Why Tribalism is So Natural (#404)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Religion on the Mind

Episode #404: Why Tribalism is So Natural

Host: Dr. Dan Koch
Guest: Tim Burnett
Release Date: June 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Dan Koch welcomes back Tim Burnett, “Pastor-ish” of the Way Collective in Santa Barbara, for a deep dive into why tribalism comes so naturally to human beings—especially at the intersections of psychology, religion, and society. The hosts explore how our instinct to form in-groups and out-groups affects religious communities, politics, and personal relationships. Drawing on moral psychology (notably Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”), evolutionary biology, contemplative spirituality, and their own lived experiences, Dan and Tim discuss the roots, dangers, and potential for transformation within our tribal instincts.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Roots of Tribalism: Evolution, Community, & Religion

• Tribal Instincts Are Deeply Human:
  • Evolutionary psychology suggests that forming in-groups was vital for survival—group loyalty helped early humans outcompete other species and survive threats (36:03).
  • Religion, historically, is a primary way societies have ritualized and organized this “binding together.”

    “Human beings are bound together inextricably. To be irreligious would be to, like, try to break apart the binding that we have in terms of societal connections, our human connections.” —Tim ([08:20])

  • However, the same binding that gives community, support, and healing can also breed division and out-group hostility.
• The Shadow Side – Us vs. Them:
  • Dan outlines the “statistically average” costs and benefits of religious in-grouping: “Compared to your secular counterpart, you are likely to be more groupish… with an increased bias against members of the out-group. That appears to be just the cost of doing business to get those benefits.” ([13:06])
• Tribalism Beyond Religion:
  • The hosts share personal examples of in-group/out-group thinking—from sports teams, music preferences, and homeschoolers, to more charged arenas like politics ([14:30]).

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2. Moral & Psychological Mechanisms: Why We Other

• Jonathan Haidt’s Contributions:
  • Rider & Elephant Metaphor: The “elephant” (intuition, emotion, gut loyalty) drives most decisions, while the “rider” (rational, conscious mind) explains or justifies those leanings after the fact ([47:57]).

    “The lawyer is lying back to us to make us feel good about ourselves in a lot of cases, right?” —Dan ([53:06])

  • Moral Taste Buds (Moral Foundations Theory):
    • Liberals tend to emphasize fairness/justice and harm/care.
    • Conservatives draw on those and also loyalty, purity/sanctity, authority, sometimes liberty.
    • This explains why each side finds some moral arguments “self-evident” and struggles to empathize with the other ([64:33]).
• Collective Effervescence:
  • Humans are “90% chimp, 10% bee” (Haidt)—we are uniquely capable of collective rituals (church, concerts, parades, sporting events) that bind groups on an emotional level ([39:12]).

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3. Breaking Free (Or at Least Widening the Circle)

• Contemplative Practice as Antidote:
  • Cultivating self-awareness and self-compassion can help us soften in-group boundaries and relate across divisions.

    “There’s this process by which we inquire intentionally at maybe a slower speed, with a little bit more awareness… the contemplative inquiry invites us to be, at the very least, thoughtful about that—and maybe, at best, more deeply intentional practitioners.” —Tim ([19:29])

• Non-Dual Thinking & Boundaries:
  • Emphasizing “not-two-ness” (non-duality): “Trying to hold the goodness of the person on the other side of the aisle.”
  • Compassion is about moving toward others with healing intent, not just “feeling their feelings.”

    “Our boundaries are where our lives touch each other.” —Tim, quoting his therapist ([45:41])

• The Reality of Permission Structures:
  • Facts rarely change minds on their own; relational safety, permission, and disruption are necessary for real transformation ([55:22]).

    “There used to be this podcast, I think it was called like ‘You Have Permission’... the most important thing about what you just brought up to me is that there’s a relationship of permission…” —Tim ([55:31])

• Progress, Stage Theory & Its Pitfalls:
  • Tim notes that typical “stage theories”—which suggest a ladder-like progression from tribal to world-loyalty—can become a new hierarchy (“just another form of colonialism”) ([26:40]).
  • Dan is skeptical of anything that flatters our side as the most “enlightened” ([27:34]).
• Seeing the Good Across the Divide:
  • Both hosts challenge listeners to seek “the little bit of truth in every worldview.”

    “If you can’t say that, then you know what game you’re playing.” —Tim ([30:20])

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4. Constraints, Realism, & Hope

• Limits of Contemplative/Progressive Religion:
  • Can communities really transcend their own need for belonging-as-exclusion? Both hosts see the contemplative path as powerful—but likely always a “remnant” approach, never the mainstream ([80:30]).

    “The in-group stuff is kind of a part of religion. It’s kind of why it works, I think… We also ought to expect that that approach will never be massively popular.” —Dan ([80:21])

  • Tim: “Does it matter if it’s 12 or 12 million, though?... If we've got the diagnosis right and... we’re feeling like we're pushing into this register of being that is meaningful, it still feels meaningful, again, whether it's 12 or 12,000.” ([81:25])
• Faith, Connection, & The Capacity To Bear Pain:
  • Referencing Thomas Merton: Jesus provides a model of a religious “center” that can connect, not divide. But this means developing the capacity to hold tension, pain, and complexity without retreating into binaries ([75:22]).

    “We don't believe that we can navigate conflict and struggle in principled ways, and instead we settle for binary thinking: us and them, good and bad… innocent, guilty.” —Tim, quoting Adrienne Maree Brown ([76:13])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Why Tribalism Is So Hard to Transcend

• “Religion is helpful… but you pay for the good with the groupishness… increased bias against members of the out-group.” —Dan ([13:09])
• “What has just become sort of infinitely interesting to me… is how these dynamics are being applied to… the political environment, our party versus their party, and what it's doing to American society.”—Tim ([15:32])

On Progress, Stage Theory, & Humility

• “It's too good to be true that all the, you know, left-leaning educated folks happen to be the ones at level 10.” —Dan ([27:34])

On Compassion & Holding Complexity

• “Can you connect with that prior version of yourself… can you include and love that person in yourself? Because if you can… maybe you could stay connected to this person [across difference].” —Tim ([44:19])
• “Our boundaries are where our lives touch each other.” —Tim, quoting his therapist ([45:41])

On the Need for Community, Even If Small

• “Does it matter if it's 12 or 12 million? …It still feels meaningful, again, whether it's 12 or 12,000.” —Tim ([81:25])
• “We also ought to expect that that approach will never be massively popular.” —Dan ([80:21])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic/Quote | |-----------|-------------| | 03:01 | Tim’s background & Way Collective’s non-traditional, “practice-first” model | | 08:20 | Meaning of “religion after religion”, binding vs. dividing in faith | | 13:06 | The costs & benefits of religious in-groups | | 16:21 | Political polarization & “approved sources” justifying tribalism | | 19:29 | Contemplation as a way to reflect on tribal instincts | | 26:40 | Stage theory, progressivism, and the critique of “hierarchy” | | 30:20 | Humility: finding “a little bit of truth” in every worldview | | 39:12 | “90% chimp, 10% bee”: collective effervescence, ritual, & belonging | | 44:19 | Non-duality, self-compassion, and loving past versions of ourselves | | 45:41 | Boundaries: “where our lives touch each other” | | 47:57 | Haidt’s “rider and elephant” metaphor explained | | 53:06 | Why facts rarely change minds; need for permission and safety | | 55:31 | The importance of relational “permission” in changing beliefs | | 62:34 | Hummingbird vs. bear story—evolutionary psychology & threat detection | | 64:33 | Moral Foundations Theory: liberals & conservatives’ “taste buds” | | 76:13 | Adrienne Maree Brown on binary thinking vs. holding complexity | | 80:21 | Why contemplative approaches will likely remain a “remnant” | | 81:25 | The value of community, regardless of scale |

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Conclusion

Dan Koch and Tim Burnett expertly dissect why tribalism remains a powerful human instinct and how it shapes everything from churches to political identities. Their conversation challenges listeners to notice—and gently push past—the automatic us/them divides, personally and collectively. By blending rigorous psychology, contemplative spirituality, and real-world anecdotes, they provide practical wisdom and hopeful perspective for navigating life in a divided world.

