00:01:03.600Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AOM podcast, which since 2008 has featured
00:01:08.460conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders that glean their edifying,
00:01:13.400life-improving insights without the fluff and filler. The AOM podcast is just one part of the
00:01:17.800a key mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word, and
00:01:22.060deed. Also, be sure to explore our articles in artofmanliness.com, read the deeper dives
00:01:26.280we do in our Substack newsletter at dyingbreed.net, and turn our content into real-world action
00:01:30.920by joining the Strenuous Life program at strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show.
00:01:43.020We all want two things that can seem at odds with each other, to be our own person and
00:01:47.220to belong. We want to stand apart from the crowd, but we also want to be connected to it.
00:01:51.800When that balance gets out of whack, we either lose ourselves in tribalism or drift into isolation.
00:01:57.300My guest today says many of the problems in modern life stem from our inability to hold
00:02:00.820these two impulses in tension. His name is Luke Burgess, and he's the author of The One in the 99,
00:02:06.120Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Today on the show, Luke explains how becoming a
00:02:11.080true individual can give you the strength to be part of a community. We discuss the difference
00:02:14.740between a solid self and a pseudo-self and what role families and rites of passage can play moving
00:02:18.540us toward one or the other, why modern politics feels like a dysfunctional family, the dangers
00:02:23.060of performative religion, and much more. After the show's over, check out our show notes at
00:02:26.920awim.is slash solidself. All right, Luke Burgess, welcome back to the show.
00:02:42.300Hey, Brett. Good to be with you again, man.
00:02:43.800So you got a new book out called The One in the 99, Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion.
00:02:50.460And this book is about how to have a strong sense of self while still being deeply rooted or connected in groups.
00:03:01.500Problem is there's a tension between those two things.
00:03:03.560And it seems like your book is trying to address the problems that that tension is causing in society and with individuals.
00:03:11.680What 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?
00:03:22.880I noticed what felt like people in general, including some people that I know very well, getting both more selfish and more tribal at the same time.
00:03:34.720which is sounds paradoxical, but there seemed to be some kind of schizophrenic thing going on
00:03:41.820between what I would call individualism and collectivism, either a weird mesh between them
00:03:49.460or a wild swing back and forth between the two. I had people that I knew would just go off grid
00:03:55.600and renounce society altogether. And then other people would just become really radicalized and
00:04:02.480extreme in ways that were pretty alarming to me. I remember reading Tocqueville at the time
00:04:07.520in Democracy in America, and he said, the science of association is the mother science and everything
00:04:13.040flows from that. And I started wondering, man, is there something going on in America, at least,
00:04:19.320with our ability to associate well and to form bonds with groups without getting completely lost
00:04:27.060inside of them or without becoming a loner and becoming completely alone? Like we hear about
00:04:31.740the loneliness problem all the time. But at the same time, you have people that have really clung
00:04:36.440to various groups, identities, whether it's online personas or political identities or whatever. And
00:04:42.560what seemed to me to be a cult-like way, you know, one of the books that was really formative for me
00:04:48.120in writing this one was Eric Hoffer, who wrote The True Believer. And he said, you know, people
00:04:51.760often join mass movements because they're fleeing an unwanted self. And that's why I sort of focused
00:04:57.860on the self in this book. Like, is there something going on with the way that we understand our
00:05:01.720own identity, ourself, that is causing something to be a little wonky in the way that we relate
00:05:08.180to various groups. And there were just a lot of things that I saw on the way, you know, I would
00:05:12.540notice that a lot of the conferences and events that I would get invites to like feature the same
00:05:17.340people. And there was like litmus tests for who could go. There's a lot of like homogeneity there.
00:05:23.180I noticed there's like a lot of emotional cutoff going on. There's children that are like cutting
00:05:27.860off their parents and never talking to them again. At an institutional level, there seems to be
00:05:32.640decay. People don't seem to exist inside institutions anymore in a serious way. They
00:05:38.080just kind of use them and go through the motions. So there's something going on there.
00:05:41.940And I don't write books because I have the answers. I set out writing a book because I
00:05:45.040want to explore something that I think I put my finger on and try to understand that a little bit
00:05:48.820better. So your title of the book, The One in the 99, this is taken from Jesus's parable of the lost
00:05:55.900sheep. You're looking at this parable through a different lens though. How is the way you're
00:06:01.340looking at it for this book different from the way we talk about it in Sunday school?
00:06:06.780Well, for those that don't know the parable, it's in two of the four gospels in the Bible.
