Three Paradoxes | The Vervaeke Series | Episode 9 (WiM066)

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Three Paradoxes | The Vervaeke Series | Episode 9 (WiM066)"

Podcast Information:

• Title: The "What is Money?" Show
• Host/Author: Robert Breedlove
• Episode: Three Paradoxes | The Vervaeke Series | Episode 9 (WiM066)
• Release Date: October 28, 2021

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Introduction to Domicide and Home

The episode opens with a profound exploration of the concept of dicide, introduced by John Vervaeke. Domicide refers to the loss of home, which transcends merely losing one's housing. Vervaeke distinguishes between physical domicide—destroying the physical structure of a home—and symbolic domicide, where the essence of what makes a place a home is lost even if the physical structure remains intact.

"Home is basically material engagement that allows you to enact a mythos so that you get worldview attunement."
— John Vervaeke [00:09]

Domicile as a Symbolic Construction

Vervaeke elaborates on home as a symbolic machine, emphasizing that it's not just about having shelter but about the serious play and cultural practices that transform a house into a home. He references the saying, "It takes a heap of living to turn a house into a home," highlighting the depth of personal and communal investment required to create a meaningful living space.

"Home is where the heart is. It was originally home is where the hearth is because people gathered around it and entered into dialogue with each other and entered into rituals with each other."
— John Vervaeke [01:54]

Interconnection Between Domicide and Property Rights

Robert Breedlove delves into the relationship between dicide and property rights, pondering whether violating property rights can lead to domicide. Vervaeke agrees, suggesting that property rights are integral to maintaining one's sense of home and, by extension, one's worldview.

"Domicile at the level of your worldview is a catastrophe, a tremendous catastrophe. The meaning crisis."
— John Vervaeke [05:42]

Historical Context: The Hellenistic Period and Domicide

The conversation shifts to historical instances of domicide, particularly during the Hellenistic period. Vervaeke explains how the collapse of Alexander the Great's empire led to significant social and cultural disintegration, creating an age of anxiety. Philosophical movements like Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Gnosticism emerged as responses to this crisis, serving as means to restore a sense of home and meaning.

"The Stoics are preceded by the Cynics... The Stoics really valorized the logos as a principle of human understanding and as an ontological principle about how the universe is organized."
— John Vervaeke [22:06]

Modern Implications: Central Banking and Zombie Companies

Breedlove connects the historical discussion to modern issues, particularly the role of central banking in violating property rights through practices like money printing. He introduces the concept of zombie companies—businesses that are unable to sustain themselves without continuous financial support, often resulting from distorted property rights and capital misallocation.

"Whenever the central bank is printing money, they're violating everyone's property rights. That's all they're doing."
— Robert Breedlove [34:41]

Vervaeke acknowledges this connection, suggesting that central banking-induced property rights violations contribute to the emergence of zombie mythology in contemporary culture.

"Zombie companies are sustained by theft. So it's by eating brains."
— Robert Breedlove [76:28]

Symbolism: Zombies as Emblems of the Meaning Crisis

The discussion delves into the symbolism of zombies, portraying them as embodiments of domicide and the broader meaning crisis. Zombies represent a lack of community, disconnection from meaningful narratives, and a perpetual state of decay—mirroring societal disintegration caused by disrupted property rights and lost cultural frameworks.

"Zombies are the embodiment of domicide. Its lack of reflection is revealed in a disturbing trend of radical disengagement..."
— John Vervaeke [59:37]

Philosophical and Religious Dimensions

Breedlove and Vervaeke explore the philosophical and religious underpinnings of domicide and the meaning crisis. They discuss how Christianity historically provided a sacred canopy that united individuals under a shared worldview, effectively combating domicide. The decline of such unified belief systems has led to increased reliance on pseudo-religious ideologies and fundamentalism on both political spectrums.

"Christianity is trying to get this always respecting, not trying to resolve, but always trying to preserve the tension between individuation and participation."
— John Vervaeke [81:44]

Resolving the Meaning Crisis: Optimal Grip and Virtue

The conversation concludes with reflections on overcoming the meaning crisis. Vervaeke introduces the concept of optimal grip, which involves balancing individual sovereignty with communal participation. This balance fosters a healthy worldview where property rights and personal autonomy coexist without descending into narcissism or nihilism.

"The balance is we have to have respect for our own property and care, but it could go too far and be narcissism that projects itself as territory."
— Robert Breedlove [67:17]

They emphasize the importance of virtue and perspectival knowing—a nuanced understanding that allows individuals to engage meaningfully with both the present moment and long-term aspirations.

"To escape nihilism, you have to be able to fall in love with the world again."
— John Vervaeke [52:15]

Key Takeaways:

1. Domicide Defined: The destruction of home goes beyond physical loss, impacting one's cultural and symbolic ties.
2. Property Rights Connection: Violations of property rights can lead to a loss of meaning and societal disintegration.
3. Historical Lessons: The Hellenistic period demonstrates how the collapse of unified worldviews necessitates philosophical and religious responses.
4. Modern Parallels: Central banking practices contribute to contemporary issues like zombie companies, reflecting a broader meaning crisis.
5. Zombies as Symbols: Zombies represent societal decay and the loss of meaningful narratives.
6. Philosophical Balance: Achieving an optimal grip involves balancing individual autonomy with communal participation to restore meaning.
7. Overcoming Nihilism: Reconnecting with the world through balanced understanding and virtuous living can mitigate the meaning crisis.

Notable Quotes:

• "Home is where the heart is. It was originally home is where the hearth is because people gathered around it and entered into dialogue with each other and entered into rituals with each other."
  — John Vervaeke [01:54]

• "Domicile at the level of your worldview is a catastrophe, a tremendous catastrophe. The meaning crisis."
  — John Vervaeke [05:42]

• "Zombies are the embodiment of domicide. Its lack of reflection is revealed in a disturbing trend of radical disengagement..."
  — John Vervaeke [59:37]

• "To escape nihilism, you have to be able to fall in love with the world again."
  — John Vervaeke [52:15]

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This episode offers a deep dive into the intricate relationships between home, property rights, societal structures, and the pervasive meaning crisis. Through philosophical discourse and historical analysis, Breedlove and Vervaeke provide listeners with a comprehensive understanding of how modern challenges reflect age-old human struggles for meaning and belonging.

Transcript

[John Vervaeke]

So domicide is the loss of home, which is not the same thing as losing your housing. It can be. So there's physical domicide, which is, I destroy your home by destroying your house. Right. Now you. You can think of the contrary example. I put you in prison. You have housing, you have shelter. But one of the intents is it's not your home. It's not a home for you. So I'm just using those two to pull it apart. And then the idea here is that home is basically material engagement that allows you to enact a mythos so that you get worldview attunement. It is a symbolic machine in the way that we've been talking about here, in which you seriously play out. All right? Now, it does work for you as shelter, but I'm not talking about it as a house. I'm talking about it as the way you play in it, which is home. Right. And of course, one of the things kids play is. Is Right. That kind of thing. In fact, there's a book written called Home, just about how profound home is. This is why loneliness and cultural shock are so powerful for you, because you're not home, you're not at home. And so that's domicile. Then we can talk more about. But think about all the things you do in your house to turn it into a home. I grew up with an expression. You might have heard it. It takes a heap of living to turn a house into a home.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, I've heard this one. Yeah. Also, home is where the heart is.

[John Vervaeke]

Home is where the heart is. It was originally home is where the hearth is because people gathered around it and entered into dialogue with each other and entered into. Right. Ritual with each other. So think about all the serious play you do in your home. The way you put up art, the way you put up pictures. All right. The way, like. So all this stuff you do, like. It's odd. People will often put up pictures of themselves and their family in their. In their house. It's like, why are you going to forget these people? No, what is it I'm doing? I'm trying to bind my identity and their identity because those identities are bound to the identity of this house. Trying to make. I'm trying to identify it as the. This family place. Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

To make a home.

[John Vervaeke]

Right. And notice the play on the word familiarize. To make familiar is also to make it your family. It's exactly the word. Right. Okay. So. So what I'm trying to convey is that home has this incredible mythos, religio Function to it. Now, you also have to recognize that home isn't a single thing. It's a nested thing for you. Your whole. Like, for example, my home is this apartment, but my home is also Toronto, Canada, the earth. Right, right. Ultimately, the cosmos. In fact, the difference between the word universe and cosmos, one of the ways of understanding it is when I say cosmos, I'm feeling at home in the universe. I meant feeling at home in the physical housing of the universe. So domicide can go from a loss of a sense of home. How could that happen? Individually, you're with your beloved partner, you've been married, and then the marriage breaks down, divorce, and you don't want to be in that place anymore, or you can't live there anymore because although the physicality of the structure hasn't changed, you're not at home in it anymore because the weight was bound to the serious play of your. The cultivation of your love and your relationship that has lost. And you're experiencing domicile.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

Now imagine that happening not for you individually in your house, but it happening for a civilization within the cosmos that's domiciled on the level of the meaning crisis.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right, right. Okay, that makes sense. I want to read this excerpt. This is from the zombie book, Zombies in Western Culture that you co. Authored. Just sort of framing up domicile a little bit. You said, quote, humans are animals who most fundamentally understand what reality is, who we are and how we ought to live by locating ourselves within larger narratives and meta narratives that we hear and tell and that constitute for us what is real and significant. When such narratives collapse, we are lost in the dislocation, fragmentation, and disorientation of homelessness. In short, one suffers a worldview crisis. One runs the risk of losing the plot. And you go on to say that this. So there's this. And this kind of gets back to the homemaker versus the house builder, where the house builder is constructing the physical reality. The homemaker is adding the realm of relevance to the house. I guess. And you go on to say about domicide here, or I guess this is worldview more. So domicile would be the destruction of worldview, that it mirrors the Darwinian fittedness between an organism and its ecological niche.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes, yes. You want me to unpack that?

