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EXIT Podcast Episode 29: Joe Norman
388 Plays3 years ago
Joe is a data scientist and lecturer in Complexity Studies at appliedcomplexity.io. 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. He operates a homestead in rural New Hampshire, where he is active in local government and working to build real things in the real world.
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Transcript
Introduction to Joe Norman
00:00:18
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
Today we've got Joe Norman.
00:00:21
Speaker
Joe is a data scientist and lecturer in complexity studies at AppliedComplexity.io.
00:00:27
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.
Rationalism and Its Limits
00:00:36
Speaker
Hey, so from following your Twitter account, I detect a lot of rationalist DNA.
00:00:46
Speaker
Do you have a history in that space?
00:00:47
Speaker
I do.
00:00:49
Speaker
No, no.
00:00:50
Speaker
I actually, you know, a lot of these terms I'm obviously aware of, but I don't necessarily know what they imply.
00:00:56
Speaker
I've always been bad with kind of tracking like clicks and collectives.
00:01:02
Speaker
And so actually maybe, so I guess the answer truly is maybe, but I don't know it.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, not consciously.
00:01:12
Speaker
I mean, so my experience with that was basically I was always sort of a,
00:01:17
Speaker
a rationalism skeptic, but I found some of those ideas really interesting.
00:01:21
Speaker
And I kind of played in that space a little bit.
00:01:23
Speaker
And I think that you and I have similar sensibilities about the limits of, of, of rationality, pure rationality.
00:01:33
Speaker
So what is, so what is rationalism from your perspective?
00:01:37
Speaker
So I know what we're talking about.
00:01:39
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.
00:01:52
Speaker
And just sort of like, we're going to be very big brained and utilitarian.
00:01:59
Speaker
Like, honestly, I couldn't really articulate to you exactly what it is, except that it's like,
00:02:03
Speaker
It's like everything can be broken down into a rational argument, into a rational frame, and then kind of argued from there.
00:02:12
Speaker
And the implications are clear and that kind of thing, I take it.
00:02:16
Speaker
Or at least we're going to try to do that.
00:02:18
Speaker
And we're going to be as disciplined as possible about that.
00:02:25
Speaker
And I actually kind of admire that approach.
00:02:29
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.
00:02:38
Speaker
So I think, yeah, it's definitely...
00:02:43
Speaker
you have things to say about that space, even if you haven't inhabited it for sure.
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:48
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.
00:03:12
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.
00:03:35
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.
00:03:51
Speaker
Even if they don't come around to this whole system of looking at things is probably insufficient.
00:03:59
Speaker
They're pretty profound guys.
00:04:03
Speaker
Well, so...
00:04:05
Speaker
Speaking of people that are kind of cool but that I don't totally agree with, I'm not a libertarian.
Libertarianism and the Free State Project
00:04:12
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.
00:04:28
Speaker
Can you try to sell me on New Hampshire?
00:04:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:31
Speaker
Sell you on New Hampshire.
00:04:32
Speaker
Well, I don't know if I necessarily want to sell you or sell people in general on New Hampshire.
00:04:37
Speaker
I've sold myself on it.
00:04:39
Speaker
And the Free State Project, I do not consider myself a libertarian.
00:04:44
Speaker
I do have a lot of libertarian tendencies and leanings.
00:04:47
Speaker
But again, similar to the rationalist thing, I'm kind of like allergic to labels.
00:04:52
Speaker
And of course, I can't avoid it entirely.
00:04:54
Speaker
But yeah.
00:04:56
Speaker
I don't like a lot of the implications that come along with, with that word.
00:05:00
Speaker
And it's really interesting because, you know, the free state project, it it's mere existence.
00:05:07
Speaker
So for those who are not aware in New Hampshire, there's this thing, obviously New Hampshire called the free state project.
00:05:13
Speaker
And, um,
00:05:14
Speaker
It's been going on for, I don't know, nearly two decades now, maybe 15 years, something like that.
00:05:20
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
00:05:32
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.
00:05:52
Speaker
Now, one of the things that's interesting about that is it immediately kind of raises a few incoherences in, in,
00:06:02
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.
00:06:14
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
00:06:26
Speaker
to potentially concentrate like-minded people in that unit and affect change there.
00:06:31
Speaker
So there's some interesting tension there.
00:06:32
Speaker
And it comes to the surface.
00:06:34
Speaker
It's not all under the surface.
00:06:35
Speaker
And there are very explicit arguments and fights right now within, as I know that there always are, within kind of libertarian communities.
00:06:44
Speaker
Again, a little bit of a paradox there.
00:06:45
Speaker
But –
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah, the fights right now, a lot of them are around, you know, what, excuse me, what are our views on borders?
00:06:54
Speaker
What are border policies?
00:06:56
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.
00:07:02
Speaker
We can kind of work that out later, just details.
Political Boundaries as Biological Systems
00:07:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:06
Speaker
But from my point of view, I kind of treat things as biological systems.
00:07:11
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...
00:07:23
Speaker
Where are its boundaries?
00:07:24
Speaker
What are its boundaries kind of made of, so to speak?
00:07:27
Speaker
How do they interact with the flows across things, flows of things across the boundaries?
00:07:34
Speaker
How do they regulate that?
00:07:35
Speaker
And so, you know, borders in any political platform, from my perspective, it's going to be coherent.
00:07:40
Speaker
You know, borders and boundaries are one of the first things you have to make clear.
00:07:43
Speaker
Where do you stand on that?
00:07:44
Speaker
What do you think about that?
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:48
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.
00:08:03
Speaker
And so, um,
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, if you've got these incoherencies baked into the cake from the beginning, that will inevitably create these problems.
00:08:13
Speaker
Have you ever read Albion Seed by Hackett Fisher?
00:08:18
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.
00:08:25
Speaker
So, so one of the things that he talks about that I find so interesting is definitions of freedom.
