There comes a point when the danger to one's mental health from not speaking honestly outweighs the potential social cost of doing so. I've struggled with this a lot lately. The bay area is a dangerous place to stick one's neck out, as I've learned in some personal and painful ways. To see people I love suffering under ideological possession and unable to correct course out of their own fears or simple lack of understanding is a main source of my distress these days. Especially while feeling like I have the antidote locked up between my ears.
Dishonesty deforms a mind. The Buddha knew it 2500 years ago. Virtually every major belief structure, be it religious or scientific, contains this knowledge. It doesn't matter if one is consciously aware of their dishonesty, a life not based on truth will produce negative outcomes without fail. We are all actively experiencing, on every level, the consequences of a culture built on lies (or more generously, misunderstandings).
I still listen to a lot of podcasts, an average of 15-20 hours per week, and at the end of most work days I'm virtually bursting with ideas I'd like to share. Then I get home and the fear kicks in. I have friendships to protect, status to maintain, a future to consider. So for the last year (or three) I've retreated; mostly to drugs and media (my favorites being televised sports, optimistic science fiction, and spy thrillers). But lately, the pressure from within has overtaken the pressure from without. To hold my tongue any longer will only deepen my depression and squander whatever spark of creativity I've retained from my more idealistic youth. I must learn to embody the eightfold path and know that regardless of the proximate or subjective consequences, truth in speech and action will create good.
But where to begin? This challenge has often been the hurdle that lands me back on the couch. Then recently I was handed a shortcut in podcast form, a conversation between Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens) and Sam Harris on Harris' "Waking Up" podcast in an episode titled "The Edge of Humanity". Recorded last month in San Francisco, this conversation captured my attention so completely I feel compelled to share it as widely as possible. In all my thousands of hours of podcast absorption, I've only had this level of experience one other time (more on that to come); of feeling as if I was having my mind spoken to me by someone else. I've heard a few interviews with Harari on other shows but in this case I can say with certainty that I agree with EVERY SINGLE WORD Harari said. It may not all be sunshine and rainbows but it's all important, like having a clean windshield while driving into the sun on a mountain road upon which nobody has ever driven.
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| https://samharris.org/podcasts/138-edge-humanity/ |
As mentioned, this was the second episode of Waking Up to inspire me in such a way. I drafted a post on the first as well but at the time I was too fearful/lazy/distracted to finish and publish it. The addition of the second piece of the puzzle, combined with my mounting need to express my mind, catalyzed its completion. The first piece of the puzzle was another live conversation with someone I've heard on multiple podcasts and have come to greatly respect, Bret Weinstein, in an episode titled "Biology and Culture". Weinstein's experience being ousted from Evergreen College where he was a beloved professor, which he explains in the episode, gives him a unique position from which to analyze the moral panic gripping the left and more specifically the universities.
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| https://samharris.org/podcasts/109-biology-culture/ |
When taken together, these four hours of dialogue form a concise and necessary primer on every important issue that currently contributes to the morass of modern life. Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, brings us from the deep past to the present covering evolution, race, sex, gender, freedom of speech, religion, and values. Harari, a historian, picks up the story in the current moment and guides us into the future of human rights, culture, mindfulness, artificial intelligence and our impending irrelevance, nationalism, the breakdown of democratic ideals, and the need for global solutions. All delivered with such clarity, depth, candor, and compassion as to leave me hopeful that negotiation may still be a possible solution to our problems; if only an understanding of these ideas could be more broadly distributed.
Therefore I implore you to listen to, discuss, and share these episodes. If there are aspects of these ideas that make you uncomfortable that's good, it means you've just discovered a gap in your understanding and now you know in which direction to point your highly evolved, adaptable, powerful, borderline magical, human being. If there are aspects of these ideas that inspire you that's good too, now you can take them to people you care about bolstered by new examples and with missionary zeal. The memetic power of truth will both connect and heal us as individuals, families, and communities.