[Robert Breedlove]

So, yeah, I'm very interested there. You know, Darwinism. I'm increasingly compelled by this concept of universal Darwinism. It seems to be everywhere we look. Right. Our own cognition has Darwinian elements to it. What I'm interested here in getting towards is the Relationship between worldview domicide and territoriality. Right. We're all, you know, we have a physical territoriality. Clearly, humans. Take it a step further, it sounds like.

[John Vervaeke]

So let's try the first thing about the. So the, the idea, then this is sort of. It's post Darwinian, so it's at the cutting edge of neo Darwinian and post Darwinian philosophy of biology. Another Walsh, by the way, my, my colleague at the University of Toronto, Dennis Walsh, who's cutting edge. Yes, all the important thinkers are at the University of Toronto. That's true. So anyways, so this is the idea of niche construction, and it's also been taken up within psychology by. I can't remember the name of the scientist. But anyway, so niche construction is the idea that not only is the organism being shaped by the environment, the organism is shaping the environment. And of course, global warming is a powerful example of that. We're engaging in a very, very risky kind of niche construction right now. And the thing about it is that niche construction, it can vary in its scope and its depth, and there's all kinds of things. And it can be. There's a thing called the Baldwin effect, when it can be happening like. So the Baldwin effect is, let's say language is literally something like a skill that I have to learn, and it gets. And everybody learns it, but it gives tremendous advantages, right? So for a while, everybody keeps learning it because it gives the advantages. But what's evolution going to do? If that persists long enough, evolution is going to start selecting for individuals who can learn it faster and faster and faster and faster until the we become innately linguistic beings. That's the Baldwin effect. And that's another kind of example of that niche construction. We change the environment, and then the environment changes us, and then we change the environment. Now, the same thing with all that imaginal projection, it's the same loop. ROBERT what I do is I do this imaginal projection that shapes the environment in a certain way, and then it shapes me. That's exactly what I'm doing with home. I. I shape this place so that I get shaped, and then I shape the place, and that's the loop. It's the same loop. And what am I trying to do? I'm trying to. And this is what all of culture is. We take that niche construction and we ratchet it up in culture. Because in culture. What is culture? Culture is shaping the world to me and shaping me to the world. That's what culture is.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right?

[John Vervaeke]

And that process, Right. That within culture. Geertz Clifford Geerts called worldview, Worldview attunement, where the modeling of the shaping of the world to you and the shaping of you to the world are creating what we. What Chris and Philip and I in the book called Worldview Attunement in the agent arena relationship, the identity of the agent and the identities in their arena are co creating, co determining, co shaping each other. And domicide at the level of your worldview is a catastrophe, a tremendous catastrophe. The meaning crisis. So like that poll in 2017 in the UK, 89% of people polled thought their lives were meaningless. And we have overwhelming evidence that Duchess has. And they also are lonely and they feel that their work is futile. Like all of these things are bound up together in the same way. Right. So one way of saying this is there's no. They don't feel at home in their lives in deep enough way. This is why Covid is causing this mental health tsunami. Because it just. We were already suffering domicide. And then what it is, it just accelerated domicile and people were trapped in this little tiny narrow home and trapped within the meaning making of their own selfhood. And that's not enough. And so domicide got worse.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

People reach out with conspiracy theories and they try to. A conspiracy theory is an imaginal attempt, an irrational imaginal attempt to try and use mythos to home the world. That's what a conspiracy theory is.

[Robert Breedlove]

Okay, that's interesting. So what. And I know in the case of the Grassy Narrows, which maybe you could speak to a little bit of that and the Hellenistic case of domicide, because this doesn't have to be. You're talking about COVID kind of being this worldview level abstract destruction. But the Grassy Narrows was very much physical relocation. People sort of had their worldview shattered. Because what I'm getting at here, and I'm just openly transparent, is that to the extent that worldview attunement and or domicide is related to actual Darwinian territoriality, I think we could then map that to property rights. Because that's how human beings express property rights. Or I'm sorry, express territorialities through property rights. Yes. And the most basic to not. People get very confused in this area. The most basic form of property is you own you, I own me. We each own our own time. That's the most personal form of property. The extension of property is what I combine myself with in the world. I plant a garden, I build a house, whatever. So I take my self ownership and extend it into ownership in the world. And so the thesis I'm sort of exploring here is that if we violate private property rights, is that an instigation of domicide?

[John Vervaeke]

It can be. I mean, so my concern here is. I mean, you're doing the Lockean theory, which I get. Right. I remember studying it.

[Robert Breedlove]

What is it? I don't even know what it is.

[John Vervaeke]

It goes back to John Locke. John Locke's idea is that I own my time and labor and I mix it with other things, and that's how I turn it into my property.

[Robert Breedlove]

Okay, yes.

[John Vervaeke]

John Locke's. John Locke's theory. That's the theory of value that John Locke proposed. The thing is, and while I'm not challenging that, I think there's. I want to challenge the individualism of Locke because I think, given the way you've defined it and given all the arguments we've made today, that there's not only individual cognition, there's distributed cognition.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

There's also the time of civilizations and the distribute. Right, right. There's that. So there has to be a sense also in which there's not just individual property, there has to be property for the. For distributed cognition, given your definition, there has to be how the group spends its time and how it mixes its time with the world in an important way. And so what I would want to say is the notion of territory covers both of those possibilities. Because think of the territory of a country that's not your. It's not atomic, it's not yours plus mine. It's not like we link together all the individual properties. No, no. There's a distributed cognition that functions in that way, and therefore the time investment. I'm trying to use terms that line up with yours belongs to the country or the nation. Right. And so territory moves between the two as a term. And the interesting thing is, so does the notion of home. There's a notion of home that can be focused on you, then on your family, then on your neighborhood, and then on your country, because you definitely feel like you're going home when you're going back to Canada. You even feel like you're at home if you. Well, I'm a Canadian. Sorry, I didn't mean presumptuous. When I'm abroad and I meet another Canadian, I feel like I'm at home, not because they live in my house or they even live in my city, but because we share Canada together. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

[Robert Breedlove]

Okay, Agreed with that. That, you know, we have to cooperate, interoperate, harmonize our actions. But There is a problem when we go from private property, which is like you own you and you own the things you produce, to this concept of. This nebulous concept of public property. Because this sorts.

[John Vervaeke]

To give an example though, who owns English? Who owns English? You and I are absolutely.

[Robert Breedlove]

Well, you can't own English actually, because English is non scarce. English is information. So the idea that you can own an idea is itself fallacious. And this goes into capitalism. True capitalism says intellectual property is bs.

[John Vervaeke]

Okay?

[Robert Breedlove]

You can only own scarce factors of production.

[John Vervaeke]

So that's interesting then, because that means then if what we've said, that home is largely a cultural thing which is at the level of ideas and meaning and information making, then it is in some sense needs to be distinct from territory. If territory is, as I think you're indicating, bound to scarcity. So then there's a. Although there's a similarity, there must be some important difference in kind between home and territory then given this argument.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. And when we confound the two, I think this may be a contributor to domicide. Frankly.

[John Vervaeke]

It could be, it could be.

[Robert Breedlove]

This is where like there's a great book on this, I've been doing a series with Jimmy Song on. It's called Democracy the God that Failed. But it makes the point that once when we move from monarchy to democracy, the monarch had a property right in the people basically had a tax base. So he had, he had a. And financial incentive to keep taxes low and predictable and not wage too much war. He wanted the tax base to be sustainable over time because he had a property right in the tax base. But when you move to a democratic governing model, you go from an ownership, from the monarch having a private property Right. And the people to a democratic ruler is just effectively renting the tax base. So they come in and they want to extract as much wealth as possible and then they're out in four to eight years. They don't give it, they don't care.

[John Vervaeke]

Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

They have no long term interest.

[John Vervaeke]

So the frame problem. So while we set up democracy for the intended effect of being self correcting, we have an unintended side effect of turning people from invested owners, if I'll use your metaphor, into people that are renting and trying to exploit as much as they can in a limited amount of time.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, no, you do. And he goes through a very compelling, you know, a priori based argument that this raises time preference. So it's a de civilizing force over time.

[John Vervaeke]

Right, right. And so Plato's argument, this is analogous to Plato's Argument really against democracy. Yes.

[Robert Breedlove]

Interesting. I didn't know that. So that's what I'm getting. Just this idea. Because if we can. It seems like there's a lot of confusion and confoundingness of who gets to tell who what to do. Especially today, we're trying to figure out how to govern ourselves. There's an upheaval in our social structures. But this idea of property really cuts through a lot of it. Just like you own you, I own me. If we just respect that first and foremost and we don't transgress against one another's property, it clarifies a lot of things in the world. So that's what I was trying to get at a little bit is to see if there was a connection between domicile and property rights.

[John Vervaeke]

There is, I think, given what you're saying. I mean, the original meaning of violence is to violate the boundaries of a person. Now one of the things we're doing is we are extending the boundary of personhood such that we are extending the meaning of violence. So now people are even. And I have some philosophical concerns about this, but I understand the intent, which is, you know, your language can be violent because you are crossing a certain boundary. Right. And so I'm not advocating for that and I'm not criticizing it. I'm just pointing out. Right. That, that, that, that. That notion of boundary violation and ownership of oneself being proper to oneself.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

That's. The. People forget the original meaning of the word property properties. In philosophy, when we talk about the properties of an object, we talk about the things that constitute its identity. Yeah, right.

[Robert Breedlove]

One's own, I think, is what proper means.

[John Vervaeke]

Well, yeah. Belonging to. Yes, right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah.