00:08:29
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.
00:08:38
Speaker
And, um, growing up,
00:08:42
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.
00:08:55
Speaker
And one of the things that I'm sort of coming around to is, like,
00:09:01
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.
00:09:09
Speaker
They wanted freedom for us, not individual freedom.
00:09:16
Speaker
And that's a legitimate case to make.
00:09:18
Speaker
You're talking about libertarians and boundaries.
00:09:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:22
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.
00:09:36
Speaker
Right.
00:09:36
Speaker
So obviously the danger, so the truth is that we are certainly a social species and we behave in collective ways
00:09:48
Speaker
And we always will.
00:09:50
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.
00:10:13
Speaker
Right.
00:10:15
Speaker
the obvious danger there is that you, you then become just a pure collectivist, right.
00:10:20
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.
00:10:26
Speaker
So balancing that is, is an interesting problem and challenge.
00:10:29
Speaker
And indeed, you know, I, I wrote a short essay maybe six months ago or so where I argue that, um,
00:10:38
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?
00:10:59
Speaker
Is it about the rights of the life of the unborn child?
00:11:04
Speaker
Or is it the rights of the woman who's carrying rights?
00:11:06
Speaker
And these don't have...
00:11:08
Speaker
And we should never expect them to have absolute answers or to find absolute consensus.
Localism vs. Globalism
00:11:13
Speaker
So you actually need to have these clusters where you come to different conclusions on these things.
00:11:18
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?
00:11:28
Speaker
The true liberty is in the having a system that can support this this plurality.
00:11:35
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.
00:11:48
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
00:12:12
Speaker
one global village in order to support pluralism.
00:12:18
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.
00:12:27
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.
00:12:38
Speaker
It's somewhat of a LARP or somewhat of a COPE.
00:12:41
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.
00:12:56
Speaker
So from your perspective, I'm really interested in hearing why, you know, localism isn't isn't actually a LARP.
00:13:03
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.
00:13:14
Speaker
So I'm truly not sure in what way it would be a LARP like.
00:13:21
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?
00:13:28
Speaker
There's sort of the political thing, you know, what is the political structure?
00:13:33
Speaker
What are the practices?
00:13:34
Speaker
Does it support localism?
00:13:35
Speaker
Does it not?
00:13:36
Speaker
How are those policy decisions made, et cetera, right?
00:13:38
Speaker
So in New Hampshire, for instance, we have an extremely at, you know, sub state level, very decentralized decision making.
00:13:46
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.
00:13:55
Speaker
And we as the people are the legislature.
00:14:00
Speaker
And a lot of relevant policy is set at that town level in New Hampshire.
00:14:05
Speaker
So the reality of decentralization is here in many ways.
00:14:09
Speaker
It's not something that's like a fantasy.
00:14:11
Speaker
It's like here.
00:14:12
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?
00:14:24
Speaker
It's because we continue to be a very decentralized system.
00:14:28
Speaker
nation.
00:14:30
Speaker
We are not centralized in most ways.
00:14:33
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.
00:14:50
Speaker
So, localism is here.
00:14:52
Speaker
Well, I think
00:14:57
Speaker
One of the things that makes us special, and we can talk about the trucker situation if you want.
00:15:03
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.
00:15:15
Speaker
There's a game theoretic problem with being maximally reasonable and putting all these provisos on everything.
00:15:25
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
00:15:56
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.
00:16:03
Speaker
So we're not gonna.
00:16:06
Speaker
That's right.
00:16:07
Speaker
And, and, and, um, even when, you know, like you said, it's just paper, right.
00:16:13
Speaker
And it is just paper, but there are, um,
00:16:18
Speaker
large scale cultural expectations around that paper.
00:16:22
Speaker
And that's what makes that paper real in some way.
00:16:25
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.
00:16:35
Speaker
So they're not as extreme as they would be otherwise.
00:16:38
Speaker
So, you know, I, I certainly understand what people say.
00:16:40
Speaker
It's just paper.
00:16:41
Speaker
It's not really going to protect you.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yes and no.
00:16:44
Speaker
There's a reason that governments and constitutional governance has become such a relevant player in this world that we live in.
00:16:54
Speaker
And that's because making things very explicit, writing down the contract actually is enormously powerful in human social systems.
00:17:02
Speaker
It's something to point to that has its own kind of structural persistence.
00:17:07
Speaker
And yes, the interpretations can change.
00:17:08
Speaker
There's all kinds of challenges and this and that, but it's not the same as not having it.
00:17:12
Speaker
It's just a piece of paper, but it's a very powerful piece of paper.
00:17:16
Speaker
And indeed, you know, the Canadian charter rights thing, it's, yeah, they can just say it's basically instrumental, right?
00:17:24
Speaker
Like you have these rights until there's a problem that is big enough that we suspend these rights.
00:17:32
Speaker
And, um, yeah, so it's like, so, okay, who makes that call?
00:17:35
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.
00:17:40
Speaker
Um, so, you know, it's interesting cause there's, uh, they're now talking about this, um,
00:17:47
Speaker
U.S. I've been on Twitter.
00:17:49
Speaker
I've openly supported the Canadian Truckers Convoy.
00:17:53
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.
00:18:03
Speaker
So when people say, oh, there's no real problem, it's all...
00:18:06
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
00:18:34
Speaker
as much sense.
00:18:37
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
00:18:49
Speaker
against a lot of that stuff.
00:18:51
Speaker
So we have preventative measures, you know, you can't do this, you can't do that.
00:18:55
Speaker
And so, you know, my direct experience of the USA is that it's still quite decentralized in a very functional way.
00:19:02
Speaker
And so a kind of nation scale trucker convoy, it's like, it doesn't make any sense in some sense.
Local COVID Policies in the US
00:19:08
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, most of the people who
00:19:13
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.
