#148： Trying Not to Try With Edward Slingerland
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss a paradox that has been around for thousands of years: when you try really hard at something, it makes the thing you're trying to do harder to achieve. My guest today is the author of the book, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity, which explores this paradox and explains how we can live a more spontaneous life.
Transcript
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right okay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so have you ever
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noticed whenever you try really hard at something you end up not being able to achieve the thing
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you're trying to do so for example you can't sleep at night you try really hard to fall asleep and
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it just makes falling asleep harder to do or you're going to a party you want to make small talk feel
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comfortable relaxed doing it so you try really hard and it just makes you uptight and nervous and
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it makes you feel uh the conversation doesn't flow the way you want it well what's interesting is
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chinese philosophers thousands of years ago understood this paradox whenever you try to do
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something it makes the thing you're trying to do harder to achieve so confucianism daoism they all
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understood this well my guest today has written a book exploring these different chinese philosophies
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the insights they have about trying not to try combining it with insights we've gotten from
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neuroscience and cognitive psychology on how we can have a more spontaneous life and how we can
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actually achieve this trying not to try so we have a more spontaneous relaxed life and things
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go the way we want his name is edward slingerland he's the author of the book trying not to try the
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art and science of spontaneity today on the podcast we're going to discuss some chinese philosophy and
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this is great because i've i've never really been a student of chinese philosophy this book does a
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great summary of the early chinese philosophers so we're going to discuss that their insights on how
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to live a more spontaneous life and what neuroscience and cognitive science can teach us about trying not
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to try really great podcast to get a lot out of this without further ado edward slingerland
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edward slingerland welcome to the show thanks for having me so your book is trying not to try
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and it's about the art and science of spontaneity and you approach this by looking at what ancient
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chinese philosophers how they approach spontaneity so there's two big concepts that you talk about in this
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book that is going to connect our conversation so the first is ue and i guess this was the word
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that chinese philosophers uh use to describe the spontaneity you're talking about can you talk a
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little bit more about what exactly you mean by spontaneous and what the these philosophers meant
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by ue and spontaneity yeah so the ue literally means no doing or non-doing it's sometimes translated
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as inaction but i think really the best translation for it is something like effortless action
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so it's a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent you have a feeling that you're not
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exerting effort or even really doing anything and yet everything works out perfectly so it's a bit like
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being in the zone as an athlete so you have these stories in the early chinese texts of a skillful
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butcher who cuts up this enormous ox and he just kind of moves his knife through it and it falls apart
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and the lord who's watching him and is amazed because it seems like magic that he could do this
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so skillfully or you have these people who are in social situations so you have the confucius moving
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through social situations or political diplomatic situations with this effortless ease and he doesn't
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seem to be trying he doesn't seem to be really working at it and yet everything works out
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and so why why were they you know well here's another first question like how does it connect
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to this other concept of is it doe d-e yeah duh it's actually not duh like no duh yeah unfortunately
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modern mandarin yeah so the if you're in a state of ue you get this power called uh which maybe you
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translate as charisma charismatic power so it is something that if you're a confucian attracts people
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to you and makes them want to follow you so the ideal confucian ruler is in a state of way and
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then everything just falls into order around him he doesn't have to command people to follow him
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everyone just wants to follow him if you're a daoist it's what if you're a laozian daoist it does the
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same thing it kind of brings the world into order but no one knows that you're doing it you're kind
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of this dark figure that no one knows about it yet suddenly everyone feels natural and starts acting
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naturally and if you're a duang zian this other daoist thinker it seems to be a kind of power that