00:06:10.400The gospel of Luke, of course, is my favorite. And Jesus tells the parable of a shepherd who
00:06:15.780has a hundred sheep. One of the sheep is lost. And he asked the question, which one of you having
00:06:22.300a hundred sheep and losing one would not go in search of the one and find it and then bring it
00:06:27.620back to the flock. And it's, you know, the traditional interpretation is that the lost
00:06:31.840sheep is, you know, the lone sinner and that God always goes after the sinner, you know,
00:06:36.920the love of God searching for what is lost. And I understand the theological meaning,
00:06:40.680but it always left me kind of wanting on a practical level, you know, like it's kind of
00:06:44.800hard to apply that parable to life and community. So I started to wonder if it had something
00:06:50.660important to say just about human relationships and the way that we're in relationship to various
00:06:55.100groups. And then I read, I guess the nerd that I am, I was doing kind of a research project and I
00:07:01.900was reading the Gnostic gospel of Thomas and the Gnostic gospels are gospels that is apocryphal
00:07:07.040did not make it into the canon of the church, but always for some reason. And in this one,
00:07:12.760I thought it was really interesting because it was like very modern. In that particular gospel,
00:07:18.020when jesus finds the lost sheep the lost sheep is not a sinner it's not even lost he pats the
00:07:24.660sheep on the head and basically praises it for not being like anybody else and says oh you know
00:07:29.620you're smarter than all of these other sheep you're the only one that understands what i'm
00:07:33.020really saying and singles the sheep out as the special one because he's smarter right he's got
00:07:37.760the highest iq and i was like man this is really indicative of the time that we live in we're like
00:07:42.120the one is glorified certainly in silicon valley and in other places everybody just like wants to
00:07:47.500be different. And I was like, that's the complete opposite actually of the version of the parable
00:07:52.340that made it into the canonical gospels. So I was like, there's, there is something here in this
00:07:56.680parable that I want to explore from like a sociological level. I want to get inside the
00:08:01.780head of the lost sheep and kind of step back from the traditional interpretations that I've heard
00:08:06.920and ask basic questions like, you know, why did the sheep leave? What if we don't assume that it
00:08:13.700was lost maybe it left intentionally what happened to it while it wandered it seems like that's the
00:08:18.780definition of a rite of passage a separation from a group and a liminal state and then a
00:08:23.600reintegration with the group did it come back change you know we don't hear any of that you
00:08:27.880know we don't hear about a different sheep coming back but certainly when we go on journeys when we
00:08:33.940are separated things happen to us and usually we come back different from when we left when we
00:08:39.300travel. And that is the lens through which I wanted to write the book. I mean, I am a Christian,
00:08:44.920but I stepped back from everything that I knew about it. And I just said, maybe just on a human
00:08:49.920level, this has something really important to say to us today. I'm curious, I haven't read the book
00:08:54.700of Thomas, but in that version of the parable, does the sheep that wanders off because he's
00:08:59.800different, does he come back to the group? No, he's in the Gnostic tradition, he kind of ascends
00:09:05.780to another like level of the hierarchy, which allows him special access to the teachings of
00:09:12.740Jesus and he's closer to him and he never really fully comes back, which is also really, really
00:09:18.460interesting. It's kind of a status thing. That's interesting. Very Nietzschean almost. Yeah. So,
00:09:24.100I mean, I think these two parables, like the different interpretations, like the one in the
00:09:26.880canonical gospels, it's about the group, you know, we want to be part of the group, but in this
00:09:31.740thomas version is like the individualistic version and i think what your book is trying to do i mean
00:09:36.860correct me if i'm wrong it's kind of synthesized like let's let's see how we can do both in a way
00:09:40.920that feels affirming and good absolutely the premise is you know human beings have two fundamental
00:09:48.900drives that exist simultaneously and they're both good and one of them is the drive to to be known
00:09:57.020as individuals. It's the drive to differentiate ourselves. Nobody that I know really likes to
00:10:01.920just be treated as a number, as part of a crowd or a group. It's dehumanizing, right? We want to
00:10:06.540be known as Brett and Luke and known for our distinctiveness, right? Gifts and talents.
00:10:12.740And the other drive that we have is to be in communion with others and to seek community.
00:10:17.660I mean, we've been tribal for all of recorded history for a reason. You know, it provides
00:10:22.300safety, it provides camaraderie and solidarity. And the point is those two drives should exist
00:10:27.980in harmony. And actually it's, it's our inability to sit in the tension between those two simultaneous
00:10:35.680drives and desires. That is actually what's causing the problem because we go to one extreme
00:10:41.820or the other, because we think that when we've experienced a tension between the two things,
00:10:46.420when we're part of a group, for instance, and we feel like they're rubbing us the wrong way,
00:10:50.800or maybe we're a little out of step with the way that the group is moving.