00:19:21
Speaker
But I would say the bulk of the country that have the... And this is part of the...
00:19:29
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,
00:19:46
Speaker
you know, they can, they can dial it down in this very precise way to, to avoid creating too much unrest.
00:19:55
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.
00:20:02
Speaker
I mean, I haven't, I haven't lived in an extreme COVID jurisdiction throughout this process at all.
00:20:11
Speaker
And so,
00:20:12
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.
00:20:23
Speaker
They have essentially no voice in.
00:20:26
Speaker
Right.
00:20:27
Speaker
The ones that have come closest to home for me are the Northeast City Vax mandates, Vax pass policies.
00:20:35
Speaker
So Boston had one.
00:20:37
Speaker
It's canceled now.
00:20:39
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.
00:20:44
Speaker
And, uh, those, those hit the closest home for me, but I have to concede, like, I don't live in those cities.
00:20:49
Speaker
I don't even live in the States that those cities are in.
00:20:52
Speaker
So, um, I'd like to be able to, to visit those without having to show Vax passes around.
00:20:57
Speaker
But, you know, at the end of the day, it is their call.
00:21:00
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.
00:21:08
Speaker
Um,
00:21:09
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.
00:21:18
Speaker
You know, that's...
00:21:19
Speaker
that's an intense situation to be in, but the way things are structured now, our political borders internally are completely mobility friendly.
00:21:31
Speaker
You can get up and move.
00:21:32
Speaker
And I would suggest that's a very strong way, the vote with your feet thing, it's very true.
00:21:38
Speaker
It's so much stronger now with so many jobs going remote.
00:21:43
Speaker
I have this vision of,
00:21:45
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,
00:22:05
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.
00:22:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:16
Speaker
I mean, that's me.
00:22:17
Speaker
That's, that's what I do.
00:22:19
Speaker
Right.
00:22:19
Speaker
Right.
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah.
Homesteading in New Hampshire
00:22:20
Speaker
I mean, me too.
00:22:21
Speaker
And, uh, well, but speaking of that, like you strike me as a very cerebral person, a very ideas oriented person, um,
00:22:33
Speaker
I'm fairly new in the homesteading game.
00:22:35
Speaker
Has that been a natural fit for you?
00:22:36
Speaker
What's that been like?
00:22:38
Speaker
Has it been a natural fit?
00:22:39
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?
00:22:47
Speaker
Do I not like kind of fit with this?
00:22:49
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?
00:22:55
Speaker
But I think the answer is solidly at this point.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yes.
00:22:58
Speaker
Um,
00:22:59
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.
00:23:13
Speaker
And, you know, it's something I continue to struggle against, I would say.
00:23:18
Speaker
At the same time.
00:23:21
Speaker
Well, yes.
00:23:21
Speaker
So I had a question about this, which is, I mean, essentially, right?
00:23:25
Speaker
I mean, of course, this group that we're a part of, it's called Exit.
00:23:28
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...
00:23:38
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.
00:23:50
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.
00:23:59
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...
00:24:16
Speaker
we can come together.
00:24:17
Speaker
And that's certainly, you know, what Bennett has started with his business that I'm a part of.
00:24:24
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.
00:24:33
Speaker
Whereas obviously, you know, in physical space, you know, you actually have to
00:24:37
Speaker
build your homestead or build your farm or whatever else.
00:24:41
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.
00:24:59
Speaker
And I'm curious to hear how you tend to think about, you know, the tensions or lack thereof there.
00:25:05
Speaker
Well, I mean, the tension is clear, right?
00:25:07
Speaker
You only have so much time to give in a day.
00:25:11
Speaker
And so only so much time for social engagement, economic engagement, et cetera.
00:25:16
Speaker
And so any time that's spent online is taken away from local engagement.
00:25:21
Speaker
And it's something that is a challenge when it comes to being a remote worker and trying to
00:25:29
Speaker
embody and enact this kind of localist lifestyle.
00:25:32
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.
00:25:40
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.
00:25:55
Speaker
And I'm not trying to paste over
00:25:58
Speaker
their existence or how they live or anything like that.
00:26:00
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.
00:26:11
Speaker
Now, how does one do that?
00:26:11
Speaker
I think there's no one answer, but I can give you like, for instance, what we are doing and expecting to do.
00:26:18
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.
00:26:25
Speaker
I've just been, it's been too much.
00:26:27
Speaker
I've had to drop things.
00:26:28
Speaker
And that's one of them.
00:26:29
Speaker
I did the volunteer fire department.
00:26:31
Speaker
That was extremely embedding and enlightening.
00:26:34
Speaker
I got to understand more of how the people are around here and especially those who
00:26:39
Speaker
are truly kind of, um, without knowing it unconsciously localist.
00:26:43
Speaker
Right.
00:26:45
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.
00:27:03
Speaker
And I, I hope that part of, uh,
00:27:08
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.
00:27:21
Speaker
And it doesn't need to be that way.
00:27:22
Speaker
At least it does not need to be so severe.
00:27:25
Speaker
Sure.
00:27:26
Speaker
One of the obvious reasons why that happens is because it's cheap.
00:27:29
Speaker
You know, Walmart is cheap.
00:27:31
Speaker
And one of the...
00:27:34
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.
00:27:51
Speaker
How do you address that?
00:27:52
Speaker
How do you bring people who are kind of closer to the knife's edge into this world?
Economics of Localism
00:28:01
Speaker
So I think it is a matter of things are cheaper.
00:28:04
Speaker
That's part of it.
00:28:06
Speaker
There also are simply habits.
00:28:09
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.
00:28:29
Speaker
So, you know, it's, some of that is true.
00:28:32
Speaker
Some of that is myth.
00:28:34
Speaker
And I think that finding those areas where it's not quite true is really powerful.
00:28:39
Speaker
And, you know, it's a market economy.
