’s interesting is I just don’t understand, like what’s the granted what they make when they make sex jokes, for example, they say like men and women on the on the natures of them. They must be attracted to one another because they have something in common. But it’s not like it’s they have the same some necessity. They said they have a necessity in common, but it’s not it’s not a geometric necessity. It’s not imperative. Yeah, it’s an imperative. Yeah, it’s an imperative. Yes. So they reference these imperatives in the book. Right. And then they, you know, and then they just think, I don’t know, I just I’m so confused. I think a hint. Well, there’s a hint there of what Emmanuel said earlier is you have to start with Genesis. He didn’t have Genesis, but he would like to be fair. What they talked about it in book two. They were talking about the gods and what the gods needed to be all that stuff like they kind of went into that. It seems to me like they were kind of rebelling against the gods a bit. No, against against the Greek conception of the God. Right. So today they deconstructed to use this crappy word, the Greek gods, right, because they weren’t doing what they ought to be doing. Right. And what did they do now? They deconstructed the category of sex, right, which is a natural category. Like if I look around, like the distinction that I make between people is going to be based upon sex first. Like that’s going to be my first discernment. And so saying that the way that your senses inform you, the primary way that your senses inform you, whether it’s through the gods, right, like the gods in some sense, your culture informing you. The way that you’re being informed is incorrect. There is this other way of being informed, which involves this cave thing and goodness. And he’s basically saying, well, in order for all of these things to function, we need an amination. Like this philosopher king is going to this place and he’s getting sacred knowledge, like literally, like I think they’re using the word, but it’s sacred because it’s set apart from all the other things. Like the other people can get to it. Right. And there are sacred behaviors, right. Like, oh, we need to make marriage sacred and we need to make these other things like not acceptable because we’re trying to have an organization. And this organization is a confirmation. Like we’re conforming to the principle of justice in the city, right, or to the just ideal city. And that is the thing that allows us to go against nature. Like, OK, we’ve decided, and like for whatever reason we did that, like, we have come to agreement that this is necessary and therefore we’re going to conform to what is required to manifest that we deem necessary. But like that can be communism, right, like that can be fascism. Like there’s many ways that we can deem things necessary as a group. Because when they they talked about the necessity for the Guardian, like to start with white when you dye something purple, like you can, you know, you can make any color you want. If we want to make communism, we can make communism. But, you know, again, they just the starting the starting of whiteness is one of the things that we’ve learned is that, well, you can’t, as you’ve already pointed out, is that the problem with with with categories, which is ironic. The reason why we can’t pursue evaluating absolute justice is because we cannot actually that’s the wrong. You cannot actually judge. That’s not what you cannot actually judge, which is ironic. I’m not ironic, but like they’re saying that all these problems are like inherently coupled to the concepts that we’re trying to explore. You know, like with with with justice, it’s like, yeah, I see the component of of which word you said, conformity or submission. Like there there has to be in our picture here, there has to be submission for there to be because they talk about like the philosopher king is also submitted to the people. So who’s really in charge? The people or is it the king? Right. It’s like, oh, yeah, that’s a problem. It’s a modal problem. It’s not just a technical problem. It’s a problem with the mode by which we define those concepts or things. You know what? And they say the king is going to have the worst life of the whole city. Yeah. So there goes the utility loss right there for that guy, at least or or I’m sorry. No, it still works. Never mind. Go ahead. Even Oh, reminds me. Reminds me, you know, sometimes lately when I’ve been contemplating, you know, commandments, like you could take an example like love your neighbor or, you know, honor your father or something like that. And it’s like, well, maybe they’re being a bad neighbor or maybe they’re being a bad father. And what you said is it’s actually impossible for you to determine if they are actually being a good or bad neighbor or father or not. It’s actually not your place to judge because it’s impossible for you to make that that that judgment. So in a way, that commandment is allowing you to defer adjust defer the judgment to a higher authority, which would be God. Right. It’s like, OK, well, I’m going to honor my father regardless. And if he’s a good or a bad father, that’s going to be that’s between him and God. And that will be that’ll be played out in some other way. But I’m doing my part by adhering to this this this commandment. So I don’t have to make that judgment on I don’t I don’t have to make the judgment if my father is a good or just a neighbor, if my neighbor is a good or bad neighbor, if they did, if they deserve my goodwill or not. It’s like they just deserve your goodwill regardless. And if they what they do with that goodwill is if they