00:10:55.160We think that something is wrong, either with us or the group.
00:10:57.780And in fact, it probably means that it's an incredibly healthy way
00:11:00.600to be in communion with the group if you can find a way to work through that.
00:11:04.320So the point is actually that it's the fleeing from the tension
00:11:07.960or what Hoffer called the unwanted self.
00:11:10.560Because we don't want to lean into that,
00:11:12.800that is actually what's causing the problems
00:11:14.600is the inability to deal with that itself.
00:11:17.160Well, let's talk about these ideas in detail.
00:11:19.280Let's talk about this idea of the individual.
00:11:21.280Use the word self to describe the individual.
00:11:24.660There are many definitions of what a self is.
00:11:27.600When you're talking about a self, what do you mean by that?
00:11:30.980The closest thing to what I mean by the self is what people used to call the soul a long
00:11:38.500It was commonly used, which is the deepest identity, this incommunicable selfhood of
00:11:44.340the human person that was in relationship to the world with God, if you're a believer, that is
00:11:50.280distinct and yet is part of the world, the one and the many. This is one of the classical problems
00:11:56.420of philosophy. Why is there one thing and many things that have some relationship between the
00:12:01.880two? It's fundamentally what the book is about. And then the word self began to be popularized
00:12:07.560around the time of the birth of the novel, when we would read stories about other people who were
00:12:12.360protagonist and we would imagine ourselves as protagonists and the self became used. And today
00:12:17.260we often use the word identity and identity I think is the thinnest of all of them. You know,
00:12:22.580we can apply labels online. I think identity lacks the depth of either of the previous two,
00:12:29.100which is funny because my book is called Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, because
00:12:33.360I think, you know, my publisher probably wouldn't have liked me to put the word soul in the title
00:12:38.000of a book. That's fundamentally what I mean by self. And in the book, I draw pretty heavily on
00:12:44.580a thinker named Murray Bowen, who also had a more functional developmental understanding of the self
00:12:52.140where, you know, our self understanding of ourselves as an individual is formed through a
00:12:58.260social process over time where we begin to distinguish our ideas, our beliefs, our emotions
00:13:04.620from those of the people around us, or we don't, or we don't learn that. And we become what he
00:13:10.320refers to as more of a pseudo self. And that functional understanding of the self that I
00:13:15.720drawn from Bowen, I think is complimentary with the kind of deeper understanding of the soul,
00:13:22.800which is more of an ontological understanding. So there's both this kind of functional process
00:13:27.540oriented understanding of how we develop more of an understanding of who we are and how we're
00:13:33.080distinct and separate from other people paired with more of the ontological understanding which
00:13:38.600doesn't necessarily rely on anything right so which gives people their dignity even if they
00:13:43.760don't remember who they are like my dad who has alzheimer's so i think the two understandings of
00:13:48.600the self and my mind have to go hand in hand yeah with that point about how identity is sort of the
00:13:52.840idea of the self today the thing about identity like you said it's very thin because oftentimes
00:13:58.960when we shape ourself around an identity going to aristotle aristotle would say a lot of what we
00:14:05.600think about identity those are accidental traits of us so it's like our sex our race our nationality
00:14:12.420like we just happen to be male living in the united states or whatever but it doesn't really
00:14:16.720get to the core of what makes you you exactly yeah i mean it's funny i mean the book opens
00:14:23.360to give away the prologue i was driving in ireland i was driving behind an ambulance that had my dad
00:14:27.940and going to the hospital. And I noticed all of these sheep in the pastures that had basically
00:14:33.300like neon symbols, like squares, circles, numbers, spray painted on their fur. And I'd never seen
00:14:41.720anything like that before in my life. I only learned later that that was to, you know, the
00:14:46.740different owners of the sheep would have them graze in the pasture together and that the symbols
00:14:52.280that were spray painted on them in this psychedelic way were to identify whose was whose.
00:14:56.760and that was actually the origin of this book and I thought to myself you know what do I have
00:15:04.040invisibly spray painted on me what kinds of like identity markers have people put on me
00:15:10.240and labeled me something you know due to things I say online or what they've heard about me or
00:15:15.240whatever and those are all accidental and very very few of the people that actually even know
00:15:20.760me personally so there's kind of an element of personalism I think that I'm trying to get at
00:15:25.180throughout the entire book. Because as you said, the accidents can come and go. And what is enduring
00:15:31.740underneath? What is the substance and essence of a person, which is what I'm concerned about?
00:15:36.220You mentioned this idea of a pseudo-self. Tell us more about that.