Listener Invitation:
Want more of these reflective deep dives? Tell Dan “Give us Barabbas” for a round three with Tim!
(Contact: [e-mail])

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For more resources: See links in the show notes or find the episode on usual podcast platforms. Way Collective info and connection details included there as well.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[B]

Welcome back, everybody, to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. And Tim Burnett is back. I want to start Tim with a little story. I was sitting at coffee hour at church about a month and a half ago, and I get kind of touched on my shoulder from behind, from someone who's sitting at the table behind me. And it is this guy, Stephen Kidd. He's a psychologist. He's probably like in his 60s. And he says, hey, you know my daughter, who's a friend of mine at church, Odessa? And he's like, I just want to tell you how much I love the podcast and thank you for doing it. And I was like, you're a psychologist. This is like the best feedback to get because I have constant imposter syndrome, like everybody, and I'm not a psychologist yet. And so the fact, you know, so I asked him some questions to kind of goose myself up a little bit. Very kind, thoughtful guy, wonderful conversation. And then as I'm getting up to leave, he says, hey, Dan, one more thing. Give us Barabbas.

[C]

That is so funny.

[B]

And it was like such a great way to end things. In case you didn't hear Tim and I's last conversation, the joke early on was we got more to talk about than just what we're talking about today. So if you want Tim back on, send me a message in some way telling me to give us Barabbas. And most of those were like emails or comments. I got five or six of those. But the in person one definitely took the cake. So this episode goes out to Stephen. Thanks, man.

[C]

Hey, sometimes you need to tap on the shoulder, you know, sometimes you do.

[B]

And I will say, I got enough responses that you are back. I would say it's literally true to say you are back by popular demand, Tim.

[C]

Hey, that's very kind. Thanks to everybody in the Religion on

[B]

the Mind community to remind people who you are, Tim, you are the Pastor Ish of the Way Collective, a weekly dinner and dialogue group organized around shared practices rather than shared beliefs and rooted in contemplative Christianity. That's all, correct?

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. You got it.

[B]

And that group is nestled in paradise, that is to say Santa Barbara. And so just for that, just to level the playing field, I just want to give a. A very brief fuck you that you get to live in Santa Barbara. Did I do that last time?

[C]

I don't think you did, but I received that. I received that.

[B]

Yeah. Maybe in person.

[C]

The best coast, as they say. Oh, yeah.

[B]

And I, you know, I got the coast. I get the coast part up here in Washington. But Santa Barbara is, I mean, it's kind of. It's paradise to me.

[C]

It's a special.

[B]

But I do want to. It is special. Before we get into our. Our main topic, which is sort of a continuation of our first conversation and I'll explain that in a minute. I do want to, like, I thought a little bit about the Barabbas joke. I was like, I hope people don't think that I'm like making a joke at the expense of 1st century Israelites who were around during Jesus time. And then I thought, oh, that's actually not the concern. The concern is probably like, I bet that this has been used as a part of like real antisemitism within Christianity because it's a part of that kind of. What is the term that they use for it? The, the blood curse passage, which is in Matthew, you know, sort of like, let his blood be on your hands, Pilate says to the Jews. And so actually some people have quoted the Barabbas thing as a way of like basically making it so that the Romans are not responsible for killing Jesus and that the Jews are responsible for killing Jesus. I just want to be very clear. I'm not making such an argument here. I just was trying to have some fun with like, Bible trivia and that's what it is. It's just nerds gone wild. It's not anti Semites gone wild.

[C]

Hey, glad you clarified that and hopefully we can keep that in mind moving forward.

[B]

Also, by the way, to explain that passage, Ulric Loos, a scholar in 2005, actually made the argument that that blood on your hands, whatever passage might have been meant to the readers at the time to be kind of like a reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. And likely these were written after that. And so it also could be a way of explaining, like from their perspective, why God might have allowed Rome to, you know, or something to that effect, like a. Some sort of explanation for all of that. It's kind of interesting. Do you have anything else to say about Barabbas, Tim? Is that like an area of real focus for you?

[C]

It's really not. You know, I'm glad you, you brought it up, but I also got some give us barabbas in my DMs, I would say after the first episode. So glad we get to circle back and hopefully there will. This will not be a bloodbath. You know what I mean?

[B]

I will say, man, if someone's slipping into your DMs, there is, there is both nothing less sexy and almost nothing better to put in a DM than give us Barabbas.

[C]

It's very true. It, I mean, hidden euphemisms aside, I guess, you know,

[B]

so I wanted to, you know, because we did talk a few months ago and people may have listened to that, but it's not probably going to be top of mind if you didn't listen to that. You can of course, go back and these are sort of connected conversations. The core of the first conversation really is this idea of this resonance between what therapy and what the contemplative Christian tradition are both trying to do. The sort of shared Venn diagram space of those two approaches we talked about attending to and sitting with anxious thoughts, body scanning, sort of window of tolerance stuff, and how that, you know, that's therapy language. And you were sort of arguing like how much that runs parallel to centuries old contemplative approaches to the kind of inner life. So that's really interesting, the sort of the wisdom of a wisdom tradition. I think that's kind of one way to talk about it. There's a phrase that came up that you use in a lot of your materials, religion after religion. So the idea here is we're not abandoning the tradition, but we are going back through it to recover good things. Like, for instance, when what binds people together as opposed to what divides them, which is more the conversation topic for today. Is that a good paraphrase of religion after religion?

[C]

Yeah, I'd say so. I think we situated it sort of in the context of this spiritual but not religious culture that we are supposed to be living in and how people are abandoning religion under the name or the banner of spirituality. And I would sort of radicalize the etymology of that word to say, it's about what binds us. It's that ligare in the Latin, you know, the ligament thing. And I just am a believer and I'm sure we're going to, we're going to touch on this today that like human beings are bound together inextricably. And so to be irreligious would be to like, sort of like try to break apart the binding that we have in terms of our societal connections, our human connections. And so religion is one way of structuring or ritualizing the bindings that hold us, hold societies together, hold communities together. And so I would make the argument that we're more religious than we think. And obviously there's specific forms of world religion that have informed ways of organizing these bindings. But yeah, so I think you're right on point. And yeah, I think we're continuing to ask these questions today about, you know, how do we rebind when we're being divided? You know.

[B]

So, yeah, okay, so that is a good sort of bridge into this conversation. So we weren't talking about this so much last time. But if religion after religion is about kind of figuring out how to bind people together and if your guys, you know, your dinner and discussion model, like, tell me if this is right, I would assume the reason that you even tried out an alternative model for a church type meeting was because in part you were experimenting with how can a group of people in this actual space with these, you know, with these personality types and all these things that they happen to have, as well as sort of like the differences of the modern, you know, kind of higher paced California world, Santa Barbara being a slight exception to the higher pace, but still that like, that's a bit of an experiment with like, well, how can we accomplish this binding together that church is supposed to, that religious community is supposed to accomplish? Isn't that right?

[C]

Yeah, I think you're. Yeah, exactly right in that. I mean, I think for me, we had mentioned, even in the last episode, my experience of being diffused out of evangelicalism, not defused, but diffused, you know, and how I sort of sensed from that experience that we needed to rally around something else that didn't just naturally diffuse people out of it when they got outside of the bounded set of beliefs. And so, yeah, this organizing principle around shared practices and values has felt sort of buoyant enough to allow a lot of people to exist within the circle of committing to that way of life without sort of unbelieving their way out of it.

[B]

Yeah, I think I might Want to come back too to this question of like, what have you found in the positive? You know, we're going to be talking about what we might call the negative, like the, the difficult aspects of all of this stuff and how we understand it. We're going to bring in some Jonathan Haidt, the moral and social psychologist, some of his work on that. But maybe just a pin in it for my own sake as well as yours, to be like, I'm curious what you have found through practice, through trial and error in the way of antidotes, in the way of countervailing forces that are binding. Because we're going to talk about in group, out, group. So basically let me set it up by saying a little bit about what the research, the religion research says about in group out, group stuff. And then we will go where we go. The big finding in my mind is that religion is helpful. It is a good force for the statistically average person. We talk about this a lot. You know, there's social benefits, there's meaning and identity. There's a way, a mechanism for healing from trauma and other distress, all kinds of stuff like that. The downside, the kind of thing that you pay for the good with, if you are the statistically average Christian, for instance, is compared to your secular counterpart, you are likely to be more groupish. You will have like kind of an increased bias towards the members of your group and an increased bias against members of the out group. And that, you know, my kind of thumbnail sketch is that appears to be just the cost of doing business to get those benefits. It's like it is tied up with it in some way.

