The Art of Manliness - Belonging Without Conforming： The Path From Pseudo Self to Solid Self

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00:02:19.800 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast, which since

00:02:23.460 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders that glean

00:02:28.500 their edifying, life-improving insights without the fluff and filler. The AOM podcast is just one

00:02:33.560 part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought,

00:02:37.640 word, and deed. Also, be sure to explore our articles in artofmanliness.com, read the deeper

00:02:42.200 dives we do in our Substack newsletter at dyingbreed.net, and turn our content into

00:02:46.340 real-world action by joining the Strenuous Life program at strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show.

00:02:53.460 we all want two things that could seem at odds with each other to be your own person and to

00:03:03.500 belong we want to stand apart from the crowd but we also want to be connected to it when that

00:03:08.400 balance gets out of whack we either lose ourselves in tribalism or drift into isolation my guest

00:03:13.860 today says many of the problems in modern life stem from our inability to hold these two impulses

00:03:17.860 intention his name is luke burgess and he's the author of the one in the 99 forging identity in

00:03:23.300 the age of social contagion. Today on the show, Luke explains how becoming a true individual can

00:03:28.060 give you the strength to be part of a community. We discuss the difference between a solid self

00:03:31.760 and a pseudo-self, and what role families and rites of passage can play moving us toward one

00:03:35.260 or the other, why modern politics feels like a dysfunctional family, the dangers of performative

00:03:39.780 religion, and much more. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash solidself.

00:03:53.300 All right, Luke Burgess, welcome back to the show.

00:03:58.420 Hey, Brett, good to be with you again, man.

00:03:59.560 So you got a new book out called The One in the 99, Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion.

00:04:06.480 And this book is about how to have a strong sense of self while still being deeply rooted or connected in groups.

00:04:17.400 Problem is there's a tension between those two things.

00:04:19.720 And it seems like your book is trying to address the problems that that tension is causing in society and with individuals.

00:04:27.920 What were you seeing in the broader culture that gave you this hunch that this tension between self and group might be causing some of the problems we're having?

00:04:37.100 hmm i noticed what felt like people in general including some people that i know very well

00:04:45.700 getting both more selfish and more tribal at the same time which is sounds paradoxical but there

00:04:54.020 seemed to be some kind of schizophrenic thing going on between what i would call individualism

00:05:00.660 and collectivism, either a weird mesh between them or a wild swing back and forth between the two.

00:05:09.020 I had people that I knew would just go off grid and renounce society altogether. And then other

00:05:15.080 people would just become really radicalized and extreme in ways that were pretty alarming to me.

00:05:22.060 I remember reading Tocqueville at the time in Democracy in America, and he said,

00:05:25.460 the science of association is the mother science and everything flows from that.

00:05:30.760 And I started wondering, man, is there something going on in America, at least with our ability

00:05:36.760 to associate well and to form bonds with groups without getting completely lost inside of

00:05:44.060 them or without becoming a loner and becoming completely alone?

00:05:47.380 Like we hear about the loneliness problem all the time, but at the same time, you have

00:05:50.820 people that have really clung to various groups identities whether it's online personas or

00:05:56.040 political identities or whatever and and what seemed to me to be a cult-like way you know

00:06:01.540 one of the books that was really formative for me in writing this one was eric hoffer who wrote

00:06:06.060 the true believer and he said you know people often join mass movements because they're fleeing

00:06:10.400 an unwanted self and that's why i sort of focused on the self in this book like is there something

00:06:16.100 going on with the way that we understand our own identity, ourself, that is causing something to be

00:06:21.940 a little wonky in the way that we relate to various groups. And there were just a lot of

00:06:26.660 things that I saw on the way, you know, I would notice that a lot of the conferences and events

00:06:31.420 that I would get invites to like feature the same people. And there was like litmus tests for who

00:06:35.960 could go. There's a lot of like homogeneity there. I noticed there's like a lot of emotional cutoff

00:06:41.600 going on. There's children that are like cutting off their parents and never talking to them again.

00:06:46.100 at an institutional level, there seems to be decay. People don't seem to exist inside institutions

00:06:52.680 anymore in a serious way. They just kind of use them and go through the motions. So there's

00:06:56.460 something going on there. And I don't write books because I have the answers. I set out writing a

00:07:00.740 book because I want to explore something that I think I put my finger on and try to understand

00:07:04.540 that a little bit better. So your title of the book, The One in the 99, this is taken from Jesus's

00:07:10.920 parable of the lost sheep. You're looking at this parable through a different lens, though. How is

00:07:16.940 the way you're looking at it for this book different from the way we talk about it in Sunday

00:07:21.800 school? Well, for those that don't know the parable, it's in two of the four gospels in the

00:07:26.100 Bible. The gospel of Luke, of course, is my favorite. And Jesus tells the parable of a

00:07:31.560 shepherd who has 100 sheep. One of the sheep is lost. And he asked the question, which one of you

00:07:38.260 having a hundred sheep and losing one would not go in search of the one and find it and then bring

00:07:43.660 it back to the flock. And it's, you know, the traditional interpretation is that the lost sheep

00:07:48.280 is, you know, the lone sinner and that God always goes after the sinner, you know, the love of God

00:07:53.800 searching for what is lost. And I understand the theological meaning, but it always left me kind of

00:07:58.120 wanting on a practical level, you know, like it's kind of hard to apply that parable to life

00:08:03.220 and community. So I started to wonder if it had something important to say just about

00:08:08.160 human relationships and the way that we're in relationship to various groups.

00:08:12.060 And then I read, I guess, the nerd that I am. I was doing kind of a research project and I was

00:08:18.240 reading the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. And the Gnostic Gospels are Gospels that is apocryphal,

00:08:23.280 did not make it into the canon of the church, but always for some reason. And this one,

00:08:28.920 I thought it was really interesting because it was like very modern. In that particular gospel,

00:08:34.740 when Jesus finds the lost sheep, the lost sheep is not a sinner. It's not even lost. He pats the

00:08:40.840 sheep on the head and basically praises it for not being like anybody else and says, oh, you know,

00:08:45.820 you're smarter than all of these other sheep. You're the only one that understands what I'm

00:08:49.200 really saying and singles the sheep out as the special one because he's smarter, right? He's got 1.00

00:08:53.920 the highest IQ. And I was like, man, this is really indicative of the time that we live in.

00:08:57.940 where like the one is glorified, certainly in Silicon Valley and in other places, everybody

00:09:02.800 just like wants to be different. And I was like, that's the complete opposite actually of the,

00:09:07.180 of the version of the parable that made it into the canonical gospels. So I was like, there's,

00:09:11.540 there is something here in this parable that I want to explore from like a sociological

00:09:15.440 level. I want to get inside the head of the lost sheep and kind of step back from the traditional

00:09:21.660 interpretations that I've heard and ask basic questions like, you know, why did the sheep leave?

00:09:28.540 What if we don't assume that it was lost? Maybe it left intentionally. What happened to it while

00:09:33.340 it wandered? It seems like that's the definition of a rite of passage, a separation from a group

00:09:37.980 and a liminal state and then a reintegration with the group. Did it come back change? You know,

00:09:42.800 we don't hear any of that. You know, we don't hear about a different sheep coming back. But

00:09:47.420 certainly when we go on journeys, when we are separated, things happen to us. And usually we

00:09:53.460 come back different from when we left, when we travel. And that is the lens through which I

00:09:58.400 wanted to write the book. I mean, I am a Christian, but I stepped back from everything that I knew

00:10:03.800 about it. And I just said, maybe just on a human level, this has something really important to say

00:10:08.260 to us today. I'm curious, I haven't read the book of Thomas, but in that version of the parable,

00:10:13.060 does the sheep that wanders off because, you know, he's different, does he come back to the group?