00:15:41.200Bowen said that the pseudo-self is the level of the self, kind of a thinner surface level of
00:15:49.300ourself that is constantly up for negotiation in real time in the different environments that we
00:15:55.940find ourselves in and that can be it's first of all it's exhausting to have to negotiate
00:16:00.600a version of yourself all the time when you're in different environments you know you go to work and
00:16:05.180you feel like you have to be one person and you can sort of very easily be talked into something
00:16:10.020that you might be a little uncomfortable with to kind of just go along and it differentiates that
00:16:15.640from a deeper level of the self, which he refers to as the solid self, which is not the version of
00:16:22.700ourself, but the level of ourself, which is not up for the real-time negotiations. The level of
00:16:28.800self where we act with intentionality, we reflect. It doesn't mean that it doesn't change, but it
00:16:35.040means that the change is intentional. We actually understand where our beliefs come from rather than
00:16:40.320adopting them through kind of a process of contagion. So he would, he would go so far as
00:16:46.360to say that the pseudo self is a borrowed self. It's the easy self, not the self that we actually
00:16:51.320have to work hard to develop through things like courage, through things like being uncomfortable
00:16:57.200by saying something that we believe is true, which could disrupt the emotional equilibrium of
00:17:03.440our workplace or even our family. And like, this is very common, you know, Bowen was a family system
00:17:09.160psychologist. So all of his work was grounded in the family. And it's just very common in families
00:17:14.660to have a family unit where there's a kind of like emotional togetherness that nobody
00:17:19.640wants to disrupt at all, right? Because it causes anxiety. And he says it's often where we learn to
00:17:24.880be a pseudo self is when we're part of a family or we grow up in a family where people are kind
00:17:31.340of fused emotionally into one another. And people have not learned to separate their emotions and
00:17:38.360beliefs and ideas from that of the other members of the family. And if we don't learn how to
00:17:42.820differentiate ourselves and develop a solid self, as he says, in the family, we'll take the pseudo
00:17:47.660self out with us into the world. Yeah, I love Bowen Family Systems Theory. We did a whole podcast
00:17:53.320about it a while back ago. It was episode number 1010, for those who want to check it out. But yeah,
00:17:58.860that idea of our family of origin can develop either a solid self or a pseudo self, but often
00:18:04.860a pseudo self. And we use that pseudo self just to manage the tension within a family. I think
00:18:11.520an example that I like of that is let's say dad is really grumpy all the time. And so the kids
00:18:18.000pick up on like, well, I got to act this certain way or say these certain things. So I don't upset
00:18:22.600dad even more. Everyone's kind of walking on eggshells to manage dad's anger. And that's
00:18:28.000like pseudo self because it's not what you want to do. And it's making things worse.
00:18:31.280if you're a solid self, you would be able to still be connected to dad, but be able to tell
00:18:38.020him, you know, hey, this is a problem or dad, I still need this. You wouldn't hold back from
00:18:43.580your needs because dad's upset, essentially. Exactly. And the pseudo self provides temporary
00:18:51.160relief because if dad's grumpy, you say the thing or you do what you got to do and you get through
00:18:56.120the day and it's temporarily relieving, but long-term damaging. And one of the bad ways
00:19:02.980to sort of deal with anxiety in the family system is cutoff because emotional cutoff is easy. You
00:19:11.020know, go lock yourself in your room or don't talk to people. It's very easy to do that and very easy
00:19:16.140to feel like a solid self when you do that or to, you know, to feel mature. But that's actually like
00:19:21.140not the goal. The goal of the solid self is to be able to be connected to other people without
00:19:28.180losing yourself or fusing yourself into a system. I mean, a healthy marriage should be made up of
00:19:33.580two solid selves, not two people that have just sort of become fused into one another and lose
00:19:39.340their sort of individuality. That's not the goal. So the goal is actually to be in communion. And
00:19:43.940that's the point of the book. It's like actually how to be in communion with other people. It's
00:19:47.900why it's called the one and the 99 not the one or the 99 yeah and you can apply this idea of being
00:19:53.820a self but still connected to things outside the family you know just in how we interact with each
00:19:59.400other in terms of our politics you know it's very tribal these days people are you know they decide
00:20:05.240who their friends are based on politics so even if you had this friend that you were good friends
00:20:10.520with in high school you have all these memories and they take a political position or they support
00:20:15.540a party or a candidate that you don't like, it's like instant cutoff. And in Bowen family assistance
00:20:20.560theory, he's like, that's not healthy. You're letting your pseudo self dictate the terms of
00:20:24.840this relationship. Yeah, I've seen more cutoff for reasons of ideology, at least in my lifetime.