[C]

Sort of par for the course. Yeah, absolutely.

[B]

I kind of just want to say that at the beginning to, you know, kind of be like that. That's like when I, when I zoom all the way out on thinking about religion, psychology of religion, benefits and costs. That is really the, that's the sort of often my kind of headline answer I'll give around, like, is religion good for you? And it's like, yes, if you're average. And this is the, this is the clearest way in which it's not good. And that actually tends to have more collective and sort of social costs which are not as easily measured as some of those internal benefits and stuff like that. But now I want to zoom out beyond just religion because we are mostly talking about beyond religion. And when I was kind of thinking about the conversation today, I realized that there are a lot of different ways for me to think that my team is right and that the other team is wrong. Growing up evangelical, that gave me one of my first examples. Right. That goes very deep. We have the truth, other people don't. Eternal destiny, things like this, or eternal destinations. But there are also more surface level examples I can think of that are not religious from childhood and teenage years. So skaters and BMXers are better than rollerbladers. Do you remember that one?

[C]

Oh, yeah, sure.

[B]

Yeah. Punk is better than top 40 pop music.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Those are early ones. Then, like, college thereafter. You know, a lot of us, we kind of get more politically conscious as we become an adult, and then we find out that, lo and behold, our political tribe is superior to the other political tribe. And that is whether we stayed in the one we were raised in or if we switched. We'll still feel that way either way. So I just wanted to kind of zoom out there. I was thinking, here are some examples that are not necessarily religious. When you just think about, like, ways that you have found yourself being in groupish, like, would you add anything to that list from your experience?

[C]

Oh, well, the first illustration that came to mind when you brought that up about how it applies to Christianity, first of all, is homeschoolers. You know what I mean? Like, there's this experience of it's us versus all the public schoolers, which is kind of funny.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But then as you get older, like, I think you're right. I mean, I see it a lot, obviously, in sports. Right. Which is like, our team is better than that team, and there's that kind of thing going on. But I think what has just become sort of infinitely interesting to me in the time of our culture is how these dynamics are being applied to, like you mentioned, the political environment, our party versus their party, and what it's doing to American society. I think so. I mean, we could give more examples, but those are the first ones.

[B]

I have a political example because this is. My first podcast was called Depolarize. I'm quite interested in political polarization, even though I don't like to. I don't cover it as often as I used to because it kind of fucks me up.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

But here's an example of how a liberal or progressive would think about conservatives in this sort of in groupish way with the kind of patina on it, a little heavy butter spread on the toast with the approved sources. So in this case, it'll be science. So a person might say something like this. Well, conservatives, you know, they're high on their need for cognitive closure, and they use more of the Parts of their brain that signal fear and threat. They have a tiny world where we, you know, they don't try any new things. Whereas we travel and we explore, we're citizens of the world. This is a way of dressing it up in language that everybody will nod along at your cocktail party or ayahuasca ceremony in a way that people would nod along at the right answers in youth group if you gave the right answers. And this is the kind of thing I've certainly found myself thinking and feeling very self righteous about. But in more recent years, if I read something like that, my in group BS meter starts flashing. Not that maybe some of that is not technically true, but like, you still gotta ask why, you know, like you can't just go, cause they're bad and we're good. And that is really the sort of basic implication it is.

[C]

And you know, I think in my own experience, it just smells. You can smell it, right? Like you're saying, what you're saying is when a liberal talks that way, it smells just the same as when a conservative talks that way about the other side. And so there's that piece of like, is this the same phenomenon that's going on? And then there's the other reality, which is you can experience whether you're on either side of the aisle, the sort of vitriol, othering, kind of like belittling, demonizing of the other group. And even if you migrate, like I have, from one side to the other, you can, even though you're on the side you think is more morally astute or correct, you can still feel that from the other way and then, and then vice versa. And so because like when you move from one side to the other, you have a sense for what it feels like now you can recognize it in your own, in group. And that's the challenge of, you know, like when you're inside of a circle, what does it look like to name this, this phenomenon that we all are witnessing?

[B]

What you're describing there, the process by which we can come to recognize when our group is doing this? I mean, that feels to me like we're getting into the realm of the contemplative. Because just in a very simple understanding of that term, it's like slowing down, looking inward, considering some things, maybe trying to see how the sausage is being made, seeing how things feel. So, yeah, like, am I right to be bringing the word contemplative in here?

[C]

Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, there's many, many ways to define that word. Right, but you used it in sort of a phrase of like, we're entering in the realm of contemplative. Right, which is sort of like a domain or I feel like the association I got from the way you just connected it was that there's this process by which we inquire intentionally at maybe a slower speed, like you said, with a little bit more awareness. And to me, that actually connects with where we might head in terms of using the rational. Like choosing to do that. Right. Is one thing. And so, yeah, I would say we're bordering on that. And I think this conversation plays in a fairly broad way with a lot of what we might broach today because we're asking questions not only of in group out, group loyalties, right. But of like, is there a progression to human awakening or consciousness? Like, are we becoming more moral people? Like, is that a spiritual thing? Is that a biopsychosocial thing? What is that? You know what I mean? And so there's this process by which I think the contemplative inquiry that you outlined invites us to be at the very least thoughtful about that and maybe at, at best, sort of like more deeply, intentionally practitioners of that inquiry recognizing we don't maybe ever land or achieve or arrive right at the. At the destination, but that we want to become the kind of people who are asking these questions contemplatively and along the path.

[B]

Okay, so what you got me thinking about there, I love that question. It's a really good and really hard question. Is there progress? Capital P, you know, in, in these kinds of issues and, and maybe just because people don't know that we're going into the realm of moral and social psychology, so we already know we're talking about, like, which moral issues do you find orienting, centering are at the middle of your project? Is it about justice? Is it about harm and harm reduction? Or is it about loyalty and authority and purity and sanctity and these things that come more on the conservative end of things. And so it's really hard. But it also has me thinking about progressive revelation, you know, which is. Was an important concept for me early on in my kind of faith change process to have another way of thinking about morality and how it might connect, for instance, to the Bible. But I think there is an answer at the individual level. That's what I want to say as a therapist. There is an answer. There is a progress answer at the individual level, but I don't know. Or it's much harder to know the answer at the collective level. At the individual level. I Think we're talking about maturity, right? Right. So maturity, and there's probably some good definitions of it out there that I don't have at the tip of my tongue, but it would be something like the ability to encounter a wide variety of experiences, including painful or hurtful ones, and have it not kind of dethrone your whole life, knock you totally off of your game. Be able to still kind of live within your values despite that difficulty. Be able to sort of absorb new experiences and accommodate them in the past without getting too reactive. You know, basically being able to like, maintain your responsibilities, do your job even when things are tough. Like that's a kind of a maturity, resilience.

[C]

Right.

[B]

A person can certainly grow on that kind of a metric. But then like, well, what, how should the universe be? What should the moral values of a society be? What, what does progress look like there? That gets way, way, way harder for me to answer or feel confident about. Like, is that, are you similar in that respect or would you describe anything different?

