Transcript
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: Today we've got Joe Norman.
Speaker: Joe is a data scientist and lecturer in complexity studies at AppliedComplexity.io.
Speaker: We wanted to get him on the show because his study of complex systems has led him to a passion for building communities and carving out space at human scale, which we're all about here at Exit.
Speaker: Hey, so from following your Twitter account, I detect a lot of rationalist DNA.
Speaker: Do you have a history in that space?
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: I actually, you know, a lot of these terms I'm obviously aware of, but I don't necessarily know what they imply.
Speaker: I've always been bad with kind of tracking like clicks and collectives.
Speaker: And so actually maybe, so I guess the answer truly is maybe, but I don't know it.
Speaker: Yeah, not consciously.
Speaker: I mean, so my experience with that was basically I was always sort of a,
Speaker: a rationalism skeptic, but I found some of those ideas really interesting.
Speaker: And I kind of played in that space a little bit.
Speaker: And I think that you and I have similar sensibilities about the limits of, of, of rationality, pure rationality.
Speaker: So what is, so what is rationalism from your perspective?
Speaker: So I know what we're talking about.
Speaker: Yeah, so just the idea of kind of, well, it started with like, the biggest voices in that space were like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex.
Speaker: And just sort of like, we're going to be very big brained and utilitarian.
Speaker: Like, honestly, I couldn't really articulate to you exactly what it is, except that it's like,
Speaker: It's like everything can be broken down into a rational argument, into a rational frame, and then kind of argued from there.
Speaker: And the implications are clear and that kind of thing, I take it.
Speaker: Or at least we're going to try to do that.
Speaker: And we're going to be as disciplined as possible about that.
Speaker: And I actually kind of admire that approach.
Speaker: for some of the insights that it produces, I just think it's really insufficient to the complexity of the world that we live in.
Speaker: So I think, yeah, it's definitely...
Speaker: you have things to say about that space, even if you haven't inhabited it for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I take, you know, it's sort of like from, from the scientific realm, I think of people like maybe a Richard Dawkins who, who is working in a, you know, pretty much as, as complex of a domain as you can be in evolutionary biology, but kind of wants to make these very clean, neat, tidy arguments about what, what things are, what role they play, what role they don't play.
Speaker: And I guess what I'm sensing from your comments is that what they don't do well is sense the limits of not only what their rationality can actually articulate, but that way of framing things can actually wrap itself around and clarify and articulate in principle.
Speaker: Yeah, what I've loved about Scott Alexander and those guys, despite disagreeing with them in a lot of ways, is that they are willing to swim really deep in that pool and address some of the complexity.
Speaker: Even if they don't come around to this whole system of looking at things is probably insufficient.
Speaker: They're pretty profound guys.
Speaker: Well, so...
Speaker: Speaking of people that are kind of cool but that I don't totally agree with, I'm not a libertarian.
Speaker: I understand that you're not either, but I am an admirer of the Free State Project and what they're trying to accomplish out there just as far as having some boots on the ground and trying to make things different at the local level.
Speaker: Can you try to sell me on New Hampshire?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sell you on New Hampshire.
Speaker: Well, I don't know if I necessarily want to sell you or sell people in general on New Hampshire.
Speaker: I've sold myself on it.
Speaker: And the Free State Project, I do not consider myself a libertarian.
Speaker: I do have a lot of libertarian tendencies and leanings.
Speaker: But again, similar to the rationalist thing, I'm kind of like allergic to labels.
Speaker: And of course, I can't avoid it entirely.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: I don't like a lot of the implications that come along with, with that word.
Speaker: And it's really interesting because, you know, the free state project, it it's mere existence.
Speaker: So for those who are not aware in New Hampshire, there's this thing, obviously New Hampshire called the free state project.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: It's been going on for, I don't know, nearly two decades now, maybe 15 years, something like that.
Speaker: And it's explicitly a libertarian project, but with the insight that in order to get enough libertarian minded people in a kind of
Speaker: in a policy influencing position and posture, then there's no way to do that at say like the national scale of the U S. So they realize, okay, what we need to do is choose a state and kind of concentrate our efforts there and at least produce something that we recognize as libertarian in that state.
Speaker: Now, one of the things that's interesting about that is it immediately kind of raises a few incoherences in, in,
Speaker: libertarian philosophy is one thing, but in the libertarians that we know, the libertarians as such, the people, especially around like discomfort with ideas of borders and boundaries.
Speaker: And of course, the mobility to New Hampshire is quote unquote borderless, but it is exactly the political boundaries of New Hampshire that enable one or of any state
Speaker: to potentially concentrate like-minded people in that unit and affect change there.
Speaker: So there's some interesting tension there.
Speaker: And it comes to the surface.
Speaker: It's not all under the surface.
Speaker: And there are very explicit arguments and fights right now within, as I know that there always are, within kind of libertarian communities.
Speaker: Again, a little bit of a paradox there.
Speaker: But –
Speaker: Yeah, the fights right now, a lot of them are around, you know, what, excuse me, what are our views on borders?
Speaker: What are border policies?
Speaker: And it's interesting because from a lot of their point of view, they say, well, let's put that to the side for now.
Speaker: We can kind of work that out later, just details.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But from my point of view, I kind of treat things as biological systems.
Speaker: And if you look at the thing biologically or anything biologically, it's very clear that one of the most crucial parameters or features of a system are...
Speaker: Where are its boundaries?
Speaker: What are its boundaries kind of made of, so to speak?
Speaker: How do they interact with the flows across things, flows of things across the boundaries?
Speaker: How do they regulate that?
Speaker: And so, you know, borders in any political platform, from my perspective, it's going to be coherent.
Speaker: You know, borders and boundaries are one of the first things you have to make clear.
Speaker: Where do you stand on that?
Speaker: What do you think about that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you're taking this biological perspective and, you know, trying to, trying to nurture the growth of something rather than designing it out of whole cloth, then the initial conditions matter a great deal.
Speaker: And so, um,
Speaker: Yeah, if you've got these incoherencies baked into the cake from the beginning, that will inevitably create these problems.
Speaker: Have you ever read Albion Seed by Hackett Fisher?
Speaker: No, I've read excerpts from it and I have it sitting on my shelf as one of my necessary reads to come, but, but no, I have not.
Speaker: So, so one of the things that he talks about that I find so interesting is definitions of freedom.
Speaker: Like we think of, of liberty, especially like American liberty as being one thing, but there's very different takes on what that means.
Speaker: And, um, growing up,
Speaker: I was always taught, maybe you were taught something similar in school, that, like, the Puritan notion of liberty was just purely hypocritical, that, like, they wanted freedom just for themselves and not for anybody else.
Speaker: And one of the things that I'm sort of coming around to is, like,
Speaker: They wanted freedom to order their society in the way that they wanted and to set boundaries and to say, this is what we are.
Speaker: They wanted freedom for us, not individual freedom.
Speaker: And that's a legitimate case to make.
Speaker: You're talking about libertarians and boundaries.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: it's legitimate to say that like, if all we care about is individual freedom, then we'll be atomized and subsumed into these larger structures that we can't really control.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So obviously the danger, so the truth is that we are certainly a social species and we behave in collective ways
Speaker: And we always will.