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relaxes people around you so they feel comfortable around you it helps it's almost like a kind of
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spiritual therapy you have in other people when you can emanate this power of duh so it's a power that
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you get when you're in a state of way interesting what i found was curious is that all these different
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philosophers who were talking about how to achieve ue they all sort of came up came to rise during the
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same time period which is i guess the the warring states period is do historians have any idea why
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that is well the warring a lot of things happened in the warring states period so this was really when
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chinese philosophy starts so it's the beginning of explicit philosophizing in china and it's probably
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because it was a period of first of all expanding population and expanding literacy so you have a lot
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more people who are actually able to write thoughts down but i think primarily it was a period of chaos
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so it was a period where china was divided into these various states who were all fighting viciously
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with one another to try to obtain supremacy so eventually you know one of them succeeded in
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swallowing up all the others that that became the chin dynasty the first unifier of china but i think what
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was interesting is you have all these different states they all have courts so the rulers of these
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various states have essentially think tanks so they have these academies where they invite thinkers to
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come and give them advice about how to be successful and it's it's not an academic issue because they're
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in danger of being wiped out so it was really a time of creativity you get a lot of schools where all
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the major indigenous schools of thought in china arise and they're not just focused on a way there are
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actually a lot of thinkers who are opposed to a way and think you need to use rationality or cognitive
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control to properly order a state but it's it's i think all of this is happening in this time
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period because it's it really is when uh the the intellectual foundations of chinese thought get
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laid interesting and i what i thought was interesting about the some of the differences between say
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western thought so in west western philosophy the whole uh top-down rational approach won out
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um but and in ue it seemed it was relying more on what you call hot cognition right that's just like
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not i don't even have to think of thinking about what you're doing and things will just work out
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but also the emphasis on community so i think in western philosophy uh it's very individualistic
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yeah um and but in chinese or the ue concept community seem to play a big role in it can you describe
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the role community play in ue yeah so first of all you know ue does involve some cold cognition so
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there's uh cognitive scientists talk about two systems sometimes so we've got the hot system which
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is tacit it's mostly unconscious it's very fast it's frugal it does most of what we we do during the
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day uh we also have this ability to switch into cold cognition so this is relatively slow conscious
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rational calculating there are two different modes in which we can engage in cognition and what you
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see is a tendency in and western you know you can make these generalizations about the west and the
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east that are almost always inaccurate but um you know plausibly you could say the dominant models
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of ethics in the west in the past few hundred years have focused on cold what i'd call cold
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models so ethics is about either following rules so following maxims or calculating utility so if
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you're utilitarian calculating what the best payoff is and then making yourself do it and they're both
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cognitive control models so you you what you want to do not what your hot system wants to do is not
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what you should do and so what you have to do as an ethicist or as an ethical person is engaged in
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cold cognition figure out what the right thing to do is and then force yourself to do it force your
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hot cognition to do it in the the this chinese idea of wui they also are most of them not necessarily
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the taoists but certainly the confucians are suspicious of the kind of hot cognition we're
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born with they do think you have to cultivate yourself and use cold cognition but the difference
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is they think you're going to reshape your hot cognition into the right form and so you're basically
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one way to look at it is you're downloading insights you get through cold cognition onto your hot
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systems and that makes them much more reliable and faster and able to respond to the world in an
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effective way and it also allows you to integrate yourself in your community so the the confucian
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models are certainly are very communal what's involved in cultivating the right dispositions