00:20:31.980And Bowen would say that that kind of behavior is symptomatic of somebody who is operating at
00:20:37.620the level of the pseudo self. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, let's talk about how do we develop this
00:20:43.100sense of solid self? What do we do to do that? Because I think for the most part, our sense of
00:20:49.880self, we develop it through osmosis. We just kind of, well, here's what we do in my family. And then
00:20:55.300I pick up the stuff on the internet. Here's how I interact at work. We really don't think about
00:21:00.700you kind of resting control of developing our sense of self, using agency to develop ourself.
00:21:06.180So how do we do it? I mean, the first thing is just to become aware that this dynamic exists,
00:21:11.200that we're very susceptible to kind of emotional fusion, especially in our families or in our
00:21:16.600closest relationships, that this emotional fusion happens all the time. And if you look closely,
00:21:21.360you'll probably see it. It's kind of like mimesis or mimetic desire. Once you're just aware that
00:21:27.120this happens, you can usually see it. And the idea is just to gain some level of kind of like
00:21:31.760objectivity about what's happening, just to be able to name things coolly without getting
00:21:36.480emotionally involved right away to be able to step back and see when we feel kind of that pull.
00:21:41.920So just, uh, I think creating some, I would say, uh, emotional and spiritual distance from the
00:21:47.860systems that we are most in. And sometimes, you know, that takes, sometimes it takes trauma to
00:21:53.100do that, but I mean, hopefully that's not what it takes. So that's one of the reasons why I'm
00:21:57.100writing, I'm writing about it just to bring it to conscious awareness. There's two very specific
00:22:01.280things that I think are really, really important that I've written pretty extensively about.
00:22:04.660The first one is learning to understand why things are important to you and responding to what has value in and of itself as opposed to what has value because it's socially valuable or the things that have value because they're subjectively satisfying.
00:22:25.540So these things that have value in themselves kind of pull us out of the gravitational pull
00:22:30.380of our own needs and pleasures towards things that deserve a response from us.
00:22:35.760And that is, you know, both in the aesthetic plane.
00:22:38.840You know, if somebody sort of walked into, I don't know, a beautiful, beautiful church
00:22:44.060in Europe, I don't know, Sagrada Familia, and they were not able to feel any kind of
00:22:49.680response to it whatsoever, and they just turned around and walked out, you know, we
00:22:54.480would think like there's something maybe off with that. Like maybe they've lost the ability to be
00:22:59.460able to appreciate what is actually here. This thing is somehow worthy of a response in and of
00:23:04.380itself. And in the moral sphere, there are things that are worthy of admiration, you know, heroic
00:23:10.520sacrifices that people have made because the thing was good in and of itself and not because they got
00:23:16.060anything out of it. So learning that, and this is called value response, being able to respond to
00:23:21.200things because they are good in and of themselves is basically the way that we transcend ourself
00:23:26.740and interact with the world. And paradoxically, it's how we develop more of a sense of self
00:23:31.720because we get out of ourselves and respond to what's real in the world.
00:23:35.180This idea of this value response, C.S. Lewis talks about this in Abolition of Man. That's
00:23:41.080the whole premise of that book. He started off arguing against this idea that beauty
00:23:46.020is subjective. And he's saying, no, there's actually, you know, this higher order. He calls
00:23:52.520it the Tao that it exists out there in objective reality. And we respond to that. So when we see
00:23:59.800a beautiful work of art, or we see a beautiful part of nature, like something in us stirs. And
00:24:05.620he says, well, there's a reason why it stirs you because like that is good. And you have to train
00:24:10.240yourself. I think he says like, that's what education is all about is like training the
00:24:14.220soul so that you respond to the good, the beautiful, the true? And I think training is a great word
00:24:20.040because that ability like a muscle can atrophy so that in front of something that is true or good
00:24:26.260or beautiful, we don't feel moved, right? So there's even an effective dimension to this.
00:24:30.620We don't feel anything because if we don't train it and if we're only responding to things that
00:24:35.000are subjectively satisfying all the time, we can even lose the ability to respond appropriately
00:24:39.720to reality, to be mortified and to be in awe and wonder, to be able to respond to bad things
00:24:45.220appropriately and good things, right? It works both ways. The other really important sort of
00:24:49.960thing about developing a solid self is that we need rites of passage to do it. And we live in
00:24:54.980a society where many of them have disappeared. I think they've migrated online and digital rites
00:25:00.900of passage are maybe a little bit thinner. A rite of passage by definition is a process of
00:25:05.900differentiation for a person. They separate in some way, they go through a liminal phase where
00:25:12.200they are changed or transformed, and then they ideally reintegrate in some way with another
00:25:17.760group of people. And it's in that middle stage that the differentiation or what I and Bowen are
00:25:23.600referring to as a solid self actually happens. So there are some things that we need to do
00:25:28.400alone in order for certain types of growth to actually occur.
