The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom ｜ John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall

00:00:00.000 Voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting meta-narrative.

00:00:04.000 And that works to unite people psychologically,

00:00:07.000 and it works to unite them socially.

00:00:09.000 I'll challenge you. I think the meta-narrative isn't self-sacrifice.

00:00:12.000 I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real.

00:00:16.000 I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically.

00:00:20.000 One of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension.

00:00:25.000 I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception.

00:00:28.000 So at the heart of evil is self-destruction.

00:00:31.000 Why would any system destroy itself?

00:00:33.000 That does, in fact, have an inevitable collapse and a downward spiral into chaos.

00:00:38.000 This goes back to the idea of conscience, you know.

00:00:40.000 So maybe once you get your goals set, the perceptual systems,

00:00:44.000 are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation?

00:00:47.000 Well, that's a very hard question.

00:00:48.000 Yeah, well, they get harder as you go up the ladder.

00:00:58.000 Today's conversation is an extension and continuation of a series of conversations I've had,

00:01:14.000 most particularly, I would say, with John Verveke, who joins me today, and also with Jonathan Paggio.

00:01:21.000 And those conversations really center on specifying the foundational principles of iterable society and stable psyche.

00:01:34.000 That's a decent way of thinking about it.

00:01:37.000 You're specifying more clearly and understandably the apex towards which systems of value strive.

00:01:47.000 And that's a very complicated set of problems.

00:01:51.000 And so it takes a lot of conversations to make progress.

00:01:53.000 But I found I've been able to make a lot of progress with John and Jonathan.

00:01:58.000 They're also both lecturing, by the way, as well as me, for Peterson Academy.

00:02:03.000 And so one of the things Peterson Academy is doing is aggregating a group of thinkers who are pursuing this problem.

00:02:12.000 Some directly, like John and Jonathan, some more peripherally.

00:02:16.000 And so many of you who are listening will have listened to some of the conversations I've had with Paggio, Jonathan Paggio, or with John Verveke.

00:02:25.000 Anyways, we introduced another person into this conversational realm today, Jordan Hall.

00:02:31.000 And Jordan is a serial entrepreneur who's been successful multiple times as a tech founder and has developed the capacities that are necessary to serve as a serial entrepreneur.

00:02:45.000 And that means an openness to high-level creativity conjoined with deep technical prowess.

00:02:55.000 And then also the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff under low information conditions.

00:03:02.000 And so Jordan Hall has been talking to John Verveke for quite a long time, a series of conversations.

00:03:10.000 And I met John again recently, and we talked about meeting, and John suggested that I include Jordan.

00:03:17.000 And he flew in today to make that possible.

00:03:21.000 And so we're in our conversation.

00:03:24.000 We continued to flesh out, really, I think the best way to conceptualize it is we're attempting to articulate the structure of something like Jacob's Ladder,

00:03:35.000 which is this nested sequence of value structures that tends towards a pinnacle.

00:03:44.000 And the pinnacle is the transcendent, let's say, or the ineffable divine.

00:03:48.000 Those are matters of definition.

00:03:50.000 And we're trying to understand the hierarchical relationship between our local plans and our ultimate ends, let's say,

00:03:57.000 which is the same thing as trying to understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite.

00:04:01.000 And we're trying to do that in a way that's quite differentiated and propositional, but also is true to the phenomena and the uniting reality of the transcendent.

00:04:16.000 And so I know that's complicated, but it's a complicated issue.

00:04:19.000 And while many of you are familiar with this already and you can regard this conversation as a continuation on the same quest.

00:04:26.000 So I think we'll jump right into it.

00:04:29.000 Jordan, I was watching your podcast with Jonathan Paggio, and you started to talk to him about the vertical dimension.

00:04:38.000 And one of the things you both discussed was the notion that one of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension.

00:04:50.000 Now, cognitive capacity is soon not going to distinguish us by all appearances.

00:04:55.000 So I thought we might well delve into that.

00:04:59.000 This is obviously something John can immediately contribute to as well.

00:05:03.000 I've been trying to figure out the technicalities of the vertical dimension.

00:05:07.000 So let me run a hypothesis by you to begin with.

00:05:10.000 John, you should perhaps find this interesting.

00:05:13.000 I think it's a development of some of the ideas that we discussed when we were on tour together.

00:05:18.000 So, in this new book I wrote, We Who Wrestle with God, one of the things I pointed out was that the God of the Old Testament, and this continues in the New Testament as well, is characterized very fundamentally in multiple ways.

00:05:37.000 But one of those ways, one of the cardinal ways that he's characterized is as the voice of conscience.

00:05:44.000 And I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically, and I think the fact of conscience indicates something like a vertical hierarchy of value.

00:05:56.000 So imagine that whenever you do something, whether you know it or not, you have a proximal reason for it, and then a slightly wider reason, and then a slightly wider reason than that, and then a wider reason than that, and so forth.

00:06:15.000 And that sort of shades off into the unknowable.

00:06:18.000 Now, for example, if I asked you why you're here having this conversation, let's play it out a little bit.

00:06:26.000 Why are you here having this conversation?

00:06:28.000 You invited me.

00:06:29.000 Okay.

00:06:30.000 So that would be an indication of what?

00:06:33.000 Reciprocity with regards to hospitality?

00:06:35.000 Mm-hmm.

00:06:36.000 Yeah.

00:06:37.000 Okay.

00:06:38.000 So why was it important to you to accept the invitation?

00:06:43.000 Hmm.

00:06:44.000 So there was two other people who were connected to that invitation that oriented me towards thinking that it was a very good idea.

00:06:51.000 Okay.

00:06:52.000 We can keep going, but step by step.

00:06:53.000 Okay.

00:06:54.000 So then part of that was that there was a social network that you regarded as valid.

00:06:59.000 Yep.

00:07:00.000 You were willing to take direction from that, and they indicated to you that the conversation might be worthwhile.

00:07:05.000 Mm-hmm.

00:07:06.000 Is that a good summary?

00:07:07.000 Yeah.

00:07:08.000 Okay.

00:07:09.000 So now we've got two superordinate.

00:07:10.000 Okay.

00:07:11.000 What would it mean for the conversation to be worthwhile?

00:07:13.000 Well, that's a very hard question.

00:07:15.000 Yeah.

00:07:16.000 Well, they get harder as you go up the ladder.

00:07:18.000 One of the things that I've noticed as I've accepted invitations over the past, gosh, 10 years is that oftentimes I don't discover that the conversation was worthwhile until well after the conversation occurred.

00:07:32.000 And so there's something like, there's a split between, let's say, the epistemological sensibility of what would it mean for me to know that the conversation was worthwhile, and let's say for the moment, the ontological sense of what would it mean for the conversation to have been worthwhile, regardless of whether I knew that.

00:07:49.000 I knew that.

00:07:50.000 And there's something like a commitment to a perception or a feeling that a particular choice is worthy.

00:08:00.000 Yeah.

00:08:01.000 And then what it means to commit on the basis of that feeling is to simply engage in the moment that's occurring, regardless of having to constantly try to decide whether or not what's happening is worth being part of, as you might imagine.

00:08:13.000 Okay, okay.

00:08:14.000 So, I think what you just described is how you might gather indication that a path that you can't quite specify might be worthwhile.

00:08:25.000 Yeah.

00:08:26.000 First of all, you said that there are paths that you can't specify that are worthwhile, right?

00:08:32.000 That that would be part of exploration.

00:08:34.000 Definitely, yep.

00:08:35.000 Right, and that there are conditions under which, circumstances under which you might be willing to proceed down that investigative path.

00:08:43.000 Okay, so then we could divide that into two parts.

00:08:45.000 We could say that you're making the presumption that there's something worthwhile in conversational investigation, which is a reflection of the logos, let's say.

00:08:53.000 But there's also conditions under which you've already been set up to presume that the probability that that exploration will take place is relatively high.

00:09:04.000 Yes?

00:09:05.000 Yep.

00:09:06.000 And you used your social connections partly to triangulate in on that.

00:09:09.000 So, okay, okay.

00:09:11.000 So, all right.

00:09:12.000 So, that's not a bad indication of some nesting.

00:09:15.000 We could continue because we could say things like, well, this is also a public conversation.

00:09:21.000 And so, if we manage it successfully, then we can explore together and hopefully that's worthwhile, which we haven't defined yet worthwhile, but we'd also have the opportunity to bring it to other people.

00:09:33.000 Yep.

00:09:34.000 Well, let's see if we could define worthwhile.

00:09:36.000 So, what would make the conversation worthwhile?

00:09:40.000 Well, it's happening, but then also in retrospect.

00:09:43.000 Mm-hmm.

00:09:44.000 So, you would have something like, it's funny.

00:09:46.000 Part of me wants to go and make it analytic, articulate it in an analytic fashion.

00:09:50.000 Yeah.

00:09:51.000 We'd go there for a while.

00:09:52.000 I think this is actually wrong.

00:09:53.000 I guess the wrong fundamental approach, but let me just take that approach for a little bit just to give some room.

00:09:57.000 Yeah.

00:09:58.000 Because you can imagine if you have a hierarchy of values, then you have a, and we have a finite amount of time and energy, right?

00:10:05.000 So, we always have to be able to coordinate our allocation of finite time and energy for the moment, let's say, our purposes.

00:10:12.000 And the things that we can actually consider to be strategic or have plans.

00:10:16.000 We make plans.

00:10:17.000 I just find that as a purpose.

00:10:19.000 And then we have our values.

00:10:20.000 And we want to be able to coordinate our purposes and our values so that the most valuable things are the ones to which we attend with the most quality and amount of time.

00:10:31.000 And so, to the degree to which we realize the most valuable things on the basis of the amount of time that we're choosing to make, then we are effectively aligning our purposes with our values.

00:10:41.000 So, that's the answer.

00:10:42.000 I actually think this is a bit of a side journey, but it looks to me like that's the basis for the instruction in the Sermon on the Mount.

00:10:49.000 So, the Sermon on the Mount, which I think of as an instruction manual in some ways, basically says the first thing you do is orient yourself to the highest possible good.

00:10:59.000 And I think you could do that awkwardly and badly and it would still be better than not doing it, right?

00:11:06.000 Yeah.

00:11:07.000 Because you're developing a relationship with the highest good.

00:11:11.000 And then once you've done that, you attend with all due care to the present.

00:11:17.000 You set the frame, which is what I'm trying to do here is to serve the highest good, even though I might not be able to conceptualize that or articulate it, but that's my aim.

00:11:26.000 Having established that aim, John, you might have some things to say here too.

00:11:30.000 Like, we've talked about the relationship between value and perception and emotion in quite a bit of detail.

00:11:37.000 So, it seems to me that if you set your aim high, then even if you can't exactly specify the goal, you know, concretely, that your perceptions and your emotions will fall into alignment with that goal.

00:11:54.000 And they'll show you the way, so to speak, maybe that's, and this goes back to the idea of conscience, you know.

00:12:01.000 So, maybe once you get your goal set and the perceptual systems, are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation, you can feel your way along.

00:12:11.000 And I don't know if that's something like, do you think when you're doing that, assuming that the goal isn't concretely specified, that it's transcendent, you're still going to be able to see or feel which steps you're taking forward are, what, reducing the entropy between where you are in that goal.

00:12:28.760 And then, so you can see that both as a combination of conscience and calling in relationship to the goal.

00:12:35.580 The conscience would be the voice of negative emotion informing you when you're deviating from the path and calling would be the invitation of positive emotion informing you, at least in part at the level of emotion that you're making the path manifest.

00:12:57.120 And I wonder, too, if while you're doing that, if at the same time, this probably happens particularly with dialogue, that you're clarifying the nature of the goal further, right?

00:13:08.460 Is there any of that?

00:13:10.220 Yeah, I mean, so I've actually been doing a lot of work around that right now with respect to what I call perspectival knowing, knowing what it's like and being able to take a perspective.

00:13:24.880 And some sort of a confluence of things.

00:13:30.340 I mean, first of all, we are talking about basic relevance realization, like what do we ignore, what do we pay attention to?

00:13:37.680 And then within that, I think what you're talking about is there's three interlinked things.

00:13:43.600 There's origin, orientation, and ostention.

00:13:47.240 Origin is where am I?

00:13:48.960 And this is very much the vertical dimension, right?

00:13:52.500 It's where am I, who am I, what kind of thing am I, where am I in the environment?

00:13:58.260 And so this is, like think about it very concretely.

00:14:04.120 You're lost, you first have to, where's your origin, where am I?

00:14:07.380 Then once you have your origin, you do orientation.

00:14:11.240 And orientation is kind of like this.

00:14:12.980 Here's the proposal.

00:14:17.140 So we've talked before about Marloponte's idea that relevance realization caches out an optimal grip, getting the right trade-off relations between being too close, too far away, too loose, too tight.

00:14:28.720 You're constantly doing that.

00:14:31.080 Now, I'll use an analogy.

00:14:33.300 When I'm sparring, I take a stance.

00:14:37.060 I don't actually fight with that stance.

00:14:39.620 That stance doesn't, you don't do anything with it.

00:14:41.440 But the point of the stance is to get me sort of at this nexus place so that I got the best access to all the specific optimal grips.

00:14:50.800 So it's readiness.

00:14:51.680 You're right.

00:14:52.480 Generalized readiness.

00:14:53.620 So orientation is this stance taking.

00:14:56.040 So this is my stance.

00:14:56.520 Well, that's what the orienting reflex does psychophysiologically.

00:14:59.120 Yes.

00:14:59.460 When you detect an anomaly, the orienting reflex triggers multiple neurophysiological systems.

00:15:06.760 But fundamentally, what it's doing is preparing you for action.

00:15:10.280 You get a heart rate increase often with an orienting response that isn't exactly indicative of emotion.

