Are we stuck or liberated?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good morning, my friend.

Chris Good morning, and belatedly... Good day. I should just say good day. Good day. Good day, sir. Yes, quite so. And happy belatedly Independence Day to you and yours and the gang all around you. I guess everybody's in recovery mode now.

Scott Yeah, I actually spent it at the beach in New Jersey, a beach I'd never been to called Point Pleasant. And it's like... Did it live up to its name? It was like being in a sort of 90s hip-hop video, although maybe still contemporary on the beach, like a California hip-hop video on the beach. It was just like... It was like this, there was this, we went to this place that was like a beach, like tiki bar restaurant kind of thing with like five bars and all these plates. There was like mist to keep you cold, like cool at the bar. And people were just in their bathing suits. There's a band and then there's a beach and you go, I mean, it's just like.

Chris Kind of a lot of like, a lot of like, like bamboo and grasses happening or something like that.

Scott Yeah, all this kind of, yeah, it was really surreal. I mean, it was, it was, it was definitely. This is the only beach I... I have been to, in recent memory, it actually lives up to those Jersey Shore stereotypes. It's totally like that.

Chris That good, eh?

Scott The other beaches I tend to go to just are not like that at all. It was so packed. It was crazy.

Chris Do you realize that it was also Canada's National Day this last week?

Scott I did not realize that. As an American, I feel like that is so American to not realize that.

Chris Well, I mean, it's not like the rest of the world has any particularly elevated understanding of American culture. It's just that whatever goes on in America tends to make news around the world in the way that what happens in most other countries doesn't. But yeah, July 1st is Canada Day. It tends to be a pretty, it's actually great. It's like, you know, kind of laid back family affair, right? Everybody's got a holiday and you mainly eat barbecue and get together with friends, fireworks, parades sometimes, things like that. Not a lot of military demonstrations in my experience of various Canada Days that I've been a part of. And until recently, not so much down your side of the border either.

Scott Now, that's what's interesting about the whole military Trump parade thing. I thought like, you know...

Chris I just thought it was – I mean, if you're going to do a military parade, it's got to be awesome. I mean, like, just having a couple of stationary tanks sitting here and there isn't – that's not a parade. That's not showing off. That's – you know.

Scott What's so funny is Trump got this idea because Macron really pulled out the stops on Bastille Day. And Trump was, like, so envious. Like, he had Macron envy. And, like – but, you know, I – In general, I think, for the most powerful nation-state probably, I would guess, that's existed, definitely militarily and probably economically, we generally, one of America's virtues in our vices are many, you know, are manifold and multiple and manifold. But we generally have not done stuff like that. This is generally what illiberal states do. You see more of this in North Korea and stuff like that. We generally have not done a lot of this type of thing excessively on the national scene like that.

Chris So I suspect, and I get it was a break with tradition, but I can understand a lot of people asking, well, why not? We got all this great stuff. What's wrong with celebrating our military? And there's nothing wrong with celebrating our military. But I suppose my guess is that to the extent there are people who don't agree with changing the tradition of how the United States has done it, I think of like gridiron football metaphors. And, you know, there's some people who score touchdowns and they do some elaborate dance and they show off. And there are other people who show touchdowns and just flip the ball to the referee and get back, you know, to the huddle for the extra point. And, you know, you ask the latter group, so how come you don't do a touchdown dance? And, you know, it's usually some version of, you know, when you score a touchdown act like you've been there before.

This is just old hat for me. I suppose the American military would say, unlike a lot of other countries that feel they need to do a parade to remind the world that they've got weapons, most of us looking around the room in the military, we have battlefield experience. I mean, we deploy pretty regularly around the world. People know that the U.S. is a military superpower, and it's just inelegant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredibly inelegant. To trumpet in front of people on our national day. To trumpet in front, yeah. Yeah, so I think that's the strongest form of the argument. Why not? You know, as you say, like in France, they have military parades on Bastille Day. So it's not like there is some incompatibility with democracy to, you know, trot out the big guns and have a spectacle about it. It really is a kind of, I guess, cultural choice.

But it's interesting. And I feel like, you know, it would have been great as with any, you know, conscious change. To our culture and traditions, if they're a bit of a really interesting debate about it, as opposed to a, well, I like this idea.

Scott Yeah, and Donald Trump does that to a lot of American politics. I think, for instance, when he said we're just going to pull out of Syria, out of the Middle East, and his Secretary of Defense Mattis left, and this was sort of a flippant thing which he didn't even follow through on, and Trump's decision to withdraw. But actually, our troop presence in places like that is a real debate. There are people that are going to serve in Afghanistan soon, if not already, who were not alive during 9-11. 9-11 happened. So we took care of the Nazis and the Japanese in like five years. This is the difference between conventional military conflict and insurrections. Yeah, of our like 200, what are we, 230 plus, 243 years old or something, I'm trying to do this in my head, but I think of those 243 years, like 220-some we've been at war, at some point you've got to look in the mirror and say, maybe the problem's me.