[John Vervaeke]

The way. The way the shape belongs to this pencil. Right. In that sense. So I agree with that. What we were exploring. But I thought we came to a good conclusion. We were exploring if that, if that. If the role of property in this deep ontological sense. Right. The role it has in domicide told us something about the relationship between home and territory. And then what. What I think we saw was the possibility, the realization that they are different because of the relations you said to scarcity and things like that. Interestingly, niche construction sits between then territory and home as an interesting mediating place.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right.

[John Vervaeke]

Because the organisms, they're sort of modifying their environment and shaping them, but it's not the same thing as setting up their territory.

[Robert Breedlove]

And this is transjective again. Right. This is where the narrative and the real world touch.

[John Vervaeke]

Yeah. And then you said something. I wanted to come Back to. So I'm acknowledging your point about, you know, confusion about identity and property and ownership and selfhood. And all of these confusions are all rampant right now. And they're all I acknowledge. I think that's a. That's a deep thing. But I also. You said something. You dropped it like a gem, and I wanted to come back to it. You said they could be conflated or confused home and territory in a profound way. And I hadn't thought about that. And I just wanted to. I mean, if you don't want to, we don't have to discuss it right now. But I thought that was a really powerful idea because you can see. You can see one of the problems. You could see. Well, this would be historically controversial, but it would not be intellectually disrespectful. It's worthy of intellectual respect. One of the problems facing the Roman Empire was the control of territory, but there was not a home for most of the inhabitants within the empire. Right. And one of the things Christianity did was it turned the empire into a home, and that's one of the ways in which it succeeded. And the Romans, because the Romans were confused about those two at a deep level, there was a vacuum that was actually filled by Christianity in an important way.

[Robert Breedlove]

Okay, yes. This is the Hellenistic period domicile you speak of.

[John Vervaeke]

Right, right.

[Robert Breedlove]

They conquered a lot of new territory where they hadn't put it under a canopy yet.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes, exactly. And so that. That empire is Alexander's empire, and then it fragments into a bunch of four smaller empires, and they're always warring and people are moving around. And so you don't have shared language, you don't have shared religion, you don't. Your ancestors may not have lived where you're living. Right. And the political territory, the territorial boundaries are fluid and moving around.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

And so there's a terrific period in the Hellenistic period, basically from the fall of Alexander's empire to Rome, although I think it carries into Rome in the way I just indicated, in which there's massive domicide for the culture as a whole. And what you see is, you see these powerful responses to that domicile. It's called an age of anxiety. You see it in art, you see it in religion, and you see it in the emergence of new types of philosophy, like Stoicism, Epicureanism, Gnosticism, that are where the main job of the philosophers help to heal and make people feel at home in the cosmos.

[Robert Breedlove]

Again, the physician of the soul.

[John Vervaeke]

Right, exactly, exactly. Call no man a philosopher who has not Alleviated the suffering of others. Epicurus.

[Robert Breedlove]

Beautiful. So then it's again trying to pull this back into kind of the pragmatic viewpoint. It's like there's all this newly conquered territory, but the cost of rapport and trust among its inhabitants is really high because they don't have a common canopy beneath which to organize. So with that high transaction cost comes a lot of, I guess, divisiveness and anxiety. Right. You can't trust people, so you're very protectionist and isolated.

[John Vervaeke]

And also one of the things you've talked about, the monopoly of violence by the state. So Roman Empire is violently. So the empire is trying to set up the empire as the sacred canopy. And eventually the emperor becomes a God in that. Attempted almost to go back to the Bronze Age, where the pharaoh is a God. There's an attempt to do that and it just. It doesn't work. It doesn't take. It ultimately fails precisely because it does. You need it. It's just not well constructed. It doesn't give the mythos that was needed to pull the empire together.

[Robert Breedlove]

It's interesting because I wonder too, you know, this is something. Peterson has argued that private property rights are rooted in Judeo Christian mythology in a way. So it's kind of perhaps an extension of that canopy, if you will.

[John Vervaeke]

And it could be. I mean, so, I mean, given the way you've talked about it, though, I would expect that there should be a universal aspect to property that would not be specific to the judgeo Christian heritage. So presumably there's property even. I know you make a good distinction which I value between property and possession. But you can see even private possessions in other cultures, India, China, ancient Egypt. So what do you mean specifically, other than the universal aspect? What do you mean specifically as I.

[Robert Breedlove]

And property, Again, it's kind of a nebulous term because there's many different forms of property throughout history, the freehold property or this or that. But what I specifically mean is our modern conception of private property, where you fully own yourself, you are a completely sovereign individual. And I may be paraphrasing Peterson's argument here, but in general, he was saying that one of the core principles of Christ was that he taught us the sovereignty of the individual, like it's higher than the state right. And so that is a principle to which the state is beholden, which became expressed in private property rights, which we still have today. It's like habeas corpus, innocent until proven guilty. All of these things are. It's a principle under which Western civilization is organized so it's not saying the state's the highest power. It's saying individual sovereignty and liberty is the highest power. And that's what this whole thing is structured around.

[John Vervaeke]

Actually, it doesn't. You have to be careful. So I had a bit pushback on my colleague and friend.

[Robert Breedlove]

Please. And I may be distorting this too, so I don't want to. Holding out like I'm quoting him.

[John Vervaeke]

I think it's plausible. I think it's a plausible interpretation. And if I get a chance, I'll ask Jordan. Okay. Because the idea is the idea, and Jordan's right. And you can see this in the work of. Oh, what's his name, the guy who wrote Dominion, Tom Holland. Right. You can see the idea. Christianity is the religion that, you know, ends infanticide, killing.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, yes. And slavery to a lot like.

[John Vervaeke]

Well, to some degree.

[Robert Breedlove]

I'm not saying it's immediate, but the principles of it, even. Even the rebellion against slavery in the US was kind of Christian rooting. Right, Totally.

[John Vervaeke]

I totally agree. The evangelical movement, it's funny, the evangelicals were once the left wingers. Right American scene, the north is dominated by the evangelical movement that's pushing for the abolition of slavery. Wilberforce, who gets it removed from the British Empire, is motivated by Christianity. And of course, you know, there's Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Deeply, deeply. Both deeply influenced by Jesus. I'm acknowledging all of that. So the value of the individual human soul to God, which. And the idea that it's not the state that makes us persons, it's agape that makes us persons.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, exactly.

[John Vervaeke]

Right. But the thing to remember then is that that is ultimately a triangular relation. It's my individual soul, your individual soul, and how we make each other into persons and how we together are the body of Christ. So what's ultimate is the agape. And. And agape is both. Remember, God is agape. Agape is both between us and also something that we together relate to. So while I agree with that, but Christianity also kept trying to say, you have to counterbalance that with. And I think you exemplify this. Right, right. The danger with the sovereignty of the individual is egocentrism is narcissism. Right. Because you can conflate, you can think about what think about. This is good. I like. Sorry, I'm just having an insight. Think about narcissism. The narcissist goes from thinking that, right. They have a sovereignty to thinking they have a territory of everybody's attention upon them. See the difference. See the difference. So instead of being at home in themselves and how they are attending and being attended, how they respect. Member respect means to look at how they respect and how are they respected. They then turn it from a home. Right. And think about how home again is. This can be the shared project Agape and the Christian. The original churches were homes. Right. And how that the narcissist turns it into territory. Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

And that would be defined when the narcissist, the territory would be someone that's now a conqueror. Right. He's trying to actually transgress on the property of others.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes.

[Robert Breedlove]

Turn home into territory.

[John Vervaeke]

Right, exactly so. Exactly. That's exactly it. Right. And so you can see one way of understanding. I hadn't thought about this. This is fun. One way of thinking about the narcissist is the narcissist is somebody who's hungry to be at home, but mistakes that by constantly trying to conquer territory that relates always and solely to them.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, this, this reminds me of the, the Marley quote, that the world will know peace when the power of love overcomes the love of power.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes, exactly.

[Robert Breedlove]

The narcissist mistakes power for love, his hunger for love, or agape, perhaps he tries to replace with power and conquering.

[John Vervaeke]

Yeah. And so, and to be fair to Jordan, he was bringing that up in my most recent conversation with him. But a long standing criticism I've had of him is I've heard him talk a lot about, you know, the sovereignty aspect of Christianity that you rightly put, but not enough about the agape.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. So let me tie this back into one thing because this is very interesting. Even if there is that narcissistic impulse, then we've maximized the sovereignty of the individual, but it goes too far. And all of a sudden he wants to project back into his home as a territory, wants to conquer some of his home and make it a territory, which is like imposing his willpower on the property of others, the self ownership of others. If that option is removed because again, something like Bitcoin, it's an inviolable property. Right. Presumably that option's not there from a very practical standpoint. So does this then preserve the. Because again, civilization, if you have inviolable property, this is a principle that we've been talking about for hundreds of years, from the Magna Carta, possibly even before that, that government really was there to preserve life, liberty, property. If property's inviolable, civilization is immortal, we might say that's good. We have inviolable property finally. So it would protect us from the Narcissism, potential narcissism of a sovereign individual.

[John Vervaeke]

It could. I mean, I mean, this is another instance of the argument you keep making, and I don't mean repetitively, you're developing it, that I really like the idea of. You know, by managing this particular hybrid psycho material technology, we can afford fundamental changes in the functionality of distributed cognition. I would say it would afford the ability to reduce it. I mean, because I don't. I mean, because there's also, there's clearly psychodynamic and idiosyncratic, you know, trauma and other reasons why people are narcissists. So while you may thwart them in trying to impose their narcissism, I don't think you're going to remove narcissism from the world, for example. So that's why I tried to answer your proposal.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, agreed. Presumably over time it would be naturally selected against though, right? If narcissism is just not an effective strategy, it would kind of go away over time.

