139 Semantics & Sanity: How To Know What's "True" (Pt2)

How do you know what you "know" is true? This episode explores Sanity from the lens of General Semantics (how we translate events into perceptions). We speak about the "Chain of Perception", insanity vs. creativity, the basis of propaganda, why smart people believe dumb things, building a "efficient nervous system", liberal and conservative fallacies, and the work of Alfred Korzybski.

Transcript

Q.

How do you know that what you know is true?

This is the big question of this episode on sanity.

My interest in general semantics,

This is kind of a part two in what might be a series on general semantics,

Is largely spurred by what's going on in today's culture.

We have the modern culture wars,

Which are basically reality wars,

Which in itself have existed throughout human history.

People have always fought over what is true,

What their beliefs are,

But this is the first time,

At least the first time at this scale,

Where people are fighting over directly what should be objective reality.

This has been revealed in the pandemic of what people believe about viruses and vaccines and various remedies.

Basically the world has broken into factions over science.

Last episode on abstraction intelligence,

I brought up the satire South Park did,

Like 10 plus years ago,

Where in some fictitious future the world has broken up into basically factions of science.

We have the one true science.

No other science is real except our science.

It was a joke,

A satire,

But it's kind of become true.

We see this now.

All of this falls under the subject of general semantics.

General semantics is the study of how we translate events into perceptions.

Last episode we spoke about how rationality is not as static as we would like to think.

We're going to explore this idea in this episode through the process of general semantics,

Because the goal of general semantics is accuracy.

Can you improve the accuracy through which you translate events into perception?

This is kind of the definition of sanity.

General semantics identifies that humans typically are not very good.

We are very rarely fully sane.

We're not very good at translating events into accurate perceptions because we are limited by two factors.

One are the limitations of our nervous system,

Our sensory organs.

You can see things incorrectly.

You can have some malfunction in your hearing or your mind can play tricks on you,

That kind of thing.

But the second limitation is what we'll focus on more,

Is language.

This is our symbol making.

This is how we derive meaning from events.

General semantics was created in the early 1920s by a mathematician and scholar named Alfred Korzybski.

He created,

Actually initially it was called human engineering,

But that term wasn't so palatable and actually,

You hear the term human engineering,

You probably think of something diabolical which is kind of the opposite of what it's meant to be.

Because Korzybski,

He first wrote about it in 1921 where the big news of that day,

Which was fresh in everyone's memory,

Was the World War.

We think of it as the First World War,

To them it was the Great War or the World War because they didn't know obviously what was coming around the corner in just a little over a decade.

But basically,

Korzybski,

Along with many other people,

Looked at the atrocities of World War I,

The mass carnage,

The millions killed,

Huge parts of Europe destroyed for no real purpose and they said that this is insanity.

This is insanity,

This is crazy.

Naturally,

Korzybski in his first book on this subject,

It was titled The Manhood of Humanity because his general argument was that because of World War I,

Humanity as a whole finally was ready to grow up,

Basically to enter its manhood or adulthood.

In his eyes,

The childhood of humanity was where our primitive ancestors,

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors,

Who didn't really know how to use their sapience like a child,

They had just split from the rest of the animal kingdom in becoming conscious.

The adolescence of humanity was basically a time of intentional technology until World War I.

And then finally,

Because humanity basically crashed the car into the tree,

It was time for humanity to look at itself and be like,

Okay,

Yeah,

We need to grow up.

So he identified one of the reasons for World War I,

One of the underlying reasons was that what allows society to be stable,

Both society and its structures and relationships,

But also how it projects reality for all of us,

All of us citizens,

All of us people,

Is based on the relationships of the advancement of different parts of society.

So meaning like the level of advancement of governments and political thinking and technology and science,

But also poetry and art and everything,

Right?

There's a relationship between all of these factors.

And if one of these factors grows a lot faster or advances a lot faster than the others,

As he identified science tends to do,

Science,

He actually put this out in numbers,

Which I won't do here,

But he essentially was saying,

Science advances at a geometric rate and basically everything else,

All the social sciences grow at an arithmetic rate or incremental rate.

So if something every generation you're adding to and something else you're multiplying by two,

Obviously in a couple of generations,

Those numbers are going to be very different.

And he was saying when the level of advancement becomes very different,

It causes tension in society.

It causes tension in people's collective perceptions as well.

And the only way to correct the tension between these two greatly different values are basically a violent revolution.

Like there has to be something to basically wipe the slate clean and have everything sync up again.

So he was pointing to like pretty much every big revolution in history,

There was something to this effect.

World War I,

He said the conditions of World War I were partly started because the tension had grown so high.

And just as a small piece of evidence of this,

Like the powers of World War I didn't really know how to use their newfound weapons other than to just turn the battlefields into giant meat grinders,

Which many historians have identified trench warfare as.

So Korzybski had a solution.

It was very simply to teach leaders,

But also the masses,

To think like engineers.

This is why he initially called general semantics human engineering,

Because basically engineering applied to human perception.

It's interesting because another mathematician who had strong opinions about society,

Who we mentioned on this podcast,

Who also had a Polish name starting with a K,

Ted Kaczynski,

Spoke about him,

He's a Unabomber,

Spoke about his ideas and his essay in the ultimate fulfillment and welcoming death episode.

Kaczynski also identified this about society,

About how basically he was identifying technology and everything else.

Technology grows at an exponential rate,

This causes strife.

But Kaczynski actually had the opposite prescription.

Instead of saying let's all catch up to science,

Which is what Korzybski said,

Kaczynski said let's bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age because you can never catch up to technology,

It's just going to grow and grow and grow and ruin our lives.

So that was his solution.

Obviously in this episode we're going to explore Korzybski's solution,

But I do want to say Korzybski as a person,

Because actually using one of the principles of general semantics,

You should not separate the speaker from the communication.

You always have to be aware of who's speaking and why.

Last episode we briefly spoke about how Freud and his assumptions have basically colored how basically everyone in the Western world thinks about the mind and maybe in all of the world.

So anyway,

Korzybski was a hyper-rationalist,

He was a technophile.

Some of his ideas,

His basic values were that one should learn how to overcome human nature,

Which is not something that I subscribe to.

I mean I think our animal instincts in particular have a lot of value and we can't actually separate from them.

A little bit in Korzybski's camp on that end.

So instead we're going to apply his ideas to basically how to use the vehicles that we have.

We spoke about the dog brain in the dog brain episode,

Here we're talking about the human brain,

Our rational consciousness,

How we make meaning out of things,

And learning how to use this.

Because as I mentioned last episode,

We don't typically think about the function of our sense of rationality and how it can be tweaked just like our emotions can be tweaked.

So whereas last episode we focused on abstraction and intelligence,

This episode we're focusing on sanity.

Sanity is the accuracy in which we model reality.

And even though this is part two in our semantics inquiry,

If you didn't catch last episode,

Don't worry,

I'll make it make sense.

But of course you're welcome to check that out.

We're going to speak about the relationship of insanity and creativity and we're going to speak a little bit about the basis of propaganda.

We're going to speak about semantic disturbances,

Which are basic errors.

And I'm not going to go too deep into brainwashing,

Actually I'm just going to talk about basic things about propaganda.

I will in the future do a whole episode on brainwashing,

But here we're going to talk about what allows brainwashing to occur.

It's all about meaning making.

One quick request if you are listening to this on Spotify.

Spotify just added a rating system for podcasts,

So it would mean a lot to me if you would drop a rating.

And of course,

If you know someone who would enjoy this episode already,

Please share it.

It would mean a lot to me.

Right now you're listening to episode 139,

Semantics and Sanity.

You've probably heard the saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again,

Expecting a different result.

It's a little pet peeve of mine.

That is not the definition of insanity,

But people keep passing around that saying.

It's very trite also.

I think the first time I heard it was maybe 10 plus years ago,

Probably from an internet marketer who didn't mean to say definition,

Or maybe he was copying someone else.

Anyway,

It's a confusion of what a definition is.

The person definitely wasn't practicing E prime,

Confusing the orders of abstraction.

The thing that's aggravating is that that saying has been repeated by a lot of people.

And most recently I even heard a politician,

I'll just say who it is,

The governor of Florida,

Rhonda Santis,

I heard him say this in a speech.

Anyway,

A bit of a pet peeve.

Insanity as far as we're using it,

I should probably just define sanity.

Sanity is the accuracy in which we abstract,

Is the accuracy in which we model reality,

Make meaning from things.

Sanity is not the same thing as intelligence.

There's a relationship,

But actually you need to be intelligent in order to be sane or insane.

You wouldn't say a frog is sane or insane because a frog,

Assuming its eyes work and its hearing apparatuses work and its sense organs work,

It's modeling reality fine at the level of abstraction that it models reality.

One can only be insane or sane when they are operating at the level where they can abstract things and make meaning,

Symbolic meaning of things that are real.

So intelligence is our ability to abstract,

Sanity is the accuracy in which we abstract.

So in this episode we're going to be using a model that I'm going to call the chain of perception of a sane person.

We'll just call it the chain of perception.

I didn't invent this by any means.

In fact,

I'm sure some psychologist or communication expert has slapped a name on it,

So I don't mean to plagiarize,

But I'm creating this for myself,

For our use I should say.

And that chain starts with an actual event,

With some occurrence in objective reality.

And we're not going to question now whether such a thing is objective reality or what we can really know,

But let's just assume,

You know,

That's another philosophical tangent,

Let's just assume there's an actual event.

As an example,

Let's say somewhere in the jungle a tiger eats a bunny.

That happens whether it's observed or not,

Whether anyone can communicate,

It's just a thing that is occurring.

So now let's add an observer.

Let's imagine that you are a paleolithic person,

You're an early human,

A primitive human,

And you're there with your pet dog,

Right,

Your domesticated wolf,

Your recently domesticated wolf.

And you're in the jungle and you're observing this tiger eat a bunny.

Now I realize maybe these three animals wouldn't be in the same place,

But this is just an example,

Right?