if they blaspheme with that goodwill or whatever, if they whatever do some do something with that goodwill that’s inappropriate, that’s between them and God and your concern. Yeah, but that there’s a different problem, right? So, OK, but you did the discernment, right? You did the judgment. OK, they’re they’re bad neighbors. Now what? Right? Like, like, now you need to do another judgment, because now you need to build your action upon your judgment. Right. So like, it’s it’s an endless like, it’s all the way down. Like, you’re not going to get out of the judgment problem by solving it at one layer. Because because it’s like, OK, so now I need to treat them badly. But like, is that useful? Right. Like, like, now I’m going to come back in with my utilitarian frame is like, OK, like, how do I judge the consequences of my just act? Because I can cut it off there. I was like, I’m self righteous and I’m just going to like yell at them because that’s how I do. Right. There’s like, no, like you still screwed. So if I one time I’m back in my hometown, I got in trouble and my parents took my computer cord away and they said, you know, you can have it. It takes after a week. You can come to explain to us what it means to honor your father and mother and then you can have a computer cord back. So I had a week to sit around and think about, OK, well, I used to play Shogun Total War. Right. And like, if you like if you if your if your units like have more combat experience or perform better in their purpose, they may have higher honor. Right. Which is obviously the wrong answer. It’s not what I said. Right. I probably said something about like, oh, you have to respect your parents because of who they are or something. You know, it’s like, I don’t know what that means. I probably came up with, you know, it’s like because of their position or it’s inherent, some kind of inherent thing. Right. But it’s it’s so vague. Right. It’s like it’s not it’s not performance because then you get into this behavior, performative behavior space. Right. It’s like how would most people answer that question? Like it’s like you could ask ask any question. What is beauty? What is justice? What is honor? What is what is everything? Nobody really I don’t think anybody really knows. I don’t think anybody can like, you know, can really give a really strongly say, you know what? I’m really it’s it’s like how the Supreme Court defined pornography. It’s like, oh, you know, when you see it, it’s like we do that with everything. Everybody does that with everything all the time. And that’s how we live our lives. You know, it’s it’s just. Well, I can I can make an argument like I can make a good argument. That doesn’t mean that you’ll buy it. All right. That’s the problem. I can I can argue any position, but like and rightfully so. But it doesn’t mean that you buy it. Like most people, at least in the past, would have said because God commanded me to. Like that’s that’s why you do it. It’s not because there’s a justification. There’s an authority that tells me to. And that authority is right. Like. But I can give you the argument with authority. Right. It’s like when when you start messing with authority, like how are you going to make things better? Like, because you don’t have discernment on the level of the city. Like the only person that has discernment on the level of the city is the philosopher king. All right. So if you start messing with the hierarchy when you’re not on top of the hierarchy, how how how do you know that you’re improving things? That’s what I say, while the rest are naturally fitted to leave philosophy alone and follow their leader. It takes a requires faith, I guess. That’s the same thing as a commandment is, you know, a commandment is a little bit of a static. Static authority and the leaders are more of a fluid authority, but you have faith in submitting to them, knowing that. Going to be good. Yeah, but hold on like, like a country or a company is not only the leader. Right. Like, that’s just a miss frame. Like the leader has a certain function. Right. Like, oh, because there’s there’s this tail, I don’t know, like, where King David goes to this house and he’s like, I don’t know, what am I going to do? I don’t know what am I going to do? That’s just a mis-framing. That’s just a mis-framing, because you know, that’s just a mis-framing. Oh, because there’s this tale, I don’t know, where King David goes to this house and he’s owed all of this stuff, true honor, because he’s not explicitly owed it. And he comes there and then the wife goes at him and he says, gives him all of this stuff, and he says, yeah, my husband wouldn’t give it to you, so I’m giving it to you instead. And she broke the hierarchical relationship, right? And she made an executive decision for her boss. And yeah, like how do you deal with that? Because I’m still not sure whether she did the right thing or not, right? But she got to marry the king, so that implies that she did the right thing. And David would have killed all of them, right? Because he would have been insulted and probably murdered them also. In that sense, she also did the right thing. I don’t know, difficult questions. I mean, we can say that the king and the kingdom are submitted to the spirit, which is above the entire kingdom of the whole city. And agents within that city, I don’t know, like the king is the first point. He’s at the top, so he’s closest to that spirit, but there are subordinates that can recognize the void of that spirit and make corrections. Yeah, but if I’m in charge of the grain supplies, right? I still need to do the job within the hierarchy of the city, right? If I start