Philosopher George Santayana once remarked that, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In the Level to Power system, those who wish to lead the pack must first understand the long history of herd mentality and the mindset of those who control it.
On this episode of Level to Power, we’re joined by author and intellectual Jim Luisi. We discuss the history of human society, how mystical and empirical systems impact intellectual thought, and the way belief in gods and kings have encouraged herd mentality.
Episode Highlights:
- Tipping points between medieval thinking and empirical thought
- Oxford and Cambridge University: Impact of secular education
- Defining mysticism and empiricism
- Religion and intellectual thought
- Grammar, logic, and rhetoric
- Embracing the way of no way
- What’s next for human thought?
- Why religious organizations love Level One followers
- Herd mentality in Europe vs the West
- The middle class, capitalism, and corporations
Resources:
- Sensitive by Nature by Jim Luisi
- The Trivium by Sister Miriam Joseph
- Why the West Has Won by Victor Davis Hanson
Visit Level To Power for episode archives and transcripts
Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and post a review to empower the podcast
Quotes/Tweets:
“Every individual cannot help but be impacted by the society in which they live, and every society cannot help but be impacted by every individual”- Mark
“Mystics don’t abandon all intellect. They simply acknowledge that intellect has it’s limits”- Mark
“If one person makes a decision for the herd, without any debate, it’s not going to be the best or most informed decision”- Jim
TRANSCRIPT
| Mark Gleason: | Join me in welcoming today the author of Sensitive By Nature, Jim Luisi. Welcome to the program, Jim. Thank you for being here.
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| Jim Luisi: | Thank you, Mark. It’s a pleasure to be here.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, it’s always fun to have you on the podcast. We certainly covered a lot of interesting topics last time. We ran short on time and we had so many things to cover, I thought it would be nice if we could bring you back and cover some more topics.
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:01:00] |
One of the things that we had sequed into, briefly, last time was the fact that these strings of power are all around us. They affect cultural cycles, trends. Some of things that we wanted to discuss was things like the effect of the Roman Empire upon culture. One of the questions that I wanted to pose was, why did Western culture advance into, say, empirical thinking, where Eastern culture remained predominantly mid-evil or mystical? I think part of this discussion will have to be the definition of these terms. For the conversation, I think we’re trying to come up with a way for trying to identify what factors were contributing to the tipping point where society became predominantly empirical in their view of the world.
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[00:02:00] |
Another way of looking at that would be, say, when humans no longer interpreted events with superstition and mysticism, but instead understood that they could shape the physical world. That they could have things like horseless carriages, and ships powered by engines, and that men could fly, and men could go to the moon, and to be able to do things like harness the same reactions that power the sun. All of these things. As opposed to witchcraft and mysticism and all of these other interpretations that the mind tends to jump to. The human mind looks to explain things with whatever information it has, and makes up whatever fills in those gaps.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:03:00] |
One of the reasons I wanted to have a discussion on this in terms of the history of society and how we’ve gotten to where we are today is because we do not live in a vacuum. It’s very easy for us to say, “Well let’s talk about how we advanced in human society in the modern age.”, but we didn’t just all arrive here fully formed. We, as individuals, and every single person we interact with, all the institutions we’re forced to deal with, have a long history to them. Understanding where we come from will help us understand where we are and how best to get where we’re trying to go.
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| It’s fascinating to me that you can read Socrates, and Plato, and Aristotle, and exactly the things they were struggling with in terms of what is truth. How does one tell what is true and what is false? By what mechanisms can you use words and language to persuade people, either with logic and reason, or with rhetoric, or distraction, or emotion? This is all part of the fundamental human experience.
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[00:04:00] |
It is interesting that when we look at where we came from, and how different societies choose to evolve, and the effects that ends up having on the individual, because every individual cannot help but be impacted by the society in which they live. Every society cannot help but be impacted by every single individual. Growing up, for instance, as an individual in a Western culture will have significant impacts on the way one sees the world versus another culture. If we drop you off at the corner of Riyadh, you’ll have a very, very, different outlook on life than if we drop you off on the corner of –
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| Jim Luisi: | Wall Street.
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| Mark Gleason: | – Wall street. It is interesting –
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:05:00] |
I should also mention in there that when you point at that we are on this journey, the journey isn’t always moving forward. There are slides backwards. There are time periods when there are advancements, like there was great advancement during, say, the time of Aristotle, and the Greeks. Then that information was, at least to the West, lost for many hundreds of years. When Western Europe, or when the West fell, when the Roman Empire fell on the Western side, that time period, all the advancement that were made towards moving forwards in, basically, moving away from mysticism were lost because the church moved in and filled that vacuum of power after the Roman Empire had fallen.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:06:00] |
I just want to point out that advancement itself is a value judgement. There are people, from Western Civilization perspective, we certainly would say we’ve advanced in this way toward where we are today. Somebody, for instance, who holds mysticism to be a very high value, would say that, perhaps, we’ve advanced in other ways and we’ve backtracked in other ways. There are people, for instance, who say that naturalism, being one with nature, communing with nature, is the ideal. Where we used to be that way, the past 2,000 years have been getting away from that. Getting away from our oneness with nature and that were paying a very high price for it. It is important because this is the LevelToPower podcast where we are looking at it from all perspectives, not in some kind of PC way, but to understand that –
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:07:00] |
Also without a value judgment. I think we can look at these issues and say that mysticism versus, say, empirical thought are neither good nor bad. They’re different, for the purposes of our conversation. I think we use the terminology that advancement or moving forward from the perspective that, I think we can get everyone to agree, that we all came form a mysticism mindset, and that as time moves forward that there are pockets that go empirical in thought. That while they may slide backwards, then empiricism emerges yet again, strong. The trend, whether people like it or not, whether it’s good or bad, depending on people’s value systems, the trend is definitely toward empiricism.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:08:00] |
Right. I think it’s very, very, fair to say then. It’s very, very, fair to say that empiricism advances and declines. Certainly it rises and declines. Mysticism rises and declines in society, in prominence in society, in influence upon the mainstream ways in thinking, in a given society, and that is neither good nor bad universally, objectively. Once one takes a position toward a certain human goal, then one can make a value judgement on that. One can say that if I’m trying to achieve X in society, X is the good. Then all of a sudden empiricism is the most fantastic thing ever or the worst thing ever, or mysticism is either one of those things, because now I’ve taken a position. I think the way you’ve cast it is very, very, fair.
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| Jim Luisi: | Part of that embroiled in whether people believe technology is good because empiricism leads towards technology, more technology. If you have a value system that’s more like that of, say, the Amish, then technology is not this great thing, and not an advancement for you.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:09:00] |
I’m not sure if empiricism necessarily has to led to technology. It certainly can, and it does. Just because you take the scientific method, quote/unquote, the rational approach to knowledge, how do I know what I know? With all my confirmation bias and with all the mental tricks I play on myself to select only sources of information that I know agree with me, and everything else that human mind does, what is the system of knowledge I can use to know what is true from what is false? That is an epistemology and a way of approaching the universe. That does not necessarily need to lead to technology.
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[00:10:00] |
We could take that same approach as monks living in an abbey. As a matter of fact, there had been monks who’ve lived in abbeys, who’ve taken the empirical approach, and try to diagnose what is going on with the world around them. I agree though that the way the West has embraced empiricism has led to a lot of technology because tools are labor saving devices that … Well, they certainly lower the burden of work like any good tool does. You can say whether that’s good or bad, but certainly the technology …
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| Section 1 of 16 [00:00:00 – 00:10:04] | |
| Section 2 of 16 [00:10:00 – 00:20:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | Say whether that’s good or bad, but certainly the technology in the west has been the offspring. I was going to point out through that empiricism itself is not technology, we just happen to be using it to drive our technology.
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:11:00] |
That’s an excellent observation because when you look at the Roman empire they had really every reason to move forward in technology except for the fact that they had such a slave population that they did everything manually. They just got a larger population with hands and legs to do the work. It was only later one in the post Roman Empire era that you saw that especially in England. Where you saw that in order to get higher productivity, that it wasn’t a reasonable approach to hire or go and kidnap slaves. That mechanization and the industrial revolution ended up being the driver to be more productive. That in and of itself seemed to spur the growth of technology, to do things better and faster without having more people do it.
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| Mark Gleason: | Part of what you said is undoubtedly true, which is that slavery ended up holding back the investment in capital to make tools and technology. Why would you invest heavily in technology if you have this very, very cheap labor that can do things for you? Therefore your own society got held back from advancement because of this ultra cheap labor. There was no incentive to invest any resources or intellectual labor in solving that problem.
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Interestingly though, slavery was around since the dawn of mankind. People would invade their neighbors and force them to perform work.
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| Jim Luisi: | But also, slavery I think have a lot of misconceptions in that when you look at the Roman Empire, the overwhelming majority of slaves were Europeans. They came form northern Europe and western Europe. They were not from Africa. Slavery was really pervasive as an approach to getting the job done.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:13:00] |
On every continent, every people since the dawn of man they have owned slaves. The Chinese in the far east have had a huge slave population. The Ottoman empire used to invade Europe and take all the young Christian children and bring them back as slaves. The Roman Empire would just conquer the next country over and enslave the populations, and so on, and son on.
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| Jim Luisi: | The Egyptians did a great job of it and built great works of architecture based on a slave economy.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s right. It’s interesting though to point out, one country decided to end slavery for moral reasons, as a moral crusade. It happened to be fortunately the nation that was the current hegemonic empire at that time. It was Pax Britanica, and Britain ruled the seas for a variety of reasons. One group, one small group of people decide to end slavery worldwide to the extent that they are able to do so.
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They spend their own blood and treasure then outlawing slavery, seizing slave ships, and doing everything they can to stamp out the practice. Not only in their home country, but in their colonies and everywhere they have influence. I don’t think it was immediately evident to them that this would spurn an industrial revolution because they now needed to fill the gaps with all kinds of technology and innovations and inventions.
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| I don’t think that was obvious. They made a moral stand and said, “There is going to be a price to pay for this, but this is the right thing to do.” Only in the void that was left by this cheap labor were people incentivized to invest capital and intellectual labor in figuring out how to meet this need.
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If you look for instance in the American south, that’s a good example. In the American south if you told somebody, “Hey look, we don’t need slaves, we can still perform our agricultural tasks”, they would have told you you were crazy. Yet after slavery was outlawed, after the civil war, we fought a war to end slavery. A bloody war. After that war, within fifty years technology was invented which largely eliminated the need for slavery. It is funny that you can say that people were held back then in Roman era by the practice of slavery.
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| Jim Luisi: | The other thing that comes to mind is that I find it very interesting that the cause of people thinking that slavery is wrong didn’t emanate from the religious institutions. All those hundreds of years, the church was totally okay with slavery. They weren’t fighting it. It was only when you had the advent of empirical thought, that that seemed to start to drive that conversation and shift the mindset away from the whole concept of enslaving another human being to do labor.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:16:00] |
Well I’m going to push back a bit on that I think. We need to have a person of faith in the program with you so that they can debate you on this.
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| Jim Luisi: | Sounds like fun.
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| Mark Gleason: | The next Jehovah’s witness that comes through the door, we are throwing them a headset, and my money’s on them. The Bible as a religious document is a contradictory book a bit. I’ll have scholars who disagree with me and say, “No it’s simply transformed over time from the Old Testament to the New Testament. But if you would like to find biblical arguments for slavery, support for slavery, it is easy to do so.
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People have said that the Bible actually has more in support of slavery than against it. Because during the time of the Romans when the Bible was written, slavery was the common practice. The old testament talks about how if you have a slave, this is how you treat them. If they are a fellow Jew then you need to release them after a certain period of time during the year of Jubilee. It talks about the transactions of how you treat your slaves.
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| If this is a historical document written by people during that time, it’s completely understandable that that would be how they write their book. This is only a problem if you are trying to call this the greatest universal, moral document ever written. Now you have to explain why there is 10 commandments from God, and not one of them is don’t own slaves. All kinds of things about coveting your neighbor’s wife, nothing in there about whether you should own the slave.
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| From that standpoint, the Bible has an argument going that way. Now, it also has many passages that can be interpreted in the New Testament in particular against slavery. Many of the people in England and America who are leading the crusade against slavery were Christian religious leaders. I think it’s important to note that.
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| Jim Luisi: | Definitely.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:18:00] |
They were not necessarily empiricists. If you want to make the argument, and I’m not sure you are, that people of faith fell in a bit of a chaotic spectrum across the issue, and therefore essentially were having trouble making any forward progress, because you had people who were on every single side of this issue based on their interpretation of the bible, and that the critical force to tip this over the edge was the empiricists who came in as a critical kind of counterweight. They were able to move us in the critical direction we needed to go along with their Christian allies on their end of the spectrum. I think that’s probably a very fair statement.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes, and I would agree with that. I think we need to go back to that again. But I’d like to ask to move the topic forward a bit.
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| Mark Gleason: | That would be refreshing.
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:19:00]
[00:20:00] |
What would be, in your mind, the types of things that one would look for that would be indicative of a tipping point, where one is leaving mysticism, and now entering as the dominant force empirical thought. To me it’s that when you look at what society is willing to sanction, as long as society was willing to sanction say, trials for witchcraft, and hangings, and beheadings for witchcraft and things like that. Where men and women were killed for being accused of these phenomenon. In that time period, the tipping point would have to be at least after society no longer sanctioned that type of mystic thinking, which is actually fairly recently. To some extent, one can make the argument that even western civilization was still very heavily invested in mystical thought as recently as just a few hundred years ago.