00:15:16.640 It's indicative of the fact that you're probably going to do something with your musculature once you decide what that is.

00:15:22.340 So are you distinguishing between the, you made reference to figure out where you are.

00:15:28.000 That's like an orientation point.

00:15:29.640 And then the stance is preparation for where you're going to go.

00:15:33.600 The orientation, the origin has, there's a technical term called indexicality, which is like me here now.

00:15:42.800 That's what you're trying to find.

00:15:44.300 Who am I?

00:15:45.340 What state am I in?

00:15:46.340 Where am I?

00:15:47.160 Like where am I actually standing?

00:15:49.760 It happens when you wake up.

00:15:51.080 Right.

00:15:51.380 So you have your standing and then you have your stance and then you have a stare, which is you stand.

00:15:57.640 You point, right?

00:15:59.680 And then all of those are, what they're doing is they're configuring a perspective.

00:16:04.540 What is being foregrounded, what is being backgrounded.

00:16:06.800 Yeah, right.

00:16:07.420 And then now you can begin to do.

00:16:09.160 And that's a world creation.

00:16:11.160 But it's what you said.

00:16:12.420 Yeah, it's like, it's what Hartford Rosa calls, you're looking for moments of resonance.

00:16:19.120 You're looking for moments where, right, you, right, you are directing yourself to the world, but the world also, as you said, is calling to you.

00:16:28.080 Yeah.

00:16:28.340 You say, oh, there is a way I can go.

00:16:30.680 Right, right.

00:16:31.060 It calls out to you.

00:16:32.140 Right.

00:16:32.400 Right.

00:16:32.580 And so if you're optimally oriented, you're both controlling, you're finding that sweet spot between control and responsiveness.

00:16:40.040 And you dance that out, which I think is a good representation.

00:16:43.020 Totally.

00:16:43.500 Totally.

00:16:44.420 Because you're negotiating, which is this combination, right, of navigation and narration.

00:16:51.400 You're tracking, which is navigation, and then you're keeping track of your tracking, which is what, this is the theory of how narration probably is.

00:16:58.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:59.180 But you have to include the fact, as you mentioned, that you're also undergoing a process of transformation of self in medius rest.

00:17:06.120 Yes.

00:17:06.440 So as you said, you're in orienting state.

00:17:08.460 That's what happens in an exciting conversation.

00:17:09.340 Yeah, so what's happening here, yeah, performatively, we're engaging in the process that currently we're talking about.

00:17:15.080 Right, right.

00:17:15.640 So that means in a deep conversation, partly what you're doing is progressing forward to your various superordinate goals.

00:17:22.540 But at the same time, you're transforming the nature of the superordinate goal and the relationship between the goal hierarchy as you proceed, right?

00:17:30.780 And that's not a bad definition of a quest.

00:17:33.180 And just one thing to make sure that all of our questions are caught up.

00:17:37.720 So conscience would be the voice that comes from a higher order goal to you while you're operating at a more proximal, where you're operating more proximally, telling you that your proximal operations are violating a higher order goal.

00:17:55.460 Yeah, that's the fact.

00:17:56.140 And then you could imagine, okay, so yes, that seems reasonable.

00:18:00.540 Yep.

00:18:00.800 Yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it technically, right?

00:18:03.180 Because it is still, in a sense, it's your voice still, because it's associated with your goals.

00:18:09.280 But then it's also a voice from above, so to speak, especially if your goal hierarchy.

00:18:13.280 Now, you could imagine, too, that if you talked a bit about Christianity with Pajot as well.

00:18:20.140 So if you could imagine that you made the imitation of Christ your superordinate goal, even if you didn't exactly know what that means, because you can't, that would open up the possibility that whatever that represents could speak to you in the voice of, insofar as you understand what that means.

00:18:39.700 That could now speak to you with the voice of conscience.

00:18:43.560 And hypothetically, if it was orienting you more accurately, as you practiced it, your understanding of that would increase, and you'd get sharper at it.

00:18:53.380 You'd get more skilled at it, because you'd get more.

00:18:57.600 I've been talking to my wife.

00:18:59.140 You know, she's been investigating the relationship between self-will, so to speak, and divine will, right?

00:19:05.400 And in her prayer practice, she's trying to orient herself towards the divine.

00:19:10.260 And so what she does in the morning is, that's what she does, is she sits down for an hour, and she thinks, okay, if I was really going to do things right, whatever that means, what attitude would I have to adopt, and how would I do that?

00:19:22.860 And then you distinguish that from self-will.

00:19:25.080 So I would say, because self-will begs the question, what do you mean by self, right?

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00:20:42.760 Your spirit will thank you.

00:20:43.920 My suspicions are that the more selfish the will, the more a goal that should be lower order is elevated to the highest place.

00:20:56.680 So like a hedonistic self, because the hedonist will say something like, I would like to do exactly what I want to do right now regardless.

00:21:06.380 But there's a question that isn't answered there.

00:21:10.020 And the question is, well, why do you associate I with what you want?

00:21:15.620 Because an alternative way of conceptualizing that is that something that's lower order has taken possession of you so completely that you now identify with it.

00:21:25.040 And I mean, that has to happen to some degree when we're running out of biological program, so to speak.

00:21:33.500 Like if you're hungry, I mean, hunger should grip you and grip all your perceptions until it's satiated.

00:21:38.360 But it should, you talk to Paggio about the necessity of keeping everything in its proper place, right?

00:21:44.820 Which is something that Paggio is very concerned with trying to think through.

00:21:48.680 So, okay, one more question then, at least on this line, with regards to this.

00:21:56.420 So imagine this superordinate figure being Christ, just for the sake of argument for the moment.

00:22:02.900 So I've been trying to think through what would be the antithesis, I guess it's the antithesis of evil.

00:22:12.520 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:22:13.840 And at the same time, thinking about the postmodern insistence that there's no uniting story but power.

00:22:21.840 And so I think the idea that there's no uniting story but power is self-defeating fundamentally.

00:22:29.200 Like I've seen no evidence that in complex biological systems, even in chimpanzee troops, that power iterates well.

00:22:37.040 Power is a degenerating game.

00:22:38.420 So one of the things you might ask is, well, you might say, like the postmodernists do sometimes, that there is no superordinate game.

00:22:47.480 Like that's the central claim of postmodernism, as far as I've been able to determine, that there's no uniting metanarrative.

00:22:53.800 Everything we do is united by a narrative at some level.

00:22:57.040 And to just decapitate that arbitrarily and say, well, at some point there's no union.

00:23:03.160 It's like, well, what point?

00:23:04.680 That's a really big problem.

00:23:05.880 But when they don't refuse to admit that there's a uniting metanarrative, they turn to power.

00:23:15.060 And I've been trying to conceptualize what the alternative might be.

00:23:20.380 And it seems to me, I'm curious about this, John.

00:23:23.500 It seems to me that the central message of the Christian drama is that voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting metanarrative.

00:23:32.280 And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially.

00:23:38.580 And it seems to me almost a matter of definition that social interaction is based on self-sacrifice, because that's kind of like the definition of social.

00:23:49.420 So, and then psychological self-sacrifice would seem to me to be the offering up of the lower order value structures to something that's transcendent.

00:24:01.700 And then you get to have your cake and eat it, too.

00:24:04.780 You get, if you adopt the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice, then you unite yourself psychologically.

00:24:10.600 But at the same time, it's the best possible strategy socially.

00:24:14.900 And that is definitely, that's not only an alternative to power, it's antithetical.

00:24:20.280 It's the opposite.

00:24:21.340 So, I want to say two things about two of your main points.

00:24:26.080 The first is, I want to explore conscience, because, I mean, there is conscience that I think is the call to something higher.

00:24:36.540 But I think there's also conscience that can be pathological.

00:24:40.600 Yeah.

00:24:41.220 Because it's the internalized voice of authority figures who have punished us or traumatized us.

00:24:47.700 That's like the harsh Freudian superego.

00:24:49.340 Yeah, I tend to have a sadistic superego.

00:24:52.500 So, there's that.

00:24:54.800 And then the other thing you said about self-sacrifice, but you said something that maybe qualified it, because this is a qualification I would make.

00:25:02.780 I think the metanarrative, I'll challenge you.

00:25:05.000 I think the metanarrative isn't self-sacrifice.

00:25:07.000 I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real.

00:25:13.400 I think people make all kinds of it.

00:25:14.840 Okay, okay.

00:25:15.860 No arguments with that.

00:25:17.120 I was using self, I would say, in that fractionated, hedonistic manner, right?

00:25:22.980 Because if you're trying to organize yourself in relationship to a higher unity, you're sacrificing what's lower to that upward.

00:25:32.580 I agree.

00:25:33.180 But what I'm scanning at is I think what, perhaps, I guess, because we're talking about conscience.

00:25:40.640 And conscience is a normative self-knowing, knowing yourself normatively rather than descriptively, right?

00:25:47.240 That's what conscience is.

00:25:48.380 Okay, why normatively?

00:25:49.320 Because, as you said, what you're doing is you're knowing yourself through a normative lens.

00:25:57.460 What is true, what is good, is beautiful.

00:25:58.480 Oh, yeah, okay, okay.

00:25:59.520 So it's con-science, knowing of yourself, but what you're doing is you're reflecting on yourself through a normative lens.

00:26:06.100 Okay, so that ties together the psychological and the social, that normative lens.

00:26:10.780 Let me check if I disagree.

00:26:12.020 I may, I don't think I do, but I want to check, which is I'm grounding the notion of conscience at a level that is quite below semantics.

00:26:20.700 Sure.

00:26:21.320 It's like the moment when you are playing music and you feel the sour note come, that feeling that you have of a direction towards wrongness is conscience.

00:26:29.460 Well, this is what I wanted to, I agree.

00:26:31.520 And what I would say there is that, but that's the normative, but that's showing up in perspective taking, right?

00:26:37.380 As opposed to rule following, what you're doing is you're doing that, like Jordan P said, I'll have to do Jordan P and Jordan Mates, right?

00:26:45.580 The dance, right?

00:26:46.960 The dance of the perspective taking.

00:26:48.760 Yeah.

00:26:49.280 So when I mean normative, I don't mean like a Kantian code.

00:26:53.260 I mean the very sort of sets of constraints that you put on yourself so that you shape your behavior according to, you're trying to get at what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful.

00:27:06.320 That's what I meant by that.

00:27:07.280 So why normative then rather than ideal?

00:27:11.740 Because I, okay, so I use ideal in a technical sense, which might be valuable to us.

00:27:17.680 So John Keeks makes a distinction between goals, which are states you can realize, and ideals, which are constraints that you bind yourself to.

00:27:27.680 So, for example, like a clear goal state when I'm thirsty is to drink water.

00:27:33.460 But honesty isn't a state I get to, right?

00:27:36.660 It's a constraint I'm putting on all my behavior for the rest of my life.

00:27:40.500 So he calls those, he says, and one of the mistakes we can make is we can confuse goals and ideals.

00:27:47.100 Ideals are ways of being and goals are states that you can get.

00:27:50.860 And ideals like a meta goal, is that a reasonable, but then where does normative fall into that?

00:27:56.960 So normative, what normativity is, is normativity are, use that language, normativity are ideals, ways in which we constrain our behavior so that we can shape it, so that we can get in contact with, within and without, with, I would argue with what is most real.

00:28:12.120 That is Plato's proposal, that's what is ultimately we're trying for.

00:28:15.960 We're trying to, it's a grand act of optimal realization.

00:28:21.400 Okay, how does that relate?

00:28:23.060 Because the other connotation of normative might be social norms, for example.

00:28:28.480 And I mean, there are, I'm trying to put together the definitions that you laid out, so.

00:28:33.020 Yeah, so social norms are supposed to be justified by their appeal to what you might call ethical norms, but.

00:28:43.820 Yeah, the approximations of the ideal.

00:28:45.820 Yeah, but I don't like the doing that because normativity for me, ethics is too limited a sense of normativity.

00:28:53.300 It's about the right thing to do.

00:28:55.260 It doesn't cover everything that's covered by trying to make your thoughts as true as possible, trying to make your experiences as, as tracking as what is beautiful as possible.

00:29:07.560 So there's a, there's a discussion in Exodus that's relevant to that, I think, maybe.

00:29:13.740 So when, just before Moses goes up Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, so he's gathered up a lot of implicit knowledge by that point, by serving as judge for like years.

00:29:29.700 Anyways, he leaves, and he leaves Aaron in charge.

00:29:34.560 And Aaron is the political voice of the prophet.

00:29:36.880 And as soon as the transcendent voice, the prophet, disappears, the political voice bows to the whim of the crowd, right?

00:29:47.000 And so this is very interesting because if you have a consensus model of truth, the biblical insistence is that a consensus model of truth will devolve almost instantly into the worship of the golden calf.

00:29:59.040 It's kind of like an orgaistic materialism, which strikes me as highly probable because I don't think there's much difference between an orgaistic materialism and a profound fractionated immaturity.

00:30:11.540 Oh, yeah.

00:30:11.840 Because, yeah, you agree with that.

00:30:13.380 Totally.

00:30:13.780 Okay, and so then the prophetic voice speaks for the ideal that unifies what would otherwise degenerate into orgaistic materialism.

00:30:21.860 It's something like that.

00:30:22.760 And so I think your contention was that normative is insufficient because it doesn't include the vertical?

00:30:31.140 Ethical is insufficient. 1.00

00:30:31.680 Ethical is insufficient. 1.00

00:30:32.700 Ethical, sorry. 1.00

00:30:33.660 I think we can ground it concretely and make it really simple.

00:30:36.900 Just think about an infant that's learning how to pick up a P. 0.99

00:30:40.340 There's a whole complex of feedback loops that are going on orienting towards particular, in this case, goal, right?