[John Vervaeke]

It could be. I mean, the thing is, the narcissist, it depends. And this is where the, you said the nebulousness of property comes in because, you know, we also pay attention and there's a reason why we use that verb. Right. And I don't know if the proposal you're making, again, I'm ignorant. I'm ignorant of how Bitcoin works. I'm ignorant about a lot of the economics that, you know, that I don't know. So if I'm answering out of ignorance, I apologize. No, I'm concerned. The concern I'm expressing is that even if we get what you might call the financial system resistant to narcissism, the attentional sphere and the cultural sphere are still going to be an open playground for the narcissist anyways.

[Robert Breedlove]

Interesting. Yeah, that's interesting to think about. Okay, I don't want to get too far down that rabbit hole, but I just. And here's the other case I would just look at later is if there is a connection between domicide and property right violation, I would like to see through that lens. Historically, look at the prevalence of domicide and central bank currency manipulation because again, when a central bank's printing money, they're violating everyone's property rights. That's all they're doing. There's nothing else there. Whatever propaganda they put out, there's literally nothing. And this is a priori, this is not my opinion. This is like, again, if money is just a claim on savings or a call option on all the stuff, let's say if there's one group that can print more call options on the stuff they're stealing from everyone else. Two plus two equals four. It's very fundamental. So I would just think about teasing out that connection more. It's like, okay, more rapidly. We violated property rights via central banking. Did that contribute to an escalation in domicide? I'm not saying it's the only way to do it, but maybe the modern. Because again those. And we can get into zombies. The zombie myth thing. Go look at those charts in your book. All the explosion of the word zombie starts after 1971. When we go off the gold standard. There's this huge.

[John Vervaeke]

That's a good point, Robert. It's a good point. You saw my facial reaction. I wasn't denying. I mean what I was thinking is, oh, I wonder if that argument you just made aligns with the other argument you made on behalf of certain historians that you can see, you know, a decline in morality and a meaning crisis as you adulterate the currency. Right. And that there might. So what I was thinking of maybe. Maybe there's a connection there. And answering your question would require sort of carefully connecting those and then trying to see how that look for the relevant historical evidence for, for your proposal for your thesis.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, Austrians would just argue it's all time preference at the end of the day. Like the more you raise the time preference, morality declines, civilization unwinds.

[John Vervaeke]

And there's overwhelming evidence for that.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah.

[John Vervaeke]

But I do want to ask you something about that because this is a, this is a. There's, this is a tension within this. The self control literature, the self regulation literature. And there's two sides to it. So remember we talked about this. We talked about. Right. When you. And mindfulness. So mindfulness play flow, they move you into the present moment in a profound way.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

Right. Now that's different from the person who's experiencing hyperbolic discounting and is impulsively eating the chocolate cake because they're not managing their time preference.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

So there's one. What I'm trying to say is there's two different ways of being in the present moment. One is deleterious. And you're right, the evidence. This is cross species. This is not just human beings. The evidence for hyperbolic discounting. Overwhelming. And I'm acknowledging it, but. Right. I'm also, I'm also like, I want to. Well, I'm asking you. Maybe we work out. Do you see what I'm saying? There's another sense of being in the present moment, that's powerful, that's important for play. Right. For development, for coming into the being mode, for all of these things. And, you know, so again, how do we properly. I don't know, I'm asking this question. Coordinate between the two of them. Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

It's a great question. And just instinctually, what comes to mind is it's maybe it's a perspectival knowing. Things like when we're looking at the future, the lower our time preference, the further we're looking. Right. Like they said, the Native Americans used to make decisions seven generations out. Right. Whereas today in corporate America, it's quarterly results. Right. So that's a shrinking of time preference when we're looking at the future. But there's this other. Oh, sorry, hit my own mic. This other form of perspectival knowing where, like, just to be present is to be in touch with reality in the moment. Right. Of all.

[John Vervaeke]

Yeah.

[Robert Breedlove]

So maybe it's two different ontological modes.

[John Vervaeke]

Or something, I think, because when the second one, I'm thinking of Jesus of Nazareth saying, take no thought for the morrow. Right. And. Right, right. And consider the lilies of the valley, and Solomon and all of his finery was not as well clothed. Right. And so there's something there too. And I don't want to turn that into a Hallmark card. There's a deep, profound thing about.

[Robert Breedlove]

No, it's interesting that it's paradoxical in a way too, because like all the timeless principles we've talked about, like justice and love, like, if you can only be here and now, so you can only have it, but to get there, you almost have to have. When you're looking forward, it has to be very far forward in a way. So there's a paradox, I suspect, by.

[John Vervaeke]

The way, Robert, I suspect that this is a dimension of opponent processing and relevance realization that I did not properly try to articulate in my theory. I think there's a point of processing between these two modes and that we're constantly moving between them. And as we move between them, that alters our salience landscape. We know it does. And what I find relevant. So in addition to, you know, the generalization versus the specialization and the temporal binding versus the inhibition on return. Right. I think there's this other opponent processing between these two modes in some important way.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, No, I agree. I have the same sense. Um, I want to try because we. We're always pressed for time here. I want to just talk real quick because I don't know that we rooted domicile well, so I'm just going to read a couple of excerpts about the case from the Grassy Narrows.

[John Vervaeke]

Can I say one thing? Because it's. Yes, please. Notes and. But I want people to be clear that first of all, this is based on Brian Walsh. I think the argument still runs, but people also need to know that there is the real factor and it's ongoing. This is part of Canadian politics of the mercury poisoning, which we ignore. Right. Yeah, so. Right. So. So there's a confound in there. Speaking as a scientist, however, one thing you can say on behalf of Brian Walsh's analysis, even as there is the mercury poisoning, the cultures adapt, can't respond to it. And that's the. That's another aspect of the domicile.

[Robert Breedlove]

Well, I'd. I'd like to tie that piece in, actually. So I'll read a couple of excerpts and then I'll add one piece of commentary. You said this, and this is in regard to the case of the Grassy Narrows Nation. You said, quote, the site of some of the most severe social and familial disintegration, together with environmental despoilation ever to be seen in North America. Cases of domestic conflict, violence and suicide exploded in number. Employment plummeted, welfare dependency increased. As many as dependency increased. As many as 1000 people showed symptoms of being infected with Minamata disease caused by mercury dumping upstream. The connection I would like to make there, by the way, is mercury dumping upstream is a violation of property rights.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes.

[Robert Breedlove]

Had that upstream been privatized, it is much less likely it would have been polluted into. Because this is one of the things property rights do is if I own something, I have a capital interest in protecting it. So if that had been a private property, Right. And you dumped in my stream, I would have sued you and stopped you from doing it. So just tying that piece back in. And maybe you could just speak briefly to what this case of the Grassy Narrows Nation was and how it relates to domicide.

[John Vervaeke]

So the idea about the property, I take that well, said that there was no legal recourse. I want that understood that that's also mixed up with the. And it's come to light the horrible at times genocidal policy of the Canadian government to the Indigenous people, I mean, and that's why they had no legal recourse. So I just want. I want to acknowledge that. Yes. So that would have made a difference. I think that would have made a difference. But part of what Brian Walsh is arguing is that there was another factor which was the replacing of One style of housing with another that disrupted all of the cultural project. So not only were these people exposed to an environmental threat for the legal and economic reasons we've just discussed, their culture was at the same time slammed so that they didn't have the cultural resources to try and respond. We basically committed domicide on these people. So what we do is we throw them into a serious environmental threat and then the domicile, because the way the houses had been set up in the indigenous culture reflected their understanding of their sovereignty, but also unity. The way the mythos and the symbols and the enacted rituals and this was replaced with a western idea of what's an efficient way to put up housing and have that transportation. And so we, we had all this, you know, you know, efficiency ideas in terms of the housing, and we destroyed in a kind of obtuse manner. Right. The homing. And so these people are simultaneously having their cognition sort of hammered by the mercury. And then we're taking out any of the cultural resources, the distributed cognition that would allow them to deal, try to process, bring some meaning and also maybe some agency and responsiveness. Right. To this. So, like, that's what we're trying to point to that was going on there. So it was. There is this issue and then there's this terrific. At the same time, domicide. And so those people were like, I don't mean. I mean this with utmost compassion, not any sense of cruelty. Those people were doomed. Like, they're doomed. It's like me coming in and taking away all your nutritious food and replacing it with really, really shitty food that's going to make you feel bad. And then removing all of the things that turn your dwelling into a home, making it completely austere and barren. And so you feel. You don't feel at home. And so you're feeling really shitty. And on top of it, you don't feel at home. Notice how when you feel sick, where do you want to go? When you feel sick, where do you want to go? Home.

[Robert Breedlove]

And bed.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes. And you take that away from somebody.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, no, it's an excellent point. And then, you know, to your earlier point that home is extended mind in a way. Right. So it's like their mind was being attacked by mercury, which was a violation of property rights arising from that. And then they were being pulled, physically removed from their home, where they had spaciousness and familiarity and all these things, and plucked it down somewhere else. So it's this double whammy of property Right. Violations just destroyed their mind effectively.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes, yes. Yes, very much so. Very much. And it's analogous to what happened with the Hellenistic domicile. Yeah, right now and so the argument we make in the book, Philip and Chris and I, is the. Is that here's a way of thinking about the meaning crisis. Meaning crisis is a domicile that you can't move from.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right. Yeah. That's scary. I want to. Maybe this is the right place then. So, because I wanted to ask you about the connection between domicide and the logos.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes.

[Robert Breedlove]

And one of the again, quotes from the book here, this is a reference to Viktor Frankl.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes.