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| Section 2 of 16 [00:10:00 – 00:20:04] | |
| Section 3 of 16 [00:20:00 – 00:30:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Jim Luisi:
[00:21:00] |
As recently as just a few hundred years ago. When you look at this type of behavior, say in the Middle East, you have this type of thought still prevailing. But it’s not like we are light-years ahead here. We’re only just a few hundred years ahead. For a long time we were many hundred of years behind. When we look at how after the fall of Rome and the Church takes over. Now, there’s only the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire is expanding into Europe. They’ve taken half of southern Spain. Then the Christians retake a town called Toledo, which has a massive Islamic library, which is where all the works of the Greeks were rediscovered to the west. Then things like Aristotle was reborn, re-founded.
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| Mark Gleason: | Was that in Spain?
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:22:00] |
That was in Spain. When that happened. Now you have all of this material. You have this amazing content in Greek. They actually had translated also in Arabic. You had all this great content. You had Arabic numerals. You had Alchemy. You had all of this great scientific thought, philosophical thought and logic that had been suppressed within the West. Now, since it was now out, the Church had to grapple with this. You have all these great ideas and they go smack up against the values that the church has, which is they want to continue this whole mysticism gig. They don’t want people to be starting to think in a non-secular way. What was also interesting at that same time period, because there was a recognition that there was an understanding of certain scientific principles, they understood what an eclipse was caused by. Movement of the moon in front of the sun blocked the light and created a temporary darkness on Earth, then moved out of the way and so on and so forth.
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[00:23:00]
[00:24:00] |
These astronomical bodies. All of these concepts had to be reconciled. They were looking to create an understanding, almost like a legal system [inaudible 00:22:55] to incorporate science and religion into legal thought. They started to create this first institution, this first secular institution which we know now as Oxford University. With the birth of Oxford, this was now the first time that men could get educated, who were not monks, who were not priests, who were not part of the clergy. They could learn all of these things that nobody else had available to them. Shortly after Oxford started there was some sort of a problem, the way that History reads there was some sort of a town rape, this woman was killed and the person who supposedly did it had escaped. But they took the roommates of that individual and in the wisdom they decided to hang them.
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[00:25:00] |
The professors of Oxford left for a period of five years and many of them created another University called Cambridge, where now you had more subjects, now you had logic, reasoning, philosophy, science, mathematics and not just this legal writing trying to navigate a path between science and religion for determining how things should be done. Cambridge became a super hot spot for people to go to. It became like a major economic center, primarily because people wanted to learn that knowledge. Now as this knowledge’s taken over or it’s like unleashed. This isn’t happened in the Middle East, it only happened in the West. When this happened, now you have a direct conflict with the Church.
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I think it was Thomas Aquinas that said that “Science is saying there are natural laws for animals, these natural laws are part of this Universe” When he was able to characterize it as well “If God isn’t in control of everything, that’s okay because God was the one who created the natural laws, since he created the natural laws, all of this stuff that we’re looking at, all of this create wisdom, it’s okay, you don’t have to go nuts and start killing people. You could let it go.” So they let it go for a little while longer. Oxford started in the 1090’s, Cambridge I think was only about a hundred years after that. Then, there was a person named Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon lived in the 1200’s. He was educated in Oxford, it was like a great scientific mind in England at that time. He had made phenomenal use of the information that was found in Toledo. Was able to add a lot of value to it and extend that thought process pretty extensively.
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[00:27:00] |
He discovered many interesting scientific properties and principles and got to the point where he finally had recognized that men is governed by the same principles. That was too much for the Church so they decided to imprison him. “We got to lock this guy up, he’s a problem.” This foothold that secular education established in Western civilization is really the beginning of where this whole story goes. At some point there’s a tipping point some people look at thing like Columbus as being the tipping point, they say. Columbus went to America, he was thinking like a mystic, he wasn’t an empirical thinker, but he at least had this notion that since …
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| Mark Gleason: | I [inaudible 00:27:49] he was an imperial thinker, not an empirical thinker.
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Jim Luisi: |
He was. When the road to China was closed, the road that Marco Polo took, was closed to China and he couldn’t go that way, he felt “Well, there’s another way, I can go the opposite way and get there” and he was sure that if he went west, he would land in China. He was partially right, there was something in between. If that wasn’t in-between he would’ve eventually made it to China. He discovered the Americas. This wonderment, this created an amazing stir. But, in and of itself, to me, that’s still not the tipping point. Columbus didn’t come back an empiricist, it still took quite some time before, if we go back to what is the measure, it still took quite sometime for society to not sanction things like which trials and beheadings for that.
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Mark Gleason: |
Society advances in a direction though one issue at a time. I’ve never heard anybody ever argue that Columbus was responsible for some movement toward empiricism. He may have been responsible for one downtick in thinking that the Earth was flat and there was dragons. He made the world a little bit smaller and a little bit more knowable by being able to find land across the ocean.
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| Jim Luisi: | A little less flat.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:30:00] |
A little less flat. But, certainly this is a battle of a thousand cuts, that’s one step on the road to a horizon that he’s taking, that he’s adding to the argument certainly, but I would never say that he pitched … Certainly there’s many other people I would point to that maybe had made the case for empiricism over mysticism. Do me a favor, let’s define mysticism and empiricism, because I think those terms are very very overloaded, but in particular mysticism, a very overloaded term. Could we …
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| Section 3 of 16 [00:20:00 – 00:30:04] | |
| Section 4 of 16 [00:30:00 – 00:40:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | Inner mysticism is a very overloaded term. Could you lay out for me how you would define mysticism and empiricism within the context of this conversation.
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:31:00] |
I think when you look at mysticism you’re looking at interpretations of what’s happening around you based upon things that you make up. Let’s say it’s not raining. All the crops are drying up, but you sacrifice this goat while you do a rain dance and a few numbers of days after that it rains. Now, you make the association that while you’ve sacrificed something to the rain gods or to some gods or to nature or whatever you want to call it and that you make that association and now you have this belief that this action can cause this other thing to occur. You can make it rain by doing these things. Now, if those same individuals had kept a record of all the times, all the days it didn’t rain, all the days it did rain, when they did the rain dance, when they sacrificed the goat and looked at it from a statistical perspective they would have seen that there’s really no correlation in what they believe and they would have seen that it was just a false waste of time.
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[00:33:00] |
In that sense, through that example, mysticism is really explaining something without anything that is measured scientifically, statistically. It’s not observing your environment carefully in a very rigorous way. It’s just making up stuff in stories, or legends, or whatever it may be that sounds good. Whereas empiricism is all about keeping records. A lot of empiricism had to do with the invention of accurate time keeping. When you look at how time was kept, if you have a sundial, that’s pretty loosey-goosey as a way to measure the time. You might get close to the hours. The first clocks, they would ring every hour. It wasn’t until some time before they had the accuracy of minutes, and seconds, and things like that. As soon as they had that now scientific observation was enhanced dramatically.
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[00:34:00] |
Now you can measure the amount of time it takes for a reaction to occur in seconds, in minutes. You can measure the time it takes for something to fall one distance to another distance in seconds and minutes. You had an ability to use mathematics to a much greater extent. All of the things that we think of as empiricism are things that are the result of keeping records, keeping a process, repeatable process, that can be used to determine what the relationship of one thing is to another thing. It’s more of a mathematical statistical record-keeping instead of just passing stories down through the generations as make rain by dancing, it’s more like, “We know after we’ve looked at it that you could do all the dancing you want, it’s not going to have any help on the rain.” You might as well start to look at how you can create a dam and do some irrigation here. There are other methods if people want to really solve problems.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:35:00] |
Okay, so if we look at the Webster, or at least the internet definition, of what mysticism is it says, “The belief that union with or absorption into a deity, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect maybe obtained through contemplation and self-surrender.” A mystical experience … What I’m doing is I’m going to go ahead and try to head off the torrent of emails we’re going to receive saying that the rain dancing, sacrificing for rain is a crude caricature of a mystical experience. I understand what you’re saying. I just want to make sure we clearly define for the audience what it is we’re actually talking about when we talk mysticism and empiricism.
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| Jim Luisi: | I picked on the rain dance mainly because I’m part American Indian. I have license.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:36:00] |
If somebody is a mystic versus an empiricist I think the line we’re trying to draw here is that there are ways of trying to gain knowledge and gain insight into the universe around us. People have different approaches to that. The mystic says that, “Your intellect can go so far in understanding the world around you, but at some point your intellect can go no further, and that you need to go beyond the natural world into the supernatural world, beyond the intellectual and connect with some other force or deity which will give you insights into the proper course of action or the proper way of being.
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:37:00] |
… into explaining nature. At the same time we do want to mention, and using the Indians as an example, when we look at Aztecs and Incas, their ability to measure precisely the seasons and things that happened in the sky, even though they were heavily imbued in mystical thought, they still had developed a great area of science and mathematics.
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| Mark Gleason: | Which is exactly the point. The point is that mystics don’t necessarily abandon all intellect.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:38:00] |
What mystics do is say that intellect has it’s limits. From that point forward you need to carry forward with something else besides intellect. The problem is, where is that line? If you’re wrong about that line and intellect really could have pushed further, that many times as an institution in human society you leave yourself without recourse. If we always do this because it’s always been done, and we don’t ask about soil conditions when we’re growing our crops, we simply always sacrifice a goat, and if it doesn’t rain we just go kill a witch, and this is the practice that’s been going on, and it’s forbidden to question this practice and to use your intellect to begin to examine this area then that begins to hold your society back.
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[00:39:00] |
Even if you value mysticism as an experience, you have to agree that some of these lines in some of these societies were pretty arbitrary between what was considered intellectual area and what was considered the realm of religion. Even in England, like you said, with Cambridge and Oxford, one of the places where empiricism was really taking root, and we’re not even talking too long ago. Great thinkers, great minds, well-regarded minds in France, and in England, very liberal places, small L, liberal, had to be very careful what they said when it came to the areas they would move into for their intellectual theorizing, because the church was very, very jealous of certain areas of thought. They said, “No, this is our realm and to cross over into this realm is sacrilege.”
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| If we’re going to define this then as [crosstalk 00:39:05]
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| Jim Luisi: | That characterization of drawing that line, and we see that line being drawn over and over again, because that line is moved, you see the secular, the scientific thinkers pushing on that line, and then the church has to relinquish and say, “Okay, we’re gonna draw a new line and the new line is here.” Every time you go to move that line usually somebody gets excommunicated, somebody gets hung, imprisoned. Something bad usually happens when you go to move that line.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:40:00] |
That’s true. Religious institutions tend to act as an anchor of social value. An anchor is fantastic if you’re trying not to be adrift. It’s horrible if you’re drowning. If lots of crazy ideas come along …
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| Section 5 of 16 [00:40:00 – 00:50:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Jim Luisi:
[00:41:00] |
If lot’s of crazy ideas come along down the pike, right? How did religions as a social institution survive and thrive like they did? It had to give you some kind of inoculation against a bunch of really wacky ideas that don’t work. The latest social fad which could cause and weaken your society and cause you to disintegrate comes along and gets beaten back by the forces of conservatism in the society that say, “Our traditional way of doing things are better.” Many, many, many, many times that it is absolutely true. Regardless of whether you’re doing it for religious reasons or a empirical reasons, what you’ve done up to this point has the virtue of having not killed you yet. This newfangled thing that’s coming along that all the teenagers want to try may indeed be the end of the world just like all the old fogies are saying it is. It may not, it may not be, but I’m sure there are many, many times where people were like, “Wow, let’s try this,” and it was that push back from the traditionalist which saved Society.
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| Mark Gleason: | Right. It almost as if the Middle East doesn’t let that line keep getting moved. They pretty much hold that line with more vigor than say the church has.
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:42:00] |
Well, I think it’s important to understand why. First my conversation on [missism 00:41:29] and empiricism that I want to comment on that, so just to complete the conversation though. Missicism then is a way of acknowledging the universe that we cannot know everything with our intellect, and then beyond the intellect we engage in some other way to know the universe. Empiricism says that maybe there’s a supernatural universe, maybe there’s not, but there is a science. Science literally being to know, a way of knowing that there’s a method that we can follow to understand how far our intellect can really be pushed. [Somebody 00:42:05] making claims based upon feelings is not a way that men can deal with other men. That you need to be able to have a system where somebody’s separated by 400 years in countries and languages can perform experiments, make claims, make counter claims, and as a joint pool move forward our knowledge base together. This is the scientific method, this is empiricism.
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[00:43:00] |
I think missicism and empiricism has a pretty good definition, a working definition that we can use for this conversation. In regards to your point about where that line is, sin as it was once explained to me, I think it was a very good explanation. If you imagine a straight line to God, a straight path, the perfect path that brings you to your definition of God. Any deviation from that be it by one degree, or five degrees, or 15 degrees off of that path straight to God, that derivation, that deviation is called sin. Sin is the gap between the ideal course of action, the Godly path you should be following, and the path you’re actually following. When you look at it from that perspective it makes complete and total sense that Christianity in medieval times, and Islam for most of its history, and many other religions. When some new thing comes up, alcohol, should we drink alcohol? Well, is this going to bring us closer on the [Godly 00:43:42] path or lead to deviation to Godly path?
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[00:44:00] |
If the answer is deviations, it is illegal, or it is outlawed by God. Why would we ever do something if we’re going to admit the claim that we’re trying to know God. That we’re going to make the claim that we think this is our holy book that will let us know God. Then why would we ever allow ourselves to do anything which is going to lead us to stray from that? It’s a matter of being in integrity with what your previous claims were. Even the Amish they don’t have zippers. I don’t think they have mirrors. The idea being why are you wasting time on vanity? Vanity is taking you off this path of truly knowing God. If you’re asking … Well, if we ask the question then why is Islam currently and since for a lot of its history, been very, very locked in on discarding anything which could distract from this path that they believe to know God? It’s an interesting one, I personally think that it has a lot to do with Jared Diamond’s argument in regards to geography, and competition amongst societies.
