532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall

Voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting meta-narrative. And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially.
I'll challenge you. I think the meta-narrative isn't self-sacrifice.
I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real. I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically.
One of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension. I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception.
So at the heart of evil is self-destruction. Why would any system destroy itself? That does, in fact, have an inevitable collapse and a downward spiral into chaos.
This goes back to the idea of conscience, you know. So maybe once you get your goals set, the perceptual systems, are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation?

Well, that's a very hard question.

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

Today's conversation is an extension and continuation of a series of conversations I've had, most particularly, I would say, with John Verveke, who joins me today, and also with Jonathan Paggio. And those conversations really center on specifying the foundational principles of iterable society and stable psyche.
That's a decent way of thinking about it. Or specifying more clearly and understandably the apex towards which systems of value strive.
And that's a very complicated set of problems. And so it takes a lot of conversations to make progress.
But I found I've been able to make a lot of progress with John and Jonathan. They're also both lecturing, by the way, as well as me, for Peterson Academy.
And so one of the things Peterson Academy is doing is aggregating a group of thinkers who are pursuing this problem, some directly like John and Jonathan, some more peripherally. 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.
Anyways, we introduced another person into this conversational realm today, Jordan Hall. 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.
and that means an openness to high-level creativity conjoined with deep technical prowess, and then also the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff under low information conditions. And so Jordan Hall has been talking to John Verveke for quite a long time, a series of conversations.
And I met John again recently, and we talked about meeting, and John suggested that I include Jordan, and he flew in today to make that possible. And so So we're in our conversation,, 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, which is this nested sequence of value structures that tends towards a pinnacle.
The pinnacle is the transcendent, let's say, or the ineffable divine. Those are matters of definition.
And we're trying to understand the hierarchical relationship between our local plans and our ultimate ends, let's say, which is the same thing as trying to understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite. 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.
And so I know that's complicated, but it's a complicated issue. And while many of you are familiar with this already, and you can regard this conversation as a continuation on the same quest.
So I think we'll jump right into it. Jordan, I was watching your podcast with Jonathan Paggio, and you started to talk to him about the vertical dimension.
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. Now, cognitive capacity is soon not

going to distinguish us by all appearances. So, I thought we might well delve into that.

This is obviously something John can immediately contribute to as well. I've been trying to figure

out the technicalities of the vertical dimension. So, let me run a hypothesis by you to begin with.
John, you should perhaps find this interesting. I think it's a development of some of the ideas that we discussed when we were on tour together.
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. But one of those ways, one of the cardinal ways that he's characterized is as the voice of conscience.
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.
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. And that sort of shades off into the unknowable.
Now, for example, if I asked you why you're here having this conversation, let's play it out a little bit. Why are you here having this conversation? You invited me.
Okay, so that would be an indication of what reciprocity with regards to hospitality? Mm-hmm, yeah. Okay, so why was it important to you to accept the invitation? So there was two other people who were connected to that invitation that oriented me towards thinking that it was a very good idea.
Okay. We can keep going, but step by step.
Yeah, okay. So then part of that was that there was a social network that you regarded as valid.
Yep. You were willing to take direction from that and they indicated to you that the conversation might be worthwhile.
Is that a good summary? Yeah. Okay, so now we've got two superordinate.
Okay, what would it mean for the conversation to be worthwhile? Well, that's a very hard question. Yeah, well, they get harder as you go up the ladder.
One of the things that I've noticed is 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. And so there's something like this, 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. And there's something like a commitment to a perception or a feeling that a particular choice is worthy.
Yeah. 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.
Okay. 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.
First of all, you said that there are paths that you can't specify that are worthwhile, right? That would be part of exploration. Right, and that there are conditions under which, circumstances under which you might be willing to proceed down that investigative path.
Okay, so then we could divide that into two parts. 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, 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.
Yes? And you used your social connections partly to triangulate in on that so okay okay so all right so that's not a bad indication of some nesting i we could we could continue because we could say things like well this is also a public conversation and so if we manage it successfully then we 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.
Well, let's see if we could define worthwhile. So what would make the conversation worthwhile? Well, it's happening, but then also in retrospect.
So you would have something like, it's funny, part of me wants to go and make it analytic, like to articulate it in an analytic fashion. You go there for a while.
I think this is actually wrong. I guess the wrong fundamental approach, but let me just take that approach for a little bit just to give some room.
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? So we always have to be able to coordinate our allocation of finite time and energy for the moment, let's say our purposes and the things that we can actually consider to be strategic or have plans. We make plans.
I'm just finding that as a purpose. And then we have our values.
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. 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.
So I think, 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. 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, right? And I think you could do that awkwardly and badly and it would still be better than not doing it, right?

Because you're developing a relationship with the highest good.

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

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. Having established that aim, John, you might have some things to say here too.
Like, we've talked about the relationship between value and perception and emotion in quite a bit of detail. 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.
And they'll show you the way, so to speak. Maybe that's, and this goes back to the idea of conscience, you know.
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. 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.

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

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. 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? Is there any of that? 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 and some sort of a confluence of things.
I mean, first of all, we are talking about basic relevance realization, like what do we ignore, what do we pay attention to? And then within that, I think what you're talking about is there's three interlinked things. There's origin, orientation, and ostention.
Origin is where am I? And this is very much the vertical dimension, right? It's where am I, who am I, what kind of thing am I, where am I in the environment? And so this is, like, think about it very concretely. You're lost, you first have to, where's your origin? Where am I? Then once you have your origin, you do orientation.
And orientation is kind of like this. Here's the proposal.
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. You're constantly doing that.
Now, I'll use an analogy. When I'm sparring, I take a stance.
I don't actually fight with that stance. That stance, you don't do anything with it.
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. So it's readiness.
You're right. Generalized readiness.
So orientation is this stance taking. So this is my stance.
Well, that's what the orienting reflex does psychophysiologically. Yes.
When you detect an anomaly, the orienting reflex triggers multiple neurophysiological systems, but fundamentally what it's doing is preparing you for action. You get a heart rate increase often with an orienting response that isn't exactly indicative of emotion.
It's indicative of the fact that you're probably going to do something with your musculature once you decide what that is. So, are you distinguishing between the, you made reference to figure out where you are.
That's like an orientation point. And then the stance is preparation for where you're going to go.
The orientation, the origin has, there's a technical term called indexicality, which is like me here now. That's what you're trying to find.
Who am I? What state am I in? Where am I? Where am I actually standing? It happens when you wake up. Right.
So you have your standing and then you have your stance and then you have a stare, which is you stand, you point. And then all of those are what they're doing is they're configuring a perspective.
What is being foregrounded, what is being backgrounded. Yeah, right.
And then now you can begin to do. And that's a world creation.
But it's what you said. It's like, it's what Hartford Rosa calls, you're looking for moments of resonance.
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. Oh, there is a way I can go.
It calls out to you. And so if you're optimally oriented, you're both controlling, you're finding that sweet spot between control and responsiveness.
And you dance that out, which I think is a good representation. Totally.
Because you're negotiating, which is this combination, right, of navigation and narration. You're tracking, which is navigation, and then you're keeping track of your tracking, which is what narrow...
This is the theory of how narration probably is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you have to include the fact, as you mentioned, that you're also undergoing a process of transformation of self in medias rest. Yes.
So as you said, you're orienting stage. That's what happens in an exciting conversation.
So what's happening here, performatively, we're engaging in the process that currently we're talking about. Right, right.
So that means in a deep conversation, partly what you're doing is progressing forward to your various superordinate goals, 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? And that's not a bad definition of a quest. And just one thing to make sure that all of our questions are caught up.
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. Yeah, that's the fact.
Then you could imagine, okay, so yes, that seems reasonable. Yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it technically, right? Because it is still, in a sense, it's your voice still, because it's associated with your goals, but then it's also a voice from above, so to speak, especially if your goal hierarchy.
Now, you could imagine too that if you talked a bit about Christianity with Pagiot as well. 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, that could now speak to you with the voice of conscience.
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. You'd get more skilled at it because you get more.
I've been talking to my wife. She's been investigating the relationship between self-will, so to speak, and divine will, right? In her prayer practice, she's trying to orient herself towards the divine.
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? And then you distinguish that from self-will. So I would say, because self-will begs the question, what do you mean by self, right? Are you ready for a fresh start after the holiday indulgence? Make 2025 your healthiest year yet with Balance of Nature.
Those Christmas cookies and holiday feasts were great, but now your body's craving something different. That's where Balance of Nature comes in, the perfect way to reset your health this new year.
Getting your daily fruits and vegetables has never been easier. Balance of Nature takes fresh produce, freeze dries it to preserve nutrients, and delivers it in a convenient capsule you can take anywhere.
No additives, no fillers, no synthetics, or added sugar, just pure fruits and vegetables in every capsule. It's that simple.
Are you ready to transform your health in 2025? For a limited time, use promo code Jordan to get 35% off your first order, plus receive a free fiber and spice

