Screens made belonging easy and selfhood nearly impossible | Luke Burgis

Observe the North American dad, 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana and offers appears in minutes, remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval, no haggling, no hassle, no one called him boss. He's still on the couch, astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pick up these may apply. Tammy regularly hauled stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kid? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom, home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon, limited time offer, new members only. BJ's home of the save. Have you ever wondered how movements start? I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of "Into the Mix," a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice. This season, we're talking to unexpected progressive heroes who found purpose in unexpected places. People like Marley Dias, making sure every kid sees themselves in books. Kyle Mesteth, a native skateboarder building a movement for kids nationwide. Enjoy a lot of cool, whose music moves from protests to daily commute. Find out how they started something bigger than themselves and listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm Luke Burgess. I'm the founder and director of the Cluny Institute and the author of "Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life" and the one in 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. Chapter one, distinguishing a solid self and a pseudo-self. So it seems like every year ten books get written on how to find your tribe. So it seems to be something that 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, where 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 age of social contagion, where we're finding our tribes, sometimes we're finding tribes on a daily basis, different tribes to validate what we think and what we feel. We pick and choose tribes as we need them. And the far more important skill, I think, is not just how to leave a tribe that is, 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, 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 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 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 liminal 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 Forgas, 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. 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 Tajfel, 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 meaningless thing that he asked students to do. And then he quickly divided the students into two groups. He said, "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. Then he gave them some money to be able to reward different members of these groups. And he found that even with this nonsensical sort of made-up association that they had with half of the people in the room, they would begin to immediately reward 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 own gain, as long as it increased the distance between them and the other side. So 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 like this, you're part of that group." We somehow internalize that and 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. The algorithm will do it for us. It will tell us who our people are without us really having much of a say in the matter. My concern is that most of us accept this labeling. 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 eye statement here instead of only we statements. 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 completely given over our will 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. retreated as. as an individual, trying in the psychiatrist would often try to understand what was happening, often times through kind of a Freudian analysis by looking at 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." The first question would be, "Tell me about your whole family, 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. What happens when this kind of an inciting incident happens in the family? How does this person handle it? How does this person handle it?" In doing that, he began to see that a family functions as a system. He initially said that a family was an undifferentiated ego mass, which sounds pretty bad. A family tended to fuse and share emotions. We don't think about sharing emotions with everybody in our family, but very often, family members fuse into one system and they forget how they are individuals within that system, specifically, on an emotional level. Bowen was concerned with how people differentiate themselves within their family. He said, "In the family, we learn the difference between myself and everybody else in the family. I acquire a basic level of differentiation of self. I understand where my emotions end and another person's begin. I take that level of differentiation of self out with me into the world. Depending on how well differentiated I am, I take that with me out into the workplace, out into the political world." Bowen once said that the world's anxieties and conflict really are just the sum total of the unresolved differentiation in people's families. One of the reasons he said that is that anxiety within a family spreads like electricity, like electricity through a circuit. If you have a father or a mother or a sibling who is anxious about something, that anxiety is transferred by contagion to almost every other person in the family, especially if they have a low level of differentiation. Bowen said, "It usually spreads throughout a family and finds this way to the person who can absorb it the most easily." That person often sort of takes on a lot of emotional energy from the family because we pass it around. We don't want to actually own it ourselves, especially somebody that hasn't learned to differentiate themselves within the family. As I was trying to diagnose some of the volatility in the world that 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 because from the earliest stages, we are born into something where we're completely undifferentiated from our mothers for the first months of our life. 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. We can think about the ways that differences within a family are either rewarded or punished. 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 come into the world in our family not knowing that we exist in a web of relationships between at least two individuals, whether they're both present in our lives or not, and maybe with siblings and with friends of the family. It takes a while growing up to become aware of the ways that the different relationships in the family 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 happens in this kind of invisible web. It's never actually named. When things happen, we tend to just blame individuals without thinking about the way that maybe the entire system has contributed to the way that people are reacting. That's the invisible web that Murray Bowen named. He said, "We need to step back and objectively look at the family as a unit." Objectively, because the family often operates in highly emotional ways without a lot of objectivity because we've been with them our whole lives. These are people that we know the best. 