I'm Luke Burgis. I'm the founder and director of the Clooney Institute and the author of Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life and The 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Today on Big Think, we're going to be looking at the two levels of the self, the solid self and the pseudo self. The three temptations of the screen and then courage and specifically the four forms of courage that allow us to live well in the modern world. This Big Think interview is
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what's morally right and wrong. Their brains just don't compute the information in the same type of way. That's what a psychopath actually is. Enroll in the psychology of psychopaths and find your next course at online.el.edu. Learn something worth sharing. And now back to the interview. Chapter one, distinguishing a solid self and a pseudo self. So it seems like every year 10 books get written on how to find your tribe. Um, so it seems to be something that, you know, people want to understand how to do,
how to find your people, how to find people that you can be comfortable with. But it seems to me that we live in a world where finding tribes is easier than it's ever been, especially with the internet. We're immersed in tribes all of the time. And the big question is, what do you do once you've actually found your tribe? Then what? How do you exist within the tribe in a healthy way so that you don't lose yourself within it? And that to me is the most
important question of our time in an age of social contagion where we're finding our tribes uh sometimes we're finding tribes on a daily basis, right? Different tribes to to validate what we think and what we feel. We pick and choose tribes uh as we as we need them. And the far more important skill, I think, is not just how to leave a tribe. That is and can very much be an important skill. The harder skill is how to be part of any strong community or any
tribe without losing yourself. Nobody likes it when we're treated as a number in a crowd. You know, we want to be known by name. We want to be recognized for our uniqueness and who we are. And at the same time we have a fundamental drive for communion to be in community. We don't want to be alone. And these two drives exist in a kind of tension. But I would call it a healthy tension. And when we run from the tension, we typically fall as people and
as a society into either individualism or collectivism. And it's when a person can learn to sit in that tension um that healthy community emerges. And tension is a good thing. Tension is a sign of life. And when we lose it, things can start to go haywire. But the process through which an individual belongs to a community in a healthy way is a process of differentiation. And that doesn't mean necessarily uh leaving it or becoming alienated. It means becoming differentiated within it so that we can maintain
or find our own distinctiveness while being in communion and being in community. And when people are able to do that, it leads to healthier communities and healthier groups. And one of the things that I worry about in our world today is that we're losing the ability. We're we're we're fleeing any form of tension. We're fleeing the rights of passage that allow people to differentiate themselves. And by definition, a right of passage involves three stages. It involves a separation stage, a liinal stage where a person's identity
is a little a bit in flux and then a reintegration phase where a person comes back into relationship with those people that they left in a new and more mature way. So the tension is really the key between the individuality and the belonging. And holding those two things without letting either one of them go is the work of maturing as an adult. According to Joe Forgus, who is one of the world's leading researchers on tribes and tribalism, there are a few defining characteristics. When we're part
of a tribe, we have in-group loyalty. We default to favoring anybody who's in our group. There's shared narrative or a story that everybody who's part of the tribe accepts and then there's some expectation of conformity. You want to be part of this tribe. Um there are certain things that you need to do or conform your life around. All of these things can be taken to extremes and become unhealthy. And usually when we hear the word tribalism, we're referring to something that is unhealthy. One of the
simplest ways to determine that is whether the tribe helps people actually mature and grow and become themselves or whether they have to dissolve themselves into the tribe. They lose their own will and they give it over to something bigger than them. One of the alarming things about tribes is how easy it is for humans to form tribal associations without even thinking about it. There was a very famous study in the 1970s by Henri Tajfeld who was trying to understand like what's the minimum that it takes
to get people to engage in tribal behavior and he went in a classroom and he had some kind of um meaningless thing that he asked students to do and then he quickly divided the students into two groups. He said this all of you you're overestimators and all of you are underestimators. Now this is totally random. It wasn't even true. He just assigned the label to the two groups. And then he gave them some some money to be able to reward different members of of these groups.
And he found that even with this nonsensical sort of madeup association that they had with half of the people in the room, they would begin to immediately reward uh their own group, either the underestimators or the overestimators. And they became so tribal about it that they would actually do things that an economist would say harmed their own ability to maximize their revenue or their their own gain as long as it increase the distance between them and the other side. So this that's all it really takes.
So it seems like there's something really really ingrained in us. Even if labels are randomly assigned to us and we're told, hey, you're you're like this. You're part of that group. we somehow internalize that and be begin behaving in tribal ways that might not even be in our own interest or in the interest of the group. And that is something that I think we need to be incredibly careful about as all we need to do is log onto the internet today and we are grouped by
other people. We are the algorithm will do it for us. It will tell us who our people are um without us really having much of a say in the matter. And my concern is that most of us accept this labeling. We we get filtered into and out of groups without even understanding how it's happening and we don't experience any tension. And maybe the problem today with tribes is that we don't have a problem finding tribes anymore. It's too easy to find tribes and we're too comfortable
in them. And we forget that if we're not feeling some kind of healthy tension, if we're not saying, "Hey, maybe I should use an I statement here instead of only we statements. What do what do I believe? What do I think?" When we stop even thinking about that in an intentional way, it might be a sign that we've um completely given over our will um to something that we don't even understand. Murray Bowen was a family psychiatrist who was active in the 50s and 60s and
then was at Georgetown and had a breakthrough discovery in 1966 by applying systems theory to the family unit. Prior to Bowen, when individuals went to see a therapist or a psychiatrist with a problem or something they wanted to work out, they were treated as an individual um trying and and the psychiatrist would often try to understand what was happening often times through kind of a Freudian analysis by looking at um their specific pathologies, maybe their relationship with one of their parents. Murray Bowen said, "I can't
understand what's happening with an individual unless I understand the full system, the full family emotional system specifically that they came from." Right? The first question would be, "Tell me about your whole family." Right? Even going back to your grandparents, how many siblings do you have? Let's talk about your parents. Let's talk about each of your siblings and how they're different. um what happens when this kind of a uh inciting incident happens in the family? How does this person handle it? How does this person handle it?