00:30:46.480 But the ability to be able to discern what random articulation of neuromuscular activity, coordinating hand, brain, eye, towards an increasing capacity to actually engage in depth perception, everything else, produces the desired effect.

00:31:01.340 That extremely complex, subtle and continuous field of feedback loops and constraints that produces the capacity to move through reality to achieve a goal, that's normative.

00:31:11.060 Governed by the law of continuity or the infinitesimal, like all the way continuous, like a continuous wave.

00:31:18.620 Ethics is what happens when you endeavor to actually re-articulate that governed by the law of, let's say, the digital.

00:31:24.020 I can re-articulate semantically ethics.

00:31:26.600 I can take your norms.

00:31:27.680 Your norms have a field effect of continuity.

00:31:29.880 There's something about them which has a, how do you say it right?

00:31:33.740 They're irreducible.

00:31:34.620 You cannot actually break them apart.

00:31:36.000 They're always available to respond to the reality that you're in because they are developed in complex relationship with reality.

00:31:43.140 Ethics takes a snapshot, just like when I'm digitizing a wave and sound.

00:31:47.360 It takes a snapshot of it.

00:31:48.660 It reproduces that in a semantic form that allows us to actually do things like look at it, what we're doing right now.

00:31:54.060 Okay, so what would you say, given that definition?

00:31:56.680 So I think I've developed a parallel notion of that conceptual framework.

00:32:01.880 So when ethologists go look at wolf packs, they abstract out regularities of behavior in the wolf pack.

00:32:13.560 So like the hierarchical relationship between wolves and a wolf pack would be a behavioral regularity.

00:32:19.600 It's acted out.

00:32:21.140 And you could say it's as if the wolves are following social rules, but they're not rules, they're patterns.

00:32:27.520 But when you describe them, they're rules.

00:32:29.440 Yes, that's right.

00:32:30.060 Okay, so is that parallel?

00:32:31.760 Yes, and that's also to your notion of the prophet and the political.

00:32:35.980 At the political, we are now an aggregate of things that are not actually part of an integrated whole and therefore are governed by consensus,

00:32:43.120 which is what happens when you try to simulate a whole in an aggregate.

00:32:46.600 In the category of actually being in communion, governed by the prophet, we are in fact a well-integrated whole and therefore no longer governed by an aggregate or by politics.

00:32:54.840 Yes, okay, yes.

00:32:56.420 That's exactly what I think that story indicates.

00:32:59.180 Yeah, and so then that vertical orientation, that's symbolized in the Exodus story by Mount Sinai.

00:33:08.560 And then what happens when the commandments are delivered, they're delivered in a context of a much wider range of rules, right?

00:33:16.640 So there's like these macro rules that are really foundational and then a bunch of micro rules that are more situational.

00:33:23.760 And what seems to happen is that the revelation is something, in your language, that would be the translation of the normative to the ethical.

00:33:31.600 Yes, that's correct.

00:33:32.340 Right. Yeah, so okay, so you think that.

00:33:34.840 Yeah.

00:33:34.960 Did you know of the relationship between that and what happened at Mount Sinai?

00:33:40.740 Yes.

00:33:41.320 Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.

00:33:42.980 And we'll just, we can add.

00:33:43.700 That's something that people generally know, so it was worth asking.

00:33:46.280 No, it's, something might be interesting to add is just to think about the next step vis-a-vis Moses.

00:33:53.880 Because remember, Moses was brought up in and trained in the most executive situation humanity's ever produced.

00:34:01.720 Right, pharaonic Egypt is an executive. 0.67

00:34:04.300 And I'm naming this in terms of commander-in-chief executive.

00:34:06.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:07.960 And so one might imagine that when he finally exits-

00:34:11.320 He was a slave at the same time because he was Hebrew. 0.87

00:34:15.240 So he has a full understanding of that entire hierarchy.

00:34:16.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got the whole hierarchy, yeah.

00:34:18.920 That he would, he would naturally default back to an executive form of leadership when he moves into being responsible for governing according to these rules, right?

00:34:27.820 He would move the rules into a legislative function.

00:34:29.960 He would adopt the executive function, but he doesn't do that.

00:34:32.920 He adopts the judge function, right?

00:34:35.220 And the judge operates on, by means of norms first, laws second.

00:34:41.340 Even the common law.

00:34:42.340 Like, think about how the common law works, right?

00:34:43.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:34:44.880 What would a reasonable man do?

00:34:46.000 This is a question that is actually hitting you the whole system.

00:34:49.200 Well, yeah, and so there's something also that's fascinating about that.

00:34:52.360 Because if I, if you two have a dispute that you can't settle, you're lacking a superordinate structure that unites two different narratives, let's say.

00:35:00.780 Yeah.

00:35:01.020 And if I impose a narrative structure on you, if it's an imposition, it's going to be fragile.

00:35:06.200 I'm going to have to feel my way between your dispute and find a superordinate principle that you can't better.

00:35:14.160 Yep.

00:35:14.540 Right?

00:35:14.920 And unless you accept that as valid, like, and that would be, unless it's in accordance with your conscience and your calling, maybe.

00:35:22.260 Yeah.

00:35:22.440 It's going to fragment the first time it's stress tested.

00:35:25.780 Well, that's what I, but I think this is very close to the point I wanted to make was that for me, the normative, it doesn't just encompass the moral.

00:35:38.940 Because, for example, for you to get the common thing between Jordan and I, you have to get, first of all, a shared meaning structure.

00:35:48.820 Yes.

00:35:49.180 We're both, and I don't mean just semantic meaning.

00:35:52.200 I mean.

00:35:52.680 No, embodied.

00:35:53.640 Embodied meaning.

00:35:54.460 Yeah, because otherwise you're going to fight still.

00:35:56.080 Right.

00:35:56.340 And so you could think of a life, right, that is very ethical and yet is quite meaningless.

00:36:04.500 Somebody who is leading a very, there's, these are tropes in literature, the person who is very honest and very kind but is lonely.

00:36:12.820 That's the rich man in the Gospels parable.

00:36:15.840 Right.

00:36:16.180 Because he's followed all the rules and things aren't good yet.

00:36:18.660 Right.

00:36:19.400 So the reason why I think of normativity as a broader notion is it includes this idea of connectedness to what's real, meaning that I think is actually more foundational than our moral decisions.

00:36:34.760 Our moral decisions, I think, are ultimately regulated by what we find meaningly most real.

00:36:41.320 I think that's what ultimately orients us.

00:36:43.880 Because you need some touchstone that tells you, well, how do I know when this is true?

00:36:48.780 How do I know when this is good?

00:36:49.980 How do I know when this is beautiful?

00:36:50.860 Why touchstone?

00:36:52.760 Because I think what we're talking about is what's, the metaphor is contact with reality.

00:37:00.700 Yeah, yeah.

00:37:01.260 Well, there's a foundational element to that too.

00:37:03.240 There's two points.

00:37:03.840 It's contact and comparison.

00:37:05.280 So think about this.

00:37:07.120 Our judgments of realness are, right, this is from Spinoza basically.

00:37:12.680 You, like, think about when you're waking up.

00:37:15.380 You're in this small world and you're in the dream, right?

00:37:18.820 And then you go, you wake up to a bigger world.

00:37:22.000 And from that bigger world, you can see the limitations and the biases of the smaller world.

00:37:26.320 And you judge the bigger world to be more real than, this is what people mean when they want to be connected to something larger than themselves.

00:37:34.320 That's more real.

00:37:35.280 Right.

00:37:35.580 So that's interesting that that's upward, eh?

00:37:37.520 Of course it is.

00:37:38.320 Yeah, of course it is.

00:37:39.060 And then, but how do they know that that's the case?

00:37:44.880 Well, they know it's the case because they make a contrasted comparison.

00:37:50.040 So notice that I use the length of the stick to explain the length of the shadow and not the length of the shadow to explain the length of the stick.

00:37:59.700 One thing explains the other.

00:38:01.340 One is a source of intelligibility for the other and it's not reversed.

00:38:06.020 So we judge things in terms of a comparative contrast of increased realness.

00:38:11.740 And that is a matter of, like, you have to do this, you have to transform.

00:38:18.280 That's what you were saying earlier, Jordan.

00:38:19.600 You have to transform.

00:38:20.860 You have to wake up.

00:38:23.620 Like, ultimately, the truths are not truths that you can get to without having undergone transformation.

00:38:31.540 Yeah.

00:38:31.740 So the touchstone is-

00:38:33.320 It's a transformation of the axiomatic assumptions on which that viewpoint are based, as far as I can tell.

00:38:39.860 I think it's the axiomatic assumptions, but I think it's woven with, I don't know if you'll allow me to extend it, axiomatic skills, axiomatic states of mind.

00:38:49.800 Yes.

00:38:50.360 Paradigmatic, paradigmatic.

00:38:51.000 The axioms wouldn't have to be propositional, necessarily.

00:38:53.080 That's right.

00:38:53.820 There's paradigmatic.

00:38:54.940 Even perceptions can change, right?

00:38:57.720 That's right.

00:38:58.300 Right, yeah.

00:38:58.840 Absolutely.

00:38:59.900 The touchstone is, I want to be in contact.

00:39:02.620 I want to do this comparative, reflective thing that makes me aware of the inexhaustible intelligibility, that which is most real.

00:39:11.860 So compare a real object to a dream object.

00:39:16.040 The dream object, like, you could do some Jungian analysis, but the number of properties are limited.

00:39:22.080 You get the real object, and think about the number of, the amount of information I can extract just from this thing here.

00:39:28.040 That's what makes it real.

00:39:29.380 It's this inexhaustible realness.

00:39:31.260 And strained inexhaustibility.

00:39:33.300 Right, and I think that, well, I think you have a fount of inexhaustible intelligibility, and I think that is ultimately the touchstone.

00:39:43.980 It's the sense of contact, and it gives us the comparative, reflective judgment of what is most real.

00:39:50.220 So, you know, that reminds me of the representations of Moses' staff.

00:39:54.760 I was thinking about Moses' staff when you were talking about that first stage.

00:39:59.160 I think you described it, not as orientation.

00:40:01.400 Origin.

00:40:02.160 Origin, yeah.

00:40:03.220 So Moses' staff is a symbol of center point, right?

00:40:07.780 That's right.

00:40:08.200 Right, right.

00:40:08.760 And it's got a stable element, which is the tree, let's say.

00:40:13.660 It's the tree of life.

00:40:14.580 It's the staff of life.

00:40:15.700 But it also transforms into a serpent, right?

00:40:19.280 So it's order with the lifeblood of chaos still within it.

00:40:24.980 And wisdom, because the serpent's also wise.

00:40:27.380 Right, yeah.

00:40:28.200 Well, a serpent's wise partly because it sheds its skin and can transform entirely, right?

00:40:32.180 Exactly.

00:40:32.520 So Moses' staff, this is relevant to your concern about pathological superegos. 0.86

00:40:40.100 That's right.

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00:42:01.440 Like the left suffers from that, I think, to a large degree, because when the left examines

00:42:06.880 hierarchies, they see corrupt power.

00:42:10.400 And the thing about that is that hierarchies can degenerate into corrupt power.

00:42:14.600 In fact, it's probably, apart from hedonic dissolution, it's probably the most common

00:42:20.280 common form of pathologization.

00:42:24.400 But the fact that some hierarchies dissolve in the direction of power doesn't mean that

00:42:33.080 all hierarchies are deteriorated power, right?

00:42:35.940 That's taking it.

00:42:37.120 But then the question arises, if some hierarchies aren't degenerated into power, then what's

00:42:45.960 the principle of the hierarchy, right?

00:42:48.080 And you can see echoes of that in the culture war that we're having right now about the definition

00:42:51.660 of merit, right?

00:42:53.580 What's, well, what's the principle that rules if it's not power, right?

00:42:57.720 Now, this is why I've been playing with this too.

00:43:01.440 So some of it's voluntary self-sacrifice, but that's also where I think ideas of play start

00:43:07.580 to become important.

00:43:08.560 Yeah, I think it's, I think what we've, I think it's not power.

00:43:12.560 I think it's this, like, love, beauty, reason, play are all what, what Frankfurt calls voluntary

00:43:20.640 necessities.

00:43:21.680 They're compelling, but they're not compulsive.

00:43:23.940 Yeah.

00:43:24.360 We say, I would do no other, but I feel totally free in doing it.

00:43:28.360 So when you, when you, when you read a good argument and you come to the conclusion, you

00:43:31.780 go, yeah, I get that.

00:43:33.600 But you don't feel like you've been bludgeoned into it.

00:43:36.260 Yeah.

00:43:36.400 Do you think it would be reasonable to make play central to that notion?

00:43:41.960 Because my suspicions are, this is informed partly from studying Panksepp's psychology

00:43:48.220 of play, right?

00:43:49.380 And play is a fragile motivational state.

00:43:51.900 It can be disrupted by the dominion of virtually any other motivational state.

00:43:55.460 But you added beauty and love and like higher order values to that.

00:43:59.660 But I guess my question would be, is what you're doing with those higher order values in that

00:44:04.980 state of voluntary, what did you call it?

00:44:07.300 Voluntary.

00:44:07.940 Voluntary necessity.

00:44:08.920 Voluntary necessity.

00:44:10.000 Is that state of voluntary necessity?

00:44:12.340 Is that the definition of play?

00:44:15.280 I, I think it's the definition of the genus that play belongs to.

00:44:20.100 Nice.

00:44:20.840 Okay.

00:44:21.440 Yeah.

00:44:21.720 I think, okay.

00:44:22.120 I think, and I think they're all ways of tracking.

00:44:26.660 I'm proposing the alternative to power.

00:44:29.140 Yeah.

00:44:29.280 Which is to come into contact with reality is there is, there is an element of, we have

00:44:36.900 to exert some control.