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| [00:45:00]
[00:46:00] |
That when you have a society which is relatively stable, or relatively easy to conquer but one force, then you’re much faster to reach a balance, a regional balance in the area, stability and therefore the ruling classes don’t want anything that’s going to shake up the social order. When you’re on top of the social order you don’t want to shake things up. In places like Europe that geographically are very, very difficult to conquer, nobody has ever conquered all of Europe, even the Romans were not able to conquer all of Europe. There’s too many rivers, too many mountains, too many English channels. There’s just too many competing actors all in that region that are always pushing and pulling, and pushing and pulling. Every time a leader said, “This is against the word of God, I’m not going to allow this.” Somebody next door with an army was trying that, because they were not on top of that social order, local social order and they were trying to upset it. When somebody said, “Crossbows are an evil invention, we’re not going to have them because it lets peasants kill knights,” somebody else was arming their peasants with crossbows.
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[00:47:00] |
You had this cauldron of social pressure in Europe that you did not have in other places. In China, all of China has been conquered many times in its history. The caliphate spread over huge amounts of the Muslim world … was the Muslim world. When you say … or you say, “Well, why has Islam been so strict?” I think Christianity was forced along by inter-tribal competition in England brought about by the split and sects of Christianity. Which is also a very, very geographic regional phenomena because you have Rome way down there in Italy trying to tell Henry the eighth, way up there in England, what he can or can’t do. Rome’s ability to influence that diminished over time.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:48:00] |
All right, just the fact that Henry the eighth was able to declare himself the head of the church of England is a major step away from the rule of Christianity of the pope. The pope … If, and I think you would mention just the other day, that if this had happened in a different place, say other than England, where the pope could’ve gotten troops to that person, that that would have been undone very quickly. Because England was protected, it was further away, it was much more defend-able, that now you had an ability to do things that the pope’s armies can’t do anything about. He can excommunicate you, so he excommunicated Henry, and once that’s done it sort of like doesn’t matter to England anymore because England now has its own church. It’s fascinating though how all these little splinters got … these fractures occurred in Western civilization. To separate the church from the secular way of thinking, from empiricism. You don’t see those events, you don’t see that series of events occurring in the Middle East where-
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| Jim Luisi: | Well, you had a huge schism in the Middle East as well, right?
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:49:00] |
Yeah, you have to be fair [with 00:48:48] true, so you have all of these different sects of Islam and they battle each other there as well. I don’t think there’s ever been a case where somebody has said … because they only have the concept of this is one caliph. There’s one head of the church, just like the West, but they enforced it, I guess, without exception. England created that, Henry the eighth created that exception. Not necessarily for altruistic reasons, or for empiricism or anything like that, his reasoning was just because he wanted to marry somebody else. It was very basis for as far as the motivation behind it.
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:50:00] |
Right, but the weakening of the religious institution in Europe, and in particular England definitely created an environment where intellectuals could begin to push that line now between intellectual empiricism and missicism. Push back on that …
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| Section 5 of 16 [00:40:00 – 00:50:04] | |
| Section 6 of 16 [00:50:00 – 01:00:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | Empiricism and mysticism, and push back on that line easier than some other places, where even if there was conflict in the Muslim world, in those societies, it was not weak enough to allow some of the intellectuals there to question some of the basic tenets of their religious faith. It’s interesting thought that one of the reasons for that is that in England, you had Protestants and Catholics both. Therefore when they were coming up with new laws and a new way of doing government, it had to be a bit more secular. It was still based on the Christian faith, but it had to be more secular because they were trying to prevent a religious war.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right, you didn’t want to offend the other party.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s right. They had to make it a bit more secular.
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| Jim Luisi: | They had to be politically correct, is this what you are telling me?
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| [00:51:00]
Mark Gleason: |
That’s right. That created a little bit of breathing room for intellectuals like Isaac Newton to put out thought. More so than his contemporaries in France which was right across the English channel. But because England was in this special state of not only a weakened church by the way but a weakened king. The kingship in England began to decline in power as some of the other powers behind the throne gained in strength. At some point they actually installed William Prince of Orange in the bloodless revolution. They just took him and they installed their own king because he was Dutch.
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[00:52:00] |
He just had to be next in line for the throne because of the weird way that royals marry. But they weren’t taking a Dutchman and putting them in charge of England. They made sure all the power remained with the lords, and eventually the lords and the house of commons when they set up a parliamentary system. Remember, the Magna Carta happened in England. This was the first time a king was forced to acknowledge that there were certain obligations that a kingdom had to it’s subjects. They did that with the treat of all the barons and dukes teaming up against the king.
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| It’s interesting, because England is so hard to conquer, deals had to be struck. The problem with, let’s say, China, is that many people have conquered all of China from top to bottom. The barriers around China are high enough where they don’t make too much of a difference, at least back then. Meaning it’s very, very hard to get an army either way across a mountain, so you don’t have to worry about it.
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[00:53:00] |
The problem with that is if you have a very enlightened emperor, then there is huge advantages because you have great decisions being made. But every wrong decision that he or she makes, as Empress, is necessarily cast in stone as well. Over time, you are not kind of getting this improvement happening. You have this hardening of the social structure because there is no reason to upset the social order. Whereas in England it’s hard to conquer all of it, the Vikings can invade whenever they want to from the north, Whales and Scotts are always acting up, those troublesome Scotts. Don’t even get me started on the Irish. Deals have to be struck.
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| Then you have the French across the channel who fortunately are far enough away that it’s really hard to launch an amphibious invasion but close enough where they are always a threat. Alliances need to be made, compromises need to be struck, and you have this little cauldron of compromise that ends up being secular enough to allow the empiricists to kind of rise to the fore a bit more than other places.
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[00:54:00] |
We start having this cascade of ideas that play off of each other once this happens. Where after Newton a series of inventions and breakthroughs happen and England just breaks out and is way ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to technological innovation.
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| Jim Luisi:
[00:55:00] |
What I like is that if you zoom out conceptually, you zoom out from looking at just England. You look at the whole planet, and you realize that this conflict or this journey, you can realize characterize it more as a journey. This journey away from mysticism is still somewhere in the middle in that journey. That when you look at the numbers of the population of the planet that are still extremely governed by mysticism. That we have the luxury of being in probably the most empirical segment of the planet. We are able to express our ideas having been brought up in this environment. Even in this day and age if we just move ourselves 10,000 miles somewhere else we would find ourselves in a heck of a lot of trouble in trying to have this same conversation.
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| Mark Gleason:
[00:56:00] |
Well even if we move to another place in our own country which was steeped in mysticism in a town. We stood up in the town hall and said something about something, made a empiricist argument, we would find a lot of resistance to those ideas. We are still debating topics as a nation that revolve around where the line is between empiricism and mysticism. How far can the intellect push us? You have people that believe the Bible is the inherent word of God. By survey, it’s the majority of Americans who believe that the Bible is the word of God.
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[00:57:00] |
People of other faiths believe the same thing about their faith. We have debates still around what should be taught in schools, what lessons do you need to be taught in schools. Should it only be from the empiricist tradition? That which can be proven via science, via the scientific method. Or can we allow for revelation? Can we allow for mystical experience to guide us and show us other truths? Can we teach those alongside the empirical breakthroughs and the empirical insights? Some people I think have a very accommodating view on this.
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| I know someone who is a teacher at a Catholic school, who says Catholic schools in America are private schools. Many people send their kids to the local Catholic school even though their kids aren’t Catholic and they don’t intend for them to be Catholic. But, in many locations, the only option for private school is the local Catholic school. I was speaking with a friend of mine who was a teacher at the Catholic school and he was saying that they are very, very careful to make sure they keep science class only for traditional empirical knowledge. That is what is taught there.
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| [00:58:00] | There is a mandatory religion class and philosophy class where they talk about religion and mysticism and the ways of knowing God. What the bible tells you about the universe and what that means, and how you know that to be true from that perspective. But they draw a very, very clear line between the empirical knowledge … It’s almost like, what is to Caesar is for Caesar, and what is to God for God, like Jesus said, to paraphrase Jesus. That seems to be a very reasonable and accommodating way to do that.
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[00:59:00] |
The issue is we also have a public school system which everybody is obliged to pay for regardless of whether you send your children there or not, or wish to. There is a national, “standard” for what needs to be taught. Religious people say, “Well I see your empiricism here, I see where you are drawing the line for empiricism, but I am not represented. I do not feel like my views, my mystical insights that I’m gaining via revelation, via my belief in the inherent word of the bible is being properly represented. By the way, you are by force taking my tax dollars to do this whole institution. Therefore if you are taking 70% of the country’s tax dollars, all of whom believe in the inherent word of the Bible, how can you then not put forward the Bible in the way they want?” That’s where the line is, or the debate is at least.
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:00:00] |
Well I think the battle has to be for any group that has an interest in getting their mindset to prevail, they have to have control over the educational system. To some extent, it’s sort of like … The way I look at it, it’s better if you allow all of these different things to be in the school, as long as you provide some sort of a context for it all.
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| Section 6 of 16 [00:50:00 – 01:00:04] | |
| Section 7 of 16 [01:00:00 – 01:10:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Speaker 1: | Provide some sort of a context for it all. If you have like the work that you’re doing where you try to identify the elements of logical thinking, rational thought, and when we look at our understanding of paradigms and how these are tools, if that is taught as well, putting all of these other things in context, that’s fine. If it’s not put in context and it’s more of an indoctrination of one of these things or one of these other things, that is a problem.
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| Speaker 2:
[01:01:00] |
That’s absolutely true. The way you cast that is very, very fair. It’s funny to note, or it’s interesting to note that religion is the one that preserved the trivium for 2,000 years. The trivium is the classical education everybody used to receive which was logic, rhetoric, and grammar. Grammar, which is the law of identification. How do you know what things are? Logic is how do those things relate to each other. Rhetoric is how you find meaning in the insights you’ve gained through logic. How can you find it and express it in a way other people will understand.
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[01:02:00] |
This is the classic Aristotelian principles of knowing the universe. How do you know the universe around you? How do you identify what is true, what is false? Religion was the primary driver of the teaching of the trivium for a long time. A higher level education was considered the quadrivium, which is mathematics and astronomy and a few others. Even today the book that I read on the trivium for my first logic book I ever read was written by a nun about 80 years ago. It’s the famous book called The Trivium Education or something along those lines. It’s written by a nun. Because this is considered a foundation for a religious education is grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
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| These are highly empirical tools. This is the same thing you would teach anybody who is going to be an empiricist. Even today if you look for the trivium most of the courses you find online are from religious organizations who are trying to teach you how to think for yourself. Ironically things have come full circle now. It used to be that the empiricists were trying to say that people were just blindly accepting the status quo. They needed to learn logic and grammar and reasoning to a identify what is true from just the flow of religious dogma that was moving through society.
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| [01:03:00] | Now that we live in a highly secular society the religious people are saying to their own followers you and your children are just going with the flow. You’re not even appreciating what it is that you’re accepting as true. You just accept whatever society says. You need a mechanism by which to understand what is good in a secular world and what is not. The way you’re going to do that is by embracing logic and reasoning and rhetoric.
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| It’s funny, they consistently taught it but we’ve come full circle now where it’s self defense almost. The religious side is forced to really, really embrace these concepts to help them and their followers decide what is true and what is false.
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[01:04:00] |
Here at the apex level, the power of framework, we agree it is very, very important to embrace grammar, logic, and rhetoric. We have some courses on it in our members area. Knowing what is true, so metaphysics is the nature of the universe that we’re trying to understand. Epistemology is our mechanism or our method for understanding the universe. The empiricist will say that your mechanism to knowing the universe around you is your intellect, your logic, your reasoning to be able to piece together what’s around you in some kind of scientific method to be able to start to learn what is true from what is false. It has to be the measure that you use as you slowly cobble together a view of what reality is.
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| The mystic’s going to say, “Add to that” then your mystical insights. Anything you find out with your intellect is true except where it contradicts what your mystical insights have given you.
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| [01:05:00]
Speaker 1: |
I love the concept that you highlighted in there. When you look at the collision of 2 paradigms. It could be empiricism colliding with mysticism or mysticism colliding with empiricism or mysticism colliding with mysticism of a different flavor. They’re always faced with the same issues in that in order to break somebody out of their paradigm you have to take them at least through some sort of a light brainwashing process. You have to get them to look at how they themselves think. Unfortunately they’re all too quick to then try to fill that void with some sort of doctrine.
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[01:06:00] |
I think if we look at the whole process of looking at and understanding and inspecting how we ourselves think and how others think and continue to drive that deeper and deeper and not try to fill it with a doctrine but to understand that any doctrine can be used to fill these voids, but why don’t we look at it and choose for ourselves are there two selective doctrine or to select no doctrine. People have that choice.
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| Speaker 2: | It’s like Bruce Lee saying that once you choose martial arts style you can be defeated. You need to embrace the way of no way. You need to do whatever works in that moment which is best for that moment. Once you choose a set style you have lost. You’re fixed now in place. You can be defeated. I think there’s something to that.
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| Speaker 1: | It’s the wisdom for all life.
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| Speaker 2:
[01:07:00] |
Let’s say that doctrine is a set of claims made by a group. As long as you are retaining your intellectual skepticism and do critical analysis on all claims that come from anybody then you’ll be fine.
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| Speaker 1: | Right. Don’t give control of your thinking to another individual, another group of individuals or anything like that. You should always remain in control of your own process.