[C]

I mean, I, you know, dabble in philosophy. So there's what we call the transcendental, right. Which is sort of a, on some level can be an axiological or a value based statement about, like, are these the things that matter ultimately? Right. Those are some of the conversations we get into. And I think, for me, yeah, and I, I, I think this, I hope this is a, a decent offering here, but I don't mean it to derail us and take us a different direction. But to me, my favorite philosopher, one of them Whitehead, you know, who does the process stuff a la Tom and Tripp and people you've mentioned before, says that beauty is a wider, more fundamental notion than truth and goodness even, right? So when we wonder about, yeah, like how we would, how would, how we would outline immorality. For me personally, Tim speaking, I statements, I would say beauty is the frame in which or the horizon in which all these other beautiful notions exist, like truth and goodness and mercy and you know, like, and so forgiveness and things like that. So for me, I do wonder about the transcendental question about are these larger framings helpful? But I agree with you that it is up to the individual to go on the journey, you know, of kind of deepening their own autonomous ability to be a more forgiving, a more loving, a more compassionate type person. And so, so, yeah, I don't know how to balance that in the context of your initial thought there, but I think that I'm definitely tracking. And the other thing I was going to mention too, I Think unless you have an immediate thought on what I just brought up. But I have another thought on the progressivism stuff. So when I kind of first migrated from evangelical to what I would call progressive Christianity or something like that, I found different stage theories, different theories of human development and they kind of go along this arc from my in group to world loyalty would be one way to say it. Not just my group's right, but all people deserve dignity and belonging. And I was like, this is great. I moved from here and I moved through these stages and then I got here. Right? But then when you hang out with enough good liberals, they'll be like, well, any kind of progressivism or successionism is just another form of colonialism, right? Because there's people who are getting to the enlightened stage hierarchically who are now over and above everybody else who's less enlightened. And that's problematic for a number of reasons. Right. So you have that critique in what we call stage theory, that the progressivism of various stage theories. And by that I don't just mean progressive politically, I mean progressing through stages toward higher, higher or deeper levels of consciousness.

[B]

Level one to level ten.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. Like level ten people, like the energy there is just a sort of new form of colonialism to be, sort of like to subjugate all the lower levels of consciousness. Right. Obviously, if you read anything about stage theory and deepening consciousness, you know that the further along you get, the less you have any of that, you know,

[B]

hopefully that sensibility, the colonial critique is not the critique that I would make. I think just because I'm not like a Marxist, I'm not that into critical theory. I think colonialism was extremely evil. And I don't, I don't like differ on that. But it's not like my main lens. My criticism is just, it's too convenient. It's just, it's too good to be true that all the, you know, left leaning educated folks happen to be the ones at level 10.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Like no, no, no, no, no. This should like alert us to something. Right? Like where, where, you know, like. And I'll give you an example, I'll give you, I'll give you maybe two examples of concepts on the right that we would then say, oh, these are conservative concepts that may actually be really valuable and more valuable than we can even imagine right now. The first is like there are people who grow up on farms or who grow up like raising livestock. And those people tend to have a clearer picture of biological reality than we have doing mental work on the west coast, you know, primarily. And they might just not find all of those stages to be like realistic, for instance. And, you know, they might be right. And if they're right, then that means that we're wrong. Another one would be like the, you know, what is possibly going to become one of the sort of hot button crises of the next 30 years, which is a collapsing birth rate. And I don't know a ton about this issue, but it's not just in America. It's like in the developing world, which is where the low skill, low cost labor force tends to come to the rest of the world for. And, and there are. It's possible that this will provide a huge economic problem that affects the entire world. It's also possible that other things will compensate for it. I don't know. But like the idea of like, you know, cultures that really prioritize and value family and having children and passing things to the next generation in a way that like red America values it clearly more than blue America. If you don't think that you're kidding yourself in, in almost every way. If you are a Yellowstone truck, DRI watcher, truck driver, you probably value family more at least, like having a kids and growing families and staying connected and whatever, living in the same place as your kids, these kinds of things. So I like. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm blue state through and through. But like that's an example where it's like, if that ends up being a big problem, then all of us who had convinced ourselves that we solved it by being progressive, right? No, because progressivism and all the rights focus and you know, the sexual revolution and birth control, which, you know, has led to a lot of really, really great things in my opinion, like. Well, it also has these costs, potentially huge costs. And so that's that convenience thing I'm talking about.

[C]

Totally. And I mean, that tracks for me too. I grew up in a very red county and have since sort of, well again got diffused out of that county. Right. To much more blue county and circles. But the one thing I've realized kind of in my own journey of just engaging with these dynamics, I guess, is that there's a little bit of truth in every worldview. And if you can't say that, then you know what game you're playing. Right. And a lot of people I experience on the right especially don't want to say it about the left. And on the left, they hate to say that. Like the thing you said about families, like maybe they're just better at kind of like the, this unit of like growing humans in there, whether you agree with their ideology or not. And if you can't say that, then we've got. That's the problem that we're trying to address. And so instead if we have eyes to just look for that little bit of truth that's within everyone's worldview. I mean, I follow a lot of my old, like college group kids and like people when I was a pastor down at a more evangelical church, like still follow them on social media and they're living just very different lives than myself and in ways that you've already sort of alluded to. And yet I see their goodness. Like, I see the beauty of the way that they treat their kids and the way that they neighbor. And I'm like, could you imagine just being like, now this all bullshit anyways.

[B]

I mean, what we really need is, we need, we need the best of both worlds. Like, that's what we need. Like if, if you have all that and you're still spanking your kids, well, it'd be better if you didn't spank them. Spanking doesn't really work. Like, you know, like. But that might be one of the things that comes along with it. Not, not to mention, of course, some of the harmful ideology. But, but even just like behavior action wise, like I would, you know, I'd love a family life based a bit more around like a small town way of doing things or even a rural way of doing things, but with, you know, like the best research on how to give our kids the best shot at life. Like, can we have both? Like, you know, can we try?

[C]

And that's the question.

[B]

Could we.

[C]

That's our country question right now.

[B]

That's the way collectives question.

[C]

Hey, you're right. Maybe it's a little bit more situated than that.

[B]

All right, well, no, no, I mean, it's both. Yeah, yeah, but okay, so, so we, we've laid out the problem, right? So, so if you, if you're listening and you think I totally disagree with you guys, the other side is a bunch of charlatan bullshitters, then you know, go, go turn on Pod, save the world or whatever, you know. Yeah, I don't think anybody who listens to my show would think the opposite. That all the progressives are idiots, they would not have made it this far. So I don't need to address them. But yeah, this is not gonna be the chat for you if you think that. So let's talk about some of the mechanisms so you and I both really valued the earlier work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt. These days he's known for the Anxious Generation, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for like two years. But before that, he was known for his moral foundations theory, his rider and elephant analogy, both of these and a few other ideas of his and his colleagues best represented in the book the Righteous Mind, which is my Origin of Species. I have it behind me here on my bookshelf. You can see it, Tim. It was the book that turned me on to psychology as opposed to theology. I see you didn't follow me down that path, Tim, so that's fine. You're, you know, we're not all at the same stage of enlightenment, so you've just surpassed.

[C]

I mean, I try to stay conversant, but I can't in any way touch your expertise there, that's for sure.

[B]

Well, and I'm not a social or moral psychologist. I'm not yet a psychologist at all. But, you know, I'm a clinical. I will be a clinical psychologist, I might say a cognitive existential psychologist, you know, kind of focus on clinical work. So I'm not, I'm not an expert in that sense on the subject, but I've been using these ideas in my own life and in podcast conversations and with clients to some degree for 10 years. So let's talk about some of these, the images. And I actually think I might want to zoom out before we get to those specific images. There is a larger category which is that we can look at how our evolutionary biology has created certain things in us. So when I do like, it is very often helpful in therapy, actually to bring in an evolutionary psychology, for instance. It's both psychology and biology. But it's like how something that's not helping me right now, today, therapy client that I'm struggling with might have been really helpful to my ancient ancestors to help them survive. Like, that is often a very helpful format to talk about something. It can reduce shame, it can increase a sense of understanding how something works and like, where it comes from and why it might feel kind of alien in our present moment. I'm wondering if you have examples kind of at that broad level. Like if I say to you, explain it through evolution, where does your mind go? What times are you thinking of? How do you kind of conceive of this question in that light?

[C]

The question of what in particular in

[B]

light of evolution, Evolution, like the role of evolution in this kind of in group out, group stuff?