00:44:38.480 But there, and this is, this is the notion of resonance.

00:44:41.900 Look, think about the moments when you feel called.

00:44:45.180 You come around the corner as you're tracking through the wilderness and unexpectedly, uncontrollably,

00:44:52.780 there's the sunset that's beautiful.

00:44:55.580 And you enter into a moment of resonance and you feel that you're in contact with something

00:44:59.760 more real.

00:45:01.220 See, reality has to have an element that exceeds us, that is beyond us.

00:45:06.140 And we have to have a responsivity to it, a faithful openness to it.

00:45:10.800 That's also, that's something that's intensely desirable.

00:45:13.280 I mean, I think like one of the insistences in both the Old and New Testament is that

00:45:18.700 in the fundamental, in the final analysis, what's at the pinnacle is ineffable, right?

00:45:25.420 So if you, there's no end to the traveling up Jacob's ladder.

00:45:29.140 And that means that the ineffable transcendent is by definition outside our reach.

00:45:35.000 And there's a cost for that.

00:45:38.160 The cost to that is that you can't conceptualize it completely.

00:45:41.140 You can't articulate it, but the advantage is it's like an inexhaustible good.

00:45:46.380 Yes.

00:45:46.920 Right.

00:45:47.200 And so no matter, you know, you could imagine that you're looking at a beautiful sunset while

00:45:51.900 you're walking along a pathway in the forest.

00:45:55.640 And then you, for the first time, come across the edge of the Grand Canyon.

00:46:01.900 And you see the sunlight playing out in the Grand Canyon and you stop looking at the sunset.

00:46:06.380 Yeah.

00:46:06.940 Right.

00:46:07.620 And you could also imagine that there isn't a limit to that, that the mysteries that might

00:46:12.940 grab your attention, even if you're operating at a relatively high level of apprehension,

00:46:18.060 there's no limit upward to that.

00:46:20.560 That's kind of what Tolstoy experienced when he had a dream that resolved his suicidality.

00:46:25.760 And he had a vision of a, first of all, being hung over, he was at a great height, right?

00:46:32.460 He was hung over like an abyss, an infinite abyss, which is like an existential catastrophe.

00:46:37.700 And when he finally looked up, he could see a rope that was holding him above the abyss,

00:46:42.540 but it disappeared into the unknowable, right?

00:46:45.660 And that, it appeared, at least the way he wrote the story, was that that was enough to

00:46:50.540 snap him enough. 0.86

00:46:52.560 That vision was part of the process that snapped him out of his existential dread.

00:46:57.320 And the point you're making is that there are moments, see, those are magical moments.

00:47:03.260 Yeah.

00:47:03.620 I think we talked a little bit, I was at a party with you recently,

00:47:07.280 we talked a little bit about an extension of ecological,

00:47:11.820 what's the ecological approach to visual perception?

00:47:14.340 By Gibson.

00:47:14.760 Gibson, right.

00:47:16.340 So, Gibson talked about tools and obstacles, right?

00:47:19.860 Yeah.

00:47:20.280 So, you set a goal, you see a pathway.

00:47:23.860 The objects that you perceive are tools and obstacles.

00:47:26.480 Everything else is irrelevant.

00:47:27.720 That's associated with your idea of relevance, realization.

00:47:32.000 But there's, you can add layers to that.

00:47:34.120 So, you have tools and obstacles.

00:47:36.300 You have friends and foes.

00:47:38.260 That'd be the equivalent on the social level.

00:47:40.280 And then there's another level too, which is like agents of magical transformation.

00:47:45.020 And agents of magical transformation are beings or phenomena that emerge into your field of apprehension from a higher order level of being.

00:47:56.840 Yeah.

00:47:57.340 And the more distant up the Jacob's ladder that emissary, the more the quality of magic would obtain.

00:48:05.760 And the magic would be that the interloper is bringing with it a new set of axioms, a new set of rules.

00:48:15.320 So, that's the magic, right?

00:48:17.200 Like something magic plays by different rules.

00:48:19.980 And so, then there'd be a hierarchy of rules up Jacob's ladder, essentially.

00:48:23.860 Something like that.

00:48:25.200 Yeah, I think, I agree.

00:48:27.880 I think the, if reality is, if the experience of realness is the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility, the inexhaustibility points to the fact that we cannot make it determinatively intelligible.

00:48:44.460 We can't fully grasp it.

00:48:45.780 I think that's the ineffable.

00:48:47.820 Yeah.

00:48:48.080 And I think what that does is, and this is what my proposal, what I think existential conscience is as opposed to pathological, psychological conscience.

00:48:56.900 Existential conscience is to realize our correct attitude, our correct comportment towards the fact that reality shines in intelligibly, but it also withdraws in mystery.

00:49:09.640 And I think that, and this is Plato's central argument, which I just, sorry, I had a really sort of powerful realization that this is, I finally understood what Augustine meant when he said that Christianity was the continuity, the continuum, or even the completion of Greek philosophy.

00:49:24.040 The correct comportment Plato talked about was finite transcendence.

00:49:28.100 You have to hold, like this tonos, like the tension of the bow.

00:49:32.220 You have to hold that we are simultaneously finite and transcendent.

00:49:36.380 We are finite in that we are capable of failure and sin and decadence.

00:49:41.380 But if you just identify with that, you fall prey to despair and you become servile and manipulatable.

00:49:48.740 You have to remember your transcendence.

00:49:51.420 You are capable of orienting towards the true and the good and the beautiful.

00:49:54.340 But if we identify just with our capacity for transcendence, we fall prey to hubris and then we become tyrants over others.

00:50:01.860 We have to hold the two together.

00:50:04.180 And I think existential conscience is the call to constantly re-inhabit and re-identify with holding both remembering, that reciprocal remembering of your finite and your transcendence.

00:50:16.660 And I think the incarnation and the crucifixion are the enactment of finite transcendence.

00:50:24.400 That's just what I was thinking, because I thought if Pazio was here, that'd be the first thing he'd point out.

00:50:28.460 Yeah, so that's extremely interesting.

00:50:29.200 Yeah, you'd love to point that out to me.

00:50:30.460 Well, yeah, because you have this insistence in Christian theology that Christ as God puts on mortality comprehensively, right?

00:50:41.320 It's not just death.

00:50:42.520 It's kenosis.

00:50:43.660 It's the deep self-emptying, right?

00:50:45.700 All the way down.

00:50:46.940 All the way down.

00:50:48.020 Not past death into hell, right?

00:50:50.540 And so what that would mean, practically speaking, I think, is that obviously one of the elements of existence that's limiting and terrifying is death.

00:51:00.600 And like the terror management theorists, who aren't very pessimistic in my estimation, think that much of human motivation springs, or even all springs from the denial of death, right?

00:51:12.040 That's a Freudian trope.

00:51:14.580 But that's a problematic presumption in a variety of ways.

00:51:18.240 And it's been empirically undermined, too.

00:51:20.400 Well, we'll have to talk about that, because I don't know about the—I know of alternative models that fit the data better, but I don't know of any direct challenges to it.

00:51:27.820 But in any case, one of the problems with that presupposition is that it isn't obvious at all that death is the worst thing life has to offer.

00:51:36.560 Now, one of the—because I—the people I've seen in my life that were most damaged were damaged by an encounter with true evil, with malevolence, not with death.

00:51:46.780 People can actually tolerate a brush with death without collapsing into—like an actual brush with death, without collapsing into psychological chaos.

00:51:55.460 But if they're naive and they encounter someone malevolent, then like all bets are off.

00:52:01.460 And so part of the reason that, you know, Christ descends through death into hell is because the whole acceptance of that finitude is not merely acceptance of mortality.

00:52:12.660 It's also grappling with the reality of evil.

00:52:16.360 I agree.

00:52:16.880 I agree.

00:52:17.220 I think—and first of all, I'll say something and I want to be quiet because I want you to talk more because I value what you have to say.

00:52:30.400 I think Whitehead, he said, you know, the defining—the central thing of evil is self-destructiveness.

00:52:38.020 And so I see evil—there's malevolent evil, of course, but I think evil gets its home in the fact that we are all prey to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior.

00:52:50.200 And I think that's how transcendence offers us a response to our finitude, right?

00:52:56.440 Well, would that be a consequence of failing to establish the proper relationship with the rope that extends upward, right?

00:53:04.760 Because it's very—how do you avoid falling into despair and resentment if you don't remember the—your relationship with the infinite?

00:53:15.120 I think you need both.

00:53:16.380 I mean—

00:53:16.740 Yes.

00:53:17.100 And I find both.

00:53:18.180 I find the temptations of despair and the temptations of hubris are constant.

00:53:22.900 Yep.

00:53:23.720 That's a nice way of elaborate.

00:53:25.800 So I'm going to—I want to revisit this with regards to the tyrannical superego idea.

00:53:32.920 Yes.

00:53:33.200 Okay.

00:53:33.980 So, Jordan, I wanted to ask you, you've had a pretty practical life in many ways.

00:53:39.900 I mean, you've been involved in many business ventures, and I believe that that's what you were most known for to begin with, yes?

00:53:46.880 Yep.

00:53:47.260 So—but you've taken—and I don't know how much of this was the case with you all the way along, but you've become more known for your philosophical investigations as of late.

00:53:57.900 And so I'm curious about how is it that you made your entry into the more philosophical domain from the entrepreneurial, let's say.

00:54:08.900 I'm going to answer that in a moment.

00:54:12.160 Yeah.

00:54:12.260 But first, I want to just say something here.

00:54:13.720 I think it's useful to notice, again, and I guess I'm playing the role of self-referentiality, that while it may appear that I'm not talking, we don't actually really understand reality very well.

00:54:28.940 And I feel like I'm quite present to what's happening.

00:54:32.520 Mm-hmm.

00:54:33.260 So, it may very well be the case that I'm participating meaningfully, even though you can't hear the sounds come out of my mouth.

00:54:39.140 And you're gifted at that.

00:54:40.400 I just—I'm also aware of the fact that there's—

00:54:42.620 There's lots to be said for listening.

00:54:43.080 I'm also aware of the fact, though, that there's an opportunity here for you—

00:54:46.460 Sometimes I say things.

00:54:47.380 Yeah.

00:54:47.940 Okay.

00:54:49.260 So, I would say this is going to be a little bit odd, but in point of fact, it actually is the inverse.

00:54:54.300 Okay.

00:54:54.620 So, I was always very curious about both the nature of reality and what is right, right?

00:55:02.640 So, both the sort of metaphysics and ethics, always, as far as I can recall.

00:55:08.480 Somewhere around the probably late elementary school, I began to notice that the world that we live in, or at least the world that I had been thrown into, was suffering significantly from making any sense whatsoever.

00:55:23.640 It was sort of haphazardly thrown together in a fashion that tended to produce more negative than positive.

00:55:29.720 Think about just what happens when you go to school.

00:55:32.060 How old were you when that started to become a focus of attention, do you think?

00:55:36.760 About fourth grade.

00:55:37.980 Oh, yeah.

00:55:38.420 Okay.

00:55:39.700 And then, similarly, the same noticing, for example, like, oh, wait, I'm sitting in front of a television in the context of my home, which is lying to me continuously with a highly effective capacity to manipulate.

00:55:51.880 And yet, that seems to be something that the people who are around me seem to be perfectly okay with.

00:55:56.900 Hmm, that's interesting.

00:55:58.340 So, a sense of, there's something way off, it's way off, and curiosity about, okay, well, what would right look like and how might we accomplish that?

00:56:05.880 So, you can see how those two things link together.

00:56:07.760 So, you said TV in school.

00:56:10.480 Yeah.

00:56:10.680 Were there other experiences that you remember at a young age that, like, I'm kind of curious about what triggered this?

00:56:18.040 Yeah, I mean.

00:56:18.460 Because that's pretty early.

00:56:19.680 Another one was, you know, we live in a neighborhood.

00:56:22.780 Behind the neighborhood is a large forest, sort of a virgin forest.

00:56:26.880 I don't know how virgin it was.

00:56:28.620 And so, we play.

00:56:29.380 The kids play back there.

00:56:30.380 And we build structures and tree houses and everything like that.

00:56:33.480 And then one day, it's just been clear-cut to build out more of the neighborhood.

00:56:38.160 And the building out of the neighborhood is supremely ugly, like suburban ugliness.

00:56:41.920 And so, again, an aesthetic sense of, again, there's something deeply wrong about that.

00:56:45.700 It went from being a beautiful place of play that had an aliveness to it and had a feeling of connectedness to what I would now call, say, the sacred.

00:56:52.240 And it was perfectly profaned.

00:56:54.940 Like, it wasn't just clear-cut.

00:56:55.880 It was clear-cut.

00:56:56.720 And then they built ugly buildings in that place.

00:56:59.360 Again, these are all happening roughly at the same time.

00:57:02.240 And so, the journey that I went on then was a journey that was always entangling.

00:57:07.520 How can I have agency in the world to make the world less off, less wrong?

00:57:13.840 Think normative.

00:57:15.200 And what does right even look like?

00:57:18.220 Because I don't have a context that gives me any good answers to that question.

00:57:20.780 Every time I go out in the world and try to query it, the signals I get back from the world tend to be nonsense or wrong.

00:57:27.360 You look at TV, hmm, the president's lying.

00:57:29.980 Do you have any sense of how old you were when you were able to articulate that as a propelling principle?

00:57:37.140 I mean, Musk told me that he was about 12 or 13 when he had a very serious existential crisis and started really religious material.

00:57:46.140 And his existential solution to that was really a quest.

00:57:51.800 Like, he found that if he concentrated on learning and investigating, that that produced a sufficient influx of meaning so that his propositional concerns were, they were no longer foregrounded.