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| Speaker 2:
[01:08:00] |
The problem is that people are cognitive misers. A cognitive miser is somebody who defaults to not thinking on certain issues. We all do it. We all take a shortcut particularly when it’s an area we don’t seem to really care too much about. We all have different areas where that’s true. I care very much about these topics, and you may as well. You have an Olympic athlete and you bring up the philosophy in a way of living and they just shake their head and say, “Look, I just need to go out and run or swim. I can’t take the time to learn this stuff. I’m just going to blindly accept whatever it is my parents taught me because you know what? It seems to work for them.” That then would become the blind acceptance of doctrine.
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[01:09:00] |
Taking what your parents have taught you, and it seemed to have worked for them in society, is probably better then just taking some random doctrine and accepting that. There is a logic to taking the known versus the unknown. The problem is when you experience challenges in life, when you can’t get promoted, you can’t find a mate of a woman or man that you love, you can’t make friends, you can’t achieve your career goals, and you’re being constantly stymied by this and you don’t know why, any of these unexamined doctrines you’ve accepted in your life from all the different sources you’ve accepted them from, become suspect. They become a potential part of the reasons you’re failing. The very first time you have a real major failure in life and you’re wondering how do I advance, you have a big task in front of you the very first time that happens.
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| You have 1,000 unaccepted claims that you just went, “Okay, that’s true. Okay, that’s true too. That kind of conflicts but you know what? That’s probably true too.” You know how to go and examine each one and figure out which one of these in my programming, my accepted claims, are causing this programming fault, this programming error to occur. Let’s say I have a short temper and somebody says something to me and I just fly off the handle. I’ve done it 5 times now. I’ve just yelled at one of my subordinates. My manager pulls me in the office and says, “Look, this is the last time. You’re getting written up and you’re going to get fired if this happens again.”
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[01:10:00] |
I go back to therapy and they say, “Why do you do this when this situation occurs and you fly off the handle, why is that?” If I had this bunch of unresolved conflicts in my life of claims I’ve accepted that are all in conflict with each other …
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| Section 7 of 16 [01:00:00 – 01:10:04] | |
| Section 8 of 16 [01:10:00 – 01:20:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | … Life of claims have accepted that are all in conflict with each other. That is a complicated problem to unwind versus engaging in critical analysis my entire life and building a worldview. Look, my worldview may not be perfect but at least we’ll be able to probably nail down to the first session some of my major hangups and what’s causing my issues. When somebody lays out their doctrine, I’m just pointing out that critical analysis is necessary.
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:11:00] |
To go back to our theme, if we were to project what’s going to happen next across human society. I think we’re going to continue seeing conflict from these religious institutions because in the end all of these are ways to project influence and power. They are power for the people who are the heads of these organization and, of course, they are going to act in a way to protect their influence and their power.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:12:00] |
That’s an important point to understand. I think everybody does understand but they seem to forget it sometimes that even if the mystical belief is true, even if the Catholic Church is 100% correct in their belief system, or the Protestant Church, or Islam, or any of the other mystical religion. The institution itself is made up of people, made up of men and women who are fallible and error-prone. Who seek to expand their control, seek to expand their power, seek to expand their influence, sometimes at any cost and sometimes, and many times, not for the reasons that their doctrines would have you believe. It’s also important to remember that when it comes to personal empowerment these organizations, not just religious ones, almost every organization benefits from you residing at level one. As somebody who blindly accepts sees the one point of view which is theirs, and follows that line of thinking. Very, very few organizations benefit from somebody who engages in critical analysis and challenges that organization constantly on what their viewpoints are, so when you’re seeking personal empowerment in life …
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| Jim Luisi: | The only one I know of is Apex to Power.
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| Mark Gleason: | The Apex Nation, we take a special, sick pleasure, in only finding people who constantly challenge us which is why it is only my masochism that brings you back again and again to the podcast.
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| Jim Luisi: | I count on it.
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| [01:13:00]
Mark Gleason: |
Like a masochistic narcissist you only hurt the ones you love. It’s important that their interests are not necessarily aligned with yours when it comes to personal empowerment. They want you to be happy in life, they want you to find a family, they want you to do well in your career. Any organization, whether it’s to your community organizer, whether it’s your religious institution, whether it’s your local club, they all want you to do well. However …
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| Jim Luisi: | They want you to blindly follow.
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| Mark Gleason: | When they send out a message to the herd, they want that message to be transmitted as is far and wide. “Hey, we’re marching on Washington next week, everybody show up.” They want every member to take that message, turn around and transmit it.
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| Jim Luisi: | If someone interferes with that message and is part of, ostensibly part of that herd, they are going to be removed from that herd very quickly.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:14:00] |
An empowered individual is almost necessarily going to at least weaken that message by questioning the message, at least to understand what is it we are doing and why are we doing it and why is that good for all the individuals and not just for the leadership? The misalignment between the good of the leadership versus the good of the group is always going to be foremost in an empowered person’s mind. That weakens the message then, when someone says, “Well, why are we going next week? What good is this going to do? Is this going to help you or is this going to help us?” They want to keep people in line regardless of the institution. This is very important, so therefore their interests align with yours in many many ways but your self-empowerment is not one of those ways.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:15:00] |
That’s a very very difficult thing for people to understand. They trust their community organizer, they trust their religious leader, they trust their nation but certain things, the herd is counting on you to stampede when and if required. Sometimes for very good reason, so for instance, let’s say you have a community of, let’s say you actually have a hundred Martians. All living in a town together and there’s an outside threat that threatens Martians, every single one of those Martians is going to rally together and fight it off. Then you have somebody from Venus and they move into this Martian town, well, their interests are not exactly aligned with the Martians and therefore if something happens and all those Martians rally, they don’t know whether that Venus person’s going to rally as well or not because their interests are not quite aligned.
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[01:16:00] |
This can be a weakening of the herd stampede which is why humanity has evolved to be very very xenophobic and very very suspicious of new people who come into the group because everybody understands intuitively that we all have to at certain times rally together. We know that we’re going to rally under certain conditions but we’re not so certain about you and we’re looking for social signals from you that indicate yeah, yeah you’re going to rally with us, right? Anyway, but the dichotomy between what’s good for the group is not necessarily good for the individual is important for people to understand because of course, this show is about personal empowerment.
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:17:00] |
Right, it makes you think also about the city states in along the Mediterranean that were able to fight off massive troops that outnumbered them because they had the ability to argue. They didn’t act like a herd, they debated what the best course of action would be, and actually had a process where they could figure out the best strategy. As opposed to say, somebody who ruled them all who could make them act like a herd, that would get them to do all one thing. It could be the right thing, the best thing, or something really sub-optimal and very likely it’s not going to be the best thing because if one person makes that decision without having the input of all that debate, odds are that it’s not going to be an informed decision.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:18:00] |
Excellent point, and tactically, a group of level ones, a group of people who have accepted your position and don’t question it, it’s the only way they see the world, they can’t even question it because the only way they are looking at the world is the world that you’ve painted for them. A group of level ones can be very powerful in the short run, tactically. You’re converting a bunch of people to a religion and saying, “Let’s go take over our neighbors,” and they’re all true believers, is a very very powerful force. Right, and look at history and you’ll see that’s true. Interestingly, though, there’s a book by Victor Davis Hanson called Why the West Has Won. It’s about this conflict between Western civilization and the rest of the world basically and why Western civilization has come to dominate over a long period of time.
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[01:19:00] |
Many people have many different thoughts on this, his view is that time and time and time again when it looked like the West was going to fall, because like you said, there was these squabbling, independent-minded people, who couldn’t unite, they were always fighting each other, and always arguing, and always bickering, almost like a family. A huge outside force would come to oppose them, you know, the Persians invading Greece twice with this immense army of slaves, mostly, and the squabbling semi-free Greek states who couldn’t go more than a season without warring with each other, banded together, argued about how they were going to band together, argued about how they are going to defend themselves, argued about basically everything. When push came to shove they fought the Persians and won, and won big again, and again, and again on land and on sea.
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[01:20:00] |
The same thing happened when the Ottoman empire tried to invade Europe, again and again, the squabbling band of Western civilization tribes somehow managed to pull it off. In World War II the same thing, you had these large dictatorship, totalitarian regimes with these huge machine armies that seem like, by machine I mean people who blindly follow orders, and it seemed like this kind of rabble of Western civilization would lose. Meaning Japan looked at America and said, “Look they’re disorganized, we have an emperor who tells us what to do. How can that possibly lose to a weak democratic system where everybody argues with each other and you can’t get any will or spirit behind any particular action?” Certainly tactically …
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| Section 8 of 16 [01:10:00 – 01:20:04] | |
| Section 9 of 16 [01:20:00 – 01:30:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | Any particular action. Certainly tactically that’s true. It does take time to motivate people who are all squabbling and you have to convince people to your side. The advantage to that those is and this is what Victor Davis Hanson I think documents quite well. Is that the solutions that you arrive at, when you are constantly being challenged by everybody, by your allies as well as your enemies. The solutions are so much better than a top down approach where an emperor simply and like we said before, every decision he makes is the right one is throughout his empire. Every decision he makes which is a wrong one, is also throughout his empire.
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|
[01:21:00] |
Any decision that he makes is cataclysmic if it’s a mistake. You have this remarkable battle that occurred in the Mediterranean. The [Ottoman 01:20:55] Empire launches this massive fleet, and they’re going to take out Genoa and Venice and all the Italian city states. Basically coming after [Christentum 01:21:07]. The Pope is in a panic. They raise enough money for a fleet from all different nations who all donate money and ships. It’s a squabbling fleet because they’re all from different countries, and they all hate each other. They all have different ships. They all have different … Things are trying on their ships.
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|
[01:22:00] |
Some people have these iron rams in the front of their ships, some people have something else. They’re all squabbling with each other, and they have this massive battle in the Mediterranean, and once again some how some way the squabbling band ends up defeating a larger and on paper superior force from a dictatorship. The interesting thing is they end up capturing the flag ship of the admiral of the [Ottoman 01:21:51] side. It turns out that he traveled with all of his wealth and gold with him on the ship. He was the callous brother, or cousin, or brother in law or something. Very, very high up and connected in this power structure.
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| Because of the structure of that society, which is a dictatorship, and anything can be seized at any moment and you know if you leave the first thing that’s going to happen is the tax man is going to come to seize all your wealth on behalf of the emperor. There society was such where even the emperor’s brother in law or not the emperor but the [Califf 01:22:30] could not leave his wealth at home. He had to bring it with him to the battle because a top down dictatorship approach like they were working under, he couldn’t trust in the system that his wealth would be looked after while he was gone fighting for the country.
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|
[01:23:00] |
If you counter that with some of the ideas of rights that were starting to spring up, at the time the GDP of like two or three of those small Italian city states, was larger than the entire [Ottoman 01:23:05] Empire. Think about that for a second right? Three small city states in Italy which are the centers of trade, having a larger GDP than the entire [Ottoman 01:23:20] Empire which spans huge amounts millions of square miles, has millions of people, vast amounts of raw material and resources, and the GDP of these small Italian city states is higher than that.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:24:00] |
It’s almost a corollary for the Cold War. Where the Soviet Union had more population, had more natural resources, had more territory, was a top town dictatorship. They had everything that you think that you should want, if your [inaudible 01:23:50] are going to work. They even had some of the richest farmland in the world. In the Ukraine. The bread basket of Europe. They were unable to feed their population for many of those years during the Cold War because the system could not function. Whereas the United States which has less people, less natural resources, had a GDP which was off the charts. They produced so much food, that they had surpluses. They were just giving it away. The United States was giving it away.
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| In a rare moment of comedy, the United States offered their moral enemy the surplus wheat to feed their population. In an even more insane turnabout, the Soviet Union turned it down. I’m not sure which is crazier. Offering your moral enemy food to feed his people so he doesn’t collapse, or your moral enemy turning it down.
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:25:00] |
Right. I think one of the big advantage that the west had in those city state battles and their economic power, was because there was the emergence of a valid banking system. With that, now you had the ability to handle transactions so you didn’t have to carry your baskets of gold with you everywhere you went. At a minimum, the ships would slow down if your the Persians.
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| Mark Gleason: | Why? I think your absolutely correct. What you just said. Why did banking arise in Europe? Why did complicated banking arise in Europe versus the [Ottoman 01:25:30] Empire?
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:26:00] |
For me to take a guess at that because I would just be guessing, I would say it’s because the need for it was more apparent. You had free people, you had entrepreneurial people who were looking to have many ways of doing business. They had a bit busy trade business, and in trade you have product being moved, and you have payment system for that product, and as you do more and more volume if you don’t have a very rigorous process and a systematic way of dealing with that, you just can’t deal with that type of volume. It has to be done with ledgers and things like that to have a really large business.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:27:00] |
I’ve read some books on this. I read some books on the banking system and how it originated in Europe. I think one important component of it is you have this interesting balance of power in Europe. Where everybody hates each other for nationalistic reasons, but there’s this uneasy piece because the Pope has basically said you guys … Catholics don’t kill Catholics first of all, second of all, when the islands are invading Christians don’t kill Christians. You have these weird pockets that develop where for instance Portugal becomes a world power. Even though you think it should be wiped off the map by Spain. Right?
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| I mean it’s a very, very small country Portugal. How can the Netherlands and Portugal become world powers with navies, when they have an extraordinarily small amounts of land. It’s because the Pope said this part belongs to Portugal, this part belongs to Spain. They were dividing the world. England said okay well this parts the Dutch, and this parts the English and were not going to mess with this world order. We have agreements and treaties. Complicated treaties that will start carving up things so that you can trade here, we can trade here and these are the rules. Once you start to have that system, there’s not a lot of capital in the Netherlands. Right? It’s a very small country.