[C]

Well, I mean, Haidt makes the case that we've sort of developed as a species this sense of in group out, group loyalty as a way of for us to succeed against different, the rest of Animalia. Right. Like the rest of the beings that share this planet. And so one of the ways that we sort of succeeded in that was to bond together and create these groups. And so that's there I think, from just as early a stage as you can probably get. But the reality I think in that too is that I think we, we're seeing this play out in real time right now. The ways in which that holdover of our in group loyalty is now being used against us and pitting us against others. And so, yeah, so I think for me that evolutionary biology is foundational. And again, as you know, Haidt makes the case that this elephant that you alluded to, that part of us that is not rational per se, this is not our contemplative inquiry brain, but this is that intuition and emotion and our loyalties to those around us actually precede our ways of operating. And so again, we've been given that gift for a reason. It can I think, still serve us if we use it correctly and apply, widen the in group a little bit. But I think, you know, this idea that we are less rational than we even think we are and that we're often moving off of this gut level connection that we have. Yeah, I think it, it's, it's again, it's sort of situating the, the issue that we're facing right now in that regard.

[B]

But yeah, okay, starting at the beginning of your answer, you talked about grouping together as opposed to the way that other animals do things or in, in a, you know, originally a fight for survival and ultimately sort of biological dominance on the earth, which we eventually get to, but not for a long time, you know, humanoid genus or family, whatever level that is of which Homo sapien is an example, Neanderthal is an example, et cetera, that is like 5 million years old or something like that. Yeah, and Homo Sapien is 200, 250,000 years old. Where we get sort of genetically to our current, current, you know, basically human genome. And you know, we've only really dominated things, so to speak, in the last, basically since agriculture provided more resources for things like more weapons and you know, making more use of the natural world, which eventually becomes deltarious. Anyway, he has this idea of 90% chimp, 10% bee, as in buzzing bees. And, and this is something that is different about humans than our other primate relatives. Evolutionarily speaking, they don't have this part that likes to be a part of a hive.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And, you know, so Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, coined the term collective effervescence, which is. Comes up all the time when you talk about psychology of religion or sociology of religion. The idea that, like, you get a group together, they are all kind of pointing in the same direction, they're doing something together. It's sort of timed. There's some sort of synchronicity, and you get this bubbling up. It's an additional thing that you don't just. You can't just pluck it out of the individuals. It's, like, greater than the sum of its parts. It's this emergent property of effervescence that comes out in the collective and that has a way of binding. You can think about church, but you could also think about concerts. You could think about military parades. You think about military regiments, engage in collective effervescence. Sporting events, you know, these kinds of things. Sporting events. Yeah. Another good example. Yeah. And. And so there is this kind of, like, we have. That's one of probably a handful of biologically evolved sort of facts or mechanisms or processes or whatever by which humans who create, like, more intensely, you know, gelled together groups and that. That was, you know, arguably necessary for our survival as a species. It certainly helped it. And. And whether or not it was necessary, whether that's even answerable, it's what happened. And we are the inheritors of it. Like, we get that material, both the genetics and the kind of basic underlying psychology that is, you know, you could sort of think of like, our default operating software or something like that.

[C]

Right. Yep. Yeah. Full endorse. I mean, no notes. Yeah.

[B]

Thank you.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So that's the in group, and the in group's not really a problem until we have an out group.

[C]

That's right.

[B]

How do you. When you're talking to people at the Way Collective or anybody else, like, where do you start when you. When you're talking about out groups.

[C]

That's a good question, Dan. So I almost. I'll begin with by with saying I almost don't even have to mention out groups because everybody knows we have them. Right. It's become normative, like, across the culture to have an enemy, to have a political other, to have a religious other. To have. Yeah. And to have others be your neighbors. Like we, you know, at the local level. Like, I feel like. Yeah, you could disagree on, like, the policy in your housing track. And then you've got another. Right. Like when you're at the association board meeting. Like it's so, it's just, it almost goes without saying, like everybody just knows what you're talking about right away. They're like, oh yeah, yeah, I know that we've got those. So there's that piece. And I guess the first thing I would mention maybe is that we try to set as much of our conversation as we can around this topic of non duality. Like I think I mentioned on the last episode. And I don't need to.

[B]

Yeah, you'll need to redefine, you'll need to define that again.

[C]

Well, non duality just means not to. Right. Trying to have what we would say then maybe an easier way to access that would be like to put on the non dual mind, which means to sometimes bring together and rebind things that are apart and to try to hold the goodness of the person on the other side of the aisle. So for me, the way that we end up talking about this, whether we're talking about nonviolence and politics in America right now, whether we're talking about that person in your family at the Thanksgiving table, that again is a political or religious other than you and you know, who you've deconstructed, they haven't. Whatever it might be. Right. Like, and to set that in the context of sort of a doubling down on compassion and kind of like which is a, is a mode of connection, which doesn't. I would make a difference between compassion and empathy too. I'm not just talking about like feeling the feelings of other people, but I'm talking about moving toward one another with a healing energy. That's what compassion is like. And so kind of putting that other again, we use different illustrations for the demographics of who they are, but I actually try not to say all you left leaning people in the room think about that conservative. I instead I try to just like widen the frame a little bit and say like, you know, that political other in your mind and da da, da, da da. Or you know, and so, and then when you set that as up as the context, you kind of invite people to get to know, you know, get to know them at a relational level. I think one of the biggest connecting points I see is like a lot of us used to be on that side of the aisle, whatever aisle it is, you know what I mean? And so can you connect with that prior version of yourself and that other person and love that person, have you included and love that person in yourself? Because if you can, maybe you could find it in you to stay connected to this person.

[B]

Can I remember when I said to others that I was trying to love the sinner and hate the sin?

[C]

Preach.

[B]

Yeah. It's actually a great little trick if you can remember previous versions of yourself. Like, that's a really good way to do it because, you know, we do have this kind of. Most of us have this general self regard and we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, you know, that that's when we get to rider and the elephant. We'll talk about the rider as the personal defense lawyer.

[C]

Yes, that's one of my favorite versions.

[B]

Yeah, it's, it's so helpful. It is this thing you're talking about, like we, you know, we deceive ourselves a lot more than we think. We are less rational than we think. We are less integrated and internally coherent than we think. You know, we, we're more fractured than we think. But this, but the. But my first thought is like, okay, so you're asking people to do that. And now I'm immediately going back to our previous conversation about what's going on internally. Are you sufficiently regulated? Do you have an. Have you done enough, have you had enough time and experience with, you know, learning to separate out your thoughts from yourself? You know, I am not my thoughts to defuse from things like this. I mean, it just puts me back in the previous conversations. Can you briefly connect those and then we'll, we'll move on to the rider and elephant.

[C]

Yeah, it takes a decent level of self awareness. Right. I think is what you're saying here to do that. And so, yeah, not only sort of defusing from identifying with your thoughts, but you could even say defusing from identifying with your emotions because you're going to have elephant style emotions when you encounter another, especially if you feel unsafe and harm might ensue. But I think the other piece there for me is that like there's something that happens in us when we come home to ourselves in the way that we've been talking about. Like, if I can include that prior version of me, I mean, I could tell you stories about who I used to be. Right. If I've loved and included that person, then there's. It just, it disarms our hearts, I think, a little bit. And everything is on such high alert these days that we really, we need to be safe in that regard. And I'll say every time we teach, if we do eight weeks on compassion, right, and nonviolence and staying connected to neighbors with whom you differ, the number one thing that comes up, Dan, is boundaries because that's one of those things that we need to keep intact in order to feel safe in re approaching somebody from a different perspective. And one of the things my therapist said to me one time, I've never forgotten and I've probably repeated it thousand times, is our boundaries are where our lives touch each other. And I think for me there was so much safety in that. And it was also because I'm sort of an enneagram 4 type person which means like I'm overly individualistic and trying to be different from everybody else and, and I. And authenticity sort of the highest value. So if I'm approaching somebody with a wall up like a boundary, I can't really be authentic. So I was worried I wouldn't be able to be authentic if I did that. And instead seeing our boundaries as a place where our lives brush up against each other in healthy ways, we learn to re approach in compassionate ways that don't like burn us out, that don't kind of make us vulnerable again has really been empowering, I guess. And I think we end up talking about that a lot, I guess when these topics come up in our community.