00:10:18.900 No, he's, you know, in the Gnostic tradition, he kind of ascends to another like level of the

00:10:24.780 hierarchy, which allows him special access to the teachings of Jesus. And he's closer to him.

00:10:30.480 And he never really fully comes back, which is also really, really interesting. It's kind of a

00:10:35.840 status thing. That's interesting. Very Nietzschean almost. Yeah. So, I mean, I think these two

00:10:40.900 parables like the different interpretations like the one in the canonical gospels it's about the

00:10:45.020 group you know we want to be part of the group but in this thomas version is like the individualistic

00:10:49.960 version and i think what your book is trying to do i mean correct me if i'm wrong it's kind of

00:10:54.020 synthesized like let's let's see how we can do both in a way that feels affirming and good

00:10:59.500 absolutely the premise is you know human beings have two fundamental drives that exist

00:11:06.180 simultaneously. And they're both good. And one of them is the drive to be known as individuals.

00:11:14.220 It's the drive to differentiate ourselves. Nobody that I know really likes to just be treated as a

00:11:18.900 number as part of a crowd or a group. It's dehumanizing, right? We want to be known as

00:11:23.440 Brett and Luke and known for our distinctiveness, right? Gifts and talents. And the other drive that

00:11:30.280 we have is to be in communion with others and to seek community. I mean, we've been tribal for all

00:11:35.700 of recorded history for a reason. You know, it provides safety, it provides camaraderie and

00:11:40.180 solidarity. And the point is, those two drives should exist in harmony. And actually, it's our

00:11:48.380 inability to sit in the tension between those two simultaneous drives and desires that is actually

00:11:54.660 what's causing the problem. Because we go to one extreme or the other because we think that when

00:12:00.320 we experience a tension between the two things, when we're part of a group, for instance, and we

00:12:04.720 feel like they're rubbing us the wrong way, or maybe we're a little out of step with the way

00:12:09.820 that the group is moving. We think that something is wrong either with us or the group. And in fact,

00:12:14.500 it probably means that it's incredibly healthy way to be in communion with the group if you can

00:12:19.240 find a way to work through that. So the point is actually that it's the fleeing from the tension

00:12:24.160 or what Hoffer called like the unwanted self, because we don't want to lean into that. That is

00:12:29.360 actually what's causing the problems is the inability to deal with that itself.

00:12:32.520 Well, let's talk about these ideas in detail. Let's talk about this idea of the individual. Use the word self to describe the individual. There are many definitions of what a self is. When you're talking about a self, what do you mean by that?

00:12:47.100 The closest thing to what I mean by the self is what people used to call the soul a long time ago in the Middle Ages.

00:12:54.680 It was commonly used, which is, you know, the deepest identity, this incommunicable selfhood of the human person that was in relationship to the world with God.

00:13:04.940 If you're a believer, that is distinct and yet is part of the world, the one and the many.

00:13:10.600 This is one of the classical problems of philosophy.

00:13:13.520 Why is there one thing and many things that have some relationship between the two?

00:13:18.340 It's fundamentally what the book is about.

00:13:20.680 And then the word self began to be popularized around the time of the birth of the novel

00:13:25.660 when we would read stories about other people who were protagonists

00:13:29.220 and we would imagine ourselves as protagonists and the self became used.

00:13:33.120 And today we often use the word identity.

00:13:35.580 And identity, I think, is the thinnest of all of them.

00:13:38.600 We can apply labels online.

00:13:40.620 I mean, I think identity lacks the depth of either of the previous two, which is funny

00:13:46.120 because my book is called Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, because I

00:13:50.220 think, you know, my publisher probably wouldn't have liked me to put the word soul in the

00:13:53.960 title of a book.

00:13:55.020 That's fundamentally what I mean by self.

00:13:57.980 And in the book, I draw pretty heavily on a thinker named Murray Bowen, who also had

00:14:03.840 a more functional developmental understanding of the self where, you know, our self understanding

00:14:10.620 of ourselves as an individual is formed through a social process over time where we begin to

00:14:17.520 distinguish our ideas, our beliefs, our emotions from those of the people around us, or we don't,

00:14:24.240 or we don't learn that. And we become what he refers to as more of a pseudo self. And that

00:14:29.200 functional understanding of the self that I draw on from Bowen, I think is complementary with the

00:14:35.980 kind of deeper understanding of the soul, which is more of an ontological understanding. So there's

00:14:41.500 both this kind of functional process oriented understanding of how we develop more of an

00:14:47.280 understanding of who we are and how we're distinct and separate from other people, paired with more

00:14:52.940 of the ontological understanding, which doesn't necessarily rely on anything, right? So which

00:14:58.180 gives people their dignity, even if they don't remember who they are, like my dad, who has

00:15:02.420 Alzheimer's. So I think the two understandings of the self and my mind have to go hand in hand.

00:15:07.300 Yeah. With that point about how identity is sort of the idea of the self today,

00:15:10.140 the thing about identity, like you said, it's very thin because oftentimes when we shape

00:15:15.900 ourself around an identity, going to Aristotle, Aristotle would say a lot of what we think about

00:15:22.240 identity, those are accidental traits of us. So it's like our sex, our race, our nationality,

00:15:28.960 like we just happen to be male living in the United States or whatever, but it doesn't really

00:15:32.880 get to the core of what makes you, you. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I mean,

00:15:38.240 the book opens to give away the prologue. I was driving in Ireland. I was driving behind an

00:15:43.100 ambulance that had my dad in it going to the hospital. And I noticed all of these sheep in 1.00

00:15:46.560 the pastures that had basically like neon symbols, like squares, circles, numbers, spray painted on

00:15:55.240 their fur. And I'd never seen anything like that before in my life. I only learned later that that

00:16:01.860 was to, you know, the different owners of the sheep would have them graze in the pasture together

00:16:07.340 and that the symbols that were spray painted on them in this psychedelic way were to identify

00:16:12.300 whose was whose. And that was actually the origin of this book. And I thought to myself, you know,

00:16:19.520 what do I have invisibly spray painted on me? What kinds of like identity markers have people

00:16:25.600 put on me and labeled me something, you know, due to things I say online or what they've heard about

00:16:30.940 me or whatever. And those are all accidental and very, very few of the people that actually even

00:16:36.760 know me personally. So there's kind of an element of personalism, I think, that I'm trying to get

00:16:41.140 throughout the entire book. Because as you said, I mean, the accidents can come and go. And like

00:16:47.080 what is enduring underneath? Like what is the substance and essence of a person, which is what

00:16:51.740 I'm concerned about? You mentioned this idea of a pseudo self. Tell us more about that.