You know, at some point you have a couple bad relationships, okay, but then at certain points they're never working out. Maybe it's you look in the mirror and say, maybe it's me, you know? Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Chris I mean, we don't need to kind of spend all our time talking about it. It is a deep well of interesting things to reflect upon, right? The role of military in life and what military represents. And I was just a few days ago giving another workshop. I've been doing a series of them. with the Ministry of Defense in the UK on artificial intelligence. And this one was at a Royal Air Force's base. And, you know, really interesting talking to sort of the defense analyst community about AI because so much of the military confrontations of the future are going to be cyber war, are already cyber war. And there's, I mean, if you're in that domain, there's a ton of interesting questions. In classic, what in the military they call kinetic warfare, like guns and bombs and stuff, there are pretty well-defined norms in the international community about reciprocity. So if I shoot down one of your planes, what is a reciprocal response?

Scott I mean, George H.W. Bush, before the first war in Iraq, the one that was, you know, largely an international coalition and viewed successfully, you know, it was a sort of minimalist, get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. I mean, he had, like, ethicists, theologians, like, they were, like, talking about just war theory, you know, before he launched the attack, like, thinking about, you know, what are, like, so, yeah, I mean, these, yeah, those, there's centuries of tradition.

Chris They have those on Fox News, too.

Scott All the time, Sean Hannity. Well, Trump calls Hannity, you know, Hannity. Or actually, it's Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson was the guy that talked him out of the Iran strike, apparently. So, Sean Hannity. It's a fight for Trump's ear between 8 and 9 o'clock. Because at 9 o'clock, Hannity was saying Trump's got to do something. And at 8 o'clock hour, Tucker Carlson was... Sort of the populist kind of praising the restraint.

Chris So, I mean, yeah, so that's good to know. Good to know that there's, you know, some process of kind of, you know, getting a moral survey on what we ought to do. But, you know, as we get into new dimensions of warfare, like cyber warfare, I mean, it's not clear that anybody knows what the oughts are, right? Like, what is a reciprocal response to... Any incursion to sort of US electoral systems, right?

Scott You're targeting civilians purposefully. A lot of cyber warfare would do just that, right? It's focusing on noncombatants.

Chris That's right. Well, I mean, so one of the most devastating things that you might be able to do is hack an algorithm that's really useful or it's really important. And so how do societies keep the useful algorithm safe?

Scott Yeah, like how pissed off do you get if your partner or your roommate or somebody screws up your Netflix algorithm by watching something? Think about it on a bigger scale.

Chris Yeah, that's right. That's right. Suddenly nobody's getting to work on time. But if Bernie Sanders gets elected, it'll be, nobody will have to be on their aunt's Netflix. Everyone will have their own free Netflix account.

Scott I mean, I think that there are a lot of people... Do you have anybody that is on your Netflix account because they don't have a ton of money? I think we have two people who are young millennials from churches.

Chris You gift access to your family account. That's beautiful. See, Bernie Sanders would say, in a true democracy, you wouldn't need to do that. There must be some kind of app community for that now. Somebody has figured out how to organize that giving, surely. Craig's List. Craig's List. I thought they organized other forms of giving on Craig's List.

Scott You know, I would say, too, about the military that I think really should be celebrated. I mean, yeah, many things, many, many things. But David French, who's been on my interview show, Give and Take, a few times, he's a prominent conservative editor and writer for the National Review. He's on Meet the Press a lot, Bill Maher, things like that. He's one of the early Never Trumpers, evangelical Christian lawyer, volunteered to go to Iraq. And he wrote a great piece about police shootings. And something where he used to really defend the police more until he really looked into the data and footage and things. One of the things he was saying, like, he was a JAG, right, lawyer, you know, in the JAG Corps in Iraq. But he had to go, like, help with treaties and things. And he was in some pretty tense situations, right? And he saw guys, young guys...

Right? In the United States. So, like, he's just like, you know, he's really sort of become a lot more critical of police and police shootings because he's just like, in the military, you wouldn't get away with any of this. There'd just be so much... Not that he's saying all police shootings are bad or anything, but he's saying a lot of these things, cops are just overly aggressive, overly anxious. The training isn't there. In a way, a military trains a younger guy.

Chris Or at least that he wasn't, somehow he recognized that he wasn't going to fire and he kept talking him down, shutting him down until he gave himself up. And I remember that part of the kind of the international press coverage around that event was as a kind of a model of the restraint that the police officer had showed. Because when it's your own life on the line, it's, well, I mean, I've had no training, but it's hard for me to imagine. My fear for my own existence not driving and overriding whatever training I might have had to protect myself in that situation. Like so many things, it's remarkable how much richer the story becomes once we try to get inside every character of it.

Scott Yeah, I think that's right.

Chris Where do you want to go? That was like 15 minutes of saying hello.

Scott I don't want to go back to that beach. No, I don't know. I might go back on a weekday. I would actually like to go back on a weekday to see if it's not as crazy. Fourth of July weekend is a pretty crazy day to go.