00:28:41
Speaker
So if you start to have more demand in those local producers, they will expand.
00:28:50
Speaker
There will be more of them.
00:28:52
Speaker
So, you know, it's, it's true to some extent that there is a, you
00:28:57
Speaker
expense associated with certain decisions, but it's not, it's not ubiquitous and it's not absolute.
00:29:04
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.
00:29:11
Speaker
Like,
00:29:13
Speaker
You know, it's it's somehow it's humble to, for instance, shop at Walmart.
00:29:19
Speaker
It's not like you don't feel like you're a big shot when you do that.
00:29:22
Speaker
Right.
00:29:22
Speaker
It's right.
00:29:24
Speaker
And so there are social signaling aspects as well.
00:29:26
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.
00:29:34
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.
00:29:57
Speaker
And there are options.
00:29:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:00
Speaker
I'm pretty firmly anti-hippie just by temperament and everything else pretty much.
00:30:06
Speaker
And I really value the fact that we've made that not the exclusive province of hippies.
00:30:18
Speaker
Well, it's in fact, it's everything is, you know, shifting around with politics.
00:30:22
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.
00:30:29
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,
00:30:39
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.
00:30:56
Speaker
That was very offended by the idea that,
00:31:02
Speaker
the economies of scale claimed by industrial production aren't legit.
00:31:10
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.
00:31:26
Speaker
Right.
00:31:26
Speaker
They were the back to the land and barefoot and all that.
00:31:30
Speaker
And now it's the hippies law.
00:31:32
Speaker
Well, now it's what as well?
00:31:34
Speaker
Say again?
00:31:35
Speaker
Now it's petty bourgeois to do that.
00:31:37
Speaker
Right.
00:31:37
Speaker
Exactly.
00:31:38
Speaker
Exactly.
00:31:39
Speaker
So it's kind of amazing.
00:31:42
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.
00:31:56
Speaker
Well, so this is something...
00:32:03
Speaker
The moment one team takes something up, the other explicitly rejects it.
00:32:07
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.
00:32:16
Speaker
Then the trick is just to occupy all of the wholesome, beautiful, wonderful space.
00:32:22
Speaker
That's right.
00:32:22
Speaker
And that's what it brings up.
00:32:37
Speaker
It's good for a fragile or volatile global system.
00:32:42
Speaker
That's true.
00:32:43
Speaker
It's good for all these different reasons.
00:32:45
Speaker
It's better to be able to have these small units that make decisions so they're sensitive to local context.
00:32:50
Speaker
That's true.
00:32:51
Speaker
But at the end of the day, what I've come to realize is what I'm actually seeking is wholesomeness.
00:32:56
Speaker
And I'm not even totally sure what that is.
00:32:59
Speaker
I know it when I see it.
Seeking Wholesomeness Beyond Politics
00:33:01
Speaker
And that's what all of these things in the end for me seem to support.
00:33:07
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.
00:33:16
Speaker
And whatever kind of political label one wants to strap on that.
00:33:19
Speaker
I mean, that's, that's,
00:33:21
Speaker
I think this for me brings up, you know, kind of tying it back to how Bennett opened this with rationalism.
00:33:28
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.
00:33:40
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.
00:33:58
Speaker
And in particular, one thing you've said to me
00:34:01
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.
00:34:11
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
00:34:26
Speaker
you know, people rely on faith, faith and God.
00:34:29
Speaker
And I think that's really common, right?
00:34:31
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.
00:34:42
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
00:34:51
Speaker
you're trying to manifest by studying complexity and trying to live it out loud.
00:34:56
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.
Complexity Science and Faith
00:35:08
Speaker
Well, tradition is a computer.
00:35:12
Speaker
Hmm.
00:35:13
Speaker
Like, essentially, tradition is the process of massively complex systems being iterated upon and computed upon across millions of individuals over centuries.
00:35:28
Speaker
So I would almost think of it more like a hereditary mechanism then.
00:35:31
Speaker
You know, maybe in some sense, it's computing, sure.
00:35:36
Speaker
But, you know, it's a mechanism of social heredity.
00:35:40
Speaker
Yes.
00:35:41
Speaker
And so you can have replication and mutation and all of that.
00:35:45
Speaker
And that, you know, that's certainly a valid view.
00:35:49
Speaker
It's, it's, but it is an instrumental view.
00:35:52
Speaker
It explains, you know, why certain things could like help certain collectives of people survive better than others.
00:35:59
Speaker
Right.
00:35:59
Speaker
Right.
00:36:00
Speaker
But faith seems to be something beyond that, actually.
00:36:04
Speaker
And that's one of the things that I'm,
00:36:06
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.
00:36:20
Speaker
Um, but, um,
00:36:23
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.
00:36:37
Speaker
I was actually hoping that you would say that, to be honest.
00:36:41
Speaker
I 100% agree that it cannot be instrumental.
00:36:45
Speaker
Even from a functional perspective, it doesn't work if it's instrumental.
00:36:49
Speaker
You have to mean it.
00:36:50
Speaker
Right, right.
00:36:53
Speaker
Okay.
00:36:53
Speaker
So, so let me try to gather some thoughts here.
00:36:55
Speaker
So, so Rajiv, you were saying like, and you kind of framed it in the rationalistic issue and, um,
00:37:04
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.
00:37:13
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.
00:37:23
Speaker
But like you're saying, there's something more there that's really important.
00:37:28
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.
00:37:36
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.
00:37:56
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.
00:38:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:04
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.
00:38:18
Speaker
Rationalization is always subject to the carrot and the stick.
00:38:22
Speaker
And so...
00:38:23
Speaker
we need something else if the world is not to be dominated in that way.
00:38:28
Speaker
There's a, there's a miraculousness in the ability to, to subsume your own will.
00:38:37
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.
00:38:46
Speaker
What feels good.