So you see with your eyes,

You take in the light,

You see this tiger eat a bunny,

And the first level of abstraction is a very low order of abstraction,

Is your nervous system is now creating the image of a tiger eating a bunny in your head.

That's the very first thing.

In your dog,

Who is less intelligent than you,

Can't abstract,

But he can basically experience the same thing.

And obviously dogs maybe have different,

You know,

Their eyes are different,

They see in black and white,

They see motion better,

Forget about that stuff.

For the most part,

It's having a very similar experience,

Let's say,

To you,

Observing a tiger eating a bunny off in the distance.

The next level,

I mean,

Korzybski would say this is all one thing,

The level of sensation,

But what's also happening,

Another physiological reaction in response to this,

Is that you're probably going to have some emotional reaction,

Right?

Something's going to go on with your hormones,

You see this tiger eat the bunny,

Maybe you get a shot of adrenaline if you're kind of close by and you're like,

Oh man,

That tiger might still be hungry,

And your dog will probably also have some similar reaction,

Right?

Because all of this is kind of happening on the level of the dog brain.

There's no symbolism used here,

There's no abstracting,

You are directly experiencing something which is watching a tiger eating a bunny.

These two layers,

The actual events and the sensory experience,

Are what Korzybski would call the unspeakable level.

This is the realm of things that you're,

There are no words for it,

Right?

You can't actually put it directly into words because once you translate it into words,

You've now abstracted it and put a symbol inside the actual events.

This is why Korzybski calls this the unspeakable level.

And the quote that you've probably heard of Korzybski,

Even though maybe you hadn't heard of Korzybski before his podcast,

Is the map is not the territory.

This is his most famous quote,

This is something he says a lot in his books,

The map is not the territory.

Meaning that one should not confuse the symbols for something for the actual thing.

One should not confuse the language for the events,

Which is something that often happens still.

So let's say,

You know,

You saw this tiger eat the bunny,

Your dog saw it too,

And you want to go back to your tribe and tell people about it,

Either for entertainment or for warning or whatever.

First,

You need to abstract it,

Right?

Because you can't just translate the image that you saw in your head,

That you saw because of your eyes actually capturing the light of the tiger eat the bunny,

You can't just put that in other people's heads.

We don't have that level of telepathy.

You have to abstract your internal experience now with your feelings but also your sensory experience,

The image,

Into words.

So you go to your tribe and you say the words,

I saw a tiger eat the bunny.

You say,

I saw a tiger eat a bunny.

Right?

So now that puts it into the realm of verbal communication.

Now this communication is effective so long as the people in your tribe speak the same language as you.

They have the same set of symbols,

Right?

The same words mean the same images,

Right?

They have the same association,

Which is not always directly the case,

But obviously,

You know,

If you speak primitive Russian and they speak primitive Chinese,

You know,

Tiger eats bunny means nothing to them if you said that in whatever language,

Right?

Assuming that they speak the same language,

They are now taking the words,

These verbal symbols,

And they have to de-abstract it now,

Right?

They need to rationally receive the words,

You know,

Which might be them saying,

You know,

This is some way of receiving the words,

Recognizing that you said the words tiger eats bunny,

And then translate it,

De-abstract it into a sensory experience.

Now the quality of your storytelling will determine how close to your experience is their experience,

Right?

They might,

They're probably not going to get the perfect high resolution image that you saw,

But if you're a really good storyteller,

They will get something that may not look the same in their heads,

But it'll have the intended effect,

Right?

You might say a tiger ate the bunny,

And it might have been a brown bunny,

But they'll see a white bunny in their heads.

But that's not really what matters,

Right?

You know,

Someone who fills in every detail,

In this case,

If you were to like,

You know,

Tell us about the behavior of the bunny,

And describe the bunny,

And you know,

Say that the sun was shining and really paint the scene,

All of that in this case would actually be bad storytelling,

Because none of that is useful information.

What is useful is perhaps the meaning of the message,

Or the intended effect of the message,

Which is like,

Oh shit,

We should all be a little bit afraid because there's a tiger nearby,

For instance,

Right?

Your quality of storytelling is how much you can convey some version of what you experienced so that they experience some effect.

But they need to do the work of de-abstracting.

This is one of the reasons why reading a book is more taxing than watching a movie.

In reading a book,

You're getting the abstraction of words,

And you need to translate them into the images and experience in your own head.

When you're watching a movie,

It's a lot closer to observing something in actuality.

And something just like on storytelling,

Because I was thinking about this recently,

I have a friend,

He's actually been on the podcast,

Joseph Teske,

On the Attachment Theory episodes a long time ago.

He's a psychologist,

Yeah,

Psychologist,

Psychiatrist,

No,

Psychologist.

And he's probably one of the best storytellers I've ever met.

And I was actually thinking about this,

Totally unrelated to anything in this episode,

But he has told me stories so well that I've confused them from my own experiences.

And if you ever met him socially,

He's a just good storyteller,

Right?

He conveys the perfect amount of emotion,

His pacing is great,

He shares the right details,

Cuts out the boring stuff.

And he told me a story,

And the story doesn't matter,

It's something about meeting a fortune teller and the assistant being cute.

And he told me it so well that a long time later,

Years later,

I was actually thinking like,

Wait a minute,

Did that happen to me?

Wait,

Did I have an experience like that?

I was like,

I couldn't remember some of the details.

I was like,

Wait a minute,

I didn't actually have that experience.

Joseph Teske just told me the story so well that I actually had the image in my head so clearly that it seemed like an experience of mine,

A memory of mine.

This is a bit of a thing to be aware of with propaganda and successfully sending and receiving messages on a mass scale,

Especially when you want people to do things.

But also,

Assuming you have no diabolical motives or anything like that,

You just want to be a good storyteller,

Something to be aware of.

So there's a couple points on this chain of perception that are important.

The first is,

If there was no need for communication with other people,

Then the verbal abstraction actually wouldn't be necessary.

This is something that,

You know,

The words wouldn't be necessary.

If you were living by yourself,

If you were the only person on earth,

I mean,

If you were the only person on earth,

You probably wouldn't even have a language because who is there to talk to?

You just directly experience everything.

But this is something actually that you hear from people who maybe spent a long time in the wilderness by themselves,

Or you kind of forget to speak.

And you even hear this from people who speak multiple languages who maybe don't get to speak one of their languages for a while,

Like they forget,

Even if it's their native tongue,

It's almost like they forget how to speak it.

They forget the symbols,

They forget how to speak.

Because the only use for this ability is communication.

Another important thing to note is that the communication itself,

The words communicated to the receiver,

Say the sentence,

Hey,

I saw a Tigerita bunny back there.

The communication itself is an actuality to the receiver,

To the second person.

The second person is experiencing this event secondhand through a story,

And they're not experiencing it directly.

But what they are experiencing,

What they need to make sense of,

In the same way that the first person abstracted the actuality of a tiger eating a bunny into an image in his head,

The second person has to internalize the words and de-abstract it into an image in his head.

It's a second-degree thing.

This is actually one of the greatly positive things,

Or the thing that has allowed progress of humanity,

And this is what Korzybski called time binding,

Is that we can basically build off of previous generations.

We can build off of other people's experience.

Whereas animals,

I spoke about this in the dog brain episode,

Animals are space binders.

They map reality to physical space.

Humans,

We can do that because we have a dog brain in us,

But we also can bind time.

We can think of the past.

In fact,

Right now,

Here in this episode,

We're talking about ideas that a guy named Alfred Korzybski came up with about 100 years ago.

It's a book I read because his ideas were abstracted into words,

Into a book.

I read it,

And here I am talking to you.

Maybe you are listening to this podcast 100 years after I die,

And now you're benefiting from Korzybski through me.

But it's basically a long game of telephone,

Where every time the image could be slightly distorted.

Am I sharing exactly what Korzybski thought?

No.

Am I going to get some things wrong that are different than what he meant?

Possibly.

I might have different opinions.

But this is important to understand.

Another thing,

The last thing here,

Is that from the initial events onwards,

All of this is subject to errors of abstraction.

This whole passing on of information,

This whole passing on of an experience,

The story being retold,

It's just like the children's game telephone,

Where you're passing a secret around and every time it gets a little bit distorted.

And the funny thing is,

Someone might have an initial sentence,

It gets passed around through 20 kids,

And the last person says a totally different sentence.

It's funny,

But this is what happens in communication all the time.

Because when we put things into words,

We are separating them from the unspeakable level,

We're making it speakable.

And as we spoke about in the last episode,

Any time you abstract an actuality,

You are putting it into a group of other experiences with similar qualities,

But at the expense of removing nuance.

And we do this for efficiency,

Right?

Like,

We didn't need to see and hear every single detail about the tiger eating the bunny.

We just need to know that tiger was eating a bunny.

But as we spoke about last episode,

This gives us opportunities for errors,

Errors in perception because things are being slightly modified and left out.

So that whole chain of perception that I just shared,

That is assuming sanity,

Assuming accuracy for one person to the next,

Even with the possible errors of abstraction,

We're assuming saneness.

That's the sane order of events.

In an insane person,

That initial experience is reversed.

Instead of going actual events,

Sensation,

Perception,

For an insane person,

It goes into sensation,

Which creates a sensation,

Which creates a belief of what happened.

So an extreme of this would be a schizophrenic person.

A schizophrenic person is seeing things that,

Experiencing things that are not there.

We would call it hallucinations.

And of course there's the mystical argument that perhaps schizophrenic people are seeing into dimensions that we cannot see.

But either way,

Even if that is the case,

For someone to confuse that,

Confuse,

Say,

Another dimension for this one or confuse what's going on,

We could still call that insanity for our purposes of inaccurate modeling of the reality that we're in.

But this reverse experience that we're calling insanity is also very similar to the experience of creativity.

You start with a perception and you put it into form.

You de-abstract it.

We're going to talk about this a little bit more later in the episode.

It was good to note that when it comes to these errors,

An individual delusion,

An individual moment of insanity,

Someone bringing a perception into a sensation,

Believing in something that's not real or slightly inaccurate,

It gets compounded with each layer and to the quantity of people.

