220. Theory of Enchantment ｜ Chloé Valdary
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 43 minutes
Words per Minute
154.77338
Summary
Chloe Valdry is an American entrepreneur and writer whose writing has been published in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She s founded the Theory of Enchanter, a diversity program that's against diversity programs. This episode gets pretty emotional, as Dr. Jordan and Chloe get into the civil rights movement, which Chloe read in lockdown, which is the best way to give criticism, the power of truth, white fragility. And what exactly you could expect from one of her diversity seminars? One more thing, if you want an ad-free experience or you hate my ads, visit jordanbpeterson.supercast.co/supercast and sign up for premium on my usual platform, Daily Wire Plus. It automatically switches you to premium on your usual platform and just $10 a month or $100 a year. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Again, that's JORDAN B. PETERSON Supercast, also linked in the description. I hope you enjoy this episode. I m pleased to have with me today, Ms. Chloe Valdry. And I counted it a great honor and a privilege to be able to talk to you today about something that s radically unpopular, that should make you think twice before you do something you should make sure you re doing something you re going to think about doing something that makes you feel uncomfortable. -Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Season 4, Episode 76: "Mappings of Meaning" - "In a World Where White Fragility" - . . . . , "The Theory of Encouragement - , and & (featuring: Chloe V. Valdry, ? ) - . , , & , and , . & . (Apostle, ) : And | ; ~ + @ in this episode // = ! # etc., This episode is out on my website !! AND < Thank you, Dr. & @ , etc. , # & # , , ) , & + , + & & ) . , AND , And , @ &_ ... ), _ , + , & ,
Transcript
00:00:01.000
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.000
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Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
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Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:52.000
Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, season four, episode 76.
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Today's guest is Chloe Valdry, an American entrepreneur and writer whose writing has been published in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
00:01:09.000
She's founded the theory of enchantment, a diversity program that's kind of against diversity programs.
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This episode gets pretty emotional. Dad and Chloe get into the civil rights movement. Dad's book, Maps of Meaning, which Chloe read in lockdown.
00:01:24.000
The best way to give criticism, the power of truth, white fragility, and what exactly you could expect from one of her diversity seminars.
00:01:32.000
One more thing, if you want an ad-free experience or you hate my ads, visit jordanbpeterson.supercast.com and sign up.
00:01:42.000
It automatically switches you to premium on your usual platform.
00:01:45.000
It's nice and fast and just $10 a month or $100 a year.
00:01:49.000
Again, that's jordanbpeterson.supercast.com, also linked in the description.
00:02:16.000
I'm pleased to have with me today, Ms. Chloe Valdry.
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Chloe is the developer of a theory, theory of enchantment, that she's using in corporate work and various other venues.
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I'll tell you a little bit about her and then we'll jump into the conversation.
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After spending a year as a Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal, Chloe Valdry developed the theory of enchantment,
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an innovative framework for compassionate anti-racism that combines social-emotional learning, character development,
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and interpersonal growth as tools for leadership development in the boardroom and beyond.
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Chloe has trained around the world, including in South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, and Israel.
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Her clients have included high school and college students, government agencies, business teams, and many more.
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She's lectured in universities across America, including Harvard and Georgetown.
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Her work has been covered in the Atlantic magazine, Psychology Today.
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Her writings have appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
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And Chloe spoke a while ago with my daughter, Michaela, and Michaela enjoyed speaking with her and having her as a guest
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and suggested that I look Chloe up and I was instantly interested in her theoretical approach
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and I thought it would give us an opportunity to talk about psychological issues and cultural issues.
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And away we go. So, Chloe, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me.
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And the first question I have for you, if you don't mind, is why in the world did you agree to talk to me?
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This is such a funny question to me because I've actually been a big fan of yours for a long time.
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I saw you speak in New York City, or actually in Long Island City, a few years ago, specifically.
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And I read your book, Maps of Meaning, last year.
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And I think it's interesting that I decided to read Maps of Meaning during COVID.
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And I actually saw your lecture series on Maps of Meaning first before reading it.
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So I have been in conversation with you in a sense for a very long time now.
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And I counted it a great honor and a privilege to be able to talk to you today.
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Well, that should make you radically unpopular, I would say, all of that.
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And then I actually reread my underlined notes before this conversation just to try to prepare myself.
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I put an audio version of it out, and I think that's probably easier for people because the sentences are so long that reading it out loud enabled me to sort of emphasize some parts and de-emphasize others.
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And I think that was a good hint as to the underlying meaning.
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But, okay, so, well, so let's talk about what you're doing first.
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What is it that you're doing as far as you're concerned?
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And with regards to, let's, we'll focus on the anti-racism issue, I guess.
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So on a very simple level, I have a startup called Theory of Enchantment, and we do anti-racism work.
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And the way we understand the act of anti-racism is psychologically rooted.
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And I like to say that we take a page out of the sages of the civil rights movement.
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So Dr. King, James Baldwin, individuals like that.
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Our understanding of supremacist ways of thinking is psychological.
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So the idea is that supremacist ways of thinking occur when a human being experiences some kind of insecurity, deep insecurity within themselves.
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It could be a feeling of a loss of identity, lack of belonging, some kind of self-contempt for whatever reason.
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And then they project that feeling onto the other that looks different from them in order to feel better about themselves as a defensive mechanism.
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So Theory of Enchantment says that if that is the case, if that is how this works as human beings, then we have to engage in a series of practices to be in right relationship with ourselves, the totality of ourselves, the complexity of ourselves, so that we become less likely to overcompensate, less likely to project in the first place.
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So that's essentially what the Theory of Enchantment is all about.
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So let me ask you a couple of questions about that.
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So I put together some topics for a potential discussion a while back.
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So I thought I might address some of the more progressive claims in this discussion.
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And I believe the yes and no answers to both of those.
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So one of the things I kind of outlined in Maps of Meaning, I think, is that there are two sources of virulent racism.
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And one is universal, as far as I can tell, looking at the anthropological literature.
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So one of the things you see that's characteristic of human societies, regardless of their size and location, is that there's a strong proclivity for the members of those societies to regard those within the society as human.
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This is particularly true of isolated, you can particularly see this in isolated tribes as human and all other humans that aren't in the tribal group as not human.
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And that's really, it seems really deeply rooted.
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And so you even see it in chimpanzees, our closest biological relatives.
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So the chimps arrange themselves so that they can function within their own troop, let's say, without tearing each other into pieces, except on occasion.
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But the chimps will send raiding parties of males around the boundaries, essentially.
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And if they encounter non-chimp chimps, foreigners, let's say, even if they were once part of that troop and had moved, if they outnumber them, they'll often tear them to pieces.
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And that's a, that was discovered in the 1970s.
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And it was a major discovery because it showed how deeply rooted this in-group, out-group differentiation is, you know, that it manifests itself even in our closest animal relative.
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And so if you say, are all white people racist, the answer to that is probably yes.
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But the corollary is, well, that's probably true of all people.
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And so it's, it's the problem with the proposal that all white people are racist is that the fact that a skin color is listed in the proposition, it's a political move, and it decreases, it underplays the critical severity of the problem.
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Right? Like, if it's just white people, that's, that's not a big problem.
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But if it's all people, and even our closest relatives, it's like, man, we've got something to overcome.
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And then this is more relevant to what you said, I would say, is, given that intrinsic in-group preference and out-group hatred that could easily be kindled, and that might be there, like, deep, and even from the beginning, are there ways that we act as individuals that make that more and less likely?
00:10:02.000
Exactly. And that has more to do, I think, with the psychological development issue that you were describing.
00:10:07.000
So if I'm bitter, and unhappy, and resentful, and arrogant, and hostile, then that proclivity to derogate out-group members is going to be extremely attractive to me.
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And so if I get my own house in order, well, then I'm less likely to need a target for my unexamined malevolence and violence, and more likely to be able to get that intrinsic out-group, in-group, out-group differentiation under some modicum of control.
00:10:38.000
Yeah. I think, ultimately, as you just described, the proposal that it is only white people is actually a misapprehension of the human condition, and a misunderstanding of the fact that this proclivity exists within every single one of us.
00:10:54.420
And, you know, I take a page from, you know, Jungian philosophy, or Jungian psychology, which argues that a lot of this enters into the world, or the realm of the shadow.
00:11:07.140
So the shadow is everything we do not like about ourselves that we project onto the other.
00:11:11.360
And if a person is bitter and resentful, as you said, about all the things that they dislike about themselves, and they haven't worked on themselves, and, again, they haven't become in right relationship with themselves, then they're far more likely to take that, and instead of dealing with themselves, project that element onto the other, and then see themselves as superior to the other.
00:11:33.100
And that's where supremacist ways of thinking come from.
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It can also be in-group, as you just described, with chimpanzees.
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It doesn't have to be strictly racial or ethnic.
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Like, there's plenty of conflict between, let's say, groups of isolated people who are of the same race.
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So, obviously, the racial distinction isn't the only distinction.
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Now, we could have a reasonable discussion between left and right wing about, well, here's some other issues.
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Like, okay, well, given that proclivity for out-group derogation and the temptation to use your violent tendencies on the other, what exacerbates that?
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And so, one of the propositions we're wrestling with is, well, your own psychological lack of development.
00:12:26.680
So, if you were a better person, maybe you could get that under control.
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And that implies you could be a better or worse person.
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But there's another issue, too, that the left concentrates on pretty constantly, which is...
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And this is a reasonable question, is that if you see a society where one group, on average, has more power, authority, than the other group,
00:12:47.440
does the temptation posed by that power and authority exacerbate the proclivity for racism?
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So, then you could have a conversation about whether being white in America, let's say, tempts white people more towards racism than not.
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But you could have the contrary conversation, too.
