WillCameron

A Rational Guide to Personal Myth As an atheist, I believed that the steady collapse of Christianity was entirely beneficial. I definitely still believe that dogmatic religious belief must be brought through the filter of rationality and deconstruction. However, I’ve come to learn that there are real consequences to the loss of mythology. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has connected this loss to a "meaning crisis” that emerges as anxiety, depression, and loneliness. As the Jungian psychology D. Stephenson Bond says, “what is myth but the meanings that structure our lives…myth gives our growth the flavor of a plot.” In this article I’m going to argue for why atheists should adopt a personal mythology as an antidote to nihilism. In my last article, “ The Evolutionary Necessity of Myth ”, I argued that myths are not simply “false stories” that were failed attempts at primitive science. Instead, they served an evolutionary purpose because certain myths are more adaptive for a culture depending on the environment they find themselves in. For example, if you lived in Ancient Greece, you likely needed myths about Achilles and Zeus in order to survive those violent times. As I asked in my last article – given the environment you live in, what stories are going to help you become a better person who can navigate that environment better? When we look around at most of our myths, it becomes obvious that they tear us away from reality, from living good lives, and from science’s ability to understand that environment. Holy texts are full of lines that directly contradict what science has revealed and contain moral codes that are now considered blatantly unethical. These myths fail utterly at adapting us to our modern world, and this is precisely why so many of us feel anxious, feel depressed, feel nihilistic, and feel like our lives have absolutely no impact on a world that is completely meaningless anyway. So, if myth is so important, and if we are left without any legitimate myth that could give our lives meaning, to orient us through the present and into a desired future, it seems like the obvious path is to develop a personal mythology. This is the ethos that Carl Jung dedicated his life to articulate, that once a cultural myth fails, it is up to the individual to pick up the mantle of myth. Now…how do you actually do that? You can find out more tomorrow!

You might like the following book - https://www.amazon.ca/Education-Time-Between-Worlds-Technology/dp/0986282677 I haven't read it, but I read an essay of the authors in another anthology and it was fantastic. As for AI in education, I think we need both uniform and personalized education. There are some things that everyone needs to know in order to function well as a culture, but we also can custom-tailor education based on someone's natural gifts. One issue is in how the AI might take a child down the route of easy attention rather than right attention so there are many layers to getting it to nudge without sacrificing the child's natural gifts and interests, and without being too conformist on those things that shouldn't be conformist. A lot can go wrong in that system, but I think it's quite an interesting possibility. Having spent my elementary school and high school in drastically subpar schools I can speak to how important it is to get kids the right education based on their ability. I know this sounds arrogant, but I was way too smart for how dumb the school was. To this day I am still making up for how much I lost in those schools.

Brendan Graham Dempsey of the Metamodern Spirituality podcast has been following this. We're living in metamodern (yellow) times and there is a revival of spirituality and religion generally. After years of postmodern nihilism and aperspectival madness, people are yearning for something to reground themselves. Unfortunately traditional religion is the most common answer. There are obviously some amazing things in these traditions that need to be carried over, but they often trade the important lessons of modernism and postmodernism with the meaning and purpose that traditional religion provides.

Archetypal Projection in Muscle Dysmorphia Let’s take a look at a specific example. In recent years muscle dysmorphia has increasingly become a problem for young men. Growing up I had severe body image issues and they eventually manifested as muscle dysmorphia. While I never purged food, I would binge on unhealthy foods and then go on a 2 hour bike ride to burn those calories off. This was after having already taken my bike to work, stood all day at work, and then weightlifted before biking back home. I would then deprive myself of sleep just so I had the time to do all of this. To “motivate” myself I’d go on the subreddit r/bodybuilding and look at images of guys who were clearly taking steroids. They were muscular, shredded, (seemingly) confident, and badass. In other words, they were everything that I wasn’t and so, I was deeply motivated to become just like them. Surprise, surprise when this led, at 23, to my own use of steroids. I only used them for a single cycle of 16 weeks, but saw a huge increase in muscle and strength – and fat. By the end of the cycle I was struck by how little I now liked the way I looked. One of the things I always heard on the subreddit is that there is no such thing as one cycle, and seeing how I looked after only one, I now knew why. Fortunately that was the only time I have ever done steroids and my relationship to my body is far healthier. I’ll probably go into that in a future article on male body dysmorphia. However, the major point that I want to make with that story is for you to notice how I projected my own power onto the images of the Olympian physique. They served to mobilize and then ossify several of the archetypal functions. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, is the fact that seeing these images mobilized a Heroic projection. I had a series of goals and looking at these images motivated me to stay true to my exercise routine and, when I binged on food, they motivated me to take no prisoners and conquer myself by “working the failure out of my system” through compulsive exercise. They also indirectly mobilized an Anima projection because they represented the body I needed to attain in order to deserve positive attention from women. Shamefully fat as I was I didn’t deserve any positive regard, but by imagining myself muscular, I could also feel myself motivated by how many women I would be able to “get”. And finally, these images mobilized me against threat – through these images I was taught to hate my body, my impulses, and my current self. You can see here how motivationally complex even a single symbol can be – they serve far more than one function and are related to a wide array of beliefs and emotions. However, they also shaped and formed my beliefs and emotions. They taught me certain beliefs and reinforced beliefs I already have in regards to my goals, about what it takes to attain women, that women were something to attain, that my body was inadequate and I should hate it unless it was perfect, and so on. All of my own inner powers were hooked and then caged by the way in which these images affected me. Many of the men who were posting themselves only wanted positive attention for their own achievements or to motivate other people. If any of them knew that somewhere out there a young man was destroying himself with these images, many of them would have felt awful about it, and so I don’t mean to blame them at all. This is all related to one of the most important points I hope you take away from this article – you are already living a myth that is defined by archetypes existing out there in the world. These archetypes are mobilizing you toward goals that they themselves influence you to value and give you specific beliefs and strategies. My Heroic projection was in how I could only be a Hero by achieving this Olympian physique. Of all the ways I could have achieved something meaningful, my options were hyper-narrowed and fixated on this one option, and so it was inevitable that I would do anything necessary to achieve that. Again, just so I could have some sort of positive self-regard. Of course, these symbols come up against the beliefs you already have, so it’s not like they influence in you in a vacuum. I already believed that I wasn’t enough and so when I looked at those images they reinforced that belief, and then that belief was warped into thinking that the only way to like myself was by attaining that body through the use of steroids. Someone else with body image issues might come along and be repulsed by these images, and instead wish to be as skinny as possible. Another person with good mental health may view the same pictures and be inspired to workout in healthy ways. Even though archetypes work with your prior beliefs, the point is that they do have an effect, and so they can take advantage of the dissonance within your own belief system. If you would have asked me whether women only liked muscular guys I would have told you that this isn’t true because many women liked chubby guys. However, I had also been bullied for being fat while I was growing up and so I learned that being overweight meant pain and social ostracism. Muscularity was the only way I would be able to prevent that pain and social ostracism because I would be celebrated for being muscular just like those guys on r/bodybuilding, and I would be accepted and loved by all those women who did like muscular guys. The last update will be tomorrow!