[B]

So that's great. Let's talk about the rider and the elephant. So Haidt has this great visual metaphor, analogy. The human mind is best thought of as having from his perspective these two elements. The elephant, which is the much larger part, which means it's sort of like, I think Freud had the iceberg analogy that like the, you know, the conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg and the subconscious is much more substantial. And you know, you could like I'm not super Freudian but like the presence of a subconscious in each individual is one of the sort of indisputable contributions of Freud to psychology. He's obviously right about that. Some of the mechanisms for various things I think he got wrong. But this idea that like there's a lot under there and if, you know, I've been studying for the eppp, which is the psychologist's bar exam or like, you know, whatever, it's like our big licensure exam. It's the I will never hate a test with a fifth of the theory that I will come to hate this test by the time I'm done. Yeah, I was just learning and brushing up about memory and the current consensus is that our long term memory is essentially unlimited. So even if you just go from the perspective of the amount of stuff we are able to learn and you're not even thinking about unconscious processes and stuff like that which are also present just in terms of memory, the amount we're working with in any given moment is such a small portion of, of what we can potentially remember and learn and know. And you know, so that's one facet of the mind and that's very much an iceberg kind of a, kind of a thing. But of course, you think about like children. Developmental lens is also helpful to think about here because when, when does our, you know, our metacognition, which is our understanding of how we each think, you know, my understanding of how I think and the way I work and stuff, that doesn't really even start coming online until like late teens. So we live a whole, you know, quarter of a full adult life before we can even talk at all about like how I work. And yet we've been working. So obviously there's a lot that we can do without our conscious, rational, narrative awareness of what we're doing. Right, right. There's a big chunk of the iceberg that is below water. We can't, we don't see it. And so that's the elephant. And the elephant is, you know, you mentioned emotion. It's affective. My favorite image is that the elephant leans. The elephant leans and then the rider plots the course. The rider sort of makes sure that whichever way we're leaning will make sense and is workable. And sometimes that's not deceptive, self deceptive, other deceptive or anything. Sometimes that's, you know, I will say something like, thank you all for coming here tonight. I have been feeling like I wanted to have an eight person dinner party for a while now of people from different, you know, backgrounds and, and, you know, specialties. And so I figured out how to get you all here. Okay. So my rider lean, my elephant leaned away. And then my rider figured out who to invite and you know, took care of the details. That would be, that's great. But you could come up with an example where there is a disconnect there. So, you know, somebody who, let's say they are, they are coming to really sour on their business partner, but they are not aware of what's actually going on. Like, maybe they, like maybe there are things that the person has said that are rubbing them the wrong way. Maybe they have gotten fat and this person has a bias towards fat people. I mean, any could be anything. And then it's like, well, well, we have to. Our, our business values don't align anymore. That would be like the argument that they would give.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And it's like in this instance, it's not why that isn't the reason, but that's an acceptable thing to say. And you could even convince yourself that that's what it's about. And you could not be aware of the biases and all this stuff that's going on. So the. The lawyer is sometimes a way of getting ourselves off the hook. And it's not just like, we know the lawyer's lying on our behalf. We don't know the lawyer is lying on our behalf. The lawyer is lying back to us to make us feel good about ourselves in a lot of cases, right?

[C]

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. And the crazy thing about this is that, like, yeah, there. There's a sense in which. This is why we got to realize this. Facts don't change people's minds. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is the piece that plays in our world right now in real time is like, have you ever just shouted more evolutionary science as somebody and been like, why don't you just see it, right? Or, like, you know, right. You know what I mean? And so, like, you. You go down that track of, like, thinking, hey, I. I think I'm. I'm. I'm joyfully marching forward in whatever I find as I, like, explore ideas and I, like, learn or whatever. And wouldn't everybody else just be so interested in the truth?

[B]

Like, you know, there are times when facts do change minds. The psychological setting is they are seeking them out and they are open to learning. That's pretty much it.

[C]

That is. That is it, right?

[B]

I guess you could be open to learning about something and not seeking. Someone could send it to you, and you could be open to it. You didn't seek it out yourself. But even the fact that you would choose to read it or something like that, I think could constitute seeking like, that you are internally intrinsically motivated to know more about something. So what's funny, there is like, you know, I'm a CBT therapist. I'm cognitive, existential. I do a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy. And in that case, information and facts and looking into things does change people's minds, and then it also changes their emotions and their behaviors. But that is within the context of doing CBT therapy on purpose. You know, joining me in the work, putting in your own effort, being motivated to look at facts and evidence and whatever. And in that instance, it really is extremely powerful. But we forget. I mean, therapists ought to know this. We tend to know this, that you have to. The client has to be motivated or that won't work. And so just arguing with someone does not work. Just Giving them facts does not do anything. But when they want to look for facts and stuff, then that's when it will be effective.

[C]

Well, there used to be this podcast, I think it was called like you have permission or something. I can't remember the title of it,

[B]

but yeah, yeah, it really lost its way.

[C]

It did. But the, the most important thing about what you just brought up to me is that there's a relationship of permission, right? You are accompanying somebody in your, you know, your practice, right, who maybe for 10 sessions weren't ready to go there yet. But like through slow, consistent relationship building, permission giving this possibility does open up. But it's the relationality that gives people this, you know, ability to go maybe where they never thought they could go before. In fact, I think I shared with you a little bit some, some sociological, you know, ideas, I guess, that, that, that play on this idea that not only do you have to feel disrupted where you're at in your current stage of thinking, but you have to have significant insight into the disruption. You have to see what a new path forward could look like. But you also need people around you saying, yes, you can go. And if that permission doesn't occur, new ideas, new places in us don't emerge, let alone germinate at all. You know what I mean? And so there's that kind of piece to me that the illustration you used, I thought was great. But this happens at the in group level. Not just in a one on one relationship from like therapist and client, but also like in group, religious in groups, political in groups. If your entire in group is reifying your current stage of thinking, this, yeah, the facts aren't going to change your mind, right? You need some access point, some influence in your life that is saying, hey, it could be this, you know, you could, you could, you could do, you could, you could make this move, right, and not lose full connection, but be reconnected to, to more people, you know. And so anyways, but I feel like

[B]

I have seen that play out in six month chunks over the last few years around the question of boys and men and particular problems that they're encountering. Like four years ago it was like nobody in my circles had permission to talk about that. And then slowly, a bit more, a bit more, a bit more. And you can see it on someone's face, like if they are hearing this for the first time and they are a compassionate person and they ought to in theory be open to this. But it's like, whoa, we're not, we're not. Wait, we're not going there, Right? That's like alt right, you know, like four years ago that felt like to people, like an alt right talking point, like a fucking Steve Bannon thing.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

And now it's like the kind of thing that probably Kamala Harris has talked about for all I know. Like, it's become a lot more accepted and there's those interesting follow up questions there and, and you know, a lot to unpack. But just the. That, that is demonstrably a more open question in polite, progressive society. Still not in a lot of. Not the further you go, maybe left or whatever. But I've noticed a huge difference there. And I think permission structure is a good way of saying that, like, you know, President Obama has been talking about it and that gives a certain, that gives a certain percentage of people on the left, you know, they feel more permission to go there because, hey, Obama's, you know, he's not a right winger.

[C]

He's.

[B]

He's not, he's not on the other team. He's on our team, you know.

[C]

Right. Yeah. I mean, the thing that comes up for me, as you say that too, is like, you think about how scared a lot of parents are right now to give permission to their kids to go do things that feel unsafe, right? Like we have this culture and height in the anxious generation and other things, like talks about how we need to give people permission again to just go make mistakes, get into conflict and resolve it on their own. And like, but we're scared to give that permission because we're like, what if, what if, you know, like there's this whole, like, you know, stranger danger phenomenon right, in the, in the 80s. And like, then we're like, oh, what if they walk down the street to get ice cream and they, they get kidnapped? It's like, oh my God, like, think about the story you're living in right there, by the way, really quick, you know, and it's like, instead, like, we're just living in this culture where permission has come with a bunch of caveats, like a bunch of asterisks next to it, right? Like, just be careful what you're giving them permission to do because, you know, and in some sense there's obviously like, you know, with the screens, right? Like, you know, being aware of what kind of permission you're giving your kids is a good thing, right? So there's that side of it. But I guess the point for me is like, yeah, I wonder if we're in some sense living in a culture where permission is just transfiguring in terms of its definition of what's acceptable, what's not. And then that plays out in these other arenas we're talking about.