And in doing that, he he began to see that a family functions as a system. And he initially said that a family was an undifferentiated ego mass, which sounds pretty pretty bad. that a family tended to fuse and share emotions or we don't think about sharing emotions with everybody in our family but very often uh family members fuse into one system and they forget how they are individuals within that system specifically on an emotional level. So Bowen was concerned with how people differentiate themselves within their
family. And he said, "In the family, we learn the difference between myself and everybody else in the family. And I I acquire a basic level of differentiation of self. Like I I understand where my emotions end and another person's begin." And I take that level of differentiation of self out with me into the world. And depending on how well differentiated I am, I take that with me out into the workplace, out into the political world. You know, Bowen once said that um the world's anxieties and
conflict uh really are just the sum total of the unresolved differentiation in people's families. And one of the reasons he said that is that anxiety within a family um spreads like electricity like like electricity through a circuit. So if you have a father or a mother or a sibling who is anxious about something that anxiety um is transferred by contagion to almost every other person in the family especially if they have a low level of differentiation. And Bowen said it usually kind of spreads throughout a
family and finds this way to the person who can absorb it the most easily and that person often sort of takes on a lot of emotional energy from the family cuz we pass it around. We don't want to actually own it ourselves especially somebody that hasn't learned to sort of differentiate themselves within the family. as I was try diagnosing some of the uh volatility in the world and in our society between individuals and groups and why it seems like we have a harder time existing in
community without sort of going to extremes without losing ourselves within it. I found Bowen and I realized that the answer to the question can probably be found in the very first community that all of us are part of which is in our own family cuz from the earliest stages we are born into something where uh we're completely undifferiated from our mothers for the first uh months of our life. And it's the first place that we learn differentiation, but we continue to learn it as our family
grows and develops, but to varying degrees. So, we can think about the ways that um differences within a family are either rewarded or punished. And little by little, we sort of develop a sense of who we are based on how we manage some of that conflict within our own families. We we come into the world in our family um not knowing um that we exist in a web of relationships, right, between at least uh two individuals whether they're both present in our lives or not. Um
and maybe with siblings and with friends of the family. You know, it takes a while growing up to become aware of the ways that the different relationships in the family have have contributed to our development and specifically to our sense of self. We often don't think of our family in a system and a lot of the energy in a family um happens in this kind of invisible web. You know, it's never actually named, right? when things happen um we we tend to just blame individuals without
thinking about the way that maybe the the entire system has contributed to the way that people are reacting and that's the invisible web that Murray Bowen named he said we need to step back and objectively look at the family as as a unit right objectively because a family often operates in highly emotional ways um without a lot of objectivity because we've been with them our whole lives. Um, these are people that we know the best. Uh, you know, if we've been wounded in some way, that
runs really deep. We're often far more subjective with our own family and emotionally reactive than we are in other groups. You know, if we see some group online or we see a political group, at least we have some distance from them. We have no distance from our family. We are immersed in the family. So, we are kind of like the fish that doesn't know that it's swimming in water. So part of you know what Bowen did is try to make these invisible structures visible for people.
The pseudo self is the term that Marie Bowen gave to the level of self that is negotiable in real time. We walk into a room of people and we adopt their ideas. We adopt their emotions. Um we adopt the energy of the group because it's the easiest thing to do. And in doing that, we sort of present a version of ourselves that is not actually real. It's completely adaptable. It's a chameleon version of who we are that seeks to um f find uh commonality and um
rapport with the least amount of tension possible. It takes the the shortest pathway to establishing relationships or having a conversation with another person. He contrasted that to what he calls the solid self, which is a level of the self that is more intentionally formed. It's uh the level of the self where we've reflected. We've thought with intention about, you know, what we actually believe, what we think. We've been able to use the word I in describing what I, Luke, actually think or believe or feel about
a situation without reverting to the word we constantly. One of the things that you'll notice in um a lot of unhealthy communities is that they can only speak in we statements. When you say the word I, you actually own you're taking responsibility. You're saying I right at a at a deep level. This is what I am saying. This is what I think. And Bowen thought that the the solid self is the level of the self that is able to have an eye. Have a well-developed eye
that has been developed with with intention. Can you walk into a room and stand on your own two feet with a sense of who you are and what you believe? Or or do you sort of feel it slipping away? A lot of us have probably experienced this, you know, at Thanksgiving dinner. you know, you you you walk into the room and it's just kind of like easier to to get through when you know, Uncle Jim or whoever it is starts going on a political rant. You
just kind of nod along or somebody asks you what you think about something and you skirt the question, don't say what you really believe. You know, Bowen said that over time, if we do that enough, if we, you know, we constantly like yield um and don't actually take ownership for that level of our self that he called the solid self that has moral convictions. For instance, um we can drift into a highly undifferentiated self which is the pseudo self. So in the family system, the pseudo
self is undifferentiated. It fuses with strong personalities. It fuses into political parties and into crowds and into workplaces and can be a relatively exhausting way to live because the pseudo self is constantly being renegotiated. Everything is up for negotiation all of the time and it's not a real self and that's why he calls it the pseudo self. So the the process of differentiation is is where I begin to differentiate my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, and my beliefs from the people that are closest to me
or the crowd that I'm in. It's a way to prevent becoming fused into them and losing within them. But differentiation is incredibly hard because the way that a lot of people do differentiation, the easy way to do it is what Bowen called emotional cut off. You know, we we simply cut people off completely. I've read that there's a a new sort of trend or phenomenon where many young people are cutting off their parents or one of their parents and just never talking to them again. Um,
so it's easy to think of ourselves as differentiated um, if we're uh, if we cut people off and we're not able to be in relationship with them. What Bowen means by differentiation is to be in relationship uh, as a differentiated self as a self that has a level of differentiation but in relationship always in relationship. It's a process whereby we can be in healthier relationships as solid selves. And you know practically how does differentiation happen? This is an exercise that Bowen actually gave his students is