Speaker: And so there is some need there to say, okay, well, if you make all of your policy focused on, you know, quote unquote, individual liberty, then what of the individual liberty that, that, that harms or threatens the ability to behave collectively and the ability of those who choose to behave collectively to do so.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: the obvious danger there is that you, you then become just a pure collectivist, right.
Speaker: Where it's always the job of the individual to serve the collective and all of the horror that can come along with that.
Speaker: So balancing that is, is an interesting problem and challenge.
Speaker: And indeed, you know, I, I wrote a short essay maybe six months ago or so where I argue that, um,
Speaker: any kind of coherent form of libertarianism has to converge to localism precisely for this reason, that you are going to have disagreements over where to draw the lines on various issues, on issues of how individual versus collective-based things should be, on, you know, is it, you know, say abortion issues?
Speaker: Is it about the rights of the life of the unborn child?
Speaker: Or is it the rights of the woman who's carrying rights?
Speaker: And these don't have...
Speaker: And we should never expect them to have absolute answers or to find absolute consensus.
Speaker: So you actually need to have these clusters where you come to different conclusions on these things.
Speaker: And there's actually no way to sort of get outside that situation and decide once and for all in some quote unquote objective sense, like which one is really liberty, right?
Speaker: The true liberty is in the having a system that can support this this plurality.
Speaker: And that plurality is also not only in, you know, different collectives that have different practices, but but in the nature of how sort of atomized or not those different collections are.
Speaker: I think your quote on one of your sub-sex pieces really gets to this sort of, there's been this project of liberal internationalism or whatever you want to call it to say, where one global village, whereas you're arguing kind of from this localist perspective, actually what's needed is, or I'm sorry, yeah, you need like a globe of villages rather than one
Speaker: one global village in order to support pluralism.
Speaker: And yeah, I mean, like you said, you don't like labels, but it seems out of all of them, you tend to have a large affinity with localism.
Speaker: Related to that, I think there's a question of some people kind of think that, hey, I'm just going to go to New Hampshire in your case or some other place and enforce boundaries.
Speaker: It's somewhat of a LARP or somewhat of a COPE.
Speaker: It's kind of retreating and it's refusing to stand up, especially to more of a global project that wants to enforce the same cultural standards on everyone.
Speaker: So from your perspective, I'm really interested in hearing why, you know, localism isn't isn't actually a LARP.
Speaker: You know, it's actually something that's grounded and real and that can help support the sense of pluralism and maybe liberty at a smaller scale level.
Speaker: So I'm truly not sure in what way it would be a LARP like.
Speaker: The bottom line is all the time, regardless of say the, so there's different kind of aspects to what I call localism, right?
Speaker: There's sort of the political thing, you know, what is the political structure?
Speaker: What are the practices?
Speaker: Does it support localism?
Speaker: Does it not?
Speaker: How are those policy decisions made, et cetera, right?
Speaker: So in New Hampshire, for instance, we have an extremely at, you know, sub state level, very decentralized decision making.
Speaker: My town is still operates its legislature as a as a town meeting, meaning that we all go or not everyone goes, but everyone's invited to go.
Speaker: And we as the people are the legislature.
Speaker: And a lot of relevant policy is set at that town level in New Hampshire.
Speaker: So the reality of decentralization is here in many ways.
Speaker: It's not something that's like a fantasy.
Speaker: It's like here.
Speaker: And it's actually one of the reasons that despite so many of, I don't know, missteps and wrong ideas and this and that, why has USA continued to prosper relatively?
Speaker: It's because we continue to be a very decentralized system.
Speaker: nation.
Speaker: We are not centralized in most ways.
Speaker: Now, there are obviously forces that seek to centralize us, and those are what really put our integrity as a nation, ironically, in jeopardy, because our strength is that we are not a pure, cohesive mass all doing the same thing.
Speaker: So, localism is here.
Speaker: Well, I think
Speaker: One of the things that makes us special, and we can talk about the trucker situation if you want.
Speaker: The Canadian Charter of Rights has this, if we feel like it, or if it's convenient, or as much as it makes sense.
Speaker: There's a game theoretic problem with being maximally reasonable and putting all these provisos on everything.
Speaker: And I think one of the advantages that we have is that political, I guess insurrection is maybe too strong of a word, but radical political change can be legitimized at a smaller scale than it can be in other places because we have these rights, at least on paper, and so the powers that be sort of have to
Speaker: have to make excuses for why they're not respecting those rights rather than it just being a matter of like, well, the Canadian charter says that we don't have to do that.
Speaker: So we're not gonna.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And, and, and, um, even when, you know, like you said, it's just paper, right.
Speaker: And it is just paper, but there are, um,
Speaker: large scale cultural expectations around that paper.
Speaker: And that's what makes that paper real in some way.
Speaker: And that does mean to your point that even when though that paper is transgressed, technically there's a lot of friction and headwind against that, those actions.
Speaker: So they're not as extreme as they would be otherwise.
Speaker: So, you know, I, I certainly understand what people say.
Speaker: It's just paper.
Speaker: It's not really going to protect you.
Speaker: Yes and no.
Speaker: There's a reason that governments and constitutional governance has become such a relevant player in this world that we live in.
Speaker: And that's because making things very explicit, writing down the contract actually is enormously powerful in human social systems.
Speaker: It's something to point to that has its own kind of structural persistence.
Speaker: And yes, the interpretations can change.
Speaker: There's all kinds of challenges and this and that, but it's not the same as not having it.
Speaker: It's just a piece of paper, but it's a very powerful piece of paper.
Speaker: And indeed, you know, the Canadian charter rights thing, it's, yeah, they can just say it's basically instrumental, right?
Speaker: Like you have these rights until there's a problem that is big enough that we suspend these rights.
Speaker: And, um, yeah, so it's like, so, okay, who makes that call?
Speaker: And then you're like, then you're right back into, well, it's, it's, then it is just a piece of paper.
Speaker: Um, so, you know, it's interesting cause there's, uh, they're now talking about this, um,
Speaker: U.S. I've been on Twitter.
Speaker: I've openly supported the Canadian Truckers Convoy.
Speaker: I have friends who are in Canada, all across Canada, and they've been experiencing the negative side effects of a lot of the policy there.
Speaker: So when people say, oh, there's no real problem, it's all...
Speaker: uh it's all kind of kind of hyped up and whatnot it's like no these people actually are having very serious issues with being able to live their lives in reasonable ways reasonable ways that are not putting other people at undue risk um and i support these people and so i don't have any any misgivings about supporting my friends um now there's this there's this prospect sorry let me just finish this thought there's a prospect now the american trucker convoy and i don't think it makes
Speaker: as much sense.
Speaker: In New Hampshire, not only do we not have a lot of the overreaching COVID restrictions, we actually have legislation that's been passed and put into law that
Speaker: against a lot of that stuff.
Speaker: So we have preventative measures, you know, you can't do this, you can't do that.
Speaker: And so, you know, my direct experience of the USA is that it's still quite decentralized in a very functional way.
Speaker: And so a kind of nation scale trucker convoy, it's like, it doesn't make any sense in some sense.
Speaker: So yeah, I mean, most of the people who
Speaker: There's definitely lots of people who would like to be sort of blue state refugees who are suffering under these policies that they disagree with very strongly.