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And you could say, well, are those who are on average, say, speaking in groups, more towards the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution,
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because they're somewhat alienated and potentially bitter about that, and perhaps for good reason.
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Perhaps maybe they're more tempted towards racism because things aren't going so well for them.
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But it's a nice starting place is, look, this is this problem that it's hard for us to wrap our loving arms around the out-group.
00:13:40.720
Yeah, well, I think there's also this misconception that there's no alienation if you are in power,
00:13:48.240
or one experiences no kind of alienation, or no sense of alienation, if you have, quote-unquote, material power,
00:13:59.560
Yeah, well, it's an interesting weakness, I would say, of socialist arguments in general,
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is that there's a tremendous critique of the structure of the economic system,
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but there's also the presupposition that if you just had enough money, you'd be doing,
00:14:20.840
Well, and there's also problems that money doesn't solve.
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And there's, so, so, it would be lovely if material security actually produced full security.
00:14:34.560
So, so we seem to be reasonably in alignment about that.
00:14:39.020
So, now, practically speaking, tell me what you're doing and how often you're called on.
00:14:47.880
So, look, the corporate world has become rife with D, well, DEIs, but D-I-E is how I like
00:14:56.520
to phrase it because I'm not very happy about it.
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The notion of this catchphrase, diversity, inclusivity, and equity.
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And there are training programs everywhere to hypothetically increase people's awareness
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And I think the evidence that those programs work is extraordinarily weak.
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And there's a fair bit of evidence that they're actually counterproductive, which I find more
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But that's the, that's the practical landscape for your activities at the moment.
00:15:30.980
You're working essentially as a consultant as well as a writer?
00:15:34.200
Primarily as a consultant, I do some writing here and there, but it's primarily consulting.
00:15:38.860
And, you know, people can basically either enroll in our online course, which we have,
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or the companies can bring us in to facilitate workshops that elucidate the essence of the
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course or kind of serve as an appetizer or a teaser to the course.
00:16:01.820
Because there's obviously a huge market for this.
00:16:04.300
So, so why your thing and, and how, why are you sure that you're not doing harm just out
00:16:12.500
I'll try to answer the first few questions first.
00:16:15.620
So, so we've actually had no outbound marketing strategy to date.
00:16:22.620
So basically I've been interviewed by a number of different publications and on a number of
00:16:27.720
And those are the things that drive people to discover the theory of enchantment.
00:16:32.740
Um, there's been no paid marketing outside of, you know, just me showing up on a podcast
00:16:40.200
Um, and one of the other drivers, so we have that piece, but the other piece is that a lot
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of companies are bringing in these more toxic diversity and inclusion programs.
00:16:50.440
Um, and they're wreaking havoc in the workplace.
00:16:53.240
They're actually causing justify, justify that claim.
00:16:55.780
Cause that's pretty radical claim that they're wreaking havoc.
00:16:58.220
Those are, those are fighting words, let's say.
00:17:03.260
So I have been told by folks on our, on demo calls that we have with potential clients.
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I've been told these stories about how they bring in very specific diversity and inclusion
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programs where people are encouraged to segregate themselves based upon skin color.
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Their, their lived experiences are assumed because of their skin color.
00:17:23.280
And this ends up fostering a kind of resentment, um, on the part of people of all different
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Um, and it also ends up fostering a kind of animosity between peoples of different backgrounds,
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And so then these companies end up looking for a kind of bomb or kind of, uh, remedy to
00:17:55.460
Uh, so, so, but they're looking for some kind of medicine to fix the situation that they
00:18:00.680
unwittingly brought in and didn't, you know, um, totally oblivious to.
00:18:06.320
So that's your typical experience is that you you're being brought in after the D EI process
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It's either that or an individual or a group of individuals in an organization.
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They're being told that this is the way to do diversity and inclusion, but it's not sitting
00:18:27.760
It's not, they feel intuitively that something's off.
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And then they go out and search for alternative approaches and then they may come across theory
00:18:40.340
So I wanted to touch on something that you mentioned about the D E I process, the idea
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that it's another one of these propositions that's worthy of investigation, the validity
00:18:56.920
Are you an unquestionable authority on the nature of your lived experience?
00:19:03.980
It's the same as those other questions that we discussed, because there's obviously a domain
00:19:09.100
of subjective experience that you have unique access to, about which in some sense I can
00:19:18.400
Like if I see that you're in pain, if you tell me you're in pain, I can decide whether
00:19:25.660
I can decide whether or not that is a credible claim as far as I'm concerned, but I cannot
00:19:30.600
tell ever exactly the nature of your experience.
00:19:35.020
And so in some sense, you are an expert, an incontrovertible expert on some aspects of
00:19:43.540
The question is, well, what's the universalizing significance of that?
00:19:48.320
And so just because it's true for you doesn't mean it's true for everyone.
00:19:52.680
Just because it's true for you doesn't mean that it's true for all people who share any
00:19:56.880
particular element of your immutable characteristics.
00:19:59.900
All of the rest of that is questionable, but a lot of these claims fly because, well, they're
00:20:08.760
You could say, well, is the U.S. structurally racist?
00:20:12.080
Well, it was set up for the benefit of the people who set it up fundamentally.
00:20:19.200
So in some sense, all cultures are set up to benefit, particularly the people who set them
00:20:25.380
And then if there's other people who come in, well, you know, they have a harder time
00:20:34.200
But the no is important to assess as well as the yes, right?
00:20:37.180
To get an even-handed take on these and also to find out how universal this is or how particular
00:20:45.760
Like all countries are set up for the benefit of a relatively homogenous group because otherwise
00:20:55.000
If it isn't homogenous, people aren't playing the same game, right?
00:20:59.600
So the fundamental problem is homogeneity versus heterogeneity.
00:21:04.700
That's a really deep problem, you know, because the problem is, well, how do we all get along
00:21:09.140
together and play nice like civilized children in the playground while simultaneously being
00:21:16.540
quite different from one another at all sorts of levels of analysis?
00:21:21.780
Well, this is the essence of the American project, which is ultimately a conundrum, right?
00:21:27.220
Because our motto, our motto is e pluribus unum, out of many one, which is actually an incredibly
00:21:33.500
difficult thing to accomplish, given the human condition.
00:21:38.140
And so I would say that America is different, quite different from many other countries in
00:21:43.400
the sense that it does hold this up as its motto, as its ideal to which it aspires to.
00:21:48.160
But it also simultaneously has this very storied history of not just having a homogenous culture
00:21:54.820
and the typical sense of the word, but of course, also in perpetuating, you know, systemic cruelty
00:22:03.960
In this case, speaking particularly of African-Americans.
00:22:07.540
So you have these two warring trends or histories within the American system, which makes this
00:22:15.600
question of how to have these civilized children playing together a deeper question and a more
00:22:22.520
difficult question to solve because America holds itself up as having this model or having
00:22:32.660
Well, it's great ideal if you can manage it because you get all the benefits of diversity,
00:22:36.780
which means, and so we can talk about diversity.
00:22:45.560
And someone who thinks differently than you might have the key to solving the problem and
00:22:52.640
So that's another issue about the diversity mantra.
00:22:56.340
It's like, well, yes, diversity, but then we might want to specify, well, let's really
00:23:02.180
think hard about what we mean here with diversity.
00:23:08.720
I think the best way to conceptualize diversity across human beings is certainly not racial.
00:23:17.840
You can certainly conceptualize diversity usefully in terms of personality.
00:23:21.440
And we have a pretty good taxonomy of personality.
00:23:26.000
It's not perfect, but, you know, extroverts have their utility and introverts have theirs.
00:23:31.620
And highly creative people can be great entrepreneurs, but they're very easily scattered.
00:23:37.380
And it's burdensome to be interested in everything, let's say.
00:23:43.260
Agreeable people are compassionate and warm, but it's easy for them to get resentful.
00:23:49.000
Disagreeable people are competitive and rather blunt.
00:23:53.100
And so they can be hard to get along with, but they'll tell you what they think.
00:23:58.580
And so we wouldn't have that five-dimensional diversity of human beings if there weren't ecological
00:24:14.960
Well, sometimes it's sometimes the best thing to be is an extrovert.
00:24:19.480
So imagine you're like extroverted and really low in negative emotion.
00:24:23.900
So you're, you don't have much fear and you're out there.
00:24:27.180
Well, you're probably a target in an authoritarian state.
00:24:33.560
Because you just won't shut the hell up and you're not afraid.
00:24:37.000
So being an emotionally stable extrovert, that's a lot of fun.
00:24:40.340
There's a lot of positive emotion, but you're a performer.
00:24:45.760
And so maybe the introverted neurotic who is hiding at home is much more likely to survive
00:24:53.600
And you can walk through all of the traits and say, well, in this situation, that trait is
00:25:00.100
In this situation, that trait is more appropriate.
00:25:03.000
We need the diversity that feeds our, and all of those intrinsic differences shape the
00:25:11.740
Well, I mean, extroverts think like extroverts and so on.
00:25:15.380
You see that effect even in political affiliation, at least to some degree.
00:25:19.380
So the idea that diversity is useful, that's a good idea.
00:25:25.980
And, but then the manner in which that's conceptualized, there's the rub.
00:25:32.360
And now you said in your work, you're taking a page from the more classical civil rights
00:25:38.780
So those would be, I would say, in some sense, the traditionally recognized moral leaders
00:25:46.620
Is that a reasonable way of conceptualizing Martin Luther King, for example?
00:25:56.460
Well, I would say that the black community recognizes both Dr. King and let's say Malcolm
00:26:05.160
X as, if not completely, you know, virtuous in every sense of the word, certainly capturing
00:26:20.580
So I can only really explain this or try to explain this in psychological terms.