This is awesome. Congratulations on the interviews. This seems like the beginning of really interesting new chapter for you. Thanks for keeping us updated.

The Rational “As If” of Symbolic Consciousness The writer Brendan Graham Dempsey says that an essential component of personal mythology is the “as if” mode where you pretend “as if” your life has meaning, where you pretend “as if” things happen to you for a reason. This is what gives your life a sense of forward momentum, a sense of plot, a sense that this is happening to you for…a reason, and that reason can be almost whatever you want. You can believe that everything you do is completely meaningless and there’s no difference between staring at your bedroom ceiling all day or getting up to something…meaningful, enjoyable? Now, you might interject and say, “I see where you’re going with this. It’s more motivating to give my life a bigger ‘reason’ because then I’ll actually live more of my life. I’ve heard this before and I can get why that’s probably better for your mental health. But…that doesn’t change the fact that reality is meaningless. Objective, material reality doesn’t care about us and we have to come to terms with that.” Okay, fine. We do have to come to terms with nihilism. We have to realize that “meaning” and “reasons” may just be things human beings come up with to make ourselves feel better in order to survive, but more importantly, to thrive…like…you can actually do that too. Whatever the truth of meaning and nihilism, as I’ll talk about in the next article, we have to come to grips with rationality and deconstruction because of the very real dangers that come with myth. There is a filter of rationality and deconstruction, and however personal and atheistic your mythology may be, you still have to take it through that filter. However much you may pretend that the things you experience have a reason to them, you still have to make sure those reasons are…reasonable. Remember that a myth is meant to effectively adapt you to your environment, and so a myth is made profoundly more adaptive by rationality and science. D. Stephenson Bond refers to this rational “as if” mode as symbolic consciousness and says that it is a balance between objectivity and subjectivity, between logic and fantasy. We live in a myth while knowing we’re in a myth. However “meaningless” it might be to choose between staying in bed or getting the fuck up and living life, I know exactly which I’d prefer to do. However quickly my “meaningless” life and relationships will be forgotten after I’m dead, I know exactly how much I enjoy them while I’m actually here, living them. The “as if” mode of pretending that all of this has a reason is because it gives you a reason to live this brief life you have in a way that you’ll actually enjoy while you’re here. With that being said, the rationally filtered “as if” mode is not simply about giving our lives any reason. It might be easy to assume that the goal is to live life to the fullest in terms of pleasure, but as the psychologist Victor Frankl says, “When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” A life in which our present is full of pleasure and oriented toward the pursuit of more pleasure is not meaningful, but that is exactly the solution many of us have already fallen into. Instead, you want your personal myth to highlight the most important elements of your past in order to orient yourself in a present you can navigate so that you can envision and move toward a future you actually want to create. You want to have a life narrative that is true to the facts, that is rational and understood with healthy, critical thinking, but one that actually helps you create the life you want to live and to have an impact on the world that you consider meaningful. The point is – if you can connect your life narrative to reasons that motivate you toward a purpose that in turn helps you bring your vision to life, then you’ve successfully used rational “as if” thinking. I’ll be giving you an in-depth example of this in the article after the next, where I’ll be giving a definition of MetaMasculine. Here though, you may be wondering, why call this a personal mythology? So far this just seems like understanding your personal history in a healthy, motivating way. This is where Jungian archetypes come in. The philosopher Robert M. Ellis defines the archetype as, “any symbol that helps maintain meaningful inspiration over time.” In the creation of a personal mythology you want to identify symbolism that energizes you, that mobilizes you toward your growth as a person as you learn to better adapt to the environmental conditions you find yourself in. To get a better grip on why archetypes are important, I want to introduce you to the four archetypal functions that Ellis talks about: The Heroic Function To live and develop as human beings in the long term we need the ability to make plans and see them through to fulfill goals. The Shadow Function We need to be able to identify and avoid or eliminate long-term threats. The Anima/Animus Function We need to be able to develop relationships with those who are different from us, but who may have complementary qualities. Think of this as an antidote to narrow specialization where we’re looking for qualities we don’t have. The Potentiality or God Function To remind I am an atheist, I do not believe in God, and so that’s why I’ve named this the Potentiality function. This is probably the hardest to wrap your mind around, but the general idea is that we need to be able to maintain a vision of the possibilities for our own individual long-term development and that of our communities, while keeping ideals in mind for how things could be as well as how they are. When this function works well it is about opening ourselves to real potentials that exist beyond us. Again, this is symbolism that is meant to mobilize our energies to perform these functions in our lives over the long-term. When you watch an inspiring movie, you have had your Heroic function energized. When you watch a romantic movie, you have had your Anima function energized. When you watch a documentary that opens your eyes to some aspect of reality that you knew nothing about, widening the potentiality of your feeling, thinking, and acting beyond prior limits – that would be your Potentiality function. Regardless of which function has been energized by the whole package of symbolism in those movies, the point is that they inspire us to move in meaningful directions over the long-term. And that’s actually the issue. I say movies because they are good examples for understanding how archetypes can have the energizing power they do, but they are a bad example as far as motivating us toward something legitimately meaningful long-term. Sure you can watch a beautiful love story that motivates you to connect more deeply with your girlfriend, or that motivates you to go out to actually get a girlfriend. However, it’s highly unlikely that these movies inspire action toward these things for very long. Often enough we lose motivation and then go back to living our meaningless lives as usual. I know that last sentence sounds harsh, but a meaningless life is harsh and in the digital age we are constantly being bombarded by symbolism that mobilizes us in random directions. Often these directions are defined by whoever can afford to get the right symbolism in front of us. What this leads to is a projection: put simply, this means that your own inner power becomes hooked onto and then corrupted by these symbols. We are sent in random directions and prevented from redirecting ourselves. The key takeaway is that you are already being given archetypal mythologies by big corporations who are only motivated by the desire to make as much money as they can from you. These are the mythologies you are already living by. The next part to be released tomorrow!

In order of reading from easiest to hardest: A Theory of Everything Integral Spirituality Sex, Ecology, Spirituality At that point you've got the gist and understanding the deeper nuances of his perspective. From there I'd recommend reading, "The Listening Society," by Hanzi Freinacht, then Gregg Henriques book, "A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology," and finally, "The Romance of Reality," by Bobby Azarian. Reason being is that they are a more updated version of a lot of Wilber covers, and also a bit more grounded. I think Wilber runs away with stuff a bit too much despite being an absolutely necessary read.

