Had dinner with a friend tonight. He's disillusioned with politics. Instead of arguing about left vs right, I tried to get underneath it — what are people actually reaching for when they vote, protest, fight? I think it's the "sacred".
I tend to think that "both" sides are getting at something...that there's something real underneath the apparent "stupidity".
These are the kinds of videos I make for myself in the spur of the moment that I usually just private...but now, I'm going to put them in community posts as unlisted videos.
Behind political differences, humans have an innate desire for the sacred - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzVdXYyF8-k
Transcript:
(00:02) I just met up with a friend and we were having a discussion and he seems very disillusioned and rather than trying to uh recapitulate that conversation, let me just pick up with where it left off and see if I can think through this in real time. You know, people aren't interested in participating in the political system for a number of reasons.
(00:37) Like why should a person want to believe that engaging in civic institutions is the way that they will attain what it is they want from society. And what is it even that people want from society? If people are allegedly and ostensibly not voting in their best interest, well, what is their best interest? Is their best interest merely what will give them the most uh materially or else otherwise successful life? Is it in a person's best interest to vote for policies that give them free health care, for example? And I would push back and ask, well, is
(01:27) there a difference between something being a good idea and something that you would want the government to administer? And I don't just mean maybe you mean that in general. Maybe you distrust any government whatsoever administering a public good or service, right? Or maybe you just think that you don't trust this particular government run by pedophiles and corrupt billionaires or whatever you think it's who runs it, right? And I was asking a question that gets even deeper.
(01:58) Why even engage in this legislative rigomearroll? Why believe in a construct like the law in the first place? And it's funny, I don't want to get too deep into it, but my friend mentioned a distrust of money and how, you know, animals don't use money. And I understand that that is an interesting point.
(02:23) Like, why are we engaging in these abstractions? Well, I would say without getting too deep into it that that is part of what it means to be a human being is that we are not as tied to the immediacy of our environment in the exact same way as other conscious beings. Yes, gorillas, elephants, whatever animal you want to point to, they have the intelligence does or certain types of consciousness do seem to exist.
(02:50) It seems to be like a spectrum, but we've reached a qualitatively different level of it where our participation in reality is predicated upon that initial fall. Not in the biblical sense of we've we live in a fallen state that requires a cosmic redeemer to save us. uh not that but that our existence is one where we are um there's we experience uh an an alienation from ourselves that is part of the human experience right like an animal isn't ashamed of its nakedness at least as far as we know but the human being is that is part of I won't get
(03:32) into the metaphysics of it but that is a necessary thing that makes this mode of being special. We'll talk about that in my book another time. But the point is that the human being is not an animal. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way in a way that is emphasizing materiality or the physical.
(03:52) I mean that the human being's participation in existence is in large part through mental constructs. And this isn't to validate our increasing abstraction uh from reality, but it is to say that money is one of the things that emerges within that knowetic world, within that intellectual world, however you want to phrase it.
(04:19) So, human beings participate in more than just grounded physical practical structures. And to that end, the law is of such an ilk. The law is not something that a gorilla participates in, but human beings participation in reality is mediated through structures and consciousness. And so with that in mind, I've answered my own question in terms of why we feel drawn to participate in the law.
(04:52) But I was continuing to ask my friend, why not a monarchy? Why not an aristocracy? What type of assumptions about reality bring you to the place where we believe in the idea of neutral or fair or all of these other things? What value system is that predicated upon? And without going too deep into it, well, you might say that it could be related to assumptions about the inherent equality of all human beings.
(05:24) But where does that idea even come from? Where do we get the notion that all human beings are equal? And I I am somewhat familiar with the alleged origins of human rights uh stemming back um in the democratization of immortality via Osiris. But that's a process for another time. But the point remains that I was talking to my friend and and I was mentioning to him he was saying how someone in his family is bigoted say for example against Muslims and I just made the point that well you know maybe that's true and that probably is true but I
(06:07) feel like people on all sides whether it's left or right are reacting to real things like let's just take Muslims for example you know theologically it doesn't matter what any particular local Muslim Muslim believes. Why would a Muslim want to not just ingratiate themselves, but why would they want to allow post-enlightenment values in the United States or the West in general supersede what they believe to be the word of God? Why would they theological just logically I'm not talking about what individual Muslims who feel the pressure
(06:39) to integrate and assimilate in a western society. I'm not concerned with what any person feels at the local level. I'm just talking logically the structure of Islamic of Islam generally speaking would believe that these values are derived directly from God. Why would you then try to mitigate that in order to appease the values that were put forward by some post-enlightenment thinker like Thomas Jefferson, right? So just I'm not saying there's some sort of grand conspiracy.
(07:14) I'm not saying that you need, you know, Muslims are evil or bad, but just logically, if you have enough Muslims in your country, and if they all believe that this other set of values is more important than the arbitrary values of some ethnic group called Scots or of the English, why would they believe that God's sovereignty and and and will should be subordinated to the triflings of some random human ethnic group? they want it.