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is learning how to fulfill your social roles properly learning how to be a obedient child learning how to be a
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caring parent learning how to be a loyal minister and a large part of the training that's happening
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is training you to fulfill these social roles properly but you do see analogs of this in the west so in
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aristotle's vision of how to train people is very much um training you to be a good athenian citizen
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take your place in athenian society so there are there are analogs in the west interesting so i mean
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here's something is the uh this concept of ue is it similar to what uh let me get this name right
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mihi chikszentmihalyi chikszentmihalyi chikszentmihalyi yeah uh is his concept of flow is it very similar to that
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there are a lot of similarities so uh i read flow in grad school i actually went to grad school with
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chikszentmihalyi's son mark who's who's a colleague of mine he teaches at berkeley now uh does the same kind of
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stuff i do so it's there are a lot of parallels so phenomenologically so in terms of the way it
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feels on the inside it's very similar so you have a you lose a sense of time you lose a sense of
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yourself as an agent uh the the difference is really how chikszentmihalyi characterizes what
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distinguishes flow from other types of states so he's very eager and he's right about this to distinguish
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flow from states where you lose a sense of time and you lose a sense of yourself as an agent but
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you emerge feeling uh weakened and dirty and kind of mad at yourself so like sitting in front of a
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stupid tv show or playing a dumb video game it has some of the features of flow but you don't feel good
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you don't feel energized when you come out of it so he says well what's different about flow states then
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and what he decides is different is that they involve complexity and challenge so you get into
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flow when your abilities are perfectly calibrated to the situation so if it's too easy you get bored
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if it's too hard you get frustrated he thinks in flow you're he sometimes talks about a flow channel
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where you're kind of your the challenges are perfectly calibrated to your skill and what that
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also means is as your your skill is going to get better so you have to keep ramping up the challenges
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so if you're you know a rock climber you've got to always be trying a harder face to climb where
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you're going to get bored so and and i think this is an accurate description of certain aspects of
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what would certain instances of what we want to call flow or way so certainly high performance sports
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rock climbing probably also a lot of things maybe some things in the social world so business challenges
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kind of you know striking a good deal or winning a court case but the interesting thing is that
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Csikszentmihalyi when i originally read that book there are a couple examples he gave that just didn't
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seem to fit so particularly the one that stood out was this woman who lives in the italian alps and
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she describes getting into flow every day when she gets up and goes to milk the cows and then she
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gathers wool and then she weeds her garden and this is the same stuff she's been doing her whole life
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it's what her ancestors have done there's nothing particularly complex or challenging about it she
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knows how to do all this stuff and even Csikszentmihalyi's own survey data so he and his colleagues
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have have since gone on to collect data from people about when they get into flow states and it seems to
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be for most people in in actually situations of low complexity and low challenge so walking down a path
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favorite path that you've walked down a hundred times or hanging out with family and having a nice meal or
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playing with kids so it doesn't it the complexity challenge thing doesn't really seem to capture
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those experiences and so this is where i think is more helpful because for the early chinese the
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distinguishing feature of way is that you're embedded you're involved in something bigger than yourself
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so you're absorbed in something that's both bigger than you so it's outside of your narrow little ego
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and it also is something that you value that you think is a good thing and so people get into ue when
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they're walking in a beautiful landscape because they they are absorbed by nature this woman
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Csikszentmihalyi interviewed in the italian alps the way she described it is you know i feel at one with
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nature i feel connected to my ancestral traditions and that's what gets me into this state so i think
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actually the way in which the early chinese characterized ue is a broader and more accurate
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description of how people get into these states yeah and i love it like i think everyone has been
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in those those states before and i think we all want to try to force us into that state right because