00:26:26.060
So I think Martin Luther King represented the being who had a sense of pathos, but a sense
00:26:33.200
of the fact that something was common to the entire human race and believed that it was
00:26:41.640
better to suffer injustice than commit injustice, because ultimately the person who commits injustice,
00:26:47.960
it becomes corrupted and suffers an even greater kind of suffering.
00:26:53.580
And so this is why he advocated for nonviolence and things of that nature.
00:26:58.020
Whereas Malcolm X represented the more aggressive, reactive response to being beaten down.
00:27:06.020
And I think that the black community would argue that both of these personalities are necessary
00:27:15.640
That's a good example of diversity and personality right there.
00:27:18.660
My suspicions are that Malcolm X was less agreeable, technically speaking, than Martin Luther King.
00:27:29.660
And he can make a coherent political case from that perspective.
00:27:34.560
But then he started, which is interesting, unfortunately, in the end he was killed, but before he was
00:27:42.220
So when he went to Mecca and he saw white people who were Muslims, who he had no conception that
00:27:50.160
He realized that what he was being taught from the nation of Islam, which taught that white
00:27:55.200
people, ironically, which taught that white people were inferior, were an inferior race.
00:28:01.040
He learned to see his fellow white brother and sister as in fact a brother or sister, and
00:28:08.180
he began to change, which is what got him into trouble.
00:28:11.660
But still he represents, and from a personality perspective, this more combative response.
00:28:16.920
And I think the proper answer to that is not the conservative answer, which says we like
00:28:23.960
Dr. King and we dislike Malcolm X, but actually to be in conversation with both.
00:28:29.600
And because the danger becomes if you sort of repress or suppress the Malcolm X type response,
00:28:40.440
Malcolm X represents a natural human response to someone being beaten down, right?
00:28:45.160
And if you repress it, then it becomes a shadow that you're not looking towards and you're
00:28:51.100
And that can become so unhealthy down the line, so toxic down the line, if you don't recognize
00:28:56.040
that impulse within yourself to respond with anger or to respond with aggression.
00:29:01.120
So I think that the healthy approach to this is to study both Malcolm X and Dr. King and
00:29:10.860
What can we take from each in order to synthesize and integrate a holistic way of being?
00:29:22.280
So you're called in, at least upon occasion, when the traditional DEI approach has gone wrong.
00:29:31.220
And it isn't surprising to me that it goes wrong, because what it purports to do is unbelievably
00:29:39.660
So, and speaking as a clinical psychologist in relationship to such problems, there's many
00:29:49.160
more ways to make it worse than there are to make it better.
00:29:52.460
And so, what is it that you do that's so different when you go into a company under the rubric of
00:30:03.240
How would you differentiate yourself from the DEI crowd?
00:30:10.240
And we should go back to the issue of inadvertent harm producing as well, right?
00:30:17.480
Because how do you know it's not going to go terribly wrong?
00:30:25.720
And again, this goes back to our animating main idea, which is that anyone can fall into
00:30:35.520
It doesn't matter if you're black, white, anyone can fall into it because it's a part of the
00:30:41.280
And it's this outgrowth of projecting your own insecurities.
00:30:47.780
They are treat people like human beings, not political abstractions, criticize to uplift
00:30:54.220
and empower, never to tear down or destroy, and try to root everything you do in love and
00:31:01.380
And I can define what I mean by love a little bit later.
00:31:06.640
And so, all of the exercises that we give people are essentially in service of having people
00:31:19.340
And the exercises are not just dry or rote or strictly academic.
00:31:25.600
The exercises actually use the arts as a medium to dispel these teachings.
00:31:32.800
So, what I mean by that is, let's take the first principle, treat people like human beings,
00:31:40.680
We'll take an artist like Kendrick Lamar, who has this song called DNA, where he says in
00:31:46.940
the song, I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside my DNA.
00:31:51.140
And, you know, Kendrick Lamar is a Pulitzer Prize winning hip-hop artist.
00:31:57.040
If they're not familiar specifically with his raps, they understand who he is in the
00:32:05.420
And then we say, okay, what do you think the artist is saying here about the complexity
00:32:09.740
of what it means to be a human being when he says, I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside
00:32:16.840
And you ask that rather than saying what the answer to that is.
00:32:20.320
We ask it to the participants in our workshops.
00:32:32.940
And so, what comes out of that is, oh, I think the artist is saying that we're all capable
00:32:39.620
Or we're all capable of experiencing complex emotions simultaneously.
00:32:51.520
And so, that naturally leads to the understanding of the fact that the human being is in a way
00:32:59.400
And that I, as a human being, because I am capable of doing good and evil, I can then
00:33:08.640
see someone who has made a mistake or perceive someone who has made a mistake, let's say, who
00:33:14.320
has insulted me personally, for example, I can still see that person with the fullness
00:33:20.940
And I can see that person as, just as that person just did something harmful, I can also
00:33:25.820
see that person as equally capable of doing something good, even as I am capable of those
00:33:30.960
And so, what ends up happening through this process is I am, I start to become in relationship
00:33:37.140
with my own complexity and my own inexhaustibility.
00:33:42.780
And then I begin to perceive complexity in the other.
00:33:49.360
That's the anti-stereotype, that's the anti-stereotype.
00:33:51.500
Right, because then I'm less likely to caricature the other.
00:33:56.920
Yeah, because one of the things that bedevils social psychology continually, there's many
00:34:01.820
things, is that there's often a failure to distinguish bias and prejudice from heuristic.
00:34:10.520
So, like, we simplify virtually everything we perceive and interact with all the time, automatically.
00:34:17.980
We can't, and it's a good thing we do, because, well, this inexhaustibility that you just
00:34:26.740
That's the thing, is that if you're wandering around enraptured by the inexhaustible complexity
00:34:32.460
of everything, like, good luck trying to cross the street, right?
00:34:36.600
So, we're, what we see, technically, what we see mostly is memory.
00:34:42.240
And the memory is a, it's a heuristic, it's a supposition.
00:34:49.700
Like, I noticed, for example, I wrote about this in Beyond Order, I can really remember
00:34:57.060
I can remember, I can picture every house, but I can't picture the houses in the neighborhood
00:35:02.420
I live in now, even though I've lived there 20 years.
00:35:04.540
And it's because I see house, generic house, I don't see what I saw when I was a kid, which
00:35:14.860
And it's a good thing, because, well, when I, you see this when you're wandering around
00:35:18.700
with two-year-olds, they're completely enraptured by everything.
00:35:24.900
But they have absolutely no ability to engage in structured, goal-directed activity.
00:35:30.500
It's one of the delightful things about them, but it also means they have to be cared for
00:35:34.760
And so, we have this, now, what you're proposing is that if you get people to reflect on their
00:35:40.860
own complexity, including their moral complexity, so they open up a space and think about how
00:35:47.140
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Yes, and also you can begin to understand why, how people could come to the conclusions they've come
00:38:53.740
to, or how people can make the decisions they've made, even while simultaneously disagreeing with
00:38:59.940
those decisions. And so you can disagree without dehumanizing.
00:39:08.060
Things can go very badly wrong in your life. And part of the reason also to appreciate the
00:39:13.220
diverse complexity of other people is that they might be able to offer you a solution when you
00:39:17.200
can't, when you really need one, because they think differently than you do.
00:39:21.580
And so, I guess meditation on your capacity for suffering is also a possible avenue to appreciating
00:39:28.900
the diversity of other people. I think this is what Plato argued in Gorgeous, with his retelling
00:39:36.720
of Socrates. And Socrates is sort of, Socrates is someone who's trying to pursue the truth at all
00:39:43.160
costs. And Calicles, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that name correctly, but Calicles was the
00:39:48.160
senator who believed that truth was basically defined by brute strength or power, which should sound
00:39:57.080
familiar because it is familiar to our times these days. But Socrates goes into this thing about
00:40:04.060
pathos, about the suffering that is common to all human beings. And once you understand
00:40:09.100
the suffering that is common to all human beings, and not only have you suffered, but all human
00:40:13.580
beings suffer, you're able to become in existential relationship with other humans. And without this
00:40:19.960
understanding, you will never get there. And this is, this has a connection to the arts, because it is
00:40:27.280
the awareness of suffering that is present in some, so much of the West, in particular, is artistic
00:40:34.620
genius. It's in Shakespeare. It's in the African American blues tradition. It's in Dostoevsky, right?
00:40:41.940
It's in Steinbeck, this understanding of human suffering, which is ultimately inescapable. And
00:40:48.460
this is also why the idea that raising the material standards of everyone, which again, is important
00:40:54.600
to a certain extent, but is ultimately insufficient, because it will not enable us to escape the ultimate
00:41:01.120
suffering that is a part of the essence of the reality of existence.
00:41:04.840
When you say, so when you say treat people like human beings, not political abstractions, that, that's
00:41:14.660
really, you just outlined in some sense, what that means in terms of your practical approach, you're assuming
00:41:21.180
a simplistic stereotype, you're assuming that that's more likely to be applied to people who are different, which I
00:41:28.160
think is true. And that the way through that is meditation on complexity and suffering, some and
00:41:39.780
Okay, okay. It also means, correct me if I'm wrong, that your unit of analysis is the individual,
00:41:48.120
Okay. And that definitely puts you in philosophical opposition to the purveyors of the typical DEI
00:41:53.720
approach, because their fundamental level of analysis, I believe, it seems to be the case,
00:41:58.480
they pronounce, state that all the time, that it's, it's the group in one form or another.
00:42:05.360
Yes, but I think they're ultimately confused. I don't think it's, I don't think it's deliberate.
00:42:13.960
I think, I think there's some confusion happening.
00:42:17.180
Yeah, well, these are complex issues, right? And, and there are groups of people and, and group
00:42:22.200
identity has a reality. And sometimes it's an important reality. And so figuring out how to rank
00:42:28.980
these levels of analysis is no easy business. That's the, that's at the essence of the problem
00:42:35.800
in some sense, right? Is it? How do you conceptualize the relationship between the individual and the
00:42:40.840
group, given that both those levels of analysis exist?