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|
[01:28:00] |
They need to raise capital. Right? They need to show they have some expertise at this, and then they need to go find capital to build the ships to go and do things. The king of England go chop down some trees, build some ships, and order it done. The king of the Netherlands, cannot. He doesn’t have the resource. The king of Belgium cannot. Right? What you need to do then is to find … Have higher education, higher skill sets, and attract capital. That’s why I think those areas became beacons of complicated financial transaction. It’s the insurance industry. Right? It was created specifically for the sea trade, insuring the ships so people could invest in the ship and then guarantee their investment with the insurance distributing risk.
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|
[01:29:00] |
I mean we could do a whole show. We should do a whole show on the importance of that invention. That changed the face of the world you could argue. The invention of insurance. Certainly the invention once you could insure a ship, now someone taking their ten pounds and either investing it in the ship itself, or investing it in the insurance. Right? Now I can gather my capital, I can take your ten pounds of silver and other peoples ten pounds of silver, and form a collective risk pool and we can issue an insurance policy or we could buy an insurance policy. That frees up capital. It caused an explosion of capital that the world’s never seen.
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| By the way it also causes an explosion of self empowerment the world’s never seen. The middle class for the first time in history begins to arise in these areas, because average ordinary people can start participating in domains that used to be only for kings.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. The concept of a corporation. Concept of investing in that corporation.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:30:00] |
Which goes right back to what you were originally talking about. Right? Why did the corporation which originated in the Netherlands, and ended up being [inaudible 01:29:44] into England. Which England ended up using, and once again we could do a whole show on how that particular innovation was what made England dominate and changed the course of history. Was there ability to officially raise capital, raise money and out compete Spain in that endeavor. It was an economic war against Spain at the end of the day. Which they won …
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| Section 9 of 16 [01:20:00 – 01:30:04] | |
| Section 10 of 16 [01:30:00 – 01:40:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | In that endeavour. It was an economic war against Spain at the end of the day, which they won handedly because of the invention of the corporation. But why, in all the world, why was it there that the corporation was used? Well back to your original point of this mysticism versus empiricism, the status quo and the powers that be, the institutions of religious institution, the government institution, were weakest. They were most prone to compromise in England, you could argue, at the time because of this delicate balance that they had of Catholics versus Protestants in England. At the time, they had to … They wanted to depose, I think the next in line was the Catholic king, and none of the Protestants wanted a Catholic king, they wouldn’t stand for it so they had the bloodless revolution where they brought over the William Prince of Orange, who was the Dutch prince. B
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|
[01:31:00] |
But they weren’t going to have a Dutchman rule the English either, it was just a figurehead. Therefore they had to make sure they weaken the power of the king sufficiently so that the lords and the common folk could increase their power. It was all compromise, it was all compromise on this knife’s edge. The church of England could only go so far because there is Catholics in the country. The Catholics could only go so far because the Protestants are the ruling class. You have all this opportunity then for people to start pushing boundaries in these areas of intellectual endeavour. Of course you have the constant pressure of France and Spain pushing on you, out competing you, perhaps overwhelming you. Therefore any compromises is seen as good as long as it advances the objectives of England.
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:32:00] |
It’s interesting in that the church in western civilization, it’s almost as if they made a conscious decision to have a partnership with a secular world to have half of say, something that’s much larger than say the entire share of something that’s much smaller. When you look at middle eastern religions, their partnership with the secular world is very minimal. They just have figureheads, and those figureheads have to go back to the clerics to ask, “What am I allowed to do? Can I do this? Can I do that?” Where as that type of control doesn’t exist in the west, but the church still profits tremendously from the great wealth that the west generates.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:33:00] |
Well it certainly makes a lot of sense that if you are protestant, you’d rather that your protestant religion just rule. But if you have a choice between Protestant with some empiricism, a system like that, or Protestantism sharing a a stage with Catholicism, a similar competing religion which might lead your flock down the wrong path, that empiricism seems like a very good option. Why not embrace science where it’s going to help us move forward the true faith. The same thing if you are Catholic, the same thing actually around the world.
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| It certainly makes sense that people would make compromises because to lose to your religious rival is not an option. The reason that religious wars are so brutal, I mean inter tribal wars. The reason that Protestants and Catholic, the reason why those wars a so brutal. Sunni and Shia fighting each other are so brutal. It’s because even though Christians fighting Muslims is a war, and yes it can be somewhat brutal, Christians aren’t really worried that their own flock are going to be lead astray by Islam. If they get conquered, maybe, but they are not worried that people are going to pick up a pamphlet and really convert in mass to Islam.
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|
| [01:34:00]
Jim Luisi: |
Likewise the other way around.
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| Mark Gleason: | Exactly, Muslims aren’t too worried that a good Muslim man is somehow going to be led astray and become Christian. Yes, they want to try to tamp that down, that’s not the biggest threat.
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| Jim Luisi: | If that’s 1% of 1%, that’s a high number.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s right, but if you are Protestant, your biggest threat is Catholicism. You could easily see a scenario where Catholics might be able to win over your flock, and vice versa. If you are Sunni, in their minds a corruption of the true faith is a much larger danger in corrupting your flock than some completely wild religion over there that is completely unrelated. A corruption of the true faith cannot be tolerated. You are not too worried about the Greek God Zeus, you are more worried about the religion which is in your view a corruption of the true faith.
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:35:00] |
What’s interesting is that you are going to see religions battle one another, but in the west, you don’t need … Let’s say, religions battling one another, as they say the Islamic religions will battle one another and they will battle the non Islamic religions. But an environment where there is a partnership between the secular and the church, the church need not go to war because the secular side can do that for them.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:36:00] |
Well the church very rarely ever goes to war. I think Nathaniel Brandon was the author who first coined the terms, “The Attila and the witch doctor.” The witch doctor of any society is the religious institution who claims the moral center of what is right and what is wrong, usually based upon some kind of revelation, and/or supernatural means to knowledge. But they don’t have armies themselves. The Attila is the person who has the club and has the army, and who uses physical coercion and physical force.
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| They work together in every society. Somebody who simply subjugates people with clubs fails unless there is some philosophy as to why they are right to do so, and they tell it to the people they are subjugating. Even though those people kind of know it’s not true, it’s remarkable because they accept it anyway. The church, the witch doctors very rarely have their own armies. That’s not where their power base is. Their power is in the herd belief system, which is an extraordinarily powerful thing. You referred to it earlier …
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| Jim Luisi: | But the church is also not motivating armies of others to go and battle on their behalf, because the secular part of the west has to protect itself as well.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:37:00] |
Oh, well, for a long time the church absolutely motivated. The church was the call to arms, the church as defending Christendom in Europe. It was the most important thing to the church and they would call upon all these Christian leaders to do so.
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| Jim Luisi: | Through all the medieval times.
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| Mark Gleason: | In case you don’t believe that the power of the witch doctor can be great, remember that one of the Holy Roman Emperors, France, was the ruler of all of Europe, of all of continental Europe and challenge the Pope. Said, “What are you going to do, I’m the Emperor?” The Pope said, “Okay, I understand that.” He excommunicated him. Now the only reason that the Emperor had the right to rule in everybody’s mind was because Pope knows God’s mind, and the king is God’s appointee on Earth to rule. Therefore everybody has a religious obligation to obey the king. Once he is excommunicated, every single one of his rivals, and every single one of his vassals that serve him …
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| Jim Luisi: | Has license to go after him.
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| [01:38:00]
Mark Gleason: |
Has license to go after him. Matter of fact, risked excommunication themselves because he is no longer a Christian and you cannot follow a non Christian lord. I appoint geography out here again though. This guy is in France, surrounded by rivals, geographically a lot more accessible close to Rome and Italy. Therefore, he spent three days camping outside like a pauper at the walls of the abbey where the Pope was until the Pope forgave him and reinstated him.
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|
[01:39:00] |
The church of England, farther away, across a channel. They have their own navy. A lot harder for the Pope to reach the long arm out and grab that. It takes a naval amphibious assault to go after Henry and England. Therefore geography dictate that Henry could get away with, at least for a while, declaring church of England, seeing if his people bought it. Okay they did, all right, well then we are going to keep this running for as long as we can.
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| History may have shown that the Pope was able to motivate a lot of good Catholics to go up there and put down the usurper, but he didn’t and he wasn’t able to, and therefore ended up being a good judgement I guess in the long view for Henry to do so. But geography once again plays a very, very important role here. If you go back to, let’s say, the middle east. It’s deserts, driving across the plains and wiping out people who are corrupting the true faith happened time and time again.
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|
[01:40:00] |
I mean obviously there is a split of Sunni and Shia, and that comes from after Muhammad died, it was a political split where the people who were following the son of Muhammad went one way, and the people who were following Muhammad’s top student went the other way. It became this split where people said, “No, these are different ways to go.” Then ended up fighting wars over it, and of course the war has continued to last.
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| Section 10 of 16 [01:30:00 – 01:40:04] | |
| Section 11 of 16 [01:40:00 – 01:50:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | You know, to go, and they end up fighting wars over it, and, of course, the war has continued to last. It’s different than England, in the sense that the remoteness of England makes it very, very inaccessible, and therefore, much more difficult to bring to heel, when and if they decide to go their own way.
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:41:00] |
Right. I wonder how long it will take to complete this cycle, this mindset shift that’s happening the world, where, just like now, largely, religion in the West is a nice cultural activity, and people do it largely, at least, you look at many Catholics, and you look at even many Jews today, and they do it because it’s part of tradition, and it’s celebrated in that way. They’re not going to go out and buy swords and go after their neighbors. I wonder how long it’s going to be before that is the way that religion is looked upon in the Middle East, and other parts of the world.
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| Mark Gleason: | Look, I think our tribal natures are just below the surface, unfortunately, even in modern, advanced societies. That the mildest of social breakdown, you would begin to see some of the old fault lines coming back. I think it’s hard to imagine for some people, but look, it wasn’t too long ago that the Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in Ireland, right? Would you really be that surprised if, for some reason, it started again?
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| Jim Luisi: | No.
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| [01:42:00]
Mark Gleason: |
Now, my point is though, and people will say, “Oh, that’s not religious, though.”, that has to do with a bunch of other factors; economics, politics …” Yeah, yeah, it does.
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| Jim Luisi: | Always does.
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| Mark Gleason: | It always does. Economics and politics are driven by, partly by the software programming of that tribe, which is their religion. So you could easily see, for instance, if you have one big Catholic group with some resources that some people are competing for. Well, okay, religion’s off the table, then. However, if …
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| Jim Luisi: | It makes you wonder, sir, …
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah …
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:43:00] |
Makes you wonder that, when you look at the tremendous amount of killing the English did in Ireland, because it’s horrific, that if the Christians, the Catholics in Ireland had said, “You know, this is just ridiculous, that our differences are so minor, we’ll just become Protestants. So, that way, you don’t have to attack us.” That would have had potentially a way to defuse the entire thing. Instead, the British put Protestants in there, protected them, and went on a campaign of just killing Catholics, just to get more and more territory than they had. Now they have a pretty solid foothold in the North.
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| Mark Gleason: | The history of Ireland is complicated, but the classic situation is, you have an invading army who says, “Convert, convert or die.”, and various levels of that. You know, sometimes …
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | Sometimes they come in and say, “Look, you can keep on … pay your taxes, and we don’t care what you believe.” That happens sometimes too. Often times, they say, “You at least have to give a nod to the dominant religion, which is now ours.”
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|
[01:44:00] |
Part of the fight for survival for identity, when that happens, for instance, the Ottoman Empire, not too long ago, dominated, occupied, Bulgaria, Greece, other parts of Eastern Europe. For 500 years, they had dominated and occupied those lands, and the only thing that held those people together was their Christian identity; they clung to that.
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|
[01:45:00] |
My wife’s from Eastern Europe Bulgaria, they are a former communist country, so she was not raised religious whatsoever, at all. There’s a few churches here and there, but under Communism, if you said you were religious, you got put on a list somewhere, and you know, they watched you suspiciously. So, nobody was, in any way, overtly religious. However, you ask anybody from there, or from Greece, if they are a Christian nation, and you get an emphatic, “Yes! Yes, we’re a Christian nation. Yeah, of course, of course we are. We’re a Christian nation.” Because this was their identity that they were holding onto during this long occupation, during the Ottoman Empire. To them, the world was divided into the Christian nations, and the ones that were being dominated by the Ottoman Empire. So, this idea that you could hold onto your Christian identity and cling to this old way of viewing the world was very, very powerful for them.
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| So, you could see how, in Ireland, …
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| Jim Luisi: | There, you have two Christian faiths. One that just .. there was this subtly different their rules.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:46:00] |
Well, no, well they’re very different in their rules. They’re subtly different to an outsider. See, every split in a religion seems frivolous to an outsider, and is deathly serious to the people in the situation. Just like you having a fight with your wife, right, where you’re beside yourself. To you, it seems like the biggest thing in the world, and you explain to somebody else, and they go, “That’s it? That’s what you’re fighting over, really?” It’s similar. So, to you, a corruption of your true faith, and this is not frivolous, this is knowing God, this is eternity, this is whether your children go to heaven or hell. This is everything, this is all the marbles. The life you have on Earth is nothing compared to whether your children know the joys of heaven, or burn in eternal hell.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right, but at the same time, they’re saying, “Let’s go to war, and our children will now be killed.” Because women and children were slaughtered.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:47:00] |
Oh, well, I’m saying is, your choice is, do you die as a member of the true faith, and go to heaven, or do you let your family and yourself become corrupted, live a few more years, and go to hell? So, if you’re a religious person faced with that choice, it seems pretty reasonable, then that you would say, “Better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees.” Or at least, continue to practice in secret. At least to say, “Okay, I’ll hide the fact I’m doing whatever, but I’m still going to practice.” If you devoutly believe this, if you believer that this is the path to eternal salvation, and this is your honest belief, then, I don’t see that you have much choice.