supplement. Head over to balanceofnature.com and use promo code Jordan for 35% off your first order

as a preferred customer, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's balanceofnature.com,

promo code Jordan for 35% off balance of nature, promo code Jordan for 35% off your first preferred order plus a free bottle of fiber and spice. My suspicions are that the more selfish the will, the more a goal that should be lower order is elevated to the highest place.
So like a hedonistic self because the hedonist will say something like I would like to do exactly what I want to do highest place. 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.

But there's a question that isn't answered there.

And the question is,

well, why do you associate I with what you want?

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. And I mean, that has to happen to some degree when we're running out of biological program, so to speak, like if you're hungry.
I mean, hunger should grip you and grip all your perceptions until it's satiated, but it should, you talk to Paggio about the necessity of keeping everything in its proper place, right, which is something that Paggio is very concerned with trying to think through. So, okay, one more question then, at least on this line, with regards to this, so imagine this superordinate figure being Christ, just for the sake of argument for the moment.
So I've been trying to think through what would be the antithesis, I guess it's the antithesis of evil. That's one way of thinking about it.
And at the same time, thinking about the postmodern insistence that there's no uniting story but power. And so I think the idea that there's no uniting story but power is self-defeating fundamentally.
Like, I've seen no evidence that in complex biological systems, even in chimpanzee troops, that power iterates well. Power is a degenerating game.
So one of the things you might ask is, well, you might say, like the postmodernists do sometimes, that there is no superordinate game. Like, that's the central claim of postmodernism, as far as I've been able to determine, that there's no uniting metanarrative.
Everything we do is united by a narrative at some level, and to just decapitate that arbitrarily and say, well, at some point, there's no union. It's like, well, what point? That's a really big problem.
But when they don't refuse to admit that there's a uniting metanarrative, they turn to power. And I've been trying to conceptualize what the alternative might be.
And it seems to me, I'm curious about this, John, it seems to me that the central message of the Christian drama is that voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting metanarrative. And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially.
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. 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.
And then you get to have your cake and eat it too. You get, if you adopt the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice, then you unite yourself psychologically.
But at the same time, it's the best possible strategy socially. And that is definitely, that's not only an alternative to power, it's antithetical.
It's the opposite. So I want to say two things about two of your main points.
The first is I want to explore conscience because, I mean, there is conscience that I think is the call to something higher, but I think there's also conscience that can be pathological because it's the internalized voice of authority figures who have punished us or traumatized us. That's like the harsh Freudian super ego.
Yeah, I tend to have a sadistic super ego. Right.
So there's that. And then the other thing you said about self-sacrifice, but you said something that maybe qualified it because this is a qualification I I would make.
I think the metanarrative, I'll challenge you, I think the metanarrative isn't self-sacrifice, I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real. I think people make all kinds of- Okay, okay, no arguments with that.
I was using self, I would say, in that fractionated, hedonistic manner, right? Because if you're trying to organize yourself in relationship to a higher unity, you're sacrificing what's lower to that upward. I agree.
But what I'm scanning at is I think what perhaps I guess because we're talking about

we're talking about conscience and conscience is a normative self-knowing, knowing yourself

normatively rather than descriptively, right? That's what conscience is. Okay, why normatively? Because, as you said, what you're doing is you're knowing yourself through a normative lens.
What is true, what is good, is beautiful. So it's con-science, knowing of yourself, but what you're doing is you're reflecting on yourself through a normative lens.
What is true, what is good is beautiful. Oh, yeah, okay, okay.
So it's con-science, knowing of yourself,

but what you're doing is you're reflecting on yourself

through a normative lens.

Okay, so that ties together the psychological and the social,

that normative lens.

Let me check if I disagree.

I may.

I don't think I do, but I want to check.

Sure.

Which is I'm grounding the notion of conscience

at a level that is quite below semantics.

Sure.

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.

Well, this is what I wanted to, I agree.

And what I would say there is that, but that's the normative,

but that's showing up in perspective taking, right?

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, 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, the dance, right, the dance of the perspective taking. So, when I mean normative, I don't mean like a Kantian code.
I mean the very sort of sets of constraints that you put on yourself so they shape your behavior according to, you're trying to get at what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful. That's what I meant.
So why normative then rather than ideal? Because I, okay, so I use ideal in a technical sense, which might be valuable to us. So John Keeks makes a distinction between goals, which are states you can realize, and ideals, which are constraints that you bind yourself to.
So for example, like a clear goal state when I'm thirsty is to drink water. But honesty isn't a state I get to, right? It's a constraint I'm putting on all my behavior for the rest of my life.
So he calls those, he says, and one of the mistakes we can make is we can confuse goals and ideals. Ideals are ways of being and goals are states.
So an ideal is like a meta goal? Is that a reasonable? But then where does normative fall into that? 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. That is Plato's proposal.
That's what is ultimately we're driving for. We're trying to, it's a grand act of optimal realization.

Okay.

How does that relate?

Because the other connotation of normative might be social norms, for example.

And I mean, there are, I'm trying to put together the definitions that you laid out.

Yeah.