he would have them write a a belief paper and it would be a paper about, you know, one of their top three, four or five strongly held beliefs and he would ask them to reflect deeply on how it came into being. And usually um they would write something that gave the impression that it spontaneously arose out of nowhere. And then he would press them and they would realize that you know even our beliefs are formed as part of social processes. You know we come into the
world and we learn things from other people. We learn things from history. Some people are larger influences on us than others. Certain teachers, maybe our parents, maybe certain friends. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But you know how often have we actually investigated or probed um or thought about you know how much of this belief is due to my relationship with a certain person for instance and my wanting that person to like me. I think gossip is often one of the most common areas
that we have for differentiation in human life. It's hard to get through a single day often without being part of an environment where there is gossip going along. A simple method of differentiation is to not participate in it or to take a different stance uh as to as to the kind of group's consensus. I mean it's kind of almost the definition of gossip is that everybody kind of participates in a single stream of of ideas and see what actually happens right and usually it creates some
awkwardness or some tension and then you have a choice to make and the undifferentiated pathway forward is to resolve that tension as quickly as possible and to say oh no actually I was only joking. Okay. But the the pathway to differentiated self and a more solid sense of self is to actually just own it and to sit with it. And being able to own those things um is part of how we develop a sense of self that is confident enough to be in a tribe or
in a crowd uh without the risk of actually losing ourselves within it. August Landmasser is a man who joined the Nazi party in Germany in the early 1930s for what he said was job opportunities. He ended up falling in love with a Jewish woman after having joined the party. He thought that he could join and sort of keep a distance from the party. you know, he would just join and reap the benefits of uh the the connections and the network while remaining uh sort of uh
you know, not immersed in all of the ideology. You know, he thought that he could do that and he was badly mistaken because he began to suffer severe consequences for the relationship with the woman that would eventually become his fiance and his wife and the the mother of his children. He was threatened with jail. He was eventually sent to a penal battalion which is where uh the the Nazis would send people that they considered political traitors uh sort of in the most dangerous uh fronts in
the war and he was eventually killed. But before that, there is a picture of August Lan Messer at a rally in 1936 in Hamburg, Germany. And he is standing in a sea of men who are all saluting Hitler. And he stands there in the midst of these men with his arms crossed, looking defiantly ahead. He is the only one in the entire picture who is not giving the Nazi salute. And one of the things that impresses me so much about that action is we have this
black and white photograph today. So we know that he did that. But August Lanesser didn't do it for any reasons of performance. you know, he couldn't post it on social media to get praised um for standing up to Hitler or for taking such a courageous action. He had no idea that there was even a Nazi propagandist photographer up in the bleachers taking that photograph in the first place. Seeing him got me thinking to myself, how does a person get to the point where they they have
so much conviction? They're able to act with so much intentionality in a in a in a place where everybody around them expects certain actions from them that they're able to do that. And that to me is the definition of a solid self. You know, he could separate himself from everybody around him. At that point, he had due to the the trials that he had suffered um from being in this relationship with his fiance, he had realized what this party was really about and he began to
differentiate himself in the best sense of the word uh from it. You know, he had not completely left yet at that point, but he was on his way towards doing so. And in that photograph, we see somebody who clearly was able to say, "I will not take this particular action even if it cost me my life." And the consequences for not showing allegiance to Hitler were enormous. And he would eventually pay the price with his life. Gustav Leavan wrote a book in 1895 about the power
of crowds and this was in the the midst of the industrial revolution and Laban realized something that nobody else had realized at the time and is basically that the most important social technology in the world really the most important technology period was not necessarily the train at that time. The most important technology was a social one and it was the power of the crowd. This was the age of mass gatherings and rallies um at a level that we'd never seen before in history. And he studied
the way that crowds take shape and the way that people can seem to lose themselves in this kind of collective effervescence of a crowd and become caught up in something bigger than themselves to the to the point where they lose themselves and they lose their their own will and their will becomes uh caught up in the will of the crowd. So they do things like salute Hitler. um they say things, they behave in ways that where they that they never would if they were on their
own um or if they were under the scrutiny of somebody if they were seen by somebody that they loved. It's like they become invisible inside of a crowd. And you know, you almost become anonymous inside of a crowd. This is is why uh Rene Gerard who's another thinker that I've studied extensively realized that a lot of rituals stoning rituals a ritual in in ancient Greece where a person would be taken up to a high cliff and thrown off the cliff they were a person who was
scapegoed by a community. It would it would always be done as the crowd not as an individual. So they wouldn't have an individual executioner for instance. More often it's the crowd that would execute the scapegoat or expel the scapegoat so that no single individual could be named as responsible. It's the crowd that did it and everybody within the crowd is anonymous, faceless and that is a way of absolving any kind of personal responsibility and you can understand why in a world of sort of pseudo selves
um the crowd can become very attractive because it's a it's a way to of give ourselves over to the the Wii where you know I don't actually have to own any responsibility for for what happens even if something uh violent happens to to somebody that I care about or to an innocent person. So often in our world, we don't actually arrive at judgments about things until long after the opinions of other people have been absorbed into the way that we think about something. You our our
ideas are colored. They're mediated to us by the news, by social media, by what other people think. It's almost as if we're afraid to make a judgment about reality until we know uh who it aligns us with or how we fit into a social system. Something that I call, you know, the hive conscience. It's not, you know, my making a judgment about whether something is good or bad aesthetically or morally. It's the thinking as a first step. Well, how will this particular judgment um align me
with X Y or Z group and what will they think about that judgment? Um that is the opposite of the order that we should actually be engaging with reality uh in we can look at something and not necessarily have to know what other people think about it first. Right? It's sort of a stripping away all of the mediation and layers um to be able to have immediate contact with something or with someone and sitting with it as a solid self. So there are a few different
ways that things are important to us and it's important to distinguish why things are important to us um so that we can understand the way that we're judging that thing or the way that we're responding to that thing. And this is the situation that August Landmasser found himself in. You know, in his millu in Germany at the time, uh in the social context that he was in uh certain political ideas were important if you wanted to get a job or you wanted to maintain certain friendships.