00:16:57.360 You know, Bowen said that the pseudo self is the level of the self, kind of a thinner surface

00:17:04.300 surface level of ourself that is constantly up for negotiation in real time in the different

00:17:11.300 environments that we find ourselves in. And that can be, first of all, it's exhausting to have to

00:17:16.260 negotiate a version of yourself all the time when you're in different environments. You go to work

00:17:21.200 and you feel like you have to be one person and you can sort of very easily be talked into something

00:17:26.200 that you might be a little uncomfortable with to kind of just go along. And it differentiates that

00:17:31.820 from a deeper level of the self, which he refers to as the solid self, which is not the version

00:17:38.700 of ourself, but the level of ourself, which is not up for the real-time negotiations. The level

00:17:44.760 of self where we act with intentionality, we reflect. It doesn't mean that it doesn't change,

00:17:50.900 but it means that the change is intentional. We actually understand where our beliefs come from

00:17:55.740 rather than adopting them through kind of a process of contagion.

00:18:01.120 So he would go so far as to say that pseudo-self is a borrowed self.

00:18:05.280 It's the easy self, not the self that we actually have to work hard to develop

00:18:09.540 through things like courage, through things like being uncomfortable

00:18:13.380 by saying something that we believe is true,

00:18:15.860 which could disrupt the emotional equilibrium of our workplace or even our family.

00:18:22.100 And this is very common.

00:18:23.700 You know, Bowen was a family system psychologist, so all of his work was grounded in the family. And it's just very common in families to have a family unit where there's a kind of like emotional togetherness that nobody wants to disrupt at all, right, because it causes anxiety.

00:18:39.320 And he says it's often where we learn to be a pseudo self is when we're part of a family or we grow up in a family where people are kind of fused emotionally into one another.

00:18:50.560 And people have not learned to separate their emotions and beliefs and ideas from that of the other members of the family.

00:18:57.720 And if we don't learn how to differentiate ourselves and develop a solid self, as he says, in the family, we'll take the pseudo self out with us into the world.

00:19:06.560 Yeah, I love Bowen Family Systems Theory.

00:19:08.520 we did a whole podcast about it a while back ago. It was episode number 1010 for those who

00:19:13.560 want to check it out. But yeah, that idea of our family of origin can develop either a solid self

00:19:19.560 or a pseudo self, but often a pseudo self. And we use that pseudo self just to manage the tension

00:19:26.040 within a family. I think an example that I like of that is let's say dad is really grumpy all the

00:19:32.760 time. And so the kids pick up on like, well, I got to act this certain way or say these certain

00:19:37.440 things so I don't upset dad even more. Everyone's kind of walking on eggshells to manage dad's

00:19:43.460 anger. And that's like pseudo self because it's not what you want to do. And it's making things

00:19:46.960 worse. If you're a solid self, you would be able to still be connected to dad, but be able to tell

00:19:54.200 him, hey, this is a problem or dad, I still need this. You wouldn't hold back from your needs

00:20:00.300 because dad's upset essentially. Exactly. And I mean, and the pseudo self provides temporary

00:20:07.340 relief because if dad's grumpy, you say the thing or you do what you got to do and you get through

00:20:12.300 the day and it's temporarily relieving, but long-term damaging. And one of the bad ways to

00:20:19.600 sort of deal with anxiety in the family system is cutoff because emotional cutoff is easy. You know,

00:20:27.260 go lock yourself in your room or don't talk to people. It's very easy to do that and very easy

00:20:32.320 to feel like a solid self when you do that or to, you know, to feel mature. But that's actually like

00:20:37.320 not the goal. The goal of the solid self is to be able to be connected to other people without

00:20:44.360 losing yourself or fusing yourself into a system. I mean, a healthy marriage should be made up of

00:20:49.760 two solid selves, not two people that have just sort of become fused into one another and lose

00:20:55.500 their sort of individuality. That's not the goal. So the goal is actually to be in communion. And

00:21:00.100 that's the point of the book. It's like actually how to be in communion with other people. It's

00:21:04.060 why it's called the one and the 99, not the one or the 99. Yeah. And you can apply this idea of

00:21:09.800 being a self, but still connected to things outside the family, you know, just in how we

00:21:14.900 interact with each other in terms of our politics. You know, it's very tribal these days. People are,

00:21:20.580 you know they decide who their friends are based on politics so even if you had this friend that

00:21:26.020 you were good friends with in high school you have all these memories and they take a political

00:21:30.720 position or they support a party or a candidate that you don't like it's like instant cutoff

00:21:34.940 and in bowen family assistance theory is like that's not healthy you're letting your pseudo

00:21:39.540 self dictate the terms of this relationship yeah i've seen more cutoff for reasons of ideology

00:21:46.100 at least in my lifetime. And Bowen would say that that kind of behavior is symptomatic of somebody

00:21:52.720 who is operating at the level of the pseudo self. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, let's talk about how do we

00:21:58.680 develop this sense of solid self? What do we do to do that? Because I think for the most part,

00:22:05.140 our sense of self, we develop it through osmosis. We just kind of, well, here's what we do in my

00:22:10.620 family. And then I pick up the stuff on the internet. Here's how I interact at work. We

00:22:15.700 really don't think about you kind of resting control of a developing our sense of self using

00:22:20.900 agency to develop ourself so how do we do it i mean the first thing is just to become aware that

00:22:26.320 this dynamic exists that we're very susceptible to kind of emotional fusion especially in our

00:22:31.800 families or in our closest relationships that this emotional fusion happens all the time and

00:22:36.760 if you look closely you'll probably see it it's kind of like mimesis or mimetic desire you know

00:22:41.700 Once you're just aware that this happens, you can usually see it.

00:22:45.040 And the idea is just getting some level of objectivity about what's happening, just to

00:22:50.800 be able to name things coolly without getting emotionally involved right away, to be able

00:22:54.820 to step back and see when we feel that pull.

00:22:58.520 So just, I think, creating some, I would say, emotional and spiritual distance from the

00:23:04.040 systems that we are most in.

00:23:06.340 And sometimes it takes trauma to do that, but hopefully that's not what it takes.

00:23:11.700 So that's one of the reasons why I'm writing about it, just to bring it to conscious awareness.

00:23:16.340 There's two very specific things that I think are really, really important that I've written

00:23:19.720 pretty extensively about. The first one is learning to understand why things are important to you

00:23:28.360 and responding to what has value in and of itself, as opposed to what has value because it's socially

00:23:36.860 valuable or the things that have value because they're subjectively satisfying.

00:23:41.700 So these things that have value in themselves kind of pull us out of the gravitational pull

00:23:46.560 of our own needs and pleasures towards things that deserve a response from us.

00:23:51.900 And that is, you know, both in the aesthetic plane.

00:23:54.660 You know, if somebody sort of walked into, I don't know, a beautiful, beautiful church

00:24:00.240 in Europe, I don't know, Sagrada Familia, and they were not able to feel any kind of

00:24:05.840 response to it whatsoever, and they just turned around and walked out, you know, we would

00:24:10.800 think like, man, there's something maybe off with that. Like maybe they've lost the ability to be

00:24:15.640 able to appreciate what is actually here. This thing is somehow worthy of a response in and of

00:24:20.560 itself. And in the moral sphere, there are things that are worthy of admiration, you know, heroic

00:24:26.700 sacrifices that people have made because the thing was good in and of itself and not because they got

00:24:32.240 anything out of it. So learning that, and this is called value response, being able to respond to

00:24:37.360 things because they are good in and of themselves is basically the way that we transcend ourself

00:24:42.900 and interact with the world. And paradoxically, it's how we develop more of a sense of self

00:24:47.880 because we get out of ourselves and respond to what's real in the world.