resisting the hierarchy of the city, how are the people going to get food? I still need to make use of whatever corrupt thing I’m in. And it goes for whatever other function. And if you stop doing that, then you lose the capacity as a body to do the thing, right? And that’s what demonstrations are about, right? Although we don’t do those anymore, apparently, except in France. But yeah, if you strike, you disallow the body to function. Well, Manuel said something interesting this morning, which was that by definition, when you tell a noble lie, like when you raise a guardian class the way you raise it, you cannot commune with others by definition. So when you’re lying to someone, because it’s not reality, right? It’s a deception. So I just thought that was interesting. I just wanted to point it out. You tell a noble lie, you can’t commune? Well, yeah, yeah. So communion is some kind of, it seems like that’s an element, because they take these spirits for granted. Like, yeah, there’s spirits, right? And they just like take it as an axiom, right? Like, yeah, if they just said, you know, like, oh, well, like, we’re all united in love, then I could be like, oh, you know, that makes sense to me. I’ll just take that as on faith and proceed, right? But, you know, they’re not, I don’t know, like, I don’t really know where they’re coming from with, with, anyway, I’m just going to end up writing this. I’m going to just end up rambling. So I should just leave it. Yeah, but, but, okay, but this is interesting. So, like, why can you take that on faith? No, I can’t. Yeah, I can. Like, I have no problem with that. But that’s part of it’s pragmatism. You know, it’s like, oh, I have no… No, no, no. How is love pragmatic? Like, love is the opposite of pragmatic in some sense. Maybe I’m just lazy. Maybe I just gave up when I was like 18, 19 in terms of categorizing things. I just like abandoned. I just like, like, you know what? It’s too hard to think through any rationality. Maybe it’s just an abandonment of rationality that happened like more than 10 years ago. That’s, you know, that’s probably part of it. But I don’t know. I don’t really know. Because, like, for me, love has been one of the most… Like, love your neighbors. Like, okay. Like, what the heck does that mean? I literally have no clue. Right? Because it says something about… Your fundamental attitude towards the other person, like wishing good for them. Right? But that doesn’t tell me how to do that. Right? And even Jesus, right? Like, Jesus didn’t help everybody. Right? So he was leaving people behind. Like, yeah. Like, you can’t give up. Like, I’m sorry. Like, you don’t have ears to hear and eyes to see. You don’t. I can’t fix that. Right? What was the place that he couldn’t perform miracles? In his home time. Like, he couldn’t save the people who were closest to him. So what does it mean to love the people who are close to you, right? When he also says, you know, you don’t have ears to hear and eyes to see. So what does it mean to love the people who are close to you, right? When he also says, I’ll create a discord within the family. Right? Like, I’ll split them up. Like, I… Like, it’s not obvious to me at all because, like, there’s a bunch of obvious contradictions there. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that love is real and that there’s a way to manifest love correctly because I do believe that. But I don’t believe that people can do that without, like, serious work. I’ll tell you, yeah, it takes serious work. I can attest to that. Learning how to love goes along with your parents, too. Honoring your parents. That’s something you can’t just… It takes serious work. How do you honor them? They love your neighbor, you know, because it’s not necessarily being nice to your neighbor. That’s not love. Like you said, it’s willing the good, which entails lying to them when it’s appropriate. So you’re right. It’s not obvious. It entails all these contradictions. So I want to, if you don’t mind, I want to kind of step back from what is love. Baby, don’t hurt me. Because, you know, they’re kind of like good and evil. There’s a heart. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. At least for me. It’s way beyond me. Manuel said something this morning. Well, last week he said, which I think Mark pushed back on, the idea of between, like, opposition. So Manuel this morning, he mentioned, well, depending on how you think about the concept of opposition, because there’s lots of that. There’s in terms of the natures of men and women, we talked about the nature of contradiction. And then towards the end of the chapter five, they get into fact versus opinion. Like, how do you know this is a fact? How do you know this isn’t just an opinion? Where in the text they mentioned, I don’t know, Manuel, do you want to kind of explain again your, well, Mark is not here so that we can once and, you know, I was going to tell a joke. I couldn’t come up with a joke. But do you want to, because I find that to be a useful tool in thinking about, like, good thinking about, OK, well, what is love or what is justice or something like that. If you ask, if we take opposition as a use case and you ask, well, what does it mean to oppose something? Like, is beauty, why is it the case that beauty is the opposite of ugliness? Is that the case? Well, what do we mean by opposed? Go ahead, Manuel. Well, I just, I don’t know where the word came from when I got the word contradiction in my word, in my head. Right? So what is ugliness? Well, ugliness contradicts beauty. Right? Like it speaks against beauty. Right? Like it identifies against it. And you could say that there is an