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we enjoy it and that's what you talk about the different different chinese philosophers there's four
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of them you highlighted and they had different approaches on how you can achieve ue yeah and you
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mentioned uh confucius uh for example and uh so the name of the book's trying not to try i guess
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you the best way to describe confucius's approach is you try really hard in the beginning
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so you don't have to try later on is that right yeah you basically you he thinks you need to try
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very hard to obtain ue so we're nowhere near the state of ue in our natural state but he thinks that
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if you train intensively over a lifetime and it takes a long time it's going to take your whole life
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but if you train and rituals if you study the classics and memorize the classics so that one of
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the contributions i think i've made to the study of ue is it's it always used to be associated with
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taoism because the taoists talk about ue all the time people don't think of typically the confucians
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as having ue as a as a goal but they do so it's just it's at the end of a long process of self
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cultivation so uh confucius himself describes he's got this one passage i call a spiritual
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autobiography he says at age 15 i set my heart on learning at 30 i took my place with ritual and he
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describes going through these different stages until finally at age 70 he says i could follow my
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heart's desires and never transgress the bounds so he's gotten to a point where he can do whatever
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he wants whatever spontaneous thought comes into his head and yet he's ritually perfect so he is
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complete he's trained himself so he can finally be in a state of ue and that's what his goal is is to
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get other people to undertake this training you talked about ritual and the importance of ritual and
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confucianism and and how uh what is what is the what does cognitive scientists have discovered about
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ritual and how it can actually help us put in put us into a state of ue or flow whatever you want to
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want to call it yeah so one of the things we were starting to realize so the early chinese had these
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insights what's happening cognitive science is in the last few decades there's been uh you can think of
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it as a kind of rediscovery or a re-uncovering of the power of spontaneity so that our hot systems are
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actually very powerful most of what we're being we do involves hot systems and scientists and
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psychologists have therefore kind of stumbled on the importance of ritual they said well if that's
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the case how do you get people to change their behavior oh it'd be good if he gave them scripts to
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practice or things to do and oh okay i guess that's called ritual so the psychologists have kind of been
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getting back to this point just through trial and error and realizing the way human beings work in
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terms of our cognition so i think this is a good example of how early philosophical traditions can
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be a great resource for us in the contemporary world because actually the chinese have been thinking
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about how you would use rituals and training and these sorts of things to change people and get them
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to act in a better way you know for 2500 years so they and a lot of clever people have thought about
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this very long and hard so there's probably a lot to learn from the sorts of actual concrete techniques
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they came up with interesting and one of the critiques that uh even confucianism had 2500 years
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ago or 22 000 years ago was that you know your the goal is spontaneity but you're putting you're
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basically you're you're faking it right like you don't you're not actually you don't actually have
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it you're playing a role and there's this uh risk of being what i guess what confucius called
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being the village poser yeah that's right that's my translation of this term xiang yuan uh which
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sometimes is done villa is village honest person or village worthy so confucius was very worried
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about this problem so you were you know you're faking it until you make it you're you're going through
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the motions of let's say being a filial child with the idea that that's going to help you really
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experience this feeling the spontaneous feeling eventually of filiality the danger is that you
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just learn the outside behavior and you don't actually make it way you don't actually reach a
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state where you've really internalized it and made it spontaneous and he was worried about that and he
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was very worried about people pretending to be true confucian gentlemen who actually hadn't
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mastered it in this way and this then leads to the first real philosophical critique of confucianism
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which is that of laozi and the dao de jing where laozi says uh you should be worried about this and