00:24:51.340 This idea of this value response, C.S. Lewis talks about this in Abolition of Man. That's

00:24:57.260 the whole premise of that book. He started off arguing against this idea that beauty is subjective

00:25:03.040 and he's saying no there's actually you know this higher order he calls it the dao that

00:25:09.660 it exists out there in objective reality and we respond to that so when we see a beautiful work

00:25:16.760 of art or we see a beautiful part of nature like something in us stirs and he says well there's a

00:25:22.440 reason why it stirs you because like that is good and you have to train yourself i think he says

00:25:28.300 like that's what education is all about is like training the soul so that you respond to the good

00:25:33.280 the beautiful the true and i think training is a great word because it that that ability like a

00:25:38.280 muscle can atrophy so that in front of something that is true or good or beautiful we don't feel

00:25:44.100 moved right so there's not even an effective dimension to this we don't feel anything because

00:25:48.100 if we don't train it and if we're only responding to things that are subjectively satisfying all the

00:25:53.020 time, we can even lose the ability to respond appropriately to reality, to be mortified and to

00:25:58.640 be in awe and wonder, like, right, to be able to respond to bad things appropriately and good

00:26:02.740 things, right? It works both ways. The other really important sort of thing about developing a solid

00:26:07.620 self is that we need rites of passage to do it. And, you know, we live in a society where many

00:26:12.400 of them have disappeared. I think they've migrated online and digital rites of passage are maybe a

00:26:18.000 little bit thinner. And a rite of passage by definition is a process of differentiation for

00:26:23.420 a person. They separate in some way, they go through a liminal phase where they are changed

00:26:29.300 or transformed, and then they ideally reintegrate in some way with another group of people. And it's

00:26:35.320 in that middle stage that the differentiation or what I and Bowen are referring to as a solid self

00:26:41.120 actually happens. So there are some things that we need to do alone in order for certain types

00:26:47.040 of growth to actually occur. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

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00:31:33.100 and now back to the show yeah i want to let's flesh out some of this more in detail this idea

00:31:37.820 of training we'll say training the soul so you have appropriate value responses to things that

00:31:42.940 are good also to things that are bad i think man that's something i've noticed online we're like

00:31:48.060 training ourselves to respond to bad things in a not appropriate way i mean if you go on i i got

00:31:54.060 off x because like what ended up happening a couple years ago my feed was just filled with

00:31:59.820 just, I mean, it was basically like snuff films, essentially. People getting shot or just fights,

00:32:07.140 really brutal fights. And I'm like, this is not good. I'm kinkering my soul looking at this stuff.

00:32:13.020 You have the section about education and like really taking your education seriously and not

00:32:17.780 in terms of how we typically think of education, where you go to school and you learn math,

00:32:22.460 but it's education in a deeper sense. And you use one of my favorite writers as an example of

00:32:28.880 creating an education for a solid self. It's Louis L'Amour. What can we learn from Louis L'Amour

00:32:33.800 about an education for a solid self? Yeah. So Louis, many of your listeners may know him. He

00:32:41.640 dropped out of traditional school at 15, which in his day was not that radical. And he set sail

00:32:47.500 for Singapore. He traveled the world. He devoured books. And he kind of embodied an older vision of

00:32:53.640 education that the Greeks had, Paideia, which is the formation of the whole person. This is like

00:32:59.580 the anti-credentialing version of education. And Moore believed that education should provide the

00:33:05.760 tools for a widening and deepening of life to live with better awareness, be able to live with

00:33:11.660 awareness. And when I hear him and read him say that, I'm like, he's basically kind of talking

00:33:16.700 about gaining the ability for appropriate value response, like training ourselves to be able to

00:33:23.220 see what is worthy of our attention in the first place. And that to me is like really the number

00:33:29.100 one goal of education, especially today. Like we have a limited amount of time on this earth.

00:33:33.560 Maybe Brian Johnson would disagree with that, but I think my time is limited and I have a very

00:33:39.020 finite amount of things that I can pay attention to. I cannot care about everything. And one of

00:33:44.900 the goals of education is to form us, to be able to have the perception to know what is worthy of

00:33:51.880 our time and attention. And I think he really embodied that element of formation.

00:33:56.620 Yeah, I'd encourage people to read his book, Education of a Wandering Man, if they haven't

00:33:59.900 already. It's a quick read, but it's incredibly inspiring. And you can see how he approached

00:34:04.200 his self-development and his education. And what's interesting, he carried that with him

00:34:08.480 through the rest of his life. He'd read widely, he would read the great books, but he'd also read

00:34:13.500 just random histories of New Mexico that were written by obscure authors. And I had this email

00:34:20.260 conversation with louis lamore's son beau lamore i was asking him about louis's schedule and he

00:34:25.780 actually sent me scans of louis weekly to-do lists and they're really interesting i'm going to do an

00:34:30.800 article about it you know later on on the art of manliness but it was like you could see this guy

00:34:35.700 like he still had this thirst for knowledge and developing himself even in his his 60s and his

00:34:41.380 70s like this one i'm looking at right now on his to-do list was number 27 for the week review

00:34:48.160 self-defense, French, Spanish, Chinese. And he was just like, I loved how he included reviewing

00:34:55.280 self-defense and learning French, Spanish, Chinese on the same plane. That's awesome. I did not know

00:35:01.120 that you were a fan. Here I am thinking I discovered this unknown thinker and little

00:35:06.520 did I know that the art of manliness had already covered. Louis L'Amour embodies the art of

00:35:10.800 manliness. Yes. And in this idea of education, you talk about these two stances we can take

00:35:14.760 towards it one is the vice of curiositas and the other is the virtue of studiositas what is the

00:35:21.140 difference between the two basically the disordered desire for knowledge without a concern for where

00:35:28.100 it's leading or the value that it has in itself it's like knowledge as possession as if you know

00:35:33.500 the more we know like the better we are like if i can regurgitate all of the insights that i heard

00:35:40.260 on podcasts for the last month, and I'm somehow a more enlightened being or something like that.

00:35:46.120 And the person that coined the word curiositas, he may have not coined it, but at least he used

00:35:51.420 it in this sense, was Augustine of Hippo, who was basically writing about his thirst for knowledge

00:35:59.520 in his former way of life. He was Gnostic, and he sort of equated knowing things. It gave him

00:36:06.220 a sense of pride, actually. And he said, you know, where was it actually leading me? So a great

00:36:11.480 example of curiositas is like something that you don't need to know. And in fact, like knowing it

00:36:16.440 could be harmful to you. So, you know, seeing a car accident or a body on the side of the road,

00:36:22.840 this is actually the example that Augustine himself uses. You crane your neck to try to find

00:36:26.740 out what's going on. This doesn't actually affect your life at all. I mean, it's kind of a disordered

00:36:31.920 curiosity to just know things, kind of a morbid novel thing that we just want to know. Like people

00:36:38.060 can get into the occult for all kinds of reasons having to do with curiositas. The difference is

00:36:42.580 studiositas is something that Aquinas talked about. And this is like the ordered desire for

00:36:47.460 knowledge. Like it's knowledge that we desire because it is connected in somehow to the ends

00:36:54.640 of life, the true, the good, and the beautiful, the development of our vocation, of our, you know,