00:42:43.660
Yeah. Well, I actually think, I think it's deeper on some level than that. And I have a theory
00:42:49.040
that I want to run by you. I would be very curious to hear your thoughts. So if you look at what a lot
00:42:55.840
of diversity and inclusion consultants say in their slideshows, they say that they are trying to fight
00:43:03.040
against quote unquote whiteness. How do they define whiteness? They define whiteness as,
00:43:09.260
um, they define it as either or ways of thinking.
00:43:16.420
And these are, I'm quoting. So, you know, either or ways of thinking, power hoarding,
00:43:21.600
analytical forms of thinking, linear forms of thinking, et cetera.
00:43:26.300
Yeah. It's completely, it's completely, it's, it's really something to see that.
00:43:29.920
It's incoherent at best. But if you look at, if you look at what they say they want,
00:43:36.680
they say they want a kind of interdependent interdependency, inter or an understanding
00:43:44.400
of our interdependence as human beings, they want, um, the sort of relational way of being
00:43:51.380
right. Um, and, and what they're essentially arguing for, if I, if I read between the lines
00:43:57.020
correctly, um, is an end to a kind of alienation has taken over culturally their lives. And that's
00:44:05.960
interesting because these diversity consultants tend to be more or less left wing. But if you
00:44:12.700
were to go into right wing circles, there's this great book by, uh, Timothy Carney called
00:44:18.580
Alienated America, which looks into how many conservative white rural based Americans voted
00:44:28.580
for Trump or why they voted for Trump in the 2016 primary. So not in the general election in the
00:44:34.420
primary, when they had other Republicans, they could vote for. And he argues that the reason why
00:44:41.620
the people who voted for Trump voted for him was because they were suffering from incredible amounts
00:44:46.580
of alienation. And he traced it back to an experience of, um, you could actually see which counties that
00:44:54.520
voted for, let's say Trump over Mitt Romney. These were counties that were more likely suffering from
00:44:59.780
alcoholism and deaths of despair and opioid crises and things of that nature. Um, the disruption of civic
00:45:07.280
institutional life, et cetera. So I find that this is fascinating because what this means is
00:45:13.540
you have on the one hand, left wing diversity consultants who are confusing. I think they're
00:45:19.800
conflating race with culture in many ways. And, but what they're calling for is an end to alienation.
00:45:26.720
Well, simultaneously, the way that they're calling for it is alienating towards white rural right-wing
00:45:33.880
conservatives who for a whole host of reasons, but including that are influenced to vote for
00:45:40.000
individuals like Donald Trump, which means there's a common theme or which suggests there's a common
00:45:45.060
theme and the common theme is alienation. So what is it about alienation that creates this
00:45:54.220
kind of behavior in people, regardless of whether they're on the right or the left to, um, project
00:46:02.680
animosity toward the other, toward the out group. What is the role that alienation plays in this entire
00:46:09.480
conversation? And how do you think, what do you think the alienation, what does alienation mean?
00:46:15.160
What does, what's your understanding of, of that as a phenomenon? Yeah. So I think that the issue
00:46:23.700
is actually civilizational and not political. Um, and so there are, you will find that there are,
00:46:32.420
there are places where I agree with certain left wing consultants and there are places where I will
00:46:37.660
agree with certain right wing critics, but I actually think that what's happening is that
00:46:43.820
fundamentally in America, we've lost a capacity to relate to one another. We've lost a capacity to be
00:46:50.880
in a relational way of being with each other. And actually I would argue that that goes back all the
00:46:57.540
way to certain aspects of the enlightenment and in particular Descartes. So I would argue, so
00:47:03.840
Descartes is considered by many to be the father of the enlightenment, but he came up with this idea
00:47:10.860
known as Cartesian duality, which argues that there's a distinction between the mind and the
00:47:18.020
body. Descartes was not even convinced that his own body existed. So he, his belief was that there
00:47:24.480
was a distinction between the mind and the body and that not only was there a distinction, but these
00:47:30.960
entities, so to speak were opposed to each other. And so there was this incredibly, incredible
00:47:37.600
philosophy of rupture that was perpetuated throughout the enlightenment, because what that means, if you
00:47:43.680
deny the body fundamentally as relevant or as of significance, what you end up denying is the
00:47:52.480
relevance of human suffering. What you end up denying is the experience of certain aspects of reality
00:48:00.960
that are fundamentally embodied experiences, including things like pain and suffering. Ironically,
00:48:08.080
there is another theme or element within Western history, which exists in the arts that are part of
00:48:15.200
Western history and Western civilization that do not deny the body. And so I think that this alienation
00:48:21.820
ultimately is centuries in the making and centuries in the coming. And it comes from this philosophy,
00:48:30.600
which says, well, there's also, there's also a universal element to that, I would say.
00:48:37.480
And this is something that the Jungians have highlighted, I would say, perhaps more
00:48:43.640
accurately than, although existentialist philosophers and psychologists put their finger on it too, which
00:48:48.760
is this idea of, this is a Heideggerian idea of thrownness, is sort of the arbitrariness of our
00:48:55.320
existence. So, you know, you happen to be a black woman, and I happen to be a white man,
00:48:59.720
and we didn't choose that, it's just pop, here we are, and there are preconditions to our existence that
00:49:05.080
we didn't choose. We're also beneficiaries of and puppets of our, of the culture that we happen to
00:49:14.520
inhabit. And the culture was made by people who weren't us, and who are no longer alive, and so
00:49:20.600
it's not our own creation, and none of us feel entirely comfortable within it. That's an
00:49:25.560
inescapable part of the human condition. It's, we're subject, you know, we're subjugated to
00:49:30.840
suffering mortality, that's the biological hell in some sense, but we're also subject to the
00:49:37.480
arbitrariness of our cultural constructions. And, and so, and that's a permanent existential
00:49:43.640
problem. And then there would be, what would you, idiosyncratic variants of it that would be
00:49:48.280
culture-specific that are more, more, they're more, what would you say? You can use the example
00:49:56.440
of Descartes in the West in that more specific sense. So it's a universal problem, this idea of
00:50:01.320
alienation, and part of the question is how do you overcome that? And when you were talking about
00:50:06.360
sympathy with universal suffering and appreciation for complexity and diversity,
00:50:11.400
I had images of crucifixion in my imagination, thought, well, part of the reason that that
00:50:19.400
image was a very strange image, to be worshipped, to be so, to be regarded as sacred for so long,
00:50:26.520
to be so central, it is a image of the universality of suffering and inexhaustibility.
00:50:33.480
And so, and it's to see that crucified possibility in every individual, that's at the center of
00:50:41.800
Christian ethos. And, and, but also the capacity to transcend it, right? Well, that's, that's built
00:50:48.920
into that story, and it requires a death and a rebirth, right? And you can think of that psychologically,
00:50:54.520
as well as ontologically, that that's the religious question is, what does that mean,
00:50:59.320
in terms of the structure of reality? But we do redeem our crucified diversity and all the trouble
00:51:06.680
that gets us into by a sequence of deaths and rebirths, that happens every time we're wrong,
00:51:11.640
and we have to rebuild ourselves. And, and in any narrative of redemption, like the Exodus story,
00:51:18.280
you see that as well, this escape from tyranny, this descent into chaos, and then reconfiguration.
00:51:23.960
And so I thought in maps of meaning, I posited that identification with that process was
00:51:29.640
redemptive, rather than any of the states, right? It's that you are this thing that's on this journey
00:51:34.600
of continual self transcendence. And yeah, it's the process itself. But the issue is that
00:51:41.480
Cartesian duality, or one of the issues is that Cartesian duality, and its obsession with certainty,
00:51:47.720
and mathematical certainty, has a problem with the unknown, an existential problem with the unknown,
00:51:57.400
because it's fixated with certainty. And I know that in maps of meaning, you draw this
00:52:01.720
connection to, I believe it was Milton's depiction of the adversary of Satan, and, and, and how the evil
00:52:10.600
being is not someone who represents the other, but someone who cannot handle the unknown, and who is
00:52:16.920
fixated on certainty of an absolute sense. And in being fixated with certainty claims to be God.
00:52:24.840
And I can see that trend within the Cartesian revolution, or the Cartesian element
00:52:31.000
of the enlightenment. In being obsessed with certainty, you deny your shadow, you deny all the parts of
00:52:38.040
yourself that you do not like, and then you project that shadow onto the other. And then that causes so many
00:52:43.240
complications. And that's putting it mildly down the line.
00:52:47.160
But how deep into the woods, weeds, let's say, do you go in these seminars?
00:52:51.800
Oh, not this deep, not as deep as this conversation. But this is what my brain is
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00:54:00.920
Let's go to another principle. Criticize to uplift, empower, never to tear down, never to destroy.
00:54:09.000
Never are strong words, but I understand what you're aiming at, because it's in relationship
00:54:13.480
to the third principle, I believe. When I talk to students about literary criticism, let's say,
00:54:21.800
so let's say I'm, and this is a problem that needs to be discussed in some detail in our culture,
00:54:26.760
generally speaking. I mean, you can take a look at a figure like Freud or Nietzsche, let's say, and
00:54:32.200
if you're inclined to, you can find something they said that you're going to find deeply offensive,
00:54:38.680
and then you can throw them out completely, which means, well, it simplifies your life,
00:54:43.320
because then you don't have to read them, right? And that does make your life a lot simpler.
00:54:47.320
Right, but what you lose is whatever these people had to say. And so criticism is separating the wheat
00:54:56.360
from the chaff, like in its proper sense. You criticize something so that you can take away
00:55:02.440
what's of value and leave behind what isn't. And so that proper criticism isn't destructive.