00:38:47
Speaker
What's the best, even if it's in the longterm, even if it's like an investment decision,
00:38:52
Speaker
And faith allows you to step outside of that frame.
00:38:55
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:56
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,
00:39:07
Speaker
What is free will?
00:39:08
Speaker
What do we mean by that?
00:39:10
Speaker
Is there a space for it in the way we understand things scientifically?
00:39:14
Speaker
Or is there not?
00:39:16
Speaker
And then, you know, what do Christians mean by that?
00:39:18
Speaker
What does Christian theology have to say about this?
00:39:20
Speaker
Why is it kind of a founding assumption of Christian practice?
00:39:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:25
Speaker
And, you know, and there's sort of an interesting inversion.
00:39:29
Speaker
I find in complexity what you get a lot are inversions of deeply held enlightenment assumptions.
00:39:36
Speaker
Like, for instance, I want to say it was when I was reading Lewis where he first starts talking about law.
00:39:43
Speaker
And he starts talking about law in terms of the things that a person ought to do.
00:39:50
Speaker
Whereas a deterministic law are the things that must happen by virtue of the physical laws of the universe or whatever.
00:39:58
Speaker
Right.
00:39:59
Speaker
Right.
00:40:00
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.
00:40:12
Speaker
That's an interesting inversion to begin from.
00:40:14
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,
00:40:30
Speaker
That's a, that's a different way of thinking.
00:40:32
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.
00:40:47
Speaker
So like a mathematical or computational system.
00:40:50
Speaker
Everything is what it has to be.
00:40:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:53
Speaker
Yes.
00:40:53
Speaker
And there's no other way it could be.
00:40:55
Speaker
So it's actually kind of a, um,
00:40:58
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.
00:41:04
Speaker
It's, it's necessarily can't be.
00:41:05
Speaker
Right.
00:41:07
Speaker
Yet our, our lived experience is that we do make choices.
00:41:12
Speaker
And, you know, I, the, the naive attack on free will is like, well, you can't do everything.
00:41:17
Speaker
Yeah, no, but there's some constraints and within those constraints, it seems like there's some looseness in this.
00:41:24
Speaker
And as you said, you can actually, um,
00:41:28
Speaker
choose to do things that go against your kind of baser desires and wants and even needs in certain cases.
00:41:38
Speaker
So it is a profound thing.
00:41:40
Speaker
And I'll refrain from trying to riff too much on Christianity because frankly, I'm a neophyte in that realm.
00:41:46
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
00:41:53
Speaker
the same kinds of questions that you run into when you, when you study complexity.
00:41:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:59
Speaker
I did want to ask you about what has your experience been like reading Matthew with your family?
00:42:05
Speaker
Oh, it's been great.
00:42:06
Speaker
It's been great.
00:42:08
Speaker
You know, it's one of those things where it's so, um,
00:42:12
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?
00:42:22
Speaker
I'm like, Oh, here's the source.
00:42:24
Speaker
Here's the source of this, you know, it's turning on the mountain.
00:42:27
Speaker
It's like powerful.
00:42:29
Speaker
Um,
00:42:30
Speaker
And so that's been incredible.
00:42:31
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.
00:42:44
Speaker
So it's been great.
Cultural Themes and Biblical Sources
00:42:46
Speaker
And another thing that I've realized is that the superficial distinction between kind of, I don't know, called secular and Christian
00:42:59
Speaker
is different than what I'm discovering is the deeper distinction between them.
00:43:03
Speaker
And something can be ostensibly secular and, in fact, quite Christian and certainly vice versa as well.
00:43:13
Speaker
So I've always, I've always just to put a note on that.
00:43:16
Speaker
I've always thought of myself as being raised in a very religiously agnostic environment.
00:43:22
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.
00:43:28
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.
00:43:38
Speaker
And what is that based in?
00:43:41
Speaker
What is the foundation of that?
00:43:42
Speaker
And it's faith of some kind.
00:43:45
Speaker
It's a faith and it strikes me as a very Christian type of faith.
00:43:51
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like the way that that dichotomy is generally drawn...
00:43:58
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.
00:44:07
Speaker
That's common decency.
00:44:08
Speaker
That's our, that's our, uh, evolved morality or whatever.
00:44:13
Speaker
And then all the stuff that they don't like is the superstition.
00:44:16
Speaker
And it's, it, that where that line is drawn changes dramatically from year to year.
00:44:21
Speaker
And it's, it's fundamentally arbitrary.
00:44:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:25
Speaker
Like there's still Christians.
00:44:27
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.
00:44:35
Speaker
They must be, you know, contributing to our survival.
00:44:39
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.
00:44:52
Speaker
Exactly.
00:44:53
Speaker
Exactly.
00:44:55
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.
00:45:14
Speaker
And if it's not like, you know, we're all personally Bible believing Christians, it's more something like,
00:45:23
Speaker
conservative Christians need to be held to what is in the Sermon on the Mount.
00:45:27
Speaker
And if they veer from it, we're going to nail them on it.
00:45:35
Speaker
And what is interesting about that is as you continue to read in the Gospels and you look at how Jesus behaved,
00:45:43
Speaker
He's pretty extraordinarily confrontational.
00:45:48
Speaker
He's rough on people.
00:45:50
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.
00:46:01
Speaker
And that's an interesting tension because the Sermon on the Mount does say what it says.
00:46:05
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.
00:46:13
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.
Anonymity in Social Media Discourse
00:46:26
Speaker
But there's kind of a big tension right now on social media between sort of anons and not anons.
00:46:33
Speaker
And I've seen on your feed, Joe, at least, you know, you tend to get very, uh,
00:46:41
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.
00:46:57
Speaker
You know, on the other hand, you know, I also follow many Anons and of course, Mr. Bennett here is an Anon.
00:47:05
Speaker
And some of my best friends are Anons.
00:47:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:47:08
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.