So just like the game telephone we just said.

This is one of the dangers.

Trump coined the term fake news,

But that kind of idea has existed basically forever.

It's also what has things escalate very quickly.

Like in an individual setting,

We spoke about the mob mentality in the dog brain episode.

When people get together,

Certain things activate.

There's a feeling of herd security and perceptions and behaviors change.

Same thing when it comes to this chain of perception,

These abstractions that get confused,

It can compound very quickly into atrocities like genocide just because of some slight delusion.

So Korszewski,

He basically blamed World War I and blamed every mass atrocity on the poor abstracting ability,

The semantic disturbances,

As you would call it,

Of people who influence other people.

The term influencer wasn't used the same way back then,

But he was basically speaking about politicians and media people,

People who affect the great social narrative.

When they have a semantic disturbance,

It gets passed on into the masses and then the population becomes a little bit insane.

He said one of the reasons for this is that the way politics worked at the time and still in the West is that you kind of get rewarded for arousing people's dog brains.

You don't get rewarded from sharing practicalities necessarily.

In a democratic nation,

You get rewarded,

You get elected when you can really stir up people's emotions.

If you're going for dictatorship in what would happen sometime after Korszewski's writing in Germany or around the time,

It's already starting,

The Nazi party existed,

Same thing.

You arouse the mob.

You appeal to their dog brain.

One thing with this whole chain of perception,

Referring to the latter part of it,

Of the second person taking in words,

De-abstracting it into a perception and then a sensory experience,

Dogs can do something very similar.

I mentioned the dog,

You're watching the tiger eat the bunny with your dog.

Dogs have a level of intelligence.

They're not as intelligent as humans.

They don't have the complex,

Nuanced,

Simple-making ability.

But they do understand simple commands.

Dogs can learn their own names.

Dogs can understand sit and stay and maybe simple sentences,

Which is why in propaganda and marketing,

Slogans are often used.

Simple sentences are used because a slogan basically hits the dog brain directly.

We just – you were talking about how books are harder than movies because movies kind of bypass people having to do the work of de-abstracting by just giving you the image and the sound as if you're watching something for real.

Slogans are a step in that direction,

Whereas it kind of surpasses – you don't need to use your more energy-intensive neocortex.

A slogan,

A well-written slogan can just like go straight to the dog brain,

Just like a command – sit,

Stay.

So slogans of our time right now – make America great again,

Black lives matter,

I'm with her.

I don't know what Joe Biden's thing was if he even had a slogan.

But those kinds of slogans – I tried to hit both political parties.

Remember the Alamo is another one,

Right?

These simple sentences hit right to the emotional response,

Give us immediate feeling.

If it's well-crafted,

It gets right to something that gives us a sense of meaning and it totally bypasses our rational brain,

Right?

This is why these things are kind of dangerous.

I remember taking some marketing courses some time ago – actually and pretty much every copywriter will say this,

Which is you need to write – if you want people to pay attention to something so they buy something from you,

You need to write at a third grade level.

This has always been a hard thing for me because I would like to think I'm speaking to intelligent people.

That's why I only podcast and I don't share any other medium.

Many marketers have noted that the more complex your wording is,

The higher grade level you're speaking at,

The more energy it takes for a person to absorb the meaning and the less likely you'll keep their attention.

You want it to make it more like watching a movie than reading a book,

Which just takes more calories.

One market I was following,

This is around the first Trump election.

He actually predicted that Trump was going to win because Trump spoke at like a second grade level whereas Hillary spoke at a fourth grade level and Bernie spoke at a fifth grade level or something.

He was just like,

I'm pretty sure Trump's going to win just because he's going to get more people to understand his message.

So Korzybski's big call to all of the politicians of the day right after World War I was that we need to restructure society.

We got this big wake-up call.

We need to restructure society and politicians need to learn how to think mathematically.

They need to think like engineers because a society run by engineers wouldn't have these inefficiencies.

Because right now,

And actually still to this day,

100 years later,

The people in power are rewarded for actually being inefficient with their message,

Inefficient with their thinking by speaking dumb to the population than speaking smart.

Whereas if we had a society of engineers,

We would really be able to catch up society to scientific progress and we wouldn't have the strife.

And funny enough,

Even though he was greatly condemning all the agitators that caused the World War,

He did say that Germany at the time,

This is pre-Nazi Germany,

Actually modeled something very close to what he thought would be an efficient society.

They just didn't have their ethics right because they were basically operating as a machine.

He was like,

This high productivity,

High technological advancements,

A lot of efficiency in the society.

And he said,

If we could actually recreate something like Germany with different ethics,

The world would be a better place.

I don't know what he thought come the Third Reich because he was still alive during World War II.

I do wonder what he would think of,

Say,

Communist dictatorships that occurred after he died.

Because the CCP,

Which I've been critical of,

Very critical of,

Does run like this.

They are a true meritocracy where leaders are put in power based on their efficiency,

Which is what we kind of want a government to be,

Because they don't have to worry about being elected.

They don't have to spend any time inefficiently communicating in terms of progress to get elected.

They can just do what works and move things forward.

Versus a democracy that basically trades efficiency for what we would hope would be fairness.

So elections require rhetoric,

So politicians get rewarded for speaking well and not necessarily doing anything.

And not only speaking,

Actually not even speaking well,

Speaking at a level that less intelligent people can understand.

Because most voters have what Korzybski would call inefficient nervous systems.

They're not very good at abstracting and de-abstracting,

So they don't understand nuance.

They need very simple sentences.

This was satirized in George Orwell's Animal Farm,

Which of course is a satire of the development of communist Russia or communist dictatorship.

And one thing that was fun about that book,

If you're probably familiar with it,

Is that he kind of stratified society based on the different types of animals.

So the pigs were the smart ones,

They took the lead.

The dogs were kind of smart,

But they were very loyal.

They just followed whoever their loyalty was.

The horses worked really hard.

But most of the animals were not very intelligent,

Namely the sheep and the chickens.

And the sheep especially,

You know,

Sheep kind of represent things that just follow.

The sheep were not smart enough to learn the seven commandments of being a good communist animal or an animalist or whatever it was called in the book.

So they had to basically dumb down the message to very simple slogans that the sheep could repeat over and over again.

Four legs good,

Two legs bad.

And I think there's another one later in the book.

But it was,

You know,

This is how politics in the West works,

Unfortunately,

Not that I have a better solution.

So from a semantics level,

Politics and advertising basically reinforce – I don't know if it's right to call them fallacies.

Well,

One is a fallacy,

But basically inefficient thinking.

Two types of inefficient thinking.

One is the belief that perceptions are static.

I'll go back to calling them fallacies.

One is perceptions are static,

And the second is that the map is the same thing as the territory.

You see all the time people confuse terminology with an actual thing.

They fall behind certain words.

I'm going to give some examples later in this episode.

And it's kind of like a command to a dog.

A loyal dog,

A trained dog,

Doesn't question the motive of a command or the context of a command.

You know,

A well-trained dog follows a command.

You know,

He just has a reaction and like,

To him,

A command from his master might as well – you know,

Reacting to a command from his master might as well be him turning the other way when he sees a tiger.

It's the same kind of – you know,

He treats the communication as an actuality.

One example of like this confusion of the map and the territory is actually this guy who reached out to me for coaching a number of years ago.

And basically he had one question.

And I almost laughed initially,

But it was a real thing that was like causing him a lot of stress.

Whereas he was a young man from a very religious family.

He was just entering like a phase of trying to break free of their thinking and he was starting to explore sexually.

And he did something with a man.

I don't know what it was.

He didn't even tell me.

He did something physically intimate with a man.

Who knows what it was.

And he was concerned and very stressed of does this mean I'm gay?

Does this make me gay?

And,

You know,

I was trying to like get to the root of what was actually causing him this strife.

And what was funny to me was that he wasn't actually concerned about whatever it was he did.

He wasn't concerned about the actuality.

He was concerned about whether or not he fit in this category now of gay.

He didn't want to fit in the category.

It didn't matter about the actual action.

I have no idea what he did.

Let's just say he kissed a man or something.

He wasn't concerned about kissing the man.

He wasn't concerned about whether he liked it or not or anything like that.

He just wanted to know.

I think I asked him like,

So if you like had sex with 10 guys and that didn't put you in the definition,

Like the definition of gay was that you didn't fall into that category,

You'd be okay with that?

And,

You know,

I don't remember exactly what he said,

But that was basically where he was coming from.

He was so concerned about the term and not about the actuality at all.

And of course,

You know,

I don't care what a person does,

But,

You know,

It was silly to me and I certainly don't want anyone to feel ashamed,

Certainly about a term.

It is one,

You know,

I don't want people to feel ashamed about most actions either,

But like over a term,

That's like so silly.

And like this,

The other one,

Those perceptions are static,

You know,

Also related to the story of identity being one of these abstractions that people assume are one thing.

And I spoke about this at the end of last episode where,

You know,

When people use I am statements or you use the verb to be,

There's an implication that whatever comes after that statement like,

You know,

Joe is funny or I am smart or I am stupid,

There's an assumption that that's a static thing.

And of course with all of these adjectives,

Nothing's ever static,

Right?

Like what does it mean to be gay?

If you sleep with someone one time of the same,

Or you,

You know,

You kiss a guy,

You know,

And you never do anything again,

Like whatever category doesn't matter,

It's the actuality.

Anyway,

I assume you guys are understanding this.

Oh,

And one thing with the commands for the trained dog is I'm sure you're familiar with Pavlov's experiments.

It's where he classically conditioned his dogs to basically salivate to the ringing of a bell because he gave them food with the ringing of the bell a couple of times.

That's how classic classical conditioning works.

You associate two stimuli.

He took away the food and rang the bell and the dog salivated.

This is a marker of the lack of intelligence of a dog because a human,

Even though a human might have an association,

Right,

You might have an association with a memory to a song,

A lot of people remember,

Or smell maybe,

You know that's not the real thing,

Right?

You can discern.

Like a human would be able to discern that,

Oh,

The bell's ringing,

But hey,

There's no food here,

Or an animal can't.