00:55:13.080
It's redemptive. And you would criticize harshly for a variety of reasons. You might want to hurt
00:55:20.440
someone. But even more simply than that, you might just want to ignore them, because we really want to
00:55:27.560
ignore almost everything. And no wonder, like, how many things can you deal with? And so if you can
00:55:31.800
write someone off, you can ignore them. And perhaps that's, that's more straightforward. But the
00:55:39.400
the criticism to uplift, it's part of the therapeutic process, you know, I mean, partly what you're doing
00:55:47.880
if you do their individual psychotherapy with someone is you're, you're trying to help them decide
00:55:53.800
what to keep and what not to keep, and what to develop and what not to develop. And you can't
00:55:58.440
tell them that because you actually don't know who they are. You actually don't know. And if you do
00:56:03.080
tell them as a therapist, most of the time, A, it won't work, you'll just alienate them. And, and B,
00:56:09.640
well, what if you're wrong? So you have to ask them, it's like, and you have to help them.
00:56:15.880
Collaborative empiricism is what the cognitive behaviorists describe it as like, well,
00:56:20.760
watch your life for a week, see when you're doing better, and when you're doing worse,
00:56:27.000
and see what you're doing when you're doing better. And when you're doing worse,
00:56:30.760
and let's see if we can get you doing more of what makes you better and less of what makes you worse.
00:56:35.480
And that is a understanding of suffering. It's an appreciation of complexity. There's humility in it,
00:56:41.880
because what makes you stable and strong, productive, able to overcome your suffering,
00:56:49.080
is it going to be exactly the same as what works for me? Definitely not. And you may not know what
00:56:53.480
it is, because you're complex beyond your own capacity to understand. That's for sure. Yeah,
00:56:59.320
it's a problem. Well, that's the inexhaustibility, right? That goes right.
00:57:03.800
Right. So criticized to practically speaking, how do you teach that to people in your seminars? How do you
00:57:10.520
go about? Well, we teach people to do shadow work, or kind of element of shadow work, where we say to
00:57:18.520
people, identify someone that you do not like, or whose behavior you don't like. And by don't like,
00:57:26.360
I don't mean simply, you find it problematic. I mean, behavior that triggers your ego in such a way
00:57:33.800
where you begin to see yourself as greater than or superior to that person. It's a very specific
00:57:40.360
definition. So identify someone whose behavior, I'll put it more succinctly, triggers your ego,
00:57:47.560
right? And then identify what is it about that behavior that triggers your ego, and then identify
00:57:53.560
how that behavior shows up in you. And what that does is it enables you to
00:58:00.040
to see the other person's faults as faults, but not as something completely a human, right?
00:58:09.640
Or foreign to your own capacity to engage in those faults, which makes your critique of them
00:58:16.360
more likely to be rooted in a desire to see them be better or become their better selves, as opposed to
00:58:25.560
a desire to see them fall, which is still, if the intention is to see them fall, to harm them,
00:58:33.080
you're still in that inflated ego, you're still operating from that desire to have yourself be
00:58:38.520
superior to that person, or to prove that you are better than that person. In which case, nothing has
00:58:44.360
really changed in that exchange. And this is important, because if you criticize to tear down and
00:58:52.120
destroy, Maya Angelou has this wonderful quote, where she says, if you tell someone over and over
00:58:59.080
again, there are nothing, there are less than nothing, they will say to you, oh, you think I am nothing,
00:59:05.480
I will show you where nothing is, and they will become even worse than what you have accused them of
00:59:12.120
being. And the moral of the story is that a person cannot develop character unless they are valued.
00:59:19.240
And when I think of that quote, it's not just you deliberately or explicitly telling someone
00:59:25.000
vocally, you are nothing. It's also you showing them, right? If a person, if a young person grows up
00:59:30.600
in a dilapidated home, where the parents have basically all but abandoned the child,
00:59:35.960
the message that is being sent to that human being is that you are nothing, right? And then that child,
00:59:41.800
more likely than not, unless there's some mentor or something that intervenes in the process,
00:59:48.040
the child will grow up actually internalizing the message, thinking that they are nothing and they
00:59:52.600
will act accordingly. So our speech that we use to critique or to correct others, and indeed ourselves,
01:00:02.440
is super critical. And we have to make sure we're not compounding or making worse a situation
01:00:09.640
instead of ameliorating it, which ultimately should be our intention.
01:00:12.920
A bunch of ideas were going through my head while you were describing that. One of the things that
01:00:22.760
I found deeply soul troubling on my tours was the hunger that people had for
01:00:33.480
words of encouragement. I was struck to my core by how many people were starving for words of
01:00:46.360
encouragement. And I mean, I really mean that quite literally words of encouragement,
01:00:51.720
words that would help them be courageous. And, and, and part of that was the message,
01:00:56.520
I suppose the message that each of them as individuals had something unique to offer,
01:01:11.000
that everyone would benefit from, that we would all be lesser without that offering. And I thought
01:01:15.000
that was important and, and part of the purpose of moral striving, and that that was true of everyone. And
01:01:23.480
I, I, I, it's still, I don't know how much that affected me to see how desperate so many people
01:01:30.920
were for words of that sort. And that's part of the alienation too, I think that's rife in our culture,
01:01:36.760
because we also have this guilt-induced proclivity to denigrate ourselves as human beings,
01:01:42.680
a cancer on the planet, that everything we do is environmentally harmful, that all our activity is
01:01:48.200
malevolent and ignorant. And I mean, we are limited and often corrupted beings, but you know,
01:01:56.040
we've only had ecological awareness as such, in some sense for like 50 years. So, you know,
01:02:04.040
how fast can we really learn this? And we are striving to live despite formidable obstacles,
01:02:14.360
natural obstacles and social obstacles. And so it's reasonable to note now and then that we don't do
01:02:21.240
so badly for, given the terrible constraints that we operate within. So that's, I guess,
01:02:29.880
part of that appreciation for the commonality of suffering and vulnerability. And so, okay,
01:02:35.240
so your level of analysis is, is, is the individual. So that's definitely different. That's
01:02:41.640
definitely different. Now, in terms of rooting everything you do in love and compassion,
01:02:48.040
let's, let's go to that. What do you mean by that exactly? I mean, cause that can easily be a cliche,
01:02:52.360
right? I mean, instantly. Yeah. So I'm pulling from two traditions, which I think you'll appreciate
01:02:59.880
two wisdom traditions. Uh, one being the Christian wisdom tradition, which is rooted in agape love.
01:03:07.320
My understanding of agape love in the Christian tradition is a kind of love that enables us to
01:03:14.120
become more human. So John Verveke, who I know is one of your colleagues talks about agape love is
01:03:21.480
the kind of love that a parent who has unconditional love directs toward a child and who in directing that
01:03:30.040
love actually enables a being to become more human, because when you're born, you're sort of this blob,
01:03:38.200
right? Uh, this helpless, defenseless blob, and then the love that a parent actually can direct to you.
01:03:46.840
If it is the ideal agape love actually enables you to become more human.
01:03:52.040
And that, that interestingly enough, that involves this criticism,
01:03:55.960
right. You know, because, well, for example, when my son was, my son is more disagreeable than my
01:04:02.360
daughter. So he pushed boundaries quite hard and it was, he's quite disagreeable in that regard. And
01:04:07.640
it was really interesting to watch him toy with a boundary. Like he would just worry that boundary
01:04:12.840
like mad. And now and then he'd go off to a daycare or something like that and interact with other kids.
01:04:18.680
And he'd come home sort of possessed by the spirit of some misbehaving child he'd encountered that day.
01:04:25.000
And he'd push us with that pattern of behavior. And sometimes that would last for a while. And my
01:04:29.480
wife and I would get together and say, look, this kid is going off the rails a little bit here for,
01:04:34.360
for a week. He doesn't get away with anything, nothing, nothing. We just clamped down on him. And
01:04:39.720
every time he deviates a tiny bit, because he was testing, testing all the time, we're going to stop him.
01:04:45.480
And every time we did that, his behavior improved, he got happier, and he liked us more.
01:04:51.880
But what we were trying to punish him, what we were trying to do is to help him draw those fine
01:04:56.760
distinctions between what constituted optimal behavior and suboptimal behavior. And that was
01:05:01.720
really true in the domain of play and humor, you know, because there's a real fine line
01:05:06.600
between being playful and teasy and funny and annoying and aggressive and narcissistic.
01:05:13.960
It's a really fine line. And so it's a lovely thing to be able to, you need that critical eye
01:05:19.800
to help guide a child for whom you want the best to understand those fine distinctions.
01:05:25.640
And that's part of separating the wheat from the chaff.
01:05:29.960
Yeah, I think you're, I hadn't made that connection before, actually, but you're right.