So social norms are supposed to be justified by their appeal to what you might call ethical norms. But the approximations of the ideal.
Yeah, but I don't like the doing that because normativity for me, ethics is too limited a sense of normativity. It's about the right thing to do.
It doesn't cover everything that's covered by trying to make your thoughts as true as possible. Yeah, right.
Trying to make your experiences as tracking as what is beautiful as possible. So, there's a discussion in Exodus that's relevant to that, I think, maybe.
So, 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.
Anyways, he leaves and he leaves Aaron in charge. And Aaron is the political voice of the prophet.
And as soon as the transcendent voice, the prophet, disappears, the political voice bows to the whim of the crowd, right? 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, which is kind of like and 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. Oh, yeah.
Because, yeah, you agree with that. Totally.
Okay, and so then the prophetic voice speaks for the ideal that unifies what would otherwise degenerate into orgaistic materialism. It's something like that.
And so I think your contention was that normative is insufficient because it doesn't include the vertical. Ethical is insufficient.
Sorry, ethic. I think we can ground it concretely and make it really simple.
Just think about an infant that's learning how to pick up a pea. There's a whole complex of feedback loops that are going on orienting towards particular, in this case, goal, right? With 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.
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. Governed by the law of continuity or the infinitesimal, like all the way continuous, like a continuous wave.
Ethics is what happens when you endeavor to actually re-articulate that governed by the law of, let's say, the digital. I can re-articulate semantically ethics.
I can take your norms. Your norms have a field effect of continuity.
There's something about them which has a, how do you say it right? They're irreducible. You cannot actually break them apart.
They're always available to respond to the reality that you're in because they are developed in complex relationship with reality. Ethics takes a snapshot, just like when I'm digitizing a wave and sound, it takes a snapshot of it.
It reproduces that in a semantic form that allows us to actually do things like look at it, what we're doing right now. Okay, so what would you say, given that definition? So, I think I've developed a parallel notion of that conceptual framework so when anthropologists go look at wolf packs they abstract out regularities of behavior in the wolf pack so like their hierarchical relationship between wolves and a wolf pack would be a behavioral regularity it's acted out And you could say it's as if the wolves are following social rules, but they're not rules, they're patterns.
But when you describe them, they're rules. Yes, that's right.
Okay, so is that parallel? Yes, and that's also to your notion of the profit and the political. 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, which is what happens when you try to simulate a whole in an aggregate.
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. Yes.
Okay. Yes.
That's exactly what I think that story indicates. Yeah, and so then that vertical orientation, that's okay.
That's exactly what I think that story indicates. Yep.
Yeah, and so then that vertical orientation, that's symbolized in the Exodus story by Mount Sinai. And then what happens when the commandments are delivered, they're delivered in a context of a much wider range of rules, right? So there's like these macro rules that are really foundational and then a bunch of micro rules that are more situational.
And it's, what seems to happen is that the revelation is something, in your language, that would be the translation of the normative to the ethical. Yes, that's correct.
Yeah, so, okay, so you think that. Did you know of the relationship between that and what happened at Mount Sinai? Yes.
Okay, okay, okay, okay. And we'll just, we can add.
It's not something that people generally know, so it was worth asking. Something might be interesting to add is just to think about the next step vis-a-vis Moses.
Because remember, Moses was brought up in and trained in the most executive situation humanity has ever produced. Pharaonic Egypt is an executive, and I'm naming this in terms of commander-in-chief executive.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so one might imagine that when he finally exits- He was a slave at the same time because he was Hebrew.
So he has a full understanding of that entire hierarchy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's got the whole hierarchy, hierarchy. That he would naturally default back to an executive form of leadership

when he moves into being responsible

for governing according to these rules.

He would move the rules into a legislative function.

He would adopt the executive function.

But he doesn't do that.

He adopts the judge function.

And the judge operates by means

of norms first,

laws second. Even the common law.
Think about how about how the common law works, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. What would a reasonable man do? This is a question that is actually hitting you the whole system.
Well, yeah, so there's something also that's fascinating about that because 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. Yeah.
And if I impose a narrative structure on you, if it's an imposition, it's going to be fragile. I'm going to have to feel my way between your dispute and find a superordinate principle that you can't better.
Yep. Right? And unless you accept that as valid, and that would be, unless it's in accordance with your conscience and calling maybe yeah it's it's going to fragment the first time it's stress tested 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 uh the the moral uh 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.
Yes. We're both, and I don't mean just semantic meaning.
I mean... No, embodied.
Embodied meaning. Yeah, because otherwise you're going to fight still.
Right, and so you could think of a life, right, that is very ethical and yet is quite meaningless. Somebody who is leading very, these are tropes in literature.
The person who is very honest and very kind, but is lonely. That's the rich man in the Gospels parable.
Right. Because he's followed all the rules and things aren't good yet.
Right. 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.
Our moral decisions, I think, are ultimately regulated by what we find meaningly most real. i think that's what ultimately orients us because you need some touchstone that tells you well how do i know when this is true how do i know when this is good how it is yeah why touchstone because i think what we're talking about um is is what's the metaphor is contact with reality yeah yeah well there's a foundational element to that.
There's two points. It's contact and comparison.
So think about this. Our judgments of realness are, right, this is from Spinoza, basically.
You, like, think about when you're waking up. You're in this small world and you're in the dream, right? And then you wake up to a bigger world.
And from that bigger world, you can see the limitations and the biases of the smaller world. 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. That's more real.
That's interesting that that's upward, eh? Of course it is. Of course it course it is.
And then, but how do they know that that's the case?

Well, they know it's the case because they make a contrasted comparison.

So notice that I used the length of the stick to explain the length of the shadow,

not the length of the shadow to explain the length of the stick.

One thing explains the other. One is a source of intelligibility for the other, and it's not reversed.
So we judge things in terms of a comparative contrast of increased realness. And that is a matter of, like, you have to do this, you have to transform.
That's what you're saying earlier, Jordan. You have to transform.
You have to wake up. Ultimately, the truths are not truths that you can get to without having undergone transformation.
So the touchstone is- It's a transformation of the axiomatic assumptions on which that viewpoint are based, as far as I can tell. 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.
Yes. Paradigmatic.
The axioms wouldn't have to be propositional. That's right.
There's paradigmatic. Even perceptions can change, right? That's right.
Right. Yeah.
Absolutely. The touchstone is I want to be in contact.
I want to do this comparative reflective thing that makes me aware of the inexhaustible intelligibility, that which is most real. So compare a real object to a dream object.
The dream object, like you could do some Jungian analysis, but the number of properties are limited. You get the real object.
Think about the number of, the amount of information I can extract just from this thing here. That's what makes it real.
It's this inexhaustible realness. And strained inexhaustibility.
Right. And I think that, well, I think you have a fount of inexhaustible intelligibility.
And I think that is ultimately the touchstone. It's the sense of contact.
And it gives us the comparative reflective judgment of what is most real. So, you know, that reminds me of the representations of Moses' staff.
I was thinking about Moses' staff when you were talking about that first stage. I think you described it not as orientation.

Origin.

Origin, yeah.

So Moses' staff is a symbol of center point, right?

That's right.

Right, right.

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

It's the tree of life.

It's the staff of life.

But it also transforms into a serpent, right?