00:47:17
Speaker
They behave badly.
00:47:18
Speaker
I wish we could expose them.
00:47:20
Speaker
I think he said something like, it's like the den of scoundrels or something like that.
00:47:24
Speaker
Like,
00:47:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:25
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.
00:47:50
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.
00:47:59
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.
00:48:05
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.
00:48:15
Speaker
And so I think it's an interesting area to explore if you're willing to.
00:48:20
Speaker
Sure.
00:48:20
Speaker
Why not?
00:48:21
Speaker
So, so, okay.
00:48:22
Speaker
So let's, let's talk about JVPs.
00:48:24
Speaker
I don't know if this is the exact verbatim, but let's go with Dennis scoundrels.
00:48:28
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.
00:48:39
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?
00:48:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:47
Speaker
So,
00:48:48
Speaker
There are, I'm certain, good reasons to be anonymous.
00:48:52
Speaker
I'm certain of that fact.
00:48:54
Speaker
And then there is a spectrum of, say, good to bad reasons, where some reasons are okay, but not that compelling.
00:49:02
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,
00:49:15
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.
00:49:22
Speaker
It makes you a less influential player.
00:49:27
Speaker
and it makes the collective less influential.
00:49:29
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.
00:49:48
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.
00:49:58
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?
00:50:08
Speaker
Kind of the suggesting that suggestion that like, well, I'm doing is like them.
00:50:12
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.
00:50:21
Speaker
Right.
00:50:22
Speaker
Then, um,
00:50:24
Speaker
I'm kind of like, yeah, okay.
00:50:27
Speaker
It's not the greatest reasoning in my book.
00:50:30
Speaker
And it's slowing things down and brings things back.
00:50:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:35
Speaker
And I mean, I think it does defeat a coordination problem, which is that like...
00:50:41
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.
00:50:55
Speaker
But as long as that coordination problem exists...
00:51:01
Speaker
I got doxxed.
00:51:02
Speaker
The worst people in the world know who I am and are free to attack me personally on whatever basis they choose to.
00:51:12
Speaker
But I stay with the Anon brand, I guess, partly because it's fun, but also because it allows me...
00:51:27
Speaker
to explore ideas in a less constrained way.
00:51:32
Speaker
And, you know, I view it as a way of integrating those ideas into myself personally.
00:51:40
Speaker
And I think some people deploy their anonymity to maintain that separation rather than integrating it.
00:51:53
Speaker
But it can definitely work both ways.
00:51:56
Speaker
I see that, but I, my sense, I'm not yet convinced that being unconstrained in that way is actually a good thing.
00:52:04
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.
00:52:13
Speaker
And that could be for.
00:52:14
Speaker
Sometimes you should be constrained.
00:52:16
Speaker
Sometimes you should be constrained.
00:52:18
Speaker
Sometimes there's a good reason that you might be embarrassed to have certain things like associated with your true identity.
00:52:25
Speaker
And, you know, if what you're doing is like saying things that would embarrass you, then there's some information there.
00:52:33
Speaker
Yeah, and part of where we are now is that, you know, it's so difficult to have a private conversation.
00:52:43
Speaker
And at least with the people that you'd like to have that private conversation with.
00:52:50
Speaker
And so I think what anonymity creates is like people do need to have the freedom to explore wacky ideas, even embarrassing ideas.
00:53:03
Speaker
Yeah, but I agree.
00:53:04
Speaker
Like ideally from my perspective, that's like something for a private realm with like people you trust.
00:53:11
Speaker
Right, right.
00:53:12
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.
00:53:24
Speaker
So like, yeah, it's, well, but anyway, yeah, you could go back and forth on that all day.
00:53:31
Speaker
But I think it does lead into the crypto and DAO space of, you
00:53:40
Speaker
decentralized, autonomous, trustless organizations.
Trust Systems: Blockchain vs. High-Trust Environments
00:53:47
Speaker
I know that you're not a techno optimist necessarily, but what do you feel about the blockchain solves this crowd?
00:53:56
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.
00:54:08
Speaker
Obviously, I see the potential utility in some sense –
00:54:13
Speaker
even fiat currencies is meant to be a kind of trustless thing.
00:54:16
Speaker
Yes, you might be trusting a third party, trusting a sovereign, something like that.
00:54:20
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.
00:54:27
Speaker
They're trusting my dollar.
00:54:29
Speaker
So, so that I get the, the utility of that and why that's very important on some scale.
00:54:35
Speaker
But what I, I,
00:54:36
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.
00:54:49
Speaker
And to the point of localism,
00:54:52
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.
00:55:03
Speaker
Right.
00:55:04
Speaker
And it's like the extreme other end.
00:55:06
Speaker
It's like, it's like completely non-fungible stuff.
00:55:09
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.
00:55:18
Speaker
And so, um,
00:55:21
Speaker
I'm just personally more interested in that.
00:55:23
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.
00:55:41
Speaker
But I don't like it as kind of the main show or I don't like it per se.
00:55:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:50
Speaker
There's a comparable technique or method that's actually used by...
00:55:58
Speaker
terrorist organizations, among other people, where money is lended via trusted networks.
00:56:07
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
00:56:21
Speaker
And he just tells the guy in Bangladesh, hey, I've received this money.
00:56:25
Speaker
You give money to the other guy.
00:56:27
Speaker
And it gives the feds fits because it makes it really hard to trace like money laundering.
00:56:36
Speaker
I mean, I guess it's sort of de facto is money laundering.
00:56:40
Speaker
And it's illegal in most Western jurisdictions.
00:56:44
Speaker
But it's a sense in which trust is technology.
00:56:51
Speaker
because it relies on the trust between all four of those parties to facilitate the transaction.
00:57:00
Speaker
Yeah, you could say that way.
00:57:01
Speaker
It's a technology.
00:57:02
Speaker
It's a structuring device.