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in fact your techniques are inevitably going to produce nothing but a bunch of village posers
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yeah and another we'll get to laozi in just a second but the other other problem with confucianism is uh
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there's sort of a bootstrap problem um in that you have to like want to get into that that confucius
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approach to uh you have to you have to desire the confucius approach to get going on it but if you
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don't desire it it's like what do you do yeah how do you teach so he's he's very frustrated because
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he thinks if you really love the way then you won't have you don't have to worry about the village
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poser problem you'll love the way you'll learn to embody it in a new way fashion but he's also
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frustrated because nobody loves the way so you know everyone loves at one point he uh great line
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he says you know i don't have to teach you to love food and sex how can i have to teach you to love
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the way now where can i find someone who who really is passionate about it and this is the
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tension that he has so how do you how do you cause someone to genuinely sincerely love something
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they don't already love and that's the basic tension at the heart of the basic confucian
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approach to way yeah and i think you see that tension play out even today in people's lives like
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people want to be fit yeah but they don't love the the way that you have to get fit well they
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you know they've got to learn to actually treasure it for the internal goods you know you have to
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find something like if you want to get fit the best way to do it is to find something you actually
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like to do that as a side product would get you fit right yeah play tennis play tennis or do something
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fun um it's also a problem within learning so you know you have kids you know my daughter's in
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elementary school and fortunately she is one of these people were born loving to read so she just loves to
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read we actually have to yell at her to stop reading sometimes when we wanted to do something
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what a problem yeah it's a problem but you know schools are really interested in getting kids to love
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learning you know and love reading but if you don't how do you get them to do it if they don't
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really want to do it and you know their solution is well force them to read make them read for two
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hours you know a day um and it's not clear that that's actually productive that could in fact be
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counterproductive so yeah well that brings us to our next guy lausa um yeah because his he
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disagreed with confucius and um you bring in this concept of ironic effects it's a modern cognitive
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science or behavioral concept uh and lausa seemed to have uh insight into that two thousand years ago
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yeah so there's a movement the late dan wegner did a lot of work on that this ironic effect so you
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uh ask people not to think of a white bear and they think of a white bear if you this one great
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experiment he did you uh have people putting doing a golf putt and if you tell them you know try to
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get it in the hole but whatever you do don't overshoot the hole they overshoot the hole a lot
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more than if you don't tell them that um so there's you're basically priming people with the behavior
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you want them to not do and that causes them to do it so he called this the ironic ironic effects
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and lausa seemed to be aware of this so he he was worried that in the same way contemporary you say
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uh situation you force a kid to read for two hours a day and you think you're gonna you're doing it to
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get them to love reading but in fact it makes them hate reading because it's a chore lausa thought if
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you force people to act out virtue by doing these filial piety rituals and doing these rituals to show
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that you respected your colleagues it would actually make you a hypocrite and in fact make
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you at some level hate virtue and that's the the only real way so he really thought inevitably because
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of something like this ironic effect he actually had a term for it this term fawn which uh it means
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return or kind of turning back but he thinks anything that's pursued consciously turns into its
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opposite so if you try to be witty you're not going to be witty if you try to be virtuous
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you're not going to be virtuous and so therefore the only way to actually really be witty or virtuous
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is to not try to stop trying so his basic approach was let's stop doing everything stop doing all the
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stuff the confucians tell you to do go back to being natural again and that's how you're going to get
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these things that you want so he was really advocating trying not to try yeah so and he but of course
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this is a tension right yeah um so nobody escaped there's a genuine part of the point of the book is