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| Now, if this is an observational thing, you know, you show up for Mass, and you go to Christmas service, and then the Protestants sweep in and say, “We’re in control now.” Now, you’ve got to go to the Methodist Church on Christmas, and you don’t got to go to confessional any more, you know, you just go and do the communion, and there’s a few other small changes we’re going to make here.” Right? You are just the observational religious person, well, then, clearly, you shrug, and go, “Meh, what’s the big deal?” Right? For somebody of the true faith, it’s obviously all the difference in the world. All the difference in the world.
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|
[01:48:00] |
There’s many secular examples, I’m sure, that if we thought about hard enough, that we could come to. That if the sheriff comes to my house, and I willingly buy a war bond for $1,000.00 to support the war effort, that is an entirely different thing, the sheriff coming to my house and saying, “Give me $1,000.00 for the war effort, or I’m going to shoot you.” Morally, those are two entirely different situations; even though, in both cases, I’m giving $1,000.00 for the war effort. So I’m not sure if that’s an exact parallel, but I’m sure if we sat here long enough, we could think of a secular equivalent, where I also would be unwilling to budge, even though an outsider might say, “But, Mark, this is really … you should just compromise your principles on this one.”
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|
[01:49:00] |
Like Ayn Rand once said, “A robber breaks into your house, okay, you can give him a spoon, a piece of silver; but, to acknowledge his moral right to that silver spoon is to acknowledge that he should come back tomorrow, and take every other piece of silverware that you have.” There’s a difference between, under threat of violence, surrendering the spoon, and acknowledging their moral right to that spoon, where they can come back and take everything else.
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| So, there is a line there even the secular world, I think, that we could draw parallel to where you, yourself, also would say, like Captain Picard, “The line must be drawn here! Here, and no farther!”
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| Jim Luisi: | I’m speechless.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yes, my Captain Picard impression often has that effect. Stunned silence is an appropriate reaction.
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| Jim Luisi: | Phasers on stun, yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | So, in this march of empiricism alongside mysticism, moving toward the future …
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:50:00] |
Right, this is a multi-generational conflict for humans understanding what paradigms are, how they are being manipulated.
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| Section 11 of 16 [01:40:00 – 01:50:04] | |
| Section 12 of 16 [01:50:00 – 02:00:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Jim Luisi: | [inaudible 01:50:20] are how they are being manipulated, how they can choose to no longer be part of these herds, and they can opt out of being manipulated, which to many seems like a pretty good idea.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:51:00] |
We talked about the meta, but an individual now, an individual listener struggling for personal empowerment. If you are a person who is only, let’s say, secular, then embracing the scientific method is probably a much more straightforward prospect. You say, “Okay. Right now, I just kind of go along with the flow. Maybe I should spend more time doing critical analysis.” If you’re a person who considers yourself to have a mystical side to yourself, you’re a religious person who, of course, believes in the scientific method as applied to certain things about the natural world, but you have this mysticism as well that you are trying to embrace and reconcile in your life. Where does this leave you?
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| As an output of this discussion, we talk about this line between how far do you push the intellectual and the empirical and where is the line where that begins to fail you and mysticism then becomes what you’re going to try to use? When it comes to self-empowerment, what is one to do? Are you forced to try to surrender your mysticism, becoming a self-empowered person? Are you able to reconcile these things? In your view, what is an individual to do?
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:52:00] |
It really becomes, to me, a choice where you can have the awareness and with that awareness you can actively choose paradigms of empiricism and or paradigms of mysticism on demand as needed but you’re doing so knowing that you’re choosing that. You’re not being just a herd member manipulated left or right. You are doing so at least knowing the choices that you had in front of you and that you’re making a conscious decision at that point. I think that type of decision most people don’t have within their grasp unless they’ve had proper training. They have to have a sense of what different systems are in control of them, how they need to look at all those systems, how they recognize those systems, how they recognize the influence that’s placed upon them.
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| [01:53:00]
[01:54:00] |
They need to have that sense of awareness so, as you so aptly put it, they need to see the strings of power and how they’re tied to those strings of power and how they’re being tugged in one direction or another, even if you are a scientific person, so you don’t follow mysticism except for maybe you appreciate the tradition of, say, your Jewish heritage or your Christian heritage or whatever other heritage you might have, and so you go through the holidays and you observe certain rituals in that process minus the human sacrifices. When you approach it that way, you’re saying, “We’re doing this because it’s fun for people, for the children to understand where they came from,” but at the same time I want them to know that these are systems of thought that used to, and still do in many parts of the world, control people like animals in a herd and that when they look at anything, even if they think they’re free thinking, they understand how these different systems work.
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| They need to also expand their view of it to see all these other systems. That’s fine. You could say, “Well. Religious systems are mysticism,” but there are many other forms of mysticism that are not religions. There are political systems that are mysticism. People make claims to manipulate people’s emotions to get them to act as a herd in political systems just like any other system and they’re working the emotional, the feelings that people have.
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| Mark Gleason: | You mean like a cult of personality, for instance.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes.
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| [01:55:00]
Mark Gleason: |
You could say that, as a easy example, Kim Il Jong or whatever the leader of North Korea is now, one of the Kims. You could easily point to him and say … He actually claims to be a deity actually, but even if he didn’t, that many of the traits of mysticism are there. When you identify with a person and bind to a cult of personality and believe what they say simply because of who they are as if they have some magical means to knowledge and you’re just going to follow what they say. Whether it’s Justin Bieber or whether it’s Kim Il Jong.
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| Jim Luisi:
[01:56:00]
[01:57:00] |
You have political leaders like Kim and you have politicians, you have … We have a great election going on right now. You could just see the thing that are being said across the different sides and both of them are trying to manipulate the herds out there. Nobody’s speaking to, say, the independent thinker. If they’re speaking to the independent thinker, there’s something wrong with their message. Let me just say that. It’s all about understanding that to get elected or to influence people or to have power, to have control, when you look at anyone interested in having power exerted over others, it’s all about the numbers. It’s about having the larger army to do whatever your bidding may be and to motivate that army or to direct that army, you need to find ways to command it and in modern culture, in the world of advertising and psychology, you’re dealing with ways of triggering people’s emotions to get them to move as a herd in the direction that you want them to move.
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| That process, as despicable as it seems, is the only means available apparently for a politician, whether they are the most honest and forthright individual imaginable or whether they are the most manipulative, selfish individual imaginable, the person who doesn’t try to manipulate the herds is not going to have a chance of ever prevailing.
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| Mark Gleason:
[01:58:00] |
I want to point that out again. This is so important, so important. Your leaders, whoever they are, have an interest in you not being self-empowered on their issue or their key issues. They want you to be disempowered. They want you to respond to them with basically blind obedience and in order to get that, to prep that, they set emotional triggers so that when something happens, they say, “Look what’s just happened,” and the emotional triggers get sprung, and everybody responds. Al Sharpton needs a march on Washington ironically for black empowerment. How does he get a bunch of people to march on demand to Washington? By disempowering people, giving them an emotional trigger, and when something happens and Al Sharpton thinks now is the time, he can make a big deal about it, people respond emotionally and don’t necessarily look too closely at the facts, and march on Washington.
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| [01:59:00] | Not to pick on Al Sharpton, you have, let’s say, Rush Limbaugh, perhaps the other side of the political spectrum, who wants a letter writing campaign to senators to block some legislation. When that happens, Rush Limbaugh wants to tell his listeners, “See? This is what we’ve been afraid of. This has just happened. Right now. Right your letters now. Everybody.” Regardless of whether the facts of this particular instance that he’s putting forward justify this massive campaign, he doesn’t want to look too closely at these particular facts, maybe they’re justified and maybe they’re not just like in the Al Sharpton case. Maybe something happened an Al Sharpton’s trying to say, “This is the worst tragedy ever,” when factually, perhaps it’s not really the best example, but his audience has been emotionally primed and Rush Limbaugh’s audience has been emotionally primed to respond deliberately.
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|
[02:00:00] |
The problem is that it’s not necessarily in your best interest to respond this way. It’s definitely in the interest of those leaders. Those leader’s political power incr-
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| Section 12 of 16 [01:50:00 – 02:00:04] | |
| Section 13 of 16 [02:00:00 – 02:10:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | It’s definitely in the interest of those leaders. Those leaders’ political power increases, and prestige increase every single time they can get a large number of people to do something, but it doesn’t necessarily help the stated cause.
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| Jim Luisi:
[02:01:00] |
It’s also not necessarily bad to be led by a leader. Like, say, Reverend Al is one option, but, say, Martin Luther King had a better message, okay, and he appealed to people of many races, and to realize what he’s trying to accomplish, and to agree with that, and to say, “I am going to follow him as a leader.” As long as it’s a conscious decision that you’re doing so, and that you’re not just being manipulated to do so, but that this is in alignment with your value systems, and this is something that you want to and you feel is important in your life, that is so much more valuable than just being bounced around like a ping-pong ball, where people are leading you by the nose, and you’re not even aware of what triggers they’ve just used on you.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:02:00] |
Certainly, and certainly, if you’re going to draw a distinction between, let’s say, the perception of Martin Luther King as a leader versus Al Sharpton, I think the perception would be that Martin Luther King was addressing what everybody would agree, all his followers would agree with the facts as he was laying them out, the dangers that he was drawing from those facts, and the course of action that was required to address those dangers. What happens, though, is sometimes, other leaders have been accused of ginning up facts, distorting facts, playing on emotion, kind of skipping past the reality of the situation to stampede the herd to gain political power, to gain money, to gain influence, to gain prestige, and it’s more about self-aggrandizement than it is about empowering that group.
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|
[02:03:00] |
Because if you are critically analyzing, let’s say, Martin Luther King, who is saying, “We have a danger here, it’s a danger to us all, look at this with me, let’s go march,” you’re not surrendering any personal power doing that. You are actually increasing your personal power in engaging in that activity. If there’s someone else, I won’t pick on Al Sharpton, let’s pick on some generic leader, a community organizer of some sort, who, some controversy occurs, they’re reactionary, the very first thing they say is, “Oh my goodness, this is the worst tragedy ever. See, see? Everything I’ve told you, the dangers I’ve laid out for you, are true. Follow me, sacrifice for me, come with me, let’s show everybody that I’m a leader to this community,” and when you look at the facts-
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. Show everybody that you matter, that you count, that you’re important. For all the people who felt that they’ve had the thumb of power pushing them down, and now this is their chance to rise up, you know, yeah, these are just emotional triggers that are not appealing to their intellect. These are just ways of manipulating people.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:04:00] |
That’s right, and particularly when you’re outside the situation and you can look soberly at the facts, a lot of the moral panic and outrage that’s generated by some of these leaders is … It seems completely unwarranted based upon the facts. The people-
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| Jim Luisi: | Empirical evidence.
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| Mark Gleason: | Based upon the empirical evidence, and the people who are-
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| Jim Luisi: | Mystics.
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| Mark Gleason: | The people who are becoming disempowered, they start acting on the basis that these things are true, because they’ve trusted their leaders to tell them the truth. You do need leaders, but you need to hold your leaders and yourself accountable. It’s intellectual laziness to simply just buy in and believe, and you get the leaders you deserve that way. If you hold your leaders accountable, you get the leaders you deserve, and if you just let your leaders run wild, and believe whatever they say, you’ll also get the leaders you deserve, and that won’t work out very well for you. You know-
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| Jim Luisi: | That’s an excellent point.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:05:00] |
Another example, I think, on the right and the left that you could draw is Al Gore in 2006 or 8, on the left, had said, “Moral panic, the world is going to end, polar ice caps are melting, global warming is here, it’s going to destroy us,” and he made quite a long list of very, very specific, quote-unquote “empirical” claims, and he wanted to bring about a great deal of political and social change as a result of these dangers, which conveniently also closely aligned with his socialist philosophy of wanting to kind of redistribute how wealth and power are structured in society. Now, even if you believe in the global warming phenomenon, and even this is a serious issue, your issue was done a great disservice by Al Gore. Al Gore made a lot of money on that moral panic, he made hundreds of millions of dollars cashing in on that moral panic, but a few years pass, it’s like one of those end-of-the-world cult deadlines pass, guess what? All the claims aren’t true, it didn’t happen, so it’s like crying wolf.
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| [02:06:00]
[02:07:00] |
Even if you feel that global warming is an extraordinarily serious problem, your leader, if at that time, you were buying into, and you were donating money, and you were protesting, and you were following, because you really thought, without critical analysis and examination of the facts, that he must know what he’s talking about, and therefore he has my interests at heart, and he’s trying to save the planet, and I love the planet, so let me go support him … He cashed in. You helped him hurt your own cause, because now, skeptics, every single time this conversation comes up, say, “Look, this is hysteria. Just a few years ago, Al Gore was saying all these claims would happen, there’d be no more snow on the polar ice caps, and those were completely false. Not only false, but almost double the time has passed since he said that would happen. You know, he said four years, it’s been eight years, and the polar ice cap is growing.” You’ve actually hurt yourself, and you’ve hurt your cause, by not holding your political leaders accountable.
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|
[02:08:00] |
That’s on the left; the same thing happens on the right, like Ann Coulter, who will make some dire predictions about immigration or illegal immigration, and regardless of your stance on immigration and illegal immigration, even if you feel that’s a legitimate issue where something needs to be done in order to make sure that we have a workable system, I think all reasonable people would agree the current system we have is broken and needs to be fixed, so regardless of where you fall on that issue, if you think illegal immigration’s a big problem, there’s disservice done to that cause when, let’s say, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, our people on the right, around election years, are trying to draw a huge moral panic around the potential dangers of illegal immigration, trying to blow it way out of proportion.