00:58:06.600 Uh-huh. Interesting.

00:58:07.400 I had clients who were like that too, creative people.

00:58:10.400 If they ever stopped creating, they'd fall into the grip of their rational mind and just tear them into pieces, right?

00:58:16.540 Yeah.

00:58:16.960 But as long as they focused on that continual exploration, play, creativity, then they were fine.

00:58:24.000 They'd fall into it like a child playing.

00:58:26.640 Uh-huh.

00:58:26.800 You know, and so.

00:58:27.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:58:27.700 And that's kind of interesting because it, you know, you might think of the real as what you think because then certainly lots of people who are intellectual fall into that problem.

00:58:37.120 Yeah.

00:58:37.220 But one of the things you do as a therapist with people who are depressed, especially if they're intelligent, is help them identify.

00:58:44.440 It's probably something like a higher calling.

00:58:46.440 You say, look, let's attend to your experience and see when you're depressed and when you're not, and then see if we can characterize the moments when you're not, and then concentrate on expanding them, right?

00:58:59.960 And for this gentleman who's a very creative architect, as long as he was creating, he was fine.

00:59:06.340 Now, now and then his rational mind would crop up and say, well, what the hell's the point of all this creativity?

00:59:12.360 You know, which is a, well, it's a, it's kind of a bottomless pit, isn't it?

00:59:16.800 If the, if the ultimate goal is ineffable, there's no, there's no final answer to that question that you could proposition a lot.

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01:00:19.300 One answer would be, well, you're not suicidal when you're doing it, you know, and that's kind of an existential, well, seriously, like, it quells your pain, it quells your existential dread.

01:00:32.500 If you believe your pain is real and that's enough to make you despair, why wouldn't you have faith in what rescues you from that?

01:00:39.000 Right?

01:00:39.200 That seems like a reasonable proposition.

01:00:41.960 Okay, so back to-

01:00:42.740 I would call it pseudo-metanoia right there.

01:00:44.840 Like, if you imagine you're going the wrong direction and metanoia is to turn you into the right direction, pseudo-metanoia at least turns you perpendicular to going in the wrong direction.

01:00:53.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:00:54.600 Kind of like dead reckoning.

01:00:56.060 Yeah, and the trouble, of course, is if you get stuck in pseudo-metanoia, you don't get pointed in the right direction, you're now in a therapeutic loop where you're constantly drifting back here, unless you happen to be in a very healthy context, which will begin to drift you in this direction.

01:01:07.060 Right, so for him, like, where that would have gone over time, had it deepened, would be to identify the source of that respite that he was experiencing when he was engaged in creative action, right?

01:01:19.700 Because that's a manifestation of a deeper-

01:01:21.740 Well, it gets even bigger. He would actually have to find a way to embed himself in a world that was in continuous contact with that source of respite-

01:01:27.440 Yes, yes, yes.

01:01:27.980 To expand that territory to include the whole of his life and the whole of all that he loves.

01:01:31.880 Yes, yes.

01:01:32.740 Yeah, that's probably what the Protestants are like- 0.58

01:01:35.460 And that was my pivot in sixth grade.

01:01:38.060 Okay, okay.

01:01:38.760 So in sixth grade is when I had that thought of, you can't solve the problem by controlling a particular sphere in which you can find something like solace or joy, because you have to create an entire world that has that continuity for everything that you love.

01:01:53.260 And so that was the dual vector for me.

01:01:55.580 And so then, you know, part of the process was, okay, agency, and this leads to starting businesses.

01:02:02.040 And by the way, specifically the businesses that gave rise to this kind of thing, like digital media, digital video on the internet, making the internet available to be able to do this, you know, create like your podcast and yours as well.

01:02:14.420 Yeah.

01:02:14.940 For reasons, right?

01:02:15.860 There's obvious reasons why that's a good thing to do.

01:02:17.700 And then in the meantime, like here's a scene where in 2005, my third company has gotten to the point where it's quite successful and worth a lot of money.

01:02:27.500 I'm in the office at the Google headquarters where I'm going to be meeting with Sergey Brin.

01:02:33.400 They're talking to me about buying the company.

01:02:35.720 Which company was this?

01:02:36.760 It's called DivEx, D-I-V-E-X.

01:02:38.060 And in the lobby, I'm reading Gilles Loi's A Thousand Plateaus.

01:02:44.040 So in the moment where I'm about to actually have a serious business meeting about my company being acquired by what at the time was by steps, the ascendant giant of the space, my curiosity is still pointing to, okay, what's going on here in the world of like post-structuralism?

01:03:00.720 So these teams, they're very tightly wound for me continuously.

01:03:04.240 So that was the answer to that question.

01:03:05.940 Right, right.

01:03:06.520 Yeah, so you laid out the order.

01:03:08.840 So it was the, that reminds me of a variety of things.

01:03:13.200 The developmental psychologist Piaget spent his whole life studying children's play.

01:03:18.380 There were other things he studied too because he was a polymath.

01:03:20.880 But the reason he did that was because he was trying to reconcile the gap between religion and science.

01:03:26.860 None of the psychologists that I ever encountered ever told their students that, which is really quite sad because it was like, that's actually an important detail.

01:03:34.480 You do, yes, that doesn't surprise me, John.

01:03:37.260 Let's go back to the superego issue because this is a very interesting thing to delve into because there's a personal element to it which will make it more germane.

01:03:46.560 But there's a generalizable element that's very, very important because I do really think, like one of the things I've seen about the atheist crowd, for example, is that to be an atheist, from what I've been able to understand, requires two things.

01:04:00.900 One is a kind of alliance with a reductive materialist rationalism, and there's a kind of a Luciferian pretension that goes along with that.

01:04:09.040 But that's insufficient.

01:04:11.140 It also really helps if you were viciously hurt by someone religious.

01:04:15.400 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:15.680 And so, if we, let's delve into the nature of power a bit, and not as ability, but as, when the postmodernists make the proclamation that everything's a power game, let's say,

01:04:34.180 they're basically saying that power is the uniting metanarrative, or procedure, or world.

01:04:41.440 Now, we're trying to distinguish between, or partly what we're trying to do is distinguish between the world that's governed by power and the world that's governed by this other orientation that we're trying to flesh out.

01:04:54.740 So, let's see if we can characterize the world that's governed by power.

01:04:58.240 Now, you said that you're subject, on a fairly regular basis, to, like, a tyrannical Freudian superego.

01:05:06.040 How do you, how do, and that'll make itself manifest as a pathological conscience, right?

01:05:11.100 As guilt, when guilt is not warranted.

01:05:13.220 That's right.

01:05:13.700 Right, okay, so now we know that for guilt to be an appropriate manifestation of conscience, conscience has to be properly oriented.

01:05:21.380 But now we're left with the problem of how the hell, this is the problem of how you distinguish the spirits to see if they're of God, right?

01:05:28.240 How do you distinguish, and I mean this personally to begin with, how do you distinguish between an impulse of your conscience that's a manifestation of the tyrannical superego and one that's orienting you towards a higher good?

01:05:41.780 How can you tell the difference?

01:05:43.100 So good.

01:05:43.440 So, my response to the situation that you were describing with the architect, what I do, what I've learned to do, is I ask the source of the normativity of the judgment that's being rendered against me.

01:05:58.760 The voice is saying, whoa, that's not real.

01:06:01.060 I say, okay, tell me what real is then.

01:06:03.700 Tell me what your standard of realness is.

01:06:05.500 I get it to commit to a normativity, and then once it commits to a normativity, then I can bind it to what I was talking about earlier.

01:06:12.580 Okay, so let me ask you a clarifying question.

01:06:14.960 Does that mean that conscience without call is unreliable?

01:06:18.740 Like if I'm stopping you and calling you out on your misbehavior, let's say, but I'm not providing an alternative pathway forward, is that one of the markers of pathological, like tyrannical conscience?

01:06:33.680 I think so.

01:06:36.440 I don't know if that's the point I was making.

01:06:38.760 Oh, okay.

01:06:39.040 No, no, let's not lose that point.

01:06:40.560 That's a good point.

01:06:41.280 Let's put a pin in that point.

01:06:42.900 The point I was trying to make is, the pathological conscience isn't consistent about normativity.

01:06:49.740 What it does is constantly invokes normativity that it refuses to submit itself to.

01:06:56.740 Okay, so it's not playing by its own rules.

01:06:58.620 It's not playing by its own rules.

01:07:00.040 Is it incoherent?

01:07:02.440 It is, and this goes towards Whitehead's idea.

01:07:05.820 I find that which in it, which is ultimately self-destructive.

01:07:09.660 I think, by the way, the implications, that notion of it being incoherent, it does not cohere with you.

01:07:16.020 Well, it might not even cohere internally.

01:07:18.220 Right.

01:07:18.680 Because one of the things, like, if your superego is the voice of a sadist, then it's going to say whatever it can say for the purposes of making you guilty or hurting in some way, right?

01:07:33.360 It's not like that's orienting you towards something higher.

01:07:36.720 It's a power maneuver.

01:07:38.360 And sadism is a power maneuver, fundamentally.

01:07:40.900 It is.

01:07:41.320 And so what I've learned to do is to challenge that and say, yeah, like, in addition to whatever pain it might be inflicting, and pain can be born if you understand it, right?

01:07:53.940 Yeah, it can be salutary as well if it's appropriate.

01:07:56.220 What conscience gets is the claim, often implicit, that there's an authority behind the pain, that the source of the pain has the right to inflict pain on you because it has an authority, because it's speaking according to some standard that you should be following.

01:08:17.960 And what I try and do is get it to tell me what that standard is, and very often that I can then bind it to, wow, you know, the thing you said, you know, well, what's the point of this?

01:08:30.200 Well, give me a clear example of something that has a point.

01:08:34.780 Voice, this is pointless.

01:08:37.220 Give me a clear example of something that has a point.

01:08:39.900 Because if your point is that nothing has a point, you are engaged in self-destruction, because there's no point in me paying attention to you either.

01:08:50.120 So what is it you're saying?

01:08:51.120 What is something that actually has a point, Voice?

01:08:54.380 And then it will, if it's genuine conscience, if it's calling me to finite transcendence, it'll say, blah, and it'll call me to a virtue.

01:09:03.900 If it's this pathological thing, it will start to thrash, it'll start to flounder, because it will realize that-

01:09:11.660 It doesn't have an up.

01:09:12.600 It doesn't have something that it can actually bind me to.

01:09:17.040 It can inflict pain on me.

01:09:18.120 That's definitely the voice of a demon, right?

01:09:19.940 Yeah.

01:09:20.060 It's got no upward orientation.

01:09:21.040 Definitely the voice of a demon. 0.60

01:09:21.680 It's just trapped in hell.

01:09:22.600 It's got no upward orientation.

01:09:24.200 So that's my personal answer to your question.

01:09:27.360 But that therapeutic intervention, if I can call it that, is coupled to the philosophical reflection that finite transcendence is what I am most called to identify with.

01:09:41.500 That is what I am.

01:09:42.400 That is what my humanity is, is to hold together, reciprocally remember and recognize my finitude and my transcendence.

01:09:50.000 You know, it seems to me, to some degree, and I think this is something that happens when you do get to something fundamental, is that it has a certain degree of immediate self-evidence to it.

01:10:04.380 Well, like, how could it be otherwise for a human being?

01:10:06.940 Like, how could it possibly be that we could bear the catastrophe of our finitude without remembering our ineffable relationship with the infinite?

01:10:15.940 Well, right, you can fall into despair, but, and people might say, well, that's a rational response.

01:10:22.400 It depends on what you think the point of the rational is.

01:10:25.240 It doesn't seem to be a rational response if it's, well, we could go into that, if it's self-defeating, right?

01:10:31.960 So then why don't we investigate for a minute what that means?

01:10:35.000 Like, one of the symbolic representations of that, that's the blind leading the blind, right?

01:10:40.120 They're going to fall into a pit, okay?

01:10:42.380 Well, why not?

01:10:43.860 What's the difference?

01:10:44.760 What the hell difference does it make anyways if you fall into a pit, right?

01:10:48.460 And that's a discussion about the nature of reality.

01:10:50.640 Well, there's endless suffering in the deepest of pits.

01:10:53.700 And that, I don't know, that seems-

01:10:56.000 Well, let me give you an example.

01:10:56.980 Yeah.

01:10:57.660 The person, like, well, it's all meaningless.

01:11:00.880 It's like, well, you feel the call to speak that because you're actually committed to the truth.

01:11:07.140 You find the truth intrinsically valuable.

01:11:09.080 So you would, you, your actions are based on you holding things to be intrinsically valuable, which you actually, is in contradiction to what you're actually saying.

01:11:19.600 Right, right, right.

01:11:20.280 Right?

01:11:20.780 This is the Socratic move. 0.90

01:11:21.660 If you accept the principle of non-contradiction.

01:11:23.820 Well, but then the point is, if they're trying to, I mean, if they're just being violent, that's the idea.

01:11:30.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:11:31.500 But if they're trying to be coherent.

01:11:32.880 Right.

01:11:33.160 If they're trying to persuade me, then I can appeal to the normativity that is intrinsic to any act of persuasion.

01:11:40.140 Right, right, right, right, right.

01:11:42.960 Yes, well, okay.

01:11:45.180 It seems to me that the mere fact that someone who's desperate and nihilistic is, in fact, desperate is because they regard their suffering as wrong.

01:11:57.920 Because if you're just, if you're just suffering and you don't think it's wrong, well, then that's a different kind of suffering, right?

01:12:06.500 That's kind of like the pain of an animal, I would say.

01:12:08.860 And then it seems to me that in your realization that the suffering is wrong or unjust, there's a, there's a seed there.

01:12:17.480 Yes.

01:12:17.780 Because you've got an indication that something that's actually a good is being violated.