So it's order with the lifeblood of chaos still within it. And wisdom, because the serpent's also wise.
Right, yeah. Well, a serpent's wise partly because it sheds its skin and can transform entirely, right? Exactly.
So Moses' staff, this is relevant to your concern about pathological superegos. That's right.
You know, because you could say, and maybe this is partly why the left. Success in business isn't just about offering an amazing product or service, though that's certainly essential.
What truly sets thriving companies apart is having powerful, reliable tools working behind the seams to streamline every aspect of the selling process. These are the systems that turn the complex challenge of reaching customers and processing sales into something that feels effortless and natural.
That's exactly where Shopify enters the picture, transforming the way businesses operate in the digital age. Nobody does selling better than Shopify.
They're home to the number one checkout on the planet. And here's the game changer.
With ShopPay, they're boosting conversions up to 50%. That means fewer abandoned carts and more sales going to your bottom line.
In today's world, your business needs to be everywhere your customers are, whether that's scrolling through social media, shopping online, or walking into a physical store. Shopify powers it all, seamlessly connecting your business across the web, your store, customer feeds, and everywhere in between.
And here's the truth. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.
Join over 2 million entrepreneurs who have already discovered the power of unified commerce with Shopify's all-in-one platform. Upgrade your business to the same checkout we use with Shopify.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase. Head to shopify.com slash jbp to upgrade your selling today.
That's shopify.com slash jbp. Like the left suffers from that, I think, to a large degree, because when the left examines hierarchies, they see corrupt power.
And the thing about that is that hierarchies can degenerate into corrupt power. In fact, it's probably, apart from hedonic dissolution, it's probably the most common form of pathologization.
But the fact that some hierarchies dissolve in the direction of power, what? Yeah, deteriorate in the direction of power doesn't mean that all hierarchies are deteriorated power, right? That's taking it. But then the question arises, if some hierarchies aren't degenerated into power, then what's the principle of the hierarchy, right? And you can see echoes of that in the culture war that we're having right now about the definition of merit, right? Well, what's the principle that rules if it's not power, right? Now, this is why I've been playing with this too.
So some of it's voluntary self-sacrifice, but that's also where I think ideas of play start to become important. Yeah, I think it's not power.
I think it's this, like love, beauty, reason, play are all what Frankfurt calls voluntary necessities. They're compelling, but they're not compulsive.
We say, I would do no other, but I feel totally free in doing it. So when you read a good argument and you come to the conclusion, you go, yeah, I get that.
But you don't feel like you've been bludgeoned into it. Do you think it would be reasonable to make play central to that notion? Because my suspicions are, this is informed partly from studying Panksepp's psychology of play, right?

and play is a fragile motivational state.

It can be disrupted by the dominion of virtually any other motivational state,

but you added beauty and love

and like higher order values to that.

But I guess my question would be,

is what you're doing with those higher order values

in that state of voluntary, what did you call it? Voluntary. Voluntary necessity.
Voluntary necessity. Is that state of voluntary necessity, is that the definition of play? I think it's the definition of the genus that play belongs to.
Nice. Okay.
Yeah, I think there are all ways of tracking. I'm proposing the alternative to power, which is to come into contact with reality is there is an element of we have to exert some control.
And this is the notion of resonance. Look, think about the moments when you feel called.
You come around the corner as you're tracking through the wilderness, and unexpectedly, uncontrollably, there's the sunset that's beautiful. And you enter into a moment of resonance, and you feel that you're in contact with something more real.
See, reality has to have an element that exceeds us, that is beyond us. And we have to have a responsivity to it, a faithful openness to it.
That's something that's intensely desirable. I mean, I think one of the insistences in both the Old and New Testament is that in the final analysis, what's at the pinnacle is ineffable, right? So, there's no end to the traveling up Jacob's ladder.
And that means that the ineffable transcendent is, by definition, outside our reach. And there's a cost for that.
The cost to that is that you can't conceptualize it completely.

You can't articulate it.

But the advantage is it's like an inexhaustible good. Yes.
Right. And so no matter, you know, you could imagine that you're looking at a beautiful sunset while you're walking along a pathway in the forest.
and then you, for the first time, come across the edge of the Grand Canyon

and you see the sunlight playing out on the Grand Canyon

and you stop looking at the sunset. Right.
And you could also imagine that there isn't a limit to that, that the mysteries that might grab your attention, even if you're operating at a relatively high level of apprehension, there's no limit upward to that. That's kind of what Tolstoy experienced when he had a dream that resolved his suicidality.
And he had a vision of, first of all, being hung over, he was at a great height, right? He was hung over like an abyss, an infinite abyss, which is like an existential catastrophe. And when he finally looked up, he could see a rope that was holding him above the abyss, but it disappeared into the unknowable, right? And that, it appeared, at least the way he wrote the story, was that that was enough to snap him enough.
That vision was part of the process that snapped him out of his existential dread. And the point you're making is that there are moments, see, those are magical moments.
I think we talked a little bit, I was at a party with you recently, we talked a little bit about an extension of ecological, what's the ecological approach to visual perception? By Gibson. Gibson, right.
So, Gibson talked about tools and obstacles, right?? So you set a goal, you see a pathway.

The objects that you perceive are tools and obstacles.

Everything else is irrelevant.

That's associated with your idea of relevance, realization.

But you can add layers to that.

So you have tools and obstacles.

You have friends and foes.

That'd be the equivalent on the social level.

And then there's another level too, which is like agents of magical transformation and agents of magical transformation are beings or phenomena that emerge into your field of apprehension from a higher order level of being and the the more distant up the jacob's emissary, the more the quality of magic would obtain. And the magic would be that the interloper is bringing with it a new set of axioms, a new set of rules.
So, that's the magic. It's like something magic plays by different rules.
And so, then there'd be a hierarchy of rules up Jacob's ladder, essentially. Something like that.
Yeah, I think, I agree. I think the, if reality, if the experience of realness is the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility, the inexhaustibility points to the fact that we cannot make it determinatively intelligible.
We can't fully grasp it. I think that's the ineffable.
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. 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.
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. The correct comportment Plato talked about was finite transcendence.
You have to hold like this tonos, like the tension of the bow. You have to hold that we are simultaneously finite and transcendent.
We are finite in that we are capable of failure and sin and decadence. But if you just identify with that, you fall prey to despair and you become servile and manipulatable.
You have to remember your transcendence. You're capable of orienting towards the true and the good and the beautiful.
But if we identify just with our capacity for transcendence, we fall prey to hubris and then we become tyrants over others.

We have to hold the two together.

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.

And I think the incarnation

and the crucifixion are the enactment of finite transcendence.

That's just what I was thinking, because I thought if Pazio was here, that'd be the

first thing he'd point out.

Yeah, so that's extremely interesting.

Yeah, you'd love to point that out to me.

Well, yeah, because you have this insistence in Christian theology that Christ as God

puts on mortality comprehensively, right? It's not just death. It's kenosis.
It's the deep self mortality comprehensively, right?

It's not just death.

It's kenosis.

It's the deep self-emptying, right?

All the way down.

All the way down.

Not past death into hell, right?

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.

And like the terror management theorists

who aren't very pessimistic in my estimation,

And elements of existence that's limiting and terrifying is death. 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? That's a Freudian trope, but that's a problematic presumption in a variety of ways.
And it's been empirically undermined too. 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.
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. 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.
People can actually tolerate a brush with death without collapsing into psychological, like an actual brush with death, without collapsing into psychological chaos. But if they're naive and they encounter someone malevolent, then like all bets are off.
And so part of the reason that Christ descends through death into hell is because the whole acceptance of that finitude is not merely acceptance of mortality.

It's also grappling with the reality of evil.

I agree.

I agree.

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.
I think Whitehead, he said, you know, the defining, the central thing of evil is self-destructiveness. 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.
And I think that's how transcendence offers us a response to our finitude, right? Well, would that be a consequence of failing to establish the proper relationship with the rope that extends upward?

How do you avoid falling into despair and resentment if you don't remember your relationship with the infinite?

I think you need both.

Yes.

I find both.

I find the temptations of despair and the temptations of hubris are constant. Yep.
That's a nice way of elaborate. So I'm going to, I want to revisit this with regards to the tyrannical superego idea.
Yes. Okay.
So Jordan, I wanted to ask you, you've had a pretty practical life in many ways. 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? Yep. 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.
And so, So I'm curious about how is it that you made your entry into the more philosophical domain from the entrepreneurial, let's say? I'm going to answer that in a moment, but first I want to just say something here. 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.
And I feel like I'm quite present to what's happening. 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.
And you're gifted at that.