Chris This is very random, but can I share something? Something really unexpected that happened to me this week. Yes. So one of my readers, a guy that I've been chatting back and forth with on email for a while, passing through London this weekend. And so we got together for a drink. And he gave me this, which you can see. That is a rock. It looks like a rock. It's a rock. It's a rock.

Scott What kind of rock? Is it like a space rock?

Chris Yeah, yeah. It's a 4.6 billion-year-old chunk of meteorite. How did I guess that? Well, because otherwise, there's got to be a story, and that's the only one that came to you.

Scott Yeah, I mean, like, I was like, well, I just thought, like, I don't, like, it's got to be, it looks like a space rock.

Chris But, you know, it's interesting. I mean, so, and, like, not all rocks are 4.6 billion years old, I guess. You know, most rocks over sort of thousands or millions of years, they... They erode or they get melted in magma or some kind of tectonic activity ends them. But this thing was sort of in the protective emptiness of space for the last four and a half billion years and then crash landed into this guy's field in rural Canada. Some time in the 80s, I suppose. He has a few more chunks, and he always carries one around, and he gave it to me to carry around. A piece of the infinite is what he called it. I've only had it for a couple of days, but I'm starting to think that this is going to be a very helpful talisman, if you will, to reflect upon so much of what we are working on.

And so many of the things that sort of make us vulnerable with a capital V are so completely beyond our control or our influence, you know, like things like meteors from space and stuff like that. It's really quite fascinating to hold it in my hand. The other thing, so I had to, you know, I also had to look it up. Like, what is a meteorite worth?

Scott Yeah, that's a good question. Well, depending on the meteorite, I would guess.

Chris So more than its weight in gold.

Scott Wow.

Chris Yeah.

Scott Yeah, it's actually... So how much is that worth in your hand?

Chris Probably about, probably about like 15 or 20,000 US dollars.

Scott Are you serious?

Chris Seriously.

Scott That's a $20,000 rock? Are you going to sell it? I would sell it.

Chris I suspect the thing is that there's a pretty liquid market for these things. I imagine if you wanted to sell it, first thing you'd have to do is convince someone that it is a meteorite. This guy who gave it to me is an astrophysicist, so I assume I didn't ask him exactly where he got it dated, but he probably went to the local university and did some carbon dating on it. So what happens, I think, with meteorites is that when the rock forms, there's usually some uranium. And the uranium decays into lead at a predictable rate. And so you can measure how long ago the uranium got trapped in the rock or something like that and figure out its age. So I imagine you'd have to take it somewhere first, pay somebody to do that, give you, I don't know, like some certificate that we did this test. And I don't know if you can like, can you take a chunk of space rock to like Christie's or some auction house and see?

Scott That's a great question.

Chris I would want to know where you would— Whatever somebody wants to pay for. But I would never sell it because somebody gave it to me. So it's not a market good, right? It's been given to me in a way that it's not a market good.

Scott I love it. It's interesting because I thought when you said that about what's not in control, because I was thinking yesterday about the nature of freedom. So much of what we celebrate in the United States on Independence Day is declaring our independence from Great Britain and setting up the United States of America in a long process. But so much of that was this idea that liberty would be at its foundation, that freedom. Not that there weren't freedoms and things like that in Europe, but that I think one of the things that's interesting about United States history and some people I mean, Stanley Harawas, the great ethicist at Duke, said, you know, the United States is the only country that has the misfortune of being founded on a philosophical mistake, not an Enlightenment fan. But what the United States is different is I think in continental Europe, you know, And when the liberal democratic sort of enlightenment tradition was taking place, it's taking place in tension with over against more ancient pre-modern traditions, right? And these things are evolving together. So you have these, you know, parliament, right, is this great representation of this modern democracy. And it's in the shadow of, you know, Buckingham Palace, which is the anti-modern, right? And all this stuff, like, learns to coexist together.

Good question, Isaiah Berlin. Exactly, right? What's the nature of liberty and are we more free now? Are we going in a trajectory where we're more free in the United States? Our politics are more liberative for more people or not.

Chris And that's an interesting question. It's a really interesting question. I mean, and it's interesting as well how the moment you start to explore that question in a kind of comparative way, like how different parts of the world would answer it, one immediately becomes aware of how it's so specific to You know, the narrative, right? Like, I think the US and, you know, and Europe. I mean, Europe was, you know, it was a land of sort of, you know, kings and princes and czars and basically, you know, like Caesar wannabes, right? It was, what, czars and kaisers and... What were there a few others? I mean, yeah, everybody, everybody wanted to be wanted to be kind of the new Caesar. And so, you know, authority was some project of Heredity, trying to marry the right people and expand the claims that you had to various succession assets and stuff like that.

And then the French Revolution was about trying to—and so much political philosophy at the time was about this enlightened philosophy—was about trying to say, well, okay, if we're going to emancipate ourselves from And so freedom became about the realization of that, it seems. So, I mean, I think that for most people in kind of the democratic world, even if they don't know... Well, let's say the democratic world is itself a pretty complicated and varied place right now, but... Did you see what Putin said about Western liberalism?