[B]

It's not only that people are living in a kind of a dangerous Oriel story or something. I mean, I think that's a good example of evolutionary psychology being quite helpful if you think about, like, I'll bring this up a lot with my clients, like false positives versus false negatives, you know, so you're. Especially in terms of threat or danger. So if you have two otherwise identical humans or early humanoids or whatever, and one of them has a genetic mutation that the other one doesn't have, and so one of them is like much more concerned, like much more likely to have a false positive. There's a rustling in the bushes. They're much more likely to over interpret that as maybe a lion. Lions aren't really in bushes that often. Tigers are in bushes. Jungle tiger.

[C]

Right. I have a story about that, by the way. Go ahead, finish. I want you to finish.

[B]

I'll briefly finish versus someone who's like, eh, it's probably not a tiger, right? Then that guy, even if he's right, nice. Nine times out of 10, well, the 10th time he gets eaten by a tiger and then we don't get his genes. Whereas if the guy, if the other guy is wrong, 10 times out of 10. So he's much less likely to be right. But in every case he stops and he protects himself, then maybe he doesn't get eaten by the tiger and we get his genes. So that kind of like there's a real survival benefit to being exceptionally aware of risk as opposed to being dismissive of risk. And that it does not correlate with accuracy. It is more about historical survival encoded into our evolutionarily determined genetics.

[C]

Love that.

[B]

What's your story?

[C]

So, just briefly, my story was I used to go to this place to do kind of silent contemplation out in kind of the hills here in Santa Barbara and fairly wild place, there's not a lot of people around. And I would go to the same rock that was sort of enclosed in brush. And so I couldn't really be seen by anybody if they hiked by me or whatever. But sometimes as I would sit there, I would hear this low grunting, kind of growling rumble, like. And I was like, God, is that, Is that a bear? You know what I mean? Like, what the heck? This is crazy. You know, like, and it would go away and then it would come back again. And I'm sitting on My rock just kind of doing my silent time. And then that growl would start to kind of like, low hum again. And I'm like, oh, my God, is there a bear? Do I need to run? And then one day I was sitting there and I start to hear this low hum again. And all of a sudden a little hummingbird flies by. And it was the wings of the hummingbird, right? So you can take that analogy, that metaphor for what it is, right? My. My alert system is saying, danger, danger, danger. And yet it's this tiny. The smallest of all birds, the least dangerous of all threats. Right. And so just the deception of that. But I love how you actually brought a balance to how we need a little bit of both and. Yeah, anyways, go ahead.

[B]

It's funny, just on hummingbirds, we have a few hummingbird feeders that my wife has put up in our backyard. And so we actually have a lot of. We have hummingbirds around fairly often. And one kind of flew at me the other day, and I was like, it sounds like an airplane is gonna hit me. It was like one of the scariest sounds. Something about the frequency and that, you know, that rate of flapping of, like, it has a deep resonance that you wouldn't expect from a little creature. But it came close enough to me. It's like. It's like the way it feels when a bee gets really near your ear. But it was like five times that. So hummingbirds can be fucking scary.

[C]

I know. And I mean, guilty of confusing a tiny hummingbird for a bear. So, you know, I feel you.

[B]

Okay, so I want to skip past moral foundations theory, moral taste buds. I'll briefly describe it so that if people want to look it up, they can look it up on Wikipedia or whatever. The idea is that. And this is contested amongst moral psychologists on how to best categorize this stuff, but Height's version is that there are five or six fairly universal types of moral intuition and that progressives tend to be much higher on two of them. Fairness and justice and care versus harm. And like that. Almost all sort of progressive. Both individual public policy preferences, kind of like whatever, you know, is on our side of the aisle can basically be reduced to those two. Whereas conservatives have three or four more that this authority, loyalty and purity, slash sanctity. And the fourth one is liberty, which is more of a libertarian moral impulse. And that one kind of actually jumps across the aisles and sometimes, you know, seems to suggest kind of a third type of person actually who really is really high on liberty and that. And that the people with these different levels of these moral taste buds, you can go to yourmorals.org and actually take a, you know, that's right. Pretty robust little test and you can kind of plot yourself on it. That this reveals like just different ways of being moral. And so the simplest application for our conversation is to be like, if you are a fellow liberal progressive, it might be worth looking at this and just considering whether some of the people on the other side of the aisle, whether some of those moral intuitions and values might occasionally be worth following. And if so, then you have a blind spot and they maybe have a blind spot for something that you see more clearly than they do. And we can. And heights ultimately thing here is like, we should just be working together. Like, let's, let's, let's come up with the best possible solutions across difference and not demonize each other. So I don't want to try and go into all of that just for time purposes because I want to get back to applying this with your community. But that's a little bit. If people. Would you add anything to that to entice someone to go look this up?

[C]

No. I would say what's funny about it is that Haidt notes that because conservatives share like a low level of all those moral intuitions or taste buds or whatever, that they can actually identify more with liberals than liberals can conservatives. And I've always thought that's funny.

[B]

They do a better job of being able to put it, like put this argument in a liberal form. You ask a liberal to put it in a conservative form and the conservatives do better because it's so funny. Yeah. We think of ourselves as citizens of the world. We understand more perspectives on life. We can put ourselves in the shoes of greater variety of lived experience.

[C]

That's right.

[B]

But actually, morally we are worse at that than our conservative counterparts. They have better sort of moral cognitive empathy, that kind of a thing where they could. I bet they see it like this. They'll get that right more often than when we say I bet they'll see it like this.

[C]

That's right. And I mean, I think that's convicting. It is, but it needs to be said. Right. Because the left does have this, you know, more righteous than thou type of an attitude in a lot of ways and for good reason. Right. They really do care about harm. They want to get in the way of harm. And where I was going to go with this is this connects with Kurt Gray's work. We don't have to do that now or at all today. But but that a lot of fellow

[B]

moral psychologist who has some agreement, some disagreement with height.

[C]

Yep. Outraged. So, like. But this idea that. Yeah, is the book. Sorry, I was holding it up. You probably can't see that. And so, like, a lot of this stems from concepts of harm. Right. Like, and. And the funny thing that, yeah, like we just said, is that the conservatives can, you know, connect with and see and empathize with more liberals understanding of harm than. Than liberals can with conservatives. And that just needs to be said, I think, publicly. And.

[B]

Okay, so I want to come back to that flag I planted earlier that we've come to maybe once before. So where have you seen, like, you could take, you know. You know, feel free to bring in some of the moral taste buds, but, you know, we've more been talking about rider and elephant and. And, you know, making a case for ourselves and our blind spots. So where have you seen the opposite of this? Where have you seen growth amongst your community?

[C]

Well, I guess I should just set the context for a second by saying that part of my curiosity after kind of leaving evangelicalism was, again, I'm on this adventure of ideas. I'm learning, I'm growing. I feel like I'm expanding. Why doesn't this other counterpart, this other people in my life who are still holding. Holding their ground, like, see that? So I got really interested in why do people change or why don't they change, and why are we fragmenting? Why are we dividing? Another good book I really love is We Will Not Cancel Us by Adrienne Maree Brown. Like, why are we canceling each other rather than finding pathways toward connection? And so that's just part of my heart. In kind of bringing this up a fair amount in our community and inviting people to think about this is like, everyone is gonna just, like, stay their ground. You know what I mean? Like, I remember the book Change or Die came out, and it's like nine out of 10 people who go in for emergency heart condition end up coming back into the same office for the same problem because they can't change their behavior. Like, we have a hard time changing. And so what I'm seeing is, I think, bringing up this topic over and again in so many ways over the years. Like, people really are starting to see the invitation to not only connect with that version of themselves that's in a difficult other that we already mentioned earlier, but to really kind of take Jesus teaching to heart too. Not asking, who is my neighbor, but which one of us can be a neighbor? And to let that sort of Lead the way. And again, we don't even directly reference that scripture at all. All the time. But. But it's that idea.

[B]

Because you're so afraid of triggering all your snowflake congregants by reading Jesus now.

[C]

Well, they're going to be listening to this, Dan. They're going to love.