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. 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. We are kind of like the fish that doesn't know that it's swimming in water. Part of what Bowen did is try to make these invisible structures visible for people. The pseudo-self is the term that Murray 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. We adopt the energy of the group because it's the easiest thing to do. In doing that, we 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 find commonality and rapport. Hank joined BJ's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now, coach Hank saves up to 25% off gross restore prices, 30 pounds of pasta, 3 cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks, and that's just pregame. He knows teamwork and BJ's knows savings. This is your home coach, home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for 6 months. Open soon limited time offer new members only. You know what else is quick? Selling your car on Carvana. Just put in your vehicle information and we'll give you an offer. Tone, no hassle, no negotiation, no guy from an online listing lowballing you. Which means by the time I'm done explaining this, you could have basically done it. So haven't started? Hey, better late than ever. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice. People like Marley Dias, making sure every kid sees themselves in books, Kyle Mesteth, a native skateboarder building a movement for kids nationwide. Joy Alatakou, whose music moves from protests to daily commute. With the least amount of tension possible, it takes the shortest pathway to establishing relationships or having a conversation with another person. He contrasts that to what he calls the solid self, which is a level of the self that is more intentionally formed. It's 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 a lot of unhealthy communities is that they can only speak in we statements. When you say the word I, you actually own, you know, you're taking responsibility. You're saying I, right? At a deep level, this is what I am saying. This is what I think. And Bowen thought that 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 do you sort of feel it slipping away? A lot of us have probably experienced this, you know, at Thanksgiving dinner, you know, you walk into the room and it's just kind of like easier to get through. when Uncle Jim or whoever it is starts going on a political rant, you just kind of not along or somebody asks you what you think about something and you've skirt the question, don't say what you really believe. Bowen said that over time, if we do that enough, if we constantly yield and don't actually take ownership for that level of our self that he called the solid self that has moral convictions, for instance, 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 process of differentiation 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 myself 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 cutoff. We simply cut people off completely. I've read that there's a new trend or phenomenon where many young people are cutting off their parents or one of their parents and it's never talking to them again. So it's easy to think of ourselves as differentiated 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 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. Practically, how does differentiation happen? This is an exercise that Bowen actually gave his students, is he would have them write a belief paper and it would be a paper about one of their top three, four, five strongly held beliefs. He would ask them to reflect deeply on how it came into being and usually 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 even our beliefs are formed as part of social processes. We come into the world and we learn things from other people. We learn things from history. Some people are larger influences honest than others, certain teachers, maybe our parents, maybe certain friends and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but how often have we actually investigated or probed or thought about 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 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 ideas and see what actually happens. Usually it creates some awkwardness or some tension and then you have a choice to make. The undifferentiated pathway forward is to resolve that tension as quickly as possible and to say, "Oh, no, actually, I was only joking." 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 is part of how we develop a sense of self that is confident enough to be in a tribe or in a crowd without the risk of actually losing ourselves within it. August Landmesser 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 would just join and reap the benefits of the connections and the network while remaining sort of not immersed in all of the ideology. 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 mother of his children. He was threatened with jail. He was eventually sent to a penal battalion, which is where the Nazis would send people that they considered political traitors, sort of in the most dangerous fronts in the war, and he was eventually killed. But before that, there is a picture of August Landmesser 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 Landmesser didn't do it for any reasons of performance. He couldn't post it on social media to get praised 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 have so much conviction, they're able to act with so much intentionality 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 trials that he had suffered 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 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 Lavon wrote a book in 1895 about the power of crowds. And this was in the midst of the industrial revolution. And Lavon realized something that nobody else had realized at the time. And it's 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 at the 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 point where they lose themselves. And they lose their own will and their will becomes caught up in the will of the crowd. So they do things like salute Hitler. They say things. They behave in ways that they never would if they were on their own or if they were under the scrutiny of somebody or 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 why Renas Gerard, who's another thinker that I've studied extensively, realized that a lot of rituals, stoning rituals, ritual in ancient Greece, where a person would be taken up to a high cliff and thrown off the cliff. a person who is scapegoated by a community, 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 pseudo-cells, the crowd can become very attractive, because it's a way to give ourselves over to the "we," where I don't actually have to own any responsibility for what happens, even if something violent happens 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. 