Scott I forget. I saw it in the Business Insider.

Chris That is over.

Scott He said, Western liberalism is irrelevant. And... The funny thing was, Trump was asked about this comment while he was meeting with Putin in Japan at the G20 or whatever. And he said, well, what do you think of President Putin's statement that Western liberalism is obsolete? And Trump said, well, he looks at these cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, sees the homelessness, the mismanagement, and he sees they're very liberal cities. They're run by liberal Democrats.

Chris I feel like I'm standing at a crossroads and there are 10 avenues radiating out from it and they're all broad and tree-lined and beautifully fascinating on this question of what is... You're like that frost in The Road Not Taken. Yeah, well, so... Or the road less traveled. We've got time and endless tape, so we'll just take them all.

Scott You know that poem is totally... The way we're taught to read that poem, or the way I was taught to read it, the way everybody reads that poem is total bullshit. Because it's all like, well, you know, I took the road less traveled. That's made all the difference, right? But he said that on that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black. He says the other one then took the other just as fair, perhaps having the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear. Although, as for that passing, had warned them really about the same. He's like, it really is not really that much less traveled. But then he says, at the end, I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that

has made all the difference. But he's saying that, like, I'm going to be saying this as if I made this, that it was an arbitrary choice, and I'm going to be looking back on it.

Chris Don't take Robert Frost away from me.

Scott It's a great point.

Chris I actually think it's deeper. It's actually, I think, the way... Yeah, what you're really saying is that we have this sort of naive simplicity that we're all just kind of...

Scott I think it's sort of like a warning against the stories we tell ourselves about the choices we made and how we make up stories to make them make sense.

Chris It's sort of interesting. I think there's also, like in the classic way that it's taught, it seems to be a call to, you know, don't be a part of a group. Go off on your own direction. Yeah, yeah. Whether it is... Meaning or success or achievement or whatever the goal is, it's somehow better to go off in the loner direction. And there's some virtues there, right? About not getting stuck in groupthink and stuff like that and being true to yourself. But there is something also about actively participating in something larger than yourself. That is, in the naive kind of reading of that poem, sort of ignored, right? That sometimes being part of a community, sometimes assuming your own kind of restless need to be utterly individual into something that feels greater than me, right? It's not about me. It's not about ourselves. I think So when you talk about it being deeper, I think that in the deeper reading of the poem, it suffers less from... Boy, now we're becoming literary critics. This is great.

Scott I was going to say... There's a whole book recently, like two years ago, written about this poem and the misreading of it. Okay. And this is the most Googled English poem... I mean, the guy talks about this. It is the piece of English verse, English-language verse that's most popular, most Googled, most identifiable.

Chris Interesting. Interesting. Speaking of poems misattributed, what do you think of – somebody – I'd seen it on whatever news program that – Like the kind of the who is Marianne Williamson. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it had to do that. She's the Oprah candidate, dude. Yeah, she was the one who said this quote that is famously attributed to Nelson Mandela about, you know, our fear is not that we're helpless, but that we're too powerful or something like that. Do you know the quote that I'm talking about? I don't know the quote. I could, I could, let's see if I can find it.

Scott But she's the Oprah candidate, dude. Oprah should just run. Because you know what? Trump, try to call Oprah a socialist. Her house is bigger than yours. You can't call Oprah a socialist.

Chris Our fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. That one, anyway. Yeah, our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, it is that we are powerful beyond measure. So now, and now I don't know what to believe. I mean, yeah. Who said it, really?

Scott Really, who said it?

Chris Well, the New York Times apparently did a story on it in 2011, so they might have a view on which it is. Anyway, where was it going? Freedom. Okay, but again, you know, in China, not to talk too much about it, but in China, you know, where there is no history of emancipation from Well, no history is a strong word, but where there just isn't the same history of emancipation from, you know, the sort of hereditary war between kings and states, there's still, you know, like in kind of an imperial Chinese context, then, you know, freedom is to live in a well-ordered society, right, where you've got some son of heaven So it's not so much in obedience to anyone But in a kind of finding of harmony, which I think everybody can relate to. There is some truth in that as well, right? When we are kind of out of harmony, then we can be a prisoner to, you know, I guess the metaphor would be a prisoner to chaos, but also a prisoner to appetite, a prisoner to disorder. Kind of a prisoner to the weakness and the – I'm searching for the word. It's Friday afternoon for me here, so I'm already starting to wind down the brain. But right, like a weakness to the – you just can't get real stuff done.

Because of the disorder and the chaos. And so harmony helps us to become our best selves, to help society become its best self. And freedom is... So I guess, if I step back a minute, at a minimum, the two big branches on freedom are, is it something that I can individually possess? Or is it a kind of, you know, A social good. Can you live free in an anarchic society without any kind of law and order? And now we're getting back into kind of Western political thought around the state of nature. And what is the state of nature? And if state of nature is kind of, you know, land of the beast, then by coming together in political society and kind of saying that we're going to govern ourselves with some predictable laws, that is, although in some ways it's a restriction we place upon ourselves, in other ways it frees us to... You know, to a life of a bit more predictability and also to a capacity to collaborate with one another.