00:37:00.040 our relationships, our marriage, our relationship with God, or even just on a practical level,

00:37:04.460 a PhD student who's studying a cure for some disease, studiocitas would be the things that

00:37:09.960 are leading him to that end. And curiositas would be kind of the unhealthy things like

00:37:15.280 scrolling his Twitter feed at 2am that are keeping him from actually moving down that path. And we

00:37:20.620 live in a world obviously where social media, curiositas is like one of the fundamental diseases

00:37:25.480 of our age it's just easier than it's ever been yeah one of the rubrics i use on whether i should

00:37:31.380 like spend time with something is and it's it's kind of pragmatic but i think it's it gets this

00:37:37.280 bigger idea sort of an overarching philosophy for myself is like how will this improve my life

00:37:42.920 on a tuesday afternoon so it's those moments it's just like everyday life like how is this

00:37:49.060 going to help me make better decisions as a husband as a father how will this enrich my life

00:37:53.640 when I'm stuck in traffic, picking up the kids? Will spending time on Twitter, will this help me

00:38:01.340 navigate life on those mundane Tuesday afternoons? And if I'm honest with myself,

00:38:07.960 most of the stuff you see on social media, it doesn't do that. But again, that sounds pragmatic,

00:38:13.460 but when I'm thinking about what improves my life on a Tuesday, it's not just practical

00:38:18.720 self-developmental stuff for decision-making stuff, but includes, you know, beauty, something

00:38:24.040 that's just good and edifying. Those things also allow me to exist day-to-day in a better way too,

00:38:30.520 in a way, you know, most of that stuff online doesn't. Yeah. I mean, if you asked me right now,

00:38:34.740 and unfortunately I'm still on X and Twitter, like what's something that you learned Luke over the

00:38:39.300 last week that has actually improved your life? I couldn't name anything, you know, you know,

00:38:43.480 the last thing I learned about was like what Alexander Wang is up to at Meta developing a

00:38:47.860 new AI model. And it's like, how much can I actually, first of all, I can't even keep up

00:38:51.640 with what's going on with AI and it doesn't actually improve my life whatsoever to know

00:38:56.260 about the drama I've met over the last year. So I think the idea there with education is

00:39:01.460 take control of it, like exercise your agency and you can decide what stuff comes into you

00:39:06.980 and doesn't come into you. I want to talk more about this idea of rite of passage because we've

00:39:11.800 talked a lot about that on AOM. We used to have built-in rites of passage in our culture. They

00:39:17.280 seem to go away and you talk about how they've kind of morphed to something online. What would

00:39:23.160 a rite of passage look like in the 21st century? Because I had a lot of letters from guys who were

00:39:28.220 like, I want to do a rite of passage. I never had that. Or I want to do this for my son.

00:39:32.060 I can't give that to him. We've had other podcast guests talk about rites of passage.

00:39:36.400 When you're thinking about rites of passage, what does that look like?

00:39:40.240 You know, it's tough. I think a lot of rites of passage develop organically and it can be

00:39:44.640 difficult or maybe even a little bit dangerous to try to engineer them you know typical ones

00:39:49.880 would look like a hunt or for young boys like their first kill of an animal or kind of like

00:39:55.080 the unsupervised summer you know so which I had growing up you know and like so part of it I guess

00:40:00.780 as a parent and I'm the parent of two two daughters under the age of three right now

00:40:04.580 is you know does involve a kind of letting go and kind of that being in that scary space where you

00:40:10.000 kind of trust your children to go off and have adventures that can be kind of dangerous and how

00:40:15.520 they learn and how they grow. I guess on an individual level, I've hiked the Camino de

00:40:20.620 Santiago. I think it's a pretty, pretty awesome one because, you know, it's, it's embodied. It's,

00:40:25.680 it's physical. You meet people along the way. I think it's like the definition of a great rite

00:40:31.320 of passage. And I realize not everybody can take 35 days off of work to do that, which is how long

00:40:36.860 it takes to hike all the way across Spain on foot. And it shouldn't also be like the only one,

00:40:41.300 you know, that's, that's probably one of the more commonly known ones because there was a movie made

00:40:44.780 about it. But what can we do in our normal rhythms of our life to have these rites of passage?

00:40:51.100 I mean, honestly, I think rites of passage are also connected with ritual. Like if you have a

00:40:55.920 day of the week, the Sabbath, whatever that means to you, those can also be a type of, of it just

00:41:04.300 in the weekly rhythm of life because it involves kind of like disconnecting, like separating

00:41:10.800 from the normal workflow. And like, as we lose little things like that, I think we lose the

00:41:16.240 ability to form the solid selves, which often happens in the moments where we're able to

00:41:21.520 have some separation and some distance. So I think that there's the big ones,

00:41:26.700 there's kind of the big life-changing ones where we set out on a journey. And then there's the

00:41:30.540 ones that we can try to integrate more into our weekly, monthly, and yearly rituals.

00:41:34.900 One of the interesting things I've noticed about the way people in the 21st century approach

00:41:38.820 rites of passage, they always talk about it in a very individual way. They talk about the journey

00:41:43.940 part, the separation, being in a liminal state, but they don't talk as much about the fact that

00:41:49.940 you're separating yourself from the community for a little bit so that eventually you can

00:41:55.100 reintegrate into the community as a new self and the community recognizes you as this new self.

00:42:00.540 And I think a lot of people, you know, they're hyper individualistic and they think, well,

00:42:03.320 I can just have this like individual thing.

00:42:05.420 I can just do this thing on my own.

00:42:07.420 And you can have transformative experiences doing something on your own.

00:42:10.980 But what makes a rite of passage more powerful is when you don't just feel different, but

00:42:16.640 you have a community recognize, yeah, you're different now.

00:42:19.640 You're a different person.

00:42:20.720 You've got new status.

00:42:21.860 And we recognize that.

00:42:23.140 It's like joining the military.

00:42:24.620 You know, you get your head shaved, you get new clothes, go through the crucible experience

00:42:28.640 at bootcamp.

00:42:29.380 And then even on a national level, even regular citizens recognize you've got a different status.

00:42:36.380 And that's hard to duplicate on the more personal level.

00:42:39.540 But I think if you're looking to find a more solid self, then paradoxically, you need other people to recognize your rite of passage, your transformation.

00:42:48.860 At least you need your family to recognize it, or better is multiple families, but even better is a whole community.

00:42:55.400 And that's hard to get these days.

00:42:57.260 Absolutely.

00:42:57.700 Absolutely. I mean, a rite of passage is kind of defined with and by a community. And, you know, I noticed there's some new company called Sky Cave Retreats that basically does darkness retreats for people. And many of them are teens. You basically go into a cave or you put on a mask and you're in total darkness for anywhere between 12 and I don't know what the longest is.

00:43:17.500 but then you come out of it and they literally market it as a rite of passage. But what's missing

00:43:21.140 at the end and people kind of take off the mask is like, you know, what is the relationship to

00:43:25.540 like other groups and communities, right? So it's, some of them do seem relatively individualistic.

00:43:31.620 And, you know, I, I entered seminary formation when I was in my late twenties and that I,

00:43:38.120 sometimes I think about it. I was like, that was a massive rite of passage in my life to

00:43:42.300 enter seminary and leave behind the life that I knew, but it was a rite of passage because it

00:43:47.280 was something that I did like with a community, right? It was like a well-defined thing that I

00:43:52.520 did. I didn't invent it. I don't think a rite of passage is something that I can just sort of like

00:43:56.120 invent and call it a rite of passage. It needs to be something that I sort of co-discern and

00:44:02.100 do with other people. Even if there are aspects of it that I do alone, it's a relational thing.