00:57:06
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.
00:57:18
Speaker
Right.
00:57:18
Speaker
So, you know...
00:57:20
Speaker
Locally, I like to think that, you know, what humans ought to be is something like an organism.
00:57:24
Speaker
So very kind of tightly coupled locally.
00:57:28
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.
00:57:40
Speaker
Yes.
00:57:40
Speaker
There has to be friendships and, you know, sometimes enemies and all that.
00:57:44
Speaker
But there has to be something that's beyond the economic.
00:57:48
Speaker
And indeed, like when it comes to local things, you see that there's almost never purely economic exchanges.
00:57:55
Speaker
There's always an element of relationship building to it.
00:57:59
Speaker
And, you know, you might choose to purchase, say, from one farmer, not the other.
00:58:04
Speaker
Because you like the guy, right?
00:58:06
Speaker
And that's something when you get to the abstract economic system, there's none of that.
00:58:12
Speaker
You don't buy it because you like the guy.
00:58:13
Speaker
You might like the company, but you don't like the guy.
00:58:15
Speaker
Like that's not even part of it.
00:58:18
Speaker
So I like all those sort of fine-grained, high-complexity type of aspect of things.
00:58:25
Speaker
That's where I want to focus my energy and my time.
00:58:28
Speaker
And blockchain...
00:58:30
Speaker
Great.
00:58:31
Speaker
I'm not against it, but it just doesn't happen.
00:58:33
Speaker
It's explicitly in attempting to be a solution, seeing those things as problems.
00:58:39
Speaker
I don't see those as problems.
00:58:40
Speaker
I see those as solutions for different kinds of problems, if that makes sense.
00:58:44
Speaker
Yeah, that does make sense.
00:58:47
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.
00:59:05
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?
00:59:11
Speaker
Yes.
00:59:14
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.
Power Structures and Coordination
00:59:27
Speaker
And do you think that there's a solution to that, a way to create stable, small, balanced power structures?
00:59:35
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.
00:59:51
Speaker
and this and that, but you also need to be able to coordinate those villages with one another when needed.
00:59:56
Speaker
And you also need to, whatever you call the collection of villages, those need to coordinate with one another when needed.
01:00:01
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.
01:00:16
Speaker
Is there a stable solution?
01:00:20
Speaker
I don't know.
01:00:21
Speaker
is my honest answer.
01:00:23
Speaker
I hope so.
01:00:25
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.
01:00:43
Speaker
You're constantly in a, say, good versus evil tension.
01:00:48
Speaker
And the idea is not like, okay, finally we're done.
01:00:51
Speaker
It's like, no, it just goes on and on until something otherworldly happens.
01:00:56
Speaker
But within this world, it's not some finished thing.
01:01:00
Speaker
There's no project to finish.
01:01:01
Speaker
It just goes on and on.
01:01:03
Speaker
And that's...
01:01:04
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.
01:01:14
Speaker
And you do indeed need mechanisms to, to combat that.
01:01:18
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.
01:01:26
Speaker
They cohere when the situation arises in which they need to cohere.
01:01:30
Speaker
And when that situation subsides, they can decohere again.
01:01:34
Speaker
That's the kind of mechanisms we need.
01:01:38
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.
01:02:02
Speaker
So we need the ability to do tort law against the government, sue the government, all of that.
01:02:06
Speaker
That needs to be a very robust kind of capability.
01:02:10
Speaker
And vice versa, the government needs to be
01:02:13
Speaker
using things like antitrust more, more liberally, I would say, and, and, and breaking down big things.
01:02:20
Speaker
And is that by taxing big things to keep them from becoming big or is that some other kind of action?
01:02:25
Speaker
I'm not sure.
01:02:25
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.
01:02:35
Speaker
How then do you prevent that thing from becoming such a bloated monolith?
01:02:39
Speaker
I don't know.
01:02:40
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.
01:02:53
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.
01:03:05
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.
01:03:19
Speaker
And the reign of the judges, as far as I can tell, was essentially what you're describing, which is...
01:03:24
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.
01:03:35
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.
01:03:47
Speaker
And, um,
01:03:49
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.
01:03:55
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.
01:04:10
Speaker
And I think that it does have to be,
01:04:14
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.
01:04:26
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.
01:04:43
Speaker
And so much of what we experience now are just a mismatch of scales.
01:04:46
Speaker
You know, small things getting overrun by big things, of course, but then also, you know, applying...
01:04:54
Speaker
to very fine grain things, applying large scale solutions where they don't fit.
01:04:58
Speaker
And, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a terribly challenging problem.
01:05:03
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.
Informational Sovereignty and COVID
01:05:15
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.
01:05:25
Speaker
It's just, yeah.
01:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, like, you know, COVID really started to make people aware that, oh,
01:05:31
Speaker
the states are actually distinct.
01:05:33
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?
01:05:42
Speaker
You don't move to a state because of its policies.
01:05:44
Speaker
You move because there's a job there or something.
01:05:47
Speaker
But, you know, the potential for them to be quite distinct became clear to everybody.
01:05:56
Speaker
It's in the limit where it matters the most, yeah.
01:05:58
Speaker
Yep.
01:05:59
Speaker
Yep.
01:05:59
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.
01:06:13
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.
01:06:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that's actually a thing, like you can invoke that.
01:06:26
Speaker
And so, so,
01:06:33
Speaker
In the realm of employing mechanisms to be at different scales, to be coherent, to be adaptable.
01:06:42
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
01:06:55
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.
01:07:06
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...
01:07:17
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.
01:07:24
Speaker
And, you know, you don't have to pay attention, you know, to other things.
01:07:28
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.
01:07:35
Speaker
But then, you know, things do happen in the outside world that impact us.
01:07:40
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.
01:07:49
Speaker
And so, I mean, I'll sort of ask this to my last question, let you guys kind of round things out.