opposing, right? Like it’s like to oppose is to stand against something. Right? Like, so the way that like man and woman, right, like is different. Right. Because it’s not, well, I guess. No, no, even even in the Bible, like man and woman aren’t coming from either man or woman. Right. They’re coming from the original man, not from man. So they’re not opposing. Right. Like they’re originating from men. Right. Like man and woman are subspecies of the concept of man. And so the things that are in opposition are bound to each other. Right. Like so forward and backward. Right. Like backwards is only makes sense in relation to forward. Right. Like away and towards. Right. Like that only makes sense in relation to what you’re moving away from or towards. And they come in pairs. Right. But the ways in which you can move towards is not this has not the same shape. Right. Like it doesn’t look the same. Like there’s less ways in which you can go towards something than that you can go away from it. Right. So for me, it’s really important to have that opposition. Right. So there’s not asymmetry in going towards and away. Like there’s an asymmetrical relationship and asymmetrical relationships are really important, important, not important, but difficult. Right. Like they’re really difficult to account for in your thinking. So because because if I say you have a knife and when you come at me with a knife, I run away. You have no clue what I’m doing. Right. You just have a general sense of what I’m not doing. In fact, you don’t have a positive confirmation of what I’m doing. Like if I say I’ll run towards you, you have you know what I’m doing. Right. Like that reciprocally narrows and like it like it gives clarity if you go towards the identity or the thing that is the source of the identity. Well, if you’re if you’re going away, which is like ugliness, for example, right. Like ugliness is away from beauty. Right. Like it’s leaving the beautiful. That that doesn’t describe anything in the world. It just describes that it’s not beautiful. Beautiful. Like like it’s like a negative identity. So the couple things there, one is the asymmetrical, the asymmetrical relationship to things that that makes everything difficult because that’s a lot of what we’re doing when we when we transcend levels from the microcosm to the macrocosm to the microcosm. Those those relationships aren’t always symmetrical either. Right. And so Manuel proposed, which you didn’t mention the inversion. I like I like the example of the line that you gave versus the insider outside of a t-shirt and the three in terms of thinking about things in terms of an inversion. Because when you think in terms of an opposition, it imposes like like Manuel said, I think, or implied a telos. Right. Like you can’t oppose something without a purpose. Otherwise, what is there to be an opposition about? Right. So whether something’s beautiful or ugly, it’s like, well, you know, it’s it’s what would be in it. I mean, so an inversion is an inversion. Well, first of all, could you maybe explain what that means? And then I guess a question I just had is that are all you doing is stripping away the telos? Is it just an opposition without a telos or is it or is it more about the difference, the difference between a symmetrical or an asymmetrical concept? The ugliness, the opposition, it’s adopting the original telos because it’s identifying against it. Right. So ugly ugliness. It’s not ugliness doesn’t have its own form. It’s it’s an identification against the form of beauty. So it’s it’s ugliness is describing something that’s further away from the ideal of beauty. It’s not describing its own ideal. There’s not an ideal ideal ugliness. I think that’s what you were saying earlier. And well, just a second ago, there’s there’s an infinite amount of ways you can run away from me or there’s an infinite amount of ways you can get away from something. But there’s a few amount of ways that you can get towards towards a point of identity. Right. Like I think it was Aquinas that said whatever he said that evil has no form because evil is it’s not it doesn’t have a form. It’s it’s it gets its form from the good things. So like ugliness, if we call ugliness evil, and just we’re going to be simple. It’s it’s it’s qualified by its opposition towards something that does have an ideal. That’s non-dualistic. Now I’m actually reminded to the talk that Verveki Peterson and Peugeot had, right? Where Peugeot and Verveki were saying, well, everything is pursuing good. Right. Even the serial killer or whatever. Right. That’s like, this is not pursuing good. It’s defined. Like Verveki. Hmm? It’s a BS pluralism of Verveki that he always that he’s stuck. Yeah. Yeah. But but but but I think the point that they’re trying to get at is that it’s defined in relation to the good. Right. But that’s different than pursuing because because I don’t I don’t like it is rebellion against the thing pursuing the thing. Like that. That’s just bad use of language. Like, no, like, like it’s being bought by the spirit of it like that. That is true. Like you’re stuck in in the spirit. Like only you’re moving away from the spirit. Like I agree with that part. But that’s just being is good. And you’re you’re you’re you’re being anti being. I was like, okay. But anyway, so the thing that I was doing with the T shirt, right? Like I’m inside the T shirt. Right. And so what the T shirt means to me is it’s a protection. It’s an interface between me and the world. While what it means to you is, for you, it’s blocking access to me. Right. So so so then the nature of of what the T shirt by from the inside is different than the T shirt from