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00:27:57.320and chime card provided by chime's bank partners optional products and services may have fees or
00:28:00.200charges stated annual percentage yield and cash back for chime prime only no minimum balance
00:28:03.120required checking account ranking based on a jd power survey published october 20 2025 for more
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00:30:04.460That's square, S-Q-U-A-R-E.com slash go slash manliness. Get started with Square and build
00:30:12.260a setup that works the way you do. And now back to the show. Yeah, I want to,
00:30:17.480let's flesh out some of this more in detail. This idea of training, we'll say training the soul.
00:30:22.200So you have appropriate value responses to things that are good and also to things that are bad.
00:30:26.540i think man that's something i've noticed online we're like training ourselves to respond to bad
00:30:32.380things in a not appropriate way i mean if you go on i i got off x because like what ended up
00:30:37.520happening a couple years ago my feed was just filled with just i mean it was basically like
00:30:44.020snuff films essentially um you know people getting shot or just fights really brutal fights and i'm
00:30:50.140like this is not good i'm kinkering my soul looking at this stuff you have the section about
00:30:56.260education and like really taking your education seriously and not in terms of how we typically
00:31:01.380think of education, where you go to school and you learn math, but it's education in a deeper sense.
00:31:06.920And you use one of my favorite writers as an example of creating an education for a solid
00:31:12.660self. It's Louis L'Amour. What can we learn from Louis L'Amour about an education for a solid self?
00:31:19.660Yeah. So Louis, many of your listeners may know him. He dropped out of traditional school at 15,
00:31:25.600which in his day was not that radical. And he set sail for Singapore. He traveled the world,
00:31:31.560he devoured books. And he kind of embodied an older vision of education that the Greeks had,
00:31:37.360Paideia, which is the formation of the whole person. This is like the anti-credentialing0.78
00:31:43.140version of education. And Moore believed that education should provide the tools for a widening
00:31:49.060and deepening of life to live with better awareness, be able to live with awareness.
00:31:53.940And when I hear him and read him say that, I'm like, he's basically kind of talking about gaining the ability for appropriate value response, like training ourselves to be able to see what is worthy of our attention in the first place. And that to me is like really the number one goal of education, especially today. Like we have a limited amount of time on this earth. Maybe Brian Johnson would disagree with that, but I think my time is limited and I have a very finite amount of things that I can pay attention to.
00:32:23.540I cannot care about everything. And one of the goals of education is to form us, to be able to
00:32:30.960have the perception to know what is worthy of our time and attention. And I think he really embodied
00:32:35.920that element of formation. Yeah, I'd encourage people to read his book, Education of a Wandering
00:32:41.120Man, if they haven't already. It's a quick read, but it's incredibly inspiring. And you can see
00:32:45.240how he approached his self-development and his education. And what's interesting, he carried
00:32:49.980that with him through the rest of his life. You know, he'd read widely, he would read the great
00:32:54.160books, but he'd also read just, you know, random histories of New Mexico that were written by
00:32:59.440obscure authors. And I had this email conversation with Louis L'Amour's son, Bo L'Amour. I was
00:33:05.480asking him about Louis' schedule and he actually sent me scans of Louis' weekly to-do lists. And
00:33:11.780they're really interesting. I'm going to do an article about it, you know, later on, on the art
00:33:15.080of manliness but it was you could see this guy like he still had this thirst for knowledge and
00:33:20.520developing himself even in his his 60s and his 70s like this one i'm looking at right now on his
00:33:26.300to-do list was number 27 for the week review self-defense french spanish chinese and he was
00:33:34.780just like i loved how he included reviewing self-defense and learning french spanish chinese
00:33:40.140on the same plane. That's awesome. I did not know that you were a fan. Here I am thinking I
00:33:45.760discovered this unknown thinker, and little did I know that the art of manliness had already covered
00:33:50.860it. Louis L'Amour embodies the art of manliness. Yes. And in this idea of education, you talk about
00:33:55.460these two stances we can take towards it. One is the vice of curiositas, and the other is the
00:34:00.840virtue of studiositas. What is the difference between the two? Basically, the disordered desire
00:34:06.520for knowledge without a concern for where it's leading or the value that it has in itself.
00:34:12.600It's like knowledge as possession, as if the more we know, the better we are.
00:34:17.860If I can regurgitate all of the insights that I heard on podcasts for the last month and
00:34:24.800I'm somehow a more enlightened being or something like that.