However,

When it comes to slightly more complex things,

Mixing up maps and territory,

A lot of times people don't correctly discern what's actually going on.

They're associating a stimulus with something else.

For example,

Everything read in a news article must be true.

I mean,

This is one of the things that's part of the culture slash reality wars going on is that people don't know what is true,

And people assign other entities to tell them what's true because of something.

This is a key sentence that if you remember nothing else from this episode,

Please remember this.

The key is that most of what we know,

And like we being every single individual person,

You,

Me,

The smartest man in the world,

The sanest person in the world,

Most of the things that each of us know is not directly experienced.

Most of the things,

If you look at the chain of perception example that I gave,

Most of the things in our head are actually from other people having experienced things and us taking it and de-abstracting it.

Think about everything you learned in school,

Every book you read,

Everything you learned from a friend who told you something.

If you think about the things that you yourself learned from direct experience,

Which I'm sure is some things,

I'm sure you learned some things in whatever your career is that can only have been learned from doing it,

Not from learning about it.

You probably picked up some life lessons just being a person in the world directly,

But a lot of what we know is based on the experiences of others.

In fact,

Not even direct experiences of others,

But kind of this long telephone game of other people are experiencing things,

Passing it on to other people,

Passing it on to other people,

Finally getting it to us.

Even to this day,

And now,

For example,

With the pandemic stuff,

Both sides of the aisle,

Pick on vaccines for a second,

Both ends,

Whether you're pro-vaxx or anti-vaxx,

We'll just talk about the extreme ends because they're the loudest,

Of course.

Both sides are using science,

Using rationality.

Maybe we all know someone who's extreme on one end or the other.

I'm sure they could pull up an article with a scientist,

With an MD,

Saying this,

That,

Or the other.

In fact,

All of us could probably,

With a little bit of Googling,

Although if you're anti-vaxx,

Maybe the resources are harder to find,

But they're there.

There's Peter McCullough who's on Rogan.

He's saying a lot of convincing things.

Maybe because I'm more on the anti-mandate,

At least,

Maybe I take it in more than someone who's pro-mandate,

Pro-vaxx,

Whatever.

The point is,

How do we know what's true?

We're all using second,

Third,

Many times hand information to make up what we believe about the world.

This is part,

Again,

Of what has allowed human progress.

We build off of the experiences of others.

We build off the thinking of others.

As Newton said,

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

It's what's allowed progress.

Every generation does not have to start afresh.

We can basically start from where the last generation left off.

However,

This also leaves us open to fallacies because most of what we know has been basically first digested by someone else.

This ability of time binding to learn from others' experience is also what makes us particularly vulnerable to propaganda and brainwashing and whatnot.

Initially,

I was going to pick on flat earthers because that's something that is very easy.

If you're a rationalist,

It's very easy to be like,

Ah,

Look at those crazy people.

I want to not attack them even though I do think it is insane,

Improper modeling.

For the sake of argument,

We're questioning everything here.

How do I know?

How do I actually know that the world is round?

My basic position is based on why would every pilot – and forget about the people who control information,

But even the people who have to act on this information,

Like long-distance pilots who have to account for the curvature of the Earth or even snipers who have to also account for the curvature of the Earth and rotation of the Earth,

They would all be in on it too.

That to me is silly.

But let's be fair,

I haven't spoken too deeply to a flat earther.

If anyone's listening who is a flat earther,

Please email me.

I'm curious to be convinced.

But I was thinking,

Some people are like,

How could anyone believe that the Earth is flat?

Well,

It's based on the same idea.

Most of what we know – in fact,

For all of us,

Even those that believe the Earth is round and we think that's correct,

We're not experiencing it directly.

We're getting it from books,

We're getting it from other sources,

We're getting it maybe the most convincing thing are images and whatnot.

But even that,

I mean,

It's possible that all of it could be faked,

Right?

I'm not saying it is,

But it's all possible.

And on the one hand,

It's healthy to be open to this because certainly we do receive false things from time to time.

False information,

That is.

Since we don't directly interact with most of the things,

Since most of what we know isn't gained by direct experience,

Most of the things that we need to know isn't from direct experience,

We have to choose a surrogate,

Right?

We have to trust in something,

Whether it's someone,

A scientist where we get our science information,

Leaders who tell us things,

Government bodies,

The government itself,

Ideologies,

Right?

It's a natural thing to defer to someone else.

It's a natural impulse to defer to some trusted resource that we trust to pass on the information that we should know.

Now,

Some people do this more than others.

Obviously,

There are very sheepish people who just nod their head and accept whatever their reference group or their assigned leader tells them.

But we all do this and myself included,

Right?

The things that I've chosen to believe is based on information that I think is true,

That I believe are trusted resources.

But someone who thinks similar,

Who has the same intelligence as me could also make an argument for the opposite with a lot of these things,

Pandemic stuff and whatnot.

A good friend of mine and I were speaking about this recently because he's in a city where there aren't mask mandates.

He's walking around without his mask and he actually happens to be vaccinated.

He was out in a public park and we were calling her Karen,

But someone came up to him and basically made some shaming gesture at him that he wasn't wearing a mask in a public park.

And of course,

He got upset.

He thought,

What is the right response?

And then of course,

Because he's a smart guy,

He started inquiring why someone like her would even bother doing it.

There's nothing to be gained by antagonizing her.

So one possible reason is that,

As Kaczynski would argue,

People who are like this kind of leftist,

Perhaps,

And that's Kaczynski's term,

I'm not shitting on all leftists.

I lean left on a lot of things.

But there is something that's coming out in a certain kind of person who let's say is trying to police others with masks.

In a sense,

One explanation at least is that it's a power move.

Such a person maybe doesn't experience a lot of power in their life,

A lot of fulfillments,

A lot of Kaczynski.

So the best opportunity for power is to basically tell someone what to do in a context where they're not going to get in trouble.

Because the collective would generally side with her.

At least she believes that.

She's not going to get in trouble for yelling at someone.

It is also the perhaps illusion,

I would call an illusion,

Maybe she wouldn't,

But illusion that you're doing something for public good by yelling at someone to put their mask on.

That could be one explanation,

Unlike some safety primal level.

But also attached to the safety primal level,

To bring it up a level of attraction if you will,

Is that it's also to reassert a reality that she's chosen to believe.

We were thinking about this,

Like why does it matter so much?

It can't possibly be that she's actually worried about getting the virus from someone.

We assume she's vaccinated,

Is in a public park,

They weren't standing right next to each other,

But she just wanted to police someone to wear a mask.

It couldn't be that she's actually worried about the virus.

But it could be that she does feel unsafe in a way because someone walking around without a mask on is evidence that her worldview might not be totally accurate.

It's an evidence that she might be insane.

So she wants to make sure that that doesn't exist.

This is one of the reasons why people have traveled huge distances to kill each other over their belief about a man in the sky.

Because if someone is presenting evidence that's contrary to yours,

It's possible evidence of your insanity and no one wants to feel like their reality is unstable so that people can go to the lengths of wanting to kill others to make sure they silence opposite realities.

So because we don't directly experience most things and therefore we need to choose surrogates that we receive our information from,

Decide what abstractions to believe,

It comes from a necessity.

We have to defer to somebody.

We have to defer to science or news or some sort of source of information.

This leaves us ripe to a huge semantic disturbance,

Let's say,

Which is the us versus them paradigm.

I spoke about the error in thinking and how last episode I spoke about how racism and anti-racism and basically any-ism is basically a misuse of our brain power.

It's actually a sign of a lack of intelligence.

This is not to take a moral stance of like,

Oh yeah,

Anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid or anyone who is hateful is also stupid.

That's not necessarily the case.

There are smart people who are also hateful.

But racism and anti-racism is actually an example of poor abstraction,

A confusion of abstraction.

But people are very susceptible to this.

For the sake of simplicity,

It's easy to put things in groups and drop nuance and put things into an us versus them category because the ultimate poor abstraction,

The ultimate vague abstraction are the words good and bad.

Good and bad mean in terms of like if you were speaking in EME Prime and trying to de-abstract things into very clear concrete things,

The words good and bad don't mean anything clear.

In fact,

They're so easy to misinterpret.

But it's something that stirs up emotions of putting,

Drawing a line in the sand of this is good and this is bad.

Right and wrong are the same thing.

In reality,

There are very few things that are across the board right and wrong.

But some part of us,

Some primal part of us that wants life to be,

Wants existence to be a little more simple,

Wants to put things in the sense of right and wrong.

Almost everything is context-based.

And some of the best stories,

Some of the higher brow stories,

I'm thinking of To Kill a Mockingbird and basically any fictional story that actually humanizes as villains.

Because it's one thing to be like,

Okay,

There's a hero and there's a villain who's the ultimate evil and just wants everyone to hurt.

That's kind of a simple story.

But that doesn't really exist in reality that much.

Very often,

Even the most villainous people,

There are nuances involved in reality.

But that can be challenging to a person with sheep-level intelligence,

Someone who's in a sense behaving like cattle because they're not doing their own abstracting.

They're taking on someone else's symbols,

Someone else's beliefs about things.

People are very susceptible to this.

Good versus bad,

This black and white thinking is something that a lot of people revert to,

Especially when they're either mentally taxed or just afraid.

Because it ultimately comes down to security.

People have a survival fear,

Let's say lower brainpower people.

I don't want to make it too judgmental,

But some people have a survival fear that if their group's model is wrong,

Then they won't survive.

To go back to our hunter-gatherer times,

There weren't things like governments or churches.

There were individuals.

A lot of what you believed were kind of deferred to a couple of key individuals,

Maybe some tribal elders,

Maybe the chief,

Maybe the matriarch,

Whatever kind of tribe it was.

You assume that that person has the right handle on reality.

If it's proven or if there's evidence that your person,

Your surrogate on reality is wrong,

Your champion for reality is wrong,

Then there's a chance that you won't survive because your tribe is using the wrong map.

That's a very primal fear that you don't want your Moses to be leading you the wrong direction in the desert.