Speaker: But I would say the bulk of the country that have the... And this is part of the...
Speaker: the beauty or the insidiousness of this system, depending on how you look at it, um, is that there's always this pressure release valve, um, that, that takes the wind out of dissident sales and dissidents complain about this a lot, which is like, um,
Speaker: you know, they can, they can dial it down in this very precise way to, to avoid creating too much unrest.
Speaker: But at the same time, it also means that significant portions of this country just haven't had to deal with those kinds of restrictions.
Speaker: I mean, I haven't, I haven't lived in an extreme COVID jurisdiction throughout this process at all.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: Yeah, my ability to get like personally angry about it is not the same as somebody who's had their business shut down or, you know, they're watching these things be imposed from the top.
Speaker: They have essentially no voice in.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The ones that have come closest to home for me are the Northeast City Vax mandates, Vax pass policies.
Speaker: So Boston had one.
Speaker: It's canceled now.
Speaker: Um, and New York, I have no idea what they're doing in New York, but they've done all kinds of insane things.
Speaker: And, uh, those, those hit the closest home for me, but I have to concede, like, I don't live in those cities.
Speaker: I don't even live in the States that those cities are in.
Speaker: So, um, I'd like to be able to, to visit those without having to show Vax passes around.
Speaker: But, you know, at the end of the day, it is their call.
Speaker: As long as it doesn't start to impose on me where I live and I don't have a voice where I live, then I can only be so upset with it.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But yeah, and I can certainly understand, let's say you're living in one of those cities and you totally disagree and they just start, you know, implementing these policies by executive fiat.
Speaker: You know, that's...
Speaker: that's an intense situation to be in, but the way things are structured now, our political borders internally are completely mobility friendly.
Speaker: You can get up and move.
Speaker: And I would suggest that's a very strong way, the vote with your feet thing, it's very true.
Speaker: It's so much stronger now with so many jobs going remote.
Speaker: I have this vision of,
Speaker: the interior of the country becoming a new frontier because there's places that are not close enough to significant urban activity to attract, um, substantial, uh, population yet, but with huge portions of, of people with like, uh,
Speaker: a desire to homestead or to live more rurally, but they have like the software skills or the remote, the remote work skills to, uh, essentially subsidize that project.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that's me.
Speaker: That's, that's what I do.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, me too.
Speaker: And, uh, well, but speaking of that, like you strike me as a very cerebral person, a very ideas oriented person, um,
Speaker: I'm fairly new in the homesteading game.
Speaker: Has that been a natural fit for you?
Speaker: What's that been like?
Speaker: Has it been a natural fit?
Speaker: It's been a very natural fit in terms of it's, it hasn't been like, Oh, did, did, was this a bad idea?
Speaker: Do I not like kind of fit with this?
Speaker: Although there have been moments with more extreme moments where as a family, we've questioned, you know, are we cut out for this?
Speaker: But I think the answer is solidly at this point.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: There has been, I pointed this out elsewhere, that one of the things that it's helped me to begin overcoming is a bit of analysis paralysis in especially physical things, constructing things, fixing things.
Speaker: And, you know, it's something I continue to struggle against, I would say.
Speaker: At the same time.
Speaker: Well, yes.
Speaker: So I had a question about this, which is, I mean, essentially, right?
Speaker: I mean, of course, this group that we're a part of, it's called Exit.
Speaker: Exit, of course, I mean, for me, at least coming from the book Exit Voice Loyalty by Albert Hirschman, you know, sort of as a way to express...
Speaker: express your sovereignty, which is what we're describing, for describing the interior of the country becoming a new frontier, that's a way of exiting.
Speaker: But I think there is sort of this tension because on the one hand, we're talking about localism is this very real embodied thing in state or local legislatures.
Speaker: But on the other hand, it's really, really helpful to have sort of digital networks or, you know, I kind of refer to it not as localism, but sort of ideological or functional shelling points around which, you know, we can...
Speaker: we can come together.
Speaker: And that's certainly, you know, what Bennett has started with his business that I'm a part of.
Speaker: But I think there's some limitations, especially when we're talking about scaling up or down, you know, digital networks tend to be or can become scale free pretty quickly.
Speaker: Whereas obviously, you know, in physical space, you know, you actually have to
Speaker: build your homestead or build your farm or whatever else.
Speaker: And so something I'm working out is, you know, and of course, with the rise of crypto and everything is kind of how much alignment can there be, should there be between sort of digital networks or digital localism or digital shelling points versus, you know, the physical manifestations of that.
Speaker: And I'm curious to hear how you tend to think about, you know, the tensions or lack thereof there.
Speaker: Well, I mean, the tension is clear, right?
Speaker: You only have so much time to give in a day.
Speaker: And so only so much time for social engagement, economic engagement, et cetera.
Speaker: And so any time that's spent online is taken away from local engagement.
Speaker: And it's something that is a challenge when it comes to being a remote worker and trying to
Speaker: embody and enact this kind of localist lifestyle.
Speaker: And because, you know, the homesteading, okay, you can, you know, be online, go tend to your chickens, go tend to your goats, whatever, you can do all that.
Speaker: But the building yourself into a community, you know, ideally, I think ideally, maybe not ideally, at least for me in my situation, there's already, you know, longtime locals that live here.
Speaker: And I'm not trying to paste over
Speaker: their existence or how they live or anything like that.
Speaker: I'm more interested in embedding myself into this local community and becoming a part of it and maybe even enhancing its communal aspects.
Speaker: Now, how does one do that?
Speaker: I think there's no one answer, but I can give you like, for instance, what we are doing and expecting to do.
Speaker: And I've done a couple of things for a time, although I can't say I'm active at the moment, since we've had our second child.
Speaker: I've just been, it's been too much.
Speaker: I've had to drop things.
Speaker: And that's one of them.
Speaker: I did the volunteer fire department.
Speaker: That was extremely embedding and enlightening.
Speaker: I got to understand more of how the people are around here and especially those who
Speaker: are truly kind of, um, without knowing it unconsciously localist.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that was enlightening in multiple ways, including how those who are in some sense, the most local Americans that exist have very globalist type habits, especially in consumption and purchasing behaviors, which, um, to me is, is a shame, um, and a bit ironic.
Speaker: And I, I hope that part of, uh,
Speaker: our move into the future is a continuing kind of waking up to the way people are just kind of exporting their money away into these global corporations and institutions.
Speaker: And it doesn't need to be that way.
Speaker: At least it does not need to be so severe.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: One of the obvious reasons why that happens is because it's cheap.
Speaker: You know, Walmart is cheap.
Speaker: And one of the...
Speaker: One of the critiques that I think we're always going to get of this approach and this lifestyle is that it's essentially a luxury belief and that it's held by people who have software jobs that can subsidize it.
Speaker: How do you address that?
Speaker: How do you bring people who are kind of closer to the knife's edge into this world?
Speaker: So I think it is a matter of things are cheaper.
Speaker: That's part of it.
Speaker: There also are simply habits.
Speaker: And there are many instances where, like, for instance, if we purchase a whole beef share, like a whole cow from a local farm that does everything extremely holistically, you know, regenerative farm, all of that good stuff, we pay less per pound than if I go to Walmart and buy, you know, beef and styrofoam per pound.