[Robert Breedlove]

Very famous author, man's search for meaning survivor of Nazi internment camp. In the book you write his method of logotherapy, which I'll let you speak to. What that is gives a prescription for self affirmation. When one is quote in. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way, an honorable way. Then this you said was hearkening back to the Stoics response of the philosopher slash physician to the Hellenistic domicide.

[John Vervaeke]

Exactly, exactly. So the Stoics, I mean it's already in Plato and the Platonic tradition, but the Stoics really valorized the logos as a. Not just a principle of human understanding, but as an ontological principle about how the universe is organized. And then they coupled that with the idea and this is what Frankl is picking up on a logo. Logotherapy is bringing the logos to a situation of trauma and suffering is a way in which you can home it. So let me try and do this little step by step. So the Stoics are preceded by the Cynics and we've again, we've degraded this word and we've lost the original meaning of the word. Now we use cynic to mean somebody with a secret agenda. That's not the original meaning. The Cynics are responding to Hellenistic domicide with this idea. What's caught like they're a doctor. Here's the diagnosis. Your distress is being caused by. You're setting your heart upon the wrong things. You're setting your heart upon man made conventions and institutions. And they will ultimately let you down. They will ultimately disappoint you. So you should set your heart on the two things that are eternal natural law and moral law. That's cynicism. And that's why Diogenes leaves Athens and goes out and lives in a barrel. And that's why when Alexander comes. So here's Alexander the king of the world, Right. He comes to Diogenes and says, I can give you whatever you want. What do you want? And Alexander is a master of his own self myth, Right?

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah.

[John Vervaeke]

And Diogenes said, can you move a little to the left because you're blocking the sunlight? Talk about individual sovereignty. Talk about.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right, okay.

[John Vervaeke]

Yeah, right. So. And what. What the Stoics said is. They said the Cynics because. And there's a direct line of teaching. The Stoics said the Cynics are on the right track, but they. They're there, but they're concentrating too much on the what instead of the how. It's not what you set your heart on, it's how you set your heart on anything. And so what the Stoics are about is. Right. And so Epictetus, right. Pay attention to what's in your control, what's not in your control. And what does that mean? It means what we often try to do is control the world to deal with our trauma. And trying to move the world is really hard. And we don't try. We don't even pay attention to the meaning, the framing.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

And a lot of the times we're suffering because of the meaning. It doesn't mean there isn't physical suffering. They never said that. But a lot of the times our psychological suffering, our existential suffering is due to the meaning of the thing rather than the thing itself. So it's not. It's not what you're setting your heart on, but how you're setting your heart right. And so understanding that allows you to bring the logos, the principle of intelligibility, of meaning making, to bear. So what you're doing, right, and you can see this here's, you have a daughter, right? So you've gone through this too. Okay? So you talk to people about their subjective well being, which is, how are. How do you feel? How are you doing? How's your life going? Right? And you know, and people value that and as they should. You know one thing that really destroys your subjective well being? Having a child. Your sleep goes down, your diet goes down, your relationship with your partner goes down. You're under constant stress. There's uncertainty. Your subjective well being crashes.

[Robert Breedlove]

Why do people somehow not.

[John Vervaeke]

Well, you don't die, but it goes down. But you know what goes up? Meaning in life.

[Robert Breedlove]

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[John Vervaeke]

This is one of the things I think of the fundamental confusions of our culture. We think those two are identical, they correlate, but they can go apart like this, right? You have a kid and that's agape again, because that's where you're mostly experiencing agape. Now here's the thing, and this is part of the meaning crisis. People can, this is Frankel's insight. People can endure tremendous, tremendous distress if they can find, find a meaning in it.

[Robert Breedlove]

He who has a why can bear any hell. Right?

[John Vervaeke]

Yes. Nietzsche. Yeah, and Nietzsche got that. And he got that. That's the key to the response to nihilism. You have to. You have to. I put it this way, you have to. The response to nihilism is no philosophical proposition. It's being able to fall in love with the world again.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, right.

[John Vervaeke]

And so being able to bring a meaning onto something. Now if you're in domicide, you know, and you'll like this language, I think you know what, you have a scarcity of meaning and so you are in scarcity mentality, which means, as you said, you lose cognitive flexibility. You're subject to hyperbolic discounting. This is scarcity mentality is now being well established within psychology. We are in a scarcity mentality about meaning. So we cannot use right meaning to try to deal with our distress. And so we've got a vicious circle. We're suffering distress because we're feeling domicide and because we're in domicile, we don't have the meaning to bring to bear. And there we go.

[Robert Breedlove]

So deep and interesting, profound and mind blowing in a lot of ways. I want to just. Again, this is all hypothesis, but I love thinking out loud with you, so here goes. I think I've related to you previously that we know words are an expression of the logos, again the original meaning of the word word or ratio. I've argued in much of my writing that prices, so words are this coordinating element of our existence. Prices too are an exchange ratio. So it's rooted in ratio, which I argue is an expression of the logos. Right. It's human action. It's a representation of human action, effectively that coordinates, that's what coordinates the economy or prices. And you're saying that domicide is a scarcity of meaning. Nietzsche is saying the antidote to, I guess domicide or meaninglessness is this. I'm sorry, to fall in love with the world again is like an antidote to this.

[John Vervaeke]

Well, that's my proposal. His proposal was the will of power, which is a different thing.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right, okay, fair enough, fair enough. So the idea that again, central banks printing money, violating private property rights, distorting prices, by the way, and this is the real measurable pain point that central banks create, they create a misallocation of capital because they distort this communication apparatus we call prices. All of a sudden you don't know if a price you observe in the marketplace is supply and demand or policy. They're picking winners and losers. And this is maybe a segue to. Our next topic is the myth of zombies. That's what creates zombie companies. A zombie company is definition an enterprise which is producing losses. In a capitalistic environment, it would be bankrupt. Its capital would be reallocated to higher and better aims. But because there's a central bank behind it stealing from the productive economy and allocating the stolen proceeds into that entity, these loss producing enterprises can persist over time. That's what a zombie company is.

[John Vervaeke]

So it actually has that name, a zombie company. Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Complete like Google. It's everywhere. And we're riddled with them. We're increasingly riddled with them. The more money we print, the more misallocation of capital there is, the more zombie companies we have.

[John Vervaeke]

Can I ask you that?

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

Like I take you to be a trustworthy source. Like has people have people done like, like historical empirical investigation of that correlation that as you come into fiat currency, the number of zombie companies expands or grows. Like is there a direct correlation?

[Robert Breedlove]

I will, I would have not off the top of my head, I don't know per se. But I will say this like. And following the markets for 10 years, I can observe there's two things that happen. So when your money loses value over time, two things are happening. People become more prone to gambling. You're Going to do anything you can to outpace inflation. You just want your dollar to be worth the same in purchasing power tomorrow as it is today. But the faster its value is diminished, the further out on the risk curve you're pushed. So you'll see more and more unicorn companies, more and more high risk ventures essentially as people are trying to outpace inflation. And the flip side of that is the more wealth is being confiscated by the government through inflation and then they're picking winners and losers. They're just allocating this capital. Oh, this bond fund. This is really prevalent in China. Japan has been a zombie economy for 20 years now because their central bank was so overly active. So that's the two sides of the equation. I would have to get back to you on the empirical study, but I don't think it's super debated. I don't even think people that are pro central banking can argue that zombie companies are bad, but they think that the benefits of printing outweigh the.

[John Vervaeke]

I was specific. I'm not disputing the normative judgment that they're sort of ultimately long term bad. What I'm wondering is the specific empirical claim that they're. Two questions like your claim that they're increasing. And I'm wondering is the rate also increasing the rate of the existence of zombie companies?

[Robert Breedlove]

I would have to get back to you on that. But my sense of it, just off the top of my head and having followed markets for 10 years, is that the answer is yes. And you could see, and it's not black or white, right? It's not like zombie company, non zombie company. For instance, when we were printing, one of the things printing money does is it lets larger companies borrow money more cheaply to buy back their own shares. Okay? So they're getting privileged access to the stolen proceeds of inflation. And this drives centralization. Basically, the bigger you are, the cheaper you can borrow money, the bigger you can become. And this dispossesses all small companies because the costs of regulation are increasing, inflation are increasing. So this is actually creating disparity in wealth, not only at the individual level, but also in the corporate level and the geopolitical level, frankly. This lets the United States, we export inflation by printing the dollar. So we export the cost of inflation onto the world. We have what is called the. This is called the exorbitant privilege of being the global reserve currency. So we get to send other nations printed dollars that we can produce ad infinitum. They send us goods and services. So you can imagine how much of a privilege this really is. It's called the exorbitant privilege for a reason. So all that said, I just wanted to draw this, and maybe this is just me trying to make a good segue. Here is there's an interesting connection between domicide, violation of private property, the emergence of zombie mythology, which, as we said in the beginning, the artist is mythologizing the present for the future. Zombie companies.

[John Vervaeke]

Also, the extension of the term zombie to these companies, that's an important phenomena in its own right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. And then when I read your work on zombies, which we probably need to explain this, people think, like, what are they talking about? Let me. I'll open with just another excerpt here. So you say that if the zombie draws out our withdrawal, stands for our lack of standing for anything, and is in touch with how out of touch our worldview has become, then the zombie is the embodiment of domicide. Its lack of reflection is revealed in a disturbing trend of radical disengagement, cutting across all domains of human life, deeply severing ties to ourselves, others, and an overarching social meta narrative. We stand to lose our cognizance, communicability, community, and culture. Again, just through my lens, I keep coming back to the. I think I'm positing here that property is that attunement mechanism between agent and arena, at least in the economic domain. And when we've distorted that attunement, this zombie mythology has emerged and it's in culture everywhere. But it's not just the meta narrative. We're also taking that meta narrative and applying it to the real world in these companies. Rant over.