the outside. And you could say, well, the inside is opposing the outside of the T shirt. Right. But the way that you understand things from either perspective is completely different. Yeah, that’s kind of was in language creation. Isn’t it? Oh, yeah. Sounds like a chapter in language of creation regarding disguises, I think is the word that we use. Or clothing, I can’t remember. Maybe. But yeah, but they’re talking about clothing is what grants you identity. Like that’s the way that clothing is used in the Bible. So that I put I put on an identity and that identity can be artificial or natural. So I can be hungry or I can be a king. Right. And a king is an artificial identity that’s societal as opposed to natural. So you have woven clothing and you have the bare skin or whatever, right. Or sheep skin. I want to I want to go through these things that I read so that we at least get to the same point again. So original nature is a thing that they keep referencing to. And I think what they’re talking about is affordances. Right. to. And I think what they’re talking about is affordances, right? So there’s a person, and a person has a certain capacity to get to a place, right? Like a set of affordances. And if I recognize the affordances, then I can classify your nature, and then we can develop you into it. And then, well, this goes into the thing that we were talking about. Laughing at the naked women is a fruit of unripe wisdom, right? So they don’t say the laughing is bad or stupid or whatever. No, they’re classifying it in relation to wisdom, and then they’re classifying it as a fruit. So it’s something that is born from wisdom, and it’s unripe. So this is like this pre-imposing category, right? So apparently they have classified laughing at women as a wisdom problem, and therefore, like it is unripe wisdom. But that presupposes that it could ever get ripe or something, right? Like it presupposes that the person can get to maturity. And that’s not a thing that you can presuppose. So I’m really confused about the language usage there. So towards the end of the chapter, they talk about the difference between knowledge versus opinion. So is the difference, is a fact, or like what is a fact, is a fact or knowledge just a shared frame? So you mentioned, you said, what was the set of affordances? Oh, natures. If natures are affordances, if everything that I say coheres and conforms to your understanding of the nature of something, do we call that a fact? Or do they say that, I don’t know. Like, well, what, because they talk on this theme. I wasn’t really clear what they were trying to say in the whole knowledge versus opinion first thing at the end of the chapter. It’s not a shared frame? Okay. It’s in regard to beauty, people that can see beauty, like remember the appearance of people that see only the appearance of beauty versus the actual core of beauty, the first principle of beauty, people that can see the first principle of beauty, they’re saying have knowledge of it. People that don’t only have opinion of beauty. So it’s an attunement issue. They’re talking about, what’s that? It’s an attunement issue. Yeah, I guess you can say that. So you can, you have to distinguish two things, so you have materialistic facts, which can be not good or bad, but they can be good or false, or right. But I would use the word good, like good as in accordance with reality, or false. So like you have hair that comes up until your butt, right? Like that’s false, right? Like it’s not a durable fact that that’s not true. Right. Now, the fact is a thing that we can share, right? Because it’s a reference to materiality and it’s defined, right? So either it fits the definition or it doesn’t fit the definition, right? But facts are just information because like that fact doesn’t tell me anything. Like it only tells me something if I contextualize it, like, he’s a man and he’s not supposed to have long hair to his butt. So not having long hair to his butt is not a detriment and is irrelevant or whatever. Right. So the meaning isn’t in the facts. Now, there’s this knowing, right? And this is the biblical knowing, right? Like, which is problematic because like Viveki uses that word like 15 ways to Sunday, but not in the right way, apparently. But knowing is like knowing how to ride a bicycle, right? Or knowing how to play a computer game, right? Like I don’t know how I do the thing that I do in a computer game, right? I could step back and look at what I’m doing and I could maybe describe a bunch of things that I’m doing while I’m playing the computer game. But inherently, I don’t know, right? Like I don’t know what’s going on inside of me. I just know that it works and that it’s true, right? Because like it allows me a certain relationship to the computer game. And if it’s not true, I get upset, right? I need to do it better. So the knowing is a consequence of being able to manifest something, right? To being in a true relationship with it, right? So if you abstract that to the good or to beauty, right? Like what would it mean to know beauty? Well, that means that if I am in relationship to beauty, it gives me intelligibility and agency that without it I wouldn’t have. Like that’s as good as I can do right now. I’m thinking about this. You’re getting complicated. Go ahead, Ethan. You know, I just, we’re probably trying to end. It reminded me of something Manuel said a couple weeks ago or so about these women regarding this appearance and the core of something, where the appearances come from, right? There’s these two things. Something that’s set apart, right? And he was talking about all these women that have their ideal pregnancies or planned