Scott Yeah, I'm rereading this book right now, The One, The Three, and The Many, by Colin Gunton. These were lectures he gave in 1992. It's a fantastic book. In the introduction, he says, this is the pathos of modernity. In both the failed experiments of modern totalitarian regimes and the insidious homogeneity of consumer culture, there is a tendency to submerge the many in the one. Where the true one is displaced, false and alienating gods rush to fill in the vacancy. So he thinks there that in modernity, you know, you look at people less as in this sort of harmony and order, like you're saying, in a Chinese perspective. Everybody's part of a unit. Everybody, like, you know, we tend to think, like, if certain kinds of Eastern thought think unity is what's most real, reality is like an ocean, right? Like, I think modern Western thinking is more like atomistic.

The most real thing is the smallest part. So what's a cell? A bunch of atoms. What's an organ? A bunch of cells. What's a body? A bunch of organs. What's a family? A bunch of individuals. What's a city? A bunch of families and associates. What's a cell?

Chris That way of thinking is sort of the rational project, right? Going right back to the Greeks. We used to have these sort of totalizing myths, and then we discovered that, well, we can actually break the reality down into pieces that are explainable. And once that becomes the project, then it seems that that's the path to knowledge and what's real, and that aggregates The systems theorists would say, listening to our conversation, freedom, to some extent, is an emergent property. Of a system, right? It's not something that you can find in the piece. It's a condition of the system. And the way that, you know, trust, well, does trust exist? Yeah, sure. I mean, well, in what way does it exist? It's not like you can kind of, you know, shine a laser on my little piece of meteorite and see an atom of trust inside it. It exists as a kind of social reality. And I suppose that that is a bit of the – kind of one of the core tensions. And it's interesting that we live in this time where there's just so much more exchange between different freedom projects across humanity. But do we find it? Do we advance it in the lives of individuals in – In the lives of the group, right? I mean, one of the big, big questions, I guess, really being asked in American society in the 2020 election and sort of Democrats versus Republicans is, you know, do we advance the cause of freedom by removing people's like economic, like socioeconomic constraints and burdens?

Or would that be trespassing on people's property freedoms? And, you know, it's interesting. I mean, so, you know, the modern story is so polarized between Democratic and Republican, but there are really rich and long traditions on both sides, right? I mean, you go back to John Locke and it was all about property, really.

Scott We'll see you next time. And there are both things that I think we broadly agree on in Western political life, that somehow we want both of these in some measure. But the idea is that one can encroach on the other too much or something.

Chris Yeah, well, more broad avenues to go down. Here's just a random aside. Did you ever read Amartya Sen, this famous development economist? No. So he wrote a book called Development as Freedom back in – it's quite a while ago now. It must have been in the 1990s. Basically, it's one of the most succinct and just best arguments for the freedom to and how development in terms of helping. He's an Indian economist and he was speaking about poor societies generally, but helping poor society to become wealthier. And thereby, you know, have both freedom from certain things like disease and hunger, but also freedom to invest in their own education and consume and things like that. That this is what freedom really was, at least at a global scale, what the most important frontier of advancing freedom is. I suppose it's interesting to think about, as you frame it, this is kind of the tension that you describe to people, and they obviously kind of want both. They both want the freedom from just arbitrary and capricious force.

You know, frustrating their lives, but also the freedom to build lives of meaning and purpose and growth and significance for themselves. Who's going to disagree with that? And then the question is, how do we go about reconciling those? To the extent that they are in tension, right? To the extent that, well, what we want to do is the group kind of wants to confiscate some of your property and that everybody be agree with that so that we can Give other people some freedom from some wants and just other constraints that impose upon them. The question becomes, how do we do a better job of kind of fruitfully exploring that tension? I don't know.

Scott Yeah, I mean, and I think that's at the heart of, like, the whole, the current sort of populist debate right now. I mean, I had David French on, who I mentioned earlier, on Give and Take last week, and I love, I've had him on, like, three times, four times. This is a democratic sort of project. Because it doesn't seem to work for enough people. I think that's a lot of the debates playing out. The other thing, too, I just think about freedom. Since our last episode, our Žižek-Peterson discussion, I have been reading Žižek and really fascinating stuff. Right now, I'm reading through his book, Absolute Recoil.

Chris Come on, pull up the Žižek impression.