[John Vervaeke]

No, no, no, you're not ranting. That was great. And you know, I am intrigued. I'm a scientist. I need more. But you're only presenting it also as a hypothesis, so. Yeah, right. Like the point you make about, look at the spike in the graphs and look at the date and, you know, there's a correlation there. And I'm gonna have to reflect on that because that's a very good observation. I want to acknowledge that. Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Thank you very much.

[John Vervaeke]

Okay, now the idea. The idea that the attunement is going out because of that, like, and again, you know, the. I've admitted that, especially in the original, it was not enough about distributed cognition. And relatedly, there was not enough about socioeconomics in the book, even in a lot of the. In a lot of the series I've now been in the last two years really concentrating on distributed cognition. It's one of the reasons why I'm talking to you. One of the reasons why I'm talking to you. So I want to acknowledge all of that and I want to acknowledge the plausibility of the hypothesis. It should be taken seriously, reflected on, and you did qualify it. Because what I want to say though is it's clear that the zombie also represents the inversion, the perversion of the Christian framework. It's a denigration of the resurrection. And then we have the zombie apocalypse, these two things, which is a denigration of the Christian notion of apocalypse. I'm not a Christian, I'm not advocating for Christianity, but I'm trying to show that there's also a mythos. Right. All that mythos stuff, the symbols, the sacred play. Right. The ritual, all of that is also being lost and the loss of that is being represented in the zombie as well. Yes. Now, I don't think that the. If you'll allow me your adjective, the economic. And I'll say the. I don't think the socioeconomic and the cultural. Religious, remember that culture and cultists are deeply connected. Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Cultists.

[John Vervaeke]

Right, right. I don't think they're identical, but I want to say that I'm finding it increasingly plausible that they are affecting each other in the historical development of the meeting crisis. That's what I think I could. How I could respond to your proposal, your hypothesis.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. Then fair enough. That's. And again, not mine, the Austrian tradition, they talk about the connection between civilization and culture and, you know, the. The implementation of property effectively, which you can think of money as just one of the implementations of the principle of property effectively. And another way, maybe this will land with you a little bit. This keeps jumping into my mind. I don't know why, but the concept of optimal grip and property, it's like that's how we have this force of humanity moving around the globe. We're all trying to interoperate and coordinate in a way that from a utilitarian standpoint, I guess satisfies the most, wants for the most people.

[John Vervaeke]

Richard, that's brilliant. I'm sorry for interrupting. I just want to zoom in on that and expand it because think about one of the prime sort of what maybe one of the core virtues is having an optimal grip on oneself.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

Because you can be too focused or you can be too non. Right, right, right. Do you see what I'm trying to get at?

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. Too discriminating or too generalizing.

[John Vervaeke]

I think something. Or also that I can be. Yeah, like that. That's part of it. But also I can Be too close to myself and too distant from myself. Think of the double meaning of the word pride. Pride is right. There's a sense of which it's a vice. And then we have a completely other meaning, which is now. No, a sense of like. So we can think about it as the territorial sense and the sovereignty sense of pride, given some of the languages talked about before. And optimal grip is. Or let's talk about being. Having a virtue of being courageous. I can be too self protective and that makes me a coward. I can be too negligent of myself and then I become a foolhardy idiot.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, okay.

[John Vervaeke]

Oneself.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, yes, please continue. You just reminded me of one of my favorite quotes of all time though, which is what? I have to look it up. It's a long one. G.K. chesterton, on courage.

[John Vervaeke]

Well, all I'm saying there is if, right. If what we're talking about is if the primary property is the propriety towards oneselfhood, then the optimal grip on oneself, which is what virtue represents. There's a deep connection there. There has to be a deep connection between the optimal grip on oneself, sovereignty, property, that these terms we're using ownership of oneself. Right. And the optimal grip right on. On reality that we term virtue.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

[John Vervaeke]

Those two are bound together.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. Okay. Yes, yes. Okay. So. And there's a deep connection between the marketplace and virtue. So one way to maybe think about this is who's the boss of the CEO? Yes, the market. The market, all the collective property rights of the marketplace is telling the CEO what to do with his business to satisfy its wants. So there's this. Maybe that's the balance is we have to have respect for our own property and care. But it could go too far and be narcissism that projects itself as territory. But if it's checked against the inviolable property of others that are voting for what they want. And you can't take my property, you can only listen to my vote. That's the correct equilibrium, the proper equilibrium, we might say.

[John Vervaeke]

Yeah, appropriate. Right in the center. Appropriate. So I take it though that you view that that's an ideal description because. I take it, because you've launched many criticisms that the current system we have and the corporations we have are terrifically corrupted in a lot of ways.

[Robert Breedlove]

Capitalism, I think, in its purest sense makes a lot of sense. But central banking is a fully corrupt institution. It's a currency counterfeiting organization. It sounds radical, but I'd say just study it and you'll find that that is in fact at the bottom. And then from that, most government action is not proper either. Right. So they're spending stolen proceeds to do different things.

[John Vervaeke]

There's also many market players that are gaming this corrupt system also. I mean, that must also be the.

[Robert Breedlove]

The zombie companies.

[John Vervaeke]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, exactly. Yes. Okay. It creates a tendency towards centralization. And so. All right, let me read this quote from GK Chesterton. I don't know why I'm just now, like, things are just occurring to me and I just want to share them because. Feels right. G.K. chesterton made a quote on the paradox of courage.

[John Vervaeke]

We should set it up a little bit. Chesterton is a Christian. He's a Christian apologist. Just so people know the background.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, yes. This is a bit of a long one, but I'm gonna do my best here. So take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains entangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. He that will lose his life, the same shall save it. It is not by a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed on an alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage, even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and he will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it. He must desire life like water, yet drink death like wine.

[John Vervaeke]

That's brilliant. I want to do the same thing. I want to read one of my favorite quotes in response.

[Robert Breedlove]

Please.

[John Vervaeke]

One of my closest friends gave me this beautiful card. And watch what happens when you open it. There's a ship inside.

[Robert Breedlove]

Nice. Beautiful.

[John Vervaeke]

And this is from Moby Dick.

[Robert Breedlove]

Okay.

[John Vervaeke]

But as in landlessness alone rides the highest truth shoreless indefinite as God, so better it is to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee. Even if that were safety for worm like then, oh, who Would crave and crawl to land. Terrors of the terrible. Is all this agony so vain? Take heart. Take heart, O Bulkington. That's one of the characters. Bear thee grimly, demigod. Up from the spray of thy ocean perishing straight up leaps thy apotheosis. And he's giving the example of a ship that is in the middle of the storm. And right. If it tries to get to shore, the storm will actually destroy it. And instead what it has to do is turn away from the shore, away from home. Right. And let the storm power it out to sea. And he's using that as a metaphor of our confrontation with the infinitude of existence and the kind of existential courage we have to summon up in order to actually continue to exist. Moby Dick is one. Moby Dick is the great novel about the advent of the meaning crisis within modernity, within sort of modernity, modernity's awareness. Like, if I had to have one novel, it would be Moby Dick.

[Robert Breedlove]

Moby Dick. Beautiful.

[John Vervaeke]

Great myth, great mythos. Moby Dick is mythos, the artist making a mythos for us. Now. Moby Dick is the mythos of the advent of the meeting crisis.

[Robert Breedlove]

Beautiful. Wow. Wow. Yeah. That's power. I have not read Moby Dick, but now I'm going to order it. So thank you for that. I, um. Okay, so there's something. I mean, yeah, we could explore this for a long time. I want to move. Maybe we'll leave it at. I'll. I'll leave it at this. My. Just the thought that I had was perhaps the zombie occurrence is a mythologization of property rights being violated via central banking and. Or the state. So we have zombie companies. Deification of the state, which was the problem in the 20th century. Right. That's what really created World War I, World War II was this ideological possession and then. Which was funded by the central bank. And then there's genocide and total war on the back of that.

[John Vervaeke]

So there is that. And like I said, I think we make a careful argument in the book for the zombie as the symbol of the meaning crisis. Zombies, they can't speak, but they hunger for brains. The organ that makes sense of things. It's intelligible. They're the only communal monster, but they have no community. They shuffle around in a mindless horde. All of us do when we're walking up and down the streets in the cities, especially the Canadian cities in winter. But, you know, and the zombie can't be satisfied. The zombie is fully bound. You want to point to the Creature who has the most hyperbolic discounting, right. The most time preference. The zombie. Right. And the zombie is not supernatural.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right.

[John Vervaeke]

Or generally there's. And, and in, you know, in the Walking Dead, they make. They say this more than once in the series. We are the walking dead.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

The human beings are the one. The zombies come from us degraded and we are just them already, but we haven't fully realized it.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, right.

[John Vervaeke]

Like I said. And then you get the perversion of the Christian. The zombies are resurrected, but not to the life. Right? Not to the abundant life, but to the absolutely decadent life because they are perpetually decaying.

[Robert Breedlove]

There's.

[John Vervaeke]

The apocalypse is supposed to reveal the new world that redeems this one. But the zombie apocalypse is just the endless growth of the decadence. And the zombie is, you know, Deleuze said it. Right. It's the only modern myth. It is the way in which the culture has been portraying the meaning crisis to itself. Now, like I said, I want to acknowledge your socioeconomic point and it was not in my work and that's just a lacuna. But like I said, I think the religious cultural history and the philosophical history have also contributed greatly to the advent of the crisis. Loss of the wisdom institutions, the loss of the monastery has also contributed to the media crisis. All of these things. And so it's. It. I find it so. It's almost so. I'm really worried of the arrogance of my own theory here. But it's. Of course they're going to call these companies zombie companies. Of course they are. Of course they are. Think about it. They have all of. They have all of mythology to draw from to label these. Right. They could be changeling corporations or companies or they could be, you know, vampire companies, because they're just sucking up. No, they're zombie like there's a reason why that was.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, yes, they are walking dead. They continue to exist, but they're bleeding capital. Right. They're losing money, but they're sustained by theft. So it's by. By eating brains, I guess. Right. Eating the warm clovers.