Speaker: So, you know, it's, some of that is true.
Speaker: Some of that is myth.
Speaker: And I think that finding those areas where it's not quite true is really powerful.
Speaker: And, you know, it's a market economy.
Speaker: So if you start to have more demand in those local producers, they will expand.
Speaker: There will be more of them.
Speaker: So, you know, it's, it's true to some extent that there is a, you
Speaker: expense associated with certain decisions, but it's not, it's not ubiquitous and it's not absolute.
Speaker: So that, that's one thing that, that like I've realized and, and, you know, there, there's social signaling aspects to it.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: You know, it's it's somehow it's humble to, for instance, shop at Walmart.
Speaker: It's not like you don't feel like you're a big shot when you do that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's right.
Speaker: And so there are social signaling aspects as well.
Speaker: Like, oh, like, you know, if you go to the hippie co-op, then that's signaling something versus if you go to Walmart, then that's signaling something.
Speaker: So as much as I don't like to kind of rely or depend on people kind of becoming more conscious and aware of things, because I think it's in general, fragile approach, there seems to be some necessity for that, for people to realize, and not just on the individual level, but on the collective level, like we are undercutting our own existence by continuing to engage in these particular habits.
Speaker: And there are options.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm pretty firmly anti-hippie just by temperament and everything else pretty much.
Speaker: And I really value the fact that we've made that not the exclusive province of hippies.
Speaker: Well, it's in fact, it's everything is, you know, shifting around with politics.
Speaker: And I mean, that's why left and right can be such useless kind of terms, because everything's changing all the time, what's associated with those terms.
Speaker: And indeed, like, one of the things that's been happening on Twitter, like, I don't know if you follow the account William Wheelwright, but he made a post or a thread about like,
Speaker: just throwing out an idea, like if this many people did this much food production themselves, then like that would be, you know, enough for the U S or something at 70, I don't remember the particular claims, but there was a huge like left leaning reaction to that.
Speaker: That was very offended by the idea that,
Speaker: the economies of scale claimed by industrial production aren't legit.
Speaker: The mere idea that those are not real or they don't matter or we shouldn't leverage them or whatever seemed very offensive to the left, which is amazing because, like you said, this is sort of from when we were kids, this is the province of the hippies.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They were the back to the land and barefoot and all that.
Speaker: And now it's the hippies law.
Speaker: Well, now it's what as well?
Speaker: Say again?
Speaker: Now it's petty bourgeois to do that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So it's kind of amazing.
Speaker: And I, you know, it's a bit of a disappointment to me because I say, you know, I look at things and I kind of say, well, the left and the right can kind of meet in localism and you can kind of dissolve that dichotomy.
Speaker: Well, so this is something...
Speaker: The moment one team takes something up, the other explicitly rejects it.
Speaker: And so I don't know that there can be a dissolution of this thing as long as we identify at scale with these labels.
Speaker: Then the trick is just to occupy all of the wholesome, beautiful, wonderful space.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And that's what it brings up.
Speaker: It's good for a fragile or volatile global system.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: It's good for all these different reasons.
Speaker: It's better to be able to have these small units that make decisions so they're sensitive to local context.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, what I've come to realize is what I'm actually seeking is wholesomeness.
Speaker: And I'm not even totally sure what that is.
Speaker: I know it when I see it.
Speaker: And that's what all of these things in the end for me seem to support.
Speaker: And so that's my, that's my ultimate project is, is how do I become more wholesome myself, help the people in the systems around me be more wholesome.
Speaker: And whatever kind of political label one wants to strap on that.
Speaker: I mean, that's, that's,
Speaker: I think this for me brings up, you know, kind of tying it back to how Bennett opened this with rationalism.
Speaker: You know, it used to be, you know, if you were a stuffy evangelical, you know, the way to do that is to fix that is to go get education and, you know, become secular and rational.
Speaker: And nowadays, I think you posted something on Twitter that really resonated with me and I think a lot of other people, which is kind of understanding how faith is a bulwark against sort of the centralizing atomization of secular society.
Speaker: And in particular, one thing you've said to me
Speaker: which I think rings true for a lot of people, is you said, you know, your study of complexity science, obviously you have a PhD and you run your own institute and you're teaching a course.
Speaker: But you said, you know, the more and more you delve into complexity, which is kind of the opposite of reductionistic science, it leads you more to, you know, the principles espoused by Christianity or, you know, it leads you more to seeing how, you
Speaker: you know, people rely on faith, faith and God.
Speaker: And I think that's really common, right?
Speaker: And you'll see a lot of reactions from more left-leaning people saying, you know, oh, look at these people, they're very revanchist or they want to go back to, you know, some very oppressive thing.
Speaker: And it's like, no, actually, you know, there's a, if you really study the Bible or if you study other religious texts, you see it actually contains a lot of what
Speaker: you're trying to manifest by studying complexity and trying to live it out loud.
Speaker: So I'm really curious to hear you kind of riff on this idea that actually, you know, like studying complexity, you know, and the science of complexity leads you closer towards faith or to something like Christianity.
Speaker: Well, tradition is a computer.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: Like, essentially, tradition is the process of massively complex systems being iterated upon and computed upon across millions of individuals over centuries.
Speaker: So I would almost think of it more like a hereditary mechanism then.
Speaker: You know, maybe in some sense, it's computing, sure.
Speaker: But, you know, it's a mechanism of social heredity.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And so you can have replication and mutation and all of that.
Speaker: And that, you know, that's certainly a valid view.
Speaker: It's, it's, but it is an instrumental view.
Speaker: It explains, you know, why certain things could like help certain collectives of people survive better than others.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But faith seems to be something beyond that, actually.
Speaker: And that's one of the things that I'm,
Speaker: coming around to is that there, it certainly is the instrumental aspect because if your, um, traditions are not fit for survival, then, you know, then they won't last.
Speaker: Um, but, um,
Speaker: almost by definition, faith seems to be something beyond sort of the rationalization that this set of things seems to confer survival, therefore I'll join in on it.
Speaker: I was actually hoping that you would say that, to be honest.
Speaker: I 100% agree that it cannot be instrumental.
Speaker: Even from a functional perspective, it doesn't work if it's instrumental.
Speaker: You have to mean it.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, so let me try to gather some thoughts here.
Speaker: So, so Rajiv, you were saying like, and you kind of framed it in the rationalistic issue and, um,
Speaker: Yeah, because I think anybody who realizes at some point the limits of rationality, you know, they might end up in this functional or instrumental perspective.
Speaker: But I think there's many, many more people who realize, you know, you can ground it in sort of saying, OK, there's these principles, you know, in religion, you know, that map to complexity science.
Speaker: But like you're saying, there's something more there that's really important.
Speaker: And we seem to have lost it, although we're almost recovering it now as we see people move into these more localist movements.
Speaker: So I will offer one instrumental aspect, or at least it could be interpreted that way, in which, you know, one of the, I think one of the tweets you're referring to, what I was really thinking was I look at people's actions that look and are courageous in the face of all kinds of massive forces, you know, poised against them.