00:44:09.300 Yeah. I'd say that tension between self and group, you need both to have both. The group requires

00:44:16.100 selves. And then a self requires a group so you know that you're a self. The trick is figuring

00:44:21.940 out how to be a solid self instead of a pseudo self as you interact with this group. And I think

00:44:26.800 healthy groups would help individuals become solid selves so that they can make the group better

00:44:33.020 because pseudo selves don't make the group better. Absolutely. And that's, I think, one of the litmus

00:44:38.480 tests, kind of the Occam's razor for discerning the spirit of a group or evaluating a group is

00:44:45.140 like to what extent is this institution or this community or this group forming solid selves and

00:44:50.880 to what extent does it seem like there's a level of coercion or expected conformity that can

00:44:57.540 incentivize the formation of a pseudo self and actually evaluating groups on that criteria and

00:45:04.740 not just like the power that they have or the money that they have can be an incredibly powerful

00:45:10.100 way to kind of cut through some of the noise because what people claim and the values that

00:45:14.200 they list on their website is very different than the spirit that actually animates it yeah

00:45:17.780 and something you talk about too throughout the book is this idea of becoming a solid self

00:45:22.500 you know setting yourself apart while still being connected to the group that often requires courage

00:45:29.600 to do that because you might belong to a group that means a lot to you you have relationships

00:45:34.320 that mean a lot to you but you might have to say something that's gonna be uncomfortable or you

00:45:39.420 might have to go against what the group has to say or what they're doing. How do you develop

00:45:46.120 that courage to act in those moments where you have to be a solid self? I got to say the

00:45:53.040 uncomfortable thing. There might be consequences for me and I might rock the boat. How do you

00:45:59.420 develop that courage to do that? Because I think everyone's had those moments, whether it's at work

00:46:02.940 or in their family. And the easiest thing is to fall into pseudo self or I'll just kind of go

00:46:08.260 along with what everyone's doing because I don't want to rock the boat how do you develop that

00:46:12.060 courage to be a solid self yeah well there's a great book and I think AOM has actually hosted

00:46:17.900 the author of this book called the mystery of courage oh yeah we just had him on like not too

00:46:21.620 long ago and uh courage is is mysterious and and you know one of the points that he makes like we

00:46:26.640 spent a lot of time talking about it thinking about it abstracted from it and you know we

00:46:32.160 usually equate it with like physical courage and you know we all like to think that we have it

00:46:36.920 until we're like tested in battle.

00:46:39.540 And then you can have one person who's like courageous in war

00:46:42.120 who goes home as a total coward in his own family.

00:46:45.640 So it is a very mysterious thing.

00:46:48.500 And I would say that we should sort of reframe courage

00:46:53.360 and think about it more as kind of a daily existential act.

00:46:57.620 And the author that I draw on in the one of the 99 the most

00:47:01.200 is a 20th century theologian named Paul Tillich

00:47:04.340 who wrote a book called The Courage to Be.

00:47:06.920 And he just sort of refers to an existential courage to affirm the goodness of existence,

00:47:12.520 the goodness of the things in our life, really on a daily basis, to actually choose to exercise

00:47:18.680 the courage just to say yes.

00:47:20.880 And he distinguishes a couple different forms of courage.

00:47:24.020 And he says, we need to exercise the courage to be a part, the courage to be a part of

00:47:28.560 something bigger than ourselves, which often involves sacrifices, you know, hopefully not

00:47:33.180 the sacrifice of what is most essential to us though, but you know, some sacrifices. And then

00:47:38.260 there's simultaneously the courage to be, he says, as oneself, which I take to mean like to be a solid

00:47:45.020 self. And he, he writes, I quote, the courage to be is essentially always the courage to be as a

00:47:52.360 part and the courage to be as oneself in interdependence. You know, you don't get to have

00:47:58.500 one without the other. And, you know, thinking of courage on this relational level and thinking of

00:48:04.760 bringing courage into relationships in order to develop stronger relationships, whether it's with

00:48:10.280 your wife or in your workplace or with your family or just with a friend, having the courage to have

00:48:15.600 a difficult conversation, to speak the truth, to show up somewhere when you really don't want to,

00:48:21.440 sometimes just showing up itself is an act of courage. So I think we really need to step back

00:48:25.420 and reframe courage as something that is a little bit more mundane or quotidian than we typically

00:48:31.280 think about it when it only gets associated with soldiers. Yeah, that idea of having the courage

00:48:35.760 to be a part of a group and courage to be you. That's Murray Bowen. It's like living in that

00:48:41.020 tension between self and group. And I mean, I can see this on a mundane level, like a church

00:48:47.580 congregation. You might belong to a church congregation. And like most church congregations,

00:48:52.540 there's gonna be a lot of people there that just rub you the wrong way and they're just annoying

00:48:57.280 and they don't do things the way they just say things that are just like why did you say that

00:49:01.500 the easy thing to do is like i'm just gonna just back off i'm gonna walk away and maybe you need

00:49:06.820 to do that eventually but i think that it is an act of courage like okay yeah this place is not

00:49:12.220 great but i'm gonna have the courage like to hang in there and be a part of this while still

00:49:16.540 simultaneously being a self and trying to be like hey let's do things this way because it might

00:49:22.480 be better. You got to have the courage to do both. Yeah. You know, I, I'm fascinated with

00:49:28.400 monasticism for many reasons. And one of them is kind of the vow of stability that a monk would

00:49:34.380 take and not to get too kind of inside baseball here, but there's kind of a debate. I'm Catholic

00:49:40.320 and there's a debate in the Catholic church. It used to be that you would go to the parish

00:49:43.920 that was within your geographical boundaries, just like you would go to a public school.

00:49:47.980 And now people basically just go anywhere. They go to the one where they like the liturgy,

00:49:52.360 either like the people, the church shop, the priest. It's the church shopping, right? So we

00:49:55.620 just live in a world of church shopping. And I often wonder, and this applies to a bunch of

00:49:59.120 different aspects of life, not just churches. And there's kind of a big debate over, you know,

00:50:03.620 which system is better. But I think there, there is something to stability, just being like, you

00:50:07.560 know what, I'm going to show up here, and I'm going to make a commitment to be here. And I'm

00:50:11.400 not just going to cut and run the first time that, you know, the priest gives a homily I don't like,

00:50:15.240 or I encounter somebody that I rubs me the wrong way. There's something about stability that I

00:50:20.660 think we've lost. And I'm not suggesting that you'd be stable in bad situations. But I don't

00:50:27.040 know. We can just cut and run so easy. I think when we lose all friction for leaving, I think

00:50:32.980 a total loss of friction is probably generally a bad thing in society. Yeah. And this whole idea

00:50:38.020 of people cutting off from groups easily, it's contributing to the instability and the sense

00:50:44.320 that nothing works anymore, that people complain about all the time, right? Because everyone's

00:50:49.180 like all these institutions we we have they don't work anymore well it's because like everyone's

00:50:52.880 just cutting and running like there's no one sticking it out for the long haul even when

00:50:56.980 things suck to make it better and so it just and there's a death spiral and things get worse and

00:51:02.060 worse and worse absolutely yeah well i mean let's talk more about this idea so we talked about the

00:51:07.800 self there's developing a solid sense of self it's about knowing that there's this sense of self and

00:51:13.460 figuring out like what is you what's actually yours and what's the stuff that you've kind of

00:51:18.140 picked up through osmosis, being intentional about your education and educating your soul,

00:51:23.160 your soul self. And then thinking about rites of passage, big and small. Let's talk about this

00:51:28.160 group idea. Beginning of our conversation, you talked about how you're seeing an increase in

00:51:33.820 tribalism in our culture, in our politics, in our faith, even in fandom. People get really

00:51:40.860 mean when it comes to the things that they're fans of, whether it's pop stars or sports teams.