00:34:28.260And the person that coined the word curiositas, he may have not coined it, but at least he
00:34:33.080used it in this sense was Augustine of Hippo, who, you know, was basically writing about his
00:34:39.900thirst for knowledge in his former way of life. He was Gnostic and he sort of equated, you know,
00:34:46.860knowing things that gave him a sense of pride actually. And he said, you know, where was it
00:34:51.140actually leading me? So a great example of curiositas is like something that you don't need
00:34:56.000to know. And in fact, like knowing it could be harmful to you. So, you know, seeing a car
00:35:02.800accident or a body on the side of the road. This is actually the example that Augustine himself
00:35:06.560uses. You crane your neck to try to find out what's going on. This doesn't actually affect
00:35:11.420your life at all. I mean, it's kind of a disordered curiosity to just know things,
00:35:16.160kind of a morbid novel thing that we just want to know. Like people can get into the occult for all
00:35:21.360kinds of reasons having to do with curiositas. The difference is studiositas, something that
00:35:26.360Aquinas talked about. And this is like the ordered desire for knowledge. Like it's knowledge that we
00:35:31.780desire because it is connected in somehow to the ends of life, the true, the good, and the
00:35:38.020beautiful, the development of our vocation, of our relationships, our marriage, our relationship
00:35:44.020with God, or even just on a practical level. A PhD student who's studying a cure for some disease,
00:35:50.300studiocitas would be the things that are leading him to that end. And curiositas would be kind of
00:35:55.540the unhealthy things like scrolling his Twitter feed at 2 a.m. that are keeping him from actually
00:36:01.340moving down that path and we live in a world obviously where social media curiosity toss is
00:36:05.900like one of the fundamental diseases of our age it's just easier than it's ever been yeah one of
00:36:10.700the rubrics i use on whether i should like spend time with something is and it's it's kind of
00:36:17.540pragmatic but i think it's it gets this bigger idea sort of an overarching philosophy for myself
00:36:22.840is like how will this improve my life on a tuesday afternoon so it's those moments it's just like
00:36:29.520everyday life? How is this going to help me make better decisions as a husband, as a father? How
00:36:34.500will this enrich my life when I'm stuck in traffic, picking up the kids? Will spending time
00:36:41.600on Twitter, will this help me navigate life on those mundane Tuesday afternoons? If I'm honest
00:36:49.300with myself, most of the stuff you see on social media, it doesn't do that. Again, that sounds
00:36:54.920pragmatic, but when I'm thinking about what improves my life on a Tuesday, it's not just
00:37:00.020practical self-developmental stuff for decision-making stuff, but includes, you know,
00:37:05.240beauty, something that's just good and edifying. Those things also allow me to exist day-to-day
00:37:11.340in a better way too, in a way, you know, most of that stuff online doesn't.
00:37:15.080Yeah. I mean, if you asked me right now, and unfortunately I'm still on X and Twitter,
00:37:19.460like what's something that you learned Luke over the last week that has actually improved your
00:37:23.180life. I couldn't name anything, you know, you know, the last thing I learned about was like
00:37:27.200what Alexander Wang is up to at Meta developing a new AI model. And it's like, how much can I
00:37:31.840actually, first of all, I can't even keep up with what's going on with AI and it doesn't actually
00:37:36.360improve my life whatsoever to know about the drama at Meta over the last year.
00:37:40.240So I think the idea there with education is take control of it, like exercise your agency and you
00:37:46.340can decide what stuff comes into you and doesn't come into you. I want to talk more about this
00:37:51.900idea of rite of passage, because we've talked a lot about that on AOM. We used to have built-in
00:37:57.220rites of passage in our culture. They seem to go away. And you talk about how they've kind of
00:38:02.220morphed to something online. What would a rite of passage look like in the 21st century? Because
00:38:08.140I had a lot of letters from guys who were like, I want to do a rite of passage. I never had that.
00:38:12.240Or I want to do this for my son. I can't give that to him. We've had other podcast guests talk
00:38:17.060about rites of passage. When you're thinking about rites of passage, what does that look like?
00:38:21.900You know, it's tough. I think a lot of rites of passage develop organically, and it can be difficult or maybe even a little bit dangerous to try to engineer them. You know, typical ones would look like a hunt or for young boys, like their first kill of an animal, or kind of like the unsupervised summer, you know, so, which I had growing up, you know, and like, so part of it, I guess, as a parent, and I'm the parent of two, two daughters under the age of three right now, is, you know, does involve a kind of letting go,
00:38:49.500and kind of that being in that scary space where you kind of trust your children to go off and
00:38:54.780have adventures that can be kind of dangerous and how they learn and how they grow. I guess
00:38:59.740on an individual level, I've hiked the Camino de Santiago. I think it's a pretty awesome one
00:39:05.660because it's embodied, it's physical, you meet people along the way. I think it's like the
00:39:11.840definition of a great rite of passage. And I realize not everybody can take 35 days off of
00:39:17.040work to do that, which is how long it takes to hike all the way across Spain on foot.