pregnancy. I think that’s the term planned pregnancy. And so in their mind, they’re actually they’re coming up with an idea, a mechanism that where they’re coming up with a plan, right? They’re actually identifying in appearances of what they conceive of as a good pregnancy. So they have this plan. This is going to happen, then this is going to happen, and then this is going to happen, and this is going to happen. And then none of that stuff happens and it just completely fractures them. Whereas the proper thing to do is to think of your attention must not be put to the appearances of good pregnancy. It must be put to good pregnancy itself, which can’t be, it’s a difference in attunement. And if your attention is to good pregnancy, it’s going to appear itself in however way it is going to appear. So if this particular thing happens as opposed to that particular thing, it’s ultimately not going to matter because you’re identified in the good pregnancy, the uncreated potential. Another way to frame it is, what is the thing that allows you to go through the process, right? So I’ve had conversations with people and they go to the hospital willingly, right? Not because they had to, but they willingly go to the hospital. And then they get upset. And it’s like, well, you chose to go to the hospital, like you know the nature of the hospital, right? Like you have to wait in line and then you have to go that place, that place, and then those people are going to be those people that’s going to be busy, right? And it’s going to be frustrating, right? So if you decide to go to the hospital voluntarily, you have submitted to exposing yourself to these things. Like that’s part of your calculation of whether to go to the hospital or not. So you don’t get the right to be upset about it. Like you exposed yourself to these things voluntarily, and like now you just got to eat it. And so the question then is, well, okay, if I need to go to the hospital, what does that require of me? Like how do I participate in all of these frustrating things without getting frustrated? That’s the thing, right? Like that’s the thing that you need to have. Like what is the thing that allows me to do the navigation without knowing the specifics of what person I’m going to run into, the way that they’re going to frustrate me? Like I just need to know, right? Like partially I have something going on with me and they’re going to help me and I find that important, right? So that’s my justification, right? And that’s like, well, in order to get this, I’m just going to have to suck it up. And if I’m nice, it might even happen faster than if I’m not nice. So I’m going to be nice as well, right? Like I’m not going to be totally utilitarian again. But that’s the way that you should look at it, right? Like not, oh yeah, like if I come in and there’s nobody at the counter, I’m going to press the bell. But if I’m going to go in and there is someone at the counter, I’m going to say this to them, like this specific line. And that’s the distinction, right? Like are you going to create a plan or are you just going to be the person that’s able to do the situation, like to undergo this and successfully get what they want? Yeah, I can, identifying in the type of person you’re going to be as opposed to identifying in specifically what you are going to do. You can’t predict the way that the world is going to unfold itself or the way that the world is going to manifest itself in appearance. You can’t predict that. You can’t tie your identity up in that. It’ll fail and your identity will be crushed. Yeah, and you will be crushed, right? Because now you don’t have any means. And now you’re upset and you’re going to act from your emotional frame, right? Which is a bad frame. So, you can get something in there. Well, I’m not even back to where we started. Where we’re supposed to start. But yeah, go ahead. Thank you. If we say that the natures is like the affordances available to something, we were talking beforehand about education and about how, well, question one was, is education the thing that they propose as the way to program the spirit? And as Manuel, this is another thought from Manuel, is if they’re defining education in that way, then that’s not the kind of education that we’re used to. I don’t know if Manuel’s got tons of notes. I don’t know if you want to take over, but we mentioned about how education, by definition, if education is pointed towards a telos or a purpose. I’m trying to remember now. I’m sorry. I’m falling apart. But you made a statement this morning, Manuel, that resonated with me about how you cannot, by definition, educate somebody inside of a classroom if you’re going to treat everybody the same, right? And so the question is, is like, well, if you need 10% of the population that can do some math and read and knows some stuff, how do you not end up at universal suffrage, where you say education is now all right, and then you run into a bunch of problems with trying to treat everybody the same? We can’t be completely, we can’t treat people completely idiosyncratically. So anyway, I’m kind of going all over the place here, and I’m not connecting these dots very well, but I guess, go ahead. Well, the universal suffrage has to do with a sense of justice, right? And a sense of equal opportunity, right? And like, Gladiator City doesn’t have equal opportunity. Like, ideally, if they could like scan the brains of the baby for their nature, right? And then put every baby that has philosopher nature into the philosopher education thing, then you’d have equal opportunity. But no, right? And then they also have this reading program where they made