If this actually worked in the way you think it is, this is unethical and bordering on rape. You're completely misunderstanding what good game is about. Good game is about expressing your authentic self in a way that relatable to the women who would be attracted to who you actually are. It isn't about tricking or convincing women, but is instead consensual and co-creative. Seduction is not something done to women by men, but something they create together.

Be careful attributing intelligence to a certain position. You're creating a defense system around a certain ideological position because now to see yourself as a smart, you need to adopt the belief system of solipsism. Many very intelligent people, far smarter than anyone on this forum, subscribe to reductionist materialism. One could argue that this is not "real intelligence" and that's a fair rebuttal, but the point is that they could outperform you in most areas that most people think of as "intelligent" and you seem to be using intelligence in that way. Either way, to ride the dynamic tension between discernment and openmindedness you want to be aware of the memetic locks you place on your belief system based on how you create a normative hierarchy out of certain ideological positions. One position is better because it is more intelligent, therefore, to see myself as intelligent I must believe that position, and now I'm better and smarter than anyone who disagrees with me. Quite a lock!

Ever since I was a kid I have been fascinated by ancient mythologies. Although I’ve never forgiven my mom for giving me Greek Mythology for Dummies, I think it speaks volumes on how myths are seen in our world today. They’re either fun fantasy for history nerds and children, or dummies. Why is it then, that myth is found in every human culture? If myths really are just pointless stories, why is it considered an essential element of culture itself? By the end of this essay, I’m going to help you understand how myths actually serve an evolutionary purpose for both culture and person. As an atheist I can understand how ridiculous this may seem, but Jungian psychologist D. Stephenson Bond gives a pretty compelling case in his book, “Living Myth”. Just think about it. Evolution is about a species adapting itself to an environment. If you have a culture that develops a certain mythology, it is because they are trying to understand their place in the world in order to better live in that world. Despite their fantastical elements, a myth is not merely a story that is false and fantastical. Instead, when I say myth, I mean a story that is meant to determine how well a culture can adapt to the environment they live in. As such, here’s a better way to look at how myth operates in your own life – given the environment you live in, what stories are going to help you become a better person who can navigate that environment better? For example, let’s say you live in Ancient Greece at the height of the conflict between the city-states. It’s probably (maybe!) the case that the most important myths – stories – will be those of Achilles, Ares, and Zeus rather than the more pacifistic myths of Jesus or the Buddha. It’s not just that your lack of technology prevents a more sophisticated science. You need children to play as Achilles, to imagine what he’d do in various situations and against various foes, all so that they can internalize the very being of Achilles. This process will, in turn, help them grow up to be great warriors who can ensure the safety of your way of life, or at the very least, support such warriors. Again, these stories aren’t just fanciful narratives, but are instead the stories that you have to tell yourselves about yourselves, about your world, and about how you should engage with the world. On top of that, once a culture becomes embedded within a myth, it’s not just the environment that you have to navigate. Myth also begins to give lessons for navigating the world that the mythology itself has created. If a culture’s mythology has stories about how to live correctly, then that creates demands upon people to live in that way. You have to follow the rules of the myth. Another example, the Spartans had a sort of mythic figure named Lycurgus who is said to have created the militaristic way of life that most of us associate with Sparta. They tell themselves a story of a lawless dark age that was solved by Lycurgus, which is used to justify why they should dedicate their sons to the life of a warrior. It’s not just that they have a semi-magical myth about the origin of their people. This story justifies an entire way of life that demands how they must engage with one another and with the rest of the world. The more complex the mythology becomes, the more energy people are pressured to invest in learning how to conform to specific ways of feeling, thinking, and acting. The Fate of a Myth That Is No Longer Adaptive If you read my previous essay, “The Conformist Cage of the Nice Guy,” then you know how dangerous the pull of conformity can be. This becomes even more important given everything I’ve said so far. If a mythology is meant to adapt us to a certain environment so that we can thrive, then what happens when that mythology is no longer adaptive? At that point we are demanding our children conform to a mythology that is actively making them less adaptive. If a story is not helping you navigate the environment, then by default, it is likely making you worse. The environment is always changing, so that means you and your myth must too. For example, the history of North America is in part defined by the conquest of the Indigenous peoples. At a certain point in our history there was a cultural myth about the expansion of European peoples across the continent which led to the birth of modern capitalist liberal democracy. You can see already that there are two very different stories being told. On one side we have a positively framed story about the birth of modern civilization, and yet on the other we have a story about the genocide of an entire continent. Both of these myths are kept alive through the way children play, though in a very telling way. As a kid living in Canada we often played cowboys and Indians. One of my friends was actually Indigenous. What was so interesting is that I remember that I had said that I wanted to be the cowboy and he could play the Indian. He refused because the cowboys are cooler. Now, you might look at that and think, it’s just kids playing games, but it’s not just that. He was literally Indigenous, he was literally a descendent of the “cowboy conquered Indian”. So just imagine for a moment what that’s teaching him about his own identity as an Indigenous person. What is that teaching me as a white kid playing with a boy who is Indigenous? We’re both learning every time we play cowboys and Indians that it’s a bad thing to be Indigenous, the cowboys were meant to conquer them, and that everything that happened to his people was a necessity for the advancement and progress of civilization. The difficulty with this specific myth is that it’s not exactly wrong. Society has advanced in many ways with science, technology, medicine, and even civil rights. However, this “advance” has also had many negative consequences as well, with several studies showing Indigenous peoples being more likely to have worse health, be unemployed, have lower income levels, be less educated, and to end their own lives. So my point is, we have a myth or story that tells an entire culture how to think about their history and what games their children should play to understand that history. And yet, this story fails to help many members of that very culture to effectively adapt to the environment they live in. Now, with all of that being said, you might think, “well…doesn’t that mean we need to have stories about our past that are as accurate as possible? Sure I can understand how myths were stories that helped us understand ourselves and our place in the universe, but we need stories that are…true. We need to tell true stories about the conquest of Indigenous peoples and of the progress that we’ve made since that atrocity, so that all people can take advantage of that progress.” And to all of that I say, yes, you’re 100% right. We need our cultural myths to track with reality as much as is possible. I’m not advocating for “right” history by a spooky government ministry. However, your cultural myths and stories are not just about your past, which requires you to be as factual as you can be. Your cultural myths are also meant to help you understand what your future ought to be, which means what ought to stay the same and what ought to change. In other words, you want your myths to highlight the most important elements of the past in order to orient yourself in a present you can understand so that you can envision and move toward a future you want to create. The fact is though, you will never be able to teach everything there is to know about the past and so that means some things won’t be learned by the vast majority of your culture. If your goal is to promote the flourishing of all members of the society, which personally I think it should be, then the specific myths you tell must support that as best as you can. Unfortunately, in every educational and media system there will be tradeoffs where a culture benefits from learning one thing, but is damaged by not being able to learn about some other thing, and vice versa. All of that means that no matter how selective you are, you may have to re-select for a better (hopefully) collection of historical facts. So…how do we actually do that? How do you actually go through your culture’s past and create myths that can support the flourishing of all members of your culture, knowing also that no matter how well you pick many won’t even get access to those myths? Already you’re seeing the problems that arise here, but now we even have some government organization selecting which myths are the important myths that we should teach people (don’t they already?). And what about the interpretation of those myths? Any historian will tell you that one historical “fact” can mean many different things depending on what interpretation we draw. A perfect example of this is seen in the movie Spiderman: Homecoming when Mary-Jane says the Washington Monument is a monument to slavery. Many self-proclaimed patriotic Americans criticize this message, saying there is no definitive evidence and that it’s just woke SJWs trying to make America look bad. The fact that there is controversy around this piece of history is precisely my point. We have a movie about a magical spiderperson fighting a birdperson and embedded within is a story about our past that either gets approving claps or outraged hands thrown in the air. Regardless of whether or not the Washington monument was actually built by slaves, the fact of the matter is that this specific myth has not effectively adapted us to our environment and culture. Again, a myth is a story that is supposed to adapt a culture to its environment and to itself, and it needs to track to the historical facts, whatever they are. Obviously, myths are not meant to divide the people who follow them. But now, more than ever, we can’t even agree on which facts are actually facts let alone how we should think about those facts. Mythological Symbolism Beyond Religion It seems so strange to think that such a controversial point could rest on a single line in a superhero movie, but I think the example of a