Speaker: And I see that the only, you know, the rational thing to do in a lot of those situations would be to not be courageous.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But the faith seems to be that faith in some sense or another, maybe it's Christian faith, maybe it's some other kind of faith, is the only thing that actually can resist kind of the carrot and the stick.
Speaker: Rationalization is always subject to the carrot and the stick.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: we need something else if the world is not to be dominated in that way.
Speaker: There's a, there's a miraculousness in the ability to, to subsume your own will.
Speaker: There's a miraculousness in the ability to not do what you would like to do because the stick is I want to do what I want to do.
Speaker: What feels good.
Speaker: What's the best, even if it's in the longterm, even if it's like an investment decision,
Speaker: And faith allows you to step outside of that frame.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And, you know, like, so when it comes to Christian themes, like one of the deepest questions you might ask in, say, complexity science, looking at living organisms, looking at human beings is,
Speaker: What is free will?
Speaker: What do we mean by that?
Speaker: Is there a space for it in the way we understand things scientifically?
Speaker: Or is there not?
Speaker: And then, you know, what do Christians mean by that?
Speaker: What does Christian theology have to say about this?
Speaker: Why is it kind of a founding assumption of Christian practice?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, and there's sort of an interesting inversion.
Speaker: I find in complexity what you get a lot are inversions of deeply held enlightenment assumptions.
Speaker: Like, for instance, I want to say it was when I was reading Lewis where he first starts talking about law.
Speaker: And he starts talking about law in terms of the things that a person ought to do.
Speaker: Whereas a deterministic law are the things that must happen by virtue of the physical laws of the universe or whatever.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so the fact that he starts from laws are not the things that constrain things to occur this way, but that things ought to happen this way and you have to actually choose those things.
Speaker: That's an interesting inversion to begin from.
Speaker: If that's somehow the basis of reality is not physical law in the sense of necessary stepwise unfolding of some formal system, but some way that things ought to happen and often don't happen that way,
Speaker: That's a, that's a different way of thinking.
Speaker: And there's a big tension in, in our scientific understanding of things in terms of basically the underlying assumption of, um, all reductionistic kind of enlightenment post enlightenment science is that reality is a formal system.
Speaker: So like a mathematical or computational system.
Speaker: Everything is what it has to be.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And there's no other way it could be.
Speaker: So it's actually kind of a, um,
Speaker: it's kind of an incoherence or, or, or contradiction when we talk about, well, it might have been different or it could have been different.
Speaker: It's, it's necessarily can't be.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yet our, our lived experience is that we do make choices.
Speaker: And, you know, I, the, the naive attack on free will is like, well, you can't do everything.
Speaker: Yeah, no, but there's some constraints and within those constraints, it seems like there's some looseness in this.
Speaker: And as you said, you can actually, um,
Speaker: choose to do things that go against your kind of baser desires and wants and even needs in certain cases.
Speaker: So it is a profound thing.
Speaker: And I'll refrain from trying to riff too much on Christianity because frankly, I'm a neophyte in that realm.
Speaker: But what I just find that a lot of the, rather than the answers necessarily, a lot of the questions that are raised turn out to be
Speaker: the same kinds of questions that you run into when you, when you study complexity.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I did want to ask you about what has your experience been like reading Matthew with your family?
Speaker: Oh, it's been great.
Speaker: It's been great.
Speaker: You know, it's one of those things where it's so, um,
Speaker: our culture is so saturated with these themes, ideas, even particular phrases that somehow on, on first reading, it's like not the first reading, right?
Speaker: I'm like, Oh, here's the source.
Speaker: Here's the source of this, you know, it's turning on the mountain.
Speaker: It's like powerful.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And so that's been incredible.
Speaker: And it really feels less like taking in something new and more like connecting a bunch of the dots of the patterns that I've been swimming in my whole life, but ignorant to them.
Speaker: So it's been great.
Speaker: And another thing that I've realized is that the superficial distinction between kind of, I don't know, called secular and Christian
Speaker: is different than what I'm discovering is the deeper distinction between them.
Speaker: And something can be ostensibly secular and, in fact, quite Christian and certainly vice versa as well.
Speaker: So I've always, I've always just to put a note on that.
Speaker: I've always thought of myself as being raised in a very religiously agnostic environment.
Speaker: And when I'm coming to realize is that's, and I'm just in terms of the scope of my family, say, I'm going to realize is that's not the case.
Speaker: Like one of the things my parents instilled in me very strongly, despite us being essentially agnostic superficially was like the value of love in the family.
Speaker: And what is that based in?
Speaker: What is the foundation of that?
Speaker: And it's faith of some kind.
Speaker: It's a faith and it strikes me as a very Christian type of faith.
Speaker: Yeah, I feel like the way that that dichotomy is generally drawn...
Speaker: is that all of the parts of the Christian milieu that makes, that still makes sense to secularists, they just say, well, that's common sense.
Speaker: That's common decency.
Speaker: That's our, that's our, uh, evolved morality or whatever.
Speaker: And then all the stuff that they don't like is the superstition.
Speaker: And it's, it, that where that line is drawn changes dramatically from year to year.
Speaker: And it's, it's fundamentally arbitrary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like there's still Christians.
Speaker: It's a common sense and, and, you know, it's, it's often circular to say, well, um, these things must be good because they're common sense.
Speaker: They must be, you know, contributing to our survival.
Speaker: Um, but, but it's indeed, I mean, what really you're getting to there is there's, when you, when you make the claim that, well, it's common sense, uh, you're basically saying that there's no further explanation, which is basically a way of saying it's a faith-based proposition.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And I, yeah, I hope that you, I hope that you continue like, because what's, I have this sort of hobby horse, I guess, where so much of our public life is explicitly informed by the Sermon on the Mount.
Speaker: And if it's not like, you know, we're all personally Bible believing Christians, it's more something like,
Speaker: conservative Christians need to be held to what is in the Sermon on the Mount.
Speaker: And if they veer from it, we're going to nail them on it.
Speaker: And what is interesting about that is as you continue to read in the Gospels and you look at how Jesus behaved,
Speaker: He's pretty extraordinarily confrontational.
Speaker: He's rough on people.
Speaker: And he does not behave in the way that Christians are currently expected to behave on the basis of what's in the Sermon on the Mount.
Speaker: And that's an interesting tension because the Sermon on the Mount does say what it says.
Speaker: But yeah, how does that all wrap together is a really interesting question that I think you're going to have a fun time with.
Speaker: So speaking of confrontation, I want to ask you, I've been wanting to for a while ask a little bit more of a spicy question, but this is just something that's come out of the quote unquote discourse.
Speaker: But there's kind of a big tension right now on social media between sort of anons and not anons.
Speaker: And I've seen on your feed, Joe, at least, you know, you tend to get very, uh,
Speaker: get very ornery when, you know, you see people who are Anons, you know, who claim to be like, oh, we're the founding fathers and we're dissident and we're coming together, you know, to form a new constitutional confederation.
Speaker: You know, on the other hand, you know, I also follow many Anons and of course, Mr. Bennett here is an Anon.
Speaker: And some of my best friends are Anons.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I think, you know, for me, at least, part of this came to a big heat when I think there was a feud with Jordan Peterson, where he was like, you know, Anons are really crazy.
Speaker: They behave badly.