guardians with each other so that they get better guardians, right? So like, that’s not equal, right? Like, now you’re pre-selecting, which helps with the selecting because you have pre-selected, right? So like, I guess that’s a good thing. But the purpose isn’t equality of the city, right? The purpose of the city is equality in happiness or whatever, right? And then they have different measures of happiness, right? So you’ve got over this, the financial, then the owner, and then you’ve got this poor philosopher king that has to do, get his stuff from God, I guess, because yeah, they’re not going to take care of him. They’re just going to harass his ass all the time. Yeah, so that’s interesting that you mentioned the whole, if you can hook up the baby nature head scanner. I didn’t even think about that. We just took it for granted that we understood that we were able to select this guy should be a guardian and that guy should be a husbandman. But if you don’t even know the nature of something, then, and this is where I was going with education. So like education- That’s the wizard’s hat in Harry Potter, right? Yeah. You put on the hat. It’s like, oh, we just get your nature, you know? We’re going to put you with your nature. Sorry, lost my turn to thought. Oh, basically, in terms of manifesting potential, you have to close doorways as you get old. So you can be anything. You can be many things, at least. And then as you choose to do one thing, you’re closing the door to other things. Can you be many things? Because the path has to be provided to you, right? You can’t self-manifest in everything because if you don’t get assistance, like you’re going to have to reinvent the wheel by yourself. So like, no, you can’t. Like that’s already not real. Like society has to provide you the means to manifest the things that you are. And if society is going to pay artists that don’t make money with their art, you can be an artist. But like if they don’t do that, you cannot be an artist because like you don’t have any money to be an artist. I can be an adolescent though. And I can stay at home and never leave the house and play games. No, you can’t. That’s only by the grace of your parents. Only, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. What is by the grace of your parents or whatever? But like you can’t do these things by yourself. Like there’s no option. Like it has to be provided for you. So where I was going to try to go would be what is the appeal to unity for the husbandmen in the Republic? Is it, it seems, is it so like, like, oh, like personal responsibility. How is it the case? Like where does, where does personal responsibility come in? Like, so this is basically like, is, are all your choices, you know, the frame is like, are all your choices determined because of there’s no such thing as free choice because you have all these influences around you. Right. Did they, did they, did you pick up on any threads in chapter five or anything else about personal responsibility, personal sovereignty, obligation? I don’t know, whatever it is. I mean, we, we, we brought up a couple of frames, like the honor and financial stuff, but those, those are just like motivations. Those are just like possible things that could drive people. Did they, did they talk much about individualism versus, you know, communal things? Actually, I have a note here on individualism. How surprising. 465D, they’re talking about the victory of the guardians, probably regarding in warfare is greater than the victory of the Olympian. Like when the Olympian wins a race or something like that, because the victory is not for the person, but for the whole of the city. Their identity is placed not in themselves, but it’s placed in the city. And their victory is for something much bigger than themselves. Whereas the Olympian’s victory is just for himself. I mean, we’re kind of straw manning it a little bit. You could say he’s represented by a different country. Anyways, you get the point. I mean, I think they even made a point about individualism here. 466B, when people start identifying in themselves, they end up consuming everything and consuming the whole city. So your happiness can’t be, if your happiness is determined by yourself or something located within yourself, you’re going to end up consuming everything, the entire city. So your happiness must be placed somewhere outside of you. And that’s what they’re saying is it’s based in the city itself. Acknowledging that alone will prevent the hermeneutic of suspicion from leading to postmodernism. Like that alone, the thing is, is they just kind of… Well, that wasn’t even an exposition. That was just a statement. I’m going to presume that they believe that, as in like Plato believes that. But again, I’m just struggling to understand where those kind of claims come from in their mind. What claims? Like saying if you’re too individualistic, you’re going to direct the whole… It doesn’t work. Basically, it’s because it doesn’t work in reality. Maybe that’s the test case. Maybe the test case is like, if you… Well, no, I don’t know. No, they’re reverent reality. And they went into the waters of the city. And the other cities are divided against themselves. And by inference, the other people are divided against themselves, too. If you are a just person and you’re facing a person who’s divided against themselves, you’re going to win because you’re not divided against yourself. You can act with purpose while the other one can. Then again, that doesn’t make the purpose good. And now we get the fractal integration. So you need to be integrated in your society. And then when you’re integrated in your