it was very difficult to exist exist in that environment um as a differentiated person who did not agree with the kind of the political temperature of the waters at the time. So things are important because they're socially mediated to us. It's almost as if with social media today um sometimes we get the feeling that we have to care about certain things just because everybody else is talking about them. And if we don't know about it or we don't care about it, you know, something's wrong with
us. So it's but so it's not important for any objective reason. It's important because it's socially important because other people think that it's important whether it has any kind of objective value or not. But then there are things that have value because they're important in themselves. There's something about them that is important. Even if nobody else knows or cares if even if we encountered it on our own, it has objective value that makes a claim on us. In the case of August Landmasser, he was responding
to the relationship that he was in and responding to the love in that relationship and the duties that he owed to his fiance, right? To protect her and to be with her and not to leave her just because the party told him that he had to leave her. And he was responding to that objective goodness um even at great sacrifice to himself. that was an act of transcendence. And one of the huge dangers of crowds or tribes or rallies is that there's rarely um something outside
something that transcends the group itself. All of the values are sort of mediated within the group. But August Landmasser appears to be the only person in that shipyard that day that was responding to something that was not immediately socially mediated or part of the group of people. uh that were there standing in that shipyard on that particular day. I've been a part of many groups and communities uh in my life and that's actually when the difficult work begins because you can get so comfortable and they
can feel so safe and you can be so validated within them that you can actually stop growing. You can stop reflecting and you can just sort of sit in the relative comfort of a tribe without actually doing the hard work of continued continuing to be a differentiated self that is contributing something positive that is evolving that is adapting that is pushing the group when necessary that is um is still able to judge and evaluate reality as a person and not only as a group. And if
you are in a group of 100 people and all 100 people um only come to decisions or conclusions or judgments as a whole without actually allowing the individuals to do the hard work of arriving at uh doing the thinking themselves. then you just get an undifferiated mass of people where people's individual wills, maybe even their individual minds are subsumed into the group. And I think that's incredibly unhealthy. And the goal is not to leave a tribe or to join a tribe. The goal should be communion
after differentiation. What are the groups and communities that are actually strong enough to have people within them that are evolving and differentiated people? The weakest groups, the most insecure groups are the ones that can't tolerate a differentiated self within them. And that's probably the first thing that you should look for when you're thinking about joining one. Chapter 2, the three temptations of the screen. Jack Dorsey mentioned that perhaps we talk a lot about free speech and it's acting as a cover up for the real problem.
I think that the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about about free will. We're being programmed based on what we say we're interested in and we are told uh through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting and as we engage and interact with this content the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias. I think what Dorsey means is that we are losing the ability to make our will our own. So it's less free. You
know, we are carrying out the desires of other people and that we should be talking more about free will because free speech is really just the outward expression of free will. We say what we will. And perhaps we should focus on the way that the will is formed and shaped by the crowd and by modern technologies so that when we do speak we are speaking as ourselves and not just uh a a member of of a crowd. this new power that Gustav Laban had recognized as
important in the late 19th century, the power of the crowd and the dynamics of the crowd to actually uh make a person's will um get lost into the power dynamics of the crowd. the studies of Murray Bowen who realized that within a family the emotional system is so strong that we can get bound up with it to the point of losing a sense of self and a separation between our emotions and other emotions, our ideas and other ideas. and the thinker Renee Gerard who realized that
mimisis um this unconscious power of imitation causes things to spread very quickly between people where we imitate things uh in a knee-jerk way not in an intentional way. All of these things are really talking about the same phenomenon which we see in our world today in incredibly powerful ways due to the accelerant that technology is and that is social contagion. Bowen thought that it was incredibly difficult to behave and act as a differentiated self even within a small family. You know, it was the work of
18 years, sometimes a lifetime, learning how to be a differentiated person with a solid sense of self in a family without smartphones. It was hard without the technology. How much harder is it today in a world where we are bombarded with expectations um of other people sometimes thousands of people in this world um of social contagion where it's incredibly difficult to actually know where we end and other people begin. Social contagion is a phenomenon where we're caught up in emotions and ideas and even a sense
of identity through a a process of contagion without actually understanding the response that we're giving to other people. You know, we do things instinctively and reflexively um usually to to fit in to be part of a group online. social calculus about the things that we say, the thing that we tweet, uh the way that we show up in a room, about how it will benefit us very often. Um or we just instinctively get caught up in the the kind of emotion of a moment. And obviously
with smartphones in our pockets, uh we're we're so immersed in a discourse at every moment of every day. It is just an invitation to live life without stopping to reflect and understand the eye that is doing the interacting and the engagement. There's not a lot of good models out there necessarily and we can group ourselves based on where we get the most validation. And uh social contagion is a phenomenon that is shaping identities and giving people the consolation of feeling like they're parts of groups without