There's lots to be said for listening.

I'm also aware of the fact, though, there's an opportunity here for you.

Sometimes I say things.

Okay.

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

Okay.

So I was always very curious about both the nature of reality and what is right, right? So both the sort of metaphysics and ethics, always, as far as I can recall. 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 from making any sense whatsoever it was a haphazardly thrown together in a fashion that tended to produce more negative than positive think about just what happens when you go to school how old were you when when that started to become a focus of attention do you think about fourth grade oh yeah okay um 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.
And yet that seems to be something that the people who are around me seem to be perfectly okay with. Hmm, that's interesting.
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? So you can see how those two things link together. So you said TV in school.
Yeah. Were there other experiences that you remember at a young age that like, I'm kind of curious about what triggered this.
Yeah. I mean, that's pretty early.
Another one was, you know, we live in a neighborhood.

Behind the neighborhood is a large forest,

sort of a virgin forest.

I don't know how virgin it was.

And so we play, the kids play back there.

And we build structures and tree houses

and everything like that.

And then one day it's just been clear cut

to build out more of the neighborhood.

And the building out of the neighborhood

is supremely ugly, like suburban ugliness. And so again, an aesthetic sense of, again, there's something deeply wrong about that.
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. And it was perfectly profaned.
It wasn't just clear cut, it was clear cut. And then they built ugly buildings in that place.
Again, these are all happening roughly at the same time. And so the journey that I went on then was a journey that was always entangling.
How can I have agency in the world to make the world less off, less wrong, think normative? And what does right even look like? Because I don't have a context that gives me any good answers to that question. 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.
You look at TV, hmm, the president's lying. Do you have any sense of how old you were when you were able to articulate that as a propelling principle? 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.
And his existential solution to that was really a quest. 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.
Uh-huh, interesting. I had clients who were like that too, creative people.
If they ever stopped creating, they'd fall into the grip of their rational mind and just tear them into pieces, right? Yeah, but as long as they focused on that continual exploration, play, creativity, then they were fine. They'd fall into it like a child playing.
And that's kind of interesting because you might think of the real as what you think, because then certainly lots of people who are intellectual fall into that problem. But one of the things you do as a therapist with people who are depressed, especially if they're intelligent, is help them identify.

It's probably something like a higher calling. 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? And for this gentleman, who's a very creative architect, as long as he was creating, he was fine. Now, now and then, his rational mind would crop up and say, well, what the hell's the point of all this creativity? You know, which is a, well, it's kind of a bottomless pit, isn't it? If the ultimate goal is ineffable, there's no final answer to that question that you could propositionize.
Success in business isn't just about offering an amazing product or service, though that's certainly essential. What truly sets thriving companies apart is having powerful, reliable tools working behind the scenes to streamline every aspect of the selling process.
These are the systems that turn the complex challenge of reaching customers and processing sales into something that feels effortless and natural. That's exactly where Shopify enters the picture, transforming the way businesses operate in the digital age.
Nobody does selling better than Shopify. They're home to the number one checkout on the planet.
And here's the game changer. With ShopPay, they're boosting conversions up to 50%.
That means fewer abandoned carts and more sales going to your bottom line. In today's world, your business needs to be everywhere your customers are, whether that's scrolling through social media,

shopping online, or walking into a physical store. Shopify powers it all, seamlessly connecting your business across the web, your store, customer feeds, and everywhere in between.
And here's the truth. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.
Join over 2 million entrepreneurs who have already discovered the power of unified commerce with Shopify's all-in-one platform. Upgrade your business to the same checkout we use with Shopify.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase. Head to shopify.com slash jbp to upgrade your selling today.
That's shopify.com slash jbp. One answer would be, well, you're not suicidal when you're doing it you know that's kind of an exist well seriously like it quells your pain it quells your existential dread 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 right that seems like a reasonable proposition okay so back to i would call it pseudo metanoia right there 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 yeah yeah yeah kind of like dead reckoning 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.
Right, so for him, 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. Because that's a manifestation of a deeper...
He would actually have to find a way to embed himself in a world that was in continuous contact

with that sort of respite.

Yes, yes, yes.

To expand that territory

to include the whole of his life

and the whole of all that he loves.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, that's probably

what the Protestants are like.

And that was my pivot in sixth grade.

Okay, okay.

So in sixth grade

is when I had that thought of,

it's 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. And so that was the dual vector for me.
And so then, you know, part of the process was, okay, agency, and this leads to starting businesses. 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, create like your podcast and yours as well.
Yeah. For reasons, right? There's obvious reasons why that's a good thing to do.
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. I'm in the office at the Google headquarters where I'm going to be meeting with Sergey Brin.
They're talking to me about buying the company. Which company was this? It's called DIVX.
And in the lobby, I'm reading Gilles Loi's A Thousand Plateaus.

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 post-structuralism?

So these teams, they're very tightly wound for me continuously.