That's a pretty scary thing,

Which is why,

Again,

People are willing to kill so they don't have to have that cognitive dissonance.

Because to directly interface and assess and de-abstract reality yourself is a huge responsibility.

It's a very challenging thing for most people,

And as far as how we evolved to be,

If you're in a collective,

In a tribe,

Most people actually didn't have to do that.

There's a reason why,

Maybe using some judgmental words like sheep or low-efficiency people,

But that's actually how the masses are supposed to be.

If you're in a Paleolithic tribe of 100 people,

Unless you're the chief or maybe the shaman or one of the elders or the matriarch or something,

Or one of the core key officials,

If you're not one of those people,

If you're one of the commoners,

If you're one of the masses,

You actually don't have to worry about that stuff.

It's actually in your nature we've evolved to follow someone that we trust,

The chief,

The shaman,

The whatever.

So a lot of what's going on with the culture wars is that,

In a sense,

People are trying to defend their source of information.

Right now it's coming out as basically political ideologies slash news sources.

There's scientists on both sides saying this and that about what's true about the virus and the vaccine,

And the people who are getting the most heated about it are basically acting just like two chiefs disagreeing about things and they're about to go to war over it.

So I want to relate to something,

A topic that's more commonly spoken about on the podcast,

Which is intersexual dynamics.

I've been preparing an episode that's more on this.

It's going to be titled something about the stages of male psychology.

Actually,

I don't know what it's going to be titled.

But I've been looking into other branches of men's psychology developments,

One being the red pill.

I'll speak about that more.

But one red pill idea that is interesting is that they use this term called frame.

It's like who sets the reality?

And a lot of red pill advice is that the man needs to set the frame.

I'll speak about that more next episode,

But it's a good idea.

And when it's not coming from a resentful place,

It's actually,

In my opinion,

A gift that a man gives a woman.

And actually,

It's a gift that women need so much that they're willing to basically test men and prod men and do things to basically see if a man is strong enough to set the reality for her because when she is pregnant,

If she gets pregnant with that man,

She definitely will not be able to set the reality for herself.

She does not want to have to have the burden of creating a baby,

Creating a life inside her body and interfacing a reality.

So she wants to find a man who's strong enough to do that for her,

Which that might upset a feminist or two.

Just like,

As I said in the last episode when I was speaking about racism as an example,

If you find yourself getting triggered by anything,

Consider that maybe it's a semantic disturbance.

And I'm not saying this to be antagonistic or,

You know,

Anyway,

I hope you get where I'm coming from.

I was actually speaking about this with a friend.

We were speaking about how a man should be with a woman and he was speaking about how,

Why is it that a man has to be the so-called rock for a woman when she's being emotional?

Why do I need to,

You know,

I was basically sharing with him how it's,

You know,

When you're in some sort of conflict or tension point with your partner,

With your woman,

You know,

Assuming you're talking to a man,

Speaking to her logically or trying to convince her or trying to be right is never effective.

That never works.

The only thing that works is basically seeing to her emotional state first,

Because that's really what she's asking for.

And he came back with,

You know,

An opinion that I think a lot of guys have because we live in a rationalist society.

He said,

But isn't that infantilizing her?

Isn't that treating her like a child?

And I had to think about that for a while.

But I would argue that even that sentence,

That idea of infantilizing a person,

That speaking to someone's emotions before their rational self is infantilizing,

That in itself is a semantic disturbance,

Because it implies in that sentence that the norm,

That this behavior of say,

Handling someone's emotions first,

It is the reference point for it is how we speak to a child.

Like that's where that normal,

That's where that behavior is normal.

Whereas I would argue that that is how,

You know,

Everyone should actually speak to each other,

Or this is how everyone should deal with someone who is deep in their feelings,

Whether it's a child or a woman or a friend,

Right?

I mean,

Even in an argument,

Right,

Like trying to fight someone who's angry at you with rationality is never going to work,

Right?

It's almost always more effective to deal with their emotions.

So I think this idea of infantilizing a woman,

This idea that a man sets the frame and it's actually a gift for the woman,

That's a semantic disturbance.

And I ranted about this in other episodes about how even feminism has bought into certain male-oriented values such that,

You know,

The idea of being a leader is seen as being better than a mother,

Which I disagree with.

But anyway,

From a tactical standpoint,

It's just basically the best way to smooth things out is to find common reality.

This is perhaps a practical application of a lot of this stuff.

And I have a little example.

I think last year,

There's two friends of mine,

This is back when I lived in Chiang Mai,

Two friends of mine,

The three of us hung out a lot.

We went to the gym together,

We did a lot of things.

These two guys,

They basically had a misunderstanding that escalated into like a pretty heated argument to the point of like they just didn't want,

They wanted nothing to do with each other.

Now I tried to mediate,

You know,

For my selfish reasons that I liked hanging out with the both of them together.

So you know,

I tried to,

They said I was Switzerlanding,

I was being Switzerland,

Of basically trying to mediate.

And the way that I mediated,

And this is something I learned at one taste actually,

You know,

Having to mediate many very heated disputes between jealous people and the community houses and all that stuff and various misunderstandings.

The best way to mediate is not to convince people to be friends,

It's not to convince people of anything other than to get,

To find out where people are not perceiving reality.

It's to find the common place where people can agree to the same reality.

Because when you get two people to agree to the same perceptions of things,

Very often the issues,

The conflict kind of resolve themselves.

It's very hard to be hostile towards someone when you both agree and assess a situation the same way.

So,

I mean,

Between my friends who were fighting essentially,

I just asked them very simple questions of like,

Can we agree to such and such?

Can we agree that this maybe wasn't malicious on his part?

Can you agree that maybe this was – and basically,

Can we agree,

Can we agree,

Can we agree?

To the point that they were both like,

Okay,

We both see the situation the same and there's no more argument.

Like there's no reason to even convince anyone of anything.

On the flip side,

Conflicts escalate,

Sometimes all the way to war,

Sometimes all the way to genocide when realities are split.

So it's very important to note when we're abstracting,

Which is what we do every time we speak,

I'm doing this right now,

We have to notice what the context of things are because words are symbols and they have denotations,

Which are direct definitions and connotations.

So something that we see going on in society now is certain people are trying to redefine,

You know,

Basically give new denotations to things.

That's kind of like an aggressive way to change reality.

But something that we,

You know,

Is more common are the change of connotations or associated meanings with different words.

And this is something,

You know,

I only recognize through Korzybski's work is that a lot of the errors in people's thinking is,

And these are my words,

But are people kind of trying to play science without using science?

Right?

Something is only science when it goes through the scientific method.

That's what defines something as science.

The scientific method is a method to make sure that you are not accepting a false positive.

That's why you have a hypothesis.

You test it,

You have a conclusion that proves or disproves the hypothesis,

Right?

It's to make sure that you don't believe in things that are false.

And you know,

Everything in science is built this way,

Right?

Science very often,

I mean,

Actually most of the words created are in the science world because scientists are discovering new things about,

You know,

The world in different fields.

And when you discover a new thing that has never been named before,

It needs a name,

Right?

It needs some sort of term for the sake of efficiency,

Right?

You couldn't advance subatomic physics without the word for electron,

Like what you can describe.

Like,

Oh,

It's kind of like a particle,

Kind of like a wave.

It has this negative charge,

Goes around a proton.

No,

No,

Just call it an electron,

Right?

It needs a name,

Right?

And same thing with other abstractions like categorizing,

Classifying life forms,

Right?

For a biologist,

You know,

Even though,

I mean,

Sometimes it's useful for a biologist to just refer to all mammals as mammals.

They have certain qualities that are common.

It's easier to classify than listing every single species that falls under that.

Same thing with like in chemistry,

The noble gases.

There's a bunch of gases that they have,

You know,

They don't have any free bonds,

They all behave the same way,

They're inerts.

It's useful to put that in an abstraction and give it a name so that you can refer to all of them for efficiency purposes.

The problem is,

And you know,

All of this is important,

The problem is that a lot of people have the same impulse to understand and abstract and label things for the sake of efficiency and understanding the world,

But they use it the wrong way.

So for example,

Like postmodernists,

In various people,

You know,

Korzybski didn't attack postmodernists directly,

I am a bit,

But they're essentially misusing abstraction to falsely understand reality.

I'll give a more common example first.

For instance,

Astrology.

I'm not super knocking astrology,

I have friends who are astrologers,

My wife loves astrology,

I kind of like the symbology in astrology.

I do think it's kind of crazy to take something,

Anything literal from a horoscope that you read online.

But one thing about astrology is that it has a lot of terms.

There's a lot,

I mean,

I have friends who have really studied it deeply and hopefully they don't take too much offense to me saying this,

But astrology has a lot of terms for things that don't correspond to anything in reality.

There's a lot,

You know,

The sun sign and I am not even in houses,

Like,

I mean,

I'm sure an astrologer would argue with that and say,

No,

No,

It definitely does,

But like that's never been proven.

It's not been disproven,

But it's not been proven,

Right?

There's no,

All of the things in like calculating charts and stuff,

Which,

You know,

And just for the record,

I'm kind of hippie,

I've had many readings,

I think they're fun and interesting and sometimes in part something useful,

If not just entertaining.

But the terms in astrology don't actually correspond to anything in actuality,

Right?

Another example,

I had a friend who was going to this tantra school.

Tantra is another thing that I,

You know,

I've gotten a lot of value from.

This is this kind of school is run by this guy.

I don't really know him,

But he seemed,

I don't know,

He seemed kind of culty to me.

I'm kind of sensitive to this thing.

And he had this class,

I sat in it once.

This is like,

You know,

Multi,

It's basically like a school where he taught kind of basic tantra things,

But with a lot of information.

Like he had slide shows,

He had handouts,

And his classroom was mostly young women.

My friend who was there was a young woman,

She was like,

Yeah,

Wow,

This is like being in school again,

But it's actually interesting.

And I was like looking at her handouts,

Like she was studying as if studying for school,

But it was all stuff that,

I'm not going to say it was useless,

He was talking about chakras and stuff,

Which I think,

You know,

Is a model that has some value to it.