Scott It's hard to get into it. I love that one thing he said. We started at last week. I mean, godlike figure comes to Slovenian peasant and he says, I give you anything you want, but the thing is you must give your neighbor double. He said, fine, make me blind in one eye. Look at the cover of this book, though. I mean, for a philosophy text. It's so sexy. Yeah, it's a good one. For people that can't see it, it's like silver or glossy. But in the section, in the early in the book, he's talking about the nature of freedom. And he talks about, he has this section, and he's an atheist. He's a dialectical materialist, he calls himself. He's kind of reinventing that term a little bit. But he talks about acting with the grace of God. And he talks about this Jesuit, the spiritual practices of the Ignatian tradition, the Society of Jesus. These Ignatian, this Jesuit sort of spiritual practices are meant so that you can discern God's will, but not that you're like, get rid of your own subjectivity, but that you actually take it more seriously. And then he goes into this little kind of discourse on Descartes, and he sort of says how Descartes thinks

But he thinks when you act as if you're not free, everything's determined, but I don't know the plan. So I can't act like my choices are going, I can game them all out and know what they mean. I can just choose what I'm choosing. I can really be a subject and really freely choose. And he thinks the only way you can freely choose is to believe in something like this predestinating. And he calls that acting with the grace of God. But he thinks that that sort of sense that you choose Knowing that the contingency of events is going to play out in a way that it's going to feel predestined, and yet you still take it seriously. And then he's got this great footnote. He says, postmodern philosophers from Nietzsche onwards expressed their preference for Catholicism over Protestantism. Catholicism is a culture of external playful rituals in contrast to the inner sense of guilt and the pressure of authenticity that characterizes Protestantism. We are allowed to just follow the ritual, ignore the authenticity of our inner belief. However, the playfulness should not deceive us. Catholicism resorts to such subterfuge to save the divine big other in his goodness, while the capriciously, quote, irrational predestination in Protestantism Confronts us with a God who is ultimately not good and all powerful, but indelibly stained by the suspicion of his being stupid, arbitrary, even outright evil. The implicit dark lesson of Protestantism is if you want God, you have to renounce part of the divine goodness.

It's so great that this idea that you have to have this sort of sense that things are not in your control to be free. That when you realize that, I mean, I guess this is sort of the serenity prayer. Like, God, give me the wisdom to change things I can change, or the wisdom to accept the things I can't change, the courage to change the ones I can, and the... The grace to accept the things I can't change, the courage to change the ones I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference. And I think the wisdom is very small, right? That freedom is a very narrow thing where you're really free because you can control very little, but you can still act.

Chris So let me clarify that.

Scott Having a part of our lives that is outside of our control advances our freedom because... Because you act regardless of the consequences, that when you're free from sort of all the calculus of the consequences, in the sense of, like he tells this great story... Which is to say that like somebody else is worrying about the consequences.

Chris so i can just act i guess i guess it's sort of like it's the anti-cont right where you've got to like figure out you know what the categorical imperative is and figure out the way of acting that everyone would like that that would be the rational action to take in there and then take that action and that's freedom and i guess someone else is is kind of saying that like that sounds If that is freedom, then it is such a burden of calculus to come to the one act that counts as free. And what this is saying is surely freedom is to not have to do that calculus, to not bear that burden of finding the one act, but instead to more honestly act out yourself.

Scott Yeah, he tells this story from this Russian therapist he knows or something about this guy who's... We all know a Russian therapist. ...struggling his... Yeah, exactly. Take two vodka, call me in the morning. You basically see that there's this patient who is contemplating leaving his wife. Their marriage is struggling. He's estranged and moving... We'll be right back. I think what Žižek is getting at, and I've been rereading this section a few times, but I think what he's saying also frees you from what Frost is saying, that you don't have to then make up this bullshit story about how even though you had an arbitrary choice in front of you, That neither one was less traveled. They were both the same. But now I have to tell myself I chose the road less traveled and that's made the difference of

who I am right now. I think he thinks that you don't have to do that kind of spin. He has this great quote. I think it's from Descartes. He's like, the way to act freely is to act like you're not free.

Chris You know what's really interesting, and I know this is going to sound completely banal to you, but I guess I just sometimes— I love banal.

Scott I was in banality all day yesterday. I was at banal beach.

Chris That's fair. It's your national holiday, so you're allowed these things. But this conversation really brings home for me how tied into Christian thought democracy is. It is this whole burden to make good choices. We have, through democracy, put upon ourselves such an enormous moral burden to make good choices for the well-being of the community, which is a total Christian thing to do. It seems like the idea that freedom would be freedom from Because, of course, it couldn't enter into our head in a European Christian culture that had a French Revolution. I mean, it was within just a soup of moral responsibility that the notions of kind of a social contract of the sovereign will of the people Could sound at all like a good idea, right? Yeah. And so it's interesting. Ten years ago when I was doing my doctoral work in Beijing, the way to get anybody to do a good conversation was to ask them, so what is freedom really? Because everybody kind of wanted to dispute a sort of Western liberal frame of we're free but you're not kind of thing.

And then I suppose that would be a very strong argument for kind of, you know, if Plato were here, we should ask him, like, is this what you meant by philosopher king, right? That if we got somebody who just sort of making good decisions on our behalf, okay, so they can handle all of that responsibility stuff. And we can focus on ourselves, you know, within some reasonable – and that's what makes them a philosopher king, like they're being pretty reasonable in terms of setting up the rules of the game. So that – but I don't – I know you want to say a thousand things to that, but I immediately want to complicate my own view around, you know, whether freedom sort of inside some higher groupthink that this sort of been set for us – Is the best freedom or even the healthiest freedom? And I'm not sure this is a fair comparison to make, but zooming completely back to where I was a few days ago talking to some analysts in the defense intelligence community about AI and its implications. And one of the things that we were talking about is, so what are the threats to AI?