Speaker: I wish we could expose them.
Speaker: I think he said something like, it's like the den of scoundrels or something like that.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And of course, I know how you feel about I think all of us here actually feel similarly about JVP in that, you know, he has some good stuff, but there's some fundamental things missing, whether it's, you know, he still falls under this liberal conception of extreme individual rights or he goes to Monsanto, you know, rallies, you know, events sponsored by Monsanto or he constantly he's like, oh, truckers, you need to go home because you're too disruptive.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, I'd like to hear you flesh out your opinion more, you know, because obviously, you know, none of us here are against Anon, you know, and there's a value to it.
Speaker: But I think there's a tension there, too, where it's like it is important, especially, you know, like Bennett here was doxxed.
Speaker: And, you know, it's a way for people to protect themselves, but it can also lead to, you know, people being more abrasive and confrontational than they need to be.
Speaker: And so I think it's an interesting area to explore if you're willing to.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: So, so, okay.
Speaker: So let's, let's talk about JVPs.
Speaker: I don't know if this is the exact verbatim, but let's go with Dennis scoundrels.
Speaker: I think that is true in the sense that if you are a scoundrel, you're going to be a non, like it's, it permits you to act, behave in ways and become unaccountable for those behaviors.
Speaker: And so that is, you know, if you are a scoundrel, then you are likely a non, that doesn't mean that if you were a non, you were likely a scoundrel, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: There are, I'm certain, good reasons to be anonymous.
Speaker: I'm certain of that fact.
Speaker: And then there is a spectrum of, say, good to bad reasons, where some reasons are okay, but not that compelling.
Speaker: My sense is, as a kind of political force, talk about being a dissident, collectively, while there is a cost individually to being not anonymous, potentially,
Speaker: There is also a great cost in so many who would like to push back against things they see happening right now being anonymous.
Speaker: It makes you a less influential player.
Speaker: and it makes the collective less influential.
Speaker: There's something very deep ingrained in us where there's a gravity to seeing the identity of the person, feeling that's a true identity, seeing that there is a price that person could potentially pay by owning those views and opinions.
Speaker: And so I see that there's, like I said, I was joking, but it's also true that some of my best friends are anonymous.
Speaker: I see because when you see both sides of that, you also come to see that when there's kind of a virtue signal about anonymity, like, Oh, what about the founding fathers?
Speaker: Kind of the suggesting that suggestion that like, well, I'm doing is like them.
Speaker: And then, you know, that the reality of their situation and why they're really anonymous, maybe like they're, you know, maybe it's something as, as much as like their parents would be upset if they read what they were writing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Then, um,
Speaker: I'm kind of like, yeah, okay.
Speaker: It's not the greatest reasoning in my book.
Speaker: And it's slowing things down and brings things back.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, I think it does defeat a coordination problem, which is that like...
Speaker: Sure, if we all went face and we all said what we really believed all the time, then in a sense that the spell would be broken and the walls would tumble down and we'd all be able to do that.
Speaker: But as long as that coordination problem exists...
Speaker: I got doxxed.
Speaker: The worst people in the world know who I am and are free to attack me personally on whatever basis they choose to.
Speaker: But I stay with the Anon brand, I guess, partly because it's fun, but also because it allows me...
Speaker: to explore ideas in a less constrained way.
Speaker: And, you know, I view it as a way of integrating those ideas into myself personally.
Speaker: And I think some people deploy their anonymity to maintain that separation rather than integrating it.
Speaker: But it can definitely work both ways.
Speaker: I see that, but I, my sense, I'm not yet convinced that being unconstrained in that way is actually a good thing.
Speaker: There's certain kind of ownership of, of utterances or of tweets or whatever it is that does constrain a person to not say certain things.
Speaker: And that could be for.
Speaker: Sometimes you should be constrained.
Speaker: Sometimes you should be constrained.
Speaker: Sometimes there's a good reason that you might be embarrassed to have certain things like associated with your true identity.
Speaker: And, you know, if what you're doing is like saying things that would embarrass you, then there's some information there.
Speaker: Yeah, and part of where we are now is that, you know, it's so difficult to have a private conversation.
Speaker: And at least with the people that you'd like to have that private conversation with.
Speaker: And so I think what anonymity creates is like people do need to have the freedom to explore wacky ideas, even embarrassing ideas.
Speaker: Yeah, but I agree.
Speaker: Like ideally from my perspective, that's like something for a private realm with like people you trust.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And what, I mean, essentially what happened to us in our little group is that we were doxed in a private chat, which is, you know, the story of almost everybody that comes into those circumstances.
Speaker: So like, yeah, it's, well, but anyway, yeah, you could go back and forth on that all day.
Speaker: But I think it does lead into the crypto and DAO space of, you
Speaker: decentralized, autonomous, trustless organizations.
Speaker: I know that you're not a techno optimist necessarily, but what do you feel about the blockchain solves this crowd?
Speaker: It's kind of on the other end of the spectrum of what I'm actually interested in developing high trust environments where that's the kind of currency of the realm is the trust.
Speaker: Obviously, I see the potential utility in some sense –
Speaker: even fiat currencies is meant to be a kind of trustless thing.
Speaker: Yes, you might be trusting a third party, trusting a sovereign, something like that.
Speaker: But when I hand a dollar to somebody, you know, the cashier at the store, they don't have to trust me so much.
Speaker: They're trusting my dollar.
Speaker: So, so that I get the, the utility of that and why that's very important on some scale.
Speaker: But what I, I,
Speaker: what I shy away from a bit is the notion that all transactions should be that way, or that's sort of the foundation of our transactional space.
Speaker: And to the point of localism,
Speaker: I'm actually much more interested in potentially like, you know, despite the, the, the complications it introduces just, just to kind of push on this in the other extreme, like barter with people I trust.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's like the extreme other end.
Speaker: It's like, it's like completely non-fungible stuff.
Speaker: You don't, you have all these problems introduced by not having currency and it's completely based on face-to-face interactions and knowing one another and all of that.
Speaker: And so, um,
Speaker: I'm just personally more interested in that.
Speaker: And I think that that is sort of an essential end of the spectrum that we need solved for and filled in where then maybe something like a globally deployed blockchain cryptocurrency has a place in larger scale transactions and things like that.
Speaker: But I don't like it as kind of the main show or I don't like it per se.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a comparable technique or method that's actually used by...
Speaker: terrorist organizations, among other people, where money is lended via trusted networks.
Speaker: I think it's called Hawali or I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but it's a form of money transfer where you give your money to the local exchanger guy and
Speaker: And he just tells the guy in Bangladesh, hey, I've received this money.
Speaker: You give money to the other guy.
Speaker: And it gives the feds fits because it makes it really hard to trace like money laundering.
Speaker: I mean, I guess it's sort of de facto is money laundering.
Speaker: And it's illegal in most Western jurisdictions.
Speaker: But it's a sense in which trust is technology.
Speaker: because it relies on the trust between all four of those parties to facilitate the transaction.
Speaker: Yeah, you could say that way.
Speaker: It's a technology.
Speaker: It's a structuring device.
Speaker: You can structure systems in ways where you have trust that you simply can't structure it otherwise, even if you have trustless technologies to fill the gaps.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, you know...