[B]

Love that.

[C]

No, they. That is partially why. But I don't think it's about the snowflake thing. I think it's a. I would call it a pastoral sensibility or a translational task that I have.

[B]

Obviously, I'm just giving you. I'm giving you for that.

[C]

You are.

[B]

You are trying to meet people where they're at.

[C]

Exactly. So. So. But yeah, all that being said, like, we're kind of sitting in that arena. Right. Or that domain. And I think what I witness is that people have literally come up and told me, like, hey, when I hosted, you know, Christmas dinner this year with, like, my huge family that comes over, I had, like, so much less anxiety going into it because I knew what it meant for me to stay grounded and also not need to change everyone else's truth, especially by fact, shouting, like we said or anything. Like, I can just be there in relationship with them and, like, hold my boundaries where I need to and engage or not engage on any topic I want to or don't want to, but that allows that continued connection. Now there's this whole other side of it which is like, is there a loss of intimacy that comes with, like, choosing your subjects and kind of like not sharing the fullness of yourself? And that's the whole thing. But. But you know what I'm saying, like, I see people live in real time, I guess, is what I mean. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. I love that. I see that what you just mentioned as also part of reality. So, like, reality includes both the fact that, hey, we can follow better practices that make it more likely that our loved ones will change their mind versus less likely if we do the wrong things? And that. And we can. Reality also includes, like, if we attend to our own regulation, whatever ways that manifests for us, that we can increase our resilience and our efficacy and we can have a better time in those. Like, that's all true. Reality also includes that there are consequences for beliefs, for actions, for loyalties that, like, you know, like, there are people in my life that, like, I heavily associate with Donald Trump because they have caused me to. Yeah. And whatever we end up blaming Trump for, I will in part blame them for their part in that. Now, I don't Want to blame them more than their part.

[C]

Right, right.

[B]

Like, that would be trying to keep myself anchored to reality.

[C]

Sure. Right.

[B]

You know, or, for instance, like, it may be the case that, you know, Trump and co sort of irrevocably damage the United States or the rest of the world in ways that, you know, 10 years from now are much clearer than they are now, or they're easier to catalog or describe. And then there will be people who either will sort of like, come to terms with that or not. And the ones who do, I will be closer with than the ones who don't. Like, that's also part of reality. Oh, yes, yes. That's the cost of doing business.

[C]

100%. 100%. Yeah. I think, you know. Yeah. The other thing I see, we come back to this Merton quote that we share a fair amount in our community, which basically, in the middle of the last century, this is like almost 100 years ago. Not 100 years ago, 75, maybe years ago or so. He said that religion would not survive if it remained based on. In group consciousness alone. But he said if those who draw close to the center of their own traditions could bear witness to the underlying unity that permeates and transcends all traditions, religious consciousness could be a source of world unity and even world peace. Right. And we're running up against not only this political othering, but the sort of like, Frankenstein form that Christian nationalism has taken in our country. Right.

[B]

That.

[C]

That has not transcended the in group consciousness thing. And so I think part of the contemplative invitation for me in our community is to help people see that people who identify as spiritual or religious or whatever can be a force for unity and peace. But it starts here in again, me coming home to myself, me reconciling my complexity again, like Adrienne Maree Brown says, I think it's just like, beautifully put. She says the thing that continues to fragment us, where we just want to cancel somebody who does the opposite thing of what we want to do. She says that we're doing that because we do not believe in our own complexity. She says we don't believe that we can navigate conflict and struggle in principled ways, and instead we settle for binary thinking, us and them, good and bad.

[B]

I like that.

[C]

Angel abuser. Innocent. Guilty. And that's just it. I think we have such a. Such a possibility or a potential before us to go a different way. And so, yeah, that's the stuff. Like, we're just sitting in that. You know, I really like that as

[B]

a Map of the terrain. I think you are. I've noticed just in the last few things you said that we might have a different like prognosis. I think the diagnosis is the same.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And you know, I love, I love Thomas Merton. I think I disagree with his prognosis. Like, I think I agree with his diagnosis. But I think that what Merton didn't know, and I don't know if anybody knew this when Merton was writing to the degree that we can kind of quantify it now is like the in group stuff is kind of a part of religion. Like, it's kind of why it works, I think. And I think what we're finding is that progressive, contemplative, open handed religion can definitely be a force for unity and peace. It is a force for unity and peace. You know, Merton just was kind of, I guess he overlapped somewhat with the civil rights movement, but not its fullness because of his accidental death before his time. But like, you know, that's an example of a more that type of Christianity really leading to lasting change. Yeah. But I think he failed to appreciate the eternal demand for in groupish religion. And you know, I just think, well, yeah, I'm less sanguine on the sort of future prospects of this than you are. But in terms of religion being the thing, because of just the way I think it works at a deep level.

[C]

I mean. Yeah. Does it matter if it's 12 or 12 million though? I mean, I think the, the idea, right, like applies in terms of the potential for a community, however sized it is to realize this kind of consciousness. I think, like, I agree with you on, on some front with the Merten stuff, but I also think this is somebody who was in community as a monk, like most of his life and wasn't talking about this stuff outside of an in group, like was in one the entire time. And I think what he's referring to has more to do with the consciousness the in group cultivates. Right. Like, it has a lot to do with again, what are the core values? What are the core practices of a community? Are they furthering this in group consciousness that says, you know, we're set apart from the world, you know, we're meant to kind of be us against the world, you know, not dubs. Right. And I don't find that anywhere in his praxis, you know what I mean? And so I think what he's talking about, you know, is, is cultivating a certain way of being, a way of seeing in the world. Like, I love that when Jim Finley Reflects on his time with him as a spiritual director. He says, you know, monks used to come to him and say, like, you know, are we here to just kind of, like, set ourselves apart? And he would say, we're not here to separate ourselves from the pain of the entire world and just stay safe. We're here to learn how to bear the pain of the entire world in our hearts. Right. Like, and it's that invitation in community that. That we, I think, struggle with. Honestly, we don't do it perfectly. Every week, people bring up like, the climate's collapsing, like, our. There's another mass shooting in San Diego this week. Like, what? How am I supposed to just be a peaceful person? And that question of, how are we in community holding the reality, the painful reality, the struggle that we all have in a way that doesn't harden us up and seclude us from the rest of the world, but actually connects us to it. And so, yeah, I think, to me, that's.

[B]

I agree that that's our call. I think that is our invitation. I think. I agree with the diagnosis and the treatment plan.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

I think. I just think, like, we also ought to expect that. That that approach will never be massively popular. That's. I guess, what I'm saying.

[C]

I mean, I. Yeah, I'm fully. I think we're on the exact same page there. In fact, I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but I had to give a talk to a little contemplative group here in Santa Barbara a number of months ago. But it was on Richard Rohr's new book, the Tears of Things. But they randomly just assigned me this chapter called the Remnant. And basically his claim is that the prophetic voice is sort of this remnant voice, and that the remnant voice is never, ever center of power. It's never cent of gravity. And so my point, and bring that up. And what you said is like, yeah, I mean, like, way Collective is not large. People aren't knocking our doors down to come be at dinner and dialogue on Wednesday nights. But. But it's also feels very valuable in terms of. Yeah, if we've got the. The diagnosis right and, you know, everything and we're. We're feeling like we're pushing into this. This register of being that is meaningful. It still feels meaningful again, whether it's 12 or 12,000 or whatever. So.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally agree. Totally agree on that. And that. I think that's a good place to get the. Good place to wrap it up. Tim. There might be even more episodes we can do. Although I don't want to talk about spiral dynamics, so not sure if we'll find it. But, you know, I mean, feel free to let either of us know. Barabbas, round three, maybe that's. Yeah, yeah, let's just. We'll. For now, we'll stick with Brabus Round three if people want a third one. Tim, thanks so much, man. We'll have the same links to your stuff that we had in the last episode in the show notes so people can find you if they are anywhere near Santa Barbara or if they want to, like, follow you on Instagram or X or whatever.

[C]

Dan, thanks again for having me. Always fun. Appreciate you.

[B]

Always a pleasure.

[C]

Peace, peace, peace.

[B]

Sam.