Spiderman movie actually speaks to something incredibly important about myth, which is also what separates it from a mere account of the historical facts. It’s the specific vehicle or package in which the myth is delivered that also defines how powerfully adaptive that myth is for the people who follow it. In the past these would be the fantastical stories handed down from elder to child, or rituals and ceremonies in which congregants would be handed the secrets of the universe, but today our myths are delivered to us by a movie industry that is primarily motivated by their multibillion dollar profits. The philosopher Robert Ellis also identifies this as a problem, writing, “the majority continue to seek archetypes in a disconnected, deracinated way: for instance in films, television, video gaming, or population fiction.” If you know anything about the psychologist Carl Jung, then you likely already know about the archetypes. Beyond anything else we could say about the necessity of myth, I think archetypes are the key piece in explaining precisely why myth is such a necessity in our lives and why movies currently fail utterly as a vehicle of myth. Ellis has a beautiful book called Archetypes in Religion and Beyond that goes into depth on updating the theory of archetypes with the latest science.16 We’ll be going into this work much deeper in the next essay on the necessity of developing a personal mythology, but I want to spend some time explaining what exactly an archetype is. Ellis defines the archetype as a, “schematic, diachronic function: any symbol that helps maintain meaningful inspiration over time.” For example, when you watch an inspirational movie and feel motivated to start taking action on your goals, this is because an archetype of the Hero has activated that feeling within you. The reason this works is because the movie was able to trigger within you the full process of accomplishment. Through the narrative you were able to connect your regular life with the regular life of the hero at the beginning – you could actually relate to him and his struggles. Then you were given the feeling of failure, the feeling of hitting obstacle after obstacle…but choosing to continue marching forward even when things seemed so hopeless. And then, the feeling of finally getting a taste of success, the feeling of the breakthrough as you overcome all obstacles and finally achieve your dreams. You get to live the achieving of your dream vicariously, through the characters in the movie. It’s not just the embodied, emotional experience, but also the fact that it’s a narrative – you meet the characters, get to know them in a way that feels very real, and then see them go through the full process of achievement. It’s activating all of these connections within your understanding of what it takes to achieve, making it seem possible for you, so that you almost get a sense of direction in your own personal life toward the accomplishment of your own goals. Like, “if this character can achieve, well then maybe I can too.” But that’s kind of the issue. The mythologist Joseph Campbell talks about the psychological function of myth being a guide through the stages of development. While movies today can motivate many of us to achieve, we often aren’t given a specific pathway forward. Maybe we watch 300 and feel inspired to get in the gym and become a Spartan, but then this motivation slowly dies down, we cave on our diet, and next thing we know we’re back jerking ourselves off in between rounds of the latest video game. Why exactly does this happen? The reason is that we don’t have a cultural myth that can guide us forward beyond our selfish, materialistic concerns. I think hitting the gym is an amazing thing and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get jacked. However, that’s nothing to orient an entire life around. It eventually feels stale and empty because getting jacked doesn’t necessarily make us happy or fulfilled in life. Maybe we do it to get girls but after getting to a 225 bench press we realize we still haven’t even worked up the courage to talk to a girl. Maybe we got into the gym to have the discipline to dedicate ourselves to our career but we realize we’re in a career we hate, that doesn’t make us feel fulfilled or like our life has meaning and purpose. A cultural myth is meant to motivate us to evolve ourselves psychologically, to bring us together under shared goals that we actually care about, to help us understand the world and our place in it, and to direct us toward something outside of ourselves that we can care about more than our daily, selfish concerns. Today most of us spend our lives wasting away in front of a black mirror. Today we are polarized more than ever and can’t agree on simple details of historical facts. Today our trust in science, our greatest tool for discovering what is true, is trusted less and less every year. Today we direct our lives toward fawning over celebrities and helping the hyper-rich become even wealthier. The causes of these issues are many. I’d be severely out of touch if I suggested that the only solution was a cultural myth. However, the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has worked in-depth on the meaning crisis, or an explanatory framework that helps us see why so many of us struggle today with anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness despite the fact that so many of us live healthier, safer, more entertaining lives than ancient kings. What Vervaeke says is that we not only need stories containing meaningful archetypes that can motivate us toward goals we can actually care for, but we of course actually need goals that we can actually care for. Let alone the kind of work we need to do on ourselves to be able to achieve those goals. Without a cultural myth so many of us are cast adrift on an empty sea wondering why we feel so alone, why we feel so hopeless, nihilistic, and stuck in our lives. We bury our sorrows in cheap pleasures that have no bearing on our lives – superhero movies, video games, celebrities, and porn. None of these things can ever hope to be something for us to orient our lives around, and yet for far too many of us they are the only things we have to do so. Despite that…what cultural myth could we possibly have to adapt us to ourselves and to the environment, to perform the evolutionary and psychological function that myth was meant to perform? The deconstruction of Christianity, paganism, and all other mythologies was an absolute necessity because of the very real issues they had. They were oppressive stories full of bullshit that ripped us away from reality so that we wasted our lives praying to make believe men, women, and animals living in the sky for the vein hope of an afterlife that doesn’t actually exist. The simple fact is that we cannot go back to a cultural myth that doesn’t track with historical fact, nor one that contains pure metaphysical nonsense masquerading as an ultimate truth. In the essay after the next I’ll be going much deeper into the dangers of myth, because again, as an atheist I am very much aware of the dangers of religious belief. However, the major point I’m trying to make, is that we still need a cultural myth moving forward even if we cannot find one by looking backward. Even if you connect with Christianity and wish to bring it through the great filter of rationality and deconstruction, you must actually bring it through the filter. You cannot go back and assume that everything will work out fine because the environment is continuously changing and so your cultural myth must itself, continuously change. Anything else is a utopian ideal. So where does that leave us? How can we actually move forward as a people when every avenue for cultural myth seems empty at best and dangerous at worst? The path, at least to my mind, is to begin cultivating a personal myth. If you want to know more on that, then please stay tuned for the next essay. Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the essay, so please join the conversation in the comments below. You can also check out the videos already on my channel. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I wish you the best on whatever journey you find yourself on. References: 1 - O’Neill, S. (2018, September 25). Myth. Obo. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0191.xml 2 - Smythe, W. (2014). Myth. In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology (pp. 1211–1214). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_195 3 - Bond, D. S. S. (2001). Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life. Shambhala. 4 – Mastropietro, C., & Vervaeke (2021) Gnosis in the Second Person: Responding to the meaning crisis in the Socratic quest of authentic dialogue in J.Rowson, J., & Pascal, L. (Eds). Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity. Perspectiva. 5 – The Conformist Cage of the Nice Guy 6 - 8 Key Issues for Indigenous Peoples in Canada. (n.d.). Retrieved July 31, 2024, from https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/8-key-issues-for-indigenous-peoples-in-canada 7 – Brinkley, Alan. American History: A Survey. 12th Edition, McGraw Hill 2007. Retrieved August 4, 2024, from https://teachermetzler.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/WHY-HISTORIANS-DISAGREE_-Facts-Versus-Interpretations.pdf 8 – Fuster, J. (2017). “Spider-Man: Homecoming”: Was the Washington Monument Actually Built by Slaves? TheWrap. https://www.thewrap.com/spider-man-homecoming-washington-monument/ 9 – The Washington Monument. (n.d.). National Museum of African American History and Culture. Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://nmaahc.si.edu/washington-monument 10 – Washington Monument—Built to commemorate the first president of the United States, the monument has also become a hallowed symbol of DC. (n.d.). DC Historic Sites. Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/655 11 – Basket of Deplorables. (2017). Spider-Man: Homecoming; The Washington Monument Was Not Built By Slaves. Youtube video. 12 – Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says. (n.d.). Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://carnegieendowment.orgundefined?lang=en 13 – Tyson, B. K. and A. (2023). Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/11/14/americans-trust-in-scientists-positive-views-of-science-continue-to-decline/ 14 – U.S. is polarizing faster than other democracies, study finds. (n.d.). Brown University. Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://www.brown.edu/news/2020-01-21/polarization 15 – Box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada 2023. (n.d.). Statista. Retrieved August 2, 2024, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/ 16 – Ellis, R. M. (2022). Archetypes in Religion and Beyond: A Practical Theory of Human Integration and Inspiration. Equinox Publishing. 17 – Moon, S. A., & Dempsey, B. G. (n.d.). Building the Cathedral: Answering the Meaning Crisis through Personal Myth; 9798728831211: Books—Amazon.ca. Retrieved July 21, 2024, from https://www.amazon.ca/Building-Cathedral-Answering-Meaning-Personal/dp/B0915PKWBY/ 18 – John Vervaeke (2019) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis—YouTube. Retrieved August 2, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ 19 – Mastropietro, C., Miscevic, F., & Vervaeke, J. (2017). Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. Retrieved August 4, 2024, from https://www.amazon.ca/Zombies-Western-Culture-Twenty-First-Century/dp/178374328X/