00:51:46.820 And Murray Bowen would say, well, what you're seeing is just group anxiety.

00:51:50.800 Like people are anxious about these differences.

00:51:53.980 They don't know how to deal with them.

00:51:56.040 And I think one of the cases you're making, this lack of forming individuals with a solid

00:52:00.380 sense of self is contributing to that.

00:52:02.980 Let's talk about political life.

00:52:05.140 How are you seeing this lack of solid selves in the broader culture?

00:52:10.900 how is that contributing to making political life seem shrill and unbearable and by politics i don't

00:52:17.880 necessarily mean just partisan politics but it could mean we can use aristotle's idea of politics

00:52:22.960 just institutions that we belong to yeah i mean one of the primary distinctions that bowen makes

00:52:31.360 is you know a sort of emotional fusion and somebody who's a pseudo-self or is kind of

00:52:37.580 emotionally fused in with the family system. They have no objectivity whatsoever. And they just

00:52:43.260 react emotionally. You know, they walk in the home and a kid walks in the home and mom or dad

00:52:49.060 or both are upset. And he immediately gets kind of like sucked into that without just being able

00:52:53.660 to say, I'm actually not upset by that. And obviously, you know, he says like this, what

00:52:58.640 happens in the family is just a little microcosm of what can happen in a culture if people are

00:53:03.100 undifferentiated. And I think we have a crisis of undifferentiation where people have not been

00:53:08.080 able to develop a solid sense of self. What does that mean? Just means that we have a political

00:53:13.120 climate and a culture that is very emotionally reactive. People just react. It's like the

00:53:18.620 normalization of moral outrage that you see online all the time. It's like a symptom of the pseudo

00:53:23.860 self, right? Like it's kind of undifferentiation where you go online and you immediately catch by

00:53:28.340 contagion, it's kind of emotional energy in the air and you can't separate it from your actual

00:53:34.820 ideas. It's just made politics seem like a highly dysfunctional family. So that's definitely one

00:53:41.980 area. I don't think that we've really come to grips with the way that technology is accelerating

00:53:47.520 that. There's just been a complete loss of objectivity in the political sphere. And I think

00:53:53.160 the emotional cutoff, which is one of the things that Bowen says is one of the bad ways to kind of

00:54:00.840 deal with a difference of opinion is emotional cutoff. And we see that all the time. I mean,

00:54:06.020 just like forming little tribal groups with people that are exactly like you is a form of

00:54:11.300 emotional cutoff so that you don't have to actually engage or deal with anything. And

00:54:16.040 there's all these books written on how to find your tribe. And I think like it's super easy today

00:54:21.780 to find your tribe. And it's actually like, not the hard thing. The hard thing is like how to

00:54:25.860 exist within a tribe without losing yourself within it. And in a certain sense, I don't think

00:54:30.320 we don't have enough community. I think we might have too many forms of community and be too

00:54:35.640 comfortable in those little micro communities where we've lost the ability to even see when we

00:54:43.480 are following scripts that have been given to us in order to feel a sense of solidarity with other

00:54:49.780 people that reinforce what we believe. I mean, that has just entered the political sphere.

00:54:55.480 The mimesis is incredibly strong in politics right now. And one of the biggest problems, 0.83

00:55:00.260 I would say, is that we've lost intermediary institutions. So it's like, what's left between

00:55:06.540 me and the group chats that I'm on, and the state, there's almost nothing in between,

00:55:12.400 except maybe my church. Many people don't have that. We've lost kind of the intermediary

00:55:17.400 associations that used to provide a buffer. And when people sort of get disconnected with their

00:55:23.700 close relationships, everyday life and community, and they start paying more attention to things

00:55:29.140 that are happening really long ways away that are abstracted from them, that's a sign that

00:55:33.800 something has gone wrong. And I see that happening a lot where people are really concerned with

00:55:38.900 a kind of like national level discussions while neglecting things that are a little bit closer

00:55:43.820 to them. And I think that technology has played a huge role in the loss of these intermediary

00:55:47.640 institutions. And, you know, Robert Nisbet wrote a great book called The Quest for Community in

00:55:52.020 the 50s. And he talks about what this loss has done. And one of the things I've tried to do is

00:55:56.700 say, man, he wrote that book way before, like, the internet was popular. Like, how is the quest

00:56:02.260 for community and the loss of those intermediate institutions affecting our life today? 0.99

00:56:07.320 Yeah, I love that book, The Quest for Community. And intermediate institutions used to be things

00:56:12.100 like the Freemasons, the Elks Lodge, and church congregations, where you'd rub shoulders with

00:56:18.480 people who weren't exactly like you. And politics wasn't the focus. They were nominally neutral

00:56:24.060 spaces for doing and talking about other things. But not many of those kinds of institutions are

00:56:30.880 still around. Obviously, they're still churches, but a lot of them have become partisan, politically

00:56:35.520 aligned. And surveyors, sociologists have shown that's resulting in fewer people going to church

00:56:42.900 because people are turned off by politics in church. We had a guy on the podcast,

00:56:47.880 it's a political philosopher named Robert Talese, and he wrote a book called Overdoing Democracy.

00:56:54.460 And his whole thesis was that by making politics everything and not having spaces that aren't

00:57:00.900 political, we're actually hurting the political process because everything about our lives becomes

00:57:06.860 tinged with this hyper-partisan stuff. Paradoxically, we need non-political spaces so we can

00:57:14.140 learn the skills and relationships we need to take part in the political process.

00:57:18.320 Yeah. One way to think about it is what is the first form of contact that we have with other

00:57:25.620 people? What is the thing driving our meeting or encountering them in the first place?

00:57:30.900 If it's always politics, like that's a problem.

00:57:34.300 It's one of the reasons I think sports is pretty important.

00:57:36.460 Like it's easy to make fun of people that just become like totally crazy fans.

00:57:40.260 And if their team loses, it ruins their week.

00:57:42.100 But sports is really important because I'm a huge Detroit Lions fan.

00:57:46.960 And, you know, you show up and what you have in common is that you are a fan of that sports team.

00:57:52.280 And the first thing that you know about the guy standing next to you at the game is not his politics.

00:57:56.560 And like, what are the other things that are like that?

00:57:58.680 It's why I like the jazz club.

00:57:59.660 It's why I like the things that bring people together for some shared appreciation of an object that is not political in nature.

00:58:06.860 We really have a shortage of those things in our culture.

00:58:09.900 Something you've talked about recently, I've noticed in your writing, is religion.

00:58:14.500 Religion can be a source of development of solid selves.

00:58:16.880 We can learn that appropriate value response, responding to the transcendent.