01:12:23.640 And that's a, right, right.

01:12:24.960 So maybe this is also why that union that we discussed of death and hell with the infinite, you probably can't find, yeah, that's probably right.

01:12:37.060 You can't find an accurate way of orienting yourself to what's highest unless you traverse the lower realms.

01:12:45.320 That's what happens to Jonah, right, in the whales.

01:12:47.920 He's all the way down in the bottom of the abyss.

01:12:50.140 Then he orients himself upward and the voice of God makes itself manifest, but only under those conditions.

01:12:56.680 So cognitively, I would say.

01:12:58.280 Yeah, this is right.

01:12:58.980 There is no self-transcendence, which is a form of self-correction, unless there is a deep, and I don't just mean propositional.

01:13:06.860 I mean a deep ownership and responsibility to one's capacity for self-deception.

01:13:13.540 Okay, that, okay, now you've gone sideways with that.

01:13:16.800 Now, I've been interested, as you know, in self-deception for a very long time.

01:13:20.620 Because the previous was the thing that you really focus on, and that's the thing he really focuses on.

01:13:24.860 If we can find the place where there's meat, we've got to have done something really interesting.

01:13:27.400 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13:29.020 Well, okay, so why bring in the theme of self-deception?

01:13:33.080 Because I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception.

01:13:39.840 So at the heart of evil is self-destruction.

01:13:42.620 Why would any system destroy itself?

01:13:44.920 I mean, this is a platonic argument.

01:13:46.220 I think at the heart of it is self-deception.

01:13:49.060 I mean, this is in the, to use a Christian source, this is the epistle of John.

01:13:52.860 Like, we are prone to self-deception, and that's what keeps us from the love of God in a profound way.

01:13:59.100 What's the motivation for the self-deception?

01:14:01.840 There is, here's a specific, sorry, I'll use my name as an adjective, Vervakian proposal.

01:14:08.020 That the very processes that make us intelligently adaptive, relevance realization, which means we have to frame, we have to ignore, we have to prioritize, we have to orient,

01:14:17.860 judgment are also the processes that make us prone to self-deception, because we might be-

01:14:22.120 Ah, well, because we can lie.

01:14:23.360 We think of sin.

01:14:24.900 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:14:25.240 We miss our aim.

01:14:26.760 Yeah, I agree.

01:14:27.720 The wages of sin or death.

01:14:29.080 That's what you just said.

01:14:30.000 Yes.

01:14:30.160 The wages of sin or death.

01:14:31.360 Well, as soon as you can abstract, you can lie, right?

01:14:34.760 Because you can build a representation, like, you can build multiple representations, that's really the, or multiple worlds, for that matter.

01:14:43.280 That's the essence of the capacity to abstract.

01:14:46.040 Well, then, there's no reason that you can't falsify those.

01:14:49.240 I think even animals, I agree they don't lie.

01:14:52.400 I think lying requires a reflective commitment to the truth of what you state.

01:14:58.420 But I think animals can deceive themselves, because they can be deceived.

01:15:03.840 So, one organism can mislead, like, chimps do this to each other all the time.

01:15:08.780 And my capacity to deceive you is dependent on your capacity for self-deception.

01:15:14.600 Okay, fair enough.

01:15:15.480 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:15:17.400 So, one more step along that line, and then I'm going to ask you, Jordan, if the discontinuities that you saw when you were a kid, how you feel that they might be related to this issue of both deception and self-deception?

01:15:33.580 Because you talked about lies, the lies that were being promulgated.

01:15:37.060 You talked about the desecration of this play space that you had, which is not precisely a lie, although the erection of the ugly buildings might veer in that direction to some degree.

01:15:47.540 So, I spent a lot of time thinking about self-deception, like, a lot.

01:15:51.320 Yeah, it has crossed multiple times.

01:15:52.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:15:53.780 And so, it seemed to me that it's akin to Freud's notion of repression, but there's an important difference, because as far as I can tell, repression is like a sin of commission.

01:16:05.780 It's something you do.

01:16:07.040 Whereas most self-deception looks to me like…

01:16:09.720 Omission.

01:16:10.240 Yeah, it's omission.

01:16:10.920 That's what I was just saying.

01:16:12.360 Yeah, exactly.

01:16:13.240 I omit.

01:16:14.060 So, I think…

01:16:15.060 Yeah, I failed to explore.

01:16:16.600 Okay, so, lay out your theory of omission in relationship to self-deception.

01:16:21.340 So, it's an omission of insight.

01:16:24.180 So, think about the insight.

01:16:27.000 I thought he was angry, but it turns out he's afraid.

01:16:31.160 That's an insight.

01:16:32.060 And I realize that I have oriented the wrong way.

01:16:35.040 Right.

01:16:35.360 Now I have to reconfigure.

01:16:36.620 Right, right.

01:16:37.380 But think about, right, certain egocentric bias or proclivities or whatever that makes me the opposite of prone to insight, that makes me resistant to insight.

01:16:51.300 And what we do is, I think there's an omission.

01:16:53.800 Yeah.

01:16:54.000 We make ourselves resistant to insights that we might have intimations of.

01:16:58.860 So, here's an account of that.

01:17:03.240 I've got you wrong.

01:17:04.920 You weren't angry.

01:17:05.660 You were afraid.

01:17:07.380 Okay, well, now I have to figure out at what level of presumption I got you wrong.

01:17:12.760 Like, maybe I really got you wrong.

01:17:14.620 Yes.

01:17:15.140 And maybe I didn't just get you wrong.

01:17:17.520 Maybe that's an example of a pattern of me mistaking fear for anger that's permeated all my relationships.

01:17:24.380 Okay, now I've got an entropy pit in front of me, right?

01:17:27.560 So, I'm going to have to…

01:17:30.380 That's a journey down Dante's Inferno, I think.

01:17:33.060 I'm going to have to go into that pit of uncertainty and do the hard work necessary to reconstitute the world that that insight demolished.

01:17:42.700 And the easiest thing for me to do is just not do that, right?

01:17:46.100 I can just not do that.

01:17:47.320 And you just made Iris Murdoch's argument in The Sovereignty of the Good.

01:17:52.580 She talks about the example of the mother-in-law who has this attitude towards her daughter-in-law.

01:17:59.460 She's coarse. 1.00

01:18:00.380 Yeah.

01:18:00.540 And then she realizes, oh, she's not coarse.

01:18:03.680 She's authentic.

01:18:04.900 She's not rude.

01:18:06.220 She's spontaneous.

01:18:07.120 And then she does the thing you just did. 0.99

01:18:08.880 And then she thinks, oh, but maybe this isn't an isolated…

01:18:12.180 Maybe there's a systematicity.

01:18:13.540 Think PIJ. 0.74

01:18:14.280 Yeah.

01:18:14.460 Maybe there's a systematicity to my error.

01:18:16.420 And then she faces the choice.

01:18:18.740 The choice is, do I change in order to properly address that systematicity?

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01:19:28.800 Right.

01:19:29.400 Well, okay.

01:19:29.880 Well, so then, so Dante, I think that that journey down into Dante's Inferno is a descent into that entropy pit.

01:19:38.900 I agree.

01:19:39.340 You know, and then at the bottom, and I saw this in my therapeutic practice a lot too, Dante put the betrayers right by Satan, right?

01:19:47.760 And so imagine that you engage in one of those sins of omission in the situation that you just described.

01:19:53.720 Well, now that means that you've betrayed yourself, right?

01:19:57.120 Because you've betrayed your capacity for transformation.

01:19:59.680 I think that's that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost is that you've now divorced.

01:20:06.200 If you divorce yourself.

01:20:07.880 Yeah, well, because it's the sin that can't be forgiven, right?

01:20:10.480 And so you think, what the hell is that?

01:20:12.140 It's like, well, if you violate the spirit of transformation itself, then how in the world could you possibly recover from that?

01:20:19.400 Because you foreclosed off any, and then like in your scenario there, there was a painful realization of inadequacy on part of the self because Murdoch's character would now have to think, okay, not only did I make this mistake that's really hurt my relationship with my daughter-in-law and caused her some suffering and elevated me morally as well in comparison to her, but maybe I did that with a bunch of other people.

01:20:45.800 Yeah, exactly.

01:20:46.240 Right, and God only knows how many discontinuities that placed in my life, but maybe there's a reason that has to do with me, like a certain kind of blindness, right?

01:20:58.680 Willful blindness that might be associated with that because the payoff for her, that's the secondary gain of the Freudians. 1.00

01:21:05.780 The payoff for her was that she got to be falsely elevated morally over her daughter-in-law, and even worse, that she was punishing her for that authenticity that would be her own pathway out of her misery, right?

01:21:17.560 So who the hell wants to go through that?

01:21:19.220 That's a metanoia, but it's always down.

01:21:21.880 This is the problem with learning, I think, is that before you transfigure, there's a dissolution into an atropic state.

01:21:29.080 That's that descent into chaos.

01:21:30.640 Well, you see that in insight.

01:21:32.280 Entropy goes up first before you get the reduction.

01:21:35.800 Yeah, now you said that's been demonstrated.

01:21:37.900 Yes.

01:21:38.140 Can you tell me about that?

01:21:39.900 So it's been demonstrated, the work of Stephan and Dixon.

01:21:42.760 It's very complicated, but what you can do is you can use sort of state-space math to translate like where somebody's looking or pointing a finger into like a measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing the orientation.

01:22:00.040 The math is well established.

01:22:03.560 So excess neural activation, is that associated with that increase in entropy?

01:22:07.800 It depends because that's hard to measure, right, because it could be, you know, it could be excitation or inhibition, and so you can't just track, right?

01:22:16.240 And so, but what you get is you get a significant increase in entropy, and then you get, with the insight, the decrease.

01:22:24.640 I'm going to bet it'll look a lot like what we saw on Twitter around the H-1B thing for the past three days, if you were able to measure. 0.72

01:22:30.920 Yeah.

01:22:31.220 That's interesting, because I've been toying with that idea, Jordan, of being able to see the insight mechanics in distributed cognition, not just in individual cognition.

01:22:43.440 Absolutely.

01:22:43.980 Well, that'd be that state of confusion, right?

01:22:46.860 Where, okay, so now you've thrown an anomaly into the mix, and then everybody's chattering about how that might be reconciled, right?

01:22:56.780 Entropy goes up, yep.

01:22:57.500 Notice how it's governed initially primarily by the sin of omission.

01:23:01.860 Like nobody actually listening to anybody else, like nobody actually stepping back, taking the stance of humility, which allows them to say, wait, maybe I'm making a mistake, maybe I'm reading you wrong.

01:23:10.780 So this is part of what builds up the entropy, is the hardening of the dialogic space around something which isn't able to actually step into an appropriate level of humility to allow the insight to land.

01:23:22.100 Well, that's like a definition of tyranny.

01:23:24.360 I want to pick up on the humility thing.

01:23:26.880 Yep.

01:23:27.120 So one of the things Kaplan and Simon found who was predictive of insight is a thing they called the notice invariance heuristic, which is what you have to do when you need an insight is – so the advice you give people isn't actually the best advice.

01:23:41.680 Think of previous instances where you solved an analogous problem.

01:23:45.000 That's actually not the best because what you need is you need to think of previous instances where you failed to solve the problem.

01:23:53.160 Now, why?

01:23:54.280 Yeah, yeah, good.

01:23:55.400 That's the – that's exact – because what you do is you look for what you have failed to change, what you kept invariant across all your failures.

01:24:03.680 And that's the thing you should probably change in your current situation.

01:24:07.160 Oh, yeah, that's that too.

01:24:07.880 So that's why the tyrant doubles down in the Exodus story, right?

01:24:11.700 That's right.

01:24:11.840 Because humility –

01:24:12.960 As the anomalies mount, which is exactly what happens in life, right?

01:24:16.620 And all over the place in our world right now.

01:24:18.300 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:24:19.440 So, okay, so –

01:24:20.620 I just want to make one point.

01:24:21.860 Yeah, okay.

01:24:22.220 I think humility is the virtue of identifying with finite transcendence.

01:24:26.800 Humility is not despair and it's not hubris.

01:24:29.720 Yes, humility is a confidence in a recognition of a reality that transcends you, but a confidence that you can nevertheless address it.

01:24:39.840 Yeah.

01:24:40.040 You can be in contact with it.

01:24:41.100 Okay, so I was at church this morning with Tammy and I'm kind of getting accustomed to going to Catholic services.

01:24:47.380 And one of the ways this service opens in many of them, and maybe this is a constant across services, is that the entire congregation professes a disjunction between itself and the transcendent in the form of, like, I have sinned my most grievous sin, right?

01:25:04.940 This is something that really bothered me when I was a kid because I thought it was a reflection of a kind of tyranny.

01:25:09.960 And I think it can be, right?

01:25:12.180 It can be.

01:25:12.800 But I think more when it's oriented properly, it's that prayer for something like humility.

01:25:19.840 Like, if things aren't going right for you, especially if they repeat, I mean, one of the things you could pray for, so to speak, reorient yourself towards, is to allow yourself to come to some conclusion about how it is that you're misaligned with the ideal in a manner that's causing this disjunction.

01:25:40.440 And so, I wonder too, then, with regards to insight, so you said, reflect on your tyrannical past and essentially, so how you can shed that in the moment, but is it also, so I find, for example, if I'm arguing with my wife and it's not going anywhere, one of the things that the two of us have learned to do is to step back and think, okay, like, what the hell are we trying to accomplish here?

01:26:02.980 And at the lower level, it's, well, there's a conflict of goal or micro-world, say, and then that can easily devolve into the wish that one of them would dominate, right?

01:26:14.600 Especially if one of the views introduces some uncomfortable entropy into the other one. 0.76

01:26:19.020 It's like, just shut the hell up. 0.94

01:26:22.020 I'm right. 0.90

01:26:22.960 And then the problem goes away.