having truly understood what that means or where those groups are actually taking them. Knowing the processes that we are allowing to affect us before we join is a process that we all have to reflect on. Robin Dumbar is famous for Dumbar's number which is 150 and that was the number of real stable relationships the maximum number that he thought a human person could have. And it's why you know typically um tribes um would not be over 150 people. Um after that you know we just lose
the ability we don't have the capacity um to to actually form real relationships with people. I would reframe that in the language of the pseudo self and the solid self. You know maybe we can have relationships with a thousand friends on the internet as a pseudo self. In fact, that's probably the only way that we can have relationships with more than 150 people as the kind of self that's constantly negotiating itself in real time, which is exhausting and taxing and leads to people not actually developing
real thick community and thick relationships. Not a lot of people know that Dumbar did not say, you know, go for 150 healthy relationships like that's the optimal number. He said that is the maximum number of relationships where you know we can be in healthy relationship actually know people remember their names know something about them interact with them hopefully as a solid self even Dumbar who was writing before the age of the smartphone long before the age of social media said that it's micro communities or interconnected
um relationships is where we form the the the sense of self where we can form solid relationships, right? It's not the one or the 99. It's finding a small group of people of intimate relationships either family, close friends, work colleagues. Identify the seven or eight and invest in those and learn there how to differentiate yourself or how to be in healthy relationship with that smaller network of people. Dumbar said it's inc those smaller networks are incredibly important right and it's only then we can go up
to a maximum number of relationships which he said was 150. But today with phones in our pockets um many of us never even get the opportunity ever to practice forming the solid relationships in smaller numbers. We're immediately thrust into a world with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people. And the only way to possibly even have a chance to exist in that world is to operate at more of the level of the pseudo self. So we live in a world where from a very very young
age we are subject to incredibly powerful forces of social contagion. The world is moving very very fast and technology has given us access and eyes to see everything that everybody is thinking and doing at all times. Our world is highly socially mediated and it makes it hard to form the solid self. I think it's important to name three of the most powerful ways that the screen is doing this. The three temptations are rights of passage that are thinner than they used to be. The second is
what Augustine of Hippippo called curiositas. And this is a disordered desire for knowledge that doesn't actually matter. And the third temptation is aidia. And this is a spiritual disease that was named by monks in the fourth and fifth century which was an extreme form of restlessness of mind and soul. And that's really at the heart of what the the screen is doing to us. One of the things that the screen that technology especially social technology like social media has done is given us rights new rights
of passage. You know rights of passage are an incredibly important thing in any human culture. They are how differentiation happens. you know that the process through which a person uh does something that's usually hard and risky and they usually have to do it alone and it's the kind of thing that forms character. You know our society had rights of passage for many many years that involved um going off and uh you know taking your first trip um a pilgrimage doing something alone. the first jobs. There
used to be kind of the the tradition of having um kind of a a summer uh where you were kind of off on your own. Um these things that are the ways that people sort of grow up and they always involve uh a sort of a separation from a group, a liinal phase, and that a reintegration with a new level of maturity, probably a better sense of self. Right of passage is typically something that you need to do on your own. you you can be with
other people but there's an aspect of it that you know it's work that you have to do and with the loss of these rights of passage we've had to replace them with something and it seems that they've migrated largely online they they don't necessarily go into the marorrow or into the bone because they're they make everything a little bit easier there's less friction and a good right of passage does have some friction I'm not saying that they're all bad But they're becoming substitutes um for real
rights of passage or at least embodied rights of passage. The second temptation of the screen is something that Augustine of Hippo called curiosas. It sounds like the English word curiosity, but it's a little bit different. Curiositas for Augustine was you know what lust is to the body. Curiosity is to the mind. So it's this kind of passionate disordered desire to know whether the knowing of the thing is actually beneficial for our good or for society at all. It's kind of a lust or thirst for unqualified
knowledge. Like as if knowing more itself is the goal. And the internet, the smartphone, the feed scrolling just amplifies this sort of desired, disordered desire to know everything that we can possibly know. Sometimes out of a sense of pride. You know, we live in a culture that kind of rewards people that just know a lot of random facts even. They we we perceive them as smart. If people can just rattle off everything and they know all of the latest news items and they can go on
podcasts and ask questions about 10 different centuries in history and they remember all of these names. This actually is something that Augustine thought was incredibly dangerous because there's no teiology of the knowledge. Like where is it heading? Right? What is the goal of the knowledge? A a great example of the way that curiosity toas manifests itself in life um is you know driving driving by the scene of an accident and rubbernecking to be able to see absolutely everything that is going on. It's just knowledge for
the sake of satisfying our own our own curiosity, right? Kind of a disordered curiosity um that doesn't actually benefit us in any way. In fact, it's incredibly dangerous if we're rubbernecking and we're looking all over the place and not paying attention to where we're going. Apply that to the age of the internet and social media. Every hour there's a thousand car wrecks that we need to crane our neck to try to see more of what happened there. He says that is um leading to kind of
a dissipation of the kind of knowledge that actually matters. And he called that studioas, right? Studiosity is the alternative or the opposite of curiosas and that is you know knowledge that actually is directed at something right so this could be a PhD student who is studying the cure for Alzheimer's disease and they're knowing things is directed towards that end right towards some actual good so there's a big difference between knowing things because you desire to be a better person um to know what your calling is