He was talking about all these abstractions that didn't actually correspond to anything,

And it wasn't clear that there's any value to knowing all of these things,

Other than to give someone a bunch of words to study so they get a sense that they understand more about the universe.

And I know that's cynical of me,

You know,

I don't mean to offend anyone,

Because I say,

Whatever,

I don't need to throw all these caveats out.

But in my opinion it was a misuse of our genuine desire to understand the world.

It was basically,

He was kind of hijacking that.

And you see this a lot when people invent words,

Which is what we're on to next.

So terminology very often makes a symbol or an abstraction seem real.

Once you slap a label on something,

It seems real.

It's a very common confusion of basically confusing the map for the territory.

I have a good friend who's extremely brilliant,

But every time we speak about an idea that corresponds to psychology,

He has to tell me the psychological term.

He's like,

Oh,

This is such and such,

Or this is the,

This part of attachment theory.

Everything has to have a label slapped on it for him to move forward.

And the guy's very intelligent.

And that's maybe part of why he likes to label everything,

Because he can very quickly recall what word,

What symbol corresponds to what idea.

But it's not always useful,

And very often it's easy to confuse the map and the territory.

I mean,

I've told this story a bunch of times.

It's actually,

Maybe I shouldn't tell it,

But basically it's a story about intermittent fasting.

I have these friends who criticize me for not eating breakfast,

But once it was labeled intermittent fasting,

Oh,

Okay,

It's okay.

Another place where this can get confused is I had Dr.

Kam Sapha on the podcast last year.

He coined the term dopamine fasting,

Which is actually,

I mean,

He's got his own protocol,

But the general idea of like trying to reduce your stimulation,

It's not even something that he invented,

But he does have a protocol for what to do.

He was criticized by a reporter,

I think it was New York Times,

I could be wrong,

Some media outlet like that,

Some paper,

That criticized him and said,

Dopamine fasting is so dangerous,

It's so bad for you,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

But the problem was,

And the thing that upset him,

Was that what the article described as dopamine fasting and was attacking was not the same thing as what he was calling dopamine fasting and supporting.

So they were kind of slandering him,

But they weren't even talking about the same thing.

They were both referring to a symbol,

Dopamine fasting,

But to each of them it represented something different.

This is something that also happens very often.

Because again,

Remember,

Most of what we know is at least secondhand information.

We don't directly experience things.

So very often it's easy to confuse someone else's symbols or a symbol you receive,

As most of the symbols that we use are received from other people,

It's easy to confuse it for reality the same way a dog treats a command from its master as an actuality.

And Korzybski actually,

A lot of his criticisms of Western thinking was actually based on what he called Aristotelian thinking,

He put it in that category,

Because he felt that most of the way people think and perceive things are basically based on misperceptions of Aristotle.

And it wasn't that he was knocking Aristotle,

It was just simply that Aristotle was a very influential thinker on the way that many thinkers thought after him,

And he existed at a time where technology wasn't very advanced.

So it's understandable that he had some misperceptions,

But his misperceptions got baked into the way that people speak and think about ideas,

And there's all of this evidence of Aristotelian ideas that have become assumed reality.

Just like I was speaking last episode about how monotheism influenced Freud,

And Freud influenced all of us to think about the mind in a monotheistic fashion,

Whereas that's not necessarily the right way,

It's just a way to think about it.

So terminology.

Terminology comes with denotations and connotations,

And this can influence people.

So one example,

When I was more involved in like sex-positive communities,

I had a lot of friends who were more explorative than I was,

Certainly.

I remember hanging out with this group one time,

And there's one person in the group of saying like,

Oh yeah,

I was with a lover,

And they used,

They rubbed spaghetti on me,

Or something like that.

And another girl in the group was like,

Oh yeah,

That has a name,

It's called sloshing.

In the sex-positive world,

Because they're trying to destigmatize everything and take away the shame from everyone's kink,

Which I am for the most part a fan of,

Everything has a term.

Like this term sloshing stuck in my mind,

Because I was like,

Man,

They made a term even for being jerked off with spaghetti,

That has its own term,

That's kind of crazy.

But the purpose of that is to reduce shame.

And I'm like,

Okay,

Fine,

That's a thing.

And basically,

There's a lot of terminology that has specifically been created,

One for abstraction or efficiency,

To be able to refer to a concept quickly,

But also it kind of normalizes it.

One that we use here on the podcast often is Robert Glover's nice guy syndrome.

We could describe a bunch of beta-ish,

People-pleasing,

Collectivist,

Weak man behaviors,

Or I could just call it nice guy syndrome,

And most people nowadays know what that means.

It's efficient.

It also takes away some of the shame.

Instead of being like,

Oh,

I'm a weak person,

You could think like,

Oh,

I have nice guy syndrome and I can cure myself of it.

So there's a lot of use of that.

There's other things like the word MILF.

Before American Pie coined this term of a mom I'd like to F,

I'm sure there's a lot of young men who are attracted to older women,

But before you'd have to say,

Oh yeah,

I'm into older women,

I'm into women my mom's age,

That's weird.

But once American Pie introduced the word MILF into the English-speaking lexicon,

It de-sigmatized it,

And if you go to any porn site,

That's one of the main categories now.

But there's another one.

There's another one that came across my radar recently.

A friend forwarded me this,

It was by some super liberal professor in America,

One of these kind of over-the-top things,

And they were trying to change the word pedophile to what is called MAPS,

A minor attracted person.

And when I first saw this video,

I got pretty upset.

I was like,

What,

Someone is trying to de-stigmatize pedophilia?

Like that's not a,

That should be stigmatized,

Like that,

You know,

Because when I hear the word pedophile or when I think of that,

I think of some heinous acts or whatever,

Right?

But then I had to consider for a second that the word pedophile is also an abstraction,

And I know we're getting into taboo territory again,

Please bear with me,

I hope nothing I say right now gets taken out of context and this is for the sake of inquiry,

Right?

So I had to consider the word pedophile,

It's like,

Well,

As an abstraction,

It refers to a lot of things.

You know,

It refers to an 18-year-old who,

In some states,

It refers to an 18-year-old who sleeps with his 16-year-old girlfriend.

I don't know if this still happens,

But I know this has happened in my lifetime in certain states where someone in that situation could get charged with statutory rape if convicted,

Which I'm sure has happened at some point,

Could go to jail and could be labeled a sex offender the rest of their life,

Right?

For what most of us would consider,

Like,

Yeah,

I mean,

They were together,

Probably together when they were both minors,

Like,

What's the big deal,

Right?

That could fall under the category of pedophile,

Right?

And then I thought of another example.

You know,

I have a friend,

He's a little bit older than me,

Actually,

You know,

He's maybe 10 or so years older than me,

Married with kids,

You know,

Basically heterosexual as far as I know.

He grew up in the Caribbean,

When he was a kid,

7,

8,

9 years old,

He had a young male,

It was basically his caretaker,

Babysitter,

Who he cared about a lot,

Right?

He was kind of like his big brother,

He did a lot of things,

You know,

A positively influential person in his life,

According to him.

They also had somewhat of a sexual relationship.

I didn't ask him exactly what,

But,

You know,

This is something he shared with me,

He's like,

They did some things.

And I remember when he first told me this,

I had the reaction that I think most people would have,

Of like,

Oh,

Like,

How did that affect you,

Are you traumatized,

You know,

That's at least the thought that popped into my head.

And before I could even ask,

He was like,

But you know what,

Like,

You know,

I mean,

I feel okay about it,

Like,

I'm not traumatized,

I cared about the guy,

Whatever we did,

I feel either neutral about,

Or honestly,

Maybe I kind of enjoyed,

So I don't feel anything bad about it at all.

Right,

This idea that,

You know,

He's automatically,

He was telling me this in the context of,

He had shared this with therapists before,

And the therapists were trying to convince him that he was traumatized.

In fact,

One of the arguments against what he said,

That someone might come up with,

Is like,

Oh,

You actually,

You know,

You have Stockholm Syndrome,

You know,

You're,

Something like that,

It's a coping mechanism,

But you actually were traumatized.

You know,

Who's to say what,

Right?

But I bring this,

You know,

Obviously this is a taboo example,

But I bring this up just to ask the question,

If the result of this act,

Whatever thing that this babysitter and kid did,

40 years later,

This man has grown up,

Everything seems fine in his life,

He's married,

He has kids,

And he doesn't feel anything bad about the experience,

Should that young man,

You know,

Should the man from his past be condemned?

It's just a question,

I don't know.

Some people might say,

Well yes,

You know,

No matter what,

You know,

The guy,

He doesn't know what he's talking about,

It's a thing that shouldn't happen,

You know,

Blah blah blah,

Of course.

There are people who,

Like the MAPS professor,

Who is pushing the minor attractive person's term,

Might argue the opposite.

It's like,

Oh,

Well it was consensual,

Blah blah blah,

Okay,

You know.

In both cases,

Whoever's arguing for an absolutely this way or the other way kind of has to fall back on an abstraction,

Kind of has to fall back on a general principle of like,

Okay,

It was consensual,

Therefore it's okay.

Or you know,

A minor can never really think for themselves and therefore it's not okay.

You kind of have to refer to something outside of the experience to determine how to judge the experience.

And this is kind of how our legal system works,

Right?

Our legal system,

You know,

It doesn't,

I mean,

On some degree it occurs on a case by case basis,

But you also have to refer to laws,

Right?

Our modern legal system has some elements of let's say King Solomon's court,

Where there's like one wise man that everyone trusts,

And when he says the baby shall be cut in half,

And whatever the result is,

Like,

Oh,

Wise King Solomon,

We all trust him,

Whatever he says goes.

We have a little bit of that in the modern court system,

But of course,

You know,

That is one,

Very inefficient,

And two,

Too subjective.

It puts too much power into one man's hands,

So that's not something,

That couldn't work in a large society such as a nation.

And of course we have trials,

So there is somewhat of a case by case basis of things,

But for the most part,

When making decisions,

There's always a reference to some abstraction,

Which is what we know as laws.