01:05:34.360
And I would say this is important because agape love is what Dr. King said was the ultimate ideal
01:05:43.160
that the civil rights movement aspired towards and wanted to embody. This was a part of the reason why
01:05:50.520
when people would go out and protest segregation in diners, say, before they would go out to protest,
01:05:57.400
they would actually ask themselves, am I harboring a spirit of resentment? Am I harboring a spirit of,
01:06:05.320
of rage or vengefulness? And if I am, then I'm not going to go out to protest today because I'll just
01:06:12.840
end up projecting that onto the person that I'm protesting. And they ultimately believe that even
01:06:18.520
while I am fundamentally and vehemently disagreeing with this action that these people are engaging in,
01:06:26.440
this racist action, this dehumanizing action, I want to make sure that how I comport myself
01:06:33.000
does not dehumanize you in turn. And even more to the point, the way I comport myself is informed by
01:06:39.880
the spirit of agape love, which means seeing you as made in the image of the divine, even as you are
01:06:46.760
engaging in this problematic behavior, which is a very difficult thing to do and to practice it,
01:06:54.680
like in live, when, you know, people are calling you racial slurs or people are threatening you with
01:07:00.120
lynchings or people are actually in the process of lynching you. It is an incredibly difficult thing
01:07:06.600
to practice and embody, but this attests to the strength of that movement. And I think there's so much
01:07:13.320
more we can learn from that movement. And part of the theory of enchantment's goal is to sort of
01:07:18.200
resurrect the spirit of that movement and bring it back into public discourse. And I think, because
01:07:23.960
I think it has been lost to some extent. Well, lost and just difficult in precisely the manner that you
01:07:30.920
described, right? I mean, wouldn't it be lovely if we could comport ourselves in that manner,
01:07:35.400
you know, that the goal of your interactions with someone is to call, to do what you can in all humility,
01:07:41.160
to call forth the best in them at every possible, in every possible way. And I do believe that to
01:07:47.080
some degree, you do that with, with truth in speech, with careful attention to, to your words. And,
01:07:53.000
and, you know, I've seen some of that, I would say, well, again, perhaps most particularly in the
01:07:59.240
tours that I've done talking to people about their attempts to improve themselves and, and, and their,
01:08:07.080
their, their, their desire for that element of, that's an element of the patriarchy in some sense,
01:08:12.280
right? Is that, that, that invitation to mold yourself in a certain way, but that should be
01:08:19.880
encapsulated within this, this overarching love. And what is that love? The love is that so in a more
01:08:26.680
abstract sense, the love is, you think that's a hard thing to manage, because we're all so angry about
01:08:31.320
the limited preconditions of our existence and our subjugation to tragedy and our subjugation to
01:08:36.920
tyrannical authority built into the structure of existence, then to rise above that with your best
01:08:43.000
self and still to wish for the best to manifest itself, instead of being angry and wanting revenge
01:08:49.960
for those, that terrible suffering is that's, but you know, what, what's the alternative is to make
01:08:55.800
the suffering worse, to make the tyranny worse. I mean, you can be attracted to that because you get so angry and,
01:09:00.840
and it's like, well, to hell with everything. And why? Well, because look what's happened. Look how
01:09:05.240
injustice is. Look at how much suffering there's been. It's like, well, let's ever let everything
01:09:09.960
burn. And especially those who perpetrated, but well, we know where that ends up. Hopefully we,
01:09:17.640
that isn't where we want to go. So have you seen the film? Have you seen the film Wonder Woman,
01:09:28.040
That's a good question. It's possible. I've forgotten many movies. So why did you bring it
01:09:33.960
It is fundamentally about this question, because the villain, Ares, god of war, has this perception
01:09:41.000
of human beings and says that it's not worth it. And he poses this, he poses, he has this proposal
01:09:50.360
that he offers to Wonder Woman. And he says, come with me and we'll destroy everything because man has
01:09:55.880
ruined everything. And we'll rebuild essentially a garden of Eden. And Wonder Woman's response is
01:10:01.960
basically everything you have said about man is correct, but man is also so much more.
01:10:12.440
And this is ultimately why she refuses his proposal. And it's a beautiful movie. I highly recommend it.
01:10:17.560
Even watching is something I would highly recommend.
01:10:21.560
Yeah. So that's well, this is part of that. Yes, no answer issue is that all these claims are true
01:10:26.760
in some senses, you know, as human beings, while we're capable of despoiling the planet,
01:10:31.880
and we have to be careful of that. But that it's easy for that to turn into contempt for humanity.
01:10:38.440
And that's just not the proper, that's not an answer that's going to get us anywhere. And
01:10:42.200
we like your story about the meditation that the, uh, the protesters engaged in under Martin Luther
01:10:49.480
King's direction. I mean, I've seen often when I've counseled people who are in terrible situations,
01:10:55.640
terrible legal legal situations, for example, where they're just boxed into a corner and being tortured
01:11:02.120
to death for absolutely unjust reasons. One of the things we always did while strategizing was to
01:11:19.880
And I'll tell you, like, if you're in a difficult circumstance, a really difficult circumstance,
01:11:24.360
where everything is at stake, and you drift into resentment and start making your own moral errors,
01:11:30.840
the only potential pathway to your way through might have been compromised.
01:11:41.000
Yeah, well, you're going to cause more trouble. And like, what makes you think you can take more trouble
01:11:45.400
under these circumstances? Maybe there's some thin line that you can walk that will get you out of
01:11:49.720
the situation reasonably intact. But if you fall prey to dark and unexamined motivations,
01:11:56.680
that may be the end for you that in all in all important ways.
01:12:01.960
So, and this is this is important, because there are so the part of my critique of the progressive
01:12:08.920
take on diversity and inclusion, or an aspect of it, at least is this idea that people in power,
01:12:16.280
material power, people who have material power, somehow have it all, as if people who have material
01:12:25.000
power are incapable of falling into that very same spirit of resentment, and making their lives
01:12:30.280
absolutely worse. Although on the surface, it may look like they are oppressive. And of course,
01:12:36.280
they are in a certain way. But it's interesting. So James Baldwin was in a debate in the 60s,
01:12:45.560
I believe, maybe it was the 50s. I'm not sure. But he was in a debate in the UK. And he was debating a
01:12:52.200
conservative, actually, William F. Buckley. And he gives this these opening remarks about
01:13:00.040
the specter of racism in the south. And he talks about the Alabama sheriff, the racist Alabama sheriff,
01:13:08.040
who takes his baton and beats a young black woman. And this is very controversial statement. But if you
01:13:13.720
understand anything about pathos, or anything that we've been talking about, you understand what he's
01:13:17.640
saying. He says, on some level, I have to assume that this racist sheriff is a man. And presumably,
01:13:25.960
presumably, he loves his wife, and he loves his children. And he loves to get drunk now and then.
01:13:32.680
But yet he doesn't know what drives him to pick up the baton and hit this other human being and beat
01:13:38.120
this other human being. In some ways, what has happened to the human, the other person that he beats
01:13:43.800
is bad. But what has happened to him is in some ways, far worse. And this is not about right, this is
01:13:53.000
not about material access to power. This is about the existential implication of what happens when a
01:14:00.600
person becomes sort of corrupted by power, right, and falls into absolute, an absolute kind of hell and
01:14:10.760
perpetuates hell. Right? That is, in and of itself, a kind of nightmarish thing to contemplate.
01:14:19.720
One of the things I learned in part from Jung, but also from many of the other people I read was,
01:14:24.280
don't be so sure you know where true power lies. I mean, and so for me, like, true power lies in beauty.
01:14:32.120
True power lies in truth. And I mean that most practically. I've met people at all walks of life. I've
01:14:39.000
had a very diverse range of encounters with people, partly because of my travels, and partly because
01:14:43.720
of my work as a clinical psychologist. I've worked with people at every level of the ability spectrum,
01:14:49.160
from people who really struggled to fold a piece of paper well enough to put inside an envelope to
01:14:55.240
people who've generated world-shaping technologies. And it's, so I've seen power in its multiplicity of
01:15:03.400
manifestations. And I've certainly come out convinced, for example, that there is nothing
01:15:07.800
more powerful than the truth in the word. That's, that's the fundamental source of power.
01:15:15.800
Any sort of power that you would actually dare to want. You know, you know what I mean? It's like,
01:15:22.200
do you really want power? What do you mean by that? Do you want arbitrary authority over other people?
01:15:27.560
Really? You want that? And it's interesting. It's interesting that you say this because
01:15:33.080
I was just watching, re-watching this conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. And Nikki
01:15:39.000
Giovanni, as a young poetess, is grappling with this because her, the previous generation was the
01:15:44.680
civil rights generation. And she says, you guys are so moral. And I'm not, I don't know if I'm
01:15:49.320
interested in morality. Like she says, you know, the saying, you know, um, gain the whole world,
01:15:56.200
but lose your soul. And she goes, give me the world. I want the world. And then Baldwin essentially
01:16:03.080
asks her, are you sure you, the same question that you're proposing, are you sure you want
01:16:07.400
that kind of power? Do you know what that kind of power does to a person, how it corrupts people
01:16:14.280
and how it causes people to make these very violent, brutal, cruel decisions? Are you sure you
01:16:20.920
want that kind of power? And it's a really beautiful exchange. So it definitely resonates with me what
01:16:25.400
you're saying. Yeah. Well, all right. So let's, I would like to ask you some more cultural questions.
01:16:34.760
Sure. Okay. It's to comment on some, some broader cultural figures. You talk about Robin D'Angelo.
01:16:43.880
Tell me about Robin D'Angelo and, and, and those, that set of ideas, if you don't mind, tell me what you
01:16:49.400
think. I really don't think that often about Robin D'Angelo. Um, I know she wrote a book called
01:16:55.400
White Fragility, which was published last year and was all the rave. Um, I found it incoherent.
01:17:03.000
Um, but I learned why, what, what was incoherent and maybe this isn't productive. Like I don't want
01:17:10.040
to, I don't want to push you into commenting on Robin D'Angelo. I mean, maybe that's just not
01:17:14.200
a reasonable place for this. I'm interested in your take on some of the figures who are
01:17:20.280
in some sense leading the culture that's producing the DEI seminars and all of that. And so that's where,
01:17:27.560
what I'm trying to explore. So my issue with Robin D'Angelo is my issue with many of the, um,
01:17:36.280
many of the figures who are touted or who are promoted in this space, which is, they seem to
01:17:42.280
define the black experience exclusively in terms of degradation and peril, as opposed to
01:17:52.040
a capacity to understand actually the incredible richness of the black experience. Um, certainly
01:18:00.200
has this on the one hand, uh, experience with cruelty and brutality, but also has this incredible
01:18:09.720
tradition, especially as manifested in the arts. Okay. So, so let me ask you, I want to segue into
01:18:14.680
something that I'm pulling out of the Atlantic article that was written about you. Okay. So this
01:18:19.160
will be a more productive way of approaching this, I think. So Ibram Kendi is, is quoted here
01:18:28.440
before and after the civil war, before and after civil rights, before and after the first black
01:18:32.360
presidency, the white consciousness duels. The white body defines the American body. The white body
01:18:37.400
segregates the black body from the American body. The white body instructs the black body to assimilate
01:18:42.120
into the American body. The white body instructs the black, uh, sorry, the white body rejects the black
01:18:48.120
body. Assimilating into the American body and history and consciousness duel anew. The black body
01:18:53.400
in turn experiences the same duel. The black body is instructed to become the American body. The American
01:18:58.680
body is the white body. It's like, Hey, I read that. And I thought, ah, no, no, no, not exactly. Like, I get it.