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| In the short run, it might get them some book sales, and it might get them some traction, but in the long run, when the world doesn’t end two years later, and society’s still standing, and things are pretty much okay, people start to become deaf to that issue. Over the long run, you may support those people, they cash in on those moral panics, and you’re left as a person who’s worse off than when you’ve started, because you’ve given your money, you’ve given your support, as an individual, you’re more disempowered, and you’ve also backtracked on the same issue that you care about.
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| Jim Luisi:
[02:09:00] |
Right, and it’s so interesting that some people represent the cause with too much zealousness, and they’re too extreme, and they hurt their cause, that sometimes you even wonder whether some individuals don’t really believe anything about the cause that they are supposedly supporting, and that they could potentially be doing it just for financial reward.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:10:00] |
Oh, certainly. In my old age, I’m becoming more of a cynic, and therefore, I think on some bright, shining day in the past, most of these people were true believers. In every cause which has gone wildly off the rails, I think everybody started off as a true believer. Look at the phenomena on campus about this idea that we have a quote-unquote “rape culture,” and you hear these startling statistics, startling, stunning. The first time I heard them, I was stunned. I don’t think these are the real statistics, but something like 70% of women claim sexual assault in the four years of college, something stunning. These are higher rates than, like, Liberia during a war.
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| Section 13 of 16 [02:00:00 – 02:10:04] | |
| Section 14 of 16 [02:10:00 – 02:20:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | Then like Liberia during a war of ethnic cleansing when people are, when rape is extraordinarily common. These are extraordinarily high rates to sexual assault. On the most liberal, protected areas in one of the most liberal societies. It is a stunning revelation when that comes out. You at one kind of accept that from your leaders, and say, “Okay, that’s, like wow. That’s stunning. Okay, we have a real problem here.”
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| Jim Luisi: | We can go check your statistics yourself.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:11:00] |
One can investigate. The issue is that when there was a group of people who believed that rape on campus was a problem. They gathered their statistics for rape and sexual assault. They published them. With grate fanfare they went out and said, “Here’s our statistics, and this is the problem.” Guess what. Nobody cared. Nobody cares about your issue as much as you do. If you say, “Look, you know, one out every fifty thousand women, or one out of every thousand women, this thing happens to,” it doesn’t sound sensational. Therefore, everybody goes, “Okay, well that’s not good, but you know, it doesn’t sound like this is some crazy epidemic that we need to really act on right now.”
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|
[02:12:00] |
If you are somebody who needs action today, because you demand it, because you think this is a serious problem, you are left with abandoning your issue, making no traction, taking the long road of slow change based upon the facts, or distorting facts with fallacy and hyperbole, and ginning up controversy to get attention and cash in in the short run.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah, particularly by redefining their terms.
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| Mark Gleason: | If you distort the law of identity, to change the definition of things, that is the easiest way, it is the sweet sugar of distortion to simply move the goalpost and change what the word means. When I read that study for instance, I was stunned. I went, “Oh my goodness.” By the way, I think I saw it. I didn’t have an opportunity to follow up on it right then, which is what most people are. You just go with that headline going, “Wow, that’s a serious problem.”
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| Jim Luisi: | You’re head’s spinning.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:13:00] |
Then when you actually read the actual facts behind it, seventy percent of men interviewed dint realize that they had participated in a sexual assault. Seventy percent of women interviewed didn’t realize they had been sexually assaulted. That was the first thing I read. I went, “That’s odd. Like, I kind of see the men may not have realized they did, whatever, but you’d think the woman would have realized that she’d been sexually assaulted, right?”
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | Prior to-
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| Jim Luisi: | Where did they get the statistic from?
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s right. Then you read, and the questions that they asked were, “Have you ever made, been made to feel uncomfortable by a man asking you out on a date? You know, did somebody ever try to hold your hand or touch you didn’t want them to?” You have these things which while, look, we live in a civil society. Nobody should be able to touch you. It technically is, unless you’re brushing up against somebody in a subway or something accidentally, to touch somebody intentionally is battery I think actually. You should be protected from that. Certainly it does not fit what most people would consider the definition of rape and sexual assault, if someone tries to hold your hand on a date.
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|
[02:14:00] |
By changing the meaning, by distorting the words, and then by publishing with that distortion, you’re trying to create moral panic to get movement on your issue. The question is, “Are you … ” In the long run, you’re definitely helping yourself. There’s no question as a leader of the movement of five people that goes to five thousand people, you have helped yourself. “Have you helped your cause?” Now, they would say yes. They would say, “I have raised the profile on this issue. We should be thinking about whether or not women should have their hands held when they don’t want to. We should be thinking about women being asked out on dates when they, when, unwelcome advances. These are all important issues.”
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|
[02:15:00] |
They will wrap themselves in that flat till their dying breath. The problem is, the people that you’re trying to persuade, not even your own flock and herd. The rest of society of reasonable people who, “I want women to be safe on campus,” once I investigate finally, the facts behind your claims and find them to be severely lacking in intellectual rigor, forevermore on this issue now, even when you have a legitimate claim, you cried wolf already. You’ve come out. Now I can’t trust what you say.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right, that source is burned at that point.
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| Mark Gleason: | Sure. The next hysteria that comes out, whether Al Gore’s behind it or not, how the world ‘s going to end in twelve months because of some environmental calamity that we need to prevent, it may be legitimate. There may actually be an actual reason to panic. I, for one am going to yawn and take my time and look at the evidence. I’ve already been burned before with distortions of facts for expediency so leaders could cash in while “raising the profile of their issue.”
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| Jim Luisi: | Right. This is what one hopes the media is going to do as well, that they would also hold people accountable to their claims. More and more-
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| Mark Gleason: | Only because that’s their job description. You’re being unreasonable though.
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| Jim Luisi: | One would have thought-
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| Mark Gleason: | That is only their job description.
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| Jim Luisi: | One would have thought, but I’ll tell you, though. You watch the mainstream media and so much of it is just the promulgation of false information [inaudible 02:16:00].
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| [02:16:00]
Mark Gleason: |
The media causes the moral panic. The media has to be a willing participant in a moral panic. There’s a few things that you need. There’s a very good book, Moral Panics and Social Devils I think is the name of the book.
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| Jim Luisi: | That’s got to be tied to ratings.
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| Mark Gleason: | Absolutely. The media has to be part of the moral panic. I have a podcast on this as a matter of fact. The structure of a moral panic is such that you need a few things. You need a group of people that you’re going to appeal to, and say those are a danger. You need an opposing group of people who are disorganized, and who will not immediately rebut your wild claims. The social devils are the ones that you’re pointing to and saying, “Here, they’re the cause of this huge problem, and they’re a threat to our society.” It has to be something that’s at stake. You have to have our future of our children’s a good one. There’s, “Those rock and roll records are going to, you know, cause our children to go to the Devil,” or whatever it is. Something has to be at risk.
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| [02:17:00] | Then the media has to engage and pick this up and run with it. It’s going to run as far as it can until the moral panic starts to subside, and people realize the world hasn’t ended. The media says, “Oh my goodness. What’s going on with those Beetles records? Are kids really becoming Satanists? Oh there was a suicide in California yesterday. Is it related to the Satan cult? What you need to know to protect your children.” They ride this wave of panic selling papers, and cash in. This has been for hundreds of years. This is what they do, until people begin to realize, “The world hasn’t ended yet. This is, this is just a moral panic.” Then the media jumps onto the next issue.
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|
[02:18:00] |
Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they keep on riding it because they have a dog in the fight. Most times, they just jump onto the next moral panic they want to ride, onto the next thing. To the contrary, where you’d hope the media would be holding people accountable, instead they are propagandize this stuff. Now, if you have enough media contradicting each other, then hopefully you arrive at the truth. If you ever have a situation where you have a cabal of aligned media, which we had in the United States for a while, it’s very, very dangerous. You only get one side of the facts. Then the other side is all propaganda.
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| Jim Luisi:
[02:19:00] |
Right. When they lose their credibility, then there’s really … It’s very difficult to get it back. I look at all of these alternate forms of media now. I look at the time I have to spend. “Do I have time to read propaganda in a newspaper?” I have better things to do with my time. I really don’t want to pickup a rag and read these crazy, sensationalist headlines, and then a misleading story, which doesn’t even support the headline. The research I would have to do to check what I would read on the morning paper would take me the rest of the day. I’m better off skipping the propaganda feed and going right to whatever topic I want to research and do it myself and keep track of just events from a more reliable source.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:20:00] |
The internet has been wonderful from the standpoint of it’s broken the back of a monopoly of control of information. It used to be, even in the early days of the internet that you saw a headline on something. “The president may be risking our national security by doing the following thing.” You had to go to the Wall Street Journal. You had to go to the New York Times. You had to login, sign in, give them your email even. That was the only place you could go to get the information if you wanted to know what was behind that headline. Now you click on the link. It goes there and says, “Sign in.” If you’re not a member, you just go to Google. You type in the headline. You get eighty other stories on the same topic. You choose another one, and you read that one. Right.
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Section 14 of 16 [02:10:00 – 02:20:04] | |
| Section 15 of 16 [02:20:00 – 02:30:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason: | … topic and you choose another one, and you read that one, right?
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| Jim Luisi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yes, it’s wonderful. Unfortunately, though, now we have the opposite problem. We went from not enough information to too much information. The problem with big data that companies struggle with. We’ve gone from one opinion, or three opinions to choose from, to three thousand, to thirty thousand.
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| Jim Luisi: | Or millions.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:21:00] |
Now, all of a sudden, in this cacophony of voices, who is right and who is wrong? The skillset required, for instance, by the APEX Level To Power, of what is true and what is false. How does one know? How does one evaluate what is a true fact from what is a false fact. How does one know what’s a true opinion from a false opinion, is extraordinarily important because there’s now too many opinions. What most people do is they just go to the websites that have the opinions they already agree with, and they read that in their echo chamber and say, “Yup I was right.” Everybody loves to be right. We are becoming more and more vulcanized by this. The battle lines are becoming deeper and deeper set because people, everybody they’ve ever spoken to, or do speak to, is convinced 100% of these facts. That’s why you have these really interesting outbursts. You see the recent outburst at Yale where a student was screaming at her professor? They surrounded him and they were screaming at a professor over some e-mail about being tolerant of Halloween costumes. We’re all adults and we’re not going to have rigid standards on Halloween costumes, if you’re offended by it, just …
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| Jim Luisi: | Right, they’re not going to censor …
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s right. Exactly. They were outraged. This pampered, rich girl who’s at Yale, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It’s hard to imagine a more pampered and privileged place. [crosstalk 02:21:56]
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| Jim Luisi: | There are no un-pampered, poor girls at Yale.
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| [02:22:00]
Mark Gleason:
[02:23:00] |
That’s right. Well, no there are. I’m sure there are students who are there on scholarship, for instance, who come from poor backgrounds. This particular girl happened to come from a wealthy family. She screamed … The professor was trying to say that in his view, a climate of intellectual learning was appropriate for the university and she screamed at him, cursed at him, saying, “No, this is my home. I’m here to feel safe. I’m not here to feel challenged with intellectual ideas. I’m here to feel safe.” That is this interesting shift, I think, of this millennial generation that has had catering of ideas and catering of facts. You end up being shielded from things you don’t want to hear about. Therefore, the longer that goes on, the more jarring it is when you hear an opposing point of view and you don’t know how to deal with it. You don’t have the skill set to deal with it.
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| Jim Luisi: | Any university whose students go to block the ability of other students to hear a speaker who’s invited to campus. Somehow, that university has failed those students.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:24:00] |
These students obviously have a lot more outrage than they have a sense of irony when they call somebody a fascist and then with physical force, and with threats of physical force, block them from speaking on campus, which is almost the definition of fascism. What Hitler would do, let’s say, to get his followers to beat people up if they try to oppose him politically or kill them after he got elected right, [inaudible 02:23:46]. Using physical intimidation, physical force, to block the free flow of ideas is a critical component of fascism. The funny thing is, you have these people who are, quote, they actually say, “This guy is a fascist. We’re opposing hatred,” while they curse and scream and spit on people who are trying attend the civil discourse of ideas.
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| Jim Luisi: | When in reality they’re very lucky that they have the opportunity to hear these other ideas because there are other countries where these people would never be invited in to speak, where they can’t even look at those opinions on the internet because internet sites are blocked in certain countries. Ideas are just restricted overall. Here they have an opportunity where it’s being handed to them on a silver platter and they are, not only rejecting for themselves, but they are trying to prevent anybody else from also sharing and hearing those ideas.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:25:00] |
It’s remarkable. This is not just … Everybody says, “Oh, that’s because we’re against hate,” but … Look, Bill Maher, the liberal child of the left that everybody loves, he takes a stance on how Islam really never went through a reformation like Christianity did where it kind of reconciled some of the harsher language in its books with modernity and modern times and that this leads to then, a problem with the outgrowth of terrorism that Islam needs to address. He talks in various ways about that. You can agree with him or not agree with him, but that’s not a wildly unreasonable position to take. You can disagree with him, certainly. He can’t go speak on a college campus. A liberal college campus, here is a Hollywood liberal, popular Hollywood liberal who was supposed to go give a …
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| Jim Luisi: | He’s very smart and very funny.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:26:00] |
He’s supposed to go give a commencement address and there was a huge to do and protest against him because of his quote, unquote, “hate speech,” but it’s all hate speech. That’s the problem. Every single person can be offended by every single other person, right? There’s always somebody who’s going to be offended. If your standards are going to be that nobody can ever be offended and who judges what’s offensive? Well, the offended judge that. Then, nobody can ever come to campus, ever, and civil discourse ends, and that of course is the inevitable slide that we’re on. If you’re going to follow this to it’s logical conclusion, there can be no speech, there can be no ideas, because ultimately everything is offensive.