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 who it aligns us with, or how we fit into a social system. Something that I called the hive conscience. It's not 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 align me with X, Y, or Z group, and what will they think about that judgment? That is the opposite of the order that we should actually be engaging with reality in. We can look at something and not necessarily have to know what other people think about it first. It's sort of a stripping away all of the mediation and layers to be able to have immediate contact with something or with someone and sitting with it as a solid self. There are a few different ways that things are important to us, and it's important to distinguish why things are important to us so that we can understand the way that we're judging that thing or the way that we're responding to that thing. This is the situation that August Landmesser found himself in. In his milieu in Germany at the time, in the social context that he was in, 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 in that environment as a differentiated person who did not agree with the kind of the political temperature of the waters at the time. Things are important because they're socially mediated to us. It's almost as if with social media today, sometimes we get the feeling that we have to care about certain things just because everybody else is talking about them. If we don't know about it or we don't care about it, something's wrong with us. 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. But there's something about them that is important even if nobody else knows or cares. Even if we encountered it on our own, it has objective value that makes a claim on us. In the case of August Landmesser, he was responding to the relationship that he was in and responding to the love in that relationship and the duties that he owed 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. He was responding to that objective goodness even at great sacrifice to himself that was an act of transcendence. One of the huge dangers of crowds or tribes or rallies is that there's rarely something outside, something that transcends the group itself. All of the values are sort of mediated within the group. But August Landmesser 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 that were there standing in that shipyard on that particular day. I've been a part of many groups and communities 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 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 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 only come to decisions or conclusions or judgments as a whole without actually allowing the individuals to do the hard work of arriving at doing the thinking themselves, then you just get an undifferentiated mass of people where people's individual wills, maybe even their individual minds, are subsubbed 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 free will. We're being programmed based on what we say we're interested in and we are told 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're losing the ability to make our will our own so it's less free. 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 a member of a crowd. This new power that Gustave Leban had recognized as important in the late 19th century, the power of the crowd and the dynamics of the crowd to actually make a person's will 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. The thinker Brunei Girard, who realized that Mimesis, this unconscious power of imitation, causes things to spread very quickly between people where we imitate things 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. 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 of other people, sometimes thousands of people in this world of social contagion, where it's incredibly difficult to actually know where 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 process of contagion without actually understanding the response that we're giving to other people. We do things instinctively and reflexively, usually to fit in, to be part of a group online. Social calculus about the things that we say, the thing that we tweet, the way that we show up in a room about how it will benefit us very often. Or we just instinctively get caught up in the kind of emotion of a moment. And obviously with smartphones in our pockets, 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 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 typically tribes would not be over 150 people. After that, we just lose the ability, we don't have the capacity to actually form real relationships with people. I would reframe that in the language of the pseudo-self and the solid self. Maybe we can have relationships with a thousand friends on the internet as a pseudo-self. In fact, that's probably the only way 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 go for 150 healthy relationships, like that's the optimal number, he said that is the maximum number of relationships where 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 its micro-communities or interconnected relationships is where we form the sense of self, where we can form solid relationships. It's not the one or the 99. It's finding a small group of people of intimate relationships, either family, close friends, or 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 that 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. And today, with phones in our pockets, 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. You're listening to a quick ad, you know what else is quick? Paying your car on Carvana, just putting your vehicle information and we'll give you an offer. I'm done. No hassle, no negotiation, no guy from an online listing lowballing you. Still haven't started, hey, better late than never, sell your car today on Carvana. Have you met my kid? This is your home road warrior mom? Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bj's.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for six months, open soon limited time offer new members only. I'm Ashley C. Joy Alotakoon, whose music moves from protests to daily commute, find out how they started something bigger than themselves and listen wherever you get your podcast. 