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that this tension of trying not to try is a real paradox and i actually explore from a cognitive
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scientific perspective why why it is a paradox essentially you're using your conscious part of
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the brain to shut down your conscious part of the brain it's a direct psychological paradox and so
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you see all these thinkers struggling with the problem loudspeak thinks the solution
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is to just stop trying and embrace weak if you can really embrace weakness and not try to be strong
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then in the end you'll somehow be strong but the problem he has is this what i call the instrumental
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problem if you know that then aren't you really at some level valuing strength yeah so you're like
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okay i'm going to be i'm going to uh pretend to i mean i think a modern equivalent would be people
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who you know in a dating situation they're like okay well the way to get a date is to not try to
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get a date and so i'm going to go out and be at a bar but i'm not gonna i'm gonna act like i'm not
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interested in meeting anyone um and the problem is people like that really look like they're acting
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like they're not trying to meet anyone they don't actually seem sincerely uh uninterested and so
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that's the tension how do you genuinely not want something yeah it's what i thought was funny
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you know i kind of chuckled as i was reading it was how much parallel there is to what happened
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2 000 years ago in china what to what we see today um you know i think lausa and his followers they
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sort of uh romanticized um naturalness right they they rejected technology they'd go and farm with
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you know rudimentary tools and like they're very like hippie like yep and very they're the first hippies
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yeah and and it's the same sort of like uh tensions that you see in those different approaches
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uh then you still see them now yeah well the you know these 1960s hippies back to the land they're
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like let's go you know we're going to be natural we're going to live in harmony with nature and yet uh
00:24:52.700
it it seems to be somehow in conflict with basic human desire so all of those most of the communes
00:25:00.860
that got founded in the 60s very quickly broke down and most of those people who were following
00:25:05.940
the grateful debt around um now drive beamers and are investment bankers right um so lausa the the
00:25:13.260
tension he has is from my perspective seems to be if he's telling people they have to be natural
00:25:19.320
and yet he if he has to work so hard to tell us to be natural maybe what he's telling us to do isn't
00:25:25.600
natural yeah why do we have to work so hard to be in harmony with nature yeah that whole
00:25:30.700
thing about you know technology isn't natural but like we love to be love to use technology
00:25:35.060
we love technology yeah there must be something natural about it yeah yeah um okay so there's
00:25:40.440
lausa the other one uh he seemed to take more of a i guess a middle approach uh it's mincius is that
00:25:46.920
how you pronounce it mincius yeah mincius munza in chinese munza okay so he had this idea of we have
00:25:54.180
these these sprouts within us uh and there's four of them can you describe these sprouts and what
00:26:00.400
we're supposed to do with these to cultivate ue yeah so in some ways you can see him responding to
00:26:06.460
the daoist critique of confucianism being unnatural so you know the daoists are saying we read we need
00:26:11.780
to be natural we can't do these confucian virtues what mencius says is actually doing the confucian
00:26:17.540
virtues is what's natural for us because we have those virtues inside of us they're in our nature
00:26:23.940
in this incipient form or kind of weak form and we need to develop them and so he his metaphor that
00:26:30.780
he uses is a sprout so we have these four sprouts we've got a sprout of benevolence or compassion
00:26:35.880
we've got a sprout of righteousness we've got a sprout of ritual propriety doing the ritually proper
00:26:43.200
thing and we have this sprout of wisdom and he thinks these are these tendencies if we if we
00:26:48.680
introspect if we look inside we can see that we have these in some kind of basic form already
00:26:55.640
and they want to grow into the full virtues they want to this beginning feeling of compassion really
00:27:02.120
wants to turn into true benevolence and in order to do that we need confucianism we need the rituals
00:27:08.100
we need the classics we need these this type of training that we get from teachers but that
00:27:13.880
training shouldn't be seen as unnatural because it's actually helping this thing inside of us to
00:27:20.800
grow and so he's really trying to split the difference if you want to look at it that way
00:27:25.620
between the confucians and the daoists he still wants to be confucian he thinks he's a follower of
00:27:29.680
confucius he his picture of what society is going to look like looks a lot like what confucius wanted
00:27:34.900
but he thinks it's really tapping into these natural tendencies inside of us okay so yeah he solves the
00:27:41.180
bootstrap problem yeah yeah how do we you know get someone to love something they don't love
00:27:46.580
well we do love it at some level and i'm as a teacher going to help you see that yeah yeah you
00:27:53.020
talk about some of the stories where you'd help these like really terrible kings realize you do have
00:27:57.240
empathy look yeah yeah yeah um so yeah so there's a the famous story is this really evil king you know
00:28:04.620
men just says you can be a true benevolent king and the king says no i really just like to party and
00:28:10.660
hang out with my concubines and oppress people that's what i'm into um and then just tells him
00:28:17.040
the story about where he heard that he spared this ox that was being led to slaughter and what he does
00:28:21.980
is get him to introspect and realize that it's kind of like the puppy and the windows uh situation
00:28:27.640
the the king saw this animal that was in terror and about to be killed and he felt compassion for it
00:28:35.740
and he gets him to realize that he did feel compassion and that if he could just kind of