01:19:06.280
I get it. So what it is my take was way worse than that response. Okay. Well, I want to hear it right away.
01:19:13.240
Well, here's where I think the mistake is being made. And it's a fundamental mistake. It's like,
01:19:19.240
it isn't obvious to me as a Canadian say looking at the United States, that a huge chunk of the
01:19:25.480
American body hasn't been like remarkably defined by black culture. It's, it's, it's unbelievable.
01:19:33.560
I mean, and it is especially in the arts and, and, and that's, that's, that's a statement of admiration,
01:19:40.360
not of denigration. It's like there, there isn't anything in some sense that's more,
01:19:45.240
more closely aligned than the com in the combination of beauty and truth than the arts.
01:19:50.440
And to look at black domination in some sense, or at least massive influence in an endless array of
01:19:57.320
cultural spheres, especially musically. And God, where would life be without music?
01:20:02.120
And be unbearable without music. And so this black genius, and you see it manifest itself in ways that
01:20:11.320
just compel imitation. Yeah, they compel this tremendous imitation, which is real admiration,
01:20:18.040
right? That's real admiration is, and it's continually imitated to think of the effect of black music on,
01:20:25.080
well, every genre you can think of virtually. And so what, what is that sort of state? What's part
01:20:31.480
of that statement is, well, look, cultures are set up to benefit the dominant group. And it has to be
01:20:38.040
that way to some degree, because there is this problem of uniting the many into one, right? It's a
01:20:43.240
big problem. But to, to make a blanket statement like that, it's like, it, it isn't obvious to me that
01:20:50.680
the American body is so pure white. It's not obvious to me at all.
01:20:56.920
Well, well, part of my issue with Ibram Kindi is not simply his mischaracterization of
01:21:05.880
the impact that white people have had on our country, but by extension, his mischaracterization
01:21:13.880
of the impact that black people have had on this country. One of my favorite authors is Albert
01:21:19.400
Murray. He wrote an incredible book, which is actually a collection of his writings,
01:21:24.520
called The Omni-Americans. And the subtitle is Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy.
01:21:30.280
And there's an incredible parallel between what he writes about the African-American ethos,
01:21:36.040
what he calls the African-American idiom as expressed in music, and Jungian's ideas about the hero's
01:21:43.080
journey. He argues that the idiomatic expression as musically expressed and things like the blues and
01:21:50.920
jazz and swing and hip hop, this is not simply a literal thing. It is a metaphorical expression
01:22:00.040
of this capacity to play with whatever life gives you, including the negative potential and positive
01:22:09.880
potential. The capacity to play is what affords a kind of elegance that emerges out of the base
01:22:17.320
muck of life, right? And he calls it impromptu heroism culture, right? Which sounds very similar to the
01:22:24.360
hero's journey. And that capacity to play is precisely what has been admired from the wider American culture,
01:22:33.320
which has allowed Black American culture to pervade American culture and turn it into this composite.
01:22:40.600
And so the problem that I have with- And a much more embodied composite too.
01:22:43.320
So it is in some sense- Yes, to go back to the cart.
01:22:46.040
Yeah. You bet. You bet. It's a- It's a- It's a medication.
01:22:49.400
Yes. And it works so well because it's not exactly propositionalized. It gets underneath the propositions.
01:22:56.680
So you have said in maps of meaning that it is action, right? That presupposes
01:23:03.800
ideas. And John Verveke has said that, you know, we've been caught up. Part of the problem that we're
01:23:09.320
dealing with in the West is this, this false understanding of meaning is derived from propositions
01:23:15.800
when it is in fact participatory ways of knowing that give rise to propositions in the first place.
01:23:22.520
And so African-American culture, Black culture is a very embodied, participatory, relational
01:23:29.480
experience, especially as expressed in the arts. And this is what is admired in the wider American
01:23:36.280
zeitgeist. And so Ibram Kendi has been, I would say that he, he has been filled with far too much despair.
01:23:45.560
And he is actually underestimating the power of Black culture in his book, all throughout his book,
01:23:51.080
among other things. But that is incredible because, you know, he comes with this desire to
01:23:59.880
end racial injustice, but doesn't see that he has actually a blind spot, which mischaracterizes
01:24:07.400
America, the American experience and fundamentally depicts the Black experience exclusively as
01:24:14.840
degradation, which is precisely what white supremacists do. And that's the irony in all of this. And
01:24:30.440
You're careful with your words. You obviously thought about that for a long time.
01:24:38.680
So, yeah, I mean, this, it's interesting because I feel like the term enchantment came to me
01:24:45.160
almost in passing. I was trying to figure out how to, and we don't have to get into the details of
01:24:51.640
this. I'm happy to get into it if you'd like, but I was trying to teach people or figure out a
01:24:58.440
framework that could teach people how to love each other in the agapic sense of the word.
01:25:02.440
And then I began to ask myself, well, what are people already in love with?
01:25:08.600
And so I ventured into pop culture because pop culture shows us what people are already in love
01:25:13.160
with. And I, and I started to study aspects of our popular culture, which included things like Disney
01:25:20.280
films and Nike and Beyonce and all of these brands that have quasi religious, actually not quasi religious,
01:25:31.960
like devotion from their fans. And I was just like, why, what, what is happening there?
01:25:39.560
That's so interesting. Cause it means that you, you, this is one of the problems I have with
01:25:44.360
the rationalist atheist types. It's a major problem. It's like, forget about the ontological
01:25:49.400
claims of religion. And that, that isn't the issue in some sense, as far as I'm concerned.
01:25:54.760
And this touches on your discussion of Descartes. Like people obviously, obviously have the capacity
01:26:01.320
for religious experience. We have the capacity for awe and you could say, well, awe isn't a religious
01:26:06.840
experience. Well, that's a matter of definition and we could play that game, but, but if it,
01:26:11.560
the awe is deep enough and it's a definitional issue is, is for all intents and purposes, deep
01:26:19.000
awe is religious or, or we need another word that means the same as religious, if we're going to talk
01:26:23.880
about it and you participate that, participate in that in dance and in music and in these popular
01:26:30.680
stories, which is why I've been so interested in taking apart Disney films, for example. And
01:26:34.920
they're very expensive productions. They're very labor intensive. The people of genius work on them.
01:26:40.120
They have huge cultural impact and, and they're extraordinarily popular. It's like, what's going
01:26:45.080
on here? Uh, exactly. And so it's definitely worth an analysis. And, and I think you're wise to,
01:26:53.160
to start with, well, what is it that people are valuing and, and why it's, it's an empirical
01:26:58.680
observation in some sense. This is where they're deriving meaning and value. And the deep study of that is a
01:27:04.360
religious study. And, and, and, and well, there's just no escaping that. So, okay. So you're looking
01:27:11.480
at pop culture and I'm looking at pop culture and I'm studying Disney and Beyonce and Apple and Nike and
01:27:19.240
all of these brands. And I'm looking for a common theme to see if there's a common pattern across all
01:27:24.600
of these. And the common pattern I'm seeing is that all of these brands are creating content where
01:27:30.280
their audience sees themselves, their, their imperfect selves and their potential reflected in the content,
01:27:39.560
which is why they gravitate toward it. And so I'm seeing, you know, in these, these Disney films that
01:27:44.920
are motifs for the human condition, where this imperfect flawed would be hero has to go through a series of
01:27:51.000
ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs to discover their potential self and emerge the hero.
01:27:56.280
I'm seeing, you know, almost every Nike ad being this, this narrative for this, um, you know, sort of,
01:28:04.760
uh, junior varsity athlete trying to become better and better and better at her craft and then emerge,
01:28:11.560
uh, in a spirit of excellence. I'm seeing Beyonce say things like who run the world, girls and women
01:28:19.480
gravitating towards that because they see their potential reflected in those lyrics.
01:28:25.160
And it's a universal, it's a universal ideal that compels us to imitate. And that's what attracts
01:28:32.440
our attention. And that pattern to identify that pattern is to look for what is truly religious,
01:28:38.760
because the pattern that underlies all of the pattern that underlies everything that compels us
01:28:43.960
is the religious pattern. And it's the religious instinct that orients us towards that.
01:28:48.760
And that is not an ontological claim about the structure of reality. I'm not saying anything
01:28:52.440
about God. This is, this is a different kind of conversation. Right now that might point to God.
01:28:57.960
And in some sense, it most definitely does, but that isn't the same as the discussion about whether
01:29:03.560
God exists as a, as a, from a propositional perspective, which would be the wrong question.
01:29:10.440
Anyway, I would argue, but, um, but yeah, so I, I was seeing all of this emerge from the research that
01:29:17.560
I was conducting. And then at the time I was, I also read a book called enchantment,
01:29:24.040
which was written by Guy Kawasaki, the former marketing director of Apple.