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 is 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 Fippo called CuriosityTos and this is a disordered desire for knowledge that doesn't actually matter. The third temptation is Acidia and this is a spiritual disease that was named by monks in the 4th and 5th century which was an extreme form of restlessness of mind and soul. It's really at the heart of what 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. Rights of passage are an incredibly important thing in any human culture. They are how differentiation happens that the process through which a person 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 a character. Our society had rights of passage for many years that involved going off and taking your first trip, a pilgrimage, doing something alone. The first jobs used to be the tradition of having a summer where you're off on your own. These things that are the ways that people sort of grow up and they always involve a separation from a group, a liminal 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 can be with other people but there's an aspect of it that it's the 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 don't necessarily go into the morrow or into the bone because 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 for real rights of passage or at least embodied rights of passage. The second temptation of the screen is something that Augustine Vippo called Curiosity Toss. It sounds like the English word Curiosity but it's a little bit different. Curiosity Toss for Augustine was what lust is to the body, Curiosity Toss 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 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 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 teleology of the knowledge like where is it heading right? What is the goal of the knowledge a great example of the way that curiosity toss manifests itself in life is you know driving driving by the scene of an accident and rubber necking 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 that doesn't actually benefit us anyway in fact it's incredibly dangerous. If we're rubber necking 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 racks that we need to crane our neck to try to see more of what happened there. He says that is leading to kind of a dissipation of the kind of knowledge that actually matters and he called that studio city toss it's studio city is the alternative or the opposite of curiosity toss 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 there 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 to know what you're 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 possessiveness that doesn't actually benefit me or the world or there's no sort of common good or end to that and the internet is obviously accelerated this kind of desire for knowledge. The third temptation of the screen is what the sort of old spiritual writers specifically the desert monks in Egypt called acedia and this was really became one of what we now know is the seven deadly sins and it's often translated as sloth in English but sloth is a really bad translation because sloth implies that you know a person just sits around on their couch all day watching TV and eating potato chips at their lazy and that is not at all what acedia originally meant acedia is kind of the disease of the mind and the soul according to a vaguarius aponticus who sort of coined the term when he was noticing monks that had decided 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 acedia is something that modern technology is amplifying you know 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 acedia is real it's actually one of the number one signs of being afflicted with acedia is that you can't rest so it is a restlessness of mind and soul that the 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 it's addictive properties we don't often think of it as 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 is made acedia widespread and socially contagious and that acedia leads to this curiosity task 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 to actually form or affect us or help us grow and mature into differentiated solid selves the way that rights of passage used to Marshall McCluein 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 amplifies it for example a hearing aid extends our sense of hearing it is a technology that extends our sense of hearing but it can also caught diminish other senses because you can start to hear so many things ambient noise that you don't hear what's actually important so technology extends one of the senses but often hurts the other senses and we need to be very careful about what technology does to our perception there was an award that the medievals had for this specifically Thomas Aquinas talked about the census communists 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 memory imagination intuition Aquinas would consider the human person as having spiritual senses faith hope these are actually senses and then you know the the senses that we have reading listening hearing all of these things can converge he said and we can develop a a census communists where we we are using all of them in such a way where we can we can interpret reality there's a fascinating example of how the census communists works from a man who was part of the French resistance in World War II its 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 we 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 census communists 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 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 an important part of the French resistance he could sort of intuit 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 the census communists today we have a word called synesthesia which is a word used to describe when people begin to like taste sounds or to see smells things like that these are often used to describe people that have like psychedelic drug experiences where it's like the senses begin to converge and there's a case that could be made that maybe synesthesia where the senses begin to converge to give us kind of a unified sense of a thing or the truth of a thing is actually something deep it's there's a deep truth there about the person like we're meant to perceive reality in this unified way and I think that this idea of the census communists could help us to understand what technology is doing which is scrambling our powers of sense are in a 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, 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. 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. 