[John Vervaeke]

What's interesting is how all of these things are constellating together.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, exactly.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes, Very, very powerfully.

[Robert Breedlove]

No, I agree. And that's why I'm very. You know, that's where your work really captivated me initially. I want to read maybe one last quote about this and then if you think it's a good time, we could transition to hopefully a more hopeful topic. He said quote. It seems plausible that our elevated identification with these modalities is Also symptomatic of our cultural domicile. We're talking about zombies being reflective of domicide. It is a victual substitute for religious involvement, satiating our appetites for community and social coherence. In the absence of our sacred canopy, these partial modes of identification are overdrawn to meet the elements. They are exapted as pseudo religious domiciles, shelters of culture to huddle within as we fend off encroachment by the zombies. Elements of strangeness in the post war world. I don't know, the sense that I get is that we've almost been experimenting. When we come out from under the canopy of religion, we've experimented with other canopies like the state or what. We left something very important behind in that transition. And the state as a pseudo religious domicile was inadequate. And that's what the 20th century showed.

[John Vervaeke]

On both sides, the left and the right. Yes, both sides the state.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, exactly.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes. So, yes, that's very much. And we're seeing. I mean, there's one way. I wouldn't say it's the only way. I'm not making an argument for exclusivity, but you can see what's happening in the United States as a pseudo religious civil war between maybe Wokeism on the left and the Trump cult on the right. And they're both authoritarian and they're both in certain ways. And I'm gonna piss off a lot of people saying that I know there's other issues. I'm not denying that I know other policy issues. I know there's other things going on. But I'm saying one of the dimensions is properly understood as a pseudo religious dimension that helps to explain the deep faith allegiance, identification with these particular ideological stances. We need an explanation beyond the practicality of certain policy commitments to explain this profound commitment that is ripping the country apart and putting it on the verge of a civil war. Right. And so I'm not. Again, I am not excluding the political points, the policy points, or economic issues. But I'm saying there's a religious dimension to this phenomenon that also needs to be properly acknowledged. That's why you see all this religious behavior on both sides around their ideological commitments.

[Robert Breedlove]

Absolutely. Very well said. And I think that this is not the first time this has happened. Maybe not in this way or to this extent, but pre axial Revolution, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, here, was the Age of Anxiety, was that right?

[John Vervaeke]

No, the Age of Anxiety. The Hellenistic period comes after the Axial Revolution.

[Robert Breedlove]

Apologies. Okay, maybe we could speak to that. Then how did we resolve the Age of Anxiety previously? And then we. I guess.

[John Vervaeke]

So we resolved the Age of Anxiety by the emergence of the. The philosopher as a physician of the soul by discovering this dimension to wisdom that was only implicit in the Socratic Platonic tradition. And then. And then developing that out in the way like. Like things that are very analogous to logotherapy. But you have to remember that then what happens is, you know, Stoicism, the Platonic tradition, the Aristotelian tradition. Right. Get integrated, it's like the grand unifying field theory of human religiosity into Neoplatonism. And then Neoplatonism gets integrated with all of the profound myth, mythos of, you know, of Christianity. And you get the grand synthesis of people like Augustine. And that is the creation of a new sacred canopy that housed. No. Wrong word. I apologize. That homed people again, like I said, within the Roman Empire, in a way that was distinct from. Right. The political structures of the state.

[Robert Breedlove]

Wow. So it was the pulling all of these meaning systems into a grand unification meta meaning system.

[John Vervaeke]

And that's Geertz's definition of religion. A religion is a meta meaning system that homes and makes possible by driving worldview to it. It makes all the other meaning systems possible. It makes the legal meaning system possible, the economic system possible, the moral meaning system. It makes all of them possible. Religios religious.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, yes, yes. Which maybe that is the mechanism for connecting property to Christ. Right. It's like it's nested within this larger meeting system.

[John Vervaeke]

Yeah, could be. It could be. I mean, like we said, I think, you know, back, you can see, Christianity is giving people an optimal grip on the self, between the sovereignty of the self and the participation of the self. I was just talking about this in another thing today. One of my favorite theologians, great. One of the great theologians even called himself the theologian of culture is Paul Tillich. One of the great. The Courage to Be is one of the great books. And Tillich talked about Christianity as trying to get this always respecting, not trying to resolve, but always trying to preserve the tonos, the creative tension between individuation and participation and therefore getting an optimal grip on self and community and that. And it's constantly keeping them in opponent processing. Like. Like I was suggesting to you earlier, each one is sort of correcting the other.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right. Individuation and tonation.

[John Vervaeke]

No, individuation and participation.

[Robert Breedlove]

Participation. Okay, interesting. So just writing that out. Okay, so that's it. So and then philosophy then was the antidote to the age of anxiety.

[John Vervaeke]

Ancient philosophy as Pierre Hodo talks about. And what is ancient philosophy? Philosophy as by Leah.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, the.

[John Vervaeke]

The joint, the fellowship, love of wisdom. Yes, very much. That was the solution.

[Robert Breedlove]

So where does that, where does the line then go from? Because you're saying philosophy is, I guess, coalescing all these meaning systems. And one thing that then becomes a religion is that.

[John Vervaeke]

Well, it's, it's interesting. It's. It's interesting the way Christianity. Oh boy, this is like. This is such a complex. But it's interesting the way in which. And I'm being a little bit over simplistic, but I have to, just for purposes of this, the mythos of Christianity seeks out the Logos, the logos of the Logos of Neoplatonism. And they come together and they find a way of mutually supporting each other. There's a great anthology I recommend to you called Christian Platonism, Some of the best scholars. And Paul Tyler's book, Returning to Reality, he makes a case for Christian Neoplatonism or just Christian Platonism as a response to the meaning crisis. Because he's right, the Christian Neoplatonism was engineered to deal with a profound meaning crisis. So, yeah, you can see the mythos of Christianity and the logos of Neoplatonism coming together and they cross pollinate and they constrain and they challenge each other.

[Robert Breedlove]

Interesting.

[John Vervaeke]

So there's the Bronze Age collapse. It's the greatest collapse in civilization that the world has ever seen. So there's no controversy about that. There's tons of controversy about what caused it. Maybe it's a change in technology. Chariot warfare is made obsolete very suddenly. It could be general systems collapse, it could be both. But nevertheless, massive collapse of civilization. And there's an analogy. I'm trying to remember who made it. Maybe it was Druze, I'm not sure. But they compare it to. In the Bronze Age world, you have these huge empires, the Babylonian empire and the Hittite empire, the Egyptian. And they compared them to like dinosaurs. And they've dominated. Right. They've dominated the world for so long. And then the Bronze Age collapses, like when the asteroid hit and all the dinosaurs, and then there's all these little mammalian kingdoms that are springing up. And so there's tremendous amount of experimentation, but also warfare and strat and. Right. And then what's born out of that. And we've talked about this, so I'll just remind people. We talked about, for very prosaic reason, you get the creation of these psycho technologies, right? And then they, they get internalized into cognition. They Create second order thinking that totally alters how people, it totally alters the agent, arena, relationship, how people, how they identify or understand themselves, how they understand the world. And you get the axial view. The axial view in which wisdom is not about belonging to the continual patterns of the cosmos, but wisdom is about transcending out of the world that is fallen or illusory because of the self deceptive nature of our minds. This is the great discovery of the actual revolution. And somehow wisdom is now about transcending to a better world, a more real world. Now the thing about that is. And so, and now. And that is. And it doesn't have to be this way, right? It can also metaphorically be this way. So you can also see the better world as a future world that you are going to work towards. And you get the Hebrew notion of the Exodus out of the Bronze Age empire, Egypt towards a promised land where we are in right relationship with God, who's the ground of ultimate reality and that sort of thing. And that whole notion gets then embedded. Notice how many of our pseudo religious ideologies, including the ones ripping us apart right now, are utopian in nature. Are utopian in nature. And I'm very, very, very wary of any position that is utopian for just that reason. It's a pseudo, that's a, that's a pretty good criterion for something being a pseudo religious ideology. And both Nazism and communism are utopic visions, comprehensive utopic visions.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah.

[John Vervaeke]

So the thing is, right that, and as I just indicated that that grammar, that cultural cognitive grammar of thinking of it as two worlds, first of all, you know, that's, it's a mythos and it's functional, but the mythos gets reified. It's like you said, like you know, the frame that you, then you first, it's so useful and, but then you can't take your glasses off and we can only think of the two worlds. The world above, the world below, or the world, the utopia in the future and the world now. And the problem with that is that two worlds mythology does not sit within the scientific worldview. The scientific worldview has been exactly the opposite. It has been a worldview that has been flat. There is one world, there is one. Think of the word universe there, right? Yes, right.

[Robert Breedlove]

One song.