If it's putting forth recommendations within an analyst community that only has one shared narrative for how to look at the world, for what's relevant and what's not. And even before you had AI giving recommendations that might strengthen that, the best way to have a healthy analyst community, and it applies to defense, it applies to pretty much anything, is you need to have at least a couple narratives on the go so that you can come to these recommendations from multiple frames. And that's how you sort of get some critical thinking about, well, are we going to accept this recommendation this time? Are we going to go another way? As soon as you've got groupthink in an analyst community, You're kind of fucked. You need to cultivate that. I constantly follow the news back in China. The moral police are out pretty much on a daily basis. Government says that

men in the summer are no longer supposed to wear their t-shirts hitched up around their chest, which is how people in China Beat the Heat. It's like, no, that's sort of like that Mancini look is no longer culturally appropriate.

Scott That's like the moral police meets the fashion police.

Chris And then the culture changes, right? Like en masse. That's like literally a fascist season. Yeah. Somebody has too much time on their hands that they focused on that this week. But it kind of raises this point about how culture then evolves in that concept of freedom. versus how it evolves in, you know, say an American concept of freedom. And, you know, I think that there's probably, there's a risk when you've got sort of like one narrative Driving evolution and driving change, especially cultural evolution, but all domains. There's a risk of kind of getting into a sort of state of fragility, right? Because what if that narrative gets it wrong, right? Going back to Amartya Sen and his book, Development as Freedom, one of his big arguments was that, well, one of the best things you can say about a democracy is that they've never led a state into mass famine before. When policy gets really bad, there's a pretty immediate correction, which you can't trust will happen in authoritarian states. If you've got groupthink setting the conditions for freedom, then there's a kind of fragility about that. If you've got messiness and you do have this kind of diffused responsibility, Then you get into kind of a much more almost like organic ecological model of how change happens, right? You've got sort of the way things are going and some people are changing, but then you get this random mutation that just sends things off in a different direction, like the Me Too movement or something like that. And so you get a kind of more diverse ecology.

So we come down to, I guess, boy, wow, we've soared all over the place. But I think what you come down to is a question of You know, to what extent is freedom sort of like something to optimize in a status quo? And to what extent is it like a more dynamic concept of freedom where it's sort of an ever-shifting journey? I'm not explaining that very well. As you always do on these calls, you bring me to these ideas I've never thought of before. Sorry, now I'm getting excited. That's right, I think. Some of the classic texts on freedom, like Isaiah Berlin, like the two concepts of liberty, like positive liberty, negative liberty, stuff like that. But I feel like I don't know who's really done – who's done the work on the static and the dynamic conception of freedom. And I wonder if a lot of our thinking is kind of within a static model.

And if we think in a more dynamic model of cultural change and adaptation, how does that shift things? So, for example, now I'm talking way too much, but I guess it's – anybody else want to say it? Exactly. Yeah, you're fine. I'm so Canadian. It's like the two of us. Yeah, you're so polite. But, oh no, I laughed so hard I lost what I was going to say. It was really good too. What were we just talking about?

Scott You were talking about static and dynamic. Yeah, and I think that's right. I mean, I have two thoughts in mind. Maybe these are concluding thoughts, I don't know. So one is from Jesus and one is from Frederick Douglass that I was reading yesterday. Sorry, someone just called me. I should have that in Do Not Disturb. One is something I think from the teaching of Jesus. The other is something, a great address I'll link to in the show notes, called What to the Slave is Fourth of July by Frederick Douglass in 1852. It's amazing. But Jesus, when he comes on the scene, you know, in first century, Palestine. There are all these sort of apocalyptic movements and apocalyptic prophets in Judaism. And John the Baptist is one of these kind of figures. And they all preach a very similar thing. Not yet, but soon. So the kingdom of God, the apocalypse, a day of the Lord's going to come and the end of history. Not yet, but soon. And when that happens, oppression, you know, death. This transformation from not yet but soon to already not yet allows for some tension. I think the dynamism you're talking about, that the transformation's here and yet it's not yet here.

And so that allows you... So I was thinking about that. And then in light of what Frederick Douglass says, he has all this critique of why, rightly, the slave is so perplexed by Fourth of July and how the nation's not living up to the best intentions of its founders, nor were they living up to their best intentions. And he says at the end, allow me to say in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. The arm of the Lord is not shortened, and the doom of slavery is certain. I therefore leave off where I began, with hope, while drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions. My spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot around in the same old paths of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long-established customs of hurtful character could formally fence themselves in and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. From the all-pervading light.

Americana, I think at its best, I hope, is this very kind of self-criticism that you can't celebrate America without seeing its inconsistencies. You can't rejoice in the alreadyness of it without really being convicted and humbled by the not yet-ness of its charter.