00:28:41.460
almost meditate on that feeling focus on it and learn to strengthen it that would allow him to turn
00:28:47.960
into a truly benevolent king the other thing too you mentioned so mince has this idea that you have
00:28:54.700
these sprouts you want to help them grow but you don't want to try too hard um yeah because you either
00:29:00.200
you mentioned the parable of this farmer who saw the sprouts in his his garden and he went and just
00:29:06.140
pulled them out yeah trying to get him to grow faster trying to get them grow faster so it is
00:29:11.240
confucianism but not really hardcore confucianism well it's not he doesn't want you to force it his
00:29:17.000
target there is really these uh these utilitarians so these people called the moas and the moas think
00:29:24.340
that they're they're not they're not into way at all they think what you can do is rationally figure
00:29:30.660
out that behavior x results in the best consequences for everyone and so force yourself to do behavior
00:29:38.660
x and and in this view it's impartial caring so they want you to act impartially toward all people
00:29:44.540
it looks their ideas in a lot of ways sound a lot like modern some modern utilitarians like peter singer
00:29:49.700
um and and they're similarly rationalistic in the sense that they think we just have to
00:29:55.180
rationally grasp this thing and then put it into practice and mentions his critique of that is that
00:30:00.680
it's actually you're forcing people to go so far against their nature that it's just going to result
00:30:08.140
in disaster so getting forcing people to act completely impartially and not favor their own kids
00:30:15.780
over other people's kids or favor their own parents over other parents is so unnatural that for it's
00:30:21.760
like pulling on sprouts to try to get them to grow in a direction you want them to grow you're actually
00:30:26.420
going to kill the plant and it's not going to work so go ahead yeah so you need guidance but it needs
00:30:33.160
to be gentle guidance just in the way you can't make a plant grow faster than it's going to grow and how
00:30:38.980
does his approach confirm what many cognitive scientists are discovering to be true about how
00:30:44.440
human motivation or human cognition works yeah so i i talk about mentions a lot when i'm talking to
00:30:52.640
philosophers because i think his model actually has a lot going for it from a contemporary empirical
00:30:59.340
standpoint so first of all it's it's becoming increasingly clear that moral cognition and especially
00:31:06.540
moral behavior is driven by emotions and so mencius was right about this that we have these four
00:31:12.840
feelings these sprouts that really are driving our behavior and he also seems to be right that they're
00:31:18.280
distinct so uh philosophers often talk about morality as if it's a unitary thing western philosophers
00:31:25.520
in mencius's model what we could call morality is just a blanket term for these distinct
00:31:31.500
moral emotions so empathy and uh justice you know feeling of anger when people are being unjust
00:31:39.820
and the important thing to see is that these are really different types of feelings they're inspired by
00:31:44.640
different situations they have different behavioral uh outcomes they have different phenomenological on
00:31:51.040
the inside feeling to them and so mencius seems to be right about that that the way to look at it is
00:31:56.720
morality is modular it's emotional it's based on our emotions and it's modular so it's we have these
00:32:03.080
distinct moral emotions that that uh are are very different from one another although they all we call
00:32:08.880
them all moral because they have to do with helping people get along with other people in society so he
00:32:14.500
seems to be have been very present in the sense that he was uh he thought that morality was about
00:32:20.300
cultivating embodied emotions and and that's a message that i think modern ethicists really need
00:32:26.700
to get okay so look we talked about three there's one last one you're gonna tell me with his name
00:32:30.820
because yeah yeah yeah i was pronouncing it different in my head yeah um so what was his approach
00:32:38.140
to ue was it seemed like it was very similar to laozi's approach to uh there are similarities and
00:32:43.840
that's why they so duangza is typically paired together with laozi and called the the they're
00:32:51.140
called the taoist school but that's a later that term's a later invention so the confucians actually saw
00:32:57.140
themselves as confucians as followers of confucius as members of a school they were um you know fighting
00:33:04.440
about who really got confucius right but they all thought they were they were following confucius
00:33:08.920
the the taoists weren't following each other so as you'd expect maybe of the taoists they were a
00:33:14.000
little bit less organized um so duangza he's classed with laozi because he's similarly worried about
00:33:20.780
trying too hard so he does think the solution as laozi does is to try less you know to to go toward
00:33:28.340
more than not trying part of the the strategy and but his his technique is a bit different he doesn't
00:33:34.960
have any kind of concrete so laozi has got a very concrete vision of what a natural life should look
00:33:41.400
like and he wants you to pursue that vision drop out of society go live in a small village
00:33:46.880
use primitive technology never leave your village that's going to make you natural duangza thinks
00:33:53.060
actually having a concrete vision about what's natural is part of the problem so i think he'd be
00:33:58.640
as critical of laozi as he and he is actually as critical of these primitivists who are very much
00:34:04.100
like laozi as he is of the confucians so he thinks that the similar problem they all have
00:34:08.100
is they're sure they know what the right way to live is and he thinks in fact we don't know what
00:34:13.720
the right way to live is that the only way we can live properly is to surrender to make our mind
00:34:20.760
empty to make it tenuous this is the shoe this term he uses and if we can do that we've got a kind of
00:34:28.340
onboard guidance system sent from heaven so he believes that the the kind of uh sacred force in
00:34:36.560
the world heaven has implanted this thing called the spirit inside of people and that normally we
00:34:43.660
don't listen to our spirit because we're using our mind too much we're full of thoughts about we know
00:34:50.160
what the right thing to do is or we have these maxims we're trying to follow or we're trying to
00:34:54.700
maximize utility he thinks if we could stop trying and and make our mind empty this spirit would be
00:35:02.000
able to take over and guide us in the proper direction interesting yeah um so what i thought
00:35:09.660
was really great at the end of the book you wrapped us up you made this connection to uh ue or flow
00:35:13.940