And our legal system is basically set up to be reactive.

Something happens,

And then a law has to be made.

Something new happens that's never happened before,

And a law has to be made.

In fact,

The way the American justice system works is that you typically refer to past cases.

When you're dealing with something that has happened before,

You basically refer to an old judge's decision,

Like,

This is what some other judge in some other court rules,

Or this is what a jury,

Or this is something that happened,

And that is evidence for what the law should be.

There's an abstraction.

Whereas if we talk about this example with my friend and his childhood babysitter,

I know it's maybe uncomfortable to think about for some,

But if we really examine it,

We can't,

In my opinion at least,

To really be ethical,

We can't just put it in a category of,

Okay,

This is bad because of this,

Or this is good because of this.

We kind of have to examine it in itself,

Right?

I ask the question not with any opinion of what should happen in a situation like that,

But it's just a question of recognizing that no matter which side or whatever you choose,

You are abstracting,

And abstraction leaves room for inaccuracy.

To bring this back to something that we can use practically in daily life,

And this is a basic social skill along the lines of my Switzerland technique of getting people on the same page,

When you're dealing with someone,

We're having a conflict with someone,

And this is a skill that I hope to employ well as a parent.

I've gotten better at this with women over time.

I wasn't good at it at the beginning,

Which is,

And this is just a skill with any person,

It doesn't matter what the context is,

Which is to separate actions from people.

If someone does something that you don't like,

It doesn't mean you blanket label them as bad or in a category,

Right?

Because that actually is an abstraction that is separate from reality,

And you know,

You condemning that person is not going to benefit anything in the future because it's going to reinforce shame,

Which we know reinforces the behavior.

Whereas if you can condemn the action,

But still love the person,

Or still care about the person,

That's actually the most effective thing.

Some of the best reconciliatory techniques that are done in various intentional communities that I'm aware of,

And it's actually seen in Shantaram,

My favorite novel,

Where there's basically a scene where a guy gets drunk,

Beats his wife,

He does something pretty terrible.

The guys in the village basically fuck him up for it,

Right?

They force him to drink and they beat the shit out of him,

Right?

Justice.

But that's not where it ends.

After all of that,

They basically bring him back into the community and let him know that he's still part of them,

And gives him an opportunity to make things right again,

Right?

And in the story,

It's obviously a fictional story based on a true story,

But that actually inspires him to become the best husband from then on.

Most immersive because he wasn't separated from the group.

And it's just an effective thing for yourself for your own practical,

Even selfish reasons.

If you can separate people's actions from abstracting them as one thing,

Putting them in a category of this,

This or whatever forever,

That's just an effective way to deal with people.

But now we're going to end.

We're going to come back to this question that I asked right in the beginning.

How do you know what you know is true?

How do you know what to believe?

We spoke about how we tend to defer to some entity that we trust is right,

Whether it's a person or an ideology or a reference group,

Our political party,

Our chosen news source.

We typically defer to something.

But there are errors.

There's an opportunity for error with that in two different directions,

Actually.

There's what I might call the extreme liberal viewpoints.

In extreme,

We can say this is kind of the postmodernist viewpoint of accepting everything equally and the postmodernist idea is that everything is a construct,

Therefore anything can be true.

This is basically living in the realm of total abstraction to the point of detaching from reality.

That obviously can lead to problems.

Detachment from reality being the big thing,

Which can lead to issues.

That's one extreme of error.

Another extreme of error is the opposite.

It's a total deabstraction.

This is what I might call the extreme conservative viewpoint of saying our viewpoint is absolutely the best,

No room for anything else.

And the extreme of this,

The foil to postmodernism would be,

Let's say,

Abrahamic religions.

Our God is the one true God.

All other gods are incorrect.

All other worldviews are incorrect.

I was actually speaking to a friend of mine who has some kids in high school.

They've gone to Catholic school,

Which has various positives,

But one thing he was saying that maybe wasn't the best was that the Catholic culture,

The Catholic school culture,

Doesn't really encourage diving into other worlds.

I forget exactly how he put it,

But really experiencing other cultures.

You learn about other cultures from afar,

But kind of stay where you are.

That's kind of like the core of conservative policy.

You don't leave your bounds because where you are,

Our land is the best.

Both of these,

Extreme abstraction and extreme deabstraction have their issues.

One leaves you groundless.

The other one,

You might be grounded,

But then you might not be accessing the best of everything.

There's something to experience everything versus not everything.

They're both important.

It reminds me of a Dr.

Seuss book,

Which I think also was written not about World War I,

But was written as a satire of World War II,

Or maybe just war in general.

I don't remember.

It's called The Butter Battle Book.

It's a book where these two nations are at war.

One nation butters their bread on the top of the toast,

And the other one butters the bread on the bottom of the toast.

I remember,

Because this is something they show kids,

When I was in kindergarten,

They showed it to our class.

Some kids in the class were like,

Why don't they just put them together and make a sandwich?

You actually need both styles of thinking to really have an efficient nervous system,

To really be effective and super sane.

You need the ability to branch out and come back together.

Actually,

As far as life strategy,

Winston Churchill's famous quote,

You probably heard this before,

If you're not a liberal,

When you're young,

You have no heart.

If you're not a conservative when you're old,

You have no head.

It's useful to be a liberal and branch out when you're young and to dial back in when you're old.

I mean,

That's maybe not exactly what he was going for.

That's how I'm using it now.

Actually,

This is one of the important dialogue pieces in my book,

Early in the book,

Where someone,

A guy I just happened to kind of randomly meet,

Tells me what he calls diamond theory,

Which is life is like a diamond.

You spend your youth branching out and then you reach some inflection point and then you focus back in on what you love.

We tend to do this.

In fact,

You can even see this on a government scale.

The Chinese Communist Party basically did this where they gave freedom,

Allowing their economy to grow and pseudo-capitalism,

And then you just took it all back.

They allowed for expansion and now they're taking back control.

It's an inefficient nervous system,

What I've been calling sheep or people with inefficient nervous systems that end up following one or the other extreme because they're not doing their own abstracting and de-abstracting.

They're deferring to someone else.

If that someone else is someone who also has semantic disturbances,

A dictator,

A political ideology,

A politicized news source,

Then they're taking on all the semantic disturbances of whomever they defer to versus an efficient nervous system that abstracts and de-abstracts as directly as possible as well as possible.

So I'll return to an idea that I briefly mentioned earlier,

Which is that we talk about insanity.

Insanity basically reverses the perception process where an insane person starts with a perception and then experiences it as real rather than experiencing something and then having the perception.

But also this is what a creative person does.

A creative person starts with an idea,

Starts with a perception,

And if they are effective,

They de-abstract it into some medium that other people can experience something close to it too.

A painting can make you feel things,

Perhaps feel the thing that the painter was feeling.

Same thing with music,

Same thing with poetry.

Outside of what we might call art,

This is what traditional mystics have done.

They delve into the realm of deep abstraction,

Of detachment from reality,

Of things that don't have an actual existence,

And then come back and make it real,

Either by creating art or by coming back from the mountain with a set of commandments.

They basically symbolize things in a way that we other people can understand and get some of that experience.

Whereas an insane person,

Say a schizophrenic,

An extremely insane person,

Does the same thing.

They go deep out into the world of abstraction,

But they don't come back.

They don't have the de-abstracted ability.

The creative process requires both.

I have experienced this as a writer.

Sometimes even when I get high and I think of podcast ideas,

I go really far out and I think of these things.

It's like,

Wow,

Wow.

I'm just blowing my own mind with the things that are happening,

But I can't seem to bring it back down to earth.

I've tried recording a few podcasts.

Last year I had some podcast ideas that I was so excited about,

But I could not put it into words that made sense.

I actually had to delete them because I was lacking in the de-abstracting ability.

This returning to reality is really critical.

One last little story.

I have an acquaintance friend that I used to speak to.

I coached him a little bit,

A long time ago.

He was a guy who was really challenged by his fears.

He had a fear of women.

He had a fear of progressing in career,

Even getting a job sometimes.

Lots of fear.

I met him at a workshop.

He had been seeking help and whatnot.

I lost touch with him for a few years.

Then one day I got a message from him.

We ended up chatting.

He was telling me that he was certain that men in suits were following him.

At first,

I laughed.

I thought he was joking,

But he's like,

No,

No,

This is serious.

He got upset that I laughed at it.

I was like,

Oh shit.

He actually believes this.

I don't know what his mental health background is.

I know he was smoking a lot of weed,

Which is known to cause schizophrenic incidences.

This is also what happened.

Also,

In my interpretation,

What he was saying was these men in suits,

As kind of like you fit out of the beautiful mind,

But these men in suits would always appear when he was about to do something that was in the direction of his goals.

Anytime he was about to talk to a girl he was attracted to,

Men in suits would show up and he would get scared and go away.

Or anytime he was about to go apply for a job,

Men in suits would show up.

To do anything that was good for him,

Go to the gym,

Men in suits would show up.

At first,

I was so shocked.

I did what you're definitely not supposed to do when you're speaking to someone who's dealing with this kind of delusion or even a hallucination.

I said,

Oh man,

You're crazy.

There are no men in suits.

It's not what you're supposed to say.

You're invalidating his reality and you're making yourself – he's going to see you as part of the people conspiring against him,

Right?

So the second time we spoke,

I tried to correct myself.

I don't know if this is the best way to deal with someone dealing with this kind of thing,

But this is what I did.

I think it was more useful.

Where I said,

Sorry for going crazy.

Men in suits are following you.

I validated his reality.

I said,

Dude,

You can't let these men in suits fuck up your life.

You got to show them who's boss.

You're stronger than – next time you're out in public and you see these men in suits about to interrupt what you're about to do,

You should go up to them and confront them.

Don't worry.

You're in public.

You're going to be safe.

They're not going to attack you.

But you should go up to one and say,

I know you've been following me.

Stop following me.

I'm going to do what I want,

Right?

I hadn't heard him say anything about it since.

I actually don't really know what happened since,

But I think and I hope,

I guess,

This is what happened is that because I went along with his reality and he was encouraged then to confront this fiction he created,

It probably took away the fiction.