in life. That is a very different kind of knowing than the kind of desire for knowledge or thirst for knowledge that is driven more by just a passion to acquire knowledge itself. There's kind of a possessiveness in that kind of knowing. Uh possessiveness that doesn't actually benefit um me or the world or there's no sort of common good or end to that. And the internet has obviously accelerated this kind of desire for knowledge. The third temptation of the screen is what the sort of uh old
spiritual writers specifically the the the desert monks in Egypt called aidia. And this was um really became one of what we now know as the seven deadly sins. And it's often translated as sloth in in English. But sloth is a really bad translation because sloth implies that um you know a person just sits around on their couch all day watching TV and eating potato chips right they're lazy and that is not at all what aidia originally meant aidia is kind of the disease of the mind
and the soul according to a vagriaicus who sort of coined the term when he was noticing monks that had decided headed to go live either as hermits or as monks in the deserts of Egypt and a kind of restlessness would come over them and they would pace around in the middle of the day. They would want to be anywhere except the place that they were at. They would wonder about all the different forms and shapes that their life may have taken. They wanted to be attending
to any reality other than the reality in front of them. So it was actually a form of extreme restlessness that they were experiencing almost an inability to just adhere to the reality or the responsibilities in front of us wanting to escape and do anything else. And this aidia is something that modern technology is amplifying. You know, a a restlessness, staying up at night, scrolling the phone in the darkness of the bedroom. And the inability of people to experience true leisure is a sign that aidia is
real. It's actually one of the number one signs of being afflicted with a cyia is that you can't rest. So it is a restlessness of mind and soul that these spiritual writers in that fourth and fifth century very clearly identified. Now this is a spiritual category that I think is important to apply to technology because we typically think about it in terms of you know the dopamine hits on the brain and its addictive properties. Um we don't often think of it as um forming a kind
of spiritual restlessness in a person where you know nothing that they do is ever enough. There's always something more somewhere else to be something else to know. This restlessness of mind and soul is the fundamental disease of our time that technology is affecting. It has made aia widespread and socially contagious. And that acidia leads to this curiosas, this disordered desire for knowledge that doesn't necessarily matter. And then that leads to these counterfeit or thin rights of passage, these things that we do that don't act actually
form or affect us or help us grow and mature into differentiated solid selves the way that rights of passage used to. Marshall McLuhan, the famous media theorist, said that any form of technology is kind of an extension of the human person and that extends one of our senses even um amplifies it. For example, a hearing aid extends our sense of hearing. It is a technology that extends our sense of hearing. Um but it it can also c diminish other senses because you can start to hear
so many things. um ambient noise that uh you don't hear what's actually important. So technology extends one of the senses but but often uh hurts the other senses and we need to be very careful about what technology does to our perception. There was a word that the medievals had for this. Specifically, Thomas Aquinus talked about the census communis. And that doesn't mean common sense. In a way, it's related to common sense, though. What he meant is all of our sensory faculties working together to help us
perceive reality as it is. And he didn't only mean the five physical senses that we all know. He meant even our intellectual senses, things like um memory, imagination, uh intuition. Aquinus would consider the human person as having spiritual senses. Um faith, hope, these are actually senses. And then you know the the the senses that we have reading, listening, hearing, all of these things can converge he said and we can develop a a census communis where we we are using all of them in such a way
where we can we can interpret reality. So there's a fascinating example of how the census communist works from a man who was part of the French resistance uh in World War II. His name was Jacques Luceron. and he's lost his sight as a very young boy during an accident at school. He actually fell and his spectacles broke and the glass went into his eyes and into his retinas and they were not able to save his eyes. So, he went completely blind. Over the course of the
next few years, he noticed that his loss of sight allowed him to develop really excellent sensory perception and all of his other four physical senses. But he also noticed a kind of intuition or sensus communist that he developed with the people that he would meet. when he would meet somebody, you know, he couldn't see anything, but he would say that people presented himself to them uh as various hues and sources of light and you know, he could sense whether they were trustworthy or whether they weren't.
This is why he was such a important part of the French resistance. He could sort of intuitit things. He developed almost this kind of mystical sensory perception after he lost his eyesight because he was forced to rely on something more intuitive that he describes as this sensus communis. Today we have a word called sesthesia which is a word uh used to describe when people begin to like taste sounds um or to see smells um things like that. These are often uh used to describe people that
have like psychedelic drug experiences um where it's like the senses begin to converge. And there's a case that could be made that maybe sesthesia where the senses begin to converge to give us kind of a unified sense of a thing or the truth of a thing um is actually something deep. It's it's it's there's a deep truth there about the person like we're we're meant to perceive reality in this unified way. And I think that this idea of the census communist could help us to understand
what technology is doing which is scrambling our powers of sense our intellectual senses our physical senses our spiritual senses to the point where we're not bringing all of them to bear on any one particular thing. And we need to recover that sort of sense of looking at the totality with our full sensory faculties. When Bowen spoke about the differentiation of self and the level of differentiation that people had, the spectrum of the pseudo self and the solid self. And by the way, we all have both.