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. It's the solid self that sort of allows us to be the same person in any context. What the level of context that we have, the number of different groups that are vying for our attention that ask us for a loyalty, we can't be loyal to everything, how do we deal with a world where we've got dozens of different people that expect different things from us and expect different loyalties. Well, if we're not careful, we can find ourselves just negotiating our sense of self with each of them in real time. In 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 in 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 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 and 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 the what technology is doing to the human person. We're incredibly complex creatures and I believe we're more than just the brains in that there are 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 demonic possession is literally when a person's will is possessed by another. If 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. There is something demonic about social contagion. There's a very famous story in the Bible where Jesus encounters a herd of swine and there's a man who's demonically possessed and he asks the demon inside of the man what his name is and he says we are legion. 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, this group, 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, uses 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. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana and offer appears in minutes, remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval, no haggling, no hassle, no one called him boss. Sell your car today on Carvana.com, pick up these may apply. Tammy regularly haul stuff to her kids at college. Have you met my kid? Join for just $20 at BJ's.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for six months, open soon, limited time offer, new members only. If you ever wondered how movements start, I'm Ashley C. Joy Aladakoon, whose music moves from protests to daily commute, find out how they started something bigger than themselves. And listen wherever you get your podcasts. Chapter three, the importance of courage. I can think of no virtue more important for us to move forward in the particular milieu 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 a part 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 and 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 person, or the one Silicon Valley founder, the outlier, and not a lot of focus on the 99 or the community and certainly not a whole lot on the relationship between the one and the 99. Sam Altman said that AI is going to allow the first one person 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 Tillich is a German theologian who fled Nazi Germany and came to the U.S. and started teaching here at the age of 40. seven years old. And he suffered his own kind of 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 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 nihilistic 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. And we usually associate courage with 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 to be present to the people in front of us. And this was 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 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 sleep walk 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 at every moment. This is related to a sedia that we talked about. A sedia 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 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 in a world where we flip between individualism and collectivism or getting lost in the machine or lost inside of companies where we treat it as interchangeable parts, he said we need to have both the courage to be apart 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 and be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to be a part of a team, to have the courage to lean in to that kind of work, to let go of the things that we need to let go of. It is not easy being in community. Believe me, I live 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 a part. So he said we need to have the courage to be a part. 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 a part 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 Tillic 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 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. Communionist is a deeper bond where there's differentiation is allowed to happen and in fact it's encouraged. The courage to be in communion I think is simply a summary of everything that Tillic 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 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 where we can acknowledge that both things are important. I think we are made to believe that tension or discomfort is bad 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. And 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. Now, the word courage comes from the word heart core in Latin. So it has to do with feeling certain things, acknowledging that we feel certain things, including discomfort. And maybe not viewing it as a sign that something is wrong, but viewing it as an invitation to be there, 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. Our country will be healthier. Our relationships will be if we exercise more courage. And I think Tillick 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 Navalny, 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 his murder, had the courage to go back to Russia and to be with 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 him, self, 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, you fight for the common good without sacrificing your integrity. And Alexei Navalny, at various stages in his life, exercised all forms of the courage that we're discussing here. The courage to be, 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 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 piece. And we all need to be 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. I coach football. Now, coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks, and that's just pregame. Open soon, limited time offer new members only. Observe the North American dad. 50s. Great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana and offers appears in minutes. Remarkable. The highest form of approval. No haggling. No hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch astonishing. Share comfort and enjoy this holiday season at Tacovas. Our boots are handcrafted in over 200 meticulous steps and have a broken infield right out of the box with styles for everyone in the family. Our expert staff can help you pick the perfect gifts and we have free in-store gift wrapping to help make the holiday season truly special. See you soon at your local Tacovas store or shop with us anytime at Tacovas.com.