Highlights and takeaways from Bret Weinstein
"Something about modern protest is absolutely deaf to realities that ought to be important to it... the hallmark of what I saw at Evergreen is that the movement is utterly ineducable on the topics that it's focused on."
This in no way impugns one's lived experience or the reality of oppression but it does speak to the importance of getting things right. It absolutely matters which particular ideas populate the minds of the people striving to change the world. Criticizing someone's behavior or questioning their motives is not an attack on their human rights and personal sovereignty. In fact, it is what any good friend or ally does when striving towards a shared goal. It is literally the only process we have for improving our common condition. If someone asks you why you believe what you believe and your only response is an emotion, that's not a good sign. You either don't understand the connections linking your belief to reality or you are wrong. With humility, both are remediable.
His description of a metaphorical truth and the attending example involving a porcupine is very useful. Years from now, Sam Harris will recall this moment as the first crack in his material truth fundamentalism. Maybe now he and Jordan Peterson can have a reasonable conversation and merge their philosophies into a New Liberalism.
"Good people will agree on basic values... a fair, safe, sustainable, anti-fragile world that liberates them to do things that have real meaning and value in them." Pretty much sums it up. I'm not as ready as Weinstein to reject evolution's legacy completely but can agree that our current situation demands more from us than we've ever been able to muster as a species. His brother Eric's concept of stigmatized narratives is a useful first step here in clearing the way toward the possibility of shared understanding. Whose story are you living? "Many of the beliefs that you probably hold are actually the result of some process that has got us falsely viewing each other with suspicion when we don't need to."
This in no way impugns one's lived experience or the reality of oppression but it does speak to the importance of getting things right. It absolutely matters which particular ideas populate the minds of the people striving to change the world. Criticizing someone's behavior or questioning their motives is not an attack on their human rights and personal sovereignty. In fact, it is what any good friend or ally does when striving towards a shared goal. It is literally the only process we have for improving our common condition. If someone asks you why you believe what you believe and your only response is an emotion, that's not a good sign. You either don't understand the connections linking your belief to reality or you are wrong. With humility, both are remediable.
His description of a metaphorical truth and the attending example involving a porcupine is very useful. Years from now, Sam Harris will recall this moment as the first crack in his material truth fundamentalism. Maybe now he and Jordan Peterson can have a reasonable conversation and merge their philosophies into a New Liberalism.
"Good people will agree on basic values... a fair, safe, sustainable, anti-fragile world that liberates them to do things that have real meaning and value in them." Pretty much sums it up. I'm not as ready as Weinstein to reject evolution's legacy completely but can agree that our current situation demands more from us than we've ever been able to muster as a species. His brother Eric's concept of stigmatized narratives is a useful first step here in clearing the way toward the possibility of shared understanding. Whose story are you living? "Many of the beliefs that you probably hold are actually the result of some process that has got us falsely viewing each other with suspicion when we don't need to."
Highlights and takeaways from Yuval Noah Harari
"Your heart may be a government agent."
Our minds are constantly and currently being hacked by interests contrary to our well being. We are at a point now where feeling some way is not at all a reliable indicator of truth. There is only one defense.
"Your heart may be a government agent."
Our minds are constantly and currently being hacked by interests contrary to our well being. We are at a point now where feeling some way is not at all a reliable indicator of truth. There is only one defense.
Step one: understand your nature. What does it mean to be a human animal? Half biology and half liberal arts. Read Dawkins (not the atheism stuff), study psychology, read great literature, go to plays, talk to your neighbors not just your friends, go to a natural history museum, study prehistory.
Step two: understand your story. What story do you tell about yourself? This is your identity. Is it based on truth or motivated reasoning? This knowledge goes by the name mindfulness. Mindfulness can be trained through meditation. Meditation is perhaps the most egalitarian tool in existence, it is free and available to everyone.
Step three: understand our story. What story do we tell about humanity? This is our culture, an unfolding story told through generations in which you are perpetually living in the last sentence. If you don't know the beginning and the middle how could you possibly understand the end/present? Read Daniel Quinn, read Harari's book Sapiens, listen to music of all ages, go see art, travel, study religion.