you know we'll call it ue um that i never really thought about before why we value it so much and it
00:35:20.520
comes down to human trust what is it about spontaneity that makes us more trustworthy yeah so
00:35:29.260
one of the things i'm trying to explain in that that last section is why ue and uh should fit together
00:35:37.860
so i said in the beginning if you're in a state of ue you get this power this charismatic virtue or
00:35:43.520
charismatic power the the chinese explanation is religious it's a theological explanation so they think
00:35:50.160
the reason you have da when you're in ue is heaven gives it to you as a reward when you're in ue you're
00:35:56.660
following heaven's heaven's dal heaven's way and so it gives you this power as a reward but what i'm
00:36:04.460
wondering in the book is from a modern perspective we don't share this metaphysics we don't believe
00:36:09.360
there's a heaven that's giving us this power necessarily so what's a naturalistic explanation of
00:36:14.460
why these two things should fit together and i think the answer has to do with problems of
00:36:18.980
cooperation we have in large-scale societies and civilization so when people are living
00:36:24.780
in civilization they're having to cooperate all the time with people who aren't related to them
00:36:31.420
and who they don't really know well personally necessarily and so there's there's some really
00:36:36.280
basic uh cooperation dilemmas that arise in situations like that and one of the things you need
00:36:42.540
to be sure of to get coordination off the ground is that people these people you're interacting with
00:36:49.500
are committed to the same values as you that you can trust them so uh if we're in a an army unit
00:36:56.840
together and we're going to be sent over this ridge to attack the enemy i've got to believe that
00:37:02.320
you're as gung-ho as i am and that when you know the sergeant says charge you're going to run just as
00:37:08.520
fast as me and you're not going to be like you know hanging a few paces back letting me take the
00:37:13.400
first bullet and so how can i be sure of that i've got to trust you and one of the things i do is
00:37:19.640
review a bunch of literature coming out of social psychology and cognitive science suggesting that
00:37:24.620
we we trust people who are spontaneous we trust people who are not kicking off signs of conscious effort
00:37:33.780
and that seems to be because actually in order to lie or cheat or deceive people you have to exercise
00:37:41.200
cognitive control and so there's something about somebody who is not trying who's in there's
00:37:47.680
something about someone who's in a way that inspires trust in us because people who are not trying are
00:37:53.720
usually honest they're whatever it is they're doing or saying is probably true because they're not
00:37:59.880
kicking off signs of lying or trying to fake it really interesting stuff um so this has all been
00:38:06.260
great we we've talked we've covered a lot of different approaches to away i'm curious before we we end the
00:38:11.120
conversation is there one thing that a person who's listening to this podcast can start doing today to
00:38:17.680
maybe cultivate a bit more way into their life or do you have a favorite approach yeah you know this is a
00:38:23.860
tricky thing and the book was marketed as a self-help book and a lot of people got pissed off because
00:38:28.980
there's not they thought there'd be like a little pull out section yeah where was the bullet points
00:38:33.200
at the end of the chapter bullet points no bullet points and so there's no one solution because it's
00:38:39.960
genuinely a paradox and if a if there were a solution it wouldn't be a paradox but what i think is helpful
00:38:46.480
the kind of takeaway from the book is first of all just having a word for way is helpful like i find that
00:38:53.300
people who know about the stuff who i've talked to about it they start using it in their daily lives because
00:38:58.120
we just don't have a good word for it and one of the reasons we don't have a good word for it is
00:39:02.320
because we don't tend to recognize the power of spontaneity in our everyday lives and so i think
00:39:08.620
we've really been trained that to reach our goals or to get what we want and we just have to try harder
00:39:14.700
so we're not where we want to be we'll try harder work harder uh you know put your put effort into it
00:39:19.560
and we what we don't see is that when it comes to a lot of goals so um happiness creativity
00:39:26.200
attractiveness that's completely counterproductive that consciously pursuing it means we're not going
00:39:33.820
to get it and so knowing about way kind of recovering a sense of the power of spontaneity i think
00:39:40.080
helps us to see to recognize in our lives situations where we're trying and we shouldn't be
00:39:46.920
and actually what we need to do is stop and how we're going to do that may vary it may be that
00:39:51.960
you know we need to do a kind of duang zian meditation where we just clear our mind before
00:39:56.460
an important meeting let's say we know that when we go into the meeting we have a tendency to talk
00:40:01.380
too much and try too hard to impress the boss and we got to stop doing that how do we actually do that
00:40:07.240
maybe you know it involves meditating you know doing a little mind mindfulness exercise before you go in
00:40:13.200
maybe it involves actually going for a intense run beforehand and just tying tiring your body out
00:40:20.780
so much that you're you're not able to be too pushy the thing is the the what what the barriers to
00:40:27.540
wui are for any given individual really depends on the individual and i think that's why there are these
00:40:33.400
these different strategies because which one is the right one is going to vary from individual to
00:40:39.580
individual and it's also going to vary from situation to situation but that's where i think
00:40:44.620
having this kind of grab bag of strategies the early chinese really i think explored all of the
00:40:49.920
logical possibilities you could have and so you've got them there you've got these different strategies
00:40:55.720
and which one's going to be the the best one is really something that's going to you're going to
00:41:00.840
have to evaluate in your own life and and and based on what the challenge is to spawn to the adr that
00:41:06.460
you're facing all right well edward slingerland this has been a fascinating conversation thank
00:41:10.700
you so much for your time it's been a pleasure yeah thanks a lot my guest today was edward
00:41:14.300
slingerland he's the author of the book trying not to try and you can find that on amazon.com and
00:41:19.440
bookstores everywhere well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more
00:41:26.980
manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com
00:41:31.060
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00:41:35.560
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00:41:40.300
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