Speaker: Locally, I like to think that, you know, what humans ought to be is something like an organism.
Speaker: So very kind of tightly coupled locally.
Speaker: And, and there's the only way to facilitate such tight coupling is has to be super economic, it can't be purely economic, there has to be relationships.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: There has to be friendships and, you know, sometimes enemies and all that.
Speaker: But there has to be something that's beyond the economic.
Speaker: And indeed, like when it comes to local things, you see that there's almost never purely economic exchanges.
Speaker: There's always an element of relationship building to it.
Speaker: And, you know, you might choose to purchase, say, from one farmer, not the other.
Speaker: Because you like the guy, right?
Speaker: And that's something when you get to the abstract economic system, there's none of that.
Speaker: You don't buy it because you like the guy.
Speaker: You might like the company, but you don't like the guy.
Speaker: Like that's not even part of it.
Speaker: So I like all those sort of fine-grained, high-complexity type of aspect of things.
Speaker: That's where I want to focus my energy and my time.
Speaker: And blockchain...
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: I'm not against it, but it just doesn't happen.
Speaker: It's explicitly in attempting to be a solution, seeing those things as problems.
Speaker: I don't see those as problems.
Speaker: I see those as solutions for different kinds of problems, if that makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah, that does make sense.
Speaker: You've talked about distributism and one of your critiques being that if you tax things as they get bigger, which is sort of the way that the point of distributism is to maintain things at a small level and just progressively tax them as they grow to keep them small.
Speaker: And one of your critiques is that you potentially create another bloated power base in the people who collect and distribute the tax, right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And that's been something that I've chewed on quite a bit, which is like, you know, if we stay small, then we're just sort of waiting around to get eaten by somebody that chooses not to stay small.
Speaker: And do you think that there's a solution to that, a way to create stable, small, balanced power structures?
Speaker: Well, the bottom line is I typically refrain from kind of using the terms that sounds jargony and it starts to sound nerdy, but localism ultimately, if it's to persist, has to be multi-scale localism, meaning that you might have your village and your town.
Speaker: and this and that, but you also need to be able to coordinate those villages with one another when needed.
Speaker: And you also need to, whatever you call the collection of villages, those need to coordinate with one another when needed.
Speaker: And so there has to be the ability to cohere into larger scale behaviors in order to be able to push back against other large scale entities coming to steamroll things.
Speaker: Is there a stable solution?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: is my honest answer.
Speaker: I hope so.
Speaker: But I also recognize, you know, this is kind of one of the things that, you know, a Christian framing actually seems to resonate with, at least from my reading, is that, you know, the reality we live in is not like, there's not a kind of, there's no stasis.
Speaker: You're constantly in a, say, good versus evil tension.
Speaker: And the idea is not like, okay, finally we're done.
Speaker: It's like, no, it just goes on and on until something otherworldly happens.
Speaker: But within this world, it's not some finished thing.
Speaker: There's no project to finish.
Speaker: It just goes on and on.
Speaker: And that's...
Speaker: part of the reality of localism is that you'll always have forces that are seeking to centralize or larger scale forces trying to overrun smaller scale forces.
Speaker: And you do indeed need mechanisms to, to combat that.
Speaker: And like, think about it like a, you know, a school of fish when, when there's a predator, they might, you know, kind of do like fish balls and stuff like that.
Speaker: They cohere when the situation arises in which they need to cohere.
Speaker: And when that situation subsides, they can decohere again.
Speaker: That's the kind of mechanisms we need.
Speaker: And my sense, you know, in kind of public versus private mechanisms in the larger scope of thinking about society is that in the private realm, we need a lot of tools to be able to kind of attack and descale the public realm, the government, the state.
Speaker: So we need the ability to do tort law against the government, sue the government, all of that.
Speaker: That needs to be a very robust kind of capability.
Speaker: And vice versa, the government needs to be
Speaker: using things like antitrust more, more liberally, I would say, and, and, and breaking down big things.
Speaker: And is that by taxing big things to keep them from becoming big or is that some other kind of action?
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: And to your point, I I've raised this issue with at least Belloc's prescription for distributism to just progressively tax things so they don't get too big.
Speaker: How then do you prevent that thing from becoming such a bloated monolith?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: So in a very fuzzy outlook, somehow these two things need to be checks and balances with one another where they're both serving to kind of break the other down in scale.
Speaker: And I don't know the details, but tort law on the one hand against large government stuff and antitrust type of action on the other hand.
Speaker: Yeah, in 1 Samuel, there's a passage where the people are demanding a king, and they've just gone out from this very chaotic environment of the reign of the judges.
Speaker: And the reign of the judges, as far as I can tell, was essentially what you're describing, which is...
Speaker: we're going to, we're going to live in these clan confederations and the sort of patriarchs of the clan are going to be essentially sovereign in charge of themselves.
Speaker: And then when there's a threat, you know, God will choose a judge and, and we'll, we'll cohere around this like war chief and go fight the battle and then go back to what we were doing.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: the people demand like a king with a standing army and God gives them all the reasons why that's not a good idea.
Speaker: And I, I, I get what, like, like the book of judges is, is not a great advertisement for that way of life because it's, it's pretty violent and pretty chaotic, but I've always found that passage really compelling.
Speaker: And I think that it does have to be,
Speaker: a dynamic system where the, the level of coherence and the ability to make a fist and then unmake the fist unclench, like that has to be a part of the equation.
Speaker: Yeah, in some very objective sense, it does have to be because forces come at different scales and you have to be able to adjust the internal structure of the system to address those scales at the scale that they impose themselves on.
Speaker: And so much of what we experience now are just a mismatch of scales.
Speaker: You know, small things getting overrun by big things, of course, but then also, you know, applying...
Speaker: to very fine grain things, applying large scale solutions where they don't fit.
Speaker: And, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a terribly challenging problem.
Speaker: It's not in any way obvious, but you know, the good news in my opinion is that in the USA here, we have a lot of the structure and mechanisms are already there for us.
Speaker: Part of our job, I think, is kind of our generation, say, is actually to make sure we are aware of those mechanisms, how they are wielded, how they're leveraged, and start using them.
Speaker: It's just, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, like, you know, COVID really started to make people aware that, oh,
Speaker: the states are actually distinct.
Speaker: Like when I was younger, I think that everyone kind of had the sense that, yeah, sure, the states have a little different policies here and there, but essentially it's all kind of the same, right?
Speaker: You don't move to a state because of its policies.
Speaker: You move because there's a job there or something.
Speaker: But, you know, the potential for them to be quite distinct became clear to everybody.
Speaker: It's in the limit where it matters the most, yeah.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And so there's things already there, like, like the anti-commandeering doctrine, that like there's mechanisms in place that have a history, and you can invoke them at, say, the state level.
Speaker: And there's just the fact that people don't, aren't aware or thinking to do that, including, you know, representatives in the government, they're not necessarily aware.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, that's actually a thing, like you can invoke that.
Speaker: And so, so,
Speaker: In the realm of employing mechanisms to be at different scales, to be coherent, to be adaptable.
Speaker: I think the most recent, you posted a short article on being sovereign and it was sovereignty, of course, has many skills and many definitions, but it was in the context of essentially
Speaker: Speaking of COVID and other things, kind of being in a constant information war and how it's really easy to be captured by certain narratives one way or another.