01:07:54
Speaker
But, you know, we are kind of in a constant information bombardment.
01:07:59
Speaker
And what mechanisms do you suggest or what do you use to sort of leverage, you
01:08:05
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.
01:08:18
Speaker
And it applies of course, on the physical skills that we're talking about, but also sort of in the information space.
01:08:25
Speaker
Right.
01:08:26
Speaker
You know, not, not an easy thing.
01:08:28
Speaker
One thing is obviously becoming sensitive to the,
01:08:33
Speaker
when you are simply kind of taking a position as a tribal decision-making type of mechanism.
01:08:40
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.
01:08:54
Speaker
And so, so again, I don't think that that's the only way to do things.
01:08:58
Speaker
There's a time and a place to just sort of tribe up.
01:09:01
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.
01:09:15
Speaker
It's just a fact of the world that sometimes we have to do that.
01:09:19
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.
01:09:30
Speaker
It's easy to not do that, but it's easy to do that as well.
01:09:34
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.
01:09:43
Speaker
Go look at, you know, what the neocons are saying.
01:09:46
Speaker
Go look at what the, you know, dissident right is saying.
01:09:49
Speaker
Go look at what Ukrainians are saying.
01:09:50
Speaker
Go look at what Russians are saying.
01:09:52
Speaker
You can actually just go do that.
01:09:53
Speaker
And that's what I've been doing with this particular situation.
01:09:55
Speaker
And then you start to actually develop a, you get everyone's kind of self charitable perspective, right?
01:10:02
Speaker
And
01:10:03
Speaker
it'll naturally start to, at least for me, it naturally starts to sort itself out in my mind.
01:10:07
Speaker
What's more bullshit and what's, what's ringing true.
01:10:10
Speaker
And I trust my intuition in that way.
01:10:12
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,
01:10:23
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.
01:10:33
Speaker
What are they saying?
01:10:34
Speaker
And I think it's a lot of people, I said some things about Putin and simping for Putin on Twitter this morning.
01:10:44
Speaker
And a lot of people were like, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
01:10:49
Speaker
And I think that is just so naive.
01:10:53
Speaker
We are entangled in so many different kinds of relationships in this network of friends and enemies and temporary allies and whatever.
01:11:05
Speaker
The idea that the enemy of your enemy is necessarily your friend is absurd.
01:11:09
Speaker
The enemy of your enemy could very well be a worse enemy.
01:11:13
Speaker
Right.
01:11:13
Speaker
It ain't clean.
01:11:15
Speaker
So, you know,
01:11:18
Speaker
There's no easy answer, man.
01:11:19
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.
01:11:28
Speaker
It's, there's a feeling is for me, there's a distinct feeling associated with those two modes.
01:11:33
Speaker
And so I can kind of tell which I'm doing and I'm not ashamed of sometimes I'm tribing up, right?
01:11:38
Speaker
It's sometimes that's, I feel that's necessary.
01:11:41
Speaker
Well, and it's certainly true that global scale events can affect you.
01:11:49
Speaker
It's much, much less clear that you can affect them.
01:11:53
Speaker
And so your level of involvement and analysis and, you know, emotional valence, I think part of the temptation to, to,
01:12:09
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
Community, Experimentation, and Sharing Ideas
01:12:24
Speaker
what I mean?
01:12:24
Speaker
Like it matters.
01:12:26
Speaker
So what I'll say is this, is that when you look at things from a system's perspective, there's –
01:12:33
Speaker
a very clear condition under which small things do matter.
01:12:38
Speaker
And that is when things are very unstable.
01:12:40
Speaker
And I think that we are in a quite unstable configuration right now.
01:12:46
Speaker
So I wouldn't discount any little thing from potentially having large scale effects.
01:12:51
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.
01:12:58
Speaker
And you know, it goes viral and it's got 100,000 likes or whatever.
01:13:03
Speaker
That's not insignificant.
01:13:05
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.
01:13:18
Speaker
So I don't begrudge anybody from seemingly kind of screaming into the void in some sense.
01:13:25
Speaker
Um,
01:13:26
Speaker
Although, of course, something I said kind of up front of our conversation, there's a bandwidth constraint.
01:13:31
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.
01:13:43
Speaker
Right.
01:13:44
Speaker
There's like kind of an expected value consideration to be had.
01:13:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
01:13:51
Speaker
But little things can go very far in an unstable world.
01:13:57
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:13:59
Speaker
Well, this has been a great conversation.
01:14:01
Speaker
It's been really good to talk to you and get to know you a little bit.
01:14:04
Speaker
Yeah, and it's great to talk to you.
01:14:06
Speaker
I'm glad you could come with the podcast.
01:14:10
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
01:14:16
Speaker
goal is that we have kind of aligned in a lot of ways that what you're doing.
01:14:20
Speaker
And of course, like I'm taking your class right now, which is really helpful and aligned in a lot of ways.
01:14:26
Speaker
But I feel very optimistic.
01:14:28
Speaker
I feel like there's a group of people kind of partly online, partly, you know, in many different states.
01:14:34
Speaker
And we're all starting to find each other and have our own perspective on things.
01:14:38
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
01:14:46
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.
01:15:02
Speaker
And we're going to have to fix that.
01:15:05
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:05
Speaker
I mean, there's a huge number of experiments happening right now, bottom line.
01:15:08
Speaker
And that's, that's a good thing.
01:15:09
Speaker
There needs to be.
01:15:10
Speaker
So yeah, agreed.
01:15:11
Speaker
And thanks for joining on the class too.
01:15:14
Speaker
Appreciate that.
01:15:15
Speaker
Hey, man, good talking to you.
01:15:16
Speaker
Thanks a lot.
01:15:17
Speaker
Thanks, guys.
01:15:18
Speaker
You can find Joe on Twitter at at Normonics.
01:15:21
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