00:58:20.520 But you make the case in this book and your other writing that the online pseudo self haunted world we live in, that's infecting a religion in a lot of ways. How are you seeing that?

00:58:31.900 yeah i mean i worry that you know there's been talk about some vibe shift and i just worry that

00:58:38.760 it's a thinner version of religion i don't necessarily know that we should be measuring

00:58:44.980 the interest in religion by like engagement when you know a priest does like a dancing tiktok video

00:58:52.020 man i i just don't know if that's really how we should be measuring the interest in it and there's

00:58:57.300 something mimetic about it where like the religious communities are sort of like mimicking

00:59:02.680 the things that kind of like work in the world to try to keep up or something like that. 0.99

00:59:07.100 And I just don't think that that's the right path. And I think it generally

00:59:11.380 leads to kind of a performative piety or I think making religion something performative is really,

00:59:17.960 really dangerous. And, you know, we just live in this world that's mediated by screens. And it's

00:59:22.340 like if we do something that other people can't see, it doesn't exist. And then there's a way

00:59:27.320 that in religious, and I'm a religious person, we always have narratives that we can tell ourselves

00:59:33.180 like, well, I'm evangelizing, right? By going and doing this thing and showing this video of me

00:59:38.260 doing this thing, I'm actually just evangelizing. Well, when does that cross the line to becoming

00:59:43.580 performative and engagement driven? So I think we're, I hesitate to talk about this stuff,

00:59:48.700 But I just think we're walking a relatively dangerous line when religion migrates to the digital sphere, because you're dealing with something that I believe is very sacred. And there's so much of it that cannot be externalized. And if we identify with only what we see and the externals, it can just, it risks thinning out the actual substance of what we're doing.

01:00:10.680 yeah i agree something i've noticed is kind of the rise of these like online apologists from

01:00:16.820 different denominations and they do these debates it doesn't matter the denomination like they all

01:00:23.000 seem like the same kind of personality and it's a personality it just just bothers me and also

01:00:28.080 it's couched as this intelligent debate but what it really is it's just like this status contest

01:00:32.420 it's not productive i don't know something about the whole thing feels gross well you know what's

01:00:37.320 really interesting to me i mean you're you know art of manliness right and a lot of the people i

01:00:42.160 noticed that do kind of the aggressive apologetics are like the bearded cigar smoking kind of like

01:00:49.180 version of a man it's just kind of interesting that there's a certain kind of personality and

01:00:53.360 i don't know if it's necessarily good to like equate that like to masculinity like this very

01:00:58.100 specific way of being religious yeah no i don't like the whole idea we got to own people i got

01:01:02.840 to own you i don't like right right one last thing and you kind of mentioned it earlier but this idea

01:01:06.980 of the monastery? What it can teach us about a group that can develop a solid sense of self?

01:01:12.880 What can we learn from monasteries? There's so much. I wouldn't expect anybody to read the rule

01:01:18.520 of Benedict, but I have. And to sum it up, the thing that strikes me about the rule of Benedict

01:01:23.360 is that it's a rule of life that's been in use for 1500 years now to help monks live together

01:01:28.660 in a stable community for their entire lives from the time they enter until the time that they die,

01:01:33.100 usually buried on the grounds and it's a rule of life right it's not an operating manual

01:01:38.120 it's not a procedural manual for like what to do when these things happen it has to do with

01:01:43.900 the relationships between the monks that live in the monastery and how to handle disagreements

01:01:49.580 how to handle the reception of new monks and it's all oriented towards building virtue it's oriented

01:01:58.020 towards charity and towards growth and holiness. Now, I don't think that a CEO necessarily has to

01:02:04.640 have those goals in their company or something like that. But very rarely, like when do we

01:02:09.840 actually see kind of like things that deal with the quality of relationships and not necessarily

01:02:16.600 just here's how to deal with this operational thing when something goes wrong? Like almost

01:02:21.700 never. So it's a rule of life. And humility is what makes the whole thing work because you have

01:02:28.220 to accept that all of the monks in the monastery are submitting to this shared rule. And the rule

01:02:35.380 is actually even more important than the abbot. Even the abbot himself has to submit to the rule

01:02:40.420 so that nobody can become like the cult figure. So the rule requires humility and obedience to

01:02:47.240 follow. And it leads to, I mean, it's, it's been around a very long time and I'm going to go with

01:02:53.100 the Lindy thing here. I mean, there's probably something really, really powerful to a rule of

01:02:57.820 life that has been used for over 1500 years in community. And the whole thing is based on

01:03:03.180 humility. And there's little fascinating little tidbits in the rule of Benedict, you know,

01:03:07.920 things that you wouldn't expect is written by St. Benedict of Nursia. And he says,

01:03:11.780 when a new monk wants to be admitted,

01:03:15.500 leave him outside of the walls of the monastery

01:03:17.840 for a few days to test his resolve

01:03:19.840 and to see if he really wants to come in.

01:03:21.860 And then just let him in, not all the way,

01:03:24.040 but just let him in,

01:03:24.720 but don't admit him to the dining hall

01:03:26.000 or the sleeping quarters.

01:03:27.440 And you wouldn't expect to read that kind of thing

01:03:29.640 from a saint, but that's in there

01:03:31.700 because he sort of believed in

01:03:33.380 there is a rite of passage even to enter

01:03:35.560 and a kind of testing of desire that needs to take place.

01:03:38.980 And then there's other strange things

01:03:40.420 always have the youngest monk present at an important decision of the monastery. The abbot

01:03:46.660 should always ask the youngest monk what he's thinking about a decision because the spirit

01:03:52.040 can work just as well through the youngest as through the oldest. It's filled with these kind

01:03:56.320 of counterintuitive things that you don't necessarily see in the world, but they have

01:04:01.400 to do with an understanding of the human person that is beautiful, that allows the one to live

01:04:08.580 in community and in deep communion with the 99. So as I wrote, I got to the end of the book and I

01:04:14.220 was like, what can I turn to, to suggest something that we might be able to look to, to help build

01:04:19.340 the kinds of communities that form solid selves. And I could not find anything than encouraging

01:04:24.580 people to look, at least look at the rule of Benedict and think seriously about how to adapt

01:04:29.900 some of its rules to your life or your organization. Well, Luke Burgess, it's been a great

01:04:36.040 conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Hey, thanks so much,

01:04:40.020 Brad. It's always, always a pleasure. LukeBurgess.com is my website and you should be able to find the

01:04:44.720 book and the audio book anywhere that books are sold. Fantastic. Well, Luke Burgess, thanks for

01:04:48.520 time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much, Brad. My guest today was Luke Burgess. He's the author

01:04:52.800 of the book, The One in the 99. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can

01:04:57.020 find more information about his work at his website, lukeburgess.com. Also check out our

01:05:00.740 show notes at aom.is slash solid self where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this

01:05:04.980 topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. If you haven't done so already,

01:05:16.700 I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review novel podcast or Spotify. It helps

01:05:20.100 out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a

01:05:23.720 friend or family member who would think of something out of it. As always, thank you for

01:05:27.340 the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind us not to listen to AOM podcast,

01:05:30.740 but put what you've heard into action.

01:05:34.980 We'll see you next time.

The Art of Manliness - June 16, 2026

Belonging Without Conforming： The Path From Pseudo Self to Solid Self

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