I work with men who struggle with porn addiction. As others have said, a lot of them have very deep shame and feel like they deserve to be treated like garbage. I'm all for people having whatever thrills they want, but I know of guys who have spent 6 figures on prostitutes, OF, etc. It takes over their lives. I had a conversation with an escort and her perspective was that, "it's an exchange of services between two consenting adults," and then in the same conversation blamed capitalism. There is little empathy in some escorts and a lack of responsibility. I'm not foolish enough to make blanket claims about the industry, and I definitely don't think capitalism creates the highest consciousness affordances, but she isn't the only one who thinks like that. I think there is a healthy way to live even extreme kinks, but it wouldn't surprise me if the majority are not doing so.

No worries, I completely understand.

From 1941 to 1945, the Nazi’s systematically murdered 6 million innocent people. Looking back it seems absolutely insane that so many normal people could not only allow this to happen, but actively participate in such a horrifying atrocity by, “just following orders.” Hannah Arendt wrote about how people just like you and I can so easily get warped by the forces of conformity. In this essay we are going to be talking about the psychology of conformity and how you can learn to resist its downward pull. We begin that journey with the infamous Asch experiment, which found how deeply foolish conformity can make us. Here, they’d have a group of people sitting at a table and ask them to compare the lengths of several lines to see which two were of equal length. The trick was that only one of the study’s participants was even a real participant. Everyone else was an actor who was told to lie about which was the matching pair. The terrifying reality is that 74% of participants conformed to the lying actors despite the fact that they could see the lie with their very eyes. Think about what that implies about you. Be honest with yourself, would you have the courage to say what you saw, despite the fact that everyone else was saying different? You might say, “but that’s just lines! When it comes to real world problems, more people would be able to speak up!” Well…Dr.’s Franzen and Mader decided to do the exact same experiment, except instead of lines they used real political opinions. They were asked whether or not citizens should receive more liberties, more freedom. When the actors said yes more freedom, 81% of participants said yes. When the actors said no, that dropped to 33%. That means that 48% of people were willing to change their minds about our freedoms as individuals just because a group of strangers said so. In a similar setup, Dr. Crutchfield found that an extra 40% of people agreed that freedom of speech should be taken away when they were socially pressured by actors4. “But that’s just people in a lab!” The German citizens who were just following orders weren’t in a lab, and that’s the point. If so many of us seem so willing to violate our own eyes and our own freedoms when we’re sitting safe in a lab, how many of us would be so quick to conform the moment the social pressure had real consequences? I ask you then, do you want to be someone who was just following orders, or do you want to be one of the few who stood up and said no? Becoming the kind of man who can stand his ground is exactly what this substack is about. Egocentric Teenagers and the Pull of Conformity So, to understand how to break free from conformity, we first have to understand why it actually happens in the first place. What many don’t realize is that, according to Dr. Robert Kegan, conformity is actually a developmental necessity. He even refers to one teenager as, “an unsocialized, self-interested creature who needs their [parents] behavioural limits.” The idea of an “unsocialized” teenager is very important because it implies that there is a beginning to socialization, or, the process by which we are made to conform to our parents, and to the culture we are raised in. If the teenager isn’t socialized at the beginning of this process, then what exactly is he? This is what we are as children – egocentric. This doesn’t mean egotistical where we’re really arrogant or an asshole. Instead, it’s more about our ability to understand how things happen. So for example, let’s say you ask a child, “how does the sun move through the sky?” The child will say that the sun is following them7. If you ask them, well does the sun follow anyone else? They’ll say no! It never occurs to them that the sun couldn’t work this way because they can only understand things from their own, limited egocentric perspective. They can explain things only as they relate directly to them. Now, socialize that kid. Teach that kid right from wrong. Teach that kid social norms, the rules and regulations about appropriate behaviour. How can a child really understand any of that? To adopt social norms and rules a person must be able to set aside their own egocentric desires and think about what society expects of them. How well do you think that kid is going to be able to do that when their problem-solving is – Oh! Oh! The sun follows me through the sky!? Instead, we teach that child to obey social rules because they learn that disobedience, non-conformity, equals fear, ostracism, punishment – pain of some kind. When a child is acting badly, they are punished, and so they learn that if they don’t conform there will be punishment. This may obviously sound negative, and the way I’ve been framing conformity is as a negative thing. This isn’t necessarily the case. In punishing us our parents are trying to teach us how to be civilized, well-behaved kids because they want us to become adults who can actually navigate the world. Dr. Mark Leary, a social psychologist, has written about how automatic our conformity to social norms is. We might be sitting in a restaurant sharing a meal with friends, laughing and talking loudly, and yet very few of us grab food from our friend’s plates without asking, or wipe our mouth on our shirts, or belch very loudly. These are all things we do as kids before our parents chastise us into civilization, and most of these things are perfectly fine to conform to. It’s not as if you gain anything by breaking these rules. In fact, many of the social norms we’re socialized into obeying are there for a good reason. As much as you may want to stare at your sexy co-worker’s chest, you also don’t want to make her feel uncomfortable or objectified. Not merely because you fear punishment, but because you actually care about her personhood, you actually care about the fact that she is a human being. In the process of socialization we aren’t merely learning that breaking these rules means we get punished. Eventually we get to the point where there is a leap in our ability to make sense of the world. There’s a difference between saying, “I follow social norms because I fear punishment,” and, “I follow social norms because I’ve made them a part of who I am and how I think about the world.” Returning to Dr. Kegan, he’s written about a group of young boys trying to understand the golden rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” When the boys tried to explain their understanding it became very obvious that they understood, “do unto others as they do unto you.” You hit me, so I hit you. To understand “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a leap in the complexity of their understanding. Now I can think what I would want them to do to me in a hypothetical situation, rather than simply this is what they concretely did to me. To be clear, this isn’t a matter of learning how to empathize with someone else. A child who can only learn through punishment can still empathize with someone and be punished by feeling bad that they hurt someone. However, as we become increasingly socialized we can begin to think more abstractly and so we can