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|
[02:27:00] |
A guy named Haidt, is his last name, H-A-I-D-T, he wrote an excellent paper which was very prescient. I think he wrote it before all this kind of exploded on campus. What he was saying, the shift is now, it used to be that you said something, if I didn’t like it and I was offended, I could walk away, but we all agreed that in an open society that if I felt emotionally triggered, I probably should go find out what triggers me so badly because even though you’re just saying these words, they’re just sound waves in the air, and why is this causing me so much distress. To avoid that is exactly the wrong thing to do. When somebody’s afraid of elevators, the trick is not to keep them away from all elevators, the trick is to slowly introduce them to elevators over time in various non-threatening ways, so that they develop a resistance to it in their minds.
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| Jim Luisi:
[02:28:00] |
That’s such a wonderful point. I only can recall one person, I think, in my lifetime, where while I was speaking with him, he said, “I can feel myself getting emotional about what you’ve just said and I want to catch myself because I want to understand why I’m feeling that way because I don’t know.” He had to explore it and talk about it some more. He had to check himself. It was just a fascinating approach that somebody can take to make sure that they’re not just going to be driven off on some emotional tilt.
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| Mark Gleason: | That is the road to empowerment, right? The road to empowerment is undoing and limiting your own emotional triggers. That’s the road to empowerment. Somehow, wrapping yourself in the flag of your emotional triggers and saying, “It’s your problem because you triggered me,” is ultimately extraordinarily disempowering to you as the person who’s being triggered. Try going and being a professional poker player with that attitude, right? Try being a stock broker with that attitude and saying, “Anything you say to me may put me in an emotional tilt where I may perform very badly, so don’t do that.” See how far that gets you at the poker table.
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|
[02:29:00]
[02:30:00] |
The interesting thing was, the shift has been from, it used to be that you said something to me and it was my hang up that I had to go resolve of why that bothered me so much, even if I disagree with you, even if it was offensive to me, I should be able to deal with it in some kind of adult way where I am not disempowered by that. It shifted to, when you’ve offended me, you have aggressed upon me. You have actually committed an aggression. You have attacked me in a very, very real way. I am aggressed upon. Therefore, I am totally justified, now that I’ve been attacked, in self defense now, to come back, and attack you, and attack you I will, twice as hard, because I’m the one who’s been attacked first. How do you know that you’ve attacked me and you’ve aggressed me? I’ll let you know when you’ve crossed that line because I will tell you how offended I am. I am the only judge of whether or not you have aggressed me. We can go in front of a school board where you can get accused of attacking me because of something you said that you had no idea would necessarily trigger me.
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| Section 15 of 16 [02:20:00 – 02:30:04] | |
| Section 16 of 16 [02:30:00 – 02:46:51] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Mark Gleason:
[02:31:00] |
Well, where was your trigger warning? You should have had a trigger warning. You should have prefaced this with a trigger warning. This is where you have these professors who talk about, in law class, some woman professor was talking about how she was avoid the topic of rape law. Rape law for lawyers who are going to be prosecuting and defending rape cases. She would avoid it. She’d avoid those examples because she had too many problems of people who were quote unquote triggered by the discussion of rape and therefore they had to avoid it because it would derail the entire class and it would put her professorship up for issues because people would complain. Therefore, she just avoided it in law class about rape. You have lawyers going out in the world who are going to try and prosecute and defend rape cases who didn’t cover rape in school because some lawyers or some people in their class could be emotionally triggered by the topic.
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| This obviously, I think most people understand that this is political correctness run wildly amok. How could you possibly have a situation where you’re sending these people out into the world where they’re going to be dealing with real issues that they are entirely unable to confront? They’re going to have a meltdown.
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| Jim Luisi: | She’s going to go to surgery and her doctor will have a fear of seeing blood and he won’t be able to do his job and it’ll be consistent with her line of thinking.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:32:00] |
People need to ask themselves, even if they agree with this whole thing they need to ask themselves is this system empowering you or disempowering you? When you exit this law class having not covered these rape topics and now you’re going to be in the real world for a real career at your first job at the first law firm where everything’s hanging on the line and you invested much effort to get to the point you are and you have a rape case which you’ve never even thought about or covered before. Are you helped by this system?
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| Jim Luisi: | The shingle outside her office would just say, “Not rape.”
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:33:00] |
You better hope it was a guy trying to hold a girl’s hand. You better hope that this is the case. Technically, by the way, that would be assault and battery. Anyway, it’s fascinating how what I care about is the personal empowerment, the individual empowerment of our listeners. Really of everybody, but the Apex Nation, we’re trying to find the people who see the forest for the trees, who understand that following the herd is one way to have a certain amount of safety and get certain things, but the heard has no incentive in your individual and personal empowerment.
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| Jim Luisi:
[02:34:00] |
Also to reiterate what we had said early on, we’re not trying to pass judgment on what is good and what is bad. We’re not saying that even mystical thinking is good or bad. It just is. We want people to understand it for what it is and people can disagree with us on any of the issues, but the one thing that we would battle against, probably the only real key issue that we would battle against, is that it is our goal to have people understand why they’re making certain decisions. Are they choosing to follow somebody or are they being manipulated to follow somebody? As long as somebody is aware, we’re good with whatever decision they make. It’s up to them.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s what personal empowerment is. Sometimes it’s better to be doing the wrong thing if they’re arriving at that decision through critical analysis, than the right thing that you’ve blindly accepted because if you blindly accept many different things, you have no mechanism to correct. If you blindly accept that we plant our crops in February because the god of Thor says so and that works you do it blindly because that’s what Thor says, and through critical analysis I plant them in December because I have a theory I think that might work. It doesn’t work. Guess what?
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| Jim Luisi: | At least you tried.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:35:00] |
I have a mechanism by which to correct if I’m using critical analysis. That did not work. Why didn’t that work? Why is it working in February? Is it really because Thor’s helping us? Is there some other factor here? I have a mechanism by which to constantly improve myself so that eventually I can find the right scenario. If I’m blindly accepting something as dogma, then I guess maybe that’s the line I want to draw. I’m not against doctrine, maybe I’m against dogma. If I blindly accept the doctrine as dogma, then that leaves me vulnerable. First of all, if I am doing-
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| Jim Luisi:
[02:36:00] |
At that point, you’re not even living your own life. You’re living somebody else’s life who’s leading you. If you’re going to be living somebody else’s life, you’re not accountable anymore for anything you do. There’s a whole different value to your life. It’s almost like worthless at that point. Whereas if you take control of your life and you are doing what you’ve decided, then whether it’s good or bad, at least you’re accountable to that. If you benefit, it’s because of your efforts. If something bad has happened, it’s something that you can work on and improve, but if you’re just constantly following what somebody else says to do, how do you improve? What do you do, you just pick somebody else to follow because that first one didn’t work out too well and you just bounce around from leader to leader to see who you want to follow? That’s a very strange way to live one’s life.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:37:00] |
Back to my example, even if you were wrong and February was time to plant your crops and you tried December and you made it back to February based upon the results of your own critical analysis, but then the weather shifts. You have a dry season that year. The person who has struggled with their own critical analysis is much better positioned to now figure out, “How does this impact me. Do I move my crops up? Do I move them later? How do I change,” because they’ve already struggled with that. The person who is accept everything on blind faith of what the herd has told them to do is lost. They’re lost and any leader that steps up then and makes meaning out of that chaos is who the herd is then going to follow.
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[02:38:00] |
If you’re looking to have more leadership roles in your life, that’s how is through critical analysis. If you want to make sure that you’re not being led off a cliff by a leader who is completely wrong about which direction to go, you also need to have critical analysis. It’s all about the self-empowerment. I’m not a religious person, but I can certainly draw a line for myself and say intellectual critical analysis should dominate all these areas of my life. If somebody asks me, wants to engage me on a conversation about what happens after we die, I don’t know that and my intellect and my empiricism and my critical analysis begins to fail. I begin to lose the tools to have an empirical conversation about what happens after we die.
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[02:39:00] |
In that context, a discussion of mysticism to me becomes more appropriate because we’ve lost some of the normal tools we might have when we’re dealing with the natural world. That doesn’t mean that’ll always be the case, but certainly right now. I don’t feel like I have the tools to really be able to have a fine conversation around that. However, when something like when do you plant your crops, or what values should we embrace in the world, what goals should we be pursuing as a nation, there’s lots of things that happen in the real world. What is the proper road to happiness for an individual? What’s the proper society structure for men and women to deal with other men and women? These are things which critical analysis and empiricism has a lot to add to the conversation. I think that it’s very important that you don’t just take wholesale sets of ideas that come from your leadership regardless of that leadership.
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| By the way, there’s secular leadership which is the same way. Political movements are not innately religious, but they are filled with dogma and propaganda and ways to disempower the individual to move forward the stated goals of that particular herd.
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| Jim Luisi: | They tap into the human mind’s tendency to be driven by mysticism even though they are secular.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:40:00] |
Exactly. People are cognitive misers who want somebody to make meaning for them so that they can just agree and follow it. People like to have leaders and it’s important to understand if you’re trying to empower yourself that you can be one of those leaders. You can be the person who makes the meaning so everybody else goes, “Oh. Well. Okay. I’m going to follow this guy in this topic.” If that’s your goal, that’s fantastic. If that’s not your goal, that’s fine, but you need to separate out what is the herd’s signal of propaganda and what is reality. Otherwise, you are going to lead a life of disempowerment and you are going to wonder why you’re never able to empower yourself in a social context, why you can’t make money, why you’re unable to get promoted, why you’re unable to find a mate of social market value that you desire.
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| All these things that you’re struggling with in life is a function of these social power dynamics in which you’re swimming. You’re a fish and right now you can’t see the water because to you, the water’s always been there. It’s like us, we walk around in the air. It’s not a vacuum. There’s air. We don’t see the air and we forget about it, but it really does connect us all. The strings of social power that exist in the herd are the same like that. They’ve been around so long and we’re so familiar with them and they’re so ingrained, and so subtle.
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| Jim Luisi: | They’re so invisible.
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| [02:41:00]
Mark Gleason: |
They’re completely invisible. We forget they’re there, yet marketers don’t forget they’re there. Politicians don’t forget they’re there. Propagandists, media don’t forget they’re there. When you’re wondering why you ended up with 5 televisions you don’t need that you order on eBay last night when you were up at 4 o’clock in the morning, it’s because somebody is pulling the strings of power. If you’re wondering why you’ve been supporting a political movement for 20 years and the cause has not advanced at all. The years have advanced, people have gotten rich, money has changed hands, but-
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| Jim Luisi: | Most likely it’s from you to them. That’s just the way it works.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:42:00] |
Absolutely. They need your support for a cause you believe in. I’m not even saying your cause is right or wrong. I’m just saying that every cause has the downside of a error-prone human at it’s lead and that you need to hold your leader accountable and you need to recognize when they’re telling you- Look, I follow certain leaders who I respect, but I am very, very cognizant of when they are getting me a message which is moving my cause forward and when they’re giving me a message which is moving their cause, meaning themselves, their enrichment forward. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes I want them to be more prominent so they can be a bigger voice for me. Sometimes them scaring some politicians so they can get invited to some more parties so that they can cash in and get paid to go away and not talk about my cause for a while. That’s important for me to understand when that’s happening and not give them my support.
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[02:43:00] |
We covered a wide range of topics today. Is there anything that you want to end on in terms of … I think this is a nice place to end which is that we covered how large societies and herds of people move and interact in terms of countries and nations and then we brought it all the way down to how individuals relate between each other and between themselves and these herds of people and institutions.
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| Jim Luisi:
[02:44:00] |
I think we also had a great exchange of ideas on why Western culture advanced out of the mystical thinking as a predominant way of thought and why the Middle East is still just only a few hundred years behind us or a couple of hundred years behind us and just wanted to mention that if it wasn’t for the help from the Eastern Roman Empire, we would have lost tremendous wealths of knowledge and so their organization, their ability to hold together, and their ability to create these massive libraries of knowledge and translate them from one language to another and have it be there. It wasn’t destroyed. It wasn’t like they went on a rampage and destroyed all ideas that they came in contact with.
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| When we look at Eastern civilization or culture, it’s neither good nor bad and Western culture is neither good nor bad. They’re different. They’ve helped each other through history and I think that this has been a very interesting conversation.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:45:00] |
It’s easy to say that because Western culture has dominated militarily and economically that it is superior. That argument is made. Logically, that does not necessarily follow. It depends upon the standard with which you’re judging. If you’re judging a culture by its ability to field a Navy, then certain cultures have done very, very well with that, Chinese being one. They actually had a huge Navy which they ended up sinking.
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| Jim Luisi: | They have a bad track record with typhoons.
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| Mark Gleason:
[02:46:00] |
That’s right. If you’re judging a society on other standards, so it does come down to the standard by which you’re judging. When we’re looking at these things, it’s more a matter of how did these ideas evolve and what results those were and then looking at it from different prisms, you can see why events went the way they went, why the West began to dominate certain fields and not others. You might even be able to point to the Eastern practice of being patient and planning in the long run and the Western kind of predisposition to be inpatient and get things done quickly. Next time we can talk about where that comes from and how the geography and the social structure of, let’s say, China led itself for long-term planning whereas the tumultuous and broken up geography and broken institutions and conflicting institutions of Europe led to, “We better get this done right now. We can only plan the next year.”
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| Very good. It’s always a pleasure to have you on the program, Jim. Thank you so much for coming by and please, let’s come back again and we can push some more into these topics.
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| Jim Luisi: | Very good. Thank you for having me.
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| Mark Gleason: | Very good. Change your level. Change your life. Change the world. Welcome to Apex Level To Power.
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