Chris So that's interesting because it kind of brings us back full circle to this question of How do we better bring the tensions into our politics? And that that does seem to be not just a fruitful place, but a kind of...

Scott Yeah, not framing them as problems. Tensions is great because not looking to dissolve them, but to see the truth in the tension.

Chris Exactly, to see the truth in the tension. The work that you and I were doing in Toronto, bringing together people to look at the global challenges in the world and really to try to You know, begin a cultural shift from kind of a cultural shift from, you know, there are these debilitating global crises in the world that must be solved, but they can't be solved. And so it just are the font of anxiety and despair and, you know, upheaval and all of that. 2. Being liberated by the existence of these challenges that mean that we can expire past compromises and past solutions. and explore new ways of thinking and new ways of working together and that the very existence of these challenges and that there's a kind of common recognition of them across so many of the divides in society brings us together. In a way, it's sad and astonishing, but I think this is also our work, is to push back against the narrative that can only see these as problems, as crises.

These are the best opportunities to achieve You know, a deep and meaningful renaissance in our political culture, in human culture more broadly, because what better opportunity, like not just one, to come together in new ways, but two, to challenge old ways of thinking and being. And actually, I mean, we're almost, we're already there in the sense that... Nowadays, in pretty much any room full of formal leadership, there is this widely shared idea that we've probably got to make some fundamental changes. Nobody needs to be sold on that. I go around the world telling the story, but it's just another version of story that other people are. Everybody knows it already. Whatever particular perspective you bring that shows that this is true, we already believe that. But we haven't yet figured out how to sort of embrace what is exhilarating about these existential challenges. Now, we've got to land this plane because I've got to run. But, you know, it's interesting to think about, so how do we make that shift? So, I mean, we're experimenting with how to make that shift in terms of bringing people together into our base camps around these challenges. But, like, within... And it'd be interesting to see what does it take to, in essence, transform culture and making culture the project and the impact. But it'd be interesting to kind of watch, since it is sort of... American Independence Day. But to watch the American political project and to look for who is experimenting with and how to create new coming together around the big challenges.

And he even comes together to debate these wonderfully giant questions like what is freedom, which really you have in the political party system there, really strong advocates for the freedom from and the freedom to. And I think in this moment, it presents just a terrific opportunity to ask Both of these parties, as we've been thinking about freedom, have we been too static in our understanding of what makes us free? Is there a more dynamic model? And maybe in that dynamism, we see the need both for expansive individual action, but also some investment in our social capacities of adaptability and resilience. I can't run for president because I'm Canadian. Everybody's like, dude, you should run. Run as an independent. Make it even more interesting.

Scott My slogan would be, truth is in the tensions. So it's interesting. There's this Vaclav Havel quote. This is your last quote, and then we gotta go. Democratic thinker. Yeah, this is it. He said, hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. And I love that, that it's not in the outcomes and things like that, but it's this sort of like, the stuff you're talking about, about being invested in a meaningful struggle like this, regardless of how it turns out, but that it's sensible and meaningful. I think it's where it begins.

Chris I love that, and speaking the other day with several people who are involved in this community that we're building, this community of action around these global base camps, And there is this urgency to answer questions. What is the core team going to be? And who's the advisory group going to be? And how are we going to decide who the participants are to these amazing events? There's so much that needs to be decided. And how are we going to decide it? And I didn't have Havel in my mind the way that you do. But what I talked about is, I think, I think that what we want to do is actually figure out how can we keep everything provisional. We don't ever want to reach a final answer on these things because the moment that there's a group of people that answers it, it means that there's really nothing else. These are the fun questions. There's nothing else for other people to do. It's going to be a pretty dead community if it's like, basically, you can come on board to this finished thing and accept all these answers or not. I mean, I'm going to go find something else that I can work on because I prefer unfinished projects.

Now, reality is that from time to time, we need to give a provisional answer. But it's always provisional. But it's always provisional. And then what happens in the execution of that answer then becomes input into the permanent debate, right? So that is sort of what the Democratic Project is about. It's just that we – how do we kind of – Absolutely. So maybe that's part of what – You know, increasingly polarized polities need to remember, be reminded of, that it's all provisional, folks. Like, we've got a system where the conversation is permanent. And so even if you really disagree with this decision, it's not like... It's not like this is it, right? If you're right, then it might, you know, and there might be 10 or 20 years of suffering the consequences of getting it wrong. We get that. But if you're right, then it's going to come around the other way. If you're like, yeah, that was the wrong way to go. We're going to retrace our steps and go that way. And, you know, I'm holding, maybe I'll wind up on this, you know, I'm holding this 4.6 billion year old rock in my hand, which is a reminder that Dude, everything is provisional.

And really the only things that endure are our culture, are our ways that have some capacity to transmit, not the impacts of actions, but the ways of acting and the ways of thinking into the far future. And so let's focus more on those and focus less upon the immediate consequences. And maybe that'll just help us all to have a bit more of that tolerance for the tensions and tolerance for the unfinished projects that I think you rightly call upon.

Scott And this, too, is part of it, my friend. Always a pleasure.