actually handle a more complex relationship with other people. You can understand abstract social norms about sexual propriety, and use them to better understand what the consequences of your actions would be on your coworker. In other words, you can imagine more to be empathetic about. As such, you take sexual propriety on as a value regardless of the punishment you might receive if you broke that social norm. The issue with conformity to these social norms arises when we have to break the social norm. We internalize these social norms so deeply that we assume they are the “natural way of things” and that breaking them is not merely immoral, but unnatural or in defiance of the reality of things. So for example, the nice guy is someone who has internalized the abstract values about sexual propriety and respect for women so deeply, that’s he actually incapable of breaking them in a romantically intelligent way. I’ve literally even heard of guys who are sitting on the bed with a woman who is practically begging to have sex, and he’s like, “oh no I would never disrespect you like that.” Often these guys will become close friends with women because they think that’s what they need to do in order to be romantic, and then they just end up getting friendzoned. They believe that women are only interested in assholes when in reality they’re interested in guys who actually make a move, which means they have to risk breaking the rules of sexual propriety. To be clear, that doesn’t mean they disrespect a woman, it just means they treat her in a way that is different from a friend or coworker and in a way in which she would be receptive to if she’s interested. But why can’t he break these rules? Because at some point he was ostracized or was taught that he would be ostracized if he broke those rules. He learned that he would be punished if he didn’t respect whatever social norms his parents cared about, and then what his teachers cared about, and then what his classmates cared about. How many of us were at the receiving end of “Adam and Eve sitting in a tree.” We were taught sometimes very early that we would be made fun of if we broke the social norm set by our peers – no one should find out you’re attracted to someone. Notice what’s going on here. We are subjected to an emotionally difficult situation and taught that if we obey the rules of those around us, we will be saved from feeling those emotions again. Over the course of our upbringing we learn that we need to take into consideration the opinions and perspectives of other people so that we can be sure we won’t be punished. By first caring about ourselves and our own desires to avoid social punishment, we eventually learn to care about the opinions of others. This is how we’re slowly led to that leap in complexity I referred to earlier, where children go from “do unto others as they do unto me,” to, “do unto others as I would have them do unto me.” Dr. Amsel talks about that specific leap as the ability to think hypothetically, in this case, about what others would think or do. It’s not just that you’re fantasizing in some magical pretend play with witches and wizards. It’s that your hypothetical thinking tracks far more to what would actually happen. As a young teenager you can actually use your hypothetical fantasy to understand and navigate reality in a way that a younger child cannot. It’s simply too complex for them to understand all of that. Now at this point in your development you’re beginning to see just how much others can understand about you and the consequences that would have on you. You can begin envisioning in your mind how much punishment you’ll receive if you break the expectations that you imagine others have of you. As such there is increasing internal pressure to care about the standards and expectations of others. When you consider violating their standards this produces a degree of anxiety that is only soothed when you conform to those expectations, especially when you get actual real-world approval from others for your conformity. One of the best things a teenager could ever hear is, “you’re really cool, I like you.” Again, what’s really important to understand here is that it’s not just that you now care about the opinions of others. Even young children cared about the opinions of others. At this point, you almost completely set aside your own wants and needs. You privilege the opinions of whatever group you want to be a part of. You become increasingly susceptible to peer pressure because you’re desperate for your peer’s approval. Any time you feel out of alignment with your group’s expectations and standards you experience that as anxiety, stress, shame, or guilt. You’re motivated by these negative feelings to become more and more like your peers. You experience these negative feelings as an internal incoherence. Your internal landscape feels chaotic and the only way you can resolve this is by finding coherence from the external world and in the external world. You think, “If I abide by my group’s norms, I am able to solve my internal problems.” Unfortunately, this creates an internal coherence that is dependent on external coherence. The internal compass that is meant to guide you through life, to help you make your decisions, is torn from your own wants and needs, and then placed firmly in the external, into the group you desperately seek to belong to. By the time you’re an adult you have fully internalized the social norms, rules, and regulations of your group, your culture, your political party, your church, your job. At this point you’re not even able to challenge them because they are just considered the natural way of things. This is the Conformist, the good little sheep that cleaves to the herd. You may also have heard this called herd mentality because they’re incapable of thinking freely, outside of the bounds of the herd. The Dangerous Reactions to Conformity’s Prison Now, think about what happens when there is external incoherence. Think about what happens when someone comes along who looks different, acts different, talks different from “the natural way of things,” from all the things that have been conditioned into your very being by all those years of punishment. This causes internal incoherence which you have learned can only be resolved by finding external coherence. You are not merely motivated to conform yourself to the standards of your group, but also to demand that these strangers also conform. Or worse yet, what happens when your authority figures, the top exemplars of all that your group represents, tell you that all the problems you’re facing are the fault of the people who are different? What happens when you have financial issues, relationship issues, political issues, or religious issues, and your authority figure tells you that the only solution is to punish the strange wrongdoers who have done this to you? You can see how difficult it would be for this person to stand up and say no. When you realize that your actions have led to the deaths of millions, it’s far easier to deal with that internal incoherence by looking for external coherence in the safe embrace of the phrase, “I was just following orders.” I may not know what was going on, but I know my group must have had their reasons. Unless you learn to question social norms in intelligent ways, this could be you. If you crumble quickly under social pressure, then the obvious answer is to learn to be more assertive. Unfortunately that’s much easier said than done. Think about what happens when the process of socialization is extremely emotionally painful. For people who were chronically bullied, ostracized, invalidated, raised by strict parents, or who had a strict teacher, they’ve learned that the costs of non-conformity are far too high. The higher the demand for conformity or the higher the risks for non-conformity, the more difficult it’ll be to actually challenge that conformity. Dr. Leary writes that people who are more sensitive to approval and disapproval