society, you’re participating at least in the goodness of the society over your personal goodness. Right? That doesn’t make what you do good or what you do point towards the good or whatever. But it’s more towards the good than when you’re individualistic. And that’s the point. Like, I don’t… Like, this is again going to fade. You have to be more good than whatever you are now. And that’s all most people get. Like, people don’t get to decide more than being more good. And this is the difference between a sheep and a shepherd. Right? But the shepherd has two things. He has to deal with his own stuff, and he has to deal with the flock. So the shepherd has a special role. And for example, if we talk about Christianity, the shepherd has to pray for the flock. He has to provide spiritual guidance. And in some sense, like he has to be the authority, right, in the direct means, right? And he has to create the connection, right? He has to stand between the individual and God. Right? So like, if a person cannot find God in whatever they’re trying to find God, he has to be the means by which that person is going to find God, because that is his role. That’s what he’s shepherding for. I was thinking about like… There’s no… Go ahead, Ethan. So good luck. All right, man. See you guys. See you, man. Yeah. Okay, well now we need to… Time’s up. Yeah, see, if I don’t have multiple… It’s 11.30. What? See, if I don’t have multiple monitors, there’s no way for me to know, because I can’t look at the clock. We could easily go all day doing this. It’s too bad we’re not in an academy, because that’s what they… Well, they would arguably do this and then go wrestle. So… Yeah. That sounds like a good time to me. We need to get that wisdom test going. It’s going to be hard for us to wrestle with each other, though. All right. See you guys. See you, man. Yeah, we could go on and on. You have to work hard, Danny, to keep up with your wrestling, Danny. Well, again, I was thinking about… Anyway, we could go on and on and on. I guess I’ll keep to myself. So I was thinking… Well, okay, fine. Yeah, I love you. I’ll try to mention this. As you were talking, I was thinking about the shepherd or the pastor, or… I was like, there’s some in counseling. If you were to ask a pastor, I don’t know, if there’s a pastor around here, we could ask maybe. How do you know when you’re counseling somebody? How do you counsel somebody? You have to have faith in… Anyway, let me just stop there, because this is going to open a whole can of worms and it’ll be long. Well, like the Christians have this hack, right? They have the word of God. So that’s true. So they just point you and they say, okay, this is true. This is where you are. Put them together. All right. And yeah, go ask God to help you do that. That’s basically what they’re doing. Now you can step outside of that. Well, first of all, I don’t know if you have to, but you could. But then you still have to give a divine principle and have the person see through it. Well, you have to enchant the world through the lens. So maybe we’ll get into that later in the Republic. It’s like, how can you get people to see in new ways? Well, that means that you have to get them intimate. You’ve got to have them have contrast and then move within the contrast. And then they can start to develop the knowing, the knowing of what it is like to navigate the world like that. And then that is a better perspective, a better being to participate in than the one that you’re stuck in. And then you’ll be liberated from your confines. You’ll be liberated from your confines. I don’t think there’s a way around that principle. I don’t care what you’re trying to teach people. You’re going to have to go through that process. Now, to go back to the schools, do you do that by putting children in the classroom and writing things on the chalkboard? Is that how you manifest that? Or is that better done differently? Yeah, I could take that. We can go a million different directions from it. But I suppose we shouldn’t. Yeah, so we should set an intention for going through the week. Having a lens, right? To see the world through that lens. That would be informal participation. Yeah, so I do think that relating to motivation of people is still a thing that I want to develop. Because I want to make an appeal to the other person to stay with me, to bind themselves to the activity. So yeah, I guess that’s where my discernment is going to be. Mine is still on a similar theme, but it’s away from motivation. I was thinking of a little bit more, materiality is not the right word, but at a lower level in terms of motivation. And now my eyes are a bit more up towards the thing behind that. Which I mean, they always were. But in terms of motivation, I think that’s where my discernment is going to be. I think that’s where my discernment were. But in terms of I’m starting to see, I think I’m starting to get a little bit of a better picture of how, I don’t know, Greeks or Plato or whatever. I’m starting to get a feel from the book. I’ll just put it that way. I’m starting to get a little bit of a better feel. It’s just so important. It’s so important to be attuned to those things. Otherwise, your life is just going to, you’re going to destroy yourself. So anyway, I’m still circumambulating around a similar theme for a couple of weeks. I’m going to stay there a little longer. But making good, this was great. I mean, I thought today was great. And you did a great job of explaining a whole bunch of confusing things. So thank you. Yeah, well, let’s take a moment for integration and connect our experience to the intention and see if we can find means to manifest that. Okay.