01:26:24.680 But the problem with that is that if you do that all the time, then you're always right and your partner's always wrong.

01:26:30.760 That's your metagame argument.

01:26:32.000 Yes, exactly, exactly.

01:26:33.680 But so you can step back and you can think, okay, well, what the hell are we trying to accomplish here?

01:26:39.100 Then you have to remember that, well, you're married and the person's going to be there tomorrow and that you love them.

01:26:44.820 Then you have to remember what that means.

01:26:46.600 And then you have to remember what it's like when you're not arguing, which is often very difficult when you are arguing.

01:26:54.240 And then you have to call to that spirit, I think.

01:26:57.760 And that's what delivers the insight.

01:26:59.480 It's like, okay, what are we trying to do here?

01:27:01.020 We're trying to make productive peace.

01:27:03.840 Okay.

01:27:05.300 The argument was power, let's say, a power manifestation, at least in part.

01:27:10.660 But the proper goal is productive peace.

01:27:12.640 And then you'll get an answer from the spirit of productive peace.

01:27:16.320 So you do this, you do this, you know, by asking, you can even do this with like individually, the Solomon Paradox, Igor Grossman's work.

01:27:27.820 Somebody, get them to describe a problem they can't solve.

01:27:30.820 They will inevitably describe it from the first person perspective.

01:27:33.380 Ask them to re-describe it from the perspective of a friend or somebody who knows them well.

01:27:40.000 And when they re-describe it from a perspective other than their own, they'll often get an insight into that.

01:27:45.100 Because it breaks them out of the fact that they're like...

01:27:48.380 That's interesting.

01:27:49.760 Because, you know, you may know that there's no difference between being self-conscious and being in a state of negative emotion, right?

01:27:56.920 They're statistically inseparable.

01:27:59.800 And depressed people are much more likely to use first person pronouns.

01:28:03.380 That's right.

01:28:03.720 Yeah, yeah, and socially anxious people too.

01:28:05.940 That's right.

01:28:06.320 You know, one of the ways I used to treat my socially anxious clients was when they were having a party, I'd say, well, just concentrate on putting everyone else at ease, right?

01:28:14.900 And then they'd forget about themselves, which is exactly what they were hoping to do.

01:28:18.400 But you can't just forget about yourself, right?

01:28:20.920 You have to put up a new frame.

01:28:23.980 So, okay, so, all right.

01:28:27.140 Now, you talked about self-deception.

01:28:29.660 And these experiences that you had when you were a kid, you saw this disjunction between what you were perceiving, what you were perceiving, and what you knew.

01:28:38.660 Like, it's interesting that...

01:28:39.880 Yeah.

01:28:40.260 Okay.

01:28:41.900 Do you...

01:28:43.860 And you said that the television essentially was full of lies, right?

01:28:47.620 Okay.

01:28:48.820 Flesh that out a bit.

01:28:50.140 And tell me and everyone who's listening and watching what deception you think you were detecting.

01:28:57.180 I might just make it very concrete.

01:28:58.280 As an example, there were two.

01:28:59.660 That I remember quite clearly.

01:29:01.360 One was a McDonald's Happy Meal, which was, in fact, not at all happy when you actually got it.

01:29:06.900 And then the other one was the president, Richard Nixon, explicitly saying something on the television.

01:29:14.420 And then having my grandfather over here letting everybody in the family know that that was a lie.

01:29:19.040 So, those are the two events that I remember going, huh.

01:29:21.340 So, I live in a culture where this kind of thing happens.

01:29:24.720 I didn't think it in that way, but I remember the feeling landing very heavily on me.

01:29:29.580 Huh.

01:29:30.120 That means I can't actually...

01:29:32.160 This is like the child who has an alcoholic parent who begins to have to take responsibility for parenting because they notice.

01:29:38.880 So, our culture is an alcoholic parent.

01:29:40.540 It's actually a really good metaphor.

01:29:41.920 Oh, that's brilliant.

01:29:42.640 Yeah, it's a really good metaphor.

01:29:44.480 And so, that feeling of, oh, I need to start taking responsibility for navigating this world.

01:29:49.300 Why did you make that?

01:29:50.480 Okay, but that's not the only...

01:29:52.180 Okay, keep going.

01:29:52.620 In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain fails and he gets alienated from God and in consequence of that.

01:29:59.620 So, he experiences a landscape of trouble, let's say.

01:30:03.380 But his response isn't to take responsibility.

01:30:06.380 His response is to curse fate and...

01:30:08.660 I wasn't alienated from God.

01:30:09.720 I was alienated from our culture.

01:30:11.040 Those aren't the same.

01:30:12.600 In point of view, my conscience...

01:30:14.620 Yeah, but they can easily become the same.

01:30:18.240 Like, people, you know, if your faith in the patriarchy, so to speak, is demolished, then why not go all the way down to the bottom and assume that everything's pointless and deceptive?

01:30:32.640 I mean, this happens to people when they despair.

01:30:34.560 Sure, sure.

01:30:35.160 I've been there.

01:30:35.760 Okay, but that didn't happen to you when you were a kid.

01:30:38.380 And you said you decided to take responsibility.

01:30:41.120 Okay, and you also made reference to your grandfather.

01:30:45.060 Mm-hmm, yeah.

01:30:45.600 Okay, so did he play a role in this?

01:30:48.680 Only in this particular episode.

01:30:50.000 Only in that episode.

01:30:51.060 Okay, so why didn't you despair and why did you decide to take responsibility?

01:30:56.680 And then what did that mean?

01:30:58.240 Well, I think the answer to why I didn't despair was that so much of my life was still very much connected with just base reality as a kid.

01:31:05.740 Living in a physical environment, maneuvering around.

01:31:08.800 And so something like 95% of my life was, it's possible to navigate reality in a fashion which works.

01:31:15.600 And were you doing that successfully?

01:31:17.340 Yeah, yeah.

01:31:17.800 Okay, along what dimensions?

01:31:19.280 You had friends?

01:31:20.080 I had friends, yes.

01:31:20.960 Okay.

01:31:21.180 I was not hungry often.

01:31:23.380 I could explore, I could adopt challenges like catching the frog and accomplish catching the frog and noticing that it was delightful.

01:31:30.480 I could go crawl in the creek, you know.

01:31:32.620 So you had a track record of success.

01:31:34.760 What about your relationships with your parents at that point?

01:31:38.000 Pretty healthy, I'd say.

01:31:39.060 I think so.

01:31:39.560 Okay, so you were fairly firmly grounded.

01:31:41.820 So you had a platform that enabled you to determine what constituted the truth.

01:31:46.080 Exactly, so you do it from the center out.

01:31:47.480 Right.

01:31:47.640 The center out was pretty solid.

01:31:49.380 Right.

01:31:49.800 My own sort of physical body, my ability to maneuver in space, my ability to connect things, my relationship with my parents and my close family, my relationship with friends, my relationships with nature were all pretty solid.

01:31:59.280 So when I come against this error at the level of culture, that's the anomaly.

01:32:05.260 I don't have to worry about the center.

01:32:06.400 The center is pretty solid.

01:32:08.420 Yeah.

01:32:08.740 Why phrase it in terms of center and anomaly?

01:32:16.280 Well, anomaly in the sense that for the most part, again, everything is actually functioning reasonably well.

01:32:22.280 You know, this notion that we talked about at the very beginning of being able to have values aligned with purposes and being able to make choices that land with a sense of, yep, this is landing.

01:32:30.500 And I mean, in a physical sense.

01:32:32.840 So when the anomaly in this case would be an experience that throws an error in that category of, huh.

01:32:37.860 Now, I have set now a new purpose.

01:32:40.260 My new purpose is to cajole my parents into taking me to McDonald's to get a happy meal.

01:32:44.080 I have noticed that in the act of doing that, I'm creating dissonance with my own relationship with my parents who are not happy about this thing.

01:32:49.780 I get the happy meal. 0.97

01:32:51.040 The experience sucked. 0.90

01:32:51.980 And I made my family mad. 0.98

01:32:53.400 Anomaly.

01:32:54.160 Purpose of value.

01:32:55.260 Alignment.

01:32:55.500 Right.

01:32:55.820 Against the center.

01:32:56.820 Oh, yeah.

01:32:57.320 So that's interesting because you pointed to the fact that you had multiple dimensions of success.

01:33:06.440 And I mean, qualitatively distinct dimensions.

01:33:08.800 Yep.

01:33:09.040 So that's important.

01:33:09.940 And such that when you were introduced to the abstracted digital world, so to speak, and you saw that it was faulty, that didn't shake your face.

01:33:18.260 So now we're in a situation.

01:33:20.220 You know, one of the things I noticed when I was a parent, this was a lot of little kids, you know, this is almost 25 years ago.

01:33:27.860 So I'd often take my little kids over to see other people with little kids, and the first thing they do is put on a movie and put the kids in the basement and put on a movie. 0.98

01:33:36.620 And this always annoyed me because my attitude was throw the damn kids in the basement and let them amuse themselves, right? 0.98

01:33:43.680 They have to do that. 1.00

01:33:44.640 They have to learn to play.

01:33:46.020 They have to learn to get along with strangers, and that's an excellent—and you just short-circuit that.

01:33:50.940 But now imagine that we have all these kids that are dominated by the digital, and they come to that realization, you know, that they're being deceived in multiple ways.

01:34:00.700 The question then is, like, what the hell's their center?

01:34:05.020 They haven't won.

01:34:06.920 Do you think that's true?

01:34:08.420 Yeah.

01:34:09.940 So there's data coming out.

01:34:11.640 I'm interested in your response to this, John.

01:34:13.720 So I read recently that—many times, by the way, and I think Jonathan Haidt details this—60% of young women with a liberal political orientation have a diagnosed mental illness.

01:34:28.220 Now, that's self-reported, you know, and so there's problems with that.

01:34:32.940 But I'm wondering to what degree—and I'm not necessarily pointing the finger at the liberal ethos here—I'm wondering about this immense rise in neurotic mental illness that seems to be characteristic of our culture.

01:34:50.060 Let's just bring in to the image of the golden calf, right?

01:34:54.820 Because I think the key insight is to recognize that any time a group of people move themselves into this way of being in relationship with each other and with the world, that is—the word I used was aggregate.

01:35:08.080 I think we've used different words to describe it, meaning they're not in communion as a well-integrated whole, but are in fact parts endeavoring to pull themselves together by means of something like consensus.

01:35:17.760 There's a lot of other things to bring in together, but that's the—a way we've talked about it.

01:35:21.700 That does, in fact, have an inevitable collapse and a downward spiral into chaos, right?

01:35:27.100 That was the argument that you made earlier or that you brought forward earlier.

01:35:30.900 And from my point of view, as well as I understand it, that is the case.

01:35:35.680 And so—

01:35:36.420 It's sort of by definition.

01:35:38.160 If it's an aggregate that isn't unified by the appropriate higher-order principle, it's going to disintegrate.

01:35:44.360 Yes, that's correct.

01:35:45.080 That's why that principle isn't ideal, because it disintegrates.

01:35:49.500 And so—can we go here?

01:35:51.420 I'm going to take it up, like, one level that may be more than we can handle right now in this, like, where we are.

01:35:57.280 But the basic idea is that the ability to actually form well-integrated wholes that include a diversity of people outside of a small group of people who are genetically related has not actually been a solved problem.

01:36:08.940 So we've actually had three cuts of this.

01:36:11.980 One is the indigenous mode, which is small groups of people who are genetically related live within a culture that has been the same culture for everybody for a very large number of generations.

01:36:20.180 And by the way, if you investigate the indigenous modes, they have incredibly powerful psychotechnologies for inhibiting things like self-deception or tyrannical norms.

01:36:29.640 So it's a whole integrated complex that forms a relatively stable—over long periods of time.

01:36:35.820 Long periods of time.

01:36:36.580 Right, aborigines. 1.00

01:36:37.340 25,000 years.

01:36:38.460 Right, long periods of time.

01:36:40.340 But has the inability to grow beyond a certain number of people.

01:36:44.100 Oh, 200.

01:36:45.480 1,500 if you think about the way they create metagroups.

01:36:47.940 Okay, okay.

01:36:48.580 And has the inability to actually integrate people who have any real diversity of intrinsics, either different languages or different genetics or different—actually just ways of being raised.

01:36:58.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:36:59.100 They have a small amount, but not big.

01:37:01.800 The problem with that is that if you flip over here and you discover there's a new toolkit that has the ability to have a cosmopolitan, expansive polity that can, in fact, grow a large number of people and can absorb a wide diversity of people,

01:37:15.980 this produces a certain generative capacity along the dimension of power.

01:37:21.520 Because it has that capacity—

01:37:22.340 It deteriorates in that direction.

01:37:24.260 Well, it has it both as a positive.

01:37:26.680 It can produce, say, for example, innovation.

01:37:29.500 It can produce a way of—

01:37:30.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:37:32.220 —towards the productive environment to produce more food, for example.

01:37:35.260 Yeah.

01:37:35.740 It can solve more problems strategically.

01:37:37.680 That's a better way of putting it.

01:37:38.820 That's the advantage of diversity, let's say.

01:37:40.820 Yeah, it can solve more problems strategically.

01:37:42.620 Yeah.

01:37:42.760 And it can deploy more focused power on a particular problem domain.

01:37:46.560 So, by the way, it goes very high at the level of purpose, but it's not able to actually go as high at the level of values because the values have a very hard time being integrated.

01:37:53.220 Right, sure.

01:37:53.980 A coherent, well-integrated top to bottom where the conscience is non-tyrannical, which is why it has to develop tyrannical conscience, i.e. the pharaoh, to be able to establish something like order in that context.