He made a very important observation and that was that we can have a functional difference depending on the context that we're in. So we can go to work and operate as a solid self and then we can go into another environment with our old friends from high school and turn into a pseudo self or go home to our families and operate as a pseudo self. So we have maybe a baseline level of differentiation of self that we take into the world and the baseline probably comes
from what happened in our own families and how well we learned to be a solid self. But now the world gives us so many different contexts and we have a functional differentiation of self often depending on the context that we're in. a thousand different online sub communities and groups that we could be a part of and things that we could identify with. Uh we go from the digital world to the real world and to this workplace. People are changing jobs more than ever. I think the
average person has way more than eight or nine jobs in their lifetime. Some people change every few years. For a person without a solid sense of self, this is an incredibly difficult world to live in because of the frequency of context switching. Or we can develop a sense of self and identity in one place but not have it in another place. And it's the solid self that sort of allows us to be the same person in any context. But what the level of context that we
have, the number of different groups that are vying for our attention that ask that ask us for our loyalty. U we can't be loyal to everything. you know, how do we sort of deal with a world where we've got dozens of different people that expect different things from us and expect different loyalties? Well, uh if we're not careful, we can find ourselves just negotiating our sense of self with each of them in real time. And this sets the context for a really powerful adaptation trap where
the skill that many of us learn and become very good at is adapting really really quickly in real time which is the pathway to the pseudo self. We are rewarded for how well we can adapt and we're usually punished for not adapting. And in fact, it is the ability to learn how to sit in the tension between our integrity, who we are, and our convictions and the various groups that we're a part of without necessarily giving ourselves completely over to them. That is the key to
the development of the solid self. So the danger today is not that we're uncomfortable. It's that we're too comfortable. We're too comfortable in the groups and in the settings and in the education system. We go through the motions. We kind of sleepwalk through things without the level of intentionality. We sort of need to defamiliarize the world that we live in in the environments that we're in so that we can step back and see them more objectively so that we're not lulled to sleep. And that process
of defamiliarization is probably one that nobody's going to do for you. We need to sort of make the familiar strange again in order to see it for what it really is. There is one word that I think describes much of what we're talking about when we talk about technology today and that word is demonic. I use the word demonic to describe some of the forces and effects of technology because I think we're somehow over neurologizing um you know the the what technology is doing to the
human person and we're incredibly complex creatures. Um and I believe we're more than just the brains and that there are uh spiritual forces at work. But even if you don't think in those specific terms, think of demonic as something that acts outside of ourselves that affects or even takes over our will or ability to act. It's why, you know, demonic possession uh is literally when a person's will is possessed by another um and they they're no longer making decisions on their own. they're possessed by the
will of another person. And I think that's what Jack Dorsey meant when he was talking about or being concerned about the loss of free will. Um there is something demonic about social contagion. There's a very famous story in the Bible where Jesus encounters a a herd of swine and there's a man who's demonically possessed and he he asks the demon inside of the man what his name is and he says, "We are Legion." Right? We are Legion. And then he disperses the demon, exercises the demon,
and it runs into a herd of swine. And all of the swine um this group, this this herd of swine runs over a cliff. One of the fascinating things about that story is that the demonic is legion. Legion meaning many, right? The demonic is many and the many can affect the one to the point where the one loses agency, loses the ability to act in one's own name. And when I use the word demonic, I'm referring to this invisible hidden power. You know, the demonic never
likes to show itself. It always operates in these invisible ways where the will is subtly eroded until we think we're making decisions on our own, but we're not. Chapter 3. The importance of courage. I can think of no virtue more important for us to move forward in the particular millu that we find ourselves in today than courage. But we think of courage as one thing. I think it's helpful to think of courage as exercised in four different ways. The courage to be a part of something
to be oneself. the courage to be just to be in a firm existence. And then the thing that puts them all together is the courage to be in communion to be apart while also not sacrificing your integrity. These four forms of courage all need to be exercised at the same time. And if we think of courage in relationship to communities and to other people and not just in relationship to war or really difficult things but daily courage, we will be able to wake up every day
and take up the challenge of actually being in healthy relationship and in communities without losing ourselves within them. There's such a focus in our culture on the one and the one person or you know the one Silicon Valley founder the outlier and not a lot of focus on you know the 99 or the community and certainly not a whole lot on the relationship between the one and the 99. Sam Alman said that AI is going to allow the first oneperson billion dollar company. It's great for
the person that builds it, but I'm not so sure it's great for our society that we can have a society of one-person companies. It seems like we're all retreating from the hard work of being in communion with other people. Paul Tillik is a German uh theologian who fled Nazi Germany and came to the US and started teaching here at the age of 47 years old. And he suffered his own kind of crisis, existential crisis of meaninglessness as he was kind of sucked into the American university
system and saw what was going on with a lot of jobs in the 1950s where people were treated as really interchangeable parts. You know, he noticed that there was a kind of underlying unspoken uh despair there and it wasn't, you know, a despair or fear of death or dying. It was just kind of a fear that nothing actually meant anything. It was kind of a um a nihilistic uh sense that he had. And he said, you know, this can only be overcome with a courage. But
a very specific kind of courage is most important. And he wrote his most famous book is simply called the courage to be. And he wrote about it takes actual courage to affirm existence and the goodness of existence daily constantly in the face of what he would say is non-being. We often don't think of courage as being something existential. You know we usually associate courage with uh going to war or these big heroic acts or deeds. But he saw courage as something that we need more of
in our daily life and in our daily existence to be able to show up and adhere to reality um to be present to the people in front of us. And this was the the antidote really to this sense of meaninglessness that people were feeling at the time. But he went further than that and he said that there are you know there are really different forms of courage. There's the courage to be, which is the most foundational existential form of courage. That could mean you're not going
to sleepwalk through the day at work. Even if you're in a job that you don't love, you're going to sort of affirm the goodness of existence in every single person that you encounter during the course of the day. Assume that you have something to learn from them. Affirm their goodness. Show up and have the courage to be that every moment. This is related to aidia that we talked about. Now aidia is kind of this restlessness where a person does not want to deal with the reality