are far more concerned about the opinions of others. That seems painfully obvious, but think about what that means for the nice guy we talked about earlier. If he’s very shy or awkward he may have had some very negative romantic experiences. Even if he was never able to work up the courage to make a move, that’s all the more reason to think that romantic failure is going to be especially painful for him. And as everyone knows, if you try to get better at dating, you’re going to have some painfully humiliating experiences. This is one of the reasons the nice guy is often radicalized into the resentful incel. The tragic irony is that he has been emotionally bound into conformity by the values of sexual propriety. Again, my point is not that he needs to learn how to disrespect women and make them uncomfortable. Instead, he needs to learn how to break that conformity in more intelligent ways, but how can he do that when it’s like he’s being pulled apart by charging horses. One horse is the fear of breaking norms of sexual propriety, of the consequences of doing so, and of his legitimate care for the woman he’s attracted to. Nice guys actually want to be nice guys, but galloping in the other direction are his desires for intimacy, connection, sex, and the social status that comes with romantic success. Sure he wants to be a nice guy, but he also wants to feel like other men respect him…which often implies that he doesn’t feel that already. Pursuing women unfortunately becomes a way to do get male respect. To add on to that, Dr. Leary also writes that the higher someone’s status is relative to our own, the more likely we are to care about how they perceive us. Another obvious fun fact, but notice the implication. If we’re that shy, awkward nice guy we are more likely to assume that the women we’re attracted to are higher status than us, which makes us work harder to make a good impression. Dr. Leary further writes that the more importance we place on someone, the more likely it is that this person will view our attempts to impress with skepticism. When we combine those two concepts of our romantic interest’s higher status making us care more and be trusted less, we can see how the nice guy is in an even tighter bind. Notice also how inferior the nice guy believes himself to be relative to any possible romantic partner. He would be lucky for any of them to finally give him even a friendly smile. My point in outlining all of that is to notice how powerfully conformity has imprisoned him. He can either be crushed under it into resentful retaliation or be a good little boy and do as he’s told, hoping for the best. The fact that so many develop such a hyper-reactionary hunger for power over others only speaks to the pain of their perceived inferiority. A Step Beyond the Conformity of the Nice Guy Rising above that conformity and learning to put himself out there socially is obviously a possibility. But given everything I’ve said about how painful that would be for him, is that really likely if he doesn’t have the kind of social support he needs to do so? Ironically, he would be able to develop enough assertiveness to begin breaking through conformity if he was able to find a good enough group to conform to. Such a group would have him adopt the skills he needed to begin developing enough to assert his own individuality. So, with all of that being said, how do we actually start breaking our individuality away from conformity? If you haven’t watched it yet, my essay “Keys to the Authentic Self” goes very deeply into what the authentic self actually is and how you can you begin discovering and creating your own authentic self. This step is so necessary because if you want to wrench your compass free from the hands of conformity, you must actually have an idea for where you want to put it and then point it. It may seem obvious that your external compass should become an internal compass, but that tells you nothing about the direction it should be pointed toward. Secondly, I’d invite you to start exercising your ability to assert yourself. Dr. Leary wrote about how his students would often return from spring break telling stories about how they had adopted a new identity. When they were away from their friends, their families, and their coworkers, the pressure to “be themselves” was much less intense. On top of that, the fact that they were anonymous meant there weren’t as many risks to awkward failures. My point then, is that you shouldn’t feel like you have to start asserting yourself with people you know immediately. Obviously if you’d like to you can to do respectfully, but the point is that you want to start asserting yourself in whatever small ways you can. For example, if someone cuts you in a line, speak up and politely tell them that the line starts where it does. Most people will likely respect that once they’ve been called out. However, if they refuse, hold your ground and ask them again calmly. The moment you become reactive or angry in any way though, is the moment they’ve won. A good rule of thumb is that in any interaction the person reacting the most has the least power. If they still refuse, it’s probably best to back down, but do so calmly and with your head held high. Once you’ve risen above social pressure you have already won. It’s not about getting everyone to do as you say, but for standing up for what you believe is right. That’s another important point. It may be easy to assume that you should cut in front of lines or do other annoying things because that’s really breaking conformity. This isn’t the way. To truly break conformity is to learn to rise above the social pressure that would have you be silent and afraid. Being an asshole is falling beneath conformity. Remember that many of the social norms we have are necessary and perfectly acceptable. The true individual is the one who can learn to identify the unnecessary social norms that hold themselves and others back from being better people. In the end, learning to rise above conformity begins with learning to handle increasing levels of social pressure. Start looking for those opportunities, whether it’s standing up to someone being a dick or speaking your honest opinion when it goes against what others are saying. My advice for that is to learn to pick your battles. I do not recommend saying things that will get you fired. The point isn’t to say things you know are offensive, but to be able to stand up for your values. Either way, that is enough for today. Check out my next essay on the necessity of myth that’s available right now. I’d love to hear your thoughts on social pressure and conformity, so join the conversation in the comments below. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Please stay tuned for more and I wish you all the best on whatever journey you find yourself on. --------- References: Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Classics. Solomon Asch Conformity Line Experiment Study. (2023, October 24). https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html Franzen, A., & Mader, S. (2023). The power of social influence: A replication and extension of the Asch experiment. PLOS ONE, 18(11), e0294325. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294325 Crutchfield, R. S. (1955). Conformity and character. American Psychologist, 10(5), 191–198. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040237 Kegan, R. (1983). The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press. Kegan, R. (1998). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press. Wilber, K. (2001). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition (2nd Rev ed. edition). Shambhala. Leary, M. (1996) Self-Presentation: Impression management and interpersonal behaviour. Retrieved July 24, 2024, from https://www.amazon.ca/Self-presentation-Impression-Management-Interpersonal-Behavior-ebook/dp/B07WWK73B1/ Amsel, E. (n.d.). Hypothetical thinking in adolescence: Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.