Speaker: And one way I was kind of entertained, Bennett kind of did a thread the other day of saying, well, in a way, sort of schizo posting as an Anon can be really healthy because...
Speaker: What it really shows is you can be wrong about a lot of things as long as you're right about the things that are most important to you.
Speaker: And, you know, you don't have to pay attention, you know, to other things.
Speaker: And in a way, that's sort of a way to be sovereign, you know, just focus on your own state or your own community.
Speaker: But then, you know, things do happen in the outside world that impact us.
Speaker: And it's hard to make a lot of sense, you know, in terms of what's a good health policy, you know, what, how should we address this conflict, you know, 6,000 miles away.
Speaker: And so, I mean, I'll sort of ask this to my last question, let you guys kind of round things out.
Speaker: But, you know, we are kind of in a constant information bombardment.
Speaker: And what mechanisms do you suggest or what do you use to sort of leverage, you
Speaker: a sense of having informational sovereignty, not trying to be too captured by ideology or commitments, you know, not, not just being like pro Putin to own the libs sort of thing, but actually having well considered it, it's a hard problem.
Speaker: And it applies of course, on the physical skills that we're talking about, but also sort of in the information space.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, not, not an easy thing.
Speaker: One thing is obviously becoming sensitive to the,
Speaker: when you are simply kind of taking a position as a tribal decision-making type of mechanism.
Speaker: And I don't even think that's necessarily always the wrong thing to do, but I think you can become sensitive to when you're doing that versus when you're actively collecting information, looking at things and kind of coming to some conclusion.
Speaker: And so, so again, I don't think that that's the only way to do things.
Speaker: There's a time and a place to just sort of tribe up.
Speaker: And that's indeed a manifestation of that, that like transient coherence mechanisms to basically say, this is the position I'm taking, at least in part, I'm taking it because this is the position my clan is taking and we are cohering now.
Speaker: It's just a fact of the world that sometimes we have to do that.
Speaker: But, you know, something like Twitter, it's actually remarkably easy to diversify if you're interested in some event that's going on or whatever, to diversify the information that you're getting from it.
Speaker: It's easy to not do that, but it's easy to do that as well.
Speaker: And, you know, you've got there's some event there's some, you know, right now, obviously, the big thing is Russia has invaded Ukraine.
Speaker: Go look at, you know, what the neocons are saying.
Speaker: Go look at what the, you know, dissident right is saying.
Speaker: Go look at what Ukrainians are saying.
Speaker: Go look at what Russians are saying.
Speaker: You can actually just go do that.
Speaker: And that's what I've been doing with this particular situation.
Speaker: And then you start to actually develop a, you get everyone's kind of self charitable perspective, right?
Speaker: And
Speaker: it'll naturally start to, at least for me, it naturally starts to sort itself out in my mind.
Speaker: What's more bullshit and what's, what's ringing true.
Speaker: And I trust my intuition in that way.
Speaker: Like if I give myself the variety of signals and, uh, something starts to ring true and other things don't add up and, um,
Speaker: It's really just a choice one has to make to say, I'm going to go look at what are the various signals that are in direct contradiction with one another.
Speaker: What are they saying?
Speaker: And I think it's a lot of people, I said some things about Putin and simping for Putin on Twitter this morning.
Speaker: And a lot of people were like, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Speaker: And I think that is just so naive.
Speaker: We are entangled in so many different kinds of relationships in this network of friends and enemies and temporary allies and whatever.
Speaker: The idea that the enemy of your enemy is necessarily your friend is absurd.
Speaker: The enemy of your enemy could very well be a worse enemy.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It ain't clean.
Speaker: So, you know,
Speaker: There's no easy answer, man.
Speaker: It's just, it's just, you can kind of become self-aware of when you're tribing up and when you're kind of giving it your own analysis in two cents.
Speaker: It's, there's a feeling is for me, there's a distinct feeling associated with those two modes.
Speaker: And so I can kind of tell which I'm doing and I'm not ashamed of sometimes I'm tribing up, right?
Speaker: It's sometimes that's, I feel that's necessary.
Speaker: Well, and it's certainly true that global scale events can affect you.
Speaker: It's much, much less clear that you can affect them.
Speaker: And so your level of involvement and analysis and, you know, emotional valence, I think part of the temptation to, to,
Speaker: You know, a lot of people will go on Twitter and they're deeply insignificant to the event in question, but they will post like their moral opinion like it's a press release, like somebody's – you know what I mean?
Speaker: Like it matters.
Speaker: So what I'll say is this, is that when you look at things from a system's perspective, there's –
Speaker: a very clear condition under which small things do matter.
Speaker: And that is when things are very unstable.
Speaker: And I think that we are in a quite unstable configuration right now.
Speaker: So I wouldn't discount any little thing from potentially having large scale effects.
Speaker: When things can cascade, you can see accounts that have, you know, whatever, 10 followers, and they tweet like just the right thing that fits the moment.
Speaker: And you know, it goes viral and it's got 100,000 likes or whatever.
Speaker: That's not insignificant.
Speaker: So indeed, many of the things we do will end up being insignificant to the large scale, but in such an unstable situation and moment that actually it's not clear which things those are and which things those aren't.
Speaker: So I don't begrudge anybody from seemingly kind of screaming into the void in some sense.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Although, of course, something I said kind of up front of our conversation, there's a bandwidth constraint.
Speaker: And if you're occupying all of your headspace with those distant and large-scale things and none of it with your local immediate situation and surroundings, then you're doing yourself and those around you a disservice.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's like kind of an expected value consideration to be had.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: But little things can go very far in an unstable world.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Well, this has been a great conversation.
Speaker: It's been really good to talk to you and get to know you a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's great to talk to you.
Speaker: I'm glad you could come with the podcast.
Speaker: And yeah, I think you're really, I mean, at least I admire you because the project we're doing at Exit and the kind of
Speaker: goal is that we have kind of aligned in a lot of ways that what you're doing.
Speaker: And of course, like I'm taking your class right now, which is really helpful and aligned in a lot of ways.
Speaker: But I feel very optimistic.
Speaker: I feel like there's a group of people kind of partly online, partly, you know, in many different states.
Speaker: And we're all starting to find each other and have our own perspective on things.
Speaker: And I feel like it's a blessing and it's a really important cause to continue to have people on podcasts, you know, have people reference each other's
Speaker: Twitter threads, continue to chat and kind of just put all the really smart ideas and complex ideas that are well thought out because God knows there's way too many simplistic black and white ideas out there kind of reigning over a lot of things.
Speaker: And we're going to have to fix that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, there's a huge number of experiments happening right now, bottom line.
Speaker: And that's, that's a good thing.
Speaker: There needs to be.
Speaker: So yeah, agreed.
Speaker: And thanks for joining on the class too.
Speaker: Appreciate that.
Speaker: Hey, man, good talking to you.
Speaker: Thanks a lot.
Speaker: Thanks, guys.
Speaker: You can find Joe on Twitter at at Normonics.
Speaker: And if you want to learn more about Exit, you can sign up for our newsletter at exitgroup.us or follow us on Twitter at