So that was the answer to that question. Right, right.
Yeah, so you laid out the order. So it was the, that reminds me of a variety of things.
The developmental psychologist Piaget spent his whole life studying children's play. There were other things he studied too because he was a polymath.
But the reason he did that was because he was trying to reconcile the gap between religion and science none of the psychologists that i ever encountered ever told their students that which is really quite sad because it's like that's actually an important i do detail you do yes that doesn't surprise me john let's go back to the super ego issue because this is this is a very interesting thing to delve into because there's's a personal element to it, which will make it more germane, 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. 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. But that's insufficient.
It also really helps if you were viciously hurt by someone religious. Yeah, yeah.
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, they're basically saying that power is the uniting metanarrative or procedure or world. 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.
So, let's see if we can characterize the world that's governed by power. Now, you said that you're subject on a fairly regular basis to like a tyrannical Freudian super ego.
How do you, and that'll make itself manifest as a pathological conscience, right? As guilt when guilt is not warranted. That's right.
Right. Okay.
So now we know that for guilt to be an appropriate manifestation of conscience, conscience has to be properly oriented. 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? 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? How can you tell the difference? So good.
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. The voice is saying, whoa, that's not real.
I say, okay, tell me what real is then. Tell me what your standard of realness is.
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.
Okay, so let me ask you a clarifying question. Does that mean that conscience without call is unreliable? 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? I think so.
I don't know if that's the point I was making. Oh, okay.
No, no. Let's not lose that point.
Yeah, okay. That's a good point.
Let's put a pin in that point. The point I was trying to make is the pathological conscience isn't consistent about normativity.
What it does is constantly invokes normativity that it refuses to submit itself to. Okay, so it's not playing by its own rules.
It's not playing by its own rules. So I'll say- Is it incoherent? Because- It is.
And this goes towards Whitehead's idea. I find that which in it, which is ultimately self-destructive.
I think, by the way, the implications of that notion of it being incoherent, it does not cohere with you. Well, it might not even cohere internally.
Right. 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? It's not like that's orienting you towards something higher.
It's a power maneuver. And sadism is a power maneuver, fundamentally.
It is. 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? Yeah, it can be salutary as well if it's appropriate.
What conscience gets is the claim, often implicit, that there's an authority behind the pain, that the pain is based on, 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. 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? Well, give me a clear example of something that has a point. Voice, this is pointless.
Give me a clear example of something that has a point. 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. So what is something that actually has a point, boys? 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.
If it's this pathological thing, it will start to thrash. It'll start to flounder because it will realize that- It doesn't have an up.
It doesn't have something that it can actually bind me to. It can inflict pain on me.
That's definitely the voice of a demon. Yeah.
It's got no upward orientation. Definitely the voice of a demon.
It's just trapped in hell. It's got no upward orientation.
So that's my personal answer to your question. 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.
That is what I am. That is what my humanity is, is to hold together, reciprocally remember and recognize my finitude and my transcendence.
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. Well, like, How could it be otherwise for a human being? Like, how could it possibly be that we could bear the catastrophe of our finitude without remembering our ineffable relationship? You'd think so, right? Well, right, you can fall into despair, but, and people might say, well, that's a rational response.
It depends on what you think the point of the rational is. It doesn't seem to be a rational response if it's, well, we could go into that, if it's self-defeating, right? So then why don't we investigate for a minute what that means? Like one of the symbolic representations of that, that's the blind leading the blind, right? They're going to fall into a pit, okay? Well, why not? What's the difference? What the hell difference does it make anyways if you fall into a pit, right? And that's a discussion about the nature of reality.
Well, there's endless suffering in the deepest of pits. And that, I don't know, that seems- Well, let me give you an example.
Yeah. The person, like, well, it's all meaningless.
It's like, well, you feel the call to speak that because you're actually committed to the truth. You find the truth intrinsically valuable.
So your actions are based on you holding things to be intrinsically valuable, which you actually – is in contradiction to what you're actually saying. Right, right.
Right? This is the Socratic move. If you accept the principle of non-contradiction.
Well, but then the point is if they're trying to convince, I mean, if they're just being violent, that's the right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But if they're trying to be coherent. Right, if they're trying to persuade me, then I can appeal to the normativity that is intrinsic to any act of persuasion.
Right, right, right, right. Yes, well, okay.
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. Because if you're just suffering and you don't think it's wrong, well, then that's a different kind of suffering, right? That's kind of like the pain of an animal, I would say.
And then it seems to me that in your realization that the suffering is wrong or unjust, there's a seed there. Yes.
Because you've got an indication that something that's actually a good is being violated. And that's a, right, right.
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. You can't find an accurate way of orienting yourself to what's highest unless you traverse the lower realms.
That's what happens to Jonah, right, in the whales. He's all the way down in the bottom of the abyss.
Then he orients himself upward, and the voice of God makes itself manifest, but only under those conditions. So, cognitively, I would say… Yeah, this is right.
There is no self-transcendence, which is a form of self-correction, unless there is a deep, and I don't just mean propositional, I mean a deep ownership and responsibility to one's capacity for self-deception. Okay, now you've gone sideways with that.
Now, I've been interested, as you know, in self-deception for a very long time. Because the previous was the thing that you really focused on, and that's the thing he really focuses on.
If we can find the place where there's meat, we've got to have done something really interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, okay, so why bring in the theme of self-deception? Because I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception. So at the heart of evil is self-destruction.
Why would any system destroy itself? I mean, this is a platonic argument. I think at the heart of it is self-deception.
I mean, this is in the, to use a Christian source, this is the epistle of John. Like, we are prone to self-deception, and that's what keeps us from the love of God in a profound way.
Wow. What's the motivation for the self-deception? There is, here's a specific, sorry, I'll use my name as an adjective, Vervakian proposal, 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, are also the processes that make us prone to self-deception because we might be misplaced.
Because we We think of sin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We miss our aim. Yeah, I agree.
The wages of sin or death. That's what you just said.
Yes. The wages of sin or death.
Well, as soon as you can abstract, you can lie, right? Because you can build a representation. Like, you can build multiple representations.
That's really the, or multiple worlds for that matter. That's the essence of the capacity to abstract, well then there's no reason that you can't falsify those.
I think even animals, I agree they don't lie. I think lying requires a reflective commitment to the truth of what you state.
But I think animals can deceive themselves because they can be deceived. so one organism can mislead.
Like chimps do this to each other all the time. And my capacity to deceive you is dependent on your capacity for self-deception.
Okay, fair enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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, because you talked about lies, the lies that were being promulgated.
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. So I spent a lot of time thinking about self-deception, like a lot.
Yeah, it has crossed multiple times. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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. It's something you do.
Whereas most self-deception looks to me like- Omission. Yeah, it's omission.
That's what I was just saying. Yeah, exactly.
I omit. So I think- Yeah, I fail to explore.
Okay, so lay out your theory of omission in relationship to self-deception. So it's an omission of insight.
So think about the insight. I thought he was angry, but it turns out he's afraid.
That's an insight. And I realized that I have oriented the wrong way.
Right. I have to reconfigure.
Right, right. But think about certain egocentric bias or proclivities or whatever that makes me the opposite of prone to insight that makes me resistant to insight.
And what we do is I think there's an omission. We make ourselves resistant to insights that we might have intimations of.
So here's an account of that. I've got you wrong.
You weren't angry. You were afraid.
Okay. Well, now I have to figure out at what level of presumption I got you wrong.
Like maybe I really got you wrong. Yes.
And maybe I didn't just get you wrong. Maybe that's an example of a pattern of me mistaking fear for anger that's permeated all my relationships.

Okay, now I've got an entropy pit in front of me, right? So, I'm going to have to, that's a journey down Dante's Inferno, I think. 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.
And the easiest thing for me to do is just not do that, right? I can just not do that. And you just made Iris Murdoch's argument in The Sovereignty of the Good.
She talks about the example of the mother-in-law who has this attitude towards her daughter-in-law. She's coarse.
Yeah. And then she realizes, oh, she's not coarse, she's authentic.
She's not rude, she's spontaneous. And then she does the thing you just did.
And then she thinks, oh, but maybe this isn't an isolated, maybe there's a systematicity, think Piaget. Maybe there's a systematicity to my error.
And then she faces the choice. The choice is, do I change in order to properly address that systematicity? What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts.
You'll get 10 different answers. Bull market, bear market, inflation up, inflation down.
Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Well, until then, over 41,000 businesses have future-proofed their operations with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform. With one unified business management suite, there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions.
Think about it. With real-time insight and forecasting, you're essentially peering into the future with actionable data.
When you're closing your books in days instead of weeks, you're spending less time looking backward and more time focused on what's next. For any business owner looking to streamline their operations, NetSuite is the solution I'd recommend.

Whether your company's earning millions or even hundreds of millions,

NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities.

Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com.jbp.

This guide is free to you at netsuite.com.jbp.