[John Vervaeke]

And so, yeah, and so what happens is now we don't want to throw away all of the psycho technologies, all of the ecologies of practice, all of the wisdom traditions that we inherited from the axial revolution, but the language and the cultural conceptual grammar we have we're trying to think about it doesn't fit with our scientific worldview. So we either pretend somehow the scientific worldview is false and we get a fundamentalism, or we just say, well, we give up that all that axial bullshit and we'll just adopt the nihilism inherent in the scientific worldview. Both of those are actually still bound to the Axial Revolution grammar because one is saying the two worlds model is right and science is wrong and the other one is saying right, science is right, there's no two worlds and then there. Therefore there's no wisdom and meaning and all that. Right. There's no spirituality. Religion has no function. What I'm trying to do, with the help of Chris and Philip and a lot of other people is say, how can we revalorize, bring back to life and make a central cultural value everything that the Axial Revolution, including its children, like Christianity gave to us, without going into fundamentalism or nihilism? And pseudo religious ideologies are almost always fundamentalisms that are terrified of nihilism. That's how you can understand pseudo religious ideology. Fundamentalism is terrified of nihilism. If you don't think the Nazis are responding in a fundamentalist manner to the threat of nihilism within the Weimar Republic, you're not getting. And you don't see the Gnosticism within Nazism, you're not getting what the Nazis were on about. So we have to get out of that. That whole way of framing the problem, that's what awakening from the meaning crisis is all about.

[Robert Breedlove]

Wow. So fundamentalism on one side, nihilism associated with just religious. Where does fundamentalism derive from?

[John Vervaeke]

Just so fundamentalism, belief, it rises within Christianity and it arises in. I have to give credit to your country. Your country is the generator of religions and religious things like, you know, it turns out new religions like Mormonism and you're right. And it. New styles of religion like fundamentalism. So. And that's what I mean, the United States is such a paradox. It's simultaneously one of the most secular and one of the most religious countries in the world. Let's put that aside. But anyways, because this is weird for Canadians looking at on it from the outside, because we're so close to you in so many ways. Right. But anyways, fundamentalism arose at the beginning of the 20th century, I believe, as a technical term to express a group of Christians and Christian theologians who were basically rejecting what was known as liberal theology. This has nothing to do with liberalism. Well, not totally, but don't identify it with sort of the Political meaning of liberal. What liberal theology was basically proposing was that the core of Christianity was to try and bring the kingdom of heaven on earth. It was to, it was about social policy, helping the poor. Right? And again, all of these are. It was abolishing slavery. That's part of this. Okay, so there's lots of good there. But what drove that idea that that was the core of Christianity was this was an initial response to the success of science and technology was like, so Christianity can't really tell us about the nature of the world or the history of the world or you know, how to build bridges or how to heal people when they're sick. But what Christianity can do, right, is it can give us moral guidance. And what's that? Moral guidance? Well, we should be taking care of the poor, we should, etc.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[John Vervaeke]

Now the fundamentalists came back and said, we reject that because if that, if this continues, Christianity is just going to disappear. It's just going to disappear into. Right. One person once described the theology of the United Church, which is a liberal theological church within Canada, as it's nice to be nice. That's the whole theology. Right. And so the fundamentalists, I think legitimately were worried that Christianity was going to disappear. And they were worried that Christianity has a lot more in it than just its moral aspect. It has this all the axial. They were worried that the entire axial heritage about the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, self transcendence, the reality of God, all of that was being lost. Okay, but what they did is they basically said we're going to reject liberal theology and we're going to reject science. Now they won't say that, but that's actually what it means because what they did was they took the view that the Bible was. The Bible was fundamental in this specific sense that the bot. These two meanings the Bible. Three. Sorry, sorry. The Bible is absolutely unique. Right, right. So no other religion will work. The Bible is inerrant and the Bible is final. There will be no further holy scripture. So the Bible is perfect? Basically, yeah. The Bible is perfect in all ways. And then that gets you into tremendous conflict with science because you seem to have to deny the folks monkey trial. You have to deny evolutionary theory, you have to deny fundamental physics, you have to deny the fact that the sun is the center of the solar system and all kinds of problems.

[Robert Breedlove]

So then we're stuck today between this, I guess, specter of fundamentalism and then nihilism behind. If you take science to its ultimate conclusion, there's no value in the universe.

[John Vervaeke]

One way of Thinking of nihilism is a fundamentalism about science, that science is perfect, irreplaceable and final in its ability to tell us about the fundamental nature of reality. So nihilism and fundamentalism, theism and atheism, the way it's often pitched, right. They depend on each other because they're just mirror versions of each other and that. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

[Robert Breedlove]

Well, they share a belief in perfection, essentially.

[John Vervaeke]

Yes.

[Robert Breedlove]

Like. Yes, yes.

[John Vervaeke]

Which they got from Plato, by the way, but that's another thing. But so. And like I said, pseudo religious ideologies are about perfection. The master race, right. The final. The final commune. All of these utopic things are about the perfectibility. And the idea is they give meaning back to history. They gave meaning back to violence, to suffering. And what they're supposed to do is protect us from nihilism, which is again, why they are pursued with such vehemence. What I am trying to do, and maybe it's just hubris, what I'm trying to do with a lot of people. And just like Christianity, there's all these communities springing up about people responding to the meaning crisis with ecologies of practices, mindfulness and movement, all that stuff that Ray Kelly is doing. And other people. Right. I'm trying to understand that and I'm also trying to afford it. The way Christianity was a response to the Hellenistic meaning crisis. Can we break out of this prison? We're in fundamentalism, nihilism, right. We want to exactly what we got from the Axial revolution, but we don't want to identify with it because we. We have to somehow, appropriately, we have to optimally grip the science, what science is saying. Science also needs to respond and be able to. Science has to be willing to challenge its fundamental ontology. And this is happening right now, the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology, in order to like science, the paradoxes, science has no place within the scientific worldview. Try to give me an explanation in terms of physics or chemistry, of how science exists, what science is.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right. It's not grounded in anything. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Because the point is science is trying to filter out all value judgments, but everything is a value judgment at its basis. Is that.

[John Vervaeke]

That's what. That's that. Yeah. So that's well said. One of the. And that's. That's a particular take on science, scientism, which is the fundamentalism about science. I'm a scientist. I really deeply believe in scientists and I practice it and I will advocate for it. But I understand, right, that there is a threat of nihilism in here. And when you say science is supposed to be value free, right. It's not only that science, truth depends on meaning. Yes, truth depends on meaning and not just propositional meaning. The scientist has to have the right skills, right? It has to have the right state of mind. All right? And so truth depends on meaning and meaning depends. Meaning is relevant realization and that's evaluation process. And like where is all of that being acknowledged within the scientific worldview? Right. So unless you can home meaning making, which is also person making, you can't ultimately home science. So you got this weird thing, you have the scientific worldview, but the science and the scientists have no home. Yes, no home within that worldview. So there's an inherent nihilism in that performative contradiction within science.

[Robert Breedlove]

Interesting. Okay, so then awakening from the meaning crisis is the middle way between. Between theism and atheism, Right?

[John Vervaeke]

Non theism. Non. Like non. So, right, so the non theism. Right. And the idea to try the transjective is trying to get outside of the subject object divide. Right? Trying to get, trying to use the best cognitive science, the best, you know, philosophy of biology, the best stuff we have from complex systems theory, dynamical systems theory, the innovative work being done in the philosophy of science, trying to end the best work we have on going back to the wisdom traditions, because wisdom is a hot topic right now in psychology and cognitive science. Using all of that to try and break out of this grammar of presuppositions that is dooming us. That's what awakening from the meaning crisis is trying to do. And everything. Since all of my further projects, all of my series, and then the next big series I'm working on right now after Socrates, are all about how can we address this?

[Robert Breedlove]

Wow.

[John Vervaeke]

One of the reasons I'm talking with you, right, is because you saw a connection to a dimension that was lacking in the series. And also it connects to the whole thing I've been working on to try and respond to that gap, which is the role of distributed cognition, etc. Distributed extended cognition. That's why, that's why we're talking.

[Robert Breedlove]

Well, I'm very grateful to have been through this journey with you. This journey, it's been incredible. Very insightful for me personally, I hope. Really insightful for my audience. I think the work you're doing is tremendous. I mean, I hope you take great meaning in it because I think it is very meaningful and I hope to continue to help. I mean, I can refer. I've read a lot about this scope, so I'LL share with you the great economic philosophers that I found especially relevant to connecting these.

[John Vervaeke]

Was one of the person you mentioned, Hayek? Is that one of the people you've mentioned?

[Robert Breedlove]

I'll tell you. So I think Mises is the most profound, in my opinion. There's also. Hayek is one. Hayek's hard to read, though. He's just. The way he writes is a bit complicated. Rothbard is another reason I mentioned Hayek.

[John Vervaeke]

Is a philosopher friend of mine who, who's also like, done work on the Meaning crisis. I did the videos. Johannes Niederhauser, he's doing a new series on Hayek. And so I was. I was thinking of checking that out as maybe as a way of get. And like, he is a profound. I'm deeply, deeply, deeply influenced by Heidegger, Deeply influenced by. By German idealists. Like, he's a profound thinker, profound philosopher.

[Robert Breedlove]

On the topic of distributed cognition, there's a paper by Hayek called the Use of Knowledge in Society. And it's just a paper. It's eight or 10 pages. I can send it to you. It's profound.

[John Vervaeke]

I would love to read it. I would love to read it. I want to understand this more because I had some criticisms and I voiced them and you've responded to them very respectfully and in kind. And I like. I want to acknowledge and like, say my appreciation and honor you for that, I think.

[Robert Breedlove]

Thank you. And it's reflected back because I'm just thinking out loud here, so I don't know what's sticking and what's just my meandering. And you've been very accommodating, so thank you for that. And I, you know, I think you're onto something really big here. It sounds like, again, what did you say earlier, that we're all children's children of Descartes, where you're pushing the boundary of subject object metaphysics in a way that may break through to something that we need. Right. We're confused. We have a confusion generated by the. The way we're perceiving the world, perhaps. Yes, I'm glad someone is addressing that. So thank you.

[John Vervaeke]

Well, the way we're perceiving the world, each other and ourselves.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. Right.

[John Vervaeke]

Thank you, Robert. This has been a wonderful time together. Thank you very much.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, thank you, John.