that is most present to them. They want to be anywhere else except the place where they are. So courage affirmed the the courage to be. Then he said there are two different forms of courage that are really important and it's helpful to understand this distinction between different kinds of courage. He said, 'You know, in a world where we flip between individualism and collectivism or getting lost in the machine or lost inside of companies where we're treated as interchangeable parts said we need to have both the
courage to be a part and the courage to be oneself and they're equally important. So the courage to be apart is the courage to let go of our individualistic sort of selfish tendencies uh and be a part of something bigger than ourselves to be a part of a team to have the courage to lean in to to that kind of work um to let go of the things that we need to let go of. It is not easy being in community. Believe me, I lived with
250 men in the same building when I was over the age of 30. And you have to have courage to get up and to be a part of that without isolating yourself. So, the courage to overcome that tendency of isolation because it's easy. It's easy to be in our rooms. It's easy not to go in. It's easy not to be apart. So, we said we need to have the courage to be apart. But that's not enough. We need to have the courage to be a part
but as ourselves. And that's a second form of courage to show up with integrity to show up as a solid self as we are. And that creates a little bit of tension. And it's the tension that most people want to flee. And to not flee that tension of being oneself and of being apart at the same time is the courage to be the courage to be who we are. The courage to be a part of a group that's bigger than ourselves. And it requires being a
solid self and forming a solid self that can stand in that tension. As I was reading tilic the courage to be and these two parts of it I realized that everything that he's talking about is really the courage to be in communion and the definition of communion is you know differentiated people who are distinct that have the courage to be together without dissolving into one another. you know that is you know a healthy marriage you know that is a healthy country that is a healthy company
a healthy community a healthy church has communion which is something deeper than community um or something deeper than just being a part of a crowd I mean it's easy to be in community when everybody thinks the same thing um communion is a deeper bond where there's differentiation is allowed to happen and in fact it's encouraged enouraged. But the courage to be in communion, I think, is simply a summary of everything that Tillik wrote about. You know, it involves the courage to be oneself and the courage
to be a part at the same time. It's honoring our desire and drive to to be known as who we are and to be with other people, right? To not be alone. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, but we shouldn't do it at the cost of our integrity or at the cost of our individual identity. And it seems to me that communion is is where we can acknowledge that both things are important. I think we are made to believe that tension or
discomfort is bad. Um, and it means that something is wrong either with us or with the community that we're a part of. And in fact, the tension and the discomfort is often a very good thing. It's a sign of life, right? It's a sign that we are not sacrificing something to just ease the anxiety as quickly as possible. This goes back to Bowen in the family. You know, are we willing to be uncomfortable sometimes for the sake of a relationship? And in fact, the best relationships
are usually those that become thicker and more solid when people have actually worked through some differences in them. And it takes courage to not immediately flee tension. And we live in a society where we're trying to engineer away any form of friction. Technology is engineering away friction so that you don't have to see when you log online you don't have to see the opinions of anybody that doesn't agree with you in all kinds of ways including friction in relationships and I would argue that we actually
need to introduce more friction into human life because that is how the solid self is developed and it takes a form of courage to embrace friction or tension in human relationships. You know, the word courage, you know, comes from the word heart core in Latin. So, it has to do with feeling certain things, acknowledging that we feel certain things, including uh discomfort and maybe not viewing it as a sign that something is wrong, but viewing it as an invitation to be there, right? and to sit
in that and to explore it and to lean into it to have the difficult conversations to do the thing that we might not want to do the thing that could be the right of passage that we need to get unstuck from whatever we're stuck in. I mean our communities will be healthier uh our country will be healthier. our relationships will be if we exercise more courage. And I think Tillic gives us a very important frame for that to be a part and to be oneself and
neither one at the expense of the other one because it's very easy to have communion when everybody is the same. And it's very easy to be yourself when you don't actually have to contend with other human beings. Both of those things are easy. What is difficult but ultimately the most rewarding and fulfilling and healthy where the differentiation is possible and we need to have the courage to seek that out rather than seek the easy solutions which don't require any courage at all. Few people embody the
four forms of courage better than Alexi Noni who was the Russian dissident who died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024 and was poisoned with a nerve agent on a plane in 2020 and even after that even after being poisoned and surviving what was meant to be um his murder had the courage to go back to Russia and to be with his his his his people fighting for the cause of freedom against corruption. And he could have very easily chosen to flee. He had invitations to
go to other countries to be the lone dissonant to disconnect himself. But he chose to go back anyway. And that demonstrates the courage to be a part but also the courage to be a part without sacrificing his beliefs, his authenticity. He did not change after he was poisoned by the nerve agent. He did not sacrifice his authenticity. He did not sacrifice his moral convictions after he went back. He didn't accept a new deal. He went back on his own terms. And it seems to me that
the courage to be in communion was so important for him that he was willing to risk his life. And it was the courage to be in communion because he was fighting for the freedom of other people. He had a goal that went beyond his own good. And when you're truly in communion with others, uh you fight for the common good without sacrificing your integrity. And Alexi Nalli at various stages in his life exercised all forms of the the courage that we're discussing here. The courage to
be you know he affirmed the goodness of existence in the face of certain death. The courage to be a part of his country. The courage to do it as himself and not to negotiate what he said based on the censorship that was expected of him by the government. And then that deeper form of communion, the courage to be in communion in a country where not everybody understood what he was doing or why he was doing it or why he would sacrifice his life. He was in
a a courtroom full of mostly Putin loyalists and he said, you know, to all of you in this courtroom, I'm the one who's crazy because I'm not willing to go with the current. He goes, "But to me, you know, you all have lost your minds because you have forgotten, you know, what you are, what you stand for or what we should be fighting for here." And, you know, he was addressing them essentially as pseudo selves that had negotiated a kind of false peace. And we all
need to be uh very mindful of the false pieces that we negotiate in our lives which can lead us to lose our integrity for the sake of a temporary peace which has much more grave long-term consequences. Four times a year we print a magazine worth putting your phone down for. Big Thinks premium print magazine is built with custom artwork and expert insight from the world's biggest thinkers. No AI slap, no rage bait, just big ideas for curious people. Support the media you want to see in
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