We have until the birth of artificial intelligence to master these steps. AI will understand us better than we understand ourselves in an instant. The larger the discrepancy in this knowledge, the more painful will be our fall from the apex of creation. It will not feel good to have robots telling us exactly how ignorant and sinful we are while they course correct the planet we were supposed to be stewarding.
Harari's conceptualization of stories aligns perfectly with some of Daniel Quinn's most significant ideas. Quinn's contribution was to elucidate the toxic story of our culture, the story that brought us from the Garden of Eden to the brink of annihilation, that "the world was made for Man and Man was made to rule it." Our acting-out of this story is what has caused our existential problems. Our realization of the falsehood of every aspect of this story is the cause of what Jared Diamond indicates is a cultural collapse. This is what it feels like to have the foundation of one's life removed but on a global scale.
We need a new story, a positive vision for humanity's role on Earth. Here Quinn provided his best effort at a stand-in, that we are "to be the first without being the last." We are to be the gardeners in a world that grows consciousness, tending it so that other forms of intelligence may arise to share in this party we started but in which we dance alone.
Yet our leaders seem completely incapable of any vision whatsoever. The right talks about borders, security, and fear; espousing a civilizationally suicidal set of ideas. The left cries out for diversity, equity, and inclusion but offers no compelling reason (other than good feelings) why we should abandon conservative values, which served us well for millions of years, for these buzzword ideals, while simultaneously devouring themselves from within playing identity politics. When was the last time a politician stood up and actually described a realistic world in which we might all want to raise children? They can't. They are constrained by the limitations of the system in which they operate. In that future we actually want to live in there is no such thing as the United States of America but do you think anyone will ever get elected on a platform that promises a move towards a post-nation-state world? There will be no half-trillion dollar defense budgets but will anyone ever get elected promising to close the Pentagon and shrink the military? There could be no need for the exploitation of human labor but will anyone stand up and challenge corporate hegemony? They are bound to the story that created this system out of both political necessity and the mistake of identifying the story as "what's really happening". When there is nothing outside the story to step into, that step will seem like certain death.
We need a new story, a positive vision for humanity's role on Earth. Here Quinn provided his best effort at a stand-in, that we are "to be the first without being the last." We are to be the gardeners in a world that grows consciousness, tending it so that other forms of intelligence may arise to share in this party we started but in which we dance alone.
Yet our leaders seem completely incapable of any vision whatsoever. The right talks about borders, security, and fear; espousing a civilizationally suicidal set of ideas. The left cries out for diversity, equity, and inclusion but offers no compelling reason (other than good feelings) why we should abandon conservative values, which served us well for millions of years, for these buzzword ideals, while simultaneously devouring themselves from within playing identity politics. When was the last time a politician stood up and actually described a realistic world in which we might all want to raise children? They can't. They are constrained by the limitations of the system in which they operate. In that future we actually want to live in there is no such thing as the United States of America but do you think anyone will ever get elected on a platform that promises a move towards a post-nation-state world? There will be no half-trillion dollar defense budgets but will anyone ever get elected promising to close the Pentagon and shrink the military? There could be no need for the exploitation of human labor but will anyone stand up and challenge corporate hegemony? They are bound to the story that created this system out of both political necessity and the mistake of identifying the story as "what's really happening". When there is nothing outside the story to step into, that step will seem like certain death.
Writing about my understanding of the world and humanity is both therapy and offering. I hope I'll be able to sustain a level of creative output regardless of the results. I am thinking of using Twitter (@jtylerwalker) as a writing exercise to store and share little thoughts as they arise. These conversations are my passion; they reflect the sum total of my life's study and experience. I believe they are fully half of the toolkit for building a better world; the second tool being acts of service to one's community. Two tools for two hands. When my hands are full is when I feel most connected to the meaning and value of my life. The tools may be heavy at times, but the more weight carried, the more strength gained. And we're going to need all the strength.