(07:46) And so I'm not saying that you need to eradicate Muslims from all of your countries, but I am saying that beneath the bigotry, the alleged bigotry of people, say for example, in the rightwing or in whatever European country that's pushing back against mass migration, is there not any logical legitimacy to that? And so the problem is that okay let's say that you have a bunch of backwards people living in a rural part of the United States where they are you know more bought into the narrative that is say they the left they want to they want to
(08:24) come into the school system and turn your kids gay and they want you to become a queer transsexual Muslim or whatever it is like why would you isn't it kind of an integrity that those people are willing to vote against their interest even if the Democrats are saying let's say that hypothetically the Democrats are saying and I'm just this is obviously false but they're saying hey we're going to turn all your kids into we're going to turn them all into trans we're going to teach them that white we're going to teach
(09:00) them to gravel about how bad white people are we're going to um take out all references to Christianity and we're going to become a a Muslim school, but we're going to make sure that you have free healthcare and access to, you know, you have gas is affordable, you're not engaged in any sort of superfluous or needless wars halfway across the world.
(09:32) So then in that case it's kind of like saying and I'm not saying this is equivalent but if someone was like hey you know we'll give you a lot of money if you betray your values in a weird way isn't it kind of an act of integrity for these rural people to uh sort of disavow their quote unquote self-interest in order to be aligned with whatever they believe are deeper values.
(10:00) Because what seems to be the real problem or one of the real problems that no one's able to touch is that why like human beings and I'm not trying to get too deep into this. You want to live in a way that answers your actual deeper questions. What is this all for? Where do I go when I die? If I go anywhere where I die, what is the meaning of this existence? What is the nature of reality? And I mention this a lot that this is what Aristotle meant whenever he said it is man's nature to know.
(10:47) He didn't mean that man wants to know all of these random scientific intellectual facts. He means that a human being's soul is oriented toward understanding what the hell all of this means and why we're here. And without giving too much away, this is why I say what people yearn for is the sacred. And whenever I use the term sacred, it carries a lot of baggage with it.
(11:18) People imagine piety or some sort of weird moral air to it. But let me try to help you understand what the sacred is in a way that is a little bit more relatable. Like if there was a news story that the president got shot or whatever, you wanted to know if he died or not. You wouldn't you wouldn't reference the the oldest article.
(11:48) You would want to know up tothe- minute updates of what was going on. That desire to be connected to what is most alive to what is most relevant to what is most ripe with meaning. That is your desire for the sacred. Like if I walked into a hospital with a gunshot wound and the doctor asked me, "Oh, hey, I see that you got shot in the face with a gun, but I also see that you had some lingering toe issue.
(12:22) Which one would you like me to treat right now?" And I'm going to guess most people would be like, "Uh, treat the fact that I just got shot in the face with a gun." Right? That's the sacred that underlying impulse where it's like you can be cute and you can put up a specious argument that you would want to have your pinky toe fixed, but stop lying.
(12:47) You know that most people, and this isn't some sort of preference or thing that you were taught, it's like an innate disposition, would be immediately more worried about the gunshot wound to the face and having that fixed. This is what we mean by it is your nature. You don't have a preference for water. You don't choose all of your desires.
(13:13) You're not the you're not the designer of your existence. You are not the ground of your own being. You don't choose whether or not you want water. It is baked in to you. Likewise, a desire for the sacred, no matter how you dress it up, whether that turns into veganism or woke or MAGA or whatever it is, you want to be connected to what is most real, what is most potent with relevancy, what gives your life order, direction, meaning, purpose, what helps you make sense of experience.
(13:59) That's what you all want. That's what's underneath all of these apparent differences. That's what's underneath all of this conflict. And humanity has been at an impass. I won't go into it too much, but all of your sources of order are predicated upon contingent structures. ethnicity, tradition, whatever it is, nation, some contingent structure.
(14:30) And so whenever you have a have a situation where different people are forced to coexist, well then you're going to have the problems that we have in these societies where there's paralysis. there's not a clear consensus on what is most valuable, what is most relevant. And so you're going to be in a situation where like I call my grandma and she's lamenting the left.
(15:05) I talk to others, they're lamenting the right. And even if allegedly many people agree on the core issues, it's not as simple as well, let me sell out my deepest values for what's uh good for me. And I don't mean to make it sound so cheap, but uh I think that people are trying to be in alignment with something. They don't even understand the mechan the mechanics of it.
(15:40) So anyway, that's how I would sort of continue the conversation if I could is trying to get insight on how like what what people think Yeah. what what people think about why others are acting the ways that they do in a way that doesn't immediately, even if partially true, jump to the fact that everyone else is just so stupid or evil or misguided.
(16:16) That all may be true, but I just want to understand like, is it really just that straightforward?