01:38:04.520 You think that's a necessary first step?

01:38:06.440 Mm, probably about a third step, I'm guessing.

01:38:08.840 Oh.

01:38:08.960 You look at, like, you move from Moses to Saul and then ultimately across.

01:38:12.460 You kind of see it happening over time.

01:38:14.380 Like, there's a period of time where it can be held together by something like a shared esprit or a felt sense of a deep moment of being together.

01:38:25.200 Like, think about the Romans on the hills with the Celts coming to destroy them and they managed to come together and they produced something. 0.72

01:38:31.380 And the republic is actually able to achieve a certain level of being a republic for a while, but it goes through a degenerative cycle.

01:38:37.580 But it still has to, ultimately, the only toolkit it can go to is something like a golden calf.

01:38:43.380 Something like a way to hold an aggregate together because it has still become an aggregate.

01:38:46.820 Because we have not yet figured out how to turn these kinds of large cosmopolitan at-scale groups of people into a well-integrated whole.

01:38:54.460 Well, so one of the logical, likely pathways of devolution, you talked about the golden calf, is, like, sequential appeal to sequential hedonistic demands.

01:39:05.380 Sure.

01:39:05.680 You can make peace with a toddler that way.

01:39:07.540 Yeah.

01:39:07.820 You just give the toddler what he wants every time he asks.

01:39:11.100 Bread, circuses, and empire.

01:39:13.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:39:14.200 Think about how empire works.

01:39:15.880 I conquer my neighbor, so I'm able to actually bring booty back to my people, so they have a sequential satisfaction of lower self-demands, which keeps them relatively stable for some amount of time, but not for a very long time.

01:39:28.100 Because it is structurally, fundamentally unstable, as you said, so it will undergo collapse, which is where we are.

01:39:34.380 Yeah.

01:39:35.080 Okay, so partly what we're trying to do here, and I would say in the broadest possible sense, I think this is what you're trying to do, John, and correct me if I'm wrong,

01:39:44.400 is we've been investigating the propositionalization of an ethos that would unite iteratively and relatively permanently, and we're investigating the possibility that that must, by necessity, be predicated on something other than that hedonic, immediate hedonic gratification.

01:40:05.180 And it's also not predicated on power.

01:40:09.580 Okay, so, you know, one of the things you see in the Old Testament—

01:40:11.920 Hold on one second.

01:40:12.560 Yep.

01:40:13.320 I think that was very powerful and very important.

01:40:15.880 So in case, you know, other people besides us are participating in this conversation, put a bookmark on that.

01:40:20.920 Yeah.

01:40:21.260 Okay.

01:40:21.540 Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of exploration summarized very quickly in that statement.

01:40:29.140 Yep.

01:40:29.920 There's an immense emphasis in the Old Testament on the value of hospitality, right?

01:40:36.100 Like, it's a cardinal moral virtue.

01:40:38.280 Now, I investigated that a little bit in We Who Wrestle With God anthropologically.

01:40:42.340 I mean, part of the reason for that was, well, imagine that there are relatively isolated cities, and a stranger comes in with wares to trade.

01:40:51.320 Now, you can steal his wares, but you don't get any more, like, stuff, and so that's a drag.

01:40:57.420 But worse than that, you don't know who he's associated with.

01:41:01.480 Like, the primates that we're related to are very good at remembering who each little primate they could pound flat is related to, right?

01:41:10.480 Because you pound the little primate flat, and then his three more powerful relatives come along, and you're dead.

01:41:15.920 So they see the little guy in its social web.

01:41:21.260 Okay, so the stranger's there, and you could be very inhospitable, but then his army comes marching in, and you're all dead, right?

01:41:27.760 You don't get to trade, plus you're all dead.

01:41:30.720 Yes, that's a bad idea.

01:41:32.000 So now you have to be hospitable, and that gets the trade going.

01:41:35.440 And so I'm wondering, then I was thinking about hospitality.

01:41:39.340 Like, it's a local thing, right?

01:41:41.800 Because that's what you do at a banquet or at a party.

01:41:45.240 You make people welcome.

01:41:46.360 That's what you do if you run a small business.

01:41:47.980 If you have even the least amount of sense, you make people welcome.

01:41:51.380 Then you could think if that's scaled, well, then the whole world would be a hospitable place, and the problem would be solved, right?

01:41:57.980 So it's obviously a scalable virtue.

01:42:00.080 And maybe it's also the foundation of that societal trust that constitutes, I think, the only real natural resource.

01:42:06.920 Could you speculate, do you think, on the relationship between hospitality and play?

01:42:13.400 Yeah, I can.

01:42:14.820 Throw an insight, too.

01:42:15.840 Okay.

01:42:16.400 Okay.

01:42:17.440 I will.

01:42:18.040 I'll throw an insight, too.

01:42:18.840 So I think this goes back to, there seems to be evidence, the dating is questionable, somewhere between 120,000, 70,000 BCE.

01:42:33.180 We're facing, it looks like, the possible end of the species.

01:42:37.660 It's under tremendous pressure.

01:42:39.400 It's bottlenecking.

01:42:40.080 And it looks like the innovation that we hopped upon, again, you have to be careful because the evidence is very undetermined when you're talking about prehistory, but was expanded trade networks, where not only trade of good, but trade of information.

01:42:59.060 So what seems to have happened is human beings figured out if they could create larger networks of information gathering and good distribution, they could deal with what looks like, probably there might have been challenges to the food supply.

01:43:17.920 We don't know.

01:43:18.960 Now, the problem with that, though, the problem with that is, okay, how do you do that?

01:43:25.440 How do you actually, like, you can't make it teleological.

01:43:29.020 Well, we need to set up trade networks.

01:43:30.840 Right.

01:43:31.180 Right, right, right.

01:43:32.340 And so one of the proposals, which I find very powerful and interesting, is that you need individuals who are capable of being liminal and willing to undergo significant self-transformation and move between worlds.

01:43:45.120 And so you get the proposal of the invention, notice I'm doing it this way, of shamanism.

01:43:50.220 That what the shaman is good at is the shaman is good at actually mediating between different perspectives and different groups.

01:43:58.760 And what the shaman starts to do is you start to create.

01:44:02.720 Right.

01:44:02.980 Well, he is a border dweller.

01:44:04.540 That's right.

01:44:05.360 He's a border dweller.

01:44:06.060 Psychopomp.

01:44:06.620 Yeah, and he can move between communities and he can negotiate and he can also deal with any of ways in which the foreigner has introduced social disharmony to the group because that's one of his or her skills too, right? 0.99

01:44:23.440 But what the shaman has to do, right, is the shaman has to somehow translate their capacity for like this cognitive flexibility into something that can be learned by other people.

01:44:35.600 And the proposal is that we get the invention of important sets of rituals, that you get the invention of like something perhaps like even like the handshake, which is a ritual which is designed to try and speed up the process by which you and I, who are strangers, might be able to recognize each other as at least potentially trustworthy.

01:45:01.480 And then, but you have outward-facing rituals like that and then you have inward-facing rituals of initiation.

01:45:10.000 Like, okay, we have to tighten our identity.

01:45:12.000 So we like, in order to be willing to interact with them, we have to know clearly better who we are.

01:45:18.840 And so you get the initiation rituals, you have like interaction rituals, and then in connection with that,

01:45:27.980 you have rituals that have to do with enhancing the cognitive flexibility that makes that kind of ritual possible.

01:45:38.000 Now, here's the connection.

01:45:40.640 Ritual is play.

01:45:43.380 It is a profound kind of play.

01:45:46.560 Because what I'm doing in ritual is I'm engaging the imaginal.

01:45:50.440 So Corbin's distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal.

01:45:53.420 So the imaginary is when I picture things in my mind and I'm taking myself away from reality.

01:46:00.380 The imaginal is when I, like when a child is playing at being Superman.

01:46:06.040 They're not picturing Superman.

01:46:08.280 They're, what's it like to look at the world like Superman?

01:46:11.020 What is it like to try out this identity?

01:46:13.280 That's what a ritual is.

01:46:14.440 A ritual is a way of, what's it like?

01:46:16.500 Play, serious play.

01:46:18.280 What's it like to look at this?

01:46:19.420 What's it like to look at this person as, although they're a stranger, they're trustworthy?

01:46:24.480 What's it like to be a person that can be, can enter into recognition with you?

01:46:29.880 And so I think there's...

01:46:30.500 Right, and then identity starts to become identity with the ability to do that.

01:46:34.760 Exactly.

01:46:35.640 Right, that's identity with the hero, I think, rather than with the tyrannical father, let's say.

01:46:40.800 So I think there's, I think hospitality, right, is a name for a set of rituals that were invented and discovered to deal with this problem of how do we expand our networks?

01:46:58.520 Yeah, well, it's got to be something like, let's say you're being hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger.

01:47:04.100 You're treating them kindly.

01:47:06.140 So you're treating them as if they're kin.

01:47:08.200 That's right.

01:47:08.580 Right, and so what that means is that despite the evident differences, which might be racial, linguistic, and ethnic, let's say, so profound differences, you're making the proposition, you're acting out the proposition when you're hospitable that there's a core identity that's shared.

01:47:25.620 Right, and so that's got to be a transcendent identity because the obvious identity markers are radically different.

01:47:31.800 So while it is the case that there is something happening at the level of the horizontal, you have more goods, you have more ideas.

01:47:40.080 By the way, we could just take note of the strength, the strength of a protocol or a ritual over time and across contexts lets us know something about how important it is.

01:47:48.340 So if we think about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, how critical the hospitality protocol was.

01:47:52.760 Right, oh yeah.

01:47:53.160 Lot is willing to go to great lengths not to violate the protocol of hospitality.

01:47:58.240 That tells us pay a lot of attention.

01:47:59.580 The ultimate length.

01:48:00.560 That's right, ultimate length.

01:48:01.600 And so the vertical dimension, the fact that we are now able to enter into a state of communion by means of properly exercising this ritual, this protocol of engagement, to form a new identity that has completely new capacities and competencies that are an expansion in the vertical dimension as well as in the horizontal dimension.

01:48:19.400 And that's like, that's the key unlock that enables everything together.

01:48:22.020 Yeah, yeah, well, that's so, it's so cool that that hospitality has that imaginal element.

01:48:27.720 It's right, I'm going to, I'm going to treat this stranger as though they're welcome.

01:48:32.400 Well, on, there's, there's a question, on what basis?

01:48:35.600 Yeah.

01:48:35.960 Well, it's something like shared humanity.

01:48:38.640 So it is the acting out of the concept of shared humanity before that's propositionalized at all.

01:48:44.320 Or even not, because for Abraham, they weren't humans, right? 0.59

01:48:49.020 They're angels.

01:48:50.060 Right, well, I think that's partly pointing to the fact that the thing that you're actually establishing the hospitable relationship with is only, it's only human on the surface, right?

01:49:01.860 That's a pointer, because we've already made the case that when you're hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger, you're removing from consideration all the obvious differences.

01:49:13.960 Yeah.

01:49:14.560 But you're doing that in the realization that there's something, well, you could say in the context of that story, something divine underneath, that every stranger who comes your way is an angel in disguise.

01:49:26.200 Something like that.

01:49:26.860 Right, yeah, well, that's, certainly that's what Christ says in the gospels.

01:49:29.500 If you do proper hospitality as an ascendant coming up.

01:49:32.360 Well, then you could also imagine that the more hospitable you are to someone, the more the angelic element of their nature is like, I think this is, I noticed this in my clinical practice.

01:49:44.220 Even with the worst people, like if you're engaged in a dialogue with someone who's hurt and bad, the best possible thing you can do is to listen and never say anything that's the least bit false.

01:49:58.440 Because as soon as you do that, as soon as you do that, you're in their territory and you're not going to win that.

01:50:04.360 Like that's a very bad, that's a good thing for everybody watching and listening to know if you ever fall into the hands of someone truly dangerous, lying is a very bad idea.

01:50:13.140 They're a lot better at it than you.

01:50:15.380 So, all right, well, we should wrap up this part of the discussion.

01:50:18.620 I think on the Daily Wire side, I'm going to start by talking to John and Jordan about how they met and how their relationship developed.

01:50:25.500 And then, you know, we'll continue along the same lines.

01:50:28.680 I want to find out, too, what they jointly think they're up to.

01:50:33.560 And so, if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side for half an hour for that, please, you're more than welcome to do that.

01:50:39.380 And thank you, gentlemen.

01:50:40.740 It was lovely meeting you.

01:50:41.860 I very much appreciated that.

01:50:43.200 John, it's always great to see you.

01:50:44.640 Thank you.

01:50:44.980 I always feel that we get somewhere.

01:50:47.200 That hospitality discussion, that was particularly useful.

01:50:50.140 But there was lots in that that I felt moved, you know, moved things ahead.

01:50:54.700 I talked about that in the book, Awakening for the Meeting Crisis.

01:50:57.960 Oh, yes, yes.

01:50:58.880 And when did this come out?

01:51:00.120 This is Awakening from the Meeting Crisis.

01:51:02.260 When was this published?

01:51:03.260 October came out.

01:51:04.320 Right, right.

01:51:05.000 So, for everybody who's watching and listening, you know, you could read this.

01:51:08.840 John Vervecki and Christopher Mastropietro, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, book one.

01:51:14.260 So, anyways, gentlemen, thank you very much.

01:51:17.000 And for all you watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

01:51:20.200 Much appreciated.

01:51:27.960 Thank you.

01:51:28.940 Thank you.

01:51:35.340 Thank you.

01:51:35.760 Thank you.

01:51:36.300 Thank you.

01:51:37.200 Thank you.

01:51:37.360 Thank you.

01:51:37.960 Thank you.

01:51:38.340 Thank you.

01:51:38.480 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 24, 2025

532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom ｜ John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall

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