01:29:28.920
And he defined enchantment as a process by which you delight someone where a person sort of starts
01:29:35.080
to open up to life, and life's enticement and enticement, an invitation, an invitation and
01:29:42.920
attraction, so to speak. And, um, he, he said that this can be present in a human being and a product
01:29:50.920
in an idea. And he also said that Steve jobs use this idea to design Apple products to sort of
01:29:59.000
figure out this, the aesthetic of what Apple products should look like. And meanwhile, you know,
01:30:03.560
the idea of enchantment correlates very closely with Disney because Disney is, you know, takes
01:30:08.760
place in these enchanted forests and these magical kingdoms, and there's this underlying concept of
01:30:13.400
enchantment. And so I just decided that enchantment seemed like the proper word to define this,
01:30:20.520
or to describe this phenomenon by which we start to open up to the complexity of ourselves and thus
01:30:30.200
to others and can, and which can give us a sense of a relational way of being as opposed to
01:30:36.200
a consuming way of being right. Eric from the philosopher wrote a number of, of essays on the
01:30:44.040
difference between having and being and how he talked about how in the West in particular, we have
01:30:49.080
become caught up in this need to consume where we define our identity, according to how much we
01:30:55.400
possess, according to how much we have, um, as opposed to our capacity to become wise, to be right,
01:31:02.600
not to have to be, to be wise, to be mature. That should also be viewed with a tremendous amount of
01:31:08.280
sympathy because it wasn't that long ago when we were all like struggling to feed hand to mouth
01:31:13.800
in the face of terrible privation and starvation. It's very well said. Yes, yes. So so that's another
01:31:20.200
place to have some sympathy for hyper consuming human beings. It's like, oh, look, we, we have enough.
01:31:26.040
Oh, well, that's never happened before ever. So now we don't really know what to do with this.
01:31:31.320
It's so true. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. But that's very, that's very well said.
01:31:36.120
Um, and it's not like we don't need to, you know, we have, we do have to have things right to survive.
01:31:41.880
We have to have food and water and shelter, but we've fallen into what John Verveke calls this modal
01:31:48.840
confusion where we said, I want to be mature. So I need to have as many carbs as possible, right? So
01:31:57.480
we're confusing the having mode with the being mode. So enchantment, the, the objective of enchantment
01:32:03.160
of the theory of enchantment is to bring people back to this relational way of being
01:32:08.440
and to be in balance with the complexity of themselves, which includes the having mode,
01:32:12.200
right? Which includes our shadows, which includes our aggression, which includes our, um, angst and
01:32:18.520
anxiety and our melancholy. It's not to the end of suppressing any of those sort of more negative,
01:32:26.200
more darker emotions, but to be in balance with all of them, which is what Jung said was the ultimate
01:32:31.080
ideal or the ultimate objective of doing shadow work in the first place.
01:32:36.520
So what kind of what's happening when you're giving your seminars, as far as you can tell,
01:32:41.800
like, what do people experience and what kind of feedback are you getting from,
01:32:45.880
from, from the, the people you're working with in, in the corporate world?
01:32:50.520
Hmm. Yeah, we get really good feedback. So we give surveys, um,
01:32:54.920
um, uh, after we do a workshop to, to get people's, to gauge people's reactions and people actually
01:33:02.440
describe it as transformative. They use that word in particular to define the experience. And, um,
01:33:09.320
they say that they've never seen or approached diversity and inclusion in this way. This was a new,
01:33:15.560
a new thing for them to approach diversity and inclusion. Some people said that it made them
01:33:21.320
them see the wonder of every human being, which is really what the idea of enchantment is, is getting
01:33:28.520
at. Um, some people actually a rare few, but there are some people who are clearly coming from the more
01:33:39.640
Ibram Kendi-esque view and who say that this has, this, this is basically insufficient
01:33:57.320
And I, it's so interesting for me because I, I had to work on myself because sometimes I would be in
01:34:02.600
the workshop where, where someone was clearly from that mode of thinking and they would say something
01:34:08.360
and they would trigger my ego. It wasn't that I, it wasn't only that I had a problem with what they
01:34:12.440
were saying is that it would trigger my ego and I would feel myself better than them or superior to
01:34:18.600
them. And then I would have to call myself down and tell myself, well, you know, Chloe, you've also
01:34:22.920
caricatured people in the past and you've also stereotyped people in the past. So this action that this
01:34:27.320
person is engaging in is not something that's foreign from what you have done. So you can engage
01:34:33.240
this person in that spirit of critique, the very second principle that you are espousing without
01:34:38.600
separating this person from what it fundamentally means to be human. And that's the cool thing about
01:34:43.320
theory of enchantment is that it becomes a self-fulfilling thing. If I want to facilitate
01:34:49.400
a workshop or any, any teaching on theory of enchantment, I actually have to practice it. And I have to stop
01:34:55.880
myself when I am being caught up in these impulses to overcompensate for my own insecurities and
01:35:03.000
anxieties. Um, so that's, but overall, the response has been very, very good and very, very supportive.
01:35:11.400
And so what sort of criticism have you attracted on the ideological front? And has this been troublesome
01:35:17.960
for you personally? And how have you dealt with that and how much impact do you think your work is
01:35:24.040
having in the broader cultural arena? Hmm. Can you tell? Yeah, I don't, I think, you know,
01:35:32.040
we're only a two year old organization, so very much startup life. And, um, but the impact that we've had
01:35:41.000
in, in, in the individuals that have taken either our online course or have sat through our workshops,
01:35:47.800
it's pretty profound. Like many of the testimonials that people write to us are pretty long. Um,
01:35:53.880
and offered of people's own accord. Um, so that's really a testament, but I would say on the
01:35:58.600
ideological front, it goes back to that. So it's interesting because there's one
01:36:05.320
response. I don't know if you've heard of this, but the response is it is not,
01:36:12.120
it is not incumbent upon black people, right. To teach white people. Oh yes. That's unpaid emotional
01:36:19.000
labor or something like that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And to take a page from your book,
01:36:23.400
I would say that the proper response to that is yes and no. Right. Right. Right. Exactly.
01:36:30.760
But, but my initial response was one of contempt to be totally honest, because I'm of the opinion that
01:36:40.760
Dr. King was someone who was a kind of Zen-like figure who worked on himself deeply, um, and understood
01:36:53.640
the human condition in a very profound way. And anyone who was in that, who finds themselves in that space,
01:37:03.320
I would argue has, I would even go so far as argue has an obligation, um, to show people the way,
01:37:11.480
so to speak, because you can only come to the conclusion that like, it's not incumbent upon
01:37:16.680
black people to do that emotional labor. If you are still thinking that people who are racists in
01:37:23.640
positions of power are somehow not suffering. You could only come to that conclusion if you see them
01:37:30.440
in this caricatured sense of ironically, all powerful, omnipotent. Right. And this is where
01:37:40.120
that's right. That's right. That's exactly right. And then you, you diminish,
01:37:43.800
you diminish any real sense of, of what you have that is grounded in genuine power. And I mean,
01:37:51.720
right. People have access to the truth. People have access to the truth in some sense,
01:37:56.520
independent of their socioeconomic standing. And you, you, you talked about the heroic venture
01:38:03.240
of, of, of play in relationship to musical culture. Let's say it's like, well, here we are alienated
01:38:10.840
from in, in some sense as a class, what can we do? That's still a triumph. It's like, well, there's music.
01:38:17.800
Yeah. And what is music exactly if it isn't a call to a higher form of being and, and something that,
01:38:23.720
that we don't want to trivialize this. It's like, this is a major accomplishment. This is a major
01:38:29.880
accomplishment. No, it is, it is incredible. I, I practice music and I practice dance as a kind of
01:38:36.520
form of spiritual practice. So you can see this poster of Aretha Franklin behind me. And in front of me,
01:38:42.920
there's a massive poster of Alvin Ailey, who was an incredible dancer and incredible choreographer.
01:38:49.320
So I believe that music and dance are in the literal sense, spiritual practices that can actually
01:38:56.360
help us. They're also immune to rational criticism. Yes. Which is so cool. It's like,
01:39:02.840
shut up. I'm listening to the music. Yeah. Life is meaningless. Shut up. I'm listening to the music.
01:39:08.200
And this is, this is why I say that the ultimate, like, if you are politically speaking,
01:39:14.360
if your move is to caricature people, you will always clash with the arts because the task of the
01:39:19.480
arts is to give expression to the full range of the human condition. If you take an acting class and
01:39:25.320
you're playing a character that is the villain, if you, the professor will tell you never actually see
01:39:33.720
your character as quote unquote, the villain. You actually have to inhabit that person's mind
01:39:38.520
and understand where that person is coming from, which defies all caricature, right? Which defies
01:39:43.400
stereotype. So the purpose of the arts is to give expression to that. Whereas today in our political
01:39:51.640
culture, it is popular to reduce people to stereotype and reduce people to caricature, which is why I think
01:39:58.120
pop culture in particular, or broadly speaking, and the arts in general can rival that and give that a run for its money.
01:40:18.920
Like what you, it's always, everything you said to me indicated that you've done a lot of thinking.
01:40:28.200
It's very interesting to see. And so I pushed you on a lot of topics and you had more and more to
01:40:35.880
give the harder I pushed. So that was extremely interesting. And I hope that you can keep yourself
01:40:43.080
oriented in the spirit of your undertaking and wish you well and, and success in what you're attempting.
01:40:56.120
Hmm. Well, you've got a long way for someone who's 28. So it'd be really interesting to see what happens
01:41:02.120
to you over the years. So thanks a lot for talking with me and more power to you as far as I'm concerned.
01:41:10.440
Thank you. I, and I, and I just, I just want to say, I have been a huge fan for a very long time.
01:41:17.560
And I want to encourage you to continue with what you're doing because it has been an incredible
01:41:25.080
respite to many of us in these trying times. So I want to, to encourage you to go, as they say