Again, that's netsuite.com.jbp. Again, that's netsuite.com.jbp.
Right, okay, well, so then, so Dante, I think that that journey down into Dante's Inferno is a descent into that entropy pit. I agree.
And then at the bottom, and I saw this in my therapeutic practice a lot too, Dante put the betrayers right by Satan, right? And so imagine that you engage in one of those sins of omission in the situation that you just described. Well, now that means that you've betrayed yourself, right? Because you've betrayed your capacity for transformation.
I think that's that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost is that you've now divorced. If you divorce yourself, yeah, well, because it's the sin that can't be forgiven, right? And so you think, what the hell is that? It's like, well, if you violate the spirit of transformation itself, then how in the world could you possibly recover from that? 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.
Yeah, exactly. 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? Willful blindness that might be associated with that. Because the payoff for her, that's the secondary gain of the Freudians.
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, so who the hell wants to go through that? That's a metanoia. But it's always down.
This is the problem with learning, I think, is that before you transfigure, there's a dissolution into an atropic state. That's that descent into chaos.
Well, you see that in insight. Entropy goes up first before you get the reduction.
Yeah, now you said that's been demonstrated. Can you tell me about that? So it's been demonstrated, the work of Stephan and Dixon.
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. The math is well established.
So excess neural activation, is that associated with that increase in entropy? It depends because that's hard to measure, right? Because it could be excitation or inhibition. And so you can't just track, right? And so, but what you get is you get a significant increase in entropy and then you get, with the insight, the decrease.
I'm going to bet it'll look a lot like what we saw on Twitter around the H1B thing for the past three days, if you were able to measure. Yeah.
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. Absolutely.
Well, that'd be that state of confusion, right? Where, okay, so now you've thrown an anomaly into the mix, and then everybody's chattering about how that might be reconciled, right? Entribute goes up, yep. Notice how it's governed initially primarily by the sin of omission, 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.
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. Well, that's like a definition of tyranny.
I want to pick up on the humility thing. Yeah.
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 we give people isn't actually the best advice. Think of previous instances where you solved an analogous problem.
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.
Now, why? Yeah, yeah, good. 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.

And that's the thing you should probably change

in your current situation.

Oh, yeah, that's that too.

So that's why the tyrant doubles down

in the Exodus story, right?

The humility.

As the anomalies mount,

which is exactly what happens in life, right?

And all over the place in our world right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, okay, so.

I just want to make one point.

I think humility is the virtue of identifying with finite transcendence. Humility is not despair and it's not hubris.
Humility is a confidence in a recognition of a reality that transcends you, but a confidence that you can nevertheless address it. Yeah.
You can be in contact with it. Okay, so I was at church this morning with Tammy, and I'm kind of getting accustomed to going to Catholic services.
And one of the ways this service opens, and 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? This is something that really bothered me when I was a kid because I thought it was a reflection of a kind of tyranny. And I think it can be, right? But I think more when it's oriented properly, it's that prayer for something like humility.
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. 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? 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? Especially if one of the views introduces some uncomfortable entropy into the other one. It's like, just shut the hell up.
I'm right. And then the problem goes away.
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. That's your metagame argument.
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
But so you can step back and you can think, okay, well, what the hell are we trying to accomplish here? Then you have to remember that while you're married and the person's going to be there tomorrow and that you love them. Then you have to remember what that means.
And then you have to remember what it's like when you're not arguing, which is often very difficult when you are arguing. And then you have to call to that spirit, I think.
And that's what delivers the insight. It's like, okay, what are we trying to do here? We're trying to make productive peace.
Okay. The argument was power, let's say, a power manifestation, at least in part, but the proper goal is productive peace.
And then you'll get an answer from the spirit of productive peace. So you do this, you do this, you know, by asking, you can even do this with, like individually um uh the solomon Paradox, Igor Grossman's work, get them to describe a problem they can't solve.
They will inevitably describe it from the first person perspective. Ask them to re-describe it from the perspective of a friend or somebody who knows them well.
And when they re-describe it from a perspective other than their own, they'll often get an insight into that because it breaks them out of the fact that they're like... That's interesting because you may know that there's no difference between being self-conscious and being in a state of negative emotion, right? They're statistically inseparable.
And depressed people are much more likely to use first-person pronouns. That's right.
Yeah, and socially anxious people too. That's right.
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? And then they'd forget about themselves, which is exactly what they were hoping to do. But you can't just forget about yourself, right? You have to put up a new frame.
So, okay. So, all right.
Now, you talked about self-deception. 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.
Like, it's interesting that, okay, do you, and you said that the television essentially was full of lies, right? Okay, flesh that out a bit and tell me and everyone who's listening and watching what deception you think you were detecting. I'm just making it very concrete.
As an example, there were two that I remember quite clearly. One was a McDonald's Happy Meal, which was in fact not at all happy when you actually got it.
And then the other one was the president, Richard Nixon, explicitly saying something on the television, and then having my grandfather over here letting everybody in the family know that that was a lie. So those are the two events that I remember going, huh.
So I live in a culture where this kind of thing happens. I didn't think it in that way, but I remember the feeling landing very heavily on me.
Huh, that means I can't actually, this is like the child who has an alcoholic parent who begins to have to take responsibility for parenting because they notice. So our culture is an alcoholic parent.
It's actually a really good metaphor. Oh, that's brilliant.
Yeah, it's a really good metaphor. And so that feeling of, oh, I need to start taking responsibility for navigating this world.
Why did you make that? Okay, but that's not the only, like in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain fails and he gets alienated from God and in consequence of that. So he experiences a landscape of trouble, let's say, but his response isn't to take responsibility.
His response is to curse fate. I wasn't alienated from God.
I was alienated from our culture. Those aren't the same.
Yeah, but they can easily become the same. 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?

I mean, this happens to people when they despair.

Sure, sure. I've been there.

Okay, but that didn't happen to you when you were a kid.

And you said you decided to take responsibility.

Okay, and you also made reference to your grandfather. Yeah.
Okay. So did he play a role in this? Only in this particular episode.
Only in that episode. Okay.
So why didn't you despair and why did you decide to take responsibility? And then what did that mean? 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, living in a physical environment, maneuvering around. And so something like 95% of my life was it's possible to navigate reality in a fashion which works.
And were you doing that successfully? Yeah. Along what dimensions? You had friends.
I had friends. Yes.
I was not hungry often. I could explore, I could adopt challenges like catching the frog and accomplish catching the frog and noticing that it was delightful.
I could go crawl in the creek, you know. So you had a track record of success.
What about your relationships with your parents at that point? Pretty healthy, I'd say. I think so.
Okay, so you were fairly firmly grounded. So you had a platform that enabled you to determine what constituted the truth.
So you do it from the center out. The center out was pretty solid.
Right. 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.
So when I come against this error at the level of culture, that's the anomaly. I don't have to worry about the center.
The center is pretty solid. Yeah.
Why phrase it in terms of center and anomaly? Well, anomaly in the sense that for the most part, again, everything is actually functioning reasonably well. 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.
And I mean, in a physical sense. So when the anomaly in this case would be an experience that throws an error in that category of, huh, I have set now a new purpose.
My new purpose is to cajole my parents into taking me to McDonald's to get a Happy meal. 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.
I get the happy meal, the experience sucked, and I made my family mad. Anomaly.
Purpose of value alignment. Right, against the center.
Oh yeah, so that's interesting because you pointed to the fact that you had multiple dimensions of success. And I mean, qualitatively distinct dimensions.
Yeah. So that's important.
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. So now we're in a situation, 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. 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. And this always annoyed me because my attitude was throw the damn kids in the basement and let them amuse themselves, right? They have to do that.
They have to learn to play. They have to learn to get along with strangers, and that's an excellent, and you just short circuit that.
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. The question then is, like, what the hell's their center? They haven't won.
Do you think that's true? Yeah. So there's data coming out.
I'm interested in your response to this, John. So I read recently that six, 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.
Now that's self-reported, and so there's problems with that. 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.
Let's just bring in to the image of the golden calf. 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.
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. There's a lot of other things to bring in together, but that's a way we've talked about it.
That does in fact have an inevitable collapse and a downward spiral into chaos, right? That was the argument that you made earlier or that you brought forward earlier. And from my point of view, as well as I understand it, that is the case.
And so- It's sort of by definition, if it's an aggregate that isn't unified by the appropriate higher order principle, it's going to disintegrate.