00:39:21.520And it shouldn't also be like the only one, you know, that's, that's probably one of the
00:39:24.420more commonly known ones because there was a movie made about it.
00:39:27.340But what can we do in our normal rhythms of our life to have these rites of passage?
00:39:33.080I mean, honestly, I think rites of passage are also connected with ritual.
00:39:36.860Like if you have a day of the week, the Sabbath, whatever that means to you, those can also
00:39:42.600be a type of of it just in the weekly rhythm of life because it involves kind of like
00:39:50.980disconnecting like separating from the normal workflow and like as we lose little things like
00:39:56.480that i think we lose the ability to form the solid selves which often happens in the moments
00:40:02.320where we're able to have some separation and some distance so i i think that there's the big ones
00:40:08.620there's kind of the big life-changing ones
00:51:09.700I mean, one of the primary distinctions that Bowen makes is, you know, a sort of emotional
00:51:15.320fusion and somebody who's a pseudo self or is kind of emotionally fused in with the family
00:51:21.820system. They have no objectivity whatsoever. And they just react emotionally. You know,
00:51:26.800they walk in the home and a kid walks in the home and mom or dad or both are upset. And he
00:51:32.720immediately gets kind of like sucked into that without just being able to say, I'm actually not
00:51:36.780upset by that. And obviously, you know, he says like this, what happens in the family is just a
00:51:41.780little microcosm of what can happen in a culture if people are undifferentiated. And I think we
00:51:47.000have a crisis of undifferentiation where people have not been able to develop a solid sense of
00:51:51.700self. What does that mean? It just means that we have a political climate and a culture that is
00:51:57.200very emotionally reactive. People just react. It's like the normalization of moral outrage that you
00:52:02.720see online all the time. It's like a symptom of the pseudo self, right? Like it's kind of
00:52:07.380undifferentiation where you go online and you immediately catch by contagion, it's kind of
00:52:11.680emotional energy in the air, and you can't separate it from your actual ideas. It's just
00:52:18.440made politics seem like a highly dysfunctional family. So that's definitely one area. I don't
00:52:24.560think that we've really come to grips with the way that technology is accelerating that. There's
00:52:31.120just been a complete loss of objectivity in the political sphere. And I think the emotional cutoff,
00:52:36.680which is one of the things that Bowen says is one of the bad ways to kind of deal with a difference
00:52:44.120of opinion is emotional cutoff. And we see that all the time. I mean, just like forming little
00:52:49.360tribal groups with people that are exactly like you is a form of emotional cutoff so that you
00:52:54.560don't have to actually engage or deal with anything. And there's all these books written
00:52:59.420on how to find your tribe. And I think like it's super easy today to find your tribe. And it's
00:53:04.860actually like not the hard thing. The hard thing is like how to exist within a tribe without
00:53:09.160losing yourself within it. And in a certain sense, I don't think we don't have enough community. I
00:53:13.800think we might have too many forms of community and be too comfortable in those little micro
00:53:19.340communities where we've lost the ability to even see when we are following scripts that have been
00:53:27.700given to us in order to feel a sense of solidarity with other people that reinforce what we believe.
00:53:34.420I mean, that has just entered the political sphere. The mimesis is incredibly strong in politics right now. And one of the biggest problems, I would say, is that we've lost intermediary institutions. So it's like, what's left between me and the group chats that I'm on, and the state, there's almost nothing in between, except maybe my church. Many people don't have that.
00:53:57.460We've lost kind of the intermediary associations that used to provide a buffer. And when people sort of get disconnected with their close relationships, everyday life and community, and they start paying more attention to things that are happening really long ways away that are abstracted from them, that's a sign that something has gone wrong.
00:54:17.860And I see that happening a lot where people are really concerned with a kind of like national level discussions while neglecting things that are a little bit closer to them.
00:54:26.360And I think that technology has played a huge role in the loss of these intermediary institutions.
00:54:31.000And, you know, Robert Nisbet wrote a great book called The Quest for Community in the 50s.
00:54:34.660And he talks about what this loss has done.
00:54:37.200And one of the things I've tried to do is say, man, he wrote that book way before like the Internet was popular.
00:54:42.540Like, how is the quest for community and the loss of those intermediate institutions affecting