I'm honestly surprised you haven't been on the Integral Stage with Layman Pascal and Bruce Alderman yet. It's quite a small channel, but I feel like you guys would have an amazing conversation. Brendan Graham Dempsey of Metamodern Spirituality might be fun as well. Honestly though I feel like you'd be doing them more of a favour so I get it if that's a concern of yours.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

You need to move on and focus on developing your skill with women (and people) in general. As much as you love this girl, you are way to fused to the situation. There is less room for the true possibilities of love to take shape and form. It's like trying to do a complex dance in a closet.

Thanks for reading. It depends on the environmental demands. I like Kegan's model as a simple introduction because you have Socialized Mind and Self-Authoring. Socialized can still climb high, but there is an eventual cap once it comes to making your own self-directed decisions. They are so biased toward doing what others do that they actually have difficult enacting the kind of leadership it takes to get to higher levels of success. You can't win with everyone as a leader and they have real issues doing that. Cook-Greuter has much more nuance with more stages in between each of Kegan's stages, so you can get a better sense of why exactly some people climb higher whereas others don't. For example, there is the Conscientious/Achiever stage that is likely going to represent more executives or higher ups. The major thing here to recognize is that they are distanced enough from Conformist to be able to excel and lead, to be able to make the hard decisions that some might not like. However, they are close enough to Conformist to define their success and achievement by the standard definitions of social status. They use their emerging capacities for individuality to maximize social status, which is defined by the society you find yourself in. There are more nuances to it than that, but that's a rough starting point.

Thank you I really appreciate that. If you don't mind me asking what was the issue? What was your truth and why did community not accept?

I actually posted an article recently about the development of conformity using the nice guy as a down to earth example and the nazi as an extreme example. It's based on developmental models from Kegan, Dabrowski, and Cook-Greuter. https://metamasculine.substack.com/p/the-conformist-cage-of-the-nice-guy I'd be happy to have a conversation about it.

If you don't mind me asking, I have a few questions that will help my next response: How old are you now? Are you still married? Do you watch porn?

Owen is a good example of the difference between cultural code (spiral stage), cognitive development (cogdev), and the growth to goodness. As far as code goes, he seems to be Orange, but in terms of cogdev, he is likely metasystematic and maybe even paradigmatic. This is what confused me for a long time until I got better at telling the difference. Because he has such high cogdev it seems as if he's operating with high code like Yellow. He thinks a lot like what we might consider Yellow, but it's within an Orange value system. Or at least that's a good orientating generalization. No measurement is perfect, and my intuition is obviously going to be biased. When it comes to growth to goodness, this is the idea that as we develop in code or cogdev we are growing toward goodness. We are by definition becoming more moral. This is a myth. Instead it's more that your capacity for moral action is higher. This could go very right or very wrong, depending on the specific situation. In other words, someone like Owen may be very developed, but his capacity for morality and integrity are in some way limited by his developmental position. I actually think (perhaps hope) he has very high integrity, but regardless it is going to be defined by a Stage Orange cultural code. His capacity for morality will be shaped, limited, and provided for by Orange values. He believes in the capacity for capitalism to create a lot of good for society (which it can), but he doesn't really care to look beyond capitalism and so he is ultimately limited by that. So again, within the value system of stage Orange he may be incredibly integrous, it's just that Orange values can only get you so far. Contrast this with someone at Green who has higher capacity for integrity, but supports very low integrity moves against capitalism, and you're dealing with someone who has less integrity than Owen despite their value system affording them a higher form of integrity. I'm obviously assuming a lot, so maybe I'm wrong about him, but I think he serves as a good case study.

Yeah it's usually better to go to other people's threads and offer value to problems or topics they've made clear are most relevant to them by posting about them. This will help you build real relationships with people as they get to know you through engaging with you dialogically, rather than a soapbox monologue of a single post in which it isn't immediately obvious why it is relevant to them. Also, what exactly is your goal with these posts?

A good friend of mine was accepted into the program of her dreams, really difficult to get into. She was happy, but felt waves of sadness because she only realized then how much she'd lose by moving away to this program. The downside suddenly seemed so salient that she couldn't see the upside. It's good to remember that with mindfulness and other exercises we can work on the downside and the upside to make what needs to be more relevant, relevant. I like John Vervaeke's work on that matter.

Really looking forward to this Leo. Thank you.

I recently made a new video series talking about the foundations of psychological development (according to me) where I use movies as examples. My niche is men struggling with porn addiction, but these videos are applicable to everyone. Thought you guys might enjoy them as my own perspective and development have been very much influenced by Leo. I would love any thoughts, criticisms, or simply a watch and a like In very brief, the movies I cover are: The Martian and technical change, or a change in knowledge or skill. Most people get caught up with technical change when in reality they need the next change. Inside Out and adaptive change, or a change in mindset. It's not merely about learning new things, but about changing your day-to-day lived experience. For example, do you have a growth mindset or fixed mindset? Do you respond to emotions with more negative emotion or repression, or by feeling them fully? The Witch and stage transition. This is basically just the idea that you go through stages in life. I use Robert Kegan's transition from Socialized Mind to Self-Authoring Mind as an example. It Follows and positive disintegration, or the idea that mental suffering is sometimes a sign of growth rather than some sort of disease. In fact, in is a necessity for growth. Evil Dead Rise and the cultural embeddedness of interpretation. Our maps of reality influence how we interpret reality and our maps are often determined by our culture. You can check it out here: Thank you so much!