Yes, that's correct.

That's why that principle isn't ideal, because it disintegrates.

And so, can we go here? 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. But the basic idea is that the ability to actually form well-integrated holes that include a diversity of people outside of a small group of people who are genetically related has not actually been a solved problem.
So we've actually had three cuts of this. 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.
And by the way, if you investigate the indigenous modes, they have incredibly powerful psychotechnologies for inhibiting things like self-deception or tyrannical norms, right? So it's a whole integrated complex that forms a relatively stable over long periods of time. Long periods of time.
Aborigines. 25,000 years.
Right, long periods of time. But has the inability to grow beyond a certain number of people.
Oh, 200 you think about the way they create meta groups okay okay um and has the inability to actually integrate people who have any real diversity of intrinsics either different languages or different genetics right different actually just ways of being raised yeah yeah small amount yeah not big 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, this produces a certain generative capacity along the dimension of power. Because it has that capacity.
It deteriorates in that direction. Well, it has it both as a positive.
It can produce, say, for example, innovation. It can produce a way of orienting towards the productive environment to produce more food, for example.
It can solve more problems strategically. That's a better way of putting it.
That's the advantage of diversity, let's say. Yeah, it can solve more problems strategically.
And it can deploy more focused power on a particular problem domain. 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.
Right, sure. 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. You think that's a necessary first step? Probably about a third step, I'm guessing.
You look at like, so you can move from Moses to Saul and then ultimately across, you kind of see it happening over time. 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.
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 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. But it still has to ultimately, the only toolkit it can go to is something like a golden calf, something like a way to hold an aggregate together because it has still become an aggregate 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.
Well, so one of the logical likely pathways of devolution, you talked about the golden calf, is like sequential appeal to sequential hedonistic demands. Sure.
You can make peace with the toddler that way. Yeah.
You just give the toddler what he wants every time he asks. Bread, circuses, and empire.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The empire is.
Think about how empire works. 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, because it is structurally, fundamentally unstable, as you said, so it will undergo collapse, which is where we are. Yeah.
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, 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 immediate hedonic gratification.

And it's also not predicated on power.

Okay, so one of the things you see in the old test-

Hold on one second.

Yep.

I think that was very powerful and very important.

So in case other people besides us are participating in this conversation, put a bookmark on that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of exploration summarized very quickly in that statement. Yeah.
There's an immense emphasis in the Old Testament on the value of hospitality, right? Like it's a cardinal moral virtue. Now, I investigated that a little bit in We Who Wrestle With God anthropologically.
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. Now, you can steal his wares, but you don't get any more, like, stuff.
And so that's a drag. But worse than that, you don't know who he's associated with.
The primates that we're related to are very good at remembering who each little primate they could pound flat is related to, right? Because you pound the little primate flat and then his three more powerful relatives come along and you're dead. So they see the little guy in its social web.
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? You don't get to trade, plus you're all dead. Yes, that's a bad idea.
So now you have to be hospitable, and that gets the trade going. And so I'm wondering, then I was thinking about hospitality, like it's a local thing, right? Because that's what you do at a banquet or at a party.
You make people welcome. That's what you do if you run a small business.
If you have even the least amount of sense, you make people welcome. 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? So it's obviously a scalable virtue.
And maybe it's also the foundation of that societal trust that constitutes,

I think, the only real natural resource.

Could you speculate, do you think, on the relationship between hospitality and play? Yeah, I can. Throw an insight, too.
Okay. Okay.
I will. I'll throw an insight, too.
So, I think this goes back to, there seems to be evidence, the dating is questionable, somewhere between 120,000, 70,000 BCE. We're facing, it looks like, the possible end of the species, like it's under tremendous pressure, it's bottlenecking.
And it looks like the innovation that we happened 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. 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.
We don't know. Now, the problem with that, though, the problem with that is, okay, how do you do that? How do you actually, like, you can't make it teleological.
Well, we need to set up trade networks. Right.
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. And so you get the proposal of the invention, notice I'm doing it this way, of shamanism.
That what the shaman is good at is the shaman is good at actually mediating between different perspectives and different groups. And what the shaman starts to do is you start to create.
Right, well, he is a border dweller.

That's right, he's a border dweller. Psychopomp, 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. but what the shaman has to do is the shaman has to somehow

translate their capacity for like this cognitive flexibility into something that can be learned by other people. 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.
And then you have outward facing rituals like that. And then you have inward facing rituals of initiation.
Like, okay, we have to tighten our identity. So in order to be willing to interact with them, we have to know clearly better who we are.
And so you get the initiation rituals, you have interaction rituals, and then in connection with that, you have rituals that have to do with enhancing the cognitive flexibility that makes that kind of ritual possible. Now, here's the connection.
Ritual is play.

It is a profound kind of play.

Because what I'm doing in ritual is I'm engaging the imaginal. So Corbin's distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal.
So the imaginary is when I picture things in my mind and I'm taking myself away from reality. The imaginal is when a child is playing at being Superman.
They're not picturing Superman. What's it like to look at the world like Superman? What is it like to try out this identity? That's what a ritual is.
A ritual is a way of what's it like, play, serious play, what's it like to look at this person as, although they're a stranger, they're trustworthy? What's it like to be a person that can enter into recognition with you? And so I think there- Right. And then identity starts to become identity with the ability to do that.
Exactly. That's identity with the hero, I think, rather than with the tyrannical father, let's say.
So 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? Yeah, well, it's got to be something like, let's say you're being hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger. You're treating them kindly.
So you're treating them as if they're kin. That's 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 acting out the proposition when you're hospitable that there's a core identity that's shared. Right, and so that's gotta be a transcendent identity because the obvious identity markers are radically different.
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. 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. So if we think about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, how critical the hospitality protocol was.
Right, oh yeah. Lot is willing to go to great lengths not to violate the protocol of hospitality.
That tells us pay a lot of attention. Ultimate length.
That's right, ultimate length. 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.
And that's the key unlock that enables everything. Yeah, that's so, it's so cool that that hospitality has that imaginal element.
It's right, I'm going to, I'm going to treat this stranger as though they're welcome. Well, on, there's, that's the question, on what basis? Yeah.
Well, it's something like shared humanity. So it is the acting out of the concept of shared humanity before that's propositionalized at all.

Or even not, because for Abraham, they weren't humans, right? They're angels. 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 human on the surface, right? 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 you're you're removing from consideration all the obvious differences yeah 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. Something like that.
Yeah, well, certainly that's what Christ says in the gospels. If you do proper hospitality, it's an ascendant coming.
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, 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. 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.
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.
They're a lot better at it than you. So, all right, well, we should wrap up this part of the discussion.
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. And then, you know, we'll continue along the same lines.
I want to find out, too, what they jointly think they're up to. 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.
And thank you, gentlemen. It was lovely meeting you.
I very much appreciated that, John. It's always great to see you.
And I always feel that we get somewhere, that hospitality discussion, that was particularly useful, but there was lots in that that I felt moved, you know, moved things ahead. I talked about that in the book, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
Oh, yes, yes. And when did this come out? This is Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
When was this published? October came out.

Right, right.

So for everybody who's watching and listening,

you know, you could read this.

John Vervecki and Christopher Mastropietro,

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, book one.

So anyways, gentlemen, thank you very much.

And for all you watching and listening,

thank you very much for your time and attention.

Much appreciated.