I actually didn't want to ask him about it because I didn't want to egg him on into creating a new fiction.

But yeah,

Anyway,

Returning to sanity.

Last idea here,

I know this is a longer episode.

Bring us back to Korzybski on how to return to sanity.

So Korzybski had a lot of specific criticisms of language and the problems with language due to Aristotelian influence.

But there is a language that doesn't have any errors,

And that is mathematics.

You've probably heard from a school math teacher that math is the universal language.

Math is a language in that there are symbols that represent ideas,

Represent abstractions,

That have some sort of correspondence to the real world,

And it has to be of 100% accuracy.

There's nothing in math,

Nothing would persist in math if it was inaccurate.

Math has to model reality accurately,

Otherwise it would be useless.

It's not like French that even if there's some terms that don't correspond with reality,

It is of this other value to French or any spoken language.

You communicate with it,

There's poetry,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

But math,

You don't do that with math.

Math is just for modeling reality.

If the Pythagorean theorem didn't work all the time,

If it was subject to the feeling of the mathematician or the context or the culture or the weather,

It wouldn't be useful to carpenters,

It would be thrown out.

All the theorems in math make sense,

All the formulas are used because they're always true.

And they always refer to pure abstractions,

Like the formula for the circumference of a circle,

Pi times diameter.

All of those things don't correspond to anything real.

There is,

I mean,

The circle,

Not all the things,

I should say the circle specifically,

When you're calculating the circumference of a circle,

There is no such thing in reality as a pure circle.

Because on the paper,

In the calculations,

When it's in mathematics,

The circle has no thickness,

Right?

That does not exist in reality.

It's like when a carpenter,

Say,

Is measuring a circle,

Or measuring the circumference or calculating the circumference,

He has to decide,

You know,

It can't be like the circle of,

Let's say,

A wooden ring,

It has to be the inside edge or the outside edge,

Right?

It has to be something because the actual circle is a pure abstraction,

It does not exist in itself.

And because it's a pure abstraction,

People don't typically make abstraction errors that they do with verbal language,

As they do in math.

One thing in math that makes math effective is,

Let's say when you're doing a logical proof,

There are a set of givens,

Right?

That's usually how,

If you remember,

If you took logic in high school,

This is how it starts.

Another way to state givens,

They're basically working assumptions.

It's not that these things are necessarily absolutely true,

Because in math you're speaking about abstractions anyway,

It's that these are things that we're going to assume are true for the sake of the given problem,

For the sake of the given calculation.

Which brings us back to this idea of,

Like,

How do you know it's true,

How do you know it's a belief?

You know,

Most of the things that we know are not directly experienced.

You have to defer to some other entity and you don't know if that entity is true,

You can take on the super,

You take the postmodernist strategy of accepting everything and believing everything is a construct,

And total abstraction.

You could go the other direction of religious thinking,

Of total deabstraction,

What we believe is the absolute truth,

But somewhere in between,

Like,

How do you basically deal with reality when you don't actually know whether what you think you know is true?

And for this practical end,

This prescription I'll offer,

We're going to step away from Korzybski and go to,

Probably my favorite philosopher,

Or at least the author of my favorite philosophy book,

Finite Infinite Games,

Is James Carse,

Which is to the idea of finite infinite games that I actually mentioned a couple episodes ago,

I'm actually forgetting in what context now,

But we were speaking about worlds,

Escape of velocity,

That's what it was.

I'll repeat some ideas that I mentioned there.

The rules of chess are absolutely true only within the confines of the game of chess.

Once you're no longer playing a game of chess,

The idea that a bishop can only move diagonally is like,

No,

That's not necessarily true,

Like,

Watch me,

I'm moving the bishop zigzag,

We're not playing chess at that point,

But those rules,

That the chess piece,

The bishop can only move diagonally,

Is only true in that context,

In that world,

In that given reality where in the chess game we're agreeing to this reality for the time being of the chess game.

Same thing,

Is that the rules of the United States of America,

Or any nation,

Or the first world,

If you will,

Or the Western world,

They are true so long as you're choosing to participate in the finite game of America.

I'm not saying America is a finite game in that I think America is going to end any time soon,

It's something I'm actually afraid of,

It's a whole other thing.

Go Taiwan!

It's that the United States of America,

Which is an abstraction I like,

Just to be clear,

Is an abstraction.

The lines on the map,

Like what constitutes American soil,

It's an agreement.

Enough people agree that America exists,

Therefore it has a presence in actuality.

But if everyone,

If overnights,

The CCP comes up with some brainwashing device that makes everyone forget what America was,

America immediately ceases to exist,

Because it's an abstraction,

There's nothing actual making America exist.

So all the rules,

All the things that are,

All the laws,

Let's say,

Are only true so long as you're believing in the abstraction or interacting with the abstraction that is America.

That goes for every nation,

Every ideology,

Whatever.

So the rules,

Or the perceptions,

The beliefs of a certain ideology are true as long as you find it useful.

So I brought the idea of chess,

Is that this is the idea of self-veiling for finite infinite games,

Whereas when we enter certain games,

Or certain realities,

Certain worlds,

They're all the same thing in this context,

We are choosing to temporarily forget that there's something outside of the world.

Like you're subscribing to the pro-vaccine ideology,

For you to constantly going back and forth of what's true,

Maybe for you,

And I don't think this is not what I would agree with,

But maybe for you,

Maybe for someone,

It's actually,

It's too many calories burned,

It's too much mental insecurity to keep going back and forth of is the vaccine good or not,

Or should I get it or not,

Maybe it's actually in a sense rational for your survival and well-being to just be like,

Okay,

I'm just going to follow what CNN and the Democratic Party say.

And I'm trying to say this without judgment,

Because maybe this is the right thing for some people.

Same thing for the opposite,

Right?

Maybe someone subscribes to vaccines for the devil,

I only listen to Fox News and whatever,

That's also,

Maybe that's a choice.

But on some level,

You should be aware that this is a choice you're making,

And it's not that there's nothing outside of the reality,

It's that you're choosing to live in the reality.

Because there's a hyper conservative fallacy of believing that your world,

Your finite game,

Your ideology is it,

Right?

There's nothing outside of it,

Which of course is not true,

Right?

That leaves opportunity for basically finding out that's false,

Which means your model doesn't work.

But maybe as for as long as you're existing in a certain community or a certain bubble or a certain location,

You might as well treat that as a working assumption.

You might as well believe that whatever the dogma of this reference group is or whatever your chieftain,

Your metaphoric chieftain has said,

We're just going to assume that's true because that's the easiest way to get around in the world,

Right?

And I know a lot of people who got,

Anyway,

I know a lot of people who got vaccinated just so they could travel because whatever,

Yeah,

Fine,

Right?

There's other people who are a little more righteous like me,

It doesn't matter though.

These are all choices and I think as long as you're conscious of why you're making the choices and that you're moving on the abstraction line,

That's fine.

Because the hyper-liberal fallacy,

The hyper-conservative fallacy is believing that there's nothing outside of your worldview.

The hyper-liberal fallacy is believing that all worldviews should be equally entertained,

That they're all meaningless,

Everything's a construct,

They're all interchangeable,

Which on some level,

It might be the most zoomed out perspective,

In some way accurate,

It's kind of something I'm sharing in this.

However,

You can't live that way.

It's not useful to live that way because you're basically going through life engaged with no games.

You're not going to have any meaning in your life if you keep asserting to yourself that everything is meaningless.

The way to have meaning in your life is to choose what means something to you,

Right?

Or maybe some things just inherently mean something to you.

But you have to have that,

Otherwise you're just floating around.

That's basically what nihilism is,

Like pure apathy and indifference to everything,

Which does not lead to fulfillment.

An efficient nervous system,

Or what Kars might call an infinite player,

Willfully ascends and descends.

In Kars' terms,

It can descend down to finite play and ascend back up into higher finite play and what we might call infinite play,

The highest.

Another way to put it is they can descend down into a low,

Assuming a certain abstraction is true,

Taking on as a working assumption,

But on some level also recognizing that maybe that belief has to be discarded.

The belief itself is not objective truth.

It is a belief that you're taking on so that you don't have to constantly be thinking about every single thing,

Every moment.

Sometimes it's very useful to treat the tiger as all tigers.

Put all tigers in a category,

They're all dangerous,

We don't need to get to know each individual one.

But to do that with race is not so effective,

It's not so useful.

So it's recognizing what you're doing when.

That's basically it,

Efficiency of nervous system.

I know this was maybe a more heady topic,

Next episode will be less heady.

I'm going to give General Semantics a bit of a break.

We are going to come back to some of the ideas of this episode,

The last two episodes.

Maybe in a couple of weeks I'll do an episode really focused on the more active side of propaganda and brainwashing,

To learn the dark arts for the sake of protecting yourself as is Harry Potter,

Not so that you can all become cult leaders or anything like that.

But yeah,

I hope you enjoyed this later episode.

Maybe in two or three weeks we'll be on brainwashing.

Next episode will be on the stages of male psychology,

So it'll be kind of return more to masculinity,

Male psychology thing.

We're going to speak about intersexual dynamics and relationships in the next episode.

But it's kind of like the ongoing hero's journey because,

Just as a little preview,

I feel like a lot of what's caused men to be fucked up right now,

And actually this is kind of what I feel is the root of everyone who has some sort of mental issue,

Emotional issue,

Spiritual malady,

If you will,

Is misalignments with our physiological evolution.

My basic premise of next episode is that our psychological development is supposed to match our physiological developments,

But society has basically divorced physiology from psychology,

So people are messed up.

Anyway,

Maybe I'm giving away too much already.

Thank you for listening.

I hope it's been useful.

The History of Masculinity series will come out this year.

If you enjoyed this episode,

If you joined this podcast,

It would mean a lot to me if you rated it on whatever app you listen to.

If you know someone who enjoyed this episode,

Please share it.

Do I have anything else to plug?

No.

Enjoy your day.

Think efficiently.

I'll see you next time.